David Tracy
This essay is a synthetic, interpretive overview of David Tracy’s theology, aiming to:
· Explain Tracy’s hermeneutical method and its development over time.
· Defend the public character of theology in a pluralistic context
· Show how Tracy negotiates tradition, modernity, and postmodernity without collapsing into either foundationalism or relativism
The thesis is that Tracy offers a viable model of Christian theology for a radically pluralistic world by grounding theological reflection in interpretation, conversation, and the enduring power of religious “classics,” especially the Christ-event. I hope the reader will find the following to be true:
· Comprehensive: Covers Tracy’s full intellectual range
· Accurate synthesis: Faithful to Tracy’s categories and vocabulary
· Dialogical: Models the conversational theology it describes
· Integrative: Connects hermeneutics, Christology, ethics, and pluralism
I offer a chronological and thematic essay, moving through Tracy’s career in stages. This structure mirrors Tracy’s own intellectual trajectory—from confidence in method, through dialogue with pluralism, toward humility, ambiguity, and apophatic theology.
Biographical and intellectual background
David Tracy has focused his work on hermeneutics and theological method in a pluralistic context. His work is distinctive both for its breadth—he integrates insights from modern theology, philosophy, biblical scholarship and literary criticism—and for the critical love he shows for his own Christian tradition, even in the face of what he takes to be the undeniable pluralism of the contemporary intellectual horizon. He is well-known for his debate with George Lindbeck regarding the public character of theology. "David’s gentle, generous, and humble spirit, his quick and incisive intelligence, and his total devotion to the theological task and the Christian faith (in him, inextricably tied to one another) have deeply touched countless numbers of his students, friends, colleagues, and coreligionists." He was a founding editor of Religious Studies Review, has been a coeditor of the Journal of Religion, and has served on the editorial board of Concilium in addition to contributing to and editing various issues. He is the author of some eight books and numerous articles.
Tracy’s work displays a concern both with a broad range of studies within theology and for almost constant conversation with fellow scholars in other fields. Although the roots of his thought lie in transcendental Thomism, he has also been influenced by many other thinkers and traditions, such as the hermeneutical work of Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Derrida, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, the process theology of Schubert Ogden, and the mysticism of Simone Weil (McCarthy, 468-69). Despite this constant development of interest, however, his work has consistently focused on theological method and pluralism, emphasizing the role of interpretation and hermeneutics in systematic theological thought. It is for these methodological contributions, to his disappointment, that he is best known. In a more recent interview, Tracy reported his regret that so much emphasis has been given to his methodological considerations while his more substantive theological reflections, such as those on Christology, have been neglected (Breyfogle & Levergood, 305).
The sharpest rebuke has come from George Lindbeck, who opposes Tracy’s emphasis on the publicness of theological interpretation with his own cultural-linguistic model of religious understanding (Lints, 658-60). In addition, Tracy has been criticized by David Burrell and others for writing on methodology rather than actual systematic theology. He has also been criticized by a former student for insufficiently connecting hermeneutical theory with Christian practice (Sanks, 719-26).
His own scholarship, with its shifts and continuities, is characterized by this commitment and is stamped by the transcendental imperatives he learned in his study with Bernard Lonergan: “Be attentive, be intelligent, be rational, be responsible, develop and, if necessary, change” (McCarthy, 468).
Early methodological work (Blessed Rage for Order)
Blessed Rage for Order (1975) set forth his own “revisionist” method, which sees the central task of theology as a critical correlation between the values and claims of postmodern human experience and the texts of the Christian tradition, and which develops a panentheistic understanding of theology in the metaphysical categories of process theology (Sanks, 703-09).
Blessed Rage for Order is his seminal work. He is already committed here to critical theological reflection accountable to and speaking within the modern university, the Roman Catholic Church, and the radical pluralism of the late twentieth century.
Tracy makes two assumptions that continue to guide his work: first that philosophical and religious pluralism can be enriching if the theologian neither flees from it nor capitulates to a lazy consumer-tolerance. But the tools and insights of many viewpoints are only useful if theologians delineate and defend their methods of inquiry and apply them with integrity to the same sources. The twin loyalties of scientific inquiry and interpretation of one’s faith tradition are held joined in the ethical dilemma of the theologian.
He investigates orthodox, liberal, neo-orthodox, radical and revisionist models in contemporary theology by considering the subject and object referents in each model. Committed to what he calls a common faith or trust in the worthwhileness of life; he advocates revision and sets forth five theses. These are (1) that the principle sources for theology are common human experience and language and the facts (texts, symbols, stories, and rituals) of Christian tradition; (2) that the task of theology is to set these sources in critical correlation; (3) that the phenomenology of the religious dimensions of everyday life, morality and science must be weighed; (4) that historical-hermeneutical investigation of classical Christian texts is necessary; and (5) that transcendental/metaphysical reflection is also critical to theological work. Criteria of adequacy and appropriateness for evaluating the meanings of human experience and Christian texts are introduced. The hermeneutical analysis of subject- and object- reference is advocated as avoiding psychologizing, applicable within breadth of theology, appealing to imagination and including aesthetic elements.
Next Tracy turns to the task of outlining a new model and method for fundamental theology through the investigation of limit-language, both at the boundaries of everyday life and of intellectual inquiry. Limit-language at the edges of life and in ecstasy or peak experiences. We neither make nor control these horizons. Tracy tests the meaningfulness and truthfulness of Christian language and symbols at these horizons, beginning with New Testament religious language. His initial linguistic analyses show the illogic or emptiness of religious language but pressing further he shows that it has a poetic/symbolic character joined by total commitment and universality. In the New Testament, "going to the limits" of language through intensification or transgression in proverbs, proclamations, parables, and eschatological sayings jars us into impossible-possible modes of being in the world. This provides confidence in the ultimate worth and purpose of life. The possibility and vision are radical honesty and love in the presence of the gracious God in Jesus Christ.
The remainder of the book investigates the questions of God, meaning, and truth in relational and process models. This investigation is qualified by the need for a fuller recognition of ambiguity, tragedy and sin than is present in most process thought. Possibilities of transformation are set in the imagination through the interpretation of tradition, and the necessity of transformation is clear in the face of evil. God’s love is persuasive and non-coercive, yet its power to change our lives needs compelling and liberating language speaking to the contemporary situation. The stories, symbols, images, myths, and fictions of the Christ event disclose possibilities, so this non-cognitive function of religious language reorients us to real possibilities.
Mature hermeneutical synthesis (The Analogical Imagination)
This analysis shows that
· Tracy privileges analogy over dialectic
· Analogy enables unity-in-difference
· Dialectic remains necessary for negation and critique
Importantly, Tracy does not oppose analogy and dialectic absolutely, but sees them as complementary moments within theological reflection.
In The Analogical Imagination (1981), he presents a hermeneutical understanding of theology, centered on the notion of the classic, which emphasizes interpretation and the necessarily public character of systematic theology (Breyfogle & Levergood, 301). The hermeneutical task of the systematic theologian is the reflection upon a focally meaningful event by someone who feels themselves gripped by this event and who journeys through the symbols of his or her own tradition to articulate this understanding (Tracy, 1981, 420). For Tracy, this meaning is found in the grace and love disclosed in the event of Jesus Christ; his work tries to articulate the hermeneutical task by which this meaning is related to the challenges of a pluralistic society.
The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism. New York: Crossroad Publishing Company. The book begins by setting forth the publicness of systematic theology. Theology as public discourse is set in relation to society, academy and church, the latter having both a sociological and theological reality. The task of systematic theology is the coherent interpretation of the Christian Classics in critical correlation with the contemporary situation. Thus, both event and situation must be interpreted. Theology needs to convey the "critical freedom granted as grace and command in the originating religious event itself." Therefore, it must be adequate to common experience and language, it must convey existential meaningfulness, it must disclose truth and so hold power to transform life.
Theology has typically sought to accomplish these ends through analogy or dialectic – Tracy advocates the priority of analogy. Analogy provides focal meaning that empowers harmony and unity-in-difference. So, the analogical imagination is equipped for the polycentric, contemporary situation – the analogical imagination is open, yet committed to its own integrity and dignity, yet willing to change if it must. According to Aristotle, the power of analogical imagination is to spot the similar in the dissimilar. The analogical imagination at work in systematic theology is free to note the profound similarity in difference of all reality. Theologians participate in the wonder, trust disclosure and concealment of the religious event and step back to second order language for the sake of critical reflection. Then theology sets forth in reflective, conceptual language the original wonder and confidence. While there are always dialectics within the analogues, always no’s ringing emphatically before every yes, they give way to analogy – otherwise they degrade into rage or despair. The Christian analogue is always the Christ event – and this event has the character of always-already/not yet of the grace and gift disclosed in Jesus Christ. Christianity lives by an event and person – Jesus Christ – not by ideas. All relations of God-self-world are ordered and oriented by the always-already/not yet Christ event. In words reminiscent of Heidegger’s idea of clearings in which truth is disclosed and concealed, Tracy’s book concludes,
For the analogical imagination, once religiously engaged, can become a clearing wherein we may finally hear each other once again, where we may yet become willing to face the actuality of the not-yet concealed in our present inhumanity in all its darkness – a deepening, encroaching darkness that, even now, even here, discloses the encompassing light always-already within us. (455)
To understand Tracy’s conception of theology’s hermeneutical task here, it will be helpful to consider this task under the following four aspects: human interpretation, the publicness of theology, the notion of the classic, and the analogical imagination.
Human interpretation
The task of the theologian is interpretation. To claim that interpretation is central to theology, for Tracy, is only a recognition of the centrality of interpretation in human life in general. To understand at all is always to interpret. As human beings, we exist in the world by the way we understand (McCarthy, 469). In fact, interpretation, in Tracy’s view, is unavoidable because to experience anything in other than a purely passive sense is to interpret (Tracy, 1987, 9). Interpretation, then, is part of the larger activity of participatory understanding, as human existence finds itself always already participating and being already ‘on the way.’ Every human person is thrown into a finite and temporal horizon, says Tracy following Heidegger, and every person must risk an interpretation of the things encountered within that horizon (Tracy, 1981, 103). Tracy’s emphasis on the “risk” of interpretation here is reminiscent of the work of Ernst Troeltsch, who insisted that amidst the complexities, partialities, and limitations that surround questions of religion in history, one must nonetheless responsibly risk an interpretation of the religious essence in history. Far from undermining the validity of one’s interpretation, this subjective element was for Troeltsch a creative act that had the potential to shape this essence afresh (Troeltsch, 142-163).
Consequently, interpretation is not the activity of a particular elite but is common to all human experience. Such interpretation becomes theological when encountered by phenomena touching limit-experiences that can be correlated with Christian symbols (McCarthy, 467-70). A phenomenon provokes interpretation as far as it touches on a limit experience: this is a moment of intensification when the ordinary discloses the mysteriousness of human existence that calls for hope, faith, love, and further interpretative understanding.
The Publicness of Theology
This common activity of interpretation in human experience supports Tracy’s contention that all authentic theology is public theology. For Tracy, “theology is public discourse,” and systematic theology necessarily holds public status (Tracy, 1981, 3). Specifically, he says, each theologian “addresses three distinct and related social realities: the wider society, the academy, and the church” (Tracy, 1981, 5). Every theologian, therefore, addresses these three publics. The first, society, encompasses the technoeconomic realm, politics, and culture and involves concern for social justice and the poor. The second, the academy, provides the intellectual context of contemporary theology, which involves a responsibility for rational dialogue and interaction with other fields of knowledge and inquiry. The third, the church, identifies the theologian’s responsibility to the living tradition of a faith-community (Tracy, 1981, 14-24). A particular theologian, of course, will principally address one of these three publics. The wider society typically this is the concern of practical theologians. The academy is typically the concern of fundamental theologians. The church is usually the realm of systematic theologians. Yet, as the common social reality of any theologian involves an experience and participatory understanding in each of these three groups, he or she implicitly addresses all three realms. The complexity of this situation, which for Tracy is only a reflection of the complexity of pluralism, is something that must be faced with serious reflection. What is needed in theology, then, is a drive not towards privateness but towards authentic public discourse (Tracy, 1981, 30-31).
The classic
Tracy further explores the authentically public nature of theological interpretation with his notion of the “classic” a text(s), event(s), or person(s) that bear an excess of permanence of meaning, yet always resist definitive interpretation, it claims authority because of the intensification of meaning and value that occurs in this work (however, not all classics are ‘religious classics’). This notion of the “classic” is central to Tracy’s theological hermeneutics and forms the conceptual cornerstone for his work in The Analogical Imagination. Systematic theology, he says, requires a profound acceptance of finitude and historicity and yet maintains a kind of normative status. One can only understand these two claims through a non-authoritarian notion of authority and truth, which is to be found in his notion of the classic (Tracy, 1981, 100). A classic is a person, text, event, melody, or symbol encountered in some cultural experience that bears a certain excess of meaning as well as certain timelessness; it confronts and provokes us in our present horizon with the feeling that something else might be the case (Tracy, 1981, 101-07). This notion, therefore, is an articulation of the experience one has when encountering a hugely significant book, person, work of art, or piece of music. In contrast to mere period pieces, which are meaningful for a time but which one eventually ‘grows out of,’ genuine classics transform one’s horizon. They bring a meaning that is both particular and universal (Tracy, 1994, 115) and give rise to limit-experiences that can bear the power of the whole (Sanks, 713). Tracy does not offer any epistemological theory for how the truth of such classics is perceived but affirms that such understanding happens, like an event, and that such experiences are a common element of human life and thus provide a category for speaking about the truth (Tracy, 1981, 102). It should be noted that Tracy’s description of the notion of the classic, in which truth is linked to the spontaneous ‘happening’ of understanding that comes from having one’s horizon’s challenged and provoked by something at once particular and universal, bears resemblance to Bernard Lonergan’s description of the occurrence of an insight (Lonergan, 1-33).
This notion of the classic is the key to Tracy’s description of authentic systematic theology as the work of an analogical imagination. Christian symbols focus on the event of Jesus Christ as a religious classic. A theologian is confronted or grasped by some encounter with Christ and then journeys through the full range of Christian forms and symbols to set forth the significance of this event with relative adequacy (Tracy, 1981, 407). The encounter with the religious classic that is the event of Jesus Christ thus gives rise to second-order reflection on this encounter, and such reflection, Tracy says, takes the form of one of two major conceptual languages in theology. The first of these is analogical language, an interpretation of real-similarities-in-real-difference that focuses on a primary meaning or analogue in its manifestation and seeks to articulate the harmony of meaning in this event in relation to the whole of reality and in relation to the realities of God, the self, other selves, and the world. The harmony achieved in such reflection is not forced and is not a static and univocal uniformity. It is a unity-in-difference, always involving negations of any claim to full adequacy, yet perceiving nonetheless an emerging harmony (Tracy, 1981, 408-13). The second major conceptual language is that of proclamation or dialectical language, which emphasizes the necessity of radical negation in faithful theological language. The theological language of dialectics insists on the negation of any human efforts to save oneself, exposes the nonidentity of human reason with God’s word, and unmasks any easy continuities between God and the human or God and the world (Tracy, 1981, 414-17). The conceptual language of analogy, Tracy says, is that used by theologians such as Thomas Aquinas, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Karl Rahner, and Wolfhart Pannenberg, while the language of dialectics is the domain of theologians such as Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, and Paul Tillich as well as more recent political and liberation theologians. In their actual usage, however, he contends that these two traditions of analogy and dialectic, or manifestation and proclamation, are not two competing languages but are both necessary and complementary aspects of theological language. Genuine analogy requires negation if it is not to become a deadening univocity and dialectical language must move forward into analogy if anything, but a chaotic vacillation is to be left when “the purging fire” of negation ends (Tracy, 1981, 417-20). Both analogy and dialectics, therefore, have a similar status as “theologies within an uncanny journey through and in the event-gift-grace disclosed in the entire Christian symbol system” (Tracy, 1981, 420). Both, consequently, are aspects of an analogical imagination that seeks to formulate a theological understanding of the original religious event in relation to the realities of God, the self, and the world.
Such understanding, of course, is not guaranteed, and it necessarily involves some personal risk. Yet, the subject matter itself, in the surplus of meaning in the religious classic of the event of Jesus Christ, guides the reflection and, by transforming the interpreter’s horizon, releases him or her to trust in the overwhelming reality disclosed. It thus releases a power that transforms one’s understanding of God, self, and the world, freeing one to the self-transcendence of regard for the other and allowing the possibility for authentic conversation. Tracy writes:
Thus released, we are not freed to some new knowledge, some new gnosis which we now possess for ourselves alone. Rather we are finally freed to embrace a fundamental trust in the whole, to demand of ourselves, by that trust, a hope for the sake of the hopeless, to risk a life in the impossible gospel possibility of a faith and hope working through a love given as pure gift and stark command (Tracy, 1981, 430).
For Christian theologians, the systematic theological interpretation of life focuses on the religious classic of Jesus Christ. Tracy recognizes, however, that thinkers in other religious traditions are engaged in similar processes of reflection occasioned by their own religious classics. Because the disclosure of meaning in each of these religious classics necessarily has a public character, he is convinced that conversation with thinkers in other religious traditions is a necessity for Christian systematic theology in the radically pluralistic present (Tracy, 1981, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism. New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 449). One is not given access to univocal truth in this event-like understanding that accompanies encountering a classic such that one could isolate or codify the meaning of this truth. Rather, the encounter with a classic raises certain fundamental questions that haunt us with the weight and excess of meaning that bears upon our finite horizon from the whole (cf. Tracy, 1981, 430). In the classic, therefore, lies “the one finite hope of liberation to the essential” (Tracy, 1981, 119). This very surplus of meaning in the classic, however, prevents it from becoming a monologic conception of truth. Instead, Tracy insists that “every classic contains its own plurality and encourages a pluralism of readings” (Tracy, 1981, 113). The realized experience of the classic, then, lends itself to dialogue and conversation, and consequently occasions reflection that is public.
Later turn to engagement with postmodernity, pluralism, ambiguity, and mysticism
A significant shift occurs in Tracy’s later work:
· Increased attention to ambiguity, tragedy, and suffering
· Engagement with mystical and apophatic traditions
· Critique of totalizing systems and theological “-isms”
Rather than abandoning public theology, Tracy deepens it by emphasizing conversation with concrete others, including marginalized voices and other religious traditions.
Plurality and Ambiguity (1987) focused on the need for inter-religious dialogue and for articulating a Christian understanding of God appropriate to the current radically pluralistic context. Beginning by showing the tremendous difficulties in all interpretation through the example of the French Revolution, he explains that all understanding is dependent upon interpretation. In the contemporary pluralist situation, conversation is the way forward. It is a game, and can recover the joy of play, but it has rigorous rules. It seeks illumination and good action through questioning – and the questions arise from the classic events and texts themselves. The classic both endures, so is stable, and is always open to interpretation and in this sense is unstable. Acknowledging an interaction between event, memory, narrative, and reflective interpretation, he seeks a useable and retrievable past through the otherness of event, text, possibility. He recognizes the voices of oppressed, marginalized and impoverished people contributing to the conversation. Through his analysis of language in relation to knowledge in relation to reality, Tracy hopes for transformation and change.
Conversation and the Postmodern Naming of God
Tracy’s more recent work has picked up this emphasis on conversation and this, together with a greater appreciation for the ambiguity and pluralism of the contemporary theological situation, has led him to focus on mystical, prophetic, and apophatic elements in Christian theology. An emphasis on conversation, of course, was present in his work from the beginning. Yet, looking back upon his early work, especially in Blessed Rage for Order, Tracy sees his writing as too closely wedded to the “modern project” and not attentive enough to the relationship to the other and the different (Breyfogle & Levergood, 1994. “Conversation with David Tracy.” Cross Currents 44 no. 3:301). While still affirming the modern insight that reason can really function as a tool for communication, he objects to the search for “the correct ‘-ism’ for naming God,” including his own earlier attempt to develop the viewpoint of panentheism in the categories of process thought (Breyfogle & Levergood, 294). Contemporary western theology, he says, is unable to name the present, for all its ways of naming are too narrow and do not account for the complexity and “polycentrism” of the present pluralistic situation (Tracy, A Catholic Vision, 1994, 5-20). Even his own work, he recognizes, is limited by his experience as a Caucasian North American priest and university professor and must face the challenge of relating to concrete others with their own centers, such as African American, Native American, feminist, and womanist theologians (Tracy, 1994, 4, 22). He sees the need, therefore, for a mystical and prophetic theology that engages in conversation with such concrete others. “The true present,” Tracy writes, “is the present of all historical subjects in all the centers of conversation and solidarity before the living God. The rest is whistling in the dark” (Tracy, 1994, 22).
Such an emphasis on dialogue and ambiguity has led Tracy to his current project on the post-modern naming of God. Although recognizing the radically pluralistic context that theology must address, he still argues that it is both possible and necessary to engage in attentive and responsible theological interpretation (Jennifer Rike, 1991. “Bibliography of David Tracy.” In Radical Pluralism and Truth: David Tracy and the Hermeneutics of Religion. New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, ix-xiii). Yet his current project displays a shift in his own thinking toward the recovery of the apophatic, the apocalyptic, hiddenness, and the fragment, emphasizing God entering history not as a consoling ‘-ism’ but as an awesome and terrifying “hope-beyond-hope” (Scott Holland, 2002. “This Side of God: A Conversation with David Tracy.” Cross Currents 52 no. 1, 55). The first volume of Tracy’s unfinished trilogy, therefore, develops a theory of fragmented forms, in which these fragments challenge systems of totality and act as bearers of infinity and hope, and tries as well to recover the traditions of hiddenness and apophatic in Christian theology (Scott Holland, 2002. “This Side of God: A Conversation with David Tracy.” Cross Currents 52 no. 1, 56-59).
This shift in emphasis parallels a shift in Tracy’s own thought. He has recently become more interested in the tragic vision of such thinkers as Nietzsche and the Greek playwright Aeschylus as well as mystical theologians like Dionysius the Areopagite, Meister Eckhart, and Simone Weil. He has also become more attentive to theologians who speak of the hiddenness of God such as Luther, Pascal, and Calvin. This shift does not, however, involve a move away from his early emphasis on the public character of theology. Indeed, Tracy reports that it was from his participation in dialogues with Buddhist philosophers that he was led to a greater appreciation for such mystical and prophetic voices (Breyfogle & Levergood, 1994. “Conversation with David Tracy.” Cross Currents 44 no. 3: 293-315, 295-301).
That God is Love means God is radically relational and personal; God is the origin, sustainer and end of all reality. God is uniquely relational since God is related to all reality. The Scriptural answers to the question of who god is are primarily that God is love joined with the Greek idea of logos, or intelligence. These are primary analogies developed by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, et al. This led Tracy both to acknowledge all reality as sheer intelligibility and the entire cosmos as erotic. Yet there are undercurrents – the incomprehensibility and the hiddenness of God are manifest in the weakness, suffering and cross of Jesus Christ. Tracy’s analysis turns to the marginalization of people with strong senses of the reality of God, who are called mystics by a modernism that hold God captive to concepts. He asks where a living god breaks through totalistic systems. Post-modern attacks on logos bring new opportunities for serious thought about god in the wake of challenges to modern views of language and history. God enters post-modern thought as awesome, as hope-beyond-hope, bringing liberation and transformation. Here is the ever-deeper hiddenness of God whose Love is known in excess and gift. Christ’s resurrection is proleptic – God’s is the One who raised him, so God is hidden in all struggles for life, liberation and justice. Acknowledging the victims of history means acknowledging the hidden as well as the revealed, the absent as well as the present God, God as incomprehensible as well as comprehensible.
Tracy is concerned with unity in diversity, both in individuals and societies. He retrieves this emphasis through reference to Newman, von Hugel, and the Catholic model of caritas – which unites eros and agape. Then he seeks to show the particularity and universality of Christian Revelation. He articulates the needs for self-respect and dignity, openness to difference and otherness, and engaging the ethical universality of true and liberating justice. The universal is found in embracing the particular. Finally, all interpretation must be a hermeneutics of suspicion as well as of retrieval, because there must be a devotion to the correction of error as well as right rendering for the present situation. Seeking a theology beyond foundationalism and relativism, Tracy writes,
The theological alternative is clear: a fidelity to the ever-greater God in a new cultural and religious situation where the realities of otherness and difference are critically and religiously appropriated by all Christian theologies that dare to move beyond any form of intellectual foundationalism and its institutional counterparts, cultural imperialism and ecclesial triumphalism, and beyond any exhausted model of liberal modernity that can promise only relativism. The emerging world church is newly anxious to be freed of Eurocentrism – freed by the theologies of the new Europe that struggles to find a new intercultural and interreligious theological identity for itself. European hermeneutics reconstrued as hermeneutical discourse analysis shows one way forward intellectually. Will the new European theologies show the same hermeneutical and political way forward in an increasingly multicultural and multireligious world? (139)
My own evaluative conclusions
Here are some conclusions that derive from my study of David Tracy. My intent is to shift to constructive theological reflection, aligning closely with Tracy’s approach:
· Affirms modernity as a theological resource (but not the only one)
· Rejects literalism and reductionism
· Emphasizes Christianity as a form of life, not merely a set of beliefs
The tone is explicitly pastoral and practical, applying Tracy’s insights to contemporary Christian existence in modern society.
Tracy’s claim is that interpretation is unavoidable:
· All human understanding is interpretive
· Theology intensifies this interpretive activity when human experience encounters “limit experiences”
· Interpretation involves risk, finitude, and historical situatedness
This establishes theology not as privileged knowledge but as a disciplined, reflective human practice.
A core contribution is Tracy’s insistence that all authentic theology is public discourse, addressing:
· Society
· The academy
· The church
The text carefully explains that while theologians may emphasize one public, they implicitly engage all three. This framing allows Tracy to argue against both privatized faith and sectarian theology.
David Tracy is a theologian who:
· Takes pluralism seriously without surrendering Christian particularity
· Grounds theology in interpretation rather than authority alone
· Understands truth as dialogical, eventful, and transformative
In short, Tracy is a thinker who reorients theology from control to conversation, from certainty to faithful risk, while remaining deeply rooted in the Christian tradition.
With his hermeneutics,
· Interpretation = condition of all knowing
· Theology = intensified interpretation of limit-experiences
· Truth = eventful, dialogical, transformative
With his approach there is a viable model for pluralism:
· Rejects privatized faith
· Rejects totalizing systems
· Grounds theology in conversation rather than control
With his Christology, we see that Tracy is not reducible to method alone and lessens the accuracy of the charge of proceduralism:
· Christ-event as religious classic
· Always-already/not-yet structure
· Disclosure of grace, not possession of truth
The religious sources of Christians are classic texts: the Bible, the creeds, the liturgy, and the basic doctrines and confessions of faith that Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Episcopal, and mainline Protestant denominations received from their heritage. His point is that such classics possess an excess of meaning, they resist definitive interpretation, and they transform the horizon of the interpreter.
The creeds and other traditional statements of the churches are historical products. What I hope to do is to provide adequate grounds for speaking directly of Christian faith and action in a modern and pluralistic world and doing so with the integrity of its own unique voice as it exists in a pluralistic culture. I do not think we can legitimately find an essence of all religion or reduce religion to a common foundation, an analogy many persons receive from science and mathematics. Such an approach is reductionism that quickly becomes totalitarian. Rather, we need to approach the variety in religion as the variety of aesthetic pleasures. Theology cannot find a universal cultural or philosophical perspective from which to conduct its reflection. Theology cannot find a public sphere from which to speak; it must speak with its own voice in a way that respects the form conversation takes in a pluralistic society. Christians need to find ways to present their reflections on Jesus and on the human predicament in the context of a pluralistic society. Some religions, such as fundamentalist Islam, reject the dialogue implied in a pluralistic society, and therefore simply restate repeatedly in the hope that this messy pluralism will one day go away.
We believe in Jesus with the apostles as witnesses to Jesus, and thereby in the tradition, that mediates that belief. The tradition mediates the reality of Jesus to us. Jesus is the one remembered by the tradition that mediates him in word, sacrament, and action. Christians know Jesus through the witness of the biblical material, which is also the witness of the church. The Jesus we know and the Jesus to whom we respond is the Jesus remembered in the apostolic witness. Our response to Jesus is at once highly personal and highly communal. This suggests that Christianity remains wherever a community takes seriously the history of Jesus, the basic proclamation (kerygma) of the church, and calls for a response to understand intellectually and to open oneself to the transformation of life toward becoming like Christ implied the texts. As classic person, event, and text converge, I am suggesting that Christianity rests upon intense particularity of what God has done in Jesus of Nazareth on the one hand with the promise of the universal significance of Jesus on the other. Christianity cannot have abiding significance without people continuing to believe this and live their lives individually and corporately according to it.
What I want to suggest is something quite simple: the Bible and the Christian tradition are the wisdom of our heritage to which we direct our attention as we seek to discern directions we take today in our beliefs and values. This means that neither the bible nor the Christian tradition is adequate prescriptive texts for psychology, economic ideology, or political ideology. Although we may find helpful clues for the social influence of Christianity, we do not find a specific cultural, political, or economic program contained in the texts. Neither the scripture nor the tradition of the church arose in times when people had yet discovered an imperfect but adequate way to organize society. However, the fact that we can identify the difference in historical and cultural setting between the modern social world and the social world of the bible and the rise of Christian tradition reminds us of the underlying commonality of the human experience. Even with all the influence our social world in shaping us as individuals, we are still human beings with hope, fear, dread, capacity to deceive ourselves, anxiety, love, weakness, evil, and so on, as possibilities for our lives. As wisdom texts, the bible and tradition provide insights and clues for discerning the ways of God today and for charting a course for the future. However, the process is more like an artistic one, as over against a legal or scientific process. Modern people, embedded so profoundly with scientific and technological expectations of the world, often must make a shift in perspective or awareness I might liken to a Gestalt experience or a leap to another vantage point from which to live our lives.
Some Christians retreat into a subculture in which they convince themselves they are the true Christians, and indeed the only reflection of genuine Christian faith. The retreat involves holding to what they think of as the literal view of the bible or of the creeds. The bible becomes the chief miracle. Such persons refuse to factor their modern world consciously into the formation of their beliefs. For them, six days means six 24-hour days of creation, and so on. My suspicion, however, is that many Christians within modernity approach their sources with the glasses of their modern world firmly in place. Consequently, when modern Christians reflect upon who God is, we go well beyond the limited tribal deity and primitive culture confronted in certain layers of biblical tradition.
Christians open to modernity as a source for theological reflection do not turn to the bible for knowledge of science. They read about six days of creation and quickly place such a thought in a different realm, re-interpreting considering modern physics or dismiss it as an antiquated part of the bible that has no bearing upon Christian life today. They read about Adam and Eve and suspect it is a story rather than something literal. They struggle with what the story means for relationships between husband and wife, but most modern persons would not insist upon historical reality of the text. They read about a worldwide flood, in which God murders humanity except for one family and re-interpret it considering a softer view of God.
Christians open to modernity as a source for theological reflection read in the bible many disturbing stories. They read that God selects one family and one ethnic group, Hebrews or Jews, and re-interpret it quickly, rather than reflect upon why God favors one group rather than favoring all persons and cultures equally. They read about the sun standing still for Joshua and may focus on the scientific miracle and omit the moral problem that God did this so that the soldiers of Joshua could kill more people. They gloss over prayers for the destruction of enemies. They read about the cross and understand it considering the love one must have to die for another rather than reflect too deeply on sacrificial language alien to us. They read the stories of the appearances to the disciples considering our desire for God to recognize us at the time of our death and grant us new life, rather than engage the textual difficulties evident in reading those narratives. They read of the ascension of Jesus without putting it in the context of Jesus simply rising above the canopy that surrounds the earth. They ask God to “remember” when they know God cannot forget. They ask God to do things for them while recognizing that most of prayer consists of aligning ourselves more firmly with God and becoming channels of what God wants to do in the world. They tend to view these matters spiritually in the sense that we look for how the text engages us in our quest for what it means for us to be here, at this time and place.
Modernity influences the way modern people approach the biblical text. The God modern people worship and serve has its source in modernity as much as in the bible or tradition. The God modern Christians worship looks like one in which the modern world will have a greater possibility arriving at belief. What kind of God is that? Modern people recognize that the language of any human being, ancient or modern, has limitations in its ability to describe God. Yet most modern people recognize that human language is all we have. Therefore, modern Christians can excuse the attempts of previous generations to relate God to their world. Modern Christians also accept responsibility to relate God to modern civilization. They do so in a way that they must discover and educate themselves as to the meaning of the text for them today, incorporating the metaphors and narratives into the modern story. Christian sources inspire worship, theology, and experience, without confining theological reflections to those sources or experiencing them as confining.
What does it mean to be a Christian today? How shall we live as Christians today? The shift from facts and beliefs toward a Christian form of life is significant. One can believe all the “right” things and still be a difficult person with whom to deal, still have problems with depression, still have profound ethical struggles at work, and still be a thorn in the side of pastors. The bible and the traditions of the churches become mediators of sacred life, and in that sense become sacramental elements of Christian life and community. The power of the bible and tradition derive from their continuing ability to nourish people and communities. They would become dead tradition if it were not for the productive power at work in individual and communal life. The Christian open to modernity as a source for theological reflection does not turn to the bible or theology for a coherent and comprehensive philosophy of life. They recognize that Christians depend upon other sources for economic, political, psychological, and philosophical insights. No one can relieve the church or individual Christians of the responsibility for discerning the proper uses of theological sources available within modernity. This approach to theological reflection respects the ways of God in the world today, as it also respects the ways of God in the bible and tradition, and even in one’s own life. The church and Christians have an interest in the modern culture in which they live, for the institutional church itself crumbles when society crumbles. The church has an interest in being among the forces that help individuals and culture to be the best they can humanly become.
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