FAITH: A PRACTICAL THEOLOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION

Written by F. Gerit Immink Reviewed By Brian Brock

The Dutch have always played a bridging role in European culture, and happily their strong Reformed heritage and their proximity to German theology has become all the more accessible with their recent shift to writing in English. Utrecht Professor F. Gerrit Immink’s book evidences a wide-ranging familiarity with the many strands of Anglo-American and German practical theology, while being grounded in the classic Christian tradition of Reformed doctrinal theology. If nothing else, we can be thankful for this English introduction to that discussion, and to many modern (and untranslated) Dutch works in practical theology.

Immink describes faith as a practice in order to develop a methodological background for the various empirical and practical sub-disciplines that make up practical theology. The book’s first part lays out a theological account of faith that begins with God’s prior act, but insists that human faith is an act imbedded in the human mind and social activity. Faith is human and must be formed. However, Immink’s Reformed reservations about ritualistic and institutional elements of the church turn his attention away from currently popular approaches in which the church’s worship is the main location of this formation, by the Spirit. He makes the suggestive allusion that this happens in the church’s diaconal ministry in the world, in which the church learns lessons that it may, in turn, bring to the task of reforming its intuitional structures

The book’s second part deploys the traditional Reformed concepts of justification and sanctification to clarify how God works to reform human lives in the activity of faith. This discussion ends with an illuminating comparison of Reformed and Puritan-Methodist accounts of sanctification and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Where the Puritan-Methodist strand of evangelical theology deploys definitions of sanctification which emphasize the concepts of development and growth, and so assume a receding prominence of sin in the life of believers, the Reformed work from concepts of restraint and discipline to yield a picture of sanctification as a continual struggle with broken sinfulness.

Part three follows up the individual and internal emphasis of part two with a turn to the intersubjective, communal and institutional dimension of faith. Here Immink emphasizes the interrelation of speech and conversation with social structures His Reformed account of this connection is laid out by way of a sustained and informative engagement with the practical theologies of Schleiermacher and Van der Ven.

The final section compares the ‘revelation model’ of practical theology of Barth and Thurneysen. Here priority is assigned to preaching and witness, with the ‘anthropocentric model’ of Tillich, Kaufman, and Buttrick, with its emphasis on pastoral care and therapeutic psychology. He concludes that the two approaches must be wed in a manner that illumines the daily life of every believer.

Both our involvement in everyday life and our relationship with God and his salvation present themselves in the human mind. I believe that it is theologically incorrect to deny the presence of God in our consciousness; but it is of crucial importance to underscore the intersubjective character of that presence (285).

This conclusion comes after a plea for the discussion of foundations in practical theology that draws on the work of Alvin Plantinga to defend the claim that our concepts of language, reality and our theological beliefs cannot be pulled apart and will deeply influence any analysis of praxis in practical theology.

While appreciating that Immink has pulled the main strands of thinking in practical theology into contact with important Christian doctrines, this remains yet another book on method in practical theology. It occasionally has the feel of a scholastic analysis of theological concepts (exacerbated by recourse to the philosophical distinctions of Plantinga and Wolterstorff), rather than drawing attention to how these concepts might illumine the variegated life of faith. The closing application of his concept of faith to the practices of preaching and pastoral care covers a mere nine pages. His most interesting practical suggestion, that Christians are formed not in liturgy, but in diaconal care, is confined to passing comments on a single page. Nevertheless, his is a salutary reminder that practical theology, with all its interest in the dynamics of human life, can only be about following an active God.


Brian Brock

Brian Brock
University of Aberdeen
Aberdeen, Scotland, UK