An Exercise in Practical Theology

If this Blog was ever to be turned into a book, I think it should follow the pattern of Slavoj Žižek’s Pandemic!: Covid-19 shakes the World. A series of rambling articles, originally posted online, gathered together into a ramshackle collection of relatively early responses to the emergency. This, it seems to me, is the model for the engaged intellectual (if I’m worthy of such a title), immersed in the situation, bringing out of their treasure things old and new (Mt. 13.52). 

 

Furthermore, Zena Hitz, in Lost on thought. The hidden pleasures of an intellectual life, suggests that reading is a species of contemplation. The Dominicans as an order also value study as a pathway to God, a spiritual discipline, alongside the usual monastic use of silence and liturgy. A unity of spirituality and study. Kenneth Leech, in The Social God, pointed out St. Evagrius’s saying: “a theologian is one whose prayers are true”.

This would expose the anti-intellectualism in especially evangelical, church life. For such activity would not be narrowly utilitarian, for example serving evangelism through apologetics, valuable though that is; and indeed I am involved in this in my ministry to a twenty-first century urban technological culture.

Rather, this blog represents a directionless process of reflection. As such it is necessarily unending. Like God, without beginning or end. Rowan Williams wrote somewhere, that we always start in the middle of things. Like Christ, always with us (Mt. 28.20), Covid won’t disappear. Even with a vaccine, the virus will still be around, like flu, always requiring vigilance, now it has been unleashed on the world.

The move must then be from reflective to reflexive: meaning something that refers back to the subject. Not just thoughtfulness, but thought leading to transformation of the self, of the practitioner: spiritual growth, change in personal interiority, ministerial practice, and spiritual authenticity. Contextual theology is therefore not abstract, disinterested, but aimed at self-conversion.

Text production, from within the maelstrom, is therefore inevitably uneven in quality; written in snatched moments, rushing around attending to the administration of the local church. This social and ecclesial location also influences our perspective. Those in academia, or denominational HQ, may pronounce on larger issues, of how society may adapt post-covid. My viewpoint is limited to the surviving, and maybe thriving, of my own London congregation; not concerning myself with “great matters or things too wonderful for me” (Ps. 131.1).

Written in bursts throughout the pandemic, these notes would be a ‘chronicle’ of our shifting times: like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, or Bede: a mashup of variegated ruminations. Although I could correct certain factual mistakes, I would keep the opinions, even where these later proved unfounded, because they would retain the flavour of my changing reactions.

Not the God’s eye overview, but the human trapped within time’s catacombs. And thus a certain amount of inconsistency, if these entries were evaluated alongside each other. But as, echoing Belshazzar’s feast (Dn. 5.5), Omar Khayyam wrote: The Moving finger writes; and, having writ, moves on.”