43 - Practical Theology and Theological Education: Some Models and Questions

Practical Theology and Theological Education:
Some Models and Questions
By James W. Fowler

"Somewhere Herbert Finagarette once wrote, 'One day I saw, in a way that mattered, that the task is not to write the program, but to execute it.'... The way forward in practical theology involves placing more radical trust in God's self-disclosure and promises found in our traditions of revelation; more radical investment in concrete, existential-social-historical action in anticipation of the in-breaking Commonwealth of Love; and a more radical engagement, through present action and prayer, to make us partners in God's work of creation, governance, and liberation/redemption. "

In recent years practical theology has re-emerged as a unifying focus in theological discussion and theological education. A number of factors help to account for this: (1) There has been a growing realization that theology, in any "classical" period in its history, has been the product of the church's construction and innovation in faithfully meeting the challenge of shaping lives and institutions for Christian presence in society and culture. Work in practical theology seeks to return to the dialectic between the church's normative memory and vision and its struggles toward the action of Christian discipleship in the world. (2) A variety of largely secular strategies for personal and social transformation have appeared in recent years. These have been appropriated in the church's work of counseling, education, administration, and evangelization. Often, however, technique and assumptions about both method and success have been taken over without critical theological reflection. Practical theology seeks to help the church be

James W. Fowler, Professor of Theology and Human Development at the Candler School of Theology of Emory University, is the author Of Stages of Faith (1 98 1) and numerous other publications in the area of faith development theory

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theologically discerning in its appropriation of the tools of such disciplines. (3) In the pluralism and secularism of contemporary society, theology is under increasing pressure to speak a language that is faithful to the Christian story and vision, and at the same time addresses the felt experience and the recognized and unrecognized hungers of contemporary people. Practical theology, with its penchant for dynamic categories of analysis and its responsiveness to the situations and needs of persons, promises-without oversimplification or a new dogmatism-to close the gap between theological truths and the texture of pain and confusion in society and in people's lives. And (4) practical theology aims to speak from and to deepen patterns of particularly Christian commitment in the churches, but to do so in ways that are neither sectarian nor private. The new practical theology aims to frame and generate a language for the sharing of the ethical and spiritual riches-and the imperatives-of Christian faith in public, and in address to the issues that threaten the common good.

I

In two statements, one brief, the other longer, Edward Farley has contributed a great deal to our being able to see the question of practical theology in historical and contemporary perspectives. ¹ Farley begins his discussions of practical theology by clarifying the evolving meanings and self-understandings of theology as a reflective activity in Christian history. The four meanings and self-understandings he identifies represent both genres or types of activities, and more loosely, eras or periods in the history of western Christendom. From New Testament times (and with definite predecessors in the Hebrew scriptures) theology, though not always called by that name, exhibited a set of characteristics Farley has designated with the term "Theology/Habitus." For Farley, Theology/Habitus refers to theos-logos, knowledge of God as an existential-personal appropriation of God's self-offering. It is a form of theological inquiry that does not sharply distinguish between spirituality's struggle to allow the self to be centered and formed by the love of God and the cognitive effort to apprehend the truth of God's revelation in history. Theology/Habitus is life-wisdom; it is "theological understanding." ²

A second meaning and self-understanding of theology is broadly identified with the rise of medieval Christianity and the medieval university, though it had precursors in the early centuries of the church. This genre Farley calls "Theology/Science." Here theology is understood to carry forward and build upon Theology/Habitus, but to add to it qualities of systematic inquiry and exposition, and the effort to relate

¹ The briefer statement is Edward Farley, "Theology and Practice Outside the Clerical Paradigm" in Practical Theology: The Emerging Field in Theology, Church, and World, edited by Don S. Browning (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983), pp. 21-41. This article will be cited as "Farley in Browning." The longer statement is Farley, Theologia: The Fragmentation and Unity of Theological Education (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983).
² Farley in Browning, p. 23.

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its truths to other domains of knowledge (Scientia, Episteme). Here theology is a unified and unifying discipline (parallel to philosophy, rhetoric, and astronomy) with its own object and proper method. In "this second period theology may be (in the one sense) wisdom, but it is a wisdom which can be promoted, deepened, and extended by human study and argument." ³

In Farley's account, both Theology/Habitus and Theology/Science disappear as organizing motifs for theological endeavor after the seventeenth century. Their demise corresponds to the rise of the modern university in its commitment to an emerging critical method, and its provision of specialized divisions to support the newly differentiating secular professions. Now theology becomes the work of theological faculties, with their chairs of Old and New Testament, dogmatics, and church history. Theology, thus, "... becomes a generic term for a' cluster of relatively independent studies; it becomes a term like law, medicine, or liberal arts. Once theological sciences developed, a new problem appeared-how to relate them to each other in unity and coherence. And with that problem came a new literature, called by German theologians who were its first authors theological encyclopedia." ⁴

In passing, Farley acknowledges that in contemporary usage theology often refers to the specialization of systematic or philosophical theology, which constitutes a fourth meaning and self-understanding of theology.

Theological education as practiced in most contemporary seminaries and divinity schools is the lineal descendant of the theological encyclopedists and their fourfold division of the theological curriculum. Likewise, we are heirs to Schleiermacher's strategy of providing a principle of coherence for these differentiated sub-disciplines of theology. Both to justify the presence of theology in the secularizing university, and to focus the relations of the theological sciences to each other, Schleiermacher envisioned a field of practical theology, concerned with "the rules for the exercise of the ministries of the church." By making those rules subject to the essence of Christianity, Farley suggests, Schleiermacher found a way to integrate practical theology into the field of theology taken as a whole. ⁵

But Schleiermacher's proposals were never implemented. Instead, practical theology became more and more a matter of training persons in the techniques required for the exercise of various aspects of the pastoral office. This gave rise to what Farley has called theological education organized under the domination of the clerical paradigm. Farley indicates something of his vision for a discipline of practical theology in his summary statement on the failure of Schleiermacher's vision: "Thus a single area of theological studies that mediated biblical and historical materials and the issue of the community of faith's self-perpetuation,

³ Farley, Theologia, pp. 36-37.
⁴ Farley in Browning, p. 24; Theologia, chs. 3-5.
⁵ Farley in Browning, p. 32.

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world-oriented mission, and institutional tasks never developed. In other words, practical theology never has existed, and does not now exist as a discipline." ⁶

Farley sees a number of consequences stemming from this failure. The pastoral office and functions represent a relatively inadequate principle of cohesion for the sub-disciplines of theological study. Understood as matters of technique or personality, the aspects of pastoral praxis do not necessarily draw out or inspire fundamental investigations into Scripture and tradition. When they lead, in conjunction with secular disciplines from the social sciences, into situational analysis, this often occurs without serious theological input or monitoring. This produces or perpetuates an alienation of theory from praxis in which the pastoral office is shaped by theologically unexamined norms of the "near" tradition (the practice of those whose examples have been or are telling to the pastor). And the work of theological inquiry is left uninformed and unconstrained by the shape of issues that arise in the community of faith's struggle for faithful presence in the world.

Farley's own constructive proposal for a discipline of practical theology goes something like this: He rejects techne or the technical skills of the "pastoral-administrator" ⁷ as the organizing focus of practical theology. Rather, he argues, practical theology must find its coherence in a "unifying region" ⁸ or a "geography." That unifying region for Farley is located in "ecclesial presence." His own work on a phenomenological account of ecclesial presence lies behind this. ⁹ Ecclesial presence combines attention to the historical reality of the church and its mission and presence in the world with attention to the normative and eschatological calling of the church. "I mean by (ecclesial existence) something partly given in history, and something ideal, normative, and eschatological … a network of redemption; … it has a world-transforming aspect." Practical theology, thus, must become "an area of studies based on a phenomenology of the region we are calling ecclesial redemptive presence." ¹⁰

To be such a discipline, practical theology must, in the first place, recover and reconstitute Theology/Habitus, or theological understanding. "I would submit that theological understanding is the telos, the aim of any course of theological study, whenever it occurs." ¹¹ In this regard, Farley wants to underscore both the personal-existential appropriation

⁶ Ibid.
⁷ The allusion here is to the image of the "Pastoral Director" developed by H. Richard Niebuhr, in collaboration with Daniel Day Williams and James M. Gustafson, in The Purpose of the Church and Its Ministry: Reflections on the Aims of Theological Education. (New York: Harper & Row, 1956).
⁸ Farley in Browning, p. 38.
⁹ See Farley, Ecclesial Man: A Social Phenomenology of Faith and Reality (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975); and Ecclesial Reflection: An Anatomy of Theological Method (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982).
¹⁰ Farley in Browning, pp. 38-39.
¹¹ Ibid., p. 37.

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of faith and the acquisition of a kind of "practical knowing" ¹² that constitutes a life-wisdom grounded in faith. In the second place, practical theology must reconstitute Theology/Science. Farley: "The problem of restoring theology as a single, rigorous and reflective discipline does not mean recalling the Middle Ages but discovering how various areas of study contribute to theological understanding." ¹³ (That is to say, how they contribute to understanding, guiding, and empowering ecclesial presence.) Finally, developing a unifying discipline of practical theology involves finding a way "to incorporate as a pervasive element in the course of studies praxis in the sense of the social and political situation." ¹⁴ Here Farley refers to the "world transforming" aspect of ecclesial presence and to the requirement that practical theology leads into and keeps its roots deeply in a praxis of world transformation. We will look at this more closely in a subsequent section of this paper.

Before we leave Farley, however, let us hear him out on the curricular implications of the centrality of social/political praxis in practical theology:

Even those [theological] schools that have a clear and maximal commitment to social praxis seem not to have found a way to [make praxis pervasive and central in the course of studies]. This is because the general question of the total structure of theological study has not been raised. The result is simplistic ways of relating theology and social/political praxis in theological study…. The schools are left then with the dominant clerical paradigm and its identification of praxis with professional responsibilities with the result that the social praxis element is present atomistically and sporadically. ¹⁵

II

I would like briefly to examine the outlines of three other recent statements on practical theology, each of which is responsive to the concerns and historical analyses of Farley (though not necessarily inspired by his work). Before presenting these positions, however, I would like to call attention to a chapter in Matthew Lamb's recent book, Solidarity with Victims, in which he develops a typology for comparing how various theologies relate theory and praxis. ¹⁶ His typology, which builds from David Tracy's schema in Blessed Rage for Order, ¹⁷ identifies five patterns of theory-praxis relations in contemporary theologies. The first two are relatively straightforward and suffer, in Lamb's evaluation, from failing to be adequately dialectical. They are: (1)

¹² The phrase is Rod Hunter's, offered in a paper at a faculty retreat about three years ago.
¹³ Farley in Browning, pp. 37-38.
¹⁴ Ibid., p. 38.
¹⁵ Ibid.
¹⁶ Matthew L. Lamb, Solidarity with Victims: Toward a Theology of Social Transformation (New York: Crossroad, 1982), ch. 3.
¹⁷ David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology (New York: Crossroad-Seabury, 197 5), ch. 2.

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Theologies in which theory takes clear precedence and priority over praxis, and in which praxis is understood as the application of truths or insights derived independently of praxis by dogmatic fiat (as in Catholic neo-scholasticism) or by philosophical reasoning (as in the work of Jacques Maritain); and (2) Theologies in which praxis has an internal relation to Christianity, and theory is seen as a more or less extrinsic reflection on that praxis. There are both liberal and radical models of this type: the former tend to identify the emergent values and virtues of the Enlightenment and modernity generally with the fulfillment of the Christian impulse in history (as in certain theologies of secularization); the latter tend to identify Christian faithfulness with radical revolutionary praxis (as in some political theologies and theologies of liberation).

A third type which Lamb identifies he calls the "Primacy of Faith-Love" (over theory or praxis). In this position, great care is taken to safeguard revelation, grace, and genuine faith from distorting and idolatrous identifications with either human theory or praxis (as in the early Barth, and in Hans Urs von Balthasar). These perspectives affirm the non-identity of Christian faith-love with human theory, but paradoxically, affirm that this is a relational non-identity.

For our purposes, Lamb's fourth and fifth types are the most important and the most interesting. Following Tracy, he sees both the fourth and fifth types as working from the standpoint of a method characterized by critical mutual correlations between the "Christian fact" (Tracy's language for the objective orientation to truth that comes to expression in the Christian "classic") ¹⁸ and the exigencies of theory and praxis in history. Both are committed to carrying forward the third type's refusal to identify Christianity with either theory or praxis, or with any particular theory-praxis relationship. The fourth type engages in this mutual critical correlation by leading with theory-with the formulations of a "fittingness" that discloses truth between revelational events in the Christian memory and the unfolding texture of present historical contexts. Of this group (which includes Bultmann, Tillich, the Niebuhrs, Karl Rahner, W. Pannenberg, and Tracy himself), Lamb writes: "A common characteristic of these theologians is an uncommon concern to articulate the theoretical issues confronting theology in a post-modern world." ¹⁹ Calling them "mediational theologies," Lamb argues that theologians of this group focus their discernment of theological truth through reflection on the "ontological structures common to human existence and Christian revelation." For them, he continues, "the normativity question, therefore, is more open to a mutual interaction between reason and faith." ²⁰ Although rooted in a more dialectical and sophisticated account of theological and theoretical truth than his first type, this fourth way of relating theory and praxis (to which Farley,

¹⁸ See David Tracy, "The Foundations of Practical Theology" in Practical Theology, edited by Don S. Browning, pp. 62 and 64. Cited henceforth as "Tracy in Browning."
¹⁹ Lamb., p. 76.
²⁰ Ibid., p. 78.

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in my judgment, also belongs) still gives the priority to theory and sees it as informing and shaping praxis through a normativity derived from the interplay of faith and reason in ontological analysis.

The fifth and final type Lamb identifies has in common with the fourth a commitment to mutual critical correlations between elements of the Christian tradition and emerging historical contexts. It also is committed to the non-identification of Christian faith with any given theory-praxis balance. But whereas the fourth type sees praxis as the goal of theory, and theory as the foundation of praxis, the fifth type, critical praxis correlations, claims "that praxis itself as action or performance grounds the activity of theorizing. Praxis is not only the goal but also the foundation of theory." ²¹ Lamb identifies Bernard Lonergan, Johann Baptist Metz, and Jürgen Habermas (though not a theologian) and certain liberation theologians as representatives of this fifth type. Lamb identifies their common characteristics in this way:

Unlike theologians operating in the fourth type of critical theoretic correlations, Lonergan and Metz remain convinced that it is not enough to produce learned tomes on theology which leaves the doing of theology within the present academic, ecclesial, and social contexts. As Lonergan has remarked, the age of omnipotent theologians has disappeared with the age of innocent theory. Theory never was really innocent, but after the modern horrors of our twentieth-century history we can no longer responsibly continue doing theology as if, for instance, a seminar on the holocaust could be added to the old curriculum…. I would say that the self-referrent of theologians in the critical praxis correlation is their awareness that only authentic religious, moral, intellectual, psychic, and social forms of praxis can ground an authentic doing of theology. The object-referrent is their varying efforts at thematizing new ways of doing theology within an interdisciplinary collaboration which would promote a critical praxis correlation that aims at academic, ecclesial, and social transformations…. These theologians challenge us with a call to change the way we are doing theology…. They address their call to conversion or change to the publics of the academy, the churches, and society at large. ²²

III

Now, having offered Lamb's typology for distinguishing theological relationships of theory and praxis, I would like to turn back to the consideration of three recent positions on practical theology. Each of these, I believe, best fits in Lamb's fourth type, though at least two of them are taking turns toward the fifth type.

First, I invite the reader to look at the position I offered in the volume edited by Don Browning on practical theology. I was asked to focus on a practical theology of Christian education. I began by characterizing practical theology as "theological reflection and construction arising out of and giving guidance to a community of faith in the praxis of its mission. Practical theology is critical and constructive reflection on the praxis of the Christian community's life and work in its various

²¹ Ibid., p. 82.
²² Ibid., pp. 84-85.

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dimensions." ²³ To clarify the character and complex dynamics of this practical theology's reflection, I developed an interactional model: ²⁴

Note that, like Farley, I see ecclesial praxis (his ecclesial presence) as the organizing center of practical theology. Ecclesial praxis is located between the normativity of the Christian story and vision (Scripture and tradition) and the present historical contexts of mission and praxis (present experiences and situations). Practical theology, as critical and constructive reflection on and guidance for the praxis of the community, draws on the tradition and Scriptures with the hermeneutical aid of the various specialized theological disciplines (exegetical, historical, systematic-ethical, and fundamental theology). In its efforts to interpret and respond to present contexts and issues of praxis, it draws on the hermeneutical aids of a variety of humanities and social scientific disciplines. In its own sub-disciplinary foci, practical theology attends to various particular dimensions of ecclesial praxis as modes of action in and interaction with persons and contexts of personal and social formation and transformation.

Focusing specifically on a practical theology of Christian formation, I identified as its goal "to call forth and nurture persons who taste and see the sovereign love of God as constitutive of all that is, and who come to make being partners with God, in His present and in-breaking reign, the fundamental option of their lives." ²⁵ To develop a practical theology adequate to undertake the pursuit of this goal, I pointed to the need for four foundational elements. These elements require significant contributions and control by all of the disciplines of theology and from some cognate non-theological disciplines. They serve to demonstrate, with

²³ James W. Fowler, "Practical Theology and the Shaping of Christian Lives" in Practical Theology, edited by Don S. Browning, p. 149. Cited henceforth as "Fowler in Browning."
²⁴ Fowler in Browning, p. 153.
²⁵ Ibid., p. 156.

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some concreteness, Farley's unifying discipline in the service of ecclesial presence. These four foundational elements can only be listed here without elaboration: (1) "A theory of God's sovereign love as the pattern of action underlying and giving character to the cosmic process." ²⁶ This foundational element calls for a theology of God's action as Creator, Ruler, and Liberator-Redeemer. It also calls for a correlated theory of human response and vocational partnership with God, ²⁷ (2) A theory of faith development. ²⁸ This foundational element, were I writing now, would be presented as a theory of "becoming a subject before God." But three years ago I characterized it as an empirically based theoretical account of patterns in the development of consciousness, its benefits, values, and interpretations. (3) A theory of the virtues and affections of the Christian life. ²⁹ As in the first element, here again all of the exegetical, historical, and ethical disciplines of theology would be called upon for help with this foundational element. And (4) a theory of methodological principles and strategies for formation in faith. Here historical accounts of catechesis in other periods and the theological-practical presentation of traditions of spiritual direction would need to be combined with attention to theories of learning and instruction from educational research.

This brief overview will serve to illustrate an option in practical theology. It bears obvious relations to Farley's work and offers some specificity beyond his fairly general indications. My position, as I expressed it in this earlier article, seems on the whole to fit into Lamb's fourth type, among the critical theoretic correlations.

The second approach to practical theology I want to sketch is that of David Tracy. Although his major work on practical theology is still in progress, his article in the Browning volume indicates the main lines he intends to pursue. Tracy, following Lonergan, has identified three distinct but complementary subdivisions of theology, each with a special focus and method, and each addressing a particular public. There are:

Foundational Theology, Academic Public, Truth(Metaphysics, Dialectics)
Systematic Theology, Ecclesial Public, Beauty (Poetics, Rhetoric)
Practical Theology, Social Public, Good (Ethics, Politics) 30

Tracy defines theology as, "the discipline that articulates mutually critical correlations between the meaning and truth of an interpretation of the Christian fact and the meaning and truth of an interpretation of the contemporary situation." Tracy continues:

Each subdiscipline develops public criteria for its claims to meaning and truth. Those criteria also range from the necessary and abstract (transcendental

²⁶ Ibid.
²⁷ See ibid., pp. 156-158; and my book Becoming Adult, Becoming Christian (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984), ch. 4.
²⁸ Fowler in Browning, pp. 158-160.
²⁹ Ibid., pp. 160-161. See Becoming Adult, Becoming Christian, ch. 5.
³⁰ Chart taken from Lamb, p. 80. See also Tracy in Browning, pp. 62-63.

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or metaphysical) criteria of fundamental theology through the hermeneutical criteria of truth as disclosure and concealment in systematic theologies to the concrete praxis criteria of truth as personal, social, political, historical and natural transformations and ethical reflection in practical theology. All three subdisciplines are needed to assure the presence of the full range of criteria necessary for the affirmation of the public character of theology's claims for meaning and truth. ³¹

In contrast to Farley's and my positions, which tend to locate the unifying focus of practical theology in ecclesial praxis, Tracy seems to see that focus as centering in social transformation. ³² For practical theology, the principal theoretical criteria are those of theological ethics as related to the praxis of social transformation. We understand more clearly what Tracy has in mind when he discusses contemporary praxis in relation to the Aristotelean tradition:

What we can affirm with Aristotle and the classical tradition is that praxis is the action of moral agents guided by some goal of the good and virtuous life and directed to the development of a character possessing phronesis or practical wisdom. What we can also affirm in our period is, first, that praxis is mediated through a historical and social consciousness that needs explicit study; second, that praxis must be explicitly related to the techniques of modern technology in order to prove effective; and, third, that the goal of the good and virtuous life is itself a projected possibility for any agent. We need, therefore, to interpret critically ideals of the future of the self, society, history, and nature. ³³

Tracy sums up his position on practical theology by identifying it as "the mutually critical correlation of the interpreted theory and praxis of the Christian fact and the interpreted theory and praxis of the contemporary situation." ³⁴ He then specifies four principal steps at which practical theologians should engage in collaborative work: (1) Collaborative exercise of the development of models of human transformation, to be provided by psychology, social science, historical studies, cultural anthropology, philosophy, ecological theories, and religious studies and theologies. ³⁵ (2) Collaborative development of public claims to human transformation provided by different concrete ideals for the (social) future. (3) Careful attention to the hermeneutical issues in practical theology, as focused on socially mediated contexts and models of transformation. He stresses the importance of the hermeneutics of suspicion in this connection, "to unmask the systematic distortions in the person, social, cultural, historical and religious models of human transformation." ³⁶ And (4) drawing on the first three steps, a disciplined

³¹ Tracy in Browning, pp. 62-63.
³² Ibid.
³³ Ibid., pp. 75-76.
³⁴ Ibid., p. 76,
³⁵ Among these theories of human transformation, Tracy distinguishes between synchronic models (Piaget, Lonergan, Kohlberg, and Fowler) and diachronic models (Browning, H. R. Niebuhr, and Gustafson). See Tracy in Browning, pp. 76-77.
³⁶ Tracy also recognizes the importance of unmasking the systematic distortions in the critical theories themselves, that is, the Freudian tradition's systematic distortion of feminine experience. See ibid., p. 78.

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reflection upon the possible mutually critical correlations obtaining between secular models of moral praxis with an emancipatory thrust and Christian faith praxis. ³⁷

Tracy is formidable in his piling up of abstractions. If for no other reason than that, we are confirmed in seeing him still as being best described by Lamb's fourth type, the critical theoretic correlations group.

Don Browning offers the third practical theological position I want to look at briefly. His position is much like that of Tracy, who has influenced him considerably. In my judgment, Tracy's proposal suffers for lack of a designated community context or locus for practical theology. One suspects that the model of the inter-disciplinary seminar in the Committee on Social Thought of the University of Chicago underlies Tracy's writing about practical theology. Browning, on the other hand, seems to have in mind primarily a therapeutic or counseling setting, defined by relation to a Christian community, and conducted by one who has clear identification with a variant of the Christian tradition. His focus, in contrast to Tracy's abstract concern for social and personal transformation, seems dominantly to be focused on personal transformation.

Like Tracy, Browning sees practical theology's normative reflection as centering most squarely in the area of ethics and moral thinking. In a way that specifies and focuses the method he has in mind beyond the position of Tracy, however, he has identified five interpenetrating and non-hierarchial levels of moral thinking. Intending to include both "objective" dimensions of Ethics, and "characterological" (or aretaic) dimensions, he correlates the objective and characterological at each level: ³⁸

Seeking to overcome recent tendencies in theology and ethics to limit themselves to one or two of these levels, while ignoring the others, Browning sees a need for comprehensive attention to all the levels in his "revised correlational" practical theology. The metaphorical level deals with a person or group's operative images of the ultimate context of experience. It is the most distinctly religious level. The obligational level is the most distinctively moral level, and involves a person's criteria for determining right and wrong, duty and obligation, and the like. The

³⁷ Ibid.
³⁸ Don S. Browning, Religious Ethics and Pastoral Care (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), p. 57. (Cited henceforth as Browning, REPC). See also Browning's unpublished paper, "Christian Education and Practical Theology," delivered at Candler School of Theology, November, 1983.

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tendency-need level focuses on human instinctual and evaluational tendencies, in largely non-moral terms. The contextual-predictive level tries to specify common sociological, psychological, and cultural trends which are likely to condition our actions and consequences. Finally, the rule-role level "tries to articulate the concrete rules, roles and processes of the communication necessary to construct a world according to the visions, obligations, and possibilities opened up at higher levels." ³⁹

For Browning, practical theological judgment involves a mutually critical engagement among (1) the central witness of the Judeo-Christian tradition at each of the various levels, (2) the contents and perspectives of various other competing cultural interpretations of our experiences-again at each of the five levels, and finally, (3) the consultee's own personal experience and perspectives, at each of the five levels. ⁴⁰

IV

Reflection on the four models we have sketched in the previous section suggests at least the following four points of convergence or agreement:

(1)Each of the four models holds to a genuinely dialectical approach in characterizing the relation between theory and praxis. They resist any effort to subordinate praxis to theory, as in notions of "applied theology." At the same time, they resist any flatfooted assimilation of theory to praxis, which generally involves anti-intellectualism and the naive exaltation of what I earlier called the "near tradition." They, in a variety of ways, sharpen our awareness that the interpretation of the normative sources and vision of Christian faith guides perception and interpretation of situations of current challenge and response. Reciprocally and conversely, they also help us appreciate that the questions we put to Scripture and tradition are enriched, and lead to enriched and altered interpretations, when the emergent contextual issues are allowed their reforming initiative in our processes of interpretation and response. They are in agreement, then, in calling for a genuinely dialectical understanding of the relation of theory and praxis.

(2)Implicit in each of the models we have considered is a concept of truth as both dialectical and emergent. While they do not go so far, as yet, as to suggest that the moments of emergent truth generated in the dialectic of interpretation between theory and praxis have the status of revelation, ⁴¹ this kind of claim seems to me to be a logical and necessary

³⁹ Browning, REPC, p. 55.
⁴⁰ Ibid., pp. 56-57. Note the similarity between this interplay and Charles Gerkin's account of the interpenetrating stories and "horizons of meaning" of the helper, help-seeker, and the Christian story and vision The Living Human Document (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1984). It also parallels Thomas H. Groome's fine account of a " shared-praxis" approach to Christian Education in his Christian Religious Education (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980).
⁴¹ The older generation of theologians behind Fowler, Tracy, Browning, et al., including H.Richard Niebuhr, did of course make this kind of claim. I am indebted to Richard

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extension of their positions. I shall suggest in a moment that their failure (and my own) to clarify this crucial dimension of a praxis understanding of truth may indicate an insufficiently dialectical understanding of the theory-praxis relation, which may, in turn be rooted in a persistent tendency to substitute for praxis the idea of praxis, or, in other words, to sublate praxis into theory.

(3)Related to the issues focused in the previous paragraph, we see each of the four models we have examined focusing special attention on the role of hermeneutics and hermeneutical understanding in practical theology. As these four theologians envision the tasks and methods of practical theology, the unifying methodological (if not "regional" or functional) focus is to be found in hermeneutics. Each is concerned that hermeneutical method be "critical"-both in the sense of being methodologically reflective and sophisticated, as well as in the sense of employing a "hermeneutics of suspicion." Hermeneutics should have both a method and a critical theory of its method by which to discern and correct for its own systemic distortions in the interpretation of situations, Scripture, and tradition.

(4)Finally, all four of our practical theologians see this discipline as concerned not just with guiding the maintenance of ecclesial presence in society, or with the mere formulation of persons for "adjusted" living in society. Rather, they see practical theology, in the service of Christian faith, as intrinsically concerned (interested, "prejudiced" in Gadamer's sense) toward personal and social transformation. And insofar as they are radically interested in praxis, the criteria and strategies of transformation they generate will arise from and contribute to behavioral, social, and structural transformation, and not just to transformation of attitudes, beliefs, and espoused values.

Having identified these four areas of convergence and agreement between the positions we examined, I must now try to articulate two deep sources of concern and reservation regarding them. Both have to do with the suspicion that for all their attention to the need for accounting for the dialectical interaction of theory and praxis, and of Scripture and tradition with present situations, they fail to be dialectical enough in existential-historical reality.

V

The first of these concerns comes at the point of these positions' relative lack of attention to or development of what we might call a critical and correlational "theory of divine praxis." With the exception of my position, and a kind of pale imitation of it in Browning,⁴² the

Osmer for his continuing fruitfully to pursue the question of how contemporary revelation, the disclosure of the power, character, and truth of the Whole by the power of the Whole (Tracy, Analogical Imagination) is accounted for in various practical theologies
⁴² Browning, REPC, pp. 58-59.

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dialectic that gets most attention in these models is that between situational analysis, and the hermeneutical resources to be used in it, on the one hand, and the relevant central themes of the Christian story and vision, and the hermeneutical resources for their interpretation, on the other. There is no clear affirmation or examination of the priority and objectivity of divine initiative as the ground, the tendency, and the backdrop of situations of contemporary interpretation and response. This omission results in the subtle but dangerous tendency to abstract from actual contexts and issues of praxis, and from risky correlative existential-historical interpretations of the dialectic of divine and human action, and to focus instead on meta-theoretical issues of method. I will want to suggest in a moment that this omission has its roots in a culturally and historically understandable complex of sources of systematic distortion which, no less than other significant sources of interpretative distortion, call for the employment of a hermeneutics of suspicion.

This leads to my second deep reservation and concern about the four models we have examined (this time including my own, insofar as it makes faith development theory fundamental among its constitutive elements). My concern has to do with their common reliance on what Johann Baptist Metz has called the "Pyrrhic victory over the Enlightenment or the secretly enthroned middle-class subject in theology." ⁴³ Let me present some of Metz's argument. In nineteenth century progressive liberal apologetics we see a dramatic inversion of Christianity's defensiveness before the Enlightenment's critical disembowelment of religion and its claims to groundedness in revelation. In this new response, says Metz,

The Enlightenment is no longer regarded as the quintessence of anti-ecclesiastical and anti-theological provocation. It is treated as a locus theologicus, a place, in other words, where Christianity becomes universally rational and therefore at the same time historically universal. In one form or another, almost all theologies that have in their own time been regarded as modern or progressive have been filled with satisfaction with regard to this late victory. Whereas the earlier Catholic apologists had defended tradition and authority, the liberal theologians pleaded, with the restrained pathos of the Enlightenment, for democracy, public life, honesty, freedom of conscience, autonomy and freedom to express one's opinion in the Church. Their plea was to a great extent justified, but it should not be forgotten that, when they took up the weapons of the Enlightenment, these liberal apologists also took over the difficulties. ⁴⁴

Stimulated by Metz, but in some respects going beyond him, we can say that a dangerous tendency manifested by each of the four models we have examined (and by the entire group of newer theologies Lamb identifies with his fourth type) has its complex roots in theology's making the weapons of the Enlightenment-and their fundamental assumptions-its own. Most fundamentally, I believe, these theologies

⁴³ Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology (New York: Seabury-Crossroad, 1980), p. 27.
⁴⁴ Ibid.

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remain trapped in a dialectic in which critical reason tries to overcome the limits of critical reasoning by the mediation of reason alone. I am not unaware of the variety of hermeneutical maneuvers by which philosophy and theology have sought to escape from this sack. The often ingenious and always complex attempts to do theology on ground prepared by Gadamer, the later Heidegger, and the later Wittgenstein all represent ways of trying to get beyond the rationally self-grounded subject of the Enlightenment. Paradoxically, however, regarding the restoration of initiative to the source and ground of revelation and the restoration of authority to the Christian story and vision, it seems to me that in these strategies we inevitably end up worshiping before the altar of the sovereignty of method, on which is finally an elaborate but thinly disguised version of Enlightenment critical reason.

The foregoing sounds more anti-intellectual and more ungrateful to mentors and colleagues than I in fact intend to be. In many ways, the indictments of the previous paragraph are self-criticism, aimed at what I take to be the "dark" side of faith development theory. The indictments represent the endpoint of a line of reasoning that goes, in extremely abbreviated form, something like this: (1) The Enlightenment gave rise to the creation of a new human self-image and reality-the self-critical epistemological (and axiological) Subject. (2) Correlative with and fundamental to this new self-image are critical reason and volitional autonomy. (3) Reason, in the service of responsible freedom, is taken to be the prime mediator of the Subject's relations to tradition, to human relations, and to the claims of ethical and religious ultimacy. (4) Severed from the possibility of metaphysical knowledge, critical reason learned to approach truth by the rational, transcendental establishment of method. (5) Method, primarily hermeneutic in character, then, becomes the fulcrum on which the lever of interpretation can rest, and it becomes the arbiter of the interpretation of tradition, of the present situation, and of actors' self-other understandings.

While the foregoing sketches some account of the post-Enlightenment career of the Enlightenment's new Subject as knower and interpreter, Metz forcefully grasps this Subject's career as social, political, and economic being. He calls this emergence "the middle class citizen." Examine his description:

This new man can be defined as the subject who is in control and at the same time in need in society. His ability to control now has hardly any remaining receptive aspects and he is already able to dominate almost everything in the natural world and in human history. His practical understanding is orientated almost exclusively towards models that are based on this control of nature and on the satisfaction of his own needs. His other practical patterns of behaviour as a subject are disappearing and losing their effectiveness. ⁴⁵

Here we face the paradox which practical theology and theological education must move through. It is precisely on the basis of the work of

⁴⁵ Ibid., pp. 28-29.

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thinkers who have helped us come to terms with the limits of critical reason (which can so easily be subsumed in technical reason) that we are in position to make analyses like that of Metz above. And yet, the effort to overcome the condition it describes by virtue of the transcendental establishment of method remains self-defeating. This is, I think, finally due to the fact that by establishing the grounds and terms on which the meanings that come to expression in the revelatory moments of traditions can be taken as imperative, the imperativeness of the ones making the judgments remain sovereign. And the tradition's imperatives-which are, in fact, really lenses by which to discern the actions and intentions of God in the present and future-remain matters of human interpretation and matters of optional, volitional choice and response.

Somewhere Herbert Finagarette once wrote, "One day I saw, in a way that mattered, that the task is not to write the program, but to execute it." The tone and thrust of his statement will serve to point in the direction for practical theology this essay suggests. The way forward in practical theology involves placing more radical trust in God's self-disclosure and promises found in our traditions of revelation; more radical investment in concrete, existential-social-historical action in anticipation of the in-breaking Commonwealth of Love; and a more radical engagement, through present action and prayer, to make us partners in God's work of creation, governance, and liberation/redemption.