Political Theology

ISSN: 1462-317X (Print) 1743-1719 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ypot20

How Does Theology Go Public? Rethinking the

Debate between David Tracy and George Lindbeck

Kristin Heyer

To cite this article: Kristin Heyer (2004) How Does Theology Go Public? Rethinking the Debate
between David Tracy and George Lindbeck, Political Theology, 5:3, 307-327

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/poth.5.3.307.36721

Published online: 21 Apr 2015.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 4

View related articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ypot20

Download by: [Gazi University] Date: 31 March 2016, At: 01:58

 [PT 5.3 (2004) 307-327] Political Theology (print) ISSN 1462-317X
Political Theology (online) ISSN 1473-1719

HOW DOES THEOLOGY GO PUBLIC?

RETHINKING THE DEBATE BETWEEN
DAVID TRACY AND GEORGE LINDBECK

Kristin E. Heyer
Loyola Marymount University
Downloaded by [Gazi University] at 01:58 31 March 2016

1 LMU Drive, Suite 3700

Los Angeles, CA 90045-2659, USA
kheyer@lmu.edu

ABSTRACT
The possibilities for taking theological ethics ‘public’ have taken on added
significance amidst debates over the nature of moral norms. If realist theological
ethics can find a public voice, it will enhance the prospects for interreligious
ethical collaboration and the place of theology in it. A key question remains
whether particular contexts of religious symbols render them meaningful only
within communities of ‘origin’, or particularity actually enables broadly compel-
ling meaning or a public voice for theology. At issue in the Tracy-Lindbeck
debate are their understandings of ‘public’, their responses to philosophical
anti-foundationalism, and their theological presuppositions. While postliberal
emphases on the distinctiveness of the Christian community and attention to the
ecclesial community complement Tracy’s emphases on dialogue and coherence,
Tracy’s recent methods provide more adequate responses to the challenges posed
by postmodernism.

As we confront a twenty-first-century world characterized by religious plu-

ralism, globalization and postmodernism, debate continues over the nature
of moral norms and prospects for interreligious dialogue. Amidst such ex-
changes, the possibilities for taking theology and theological ethics ‘public’
have taken on added significance. (For our purposes here, ‘public’ will refer
to a realm beyond the confines of self-enclosed, private enclaves, including
but not limited to church, academy, society and the wider world.) For if
realist theological ethics can find a public voice, it will enhance the prospects
for intercultural and interreligious ethical collaboration and the place of
theology in it. Political theologians also must contend with these social reali-
ties as they engage theology in a global conversation, postmodern academy
and pluralist context that pose various challenges to normative and theologi-
cal reflection.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004, Unit 6, The Village, 101 Amies Street, London SW11 2JW.
 308 Political Theology

As a result, different political and public theologies have emerged in recent

decades, ranging from open embrace of culture and efforts to identify a com-
mon human morality and moral language, to withdrawal from the world to
preserve gospel values against cultural forces hostile to them. One of the issues
brought to the fore in the process is how theologies ‘go public’—whether, for
example, the inevitability of the particular origin and context of religious
symbols and beliefs renders them decipherable and meaningful only within
the community of ‘origin’, or whether such particularity may actually enable
more broadly compelling meaning or a public voice for theology. In the meth-
odological debates between George Lindbeck and David Tracy, for example,
one major distinction involves the significance of ‘public’ for each. That is,
the figures’ different approaches call into question whether ‘taking theology
Downloaded by [Gazi University] at 01:58 31 March 2016

public’ constitutes an imperative for theology or instead poses dangers to the

theological enterprise.
This article will explore the Lindbeck-Tracy debate from the perspective
of the public nature of theology. Identifying the shifts in Tracy’s thought in
recent decades and the philosophical and theological presuppositions of both
Tracy and Lindbeck, I argue that Tracy’s most recent methods survive postlib-
eral criticisms and provide more adequate responses to the challenges posed by
postmodernism. The complementary insights of Tracy’s and Lindbeck’s
approaches and the evolution of Tracy’s method, in particular, provide con-
temporary theologians and ethicists with helpful resources for engaging the
wider world in the twenty-first century.
Most would agree that in a postmodern age we can no longer claim to
identify or produce something corresponding to ‘the public’ (for example, a
sphere isolated from contingencies, personal preference, bias, tradition). If
this is the case, we must then ask whether the only alternative lies in various
self-enclosed particular ‘publics’ to which only an intratextual few are privy,
or whether there remains another alternative. For if ‘public’ no longer refers
to universal, neutral rules for discourse based on fixed abstract notions of
reason, how then do we move beyond the impasse left in its wake? George
Lindbeck and David Tracy suggest different possibilities for resolving this
dilemma. The postliberal response to this situation (as well as to other factors
such as the marginalization of theology within the academy) has been to
define the Christian community intratextually and view efforts to commu-
nicate beyond that community as risking capitulation if not as impossible.
Tracy, on the other hand, continues to seek ways to bridge the divide between
the particular and universal, through his models of the classic and conversa-
tion, perceiving publicness as a task for all theologians. These different
responses, in part, yield different models of public theology. At issue are
Tracy’s and Lindbeck’s understandings of ‘public’, their responses to philoso-

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004.

 Heyer How Does Theology Go Public? 309

phical anti-foundationalism, and their theological presuppositions. This article

will address each of these dimensions in turn, in the service of elucidating
each figure’s methodology.
The ‘postliberal-revisionist’ debate has been in some sense a moving target,
as the participants interactively refine their positions. Redefinition seems
particularly to have characterized Tracy. Lindbeck and others rightly faulted
Tracy’s earlier works for describing universal human limit experiences with-
out properly considering the historical and cultural-linguistic contexts neces-
sary to mediate such experiences. Tracy’s later writings, however, incorporate
postmodern insights into evolved models such as the classic and conversation
in attempts to move beyond the objectivism-relativism deadlock. Postliberal
emphases on the distinctiveness of the Christian community amidst theology’s
Downloaded by [Gazi University] at 01:58 31 March 2016

marginalization well balance Tracy’s emphases on dialogue and coherence or

apologetics. Yet while Lindbeck and Tracy instruct and complement in some
areas, Tracy’s models of classic and conversation most adequately balance
respect for the tradition and for the postmodern, pluralist context. An explo-
ration of Tracy’s evolving methodology, Lindbeck’s approach, and the philoso-
phical and theological differences between the two will serve to illuminate
their complementary insights into the public dimension of the theological
enterprise.

Overview of the Evolution of David Tracy’s Public Theology

Tracy remains for some a standard illustration of liberal theology, against
which the postmodern critique can be tested and proven true.1 Even if some
characterizations have some validity in light of the ‘method of correlation’
Tracy proposed in the 1970s, they are much less accurate in light of his more
recent work. Over the past several decades David Tracy’s thought on the
public nature of theology amidst pluralism has developed in significant ways.
A brief overview of his development shows general shifts from a model of
‘correlation’ to ‘classic’ to ‘conversation’ in his published works and fuller
incorporation of postmodern insights such as attention to the concrete ‘other’
and an acknowledgment of the problematic nature of transcendental reflec-
tion. In brief, Tracy’s theory of the classic centers around his thesis that in
naming certain texts, events, images, rituals, symbols and persons ‘classics’, we
mean that we recognize in them ‘the disclosure of a reality we cannot but
name truth’.2 His conversation model entails a dialogical ‘exploration of pos-

1. Cf. Kathryn Tanner, Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1997).
2. David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism
(New York: Crossroad, 1986), p. 108.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004.

 310 Political Theology

sibilities in the search for truth’, where participants sincerely engage one
another with genuine openness to mutual transformation.3 We shall return to
both theories below in the course of the discussion of Tracy’s developments.
A major transition within Tracy’s method in recent decades has been his
move from correlating universal ‘limit experiences’ toward a greater con-
textualization of experience. Tracy first offered a revisionist method of
critical correlation in his work on fundamental theology, Blessed Rage for Order.4
He argued that the theological task entails a critical correlation of the results
of the investigation of Christian texts and common human experience and
language,5 employing an explicitly transcendental or metaphysical mode of
reflection to determine the truth status of the cognitive claims of religious
meanings.6 In this earlier work, Tracy emphasized reflection on positive
Downloaded by [Gazi University] at 01:58 31 March 2016

limit-experiences of life as a means to approaching religion, emphasizing

fundamental trust as the primary secular clue to approaching the meaning of
religion, God, and Christ. Tracy’s later works entail increasing modesty
regarding the role of transcendental reflection in fundamental theology; he
writes, ‘…I am not sure as I once was that modern reason can produce so
unproblematically the kind of uncomplicated metaphysical and transcenden-
tal arguments needed for fundamental theology’.7 He also comes to acknowl-
edge that there exists no ‘common unified essence’ to religious experiences.8
Another shift evident in Tracy’s work is from optimism regarding such
possibilities for correlation to an awareness of negative experience and pro-
found ambiguities, stressing similarities-in-difference in his work on analogical
understanding. In 1981 Tracy wrote that his theological understandings of
religion, God, and Christ had changed in tone: with increasing awareness of
the profound negative aspects of human existence, Tracy found the ‘funda-
mental trust’ transformed by ‘being arrived at only through a route highlighting

3. David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 20.
4. David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1975).
5. Tracy further specifies common human experience as ‘that immediate experience
of the self-as-self which can be reflectively mediated through such disciplines as art, his-
tory, cultural analysis, human scientific analysis…generically labeled “phenomenological
analyses” ’ (Blessed Rage for Order, p. 69).
6. Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order, p. 56. Tracy describes this transcendental or meta-
physical mode analysis as testing findings against the criteria of ‘coherence and fidelity to
experience, broadly understood’ (Blessed Rage for Order, p. 172); such reflection ‘attempts the
explicit mediation of the basic presuppositions (or “beliefs”) that are the conditions of the
possibility of our existing or understanding at all’ (Blessed Rage for Order, p. 56).
7. Tracy, preface to the 1996 printing of Blessed Rage for Order (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996), p. xiv.
8. Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity, p. 90.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004.

 Heyer How Does Theology Go Public? 311

the negative at every moment of the theological journey’.9 In order to continue

a genuine affirmation of personal, cultural, theological and religious pluralism
despite these negative realities, Tracy turned to a strategy of the ‘analogical
imagination’ in his work on systematic theology under that title.10 This model
relies on the basic belief that humans understand one another only through
analogy—by sensing the central vision that empowers one another’s lives. If we
converse these visions may meet. We will be changed when the interaction of
these visions discloses the similarities-in-difference (analogies) in all thinking
and every life. The analogical imagination allows transformative conversation
to take place.
Tracy’s most recent moves are toward methods that are radically herme-
neutical, critical and self-critical, with increasing attention to questions of
Downloaded by [Gazi University] at 01:58 31 March 2016

language, plurality, historicity, ambiguity and suspicion. Yet he has not aban-
doned the possibility of common understandings. In his attempts to recognize
an awareness of particular traditions while sustaining a public theology, Tracy
has distinguished between fundamental and systematic theology as well as intro-
duced his concept of the ‘classic’. A classic is a bearer of a claim
that transcends any context from my preunderstanding that I try to impose upon
it, a claim that can shock me with the insight into my finitude as finitude, a claim
that will interpret me even as I struggle to interpret it. I cannot control the
experience, however practiced I am in techniques of manipulation. It happens, it
demands, it provokes.11

A religious classic also displays this structure but its particular content involves
‘a claim to the truth as the event of a disclosure-concealment of the whole of
reality by the power of the whole—as, in some sense, a radical and finally gracious
mystery’.12 That is, the religious classic elicits the trust that how we ought to
live and the inherent nature of reality are finally one.13 For Christianity, the
event and person of Jesus Christ is the one classic event and person that nor-
matively judges and informs all other Christian classics.14
Tracy identifies the most significant transformation he experienced over his
career as developing from seeing the disclosure of universality in particularity
as a paradox to seeing it as involving a necessary connection. He once asked,
‘Why do the classic systematic theologies, like the classic works of art, function
so disclosively, indeed so publicly, in spite of their particularity?’ The ‘in spite

9. David Tracy, ‘Defending the Public Character of Theology’, The Christian Century 98
(April 1981), pp. 350-56 (355).
10. Tracy, The Analogical Imagination.
11. Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, p. 119.
12. Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, p. 163.
13. Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, pp. 163-64.
14. Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, p. 233.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004.

 312 Political Theology

of’ clause was gradually replaced with a firm ‘because of’. The classic achieves
genuine publicness precisely due to intensified particularity.15 The way in
which Gandhi became convinced of the power of love through Jesus’
Sermon on the Mount and Tolstoy’s writings while remaining a Hindu is
one testament to Tracy’s thesis.16 We are more attentive to and transformed
by the timeless story of Romeo and Juliet than abstract notions about love
overcoming adversity. The life and death of Archbishop Oscar Romero are
more universally gripping than vague ideals of justice for the poor and self-
sacrifice. We get caught up in particular dramas or biographies and allow
ourselves to be changed by them in ways that obscure, impersonal argu-
ments, concepts or formulae cannot compel. Classic works of literature, art
and religion through their particularity disclose and communicate beyond
Downloaded by [Gazi University] at 01:58 31 March 2016

their originating context and immediate community of interpreters. Tracy

shows how narratives whose differences are not transcended or diminished
urge us to confront their manifestations of truth. Thus Tracy’s classic is
‘postmodern’ in its cultural particularity but universal in its richness of
meaning and its resonance beyond its originating context.
As a complement to the theory of the classic, Tracy introduces the notion
of conversation in his next book, Plurality and Ambiguity. Here Tracy high-
lights the radical ambiguity inherent even in classics and in our contempo-
rary situation as interpreters and how no theory of interpretation, theology or
philosophy can ever escape the plurality and ambiguity inherent in the
human condition—the best we can hope for is the ‘relatively adequate’.17
Tracy’s theological method has become radically hermeneutical, as both the
interpretive retrieval of classics and the critical and self-critical moves that
must accompany the retrieval of texts, symbols and human expressions depend
on his model of conversation.18 He has also devoted increasing attention to
the role of dialogue and solidarity with other cultures and religious traditions
as concrete others rather than merely projected others.
Thus Tracy’s more recent works reveal that he has developed in ways that
permit him to be faithful to the tradition-conditioned nature of knowledge
and experience as well as to the public demands of authentic belief in one

15. Tracy, ‘Defending the Public Character of Theology’, p. 353.

16. Mohandas K. Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with the Truth
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), p. 137, as cited in David Hollenbach, ‘The Common Good in
the Postmodern Epoch’, in James Donahue and M. Theresa Moser, RSCJ (eds.), Religion,
Ethics and the Common Good (Annual Publication of College Theology Society, 41; Mystic,
CT: Twenty-third Publications, 1996), pp. 3-22 (16-17).
17. Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity, p. 81.
18. Werner Jeanrond, ‘Theology in the Context of Pluralism and Postmodernity: David
Tracy’s Theological Method’, in David Jasper (ed.), Postmodernism, Literature and Theology
(London: Macmillan Press, 1993), p. 155.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004.

 Heyer How Does Theology Go Public? 313

God. Tracy writes, ‘Each of us contributes more to the common good when
we dare to undertake a journey into our own particularity…than when we
attempt to homogenize all differences in favor of some lowest common
denominator…[or] are tempted to root out all particularity and call it public-
ness’.19 Further Tracy rightly fears that if theology does not engage critically
and self-critically in the global, interdisciplinary conversation—which his own
model embraces—it will not escape ideological distortion from within and
without.20 Tracy warns that to refuse to take seriously various hermeneutics of
retrieval and suspicion (feminist, Darwinian, Marxist or otherwise)—as a self-
enclosed model risks doing—is to fail to regard ‘religion’s own suspicions on
the existence of those fundamental distortions named sin, ignorance, or
illusion’.21
Downloaded by [Gazi University] at 01:58 31 March 2016

Hence Tracy’s models of classic and conversation acknowledge the multi-

plicity of communities of which Christians are simultaneous members and
reveal a certain humility regarding the grasp and pursuit of the truth in a sit-
uation of theological pluralism such as our contemporary one. The emphasis
on particularity in Tracy’s classic, in his attention to the other, and in his
conception of ‘thick’ and authentic conversation enables Christians to engage
other groups in dialogue from a distinct perspective, yet on a mutual path
toward more full understandings of ultimate reality and toward a more global
common good.

George Lindbeck’s Postliberal Agenda

In his groundbreaking The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postlib-
eral Age, George Lindbeck challenges the notion that theology can or should be
done in a ‘public’ manner. Rejecting ‘propositionalist’ and ‘experiential-
expressive’ models of doctrine, and placing Tracy in what he considers the
liberal, foundationalist, ‘experiential-expressivist’ camp, Lindbeck proposes a
‘cultural linguistic’ or ‘rule’ model.22 In his recent work, as suggested above,
Tracy insists that the concept of correlation does not entail a belief in con-
vergence or sameness, but only that some relationship is involved and its goal
is the need to relate critically interpretations of both tradition and situation,
but like all good method provides only a heuristic for the inquiry. Despite
Lindbeck’s classification of Tracy and revisionists as ‘experiential-expressivist’,
Tracy’s concept of correlation does not rely upon assumptions about common
human religious experience in the same way his earliest work did. ‘There are

19. Tracy, ‘Defending the Public Character of Theology’, p. 353.

20. Jeanrond, ‘Theology in the Context of Pluralism and Postmodernity’, p. 145.
21. Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity, p. 112.
22. George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984), pp. 16-17.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004.

 314 Political Theology

family resemblances among the religions. But as far as I can see, there is no
single essence, no one content of enlightenment or revelation, no one way of
emancipation or liberation, to be found in all that plurality’.23
On the other hand, Lindbeck’s alternative describes doctrines as function-
ing ‘not as expressive symbols or as truth-claims, but as communally authori-
tative rules of discourse, attitude, and action’.24 He articulates a postliberal
theology with three major components: this cultural-linguistic model that
seeks to provide a ‘thick’ description of religion as a comprehensive inter-
pretive scheme wherein language functions intrasemiotically;25 an approach
to Scriptural interpretation that stresses the primacy of the biblical narratives
and the intratextual hermeneutics of the biblical canon; and the ‘rule’ theory
approach to doctrine that views doctrines as non-propositional rules func-
Downloaded by [Gazi University] at 01:58 31 March 2016

tioning like grammar, governing the confessing community’s discourse and

practice. For postliberals truth is defined intratextually rather than as a rela-
tionship between tradition and other human experience.26 Lindbeck writes,
‘it is the religion instantiated in Scripture which defines being, truth, good-
ness and beauty, and the nonscriptural exemplifications of these realities
need to be transformed into figures (or types or antitypes) of the scriptural
ones’.27 Thus the cross should not be viewed as a figurative representation of
the suffering we encounter in this world, but rather such worldly suffering
should be cruciform.28
Lindbeck asserts that his intratextual framework ensures the Christian tra-
dition’s unity and authenticity across diverse cultures. Unlike theologies that
seek to translate a tradition’s symbols into wider categories, Lindbeck’s model

23. Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity, p. 90.

24. Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine, p. 18.
25. Lindbeck describes this ‘intrasemiotic’ or ‘intratextual’ function as constituting
meaning by the very uses of theological language rather than locating meaning outside the
text or semiotic system: ‘Thus the proper way to determine what “God” signifies, for exam-
ple, is by examining how the word operates within a religion and thereby shapes reality and
experience rather than by first establishing its propositional or experiential meaning and
reinterpreting its uses accordingly’. Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine, p. 114.
26. Lindbeck devotes much of his argument to critiquing experiential-expressivism,
denying that humans share prelinguistic ‘religious experience’ that religious language seeks
to articulate. He criticizes Lonergan, Rahner and Tracy for selling out Christianity’s particu-
larity in order to make universal apologetic appeals such that this system takes priority over
the Christian community’s self-description and the primary language of faith (in the Bible,
liturgy, creeds). Tracy contends that his alternative to Lindbeck’s ‘cultural-linguistic’ model
is not the ‘experiential-expressive’ one attacked but rather Tracy’s own more recent ‘her-
meneutical-political’ model. See David Tracy, ‘Lindbeck’s New Program for Theology’,
Thomist 49 (1985), pp. 464-68.
27. Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine, p. 118.
28. Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine, p. 118.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004.

 Heyer How Does Theology Go Public? 315

‘redescribes reality’ within the scriptural framework so that the text absorbs
the world, rather than the world absorbing the text.29 Lindbeck’s focus on the
significance of tradition in shaping individuals and cultures has been praised as
his greatest contribution by some, but has left him open to criticism by others
who assert that different traditions simultaneously constitute us such that we
may not ‘purely’ privilege the biblical tradition.30 Miroslav Volf, for example,
charges that Lindbeck’s gain in religious and theological security (via constru-
ing the influence between religious and nonreligious worlds unidirectionally
as his intratextual system does)31 comes at the cost of ‘hermeneutical simple-
ness’. For, Volf argues,
We can look at our culture through the lenses of religious texts only as we look at
Downloaded by [Gazi University] at 01:58 31 March 2016

these texts through the lenses of our culture. The notion of inhabiting the biblical story
is hermeneutically naive because it 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.32

This resettling is doomed, Volf warns, because we continue to simultane-

ously inhabit our cultures even after encountering the biblical story; as a
good postliberal would affirm, there exists no neutral vantage point and so
‘ecclesial nonneutrality is always already shaped by the culture that the church
inhabits’.33
Tracy himself appreciates Lindbeck’s greater use of anthropology and
literary criticism in theology, his call to closer intratextual attention to biblical
narratives for Christian self-identity, and ‘new and fruitful ways to provide

29. Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine, p. 118. Some have argued he is inconsistent here in
rejecting liberal attempts at correlation while advocating a return to a scripture-absorbed
world and retrieval of the same ‘grammar’ governing Christians across the centuries:
‘Lindbeck assumes that while no framework can commensurate Buddhist compassion,
Christian love, and French revolutionary fraternite, one framework can commensurate
“hypostasis” “ousia”, “prosopon”, “persona”, “nature”, etc… Not only is the Buddhist
cosmos different from the Christian cosmos, but the cosmoi of Jesus, Augustine, Aquinas,
Luther and Lindbeck are radically different’. See Terrence W. Tilley, ‘Incommensurability,
Intratextuality, and Fideism’, Modern Theology 5 (January 1989), pp. 96-97.
30. See Linell E. Cady, Religion, Theology, and American Public Life (Albany: State Univer-
sity of New York Press, 1993), and Tanner, Theories of Culture.
31. That is, on Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic model, the impact of religious texts on
wider culture is not a two-way street. Here religion influences wider culture (by ‘redescrib-
ing reality’, shaping or ‘absorbing’ the world) in only one direction; it is not, in turn, influ-
enced by non-religious ‘grammar’, practices, or insights.
32. Miroslav Volf, ‘Theology, Meaning and Power’, in Carmen Krieg Volf and Thomas
Kucharz (eds.), The Future of Theology: Essays in Honor of Jürgen Moltmann (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 1996), p. 103.
33. Volf, ‘Theology, Meaning and Power’, p. 103.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004.

 316 Political Theology

close theological readings of the classics’.34 He agrees that we must narrate the
Jewish and Christians stories of encountering God in history and in Jesus
Christ, but maintains that the readings of various Scriptural texts must take
proper account of the freedom of the interpreter. Tracy admits that Lindbeck’s
cultural-linguistic model presents one plausible social-scientific way of describ-
ing religions and of analyzing one theological task, yet he doubts that this is
adequate for the full range of theology’s task.35 While Lindbeck’s model’s
strength lies in the truth of intra-systemic coherence or fidelity to interpreting
the tradition by means of a rigorous intratextuality, Tracy charges that such
‘grammar’ alone is insufficient to encompass adequate interpretations of the
concrete plural narratives, doctrines, and symbols (for grammar and rhetoric
inevitably interact).36
Downloaded by [Gazi University] at 01:58 31 March 2016

Tracy’s and Lindbeck’s Responses

to Philosophical Anti-Foundationalism
While Lindbeck presents a different perspective on the nature of religion and
the public character of theology, Tracy’s and Lindbeck’s methods approach
one another in learning from philosophical anti-foundationalism the truth of
the linguistic and historical character of rationality, and the importance of
recovering classical notions of reason as dialogue.37 Tracy and Lindbeck have
both rejected philosophical foundationalism, but for different reasons: Tracy
emphasizes the conversation-like quality of argument resembling ‘the classical
notion of reason as dialogue’;38 and Lindbeck rejects a positivist epistemic
structure that assumes belief arises from objective, universal foundations.39
As a result, Tracy wants to give up the claim of objectivity (as an impetus to
greater pluralism) while retaining some notion of public rationality, while
Lindbeck rejects the notion of a common or universal rationality while

34. David Tracy, ‘The Uneasy Alliance Reconceived: Catholic Theological Method,
Modernity, and Postmodernity’, Theological Studies 50 (1989), p. 557 and n. 35.
35. Tracy, ‘Lindbeck’s New Program for Theology’, p. 468.
36. Tracy, ‘Lindbeck’s New Program for Theology’, pp. 468-69.
37. Tracy, ‘The Uneasy Alliance Reconceived’, p. 558. Space here does not allow for an
adequate explication of philosophical antifoundationalism, but it refers very generally to the
broad philosophical developments in the last several decades in Continental (e.g. Heidegger,
Gadamer, Habermas, Ricoeur, Wittgenstein) and North American (Bernstein, Rorty,
Taylor) philosophy. See William Placher’s Unapologetic Theology: A Christian Voice in a
Pluralistic Conversation (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1989), chs. 2-6, for an
account of the philosophical and scientific developments that have impacted both postliberal
and revisionist/correlationist theological methods.
38. Tracy, ‘The Uneasy Alliance Reconceived’, p. 558.
39. Richard Lints, ‘The Postpositivist Choice, Tracy or Lindbeck?’ Journal of American
Academy of Religion 61.4 (1993), pp. 664-65.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004.

 Heyer How Does Theology Go Public? 317

retaining the justification of beliefs from within a socio-linguistic or narrative

framework.40 In some ways Lindbeck wants to reject reified ‘reason’ and its
demands of conformity (especially burdensome for theology, perhaps), while
Tracy and his followers seek a notion of ‘reason-ing’ as a dialogical process
rather than an objective measuring stick.
Thus Tracy and Lindbeck have taken different routes away from founda-
tionalism. Lindbeck’s model assumes that the particular, contextual origin of
norms or beliefs (of the Christian tradition, for example) requires that they
remain local in application and private in meaning as well. He moves from the
postmodern insight that cultural and religious traditions and language are for-
mative of human experience and reason to a basic containment of norms,
meaning and understanding within an intratextual tradition. Lindbeck might
Downloaded by [Gazi University] at 01:58 31 March 2016

retort that such meaning does not remain contained insofar as the Christian
narrative is coherent and performatively successful over time. With Kuhn and
Wittgenstein, Lindbeck argues that the ‘norms of reasonableness are too rich
and subtle to be adequately specified in any general theory of reason or
knowledge’, and that in the realm of religion, ‘intelligibility comes from skill,
not theory, and credibility comes from good performance, not adherence to
independently formulated criteria’.41
Tracy, on the other hand, takes a different course beyond foundationalism.
He believes that in navigating between relativism and objectivism we are left
with ‘more flexible but no less rational criteria for the rough coherence of
what truths-as-manifestations we may hermeneutically learn from revelation
with what we otherwise know reasonably from science and all other uses of
reason’.42 Tracy acknowledges that truth is no longer understood in a Carte-
sian sense but rather conceives of it as a reality emergent in genuine conversa-
tion among authentic women and men when they allow questioning to take
over.43 Thus Lindbeck is more concerned with bringing the liberal tradition to

40. Lints, ‘The Postpositivist Choice’, pp. 665, 674.

41. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, pp. 130-31. The problem with testing Lindbeck’s
model performatively as he suggests (and indeed even testing the truthfulness of the Chris-
tian story not by correlating it to metaphysical categories or other experience but by its prac-
tical consequences) is that it commits Lindbeck to holding that various religions are equally
true and that all genuine Christians will lead fairly identical lives. The latter fails to account
for the diverse ways of living to which the Scripture calls us (pacifists and just-war theorists
root their lifestyle choices in the same Christian story) as well as the role of sin in Christians’
failure to live out what we do know the story calls us to do. Other examples of diversity
include different Christian denominations’ stances on women’s ordination, divorce or
celibacy. See Gary L. Comstock, ‘Two Types of Narrative Theology’, Journal of the American
Academy of Religion 55 (Winter 1987), pp. 707-708.
42. Tracy, ‘The Uneasy Alliance Reconceived’, p. 566.
43. See also Stephen B. Bevans, Models of Contextual Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis,
1992), pp. 86-87.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004.

 318 Political Theology

an end while Tracy seeks to develop the same tradition with a critical and self-
critical model. Lindbeck’s underlying concern is the fear that Enlightenment
rationalism and liberalism will silence Christianity’s distinctive voice in any
conversation (as evidenced by religion’s marginalization within the academy),
and fear that Tracy has not sufficiently relinquished the untenable quest for
objectivity.44
Related to these philosophical differences are Lindbeck’s and Tracy’s dif-
ferent views on the coherence of other ‘outside’ knowledge with the Christian
beliefs. Investigating such coherence entails capitulation to secularism on
Lindbeck’s account and remains both a possibility and responsibility according
to Tracy. Lindbeck warns that exploring how our beliefs through tradition
cohere or not with what we otherwise know and practice risks diminishing the
Downloaded by [Gazi University] at 01:58 31 March 2016

centrality and authenticity of distinctively Christian beliefs. For, he insists, ‘the

grammar of religion, like that of a language, cannot be explicated or learned
by analysis of experience, only by practice’.45 Thus experience itself hinders
religious ‘competence’ and religions can be understood ‘only in their own
terms, not by transposing them into an alien speech’.46 By contrast, Tracy
believes that ‘[t]heology at its best…includes the difficult and necessary exer-
cise in the quest for some understanding of how all claims to meaning and
truth in the revelatory and salvific manifestations of faith cohere with the
character of the self-correcting, unrestricted nature of inquiry itself ’.47 For, if
theologians are faithful to their subject matter (the nature of ultimate reality)
and the coherence of God’s self-manifestations and ‘the logic of inquiry itself
with what we otherwise reasonably hold, they cannot avoid asking this ques-
tion of ultimate coherence’.48 According to Tracy, apologetics must remain an
intrinsic aspect of all Christian theology, not merely ad hoc as Lindbeck insists.
Tracy’s and Lindbeck’s different responses to philosophical antifounda-
tionalism reflect distinct understandings of the meaning of ‘public’ for the-
ology. For postliberals concerned with preserving the particularity of the
Christian community and tradition, ‘public’ means ‘universal’ and therefore
philosophically untenable; ‘going public’ by seeking coherence with ‘outside’
knowledge or mediating Christian claims to ‘outsiders’ remains an undesirable
goal for the task of theology. Tracy’s model of the classic, however, attempts

44. Placher, Unapologetic Theology, p. 169. Tracy believes that Lindbeck is ‘theologically
troubled by the liberal tradition’ and that this leads his desire to do theology strictly from
within the confessional community, calling Lindbeck’s substantive position ‘a methodologi-
cally sophisticated version of Barthian confessionalism’ (Tracy, ‘Lindbeck’s New Program
for Theology’, p. 465).
45. Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine, p. 129.
46. Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine, p. 129.
47. Tracy, ‘The Uneasy Alliance Reconceived’, pp. 568-69.
48. Tracy, ‘The Uneasy Alliance Reconceived’, p. 568.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004.

 Heyer How Does Theology Go Public? 319

genuine publicness (beyond witness) due to intensified particularity. Tracy

believes that ‘theologians of every radically monotheistic religion realize that
its fundamental commitment to God demands that we express that theistic
belief in ways that will render it public not merely to ourselves or our par-
ticular religious group’.49 Tracy’s concern for the public character of theology
is motivated by the divine reality’s universal character, ‘for any authentic
speech on the reality of God which is really private or particularist is unworthy
of that reality’.50 For Tracy, ‘all authentic theology is public discourse’.51 While
the thrust to publicness may not be the major focus of every theologian, any
serious theological construal of reality demands publicness, and any genuine
theological proposal that truly means what it says about God implicitly
addresses all three publics (academy, church, society).
Downloaded by [Gazi University] at 01:58 31 March 2016

In contrast to Lindbeck’s mere ad hoc allowance, then, Tracy maintains that

apologetics must always be an intrinsic aspect of all theology—for we cannot
avoid the question of the ultimate coherence of what we know from revelation
and other inquiry, due not only to situational demands but also intratextually,
due to the logic of claims about the reality of God.52 While Lindbeck succeeds
in speaking from a particular social locus to one of the publics (church) and
would contend that a model of authentic community ‘speaks’ for itself, beyond
itself, on Tracy’s account Lindbeck does not achieve ‘authentic’ publicness in
failing to speak ‘further’ to society or academy or in allowing other communi-
ties and knowledge to ‘speak to’ Christian beliefs.

Theological Presuppositions of Each Model

In addition to their philosophical differences, Tracy’s and Lindbeck’s theo-
logical presuppositions also highlight their distinct perspectives on the public
nature of theology. As the above discussion of Tracy’s shifts suggests, inter-
cultural and extra-textual sources contribute to the development and reception
of the biblical texts and traditions in his view. The ‘ambiguous reality’ of
church, society and world also shape Tracy’s theology and public stance; he
identifies both sin and grace operative within each of his three ‘publics’ and

49. Tracy, ‘Defending the Public Character of Theology’, pp. 350-51.

50. Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, pp. 13, 51.
51. Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, p. 57.
52. ‘To abandon that critical correlational task of theology is to abandon, within theology,
its reflective task and to abandon as well the claims of all the prophets and mystics to speak
directly and purposively to the human search for meaning and truth… [such reflection] on
hermeneutical manifestation as possibility and the coherence of those possibilities to reason
[from which postliberals prescind] …questions which theologians like Aquinas and Lonergan
show is also the nonfoundationalist question of inquiry itself, the question Christians and
Jews name the question of God’ (Tracy, ‘Uneasy Alliance Reconceived’, p. 568).

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004.

 320 Political Theology

concludes that the theologian should ‘maintain trust in and loyalty to all three
publics as concrete expressions of church and world so long as loyalty to God
remains the first and pervasive loyalty’.53
Tracy’s theological presuppositions inform his stance on the universality
of Christian claims and the whole of ultimate reality behind the specific
tradition of Christianity. The universality of the divine reality and created
nature remain Tracy’s theological emphases over and above a concern for the
particular tradition of Jesus Christ. His public theology reflects a belief in the
universality of the capacity for salvation and of sin and grace. Tracy describes
God as the ground of human limit-experiences of confidence and trust,
while Lindbeck would argue that the cultural-linguistic confines of any inter-
pretations of existence make problematic so defining God in relation to exis-
Downloaded by [Gazi University] at 01:58 31 March 2016

tential or any universal experiential grounds.54 Tracy also employs a minimalist

Christology, asserting that Jesus re-presents the fundamental existential truth
of existence, ‘the always-already reality of a graced world’.55 For ‘the over-
whelming reality disclosed in the originating event of Jesus Christ is none
other than grace itself’.56 Grace, then, becomes ‘the central clue to the nature
of all reality’,57 and Christological reflection functions as the re-presentation
of ‘the truth of religious theism in a manner consonant with our actual situa-
tion’.58 In ‘reducing’ (or ‘expanding’) Christ to grace, Tracy emphasizes pub-
licness as the potential for ultimate coherence and universal meaning and
truth(s) and de-emphasizes Christian distinctiveness. Thus postliberals
(among others) will rightly object that Tracy’s explication of Jesus Christ in
re-presentative, universal terms denigrates Christ’s cultural-linguistic speci-
ficity and falsely separates the act of experiencing Jesus Christ from its inter-
pretive context or community.59
In contrast to Tracy’s emphasis on the universality of the divine reality,
Lindbeck’s doctrine of God centers on the unsubstitutable Jesus; he avoids
discussions of universal grace or the operations of the Holy Spirit, and is pes-
simistic regarding sin’s effects. Religion, Lindbeck insists, is ‘above all an
external word, a verbum externum, that molds and shapes the self and its
world’.60 Thus the internal world is restricted to ‘a capacity for hearing and

53. Tracy, ‘Defending the Public Character of Theology’, p. 354.

54. Stephen Stell, ‘Hermeneutics in Theology and Theology in Hermeneutics’, Journal of
American Academy of Religion 61.4 (1993), p. 689.
55. Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, p. 234.
56. Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, p. 430.
57. Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, p. 430.
58. Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order, p. 204.
59. Tracy maintains, despite these emphases (and despite agreement with Rahner and
Lonergan’s basic thrusts), he no longer attributes a unified essence to all religions (à la
‘anonymous Christianity’) as Lindbeck suggests.
60. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, p. 34.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004.

 Heyer How Does Theology Go Public? 321

accepting the true religion, the true external word’.61 By making the Chris-
tological center of the church ‘the narrative meaning of the stories about
Jesus’,62 Lindbeck may risk limiting his concern to the God of the narrative
rather than the God identified in the narrative, the living Christ whom the
narrative cannot encompass.63 Further, the total absorption of the present
reality into Scripture advocated by Lindbeck does not account for postmodern
concerns such as taking due account of the freedom of the interpreter. For
there can be no ‘pure’ interpretation of text, even ‘within’ a tradition; rather
interpretation involves interaction, bias, fallibility and freedom, not receipt of
‘truth’ in a vacuum. Lindbeck’s emphasis on the Christian narrative as nor-
mative proves a useful corrective to theologies that would conform themselves
to secular questions or paradigms, yet conformity to narrative action alone
Downloaded by [Gazi University] at 01:58 31 March 2016

cannot exempt Christians from clarifying our particular understanding and

response to God’s call in Christ.64
Thus the theological presuppositions of each model seem incomplete and
somewhat complementary. Tracy’s perspective emphasizes creation and grace
at the expense of the singularity of Jesus Christ. On the other hand, Lind-
beck’s important emphases on distinctiveness sometimes miss the continuing
presence of the Spirit transforming human lives and underestimate the dy-
namic reality to which the privileged narratives only point. Certainly an
adequate public theology demands attention to both sets of contributions.
Lindbeck’s emphases provide a helpful corrective amidst the marginalization
of Christian theology in the secular academy and society. Yet it should not be
overlooked that Tracy’s very model of the classic depends on particular
Christian stories, symbols and rituals for disclosure. If we take seriously
Tracy’s theological emphases—if grace is universal, God’s action in the world
ongoing, sin and ambiguity mark even the ‘internal’ church, and God is a
reality much greater than our best intratextual efforts—then we the Christian
community must not remain self-enclosed. Tracy’s model of conversation,
then, enables collaborative efforts to refine our attempts to understand and
know God in critical and self-critical ways—in all aspects of our lives.

Complementary Insights and Mutual Critiques

Even if Tracy’s models of the classic and conversation withstand postliberal
objections that his models risk appealing to assumptions regarding the universal

61. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, p. 34.

62. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, p. 170.
63. Stell, ‘Hermeneutics in Theology’, pp. 694-95.
64. Jeanrond, ‘Theology in the Context of Pluralism and Postmodernity’, p. 158, and see
David Tracy, Dialogue with the Other: The Inter-Religious Dialogue (Louvain Theological and
Pastoral Monographs, 1; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1993).

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004.

 322 Political Theology

criteria of rationality that do not stand up on contemporary philosophical

grounds, Tracy’s models do raise some questions. While he includes church
among the three publics, Tracy rarely directly addresses this public, and such
relative dearth of ecclesial considerations remains a shortcoming—it may limit
the ‘conversation’ to the academy, and he remains silent on the institutional
implications or participation in his model of conversation.65 Here Lindbeck’s
emphasis on ecclesial community would complement Tracy’s approach.
Further, Tracy remains vague regarding who constitute the members of the
global conversation he proposes and whether or not it is a this-worldly pos-
sibility. Even if Tracy’s developments do adequately circumvent philosophi-
cal foundationalism, any model that emphasizes coherence with otherwise
obtained knowledge and lacks sufficient attention to institutional ecclesial
Downloaded by [Gazi University] at 01:58 31 March 2016

considerations may risk diminishing the specificity and authenticity of the

Christian tradition.
Lindbeck’s emphases on biblical narrative and on the distinctiveness of the
Christian tradition do safeguard authenticity and correct tendencies to shape
the gospel or Christian tradition to fit contemporary philosophical or cultural
questions. Yet even moderate postliberal William Placher warns that while part
of the force of postliberalism lies in its appeal to contemporary doubts of
sweeping claims about universal rationality and celebration of a particular
community’s story, those same forces raise suspicion about appeals to ‘the
Christian community’ or ‘the biblical narrative’.66 Nevertheless postliberal
theology’s very emphasis on the distinctiveness of the Christian community
and fidelity to its narrative serves as its ‘public theology’ (performatively) as a
witness. This model may not indicate retreat from responsibility to the
concerns of wider society but rather a different model of social ethics. That is,
a community that knows what it believes, interprets a wide range of issues in
terms of those beliefs, and then puts its beliefs into action, arguably has its

65. Jeanrond, ‘Theology in the Context of Pluralism and Postmodernity’, p. 161.

66. W. Placher, ‘Postliberal Theology’, in Placher (ed.), Modern Theologians (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1989), p. 352. Placher also finds postliberals such as Stanley Hauerwas vulnerable
on the question of truth/radical relativism. Hauerwas has praised Lindbeck for his descrip-
tion of religion and doctrine against a cognitivist view, and asserts that it is impossible to
distinguish questions regarding the truth of the narrative from its normative status so the
truthfulness of Jesus creates and is known by the kind of community his story should form
(A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic [Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1981]). Placher judges such claims ‘mistaken’ as many
different communities with different narratives produce ethical persons, and due to the
understanding that Christian faithful efforts are responses to God’s gracious initiative, so the
virtue of our members or practices cannot render the story we narrate about God’s action
‘true’ (see Placher, Unapologetic Theology, pp. 164-65; the latter reason Placher draws from
Ronald Thiemann’s Revelation and Theology: The Gospel as Narrated Promise [Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1985], p. 61).

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004.

 Heyer How Does Theology Go Public? 323

own version of persuasive power within the wider society.67 Tracy might bid
Lindbeck to recall texts of the prophets’ judgments on Israel and the Gospels’
portrayal of Jesus as a friend to outcasts. While ‘Christian salvation is not
exhausted by any program of political liberation’, Tracy writes, ‘Christian
salvation, rightly understood, cannot be divorced from the struggle for total
human liberation—individual, social, political and religious’.68
According to Lindbeck, however, Christian charitable action on behalf of
the poor is effective only if there already exists a Christian cultural influence,
although seeking such influence directly can be disastrous, since a Christianity
faithful to its origins should never seek cultural and social power.69 Lindbeck
might respond to Tracy’s prophetic references that his own model does not
shirk such social responsibility but insures its most successful accomplishment
Downloaded by [Gazi University] at 01:58 31 March 2016

without risking idolatry. For he argues that religious communities enjoy long-
term practical relevance only to the extent that they concentrate on their own
intratextual perspectives and practices without initially attempting to figure out
what is most practical or relevant.70 As Lindbeck puts it, ‘Only when the songs
of Zion are sung for their own sake will they be sung well enough to gain
currency in society at large’.71 He explains this stance as flowing from the
communal analogue of justification by faith—that is, just as for individuals,
communities’ salvation is not effected by works or praxis but by faith; nor is a
community’s faith for the sake of practical efficacy, yet unforeseeable good
works flow from its faith.72 Thus different models of public theology flow
from one’s perspective on whether human liberation and social action (in part)
constitute the process of Christian salvation or only flow from it.
As Volf’s comments above suggest, Lindbeck’s model fails to take sufficient
account of the pluralistic context in which different choices are made. Kathryn
Tanner maintains that theological models of sectarian impermeability are
practically impossible, that theology and religion always consist of ‘borrowed
materials’.73 Some critics charge Lindbeck is unable to develop criteria for
critiquing a particular tradition and its inherent ideologies—such as liberalism
—without subscribing in some measure to a global conversation: ‘The focus
on intratextuality cannot take adequate care of the need to understand the

67. See Placher, Unapologetic Theology, p. 167 and Stanley Hauerwas, Against the Nations
(Minneapolis: Winston Press, 1985), p. 1.
68. Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity, p. 104.
69. Lindbeck, ‘The Church’s Mission to a Postmodern Culture’, in Frederic B. Burnham
(ed.), Postmodern Theology: Christian Faith in a Pluralist World (San Francisco: Harper & Row,
1989), p. 54.
70. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, p. 128.
71. Lindbeck, ‘The Church’s Mission to a Postmodern Culture’, p. 54.
72. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, p. 128.
73. See Tanner, Theories of Culture, especially ch. 4 (pp. 61-92).

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004.

 324 Political Theology

other, not only the other who is outside of our preferred tradition, but even
the other who may be hidden in our own tradition or even in myself’.74 While
many political theologians applaud postliberal theology’s defense of an evan-
gelical form of ecclesial resistance to individualistic, bourgeois academic inter-
pretations of Christianity, they also challenge the postliberal inclination to
separate the spiritual and the political, lack of attention to justice issues, to
critiques of ideology, and to action for ecclesial and social reforms.75
So are the differences between each model merely tactical? Is the debate sim-
ply about whether Christians most effectively influence society by beginning
with society’s shared assumptions and attempting to shape them in a new direc-
tion, working within the common discourse and established institutions, or by
describing one’s alternate worldview as authentically and forcefully as possible,
Downloaded by [Gazi University] at 01:58 31 March 2016

creating model communities of speech and action?76 In the end, Lindbeck’s

model does not seem thoroughly adequate given the Christian narrative’s call
to engage those who stand outside of its own community.77 It seems, then,
even on postliberal intratextual terms, that an urgent demand to engage and
learn from those outside our tradition exists. Tracy insists that all manifestation
disclosure demands transformation; all theory, praxis—for there should be no
split between mystical and prophetic.78 Getting the Christian story right is one
critical role for theology, but to stop at such efforts without acting on the good
news, relating it to everything else we know, working to inaugurate the Reign
proclaimed and transforming the world seems to stop entirely too short, to
remain deaf to the consistent call that the narrative itself imparts.

Conclusion: Insights from Tracy and Lindbeck

into Theology’s Ongoing Task
Our investigation into the theological and philosophical presuppositions of
postliberal and correlational theologies makes clear that the most responsible
public theology entails neither retreat to entirely closed intratextual communi-

74. Jeanrond, ‘Theology in the Context of Pluralism and Postmodernity’, p. 157.

75. Bradford Hinze, ‘Postliberal Theology and Roman Catholic Theology’, Religious
Studies Review 21 (1995), pp. 299-304 (302).
76. William Placher, ‘Revisionist and Postliberal Theologies and the Character of Public
Theology’, Thomist 49 (1985), pp. 392-416 (416).
77. Placher himself makes this point, citing imago Dei Scripture passages (Gen. 1:26);
prophetic passages reminding us that the same God who brought Israel out of Egypt also
freed the Philistines from Caphtor and the Arameans from Kir (Amos 9:7); Paul’s acknowl-
edgment that the Athenians’ God is the God the Christians proclaim (Acts 17:23); and the
repeated biblical citations of righteous examples from other traditions, including Job, the
centurion of Capernaum (Mt. 8:10) and the centurion at the crucifixion (Mk 15:39). See
Unapologetic Theology, p. 116.
78. See, e.g., Tracy, ‘The Uneasy Alliance Reconceived’, pp. 569-70.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004.

 Heyer How Does Theology Go Public? 325

ties nor reversion to foundationalism. We have encountered several ways in

which Lindbeck’s and Tracy’s models complement one another. Lindbeck’s
emphases on the distinctiveness of the Christian community and attention to
the ecclesial community complement Tracy’s emphases on dialogue and
coherence. Lindbeck may be the better descriptor of Christianity, for his
interpretive rules are less likely to conform the gospel to preconceived meta-
physical categories or subjective experiences.79 For while Tracy’s correlation of
what we know from scripture with what we know from other sources provides
more adequate resources for explaining Christianity and its claims, the Scrip-
tures do remain about Jesus Christ, not our own experiences.80 In the end
perhaps this distinction points to their different understandings of faithfully
taking theology public—for one the task entails describing and living the
Downloaded by [Gazi University] at 01:58 31 March 2016

Scriptural narrative authentically, and for the other it demands continually

attempting to explain that narrative and its implications and relate them to
experience and other knowledge.
Yet even Lindbeck himself concedes that ‘there is much in Scripture and
tradition to suggest that preaching the gospel understandably is a necessary
part of faithfulness’.81 Tracy’s model of conversation that engages those from
other traditions in mutually critical ways best engages this task of communi-
cating the Christian message beyond its ‘borders’. Tracy’s method of ‘mixed’
public dialogue may even aid Lindbeck’s efforts to counteract the diminish-
ment of biblical literacy, for some 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 correla-
tion or apologetics build, there would be insufficient resources to explain the
Christian community’s practice and witness (to ‘outsiders’) and to enable
conversion.82
Both theologians are narrativists in some sense, for, as noted, Tracy’s own
model of the classic depends on particular Christian stories and symbols for
disclosure. Yet Tracy does not conceive of the Christian narrative as autono-
mous or isolated from other forms of language; rather ‘[i]t is enmeshed in
them—impure, corrupted with historical, psychological, and metaphysical
claims’.83 It seems that as theologians and ethicists we must be willing to
wrestle with these normative claims—and their implications beyond en-
closed Christian communities. For if we believe that the Christian story is
true, not simply true for Christians, we must not stop at the borders of the
confessing community as postliberals do when they deny that the Scriptures

79. Comstock, ‘Two Types of Narrative Theology’, p. 698.

80. See Comstock, ‘Two Types of Narrative Theology’, pp. 698-703.
81. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, p. 134.
82. Tilley, ‘Incommensurability, Intratextuality, and Fideism’, p. 100.
83. Comstock, ‘Two Types of Narrative Theology’, p. 697.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004.

 326 Political Theology

make historical or metaphysical claims.84 Tracy’s models best continue this

effort to relate the inherent nature of reality to how we ought to live.
The complementary theological emphases and philosophical methods we
have encountered in Tracy and Lindbeck provide key insights into the chal-
lenges political theologians and ethicists face in our contemporary context.
Tracy’s most recent models, having incorporated some postmodern insights,
ultimately provide a more responsive, dynamic method for attending to the
public dimensions of theology today. His theory of the classic represents a
major step toward overcoming the postmodern universal-particular impasse,
and his model of conversation provides a responsible theological method
amidst pluralism. Given the growing realities of such pluralism and the post-
modern legacies, the most adequate church-world stance for the twenty-first
Downloaded by [Gazi University] at 01:58 31 March 2016

century must take seriously the human and cultural character of theological
reflection and the situated nature of truth claims; maintain humility about
the completeness of its grasp on the truth; remain fully theological and
particular even in ‘public’ interactions; maintain an adequate mechanism of
self-criticism or ‘suspicion’; and work through genuine dialogue with others
toward continually refined self-understanding about the ultimate human
good. On the whole, Tracy’s models of classic and conversation most ade-
quately enable this substantial, humbling task.

Dr Kristin E. Heyer is Assistant Professor of Christian Ethics in the Depart-

ment of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles,
CA. She specializes in issues at the intersection of theology and public policy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bevans, Stephen B., Models of Contextual Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1992).
Cady, Linell E., Religion, Theology, and American Public Life (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1993).
Comstock, Gary L., ‘Two Types of Narrative Theology’, Journal of the American Academy of
Religion 55 (Winter 1987), pp. 687-717.
Gandhi, Mohandas K., An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with the Truth (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1957).
Hauerwas, Stanley, Against the Nations (Minneapolis: Winston Press, 1985).
Hinze, Bradford, ‘Postliberal Theology and Roman Catholic Theology’, Religious Studies
Review 21 (1995), pp. 299-310.
Hollenbach, David, ‘The Common Good in the Postmodern Epoch’, in James Donahue and
M. Theresa Moser, RSCJ (eds.), Religion, Ethics and the Common Good (Annual
Publication of College Theology Society, 41; Mystic, CT: Twenty-third Publications,
1996), pp. 3-22.

84. Comstock, ‘Two Types of Narrative Theology’, p. 709.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004.

 Heyer How Does Theology Go Public? 327

Jeanrond, Werner, ‘Theology in the Context of Pluralism and Postmodernity: David Tracy’s
Theological Method’, in David Jasper (ed.), Postmodernism, Literature and Theology
(London: Macmillan Press, 1993).
Lindbeck, George, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadel-
phia: Westminster Press, 1984).
—‘The Church’s Mission to a Postmodern Culture’, in Frederic B. Burnham (ed.),
Postmodern Theology: Christian Faith in a Pluralist World (San Francisco: Harper & Row,
1989).
Lints, Richard, ‘The Postpositivist Choice, Tracy or Lindbeck?’, Journal of American Academy
of Religion 61.4 (1993), pp. 655-77.
Placher, William, ‘Revisionist and Postliberal Theologies and the Character of Public Theol-
ogy’, Thomist 49 (1985), pp. 392-416.
—‘Postliberal Theology’, in Placher (ed.), Modern Theologians (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).
—Unapologetic Theology: A Christian Voice in a Pluralistic Conversation (Louisville, KY:
Downloaded by [Gazi University] at 01:58 31 March 2016

Westminster/John Knox Press, 1989).

Stell, Stephen, ‘Hermeneutics in Theology and Theology in Hermeneutics’, Journal of
American Academy of Religion 61.4 (1993), pp. 679-703.
Tanner, Kathryn, Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press,
1997).
Thiemann, Ronald, Revelation and Theology: The Gospel as Narrated Promise (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1985).
Tilley, Terrence W., ‘Incommensurability, Intratextuality, and Fideism’, Modern Theology 5
(January 1989), pp. 87-111.
Tracy, David, Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1975).
—‘Defending the Public Character of Theology’, The Christian Century 98 (April 1981), pp.
350-56.
—‘Lindbeck’s New Program for Theology’, Thomist 49 (1985), pp. 460-72.
—The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York:
Crossroad, 1986).
—Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1987).
—‘The Uneasy Alliance Reconceived: Catholic Theological Method, Modernity, and
Postmodernity’, Theological Studies 50 (1989), pp. 548-70.
—Dialogue with the Other: The Inter-Religious Dialogue (Louvain Theological and Pastoral
Monographs, 1; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1990).
Volf, Miroslav, ‘Theology, Meaning and Power’, in Carmen Krieg Volf and Thomas
Kucharz (eds.), The Future of Theology: Essays in Honor of Jürgen Moltmann (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996).

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004.