Podróżować – doświadczać – rozumieć, czyli ks. prof. Macieja Ostrowskiego teologii pastoralnej metoda własna

The contemporary humanities consider the value of an engaged, first-person, not only third-person or objective point of view. One may consider the religious faith as a peculiarly religious first-person point of view. According to that perspective, the article’s central claim is: that what Maciej Ostrowski develops is, indeed, the first-person theology, consciously and methodologically validly practiced from the depths of personal religious faith and free from subjectivism. In justification for that claim, one pays detailed attention to the original themes admitted by Ostrowski’s theology in the “see-evaluate-act” triad, calling them his own pastoral method. In the first and second parts, it is argued that this  method leads from traveling – a pilgrimage that dynamizes the pastoral-methodological ‘seeing’ – to experience, which, in the end, leads to understanding. When the traveling and pilgrimage are to dynamize the pastoral ‘seeing’ – experience and understanding broaden the perspective of the pastoral method, placing a standard methodological rule of ‘evaluation’ in a broader, biblically-based perspective. In the third part of the article, a differentiating criterion was proposed, called the “existential test,” which is an extension of the desideratum of ‘acting.’ According to the criterion, either a theologian becomes the theology she/he authored, integrated with her/his faith, or a given set of  ideas is false. Applying this criterion to concrete examples from the theology of Ostrowski, one demonstrates that his position passes the indicated test, thus is an original contribution to theology and the practice of life.