work group 3: tony jones: thinking theologically--or not!

tony jones, who is at least one emergent villager who doesn't check his hair, blogged about our 'reflection pool' called the national working group, part of our faith as a way of life project that met in new haven last weekend.

miroslav volf and i debriefed after the meeting, both coming to the same conclusion: how hard it is, even for theologically trained pastors, to sustain practical theological reflection together. tony came away with the same insight, saying:

"what was a little surprising was how quickly we devolved into personal and pragmatic arguments for our positions. Turns out it's really hard to think theologically, even for professionals.

So I'm starting to think that the key to developing "faith as a way of life" is to inculcate in people the ability to think theologically, and that this ability would become second nature for followers of Jesus."

in planning this conversation, centered around issues of living faith in the sphere of family broadly understood, we knew we wanted to practicing thinking theologically together. yet we left the discussions relatively unstructured thinking 'of course' we would focus and push each other. it turns out that for many of us, our native language amounts to a mixture of feelings, experience, and pragmatism (for pastors, technical or programatic responses so quickly come to the fore around questions of what will work, be effective, deal with the pressures, conflicts, etc.)

so, we're going to work on this more. miroslav offered a basic template for thinking theologically and we'll seek some short guides like this for practicing thinking theologically because it really does seem that tony is right--it is key, we can practice it, and only if we practice it can it become second nature, and serve a way of life that is deeply christian.

miroslav's template of questions:

god.
who is god.
what is god doing in the world.
how is god achieving this.

us.
who are we.
where are we going.
how are we supposed to get there.

connecting the two.
what should we ultimately trust.
how should we order our trusts, provisional and ultimate.

anon, and +peace

Comments

[tony]

another great post, Chris!

[Sivin Kit]

great post and I love the questions in the template