Practice, Practice Theory and Theology

Scandinavian and German Perspectives

Kirstine Helboe Johansen, Ulla Schmidt, Kirstine Helboe Johansen, Ulla Schmidt

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9783110743883
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Ministerio cristiano

How might practice theories and engagement with practice contribute to and advance theological study of religion and religious life and practices?
This volume explores and discusses how theological engagement with practice, theoretically as well as empirically, might profit from theories of practice developed in disciplines such as philosophy, sociology, education and organisational studies during the recent decades, but so far scarcely employed within theology.
In part I, the volume unfolds key components of practice theory, especially as they have more recently been developed within sociological practice theories, reflect on their significance and potential with regard to theology. In part II, these perspectives are employed in the study of concrete religious practices - established as well as experimental religious practices, and collective as well as individual ones.
By unfolding connections between theology and practice theories, and reflecting on practice theories' analytical and theoretical potential for theological study of religion, the book will be of interest for any scholar in the study of contemporary religion and practical theology.

Part I Practice in Theology

Part I Practice in Theology

Chapter 1 Practice and theology – Topic in dialogue with history

Ulla Schmidt

Aarhus

A practical turn in philosophy and theology

In his widely cited and ground-breaking study A Fundamental practical theology from the 1990s, the late Don Browning talks about a rebirth of practical philosophy ( Browning 1991, 3). What he has in mind is the very broad strand of thought associated with concepts such as practical wisdom or practical reason, exemplified by thinkers including Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Kant, etc., and picked up and revived in, e. g., American pragmatism and neo-pragmatism, including William James and Richard Bernstein, neo-Aristotelian communitarians, especially Alasdair MacIntyre, and continental thinkers from the phenomenological and hermeneutical traditions including Heidegger and Gadamer. Browning’s observation is paralleled by other claims regarding a “ practice turn” in contemporary thought – not only philosophy but also fields such as social theory, anthropology, pedagogics, etc., exemplified by the title The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (Schatzki, Knorr Cetina, Savigny 2001). A common denominator for this turn is the assertion that expressions of human subjectivity, such as language, action, belief, knowing and reasoning, exist and transpire within practice, in the sense of an already ongoing involvement with reality and the world. There is no forming of beliefs, knowing of, speaking about or acting within reality that is not already embedded in preceding practical involvement with the world and other people, and thus constituted by pre-existing patterns and forms of being in the world. It is therefore also a form of thought that confronts dualities such as subject- object, mind- body, agency-structure and mental-material. Its formative thinkers have often reached back in the history of thought to find inspiration and resources. Through his studies of medieval thinker Duns Scotus, but also Augustine and Luther, Heidegger detected resources to point to the individual’s immersion, proximity to and concern for the reality at hand as a basis for knowledge (Pattison 2013, 38 – 39). Gadamer makes use of Aristotle’s idea of practical wisdom, phronesis, in developing his understanding of hermeneutics – a point that Browning heavily relied on and to which we will return below (Gadamer 1989, 312 – 318).

Browning also makes an additional claim, namely that together with the rebirth of practical philosophies, practical theology is also reborn (he speaks of ‘practical philosophies’ in the plural, albeit implying that practical theology is one – indeed a questionable assumption). There is, he asserts, a “recent worldwide effort to reconceptualise what is commonly called practical theology” (Browning 1991, 3), obviously with his own book as a significant contribution to this effort. Nearly thirty years later, although the concept of ‘rebirth’ and its implication of a preceding state of ‘near- death experience’ sounds exaggerated, it seems warranted to say that engagement with practice, in practical theology as well as in theology generally, has indeed developed and changed in important ways (cf. also Kim 2007, 420). Obviously, practice was ‘always’ the central topic and object of practical theology. What has changed, is the way practice is understood and constituted as its object of research, empirically as well as theoretically.

Further, a core point, in line with the above-mentioned general point concerning a reborn practical philosophy or practical turn, is how practice and practices on the one hand, and beliefs, ideas and intentions on the other, are viewed as integrated rather than separate. The forming and holding of beliefs becomes integrated with and embedded in practice, including their contextual, situated and embodied nature. Practice is not a secondary and subsequent externalisation of abstract and general beliefs, whether formed through rational deliberation or by the help of divinely revealed truths. Obviously, this is not in itself a novel insight. But there has been a growing interest in, and awareness of, its implications for the research into concrete religious practice, practices and practicing from this perspective. Practices are therefore an object of practical theological research, not simply as an external expression of inner, preconceived beliefs and ideas, or as a means or ways to intended ends, but as constitutive of beliefs – indeed of religious faith and life.

Some brief terminological clarifications are needed, as ‘practice’ is used with slightly different meanings in the research literature as well as everyday language. Historical backgrounds for different usages are further developed below, but at this point it suffices to mention the distinction between practice and a practice, respectively practices. The latter refers to socially habituated patterns of activities, for example cooking, driving, playing a game, praying, eating, gardening, worshipping and countless other examples. This is the meaning implied by praxeological approaches and theories, which are at the centre in the present volume (for a much more elaborate explication, cf. chapter 2). But ‘practice’ is also used as an uncountable noun, referring more generally to human activity: human acting as opposed to thinking. Some also use the term praxis, usually to refer to a particular conception in the history of thought or to current positions inspired by them, such as Aristotle’s notion of dimensions of human ways of life, together with theoria and poiesis (further developed below), or Karl Marx’s notion of transforming human activities (Nicolini 2012, 31, referring to Lobkowicz 1967, 419).

Main trajectories

Not only in philosophy but also in theology, this revitalised attention towards practice and practices forms a complex landscape, with different main trajectories that partly differ, partly intersect and overlap. Praxeological or practice theories, which are the focus in this volume, are but one of these. The following locates and outlines praxeological approaches in relation to this much wider field of engagement with practice in theology.

One trajectory can be identified in connection with positions focusing on religion as a human phenomenon that transpires throughout different cultural formations and practices including, but by no means confined to, practices traditionally determined as ‘ Christian’ or ‘ ecclesial’. Rather, ‘religion’ is a phenomenon or function in human life that might be lived as much in the everyday and its practices as in the institutionally and doctrinally dictated ones. Where that happens, and how practices lend themselves to be understood as ‘religious’, cannot be determined in advance, independently of their being performed and practiced. It must be ‘found’ and discursively determined (Weyel 2014, 153).

As further explicated below, Schleiermacher’s understanding of religion as a distinct, fundamental feeling, historically and culturally expressed and manifested in Christian religion and churches, is clearly discernible in the background of this approach. Unsurprisingly, it is therefore also particularly prominent in German Protestant practical theology and a focus on lived religion in the recent decades. For Hans-Günter Heimbrock, for example, religion considered phenomenologically originates in the concreteness of everyday life, as experiences of interruptions or ‘break-downs’ of its ‘ everyday-ness’, inciting a sense of liminality ( Heimbrock 2007, 75 – 78). Heimbrock emphasises how these experiences and perceptions are not only operations of the mind or related to cognitive meaning. They are more broadly about ‘life practice’ (Lebenspraxis), embodied encounters and involvements with reality, encompassing in addition to meaning also emotions, atmospheres and sensations (Heimbrock 2007, 77 – 78). Wilhelm Gräb and Kristin Merle, among others, emphasise communication about the interpretation of meaning as the core of religion. Meaning pertains to ways in which finite and contingent human life is seen in relation to the infinite – the contingent aspects of life distinguished from the non-contingent. But communicating about, or attributing meaning to, experiences is not a mere inner or mental operation. Experiencing something as religious or as an encounter with the transcendent also relies on entrenched and established linguistic and communicative conventions and practices (Merle 2013, 197 – 201). Such practices might lean towards attribution of meaning to experiences of a particular kind, commonly thought of as religious, such as prayer, worship or a sense of the sacred. But as Gräb emphatically points out, interpretations of experiences as religious are by no means confined to those. They transpire throughout broader cultural settings, including those typically characterised as secular, such as popular culture, sports, literature, arts and more (Gräb 2013b, 153 – 154).

A second trajectory is associated with political and liberation theology evolving from the late 1960s onwards as an important setting for re-evaluating knowledge and understanding Christian faith and practice (Lane 1984, 9 – 24, Miller McLemore 2016, 205 – 210). Critical of seeing theology as a product of theoretical reflection only, practical action was considered an integral dimension of theology, rather than simply its application (Lane 1984, 8). Theological topics such as salvation are not first known theoretically and then implemented; they are known in and through being lived actively and practically. An all-encompassing Christian reality of salvation is not transmitted and warranted in the form of an idea, but through praxis ¹ and its intelligibility (Lane 1984, 12). Johann B. Metz, a key figure in political theology, underscores how this cannot be conceived merely as individual, moral action. Political praxis as a way of explicating and conceiving theological notions is a social, practical reality (Lane 1984, 17). Theological ideas are not the product of, or pertaining to, a transcendental subject. On the contrary, they pertain to the subject rooted in time and history, in historically and politically charged contexts. Christian truths are only grasped and articulated in relation to concrete, historical and practical reality, not in relation to a purely transcendental reality. “It points to the emergence of a new epistemology” (Lane 1984, 22), one where knowing theological truths is inextricably bound to experiencing the praxis of liberation. The praxis of liberation becomes the source of discourse about faith. For Lane, praxis is therefore strongly normatively charged – an active engagement with reality that aims at transforming it in the sense of ensuring liberation for the poor and underprivileged. Closely connected to this is also the idea that theological knowledge is local in character, tied to particular situations and contexts, rather than abstract and general. It is rooted in the particular, changing and mutable, rather than permanent and universal (Schreiter 1985).

A third trajectory revolves around positions concerned with practice and practices as settings for cultivating and transmitting knowledge. More specifically, as closely entangled with traditions and communities, practices are conceived of as settings for nurturing and cultivating knowledge of traditions and communities – such as Christian or other religious traditions. Clearly, ‘knowledge’ does here not refer to cognitive, propositional knowledge about ‘facts of reality’. Rather, it is a form of practical knowledge – some accounts prefer the term practical wisdom (Bass et al, 2016, 6 – 7) – having to do with orienting oneself in reality, directing oneself towards overall goods and objectives (Dykstra, Bass 2002, 24; Browning 1991, 39). Aristotle’s notion of phronesis, practical wisdom, the kind of wisdom and knowledge associated with the dimension of human life called praxis (to be further explicated below), is an important historical inspiration here, although it has indeed also inspired the practical turn more broadly.

Phronesis is viewed as a form of knowledge that inheres practices and therefore depends on one’s participation in them. It is through the experience of participating in practices that one becomes habituated to the ends and goods they are formed around, learns how to order and direct one’s life in relation to them, and discerns how to comport oneself accordingly. This trajectory thus also has a strongly normative core, focusing on practices as nurturing normatively approved goods – moral, cultural or religious goods – and sustaining corresponding identities.

A fourth trajectory, the one associated with praxeological approaches, more than the preceding three ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I Practice in Theology
• Part II Studying Practice as Theology
• Contributors
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects