Why Pastoral Theology?

I hope I am in good company with other bloggers in being a little obsessive and sensitive when it comes to my blog.  I just made a major shift from a longstanding blog that I had run for a number of years.  There I tried to engage academically with theology.  This mode met with greater and lesser success at times.  The shift here was to represent an intentional attempt to shift my manner of discourse to become more particular with respect to my vocation as a pastor.

This past week I was reflecting on this recent shift and as I looked at my blog I suddenly had the temptation to change my tag line, descriptive pastoral theology.  The reason for this was both internal and external.  Externally I felt that it might project too limited a scope on what I am trying to do here causing people to judge this blog by its (sub)title.  The second and more significant motivation is my own internal relationship to the thing called pastoral theology.  I hated my pastoral theology course in seminary and I have never encountered pastoral theology text that I have appreciated nor have I come across many pastors blogging who have kept my attention.  These are supposed to be the practical applications of theology for the church but they always strike me as impoverished theoretically or simply uninteresting practically.  For this reason my academic pursuits have always been a little escapist when it comes to the day-to-day realities of pastoring.  At least when I was focusing on biblical studies I was gaining invaluable tools for directly related study.  Theology always presented itself as the un-winnable dichotomy between irrelevant systematic theology and weak pastoral theology.  I have come to terms with this experience as being a symptom of my choice in educational institutions.  However it influenced a trajectory that has been hard to alter.

I decided to keep my tag line because I see the value, potential and role of pastoring.  Given my congregations I have experienced a greater freedom in my intellectual formation.  I am no longer on a track of greater and greater specialization making sure I can account for all secondary literature on a given person or subject.  I now read broadly with a sense of imagination in how various themes can engage with each other.  The problem remains that this process has still largely confined itself to the pulpit.  It is my hope that this space will eventually lead to the exploration of other areas of pastoral work (pastoral care, baptism, Lord’s Supper, ‘mission’, etc.).  In this way I hope to engage and also challenge the intellectual trends that have been formative in spaces marginal or outside the church.  And of course that those trends would also challenge the practices within the church.

For this reason I also want to maintain the title descriptive pastoral theology.  Again, this is no claim to objective understanding of task or concept.  This points rather to a practice or discipline which is meant to slow things down and takes for granted that things are already in motion and so shifts in perspective and articulation will already announce and enact shifts of practice and understanding as this is worked in particular.

Religious Experience

For the past number of summers I have helped to organize some Friday night events for my church. We have abandoned the traditional model of ‘summer bible school’ were kids come during the day and learn verses, sing and do crafts. Instead we have hoped to create a more inter-generational experience gathering around a campfire for a less more formal time while still trying to be engaging across the ages.

In any event there is usually a small group time where people get together and share or work on a project. Last night people gathered to talk about an early and formative experience of God. After the small group sharing I asked if anyone wanted to share their responses with the whole group. There tends not to be a flood to the microphone. Three people did share (including myself) and I found the cross-section quite illuminating. One man shared about a road trip he took with his parents to Alberta. It was there that he saw the Rocky Mountains and Lake Louise. He said the experience almost moved him to tears as he wondered how something so beautiful existed and what that told him about the world and God. A woman shared about her experience at a youth conference. This was a bi-national event and so for worship there thousands gathered together. This experience also deeply moved her to reflect on things greater than herself. Finally I shared. My experience was from early grade school. It was the year they handed out those little red Gideon Bibles that contained the New Testament and the Psalms (I heard they still do this in some public schools). I remember being alone in my room and at the back of my Bible it talked about the commitment that God calls people to in the Bible. There was a place you could sign your name if you wanted to make that commitment. I can’t actually remember if I signed my name or not but I remember being alone and experiencing a sense of commitment. I have tried to neither under- or over-emphasize this event but the reality is that it remains fixed in my memory.

What I found interesting about the sharing is that one was focused on an experience in relationship to nature. The second was in response to a gathering of people. And the third was alone removed from nature and people. This was helpful for me because I tend to downplay and even be suspicious of people who talk highly of encountering God in nature. I have also found it intriguing that in the Mennonite churches in this area that I am in contact with I find that when I ask people about their faith they most often talk about the church (that is the people around them) as opposed to a relationship with God. Both of these expressions strike me as secondary as flowing from something more primary. It is easy to see now why Kierkegaard resonates so strongly with me. For him our very nature or selfhood is established in the God-self relationship. There is nothing prior to that and everything else flows from it. I suspect what I need to explore or be more open to is the manner in which this primary relationship is formed. Or is it even helpful to talk about a primary relationship. Is life too complex and layered to think that I can reduce or strip away other factors and influences so that I can be alone before God? Or is this God-self relationship a discipline in which I delineate the role of nature and neighbour to be secondary and therefore these influences are neither a cause of anxiety or fear when they appear threatening or uncertain and neither are they a false sense of security when they appear stable and generous.

The Immanent Kierkegaard

In his conclusion to Works of Love Kierkegaard introduces the words of beloved apostle,
Beloved, let us love one another
These are words of consummated love that we novices are not yet able to speak. These words are somehow transfigured and blessed. They speak of the old law that is ever-new. We do not speak these words as we cannot leave the school of commandment prematurely but we must become hearers of these words. From here SK begins his final exposition.

Now only one thing more. Remember the Christian like-for-like, the like-for-like of the eternal.

Continue reading “The Immanent Kierkegaard” →

Who Will Love This Dead God?

I have tendency to relax at times when I am reading Kierkegaard. In some ways (or at least in some of his works) he is an ‘easier’ read than other philosophers. This can appear especially true of his upbuilding discourses (which he himself claims to moving towards the ‘simple’).  In Works of Love SK spends a brief section on ‘The Work of Love in Remembering One Dead’.  This section unsettled my ease.

Loving a dead person is characterized as the most free an expression of love can become because the dead person will not leverage love. The dead, though, are also the most rigorous. If at any time the loving relationship changes then it must be related to a change in the living person. In this relationship there can be no excuse. The living can’t complain of how the dead have changed. ‘She’s not the woman I fell in love with’ can find no justification for abandoning the love of a dead person.

As I read along. I thought this was a fairly clever expression until I took it seriously and how it was both absolutely literal and absolutely analogous. What a strange spiritual discipline and yet what a powerful analogy for loving the living. Then there was one line that took this a step further. SK relates loving the dead to the parent’s love for a child. It can be said that the parent loves the child before the child is even born (or even conceived). In this way the parent loves one who does not exist. Then SK adds, But one dead is also a non-being. This sent my thought careening into Marion’s God Without Being. In this work Marion shows the problematic model of conceiving of God first as Being. This is to place the concept prior to the reality of God. And so ‘faithful’ philosophies of the God of Being are actually no better (and likely worse) than the critical proclamations of the death of (the) God (of Being). Getting back to SK I wondered if loving the dead God is a necessary move of faith exemplified by none other than Christ himself on the cross and also of the death of Christ. In Matthew  Jesus announces the forsaking God (the Father) and the forsaken God (the Son) and note also in Matthew that Jesus ‘gave up his spirit’ and with that the Trinity is dead. Who will love this dead God?

Time and Speed

For a quick and sobering overview of global circumstances take a look.  These sorts of snapshots are simply crushing, at least they can be for me.  They are often evoked to create a sense of urgency.  Predictions about increased severity are brought to the present so that increased leverage can be applied for ill or good.  One thought has come to me.  The thought is that perhaps urgency is precisely the wrong response.  We often characterize this age, or the modern age in general, as lavish, excessive, decadent.  But it is not.  Our age could perhaps be more appropriately defined as being fiercely restrictive.  And no where is this more clearly seen in how time is viewed.  Nearly every aspect of our culture is bound to the desire for speed.  I would argue (off the top of my head . . . and would be happy to be proven wrong) that a vast majority of the factors that have led to our global situation are directly or indirectly connected to our inability to be lavish and excessive with time.  Increased speed fuels the illusion of omnipotence.  Speed secures us, keeping us ahead of disaster (that is keeping us ahead of the less speedy).  Speed is killing.  Greater urgency will likely only fall prey to the beast of speed.  I offer tentatively that an expansive view of time in my practices may be the most effective response.  This is a fearful and cautious position open to revision.

And His Government Shall Have No End

Through most of my adult life I have essentially withdrawn from the formal political process.  This has been the result, I think, mainly of my inability to understand political process and my theological hesitancy in viewing government as the means to what God is doing in the world.  It seems I have been able to do little correcting the former and I have tried not to take a militant position on the latter as I have encountered many for whom political process has made constructive contributions.

In Revelation 5 we hear about the new song sung by the four living creatures and the 24 elders.  They praise the lamb who was slain whose blood purchased people for God.  These people come from every tribe, language, ethnicity, and nation.  They are made a priestly kingdom and will rule the earth.  Revelation of course is shot through with the conflict around the earth’s rule.  Spending more time in this text I have begun to reflect again what it might mean or look like for the ‘lamb’s people’ to rule.

What came to me was really quite a simple and unoriginal contrast.  Traditional government is always willing to put others at risk.  Soldiers are themselves at risk and they put foreigners at risk.  Police themselves are at risk and they put other citizens at risk.  Who are these risked lives trying to secure.  I think they are trying to secure a type of non-life or static life.  This structure of government secures those who are passive as well as those who are able to risk others.  There is a brave refrain among the families of those fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan believing in the greater good of what is being fought for.  But their lives are not secured.  Their lives are shattered, at times it appears irredeemably broken.  So they say it is for their children but this fighting poses no guarantee of that belief.  And so the ones secured are only in the present, only those who do not need to fight and probably do not really care about it.  Those secured are the stabilizing block, masse, that government needs for support and credence.

So what of the ‘lamb’s people?’  They themselves rule by placing their lives in temporal risk for eternal security.  When they witness risked people they engage themselves directly for the securing of others.  Their authority then is acknowledged through their sacrifice . . . worthy is the lamb.  Kierkegaard’s notion of the eternal is significant here as it functions in the rupturing of every moment which humanly tends towards the temporal and the securing of the self at the cost of others.  Here there can be no allegiance to tribe, language, culture, or nation for all are represented in the call of the lamb.

It should also be noted that this is not a mindless risking on the part of the faithful it is rather a willing risk in light of and in discerning response to the ills and risks manifest around them.  This is where critical discussion and charitable response can join.

How to Answer a Question

As I mentioned below I was at an interviewing weekend at a church recently.  After my sermon the floor was opened up for questions directed at me (there were about 350 people there).  I was quite surprised at the range of topics.  Now bear in mind I do not have a traditional church or education background for this particular church so I suspect at least a few individuals felt some red flags go up over my resume.  One question was whether I held to the reformed doctrine of predestination (the right answer here is no).  Another question was whether I took a literalistic reading of the Bible.  There were of course other questions.  Some had to do with my background and intention for this position.  After a day or two of reflecting on this part of the weekend I began to feel how problematic this was.  In almost all cases I think I knew what they were really asking but the questions themselves placed unnecessary parameters on how the question could be answered.  Ultimately the questions were of a yes/no nature.  And perhaps I should have simply answered them as such.  Do you hold to the doctrine of predestination . . . no.  This, I suspect, would not have been well received and so I tried to build context around my response framing out why my yes or no could be intelligible for my particular situation.  But this was framing from nowhere as I did not know what was really being sought after.

In the end this was a highly unsatisfying time.  I think for these formats to have any validity congregations must learn the basic posture of invitation as opposed to inquisition.  Share with us . . . Describe for me . . . As it stood this environment seemed to enforce the sort of subtle and indirect communication that can leave people inside and outside of churches wondering whether they are in fact inside or outside (or perhaps upside down).

Being clear in communication does not mean being blunt it means being clear first of all with yourself.  Why are you asking this, have you expressed this motivation in the question?  Do you already have a pre-determined answer you are looking for?  Does this question aim at helping you to know and understand the person you am talking with better?  Does this question place inappropriate parameters on how the person is able to respond?

I don’t actually mind being in the hot seat I just find that in situations where someone’s potential livelihood is at stake care should be taken educating a group towards an appropriate method of inquiry (well, appropriate by my standards).

Taking the Slow Train

Descriptive pastoral theology is a patient task.  DPT takes seriously the situatedness of the practitioner but also believes that the situation can always be more thoroughly described.  Most of our experiences are processed automatically through various influences.  DPT also does not limit the influences that may have potentially influenced the practitioner.  These influences are also to be described.

In order to enter into this descriptive process the practitioner must continually learn to slow the process down so that pauses and therefore breaks in our default modes of understanding can be created.  There is no appeal or claim to effectiveness or results in this process.  DPT believes that there is already more than enough at play and so shifts and breaks and questions will be automatically generative.  The task begins when basic questions are asked.

What is happening here?  How do I interpret what is going on and why? What am I bringing into my description that should not be here? Etc.

I don’t think there is any great secret or anything new in the particular articulation of these questions (though description should take note of which questions we tend to ask!)  It is the attentiveness that counts and the ability to describe carefully and slowly and repetitively.  The imagery can be drawn easily from family systems.

When my father said this (1) why did not I say something?  When I stop to think about what he said this (2) is what I understand it to mean.  Understanding it this (2) way I should have said something because I also believe this (3).  Do I often neglect to say something in these sorts of situations?  Was there something in my family that we were trained to neglect?  Next time I need to slow my interaction with my father down and hear what my father is saying in congruence with as much of myself as possible.

My basic appeal in this approach is grounded in the biblical eschatology of the book of Revelation.  This reading is most clearly interpreted in John Howard Yoder’s thesis that all Christian aims and purposes have already been secured around the throne of God.  The greatest virtue then is patience and attentiveness.  This, though, is not enough as even John (twice!) at the end of Revelation almost falls into idolatry and worships the messenger of the revelation.  Therefore the practitioner must take great pains not to close of the description or own the description but continue pausing and questioning so that open hands would remain for the gift of revelation and also the gift of worship.