Practical Theology: A New Approach, by Marcel Viau
Review by Francisca Ireland-Verwoerd
Marcel Viau is a Roman Catholic practical theologian who has taught primarily in his native Canada and most recently in Fribourg, Switzerland. The rise of practical theology in the Roman Catholic tradition is directly related to the Second Vatican Council with its emphasis on the work of local churches and pastors. This renewed focus gave the impetus for the study of pastoral theology (later called practical theology) as a discipline autonomous from systematic theology, while remaining intimately connected at the same time. Viau sees several reasons for this new way of doing theology. First, the social scientific tools for pastors have multiplied, and the methods of studying the church’s actions in the secular world have diversified. Second, in North American universities, theology–and even more practical theology–does not always have the same credibility as the physical or human sciences. Third, it is not clear whether practical theology as an ecclesial discourse is institutional or experiential. These issues of practical theology’s ways and fields of study, its unconfirmed academic status, and the tension between its institutional and experiential discourse, point to the problem of “the epistemological status” of practical theology (xi). Viau proposes to lay the groundwork for basic research that will address the problem.
For Viau, practical theology consists of constructing discourses on the basis of faith practices of Christians (xv). His basic research then is “a critical study of the conditions surrounding the production of the discourse of Practical Theology,” with the understanding that the function of practical theology is to “produce a discourse that allows our contemporaries to live faith in a satisfactory manner” (ibid.). The goal of this basic research is to “provid[e] Practical Theology with rules of conduct by sketching a basic architecture, thus establishing it as a discipline” (ibid.). Viau’s new approach is concerned with the question of how practical theology works as it attempts “to take hold of and give an account of its practices, in other words as it attempts to produce a discourse” (xvi, italics his).
In this book, Viau lays the philosophical foundations for an epistemology characteristic of practical theology. He defines ‘discourse’ as a “body of utterances” and ‘object’ as “that to which the discourse is linked” (xvii), and then addresses three questions: what is the material out of which the discourse and its object are made? (i.e. experience; chapters one, two, and three); what is the nature of the bond between the discourse and the object? (i.e. language; chapters four, five, six, and seven); and what is the adjustment of the discourse to its object? (i.e. belief; chapters eight, nine, and ten).
In the first three chapters, Viau begins by studying the presuppositions that underlie every discourse. Here he finds the pragmatic strain of Anglo-Saxon philosophy helpful insofar as it does not fall into idealism, nor empiricism, but rather holds to the notion that “the object of this discourse is external to the discourse itself” (3). For a pragmatist, experience is not confined to a mental reality, but it encompasses everything the mental content implies (e.g. sensations or the ideas formed based on the sensations) as a manifestation of the cosmos (23). The knowing of this experience is not a separate act, but a reconstruction of the experience. On the theological level then, ideas about faith cannot be dissociated from experience. Consequently God, as the object of faith, “cannot be understood without the help of experience” (25). For practical theology this means that “the input of experience allows something of the divine nature, especially as it acts upon the world, to be understood” (ibid.). Via the Realism and the Social Behaviorism of John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, Viau concludes that experience is rooted and manifested in an environment. Human consciousness consists of the experience of a phenomenon in the present time. When that experience drives the consciousness to reach out to other human beings, a social context is formed in which the experience becomes ‘common’ (37). The chapter on Signs in Language, in which Viau expounds the behaviorist sign theory of Charles S. Peirce and the semiotic theory of Charles W. Morris, emphasizes the social context in which signs communicate experience.
The next four chapters provide a closer look at conditions under which a discourse can have access to its object. The function of discourse is not to account for the object itself, but for “the events which constitute the framework of human experience” (89). In Viau’s epistemology, this theological ‘real’ is just as real as the scientist’s ‘real’ because of the bond established between discourse and object. Theology is a certain grammar that is used in a particular discourse; it is the way we speak about God and our experiences of God (97). In order to provide a sure philosophical footing, Viau seeks to ground this ‘grammar of faith’ on human nature—a so-called theology naturalized– rather than on a hypothesis about deity (ibid.). How then can we know that which is unknowable? After exploring various philosophical discourses (e.g. by Richard Rorty, W.V.O. Quine, Hilary Putnam) Viau settles on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s term “language-game” to underscore that speaking a language is an activity in which meaning is delineated by its context (112-113). Any number of language-games exists, each within “the social space of a given linguistic community” and the rules of language construction are determined by this community (114). The language-game of theology enables Viau to articulate an epistemology without the necessity of a priori knowledge of the divine.
In the last three chapters on belief, Viau uses the concept of pragmatists that truth is based on belief, to place belief at the heart of a practical theological epistemology. He draws heavily from the work of Charles Peirce and William James, while also referencing R.B. Braithwaite and Donald Davidson. Through their work he concludes that “it will always be impossible to determine a content for belief” and therefore, “the content of religious utterances always remain elusive” (171). However, beliefs can still be known by subsequent behaviors. Religious discourse—as an act of belief—and religious belief are then closely linked (171). In religious discourse a sentence has meaning in so far as the one who pronounced the sentence holds it to be true; it has meaning for the addressee in so far as that one entertains the meaning (188-189). It is true for the addressee when that one assents to the utterance (191). Now a practical theological discourse can develop in which utterances, entertainment and assent take place among other discourses, i.e. in a ‘web of beliefs’ (common sense, scientific, philosophical and religious) (195). Through discourse, addressees integrate the entertained and assented utterances into their own webs of belief by integrating the information and making a decision to act upon the information or not (206).
This book is highly theoretical. Only the introduction, conclusion and an occasional paragraph in each chapter draw the philosophical considerations into the realm of practical theology. In the body of the work Viau set out to lay groundwork for practical theology so that it will have an unassailable footing. His philosophical research is extensive as he discusses various ways in which the issues of experience, language and belief have been treated. The choice for one philosophical framework over the other is guided by his goal to provide tools for a practical theological discourse constructed out of experience.
This foundational work is important for those practical theologies that base their claims on the experience-to-theory model, such as the local theologies of Oduyoye and Isazi-Diaz, and the empirical studies of Van der Ven. In addition, Viau shows that “the truth of a discourse in Practical Theology flows from its ability to set its speaker in motion” (203). This strengthens models that also connect theory with new practices, such as the “practice theology” of Bonnie Miller-McLemore, the “practice to theory and back again” method of Don Browning, and the “proposals for practice” in Mary Elizabeth Moore’s ethnogenic method.
Viau warns the reader that the book is not about the content of practical theology, but about the foundations of its practices (xiv-xv). Yet it is hard to overlook the incongruity of a book on practical theology based on experience, and driving toward action, to consist of almost pure theory. Certain knowledge of theories of epistemology, semantics and the nature of belief is necessary for a good grasp of the book’s content. Moreover, an interest and even passion for the topic is needed to persevere through ten chapters of philosophical explorations. In the context of the fairly recent development of pastoral theology within the Roman Catholic Church, Viau’s work has a place to undergird and even justify the existence of practical theology as a distinct (and yet interconnected) discipline. It seems that Practical Theology: A New Approach is primarily directed towards the guardians of Roman Catholic Ecclesiology and Systematic Theology. The more ‘practical’ theologians may be inclined to leave this book on the shelf.