From Practical Theology to Practice-oriented Theology

The article claims that PT needs to change as a discipline in three directions. First, we cannot longer lump every person in our category of religion based on the normative conceptions of our own (Christian) religion. We need criteria to distinguish between normal experiences, spiritual experience and religious experience. Secondly, the process of opening up the material object of PT has decentred the (all-knowing) theological scholar who builds theory on lived spirituality and / or religion. Thirdly, we need to develop a new form of methodology to build theory on practical reasoning, namely practice-oriented methodology.