The Routledge Companion to the Practice of Christian Theology

Mike Higton, Jim Fodor

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415617369
• eBook ISBN: 9781317532019
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

This Companion introduces readers to the practice of Christian theology, covering what theologians do, why they do it, and what steps readers can take in order to become theological practitioners themselves. The volume aims to capture the variety of practices involved in doing theology, highlighting the virtues that guide them and the responsibilities that shape them. It also shows that the description of these practices, virtues and responsibilities is itself theological: what Christian theologians do is shaped by the wider practices and beliefs of Christianity. Written by a team of leading theologians, the Companion provides a unique resource for students and scholars of theology alike.

1

General Introduction

Mike Higton and Jim Fodor

This is not yet another book that introduces the standard topics or themes of Christian theology (‘trinity’, ‘incarnation’, ‘salvation’ and the rest) – though many of those topics and themes will certainly come up. It is instead a book designed to introduce the practice of Christian theology.

We’re not using the word ‘practice’ in the sense it has in the phrase ‘practice makes perfect’. In other words, we’re not primarily talking about the things that budding Christian theologians do when they are first starting off, in order to become proficient – before taking the trainer wheels off and doing it for real. We will certainly talk a bit, from time to time, about ways to get started on the practice of Christian theology, but that’s not the main theme of the book.

Instead we’re using the word ‘practice’ in the sense it has in a phrase like ‘her normal practice’. That is, we’re going to be talking about the ongoing habits, the persisting patterns of activity, involved in the pursuit of Christian theology. We’re going to be talking about the craft of Christian theology; this is a book about what Christian theologians habitually do.

In particular, we’re going to be asking what it means for Christian theologians to practise their craft well, so as to be – to the extent that this is possible at all – good Christian theologians.

Good practice

The Catholic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre defined a practice as

any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.¹

So, we’re talking about a human activity that is cooperative: it is not simply the activity of an isolated individual, but of multiple people interacting with one another. It is complex: we are not simply talking about a simple activity like clapping, but about an activity that has many parts and processes to it. It is coherent: there may be fuzzy edges and grey areas, but when we talk about ‘Christian theology’ we are talking about an activity or family of activities that can be identified and discussed. We’re talking about an activity that has ‘standards of excellence which are appropriate to it’: that is, we can meaningfully ask what it means to be a good theologian, and our answers are, on the whole, going to have to be specific to theology, rather than answers that could do just as well for other kinds of activity.

That much of MacIntyre’s definition is clear. That leaves the phrases about ‘goods internal to that form of activity’ and about the systematic extension of ‘human conceptions of the ends and goods involved’.

A ‘good’ is, roughly speaking, a desirable fruit. The goods of a practice are the desirable fruits that it yields. We are dealing with ‘external’ goods if we can separate these outcomes from the practice that yielded them – if we can separate ends and means. If you can say that you happen to have produced this particular good by means of this practice, but could have produced it in some quite different way, then you are talking about an external good.

An external good is therefore one where what you get (this external good) is detachable from what you have to be (good at this particular practice) in order to get it. Think, for instance, of money. You can acquire it by flipping burgers, winning games of poker, selling your paintings, or robbing banks, and quite possibly in other ways too. Getting rich (getting hold of lots of the desirable fruit produced by these activities) is a state of affairs with no inherent connection to being a skilled painter or deft burger-flipper.

MacIntyre therefore argues that an external good tends to be the kind that can be thought of as property or as a possession, something that could in principle be passed around or exchanged, but which I happen for now to own. They therefore tend to be the kind of goods for which there can be competition, because in general the more I have of one of these external goods, the less there will be for others.

Internal goods, on the other hand, although they can be the outcome of some competition to excel, tend not to result in situations where there must always be winners and losers. The characteristic form of a good internal to a practice is that it is the desirable fruit of becoming better at that practice – becoming a good practitioner. If we both become translators, for instance, we may end up competing for the same business – and if I end up cornering the market, my earning of the external good of payment for my work will mean you earning less of that external good. But we can both become, by means of diligent effort, better at speaking French – we can achieve the internal good of excellent linguistic ability – without being caught in the same kind of zero sum game. We will be extending ‘the human powers to achieve excellence’.

Moreover, if I become better at speaking French, and you do too, there will simply be more good French speaking going on – we will become part of a community with greater linguistic resources than before: our achievement of the good will mean that there is more of the good around than before. In this sense, any practitioner who truly excels at a practice, and thereby promotes the goods internal to that practice, will also tend to enrich the whole relevant community (the community of people who value this kind of good).

MacIntyre also argues that the proficiency and confidence with which a practitioner carries out a practice are directly related to that person’s recognition that the practice requires a certain kind of submission. The practitioner needs to recognize the authority of the community whose practice this is – a willingness to learn from that community how this practice goes, and what counts as being good at it. To enter into a practice is to enter into a relationship of apprenticeship not only to other contemporary practitioners, but also and especially to those notable exemplars who have preceded us in the practice. In other words, becoming a good practitioner requires not only the acquisition of certain requisite skills, but acquiring those skills in a tradition or community of practitioners. A good practitioner will therefore tend to have a sense of identity and/or ‘belongingness’ with respect to the tradition in which she sees herself embedded and against which her abilities, and the abilities of those she is either mentoring or being mentored by, or both, are judged.

MacIntyre also argued, however, that a person’s own acquired excellence in the performance of this practice gives something back to that community. It is not just that the community – let’s say the community of chess players – benefits from there being more of this good, more good chess playing around. Rather, to the extent that she becomes really good at chess, she shows that community more of what being good can mean. So although the standards of excellence by which an activity is judged arise from the very form of that activity itself, the goal or goals of that practice are not fixed for all time. Rather, the goals themselves are transmuted by the history of the activity, and ‘human conceptions of the ends and goods involved’ are extended, deepened, enriched.

When we speak about ‘the practice of Christian theology’, this is the kind of picture we have in mind. We are talking about the ongoing collaborative activity of theologians, learnt largely by apprenticeship but constantly evolving and developing, its boundaries stretched by each generation of practitioners. And we are talking about the standards of good practice, and the exemplars who embody those standards, that shape our notion of what it means to pursue this practice well. That’s what this book is about: the evolving tradition of collaborative theological practice, and the standards to which its participants aspire.

Of course, by talking about the ‘evolving tradition’ of theology, we don’t want to give the impression that there is some sort of inherent, guaranteed progress to the tradition of Christian theological practice. That would be both naïve and delusional. There are all too many challenges and threats to good theological practice, and all too many ways in which that practice can be distorted and corrupted. That is also a central theme of this book: the ways in which we might identify and respond to distortions and corruptions in the practice of theology.

A spiritual discipline?

There is something important missing from this discussion, however. We’ve talked about the ‘desirable fruit’ of the practice of Christian theology. We’ve mentioned the possibility of ‘distortions and corruptions’. And we’ve referred, using MacIntyre’s language, to ‘human conceptions of the ends and goods involved’ and to ‘human powers to achieve excellence’. Yet in the Christian community, the ‘ends and goals’ of the practice of theology have normally been understood to include knowing God more truly, following God more faithfully, living more transparently to the ways of God’s kingdom, and participating more deeply in the gracious love of God.

There is, therefore, something odd, something not quite right, about describing this practice as if it were simply the way of life of a particular human community – without going on to say something about this community’s, and this practice’s, relationship to God.

If the practice of Christian theology is indeed involved in some way – sometimes perhaps for good and sometimes perhaps for ill – in the processes by which Christians pursue truthfulness, faithfulness, holiness, or righteousness before God, then that will make a difference to how we talk about it. If we follow the deep patterns of Christian thinking about growth in holiness, justice or righteousness, we will not be able to think about these ends and goals simply as something that we might, with the right effort and the right training on our part, be able to achieve. Rather, we will think about them as something into which we might, by the grace of God, be drawn. Just as we can think of prayer both as something that we do, and as something that God does in us, so we can think of good theology as something that we do, and as something that we receive, something that God does in us – working in us by the Spirit to conform us to Christ.

We can therefore take the ideas about ‘submission’ and ‘apprenticeship’ discussed a few paragraphs ago, and recast them in the language of discipleship – and we can, perhaps, also take the whole description of Christian theology as a practice, and recast it in the language of spiritual discipline. Different theologians will do this in different ways: they will understand the relationship of this practice to discipleship differently; they will understand the relationship of divine grace and human effort differently; they will understand the relationship between theology and other Christian practices differently. You will find some of these differences if you compare the various chapters of this book. Nevertheless, in and through these differences, this too is a central theme of this book: the practice of Christian theology as a practice of discipleship, a form of spiritual discipline, closely entwined with practices of prayer, worship, and the pursuit of just and holy living.

Reason, Scripture, tradition, experience

You will see that we have arranged the chapters of this book under four headings – headings that may well be familiar. You may have come across reference to ‘Scripture, tradition and reason’ or ‘Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience’ when people are talking about the ways in which theology should be developed. The threefold list gets attributed to the sixteenth-century Anglican divine Richard Hooker; the fourfold form is Methodist, and gets attributed to John Wesley – though in both cases the neat formulation is a twentieth-century summary.²

In some discussions of these lists, the idea seems to be that these are three or four distinct sources from which theological claims can be generated, and that the theologian’s job is to know how to balance, integrate or prioritize them. So we might have the Bible telling us that God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; tradition telling us that God is Triune; reason telling us that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent; and experience telling us that God is intimately present to us – and the theologian’s job would be to work out how those four claims go together, and which should have priority.

That is not the way we are using the headings in this book. We are, after all, interested in the practice or activity of Christian theology, and we are using these four headings to point to four aspects of that one activity.

To put it simply, a Christian theologian is someone who in some specific contexts thinks about the Scriptures in company with others.

When we use the heading ‘reason’, we are simply focusing on the fact that the theologian is someone who thinks. What kind of thinking, drawing on what resources, governed by what standards, to what end – all these are questions that we’re going to be exploring. We are not particularly interested in using ‘reason’ to name an independent human faculty that, if left to its own devices, could produce answers to theological questions independent of the Scriptures, tradition or experience.

When we use the heading ‘Scriptures’, we are focusing on the fact that the thinking that Christian theologians do is carried out, more and less directly, in engagement with the Christian Scriptures. What kind of engagement, treating the Scriptures in what way, acknowledging what kind of authority, and with what fruit – all these, too, are questions that we’re going to be exploring.

When we use the heading ‘tradition’, we are focusing on the fact that Christian theologians don’t and can’t operate alone. Their thinking is a practice that exists in a tradition of practice (even if some theologians end up being reformers of that tradition), and their thinking therefore always, more or less explicitly, takes the form of conversation with theology’s past and present practitioners – a conversation that will more or less directly be a conversation about how best to engage with Scripture. We will be asking what shape that conversation should have, and what kinds of humility and boldness Christian theologians should have as they participate in it.

Finally, when using the heading ‘experience’, we are interested in the fact that this thinking – this conversational thinking that engages with the Scriptures – always takes place somewhere specific. Christian theologians each have a location – and not just a literal geographical location, but a cultural location, a gender location, a class location, a historical location. They write from contexts of specific kinds of privilege and specific kinds of deprivation. They write in the wake of specific histories of peace and violence, inclusion and exclusion, liberation and oppression. And Christian theologians write at specific points in the lives of their churches, and specific points in their own journeys of discipleship, in the midst of all this. And their location makes a difference to what they see and how they see it – to how they engage in conversation with the tradition, to how they read the Scriptures, to how they think – just as how they think, read, and converse makes a difference to how they navigate their lives in their specific locations.

The four sections therefore belong together. The reasoning discussed in section one is always scriptural, conversational, and contextual; the engagement with Scripture always involves thinking and conversation in some specific location – and so on. These are not four sources that can be separated out, but four vantage points from which to look at, and ask questions about, the same activity.

The chapters in this book

Each of the four sections of the book has its own introduction, which will set the scene, and explain more about what we mean by ‘reason’, ‘Scripture’, ‘tradition’ and ‘experience’. It will also explain how the individual chapters in that section fit in to that scene. A few initial words about the nature of the various chapters might be useful here, however.

First, the authors who have contributed to this boo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Contributors
• 1 General Introduction
• Part I Reason
• Part II Scripture
• Part III Tradition
• Part IV Experience
• Index