MPhil Thesis

Faculty of Divinity

University of Cambridge

An Investigation into the Relative Value of Philosophical and

Theological Hermeneutics for Biblical Interpretation: Reflections

on the Approaches of David Tracy and Robert Jenson

Barnabas John Ridley Aspray

Hughes Hall

This dissertation is submitted for the degree of Master of Philosophy

“Tools in the Hands

of the Wise”

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DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENT RESEARCH

This dissertation is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is

the outcome of work done in collaboration except where specifically indicated

in the text.

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Contents 1. Introduction ..................................................................................................... 4

2. Robert Jenson’s Theological Method............................................................ 8

2.1. The Absence of Philosophical Prolegomena ............................................. 9

2.1. The Gospel as News of the Resurrection ................................................. 10

2.2. The Church as Jenson’s ‘First Theology’ ................................................. 11

2.3. The Necessity of Trusting the Spirit ......................................................... 13

2.4. Summary ...................................................................................................... 14

3. Robert Jenson’s Hermeneutics: Re-Saying the Gospel ............................ 15

3.1. The Bible as the Gospel’s Authoritative Norm ....................................... 15

3.2. The Changing Contemporary Situation .................................................. 16

3.3. The Church Tradition as Normative Guide ............................................ 18

3.4. Historical Criticism as a Tool for Critique............................................... 20

3.5. Summary ...................................................................................................... 21

4. David Tracy’s Theological Method ............................................................ 23

4.1. A Sketch of Tracy’s Development ............................................................ 24

4.2. Objections to Tracy’s Philosophical Grounding ..................................... 27

4.3. Defending Tracy’s Theological Loyalty ................................................... 31

4.4. Summary ...................................................................................................... 38

5. David Tracy’s Hermeneutics: Mutually Critical Correlations ............... 40

5.1. Correlation as Translation ......................................................................... 41

5.2. Translation as Development ...................................................................... 45

5.3. Critique and Suspicion ............................................................................... 48

5.4. Summary ...................................................................................................... 50

6. Tracy and Jenson in Dialogue ..................................................................... 51

6.1. The Personal and Ethical Side to Conversion ......................................... 52

6.2. A Self-Limiting Philosophy Permitting Conversion .............................. 53

6.3. Remembering the Path to Conversion ..................................................... 53

6.4. Submitting to the New Paradigm’s Norms ............................................. 55

6.5. Conclusion ................................................................................................... 57

Bibliography ........................................................................................................... 59

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Philip ran up to it and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah.

He asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?”

He replied, “How can I, unless someone guides me?”

Acts 8:30-31 (NRSV)

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1. INTRODUCTION

Everyone reads the Bible through a lens; there is no ‘neutral’ or ‘unbiased’

interpretation. But once this is recognised, a question arises: What lens should

Christians use? Should we read through the lens of church doctrine? How, then,

could our reading ever critique the church? Perhaps through the lens of the latest

philosophy? But would this not subject Christian truth to non-Christian criteria?

Are we even able to choose how we read, or are we stuck with whatever

perspective was given us by our cultural upbringing, whether inside or outside

the church?

Such is the problem of how to relate philosophical and theological

hermeneutics. As Boyd Blundell observes, the relationship “now has its own

Wirkungsgeschichte [‘history of effects’], and as is the case with many

relationships, the lines of communication are strained.”1 Key questions which

have arisen include: is philosophical hermeneutics or theological hermeneutics

the proper starting point? Should one ground the other, or should “each act … as

a check on the other’s claims to ultimacy?”2 In short, is philosophical

hermeneutics dangerous, useful, or essential for Christian interpretation of

Scripture?

The debate in some form runs throughout Christian history, going back to

Tertullian’s defiant refutation of philosophy in his famous dictum, “What has

Athens to do with Jerusalem?” But in regard to biblical interpretation the modern

stage was set by two developments. First, the impulse of historical criticism finds

its origins in the seventeenth century, when Spinoza insisted that the Bible be

interpreted “like any other book.”3 Secondly, philosophical hermeneutics was

born in the nineteenth century when Schleiermacher “deregionalised”

interpretation from its “regional” specialisations in law, literature and theology,

thus establishing it as an independent discipline.4

One recent manifestation of the debate is found in the late twentieth-century

rivalry between two North American “schools.” Although there were a number

of aspects to that dispute, from this perspective the “Chicago revisionists”

represent the embrace of philosophical hermeneutics, and the “Yale postliberals”

represent its rejection in favour of inner-theological “intratextual” categories of

1 Blundell, “Theology, Hermeneutics, and Ricoeur’s Double Life,” 440. 2 Wierciński, Between the Human and the Divine, xv. 3 See Harrisville and Sundberg, The Bible in Modern Culture, 30–45; the phrase is Walter

Moberly’s summary of Spinoza’s method (Moberly, “‘Interpret the Bible like Any Other Book’?”). 4 Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 20.

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interpretation. After years of furious interchange between students and faculty,

both sides gradually recognised that their positions were more compatible than

the formerly depicted caricatures, and the argument cooled down.5

But the crucial questions remained, and tensions have continued to surface in

different forms. On the theological side, John Webster recently launched a

vigorous attack on theologians’ use of philosophical hermeneutics to “ground

[biblical interpretation] in general considerations of the ways in which human

beings interpret written materials.”6 He shows astonishment that, among

theologians, “Christian doctrine is rarely regarded as adequate to the task of

describing what takes place when the church reads the Bible.”7 He later

published a book presenting a “dogmatic account of the nature of Holy

Scripture,”8 which firmly asserts that “theology needs to exercise some quite

sharp self-discipline if its talk of Scripture is to be authentically theological, and

not simply a religiously gilded mixture of social science, history, cultural theory

or hermeneutics.”9 In similar vein, Kevin Vanhoozer has proposed that

theological hermeneutics be considered “first theology,” and advocates “a

distinctly Christian and theological … approach to biblical interpretation,”10

unburdened with philosophical prolegomena. Darren Sarisky also published a

volume lamenting “the drive to universality [which has] made it difficult to

employ theological terms freely in describing the text and the reader” as well as

“the tendency in general hermeneutics … to adjust theological material to fit a

more general framework.”11 He proposes instead to “construct an account of

theological interpretation around a theological view of the reader, the text, the

practice of reading, and the community of interpretation.”12

On the (more) philosophical side, David Ford has criticised how, in Webster’s

book, “the contributions of history, literature, sociology, philosophy,

hermeneutics and other disciplines to the understanding of Scripture are seen

more under the heading of threat than of potential.”13 John Barton has issued a

call to return to the theologically impartial tools of historical criticism (which he

calls “biblical criticism”) as the only legitimate mode of interpretation.14 Anthony

5 The story is chronicled in DeHart, Trial of the Witnesses. 6 Webster, “Hermeneutics in Modern Theology,” 309 (italics original). 7 Ibid. 8 Webster, Holy Scripture, 8. 9 Ibid., 43. 10 Vanhoozer, First Theology, 38. 11 Sarisky, Scriptural Interpretation, 14. 12 Ibid., 244. 13 Ford, Christian Wisdom, 78. 14 Barton, Nature of Biblical Criticism.

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Thiselton actively resists being placed into a “school,”15 but he draws heavily on

philosophical hermeneutics for all his work, as well as admitting he “shares

strong hermeneutical features” with David Tracy, the chief Chicago

representative.16

This is but a sampling of the many voices currently involved. With some

exceptions, the most polarising views have gradually disappeared, and there is

broad acknowledgement that the solution does not lie at either extreme. But the

predictable (not to mention dull) “both-and” answer does not go very far towards

resolving the real issues at stake. What is needed, beyond a vague affirmation of

both philosophical and theological hermeneutics as valuable tools, is a concrete

framework showing their relationship – in short, a conceptual toolbox, with labels

indicating when to use each tool.

This thesis aims to provide such a toolbox, by means of focused engagement

with two prominent theologians on either side of the ongoing debate: David

Tracy and Robert Jenson. In themselves, the two have barely interacted with each

other: Tracy’s sparse references to Jenson do not mention his hermeneutics, and

only one footnote in Jenson’s Systematic Theology reprimands Tracy for never

having moved beyond philosophical prolegomena.17 Still there are good reasons

to put them in dialogue. Both are thoroughly conversant with philosophical

hermeneutics (Hans-Georg Gadamer is a pervasive common influence) but have

framed it in different ways. Tracy is the most significant representative of the

“Chicago school” and openly acknowledges philosophical hermeneutics as his

starting point. Jenson, though not among the “Yale” postliberals, is indebted to

them (as to Barth, their common predecessor) for his “intratextual” approach to

Scripture, but has also modified it to overcome some criticisms previously

levelled against it. Jenson thus could be seen as a sort of second-generation

postliberal. Finally, while on the one hand there have been numerous studies

comparing Tracy with George Lindbeck and Hans Frei, and on the other hand

Jenson’s hermeneutics has been contrasted with such as John Barton, Kevin

Vanhoozer and Rowan Williams, there remains as yet no direct comparison of

Tracy and Jenson.

The layout of what follows is straightforward. Chapter two outlines Jenson’s

theological method, arguing that his initial rejection of philosophy is determinate

for everything that follows. Chapter three demonstrates how Jenson’s method

applies to biblical interpretation, where it will be seen that his theological

15 Thiselton, Hermeneutics of Doctrine, xxi. 16 Ibid., 105. 17 Systematic Theology, 1997, 1:9.

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categories adequately account for ecclesial authority, but he less adequately

explains the relationship of the gospel to historical contingency due to his

inconsistent posture towards philosophical hermeneutics. Chapter four

examines Tracy’s theological method, and argues that despite protestations to the

contrary, Tracy has not compromised the Christian faith by grounding it in

philosophical hermeneutics, because the latter provides the humility to submit

to the norms of an ecclesial community. Chapter five applies Tracy’s

‘correlational’ method to biblical interpretation and highlights its dependence on

the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur. The

final chapter compares the insights of Jenson and Tracy, highlighting their

strengths and weaknesses, and focuses on the nature of conversion as a conceptual

framework for appropriately situating the issues raised.

My concluding argument is that theological hermeneutics has normative

primacy for those within the Christian community, but philosophical

hermeneutics articulates a truth about our humanity which is fatal to ignore. No

interpretation is done in the abstract, but is done by individual theologians who,

as well as belonging to the church, also belong to a particular culture and period

of history. Philosophical hermeneutics, construed as awareness of our

embeddedness within our native culture, is a necessary reminder that the

theologian’s perspective is not divine. Our starting point will always be our

human culture. In this sense, philosophy (as pre-Christian rationality) always

grounds theology, not in a universal, but in a culturally-specific way, because it

represents the state of mind that led to an individual’s conversion and continues

to influence their way of thinking. Conversion also means that philosophical

hermeneutics submits to theological hermeneutics, not by the authoritarian

imposition of theological categories, but by inner-recognition of philosophical

hermeneutics’ own limitations. Theological hermeneutics therefore does not

replace philosophical hermeneutics, but rather redeems it, fulfils what was

lacking, and supplies boundaries for its use within the church. Both are essential

tools for any interpretive method, simply requiring the wisdom to discern when

each is appropriate. No tool is dangerous in the hands of the wise.

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2. ROBERT JENSON’S THEOLOGICAL METHOD

Robert Jenson is a creative, original theologian who, despite finding his home

in the Lutheran church, demonstrates significant influence from the Reformed

tradition (through Barth), and can even sound remarkably Catholic or Orthodox

on occasion.18 But while Jenson’s revisionist metaphysics and denial of the logos

asarkos have spawned vigorous debate,19 there has been considerably less

attention given to his hermeneutics.

In what follows I will examine Jenson’s use of five crucial theological tools for

biblical interpretation:

(1) Church as the producer and owner of Scripture;

(2) Canon as the church’s binding decision concerning the scope of

Scripture;

(3) Spirit as guarantor of the church’s faithfulness to Scripture;

(4) Dogma as irreversible guidelines for interpreting Scripture;

(5) Gospel as the salvific message preserved in Scripture.

Jenson uses many theological concepts besides these. For example, christology

becomes an interpretive lens through which to read the Old Testament, of which

he makes practical use in two commentaries;20 he puts the early creeds to work as

interpretive guides to Scripture (which he distinguishes from dogma21);22 his

later work contains the beginnings of a trinitarian lens for Scripture (although

Watson chides him for its incompleteness23);24 he seeks to recover the premodern

practice of spiritual interpretation as an appropriate ecclesial practice (but not for

constructive theology25);26 and he gives functional priority to liturgy as the

church’s “primary hermeneutical principle.”27 But I have chosen to focus on the

18 See Webster, “Systematic Theology after Barth,” 255; also Jenson’s own description of his

influences in the preface to Systematic Theology, 1997. 19 See inter alia, Bentley Hart, “The Lively God of Robert Jenson”; Bentley Hart, The Beauty of

the Infinite, 160–166; Hunsinger, “Robert Jenson’s Systematic Theology”; Cumin, “Robert Jenson and the Spirit of It All”; Farrow, Demson, and Di Noia O.P., “Robert Jenson’s Systematic Theology”; Pannenberg, “Systematic Theology.”

20 Ezekiel; Song of Songs. 21 Canon and Creed, 65. 22 Jenson, Canon and Creed. 23 Watson, “‘America’s Theologian’,” 218. 24 Systematic Theology, 1997, 1:13. 25 Ibid., 1:29.19. 26 Systematic Theology, 1999, 2:281–284. 27 Jenson, “Hermeneutics and the Life of the Church,” 90.

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given categories because, as I will argue, they demonstrate the inner logic of

Jenson’s method as well as its relationship to philosophy.

In this chapter we shall lay out Jenson’s theological method in the abstract,

and in the next chapter we shall show how it provides him with guidelines for

interpreting Scripture. Our investigation of Jenson shall reveal a tension in his

approach. On the one hand he appears uninterested in ‘bridge-building’ exercises

– i.e. finding intellectual points of contact between Christianity and extra-

Christian perspectives. Conversion to Christianity is so decisive that the

theological enterprise can only make sense to the converted. But on the other

hand he sees the gospel as always being spoken within a particular cultural

context and as being affected by that context. In a sense, this could be considered

a pre-conversion ‘point of contact’ after all.

As with any coherent thinker, the building blocks of Jenson’s thought are

tightly interlinked. But I shall argue that there is a demonstrable logical

progression to them: his ‘postliberal’ intratextual approach to philosophy leads

to his high ecclesiology which in turn leads to his centralised pneumatology.

These and his definition of the gospel mutually influence one another, and

together shape his approach to Scripture.28

2.1. The Absence of Philosophical Prolegomena

Jewish philosopher Peter Ochs categorises Jenson as a postliberal because,

according to Ochs, Jenson’s work shares all the distinctive features of

postliberalism.29 However, other secondary literature usually does not classify

him this way,30 except that similarities between Jenson and postliberals are

occasionally noted,31 which often arise through recognising Barth as the ‘critical

stimulus’ they hold in common.32 This Barthian influence accounts for Jenson’s

chief ‘postliberal’ trait which concerns us: his refusal to ground theology in

philosophy, or in his own language, to “enable the [theological] enterprise” by

28 Our treatment of Jenson will be largely synchronic, not because Jenson’s views have

undergone no development over time, but because the issues that concern us are relatively consistent. For Jenson’s own perspective on his theological journey, see “Reversals”; “God’s Time, Our Time”; “Theological Autobiography”; third-person perspectives include: Dunham, “The Development of Biblical Authority in the Theology of Robert Jenson”; Yeago, “Reflections on the Theology of Robert Jenson.”

29 See Ochs, Another Reformation, 63–91. 30 See inter alia, Fodor, “Postliberal Theology”; DeHart, Trial of the Witnesses. 31 For example, Robert Cathey speaks of Jenson’s doctrine being “worked out in categories

close to the concerns of postliberals” (God in Postliberal Perspective, 39). 32 Albeit second hand, in Lindbeck’s case. See DeHart, Trial of the Witnesses, 90; In Jenson’s

case, John Webster calls him one of the “systematic theologians for whom critical engagement with Barth has been formative.” (“Systematic Theology after Barth,” 250).

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means of “prolegomena” which “establish” the “axioms and warrants needed to

set specifically theological cognition in motion.”33

For Jenson, the problem with philosophical prolegomena is that they try to

“anchor” theology in “universal humanity” without realising that their own

axioms are as historically situated as all thinking must be.34 There is no reason

why Enlightenment philosophy, for example, should be “elevat[ed]” to become

the “unilateral judge” of all other thinking.35 Indeed, Jenson claims that

philosophy is only the name we give to “the work of Greece’s theologians:”

We have … been led to think [that philosophy] must be a different kind of intellectual activity than theology, to which theology perhaps may appeal for foundational purposes .... But this is a historical illusion; Greek philosophy was simply the theology of the historically particular Olympian-Parmenidean religion.36

Jenson acknowledges Barth as the “chief pioneer” who rejected the “modern

enterprise” of philosophical prolegomena:

[Barth] did not declare independence from ‘the philosophers’ because philosophy is something so different from theology that it must be kept at arm’s length. His reason was exactly the opposite: he refused to depend on the official philosophers because what they offered to do for him he thought he should do for himself, in conversation with them when that seemed likely to help.37

In short, theology stands on its own foundations and needs no justification

from elsewhere. As Jenson himself summarises: “We may press theology’s claim

very bluntly by noting that theology … claims to know the one God of all and so

to know the one decisive fact about all things, so that theology must be either a

universal and founding discipline or a delusion.”38

2.1. The Gospel as News of the Resurrection

If we turn, then, from philosophy, how instead does the theological project

begin? Jenson’s answer is that that the one central claim around which everything

else unfolds is the resurrection.39

33 Systematic Theology, 1997, 1:3. 34 Ibid., 1:8. 35 Ibid., 1:9. 36 Ibid., 1:9–10. Italics original. 37 Ibid., 1:21. 38 Ibid., 1:20. 39 This is another area of similarity between Jenson and Barth. As Sonderegger notes, Jenson

comes “a close second” to Barth for “theological passion for Christ’s resurrection” (“Jenson and Barth on Christ’s Resurrection,” 191).

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According to Jenson, theology is second-order reflection on the gospel. The

centrepiece of the gospel is not metaphysical speculation, but an event: Jesus has

been raised from the dead. The gospel is the message about this event, and

theology is nothing more than an unpacking of this event’s implications. As

Watson explicates, for Jenson, “rather than positing a … more accommodating

basis for God-talk, we must allow this singular event to unfold its own all-

embracing significance.”40

To begin unfolding the resurrection event, it is important to know who has

been raised. Its implications depend on the identity of the resurrected individual;

as Jenson illustrates, “‘Hitler is risen’ would lift few hearts.”41 Therefore, the

initial ‘unfolding’ is the narrative of the identity of Jesus, i.e., the four gospels, hence

their name.42

The centralisation of the resurrection-event for Jenson’s understanding of the

gospel grounds his definition of three key concepts: church, theology, and

mission. First, the church is defined thus:

Some who heard the first evangelists believed them, and in turn found themselves under obligation to carry the message. And some who heard such subsequent evangelists believed them, and so on. It is the historically continuous community, which in this way began and perdures, that her own linguistic custom calls ‘the church’. ‘Church’ and ‘gospel’ therefore mutually determine one another.43

Secondly, theology is defined as “thinking what to say [in order] to be saying

the gospel,”44 Thirdly, mission is simply saying the gospel: “if we believe what

we hear, for whatever reason, we find ourselves under the same obligation as the

apostles: We must turn from hearing the gospel—which the apostles themselves

did not—to speaking it.”45

2.2. The Church as Jenson’s ‘First Theology’

Since the church and the gospel “mutually determine” one another, and since

the gospel proclaims an event that needs no philosophical grounding, the church

becomes the boundaries within which theology takes place, and therefore the

only justification for theology. As Darren Sarisky observes, in Jenson

40 Watson, “‘America’s Theologian’,” 203. 41 Systematic Theology, 1997, 1:31. 42 Jenson, “Scriptural Authority,” 241. 43 Systematic Theology, 1997, 1:4–5. 44 Ibid., 1:32. 45 Jenson, “Scriptural Authority,” 238.

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“ecclesiology is virtually first theology.”46 Theology is defined exclusively in

relation to the church, her own “enterprise of thought,” her inner-discourse.47

This does not mean Jenson is against apologetics (Arguably he has dabbled in

apologetic endeavours himself48). He is also aware of the related issue of the

unavoidable influence of the theologian’s cultural-historical milieu on their

theology. In his preface to Systematic Theology, he writes:

Recent clamour for ‘contextual’ theology is of course empty, there never having been any other kind. … Theological proposals in the modern West typically not only converse with a particular religious and intellectual situation but describe their interlocutor. If such description pervades a theological effort, we may classify the work as ‘apologetic’ theology.49

However, he adds, “the present work is not thematically apologetic and will

not often explicitly refer to our cultural situation.”50 Apologetics is sustained

theological reflection on the surrounding culture. But, for Jenson, it must still be

addressed to the church as the community of individuals already converted to the

claims of the gospel, regardless of their reasons for conversion or their cultural

background pre-conversion.

The high priority Jenson gives to the church leads him to become a passionate

advocate of the Ecumenical movement. Catholic theologian Hans Urs von

Balthasar once said that “if we are aware of the true nature of the Church, we

must feel [the denominational] split not only as a daily wound but even more as

a constantly burning shame.”51 Jenson has arguably reached a point where he

feels this split as keenly as Balthasar wanted. As Richard Schenk puts it, Jenson

has helped us to see that “all systematic theology must begin from the realisation

that its proponents speak from separated, often even fragmented, standpoints.”52

Indeed, Jenson insists that “no one can escape being bent and limited by the

division of the church and by his or her particular location in the landscape

created by the divisions,” including himself.53 He even goes so far as to suggest

that “theology may be impossible in the situation of a divided church, its proper

agent not being extant.”54 However, he also adds that, while we wait for God to

reunite the church, we should continue to do theology, “for theology is itself the

46 Sarisky, “What Is Theological Interpretation?,” 209. 47 Systematic Theology, 1997, 1:vii. 48 Jenson, Knowledge of Things Hoped For. 49 Systematic Theology, 1997, 1:ix. 50 Ibid. 51 Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth, 3. 52 Schenk, “Theology, Metaphysics, and Discipleship,” 52. 53 Systematic Theology, 1997, 1:viii. 54 Ibid., 1:vii.

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form of waiting we must practice.”55 He describes his Systematic Theology as an

“anticipation of the one church, and this will be throughout apparent, in its use

of authorities and its modes of argument.”56

It should be apparent that Jenson’s passion for ecumenism comes as a

consequence of his epistemological stance. If the church is theology’s one

foundation, divisions in the church correspond to a cracked foundation which

make all theology unstable which is built on it. Jenson’s temporary working

solution is to pay close attention to the theology developed during the time when

the church was united, and in the contemporary situation to draw on resources

from across the denominational spectrum.

2.3. The Necessity of Trusting the Spirit

But how can we trust even the (formerly) united church as the sure foundation

for theology? What guarantee of its trustworthiness does the church have?

Jenson’s answer is essentially that we are free not to trust the church, but that not

to do so is to undermine the only ground on which Christian faith can stand. This

comes as a logical consequence of the former two positions. Since Jenson has

rejected philosophical prolegomena as a ground for theology, he has had to posit

the church as the only alternative ground. But this in turn compels him to find a

reason to trust the church. He admits that it is always a wager, a risk,57 but if we

are to remain Christian we have no other choice than to trust that God guides the

church in faithfulness. How, then, does God guide her? Jenson’s answer is “The

Holy Spirit.”

He explains the relationship as follows: the church, just like any other “living

community,” has its own ‘spirit’.58 But the New Testament further proclaims that

the “church’s communal spirit is the Holy Spirit, God’s Spirit, the spirit of the

risen Christ. And it is taught … that in this communal Spirit the community is

able to test ‘the spirits’, that it is able to discriminate and judge between the

possibly clashing proposals of its own members.”59 Consequently, “it is the

church’s founding miracle that her communal spirit is identically the Spirit that

the personal God is and has.”60

This equation of the church’s “spirit” with the third person of the Trinity has

elicited an objection from Michael Mawson. Mawson expresses concern that “this

55 Ibid., 1:viii. 56 Ibid. 57 Canon and Creed, 69. 58 Jenson, “Can a Text Defend Itself,” 254. 59 Ibid. 60 Systematic Theology, 1999, 2:181.

14

direct identification seems to militate against the possibility of recognizing the

church as itself sinful.”61 I believe Mawson is correct in this concern, although I

also note that this defect does not undermine Jenson’s epistemological

prioritisation of the church. There is a difference between being sinful and being

mistaken. Jenson can continue to maintain the doctrinal authority of the church

without identifying its spirit with the Holy Spirit, an identification which renders

impossible any ethical impurity in her. Therefore, for our present discussion, this

flaw in Jenson’s theology is not fatal, as long as the Spirit is seen as working

externally to the church to guide her infallibly, to “discriminate and judge

between the possibly clashing proposals of its own members.”62

In summary, we can see that the prominent role Jenson gives the church leads

him to give an equally prominent role to the Spirit. For him, there is simply no

other ground on which to stand than the witness of the Christian community,

and to believe this witness requires trusting in its inspiration: “Faith that the

church is still the church is faith in the Spirit’s presence and rule in and by the

structures of the church’s historical continuity.”63 Therefore, our “confidence in

the community’s communal consciousness is in fact a confidence in the guiding

presence of the Spirit.”64

2.4. Summary

In Jenson we find a theology centred on the narrative of the gospel message

of the resurrection. Theology is addressed to the church alone, the post-

conversion community of people who converted “for whatever reason.”65 The

church is commissioned to proclaim its message to each new cultural ‘situation’

it encounters, and the message changes depending on the situation. The gospel

message contains universalising assertions about God, making theology a

foundational discipline that does not need to turn to philosophy for external

warrants. The authority of the church comes through trust that the Spirit guides,

indeed is, the church’s own spirit.

We now turn to examine how this method impacts Jenson’s reading of

Scripture.

61 Mawson, “The Spirit and the Community,” 459. 62 Jenson, “Can a Text Defend Itself,” 254. 63 Systematic Theology, 1997, 1:25–26. 64 Canon and Creed, 15. 65 See previous paragraph.

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3. ROBERT JENSON’S HERMENEUTICS: RE-SAYING THE GOSPEL

This chapter describes how the event-centred character of theology underpins

Robert Jenson’s account both of the authority of Scripture and of the church’s

never-ending need to interpret it. An event in history is in one sense always the

same, but as our position in history progresses, our interpretation of the event

must also progress. We might characterise ‘Jensonian’ hermeneutics as a

dialectical relationship between sameness and difference, or continuity and change.

We will demonstrate how this dialectic works by using Jenson’s method

described in the previous chapter to answer the following questions about his

depiction of the gospel:

(1) How can we ensure that when we proclaim the gospel we are doing it

right?

(2) Why does the church need to interpret the gospel rather than just repeat it?

(3) What happens when incompatible interpretations of the gospel arise

within the church?

(4) How can the gospel serve as a corrective to the contemporary church?

We shall address these questions in order in the following sections.

3.1. The Bible as the Gospel’s Authoritative Norm

First of all, how can we ensure that when we proclaim the gospel we are doing

it right? The question of sameness relates to the question of authority. As Jenson

puts it, “[unless] we want to bring the same message as the one we heard … the

question of authority does not … arise.”66 Jenson’s theological categories provide

a strong and coherent answer to this question. His description of biblical

authority flows out of the event-driven character of the gospel:

In any living tradition, appeal can be made from one authority to another. … Within a tradition of witness to an event, such challenges will try to outdo one authority by adducing another somehow between it and the event. … Such challenges can continue until … we arrive at the apostles. [Then] we have no place else to go, for … there can be no witness in any sense between them and the Resurrection.67

The apostles, then, as the first witnesses, are the ultimate authority in the

Christian tradition, because “tautologously – if the apostles did not get it right,

no one ever did.”68 After the apostles died, “the community collected and

66 Jenson, “Scriptural Authority,” 249. Italics original. 67 Systematic Theology, 1997, 1:27. Italics original. 68 Ibid.

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certified documentary relics of the apostolic message” so as to ensure her ability

to “bring the same message she brought while the apostles guided her.”69 These

became the New Testament. The Old Testament became authoritative because

“the New Testament throughout demonstrates apostolic dependence on the holy

book of Judaism. … Thus the canon of Israel’s Scripture is for the church a sheer

given.”70

As Christians, we are bound to this decision of the early church about which

books are authoritative. Indeed, even to recognise the canon at all, Jenson says, is

an inner-ecclesial decision, because there is no other reason such a collection of

ancient documents should be considered together as a single unit.71 If we decide

that “the canon is a disastrously bad list” then we are forced to conclude that “the

church must have been irretrievably astray since the middle of the third century

at the latest.”72 Conversely, “if indeed the Spirit creates the self-identity of the

church through time, the process of canonization is also worked by the Spirit.”73

Once again we are driven either to trust that the Spirit guides the church or to

abandon the Christian faith (and church) altogether.

The Bible, Jenson concludes, is therefore the church’s “norma normans non

normata” – the “norm with no norm over it.” But he immediately adds that “other

norms establish it in this position and … are necessary to its function in it.”74 This

significant qualification raises two questions. First, why are other norms

necessary? Secondly, what are these ‘other norms’? We will expound these

answers in the following two sections.

3.2. The Changing Contemporary Situation

Why are other norms necessary? Because, says Jenson, of the continuing need,

not just to repeat the gospel, but to interpret it in each new situation. Having

established how to maintain faithfulness to the sameness of the gospel, we need

an explanation from Jenson concerning how and why the contemporary situation

requires that the gospel be said differently: Why does the church need to interpret

the gospel rather than just repeat it?

The gospel’s origin in an event (rather than philosophical propositions)

situates it within time. The implications of this alone for understanding God’s

nature drive Jenson’s metaphysics which have generated so much controversy.

69 Ibid. 70 Ibid., 1:30. Italics original. 71 Jenson, “Scripture’s Authority in the Church,” 27–29. 72 Systematic Theology, 1997, 1:28. 73 Ibid., 1:27. 74 Ibid., 1:26.

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For our discussion it is important only because it means that the gospel takes

place within a narrative, which continues with the historical actuality of the

church. The church’s historical embeddedness is therefore not an unfortunate

coincidence but part of the very nature of the gospel.75

This historically-continuous community thus faces the threat of time.76 Each

of us receives the gospel at different places in history/culture, speaking a

different native language. Therefore “the business of translation is ... [a] chief task

of systematic theology.”77 But it never stops with translation, because language

cannot fully be separated from the presuppositional framework of its speakers:

“translation is not done by providing word-for-word equivalents … because the

historical changes of vocabulary with which theology always reckons are rooted

at a level deeper than vocabulary: the level of … logic.”78

Therefore any proclamation of the gospel makes two demands upon the

proclaimer:

The gospel is any act of human communication in which two specific givens meet and interpret each other. One of these is the claim that Jesus is risen …. The other is the antecedent structure of hopes and fears of those who at a time and place come to speak of this claim.79

Theology is “mutual interpretation of these two”80 which is never complete

because the perpetual proclamation of the gospel in new cultures is “constitutive

of the church” and essential to her survival: “The church is continually driven to

cross geographical and temporal boundaries. … And beyond each [boundary]

new questions wait.”81 Therefore the church needs “repeatedly to shape the

message so as to make it comprehensible for new sorts of hearers, … not merely

to recite the gospel but to interpret it as its messengers enter new cultural or

historical situations.”82 Theological work “is thus a permanent feature of the

church’s life as it repeatedly enters new cultures and new epochs within familiar

cultures.”83

75 Ibid., 1:15. 76 Canon and Creed, 4. 77 Knowledge of Things Hoped For, 7. Italics mine. 78 Ibid. 79 Jenson, “Scriptural Authority,” 240. 80 Ibid.. Notice the great similarity between this definition and the “two constants” In Tracy’s

definition of the task of theology. 81 Canon and Creed, 63. 82 Ibid., 4. Italics mine. 83 Ibid., 65.

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As Katherine Sonderegger observes, this last point marks a departure from

Barth’s theology. For Barth, Christians are witnesses for whom obedience is

primary, not interpreters needing to think for themselves: “[i]n Barth, witnesses

speak under authority; in Jenson, they are authority.”84

Now, what we must note is that this departure from Barth is a result of the

influence of philosophical hermeneutics, especially Gadamer, as Jenson admits.85

The original postliberals would not have countenanced the introduction of a

second source for theology apart from Scripture, or the “translation” of the gospel

into new contexts. For them, translation was a fundamental compromise of the

gospel’s essence, for the very reasons Jenson gives – that translation is never

simply translation but also appeals to a language’s logical foundations in a

culture’s plausibility structure. Jenson, like the postliberals, sees theology as

addressed to the church alone and therefore needing no philosophical ground.

Unlike the postliberals, Jenson wants the gospel to meet the “antecedent

structures” of the contemporary audience. But if theology is “thinking what to

say to be saying the gospel,”86 and the gospel requires translation into a new

culture, then there must be either a sense in which theology is addressed beyond

the church, or at least a sense in which the contemporary church belongs

culturally as much to the contemporary situation as to the Christian tradition.

Otherwise no translation of the gospel into the contemporary situation would

ever be necessary. Even though Jenson accounts for change in the abstract by

situating the gospel within history, this is insufficient to explain both how and

why this change affects the gospel message itself.

As Sonderegger also observes, Jenson’s need for continual interpretation is

connected to the increased authority he gives to the church. The dynamic nature

of gospel interpretation forces Jenson to seek an ongoing norm by which its

message may be safeguarded, something of which Barth and the other

postliberals never felt the need. “Little wonder,” Sonderegger remarks, that

“Jenson reserves high praise for … [the] magisterium.”87

3.3. The Church Tradition as Normative Guide

If the gospel requires, not simple repetition, but interpretation, then what

happens when incompatible interpretations of the gospel arise within the

church? Jenson’s answer is that the interpretive consensus of the unified church

84 Sonderegger, “Jenson and Barth on Christ’s Resurrection,” 209. 85 Jenson, “Scriptural Authority,” 247. 86 Systematic Theology, 1997, 1:32. 87 Sonderegger, “Jenson and Barth on Christ’s Resurrection,” 209.

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has authority over its individual members. As Andrew Fulford summarises:

Jenson makes “the church’s teaching the final arbiter of what the scriptures mean.

… [T]he scriptures are the ultimate authority in the church, but the church is a

higher authority in interpretation than any of its members.”88 Not only the

contemporary church, but “the diachronically united church [is] the primary

reader” which, as Fulford points out, gives the church “hermeneutical control

over the text’s meaning.”89

In the past, when mutually incompatible interpretations of Scripture

threatened to tear the church apart, a council was held to decide which

interpretations would be acceptable from then on within the community. The

church as a whole established rules about the right way for its members to ‘say’

the gospel, called ‘doctrine’.90 Doctrine in this case represents the church’s

decision to go in one interpretive direction rather than another.91 To remain

diachronically unified with the church means to maintain continuity with the

church’s past decisions about how to interpret Scripture; in short, to submit to

the church’s tradition.

An irreversible doctrinal decision is what we mean by dogma.92 For Jenson,

there can be no faithful biblical interpretation that does not take place within the

historically continuous community, because the church’s continuity through

time is an essential aspect of its unified nature.93 This means that Christian

interpretation of Scripture is bound by dogma; none can be considered legitimate

which contradicts it:

Historical honesty requires the church to interpret Scripture in the light of her dogmas. If the church’s dogmatic teaching has become false to Scripture, then there is no church and it does not matter how the group that mistakes itself for church reads Scripture.94

But how can we be sure these dogmatic decisions were correct? Jenson follows

through on the logic of his position:

To affirm … dogma with … certainty, … we have to posit another source of assurance to go with … Scripture. And the only thing available is an

88 Fulford, “The Church’s One Foundation,” 13. 89 Ibid. 90 Systematic Theology, 1997, 1:17. 91 This is not necessarily a sufficient definition of all doctrine. 92 Systematic Theology, 1997, 1:36. 93 Ibid., 1:5, 26, 41. 94 Systematic Theology, 1999, 2:281.

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authority of the council itself. That is to say, we must trust that the Spirit guided the council.95

Once again we return to the need to trust the Spirit’s guidance of the church.

In this instance, that trust is manifest through the particular dogmatic

affirmations of the church’s past councils.

But is it possible that the church could ever go astray in any way? Is there any

means to allow Scripture to critique the contemporary church? This question

leads us to our final section.

3.4. Historical Criticism as a Tool for Critique

For Jenson, one of the continuing roles of Scripture is as a corrective, to call

the church back to its origins. But, how can the gospel serve as a corrective to the

contemporary church? It may do this, Jenson answers, through the use of

historical criticism.

As a reader of Scripture, it can only correct my thinking if I am open to hearing

it say something different than I already think it says. I have to recognise the

distance between Scripture and myself in order to feel its challenge to my

thoughts. For example, “Paul cannot enrich my apprehension of the gospel as

long as I presume his apprehension and mine must obviously be the same.”96

Therefore, Scripture can only be authoritative if read “historically-critically,” i.e.,

with attention to its historical distance from us.97

However, to recognise Scripture as a historical document can sever it from its

meaningfulness for the contemporary situation. When the difference between

Bible times and our time is exclusively attended to, biblical interpretation

becomes nothing more than an “antiquarian enterprise, rather like excavating

nineteenth-century pots in Manhattan.”98 If we stop at historical criticism, we

shall have turned the Bible into a dead letter, an “ancient document” which

cannot “make serious claims on us.”99 What is needed to repair this severance is

some meaningful link between ourselves and Scripture, such that its

95 Canon and Creed, 68. 96 Systematic Theology, 1999, 2:278. 97 “Problem(s),” 245. Sarisky is not quite correct to say that by “historical criticism” Jenson

means only the “biblical studies guild” (“What Is Theological Interpretation?,” 211); Jenson actually says that the church has always practiced historical criticism insofar as it has let Scripture speak a new voice of challenge into the contemporary situation (“Scriptural Authority,” 245).

98 Jenson, “On Dogmatic/Systematic Appropriation of Paul-According-To-Martyn,” 154. 99 Jenson, “Scriptural Authority,” 245.

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commonality with us can be retrieved after we have appropriately recognised its

cultural distance.

Jenson finds the solution to this conundrum in his doctrine of the church. The

historical continuity of the church community becomes the connection between

Scripture and ourselves. For Jenson, “there is no historical distance between the

community in which the Bible appeared and the church that now seeks to

understand the Bible, because these are the same community.”100 This doesn’t

mean that there are no historical-cultural differences within the church, and “it is

the task of historical critique to display them. But they are differences of times

and places within the life of one community.”101 What holds this community

together is the unified narrative which begins in Scripture and continues in the

church.102 This narrative is not just told but lived by the church who participates

in it as her own ongoing story.

It is noteworthy that the way Jenson explains this interpretive link in the

historical continuity of the church is by means of philosophical hermeneutics,

especially (once again) Gadamer.103 Gadamer pointed out that it is the very

nature of understanding to be embedded within a tradition and dependent on

that tradition for our grasp of any meaning at all. “Past and present do not need

to be bridged before understanding can begin, since they are always already

mediated by the continuity of the community’s language and discourse.”104 The

tradition created by Scripture lives in the interpreter who belongs to it, and it is

through this very tradition that Scripture has its meaning.

3.5. Summary

Jenson is a helpful example of the consistent prioritisation of theological tools

for biblical interpretation. His hermeneutics draws strong boundaries between

theology and philosophy, and provides the church with ultimate ownership of

Scripture and its meaning, a helpful aid towards church unity.

But Jenson’s system would not work without philosophical hermeneutics. His

awareness of the theologian’s historical contingency finds partial justification

through his insistence on the gospel-as-event, but this neither explains nor fully

accounts for the theologian’s need to ‘interpret’ rather than just ‘witness’ to the

100 Systematic Theology, 1999, 2:279. Italics original. 101 Ibid., 2:281. 102 Ibid., 2:282. 103 He writes that “twentieth-century hermeneutical theory ... must therefore hold in the

church and of her Scripture” (ibid., 2:280). 104 Ibid.

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gospel, or to incorporate the contemporary situation as a second source for

theology.

Nonetheless, for Jenson theological categories are ultimately normative, and

all biblical interpretation, in order to be Christian, must take place within the

boundaries they set. Although philosophy serves as a useful handmaiden, it is

theology that has the final say.

In David Tracy we find a rather different approach.

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4. DAVID TRACY’S THEOLOGICAL METHOD

The chief protagonist of the “Chicago school” during the 1980s Yale-Chicago

controversies, Catholic priest and theologian David Tracy has been the stimulus

for a great deal of furious debate. He has been accused of selling out to

modernity, of subjecting Christianity to the claims of modernism, of making no

distinction between general religious meaning and particular Christian truth,

and much else besides. Whether or not these accusations are valid, one thing

Tracy has never tried to hide is that he grounds his theology in contemporary

philosophy, specifically Husserlian phenomenology. This means that all

theological statements are for him filtered through the lens of how they relate to

human experience.

Nonetheless, an ambiguity arises in Tracy’s position as his writing progresses

over time. As William Placher observes, “to most readers it seems that his more

recent work has moved away from some of the views he stated earlier, but Tracy

is reluctant to admit this and tends to claim that he is merely approaching the

same questions from a different angle.”105 Indeed, shortly after completing

Analogical Imagination Tracy claimed that no “major changes on the issues of

religion, God or Christ have occurred for me over the past ten years.”106 But nine

years later he admitted to a lack of awareness of his own development: “[F]riends

have … help[ed] me see more clearly where I've really ‘changed’ in thought or

sensibility than I would have realized on my own.”107

I believe that one of the reasons for this ambiguity is that, while Tracy remains

consistently grounded in phenomenology, the phenomenological tradition itself

underwent changes which, with some delay, Tracy can be seen to have followed.

If we travel with Tracy on this journey, we find that phenomenology becomes

transformed into philosophical hermeneutics, leading to a recognition of its own

historical limitations and greater dependence on tradition. As Tracy absorbs this

transformation, he becomes more and more comfortable affirming the truths of

the Christian tradition, without ever losing the conceptual tools for critiquing and

developing it.

Because this development plays such a crucial role in the way Tracy

approaches theology, this chapter begins with a chronological overview of

Tracy’s thought. We then examine the objections which have been raised against

105 Placher, Unapologetic Theology, 155. 106 Tracy, “Defending the Public Character of Theology.” 107 Tracy, “God, Dialogue and Solidarity,” 900.

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Tracy. After considering these, we return to a closer reading of Tracy, to

determine which are valid, which are outdated, and which are a

misunderstanding.

4.1. A Sketch of Tracy’s Development

Tracy’s first book, The Achievement of Bernard Lonergan, is a presentation of his

early mentor’s theological method. Although rooted in “transcendental

Thomism,”108 Lonergan had also engaged heavily with the phenomenological

tradition, including its (at that time) recent developments in the direction of

hermeneutics. Lonergan himself did not radicalise hermeneutics to become the

basis of knowledge,109 but he did pass on to Tracy a commitment to the priority

of phenomenology.

Five year later Tracy published Blessed Rage for Order, in which, despite

abandoning his former allegiance to Thomist metaphysics, in other respects

Tracy still shows the influence of Lonergan.110 In this book Tracy’s primary

paradigm is phenomenology, taking “common human experience” as his starting

point for reflection.111 His definition of experience is not the empiricist one (as in

e.g., David Hume) but is clearly phenomenological in scope:

‘Experience’ should not be confined to sense-experience alone but should include that immediate experience of the self-as-self which can be reflectively mediated through such disciplines as art, history, cultural analysis, human scientific analysis, and philosophical analysis. … All these modes of analysis can be generically labelled ‘phenomenological’.112

In some ways, Tracy never abandons this starting point; we find similar language

in a much later publication.113 But in other significant ways he moves beyond it,

as we shall see.

From Tracy’s phenomenological perspective, he defines theology in Blessed

Rage as “philosophical reflection upon the meanings present in common human

experience and the meanings present in the Christian tradition.”114 The task of

the theologian is to correlate the questions and answers of these two sources such

108 Tracy, “Two Cheers for Thomas Aquinas.” 109 For example, when discussing hermeneutics as a “functional specialty”, Lonergan writes

“[M]uch contemporary discussion of hermeneutics ... attempts to treat all these issues as if they were hermeneutical. They are not” (Method in Theology, 155).

110 Sanks, “David Tracy’s Theological Project,” 699. 111 Tracy, Blessed Rage, 43. 112 Ibid., 69. 113 Tracy, Naming the Present, 112–113. 114 Blessed Rage, 34.

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that they mutually critique and illuminate one another.115 But the theologian’s

commitment to these two sources results in a crisis of loyalties. On the one hand,

“the fundamental loyalty of the theologian qua theologian is to that morality of

scientific knowledge which he shares with his colleagues, the philosophers,

historians, and social scientists. No more than they, can he allow his own – or his

tradition’s – beliefs to serve as warrants for his arguments.”116 But on the other

hand, his loyalty to the Christian tradition leads him to believe that a revised

version of Christianity can adequately answer the questions inherent in

secularism.117 Mutually critical correlation of these two sources is how the

theologian reconciles this internal conflict.

In Blessed Rage Tracy seems committed primarily to the claims of what he calls

“secular faith,” by which he means the religious sentiment common to all human

experience. He is also theoretically committed to the Christian tradition; his

revisionist project is an attempt to articulate Christianity as an adequate

framework to fulfil the demands of secularism. But nonetheless, his “ethical

commitment to the morality of scientific knowledge forces him to assume a

critical posture towards his own and his tradition’s beliefs.”118 The burden of

proof rests more on Christianity than on secular claims. “Correlation” in Blessed

Rage is more a matter of aligning Christian faith to modern standards than the

other way around. Any Christian claim that cannot be grounded in “common

human experience” must be rejected.

Six years later Tracy published The Analogical Imagination, the central thesis of

which is that because theology makes universal claims about the reality of God,

it must necessarily be “public discourse,” i.e. universally intelligible.119

However, because there is more than one ‘public’ to which theology may be

addressed, he advocates a division of labour between different “functional

specialties” in theology:120

(1) Fundamental theology addresses the academy and must share the

criteria for truth and argumentation common to all academic

disciplines.121 Its task is “the articulation of fundamental questions and

115 Ibid., 45–46. 116 Ibid., 7. 117 Ibid., 9. 118 Ibid., 7. The “he” in this passage is the revisionist theologian, to which category Tracy

assigns himself. 119 Analogical Imagination, 3. 120 Ibid., 85n.31 This overview skips Tracy’s third functional specialty, practical theology,

because it has neither the “primary attention” of Tracy’s book nor much relevance for our purposes (ibid., 69).

121 Ibid., 57.

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answers which any attentive, intelligent, reasonable and responsible

person can understand and judge in keeping with fully public criteria

for argument.”122

(2) Systematic theology addresses the church. Its “task is the

reinterpretation of the tradition for the present situation.”123 As a

confessional discipline “ordinarily assum[ing] … the truth-bearing

character of a particular religious tradition,” systematic theology is

usually considered private in form. Tracy believes this to be a mistake.

For him, “the hermeneutical character of systematic theologies,

although not obviously ‘public’ in the [fundamental] sense, is

nevertheless public in a distinct but related sense.”124

These functional specialties share two constants: “an interpretation of the

tradition and an interpretation of the contemporary situation.”125 The two

constants are related through “mutually critical correlations,” meaning that the

plausibility structures of Christian tradition and the contemporary situation are

put into dialogue in a way that transforms both.126

Despite this division of functional specialties addressing different ‘publics’, it

is a key concern for Tracy that, “in principle,” each functional specialty be

intelligible to the other publics as well.127 The focused argument of Analogical

Imagination is an attempt to demonstrate that systematic theology is intelligible

to those outside the church. To this end, Tracy argues that the phenomena

interpreted by systematic theology can be construed as particular instances of

general categories intelligible to “common human experience.” The general

category Tracy employs is that of the “classic.” A classic is a general phenomenon

both because “classics exist” in every culture,128 and because all classics are

public.129 Therefore the experience of a classic is a “common human experience”

analogous to the experience of art.130 He defines the term ‘classic’ as follows:

“Certain expressions of the human spirit so disclose a compelling truth about our

lives that we cannot deny them some kind of normative status. Thus do we name

these expressions … ‘classics’.”131 “If, even once, a person has experienced a text

122 Ibid., 63. 123 Ibid., 64. 124 Ibid., 85n.31. Italics mine. 125 Ibid., 79. 126 Ibid., 24–27. 127 Ibid., 5–6. 128 Ibid., 107. 129 Ibid., 14. 130 Ibid., 115. 131 Ibid., 108.

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… with the force of the recognition: ‘This is important! This does make and will

demand a difference!’ then one has experienced a candidate for classic status.”132

From the general category of the cultural classic, Tracy narrows to the

particular instance of the religious classic and then to the Christian classic. But

Tracy emphasises that interpretation of any classic is public, because all

knowledge of any kind is interpretation of common human experience. Thus,

consistently in the three books so far examined, Tracy’s theology is grounded in

phenomenology, and this directs and governs his theology. It is this

philosophical grounding, combined with is description of theology as “mutually

critical correlation” between the Christian tradition and the present situation,

which get him into a great deal of trouble with other theologians.

4.2. Objections to Tracy’s Philosophical Grounding

Tracy’s description of the nature of theological discourse has triggered a

barrage of objections, the chief of which is that for Tracy to ground theology in

philosophy both subordinates Christianity to secular standards, and is itself out

of touch with the latest developments in philosophy. This has the devastating

consequence that the particularities of Christianity are swallowed up in general

categories of religion, leading to the abolition of any need for theology as a

distinct discipline. We shall unpack these problems in sequence.

The primary accusation is that Tracy has sold out to modernity’s

epistemological claims. The “Yale” postliberals saw especially in Blessed Rage “all

their worst Barthian fears of a theology trimming its sails to the tide of modern

culture.”133 Paul DeHart offers a summary of the postliberal objection:

Tracy’s attempt to bring together ‘The Christian Tradition’ and ‘modern secular consciousness’ in a ‘mutually critical correlation’ was only an apparent confrontation, as the putatively neutral philosophical apparatus employed to enable their meeting in fact dictated the terms of their encounter, and thus its results, in advance.134

James K.A. Smith similarly identifies Tracy’s correlationism with the attempt

to reformulate Christianity in terms acceptable to modernist standards, calling it

“deeply apologetic. … aimed at ultimately making sense of revelation in terms

that are (supposed to be) universally accessible.”135 Boyd Blundell’s critique is

likewise based on Tracy’s embrace of philosophical criteria independent of

132 Ibid., 115–116. 133 Stiver, Ricoeur and Theology, 86. 134 DeHart, Trial of the Witnesses, 23. 135 Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy, 35.

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theology. He warns that “because the fundamental specialty is the gate through

which philosophical concepts enter Tracy’s theology, when the claims of

philosophy and the claims of theology come into conflict, he is forced to come

down on the side of philosophy. Far from theology appropriating philosophical

insights, theology ends up being appropriated by philosophy.”136 However,

Blundell does not think that Tracy has been ‘appropriated’ by philosophical

hermeneutics specifically; rather, this “is but one example of his embrace of the

academy in general.”137

Though Stanley Hauerwas does not reference Tracy in the following passage,

Blundell perceives in his critique the contours of Tracy’s approach.138 We quote

here a longer section than that cited by Blundell:

The apologist of the past stood in the church and its tradition and sought relationship with those outside. … But now the theologian stands outside the tradition and seeks to show that selected aspects of that tradition can no longer pass muster from the perspective of the outsider.139

Blundell comments, “Can those outside a faith tradition fully comprehend what

is going on inside? Does their opinion of what constitutes a valid theological

project merit consideration?”140 He concludes that “the ‘fundamental loyalty’

(Tracy’s term) of the fundamental theologian is … fides quaerens intellectum

without the fides.”141

Tracy’s grounding of theology in universalising philosophy leads to the

second objection made against him: that he absorbs the particularity of

Christianity in its general classification as an instance of something explainable

by means of “common human experience.” Yale theologian Hans Frei says that

for Tracy, “Christian description or self-description is one instance of the general

class ‘religious meaningfulness’ … [which] is a universal anthropological

phenomenon, philosophically grounded.”142 Therefore, Tracy “subsum[es] the

specifically Christian under the general, experiential religious, as one ‘regional’

aspect.”143

136 Blundell, Ricoeur between Theology and Philosophy, 42. Italics original. 137 Ibid. 138 Ibid., 24. 139 Hauerwas, Against the Nations, 24. 140 Ricoeur between Theology and Philosophy, 25. 141 Ibid., 28; the term “methodological atheism” comes from Peter Berger. See Analogical

Imagination, 24. 142 Frei, Types, 33. 143 Ibid., 34.

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Frei also highlights the impact of this on biblical interpretation, arguing that

for Tracy, “the Bible is a particular instance of the class ‘religious text’ that lays

out a particular ‘mode-of-being-in-the-world’.” But this “distorts the reading of

the gospel”144 by subsuming Jesus’ particular identity into the generalities of

human expression,145 meaning that “the text isn’t ultimately about Jesus, but

about a human possibility Jesus instantiates.”146 Similarly, John Webster rejects

the way Tracy sees “the church's reading of the Bible as an instance of a more

general phenomenon … unspecific to any one particular text or community.”147

Rather, “Christian reading and interpreting of the Bible is an instance of itself.”148

Kevin Vanhoozer notes disapprovingly that for Tracy, “biblical interpretation is

… a species of a much larger class.”149 On the contrary, Vanhoozer says: “the

incarnation and resurrection are decidedly not members of a general class! …

[W]e must begin with the particular. To begin with general categories is to risk

swallowing up the act or the Word of God in a human conception.”150

It has been further objected that such generalising strategies eventually lead

to the abolition of theology. From the philosophical side, Jürgen Habermas asks

what happens to a theology that “surrenders [its] right to ‘privilege’ so that …

like every other academic discipline, [it] will have to meet the demands for

academic justification.”151 If theology does this, “what then still constitutes the

distinctiveness of theological discourse? What separates the internal perspective

of theology from the external perspective of those who enter into a dialogue with

theology?”152 He then warns that “the more theology opens itself in general to

the discourses of the human sciences, the greater is the danger that its own status

will be lost.”153

From the theological side, Hauerwas asks: “if what is said theologically is but

a confirmation of what we can know on other grounds or can be said more clearly

in nontheological language, then why bother saying it theologically at all?”154

Robert Jenson’s one reference to Tracy in his Systematic Theology accuses him of

this problem: Tracy has not “been able to move past the self-referential concerns

144 This is Placher’s summary of Frei in his “Introduction,” 15. 145 Ibid. 146 Ibid. 147 Webster, “Hermeneutics in Modern Theology,” 313. 148 Ibid., 317. 149 Vanhoozer, First Theology, 214. 150 Ibid., 217. 151 Ricoeur between Theology and Philosophy, 21. 152 Habermas, “Transcendence from Within,” 230–231. 153 Ibid., 231. 154 Hauerwas, Against the Nations, 25.

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of [Blessed Rage]” into constructive theological discourse; in Tracy’s work,

“theology is pre-empted by its own prolegomena.”155 In short, a theology which

takes a non-theological starting point will never arrive at theological claims and

will eventually fade into non-existence.

The third and final accusation is that Tracy has overlooked the recent

‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy itself to the effect that language precedes

experience, which re-establishes the priority of tradition. This critique comes out

clearly in Yale theologian George Lindbeck’s seminal book, The Nature of Doctrine.

Lindbeck describes two prevalent understandings of doctrine: experiential-

expressivism, which “interprets doctrines as noninformative and nondiscursive

symbols of inner feelings, attitudes, or existential orientations,” and cognitivism,

for which doctrines are propositional statements of fact.156 He classifies Tracy as

an experiential-expressivist.157 Lindbeck views both these approaches as

unsatisfactory and instead advocates what he calls the cultural-linguistic

approach, which emphasises “those respects in which religions resemble

languages together with their correlative forms of life and are thus similar to

cultures.”158 Lindbeck argues that this approach is supported by recent science

and philosophy. Theologians, he claims, are behind the latest research. He

worries about the “growing gap between theological and nontheological

approaches. Experiential-expressivism has lost ground everywhere except in

most theological schools and departments of religious studies. … [Other

disciplines] seem increasingly to find cultural-linguistic approaches

congenial.”159

One consequence of the cultural-linguistic approach is that it rules out the

ability to conceptualise “common human experience” in general terms:

In a cultural-linguistic outlook … it is just as hard to think of religions as it is to think of cultures or languages as having a single generic or universal experiential essence of which particular religions … are varied manifestations or modifications. One can in this outlook no more be religious in general than one can speak language in general.160

A more significant consequence is that this approach abolishes the need to

ground theology in epistemologies outside Christianity, because there are no

universal criteria upon which a critique of Christianity could be based.

155 Systematic Theology, 1997, 1:9n.17. 156 Nature of Doctrine, 16. 157 Ibid., 38. 158 Ibid., 17–18. 159 Ibid., 25. 160 Ibid., 23.

31

Consequently, the functional specialty of fundamental theology “becomes less

crucial than for many theologians, and apologetics becomes primarily a matter

of appropriate communal praxis.”161 He does not thereby “exclude an ad hoc

apologetics, but only one that is systematically prior and controlling in the

fashion of post-Cartesian natural theology or of liberalism.”162

The epistemological priority of tradition mediated through language gives

Lindbeck the ability unapologetically to take the gospel as his starting point.

Comparing Lindbeck with Tracy, Blundell writes that “questioning the Gospel in

rational terms, as Tracy does, explicitly presents criteria (in this case ‘rationally

redeemable’) by which the Gospel should be judged.”163 But for Lindbeck, “there

is no definitively better place to begin than the Gospel.” Indeed, “Whenever one

queries the Gospel” from any basis outside Christianity, “the question is: what

are your ‘terms’ precisely, and what is their claim to primacy? What do they claim

that supersedes the claims of the gospel, and what are your criteria for making

this judgment?”164 In Vanhoozer’s words:

The community in which we stand does affect the way we read. … Furthermore, the reasons one gives for preferring the literal sense of the gospel as one’s basic explanatory framework are internal to the Christian tradition. So are all reasons that commend one’s tradition… . The only honest position to take in a rational conversation is to say ‘here I stand’. Tracy, however, tries to have it both ways: ‘Here I stand … and there’.165

In summary, the above objections amount to the accusation that Tracy has:

(1) Subjected Christianity to modern epistemological standards.

(2) Absorbed the particularities of the gospel into the generalities of ‘religion’,

thus abolishing the distinctiveness of theology and therefore the need for

it.

(3) Overlooked recent philosophical developments which give greater

epistemological priority to language and tradition.

We now turn to a closer reading of Tracy to assess both the accuracy and the

validity of each of these criticisms.

4.3. Defending Tracy’s Theological Loyalty

It must be noted that while Frei and Lindbeck make occasional reference to

Analogical Imagination, the majority of their critique is targeted at the picture

161 Ibid., 12. 162 Ibid., 132. 163 Blundell, Ricoeur between Theology and Philosophy, 23. 164 Ibid. 165 Vanhoozer, First Theology, 217.

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presented in Blessed Rage. Jenson likewise, though showing awareness of

subsequent writings, still only explicitly mentions this book.166 Even critiques

which engage with the later Analogical Imagination seem to be reading it through

the lens of the former.167 It is therefore imperative to establish the continuities

and discontinuities between these two books before determining whether these

objections hold for the later as well as the earlier Tracy.

What we find is that four years after writing Analogical Imagination Tracy

refers to it as marking his definitive “hermeneutical turn” contrasted with “the

hermeneutically informed but underdeveloped position on ‘common human

experience’” in Blessed Rage.168 This hermeneutical turn is, I believe, the key not

only to understanding Tracy’s theological development but also to adequately

distinguishing valid criticisms of Analogical Imagination from simple

misunderstandings. To demonstrate this, we now turn to a closer reading of

Analogical Imagination.

We begin by looking at the accusation that Tracy has subjected Christianity to

modern standards. Admittedly, the book can indeed sound in places as if the task

of fundamental theology were to assess the credibility of Christianity. For

example, it says that fundamental theology is “principally concerned to show the

adequacy or inadequacy of the truth-claims, usually the cognitive claims, of a

particular religious tradition,”169 and when presenting arguments, “personal

faith or beliefs may not serve as warrants or backings for publicly defended

claims to truth.”170 Also, “in principle” fundamental theologies “will abstract

themselves from all religious ‘faith commitments’ for the legitimate purposes of

critical analysis of all religious and theological claims.”171

However, it is a mistake to say, with Blundell, that the “fundamental loyalty”

of Analogical Imagination is to the academy. He has missed the book’s clear

statement that “one’s trust in and loyalty to society, academy and church are real

but … on inner-Christian terms, one’s trust in and loyalty to the reality of the God

disclosed in Jesus Christ finally determine and judge all other loyalties and all

trust in all other realities.”172 Similar affirmations of loyalty are repeated

166 Systematic Theology, 1997, 1:9n.17. 167 This is not only the case for Frei and Lindbeck, but, as Nathan Crawford points out, for

David Kamitsuka, William Placher, and John Vissers also (Crawford, Theology as Improvisation, 132n.61); See Kamitsuka, Theology and Contemporary Culture, 59–62; Vissers, “Interpreting the Classic”; Placher, “The Public Character of Theology.”

168 Tracy, “Lindbeck’s New Program,” 464. 169 Analogical Imagination, 58. 170 Ibid., 64. 171 Ibid., 57. 172 Ibid., 47–48.

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throughout and should be taken seriously.173 Regardless of what may be said

about the picture presented in Blessed Rage, the Tracy of Analogical Imagination

would agree with Hauerwas’ insistence that the apologist should stand within the

church.

Tracy sees no conflict between this loyalty, on the one hand, and the insistence

on the fundamental theologian’s principled abstraction from faith commitments

on the other hand. The task of the fundamental specialty, for him, is “to provide

arguments that all reasonable persons, whether ‘religiously involved’ or not, can

recognise as reasonable.”174 But rational explanation of Christianity is not the same

as rational proof on external grounds, or subjection of Christian claims to external

evaluation. To consider a position reasonable does not necessarily mean to be

persuaded by it. Most people find a number of positions concurrently

‘reasonable’ but are nonetheless persuaded of only one. There are presently

multiple plausible philosophical positions co-existing in the academy. For Tracy,

the fundamental theologian’s task is only to make sure Christianity is counted as

one of them, by rendering explicit its rational criteria for truth. Tracy presupposes

that this is possible; his argument is based around showing that it is also necessary

on inner-Christian grounds.175

Tracy is not, therefore, claiming that the truth of Christianity depends on

whether fundamental theology can successfully defend it. He is rather saying

that the task of the fundamental theologian is to defend the plausibility of

Christianity publicly. If she fails, her failure is only in making Christianity

intelligible to that particular public, but this does not falsify Christianity for the

other publics. Placher’s conflation of the concepts of ‘universal’ and ‘public’ is

therefore also a mistake.176 Tracy does not see ‘public’ as a single philosophical

position to which Christianity is accountable. ‘Publicness’ simply means the

criteria for rational apprehension of whatever community the theologian is

addressing. After all, we must remember that the church itself is one of Tracy’s

‘publics’.

173 Ibid., 51, 54. 174 Ibid., 57. 175 Ibid., 64. 176 Sanks says that for postliberalism in general, “’public’ means ‘universal’” (“David Tracy’s

Theological Project,” 724); Placher shows this conflation when he describes an AAR session in which “having spent three days listening to [diverse philosophical schools], I heard an impassioned plea for theology to ground itself in philosophical warrants so that it could be public discourse. I had seen no universal, public realm of commonly held assumptions, and so I find myself skeptical about the call for a public theology in this first sense” (“The Public Character of Theology,” 411–412).

34

Secondly, it is a mistake to accuse Tracy of absorbing the particular by the

general. Tracy is in fact deeply respectful of particularity, and of the way

engagement with a particular tradition alters one’s universal perspective.

Admittedly he is “wary” of “the ease with which Christian theologians can move

from an emphasis on Christian particularity to the trap of Christian

exclusivism.”177 “And yet,” he continues, “this correct suspicion clashes with

another basic intuition: the greatest works of art and all the major religions are in

fact highly particular in both origin and expression.”178 In fact, “every classic

work of art reaches public … status through, not despite, its particularity.”179

Fundamental theology is the Tracy’s functional specialty which explains

Christianity by means of general categories. But he is clear that this can never be

sufficient by itself. He writes, “[t]he move from fundamental to systematic

theology is logically always a move from the abstract, general, universal,

necessary features of a ‘religious dimension’ in all reality to the particular,

concrete reality of an ‘explicit religion’.”180 Generalisations never fully explain

any particularity. Despite putting the “religious classic” in the general category

of “cultural classic,” Tracy still insists on the “sui generis character of religion” as

irreducible to general cultural concepts.181 Even religion as a general category is

insufficient: “it is not really possible to provide one definition for the essence of

religion.”182 And although “from the viewpoint of fundamental theology, certain

essential characteristics of religion can be explicated even when a universal

definition of religion is neither attempted nor countenanced,”183 nonetheless,

“even in their ‘hard’ formulations, the claims of fundamental theology are, in

fact, ‘soft’ ones. They are not claims … to render the particular, concrete, explicit

religion redundant.”184 Theology must generalise at some level, because religious

claims are claims about “the whole of reality.”185 But these general assertions are

always working hypotheses, open to alteration through engagement with

another ‘particular’ classic.

This is additionally why theology is not abolished by being made public. No

discipline is hermetically sealed off from all the others; every discipline is the

detailed study of a particularity which for other disciplines is accepted as a

177 Tracy, “Defending the Public Character of Theology.” 178 Ibid. 179 Ibid. 180 Analogical Imagination, 162. 181 Ibid., 170. 182 Ibid., 157. Italics original. 183 Ibid., 160. 184 Ibid., 162–163. 185 Ibid., 163.

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generality or a presupposition. A new discovery or insight from one discipline

can radically alter all the others. Tracy argues that systematic theology is the

study of the particularities of the Christian faith, but also that the nature of this

study may, indeed should, have an impact beyond itself, just like every other

discipline.

There is one presupposition on which Tracy admits his whole argument

depends. His move from the cultural classic to the religious classic and then to

the Christian classic is only possible if an analogy obtains between common

human experience and particular Christian experience. But to posit analogy is

not to absorb the particular into the general. The category of analogy protects

both the particularity of an object and its intelligibility as an instance of a more

general class. For example, if I was asked what a squirrel was, I would reply with

a generalisation about squirrels: it is a type of animal. But nobody imagines that

the knowledge of squirrelhood is exhausted by its categorisation in a general class.

But if there is no analogy between Christianity and anything else – if it is in

its own category entirely – then generalisations about it become impossible.

Christianity will always remain opaque to the public sphere and no ‘bridge-

building’ communication across the borders of the Christian community will

ever be possible. Tracy says that the argument in Analogical Imagination hangs on

the “notion of the religious classic as a cultural classic.”186 If this doesn’t work,

“then systematic theology should be eliminated.”187 As David Pellauer points

out, given the book’s title, “readers may at first be surprised to discover that the

analogical imagination only appears as a topic in its own right in one brief

concluding chapter. To see things this way, however, would be to miss the

subtlety of Tracy’s rhetoric and argumentation. The whole volume, in fact, is

meant to be an example of such analogical imagination.”188 The use of analogy is

the very heart of the book.

Finally, we turn to the objection that Tracy is behind on the latest advances in

philosophy. To answer this, we look more closely at how Tracy argues for the

public nature of systematic theology. To begin with, he defines the systematic

functional specialty as “the reinterpretation of [a] tradition by committed and

informed thinkers in the tradition.”189 This means systematic theology is

hermeneutical in nature, but this “is not equivalent to being unconcerned with

truth, unless ‘truth’ is exhaustively defined on strictly Enlightenment and

186 Ibid., 68. 187 Ibid., 69. 188 Pellauer, “The Analogical Imagination,” 192. 189 Tracy, Analogical Imagination, 66.

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increasingly instrumentalist terms. Rather the theologian, in risking faith in a

particular religious tradition, has the right and responsibility to be ‘formed’ by

that tradition and community.”190

How can systematic theology “implicitly address” every public if it is the

result of commitment to a particular tradition?191 Tracy answers this question in

a crucially important passage:

Christian theology … consists in explicating in public terms … the full meaning and truth of the [Christian classic] ... which occasioned and continues to inform its understanding of all reality. Claims that a discipline, any discipline, can achieve more publicness than this for its truths are misguided. For all metaphysical or general philosophical claims to universality are … suspect to a historically conscious mind. … Whatever publicness is humanly achievable to disciplined reflection … is accomplished by all genuine Christian confessional systematic theology. …

[It] is [also] a mistaken judgment to assume that only the model for objective, public argument employed in fundamental theologies can serve as exhaustive of what functions as genuinely public discourse even for the academy. Indeed, as Hans-Georg Gadamer … has argued on strictly philosophical grounds, ‘belonging to’ a tradition … is unavoidable when one considers the intrinsic, indeed ontic and ontological historicity of our constitution as human selves.192

We find here a radicalisation of hermeneutics as the basis for all knowledge,

following the path taken by phenomenological tradition itself under the

influence of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer. The hermeneutical

turn has stayed with Tracy for the rest of his career. He asserts that “to

understand at all is to interpret”193 and speaks of the “universality of the

hermeneutical task as the task of all disciplined reflection,”194 both phrases

modified from Gadamer.195 For Tracy as for Gadamer, hermeneutics as the

ground of knowledge is a result of the historical finitude of every human being:

“The hermeneutical understanding of philosophy and theology is … an

articulation of the only ground upon which any one of us stand: the ground of real

finitude and radical historicity in all hermeneutical understanding.”196

This radicalisation has certainly taken place for Tracy subsequently to writing

Blessed Rage; in the preface to this book’s 1996 reprinting he reflects that

190 Ibid., 67. 191 Ibid., 5–6. 192 Ibid., 66. Italics mine. 193 Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity, 9. Italics mine. 194 Analogical Imagination, 68. 195 Gadamer, “The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem”; Gadamer’s statement,

“understanding is always interpretation” is in Truth and Method, 306. 196 Analogical Imagination, 103. Italics mine.

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hermeneutics at that time was “not yet the very heart of my concept of theology.

The hermeneutical turn long since has become so for me, starting with The

Analogical Imagination and continuing through all my subsequent books … .

Indeed, a hermeneutical understanding of reason, history and theology has

defined, for me, how to understand reality and thought most adequately.”197

The major effect of Tracy’s hermeneutical turn is his increased openness to

acknowledging the truth-claims of tradition, recognising that, as Gadamer puts it,

“history does not belong to us; we belong to it.”198 In Tracy’s words, “any attempt

at an autonomy so pure that it is unaffected by the tradition in which we,

willingly or unwillingly, stand is the final form of the general privatization which

plagues our culture.”199 Tracy goes on to affirm the priority of language in a

passage that might have been copied from Lindbeck’s Nature of Doctrine if it

hadn’t been written three years beforehand:

This experience of understanding, moreover, occurs in linguistic form: We do not, in fact, experience some purely nonlinguistic ‘understanding’ and then use language as a tool or instrument for its expression. Rather, from the beginning to the end of our journey to understand we find ourselves in a particular linguistic tradition (primarily our native language) which carries with it certain specifiable ways of viewing the world, certain ‘forms of life’ which we did not invent but find ourselves, critically but really, within. The word ‘hermeneutical’ best describes this realised experience of understanding in conversation.200

This means that Blundell is wrong to say that “the fundamental specialty …

holds all the power in Tracy’s model.”201 Tracy is clear that “fundamental

theology cannot live on its own. It finds that its own inner drive to truth and

concreteness necessitates its move to systematics. … Fundamental theology is

necessary but not sufficient for theology.”202 Systematic theology can only be

done as a consequence of the perspective gained by immersion in a particular

tradition, because such immersion produces the “communal taste” and “faithful

tact” necessary to interpret it well.203 Fundamental theology needs systematic

theology to ground it properly in the tradition on which both are ultimately fully

dependent to understand their Christian identity.

197 Blessed Rage for Order, xiv. 198 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 278. 199 Analogical Imagination, 100. 200 Ibid., 101. 201 Blundell, Ricoeur between Theology and Philosophy, 42. 202 Tracy, “The Necessity and Insufficiency of Fundamental Theology,” 36. 203 Analogical Imagination, 67.

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In short, philosophical hermeneutics is more deeply ingrained in Tracy than

Blundell or Lindbeck realise. But its effect is the exact opposite of their fears: it

frees Tracy to show a deep respect for the particularities of the Christian tradition,

and to invoke the radical historical contingency of all knowledge in insisting that

no discipline can claim a greater publicness than systematic theology, including

fundamental theology.204

4.4. Summary

Our examination of Tracy in light of the given objections has resulted in the

following conclusions.

(1) It is a straight misreading to suggest that Tracy makes the truth of

Christianity dependent upon modern academic enquiry. Tracy clearly

ascribes the theologian’s fundamental loyalty to God alone and no human

‘public’.

(2) By means of analogy, Tracy preserves the distinctiveness of the ‘particular’

against absorption by the ‘general’.

(3) It is an equally mistaken accusation that Tracy is not up-to-date on the

latest hermeneutical and linguistic developments in philosophy. On the

contrary, from Analogical Imagination onwards his theological method is

founded on them.

(4) But, in view of (3), Tracy can rightly be accused of taking philosophical

hermeneutics as his “starting point.” The phenomenological tradition is

the ground for all his theology, and his own developments “from

phenomenology to hermeneutics” – parallel the developments found

within this tradition.205

Tracy is a bridge-builder. He is concerned to make Christianity

understandable by showing the connection points between it and the outside

world. But his rootedness in philosophical hermeneutics leads to an awareness

of the historically situated nature of knowledge: Christianity cannot be justified

on universal grounds because no such grounds exist.

We might construe the relationship between systematic and fundamental

theology in Tracy as follows. Fundamental theology could be seen as belonging

to the genre of introduction. The only way to introduce any particularity is to draw

analogies with general categories already familiar to one’s audience.

Fundamental theology introduces Christianity to those who have not been

converted to it and do not belong to its tradition, by describing it in general terms

204 See ibid., 66, quoted above. 205 See the table of contents in Kearney and Rainwater, The Continental Philosophy Reader.

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as a religion. But it also makes clear that such a general introduction does not

exhaust the meaning of Christianity: to enter into its particularities one must

engage with systematic theology.

What impact does the above have on biblical interpretation? It is to this

question that we now turn.

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5. DAVID TRACY’S HERMENEUTICS: MUTUALLY CRITICAL

CORRELATIONS

Systematic theology, for David Tracy, is interpretation of the ‘classics’ of the

Christian tradition. The central Christian classic is not the Bible but the “event

and person of Jesus Christ.”206 The New Testament, because it records the

“original and normative responses to the Christ event,”207 becomes, along with

the Old Testament, “not just more texts, more expressions, but Scripture.”208

But Scripture is not exceptional for Tracy in its need to be interpreted. As

Melissa Stewart says, “no matter from what direction one approaches Tracy’s

theological project, she will find hermeneutics at the center.”209 Tracy’s theology

is ‘hermeneutical’ not in the sense that it is grounded exclusively in biblical

interpretation, but because hermeneutics is his philosophical paradigm for all

knowledge.

Centralising hermeneutics has two major effects on Tracy’s method of biblical

interpretation. First, philosophical hermeneutics’ insistence on the traditioned,

linguistically-embedded, horizon-limited nature of knowledge gives Tracy an

epistemological humility, enabling him to submit to Christian orthodoxy.

Despite his openness to truth manifesting from the classics of every religion and

culture, he is nonetheless clear that, for Christians, Scripture is the “classic

judging and transforming all other classics – the norma normans non normata of all

Christian religious and theological language.”210 The Bible is “finally normative:

… that set of inspirations, controls and correctives upon all later expressions, all

later classical texts.”211

Secondly, Tracy’s philosophical hermeneutics gives a clear answer to the

following question: why does the Bible need continual interpretation? Why not

interpret it accurately once-and-for-all, after which point theologians can retire

or get another job?

Tracy offers a generalised answer: “A classic, by definition, will always be in

need of further interpretation in view of its need for renewed application to a

206 Analogical Imagination, 233. 207 Ibid., 248. 208 Ibid. 209 Stewart, “From Plurality to Pluralism,” iii. 210 Tracy, Naming the Present, 117. 211 Analogical Imagination, 249.

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particular situation.”212 Otherwise theology will only be “simple repetition,”

empty of contemporary meaning.213 Philosophical hermeneutics gives primacy

to the changing horizons of the interpreter through history. In fact, “the heart of

any hermeneutical position is the recognition that all interpretation is a

mediation of past and present, a translation.”214

This mediation of past and present is explicated in Tracy’s model of correlation

summarised earlier, which now requires a fuller exposition. In brief, there are

three possible outcomes to any particular conflict of truth-claims between

‘present situation’ and ‘tradition’:

(1) Mutual interpretation can reveal an essential compatibility between the

two that simply requires translation;

(2) The claims of the present situation might give way to the claims of the

tradition, in which case the tradition develops through its application to a

new situation;

(3) The claims of the tradition might give way to the claims of the present

situation, resulting in a critique of the tradition.

These three modes of correlation build logically upon one another and shall

be treated sequentially. In what follows I will demonstrate, not only that Tracy’s

correlationism is understood primarily hermeneutically, but that this

understanding is drawn from one of the most significant influences on his later

work: Paul Ricoeur.

5.1. Correlation as Translation

The ‘translation’ aspect of correlation is broadly continuous with Paul Tillich’s

original use of the term. Tillich’s method “affirms the need for a correlation of

the ‘questions’ expressed in the ‘situation’ with the ‘answers’ provided by the

Christian ‘message’.”215 In short, the contemporary situation compels certain

questions about ultimate meaning which can be labelled religious. The role of the

theologian is to show how the Christian tradition answers such questions by

translating the tradition into contemporary language. In “confident” modes, “the

interpretations of the meaning, meaningfulness, and truth of both the tradition

and the contemporary situation will often prove a claim to a virtual identity of

meaning between Christianity and modernity.”216 Translation is necessary

212 Naming the Present, 114. 213 Analogical Imagination, 99. 214 Ibid. 215 Blessed Rage, 46. 216 Tracy, “Foreword,” x.

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because otherwise the Gospel would not be intelligible to the new culture: “We

must ‘translate’ our Christian ‘doctrines’ into a language that the secular listener

can understand.”217 Neither Christianity nor the contemporary situation

necessarily change, only the contemporary situation must realise that its deepest

questions are answered satisfactorily by Christianity.

As we noted in our chapter on Jenson’s hermeneutics, the notion of ‘theology

as translation’ has encountered strong resistance from many postliberals and

others. In their view, to translate the Christian message into a new cultural idiom

is to compromise the core identity of Christianity. One of the clearest expositors

of this position is Lindbeck. He writes, “to the degree that religions are like

language and cultures, they can no more be taught by means of translation than

can Chinese or French.”218 The inner-Christian logic of doctrine and the language

it uses are incommensurable with any other linguistic system. “Meaning is

constituted by the uses of a specific language rather than being distinguishable

from it.”219 To suggest that doctrines can be translated into other terms implies a

rational communicability between concepts in the two languages, which implies

the need to make Christianity not only linguistically but also rationally

intelligible. For the postliberals, translation is equivalent to taking an extra-

Christian starting point for faith. Rather, Christian doctrine must be taught the

way one teaches a new language – in terms of its own inner-logic. “Instead of

redescribing the faith in new concepts, [the postliberal method] seeks to teach the

language and practices of the religion to potential adherents.”220 There is no room

for apologetically-motivated ‘translation’ in Christianity: “The logic of coming to

believe, because it is like that of learning a language, has little room for argument,

but once one has learned to speak the language of faith, argument becomes

possible.”221

Lindbeck labels his alternative approach “intratextual” as opposed to the

“extratextual” approach of apologetic translation. “Intratextual theology

redescribes reality within the scriptural framework rather than translating

Scripture into extrascriptural categories. It is the text, so to speak, which absorbs

the world, rather than the world the text.”222 Lindbeck in fact “makes

217 Blundell, Ricoeur between Theology and Philosophy, 23. 218 Nature of Doctrine, 129. 219 Ibid., 114. Italics mine. 220 Ibid., 132. 221 Ibid. 222 Ibid., 118.

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intratextuality the very hallmark of theological faithfulness in opposition to

extratextual ‘translation’.”223

In an article on theological method, Tracy engages with Lindbeck’s position.

He summarises: “As Lindbeck makes clear, theology should be intratextual and

not correlational. … Theology, for Lindbeck, does not engage in a deliberately

apologetic task at all. Therefore theology should not use revisionary methods of

correlation like Tillich's, but intratextual methods like Barth's.”224 Interestingly,

Tracy shows a great deal of appreciation for Lindbeck’s “anticorrelational”

approach, seeing “no reason to reject the genuine gains” it provides, such as “the

insistence on the need to pay closer intratextual attention to the biblical narratives

for Christian self-identity.”225 Furthermore, he praises both Frei and Lindbeck for

their postliberal ‘intratextual’ approach to theological interpretation of Scripture,

which “has much to teach all theologians - even unrepentant correlational

theologians like myself.”226

But ultimately, for Tracy, to reject correlationism is to misunderstand what it

really is. The claim that correlationism is insufficient is, he says, ironically

“typically correlational” in its basis. It is “the claim that in our situation we should

now acknowledge … that modern theology by the very attempt to correlate an

interpretation of the tradition … with an interpretation of the ever-changing

modern situation … has lost its distinctively theological center by attempting to

be correlational at all.”227 According to Tracy, correlation is an inevitable

consequence of responding in any way to the contemporary situation. To correlate

is simply to interpret the two ‘constants’ for theology – tradition and the current

situation – such that they mutually illuminate one another.

One need not agree with … [Tillich’s] ‘model of correlation’, … in order to accept the general need for some kind of correlation of these two interpretations. Even Barthians correlate, if only ordinarily in the form of Nein, to the extra-theological interpretations of the situation!228

However, we must ask: Why is correlation unavoidable? Why can’t Christians

simply become absorbed into the intratextual “language game” of Scripture

without feeling the need to translate its claims for the contemporary situation? Is

it possible that Barth simply didn’t go far enough in being influenced in his

223 DeHart, Trial of the Witnesses, 152. Italics original. 224 Tracy, “The Uneasy Alliance Reconceived,” 555. 225 Ibid., 557. 226 Tracy, “On Reading the Scriptures Theologically,” 36. 227 Tracy, “The Uneasy Alliance Reconceived,” 556. Italics mine. 228 Tracy, Analogical Imagination, 88n.44.

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theology by the contemporary situation? Is Tracy’s identification of correlation

in Barth merely an exposure of Barth’s weakness?

No. The reason correlation is unavoidable is that Christianity can never be

fully disentangled from any culture such that its pure essence is identifiable over

against all other cultures. Lindbeck’s analogy of Christianity as a ‘language’ and

a ‘culture’ falls down at this point. Every Christian, whether born into a church

community or ‘born again’ as an adult convert, is nonetheless also born into an

earthly culture and language. As Kristin Heyer puts it, “Lindbeck’s focus on the

significance of tradition in shaping individuals and cultures has … left him open

to [the] criticism … that different traditions simultaneously constitute us such that

we may not ‘purely’ privilege the biblical tradition.”229 Miroslav Volf explicates

this crucial problem:

We get no sense in Lindbeck that the intratextual and extratextual worlds crisscross and overlap in a believer or a community, or that the religious world is being shaped by the nonreligious world as well as shaping it. … We can look at our culture through the lenses of religious texts only as we look at these texts through the lenses of our culture. The notion of inhabiting the biblical story … presupposes that those who are faced with the biblical story can be completely ‘dis-lodged’ from their extratextual dwelling places and ‘re-settled’ into intratextual homes. Neither dis-lodging nor resettling can ever quite succeed; we continue to inhabit our cultures even after the encounter with the biblical story. Hence it is not enough to recognize, as Lindbeck does in a good postliberal fashion, that there is no neutral standpoint, that we are always shaped by traditions of beliefs and practices. An adequate methodological proposal must also take into account that there is no space on which to stand even for the community of faith. Ecclesial nonneutrality is always already shaped by the culture that the church inhabits.230

Nor can our inability to escape our earthly cultural embeddedness be seen as

an imperfection, the inability fully to purge ourselves from sin in this life. The

analogy of church as a culture like Chinese or American culture implicitly leads

to viewing other cultures as negatives in contrast to the church’s positive. But

that is to conflate sin with nature, and to see grace as “destroying and replacing”

nature rather than “perfecting” it.231 Insofar as we are human, we belong to a

human culture and are firmly embedded within the world. As Francis Watson

has said, “To regard the church as a self-sufficient sphere closed off from the

229 Heyer, “How Does Theology Go Public?,” 315. Italics mine. 230 Volf, “Theology, Meaning, and Power,” 103. 231 For this distinction, see Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, 11.

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world is ecclesiological docetism” because it treats the church as solely divine

without human aspects.232

Instead, we should recognise that Christians are a “confluence” of traditions

– both those engendered by Scripture and those from other cultures.233 This is

why Vanhoozer’s critique of Tracy which we quoted above is misguided. To

recap: Vanhoozer defends intratextuality by asserting that embeddedness in the

Christian tradition is no different from embeddedness in any other tradition.

“The only honest position to take in a rational conversation is to say ‘here I stand’.

Tracy, however, tries to have it both ways: ‘Here I stand … and there’.”234 But

Vanhoozer is mistaken: we all do stand in two places at any one time (or two

‘places’ cohere in us. ‘Place’ is after all a metaphor for our epistemological

constitution, which is not singular). To take seriously Volf’s point above shows

that the honesty rather belongs to Tracy for admitting that he belongs to modern

Western culture as well as to the Christian tradition, and for acknowledging the

unavoidable influence of both on his theology. To pretend that our influence

comes solely from the church is to blind ourselves to the influence of culture on

our thought which neither can be avoided nor should be lamented.

In short, Tracy’s model of correlation-as-translation is a description of what

every theologian does, even those who reject the label. As Volf summarises,

“Christians and their theologies are always situated in a given culture; we

understand Christian faith as we do because we see it with spectacles tinted by

our culture.”235 Cultures and languages are not incommensurably sealed off from

one another. If they were, as Placher notes, there would be no logical way of

telling the difference between a foreign language and gibberish.236 Every

theologian is bilingual; she belongs to an earthly language as much as to the

‘Scriptural’ language of the church. This is not a defect or an imperfection, but in

fact constitutes her very task, which is to make the language of Scripture

comprehensible to the language of her earthly culture.

5.2. Translation as Development

If language-traditions cannot be separated from their implicit truth-claims, as

agreed by everyone so far cited, then the task of correlation goes deeper than

simply translation. Indeed, the very reason postliberal theologians were afraid of

translation was that they understood the implicit truth-claims of language, that

232 Watson, Text, Church and World, 236. 233 Westphal, Whose Community?, 71. 234 Vanhoozer, First Theology, 217. 235 Volf, “Theology, Meaning, and Power,” 112. 236 Placher, Unapologetic Theology, 49.

46

translation always involves some concession to the philosophical perspective of

a culture. However, since we have demonstrated the unavoidability of

translation, there is no going back. We must bite the bullet and go on to see how

this might affect the truth of Christianity itself.

Tracy is keenly aware of the historical situatedness of every theologian and

therefore of their theological position. "It is naive to assume that a thinker is so

autonomous as to be no longer affected by the effects and influences of …

tradition in our very language, a presence carrying us along by providing our

initial prejudgments and often unconscious presuppositions as to the nature of

reality.”237 This is because

the theologian, like any other human being, has been socialized into a particular society and a particular academic tradition and has been enculturated into one particular culture. Even when the relationships to society or academy are negative ones, the theologian will be internally related to the plausibility structures of that society.238

Tracy insists, therefore, that for the theologian effectively to mediate between

tradition and contemporary situation, she must first have internalised the

tradition in terms of her own language and experience. Otherwise her theological

position will only be doctrines “externally accepted and endlessly repeated,” not

productive mediations of the tradition born of true understanding.239

The theologian’s multiple internalised cultures inevitably leads to a “conflict

of plausibility structures.”240 This particular conflict in the individual theologian,

between the truth-claims of the “present situation” and the truth claims of the

tradition, produce a “personal response in the present situation to the Christ

event … as a lived experience.”241 This will be a unique interpretation of the

situation in light of the tradition, but also of the tradition in light of the situation.

“A mutually critical correlation occurs in any individual theology between the

theologian’s interpretation of the event and the tradition in the particular

situation and the theologian’s interpretation of the situation by means of the

event.”242 This will always produce something new, and is therefore a risk: “The

systematic theologian’s ownmost task … is the risk of a creative, as both

participatory and critical, interpretation of the event … in and for the interpreted

237 Analogical Imagination, 100. 238 Ibid., 25. 239 Ibid., 99. 240 Ibid., 25. 241 Ibid., 344. 242 Ibid.

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situation. Each theologian articulates some personal theological response to that

event.”243

Here we see that Tracy has modified Tillich’s correlational model and “added

the important qualifier ‘mutually critical’” which “signals that theological

correlation is not always harmonious.”244 Both ‘tradition’ and ‘situation’ are

transformed through mutual collision inside a particular theologian. This

collision neither can nor should be avoided any more than can the mutual

transformation arising from it, because the theologian needs to have internally

interpreted the tradition in the language of her culture in order to understand it

in any meaningful way at all. Even a lay Christian who inhabits the tradition

internally interprets it for themselves, but the job of the theologian is to render

this internal interpretation explicit in language. The way the tradition looks

through the lens of that new interpretation will be unlike it has ever looked

before.

I believe that Tracy’s modification of Tillich is a result of the influence of

philosophical hermeneutics, particularly Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul

Ricoeur. Their general influence on Tracy is already well understood,245 but I

wish to show specifically how it affects his model of correlation. Gadamer

pioneered the concept of development and growth of the meaning of a classic

text, highlighting the productive nature of interpretation. He wrote “not only

occasionally, but always, the text goes beyond its author. That is why

understanding is not merely reproductive but also a productive activity as

well.”246 But it was Ricoeur who showed how this growth of meaning could be

explained by means of the productive activity of cultural ‘distanciation’,

explicating the way in which cultural distance between the text and its reader is

the productive space of new meanings.247 Ricoeur wrote, “the purpose of all

interpretation is to conquer a remoteness, a distance between the past cultural

epoch to which the text belongs and the interpreter himself. By overcoming this

distance, by making himself contemporary with the text, the exegete can

appropriate its meaning to himself; foreign, he makes it familiar, that is, he makes

243 Ibid., 406. 244 Tracy, “God, Dialogue and Solidarity.” 245 See inter alia, Sanks, “David Tracy’s Theological Project,” 699; Blundell calls Tracy the

“royal gate through which Ricoeur’s philosophical hermeneutics has entered North American theology.” (Ricoeur between Theology and Philosophy, 7).

246 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 296. 247 In fact, Tracy explicitly agrees with Ricoeur’s critique of Gadamer as failing to see the

positive function of distanciation (Analogical Imagination, 136n.8).

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it his own.”248 Therefore, the act of reading “opens [a text] to subsequent

developments and subsequent enrichments, all of which affect its very meaning.”249

These “subsequent developments” explicated by Ricoeur aptly account for the

phenomenon of doctrinal development. Tracy has put Ricoeur’s philosophical

hermeneutics to use in his model of correlation, with the result that he can clearly

explain the reasons for the necessity of doctrinal development. New cultures

bring new questions to the text of Scripture. Sometimes these questions are

answered by means of new compatible meanings, but sometimes the meanings

are incompatible, and the response of theological reflection on Scripture in light

of these new questions produces new communally-agreed doctrines to guide

future generations. This description helps clarify the relationship between, for

example, Scripture and the Nicene Creed.

To summarise in Tracy’s own words:

[Our] experiences in the present may free us to develop our understanding of the event and the tradition for our own situation and its new resources into new interpretations. Such ‘developments’ of doctrine … have occurred throughout the tradition and continue to occur now.250

5.3. Critique and Suspicion

But, Tracy adds, “the notion of development through new resources in ever-

new situations does not account for the fuller reality of the theologian’s relations

to the tradition.”251 The correlations cannot be reduced to development alone,

because they are mutually critical. Whenever there is a conflict, the contemporary

situation does not invariably give way to the tradition; sometimes the reverse

happens. For Tracy, “the tradition is … ambiguous: fundamentally to be trusted

yet ever in need of self-reform, self-correction, self-clarification.”252 Critique of

the tradition is permissible because the tradition itself insists that the Christian

community must remain faithful to the originating Christ event.253

But how is critique of the tradition possible? What tools are available to enable

this? Tracy delineates two broad categories of critique. First, historical criticism

has shown itself helpful not only “to develop [the theologian’s] understanding of

248 Ricoeur, Conflict of Interpretations, 17. 249 LaCocque and Ricoeur, Thinking Biblically, xi. Italics mine. 250 Analogical Imagination, 323. 251 Ibid. 252 Ibid., 236. 253 Ibid., 237.

49

the tradition” (as we saw in the previous section) but also “to argue publicly for

the need to correct the tradition at appropriate points.”254

Secondly, the hermeneutics of suspicion may expose systematic distortions in

the tradition.255 Here Tracy shows a heavy dependence on Ricoeur, especially

where Ricoeur mediates the insights of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche whom he

famously grouped together as “masters of suspicion.”256 Ricoeur drew together

Gadamer’s insights into dependence on tradition with Jürgen Habermas’

insistence on “critique of ideology.”257 Tracy first incorporates Ricoeur’s

understanding of the dialectic between tradition and suspicion and then shows

how it was always an element in the Christian tradition from the beginning, with

the “defamiliarising and deideologising power of the prophetic, eschatological

and even utopian visions of the ancient Jews and Christians.”258

But Tracy is careful to note that critiques from outside the tradition are not to

be considered in the same way as critiques from within. Any theological position

faithful to the tradition needs to meet the “criteria of appropriateness to the

tradition.”259 This means that “he role of the church theologian entails

interpreting the scriptures … in fidelity to the community’s own norms.”260

Therefore historical criticism is not an independent norm to which the tradition

must conform. Tracy does “not believe that ‘the historical Jesus’ (i.e. the Jesus

retrievable through modern historical-critical methods), as distinct from ‘the

Jesus witnessed to by the apostolic witness’, can prove an appropriate standard

or norm for the tradition.”261 While historical criticism may be useful in the hands

of theologians in submission to the tradition, it does not have unlimited freedom.

Likewise, suspicion also has limits, needing also to suspect itself in moments

when it tries to squeeze all religious expression into its categories.262

When a theologian offers a critique of the tradition, how are we to assess its

adequacy? First, Tracy says, “the whole church community decides in the long

run whether … new interpretations and proposed correctives are faithful to the

254 Ibid.. Italics original. Tracy distinguishes historical criticism from literary and social-

scientific criticism, but in other literature they are commonly grouped together. 255 Ibid., 137n.16. 256 For a detailed treatment of Ricoeur’s relation to suspicion, see Scott-Baumann, Ricoeur and

the Hermeneutics of Suspicion. 257 See Ricoeur, “Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology.” 258 Analogical Imagination, 137n.16. 259 Ibid., 238. 260 Short History, 182. 261 Analogical Imagination, 239. 262 Ibid., 190n.71.

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tradition’s own call to constant self-reformation in its fidelity to its witness.”263

Secondly, the church must “trust in the Spirit released by that Christ event in the

church to discern and to guide the church in its fidelity to Jesus Christ. To believe

in the indefectibility of the church in the truth of the gospel is to trust the

tradition, the church.”264

In short, “The tradition of ecclesia semper reformanda is one of the surest signs

in the ecclesial tradition itself of the reality of a living tradition.”265 Critique is

necessary, but if the Spirit is guiding the entire church, we can trust that the right

critiques will be responded to.

5.4. Summary

Tracy has dramatically broadened the scope of correlation from its beginnings

in the theology of Tillich. In his hands it serves as a tool to understand the full

range of interpretations of the Christian tradition, from translation through

development to critique. Tracy’s model provides us with a method for biblical

interpretation which is both grounded in philosophical hermeneutics and

fundamentally faithful to the way the Bible has been interpreted by the tradition,

allowing for development and critique as long as these are accepted “in the long

run” by the whole church community, trusting the Spirit to guide.

Tracy shows a keen awareness, through philosophical hermeneutics, of the

ongoing influence of ‘extratextual’ culture on the church. He does not view this

as a negative influence, but rather as a source of development and critique, as the

culture both transforms and is transformed by the church. But because

philosophical hermeneutics is self-limiting, Tracy’s embrace of it leaves him

ultimately free to be loyal to the tradition, giving priority to theological

hermeneutics as an instance of philosophical hermeneutics appropriate to the

Christian tradition and in submission to the tradition’s own norms.

In our final chapter we turn to compare Tracy’s hermeneutical approach with

that of Robert Jenson.

263 Ibid., 237. 264 Ibid., 328–329. 265 Ibid., 323–324.

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6. TRACY AND JENSON IN DIALOGUE

In David Tracy we have seen a theology which takes philosophical

hermeneutics as its starting point but which, by means of its own inner-logic,

points beyond itself to submit to the claims of theological hermeneutics on

Christian interpretation of Scripture.

In Robert Jenson we have seen a theology which emphatically starts from its

own foundations and develops inner-theological categories for ecclesial

interpretation of Scripture, but which also remains aware of philosophical

hermeneutics’ insistence on the historical contingency of knowledge, and which

integrates this awareness, at least partly, into the spreading and developing

nature of the gospel.

Both analyses have demonstrated that philosophical and theological

hermeneutics are inextricably intertwined. Every Christian is a confluence of

ecclesial (‘intratextual’) and cultural (‘extratextual’) traditions, unavoidably

influenced by both in their approach to Scripture. Philosophical hermeneutics

provides an awareness of our native culture’s unavoidable influence on the way

we think, but theological hermeneutics represents the norms provided by our

post-conversion community’s way of thinking.

I suggest that closer attention to the nature of conversion sheds light on the

complex relationship between philosophical and theological hermeneutics, and

additionally highlights the strengths and weaknesses of Tracy’s and Jenson’s

methods. If theology is construed as the perspective acquired as a result of

conversion, and philosophy as the pre-conversion way of thinking arising from

a local cultural context, then we can see that conversion means the redemption but

not the replacement of philosophy by theology.

One of the profoundest reflections on conversion comes from Tracy’s former

mentor, Lonergan, who defines it as “a transformation of the subject and his

world. … It is as if one’s eyes were opened and one’s former world faded and fell

away.”266 When a person converts, she sees everything through a new paradigm.

All the same data are organised into a different pattern; a new foundational

principle underpins and explains them. It is not only those raised outside

Christianity who convert; those born in Christian communities must still make

their faith their own in a pluralist society when the explanatory force of

266 Lonergan, Method in Theology, 130. I am using conversion in broad brush-strokes, which do

not require the distinctions Lonergan makes between intellectual, religious, and moral conversion.

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alternative ways of thinking becomes apparent to them. This process may

legitimately be described as a sort of conversion.

Four features emerge from the use of conversion as a guide to construing the

relationship between philosophical and theological hermeneutics. First, it shows

that every theologian’s views are influenced by non-theological factors.

Secondly, it allows us to distinguish between closed philosophies, which do not

permit the possibility of conversion, and self-limiting philosophies such as

philosophical hermeneutics, which do. Thirdly, it demonstrates that the

theologian should remember her path to conversion both for personal integrity

in her theology and for the sake of effective apologetics and evangelism.

Fourthly, it highlights the importance of submission to the norms of the convert’s

new paradigm, i.e. the priority of theological hermeneutics for the converted.

6.1. The Personal and Ethical Side to Conversion

First, conversion highlights the personal element to interpretation, the

reminder, in Lonergan’s words, “that theologies are produced by theologians,

that theologians have minds and use them, that their doing so should not be

ignored or passed over but explicitly acknowledged in itself and in its

implications.”267

One implication of this is that an individual’s reasons for converting cannot

be abstracted into a grounding philosophy, because conversion happens for

innumerable reasons, each time involving the whole person including everything

below the level of conscious rationality: taste, intuition, enculturation, etc.

Therefore interpretation is never a purely rational exercise free of influences from

non-rational spheres of experience. Tracy seems more cognisant than Jenson of

this, saying that theology is ultimately the “personal response” of the individual

theologian to a Christian classic.268 In Tracy the particularity of this response is

held in tension with his insistence on the public nature of theology by means of

analogy.

Another implication is that interpretation has an ethical dimension. Both Tracy

and Jenson lack this dimension in their account of biblical interpretation, but

Tracy could have avoided this if he had kept more closely to his first mentor. He

adopts Lonergan’s language when he says that fundamental theology is

addressed to “any attentive, intelligent, reasonable and responsible person.”269

But a subtle shift has occurred, because these were ethical imperatives in

267 Ibid., 25. 268 Analogical Imagination, 344. 269 Ibid., 63.

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Lonergan (“be attentive, be reasonable, etc.”270), applying to the “religiously

converted” only,271 not indicative descriptions which apply to anyone. As

Werner Jeanrond notes, for Tracy “the process of interpretation would appear to

be reduced to what one might call a value-free, innocent activity.”272 Jeanrond

asserts, however: “No reading is ethically neutral, since every reading represents

an answer to a textual claim, … which may be responsible or irresponsible.”273

6.2. A Self-Limiting Philosophy Permitting Conversion

Secondly, conversion is only possible if the prior philosophy does not pretend

to conceptual closure. Although philosophical hermeneutics is considered a

‘universalising’ discipline, and indeed calls itself such, it is not universalising in

the same way as the Enlightenment. It only insists that historical contingency is

a ‘universal’ feature of human knowledge, but this insistence leads to an

epistemological humility enabling the possibility of conversion (or adherence) to

a diverse range of beliefs and traditions.

By and large the postliberals have failed to recognise this distinction. Jenson

equates all philosophy with “Greek theology” and sees it as primarily a rival

foundational discipline.274 In similar vein, Lindbeck writes: “As T.S. Kuhn has

argued in reference to science, and Wittgenstein in philosophy, the norms of

reasonableness are too rich and subtle to be adequately specified in any general

theory of reason or knowledge.”275 But what is this statement if not a “general

theory of reason and knowledge” grounded in an appeal to secular philosophy?

The difference is that it is an open theory. In this sense, the postliberals are just as

philosophically grounded as Tracy (Jenson only to the extent that he relies on

Lindbeck’s argument in the prolegomena to his Systematic Theology), since, as

many have remarked, they employ Wittgenstein as justification for their

theological position.276 But the important point is that this is nothing to be ashamed

of, provided this grounding philosophy points beyond itself, permitting

fundamental loyalty to the Christian tradition.

6.3. Remembering the Path to Conversion

Thirdly, every convert should remember his path towards conversion, for two

reasons. First, it is a path he might lead others down. The process by which his

270 Lonergan, Method in Theology, 53. 271 Holland, How Do Stories Save Us?, 34. 272 Jeanrond, Text and Interpretation, 138. 273 Ibid., 136. 274 Systematic Theology, 1997, 1:10. 275 Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine, 130. 276 See e.g., Stiver, Ricoeur and Theology, 85.

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former worldview began to seem unsatisfactory as an alternative became more

attractive, is a process worth describing for the benefit of others. Apologetics is

at its most powerful when it contains both authentic personal honesty and

intellectual rigour. Here Tracy, as ‘bridge-builder’, proves more helpful than

Jenson. Heyer summarises Tracy’s helpfulness well:

Tracy’s model … best engages this task of communicating the Christian message beyond its ‘borders’ … [S]ome degree of understanding outside of the community is necessary if any evangelization or invitation to ‘learn the Christian language’ is possible. Without the ‘bridge’ that processes of correlation or apologetics build, there would be insufficient resources to explain the Christian community’s practice and witness (to ‘outsiders’) and to enable conversion.277

By contrast, Jenson says that we become gospel proclaimers by “believ[ing]

what we hear, for whatever reason,”278 and refuses to offer ‘reasons’ to believe

the gospel because they would be seen as his despised “prolegomena” which

“enable” theological discourse.279 But he also insists that the gospel be ‘translated’

into new cultures and their philosophical substructures. This highlights an

inconsistency in Jenson’s definition of the gospel. On the one hand, it is addressed

to the church alone. But on the other hand, it changes with every new culture.

This is an implicit admission, possibly of a non-ecclesial audience to the gospel,

but definitely of ‘extratextual’ cultural influences on the church, which are not

entirely a result of sin but part of the very nature of spreading the gospel. Jenson

himself, as an individual belonging both to twentieth-century North American

culture and to the church, has reasons for his faith. These reasons need not be

considered universal, but are nonetheless a bridge from his own ‘extratextual’

culture into the church. Articulating them would achieve two goals: an

evangelistic goal of showing a route into faith for potential converts sharing his

cultural background, and the goal of personal integrity leading to a more honest

and coherent theology.

The leads to the second reason a theologian should remember his path to

conversion: the process of, and reasons for, conversion leave an indelible mark on all his

subsequent theology.

A new convert may be tempted to draw too sharp a distinction between his

unconverted and converted worldviews. Dazzled by the light of grace, he can

conflate nature with sin, and repudiate both. But in reality, he brings much of the

277 Heyer, “How Does Theology Go Public?,” 325. 278 See previous paragraph. 279 Systematic Theology, 1997, 1:3.

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old self with him. His task is not to abolish both but discerningly to distinguish

sin from nature and patiently to redeem every part of his natural self. As David

Novak says, “though … conversion is being ‘born again’, … former pagans are

encouraged to bring the best of their former culture with them into the new

religion.”280 We might go beyond Novak and insist that it is inevitable for a

theologian to bring aspects of his culture with him.

The theologian is a dual representative: he represents his native culture to

Christianity and Christianity to his native culture. He not only cannot but must

not purge himself of all former cultural influences; these comprise the distinctive

contribution he brings to the church. Both Tracy and Jenson fully recognise the

inescapable influence of one’s cultural-historical context, and explicate this

through the conceptual tool of philosophical hermeneutics. In Tracy this

recognition is integrated end-to-end, and he uses it to account for doctrinal

development, as the theologian transforms both the Christian tradition and his

native culture through ‘mutually critical correlations’.

Jenson, conversely, is affected by the same ambiguity mentioned above.

Positively, he has advanced beyond Lindbeck’s position. Alister McGrath

observes that because Lindbeck doesn’t permit the influence of external culture

on the intratextual Scriptural tradition, he is “unable to account for doctrinal

development, or respond to the need for theological reformulation and

revision.”281 Unlike Lindbeck, Jenson can account for doctrinal development,

insisting that the gospel must be said anew in every new culture. But his

description of the church is still too hermetically sealed off from the world, as if

any influence of native culture on one’s way of thinking compromised the purity

of the gospels self-grounding nature. In reality, the gospel is always grounded,

at least partially, in warrants that come from the local culture.

6.4. Submitting to the New Paradigm’s Norms

Fourthly, every convert must also submit to the norms of the new community

into which she has been received. In the case of Christianity, she must submit

first to the primary authority of Scripture over all faith and practice, and secondly

to ecclesial dogma as a guide to Scriptural interpretation which maintains the

church’s diachronic continuity.

280 Novak, “Theology and Philosophy,” 46. 281 McGrath, Scientific Theology, 53; This is not to say that Lindbeck does not give attention to

the question of doctrinal development (e.g. Lindbeck, “Protestant Problems with Lonergan on Development of Dogma”), but rather that his model of doctrine leaves unexplained how development could actually occur except as the correction of former error.

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In this area Jenson is more helpful than Tracy. Indeed, both acknowledge

Scripture as the ultimate authority of Christian theology and impose ecclesial

boundaries on historical criticism. But where Tracy mentions only once the need

to trust the Spirit’s guidance, in Jenson this recognition is pervasive and

controlling. Where Tracy acknowledges once the importance of ecclesial

consensus, in Jenson this becomes central, and consequently ecclesial divisions

are felt as deeply debilitating.

Tracy’s “relative dearth of ecclesial considerations” has two unfortunate

results.282 The first is his too-comfortable embrace of plurality, seeing it as

primarily an “enrichment.”283 Plurality may truly be an enrichment, (diversity of

views is healthy even within a united church), but according to my ‘interpretation

of the contemporary situation’, the church does not presently lack plurality as

much as it needs criteria for establishing unity. To this end, Tracy only offers

general guidelines for dialogue within a pluralist situation.284 But for Jenson “the

perennial work of theology is to help the church restore ecclesial unity,” and he

provides a framework which drives urgently towards ecclesial cohesion.285

Strangely, it is the Catholic in our comparison who shows little ‘magisterial’

interest, whereas the Lutheran offers a full account of the church’s

epistemological importance.

Secondly, Tracy’s weak ecclesiology, combined with the above-mentioned

absence of an ethical dimension to interpretation, result in his over-prioritisation

of the claims of the ‘contemporary situation’. There is an ambiguity in his use of

‘mutually critical correlations’ which travels with him throughout his career. In

Blessed Rage the contemporary situation has greater weight, and the Christian

tradition must radically revise itself in order to meet modern standards. As

Tracy’s thought develops, the balance gradually shifts such that the claims of the

tradition increasingly outweigh the claims of the contemporary situation. But

even in the later Tracy, one wonders how any church could remain united for

long if every new culture were to modify the Christian tradition as radically as

Tracy feels his ‘contemporary situation’ is justified to do. This and his enthusiasm

for “plurality and ambiguity” make his theology overly centrifugal. As Thiselton

notes, Tracy goes too far in affirming individual autonomy when in fact, in light

of the noetic effect of sin, submission to the tradition is more often what is

required.286 By contrast, Jenson’s more centripetal theology foregrounds the need

282 Heyer, “How Does Theology Go Public?,” 322. 283 Analogical Imagination, ix. 284 Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity. 285 Ochs, “Judaism and Christian Theology,” 652. 286 Thiselton, Hermeneutics of Doctrine, 113.

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for such submission, allowing the possibility of greater cohesion within the

church.

6.5. Conclusion

In summary, while Tracy and Jenson both integrate theological and

philosophical hermeneutics into their methods, we have seen that Tracy’s

philosophical hermeneutics is more consistent than Jenson’s, whereas Jenson’s

theological hermeneutics is more consistent than Tracy’s. Nonetheless, we have

much to learn from both. But what would an integrated position look like?

First, theological hermeneutics, as the post-conversion perspective, would

take priority, in fidelity to the norms of Christian community. An over-emphasis

on philosophical hermeneutics can lead to a relativising of the normative

‘centripetal’ claims of theology on every believer, of which we have seen signs in

Tracy. Although philosophical hermeneutics can engender the humility to point

beyond itself, it can also go too far in radicalising historical relativity. It then

needs theological hermeneutics as a corrective to prevent it from the wrong kind

of ‘universalising’, to which it is always tempted. As Paul Ricoeur writes, “faith

… can help philosophical hermeneutics to protect itself from the hubris that

would set it up as the heir to the philosophies of the cogito and as continuing

their self-foundational claim.”287

On the other hand, theological hermeneutics also has a temptation to hubris.

A theology which does not show awareness of its own humanity and historicity

is in great danger of confusing the universal claims of Christianity with its own

localised perspective. Then the theologian presumes that his voice is the voice of

God, and his interpretation of Scripture the only valid one. Our historical

contingency should be recognised as a result, not only of our sinfulness, but also

of our created nature. Too often our epistemological limitations are viewed as

flaws to be overcome rather than as essential aspects of our humanity.288 But the

limitations of our human nature are not to be attributed solely to the fall. Here

philosophical hermeneutics can help. As Merold Westphal puts it:

Only God is absolute. We simply are relative, both finite by virtue of creation and fallen by virtue of our sinful distortion of creation. Thus there is the very real danger that in desiring to free our knowledge from

287 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 25. 288 See Smith, Fall of Interpretation, for a fuller articulation of this point, although Smith takes

it too far the other way and does not discuss the role of sin in interpretation.

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every relativity we are forgetting the difference between ourselves and God.289

“God is God and we are not,” Westphal concludes. “Philosophical

hermeneutics can be read as a nontheological reminder of this important

theological truth.”290

For Christians to participate both in the fullness of divine revelation through

the Bible, and in recognition of their own creaturely limitations, both

philosophical and theological hermeneutics are essential tools. Wisdom is a

matter of knowing which is the right tool to use when.

289 Westphal, “The Philosophical/Theological View,” 82. 290 Ibid., 88.

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