Tragedies and Christian Congregations

The Practical Theology of Trauma

Christopher Southgate, Carla Grosch-Miller, Hilary Ison, Megan Warner, Christopher Southgate, Carla Grosch-Miller, Hilary Ison, Megan Warner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351050777
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Theology

When tragedy strikes a community, it is often unexpected with long-lasting effects on the people left in its wake. Too often, there aren't adequate systems in place to aid those affected in processing what has happened. This study uniquely combines practical theology, pastoral insight and scientific data to demonstrate how Christian congregations can be helped to be resilient in the face of sudden devastating events.

Beginning by identifying the characteristics of trauma in individuals and communities, this collection of essays from practitioners and academics locates sudden trauma-inducing tragedies as a problem in practical theology. A range of biblical and theological responses are presented, but contemporary scientific understanding is also included in order to challenge and stretch some of these traditional theological resources. The pastoral section of the book examines the ethics of response to tragedy, locating the role of the minister in relation to other helping agencies and exploring the all-too-topical issue of ministerial abuse.

Developing a nuanced rationale for good practical, pastoral, liturgical and theological responses to major traumas, this book will be of significant value to scholars of practical theology as well as practitioners counselling in and around church congregations.

Part I
Trauma

The presenting issue

Introduction to Part I

Just as traumatologists have been able to refine their response to trauma by focusing on the lived experience of it, so too a focus on the lived experience of trauma aids theologians in their task of speaking of God. The theological discipline particularly well suited to working with human experience is Practical Theology, which also has had a resurgence and enrichment in recent decades. With expanding methods and understandings, Practical Theology provides tools for examining lived experience for the clues and glimmers it offers about the nature of God and human life and for discerning how Christians and Christian communities may best respond.

In the first chapter, practical theologian Elaine Graham turns a wide-angle lens to the question of how theological reflection on the experience of trauma has impacted upon understandings of God and the Christian vocation. One of the authors of Theological Reflection: Methods,¹ Graham considers the aim of theological reflection as nurturing practical wisdom for the church. Drawing on Shelly Rambo’s groundbreaking work on the theology of trauma, she explores essays in Post-Traumatic Public Theology (2016)² and Alan Everett’s reflection on the Grenfell Tower fire in London,³ in order to ground a discussion of how different methods or modes of theological reflection on the experience of trauma may renew, expand or challenge theological and secular understandings. Constructive narrative theology is shown to fund the rereading and reclaiming of Scripture. Canonical narrative theology, drawing on the suffering of Jesus, resources healing for veterans and challenges a social narrative that has silenced the lived experience of war. Reflection on the experience of marginalised people emphasises the importance of right action over right belief. And the incarnational ministry of local churches is held up to be where God takes place. In Graham’s assessment, theology is in dialogue with science, art and communal and personal experience to enable the nurturing of faithful personal and communal discipleship and engagement with the wider world.

1 Elaine Graham, Heather Walton and Frances Ward, Theological Reflection: Methods (London: SCM, 2005).

2 Stephanie N. Arel and Shelly Rambo, eds., Post-Traumatic Public Theology (London: Pal-grave Macmillan, 2016).

3 Alan Everett, After the Fire: Finding Words for Grenfell (London: Canterbury, 2018).

In Chapter 2, Carla A. Grosch-Miller fixes a narrower gaze on what happens when a traumatising experience shatters a particular and potentially foundational theological understanding. Working with a case study of how the suicide of a young teenager rocked a church and its priest, she explores the power of the stories on which we build our lives and the urgency of experience as a driver for reframing those stories. Grosch-Miller proposes a model of the pastoral cycle which takes seriously lived experience and embodiment in critical-liminal conversation with theological and other sources and which can chart the remaking of tradition. Like Graham, she finds Rambo’s articulation of the ‘middle’ space (between Good Friday and Easter Sunday) – which holds both death and hope of God’s overcoming of death through enduring love – a particularly fruitful concept.

1 After the fire, the voice of God

Speaking of God after tragedy and trauma

Elaine Graham

‘How can we find the language to express our grief at the loss of so many people in unimaginably terrifying circumstances?’¹ So writes Alan Everett in the aftermath of the fire that engulfed Grenfell Tower in London in June 2017. His reflection on the trauma unleashed by those terrible events tries to find meaning out of what happened. One grain of consolation was the response of faith communities and the reserves of practical help and volunteers they were able to muster in the vital hours and days after the tragedy. But Everett is also struggling to make sense of what happened theologically: how to find the language to articulate the depths of human emotion; how to speak of God. Where was God in these events?

1 Alan Everett, After the Fire: Finding Words for Grenfell (London: Canterbury, 2018), 117.

As Jeffrey Alexander argues,² injury and suffering are not just events that happen. Rather, trauma that is experienced by a community is a product of the cultural imagination insofar as events emerge from, and help shape, collective identities and actions. Responses to social suffering are certainly material, but they also involve cultural processes of meaning-making. How are narratives about suffering, its causes and effects, constructed and mediated? We must clearly address the practical and political implications of collective suffering and trauma, but also attend to their discursive and symbolic dimensions: questions of meaning, attribution, purpose and narrative. So theological engagement is also necessary in order to consider how understandings of the will of God, the suffering of Christ and the meaning of redemptive hope function within our cultural imaginations.

2 Jeffrey C. Alexander, Trauma: A Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012).

In this chapter, I want to bring some ideas about what it means to ‘reflect theologically’ together with some recent writings on tragedy and trauma. I argue that theological reflection has always been part of Christian tradition and has always emerged in response to three key practical tasks: the formation of Christian character, building and maintaining the community of faith and communicating the faith to the wider world.³ I want to demonstrate how these imperatives make use of different elements of the Christian tradition – notably Scripture, tradition, cultural information and experience, both individual and corporate – to generate ways of speaking that are capable of inspiring and nurturing a ‘practical wisdom’ for the Church.

3 See, further, Elaine Graham, Heather Walton and Frances Ward, Theological Reflection: Methods (2nd ed.; London: SCM, 2019), 11–12.

Methodology in theological reflection

Theological reflection has been the term of reference for the practical end of the theological spectrum for more than 30 years. There is no single method in theology today, and a plurality of approaches is generally accepted and expected. Most theologians and ministers, however, understand that theological reflection deals with the connection between theological sources and the issues, experiences, trends and possibilities of contemporary life. In Theological Reflection: Methods,⁴ together with my co-authors, Heather Walton and Frances Ward, I argued that theological reflection has always been about resolving practical dilemmas arising from everyday life. Different methods of theological reflection, then, are not abstract constructs imposed on experience but, rather, ways in which Christians have come to formulate their ideas and understandings of God in and through their particular contexts and concerns. Theological reflection ‘enables people of faith to give an account of the values and traditions that underpin their choices and convictions and deepens their understanding’.⁵

4 Graham et al., Theological Reflection.

5 Graham et al., Theological Reflection, 6.

We based our exploration of theological method on the assumption that practical theology is not simply a matter of examining practice through the lens of theology. Rather, it is a work of constructive theology which is not confined to the academy but is at the heart of a lifelong learning that characterizes faithful discipleship:

At the heart of theological reflection… are questions about the relationship of theory and practice, and how to connect theological discourse about the nature of God to the exercise of faith. This is an endeavour shared by laity and clergy. Christian practice is not simply about the duties of congregational ministry but the entire life and witness of the Church. It is predominantly a critical interrogative enquiry into the process of relating the resources of faith to the issues of life. The exercise of theological reflection is thus one ‘in which pastoral experience serves as a context for critical development of basic theological understanding’.⁶

6 Graham et al., Theological Reflection, 6, citing Burck and Hunter, 1990, p. 867.

Fundamentally, theological reflection arises from practical discipleship. It aims to articulate the nature of God in order that people might lead godly lives. In particular, it serves the following main purposes: facilitating Christian nurture, describing the normative ethos and contours of the faithful community and engaging in dialogue and apologetics with the wider world and those who hold different worldviews. These three tasks constitute theology as a form of ‘practical wisdom’ within which faithful discipleship is shaped. Christians have turned to the sources of their faith, such as Scripture, experience, church practice and cultural information, in order to articulate the normative horizons by which authentic living can be guided.⁷

7 In Theological Reflection: Methods, we set out seven different types or methods of theological reflection according to the differential emphasis placed on the key resources of scripture, reason, culture and experience. The selection consists of (1) ‘Theology by Heart: The Living Human Document’ (records of personal experience), (2) ‘Speaking in Parables: Constructive Narrative Theology’ (parabolic and other metaphoric narrative), (3) ‘Telling God’s Story: Canonical Narrative Theology’ (the scriptural witness), (4) ‘Writing the Body of Christ: Corporate Theological Reflection’ (the credal and ritual expressions of the church’s life), (5) ‘Speaking of God in Public: Correlation’ (the relation of theological thinking to culture and non-theological forms of discourse), (6) ‘Theology in Action: Praxis’ (performance-based knowledge such as liberation theology) and (7) ‘Theology in the Vernacular: Contextual Theologies’ (the particular form of the gospel’s expression in any specific place and time).

In what follows I consider what this understanding of reflecting theologically on practice might mean for work that responds to tragic or traumatic events and, in particular, what can be learned about the key tasks of doing theology as a practical undertaking. I refer extensively to the collection of essays published in 2016 titled Post-Traumatic Public Theology,⁸ which was, in part, inspired ...