Practical theology in the UK tends to draw from mainly Anglophone sources, looking to research from North America and South Africa in English or works in translation from other major centres such as Germany, the Netherlands and Latin America (including Brazil). One of the consequences of this is that has probably not engaged sufficiently with German-speaking traditions of practical theology – or that any such influence begins and ends with Friedrich Schleiermacher. So it is good to welcome the publication of this book, translated and much abridged from its German original, as an opportunity to gain an overview of the discipline in Germany. In the process, we recognise how divergent practical theology can be, according to its intellectual, ecclesial and cultural contexts.
The focus of practical theology, according to Grethlein, is ‘the theory and communication of the gospel’. Since the gospel constitutes the core of Christian belief and practice, then practical theology must interrogate the nature of the communicative acts by which that takes place. In essence, practical theology ‘elaborates theories for the understanding of communicating the gospel’ (p. 3); and represents the study of how that communication takes place: concretely, contextually, in word and sacrament.
This highly synthetic and theory-driven approach begins to give the reader a sense of how practical theology in Germany has evolved historically, and how it differs from other international approaches. Put broadly, in the United States the emphasis has rested on the sub-disciplines of theological education and ministerial formation: practical theology in the service of the activities of pastoring, in all its functions. In the United Kingdom, whilst training for ministry figures strongly, over the past generation it has gravitated towards an understanding of itself as a study of the theology of Christian practices: how practice is itself theologically redolent; how everyday practice calls forth reflection on the sources and norms of received tradition in the processes of meaning-making and interpretation; how theological tradition speaks into practical dilemmas. Much contemporary work has taken an increasingly auto-ethnographic or narrative-based turn, as personal experience becomes the starting point for more comprehensive theological reflection on practice. In South African practical theology, the imperatives of reorienting Christian communities towards the demands of nation-building and reconciliatory practices has called forth new models of church praxis which integrate restorative and often revisionist readings of scripture and tradition with renewed understandings of social responsibility and citizenship.
Grethlein's account of practical theology in Germany offers yet another perspective. Mindful of the growing gulf between church and society since the dawn of modernity, he offers a sustained analysis of the development of practical theology as an endeavour of bridge-building – itself a form of communication. The challenge for the twenty-first-century discipline is, thus, its ecclesial and clerical captivity; an inadequate empirical basis; and its lack of robust theoretical foundations. What matters is to reconnect the church with the complexities of lived religion beyond the institution – indeed, beyond Christianity altogether, and work from these realities in order to construct adequate theories of communication of the gospel (p. 59).
If communication rests at the very heart of practical theology, then, its exponents are charged with proper understanding both of the context into which the gospel speaks and the means with which it can be communicated. This Grethlein concludes, is communication ‘about, with, and from, God’; or the practices of ‘telling, praying, and blessing’ (p. 208). It is through these concepts and in these final chapters that Grethlein finally begins to unfold his own model of practical theology. These modes of communication – story-telling, preaching, offering, thanksgiving, celebrating, practising hospitality – are both deeply human undertakings and also profoundly theological (and christological): ‘it is God's turning towards human beings that is the basis for all communication with him’ (p. 239).
This is not a book for introducing new students to the field of practical theology. Notwithstanding its aspirations to empirical enquiry, it is uncompromisingly theoretical. Its argument is pursued exhaustively via surveys of literature, primarily within German-speaking contexts, with some additional discussion of authors from the United States. Its structure also betrays the extent to which, institutionally, practical theology in Germany has been bifurcated into Protestant and Roman Catholic approaches. Given the predominance of a largely inductive model within the English-speaking field, which adopts a movement from practice to theory and back to practice, the absence of concrete, lived examples within this book may strike many readers as odd. It is hard to make the leap of translation into such a very different intellectual and disciplinary context, and the detailed exposition of so much work with which I was unfamiliar was challenging. However, Grethlein's central theme, of practical theology as the mediator between human and divine communication – or as the Australian practical theologian Terry Veling puts it, ‘on earth as it is in heaven’ – remains with me as a creative and thought-provoking proposition.
