Acting out

Christian Century, May 22, 2002 by John P. Burgess

Practicing Theology: Beliefs and Practices in Christian Life.

Edited by Miroslav Volf and Dorothy C. Bass. Eerdmans, 265 pp., $18.00 paperback.

AMERICANS REMAIN deeply attached to religion. The days of the "secular city" (Harvey Cox) have been left behind for "the spiritual marketplace" (Wade Clark Roof). Though Christianity may play a less prominent role in the public arena and may have more competition from other religions and spiritualities, high percentages of Americans continue to claim belief in God and affiliation with a community of faith (especially the Christian God and the Christian church).

Yet, as every American mainline pastor knows, people are far more attached to the idea of religion than to its practice. In the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches 1998 George Gallup speaks of three gaps that afflict contemporary American Christianity. Although religion is highly popular, "survey evidence suggests that it does not change people's lives to the degree one would expect from the professed level of belief." People call themselves believers, yet biblical and theological illiteracy is rampant. Americans join churches, yet they are ambivalent about religious institutions and easily float in and out of religious communities.

Church leaders worry about how to close these gaps in ethics, knowledge and affiliation. Increasingly, their attention has fallen on the "practices" side of the equation. How can belief be translated into practice? How can personal religious experience be more fully integrated into patterns of communal life and practice? What is needed, according to much of the mainline decline/renewal literature, is not a set of abstract intellectual arguments, as though the problem were a theoretical atheism. Rather, American Christians need to learn to resist a practical atheism. They need to live out their faith.

At the forefront of this thinking about the role of Christian practices has been Craig Dykstra, Presbyterian minister, theologian and head of the religion division of the Lilly Endowment. Working with Dorothy Bass, formerly a seminary professor and now director of a Lilly-funded project on the education and formation of people in faith, Dykstra has argued that the Christian life is best understood as a process of moral formation. One grows in faith as one participates in disciplined, communal practices of living the faith.

Among the recent fruits of Dykstra and Bass's labors has been Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People, a book of essays edited by Bass and published in 1997. In it 12 theologians explore particular practices of Christian faith, ranging from honoring the body to keeping Sabbath, from dying well to singing the faith. The book has won numerous accolades and has been widely used by church study groups and in seminary classrooms.

Practicing Theology continues in this trajectory. Like the earlier volume, it is a group effort. Dykstra and Bass contribute an opening essay; Miroslav Volf, professor of theology at Yale Divinity School, brings the volume to its conclusion. Among the other contributors are various prominent professors of systematic theology in divinity schools and seminaries. The book is a series of reflections on how beliefs and practices intersect and condition each other, and it is directed more to an academic than a lay audience. Do beliefs explain and justify practices or do practices shape and justify beliefs? Do beliefs serve as a kind of ideological overlay, or do they help guide and correct practices? How can one believe the right things but fail to put them into practice? How can reflecting on practices deepen our capacity to engage in them?

This concern reflects larger movements not only in the church but also in recent theology and ethics. Feminist and liberation theologies, with their emphasis on the priority of praxis, offer one approach. It is in the worldly struggle for equality and justice that Christians discover the liberating power of the gospel and Christian belief. Practice shapes belief. Postliberal theologies, influenced by the work of philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre, have approached the question from a different angle. For postliberals, foundational narratives play a key role in shaping communities and their distinctive ways of living. The gospel and Christian belief, focused on the story of Jesus, shape a community that practices nonviolence and hospitality.

From yet another angle, the interest in practices has grown out of renewed attention to worship, sacraments and spirituality. New liturgical theologies have reemphasized the ancient Christian slogan lex orandi, lex credendi. The way we worship shapes the way we believe. From this point of view, more faithful and regular celebration of the sacraments and observance of the spiritual disciplines, especially daily prayer, would help renew Christian faith and life.

While the authors of Practicing Theology explore all these angles, a particular doctrinal concern emerges as key to their particular interest in practices: the Reformation understandings of sanctification. As contributor Serene Jones notes, "To know Christ is to live a certain way, to be disciplined into certain patterns of living, to become a person disposed toward certain kinds of actions and thought. Although Calvin never uses the explicit language of practices to capture the character of this new material reality, his description comes close to an understanding of practices as put forth in this volume. ... Practices are the things that Christians do as their lives are conformed to ... patterns of holiness--sanctus."