Exploring Ordinary Theology

Everyday Christian Believing and the Church

Leslie J. Francis, Jeff Astley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317137221
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

'Ordinary theology' characterizes the reflective God-talk of the great majority of churchgoers, and others who remain largely untouched by the assumptions, concepts and arguments that academic theology takes for granted. Jeff Astley coined the phrase in his innovative study, Ordinary Theology: Looking, Listening and Learning in Theology, arguing that 'speaking statistically ordinary theology is the theology of God's Church'. A number of scholars have responded to this and related conceptualizations, exploring their theological implications. Other researchers have adopted the perspective in examining a range of Church practices and contexts of Christian discipleship, using the tools of empirical study. Ordinary theology research has proved to be key in uncovering people's everyday lay theology or ordinary dogmatics. Exploring Ordinary Theology presents fresh contributions from a wide range of authors, who address the theological, empirical and practical dimensions of this central feature of ordinary Christian existence and the life of the Church.

Chapter 1
The Analysis, Investigation and Application of Ordinary Theology

Jeff Astley

Definition and Characterization

I have defined ordinary theology as ‘the theological beliefs and processes of believing that find expression in the God-talk of those believers who have received no scholarly theological education’ (Astley, 2002: 1, cf. 55–8, 64, 94). As not all such discourse can count as theology, I restrict the designation to ‘reflective’ God-talk (52–7). We should not automatically deny a reflective status to the theology of these believers, although the reflections of ordinary theologians are frequently less precise than the academy expects. This sort of theological reflection also involves more than can be mapped on to people’s cognitive faculties alone (140–45). Along with its ‘practical goal’, this may allow us to describe such reflection as ‘ultimately intended for every believer’ rather than a ‘theological speciality reserved only for experts’ (Kinast, 2000: 64).

My description of the nature of ordinary theology (Astley, 2002: 57–95) treats it, to some extent, as an ‘ideal type’ in that it stresses, and sometimes simplifies and exaggerates, certain common elements and tends to focus on extreme cases. I hold that the difference between ordinary and academic theology is only a matter of degree – no pun intended. Even academics normally begin by doing theology in an ordinary way, and this ordinary theology often continues to underlie their more academic theological expressions. And, historically speaking, the academic mode of theology owes much of its origin to – and develops alongside – this less conceptual, technical or systematic form of theology, which begins as a ‘cognitive disposition and orientation of the soul’ that represents the ‘wisdom proper to the life of the believer’ (Farley, 1983: 35; 1988: 88) and becomes a personal, autobiographical and aphoristic ‘irregular dogmatics’ (Barth, 1975: 277–8).

Such a widespread – and, in that sense, ‘common’ and ‘ordinary’ – theology (Astley, 2002: 49–52) is learned and ‘taught’ in very different ways from those of the university or seminary. Much of this takes place through Christian prayer, worship and Bible reading, and Christian living and fellowship; through the life of the home, street or workplace; and in reflection on other, everyday life experiences and activities – and hardly at all through such ‘out of the ordinary’ things as lectures, academic seminars, tutorials or private study.

The significance of ordinary theology is twofold (144–62). There is an uncontroversial, pragmatic justification for its study, in that the church needs to know about the beliefs, and patterns and processes of believing, of those who receive its communicative and pastoral ministries.1 The wider significance of ordinary theology, however, and the theological justification for its study, is that ordinary theology in some sense ‘works’ for those who own it. It fits their life experience and gives meaning to, and expresses the meaning they find within, their own lives. It is highly significant for them because it articulates a faith and a spirituality, and incorporates beliefs and ways of believing, that they find to be salvific – healing, saving, making them whole. Ordinary theology helps people spiritually and religiously.

This is not to say that every part of the unsystematic bricolage that makes up most Christians’ ordinary theology works in this way. People often find themselves holding beliefs that are not helpful to their spiritual life or sense of meaning, and may even get in the way of these things. I would argue, however, that the whole of their belief-(non)system – and some parts of it in particular – must be salvific for people if they are to continue to hold it.2 Although there are other causes, this is one positive reason why religious learners are often so resistant to any change in their ordinary beliefs.3

Analogies

Does something like the ordinary/academic distinction in theology apply in other areas? The relationship between ordinary and academic theology and ordinary and academic physics or statistics (or social sciences such as economics) is not really analogous. For ordinary (‘folk’ or ‘naïve’) physics often fails us in negotiating the physical world, and our ‘informal mathematics’ is frequently misleading. Our natural misunderstandings in these areas are poor substitutes for empirically proven or logically secure beliefs. By contrast, even when our ordinary theology is wholly anecdotal, figurative, inconsistent or even logically confused, it may serve us as a personal expression of a self-involving religious response or relationship that works. Its salvific, meaning-making function involves a psychological/spiritual change in a person, which (theological realists insist) depends on transcendent facts about God’s structuring of the human heart through nature and grace, so that it is restless until it rests in him. Bad science or poor risk assessment do not help us in any similar way. Certainly, they do not spiritually heal people or make them whole.

We may speculate that ordinary theology more closely resembles our folk knowledge about human thinking, feeling and behaving, than it does our untutored understanding of the laws of physical things or numerical relationships. Some moral philosophers interpret their task as making sense of everyday or common morality, rather than imposing a more sophisticated notion to overwrite and replace it (e.g., Gert, 1998: preface and ch. 1). Our ordinary morality works in our social relationships and decision-making, and moral theories are often tested against widely held moral ‘knowledge’, ‘ideals’, ‘experience’ or ‘insights’. Some psychologists argue similarly that the ideas of folk (naïve, common sense or vernacular) psychology embrace well-established constructs and assumptions, albeit expressed in aphoristic style, that academic psychologists should seek to extend rather than to eliminate (cf. Crane, 2003: ch. 2). Folk psychology also ‘works’, in human interaction and in predicting and even explaining everyday behaviour, even though it too is open to cognitive refinement and correction.

Study

Our characterization of ordinary theology needs to be earthed in – and adequate to – the empirical reality of people’s beliefs and values. The content, and perhaps sometimes the form, of ordinary theology are likely to vary across cultures, churches, congregations and individuals. There is no one ordinary theology, as there is no one academic (or, in truth, normative ecclesiastical) theology. As the church is both many and varied, we should expect variety in ordinary Christian theology.

Empirical Study

The descriptive task of the study of ordinary theology requires us to engage in ‘theological listening’: listening out for it and attempting to portray it. This sort of description is always partly dependent on the listener’s own theological presuppositions, if only because we won’t hear another person’s God-talk as theology unless we have some idea about what sort of thing a theology is. (And if we think that theology can only exist in the form of technical concepts and systematic arguments, we shall not hear much of it from the pews – or the pulpit, come to that.) So even at this stage, and certainly if they listen in detail, students of ordinary theology are engaged in a hermeneutical task in which ‘continuing theological reflection, i.e., a process of ordering and interpretation, … [modifies] the perspective within which the “facts” are perceived’ (van der Ven, 1993: 121). This description, therefore, always ‘takes place within a dialogue or conversation’ (Browning, 1991: 64).4

Theological listening may take many different forms. In trying (often unsuccessfully, I fear) to encourage clergy and ordinands to take seriously the ordinary theology of churchgoers and others, I am sometimes accused of pressing them to become professional ethnographers or expert statisticians. This volume contains several examples of such time-consuming empirical studies, which report either rich qualitative data derived from small samples, or more representative analyses based on quantitative data from larger populations. We must welcome this work; the church needs much more of it. But with the necessary reflexivity (critical self-reflection on the enquirer’s role and effect), normal pastoral conversations and alert, empathetic and intelligent observations can already tell us a great deal about what people believe, as some of the other essays here bear witness. The great value of more in-depth study through research interviews and questionnaires is that it allows us both to validate the anecdotal, and to explore behind it. But all theological listening will encourage people to think and speak (even write) about their theologies, and to feel that their beliefs are being taken seriously – because they are.

In this volume we are largely concerned with theological listening directed to what people are literally saying (or writing). This process takes seriously their feelings, relationships and actions, and especially their values, ideas, beliefs and understanding, as these are expressed in their words.

Studying Ordinary Theology in Practice Practical theology centres on the claims that praxis5 is ‘the fundamental locus of theology, the “place” where theology occurs’ (Boff, 2009: xxi); that people’s practice is ‘its own proper “articulation” of theological conviction and insight’ and has its own theological authority as the bearer of ‘embodied theology’ (Cameron et al., 2010: 51); and that theology is a ‘performative discipline’ whose task is to describe how a situation is already theology-in-practice (Graham, 1996: 7). Practice is here viewed as the performance, or acting out, of the ‘text’ of a person or group’s beliefs, values, theories and theologies (Swinton and Mowat, 2006: 19–20). Other language that is used of this relationship between theological beliefs and practices (or communities of practice) includes ‘embedding’ and ‘underpinning’, and belief being ‘within the act itself’. These are all potent and illuminating metaphors.

Unfortunately, it is often difficult to infer people’s beliefs from their practice. Unless one defines beliefs in terms of behaviour,6 there is rarely a one-to-one relationship between beliefs and their expression in actions, and sometimes only a weak empirical correlation. Disagreements over the metamechanics of sacramental theology and the metaphysics of divinity rarely map tidily onto the overt behaviour of Christians at their worship, or in their actions outside the church building. In this sense, different theologies may undergird the same practice, and we must be cautious about imputing to people’s practice a theology that they would not themselves claim to hold (but see below).

This is why ordinary theology research normally concentrates on people’s beliefs as they are expressed in their words: portraying the theology in what people say (or write) rather than the theology implicit in what they do. I want literally to hear the theological voice of those who call themselves ‘just ordinary’. In taking their practices seriously, we must include in this category the speaking (or writing) of their reflective God-talk. However hesitant, inarticulate and unsystematic is a person’s ordinary theology, it is easier literally to hear than is their practice. Practice speaks ‘very loudly’, of course, as we say; and often ‘more loudly than words’. But it does not speak in words. Inferring people’s theology from their practice may sometimes be our only recourse; but it is a rather different sort of activity from describing, understanding and analysing what they say.7

I would argue that we should not only listen, but also (wherever possible and appropriate) ask people about what they believe, pressing them as to what they mean by what they say. Wittgenstein argued that to understand the believer we have to know the inferences that the believer draws.8 As usual, the enemy is superficiality. Our earnest hope is that if we really ‘listen up’, and listen in depth, we shall find out what these ordinary theologians truly believe, in part ‘based on the evidence of the implications, both implicit and explicit, that they actually draw and adopt in their discourse and their lives from the language they are using’ (Astley, 2002: 121). (Please note: lives and discourse.) In descriptive ordinary theology, we must always strive to unveil the theology in the linguistic data, rather than impose our own theological categories onto that data (within the limits of n. 4).

There is a problem here, of course. If people are conscious that they are drawing these theological implications, then they will probably cheerfully accept the account we give of their theology. It will then become an agreed account of what they actually mean by what they say and do. But if they do not consciously recognize that they are drawing and accepting these implications from their own theology, they may not accept our account of it. On such occasions, and having reported this disagreement, we may be permitted to stick to our account. If at all possible, however, we should always give people the opportunity to disagree with our description of what it is they are ‘really saying’.

Theological Study

There is a further, and wholly proper, way of studying ordinary theology that takes us beyond such empirical description-and-interpretation to a more evaluative and reflective, broadly theological critique.

Having first listened to what ordinary theologians say, and probed the theological inferences and connections that ordinary theologians themselves make, theologically-trained observers may then reflect theologically on this ordinary theology, presenting their own theology of ordinary theology. This will usually take the form of a ‘critical practical theology’ (see Kelsey, 1992: 206–7, 211; Heitink, 1999: 221), in which questions are raised about the truth of what ordinary theologians are saying, and the extent to which it is faithful to Christian norms.9 This mode of studying ordinary theology can be appropria...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The Analysis, Investigation and Application of Ordinary Theology
• Part I Reflecting on Ordinary Theology: Analytical and Theological Perspectives
• Part II Researching and Situating Ordinary Theology: Empirical and Contextual Perspectives
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects