Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.01.2007, Blaðsíða 61

practice and as actually or potentially participation in God’s activity. This
proper theological interest in God’s activity in history and in nature implies
that at the level of human agency practical theology cannot be concerned
exclusively with the activity of Christians or of the Church. It applies a theo-
logical critique and analysis to the practice of people as such, and people-in-
relationship rather than artificially isolated individuals who are assumed to
be free from all social ties and forms of conditioning. And because the divine
practice of God in Jesus Christ has at its heart passion, with its dual sense of
suffering and intense emotion, a Christian understanding of practice must
concern itself not only with activity but with feeling and with suffering as
well. But with these provisos, Practical Theology is also concerned with the
practice of Christians. At this level it might take as its motto the saying of
Kierkegaard that the real problem is not so much what Christianity means as
how to be a Christian, adding that in striving to be and act as a Christian one
learns what Christianity is.
The specific danger here is that of regarding the Christian as agent in
unduly individualistic terms, whether those of pietistic individualism where
there is little reference to the Christian fellowship, or of possessive individual-
ism in which the individual is seen as owning herself and defined in terms of
what she can gain and what she possesses, in terms of things rather than social
relationships. Christian practice, Christian being and Christian relationships
must always be understood in the context of the Church and of the Reign of
God, and cannot therefore be understood in narrowly individualistic terms.
Practical theology also studies ‘practices’, or ordered ways of arranging be-
haviour, like the professional practices of medicine or the law, or indeed of
ministry (although there are a number of problems in describing ministry as
a profession).23 Here practice is the behaviour of a class of professionals in ac-
cordance with a professional code, and under the discipline of‘the profession’.
We are reminded that education is not simply the imparting of knowledge
and skills; it is also, and always has been formation. The ends or goals of a
profession are generally agreed, if in rather general terms: physicians’ practice
23 Cf. the understanding of practices in Miroslav Volf and Dorothy C. Bass, eds., Practicing Theology: Beliefi and
Practices in Christian Life. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002, pp. 6 and 22..