The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology

Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444345728
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Through a series of essays contributed by leading experts in the field, The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology presents an introduction to practical theology as a major area of Christian study and practice, including an overview of its key developments, themes, methods, and future directions.

• The first comprehensive reference work to provide a survey, description and analysis of practical theology as an area of study
• A range of leading scholars in the field provide original contributions on the major areas, issues, and figures in practical theology
• Reviews an extensive range of methods for studying theology in practice, along with sub-disciplines in theological education such as pastoral care and preaching
• Covers developments in the discipline in a range of global contexts and distinct Christian traditions
• Shows how practical theology is relevant to everyday life

PART I: Way of Life: Shaping Faith among Believers in Home and Society

1 Suffering

Pamela Cooper-White

2 Healing

Susan J. Dunlap

3 Playing

Jaco Hamman

4 Eating

Dorothy C. Bass

5 Loving

Herbert Anderson

6 Consuming

Katherine Turpin

7 Blessing

Christian Scharen

CHAPTER 1

Suffering

Pamela Cooper-White

A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation,

Rachel weeping for her children;

She refused to be consoled because they are no more.

Matt. 2:18 (NRSV)

Raquel did not know how she ended up at the creek.¹ It was the place she always went to be alone and to think. Today, there was no thinking, only raw, animal pain, and sounds coming from her throat and belly that she did not recognize as her own. Memory fragments pushed their way into her consciousness, and then dissolved again like the foam swirling around the rocks in the water: the phone shrilling in their bedroom at dawn, her husband Carlos’s ashen face and then his eyes, rolling upward as if he were longing to escape his body, and his broken voice telling her “There’s been an accident. David is dead.” Their beautiful son David broken, dead – no, that word cannot have anything to do with David! – the words “terrible accident,” “T-boned,” “totaled,” “the other guy ran a light,” a stranger coming off his night shift, racked with remorse, the police, “I’m so sorry ma’am,” hospital, blood, a pale green sheet over David’s-not-David’s face, an undertaker. There were the terrible places they had to go, people to talk to, a sense of incomprehensible urgency, impossible things to see and do. There was the feeling of icy numbness, an emotional and mental hypothermia – hearing, but not comprehending – refusing to comprehend. Then came the stumbling out of the house, across the yard and half-running, half-sliding down the bank, branches whipping her arms and legs. The falling to her knees, here, on the rocks at the edge of the water, keening: Where is David? What are they doing with David?

Suffering is the starting point for all pastoral and practical theology – in Jürgen Moltmann’s words, “the open wound of life in this world” (1993: 49). My method, in common with most practical theologians’, is inductive, beginning with experience, rather than deductive, deriving propositions from abstract theories of human nature (either philosophical or psychological) or from doctrines of God, evil, and salvation. Therefore, the steps that I will take begin with the concreteness of human experience: (1) What is happening here? What is suffering? How do we make meaning of such pain (using both social-scientific and theological perspectives)? (2) Deepening our theological reflection, what are the theological problems raised by suffering? What might be understood in the presence of this suffering person about the nature of suffering and its relationship both to the problem of evil and to what we can discern about God’s activity in the midst of suffering? As Christian theologians, (where) do we find an answering cry of hope and redemption to the groans of suffering? (3) Turning more explicitly to praxis, what healing and liberative responses might grow out of these reflections? How might hope and redemption, love and justice, be conceived in this situation?

Binary divisions between Christian tradition and human experience, or theology and practice, are false dichotomies. Theology and the lived situation cannot be pulled apart, except as an exercise of abstract thought. The aim of practical theology is not speculation, but liberative praxis. Practical theology is not merely the application of systematic theologians’ abstract conceptions through a refinement of pastoral skills. I would also argue that it is more than “critical theological reflection upon practices of the Church as they interact with practices of the world” (Swinton and Mowat 2006: 5). Practical theology is a constructive theology in its own right, in which all categories of scriptural exegesis and doctrinal formulation are open for ongoing consideration and critique. As a feminist theologian, moreover, I embrace the idea, along with other feminist/womanist/mujerista, liberation, and postcolonial theologians, that human experience is an authoritative source for theology (e.g., Gutierrez 1987; Cone 1997; Lartey 2003; Isasi-Díaz 2004). For criteria, I assume that “good” theology must inform and be informed by both healing and liberation, and therefore must be relevant to and ultimately grounded in Christian practices of community (e.g., Lartey 2003). Guided also by my Anglican identity and formation, I take scripture, tradition, and reason and experience as valid sources for theological reflection – but as a practical theologian I begin with experience, then scripture and tradition interpreted by reason, for both ongoing theological reflection and the creative shaping of personal and communal responses to suffering.

What Is Suffering?

The English word suffer defines itself by onomatopoeia: the s a wincing intake of breath followed by a sibilant sound of pain, squeezed through the teeth … the uh – not the “ah” of pleasure but the truncated moan/grunt/groan of an ache or a kick in the stomach … the fff of surprise that the pain goes on, deflation in the face of its continuation … the er a sound of depletion, running out of air, of life, of hope. Suffering is sometimes listed as a dictionary synonym for other words: pain, anguish, distress, misery, agony, torment, affliction, and it belongs to that family of words which signal a deep wound or dis-ease. But suffering, to suffer, conveys something the other terms do not – an ongoingness and a bearing-with entwined with the passage of time or the subjective experience of time slowing down as s-uh-ff-er-ing swallows the hope of a speedy end to pain. Its ongoingness is revealed in the popular wisdom after someone has experienced a quick death: “Well, it’s a blessing that she didn’t suffer.”

In addition to its ongoingness, suffering conveys a level of symbolization, of expressiveness, that pain does not. Pain may be mental, physical, or emotional, but the word pain itself merely denotes a phenomenon. Pain simply is. It can be described (“acute” or “chronic,” “here” but “not there”) or even measured (“6 on a scale of 1 to 10”), but it does not convey any meaning in and of itself. Some pain is even necessary to survival – for example, the burning sensation that causes us to take our hand off a hot stove. But pain is registered at the most primal level of brain function, and does not register in the thinking part of the brain (the prefrontal cortex) before we have already yanked our hand away from the source of the burning.

Suffering is the meaning that we make, or attempt to make, of our pain (Cassell 1991; Sulmasy 1999). Indeed, suffering requires consciousness, and with consciousness, symbolization and a rendering of pain into some meaningful articulation – a word, a cry, a narrative, even a pleading look into the eyes of another. For healing to take place fully, we must make meaning in relation to our pain, incorporating our values, spiritual beliefs, hopes, fears, anger, sorrow, and a narrative sense of what has happened, is happening, and is going to happen. So pain – especially pain that exceeds transient physical pain – must actually be transformed into suffering for holistic healing of mind, body, and spirit to occur. And for pain to be transformed into suffering, there must be communication of that pain to another living being. Pain is mute, but suffering speaks.

While Raquel experiences the normal shock, numbness, and confusion of acute grief, she is not cut off from expressing her pain. As we imagine the sharpness of the rocks under her knees, hear her deep wailing, and share her memories and images, we receive and recognize her suffering. We can connect it to our own memories and narratives of suffering and our hearts go out to her. This is pain that is told, and in the telling draws us into an intersubjective relationship with her sorrow and our own. As the intersubjective sharing of pain, suffering actively elicits recognition. In fact, it is when recognition is withheld or refused by another that suffering collapses back into unarticulated pain.

Certain forms of pain by their very nature remain encapsulated, unsymbolized, and unexpressed. When pain is too overwhelming, threatening, or incomprehensible, it is dissociated rather than fully experienced and expressed. This is the definition of trauma – not simply any injury, but one that threatens physical or psychic annihilation – akin to what theologian Wendy Farley (1990) calls “radical suffering,” which cries out for justice even if healing is impossible. Traumatic experience is walled off, broken into its different aspects (e.g., bodily sensation, emotion, and thought), without normal narrative links to make sense of what happened. Traumatic experience is therefore “unformulated” (Stern 2009), inexpressible, and therefore unrecognized by another.

It is precisely this absence of recognition that prevents pain from becoming suffering – as when an abuser who “loves” the child becomes the unseeing, unempathic monster who uses, beats, or rapes him; or when there is a collective shock such as the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, or the massive earthquake in Haiti in January 2010, and the normal “holding” function of society temporarily breaks down. There is a rupture in the capacity to know. When our pain, particularly intense pain, is not received and understood by an empathic other, the body-mind reacts to trauma through the mental process of dissociation, in which knowledge is kept out of awareness as an unconscious defense against the terror of being totally overwhelmed or annihilated. Nonverbal enactment then becomes the only mode by which this unformulated experience can communicate.

Enactment, in the words of relational psychoanalyst Donnel Stern, is “the interpersonalization of a dissociation” (2009: 86). The lack of symbolization and conscious articulation prevents suffering (the expression of pain and its associated meaning) and hence healing of the original wound. As dissociative processes outlive their usefulness and create new problems, they set in motion new forms of suffering, which can be understood as suffering, but as incomprehensible suffering that never seems amenable to healing, unmoored from any obvious cause. So an adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse does not understand why she cannot seem to sustain a meaningful relationship; a war veteran cannot understand why the long-anticipated homecoming is not a source of joy; survivors of a natural disaster cannot understand why they can’t seem to settle back into a routine years later; Raquel cannot understand how the loss of her son is wreaking havoc in her family. Dissociation creates new suffering because it is disconnected from its traumatic origins and remains incomprehensible and unhealed.

When suffering is fully connected to the original source of unbearable pain, it is tragic but comprehensible. It may be expressed best by this paradox: nondissociated suffering is to bear the unbearable. Because suffering is the expression of pain that leads to meaning-making, it allows us to bear up under unbearable pain without negating or denying the reality that we are doing so. Through symbolization, reaching out, and retelling, pain becomes more bearable because, as new meanings are constructed in relationship, the burden is shared and God’s compassionate presence is experienced. This can connect individual experience to the larger social context in which suffering occurs, and to action for justice and change.

Theological Dilemmas: The Problem of Theodicy

The very existence of pain and suffering raises particular challenges for theology in its search for meaning.² Why must we suffer at all? Is suffering ever redemptive? Two tropes have been especially problematic: first, the logical or philosophical contradiction between the belief in a good and all-powerful God and the existence of evil as the cause of all suffering; and secondly, especially for Christians, the ethical question raised by the crucifixion and by theologies of atonement in which suffering is framed as salvific.

There is a logical contradiction, laid out historically in philosophy and theology, between three mutually incompatible axioms: divine goodness, divine omnipotence/sovereignty, and the existence of suffering/evil. The eighteenth-century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz used the term theodicy – literally, the justification of God (theós, God + díke, justice) – to describe efforts to grapple with this problem. But the question is as ancient as humanity itself, and appears in the Bible most poignantly in the Book of Job. Any attempt to resolve this triangle must resort either to weakening one of the three points (usually by strengthening another point) or to leaving the contradictions as an ultimate paradox in which logical explanations dissolve into an appeal to mystery.

Early church formulations tended to emphasize the fullness of God’s goodness and perfection (following Plato) and to de-emphasize the power of evil. At the turn of the fifth century, Augustine of Hippo framed evil as an absence of good (privatio boni) rather than an opposing malicious presence – a tear in the fabric of God’s harmonious creation caused by humans’ willful turning away from God (Gen. 3). Even earlier, in the second century, Irenaeus of Lyon viewed suffering as a necessary corrective to bring an immature creation to perfection (Hick 2007). In the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas further codified Augustine’s view, defining evil as the absence, disproportion, or misuse of the good order of the universe ordained by God through natural law. This view has remained foundational for Catholic doctrine.

In the Reformation, theologians turned to the sovereignty of God as the strong point of the triangle. They qualified evil by redefining it as a part of God’s ultimate plan, beyond finite human knowledge. Especially for Calvin and later reformed theologians, God’s goodness is preserved through confidence in God’s providence. Evil becomes a temporary experience of suffering that will ultimately be healed and even forgotten (Volf 2006) in the final redemption of all creation. Twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth described evil as das Nichtige (Nothing), which appears to have power but has already been “objectively defeated as such in Jesus Christ” (Zurheide 1997: 35–48). Lutheran theology is similar in its focus on eschatology, but places particular emphasis on the cross as a sign of God’s sharing in the suffering of creation (Marty 1983: 59). Luther also emphasized the “hiddenness of God,” the unknowable aspect of God in which God uses sufferin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Wiley-Blackwell Companions to Religion
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Notes on Contributors
• INTRODUCTION: The Contributions of Practical Theology
• PART I: Way of Life: Shaping Faith among Believers in Home and Society
• PART II: Method: Studying Theology in Practice in Library and Field
• PART III: Curriculum: Educating for Ministry and Faith in Classroom, Congregation, and Community
• PART IV: Discipline: Defining History and Context in Guild and Global Setting
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Names