Pastoral Theology and Homiletics
Reflecting on (church) life | accompanying people | opening up perspectives
Pastoral theology is an adventure. It leads into the centre of a fascinating whirlpool of differences: church and world, nature and grace, people and powers. Out of these tensions, it interweaves the great narratives of scripture and tradition with the many small stories of our everyday lives - discursively condensed in homiletics at the exemplary practical location of the sermon.
Pastoral theology thematises religious and secular experiences of these implicit 'light theologies' in the potentially creative difference between the practical fields of the present and the discourse archives of the past. In this, it proves to be a discipline whose representatives are constantly running back and forth between both places (lat. discurrere) - in other words: conducting a 'discourse' on the creative potentials of precisely this difference.
As an 'ethnology of the people of God', it combines the perceptual joy of pastoral field research ("seeing") with the judgement of theological archive research ("judging") - in order to then bring the results of its 'participant observation' into equal dialogue with practitioners ("acting"). In contact with the field of practice, it thus exposes itself to a fundamental presumption of learning: Pastoral theology is not a one-way street!
In this context, you can acquire the competence to develop a small local theology for your own context independently and at eye level with as many participants as possible - regardless of whether your future place of work is in a parish, school or elsewhere. It is always about the competence to negotiate the big themes of God's speech in the small places of his people: curious, down-to-earth and full of experience.
This inevitably leads to contrasts, the differences between which have long since permeated our late-modern everyday life: Religions, denominations and secularities of the 21st century. Interculturally orientated pastoral theology still has much to discover in the adventures of its present. New pastoral places to follow Jesus, but also fascinating people, interesting stories, sincere devotion - and most of all: their own God as the mystery of the world.