Pastoral work and theology cannot be separated

Monday, July 31st, 2017

We often hear it said of Pope Francis: “He’s not a great theologian, but he is a great pastor,” as if this assertion made any sense.

As a theologian who shares Pope Francis’s heritage of Latin American Catholicism, I strongly disagree.

Pope Francis is a terrific theologian, whose theology is coherent and cogent because it arises precisely out of his walking with the community.

And, he is a great pastor because his pastoral practice and teaching are informed by a careful and thoughtful theology that reaches back into our tradition and grounds itself in the Gospel.

Although “snobbery” between theological disciplines is contrary to the work we all need to do, as Jim Heft asserts in America, I do not feel that the way to do this is to simply erase all distinctions or to supplant one hierarchy with another.

The distinction between the disciplines of theological work and how these function in our common life is necessary.

To distinguish the different theological tasks and how these can be interlaced together is productive.

Frankly, the polemics around separating the theological from the catechetical and the intellectual from the pastoral is what my students might call a “first world problem.”

It exemplifies the kind of conflict that women theologians and theologians of colour, in particular, simply cannot afford.

We do not have time or energy for such divisions because of the urgency of our work.

One way to understand how the pastoral and theological are intertwined is to think about Martin Luther King Jr.

There are two titles that precede his name: the Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr. He is both a professional theologian, with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and a pastor.

In King’s case, we can see how seamlessly he moves from the life-and-death concerns of his community to mining the Christian tradition for a way to judge racism and segregation (in his “Letter From Birmingham Jail” he quotes both Aquinas and Augustine), to then formulating a theology that can address the suffering of his community in light of the Gospel.

As we can see here, what King understands is that the formation of his community’s living faith, his pastoral work, requires a previous step, and that is the work he does as a theologian.

King reflects on how the interplay of the present and the past in the Christian tradition provide new perspectives. Continue reading

Cecilia González-Andrieu is an associate professor of theological studies at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, California.
Image: Women’s Lifestyle