‘Even When I’m Washing the Underwear?’: Towards Understanding the Particularities of a Transformative Arab Evangelical Practice of Theological Reflection in an Arab-Muslim Milieu

Autor: Hutcherson, Caleb Mac
Přispěvatelé: Reitsma, BJG, Blythe, Stuart, van de Wetering, Stella, Faculty of Religion and Theology
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2022
Předmět:
Popis: In this thesis, I describe and evaluate the contextual, confessional, and transformative nature of the practice of theological reflection at the Arab Baptist Theological Seminary (ABTS) in Beirut, Lebanon. Developing students’ capacity to reflect theologically on everyday life and ministry is widely recognized as one of the overarching aims of contemporary practical theological education. Yet most of the theoretical discourse about the practice of TR takes place in contexts that differ from the Muslim-majority, Arab socio-religious contexts of the evangelical students at ABTS. In response, I advance a critical, contextual study of the practice of TR in the experiences of Arab evangelical theology students from ABTS as a constructive way to understand and enhance practical theological reflection in and for Arab-Muslim contexts. In Part 1, I consider the practice of TR, both in the literature and in practice at ABTS. I start by tracing apparent difficulties in the practice of TR at ABTS that led to analyzing the wider discourse about TR. This locates the need for an empirical description and evaluation of TR in an Arab-Muslim context within the field of practical theology. Following a thick description of the qualitative case study design and process of reflexive thematic analysis I used to research the practice of TR at ABTS, I then describe and analyze the nature of TR in my Arab evangelical participants’ accounts of the practice. This analysis leads to formulating the notion of ‘divinely ordered connectivity’ as a central organizing principle for framing my participants’ talk about and practices of TR. From my description and analysis, I demonstrate how the nature of the practice of TR in their accounts both intersects with and challenges socio-cultural orientations and theological norms common to their contexts. In Part 2, based on this theoretical and empirical consideration of the practice of TR, I evaluate the nature of the practice from the case study according to the theory and theology, as expressed in the TR literature, about what constitutes contextual, confessional, and transformative TR. To evaluate the contextuality of the practice with reference to the particularities of an Islamic hermeneutical context, I draw on the work of Khaled Abu El Fadl’s ‘Reasoning with God’ approach to a contemporary discerning of Shari’a in Islamic legal tradition. Similarly, I evaluate the confessional with reference to the particularities of evangelical theological commitments by dialoguing with Andrew Root’s synthesis of criteria for an evangelical practical theology. Finally, I evaluate the sense of transformativity with reference to the particularities of early liberationist approaches to transformative-action modes of TR that seek to promote liberative social transformation. Through these evaluations, I argue that the practice of TR in the case of ABTS demonstrates cautious contextuality, hybrid evangelical features, and a tenuous transformativity. This analysis provides original contextual perspective, as well as original interpretive analysis of the similarities and differences between the practice of TR at ABTS and each of these contexts of meaning. From these conclusions, I identify a number of implications both for the theology and practice of theological reflection among Arab evangelicals, as well as for the field of practical theology. In doing so, the outcomes of this research support recent claims about the significance of attending to the particularities of practical theological reflection in a given context for enhancing its practice and theory.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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