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Faith: a Practical Theological Reconstruction

Author:	F Gerrit Immink
Published By:	Eerdmans (available in the UK from Alban Books, Edinburgh) (Grand Rapids/Cambridge)
Pages:	309
Price:	£18.99
ISBN:	0 8028 2793 4

Reviewed by Alun Brookfield.

The author of this book is Chair of Practical Theology at Utrecht University and is widely regarded for his philosophical as well as his theological skills. He brings those skills, along with his broadly Calvinistic theology, to bear on the subject of faith and allies them to his experience as a Protestant pastor in the Netherlands.

His stated concern in the Preface is to address the question of faith in daily life rather than in theory and to do so by subjecting faith to a rigorous academic examination. Whether he achieves this aim is, in this reviewer’s opinion, open to question. As he admits in his Introduction, it is important to recognise “the complexity and unruliness of faith”. It is therefore a very difficult concept to explore either in theory or practice and doubly difficult if any attempt is made to separate them.

Immink begins by recognising that the word ‘faith’ itself is a slippery one - it can have any one of several different meanings, not all of them religious. So he devotes his first chapter to the anthropological and metaphysical aspects of faith, from the starting point of assuming that faith, although it is a divine gift, takes shape only in the lives of human beings, who are intrinsically spiritual.

Chapter 2 explores the interconnection between faith and life, before going on in Chapters 3 and 4 to examine the theology of faith. He addresses the question of where faith comes from (God) and how it is exercised through a divine change wrought in each believing human being. He concludes that “faith is not a form of escapism, but it stimulates the imagination and motivates us towards action".

Chapters 5-8 address the fact that faith does not exist without communication - between humans and between God and humans. This in turn raises the question of how we speak about God, who is, of course, so ‘other’ that language can be more of a hindrance than a help to communication about God.

Immink’s final chapters attempt to pull all this theorizing together into a fresh reconstruction of the praxis of faith, which he sees as especially expressed in the act of proclamation of the Word of God, and in pastoral care in community. Ultimately for Immink, “the life of faith consists of an actual relationship between god and the human world”.

Although this is a fascinating and enlightening book, with a wealth of scholarly material,  and well worth its price, it is ultimately unsatisfying because, in the view of this reviewer, the author has failed to step outside his own Reformed tradition. Faith is examined from within, rather than from without, with the result that his own theological presuppositions get in the way of his analysis. Over and over again, he seems to go to the edge of new and radical thought, then pulls back before he can venture into the unknown.