{"id":2371,"date":"2016-06-29T05:21:44","date_gmt":"2016-06-29T09:21:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/practicalmattersjournal.ecdsdev.org\/?p=2371"},"modified":"2016-06-29T13:36:25","modified_gmt":"2016-06-29T17:36:25","slug":"christian-theology-in-practice-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pmcleanup.ecdsdev.org\/2016\/06\/29\/christian-theology-in-practice-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Christian Theology in Practice: Discovering a Discipline"},"content":{"rendered":"
Download PDF:\u00a0RV Daniels, Christian Theology in Practice<\/a><\/strong><\/h5>\n
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Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore
\nGrand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012. 334 pages. $34.00<\/h3>\n
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In Christian Theology in Practice: Discovering a Discipline<\/em>, Bonnie Miller-McLemore offers a collection of her work in the fields of practical and pastoral theology that \u00a0spans twenty years (1992-2010). With attendant introductions that \u201csituate each chapter, provide connective tissue and allow for reassessment and rebuttal,\u201d she attempts to move \u201cthe discussion of the nature of Christian theology just a little bit,\u201d writing to the academic community, \u201cfor the sake of our wider publics\u201d (14, 8).<\/p>\n

In offering this collection, Miller-McLemore seeks to challenge the ways academic theology, both systematic and practical, has \u201cunderestimated the intelligence involved in practice and overlooked the limitations of merely academic knowledge\u201d (172). To do so, she draws upon scholars in practical and pastoral theology who have \u201cdisrupted conventional theological boundaries\u201d and prompted these guilds to attend more closely to the realities of people\u2019s lives (1). Miller-McLemore calls for a rhizomatic approach that moves from hierarchical theological approaches to \u201ca more organic, ecological reading.\u201d \u00a0Such a reading would encourage \u201ccircular and mutually interdependent movement\u201d while also calling for a \u201cmultiplicity of ways of knowing\u201d (3, 162). This project of \u201cdiscovering a discipline\u201d involves three elements for Miller-McLemore, which are reflected in the text\u2019s organization into three parts: \u201cthe living web<\/em> as theological subject matter, practical wisdom <\/em>as a way of theological knowing, and gender<\/em> as a critical category for understanding human situations\u201d (1).<\/p>\n

In Part I, Miller-McLemore explores this \u201cliving web\u201d that she defines as the subject matter of theology in the first chapter. She then amends this basic metaphor in the second chapter, in light of its \u201cwidely varied meanings,\u201d to \u201cthe human document within<\/em> the web\u201d (46; 48, emphasis mine). This emphasis on the human document within the web acknowledges that humans can only be understood within their broader context, but does not \u201cget lost in the forest for all the trees\u201d (47). It is through this metaphor that Miller-McLemore locates the importance of public theology and the \u201ctheological engagement of public issues of significant practical and pastoral consequence, such as child welfare and economic justice\u201d (75). \u00a0Concomitantly, it explains her reasoning in articulating pastoral theology alongside practical theology, as both share an investment in practice and experience, and \u201cthe interlocking, continually evolving threads of which reality is woven\u201d demands \u201ca multilayered analysis of human strife\u201d (37, 45). She concludes the section by offering a four-part definition of practical theology, explaining its distinctive enterprise as \u201ca discipline<\/em> among scholars and an activity of faith <\/em>among believers,\u201d as well as \u201ca method <\/em>for studying theology in practice [\u2026] and a curricular area <\/em>of subdisciplines in the seminary\u201d (101).<\/p>\n

In the second part of Christian Theology in Practice<\/em>, Miller-McLemore turns her attention to (or, rather, curates her previous essays attending to) the importance of multiple forms of knowing and the role of practical theology in moving beyond both the clerical and the academic paradigm (chapter 7). She explains that practical theology\u2019s historical attempts to be identified as intellectually rigorous has restricted it to the \u201chighly cognitive nature of Western twentieth-century theology,\u201d which has dismissed bodily (and ostensibly, other forms of) knowing and resulted in a diminishment of the field and its ability to help people live out, to practice, their faith (138). Building on her assertion that knowledge \u201cis seldom singular, \u2018separative\u2019 universal, or uniform,\u201d Miller-McLemore calls for \u201ca maternal feminist epistemology\u201d that unites knowledge and action (chapter 5).\u00a0 She describes such an epistemology as \u201ca mode of circular bodily reasoning that interweaves physical sensation, momentary cognition, behavioral reaction, and a physical sensing and intellectual reading of the results\u201d (130). Miller-McLemore continues in this section to build upon this call for varied forms of knowing through attending to pedagogy and theological know how (chapter 8), and highlighting the subversive, liberative impacts of practical theology on and in theological education (chapter 7).<\/p>\n

Finally, building on this maternal feminist epistemology, in the third and final part of the text, Miller-McLemore turns to gender as a key category of analysis.\u00a0 She explores how feminist theory\u2019s attention to context, commitment to parity and justice, and sensitivity to power dynamics has shaped pastoral (and, by extension, practical?) theology, engendering a shift in how the field looks at women and families. Throughout the chapters in this section\u2014exploring feminist theory\u2019s influence (chapter 9), the effects of that influence (chapter 10), and its role in psychology (chapter 11)\u2014Miller-McLemore examines how feminist theory and gender studies have \u201csparked a shift in focus from the individual to the community, from personal distress to social injustice, from personal fulfillment to the common good, from an ontology of separative selfhood to an open web of relationality\u201d (307). This has enabled pastoral theology to attend to its aims of both supporting individuals in crisis as well as of \u201cbreaking silences, urging prophetic action, and liberating the oppressed\u201d (250).<\/p>\n

As a Ph.D. candidate in theological studies, reading Christian Theology in Practice<\/em> was somewhat outside of my realm. Its topics were particularly directed to the discipline of practical theology\u2014perhaps more suited to my colleagues in the homiletics and liturgics or the religion, psychology, and culture areas. Yet it is precisely its place outside my field of \u201ctheological studies\u201d that speaks to its importance both in<\/em> my field as well as to<\/em> the broader enterprise that is \u201ctheological education\u201d of which our respective fields\/areas\/disciplines\/guilds are a part. Miller-McLemore\u2019s compendium of essays serves as an immeasurably helpful reminder of the importance to remain aware of the tendencies in my work and in my guild towards hierarchical ordering of knowing (think: theology\u2019s historical referral to itself as \u201cqueen of the sciences\u201d) and to be open to different epistemological frames shaping scholarship. At the same time, this text also affirms the need for practical theology as<\/em> a field.\u00a0 \u00a0It can attend specifically to \u201cthe human document\u201d and call us, who are in other fields but hold similar commitments, to keep in mind the importance of this \u201cliving document within the web\u201d as we pursue our respective scholarship, perhaps even compelling us to attend to the practical ourselves in various ways and to various degrees.<\/p>\n

While the text was outside of the general purview of my field, as a feminist theologian (in training), I was particularly appreciative of Miller-McLemore\u2019s attention to gender\u2014as a category of analysis and also as a resource for<\/em> analysis and constructive theological and practical work. However, it was precisely (somewhat ironically, perhaps) here where I hoped for more. In the first two-thirds of the text, Miller-McLemore almost always situates pastoral theology alongside or as a part of practical theology (with Chapter 6 seemingly being the only exception, and even here, the scope is broader). \u00a0This makes sense given her arguments in the first section about the significance of the two in tandem, highlighting their shared investments (in practice\/experience) and the heft of their combined contribution: \u201cwhereas practical theology is integrative,\u201d she explains, \u201cconcerned with the broader issues of ministry, discipleship, and formation, pastoral theology is person- and pathos-centered\u201d (10). Yet in the third and final part of the text, Miller-McLemore\u2019s focus turns almost entirely to \u201cpastoral theology.\u201d This is understandable, given her own training\/expertise (as well as the context in which the essays were originally written), but especially given her insights from the beginning of the text, it would have been useful if she would have drawn the same connections between pastoral and practical theology as they both are shaped by and shape gender and feminist studies. As someone in theology who benefitted from her insights about practice throughout the book, I longed for more reflection on precisely how gender and how feminist theory shaped and could continue to shape practical theological reflection.<\/p>\n

Relatedly, in addition to wanting to hear more about feminism and practical theology, I wanted to hear more in general\u2014which is to say, I found that the book ended rather abruptly. In the introduction, Miller-McLemore explains her reasoning behind the format of the text, particularly explaining her choice to leave the essays in their original form and preface each with an introduction. She writes that \u201csomething compelled me to proceed first with this collection to what I had said and what needs saying\u201d (5). Throughout the text, Miller-McLemore offers a number of insights about \u201cwhat needs saying,\u201d but perhaps it would have been beneficial for her readers to know more broadly, what (now, still) needs saying, after this articulating of\u2014discovering of\u2014a discipline? What work is now to be done?<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>Despite these longings for more from her text at various points, I nevertheless found Christian Theology in Practice<\/em> to be an exceptionally thorough and erudite collection of reflections on key insights, both of and for \u201cChristian theology in practice\u201d in our contemporary milieu. For anyone teaching and\/or writing in theological education (as well as anyone training to one day do so), Miller-McLemore\u2019s work is an invaluable resource on a number of fronts. \u00a0It should be required reading for those who seek to not only \u201csustain a life of reflective faith in the everyday\u201d in their own lives, but train and teach those who will lead others in that task in their roles as pastors and priests, educators and non-profit workers.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Download PDF:\u00a0RV Daniels, Christian Theology in Practice Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012. 334 pages. $34.00 In Christian Theology in Practice: Discovering a Discipline, Bonnie Miller-McLemore offers a collection of her work in the fields of practical and pastoral<\/p>\n

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