BOOKS
McBrien, Richard P.
Blessed Rage for Order DAVID TRACY Seabury Press, $12.95 RICHARD P. McBRIEN This book has already been sufficiently praised, and to some extent, overpraised. Indeed, I contributed to the initial...
...I should not now want to retreat from that judgment, but some second thoughts about the book's central thesis are in order...
...I should suggest, in fact, that Blessed Rage for Order, which advocates a revisionist way of doing theology, may be at once too revisionist and not revisionist enough...
...The Christian tradition, in the meantime, is received almost as a given...
...But how do Christian texts, which are themselves articulations of the "common human experience" for specific communities, constitute a source essentially different from "common human experience and language...
...The word "faith" in the formula "faith seeking understanding" apparently means for him "beliefs (which) serve as warrants for (one's) arguments...
...It seems reasonable to state...
...If the symbol "God" (or its several variants) has no real, personal, experiential meaning for the student of religious and theological speech, then that student must always be an outsider to the formally theological process...
...There can be no mistaking the fact that Tracy is aware of the problem I have raised...
...How are the texts themselves derived...
...He proposes that the theologian has "by professional and, thereby, ethical commitment" an obligation "to study (his/her) tradition's past and present claims to meaning and truth" (p...
...Tracy evidently does not intend to argue that theology collapses into philosophy, but his language can lead the reader to that conclusion...
...But it is not clear from the language employed in the argument that this is, in fact, what the author means...
...72, italics mine...
...His judgment about the relationship of faith and theology-at least as that judgment is expressed in the book- is not readily compatible with Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas, for example...
...36, n. 16...
...That is, the theologian moves from faith to understanding...
...Tracy writes, "that the major specific difference in the theological as distinct from philosophical investigation of Christian language is the Christian theologian's responsibility to show how his or her present categories are appropriate understandings of the Christian understanding of existence...
...Rather, the formula means that the question of God must be one's own question before a consideration of the question can be called "theological...
...Isn't there only one source for theology (Christian and non-Christian theology alike...
...Indeed, he poses it directly in the text: "how (does) a fundamental Christian theology differ from a philosophy of religion...
...It is a word which clearly conveys something extrinsic to the process of philosophical reflection itself...
...But the answer he supplies suggests a positivistic notion of theology...
...But the positing of a necessary prior commitment of faith for the doing of theology does not require that the beliefs emerging from that faith serve as warrants for one's theological arguments...
...Is not Tracy here implying that theology is, by definition, the study of one or several of its own products, while failing to raise the really fundamental question about the process by which theology's various products are created...
...It is not enough, in other words, for the theologian to have some pre-understanding of the subject-matter (religion...
...What would make such "philosophical reflection" theological in any distinctive sense at all...
...What he needs," Tracy suggests, "is some adequate pre-under-standing of the subject-matter (religion)-a pre-understauding basically present to anyone able to ask the fundamental questions of human existence articulated in religious and theological speech" (p...
...Specifically, Tracy argues that theology differs from philosophy in one respect only...
...The theologian confronts the God-question as his or her own question...
...43, italics mine...
...As far as I can determine, Tracy does not explicitly acknowledge how unprecedented his position may be...
...The theologian, Tracy notes, ordinarily chooses to study his religious tradition's past and present claims to meaning and truth because he has committed himself to a Christian self-understanding (p...
...The inner moment of grace is not taken into account here...
...Clearly we are some discernible distance from the traditional notion of philosophy as the ancilla theologiae...
...At first glance, the definition reduces theology to a division of philosophy...
...The noun "responsibility" recurs throughout the discussion...
...I should think that Tracy himself would agree with this, that he would insist that a theologian must surely confront the God-question as his or her own...
...Nor is the author in company with such modern figures as Rahner, Schillebeeckx, and Lonergan (an estrangement Tracy did acknowledge, with regret, at the 1974 convention of the Catholic Theological Society of America...
...The erudition and sheer intelligence displayed in this book should remove any doubt about David Tracy's capacity to make that effort...
...But it is precisely that process, as well as our careful reflection upon the products of that process, that theology is concerned with...
...The "fundamental questions of human existence articulated in religious and theological speech" must be the theologian's own questions...
...I raise this point without forgetting Tracy's insistence that "Christian fact" embraces more than texts, i.e., symbols, rituals, events, and witnesses, and without denying that a processive approach can also be positivistic...
...Was there no theology before there were texts...
...But it informs the process of theological reflection in a way that renders that process different from the process of strictly philosophical reflection, or indeed from that of any of the other so-called soft sciences...
...Granted, such a view might not have gone unchallenged in Chicago, but the fight would have been worth making...
...But a theologian...
...But the theologian qua theologian need not be a believer...
...And that critical process has both an inner and an outer moment...
...In modifying, if not rejecting, the traditional view of the faith/theology relationship, Tracy does not do it complete justice...
...If this responsibility is not addressed, then Christian theology becomes without remainder a philosophy of religion" (p...
...And the confusion is probably rooted in the way he talks about "faith" and "beliefs...
...Accordingly, theology is not so much the study of texts alongside the study of common human experience, as it is the critical process by which such texts come into existence in the first place...
...Indeed, I contributed to the initial chorus of acclaim in Com-monweal's Christmas Books issue last year, referring to it as "perhaps the most significant theological monograph published" that year and "a remarkably substantial synthesis of the contemporary discussion on each of the book's central topics...
...In its briefest expression," Tracy writes, "the revisionist model holds that a contemporary fundamental Christian theology can best be described as a philosophical reflection upon the meanings present in common human experience and language, and upon the meanings present in the Christian fact" (p...
...A philosopher or sociologist of religion, perhaps...
...There is no analysis of the process by which the Christian fact, with its assorted texts, comes into being...
...Such reflection upon common human experience and the Christian fact becomes theological when the one doing the reflection assumes some "responsibility" for showing the appropriateness of his categories to the Christian tradition...
...Yet, in principle," he insists, "such commitment need not be the case...
...The theologian, unlike the philosopher, the sociologist, or the historian, is concerned not only with "common human experience" (as problematical as it is abstract) but also with Christian texts...
...It is too revisionist in that it seems to erase the difference between theology and philosophy...
...namely, common human experience...
...and it is not revisionist enough in that it seems to adopt a positivistic understanding of what the author calls "the Christian fact...
Vol. 103 • December 1976 • No. 25
