| Why Phenomenology? Click here to return to the Church Innovations web site. This past June over a lovely meal in Malibu a group of philosophers and theologians, including William Abrams, asked me why I used phenomenology as a basis for my theological work. The question from a world-renowned linguistic analytic philosopher and a truly faithful and creative Christian philosopher came as no surprise. In his typically generous way he genuinely wondered at how I seem happy to join such a notoriously opaque and thick philosophical practice to my regular practical and plain interest in the everyday life of the church in God’s mission in the beloved world. What struck me as surprising is that this exact same question has been asked of me by a number of people from a rather amazing variety of social locations. Most of these have not been academics, and most have asked in a remarkably friendly, but somewhat baffled tone. In this same friendly spirit, I want to reply with a short but painfully meandering initial answer. Some of this reply is biographical including taking the opportunity to thank some of my teachers and some more directly a plain answer. Early in my studies as an undergraduate I was captured by the one intellectual and practical question that has formed my intellectual, research, teaching, and ministry practice. In undergraduate school I had the blessing of several fine biblical scholars, especially Walter Keller, a group of philosophers attentive to the church’s thought, Richard Luecke (a McKeon student) and Ken Klein, a neo-positivist linguistic analyst, and my beloved and wise advisor, Warren Rubel who was steeped in literary and philosophical hermeneutics. During that inchoate period, I became deeply indebted to Luecke’s very practical Chicago Aristotelian pragmatist framing and the virtues of the common language analytic tradition. After reading for the umpteenth time E.D. Hirsch’s Validity in Interpretation, I decided to read the appendix that engaged in a full-blown critique of the work of a German phenomenologist, Hans Georg Gadamer. Rather than convincing me of Hirsch’s wisdom, the appendix made me extremely curious about Gadamer and phenomenology. It would be years before I came to a deep understanding of what drew me to this turgid German thinker, even after I studied with him at Heidelberg. The question was only intensified in my time at Concordia Seminary and Concordia Seminary in Exile, Christ Seminary—Seminex. However, since my seminary was at this time in deep upheaval associated with the church of my Lutheran tradition, I was only able to take one course sequence at Washington University with Spiegelgruber on the history of the phenomenology movement that at least whetted my appetite for the phenomenological tradition. As is to be expected of someone studying with this exceptional faculty in such a difficult time, it was my teachers of Bible, especially Ralph Klein, Edward Krentz, Norman Habel and especially Fred Danker who captured my imagination during this time. Most importantly, I honed and deepened my own Lutheran hermeneutics with Robert Bertram and continued my life long learning from Edward Schroeder, my first teacher of theology in undergraduate school, and my continuing teacher to this day. By the time I was a student of Hans Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, David Tracy, Stephen Toulmin, Wayne Booth, Charles Wegener, Langdon Gilkey, and Brian Gerrish I had formulated my question this way: How does one render public and explicit a supposedly authoritative text in a culture of pluralism in such a way that it functions normatively for real persons? Notice, I was not asking how does one justify such interpretation, though that is a necessary moment in such an argument, but what are the practices, the how, for doing so. I have never left this question. My dissertation took it up in a discussion at a meta-theoretical and theoretical level by analyzing and critiquing a spectrum of New Testament interpreters, theologians, and philosophers who have read the Gospel According to Mark since the Second World War. Upon completion of this dissertation, I was already teaching a course with my dear friend, colleague, and partner in this work, the rightly celebrated New Testament scholar, Donald Juel. The course took up some of the central themes of this question and developed them. Over 14 years, before his leaving Luther Seminary to teach at Princeton, we taught the course every year, changing, developing, and deepening both the practices we sought and the meta-theoretical and theoretical frames for using Scripture, in particular, Mark, in the life of local churches. After his leaving we continued a major project, funded by the Lilly Endowment, Inc. (deep gratitude to Craig Dykstra and James Wind) that expanded the conversation to a rather wide international community of scholars. While the question remained the same, the framing became richer and wider, deeper and more disturbingly relevant and poignant for us both. One passage in Mark in particular seemed to strike me as a painful parable of my plight. Following Mark’s telling of Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples, while Jesus is preparing for the three days ahead of him, he takes the disciples to a garden for prayer. Between his own praying, he breaks to find the disciples asleep and he begs them to awake, watch, and pray. They find it very hard to do so. This spiritual drowsiness seems to be so true for me and many of my contemporaries. We want to watch. We want to be aware, attentive, and to pray, but we keep falling asleep. In a quiet and powerful way, it came to me that phenomenology precisely offered the practices that assisted my faithful dwelling in God’s Word and world. Phenomenology gave me the practices of attentiveness, wakefulness, critical but generous attending to the given that all the prejudices, both fruitful and unfruitful, framed, shaped, ordered, and dominated my reading of Word and world. Phenomenology was the helpful discipline that made possible a liberation from drowsy acceptance and acquiescence to Word and world. My use of phenomenology became more intentional. The practices of bracketing, folding, critical distance, and seeking a critical participation in the fusing horizons of Word and world became increasingly powerful, fruitful for seeking truth regarding my persistent question. While forsaking a belief in a general hermeneutics, much like the pursuit sought by Schleiermacher and the strong mediating tradition of German theology and philosophy of the Nineteenth Century, I remained convinced by the general direction of the phenomenological tradition growing out of Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, and especially the work of my dissertation advisors Paul Ricoeur and David Tracy and readers Wayne C. Booth, and to a great extent over against my fourth reader, Hans Dieter Betz. Betz, however, helped me complete a loop in my education by reintroducing me to Gerhard Ebeling, Betz’s own teacher from his undergraduate work at Tuebingen, and someone who I had read with much interest in college and seminary years. The link to Ebeling, with major departures, remains critical to my own Lutheran hermeneutics of Word and world. During Chicago days I came into a far deeper conversation with Aristotelian pragmatism, analytic philosophy, and major historical figures in the Christian and Jewish tradition, especially the writings of Thomas Aquinas and the Longerganian interpretation of Thomas through work with Ann Carr, David Tracy, and Bernard McGinn. Still, I remained primarily a phenomenologist who found the critical conversations that Gadamer and Ricoeur had with the critical theorists, especially Jurgen Habermas and the French philosophers, Levinas, Paul DeMan, and Derrida my home. Ricoeur’s three fold hermeneutics of (1) good will, (2) critical suspicion, and (3) doubt of self remains my working meta-hermeneutics. I integrate within this essentially Ricoeurian meta-hermeneutics most of the traditional forms of the historical critical method, literary criticism, critical theory, and so-called post-modern, or neo-Nietzschean interpretation theory. I find Ricoeur’s understanding of the rule of metaphor, the sustaining prejudice of discourse analysis, especially narrative analysis, most friendly to both qualitative and quantitative sociological analysis. I remain baffled by the failure of most of his readers to understand the rather profound force of his analysis of “having one self as another.” Ricoeur’s life long work on the will remains a horizon within which my own work functions as a small but deeply indebted footnote of my teacher. Despite the thickness of this Continental tradition, I find it most practical spiritually, intellectually, and operationally in my deep commitment to doing theology in, with, under, against and for local churches. For over thirty years, I have worked with the fruitful prejudice that God’s movement in the world can best be understood from within the actual practices of local Christian communities. In communities gathered around the one gospel and sacraments for the sake of God’s beloved world, I find the primal work of understanding the missional God. The once abstract and merely speculative doctrine of the Trinity has become concrete, specific, alive and enlivening in the phenomenological analysis of the practices of local churches and the systems that care for them, indeed, even the systems that do not care for them. This is the vision that has driven my work with the team at Church Innovations Institute, a not-for-profit learning community I founded in the late 80s with the purpose of “innovating your church’s capacities to be renewed in God’s mission.” With this team, especially Dr. Patricia Taylor Ellison, Pr. Robert Armstrong, the Rev. John Mueller Nowell, Gary Pearce, Barbara Miller, Daniel Lautenbach, and Caroline Hvidsten, and 21 associated consultants I practice the disciplines of phenomenological attentiveness of the practices of local Christian communities. The Institute invited an international group of sociologists, theologians, and church leaders to form an International Consortium for a theologically formed, social scientific understanding of missional church, especially local Christian communities and the systems that create the matrix for their being renewed in God’s mission. The founding triumvirate was Professor Coenie Burger, University of Stellenbosch, S. Africa, Professor Harald Hegstad, Norwegian School of Theology, Oslo, Norway, and me. Having expanded from its beginnings, this group coming from four continents meets yearly. This year we meet for the fourth time in Africa. The CI team forms a worldwide learning community with thousands of local churches, church leaders, and scholars to innovate such a missional church. Many intellectual disciplines, some indebted to phenomenology, but many not, share our work. Together we join these local churches in doing theology for the sake of God’s mission. We join together cutting edge research and consulting practices that, when blessed by the Holy Spirit, profoundly renew local churches and the systems that create the matrix for their being missional church. The list of consulting practices begins with our primary offering: the Partnership for a Missional Church. Together with a cluster of congregations (6-15 local churches) we covenant for a 3-5 year journey of spiritual discernment for innovating their capacities to be renewed in God’s mission. We prefer to work with local judicatory leaders and schools of theology in forming this learning community so that these systems become part of an innovative system for innovating missional church. We have at this time clusters on four continents involving dozens of denominations and independent local churches. Together with these many local churches and systems we engage in the primary research that is joined with the secondary research on this topic to the basis for new innovations of our consulting practices. This becomes the circular journey of spiritual discernment for a primal task of the church, truth seeking communities participating in God’s mission in the beloved world. The other consulting processes involve very practical tools for assisting church staffs to be renewed in God’s mission; we call this Staff Covenanting. Since the level of innovation necessary for meeting the challenge of the new missional era leads to necessary and complex conflict, as it did in the early church, we have taken our clues from contemporary conflict studies and consulting practices in working out the vision of the early church for integrating conflict and mission. We have developed over a twenty-year period of time ways of joining conflict and mission. The most recent version of this work is called Thriving in Change. Like all of our consulting practices, it is a result of years of working with local churches primarily through longitudinal research into the excellent successes and failures of that work. Dr. Ellison led a team that has just completed a major longitudinal study on Conflict and Mission and a major redesign of those consulting resources. We are in the beginning of another major longitudinal study of the Partnership of Missional Churches. These longitudinal studies work with major online resources designed and executed by our Information Technology Team, headed by Daniel Lautenbach. These resources are gathered in one online database called Church FutureFinder. Much more could be said but my point is simple. Like St. Augustine, and I imagine most Christians, I find myself using phenomenology to be critically attentive to Word and world because God has guided my wakefulness through this itinerary of learning long before I saw its purpose and by the power of the Spirit, I pray these phenomenological practices will continue to grant the faithful, hopeful, and loving fruits of renewal in God’s mission in a manner that respects the critical disciplines of our time and the critical place of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as the center of my life and work. In Christ's Peace, Pat Keifert |
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