Towards a Theology of Doing: The Science of Christian Reflection “from Below”
“Only experience makes a theologian.”
- Martin Luther [1]
“The crucified Christ is to be seen with the eyes of the heart.”
- Alistair McGrath [2]
The vision we have for this series of articles on marketplace theology is this: every person in the marketplace could become a theologian of application. But to accomplish this the marketplace theologian must be in the marketplace, and preferably actively so. It is not obvious that one cannot learn well the doctrine in the classroom and do it later. In contrast the best education is education in service. It is transformative not preparatory. And behind this is an important principle of spirituality: the attempt to know God apart from the activities of life is unreal. So, we in the Institute of Marketplace Transformation are attempting to raise up a generation of marketplace practitioners that are theologically reflective. We desire that people in the workplace should understand the meaning of what they are doing, find God in their Monday to Friday engagement, and engage in God’s mission in and through their daily work. But to explore this first we must define the term theology.
The late J.I. Packer says that “theology is for achieving God's glory (honour and praise) and humankind’s good (the godliness that is true humanness) through every life-activity.” If that does not put fire in our bones to be a theologian I do not know what would! In this series of articles we are using a definition adapted from the seventh century Puritan, William Perkins: “theology is the science of living blessedly forever”.[3] Thus, Marketplace theology (involving thought, prayer and practice), is the science (involving investigation, inquiry and study), of working (the energy whether manual, mental or both expressed with the purpose of accomplishing something), blessedly (in the light of God’s purpose and his presence in our work, blessing neighbour God and self), forever (taking the long view which extends to the new heaven and new earth).” Our first article was an “Introduction to Marketplace Theology: Toward a Wholistic Science of Work, Worker and Workplace.” In it we affirmed that an integral Biblical marketplace theology involved thought (theoria), prayer (ora) and practice (praxis). It is hard to imagine how radical this view is because we have become acculturated to an applied theology as a discipline taught in seminaries to prepare people for their clerical duties in the church: apologetics, preaching, pastoral care, equipping, counselling and evangelism. But, as we have already seen (in article 1) if people ponder (think), pray and act reflectively on their life in the marketplace, not just in a linear way, but in a spiral of learning and growth (acting and reflecting, reflecting and acting, praying and acting, acting and praying) they are marketplace theologians—perhaps without knowing it!
In this article we are exploring the second phrase in Perkins’ definition, the science, the investigation of marketplace theology, especially as it involves doing theology from below as well as from above (meaning for the latter starting with the revelation of God in Scripture). There are strong biblical and educational reasons for this synergistic approach to the relationship of thought, prayer and action.
Pondering, Prayer and Practice
Many of the commands of Jesus link revelation with obedience and practice: "If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love” (John 15:10); “If you hold to my teaching you are really my disciples” (8:3); “If anyone keeps my word, he will never see death” (8:51). Sometimes, Jesus invited people to “believe this”; more often Jesus said “do this and you will live” (Luke 10:28; see also Matt 19:21). Jesus issued a call to the early disciples, and to all disciples today, to follow him (Luke 5:11, 27; 9:1-2, 59). Following Jesus was and is a total life apprenticeship to, and communion with, the Lord. Especially in the Gospel of Luke Jesus teaches that obedient action is the organ of further revelation. “If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets,” he said, “they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead” (Luke 16:31). Jesus puts these words on the lips of Abraham in the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus and proclaims that even his own resurrection will have little evidential value if they are not acting on what they presently know. Many of the disciples were not able to verbalize their faith in Jesus as Messiah and Son of God when they started to follow him (Matt 16:13-20). So, knowing is wholistic. It is active. Consequently, Francis of Assisi once said, "Humankind has as much knowledge as it has executed." That means that what you really know—in the fully biblical and Hebraic sense—is how you live and work. For example, James Houston, founding principal of Regent College, said at a pastors’ conference, shockingly, that the curriculum vitae of a pastor is written on the face of his wife. But Francis was not the only theologian of practice.
Christian philosopher from Denmark, Soren Kierkegaard, affirmed that we learn by doing. “The law for the communication of ability is: to begin by doing it. The student says: ‘I cannot’. Then the teacher answers: ‘Now, now, do it as well as you can’. Thereby the instruction begins. Its end is to be able.”[4] Kierkegaard freely attributes this idea to his mentor Socrates who argued that virtue cannot be taught, but must take the form of a “being-able, an exercising, an existing, an existential transformation,” says a student of Kierkegaard, Christian Breuninger.[5] For Kierkegaard “Christianity is not doctrine, it is an existence, an existing. Christianity is not the doctrine about denying yourself…. Christianity is to deny oneself.”[6] According to Kierkegaard, “the best school for learning Christianity is in the world…. In other words, Kierkegaard is groping for a way to mobilize Christianity out of the Church and into the world: ‘from a Christian point of view, to confess Christ is to do it in the situation Christianity assigns: the actual world.’”[7] Another voice in asserting the need to learn, believe and grow by doing is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, theologian and Second World War martyr.
Bonhoeffer remembers a conversation he had with a French Christian in which that person said he wanted to become a saint. Bonhoeffer admits that he was impressed, and thinks he, the French Christian, may have well done that. But Bonhoeffer responded that he wanted to learn to have faith, not realizing at the moment what a contrast that was. “I discovered later, and I’m still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith… By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In doing so we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God.”[8] So, too, I am arguing that the marketplace is an arena for growth in faith, growth in the knowledge of God and God’s purpose in and through work. How could we have missed this fundamental truth, especially in the Western world?
The Decline and Fall of Applied Theology
Initially practical or applied theology in the West was not a separate discipline but a way of speaking of theology itself. Theology was considered a practical science as early as Duns Scotus. "Widespread from the Middle Ages through the seventeenth century is the view that 'theology" names a habitus or a disposition of the soul... of a practical not just a theoretical kind. Theology is, accordingly, a practical knowledge having the character of wisdom since its object is God and the things of God grasped in the situation of faith and salvation."[9] So says Edward Farley in reviewing the history and promise of applied theology. But in the seventeenth century in the West something happened.
Moral theology in general expanded to include ministry activities. An isolated instance was the seventeenth century Reformed theologian of Holland, Gisbert Voetius. He proposed broadening practical theology to include both moral theology and the activities of ministry. In the eighteenth century the clericalization of applied theology was furthered. Applied theology became pastoral theology which emerged as separate from moral theology—concerned with poimenics (the activities of the minister). The isolated instances of this in the seventeenth century became more widespread in the eighteenth century. N. H. Gundling (1753) claimed that practical theology included pastoral, casuistic, and homiletical subjects.[10] In the nineteenth century practical theology became fully clericalized, a fourth theological discipline, but not including ethics. Applied theology then had five subdivisions: homiletics, catechetics, liturgics, church jurisprudence, and pastoral care.[11] It was limited to a science in the university/seminary setting, and further narrowed from a church-clergy science to a solely clergy science. A stunning example of this is the lovely work, Richard Baxter’s The Reformed Pastor. Then comes the Enlightenment, that European intellectual movement of the late 17th and 18th centuries that emphasized reason and individualism rather than tradition. It was heavily influenced by 17th-century philosophers such as Descartes, Locke, and Newton, and its prominent exponents included Kant, Goethe, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Adam Smith.
Enlightenment definitions of theology reduced theology to the God-talk of Job's miserable comforters: rational, objective and abstracted. Following Enlightenment assumptions theological colleges separated the "academic" (rational) subjects—biblical studies, history, systematic theology, philosophy and ethics—from the practical subjects. The result of this was that the "academic" subjects themselves became fragmented and distorted, conformed to university disciplines (as though practice had no intrinsic place in these disciplines), and the practical theology field was reduced largely to how-to techniques.[12] The “nineteenth century consensus,” however, was critiqued by Roman Catholics—which wanted applied theology returned to the church. With the twentieth century and the ascendency of technique came the specialization and multiplication of the fields of applied theology: counselling, leadership, equipping, discipline, church growth, urban mission, and evangelism. At the same time both Catholics, especially following Vatican II, and Protestants called for a comprehensive discipline of praxis in the world, an applied theology of the laity, the whole people of God, not only in the life of the church but in the world. We are now being challenged by postmodernism to be more wholistic[13] though we should not abandon reason in the process! In the twenty-first century, with the decline of Christianity in the West, and the emerging of Christianity in some of the majority world, seminaries are slowly beginning to offer courses for non-clergy people of God, not only to serve better in the church, but for their service in the world. And in North America institutes, including the Institute for Marketplace Transformation, are multiplying like the proverbial mustard seed and attempting to do what the seminaries and churches would not do. But why did it happen in the first place?
If all the disciplines of the theological academia were consistently taught as the Bible proposes—faith active in love (Gal 5:6)—would there be any need for a separate discipline of applied theology? In this context Craig Dykstra does a fine piece of analysis on right practice.[14] He wonders whether the teaching of other disciplines in a wholistic way—taking praxis into consideration—would eliminate the need to teach applied theology at all! Dykstra thinks this is too idealistic a dream. But I would personally welcome the demise of applied theology as a separate discipline. And this essay takes the view that marketplace theology must be wholistic involving thought, prayer and practice. So, we are asking in this article, what does it mean to have a theology of doing (the third in our theological triad of pondering, prayer and practice)?
Towards a Theology of Good Works: Orthopraxy [15]
We are in desperate need today of a theology of good works, especially among evangelicals. We are saved by grace through faith and not by works; that is the gospel. But faith without works is dead and that is an implication of the gospel too. So, the Roman Catholic mentor of the late Pope John Paul II, Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, uses the term “salvation” for what Protestants might prefer to use the term “sanctification.” “Work,” he says, “by its difficulty, redeems, liberates, ennobles, and sanctifies… The sweat of a man’s toil-stained face marks a suffering that purifies not so much the body as the soul. In this suffering is the whole Calvary of man who dies every day on the cross of his life in order to destroy death by this slow-death agony, and so attain the glory of resurrection.”[16] Is this what Luther meant when he said that there is a cross to be taken up in the marketplace? And is this not what Paul was referring to when he wrote in Philippians 2:12-13: “Continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose.” So, faith engages the whole person in thought, prayer and action. What, however, is right practice? When is a deed, or work itself, Christian?" What I propose makes an activity Christian is not the husk but the heart. It is faith, hope and love. Martin Luther deals with this brilliantly in his “Treatise on Good Works.”
In that treatise, Luther compares the works of a husband who is confident of his wife’s love, and even a little thing or a small gift to her will please her since it arises from this confidence. He compares this to a husband who is in a state of doubt and worries whether even a big gift or a great action can win his wife’s favour. Luther then compares this to our relationship with God. The person who has gospel confidence can sweep the floor or give a cup of coffee gladly and generously knowing as David says in Psalm 41:11, “I know that you are pleased with me.” The second person, he says, is “in a state of doubt, worries and starts looking for ways and means to do enough and to influence God by his many good works.”[17] The unselfconsciousness of such faith-action is a matter raised by the disturbing parable of the Sheep and Goats (Matt 25:31-46) where both the righteous and the unrighteous are surprised that what they did or did not do to “the least of these my brothers and sisters” was done or not done to Jesus himself. We onlookers are caught up in the parable and are surprised by the implication that loving and compassionate actions (surely intrinsically Christian practices) are Christian precisely because they did not have a spiritual reward in view! They are Christian, Luther would say, because they arise from gospel confidence, from the generosity of a heart set free by acceptance with Christ. It is this element of surprise for which we are least prepared when we ponder the parable. Perhaps one of the purposes of theological education it to set us up to be the righteous ones surprised on the day of judgment when we discover we acted in love when we shared a cup of coffee with a neighbour, visited someone in prison, shared a meal with someone, build a home for someone, or repaired a broken gear for a printing company, without knowing it was for and to Jesus. So, it is not the religious character of our actions—the Bible open, the name of Christ proclaimed—that makes our actions Christian, but faith, hope and love. But there is more.
On a most basic level orthopraxy—right action—is about practices that are in harmony with God's kingdom in the church and world, that bring value and good into the world. Good work does that. Good work, theologian Karl Barth notes, improves and embellishes human existence, does not use human beings as tools, provides time and space for reflection and is limited by Sabbath.[18] But there is much more to orthopraxis than the application of rational and mental truth. There is revelation and illumination—knowing through doing. We should speak of this as a spiral of learning—theory, prayer and practice—as we keep re-entering each phase at a deeper level. The orthodoxy-orthopraxy tension in the West reflects the intrinsic dualism of Western Christianity, and the lingering effects of the Enlightenment. ln contrast, the Bible invites us to wholistic living that embraces truth, as truth learned through faithful pondering, praying and practice, all in a seamless robe. The late Ray S. Anderson notes, “Paul's theology and mission were directed more by the Pentecost event which unleashed the Spirit of Christ through apostolic witness rather than through apostolic office. This praxis of Pentecost became for Paul the "school" for theological reflection.[19] The gospels and the Acts point to the same unity of knowledge.
Every action has implicit theory just as every theory has implicit action. So theological reflection in a societal occupation (or church ministry for that matter) is essential for living theologically. But in these matters we are not trying to squeeze blood from a rock. Daily life is bursting with theological meaning. What a strange marriage psychology would require one to love fully and then only to kiss, rather than to kiss in order to love! What a strange perversion of the Christian life that would forbid one to act until one knows fully, and to not to act in order to know! So we are left with the basic question: what makes practice Christian? And how can we do theological reflection on our actual practice.
Inside Christian Practice
Can we do theological reflection by introspection, plumbing the depths of our own soul for clues as to whether we are acting in faith, hope and love? Or it is a mostly unconscious thing that we are acting, like Luther’s gospel-confident person, out of true acceptance with God? Can we do theological reflection through prayer? Or pondering (thinking)? As we have already seen, theological reflection is done both from above and below and involves all three of head, heart and hands. Let me offer, firstly, one way of doing it. Case studies is a way of doing theology “from below.” In a case a person tells the story of a concrete dilemma but the case turns out to be universally significant—the more personal the more universal. But because cases start not with the revealed truth of God’s Word but with concrete life situations, they involve doing theology from below. But we understand the case by exploring the grand story of God’s revelation in Scripture. Other ways of doing theology from below include listening to the questions people are asking and reflecting on them, or identifying what is happening in the world and reflecting on it. We can explore felt needs such as work-life balance, shame, time, significance, security, and vocational transition. We can do theology from below by hearing the stories of people and discerning the meaning and the work of God. Examining and reflecting on evocative dimensions in so-called secular culture is another way of doing this. Interviewing people either privately or possibly in the church service can be a great way of doing theology from below. Questions to ask are: What do you do for a living? What are the issues you face in your daily work? How does you faith impact and make a difference to how you deal with those issues? How can we pray for you for your ministry in the workplace. Do that with ordinary church members for fifty-two weeks and you will have turned the church inside out, and in the process “ordained” fifty-two people for their full-time ministry in the workplace. So, there is a theology of theology of application or, as it is sometimes called, theological reflection. For further reading I am providing a bibliography on this subject which is found in the following footnote.[20] But, lest I be misunderstood I must clarify something.
We must do theology not merely “from below” but also “from above,” that is starting with divine revelation in Scripture and insisting that it not mere information about God and God’s purpose but enacted revelation, fleshed out in the nitty-gritty of everyday life, including the workplace. So, for example, as we open the Bible we discover God as a worker who still works, as Jesus said in John 5:17: “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working.” But Genesis 1:27 says that God made humankind in his own image, which must include the work that we share with God as co-creators or, as some prefer, sub-creators, but not on the same scale. And God does work we cannot do. So, all our work in the marketplace, provided it is good work, enters into God’s ongoing work of creation, sustaining, redemption and consummation. We will take this up more fully in another article. But doing theology “from above” is normal in theological thinking. But I am proposing a shift from the “applied theology” mentality—which largely has been hijacked to the service of practical strategies for churchmanship as part of the clerical captivity of the church—to the “theology of application.” Why? Because Scripture models doing theology from below. For example, there are at least three books in the Old Testament and part of the New Testament that in my view start with life and ask questions about our experience of life and work in the presence of God. The first is Ecclesiastes.
Book One: Ecclesiastes and Thought
There are at two views of this professor’s dark reflections on life “under the sun,” the code word in the book for not referring to a transcendent and personal God—in short, two dimensional life.[21] One view is that he knows the answer but is confronted by a thoughtful secularist and takes this inquirer’s questions to their logical conclusion, namely that life without God is meaningless. It is, hebel, “a puff of smoke.” But the other view is the one I take, namely that the professor is asking his own questions about the meaning of money, work, pleasures, religion, and success without God and with God. In so doing he concludes where Proverbs begins with the affirmation that life is meaningful if we “fear God” (Eccl 12:13), which surely means intimate, affectionate respect and reverence of God—in short, a three-dimensional life. In my view this professor has discovered meaning through thinking about life both “under-the-sun” and “under-heaven.” We will explore this further in a later chapter. But there is a second Old Testament book that starts with life from a different angle—Job.
Book Two: Job and Prayer
Unlike the Professor in Ecclesiastes who, as a thinker, asks, as I propose, his own questions in the presence of God, Job addresses God directly with the terrible experiences he is having in life. In this case theology is wrung or squeezed out of experience, not simply applied to his experience. His traditional theological “friends,” if we dare call them this, were orthodox and “top down” theologians and their speeches could have been published in Christianity Today. But they were damned. As George MacDonald, friend of C.S. Lewis, suggests, “There is nothing so deadening to the divine as a habitual dealing with the outsides of holy things.”[22] Indeed when God finally speaks to Job’s “friend” Eliphaz, God says “I am angry with you and your two friends, because you have not spoken well of me, as my servant Job has” (42:7, emphasis mine). To speak well of God is to be a theologian. But Job, who is a good theologian by God’s standards, though a dismal failure before his friends, attacked and pestered God, like the widow before the unjust judge in Jesus’ parable (Luke 18:1-8). Job lamented about his situation directly to God and, surprisingly, is affirmed in the end by God. And blessed by God.
In passing we should note that Job in his blustering attacks on God stumbled on the gospel in three remarkable ways. First, he maintained that if God could become human they would settle this issue once and for all—“He is not a mere mortal like me that I might answer him,” (Job 9:32). Second, he believes he has an advocate in heaven, a lawyer who will plead his case—“my witness is in heaven; my advocate is on high” (16:19). Third, Job affirms that he has a goel, a family kinsman with the power to redeem him, only this goel, this redeemer, is in heaven and that “in the end he will stand on earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God” (19:25-26). Job discovers the gospel through his agonizing prayers. The issue for Job is whether he has gratuitous faith, that is, faith that is not dependent on the benefits of believing. So, the Satan says to God in the opening dialogue, “Does Job fear God for nothing?” (1:9). But Job proves he is a true believer, that he has gratuitous faith, when he cries out “Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him” (13:15). Why the difference in the Lord’s evaluation between the friends, whom I am calling orthodox (Western) theologians, and Job?
It is simply this: while the friends of Job talked about God to Job, Job talked to God about himself and his life situation. The friends were top down theologians, thinking and talking; Job prayed. I have in my Bible all the cases where Job prayed to God underlined. It is his most common theological strategy. For the friends there are no prayers only the constant handling of the outside of holy things. Remarkably, the liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez says that Job shows us that it is more important to contemplate God than to understand (intellectually) God’s justice.
The truth that [Job] has grasped and that has lifted him to the level of contemplation is that justice alone does not have the final say about how we are to speak of God. Only when we have come to realize that God’s love is freely bestowed do we enter fully and definitively into the presence of the God of faith…. God’s love, like all true love, operates in the world not of cause and effect but of freedom and gratuitousness.[23]
Job was doing theology from below. But there is a third book in the Bible that demonstrates doing theology from below—the Psalms.
Book Three: The Psalms and Existential Experience
In the Psalms the whole range of human experience is brought before God in prayer. John Calvin said of the Psalms that they are “an anatomy of all the parts of the soul.”
There is not an emotion of which any one can be conscious that is not here represented as in a mirror. Or rather, the Holy Spirit has here drawn… all the griefs, sorrows, fears, doubts, hopes, cares, perplexities, in short, all the distracting emotions with which the minds of men are wont to be agitated.”[24]
The word of God in the Psalms is this: you can bring your entire experience to God. You can tell the whole truth about yourself to God, expressing your emotions without reserve. There is no situation you can be in which you cannot take to God. And in the process you will be able to worship God even though God’s ways are largely inscrutable. It is this metamessage of the Psalter that is, in my view, as important as the message of the individual Psalms. So, the Psalter shows us how to find meaning in life through existential experience and prayer. But what about the way of practice?
Book Four: The way of Practice and the New Testament
Paul became a Christian and saw Jesus as the Son of Man partly through his intense opposition to the Christian sect, so much so that he dragged men and women who followed Jesus out of their homes and into jail. But he was there when they stoned Stephen, holding the coats of those who stoned this first missionary to death. He heard Stephen announce that, as he died, he could see Jesus standing at the right hand of God as the Son of Man, that enigmatic figure found in the book of Daniel chapter seven. In that Old Testament book the Son of Man was a boundary breaker. He brought the non-Jewish world to God and introduced the kingdom of God to the entire human race (Dan 7:13-14). Not surprisingly the Son of Man was the favourite self-designation of Jesus.[25] This encounter with Stephen prepared Saul for his encounter with the risen Christ on the Damascus road. Following that experience of being apprehended by Christ it seems that Paul hammered out the doctrine of justification by faith through grace in the context of the Gentile mission, doing theology from below as well as above. His encounters in the Gentile world, his disputing with the Judaizers who wanted Gentile believers to come to Jesus through the law and circumcision, was, I believe, revelatory for Paul and led him to interpret Scripture differently from his peers.
And, not only Saul/Paul but a second apostle, Peter, discovered through a dream and a Spirit-led encounter with the Gentile Cornelius that God does not play favourites and that God includes the outsider in his kingdom (Acts 10). There is in the history of the church a theological template for exploring practical experience: the Methodist quadrilateral. Four things must be considered to gain truth—Scripture, reason, tradition and experience.[26]
So, having typified the three ways of doing theology as Eastern—through prayer (Psalms, Job), Western—through thought and reason (Ecclesiastes) and Asian—through practice, this last way—through practice—has merit especially as illuminated in the Asian context which is culturally grounded in Confucianism.[27] Taken together, head, heart and hand, it seems that truly it is only together with all the saints that we can grasp “how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ” (Eph 3:18).
Why do theology from below? We do it to make sense of life experiences. We do it to gain wisdom in perplexing life situations. We do it to seek God’s guidance and direction when there is no clear biblical direction. We do it, as Job did, to find meaning in our lives in the light of God’s story. Job found the truth about God through prayer, not through thought as was true for the Professor. So, there is reason to question the “tacking on” of applied theology to systematic theology, or the “tacking on” of spiritual theology to systematic theology.
Conclusion
A truly biblical theology of the marketplace must include head, heart and hand. The head includes the biblical meaning of work, the meaning of exchange—which is the essence of business—and the meaning of the principalities and powers that resist the coming of the kingdom of God. The heart includes the spirituality of work, the way in which work itself is a spiritual discipline, the meaning of money and stewardship, and how to take your soul to work. The hand suggests that the marketplace theologian must especially be involved in actual work in the world and is reflective on it. So, a total marketplace theology includes all three, head, heart and hand—exactly what a kingdom theology of the marketplace provides.[28]
Note: The forgoing may be copied for research purposes but not published. Copyright, R. Paul Stevens 2021.
References:
[1] D.M. Luthers Werke. Kritoische Gesamtausgabe: Tieschreden (6 vols): Weimer: Verlag Hermann Bohlaus Nochfolger, (1912-1921), 1:16. “Sola autem experiential facit theologum.” Quoted in Alister McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross: Martin Luther’s Theological Breakthrough, 2nd edition (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 207.
[2] McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross, 207.
[3] William Perkins, A Golden Chain (1592), in Ian Breward, ed. The Work of William Perkins (Appleford, England: The Sutton Courtenay Press, 1970), 177.
[4] Soren Kiekegaard, Journals and Papers (6 vols) trans. Howard and Edna Hong (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), vol 1, entry 656.
[5] Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, Vol 1 entry #1060. Quoted in Christian Beck Breuninger, “The Usefulness of Soren Kierkegaard’s Strategy of Edification for Homiletics,” MCS Thesis, Regent College, 1988, 39.
[6] Kierkegaard, Letters and Papers, Vol 1, entry #1061.
[7] Kierkegaard, Letters and Papers, Vol 4 entry #4056, quoted in in Breuninger, 40.
[8] Dietrich Bonhoeffer in a letter from Tegel prison, 1944, quoted in Melanie Morrison, “As one stands convicted”, Sojourners (May 1979), 15.
[9] Edward Farley, "Interpreting Situations: An Inquiry into the Nature of Practical Theology," in Lewis S, Mudge and James N. Poling. Formation and Reflection: The Promise of Practical Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), 18.
[10] Farley, “Interpreting Situations,” 19.
[11] Farley, ”Interpreting Situations,” 3-4.
[12] Craig Dykstra, "Reconceiving Practice," in Barbara Wheeler and Edward Farley, Shifting Boundaries (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox, 1991), 55.
[13] See Stanley J. Grenz, "Star Trek and the Next Generation: Postmodernism and the Future of Evangelical Theology Today," Crux XXX, No. 1 (March 1994): 24-32.
[14] Craig Dykstra, "Reconceiving Practice," in Wheeler and Farley, Shifting Boundaries, 35-66.
[15] Some of the following is abstracted from “Living Theologically” in R. Paul Stevens, The Other Six Days: Vocation, Work and Ministry in Biblical Perspective (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 247-251.
[16] Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, All You Who Labor, Work and the Sanctification of Daily Life (Manchester, NH: Sophia Press, 1995), 98. Wyszynski continues to write “Work becomes an instrument, one of the means of salvation,” 99. This is to be distinguished from the kind of works righteousness about which Luther reacted in a time when he viewed the monastery as a kind of salvation machine.
[17] Luther, “Treatise on Good Works,” Luther’s Works (Minnesota, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016), XVIV, 27.
[18] Gordon Preece, Changing Work Values (Brunswick, Victoria: Acorn Press, 1995), 178-9.
[19] R. S. Anderson, The Praxis of Pentecost: Revisioning the Church’s Life and Mission (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1993), 163.
[20] A Bibliography for doing theology from below would include:
Howard W. Stone and James O. Duke, How to Think Theologically. 2nd edition (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), 142 pages.
Miroslav Volf and Dorothy C. Bass, eds., Practicing Theology: Beliefs and Practices in Christian Life (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002) The closing chapter by Volf on “Theology for a Way of Life” is especially worth reading, pp 245-263.
Elaine Graham, Heather Wilson, and Frances Ward, Theological Reflection: Methods (2nd edition, London: SCM Press, 2005, 247 pages) In this book the introduction (pp. 1-21) are especially worth reading. In the context of outlining various ways of doing theological reflection, this book also contains fascinating examples of how theological reflection has been done by believers throughout Christian history.
Patricia O’Connell Killen and John de Beer, The Art of Theological Reflection (New York: Crossroads, 2019). This text has a number of helpful perspectives but is light on biblical authority.
Simon Chan, Grassroots Asian Theology: Thinking the Faith from the Group Up (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2014). “Grassroots theology…reflects the lived theology of Christians in their ecclesial experiences. It is not bound by elitist sociopolitical or individual experiences, but ‘essentially an ecclesial endeavor requiring cooperation between the people of God and the theologian.’”
[21] For an excellent and recent scholarly work on Ecclesiastes I recommend J. Daryl Charles, Wisdom and Work: Theological Reflections on Human Labor from Ecclesiastes (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2021). Charles masterfully develops the main thrust of Ecclesiastes, namely that “nothing in life has meaning apart from a theistic outlook” (40).
[22] George MacDonald, The Curate’s Awakening (Minneapolis: Bethany House Publishers, 1985), 176.
[23] Gustavo Gutierrez, On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent, trans. Matthew J O’Connell (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988), 87.
[24] John Calvin, Commentary on the Psalms, trans. Rev. James Anderson (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1996), Part 1, Vol 1, p. xxxvii.
[25] I. Howard Marshall, “Son of Man,” Joel B. Green, Scot McKnight and I. Howard Marshall, eds., Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels (Downers Grove, InterVarsity Press, 1992), 776.
[26] Howard W. Stone & James O. Duke, How to Think Theologically, 2nd edition (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), 46-56.
[27] Undoubtedly Confucian thought continues to provide a profound influence on Asian theology. Confucius outlined the seven steps to gaining peace in the kingdom—a very practical goal. 1. The investigation of things; 2. The completion of knowledge, 3. The sincerity of the thoughts. 4. The rectifying of the heart. 5. The cultivation of the person. 6. The regulation of the family. 7. The government of the state.
[28] Please see my forthcoming book, The Kingdom in Work Clothes: The Marketplace and the Reign of God (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2022).
