The Analogical Imagination

...The third distinction regards ways of rendering intelligible what inherently surpasses our capacity for expression...

...As step two, we might expect to find a systematic theology elaborated here...

...Moreover, no major classic is ever adequate to the reality to which it nonetheless manages to give voice, and all the more so religous classics...

...What ever happened to critical intelligence and the promise and the promise of the Enlightenment...

...every vigorous conversation must employ it...

...the second...

...An irenic spirit, it is true, will want to extend complementarity to cover what others would call opposing position, yet the perspective of hindsight often supports the wider judgment...

...Since a classic "lives as a classic'' only if it continues to find "readers willing to be provoked by its claim to attention"( 109), the resulting conversation-with the text itself and among those responding to it-becomes a living tradition of interpretation...

...Hence his avowal of the need for traditio and of the human necessity for that quality of discernment and penetration emanating from particular communities as they continue to appropriate critically their originating memories...

...Grace is the key to what systematics he does offer, and the passages celebrating it betray a passion nearly capable of enlivening the prose which ever hangs heavily over so otherwise lightsome a work...

...If this were a mere conflict of -isms, we could afford to yawn...

...I make this observation without criticism to locate the genre of this work, for as a prolegomenon it is eminently successful in releasing erstwhile students and teachers of theology from hobbling either/or's...

...Tracy sketches how each mode in fact calls upon the other when it comes to a more complete presentation...

...There is a no other, no easy way...

...The very dynamics inherent in the production and the continued reception of a classic allow Tracy to aver: "for the Christian the present experience of the spirit of the Risen Lord who is the crucified Jesus of Nazareth is the Christian religious classic event"(265...

...Once we grasp the import of this response, together with his employ of three distinctions, we will be able to appreciate the simplicity of his argument...

...The second regards criteria...

...Classics then become a bridge from the inescapably particular character of a community of faith to a mode of discourse which compels the attention of all-overtime as well as space...

...make sense of our lives and our destiny becomes willful-or "privatized...

...In any case, even suspended conversations shape the subsequent thought of the interlocutors, and vigorous opposition concentrates the mind...

...It indicates Tracy's primary public, academe, and even identifies his major conversation partners: what John Robinson calls the "German-American school...

...One can readily see how this model can be employed with respect to the recognized classics of Jewish and Christian tradition, and indeed to elucidate the founding event of Christianity: Jesus himself...

...For that is the public philosophy of our age, and the collective ways of meeting it may be more frightening still: diverse forms of fundamentalism...

...What can result from such a crucible we call classics when they "so disclose a compelling truth about our lives that we cannot deny them some kind of normative status...

...Each step demands a specific mode of argument and reflection, and we are only doing theology when we attend in some fashion to all three...

...Yet if we cannot find grounds adequate to the choice, then the entire endeavor to...

...The overriding concern of the work is in fact pastoral...

...These two are later supplemented by the mode proper to transforming action, to accommodate more recent liberation theologies, and the demands of complementarity proportionately expanded...

...David Burrell THIS LONG-promised book by David Tracy represents the second moment in elaborating a theology according to the pattern which he espouses: "fundamental" (his earlier Blessed Rage for Order), "systematic," and "pastoral...

...And it is stunning in its scope as well as in its capacity for ordering current complexities...

...Tracy offers a way to account for this variety of interpretations, and especially for the manifold theological accounts we need by outlining an ideal of theological understanding which demands that it be relatively adequate to the realities encountered...

...in fact we are offered a stunning prolegomenon to any present or future systematics...

...Tracy, ever irenic and always mindful, is no optimist...

...So long as we can employ a meta-theological test of complementarity, we can recognize how certain positions represent needed correctives of others...

...He then goes on to spell out "relative adequacy" in three pairs of features which jointly show how one characteristic form of presentation will inevitably need to be complemented by another...

...The first distinction he employs divides theological modes into manifesting and proclaiming, with Eliade exemplifying the first and Barth et al...

...Here Tracy shows how customary oppositions between analogical and dialectical language can be rendered complementary by an account of analogical discourse whch includes a negative moment, and by recognizing that even the most "dialectical" of theologians must finally affirm the primacy of grace...

...By focusing on the living community as bearer of a tradition and insisting that "tradition is the major constitutive mediating reality of the event of Jesus Christ," Tracy makes us attend to the continuing call for interpreting our lives in the light of the ideals of a community, and re-interpreting those ideals by our informed experience...

...Only a simplicity born of wit can contribute to our capacity to discern among bewildering alternatives-as only a mindless optimist can celebrate these as "pluralism...

...For the patterns we need to use to find our way have proliferated, and we are told we can only choose among them...

...Tracy's response is brilliant, and in developing it he elaborates the mode of thinking appropriate to systematic theology...

...to partake in its drama among students is crucifying...

...In fact, "the intrinsic unsteadiness of the major classic becomes the sheer dialectical tension of the religious classic "(214...

...Were he to take some effective steps to distance himself, however, from that single public and that restricted set of interlocutors, one suspects that Tracy might one day himself offer us a classic.ffer us a classic...

...Theology demands two sets of criteria operating at once: the first testing how appropriate an expression may be to the tradition it embodies, and the second testing it for wider com-prehensibility...

...Formulated by Sartre, this dilemma faces teachers as they find their students all sharing some form of relativism...

...And the exercise is not arcane...

...What Tracy does oppose is retreat from all conversation or a silence imposed...

...The result is an inherent multiplicity of expressions, evident already in the various faces of Jesus and of discipleship offered in the apostolic writings...

...The fact of such works as part of our shared history offers an alternative model for rationality to the Enlightenment ideal of autonomous reason...

...That the prose of the work itself contributes its own measure of complexity is a stubborn fact which I shall try first to neutralize and finally to explain...

...Tracy anguishes over the plight of anyone living today who hopes to make sense out of their situation in the world...