Theopedia

Practical Theology

Definition

Practical theology, sometimes called pastoral theology, is the theological discipline concerned with the church’s own life and ministry: as an art, it aims at the effective publication of revelation and the edification of Christ’s kingdom on earth; as a science, it studies the revealed principles governing that art.1 Where systematic theology roots itself in exegesis, practical theology roots itself in the doctrine systematic theology establishes, sharing ecclesiology as common ground with it.1 It is one of several theological disciplines, alongside biblical, historical, and systematic theology.2

Areas of Study

A. A. Hodge grouped practical theology’s subject matter under five main divisions.3 The first three concern the church itself: its divinely revealed idea and design; its appointed constitution and methods of administration, together with the history of rival forms of church organization and the controversies they occasioned; and the discretion Christ allows his people in adapting methods of organization to changing conditions. The fourth concerns membership: its conditions, the duties and privileges it carries, and the relation of baptized children to the church.3

The fifth division, the church’s officers, Hodge further grouped by function.3 As teachers, officers practice catechetics, the Sunday school, sacred rhetoric (homiletics and preaching), and the production of Christian literature. As leaders of worship, they oversee liturgies, free forms of prayer, psalmody, and sacred music. As rulers, they exercise the offices of ruling elder, pastor, and the church courts (the session and, above it, the presbytery) through which church discipline is administered.3

Strong’s shorter account calls practical theology “the system of truth considered as a means of renewing and sanctifying men, or, in other words, theology in its publication and enforcement,” and assigns homiletics and pastoral theology proper to it as “scientific presentations of the right methods of unfolding Christian truth.”4

Historical Development

The theology-itself debate: theoretical, practical, or both

Before “Practical Theology” named a branch of the theological curriculum, theologians debated whether theology as such is a theoretical or a practical habit of mind. Petrus van Mastricht, writing in the Prolegomena of his Theoretical-Practical Theology (1682-87, expanded 1699), surveyed the positions current among his own Reformed scholastic contemporaries.5 Followers of Thomas Aquinas held theology to be a merely theoretical habit, since salvation consists in “our most perfect contemplation of God” (John 17:3; 1 Cor. 13:12). Followers of John Duns Scotus held the opposite, that theology is merely practical, a position Mastricht himself accepted “in a healthy sense.” A third group called it neither theoretical nor practical but “loving and affective.” A fourth divided theology’s own content in two: theoretical with respect to what must be believed (God, the Trinity, the union of Christ’s two natures), practical with respect to what must be done.5

Mastricht set his own view apart from all four: theology, for him, is not “theoretical-practical, properly speaking and in itself,” despite the title his own method of treatment gave the book, but rather “practical, and even preeminently practical.” He gave four reasons: theology is “the doctrine according to godliness”; Scripture calls knowledge without practice “vain” (1 Cor. 8:1-3; 13:1-2) and even “dead” (James 2:17); everything theology treats concerns either an end or the means to it, and both are practical matters; and Scripture assigns each head of theology its own practical use.6 Francis Turretin (1623-1687) raised the same question independently, and Mastricht notes that Reformed scholastics of his generation were reopening a dispute that reached back to the thirteenth century and that the Remonstrants and Socinians had reopened in their own way as well.5 The debate was not merely academic for Mastricht: in 1667, when the Elector of Brandenburg called him to Frankfurt an der Oder, it was to “a professorate in Hebrew and practical theology,” and his inaugural address there argued for the necessity of both praxis and theory for the theologian, a theme he had already taken up as a student at Utrecht.7

Naming a standing branch

By the nineteenth century, theological encyclopaedists had settled “Practical Theology” as one standing branch among several. Strong divided theology into Biblical, Historical, Systematic, and Practical, placing homiletics and pastoral theology under the last.4 Hodge classed it as one of six branches of theological encyclopaedia, alongside apologetics, exegetical, historical, and systematic theology.2 Bavinck’s own history of the discipline’s names records that qualifiers like “didactic,” “systematic,” or “positive” were added to distinguish dogmatic theologia “from biblical ethics or ‘moral’ theology as well as from ‘practical’ or pastoral theology.”8 Practical theology served throughout as the counterpart discipline the others were defined against, not as a residual or lesser category among them.

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t calling theology “practical” reduce it to technique or moral exhortation, emptied of doctrinal content? This is substantially Scotus’s own position as Mastricht reports it, and Mastricht’s answer is not to reject the practical designation but to redefine what it covers.5 “Practical” does not mean lacking contemplation: the highest speculative truths theology treats, God’s own being, the Trinity, the union of Christ’s two natures, cannot themselves be produced by human action, yet they still call forth “an action of love and veneration” in response.6 Conversely, a theoretical grasp of those truths that stops short of that response is not yet theology as Scripture describes it: knowledge without practice is “vain” and even “dead.”6 On this account, practical theology is not doctrine’s lesser counterpart but doctrine carried through to the end for which it was revealed.

Is practical theology a real theological discipline, or only applied ministry skill separate from doctrine proper? Hodge’s own definition answers by grounding practical theology in the same material as systematic theology: it “roots itself in the great principles developed by Systematic Theology,” with ecclesiology as ground common to both.1 Practical theology does not compete with doctrine or stand apart from it; it applies principles systematic theology establishes to the church’s own life, constitution, and ministry.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 1, “Christian Theology; Its Several Branches; and Their Relation to Other Departments of Human Knowledge,” Q11, 23-24: “Practical Theology is both a science and an art. As an art it has for its purpose the effective publication of the contents of revelation among all men, and the perpetuation, extension, and edification of the earthly kingdom of God. As a science it has for its province the revealed principles and laws of the art above defined. Hence as Systematic Theology roots itself in a thorough Exegesis at once scientific and spiritual, so does Practical Theology root itself in the great principles developed by Systematic Theology, the department of Ecclesiology being common ground to both departments: the product of the one, and the foundation of the other.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chap. 1, 17-18. ↩ ↩2

  3. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chap. 1, 24-25. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  4. Augustus Hopkins Strong, Systematic Theology: A Compendium and Commonplace-Book Designed for the Use of Theological Students, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: The Griffith & Rowland Press, 1907), 41-42: “Practical Theology is the system of truth considered as a means of renewing and sanctifying men, or, in other words, theology in its publication and enforcement. To this department of theology belong Homiletics and Pastoral Theology, since these are but scientific presentations of the right methods of unfolding Christian truth, and of bringing it to bear upon men individually and in the church.” ↩ ↩2

  5. Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 1, Prolegomena, trans. Todd M. Rester, ed. Joel R. Beeke (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2018), chap. 1, “The Nature of Theology,” §XLVIII, 206. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  6. Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, 1:207. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  7. Adriaan C. Neele, “Petrus van Mastricht (1630-1706): Life and Work,” in Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 1, 32-33. ↩

  8. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 1, “Dogmatic Theology as a Science.” ↩