Sentences with phrase «matters in a theological school»

What the proposal does argue is this: Study of various subject matters in a theological school will be the indirect way to truer understanding of God only insofar as the subject matters are taken precisely as interconnected elements of the Christian thing, and that can be done concretely by studying them in light of questions about their place and role in the actual communal life of actual and deeply diverse Christian congregations.

All of the disciplines actually employed in the study of various subject matters in a theological school are also used in a variety of types of schooling that do not claim to be and are far from being theological.

Not exact matches

Further, they are already aware of «disagreement about some theological matters» and the CCCU schools are committed to «certain essentials of the faith once for all delivered to the saints» simultaneously adhering to particular theological postures in one's particular school and its theological tradition.

So we modify our answer: a school is truly theological to the extent that it is a community of persons seeking to understand God, and all else in relation to God, by studying other matters that are believed to lead to that understanding.

If the defining goal of a theological school is to understand God truly, then as a matter of faithfulness to God the freedom of a theological school's effort to understand must not be constrained by the way in which it is governed as a political and social reality in its own right.

Like any effort to understand, a theological school's effort to understand God is a matter of conceptual growth guided by certain interests that may themselves be transformed in the process, and like any effort to understand, those guiding interests are themselves socioculturally situated.

The conceptual growth in which a theological school is engaged is a matter of degree in a second way.

A Christian theological school is defined, we have repeatedly stressed, by its interest in truly understanding God by focusing study on the Christian thing; but as a matter of contingent fact it happens that the Christian thing is most concretely available for study in and as Christian congregations.

By engaging people in the effort to understand God by focusing study of various subject matters within the horizon of questions about Christian congregations, a theological school may help them cultivate capacities both for what Charles Wood [2] calls «vision,» that is, formulating comprehensive, synoptic accounts of the Christian thing as a whole, and what he calls «discernment,» that is, insight into the meaning, faithfulness, and truth of particular acts in the practice of worship (in the broad sense of worship that we have adopted for this discussion).

Indeed, this procedure would largely retain the range of subject matters or content conventionally found in theological schools» curricula.

No, it is not the subject matter that makes theological schooling either «theological» or unified; rather, it is its overarching interest to understand God, an interest refracted in three interdependent questions that may order each course's inquiry and unify them all into a single course of study.

A way to make this point is to exploit two metaphors: We could think of questions about the communal identities and common life of diverse Christian congregations as the lens through which inquiry about all the various subject matters studied in a theological school could be focused and unified.

These are the various subject matters that are the immediate or direct objects of study in theological schooling.

If the goal that makes a school «theological» is to understand God more truly, and if such understanding comes only indirectly through disciplined study of other «subject matters,» and if study of those subject matters leads to truer understanding of God only insofar as they comprise the Christian thing in their interconnectedness and not in isolation from one another, then clearly it is critically important to study them as elements of the Christian thing construed in some particular, concrete way.

However, the proposal does not imply any major changes in the traditional array of subject matters studied in theological schools.

There is no distinctive «theological method» that must be used to make all inquiries into all subject matters studied in a theological school genuinely theological.

By the same token, our working description's stress on the self - critical moment in Christian congregations» practice of worship has implications concerning the subject matter of theological schooling.

Implicitly the study moves to counter the three sorts of change in Schleiermacher's model of a wissenschaftlich «professional» school that we found in the Kelly and May - Brown studies: the abandonment of a specifically theological account of the subject matter of the Wissenschaft; the individualistic and functionalist understanding of «professional»»; and a separation of Wissenschaft from professional training that leaves both incapable of internal critique of ideological differences.

Only when we can identify these matters will we be in a position to respond to objections to the very suggestion that a theological school focus on the study of congregations.

The proposal that has been partially elaborated in this chapter is that a theological school is a community of persons trying to understand God more truly by focusing its study of various subject matters within the horizon of questions about Christian congregations.

He undertakes the task they abandoned of providing a specifically theological account of the subject matter of theological schooling's Wissenschaft: God in relation to neighbor; neighbor in relation to God; neighbors related to each other before God.

That is the reason for urging that study of all the subject matters to which theological schools attend, in the hope of understanding God more truly, be focused through the lens of questions about particular Christian congregations.

That allowed me to show why various subject matters that ought to be studied by a theological school (e.g., Bible, Christian history, theology, psychology and sociology of religion, etc.) are best studied in their theological significance (i.e., as means to understanding God) by studying them in their relation to the common life of actual congregations.

Although both proposals adopt paideia as the type of education appropriate to theological study and explicitly or implicitly urge its modification to embrace certain types of Wissenschaft, they disagree strongly about whether there is some transcendental structure that is self - identically, universally in all types of theological schooling, no matter where it is located.

My proposal has been that precisely because a theological school is not defined by the goal of educating church leaders it may, as a matter of contingent fact, prepare its students very well for leadership in congregations.