I have often been accused of being overly theoretical and ‘in my head’ – which I think has been with good reason. Over the past few months, a few people around me have been challenging me to be more practical and to implement my thoughts or at least ground them.

Questions such as “give me an example?” and “what does that look like?” are really helpful to move me to that.

But that got me thinking.

A book I am currently reading quoted an old addage “there’s nothing as practical as a good theory”.

My thinking is that being in “theory land” is for me an act of faith where I read something in the Bible and want to hold on to that ideal and see it in my life. To dwell on the miracles, redeemed lives, healings, changed cities, etc. inspires us.

Then along comes pragmatism and suggests that that won’t work for reasons x & y. It has been tried and failed. Etc.

And I find that frustrating, because i want the theory to work.

And it often never gets to the point of even trying to implement
it.

When I read the Bible I find my idealism would say “we could redeem this situation with a handful of…” or “God will provide for our food needs” or “we can do that”. Yet pragmatism would say “you can’t take this city with these few men” or “you can’t feed this many people with so little food” or “you can’t give away all your money to the poor”

Take for example, the feeding of the 5000. Jesus doesn’t survey the crowd and go “wow, we just can’t feed this many people with so little resource”. Neither does he go out and just purchase the food necessary to feed them. Nor does he tell those with a lot to give to those with little or none.

Jesus’ faith (the theory) is that with God, the impossible is possible. He knows that God will provide for His people. In Matthew’s telling he has already spoken of “do not worry” about what you will eat/wear etc. He then gets practical and begins to do based on what he knows.

Now to demonstrate that I am not anti-pragmatic a similar situation arises in Acts with the food distribution lines and the Twelve get practical and say “we are focussing on this, get a few leaders to sort this out”. Sorted.

But both highlight the important part to me:

Pragmatism needs to come after theory.

Faith is being certain (in your actions) of what you cannot see (your theory). So the proper method for applying this is “here is the theory on, say, leadership. the Bible indicates it looks like this”. Pragmatism then says “ok, how can we make this work?”.

Yes, there is need for some form of a feedback loop from practicalities back to the thoery, but this needs to done as a subsequent, creative, reflectice act.

When it is ordered in this manner there can be creativity and inspiration at both points. I often find that pragmatism seems to kill creativity in theories before they have even been fleshed
out.

This is where a process like de Bono’s 6 thinking hats would force
time to be spent in both the theory and the practice modes.