Against (Theological) Method

Paul Feyerabend’s book, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge, questioned the notion of a singular scientific method. This countered the concerns we students had about ‘methodology’ in our subjects (mine was history). Looking back we were interested, not so much in the nuts-and-bolts of how to do history, as the overarching philosophical worldview employed to understand it.

When I came to teach theology (a short-lived disastrous enterprise), I was surprised to discover an infatuation with ‘method’. Deriving from Third World Liberation Theology, this approach was designed to promote action, rather than abstract academic debate. Perhaps the most influential instance, in Britain, is Laurie Green’s ‘Spiral’ (in Let’s Do Theology. Resources for Contextual Theology):  a circular process involving stages of Experience, Exploration, Reflection, and Response; which then spirals off into fresh experience for later reflection, in a continuing process of action-learning.

Other examples exist. SCM Press have even produced a handbook of Theological Reflection Methods for the aspiring student. All begin with our practice, and issue in planning. However, I have two objections to this reductivist school of contemporary theology:

1.It reduces theology to a rote-formula, a false model of scientific method. Although useful in providing students with chapter headings for their essays, it cuts out imagination, creativity, and intuition. James Elkins’ book, Why Art Cannot be Taught. A Handbook for Art Students, outlines the serendipitous nature of a fine arts education. While Theology does not belong in the Arts, or Humanities (it is ‘Divinity’, a discipline no longer recognised in secular universities: for them, it’s like teaching Greek mythology, as if it were true!), there is much to learn from this divergent ‘methodology’.

2.The origins of such reflection also make it suspect. David Kolb created the basic model, now used in all professional qualifications: including nursing, teaching, and pastoring. He, in turn, derived this from the US philosopher, John Dewey. Dewey was a pragmatist. That is, he disbelieved in any notion of absolute or revealed truth. For him (and others like William James), truth was vouchsafed by its ‘cash-value’; that is, its usefulness in practice. Truth was to be created, constructed, by humans; not received from above, or any traditional authority. This directly contradicts Christianity’s idea Divine Revelation.

Both criticisms pinpoint the rationalism of theological reflection, the elevation of human reason. Furthermore, it’s assumed we can divorce our sociological analysis from our theological reflection. But this is belied by Roy Clousers’ The Myth of Religious Neutrality. An Essay on the Hidden Role of Religious Belief in Theories. Our basic presuppositions affect our garnering or supposed ‘facts’. The questions we ask shape the answers we get. It’s impossible to reintroduce our faith at some later stage, uninfluenced by this ‘methodological atheism’ (to use Peter Bergers’ phrase from Invitation to Sociology. A Humanistic Perspective: an approach he later transcended).

The end result of any such attempt will be to sacrifice the vertical dimension of theology, for a purely horizontal plane of immanence: a mess of (theological) potage – Gn. 25.29-34.