The Mirror of Learning: Towards a Theology of Reflection in Adult Christian Education
John Williams
Introduction: Doing Theology on the Beach
A few years ago at a church training conference, one session of evening prayer was designed to recreate the wilderness experience. During the liturgy, buckets of sand were brought in and placed around the room on sheets spread over the floor. We were invited to approach the sand when we were ready, take handfuls of it, feel it and scatter it and use it as a basis for our meditations. Unfortunately, the sand turned out to be slightly damp. As I handled it and let my thoughts wander I soon realised that I was not in the desert at all, but on the beach of my seaside childhood, where the sand always seemed to be damp because twice a day the tide came right up and covered it. I was transported back through the years to that familiar seaside, to experience again its contrasting moods. Sometimes, to lie on the sand listening to the gentle lapping of the waves or gazing trance-like at the distant horizon was to be seized with a potent sense of cosmic order, the assurance that all manner of things shall be well, as the God of creation works all for the good. Yet at other times, to linger on the promenade watching the monstrous waves come crashing over the railings, laden with pebbles and grit and sometimes even heaving up great lumps of rock, was to be captured with a sort of primal awe at the forces of chaos. Occasionally tragedies occurred as holidaymakers who had not grown up beside the sea, and fatally underestimated its lethal power, ventured too close to observe the waves from a slipway, and were swept away. The life of faith, it seemed to me as I handled that all too un-wildernesslike damp sand, was reflected in those contrary moods of the sea and the shore, the alternation of cosmos and chaos.
It was quite vivid but it was not (I presume) quite what the planners of the worship had in mind: and yet, who was to say that what I got from the inadvertently damp sand was ‘wrong’ in terms of what those who planned the worship expected dry sand to convey? So it is that any adult educator who facilitates a process of theological reflection must inevitably cede a measure of control over the outcome. It will be a central theme of this article that a key role of theological reflection in the practice of adult education is to open up formative learning possibilities for the learner that are facilitated as to the process, but not finally dictated as to the content, by the educator. And this educational argument will also be shown to be fundamentally a theological one: that, as faith moves between the twin poles of cosmos and chaos, it accurately mirrors the nature of divine-human encounter, and thence of spiritual growth, a moving forward that is driven by experiential disjunctions of knowing and not-knowing (nescience), revealedness and obscurity, answer and question, calm and storm.
Theological Reflection: Models and Metaphors
A research project undertaken by Roger Walton (2003) revealed a large number of theological training institutions offering their students courses in, or nurturing the skills for, theological reflection. However, in relation at least to the way students were encouraged to engage with the Bible, Walton found little consistency as to what this meant in practice. In some instances the ‘reflection’ amounted to little more than observing certain resonances (via story or imagery, for example) between the biblical text and some contemporary situation or experience, and reading the one in the light of the other, a process that might well be helpful or illuminating for the person engaging in it, but which often lacked critical ‘edge’.
Lartey (1996), writing on practical theology, notes that ‘reflective praxis’ is one model for this discipline, and comments that it ‘may become anti-intellectual and thus cut [itself] off from an important source of critical life skills’. He offers a synthesis based on a modified version of the familiar learning cycle but incorporating a two-way critique. First there needs to be a ‘situational analysis’ of the experience being reflected upon, to gain a proper ‘fix’ on the detail and to avoid undue subjectivity of perspective. After this, materials from the tradition are brought to bear to interrogate and illuminate the situation; and thirdly and crucially, the situation as it is being subjected to analysis is also allowed to act back upon, and potentially call into question, the ‘faith perspectives’ of the person(s) engaging in the reflection. These three stages of analysis may be repeated, back and forth, as necessary, before proceeding to the stage of identifying responses to the situation and deciding on any action. For Lartey this is generally a corporate rather than an individual process.
O’Connell Killen and de Beer (1995) stress the need to enter fully and honestly into the experience that is the subject of reflection, including attentiveness to its affective dimensions. Feelings are ‘our embodied affective and intelligent responses to reality as we encounter it’ (p35) and by focusing on them we can begin to generate images, pictures and metaphors that help us to interpret the experience and move on to fresh insight. Images ‘capture the totality of our felt response to reality in a given situation’ (p 37). By working with feelings and images before introducing material from the theological tradition into the reflective process, O’Connell Killen and de Beer maintain that theological reflection is functioning as a particular instance of a universal human pattern of ‘movement towards meaning’.
From all this we may conclude that theological reflection includes at least the following ingredients:
·Thinking about faith in the light of experience
·Bringing theological resources to bear on the raw material of life
·Raising ‘why?’ questions through the critical disjuncture of faith and experience
·Generating images to challenge practice with theology and theology with practice
·Assisting the process of Christian growth by learning from experience
·Asking how behaviour might change in the light of fresh theological learning
Writing of Friedrich Schleiermacher as a founding father of modern theology, B.A.Gerrish writes that ‘theological reflection makes sense only if it is framed within a life of spontaneous piety, since, when all is said and done, theology is nothing other than honest, persistent, critical reflection upon piety’. This approach rests upon the ongoing, regular life of religious practice as the source or mediation of the awareness of God both in the intentional actions of Christian life (behaviour) and in the process of reflection upon it. The corresponding model of theological reflection is the relatively simple one of a repeated oscillation between action and reflection, against the common backdrop of the ‘awareness of God’ brought to expression through what Schleiermacher called ‘piety’. Other more developed and deliberately structured models of theological reflection, which are mostly variants on the Learning Cycle (Kolb, 1984) ‘theologized’ in some way, belong more appropriately in educational contexts where reflection needs to become a formalized exercise.
The movement back and forth between action and reflection is therefore of particular relevance to all those who combine in themselves both a personal commitment to a religious faith and a responsibility to teach it or publicly represent it or engage with others in exploring it, that is, in Christian terms, all ‘ministers’ of the church, lay or ordained. It is possible to study the contents of a religious tradition without personal faith commitment, and as such not to engage in theological reflection as part of the academic process. On the other side, as Jeff Astley has insisted, by no means all ‘ordinary believers’ will be required to undertake theological reflection routinely or often, and some may never do so.
Reflection and Learning
In all the foregoing there has been an assumption that what makes the reflection process theological is the importation into it of materials from the faith tradition as a resource. However, more needs to be said by way of a theological rationale for the process itself. A reflection occurs when an image is projected onto a surface that is so constituted as to transmit the image back. The image in question might be of ourselves, our ideas, opinions, knowledge or worldview. Some reflectors, like modern mirrors, send back a ‘true’ image; in some circumstances this may be reassuring, in others rather disturbing (do I really look like that?) Others, like fairground mirrors, are designed to distort, and in so doing to present a challenge and raise awkward questions. Still others, like the early mirrors referred to by St Paul, reflect only dimly and imperfectly, reminding us only too forcefully of our ignorance. The type of reflection we get back elicits different reactions.
This is how change is stimulated in us, how in fact we learn: as we project our thoughts, our commitments, our most tentative speculations as well as our most dogmatic certainties, onto the reflecting surface of the other, in experiencing the world and in encounter with other people, and we respond to what comes back, sharp and clear, distorted and problematic, or dim and uncertain as it may be. Whenever I inadvertently catch sight of myself in a mirror from an unusual angle, I momentarily wonder who it is. Catching the reflection and working with it is thus intrinsic to being able to learn at all, otherwise we remain locked inside a self-perception that is never called into question. The significance of encounter as an engine of personal growth and maturation is rooted by Judaeo-Christian theology ultimately in the mystery of the ‘I - Thou relationship’ that characterises the salvific (making whole) coming together of the human and the divine.
Postmodernists employ Derrida’s neat coinage of différance to capture the flavour of this: that final meaning is always deferred because we differ as persons, as we must since each of us is unique. In any communicative act (which cannot be genuinely communicative unless it is two-way and therefore reflective) there is always a ‘gap’, a space between us (aporia) that ensures that what comes back is never quite identical with what was sent out. The advance of meaning, or of its appropriation, as human beings engage with one another and with the world (and, theologically we should wish to say, par excellence with God), proceeds by an ungainly dance of sidesteps and shuffles rather than by either the ‘clear and distinct ideas’ of Cartesian logic or the grandiose oppositions of Hegelian dialectic.
Reflection thus becomes a repeated process of bouncing ideas and evaluations back and forth among the partners in a conversation, not as an intellectual exercise but against the backdrop of the daily commitments in which the participants are involved (in this case, as practising Christians). Parker Palmer writes that ‘the truth that emerges through listening and responding to each other and the subject at hand is more likely to transcend collective opinion that to fall prey to it. With consensus, individual truth is both affirmed and corrected by the communal troth in which we live and learn’. Palmer’s use of the archaic word troth is important. As a kind of blending of trust and truth, the idea of troth points to mutual commitment, an honest and open giving and receiving in relationship, a listening and learning, that forms the context for personal and corporate growth and development. Trustfulness and truthfulness belong together somewhere at the heart of education as also of Christian discipleship.
A further concept that fleshes out this approach to the creative potential of reflection for fresh learning is that of the religious imagination. Maria Harris argues that imagination straddles the divide between mind and body, the condition in which we unavoidably live; it seeks to overcome the dichotomy of reason and emotions. It mediates, and in mediating it creates. It reconciles, and in reconciling it also adds and enriches. It interprets the world, and in so doing it contributes to the creation of a new world. To relate imaginatively to the world is not merely to accept it, but to change it. This understanding of the imagination and its activity is not an exclusively religious one: people who are not religious also engage in it. The religious imagination, however, sees this function as a fundamental dimension of the mystery of human persons created in the image of God. We are not machines nor mere puppets, but personal beings capable of envisioning, interpreting and changing our world.
Imaginative religion stresses journey, exploration and mystery. The truth lies yet ahead of us. Dogma is only an approximation, the best we can do so far as we have come. The ‘reasons of the heart’, as Pascal put it, can plumb depths unknown to the reason of the mind. Spiritual communication between persons can occur in a mode that recognises the calling of ‘deep unto deep’ in a manner that transcends mere doctrinal difference. Imaginative religion knows that words, concepts and theological statements do not tell the whole story; their meaning is deferred, they are subject to the différance that creates the space for novelty within and between all communicative acts and facilitates the discovery of fresh truth. Imaginative religion counteracts the dead hand of orthodoxy with a challenge to immersion in a living stream of tradition that is ever rich and fertile and never foreclosed and final.
Against this view of a reflective, imaginative, relational process, church-based ‘teaching ministry’ often acts as a kind of technology of Christian identity, offering believers tools and instruments by means of which to maintain the social construct of faith. By contrast, reflective methods rest not on instrumental but on communicative rationality. The ‘reason’ (rationale) is not, ‘what do you need to know in order to accomplish a particular task?’ (for example the task of being a believing Christian today), but ‘how are you growing in understanding?’: how are you learning, learning how to think, learning how to be. It is possible only from the platform of communicative rationality to launch the critical rationality that puts the question ‘why?’ and thereby opens up the possibility of critique and change. It is not possible to do this from the platform of instrumental rationality alone. Christian education is oriented to critique and transformation. It has the development of critical rationality as a key aim. To achieve this it must therefore firstly facilitate communicative understanding.
Design for learning: reflection as model and method
The course unit with which this essay is concerned forms the backbone of the ‘Christian Doctrine and Ethics’ strand of training for Ordained Local Ministry within the Wakefield Ministry Scheme. For the cohort of ordinands starting training in autumn 2004, this strand has been redesigned, following a recommendation by the House of Bishops’ Inspectorate that ‘more programme time is identified within the mini-residentials in which candidates can acquire more theological knowledge and practise theological skills, especially theological reflection’. The skills of Christian ethical reflection are also brought here within the overall framework of theological reflection, although particular moral and ethical issues are also engaged with elsewhere in the learning programme. The course comprises sixteen 1¼ hour sessions interspersed with a further six ‘tutorial’ sessions which seek to anchor all of this in the candidates’ ongoing practical experience in the parish (and beyond).
The first session is designed to introduce the candidates to a model of theology as reflective practice, setting this alongside other models they might be bringing with them (the most common of these being that ‘theology’ is academic, difficult and remote from practical concerns). The second explores the reflection model by means of the Learning Cycle. The third gives the group an extended opportunity to try this out for themselves. The fourth then sets out to make the link between theological reflection and spiritual formation as a way of introducing some aspects of the Doctrine of God: how do we know God and grow in that knowledge? Sessions five and six repeat a similar process to sessions one to three, but this time in respect of ethical thinking. Sessions seven and eight are closer to a traditional seminar model, looking at selected extracts from current theological and ethical scholarship and encouraging the group to identify what we can learn from them. Sessions nine to sixteen examine a range of topics about God, Creation, Providence, Christ, Faith, Church and Christian Living, such as might be expected in a traditional theological syllabus, but in this instance the students are invited to work together with the course tutor in designing the precise content of those eight sessions, as an exercise in discerning how theological reflection responds to the questions they are encountering in the context of practical ministry. In what follows a more detailed account is given of the first four sessions.
In a simple word-association exercise at the beginning of the first session, candidates are invited to brainstorm the words they associate with the term ‘theology’: words such as ‘academic’, ‘scary’, ‘remote’, ‘abstract’, being regularly offered. For the second exercise of the session candidates are given a sheet containing four short extracts from different kinds of theological works and asked to discuss in pairs the impact of the passages upon them. The aim is not to interpret the texts but to respond to the differences of style and feel between them. Allowing people to share their immediate personal responses to the texts provides a way of gently breaking up the ground, getting people into the world of academic theology by observing how, in very different ways, each writer is engaging in a piece of reflection rooted in their personal faith but drawing on different kinds of resources (historical, philosophical, cultural etc) to help them explore and articulate it.
The remainder of session one introduces three models of ‘theology’ for discussion: the ‘Queen of the Sciences’ derived from the medieval worldview, the ‘Specialist Discipline’ of the modern university, and the ‘Reflective Practice’ that is to become the guiding paradigm for the course. At the beginning of session two the candidates are sent away in pairs to tell one another the story of a time in their life when events led them to some fresh learning about God. They are asked in conversation to try to tease out what was learned and why- what factors contributed to the learning and how were they changed by it? The purpose of this is to build confidence by showing that they are already doing practical theological reflection, before presenting the theory of it. This model for theology is then explored in much more detail in the second session, using the Learning Cycle.
The candidates are then asked to come to the next double session having selected an issue or situation from their current practical / pastoral experience as the material for an extended exercise in theological reflection. Working in groups of three, each person in turn presents their issue with one of the other two as ‘tutor’ to help them undertake the theological reflection, and the other as observer. The person presenting has five minutes to describe the experience forming the material for reflection. The ‘tutor’ then takes them through the process of teasing out the essential aspects of the experience and finding out what theological resources from personal experience and external sources might be relevant to understanding what is going on and learning from it. Together they aim to establish what is being learnt, and how it will affect action in future. The observer then has the opportunity to make any comments about the process. This exercise takes up the whole of session three. There is only a minimal ‘de-brief’ as the object is for people to take responsibility for the learning at this point and carry forward into their practical experience the action steps they decide through the process.
Session four employs the style of a ‘resourced conversation’ to help the group explore how what they have done so far is itself theologically significant, throwing light upon what it means to grow in the knowledge of God. For this a worksheet is used containing a range of varied materials, introducing the ideas discussed in the earlier part of this article:
§A brief account of the real life piece of theological reflection based on the damp sand, illustrating the point that this model of doing theology loosens the hold of the teacher over the learner by opening up a creative space in which learners may well go off on a fruitful track of their own.
§A reflection on the meaning of the metaphor of ‘reflection’, exploring how literal reflections can be clear and true, dim and obscure or distorted and disorienting; leading to a discussion of how we learn and grow by a continual process of projecting out from ourselves ideas, thoughts, experiences, onto other people, contexts, God, and discovering what ‘comes back’.
§A collection of three New Testament passages using the reflection metaphor (1 Corinthians 13:12, James 1:23, 2 Corinthians 3:18) as an invitation to Bible study in groups of two or three.
§A suggestion that the idea of learning through reflection might challenge Descartes’ maxim of ‘I think, therefore I am’ with something like ‘We relate, therefore we become’, and that this might be theologically more in tune with our confession of God as Trinity, i.e. that personal identity derives from the relational nature of being (Zizioulas, 1993).
§A short extract from Parker Palmer’s To know as we are known (1983:97), referred to above, in which he employs the archaic word ‘troth’ to describe the way ‘truth emerges through listening and responding to each other and the subject at hand’.
A further task in session four is to set an assignment for discussion at the forthcoming tutorial session. For example, when the intervening period was the Christmas season, candidates were asked to choose a service they attended, or a sermon they heard, over the Christmas period, and to reflect on ‘what understanding of the theological meaning of Christmas the service or sermon conveyed to them’, and come to the session prepared to share this with the group as a discussion starter. The intention was to draw upon the approach to theology learned in the first four sessions to produce material that would lead naturally into an exploration of Christology and the doctrine of the Incarnation.
Conclusion
Reflection is much more likely to be encouraged where there is informality and interactivity, but also a place for silence and individual pondering. We learn together and from each other, whoever is in the role of teacher or learner on any given occasion. Personal growth is the ultimate goal of education, and learning ultimately is measured by change in oneself; and the theological case for this is based on how God leads us towards the flowering of full personal identity in relation with others whom God is similarly leading. Evaluation therefore is never complete in terms only of ‘what do you know?’ and ‘what can you do?’ as a result of participating in a learning event; there is always also the ‘how are you changing?’ or ‘what are you becoming?’ to be explored. As Mezirow (1991:219-20) states: ‘If a goal of education is to foster transformative learning, dogmatic insistence that learning outcomes be specified in advance of the educational experience in terms of observable changes in behaviour or “competencies” that are used as benchmarks against which to measure learning gains will result in a reductive distortion and serve merely as a device of indoctrination’. The use of the word ‘indoctrination’ should alert us to the peculiar aptness of this point in relation to the field of theological education.
I have argued that theological reflection at its most basic is a habit of life for any Christian with a responsibility for teaching, sharing or helping others to explore faith. For this reason I have used a simple model of constant alternation between the active and reflective modes of Christian living. More deliberatively structured models will be appropriate for more formalised educational contexts. I have rooted this understanding of reflection in a theological framework of divine-human encounter as the source of personal formation and growth. This relational model entails the use of the religious imagination and the facilitation of communicative understanding within the educational process. The teacher is always also a learner, because the teacher is a disciple on the way. It is impossible be a facilitator of reflection and a fount of all knowledge at the same time. For the learner, the sand of the wilderness may always turn out to be the sand of the beach after all.
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