Advancing Practical Theology

Eric Stoddart

Description

Advancing Practical Theology argues that the practical theology as a discipline does not at present fulfil its radical potential and addresses some directions that the discipline needs to take in order to respond adequately to changing social, ecclesial and global circumstances. This book will generate debate as a polemic contending for a future of the discipline that features an enhanced role for the lay (i.e. non-professional) practical theologian who is radicalized with respect to the discipline’s preferential option for the broken in which practical theology addresses and is addressed by postcolonial concerns.

Informations

• Publié par: Hymns Ancient & Modern
• Date de parution: 07 juillet 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780334051930
• Langue: English

Extrait

Advancing Practical Theology
Critical Discipleship for Disturbing Times
Eric Stoddart






© Eric Stoddart, 2014
Published in 2014 by SCM Press
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The Author has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this Work.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
978 0 334 05191 6
Typeset by Regent Typesetting
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon





For A. R.




Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction

1. Approaching Practical Theology
2. Plunging into Practical Theology
3. Case Study: Scottish Independence and Christian Perspectives Study Group
4. Critical Discipleship
5. Professing to be Professional
6. A Passport to the Future
7. Case Study: The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology – The Neoliberal, Imperialist Elephant in the Room?
8. Radicalizing Practical Theology

Coda: A Letter to 1996 from 2014
Bibliography




Acknowledgements
This book has its origins in an invitation from John Swinton to give a paper to the postgraduate Practical Theologians in the School of Divinity at the University of Aberdeen in March 2013. I tried out some of the ideas again a few months later in a parallel session paper at the annual conference of the British & Irish Association for Practical Theology (BIAPT) in York. I am grateful to both audiences for their feedback.
I also wish to express my thanks to those who took part in the case study discussions on Scottish Independence. Their pseudonymous participation was conducted under the research ethics protocols of the University of St Andrews (approval reference, DI10486).
I would like also to mark my appreciation of Fr Ian Paton and Mtr Kate Reynolds, whose sacramental and preaching ministries at Old St Paul’s Scottish Episcopal Church in Edinburgh continue to sustain and challenge me as a person and as a Practical Theologian. They do not, of course, bear any responsibility for the ideas expressed in this book.
Eric Stoddart
Feast of the Annunciation, 2014




Introduction
It’s not a choice. It’s more a dawning realization that I’m not like most people. At first it wasn’t easy to admit to myself, but it gradually became easier. I had no role models, but I was aware enough that being different wasn’t approved of. I’d known for a long time – maybe for as long as I could remember. They , I was told, are a threat and, if not contained, will contaminate the weak-willed. Little wonder then that I felt I had to be circumspect, letting only a few trusted friends in on my secret. But, eventually, perhaps I think rather late, I found others like me. I wasn’t actually alone. I could, finally, self-identify as a ‘Practical Theologian’.
I don’t want to claim a conversion – I’m not sure that anyone turns to start being a Practical Theologian. This process is more a coming out, acknowledging a fundamental aspect of how you’ve been seeing the world for quite some time. There are no guarantees as to how people who know you will react. To some, your admission comes as no surprise. Others are shocked, even feeling betrayed. One or two may be interested in how you do it. Some congratulate you on your courage, while others remonstrate with dire warnings in a well-meaning attempt to get you back to the straight and narrow.
Many Christians were familiar with Pastoral Theologians. These men (in the days when God was permitted to only call men to clerical ministry) had a distinctive flair. Their interests in counselling, preaching or liturgy set them apart, but, despite outward appearance, they might or might not have been Practical Theologians. The acceptance – up to a point – of Pastoral Theologians paved the way for those of us who could no longer suppress our practical theological nature.
In trying to introduce the discipline of Practical Theology I am teasing – but only half-joking. Practical Theologians are, I think – to quite an extent – born, not made. At the very least we are shaped in our understanding of how people ‘know God’; more specifically, how people know they know God. To put it another way, Practical Theologians are congenitally more comfortable with the notion of two-way rather than one-way streets. Practical Theologians will, to various extents, hold that people’s practice is informed, shaped perhaps, by doctrine – or even dictated by it. But, and this is probably the crucial difference, Practical Theologians want to keep asserting that doctrine is informed, shaped and even dictated by practice. No two Practical Theologians will represent that traffic-flow in exactly the same way. Sometimes the street will be one of those set out to allow all traffic in one direction, but only cyclists in the counter-direction. That’s all well and good as long as the white lines on the road marking out the seven-eighths width for the main traffic, and the narrow remainder for cyclists, doesn’t get rubbed off or lost when the carriageway is resurfaced. Having said that, the life of a Practical Theologian does sometimes feel like cycling against the flow – legally, but with nothing but a faded and intermittent white line marking your right of way.
It’s the fact that Practical Theologians swing both ways or, we could say, are bi-directional that sets us out as deviant in many people’s eyes. There is great security in a one-way system where doctrine determines practice. But the model of applying theology to our own and others’ lives is only safe in theory. It’s not actually how doctrine is developed. Real, rather than ideal, life is much more bi-directional than many applied-theology advocates might care to admit. To be honest, I suspect that quite a few people who are very strict on doctrine determining faithful practice will have had moments when they’ve been bi-curious. They’ve wondered what doing theology in the opposite direction might be like. Perhaps they’ve had a go in secret but, quite unnecessarily, felt ashamed of themselves as a result. So, to be bi-directional, to be a Practical Theologian is, in comparison with what others claim as real or proper theology, a challenge to what’s viewed as ‘normal’.
To be honest, Practical Theology is imaginary. It is a construct in the minds of its devotees, detractors and now in yours too. This is not quite such an extraordinary or self-defeating claim as it at first might seem to be.
‘Practical Theology’ is a term used, in no particular order of importance, to identify (a) a field within the broad study of Divinity, (b) networks of similarly minded researchers (both academic and practitioner), (c) membership in learned societies (national, regional and international), (d) various scholarly journals, (e) a range of shelf-marks within library classification systems, (f) methods of generating theological knowledge, (g) forms of reflection upon practice, and (h) topics of interest to biblical and theological researchers. Anyone can claim to be a Practical Theologian – though their assertion might be contested in good scholarly tradition (and perhaps for some less worthy motives of market segmentation in publishing). But no one can step in to deny the use of the label – unlike what would happen if I advertised my services as a lawyer without accreditation by the Law Society or as a doctor without General Medical Council registration.
Benedict Anderson coined the term ‘imagined communities’ to describe our experience of nationalism. For him, the nation ‘is imagined , because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’. 1 I am positively not likening Practical Theology to a nation, but Anderson’s concept is still helpful. To be an ‘imagined community’ is to acknowledge that the boundaries, prerequisites of membership, and what is deemed to be held in common are not givens. Rather, the community is constructed and reproduced in our minds and our behaviour.
Imagined communities of Practical Theologians are generated by common interests, membership of associations, or job descriptions across universities and colleges – expressed nationally and regionally. At the same time, ‘dual nationality’ (to continue Anderson’s theme) is widely practised. Christian ethicists can self-identify also as Practical Theologians, depending on the advantages in academic or church contexts. Similarly some systematic theologians will choose to locate their work within the Practical Theology domain. (The role of publishers in deciding into which section of their catalogue to place an author’s new book is, I suspect, not insignificant.) Here we move bey