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9 Human Action Throughout this project I have sought to offer an “about face” to practical theology, calling it to give direct attention to the mystery of divine action as the core of its disciplinary focus on the lived and experiential. I have tried to make a case for the lived and experiential encounter of divine action as coming to us in the shape of ministry itself. I have asserted that ministry is first and foremost God’s own action that comes to us in experiences ex nihilo and in nihilo (justification) for the sake of the love of giving us God’s very being (participation). So God’s being is in the becoming of ministry, and we experience the divine being in the lived act of ministering to us. We take the divine being’s form (being conformed to Christ—Christopraxis) by taking on ourselves, through the Spirit, the actions of ministry, by sharing in the hypostatic personal being of our neighbor. So practical theology is a theological discipline that gives its primary attention to the lived and experiential by making ministry its central focus (and text). By doing so, it seeks to articulate the character of divine ministry by giving practical theology a distinctive theological voice, making it a dialogue partner with all other forms of theology, and making it inextricably theological. In addition, it attempts to convey the shape of human ministerial actions by keeping practical theology focused on lived and experiential—and even performative—human actions, seeking to explore how teaching a class, preaching a sermon, leading worship, or running a youth program participate in the divine being by joining the divine action of ministry through the framework of possibility through nothingness. Into Human Action This very framework of human action joining divine action in and through ministry compels us to reflect deeply on human action itself. As I have mentioned in previous chapters, established practical theology has done rich and excellent 243 work on human action, exploring it through hermeneutical theory, habitus of practice, feminist theory, postmodern place theory, and neo-Aristotelian conceptions of phronesis and praxis. Such work has secured practical theology on solid academic ground, giving it the footing to build past its bastardized state in the basement of the theological enterprise. Yet, because this rich work has been done primarily with attention to human action, practical theology has gained its confident structure by linking up to the social sciences, as pointed to in the theories of human action provided earlier. In the last chapter and in this one as well, I too will turn to the social sciences. However, I have tried in my chapters on justification and participation to make space for an understanding of anthropology (and therefore human agency) that is constructed from conceptions born from the experience of divine encounter itself. I have turned to critical realism and its scientific conceptions because, while it is not an apologetic for divine action, it refuses the reductions that eliminate it from most social-scientific conversations, reductions that have drawn practical theologians’ attention away from transcendence or divine encounter. Following this theological commitment in dialogue with realism, I have asserted that human action is always bound in the framework of possibility out of nothingness and cannot, because of sin and brokenness, create a possibility for itself. In the language of realism, human epistemological constructions have no ultimate power in themselves to create or possess the fullness of reality. Therefore, human act and being are always in need of the negating and resurrecting work of Christ crucified (Christopraxis), always in the need of independent objective reality to encounter them as a personal event (as revelation). This realist conception of human impossibility also points to the human being’s possibility (given to it as the ministerial gift of personal encounter). As hypostatic creatures, as persons, we are open to encounter. We are the relationships that make us; we have our being in and through relationships that place us into reality, and therefore we are open ontologically to the possibility of encounter. All our knowing is conditioned by our hypostatic nature of belonging, to paraphrase Polanyi.1 And through this 1. Smith adds a social-scientific element to my theological assertion that we are our relationships, helping us to define what kind of relationships do indeed make us—deeply spiritual relationships of love, or, as I would say, of ministerial action, for ministry is engendered from and for the sake of love. “But note that...

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