SERVICIOS
PEDAGÓGICOS Y TEOLÓGICOS (SPT)
(PEDAGOGICAL AND THEOLOGICAL SERVICES)
FOR A QUALITY THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION
MANIFESTO
1.
To Promote a Debate
We
are people committed to Theological Education (TE), taking as a starting
point the diversity of our practices: from the classroom as well as
from the church, from the university and from non-formal education,
from research as well as from political commitment, from theology as
well as from the science of religion, from somewhere in Abya Yala or
from other areas committed to this reality.
We begin this document by defining what we mean by TE (section 2), then
we try to substantiate our choice and use of the term “quality”
(3) within the challenges of the current situation (4), linking it to
the quality of life (5), which is becoming increasingly threatened in
our Abya Yala. We conceive of TE as a practice embedded in Christian
mission (6) as well as in general education (7), which seeks a way in
which both spheres must approach the struggle for an abundant life for
all. TE, as a systematic, rigorous effort, needs the critical support
of theology and of pedagogy, as well as of many other disciplines. Starting
from a paradigm (8) suited to integrate both aspects in a liberating
and intercultural framework, we point out some characteristics of a
quality theology (9) and pedagogy (10). Finally, we relate some of the
particular characteristics of a quality TE (11) to the institutions
(12) in which it can be achieved, suggesting some possible uses of this
manifesto (13).
2.
What We Mean by Theological Education
We understand TE to be part of the Church’s mission of announcing
and anticipating the Reign of God in history. It deals with a particular
kind of education connected to the creative, organized, and critical
learning of those who reflect on their faith—that is, those who
do theology—from the diversity of their gifts and ministries.
TE differs from other responsibilities in the Christian community, such
as initiation into faith, catechesis, liturgy, proclaiming the Good
News and the pastoral service, although it is supported by these. We
propose a TE that is open to all believers, women and men, that is continued
throughout their lives, and with an incidence in different spheres and
degrees of specialization. To accomplish this, TE will dialogue with
political practices, cultural expressions, and the sciences committed
to the defense of all aspects of life. We vindicate a TE that is articulated
in a Jesus-modeled theology, and produced by a Church that is not self-centered
but directed toward the Reign of God.
We envisage a TE devoted to encouraging the defense of life. Such TE
needs to be contextual, open, dialogical, change-oriented, interdisciplinary,
and intercultural, and assumes and goes beyond traditions and cultures,
as well as pastoral and particular educational models. In addition to
being at the service of the churches, we would like TE to be open to
questioning by explicit or implicit theologies in the religious, cultural,
and contemporary traditions of Abya Yala. Thus, we are talking about
a TE that is assumed within the framework of the Christian faith, but
from an inter-religious context and perspective.
3. Why Do We Speak of Quality in Theological Education?
In this globalized world, the term “quality” is used frequently
and in very diverse ways. Invariably, in every corner of our planet,
people have tried to define what a “good education” would
be, but the different approaches to quality are historically and culturally
conditioned. In the 1980s, the neo-liberals imposed on education and
other social practices a discourse of quality similar to the quest for
“excellence” or “total quality” in the business
world. Among other things, this approach aims to separate arbitrarily
the technical from the political, as if education could be isolated
from the social environment. However, despite our criticism, we appropriate
some of the challenges posed by this trend. We want to adapt this language
and its demands and refashion it from an ethical, political, and theological
perspective, as we think it would be beneficial for TE and our churches.
We don’t talk much about quality in theology. But if we are to
do so, particularly from Abya Yala, we need to assume and overcome several
tensions and contradictions. Following the example of Jesus, Christian
quality would:
• Integrate the inspiring and transforming (Pneuma) Word with
a normative discourse (Logos);
• Assume the creative tension between the faith of the people
of God and the sophistication of a discourse regarding faith;
• Be nourished by the struggle for change as well as by mystical
silence;
• Move between cultures with emerging rationalities and the legacy
of a dominant culture and rationality; and
• Know that “truth is something constructed” and that
there is always the risk of its being “imprisoned in injustice.”
To seek quality in the theological undertaking means combining in an
imaginative way the search for theological relevance in the context
of the overwhelmingly pressing reality of Abya Yala regarding the pertinence
of a discipline that has its own epistemological identity and demands.
4. The Vulnerability of Theological Education Demands Greater Responsibility
from Us
It is crucial that we take responsibility for the quality of our work
in Abya Yala, above all, in higher education, because it is becoming
more difficult to justify the very existence of TE:
• Churches question us about the real service that we provide;
• Social movements pressure us to explain our relationship with
their struggles;
• Ancestral and emerging cultures ask us about our complicity
with the colonial past and with a present that is sometimes neocolonial
and influences the way of learning, teaching and researching;
• Educational institutions (academic as well as non-formal) demand
that we give an account of our pedagogy and teaching methods;
• Governments, through their respective ministries of education,
impose ever stricter formal requirements on our institutions to grant
recognition at the university level; and
• Funding agencies demand well-founded theological-pedagogical
plans, as well as transparent and efficient financial administration.
Because of the vulnerability of TE we must assume greater responsibility.
To face this challenge we must relate the quality of TE with the general
context, as well as with the practices, disciplines, and paradigms that
are a part of it.
5. For an Abundant Life
Within the Christian faith, life is lived as a gift, as something that
precedes us, that continually transcends and transforms us, even beyond
death. We remember that God is the author of life and that we are part
of a Creation without boundaries, which includes all living beings in
the world.
Quality of life is not a state of being, but a dynamic and relational
goal: no one can achieve a true quality of life while the lives of others
are threatened. Quality of life is integral: material and spiritual,
physical and intellectual, moral and esthetic, personal and communal,
natural and cultural. It embraces both needs and desires.
We acknowledge that, generally speaking, our societies, cultures and
churches fail to guarantee an abundant life not even for themselves,
not to say for everyone. On the other hand, neither do our practices
nor our theological and pedagogical projects necessarily assume the
centrality of life and its defense.
As Christians we envisage the Reign of God as the horizon of abundant
life, of a shared and harmonious life. It is this utopia that drives
us to craft a quality of life together with other cultures and beliefs
that have life as the heart of their commitment. In every context, place,
and circumstance, we must discern how we can creatively articulate this
utopia to different social actors and movements within a particular
project of community, of society, and of citizens. We acknowledge that,
while aiming to this common utopia, we held different and even contradictory
visions and practices according to our own social or cultural origin,
according to our gender, our generation, and so forth. We admit that
such a diversity of utopian visions is conflictive.
Faced with the colonization of minds intended to impose a dominant system,
faced with the globalization of late capitalism, the “virtualization”
of reality, and the destruction as well as privatization of public spaces,
we put our faith in a quality education—including TE— suitable
to bring about spaces in which diverse ways of life might develop that
make it possible not only to resist these impositions, but to create
a subjectivity that anticipates new life styles. The eschatological
tension of faith and Christian theology—its inevitable dimension
of hope—is the invitation to think, believe, and work in terms
of the “new human being,” of “the new creation in
Christ.” Therefore, we propose a theological education that remains
open to new experiences of faith, and to a renewed future; not one anchored
to predetermined systems or schemes, nor won over by the ideology of
a single system and its deep anthropological implications.
6. For a Transformation Bearing Mission
By quality mission we mean both the projects and the practices of those
who follow Christ at the service of an abundant life and the anticipation
of the Reign. Mission comes primarily from God rather than from the
work of people or specific institutions. Mission, for Christians, must
be a creative and change bearing practice. Its quality emanates from
its closeness and conformity with the practice of Jesus and all of those
witnesses who, throughout history and in their own context, were inspired
by the Holy Spirit to retrace the same path and continue along it.
At the same time, we admit that Christian mission always presents a
contradictory aspect, which defines a permanent tension between the
ideal and the real, between the coming of the Reign of God, the incompleteness
of the human being, and the ambiguity of any human project. From the
point of view of TE, we see mission as:
• A response to the Mission of God as a call or demand that precedes
our initiatives;
• A Church not self-centered, but at the service of the excluded
and of an abundant life;
• Denunciation of and resistance against all kinds of power (economic,
political, religious, moral, sexist) that intend to become absolute;
• Development of and participation in alternative and liberating
social practices that lead us on paths to greater equity, justice, peace,
non-violence and preservation of the Creation;
• Accompaniment and consolation of suffering people; and
• Inclusion and wholeness: an inclusive focus (at the service
of all humanity) as well as integral (for all the dimensions of a person).
7. For an Education devoted to Life
We are struggling for an education devoted to life in abundance, which
means a continual and permanent high quality education for everyone.
By denouncing the divorce between quality and equity, we vindicate the
democratic nature of education, the ethical concern for shaping responsible
citizens and the struggle for living together in solidarity. We believe
that, among many other criteria, quality education involves:
• Diversity, accessibility, and the permanence of diverse educational
modalities and specializations throughout life;
• A critical knowledge of reality and systematic analysis;
• Emphasis on learning, on learning to learn, on learning to be,
on learning to live together, and on learning to follow a path that
leads to a culture of peace;
• Respect for the different ways in which people give meaning
to their lives;
• Advocacy for fair production, distribution and consumption of
goods;
• Consistency between discourse, theory, and practice;
• Social, cultural and citizen participation;
• Leadership and interaction of the participants in educational
communities;
• Permanent evaluation of the leadership and of their goals regarding
to their pertinence and impact on specific contexts; and
• Development of Pedagogue-student and of student-Pedagogue relationships
in agreement with political projects aimed to improve the quality of
life.
Many of these challenges are a legacy from the popular education movement.
8. For an Intercultural Paradigm
As a part of the political, pastoral, and educational practices that
aim to quality of life, we relate TE to theology and pedagogy, and these
to a broader paradigm within which they operate. This has to do with
an epistemological framework in which different viewpoints and dimensions
of action and human thought meet. Even at the risk of remaining at a
very abstract level, we tentatively describe this paradigm as:
• Inter/trans-disciplinary and intercultural;
• Integral and multifaceted (multiplicity of forms of knowledge
and the complexity of their relations);
• Inclusive of the multiple forms of rationality and human potentialities
(emotional, cognitive, physical, spiritual, moral, intuitive, creative,
etc.);
• Contextual and historical (articulated in historical circumstances
and in economic, political, cultural, gender, and other contexts);
• Problematic and transforming (toward changes implying a greater
quality of life for everyone);
• Intuitive and unprecedented (open to unexplored dimensions of
the person and of human life, of history, of other cultures, etc.);
and
• Procedural, in an ascending spiral (that is, with successive
interpretations, contextual, and transcending).
9. For a Liberated and Liberating Theology
We are putting our faith in a quality theology in which the practices,
contents and methods are in permanent interaction. Its method, in addition
to using the paradigm previously described, will present its particularities
that are peculiar to hermeneutical, communal, ecumenical, and other
spheres. From within its own context, a quality theology integrates
and articulates emerging theologies with theologies that have interpreted
the Christian faith in its multiple expressions throughout the history
of the Church. The evangelical hallmark of this theology comes from
a revelation intended more for “fools and children” than
for “wise men and scholars.”
The community of faith produces and takes an active part in theology
and is not only a recipient. Its activity articulates the technical
and regulating role of the professional theologian, as well as of the
Church or of church tradition.
We want a theology that critically assumes is own identity and specificity
in dialogue and interaction with other theologies. Furthermore, in the
context of an ethical and hopeful horizon, we will build the quality
of theology in dialogue with other spiritualities, sciences, as well
as cultural and ideological expressions. We will see that the content
of a quality theology includes some of the following dimensions:
• Prophetic, sapiential, and mystical;
• Trinitarian, that is, in creative interaction between its theological,
christological, and pneumatological dynamic;
• Practical, biblical, and hermeneutical;
• Provisional, because it is attentive to the unexpected irruption
of grace in different situations and circumstances;
• Liberated, and liberating from intellectual, political, and
ecclesiastical systems that act against an abundant life;
• Embedded in a specific tradition (theology is always conjugated
in plural form; there is no theological synthesis that subsumes all
of the particular traditions);
• Articulating the spiritual with the political; and
• Open and receptive to the richness and teachings of other beliefs,
worldviews, and spiritualities.
We retake many of these theological characteristics as part of the rich
legacy already transmitted to us by the Latin American Theology of Liberation.
10. For a Pedagogy of Hope
A quality pedagogy is that one which we are able to build and renew
continually, from emerging educational experiences, without enclosing
ourselves in any particular pedagogical school, but making it relevant
in the specific context or circumstances. Such pedagogy submits educational
practices to a critical assessment, seeking to supplement and strengthen
their quality without conferring any legitimacy to them. It is rather
the outcome of a permanent inter/transdisciplinary work with all the
sciences and arts of education. We count on a rich tradition to produce
quality from pedagogies:
• Of hope, related to a broader political project;
• Of transformation and of context;
• Of diversity (diversified pedagogy tailored to the subjects’
field of knowledge, projects, methods, contents, types of learning,
etc.);
• Of dialogue between different knowledges and cultural negotiation;
• Of creativity (assuming the multiplicity of expressions and
promoting autonomous learning);
• Of democracy and equality (in terms of human rights, culture
of peace, of gender, inter-generational, and ethnic equity, etc.):
• Of criticism, participation and dialogue;
• Of popular social sectors, that is to say, sensitive to the
presence of excluded people, of those marginalized by power structures;
linked to cultures produced by people so far ignored by established
knowledge.
11. For a Theological Education of Quality
As expressed by the characteristics and criteria that we have indicated,
we closely relate TE with the quest for the quality of life (personal,
spiritual, institutional, political, etc.). We want to open TE to a
multiplicity of social actors who respond to charismas and ministries
connected to different kinds of theological students and modalities
of teaching. This means recognizing the diversity of needs, interests,
intelligences, and talents, according to gender, generation, culture,
beliefs, sexual preference, and so forth, of each one. We want to translate
the recognition of diversity into a coherent interaction between theological-pedagogical
theory and practice.
If we propose a TE that would make a critical and constructive contribution
to the mission of the Church, we will have to aim towards:
• A reciprocal or cross-fertilization between popular theology
(communal, biblical, artistic, political) and the academic exercise
of theology;
• Continuity and diversity of TE throughout all of life and in
all environments;
• Resolution of the tension between vocation, critical reflection,
and acquisition of tools for Christian commitment in general and pastoral
work in particular;
• Construction of bridges between theology and the pastorate,
between ecclesiastical commitment and the transformation of society,
between comfort and denouncement;
• Articulation and complementarity between the different areas
of theological work;
• Critical, creative, and interactive use of the principal mediations
of theological work (spiritual, practical, hermeneutical); and
• Relevance and impact of TE (in the context of the family, community,
church, cultural, social, political, etc.,) in terms of the pertinence
of theology as a discipline.
12. For Quality in Theological Education Institutions
We link the quality of a TE institution to the quality of life and of
TE itself. The kind of human relations within an institution foreshadows
the climate and quality of its institutional life. Quality management
in the institutional life is measured by the level of learning, security,
welfare, mutual trust, initiative, as well as by other general criteria
linked to an inclusive character, diversity, and gender equity. The
quality of management and of administration, regulated by planning,
monitoring and evaluation techniques, is subject to the project and
to the participative performance of TE. In other words, the administrative
model also should respond to the criteria of service and pedagogical
criteria in the search for a true learning community. Because relationships
connected to knowledge are inevitably relations of power, the management
of a quality TE institution needs:
• Democratic, political participation;
• A style of relations based on mutual trust and transforming
professional commitment;
• Transparency, flexibility;
• A solidary efficiency (as an alternative to that which is dictated
by the appetite for wealth);
• Empowerment of the various actors;
• Distribution of information;
• Sustainability (less dependence, more self-management);
• Etc.
13. How to Work with this Manifesto
The convictions and hopes that we express in this manifesto will have
an impact and relevance only in the measure that the actors involved
in TE make them their own, restating them according to their own context,
church, educational instance, and specific actors. Sections 5 and 12,
and in particular the last four, can be used as information for holding
workshops where people involved in specific TE institutions would translate
the norms and guidelines into verifiable indicators within their own
practices. We are convinced that this manifesto can stimulate deep debates
about some of the pillars on which any TE project rests, for instance:
• The general context of TE and of the institution;
• The pedagogical, theological, and political project;
• The study plan and curriculum;
• The formation and continual education of professors, the revision
of materials;
• Teaching methods;
• Management and administration;
• Many other aspects.
Servicios Pedagógicos y Teológicos (SPT) is at your disposal
to support and coordinate the development of this kind of initiatives,
taking into consideration the particular reality of each institution,
and has qualified professionals to assist in this area. Those interested
can write to serviciospt@gmail.com
As individuals, we endorse this manifesto as the outcome of a collective
reflection encouraged by SPT, which gathers our convictions and integrates
our individual contributions:
• Nancy E. Bedford, Theologian, Argentina and the USA
• Heinz Bichsel, Theologian, Switzerland
• Fernando Bortoletto F., Theologian, Brazil
• Beatriz Cajías, Pedagogue, Bolivia
• María Chávez, Theologian, Bolivia
• Víctor Codina, Theologian, Bolivia
• Manoel Bernardino de Santana F., Theologian, Brazil
• Hans de Wit, Theologian, The Netherlands
• Wanda Deifelt, Theologian, Brazil and the USA
• José Duque, Theologian, Costa Rica
• Welvi Enríquez, Theologian, Uruguay
• Benito Fernández, Pedagogue, Bolivia
• Raúl Fornet Betancourt, Philosopher and Theologian, Cuba
and Germany
• Verena Grüter, Theologian, Germany
• Dante Ibáñez, Pedagogue and Theologian, Argentina
• Nelson Kirst Theologian, Brazil
• Néstor Míguez, Theologian, Argentina
• Ofelia Ortega, Theologian, Cuba
• Anaida Pascual, Pedagogue, Puerto Rico
• Matthias Preiswerk, Theologian and Pedagogue, Bolivia
• Luis Rivera-Pagán, Theologian, Puerto Rico
• Jairo Roa, Theologian and Economist, Colombia
• Juan Sepúlveda, Theologian, Chile
• Guillermo Steinfeld, Theologian, Argentina
• Danilo Streck, Pedagogue and Theologian, Brazil
• Jung Mo Sung, Theologian and Philsopher, Brazil
• Roberto Zwetsch, Theologian, Brazil
Abya Yala, Christmas 2007
The following people also support this proposal:
• Reinerio Arce, Theologian, Cuba
• Viviana Barrón, Pedagogue, Argentina
• Pierre Buehler, Theologian, Suiza
• Oneide Bobsin, Theologian, Brasil
• Nancy Cardoso, Theologian, Brazil
• Leopoldo Cervantes-Ortiz, Theologian, Mexico
• Abraham Colque, Theologian, Bolivia
• José Luis Claure, Pedagogue and Theologian, Bolivia
• Alejandro Dausá, Theologian, Cuba
• Josef Estermann, Philosopher and Theologian, Bolivia
• Jieun Kang, Philosopher, Paraguay
• Gloria and Ross Kinsler, Theologians, USA
• René Krüger, Theologian, Argentina
• Roy H. May, Theologian, Costa Rica
• Violeta Rocha, Theologian, Nicaragua
• Harold Segura, Theologian, Colombia
• Elsa Támez, Theologian, Costa Rica
• Cherie White, Theologian, Mexico
• Janet Woodward H., Theologian, Costa Rica