Theological education and a durable pastoral theology of mission

One of the challenges of theological education as formation for ministry is to help students make the connections. The connections between what is so about God and what is so about our lives; the connections between God revealed in the incarnate Christ and experienced in the power of the Spirit, and what it means to be a human being; the connections between human community, its possibilities and failures, its frustrations, agonies and cost as well as its fulfillments, joys and gifts, and the life of God as the God who is for us, and whose nature is loving outreach; the connections between theological conviction and pastoral practice, and the connections between a richly dynamic Christian theology of the reconciling, restoring, renewing love of God in Christ through the Spirit, and Christian existence as embodying that reconciling, restoring and renewing love in a community of faith and hope.

Theological education can never afford to be merely pragmatic, practice centred, informed primarily by pastoral need or missional urgency. Theological education and a durable pastoral theology of mission requires a deeper rootedness, a more transcendent vision, a more dynamic source of energy, insight and spiritual aspiration. And that is to be found in an adequate understanding of who God is, and that the God who is with us and for us in Christ, and who is in us and in the world through the Spirit, is a God who comes to us, who "exists from all eternity in relation to another".

I'm now immersed in preparation for the class on the theology of the Triune God. As part of that preparation I'll now be reading several of my favourite theologians,  swimming again in some of my favourite deep water places. From now till Pentecost I'll post a weekly reflection on the essential connections between our understanding of the Triune God and the nature and practices of pastoral care and the mission of the Christian community to incarnate the reality of the God who, in the power of the Spirit, was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.

Here's Catherine Lacugna, stating her understanding of the Triune God:

The ultimate ground and meaning of being is therefore communion among persons: God is ecstatic, fecund, self-emptying out of love for another, a personal God who comes to self through another.

Indeed the Christian theologian contemplates the life of God revealed in the economy, in the incarnateness of God in Christ and in the power and presence of God as Spirit. Revealed there is the unfathomable mystery that the life and communion of the divine persons is not intra divine: God is not self-contained, egotistical and self-absorbed but overflowing love, outreaching desire for union with all that God has made. The communion of divine life is God's communion with us in Christ and as Spirit.

Catherine Lacugna, God For Us. The Trinity and Christian Life (San francisco: Harper Collins, 1991) page 15. 

Decided to display the Rublev Icon on the sidebar for a while. In my own spiritual life this has been a source of inspiration, comfort, insight, imaginative reverie, prayerful and playful contemplation, soul-steadying beauty and suggestiveness, for over two decades. Taking time to wait and pay attention to it, is like an act, better, a process, of re-orientation, of regained perspective, of enhanced awareness of that which always lies beyond our understanding, but closer to our hearts than we can ever know.

Comments

[Ronnie Hall]

You tell them I said that Trinity module is dead useful! Indeed I'm currently writing on the implications of a triune God for cultural diversity and at my church we have lots of diversity.

[Jim Gordon]

Ill tell them Ronnie; I'll tell them! :)