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WMCluster: Home -- Current Activities -- Documents -- Consultations -- Consultation IV |
Notes for Presentation to Western Mission
Cluster Consultation IV
Spirit in the Desert Retreat Center, Carefree, AZ, January 18, 2002.
Patricia O’Connell Killen, Ph.D.Department of Religion
Pacific Lutheran University
Tacoma, WA 98447-0003
253-535-7776
killenpo@plu.edu
[NOTE:
This material is for the use of persons who attended the Western Mission Cluster
gathering, January 18-20, 2002.
In
whatever ways you use the material with others, please credit all sources
appropriately.]
I. INTRODUCTION
A. Appreciation for invitation to continue my reflections, “Equipping the Baptized: Linking Faith with Daily Life” at this year’s Western Mission Cluster meeting.
B. Note that manuscript from last year is on website. I am submitting a corrected version of it to Jim Boyce to replace the one that is there.
C. Preview of talk: will do four things:
1. Summarize briefly my main claims from last year to set the context
2. Propose what I consider the most crucial outcomes for theological education of adults, if we are serious about their being able to link faith and everyday life in life-giving and not death-dealing ways
3. Identify what I consider the essential characteristics of theological education that contributes to adults being able to link faith and life, using three successful programs to illustrate
4. Invite conversation about these ideas in relation to the work of the Western Mission Cluster
II. SUMMARY OF KEY POINTS FROM LAST YEAR’S ADDRESS: “Irony and Promise: Theological Education for Faith Formation and Life-Long Learning in the Twenty-First Century”
A. Fundamental Assumption: When a religious heritage is vital, when it works in the lives of individuals and communities, it grounds critique of self and society and funds the imagination for dealing with novel challenges. Formation in faith shapes people’s imaginations.
B. Our Task/Purpose: As theological educators we are about carrying, transmitting a profoundly liberating heritage into a future, the terrain of which the human species has never before imagined. We are called to provide people access to the wisdom and deep practices of the Lutheran heritage that is at one and the same time critically engaged, soul sustaining, and faithfully imaginative. We must find ways to make the grace, gift, charism, and insight of Lutheranism intelligible in humanistic terms for the twenty-first century.
C. Contextual and Situational Challenges
1. Religious identity and affiliation are an individual’s solitary, independent project -- divorced from extended family, ethnic community, stable neighborhood, social class, economic status, or region of the country.
a. This project is undertaken in an age-cohort segmented world.
b. In a world in which institutions are profoundly problematic. Before September 11 they were problematic because not trusted. Since 9/11 institutions may increasingly become problematic as they become totalizing.
c. In a culture of limited-liability commitments and consumer orientations.
2. We are a nation of religious seekers in a context that has eroded people’s capacity for access to or trust in the teachings, practices, and communities that help people develop sensibilities to distinguish between authentic and trustworthy spiritual teachings and the spiritual version of a pyramid scheme.
3. We work to transmit a theological heritage in a world where the dominant epistemology contains two categories--brute fact and mere opinion, with nothing in between. Yet that in-between space is where we make sense of things, articulate meaning, explore depth. That in-between space is the place where theology and spirituality reside, not in lists of biblical absolutes that are docetistic and deny the incarnated nature of Christ and of our knowing of God.
4. We are taking an ethnic, biblical, theological heritage and translating it into humanistic language for the twenty-first century. The task is to make Lutheranism intelligible while maintaining the integrity of the heritage so that people can cooperate with God’s Spirit active in history.
III. CRUCIAL OUTCOMES FOR THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION OF ADULTS THAT RESULTS IN THEIR BEING ABLE TO LINK FAITH AND EVERYDAY LIFE IN WAYS WORTH BOTHERING WITH
A. Five Fundamental Skills Adult Christians Should Develop Through Theological Education
[Explanatory Note: I have borrowed and developed these from the work of my colleague, Jack Shea. Jack discusses them in terms of training for professional ministers. I argue that these skills are required for theologically educated laity in their daily life. See: John Shea, “Doing Ministerial Theology: A Skills Approach,” in David Tracy, ed. Toward Vatican III: The Work That Needs to Be Done (NY: Concilium, Seabury, 1978.)]
1. The ability to hear the religious dimension when it is articulated in secular language and then to respond to it with Christian religious perception. Religious reality is present and people express it, but without using explicitly religious language. People talk about ultimate meaning, identity, hope, their own distortedness, suffering, and mystery, but don’t use words like God, sin, grace, Christ, or cross. Adult Christians need the skill of cracking the new religious code.
An illustration of how much people focus on the religious dimension comes from the science fiction TV series, Star Trek: Next Generation. When the series went off the air a local station sponsored a Star Trek: Next Generation marathon. Over a weekend the station aired viewers favorites. The single most popular episode was “The Inner Light.” In this episode, the Voyager encounters a satellite hanging in empty space. A beam from the satellite hits the captain as he stands with his officers on the bridge observing the satellite. In the course of the episode, the captain, Jean-Luc Picard, lives an entire alternative life on a planet. He makes friends, marries, has children, and takes pleasure in his grandchildren. As a scientist he sees that the microbes in the soil are dying. He figures out what the leaders on the planet knew, its sun is going nova, the planet will be destroyed. At this point, Picard’s new family tell him what has happened. The satellite had been launched by the people on the planet, with the stories of their ordinary lives in it, in hopes that some day other sentient life forms would pass by and know that they had lived, that their lives had meaning.
That this episode was the most popular of several years of the series, in the Pacific Northwest, the least churched part of the United States, suggests something about how religious issues are being construed today.
2. The ability to hear an explicitly theological question and to respond to it with accurate theology. The theological heritage of the Christian tradition and Lutheran Christianity matters. Theological illiteracy is as serious a problem as biblical illiteracy, perhaps more so. Engagement with the richness of the theological heritage is one antidote to the reductionistic thinking that shapes so much of religious discourse in our time.
3. The ability to hear an assumptive world and to surface it. Too much discourse today presumes that the statements made are all the meaning that is present. Yet, when we speak and especially when we assert convictions with passion, they are undergirded by an entire assumptive world grounded, at least implicitly in theological understandings of God, salvation, human nature, and more. Theologically educated adults should be able to listen in ways that allow them to grasp the assumptive world of a speaker. They should be able to converse in ways that are attentive to this deeper, assumptive dimension.
4. The ability to hear the relationship between the Christian story and concrete activity. The Christian story directs our attention to certain dimensions of life, certain problems, certain kinds of experiences. It harnesses our energy to address these problems and to articulate the meaning of experiences. In their worlds of family, community, and work, theologically educated adults, ideally, will be sensitive to this relationship and will bring it deliberately into the process of decision making.
5. The ability to notice and articulate the theological assumptions out of which one lives. Adults can be prisoners of their theological assumptions or owners of theological understandings. They can react out of unacknowledged theology or they can respond out of an informed theology. Developing the ability to notice and articulate the theological assumptions out of which one lives is essential to developing congruence among faith convictions, the theological heritage, and one’s daily living.
B. Maturity in Faith/Capacities for Wisdom
1. To learn and exercise the kinds of abilities that I am saying are necessary in order to link faith and life in a way worth bothering with requires spiritual and psychological maturation on the part of adults. Instrumental understandings of theological education and ministerial skill will not provide people the context they need to develop wisdom. And, in thinking about what is required for carrying the Christian heritage into the twenty-first century in a vital way, wisdom has become an increasingly important category for me.
2. My thinking about wisdom was provoked some time ago by my effort to understand how people of faith from different social locations actually thought with their faith, i.e., engaged in critique of themselves and their societies and imagined creative options for the future. Why are some people able to do this and others not? What are the psychological and spiritual issues that render a religious heritage an ideological club rather than a source of critically engaged, soul sustaining, and faithfully imaginative wisdom and practice? These are crucial questions for those charged with theological education.
3. Characteristics of wisdom. I began reading works in the psychology of wisdom in an effort to explore my question about when and how religious heritages worked for life or for death. One collection of essays by psychologists, anthropologists, historians, and philosophers that influenced my thinking was Wisdom: Its, Nature, Origins, and Development, edited by Robert J. Sternberg (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1990), I developed a summary list of characteristics of wisdom from these essays [put up on overhead].
* Aware of inner process and outer reality and their interrelationships
* Integrate their own soul with their agency in the world
* Aware of, notice, and can express their feeling and thinking
* Open to experiences of loss and grief
* Have a sense of proportion
* Practice a hermeneutic of suspicion and retrieval
* Imagine and hope
* Nurture persons or projects without seeking to control the outcome
* Act or refrain from acting toward others and the world in ways which restore harmonious relations among persons and other elements of creation
Wisdom became even more central in my thinking when I wrote Finding Our Voices: Women, Wisdom, and Faith (NY: Crossroad, 1997). Women and men of genuine faith experience the journey to God as a school of wisdom. I want to quote from my own work here which expands on my summary list of qualities of wisdom:
“Researchers exploring wisdom focus on the qualities that wise persons manifest, their senses of themselves, their visions of purpose and meaning for themselves and for existence, and the ways they act in the world. The researcher’ findings suggest a mode of human existence focused on creative, compassionate living.
Wise individuals exhibit a marked awareness of their own inner process. They notice and can identify the diverse feelings, impulses, imaginings, and desires that constellate in particular ways for them in any concrete situation. They are open to the full range of human emotions that any situation brings to them. Their awareness leaves them remarkably free to be at peace and to act in creative ways.”
“Neither mesmerized, obsessed, nor deceived by their inner processes, wise persons have a capacity to be open to their lives, both the inner and outer dimensions. They do not deny experiences of loss or grief but demonstrate a marked comfort with their feelings without being caught in or defined by them.”
“Wise individuals are discerning about their world and their relationships.”
“Above all else, wise persons discern deeper levels of reality and act in ways that lead to richer life for themselves and for other individuals, communities, and the planet. Their ability to do so arises from their capacity to discriminate between fleeting phenomena and more enduring truths and values. Wise individuals recognize that they are part of a larger context. They know that cultural, social, familial, and religious contexts have shaped and continue to shape their experiences and perceptions and the experiences and perceptions of others. Rather than chafe against the limits that being enfleshed, enculturated beings entail, however, wise people embrace those limits, even while they hold them lightly and gently. At the same time, they also are deeply appreciative of individuality, their own and that of the people around them. They are not threatened by or fearful of difference.”
“While wise individuals recognize and appreciate the contextual and embodied nature of human existence, their awareness of its limited and partial quality does not leave them adrift. Instead, it seems to make them more passionate and focused in their commitments. Wise people are deeply rooted in values and visions about life and meaning. They are invested in particular relationships and projects, willing for these commitments to shape them as human beings. Yet, they also have a remarkable sense of proportion in valuing. Their commitments are not idols. They hold their visions and values gently and are capable of giving up their projects and their particular visions for the future when these become obstacles to authentic existence for themselves and for others. Wise individuals seem to be organized internally and interpersonally around the desire to live with people and the planet in life-giving ways.”
“Capable of experiencing their experience without fear and rooted in values and visions focused on full life for all of creation, wise individuals act in the world in particular ways. Their behavior and choices suggest a profound integration of their own souls with their agency in the world. They see myriad connections among ideas, actions, and choices that others do not see or, for reasons of interest, choose to ignore. They are comfortable with and notice the play of both affect and cognition in themselves and in those around them. Most characteristically, wise people act toward others and the world in ways that restore harmonious relations among individuals, communities, and other elements of the world” (excerpted from pp. 120-123).
4. Maturity in faith entails developing, cultivating capacities for wisdom. People of mature faith develop “authentic voices,” to borrow a metaphor from feminist theorists (See Finding Our Voices, chapter 3). They know what they think, they know what they feel, they know how their particular selves and projects fit in the world. They can engage in a hermeneutic of suspicion without succumbing to relentless cynicism. They engage in a hermeneutic of retrieval with their Christian heritage with a capacity for delight and play.
5. I think people who develop maturity in faith, capacities for wisdom, are people who have negotiated disillusionment. Disillusionment is a particularly potent experience that all too often silences voices and dreams, ends stories, and sucks people into a lifeless cynicism and despair. At the same time, it also is an invitation to renegotiated relationship with ourselves and our religious heritage, an invitation to a deepening level of conversion, to intimacy with God, and freedom for life in the face of death.
6. Theological education of adults worth bothering should have maturing in faith and developing capacities for wisdom as its goal. I don’t see how, without an emphasis on the theological education that makes this possible, we can prepare people to be effective in a world where, in the words that Tim Lull used in addressing the Western Mission Cluster in 1998, “the impact of the Christian community in the future will depend very much on credible Christian lives lived out in the context of pluralism and indifference, and the conversation about Christian faith today will most often emerge among people who work together, live as neighbors, work together for the common good in local communities” (“Continuing Education as a Tool for Missional Renewal,” 12/5/98). Without wisdom people will not be able to translate the Christian heritage well in their daily lives.
III. ESSENTIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION THAT CONTRIBUTE TO ADULTS BEING ABLE TO LINK FAITH AND LIFE
A. Definition of theological education that I propose:
THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION IS THE COMPOSITION OF A RITUAL SPACE THAT IS BOTH CONTAINER AND CATALYST FOR ADULTS’ AFFECTIVE, COGNITIVE, AND COMMUNAL GROWTH IN FAITH.
1. High quality theological education for adults gives them access to the wisdom and deep practices of the Lutheran heritage that is at one and the same time critically engaged, soul sustaining, and faithfully imaginative. (I am not saying that this is the only kind of education that can or should be done for adults. I am claiming that this kind of theological education is essential if people are to link faith and everyday life in ways worth bothering with.) To provide such theological education it is imperative that the process be considered as more than distribution of information or training in skills. Theological education that creates a context for genuine insight, for growth and transformation in faith, requires attention to setting, process, and content.
B. Biblical models supporting my claims for essential characteristics of theological education for linking faith and life
1. Two biblical models support my definition for the essential character of theological education that supports maturation in faith for adults. These models suggest that such education must include cognitive, affective, and communal dimensions.
2. Exodus Story (See Walter Brueggemann, “The Exodus as Israel’s Articulation of Faith Development,” Hope Within History [Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1987], 7-26.) Developed out of a long conversation with his colleague, James Fowler, Brueggemann argues that Israel’s model of faith development includes three elements: critique of ideology; public processing of pain; and release of new social imagination. Critique of ideology entails noticing one’s situation and being able to entertain the possibility that the situation could be other than it is. Hence there is a cognitive dimension to the process. Public processing of pain refers to the sharing of their experiences that led the Hebrew people to call out to their God. Brueggemann refers to the shared power of pain as the most subversive insight in the Bible. This stage of development is liturgical, affective, corporate. Finally, he argues, from the process of critique of ideology and public processing of pain, a new social imagination can emerge, the capacity to imagine and commit to an alternative future.
3. Mary Magdalene at tomb on Easter Morning (John 20). [Some of these ideas are introduced in a preliminary way in Finding Our Voices, chapter 2.] In this story Mary Magdalene clearly is affectively involved in her experience, overwhelmed by grief as she seeks Jesus, thinking she wants a corpse and really wanting the living Lord. In the story Mary makes three turns. First, she stoops down into the tomb and encounters the angels. Overwhelmed by grief and driven by her desire, she seems not to recognize, or at least not to be impressed that she is speaking to angels. She turns around and encounters Jesus, whom she mistakes for the gardener. When Jesus calls her by name she “turns” in the language of the evangelist, only this time it is not a physical but an interior turning, and recognizes Jesus.
There is much we could do with this story but what I want to emphasize is that Mary becomes the first person in John’s gospel to see the risen Lord because she remained in the space of the gap--the gap between her desire and the seeming impossibility of its fulfillment; the gap between what she felt and what at some deeper level constituted her identity; the gap between inadequate and fuller understanding.
“Mind the gap,” while perhaps best known to those who ride the British subways, also is an essential dimension of theological education for adults. The gap is a space. Space is a prerequisite for newness, always a sign of God’s life. Space is where the Spirit enters. Hence, an essential element of theological education for adults is cultivating the practice of noticing and remaining in the gaps--spaces of inadequate understanding, of conflict, of fear, of facing into loss and death.
Without our presence in the gaps we cannot construct meaning, cannot move beyond brute fact and mere opinion to a three-dimensional existence where we cooperate with the Spirit of God in history.
C. Four essential characteristics of theological education for adults if they are to link faith and life in ways worth bothering with. [These ideas are developed more fully in: Patricia O’Connell Killen, “The practice of Theological Reflection in Small Faith Communities,” Chicago Studies 31 (August 1992): 189-196; Patricia O’Connell Killen, “Assisting Adults to Think Theologically,” in Method in Ministry edited by James D. Whitehead and Evelyn Eaton Whitehead, revised edition (Kansas City: Sheed and Ward, 1995), 103-111; and, Patricia O’Connell Killen and John de Beer, The Art of Theological Reflection (NY: Crossroad, 1994).]
Make clear here that my bias is towards adults developing methodological self-consciousness. It is one thing to engage in a process of theological reflection. It is another to be aware that one is doing so. It is a third to be able to attend to the process of reflection even as one does so. Doing and reflecting on the process one is doing is, I think, crucial to the kind of theological reflection adults need, if they are to carry faith-inspired imaginations into their daily lives.
One question that any theological educators must face, then, is: what is the degree of methodological self-consciousness adults should have to carry their faith into the world? My bias is toward more rather than less precisely because we are at a point in the history of humans and the planet when we need more adults capable of thinking in complex ways about myriad, difficult challenges, if we are to survive as a species. We are, to use the title of Robert Kegan’s book that I noted last year, “in over our heads.” (In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life. [Cambridge, MA:Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1994].)
1. Serious, high quality material.
Theological education for adults needs to include serious, sustained study of biblical, theological, ethical, or other material that is not “dumbed down.” Study of challenging, high quality material is essential, if adults are to be responsible in their ministry in the world.
Considerations for any program must include: quality of the material, level of difficulty, and focus. Quality means material that is respectable in terms of the best scholarship, even if it is recast for presentation. Level of difficulty is significant. The material should challenge adults. What challenges, however, will depend on the group and its social and cultural situation. Serious theological education is not easily done with mass distributed, standardized programs.
Focus involves what will be studied. [Put up overhead of model of sources--action, positions, culture, tradition--to discuss where focus for study might begin.] Examples: Education for Ministry, a four-year theological education by extension program of the Episcopal Church, uses for materials a set of texts that follow a seminary curriculum, were written by seminary faculty, and are designed to replace a faculty member as lecturer. Over the course of the four years participants study Hebrew bible, Christian Testament, church history, theology, ethics, and spirituality. The Loyola Institute for Ministry Extension Program (LIMEX) uses both texts and video lectures to present its material, which also includes units for most of the classical theological disciplines. The new Methodist program, Christian Believer, uses videos of the major theologians of that church and textual materials to present theological doctrine.
Selection of material and the focus of that material should be guided by the purpose and the context of the adult theological education program.
Research shows that adult theological education groups in which participants are not increasing their knowledge of their heritage through study wither and disband. Without continuous study, a group’s reflection is stymied.
2. Practice the Nonjudgmental Narration of Experience
(Experience here includes any element of the four sources shown on the overhead--tradition, positions, culture, action. See Art of Theological Reflection, chapter 3.)
The ability to describe a text, a situation, an idea, a question, an event in its own terms is a mark of adult consciousness and cognitive ability. It involves the capacity to discriminate between self and other; the ability to corral one’s own biases, emotions, ideas, at least temporarily; the exercise of a gentle awareness that is open, expectant, not rushing to premature closure. (The desert fathers and mothers considered the ability to narrate one’s own experience [action in my model] nonjudgmentally a prerequisite to having an adult soul.)
This skill is essential to adults engaging in the “critique of ideology” about which Brueggemann wrote. Without this practice, genuine reflection, serious consideration of alternative ideas or information that might challenge one’s dearly held positions is impossible.
At its simplest level, the skill involves answering the questions: who, what, when, where, and how; and, withholding the “why” question. It is the “why” that leads too easily and quickly to premature interpretation of an event, making meaning of it before we are ready to and before we have connected it to the Christian heritage in a way that might allow it and us to be transformed.
Practicing the nonjudgmental narration of experience opens us, makes us expectant, makes it possible in the words of the famous geneticist, Barbara McClintock, to “get a feel for the organism.” In our encounter with the “other” in its own terms, we begin to enter that space between brute fact and mere opinion where meaning is constructed and where we might encounter the living God instead of our ideas about God.
Practicing the nonjudgmental narration of experience allows the “heart of the matter,” the numb of an issue or situation or question to emerge for us, gently, in a way that can surprise us.
3. Provide a creative, surprising correlation between the particularities of individuals’ lives and our scriptural, theological heritage. To put this another way: Construct a “genuine conversation: between the event, idea, situation, being considered and the Christian tradition--biblical, theological, ethical, spiritual material. The technical term for such a conversation is correlation.
Most programs of theological education do not structure genuine correlations. Rather, they provide questions that allow participants to put their own convictions or positions into conversation with a scholar’s statement of a theological or biblical teaching. This approach is useful. It is effectively exemplified in the Christian Believer program. The advantage of this approach is that it works with larger groups, widely mixed groups, short-term groups, groups without skilled facilitators. It is the approach that is most familiar to people because it matches their other educational experiences.
But if we want adults who can link their faith and life in non-reductionistic ways in the myriad situations in which they find themselves in the world, our theological education programs need to do more. That more is not easy, however. It involves facing into a problem that I describe as “the language of fruit;” or, how does an apple speak to an orange? To put it another way, how do we bring biblical and theological material from the ancient near east into conversation with contemporary situations and questions?
For an apple to speak to an orange they must get to the language of fruit. In theological reflection, getting to the language of fruit involves getting to the persistent human question or conundrum to which Christian doctrines or themes are the short-hand answer. Theological themes or code words are the Christian tradition’s short-hand answers to classic human questions. Theological education for adults needs to focus on those questions as much or more than on the answers. [Use overhead with issues behind the themes and have group identify the themes.]
The human questions/conundrums to which Christian doctrine is the response is the language of fruit for theological reflection. By identifying these questions and conundrums, and naming them with other than the theological code language, one has the resources to develop creative correlations between faith and everyday life. Using this resource makes it possible to begin conversation in the “gap” between our experience and the wisdom of our heritage in a way that invites insight and transformation. [See appendix A.]
(The Education for Ministry Program uses a theological reflection process in which participants bring their life experiences into conversation with the material they are studying using questions designed in this way. Similarly the LIMEX program works in this way.)
4. Provide an opportunity for people to name and claim something new, some way that the heritage seeps into them.
In any process of theological reflection or theological education, there need to be regular moments in which participants identify concretely what they are taking from the reflective process back to their daily lives. The step of personally claiming new insights, or deepened understanding, or actions to be taken, cultivates a habit of reflective living. This is part of LIMEX, Education for Ministry, and Christian Believer.
5. A word about facilitation
Successful adult theological education of the kind I have been describing requires skilled facilitation. One danger of democracy is reduction to the least common denominator in terms of leadership and program quality. If the church is serious about theological education for adults, then it must provide programs, with leadership, that model the competence and skill that people know from their professional lives.
6. Other considerations. [Did not include in presentation.]
Genuine theological reflection, the practice of the kind of reflection that leads to transformation and growth in faith and wisdom, takes time. It takes commitment on the part of the leader and those involved. It requires that people develop appropriate skills for interacting in a group. The group needs to pray and be rooted in a community that worships. [See articles noted above for elaboration on these points.]
IV. CONCLUSION
The kind of theological education for adults that I have proposed here: “theological education as the composition of a ritual space that is both container and catalyst for adults’ affective, cognitive, and communal growth in faith,” is neither easy nor cheap and convenient. I know, however, that people will commit to such theological education that is high quality and speaks to the questions that they are living. Ease of delivery and convenience, while valuable for some theological education, should not become the standard for all theological education. Serious adult theological education that creates the ritual space for maturing in faith and developing capacities for wisdom requires some face-to-face contact, serious commitment of time and energy, and being held accountable by the community to which one is bound. Creating this education require clarity of purpose and maturity of faith on the part of those who provide it.
Providing such theological education is, I believe, crucial for the humane survival of our species and the planet. Providing such theological education invites adults to face directly what is at the heart of our Christian calling--namely that in the mystery of our lives we come to be so transformed by a God who is closer to us than we are to ourselves that in loving unto death, our own deaths, we know safety.
Inviting adults into theological education that can help them develop more complex consciousness, sensibility, and connection to others, is an invitation to both promise and peril. The promises include “richer, more nuanced relationships to whomever and whatever is, including oneself; the freedom to choose commitments out of inner integrity instead of imposed obligation; the experience of one’s existence as gift; and the capacity for self-transcending delight in the other which makes genuine creativity and community possible. The peril includes loss of the comfort of a host of absolute certitudes; the burden of self-responsibility; the knowledge that one’s knowing can be skewed and distorted; and the realization that one’s actions, motivated by the best of intentions, cause harm” (Patricia O’Connell Killen, “Gaps and Gifts” Prism, vol. 12 [spring 1999], pp. 6-8).
Consider if my description of promises and perils just might not be a way of expressing, in humanistic terms, Luther’s notion of law and gospel, the way we come to know the promises of God.
APPENDIX
A
THEOLOGICAL THEMES IN THEOLOGICAL
REFLECTION
A crucial part of any discipline--history, psychology, anthropology, sociology, political science, or theology--is the way it approaches and reflects on reality in all its dimensions. Theology is distinguished by a cluster of themes that encode the insights of the Christian community through time, insights about God, the human person, all that exists, and the relationship among them.
Theological themes are part of the content of the source, tradition. They also, however, can become methodological tools when we use them to explore the dimensions and meaning of individual and corporate experience. For the themes to become resources, however, we need to get behind the encoded insights and back to the classic situation/question to which the theme is the answer. To put this another way: Doctrines or Christian themes are the tradition's short-hand answers to classic human questions. (This is where the liberating power of doctrine lies. We cannot tap that power, however, if we learn the tradition's answers without being aware of or knowing the questions in our own experience.)
Below are listed some theological themes with a brief statement of what they are about. Expand the description of what they are about from your own knowledge and previous study, or go to the library and look up one or two of the themes in the New Dictionary of Theology or in another good current reference source. Then, try to expand the statement or what the theme is about, but do so without using theological code language itself wherever possible. You want to get a feel for the kind of human situations that each theme encodes.
******CREATION: bottomline
pictures and convictions about the world
SIN: distortion, "wrongness," brokenness in existence
EVIL: accumulated brokenness in existence that seems to become an actual force
n individual and societal life
ORIGINAL SIN: a general condition of stuckness, brokenness, hobbledness; our
ways of harming ourselves and others even when our intentions are good
JUDGMENT: recognizing one's complicity in the distortions of existence; seeing
oneself in relation to self, God, others in total truthfulness
REPENTANCE: sorrow for harming self and others, for choosing diminished
instead of rich life; intention to choose God and life
CONVERSION: turning around, moving in another direction, experiencing oneself
moved from one standpoint to another and embracing both the losses and new
life that that entails
SALVATION: healing and life that come unearned, undeserved, unplanned, even
when we do not know that we need it
PROVIDENCE: sense of the purposefulness and care in existence that comes in
surprising and unearned ways and that can come even out of difficulty
GRACE: everything that brings growth, life, healing, joy, peace to us;
technically God's life shared with us
KINGDOM/REIGN OF GOD: conditions and qualities of existence and being when the
fullness of God’s love for us sinks in and we live with ourselves, with each
other and with the planet in that love and justice
CHURCH: the authentic human community; the community that knows how to
believe, love, hope, trust--live--in and through Jesus; the community that
continues to make Jesus present in the world
COMMUNION OF SAINTS: all those past, present, and future who have journeyed to
God and shared that journey with other human beings
ESCHATOLOGY: fulfillment, realities of the end time (heaven, hell,
fulfillment, final judgment, etc.)
REVELATION: gift of knowledge (understood both affectively and cognitively)
about God and us
VOCATION: a calling, purpose in life in line with God's purposes
THEOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY: the meaning of the human person, of being human
REDEMPTION: experience of having been saved from definitive death and bondage
to evil through life, death, resurrection of Jesus
ATONEMENT: theory of how Jesus’ life and death reconcile us to God
****************
A few for you to work on:
GOD:
PNEUMATOLOGY:
CHRISTOLOGY:
BAPTISM:
MISSION:
MINISTRY:
COMMUNION OF SAINTS:
EUCHARIST:
FAITH:
JUSTICE: