157 The Methodology of Theological Action Research 4 2. Understanding of ‘theology in four voices’ For TAR, it is not just the voices of normative and formal theology are meaningful sources but also the voice of what the practice of faithful practitioners reveals and their own voice: what they themselves can say about it. By normative theology, TAR means to say: Scripture, the creeds, official church teaching and liturgies—and everything that, for the practitioners in the organisation, counts as authoritative and thus normative in terms of their lives and practices. For formal theology, it understands the theology of theologians and their academic dialogues with other disciplines. The silent, non-verbal voice of theology, as embedded in the actual practices of a group, is termed operant theology by Cameron et al. (2010, p. 57). The theology embedded in a group’s articulation of its beliefs, as well as in how they explain verbally their actions, is referred to as espoused theology. The task of theological research is ‘to bring the four voices into conscious conversation so that all voices can be enriched’ (Cameron & Duce, 2013, p. 356). In so doing, it can be expected that the four voices will really complement and reinforce each other, although it is possible that they will sometimes prove to be contradictory. In such a case, it is still valuable to hear them all. According to TAR, a good listener cannot do without any of them: ‘We can never hear one voice without there being echoes of the other three’ (Cameron et al., 2010, p. 57). Seeking the richness of all the voices brought together is again based on the specific spiritually driven epistemology that TAR is based on. The four voices theology should be deployed from ‘the conviction that there is, in all this diverse articulation, a certain coherence—a coherence of faith, of the truth being revealed in the Spirit’ (Cameron et al., 2010, p. 56).
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