Grounding theology in experience: A theological and grounded theory exploration of the narratives of people with lived experience of altered moods and Christianity

This thesis explores the contemporary lived experience of altered moods (i.e. those experiences that are commonly diagnosed by Western medicine as affective or mood disorders) and Christianity using a distinctive and robust empirical theological methodology to develop a grounded practical theology. This methodology integrates constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz, 2014) with dialogic mutual critical correlation (Pattison, 2000); grounded theory is thus used as a theological methodology and not simply as an empirical tool.

Analysing 21 interviews with participants who have lived experience of both unusually high and/or low mood and Christianity, I argue that these mood and faith experiences inform and challenge each other in four main areas: identity-talk, interpretations of altered moods, images of God, and Christology. Three major overarching themes frame these interactions: altered moods as experience not identity, a potential disconnect between experience and theology, and suffering.

This analysis of the empirical material is brought firstly into dialogue with disability theology and then with wider Christian theological resources - contextual Christologies, trauma theology, and theology of the cross. This process of dialogue with experience highlights three distinctive aspects of theological reflection on altered moods: 1) Jesus as the site of divine understanding and solidarity, with the traditional image of his suffering on the cross adopted and transformed to incorporate the distress associated with altered moods, 2) the need to attend to the ongoing reality of suffering, and 3) theology of altered moods is a theology of experience, not of identity. Potential elements of such a theology – a mad theology – include wounds that remain, realism about experience, the solidarity of God encountered through Jesus, and the abiding nature of God’s love. Such a mad theology bears witness to the ways in which God is glimpsed and encountered even in the distress of altered moods.