74 PART ONE: INTRODUCTION Johannes Först speaks in this regard about a “theology of practice, which either reconstructs the expressions of meaning that inhabit action, or which creates such expressions purposefully and true to tradition.”194 It is important to note that the voices cannot be separated as strictly as the model suggests at first sight. The authors speak of “a dynamic of distinct, but interrelated and overlapping ‘voices’ […] in the conviction that there is, in all this diverse articulation, a certain coherence - a coherence of faith, of the truth being revealed to faith in the Spirit.”195 Each voice is, implicitly or explicitly, informed and inspired by the others. For example, the voice of espoused theology is just as much informed by the actual practice as by the contributions of theologians and by church teaching and regulations. At the same time, it is possible for one voice to contradict another. Indeed, the relationships between the voices are complex, making it hard to explicate the ‘coherence’ of which the authors speak. Yet, they state that “[i]t is, if our theological reading is right, only in the conversation between voices, carefully attended to, that an authentic practical-theological insight can be disclosed.”196 Formulating the implications of the presupposition that the relationships between the voices are mutual, the authors write: “TAR claims not only to effect change of practice through theology, but also to effect change through practice of theology,”197 which means that “the formal and even normative ‘voices’ (or at least, the interpretation of them) is quite properly to be formed by the voices that arise from faith practice as a complex locus for theological understanding.”198 In spite of the remaining questions, the model remains helpful “as a device for making this complexity manageable as a heuristic and hermeneutic framework within which to understand the TAR processes,”199 according to the intention of Cameron and her co-authors. My research has a different focus than classical TAR, which studies the interaction between the four voices within a particular faith community in order to (re-)align the operant and espoused 194 Johannes Först, Versöhnung mit der Moderne: Rekonstruktionen kirchlicher Praxis, Beiträge zur Gegenwartsbedeutung jüdischer und christlicher Überlieferungen, vol. 3 (Würzburg: Ergon-Verlag GmbH, 2017), 13–14. Original text in German: “Theologie der Praxis, die die dem Handeln innewohnenden Sinnbezüge rekonstruiert beziehungsweise sie ‘Lebensdienlich und Überlieferungsgerecht’ entwirft.” (translation: FW, italics in original). 195 Cameron et al., Talking about God in Practice, 53–54. 196 Cameron et al., 56. 197 Cameron et al., 59 (italics in original). 198 Cameron et al., 150. 199 Cameron et al., 54.
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