Practicing Theology
The Joy of Theological Creativity
About the author: Ed Watson is a PhD candidate at Yale University, focusing on questions of theology and conceptualization. He is currently working on a dissertation exploring the relationships between Christian talk of grace and racial difference.
Why practice theology? There are a lot of possible answers to this question. In this post, I am going to focus on one which centers around what it means to think of theology not just as something that we practice, but as a “practice”—or, more specifically, as a practice of transformation. Cast this way, the question of “why theology?” is bound up with the depths upon which transformative practices touch. It is bound up with the fact that practices involve creating and transforming the worlds of meaning according to which we give reasons for our other actions. This depth does not itself force a particular reason for practicing theology upon us. It does, however, open up a way of thinking the reason for theology as grounded in God’s joy for creation—and so as an expression of joy as we creatively dwell in this created world.
Why practice theology, then? I am thinking of “practice” as connoting a repeated cluster of activities which shape the shapes that one's life takes. Riffing informally off Pierre Bourdieu and Michel de Certeau, practices are activities which play a formational role in social existence, whether in terms of entrenching, subverting, or transforming the structures within which social life is lived. Practices shape the nature and the meaning of what we take for granted in all our everyday doing.
It can be hard to give examples of practices in this sense because of how innocuous they can seem—the practice of saying “thank you” when someone holds a door open, for example, or of talking at a specific volume when in regular conversation with another, both of which are not just deeply woven into the fabric of our social existence, but implicitly shape what that fabric is, how we see ourselves relating to those whose names we do not know but whose space we share.
To think of theology as a practice in this sense, however, is to think of it as both connecting to and potentially directing the deepest tides according to which one moves through the world. It is to think of theology as an activity capable of bringing us to our deepest nerves of habit—the nerves that make it so that one instinctively reacts with irritation rather than love to an expression of insecurity hidden in a gesture of self-assertion, or which make it hard to think beyond a particular and fundamental desire. In light of Augustine’s reflections on the desire for friendship, given early in the Confessions, for example, we can think about how desire for friendship can bring out the best and the worst of us. We can think about how this desire is rewarded or punished, about how the nature of the communion we seek is thereby shaped, about how our existence in communion is shaped, all in the light of a sense of how our desire for God is an expression of God’s desire for us. In other words, theological reflection opens up a way of thinking through how we have been shaped at the level of “practice”—and so can itself become a practice, through which we can reshape that which has shaped us.
Theological reflection is not necessarily a practice in this fashion, of course. It is entirely possible to engage theology in a superficial way, so that it skitters off the surface of the world. It is also possible to engage theology as a mode of self-deception, as a way of bestowing putative finality on the contingent, the self-aggrandizing, and the destructive. All the same, the questions of theology emerge from wrestling with matters of fundamental import. Theology emerges from questions like what it means to be a creature, or what it means to be a creature of God; what to do when one's life feels like a betrayal of creatureliness (whether one's own or the creatureliness of one's neighbor), or what it means when it is hard to think of creatureliness as good. In ways that often go without saying, to such an extent that these things often cannot be said, implicit answers to these questions pattern the substance of our constitutive relations. And so, to ask the question of God-in-Christ is at minimum to have stepped onto the threshold of formational practice. It is, at minimum, to have knocked on the door of the “practical.”
The difficulty of asking after the “why” of theology can now be discerned in the difficulty of asking after the “why” of practice.
This difficulty takes several forms. In a fundamental sense, we do not have a choice when it comes to practice. We have always already become ourselves through practices of relation and reflection given to us by communities both near and far; the desires which compel our questions are already practically formed, to the point that we can find ourselves asking whether we want to desire differently—and what kind of reason can we give for wanting this, given that it is our wanting that we want to change? Though there are practices that wound and that heal, meanwhile, these can also be one and the same. One of the deepest challenges of Christian theology, for example, is to reckon seriously with the fact of theological wounding, as well as the fact that this wounding has not just been “accidental” (when people are wounded by the patriarchal violence expressed by certain theologies of redemption, that is—theologies grounded in Scripture which represent God as a husband who welcomes back a “disobedient” wife after threats of violence, perhaps—this is not solely because these theologies have misrepresented redemption, but because the possibility of this violence rests in the very framework of thinking redemption). Finally, it certainly makes sense to want to be happy or to be healed. But our conceptions of happiness and healing are practically grounded. They do not hover above the world of our activity as independent phenomena. As such, the “why” of practical transformation is always premised on a practice prior to the possibility of any “why.”
'Why pursue Christian theological reflection?' is a strangely complicated question, then. The words are simple enough. But asked this way, the question asks for reasons to pursue an activity which touches on the ground of what can count as a reason. It asks why we might want to do something which challenges the character of our want. It asks a question to which desire cannot be the answer, because the character of our desiring itself becomes problematic in the space of this question.
Crucially, however (and rather beautifully), this space need not be paralyzing. Thinking with the problematic of desire instead opens up a question which can illuminate a different kind of 'why' for theological reflection—namely, what can it mean to desire fundamental transformation, whether of oneself or of the world one inhabits?
This question is not universal, and I am certain that there are desires for theology that make sense apart from the particular kind of restlessness that the question expresses. Thinking with it for now, however, the question of desiring transformation draws attention to several things. The first is that, for many of us, there is a root and rooting desire for redemption. Where there is a desire to transform, that is, there is often a desire to transform for the better, to be redeemed in some sense. This can be grounded in the sense that one is a sinner and wants to be able to love better; it can be grounded in the sense that the world is breaking people, and must be made less cruel. One way or another there is a wound, and this wound must be set right.
In itself, desire for redemption is neither good nor bad; it is a desire open to so many determinations that one cannot generalize across its various iterations. For my part, I also believe that that exploring the conceptual intricacies of Christian thought about God and neighbor can be part of how God works out grace in the world—and so my own desire for theology expresses a hope that theological reflection can indeed be a practice of redemption.
If desire for redemption is taken as a bedrock for theological reflection, however, we do risk a kind of begrudging severity. Much as casting others as primarily constituted by their lack of knowledge is a negating gesture, thinking the desire for fundamental transformation as primarily grounded in a desire to be better can denigrate that which is here now. It can lead us to turn ourselves, our neighbors, and our social worlds into most fundamentally objects for discipline, improvement, and work.
Work is needed, of course. Our world wounds people, and we are agents of this wounding. We do this through the structural violences of racism, misogyny, homophobia, and class oppression. We do this through petty vindictiveness and disregard, as well as carelessness and reasonable fear (I certainly do, at least—and this is not a platitude). One way or another, things are not as they should be. But something is troubling about the image of a stern reformer, one who postpones delight until after the fact. Jesus laughs with sinners. He delights in creatures. It is this delight which informs his biting words against our violences and self-deceptions. Jesus delights in what we are, apart from the question of whether we are what we should be.
If there is a desire for fundamental transformation—for a world made new, or a heart made of flesh—then Jesus' desire for this is grounded in delight. And the clearest expression of the significance of this fact for theology I have found, one which has animated me since I read it, is Karl Barth's assertion that theology is first and foremost an act of joy. In his reflection on the divine perfections, Barth dwells on the glory of God as most fundamentally a ground for joy, in light of which Christian theology should be animated by "joy, desire, pleasure, the yearning for God and the enjoyment of having God in the fellowship ... which God gives us."1 This glory is not a removed and aloof glory. As with everything divine in Barth's thought, the glory of God is always the glory of God for the creature; it is the glory of God's love and delight in the creature, it is the glory of God's joy in being with the creature. The glory of God is thus reflected in joy for ourselves, not in the form of "an optimistic glossing over of the need and the condition of humankind,"2 but an unconditional joy at humankind in all its need.
As a practice, theology can involve the creation of new possibilities. When pursued in community, theological reflection can be a way of engaging the fundamental conditions of one's life, at the level of both meaning and reality, and transfiguring the bounds of conceivability. The why of this practice, however, need not be given either by its origins or its ends—it need not be grounded in a need for redemption (even if this need is present) nor in how we might be changed (even if we shall be made new). The 'why' of it all can instead be given in objective fact of an unrelenting joy. It can be given in the unrelenting joy that God feels in God's creatures, and which we are given to feel in each other.
This, for me, is the 'why' of theological reflection: the joy of theological creativity, an unconditional and unrelenting joy that inheres even and especially if we hold that the practice of theology is ordered toward transforming the fundaments of desire. At the point where desire itself becomes problematic, the point at which our reasons are called into question, joy remains a reason why. Because across all of it, there can be joy before, during, and after. Joy is the transcendental condition of desiring redemption. It is the substance of God's desire for us. The practice of theological reflection need not be motivated by a pure dissatisfaction, then. Its 'why' can instead be grounded joy prior to use or effect, a joy out of which creation itself is woven, and into which our own fundamental creativity is always invited.
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, 14 vols., ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2004), II/1, 655.
Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1, 654.
