Category: descriptive pastoral theology

Taking as its medium

I have for some time now moved away from using language that refers to life and action as somehow ‘poetic’.  This shift has happened for a couple of reasons.  First, I had developed a theological writing style that employed a certain type of poetic language.  And what I mean by this is that I wrote about theological topics in a style that was simply supposed to ‘sound good’.  Theology, along with other disciplines, can afford one this opportunity.  No one can really verify if my explication of the Trinity is really valid or relevant.  Rather, it is supposed to move or  persuade.  This style tends to work fine when keeping the conversation theologically ‘in-house’.  As I began to expand my theological discourse I found that my language was running aground on folks who simply did not share some of my presuppositions and basically had the refrain of bullshit called out to me on several occasions.  This presented a clear intersection in how I was going to proceed.  I could entrench my approach and state that the conversation stalled on mutually incompatible presuppositions.  Or I could head back into the workshop and take another look at how I was going about things.  I decided on the latter.

This experience was part of larger theological shift that saw me move away from theology and practice as a discipline of orthodoxy (yes I can be challenged on how I understand orthodoxy) to theology and practice as a mode of understanding and engaging joy and brokenness in the world.  And I should also note that this past year found me heavily influenced by Kierkegaard for whom ‘the poetic’ is a false attempt at immediacy in life which actually puts oneself at arm’s length from life through ‘pretty’ language (I am grossly paraphrasing here).

This process also left a profound mark on how I now read theology.  Theology that was once inspiring now came off flat.  I don’t think I have many illusions about some neutral or material access to reality ‘as such’.  But I am much more interested in beginning from a phenomenological perspective which attempts to describe and not only describe what I see and intuit but also describe my location and perspective.  If I could now characterize my theology I would call it something like an existentially minded attempt at liberation theology.

All this to say that I was somewhat taken aback by Tim McGee’s recent post which outlines James Cone’s understanding of theology as a sort of poetic task.  Now as I read it I could see that the use of ‘poetic’ was different than the understanding I had moved away from.  It still struck me, however, that I had almost completely discarded any expression of the ‘poetic’ in how I express theology and practice.  Poetics for Cone is a response to the possibility of liberation.  We are creative and evocative because we are free.  This is an embodied and holistic poetics.

I had posted a comment on Tim’s blog stating briefly something of what I here stated above.  After that comment I went to a hospital to do some visits.  At the hospital I encountered what we all encounter at hospitals.  I saw bags of urine stacked on a cart in the hall.  I saw a bloody skid mark on the floor next to one person I visited.  I hear the calls for and saw the silhouetted nursing aids clean soiled patients.  I saw a neighbouring patient with a foot bloated literally like a blown-up surgical glove.  I heard sounds and moans coming out of doorways; one with the never ending refrain
Deloris . . . please help me, Deloris . . . please help me, Deloris . . . please help me . . .
I experienced all these common hospital scenes and I thought of the pretty words that people hold on to in this time; the pretty words people look to me for in this time.  It is many of these pretty words that I am trying to speak less of.  I am trying now to understand what theological poetics would look like and sound like taking as its medium the piss and shit of these places.

Preaching Existentially?

I am noting a consistent trend in my preaching.  I am targeting the individual.  This comes in part from my own experience and formation in existentialism but also in my experience of the Mennonite church in which it is easy for individuals to point to our good works in social supports and non-violent initiatives.  And then when the individual is called to account it is typically with some moral leveraging around what else we could be doing.

The approach I am taking seeks a type of honesty that is divorced from being identified as a criteria of truth.  I am not sure where I equated honesty with truth . . . is that a cultural thing?  But, rather, I am seeking honesty as an attempt at congruence and liberation.  I am trying to push my congruence to simply acknowledge the way things are.  This is not a statement about access to some neutral body of truth but of observations.  Observations could include things like money and economic security as constituting our primary mode of personal decision making.  Observations like acknowledging the power of status and conformity within the church.  There are many observations that need to be made as such.  Subsequent qualifications can follow but I believe many of them can initially stand.  Secondly, I am trying to divorce this from the typical and almost immediate shift to guilt and/or shame.  The reason for this is not because we are not guilty of things or that certain expressions could not be considered shameful.  Rather, I want to move away from them because they are debilitating.  I want us to get a sense that we are in many ways already ‘living a lie’ so why don’t we name it as such.  In this I want the pursuit of congruence to lead towards a liberating experience and liberating expressions.

As part of being honest with myself in this process I must admit that with respect to liberation I hold to some view of ‘enlightenment’.  This does not refer to an isolated inner-journey but again of a sort of honesty that manifests itself in congruence with action, experience and belief.  This is partially informing my conception of faith in which anchors to various modes of knowledge and decision are exposed.  While I hold a high view of material liberation as it is being expressed in many contemporary theologies I cannot shake the notion that there is a prior act and experience of liberation.  I would consider the Gospel insufficient if it cannot offer liberation to those suffering under material bondage.  That is, I believe there is liberation without immediate material liberation.  This does not mean that the two are not divorced.  Rather it takes Jesus as an example in the liberating independence he exhibits despite the fact that his life arcs towards material bondage.  So while full liberation is always to be engaged and on the table this does not deny that individuals cannot already enter into forms of liberation.  For those with material forms of power at their disposal congruence will mean acting in accord with liberation; which means oppression as incongruent with liberation.

All of this is to say that I believe in a personally engaged form of faith that works intimately with if not perhaps prior to structural changes.  So I will continue to support those working on a structural level (and hope to add my own contributions) but given my primary influence in preaching this remains a fundamental orientation.  I hope to continue to push my own ‘honesty’ in this expression.  Currently I am actively monitoring the extent to which my sermon preparation reflects a safety with respect to my own economic stability.  I believe that this influence is waning but I would also admit that it is still probably the strongest external influence.  I could interpret this as a structural flaw (that is churches that can dictate whether or not they want to keep a pastor) but I am not interested in engaging it on that level (presently).  It would seem that it would be helpful situation for a church to have to reject and even fire a pastor on the basis of his or her preaching.  In any event I am working on liberating myself from economic security in my preaching.

Thoughts or criticisms of this homiletic theology?

Nourishing an Impoverished Theology

Over at AUFS another lacerating post and comment thread has been levelled against possible symptomatic trends in theology that divert attention from the ‘flesh and blood’ powers that actually affect people (the target this time is a post by Ben Myers).  I particularly appreciate the description of powers as flesh and blood.  I am becoming increasingly convinced of the need to teach and demonstrate the practice of description, a phenomenology of sorts.  This position is not incompatible with a discursive interpretation of situations but it demands an account of how discourse is constructed.  If we move simply from discourse to discourse we begin trading in unreliable fictions which is how I understand APS’s critique of Myers’s post.  This was a feeling I also got from Myers’s earlier post on writing.  The sentiments were pleasantly structured but they never seemed to ‘touch down’ (this of course being a personal response unformulated as a criticism at the time).  I suspect I am entering theoretical waters I am unable to swim in but I want to work out at least this thought.

What we are doing in theology or any other discipline or perspective may be the manufacturing, editing and recycling of discourses but this does not mean there is no evaluation and no resources outside of discourse.  The trouble with theology tends to be something like a multi-layered discourse on incarnation without someone’s flesh touching fire, experiencing ecstasy, or willfully sacrificing.  In this way theological discourse becomes a layering and protecting of nothing; and so an engagement with nothing but postures and prose.  APS called Myers out on this and demanded that if he look (at least in Europe) one will find matters quit to the contrary.  Theologians do indeed need to step back and simply look at what is going on around them and describe it, not as though they will arrive at some homogenous neutral view but that they become engaged in flesh and blood.  And here APS’s response also falls short (as all descriptions do).  In his description there is no account for ‘progress’ under right-wing policy.  If someone would come to Winnipeg’s West End and ask about Harry Lehotsky you would soon be inundated with stories of man whose vision of dignity and quality of life for a forsaken community changed countless lives and all this based on a right-wing approach to government and economics that was the result of repeated frustrations with left-wing approaches to social support.  In this description I make no meta claims about economics only that a man engaged the flesh and blood powers of oppression found tools more readily available under a right-wing government (this description of course needs to be contextualized within the Canadian context and historical which greatly affects its possible transferability).  In any event I struggle with over the top claims like the ones made by APS.  I take them to heart as a theologian or Christian (as I have become increasingly grateful for the overall contribution many of the folks at AUFS make) because they are needed but then his post must be further problematized or at least nuanced because of the varied stories of engagement.  An apparent global perspective does not trump and cannot trump a local engagement with flesh and blood.  This, again, should not be read as an attempt to overturn APS’s post but simply to add description which may allow resonance with others for getting on in the task of ‘progress’.

Following the Kick-Ass Jesus; Or, Caged Faith

I was recently made aware of what should be an unsurprising website Jesus Didn’t Tap.

Jesus Didn’t Tap was one of the first Christian based MMA clothing companies to hit the scene. In the sport of Mixed Martial Arts, to “tap” is to quit or give up. The message of the Jesus Didn’t Tap line is that Jesus didn’t quit after going through unimaginable suffering and pain when he was crucified on the cross. The company aims to represent both the competitiveness of MMA and honoring God in all of their designs and hopes it will help spread the Christian message of salvation to a whole new audience. (from the website)

This is unsurprising and, for me, now a surprisingly clear example of heretical faith.  It is not heretical because it is ridiculous.  It is heretical because it believes that faith can be expressed analogically.  I will briefly qualify that statement by saying that I am unqualified to speak about ‘analogy’ as it is used in systematic theology and so these comments may or may not relate to a larger discussion.  My observation is simple.  Faith cannot be analogical because faith cannot be reduced from entirety into examples of totality.  This website reflects a belief that the ‘kernel’ of faith can be translated into the medium of fighting.  As a sport I actually have a relatively high regard for certain forms of MMA but this is viewed from a larger complex of social, ethical and personal perspectives.  What is at issue is the belief that you can ‘close’ the door of cage and function faithfully and independently within a confined space.  This is not a new insight but it is claiming more ground in how I view faithfulness.  This is how I would understand the word ‘piety’ as it used by folks at AUFS and also Hauerwas’s criticism of American as too ‘spiritual’.  Piety or spiritualism reflect those actions and postures which assume some effectiveness despite the realities of a larger context.  As it is Thanksgiving in Canada ‘piety’ might mean thanking God for a prosperity that comes at the direct cost of others without the means to object.  It is an act isolated from its relations.

I do not have the book on hand but Kierkegaard in his preface to The Sickness Unto Death speaks of faith as that which fearlessly encounters all of life.  In this way I have become much more receptive to ‘secular’ and ‘materialist’ expressions that attempt to thoroughly examine the functions at play in religion and culture (a critique of ideology it is often called).  To the extent that an expression distracts or insulates from an identifiable aspect of life it must be deemed unfaithful because it rejects the basic theological premise that the whole earth is full of God’s glory.  The basic posture of the Christian must remain to see, to hear, to feel, to taste, to smell.  This connects to the reason I began a new blog.  The hope was to learn the discipline of description.  I am not sure how I feel about the idea of accuracy in description (and I certainly reject any notion of neutrality) only that we tend to go through our days bypassing the basic acknowledgment and engagement with our senses.  Our mind already has enough patterns to live by assumption and guesswork and not take the time to recognize the utter uniqueness of everything (a bit grand of a statement I suppose).  So when I see examples like the one above I am reminded not of how ridiculous they are but of how tempting it is to cage faith in containable expressions allowing other forces free play in the ‘real world’ the one in which people live, breath and die; the one fallen and full of the glory of God.

I came across this quote from the website as though it was looking to enhance my point.

When Jesus stepped inside the cage of life to take on the cross, human legs did not kicked his out from under him. It was not human hands that broke his arm during the arm bar of adversity. It was not a human fist that knocked him to the mat for our sins. It was not a human that kept him inside the triangle choke of suffering. It was not the fighter’s sent by Satan to tap him out that beat him.

God gave him strength while on his back being pounded in the face by the elbows of sin. Those same hands that formed the universe. Those same hands that held you and me before the foundation of the world.

Take a jog out to the mountain of the skull. Out to the cross where, with holy blood, the hand that placed you on the planet wrote the promise, “God would give up his only Son before he’d Tap Out on you.

Truly, Jesus Didn’t Tap! – Are you tapping out on him?

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.

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.

An Introduction

While I have been active in online forums and blogging for almost a decade it has only recently become clear to me that a shift occurred (that I was not a part of!).  When I began blogging and interacting there were very few grad students and fewer professors blogging and so (in my circles) there was a relatively equal playing field for interaction.

Over time those undergrad students continued their academic careers and others joined in.  This has resulted in some truly high level and consequently specialized online spaces for critical and confessional theology.  I did not continue along the same path and it took me some time to realize I was no longer ‘one of the gang’.  To the extent that I continued trying to fit into these modes I found myself frustrated (and frustrating) while my intellectual pursuits became increasingly divorced from my professional role as a pastor.

This blog is my attempt at opening a space for what, at this point, I can only call descriptive pastoral theology.  I hope to not abandon my interests in critical theology and theory but I do hope to work from a clear ‘place’ which is as a pastor.  I call this work descriptive for personal reasons.  Some of the most formative works of fiction, theology and philosophy have been those which are simple and profound acts of description.  I realize that this term and idea needs much more unpacking . . . but that is the whole point.

And what haunts this all is Jesus’ relentless call to all those with eyes to see.  And so I am hoping de-scribe in the double movement away from the scribal task of securing discourse towards the eternal posture of seeing and therefore enacting the biblical vision of heaven.