The problematic context of ‘practical theology’

In order to understand this difference a little better, I want briefly to acknowledge some of the problematic issues with practical theology and question their effects on how theology in four voices is understood. I would suggest that the problems that we’ve had with the understanding of the four voices are symptomatic of endemic problems within practical theology as a whole. In particular, the ways in which we habitually think about practice and about thinking/articulation in practical theology has made it difficult to understand fully what we were trying to say in the four voices of theology.

Here I have in mind that ‘correlative paradigm’, so formative of practical theology, about which I have written elsewhere.¹⁰ The conceiving of practical theology - and especially theological reflection - as the bringing together of ‘polarities’, or a critical conversation between theory and practice,¹¹ suggests that at the start of much practical theology, there is an assumption of dis-integration. Practical theology can then see its particular task as the bringing (back) together of theology (understood often as ‘theory’) and practice, on the assumption that they are separate - all be it tragically so.

Against this, the ARCS project as an ecclesiological project concerned with practices (in keeping with many great ecclesiologists, such as Karl Rahner and Edward Schillebeeckx, I suggest),¹² and out of which the four voices of theology arose, assumed from the start a proper and alive integration of theology and practice. Indeed, the starting conviction that practices are theological expressions evidences this. For us, the ‘problem’ was not one of how to connect the separated realms of practice and (abstract) theology; rather, we were concerned to elucidate how the action and word of God might be discerned and responded to in a whole, ecclesial theology, in which the different loci of revelation were properly attended to as diverse but true and authoritative witnesses to that revelation. Far from being a tool or method for answering practical theology’s dominant question of disintegration, theology in four voices is rather an expression of a theological conviction concerning the reality of an integrated ‘whole-theology’. When you read the four voices with an assumption of disintegration, you get a different understanding of it.

The reception of the four voices - and questions arising

The next task in this chapter is to give an account of some of the clarification and nuancing of the four voices which has taken place since the publication of Talking About God in Practice. To do this, I want first to identify certain ‘questions arising’ in the reception of the four voices of theology, in response to which these clarifications and proper complexifica-tions have taken place. In my experience of teaching and training in theological action research, I would identify three significant areas for questions concerning the four voices: the relation of the voices to one another; the problem of the operant as a ‘voice’; and the asymmetry of authorities between the four voices, with particular attention to the question of the normative. Consideration of these three questions will shape the next section’s renewed account of the four voices of theology. However, before exploring these questions, I want also to make some mention of the place of the pastoral cycle and related ‘models’ of theological reflection (or action-reflection more broadly) in theological action research, and their relation to the four voices of theology.

It is in chapter 4 of Talking About God in Practice that theological action research as such is presented, and the understanding of theology in four voices first articulated. The chapter begins with a diagram of a typical action reflection model which corresponds to many representations of the pastoral cycle.¹³ The move from ‘experience’ through ‘reflection’ and ‘learning’ to ‘action’ lacks some of the explicitly theological resonances of the ‘See-Judge-Act’ of the pastoral cycle, but nonetheless will be widely recognisable to practical theologians. In the context of the chapter, the diagram serves not so much to describe theological action research, but rather to act as an introduction to the distinctiveness of theological action research by starting with an already recognised pattern of reflection and learning, after which what is different about theological action research is set out. In fact, I would argue, theological action research’s understanding of theology in four voices challenges much of the dominant use and understanding of the pastoral cycle in contemporary practical theology.

The pastoral cycle has its proximate roots in the ‘See-Judge-Act’ ministry of the Belgian Catholic priest, Joseph Cardijn, and his work with the Young Christian Workers Movement, which he founded in the 1920s. This is a movement committed to the three ‘truths’ of faith, reality and method, where the See-Judge-Act method seeks to enable a greater congruence between these truths.¹⁴ By 1961, this approach had found its way into the papal teaching of the Catholic church, being referred to in Pope St. John Will's encyclical on social issues, Mater et Magistral It later became the mainstay of much Latin American liberation theology, as is more widely recognised in the practical theological literature. The Roman Catholic provenance is of significance in understanding the ecclesiological context of the pastoral cycle as originally conceived; this is a ‘method’ born out of a tradition in which there is a distinctive understanding of divine revelation, its loci, its transmission and the role of the church in these dynamics. More pragmatically, See-Judge-Act was not designed as an aid to academics seeking to relate their theology to practices, but rather as a communal and prayerful process engaged in by small groups of Christians reflecting on their day-to-day life. The pastoral cycle can still serve the practical theologian and theological reflector in these ways, but this awareness of ecclesial context and history serves to ward against any reification of the pastoral cycle which sees it in terms of a quasi-academic method or research tool. In particular, the Young Christian Worker Movement and the base communities of liberation theology gather around this method in a context of shared prayer and faith-community with the express intention of seeking to understand better what God might be saying to them about their own lives as Christians. Any translation of this into the rather more individualistic, academic (and protestant dominated) world of practical theology needs to take some account of this in chastening too uncritical a promulgation of the pastoral cycle to students and practitioners.

One of the risks of separating the pastoral cycle from its ecclesial, faithcommunity roots is that it allows for a more modern, academic epistemology, more akin to social sciences and educational studies, to dominate. In this context the pastoral cycle is too easily operated as stages of reflection, in which experience/practice, analysis, theological reflection and action are held distinct. This gives rise to the idea that theology is one of the steps in the process, and undermines any fundamental sense of the reflector being involved in theology ‘all the way through’. It is notable, of course, that the original See-Judge-Act method did not include ‘theological reflection’; such an inclusion would be unnecessary in the context of practising this way of discernment in explicitly prayerful, faith groups for whom - I suggest - the theology was operative throughout the process.

The significance of these reflections on the pastoral cycle for understanding the four voices of theology and their place in theological action research lies precisely here: if the pastoral cycle is understood in terms of a procedure of stages, in which theology is one rather late stage, it remains inimical to theological action research precisely because of the way in which the four voices of theology speaks of an integrated, whole-theology - in which all aspects of the research and its attendant practices are understood as theological. For an approach adopting theology in four voices as a basis, it is indeed questionable as to whether there can ever be so procedural a sense of a model; rather, the four voices commit us to sitting with the cacophony and occasional harmony of the voices, attentively waiting for the insight (disclosure) to become clear.¹⁶