On Earth as it is in Heaven – Practicing Theology

Paul writes – Sorry in advance; this is a longer post than usual. Simon Carey Holt, as always, has some really interesting thinking and commentary up on his blog. One of his recent posts in particular has really stuck with me, and I hope will continue to do so. He writes around one of my passions, practical theology – frustratingly, I recently finished listening to or reading something really helpful on “practical theology” and its importance, but for the life of me I can’t remember where. Simon, appreciatively interacting with Terry Veling writes:

“For Veling, practical theology is “less a thing to be defined than it is an activity to be done.” It is the practice of theology, not a pre-packaged box of propositions, but a theology discerned and known in the midst of the encounters and experiences of daily life. This jells so much with my own experience. For me, the life-giving nature of theology has never been in its provision of a speculative and grand system of thought through which every situation of life can be interpreted. Rather, it’s about a way of knowing and understanding that flows out of and into experience—mine, yours, ours. For that reason, theology has always been for me more fluid than solid, more open than settled, more pervasive than under girding.

Veling says it well: “Practical theology wants to keep our relationship with the world open, so that we are never quite done with things; rather, always undoing and redoing them, so that we can keep the doing happening, passionate, keen, expectant—never satisfied, never quite finished. … Practical theology is suspicious of any theology that is too solid, too well-built, too built-up. Rather it is a theology that is given over to a passion for what could yet be, what is still in-the-making, in process, not yet, still coming.”

Perhaps this begins to get at why I feel so much at home in practical theology. For in it, I've found a way of doing theology that arises directly out of the most pressing, immediate, and deeply felt challenges of my life and the life of those around me. What's more, it gives these challenges and experiences an authoritative voice that pre-determined, pre-packaged truth can never allow.”

As I read and reflected on this I became aware of the ways in which this is true of my experience of church. I don’t want to belong to a church where belief is too solid, where belief is expressed in the kind of dogmatic terms that “pre-determines [and] “prepackages [‘truth’]” and closes down the sense that what we currently know is “still in-the-making”.

That’s not to say I don’t at any moment believe anything, but I’ve listened in on enough conversations over the years and read enough books etc to recognise that there are always nuances and perspectives that I don’t see or don’t fully appreciate. These enrich and deepen my Jesus-following journey and consequently I want to be more generous, I want to take time to listen, to ask questions, and to honour both the provisional and the communal sense of “knowing”. I need to be in conversation, I need to be hospitable, I don’t need around me the kind of ‘walls’ that unchangeable and unteachable dogma so often needs. I’m on a journey, in Christ Jesus, toward a BIG God not a god-in-a-box. I need and am comfortable with mystery.

The different ways that both Simon and I want to affirm and say something about the importance of “practical theology” are visually well conveyed in the Michael Leunig cartoon which Terry has on the cover of his book (see Simon’s post here). For me it so well expresses the role and importance of practical theology – practical theology always wants to jump the fence; it wants to open and keep open the gate at the end of the garden; it wants always to hint at, and hold out, the possibility of there always being “more”; it always and ‘ongoingly’ wants to open itself up to one more conversation, to one more question. It wants to enlarge our perspective in the midst of the every day ordinariness of living and dying……………

Veling writes in the epilogue of his book, Practical Theology: “On Earth as it is in Heaven” the emphasis is his):

“As much as it [practical theology] strives to seek the kingdom of heaven – impassioned by the desire for God and for all that is immeasurable and unconditional – it knows that this striving is undertaken “on earth” – drawn by God into [God’s depths and] the depths of the human condition.”

Finally, and relatedly, take some time to watch the Swedish movie, As It Is In Heaven (now available in NZ and Australia) through the lens of Simon’s post and mine.