ANZATFE Address

Australia and New Zealand Association for
Theological Field Education
Conference 17-19 November 2004, Auckland NZ

‘More than a tick in the box. Phenomenology and experience:
worthy partners in theological reflection’
Colin Hunter BTheol, MMin, MA, DMinStds

Preamble

It seems to me that one of the key requirements for anyone involved in the ministry of supervised theological field education is an active curiosity and an open and enquiring mind about the meaning of situations. ‘What do we think we know, how do we know what we think we know, and what do we do with what we think we know?’ are epistemological and missiological questions that I would expect would occupy the thinking of field educators on a regular basis. Our task is to encourage students to exercise curiosity about their experiences of ministry, and the experiences of those with whom they minister, and to equip them to reflect theologically on those experiences (‘Who is God?’ and ‘What is God like?’ in this situation). In the process we can’t avoid the conundrum that a number of people can be present at the same time, and apparently experience the same event, and yet report the experience and interpret the experience in very different ways. And so our question is not only about experience, it is also about interpretation, and that represents the intersection of phenomenology and hermeneutics. Phenomenology is about description, hermeneutics (from Hermes, messenger of the gods) is about understanding and interpretation.

These were the questions that motivated my research in 2002 into the experiences that students in Supervised Theological Field Education (STFE) encounter as they present goals, prepare and present case studies, formulate evaluations and comply with a multiplicity of requirements of the program. What do they experience, and how do they learn through this particular mode of theological education? How might their experiences be accessed, described and interpreted in a way that had credibility within a predominantly academic institution such as a theological college? Most other units in a theology degree can be assessed by having the student write essays or sit examinations to test their knowledge and competency with regard to the course content. It is not like that with STFE because the starting point is the student’s experience and the end point is their subsequent action in response to reflection and interpretation. STFE is not so much testing knowledge as encouraging integration of theology and praxis and our evaluations are a synthesis of evaluations by peers, supervisors, congregational committees and above all, by the students themselves. The task is not simply to take someone else’s theology, however insightful and erudite, and apply it in real-life situations of ministry. Teachers, supervisors and students in STFE are actually engaged in doing theology and it needs to be done rigorously and well.

Anyone who has been involved in a theological college over the last twenty or thirty years would be aware that STFE has not always been highly regarded by some faculty within the institution (not so within the two colleges in which I teach). STFE has been regarded as the application of theology learned in the classroom, or as practical training in how to do ministry and (therefore) not essentially theological. Part of my motivation in undertaking this research was to provide a credible justification of STFE as a valid mode of theological education and to hopefully demonstrate that it is a worthy partner alongside biblical studies, systematic theology and the history of Christian thought in interpreting and responding to existence.

Theological reflection and phenomenology

The heart of STFE is theological reflection and I would expect we would all be familiar with a number of models of theological reflection:
• The ministry model articulated by James and Evelyn Whitehead which draws on the sources of Tradition, Experience and Culture .
• The model developed by Patricia O’Connell Killen and John de Beer which uses images and prayer as means of assisting in the interpretation of experience .
• The liberation model which asks the challenging questions about justice and makes use of social analysis in interpreting situations of oppression .
• The transcendental model developed by John Paver which ‘attends to spirituality without neglecting critical analysis, social justice and the need for change’ .

Many field educators would have cut their theological teeth on John Macquarrie’s ‘Principles of Christian Theology’ and looked for resonance between models of theological reflection and his formative factors of theology – experience, revelation, Scripture, tradition, culture and reason . If Macquarrie’s framework is accepted as a working definition of what it means to do theology, then arbitrary distinctions between theology and theological reflection, or indeed between theology and praxis, disappear.

In all of these approaches to theological reflection, experience is a major source of reference simply because experience is what happens to us, and what we observe in the world around us. As the Macquarie Dictionary defines it, experience is ‘the process or fact of personally observing, encountering, or undergoing something’ . It is helpful to think of experience in these three ways, observing, encountering, undergoing. If I watch an Australia – New Zealand cricket test match on television I observe it and therefore experience it. If I go along to the match and get caught up in the crowd dynamics I encounter it and therefore experience it. But if I am out in the centre and face up to a Brett Lee express delivery I undergo it and most certainly experience it. There are levels of experience, levels of engagement, and theological reflection addresses them all.

Students in ministry experience ministry sometimes by observing what seems to be happening in the lives of their parishioners, sometimes by encountering situations by being drawn in as confessors or counsellors, and sometimes by undergoing situations in which they are one of the principal actors in circumstances that profoundly challenge and shape them. I wanted to know at what level students experience STFE; are they observers; is it an encounter; or do they undergo something that changes them in some way? By exploring a methodology to access and describe their experiences in STFE, I hoped I might learn something about reading and exegeting experience, just as we read and exegete Scripture.

So then, if we adopt the Whiteheads’ ministry model of theological reflection as our starting point, we need to pay attention to the Tradition (including Scripture), Culture, and Experience:

• We have the resources of historical method and literary analysis to interpret the tradition.
• We have the insights of anthropology and social analysis to explore culture.
• What I am suggesting is that phenomenology is the appropriate entry point for the exploration of experience.

Phenomenology is primarily about describing experience, and only secondarily about ascribing meaning to the experience. From our perspective phenomenology is not theological reflection in and of itself, it requires the conversation partners of Tradition and Culture. But then neither is a study of the Tradition theological reflection in and of itself. Edward Farley writing in the nineteen seventies and eighties was critical of mainstream theological education as it had been delivered in the modern era. He said there was a missing element in theology and that was the theological interpretation of situations , in other words relating the insights of the tradition and lived experience. To redress this lacuna, Farley suggested four necessary tasks for theological interpretation :

• The first task was to identify the situation and describe its distinctive features.
• The second task was to trace the history of the situation.
• The third task was to locate the situation within its broader context so that a more-than-parochial perspective could be developed. This might be described as locating the situation within its ambient culture.
• The fourth task was to discern the appropriate response demanded by the situation.

Phenomenology can be a key to the first of Farley’s four tasks, i.e. ‘to identify the situation and describe its distinctive features’.

A phenomenological method

Phenomenology as it is practised in many areas of enquiry today originated in a failed project! Edmund Husserl trained as a mathematician, although his interest was more in the realm of philosophy. Husserl believed that much more could be known and asserted about the natural world than the logical positivism of his mathematical training would allow, but he developed what would in time be seen to be an unrealistic model of inquiry. He proposed that it was possible for a skilled researcher to achieve pure consciousness, or transcendental consciousness, by bracketing out her/his experience that had been contaminated by culture, history and societal pressure. His concept of phenomenological reduction required that the researcher’s experience of the natural world be set aside; that she identify that her perceptions are eidetic (remembered and therefore interpreted) in character and then bracket out those perceptions when interpreting human experience. What would remain in the mind of the researcher after such a process would be an understanding of the essence of the experience. Through the method of transcendental phenomenology, in which the researcher bracketed out personal experience and transcended the distortions of history, culture and society, pure consciousness would be able to identify the true nature, or essence, of the experience. What Husserl appears to have done, is to surreptitiously re-instate the subject-object differentiation that was seen to be the deep flaw in logical positivism when applied to the interpretation of human experience .

The flaw in this remarkable project was identified by Husserl’s own student and successor as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Freiburg, Martin Heidegger and Heidegger’s student Georg Gadamer , the flaw being that it is simply not possible to step outside of one’s social conditioning and biases to ‘objectively’ interpret one’s experience. Human experience is essentially subjective and cannot with integrity be treated as an entity which can be objectified, analysed and understood in scientific terms. No individual can so transcend the limitations of historical and cultural existence as to be able to discern the essential meaning of her/his or anyone else’s experience. In fact Heidegger was dismissive, even contemptuous, of his predecessor’s philosophy, taking the totally opposite approach that interpretation is an ontological function of humankind. He proposed a hermeneutical cycle in which, in order to access the meaning and interpretation of experience, one must ‘endeavour to leap into the circle, primordially and wholly’ . It certainly proposed a very different quality of engagement with experience compared with Husserl’s ideal researcher who was required to bracket out all biases and prejudices.

Nevertheless Husserl made a lasting contribution to what we now know as qualitative research methods, and his work has been resurrected by researchers in the field of psychology, particularly Amadeo Giorgi and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. There are significant resonances between Husserl’s phenomenological method and current practice of theological reflection:
• His concept of bracketing out biases and preconceptions (what he called phenomenological epoche) is very much like the Whiteheads’ idea of suspending premature judgement.
• The distinction between noema, (which Husserl described as the immediate pre-reflective response to stimulus), and noesis, (which was the conscious examination and description of the experience), reminds us that the meaning of an experience is not immediately and unambiguously evident. If it were there would be no need for theological reflection.

A major difference between Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology and the discipline of theological reflection, is that the former was to be undertaken by an individual skilled researcher, and the latter is generally accepted as an intersubjective task pertaining to the community of faith. Phenomenology attempts to expurgate presuppositions and biases, theological reflection engages the history and values of the Christian tradition in conversation with experience in the context of the Christian community.

So then, to summarise, the specific purpose of the research was to enquire into students’ experiences in STFE, and the broader objective was to develop and offer a methodology that might contribute something to the theological curriculum debate in response to Farley’s critique.

The research process

Five aspects of STFE formed the basis of the research:
1. presenting goals to the peer group,
2. preparing a case study,
3. presenting a case study to the supervisor,
4. presenting a case study to the peer group and,
5. presenting evaluations to the supervisor.

Obviously choices had to be made about which aspects to include and which to omit and the choice was made to focus on the participants’ experiences of personal and peer supervision rather than of the congregational committee .

Each aspect of STFE researched required two contributions by the participants:
• A questionnaire which asked them to describe the experience in as much detail as they could; to recollect sensory and emotional responses associated with the particular task; to represent the experience in some creative form such as prose, poetry, drawing etc.; and to complete, in 35 words or less, an essence statement beginning with, ‘Preparing a case study is like …’
• A one-hour group session in which they worked together to begin processing their collective experience.

In the group sessions the participants were invited to spend time individually reviewing their questionnaires, and identify what were for them the key words and phrases from their responses. The group then shared their key words and phrases and grouped them in clusters of similar descriptors. They allocated names to the clusters of key words and this meant that they did the preliminary work of identifying themes as a group. The group then developed an essence statement to describe the overall experience of, say, presenting a case study to the supervisor:
The experience of presenting a case study to the supervisor involves mutual affirmation, trust and discovery, together with the challenge of vulnerability and the demand for choices in response .

By the end of each session a range of data from the questionnaires and group work had emerged which could be translated into ‘emerging themes’ for that particular aspect of STFE. When that was completed for each of the five sessions, the next task was to identify what Renata Tesch describes as ‘metathemes’ which represent the totality of the phenomenon being researched. In other words bringing together the emerging themes from each session pointed to overarching themes which described the overall experience of undertaking a unit of STFE.

The research findings (or metathemes)

1. Mutuality of learning

As an educational medium, STFE functions best when all participants are learners. The intrinsic power imbalance between a supervisor and student, (or between a peer group facilitator and students), can be redressed if the supervisor is able to acknowledge his/her own willingness to learn and to grow. Challenge is constructive and helpful if it is done in a transparent and invitational manner in which the student’s perceptions are respected, but in which both student’s and supervisor’s perceptions are open to enquiry and adjustment. Where they felt encouraged, supported and nurtured, the participants seemed more prepared to enter into the sometimes painful, threatening and risky process of revealing themselves to themselves and to others. This first metatheme is about intentional relationship as a stimulus to growth. The structures of STFE require that all of the participants agree (through the serving/learning covenants) about the processes, expectations, obligations and privileges that each will give and receive in the relationship of learning. The terms of the covenants are negotiated, not imposed, and become a guide for the learners, rather than a rigid rule to be applied in all situations. This metatheme recognises that the most effective learning is self-learning which can be either enhanced or discouraged by the nature of the supervisory relationship.

2. Intersubjective learning

This is similar to the previous metatheme, but focuses, not on the power balance between supervisor and supervisee, but on the relationships between two or more people who relate to each other as subject-subject, rather than subject-object. According to Jessica Benjamin, ‘The joy of intersubjective attunement is: This Other can share my feeling’ . This experience is well attested in the research data, particularly Session Four that dealt with the student presenting a case study to the peer group. The key words and phrases developed by the participants are rich in allusion to the experience as intersubjective and educational, e.g. ‘discovering’, ‘shared journey’, ‘mutuality in learning’, ‘discernment’, ‘learning process facilitated by being taken seriously’. Joshua’s creative response conveys the joy that Benjamin describes, as well as the essence of intersubjective learning:

Open up, trust the group, and they will honour that trust.
They ask, they help, they encourage, they discern.
They learn with me.
This is great!

Intersubjective responses, whether in a therapeutic or educational setting, create a set of shared meanings for common or ‘typical’ experiences and, in that sense, the meaning is constructed by the participants in a way that creates options for future action.

3. Chosen vulnerability

The greatest learning occurs when students choose to make themselves vulnerable. To be vulnerable is to be ‘open to emotional or physical danger or harm’, or ‘exposed to an attack or possible damage’ (Microsoft Word Dictionary). In a program in which students present reports which reveal something of themselves to their supervisor or peers, there is always the perception, and indeed the real possibility, that they may suffer emotional harm. Group interactions can be destructive if a student’s particular weakness or failing is emphasised and probed to the point of causing distress.

The initial effect of vulnerability was identified by the participants in the first session as ‘apprehension’, (because ‘I am sharing much of the inner me’), and was attended by physical sensations of sweating and shortness of breath. Whilst vulnerability can have a shadow side, it can also be a most productive avenue for growth in self-understanding. For this to happen it must be a ‘chosen vulnerability’ not a compulsory vulnerability. In other words the student must discern and decide that the act of revealing to others some hidden knowledge or truth, will of itself lead to a new understanding and liberation from a previously held, perhaps unhelpful perception. The supervisor or peer group can encourage and invite the student towards a disclosure that they perceive will be helpful, but the student must be free to choose the levels of disclosure with which s/he is comfortable. Derek’s abseiling image from the first questionnaire expresses this metatheme well:

Opening ourselves to others
requires careful instruction and preparation
and a willingness
to leap off
into the unknown and clamber up again
to the top of the cliff
wondering
what all the fuss was about!!

The student is invited to go over the edge, makes the decision her/himself, and in the appropriate environment, finds that it is not so daunting after all and s/he has in the process grown in confidence and self-esteem.

4. Revelation as a path to new understanding

Revelation of self to others leads to new understanding and comes in three ways through the STFE process:
• The revelation of self that comes to the student through the preparation of the materials for goal setting, case studies and evaluations.
• The revelation of self to others in making presentations to the supervisor and peer group.
• The new revelation of self that comes through the intersubjective responses of supervisor or peers to their presentations.

Knowledge of self is a (or perhaps the) primary objective of STFE. When it is combined with knowledge of the other through the subject-subject character of intersubjective learning, a whole new learning paradigm characterised by respect for self and other, compassionate curiosity, and the capacity to ‘suspend premature judgement’ , becomes possible. Knowledge of self and knowledge of other through intersubjective learning and chosen vulnerability is a more-than-cognitive knowledge that engages the whole self; mind, body and emotions. It is a knowledge acquired through what Paul Tillich described as ‘ontological reason’, which is ‘cognitive and aesthetic, theoretical and practical, detached and passionate, subjective and objective’ . That is why it is important to give space for the students to express their intersubjective responses in creative ways that engage their aesthetic sensibilities through art and poetry, as well as helping the presenter discern practical responses to the situation. On a number of occasions during and following the research phase, the participants expressed their appreciation of the employment of artistic expression in the research process and the new perspective on their experience that it frequently gave them. This seemed to confirm Tillich’s challenge to the Enlightenment elevation of the cognitive processes (‘technical reason’ as he described it) to the pinnacle of human ways of knowing.

Mahan, Troxell and Allen advocate the case study method of theological reflection as the most effective means of clarifying ministry situations as ‘knowledge arises out of dialogue’ . However they make the valid point that, ‘when writing and discussing a case, the presenter is always revealing and concealing’ . Concealment could be expected to increase in inverse proportion to the presenter’s sense of safety with the supervisor or within the group, hence the priority that must be placed on confidentiality, trust and respect within the STFE process if revelation is to be encouraged for the sake of the student and her/his ministry.

5. Experience as a locus for learning

This metatheme is implicit in all of the data; the whole STFE process is predicated on experience being the starting point for the action-reflection learning model. Experience is present in the process at three levels:
• The original experience of the student in a ministry placement. To be allowed into the STFE program, students must have a ministry placement as a context for learning.
• The experience of preparing a case study for the supervisor or peer group (which might be described as re-experiencing the situation).
• The experience of presenting the case study.

Each of these elements of experience, woven together, forms a learning opportunity for the student. In STFE, the initial focus of the learning opportunity is on an experience of ministry, rather than on an abstract concept of ministry, or even a theological framework for ministry. This focus then moves to the student as a ministering person and explores the student’s actions and reactions to the situation as a means of uncovering the her/his instinctive interpretation of the experience. This creates a dialogue between the twin foci of the situation and the student’s responses to the situation that facilitates new insights into, and transformations of the student’s interpretive frameworks (or operational theology).

There are other valid starting points in the learning cycle; one can start with Tradition or Culture and achieve transformations in one’s framework for interpreting experience. The traditional academic theological disciplines of biblical studies, church history and systematic theology provide tools for interpreting the tradition and experience of the church in different situations. Practical theology offers insights into the analysis of experience within particular cultural contexts. In STFE, however, the starting point is the current experience of the student, and the research has demonstrated that this is a valid form of theological education, alongside other modes, in that it encourages a structured analysis of the student’s ministry experience, using the insights gained from other theological disciplines.

Some implications for supervision and theological education

A legitimate question that must be addressed before drawing inferences for other STFE programs concerns the transferability of small-sample qualitative research to wider contexts. The accepted criteria of precision, verification, reproducibility and consistency required of scientific research cannot apply to research that seeks to describe and interpret human experience . Lincoln and Guba suggested the alternative criteria of credibility, transferability, dependability and conformability for qualitative research , but even these were considered by some to be ‘still rooted in the positivist conceptions about nature and knowledge’ ; i.e. that there is a ‘real world out there’ in which anything and everything can be analysed and described provided the correct method is applied. Whilst the qualitative researcher should always apply rigour to the gathering and interpretation of data, ‘establishing the trustworthiness of insights generated through exploratory research is the job of those who are consumers of the research’ . With that qualification, some observations are offered about how the research method and findings might inform the practice of supervision in STFE, and theological education more generally.

Directors of STFE programs need to have a clearly articulated model of supervision that underpins their program – a values statement or vision statement. Their model needs to embody principles and practices of reflective practice that place an intentional focus on experience at the centre. The very name supervision can so easily evoke images of direction, of telling, of handing down wisdom and knowledge from master to apprentice, which Paulo Freire described as the ‘banking’ model of education :

• the teacher teaches and the students are taught;
• the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing;
• the teacher talks and the students listen.

STFE offers an alternative model, one in which there is ‘mutuality of learning’, ‘intersubjective learning’ and ‘experience as a locus for learning’. It offers the possibility of learning that comes from taking one’s own experience seriously and choosing to make oneself vulnerable within an environment of confidentiality and trust. Whilst the focus of learning is on an experience of ministry – and significant professional development can happen as a consequence thereof – the student and the supervisor are learning together about themselves and about each other as persons-in-ministry. At the same time as they are grappling together with the ‘theological interpretation of situations’ they are, through ‘chosen vulnerability’, bringing their respective operational theologies into the light of day where they can be identified, critiqued and transformed.

This process is about the head and it is about the heart. This is evident in the response that one of the research participants made to the experience of presenting a case study to the peer group:

All will be well

Have you ever noticed
what strange things
will happen to
you if you let
them?

The other day I was
lying on a table with
a good number of
my colleagues
standing around me
all dressed in white
gowns with gloves on.

I was chatting with them
about this and that and
they kept bending over me
to look at my chest.
So I looked down and noticed
that my entire front was
cut open and my
colleagues were actually
performing surgery
on me.

I was about to protest when
I noticed that they all
had large healing
scars on their fronts
and they were looking
at me with deep gratitude.

It is the least we could do
they said,
after you healed
us.

All will be well,
all will be well.

Practical theology is a term that originally applied to theology generally – all theology was directed towards practice. Edward Farley traced the steps that led to the partitioning of theology, and the defining of practical theology as a discrete field amongst other fields :
• The first step was when moral theology was distinguished from speculative theology in the late eighteenth-century.
• The second step was when church polity and pastoral care were seen as a natural subset of practical theology.
• The third step was the annexation of moral theology into systematic theology and the identification of practical theology as ‘an area pertaining to the church’s fundamental activities’.

The consequence of the segregation of theology into fields or categories, according to Farley, was first the clericalisation of practical theology, then the removal of praxis from the centre of theological enquiry. That is the reason, says Farley, that theology lost the ability to provide theological interpretations of situations.

Now is the time to acknowledge the lacuna and reverse the trend; now is the time to develop theological curricula that integrate theology and praxis, operational theology and articulated theology, vocation and personhood, Fields A, B, C and D. Theological education will then address the human person as a unified subject capable of knowing God and responding to the challenges of existence with reason, courage and integrity.

References

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Benjamin, Jessica. Recognition and Destruction; an Outline of Intersubjectivity. In Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.
Farley, Edward. Interpreting Situations: An Inquiry into the Nature of Practical Theology. In Formation and Reflection: The Promise of Practical Theology, edited by Lewis S. Mudge and James N. Poling, 1 to 26. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 1988.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Philosophical Hermeneutics. Translated by David E. Linge. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.
Gubrium, Jaber F., and James A. Holstein. Analyzing Interpretive Practice. In Handbook of Qualitative Research, edited by Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln, 487 to 508. Thousand Oaks, Ca.: Sage, 2000.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson. First English ed. Southampton: Camelot Press Ltd, 1962.
Hunter, Colin. Supervised Theological Field Education: A Phenomenological Enquiry. Research, Melbourne College of Divinity, 2004.
Killen, Patricia O'Connell, and John De Beer. The Art of Theological Reflection. New York: Crossroad, 1994.
Lincoln, Yvonna S., and Egon G. Guba. Naturalistic Enquiry. New York: Sage, 1985.
The Macquarie Dictionary. Chatswood: The Macquarie Library, 1987.
Macquarrie, John. Principles of Christian Theology. Rev'd ed. London: SCM, 1977.
Mahan, Jeffrey H., Barbara B. Troxell, and Carol J. Allen. Shared Wisdom: A Guide to Case Study Reflection in Ministry. Nashville: Abingdon, 1993.
Palmer, Richard. Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer, Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy. Evanston [Ill.]: Northwestern University Press 1969, 1969.
Paver, John E. The Contribution of Theological Reflection and Pastoral Supervision to Theological Education. Master of Theology, Melbourne College of Divinity, 2001.
Strauss, Anselm, and Juliet Corbin. Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, Ca: Sage, 1998.
Taylor, Michael H. Learning to Care: Christian Reflection on Pastoral Practice. London: SPCK, 1993.
Tesch, Renata. Emerging Themes: The Researcher's Experience. Phenomenology + Pedagogy 5, no. 3 (1987): 230 to 41.
Tillich, Paul. Systematic Theology. Three vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951.
Whitehead, James D., and Evelyn Eaton Whitehead. Method in Ministry: Theological Reflection and Christian Ministry. revised and updated ed. Kansas City: Sheed & Ward, 1995.

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