Theology Today - Vol 33, No. 4 - January 1977 - TABLETALK

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Modes of Theological Argument
By David Tracy

"Fundamental theology" concentrates formally upon the modes of argument, the criteria, evidence, warrants, and backings of any purported theological statement in either systematics or practical theology, or in fundamental theology itself. I want to concentrate upon certain basic modes of argument implicit in representative contemporary, fundamental, systematic, and practical theologies from the viewpoint of fundamental theology's own proper concern for sorting out modes of argument.

"Fundamental theology" may be defined as that discipline which investigates basic meanings present in Christian fact and in common human experience. Fundamental theology thereby first employs historical and hermeneutical criteria to determine both sets of meanings. The same discipline will also ordinarily find the need to develop explicitly metaphysical criteria to investigate any cognitive claims implicitly involved in these retrieved meanings.

Since I have tried to argue the much controverted case on the need for metaphysical criteria in theology at some length elsewhere, I hope the reader will bear with me if here I simply state the form of the argument rather than its supporting argumentation. The most basic evidence can be located in the logically peculiar character of the kind of fundamental questions about the meaning of human existence or, indeed, the whole of reality proper to any authentically religious phenomenon. It seems fair to state that when one uses the words "religion" or "religious," one may legitimately refer to either a religious di-

David Tracy is Professor of Philosophical Theology, University of Chicago Divinity School. He serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Religion, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Concilium, and THEOLOGY TODAY. He is the author of The Achievement of Bernard Lonergan (1970) and Blessed Rage for Order (1975). Deeply involved in recent Catholic discussions on methodology but also versed in Protestant and humanistic trends in philosophical theology, Dr. Tracy's own concern is to reconstruct the classic Christian tradition for a contemporary secular world. "The New Pluralism in Theology," which is the sub-title of his latest book, requires what he calls "revisionist theology." This suggests that "contemporary Christian theology is best understood as philosophical reflection upon the meanings present in common human experience and the meanings present in the Christian tradition." This present essay seeks to clarify and extend the methodological implications of that programmatic declaration.

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mension to our ordinary language and experience or to a particular religious tradition-the "religions." In either case, the logical oddness of the cognitive claims implied or explicated in any properly religious dimension or any particular religion seems clear and therefore seems to demand the employment of strictly metaphysical criteria and arguments to analyze and adjudicate those claims. If this is indeed the case, it indicates that classical Christian theology's historical relationship to philosophy as its major conversation-partner remains fundamentally correct.

Fundamental theology, therefore, finds its principal task in the determination of the meaning, the internal coherence, and the truth of the cognitive claims involved in the Christian tradition and in common human experience. Additional criteria and modes of argumentation, however, also seem needed. These latter criteria may be named either "criteria of relative adequacy" or, "criteria of experiential or existential meaningfulness." In more familiar terms, they may be named "plausibility arguments." The character of these criteria, as present in such familiar contemporary texts as Reinhold Niebuhr's The Nature and Destiny of Man and Paul Ricoeur's The Symbolism of Evil, may be described as philosophical but not strictly metaphysical arguments for the relative adequacy of a particular symbol system's illuminative power for some major dimension of our concrete, factual experience. The criteria and thereby the arguments may eventually become formulated as principally ethical, as in Niebuhr's argument for the relative adequacy of the Christian understanding of historical passage. Or they may prove to be mainly existential and aesthetic as in Ricoeur's analysis of the relative adequacy of the Adamic myth on evil over the Orphic or cosmogonic myths. In every case of these frequently employed, if less often defined, modes of argument in contemporary theology, certain components of the argument seem clear. First, some theory of the disclosive power of symbol, myth, metaphor, image, and analogy is ordinarily either assumed or explicitly defended. Second, some mode of argument, sometimes rather loosely formulated, is articulated to show either the relative experiential or aesthetic adequacy or less ambitiously, the authentically "suggestive" or "illuminative" power of the Christian symbol system. Third, at least when explicitly formulated, these arguments for relative adequacy will often be correlated to more strictly metaphysical arguments for the meaning and truth of the cognitive claims present in those symbols.

Insofar as such criteria of relative adequacy initially developed in fundamental theology are used to study such concrete symbols of the Christian tradition as sin and such matters of fact, not of metaphysical necessity, in human experience as evil, the fundamental theologian moves into the distinct but related discipline of systematic theology. What, then, defines the peculiarity of systematic theology's own modes of argument? In one sense, of course, the answer seems obvious: the principal function of systematic theology is to provide the system, that is, the ordering principle, to all the central Christian doctrines, symbols, motifs. In that sense, the principal role of the systematic theologian can be described as confessional: in the precise sense of

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rearticulating the meaning and presumably the meaningfulness of a particular community's perspective upon our common lives. Yet one hopes that the present plea for public criteria and modes of argument may also serve to indicate the need in systematic theology itself to render as explicit as possible the kind of model for a confessional theology which is also an apologetic theology: the model probably most explicitly developed in the still seminal work of H. Richard Niebuhr. Indeed, whenever systematic theology is articulated as an exercise in public discourse, that theology will prove both confessional and apologetic. In relationship to the earlier work of fundamental theology, the systematic theologian will principally be concerned to refine, develop, and perhaps transform the criteria and arguments for the relative adequacy of one's own confessional position.

As a single example of the development of systematic arguments for relative adequacy, allow me to describe briefly some recent work of my own in this direction. The inquiry can be posed this way: Does not the principal subjectmatter of systematic theology-those Christian texts and symbols we all call "classics"-disclose the kind of argument relevant to systematic theology? If we assume that systematic theology attempts to rearticulate the meaning, meaningfulness, and truth of precisely the classical Christian expressions for this latter day, then two observations seem in order. First, the proper model for this task will involve both confessional and apologetic components. Second, the central notion requiring clarification is the descriptive term "classic" or "classical" as applied to the very subjectmatter requiring systematic rearticulation. A central peculiarity of a classic is precisely that its fidelity to the concrete determines its ability to disclose a universal significance. By definition a classical expression of the human spirit can never be merely private. It always bears an authentically public character. The very notion "classic," therefore, suggests the kind of criteria (specifically, concreteness and universality) and a principal kind of argument for relative adequacy (specifically, aesthetic argument) relevant to a discipline which is both confessional and apologetic.

One may assume, on strictly historical-empirical grounds, that there exist certain classical expressions of the Christian spirit. One may also assume that the systematic theologian will attempt to "confess" the enduring meaning, meaningfulness, and truth of those expressions in such manner that they function as publicly disclosive and transformative.

But why do we call certain texts classics? Although the answer is disputed in the literature on the classic, some factors seem constant. However differently defined in literary-critical terms by Sainte-Beuve, T. S. Eliot, and, more recently, Frank Kermode, or in modern philosophical terms by Hans-Georg Gadamer, a classic bears certain marks

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of an authentically public character. There is, for example, the purely public, as historical and empirical, fact that there exists a list of classical Christian texts. Although each one of us undoubtedly has his/her private list to suggest either new entries or some too long delayed omissions, the list as a whole remains. Like Everest, it is simply there. Even the most radically designed theological curriculum will discover the need to demand that all students come to terms with the classical Christian texts from the Scriptures forward. Moreover, thanks to our historical and hermeneutical colleagues, we can usually also find both critical editions as well as histories of text's interpretation. Most importantly we always find those public modes of historical and hermeneutical inquiry needed by every theological student in the attempt to interpret and critically appropriate the meaning of these classical texts. Indeed, so much is this the case that most educated persons are willing to assume that a classical text is not easily understood, much less rearticulated. Ordinarily it requires our best efforts at interpretation. Often it also demands what Gadamer correctly labels a horizon-shift on our part.

So, in approaching any classical text we make two public assumptions. First, we assume that the shifting process of the centuries can be basically trusted in signalizing, say, Paul's Letter to Romans and not the Letter to Philemon as a classical exposition of Christian faith or in designating Aquinas' Summa Theologiae rather than Lombard's Sentences as the classical medieval systematics. Secondly, we also assume that any text that has been designated a classic by the tradition demands a struggle to interpret it before we attempt any critical appropriation or apologetic rearticulation. This latter factor, moreover, has its own relevance in the search for public criteria. For a classic possesses both the concreteness of its own historical context and, by its self-transcending fidelity to that concrete historicity, a certain universality of significance. But are not concreteness and universality the ontological components and criteria sought by a discipline that is at once confessional and apologetic or, in the single word I prefer, "public"? If either concreteness or universality is absent, we do not find a classic. We find either an interesting period-piece or an example of a perhaps noble not really futile, because premature, attempt at universality.

When Thomas Mann, for example, set out to write a purely universal novel, he wrote Joseph and His Brothers- a novel commonly and, I believe, correctly judged an aesthetic failure. When Mann was most faithful to his own German historicity, as in Doctor Faustus, he managed to produce a literary classic. When I read James Joyce or Eugene O'Neill, I am not unaware that my joy and pain in the reading is increased by my own lived experience of the Irish Catholic world they portray. But I am also aware, I hope, that if all I find there is such personal pleasure and pain, I have not really understood these classical expressions of the human spirit. More exactly, I have not allowed for

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the possibility of and need for what Gadamer correctly calls the Fusion of Horizons, that is, the painstaking effort to understand and appropriate the sometimes deceptively familiar, the always demandingly strange horizons of meaning, possible-modes-of-being-in-the-world, forms of life disclosed by any classical text.

As recent parable interpretation shows, such effort will involve the need to understand such publicly available methods of investigation and argument as genre, codification, structure, and other relevant literary-critical factors. As that same work on parable also shows, precisely a fidelity to those public methods of literary-critical investigation provides new entry into the strange-as-limit worlds of meaning disclosed by these seemingly all-too-familiar Christian texts. Such fidelity to public interpretation, in its turn, seems to free systematic theologians Sallie Te Selle and Dominic Crossan to rearticulate those meanings in contemporary parabolic forms. Precisely a fidelity to interpreting in a public fashion these earliest Christian classics-the parables of Jesus-encourages many contemporary theologians to develop what I would call criteria of relative adequacy designed to rearticulate, to re-confess, to render publicly available again these still disclosive classical expressions of the Christian spirit. Whatever further questions should be raised about this mode of theological argument, the fact seems to be that the method works when a genuine classic is the object of study. It falters when some lesser text is asked to carry the burden of universal significance. Above all, the method works mainly because its fidelity to public modes of interpretation, and its very choice of that authentically public subject-matter we call the classic, frees the disclosive power of the text from narrowly confessional limitations into the wider world of public concerns.

Much more could and should be said on the possible relevance of the notion "classic" to the effort of the systematic theologian to achieve public meaning by rearticulating classical Christian texts. But I will simply conclude this section by noting three factors in the notion "classic" which deserve more attention from systematic theologians. First, the classical Christian texts, witnesses, events, symbols, already exist. Any serious theological education which could assume that these texts are either easily appropriated or not intrinsically demanding of a horizon-shift seems misguided.

Second, the peculiar ability of a classical text to unite fidelity to a particular concrete situation with a universal significance is a phenomenon with important implications. For any systematic theologian who attempts to be both confessional and apologetic-to be "public"-may well reflect in a properly argumentative fashion upon the presence of both concreteness and universality in the classics of his/her own tradition.

Third, one refinement of the criteria of relative adequacy for a systematic theology implied by this notion of the classic will be the insistence upon explicitly aesthetic criteria as crucially relevant to

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systematic theological work. As so much of the work of contemporary theologians on story, parable, metaphor, analogy, and genre shows, the need for literary-critical criteria and modes of argument has already proved its fruitfulness. As this more criteriological reflection upon that work may serve to indicate, these literary-critical modes of argument in systematic theology can be further refined by explicitly developing the kinds of criteria and arguments relevant to this work as a public function.

Above all, this recognition of the continuing public significance of any classic, by means of the presence of both concreteness and universality in its constitution, may serve to suggest a common, a public route of entry into the question of how a Christian systematics can be both confessional and apologetic. Yet even if that systematic enterprise were rendered more explicit in terms of criteria and argument, one would still wish to relate the results of systematics not only to the more metaphysically-inclined concerns of fundamental theology, but also to that final form of public theology we commonly call practical theology.

III

In terms of criteria and modes of argument, practical theology itself may be considered as yet another refinement and development of arguments for relative adequacy. Although the earlier concerns of both fundamental and systematic theologies remain relevant to any attempt at a practical theology, once again a distinctive concern shifts the major locus of inquiry and argument. The basic shift can be described as a dominant concern with praxis.

For example, the various forms of what have become known as political theologies assume the use of arguments from political, sociological, and often economic analyses and then develop explicitly praxis criteria for authentically theological collaboration with those disciplines. I will suggest below that the most important kinds of argument in practical theology can be labelled criteria from the fields of individual and social ethics. The principal question at issue remains that of developing arguments for the relative adequacy of a particular symbol-system. In my prior discussion of systematic theology, I suggested that those forms of theology which may be broadly labelled "hermeneutical" employ fundamentally aesthetic criteria to determine the disclosive or illuminative power of the Christian symbol-system. Insofar as this is the case, the position on praxis-questions of hermeneutical theologies proves to be a belief, sometimes explicit, more often implicit, that the rhetorical persuasiveness of the retrieved Christian meanings will suffice to transform personal, social, and political practice. The various forms of political and liberation theologies, however, effectively challenge this belief in the persuasive power of hermeneutically sophisticated Christian rhetoric for our

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contemporary situation. The most familiar challenge from the political theologians is, of course, the charge that a merely individualist model holds sway in alternative metaphysical and hermeneutical theologies. But whatever the truth in this familiar charge, the less noted but, I believe, more significant dispute is effectively over which criteria and arguments of relative adequacy will allow the Christian symbol-system to bear transformative power for both individuals and the wider society. That dispute can be clarified by first noting an analogous dispute in philosophy between the hermeneutical philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer and the political philosopher Jürgen Habermas.

The recent German discussion between the hermeneutical approach of Hans-Georg Gadamer and the praxis-orientation of Jürgen Habermas may be taken as a singularly clear example of a dispute over what I call arguments of relative adequacy for contemporary praxis. For Gadamer's familiar insistence upon the still disclosive power of the classical Greek tradition has led him to reaffirm his trust in the persuasive power of classical rhetoric as sufficient in the public forum. If Gadamer were correct on this matter, then it follows that hermeneutical reflection would suffice not only for questions of aesthetic meaning but also for the more difficult question of a relatively adequate strategy for societal praxis. Yet Habermas' counter-argument must also be noted: a purely hermeneutical approach can too often serve simply to affirm a tradition, to disallow the emancipatory function of critical reason, and eventually to capitulate to, not transform the given status-quo. He argues, for example, that our present social, political, and cultural situation is not sufficiently analogous to that more harmonious situation of the Greek polis wherein public discourse, personal phronesis, and thereby the power of rhetorical persuasion, could still be assumed. Rather we find ourselves in a technologically dominated political and social situation wherein systematically distorted communication on a mass scale seems to hold sway. The persuasive power of classical rhetoric seems well-nigh powerless in that all-too-easily manipulated situation. We need, therefore, some form of a critique of ideologies that can perform a critically emancipatory function on a societal level by unmasking those ideological distortions in the same way psychoanalysis unmasks the illusions of an individual.

Just as we no longer assume that a neurotic or psychotic individual can be radically transformed by intelligent, rational, and rhetorically persuasive discourse, so we cannot now assume that a societal situation of systematically distorted communication can be transformed merely by hermeneutical reflection and rhetorical persuasiveness. The criteria for relatively adequate and therefore truly public discourse and practice in that situation is one that demands, for Habermas, the development of both a critique of ideologies and a theory of communicative competence correlating language, work, and power into a public whole.

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I have presented this extra-theological dispute over criteria of relative adequacy for contemporary praxis largely in the hope that it may serve to illuminate an analogous, if ordinarily less sharply formulated dispute, between hermeneutical and political theologians. Briefly stated, in terms of criteria and modes of argument, several contemporary theological discussions seem to take the following form: Some theologians basically appeal to the disclosive power of the languages of story, myth, symbol, metaphor, parable, analogy, etc. Their position thereby implies the clear need for the kind of aesthetic criteria of relative adequacy outlined in the earlier section on systematics. Their position also implies a trust in the sufficiently persuasive power of good hermeneutical work and rearticulated Christian rhetoric or transforming contemporary praxis. Indeed, the same kind of rhetorical persuasiveness which Gadamer wishes to accomplish by means of his retrieval of classical Greek texts is what these systematic theologians effectively argue for by means of their hermeneutical and literarycritical retrieval of classical Christian texts. This position does not lack argumentative force. When analyzed in terms of criteria, in fact, the position constitutes a basically aesthetic argument for the relative adequacy, that is, the disclosive and persuasive power, of those retrieved Christian texts and symbols. Yet unlike their philosophical analogue, Gadamer, the hermeneutical theologians seem too content with a relatively unexamined trust that the rhetorical persuasiveness of those retrieved meanings will prove sufficient to transform individual and societal practice.

The political theologians, on the contrary, seem to assume like Habermas that a fair-minded analysis of the contemporary societal situation forces any observer to admit to the relative powerlessness of all rhetorical persuasion in a situation of systematically distorted communication. What will prove more relatively adequate to that situation, they effectively argue, is some form of a Christian critique of ideologies often named liberation or political theologies. It is of no little interest to note that both the philosophers Gadarmer and Habermas and their theological analogues, the hermeneutical and political theologians, can unite on certain questions of criteria and argument. For example, these theologians do unite with one another and with the metaphysical theologians to attack various forms of positivism with metaphysical ethical and aesthetic arguments only to go their separate ways again when further questions emerge about the proper strategy, the relatively adequate arguments, and practices needed to transform the present political and societal situation.

In any case, a clear willingness on all sides to engage in public discussion on such empirical questions as whether our present societal situation is really one which social scientists name systematically distorted communication and which many liberation theologians more graphically label oppression is the kind of publically relevant issue to

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any attempt to determine criteria of relative adequacy for a practical theology. Above all, on these questions of practical theology, I believe James Gustafson is correct in his oft-repeated insistence upon the need for explicitly formulated arguments from the liberation theologians in the genre of what the English-speaking world names social ethics. In my own terms, only such clear criteriological moves will really allow both participants in and observers of this dispute to adjudicate on public grounds the conflicting claims to relative adequacy for a truly contemporary Christian practical theology.

I have tried throughout this somewhat hurried series of comments upon complex theological alternatives in the present pluralistic situation to focus not on conclusions but on the modes of argument relevant to adjudicating conflicting claims among metaphysical, hermeneutical, and political theologians. That focus should allow any theologian to note both the relative strengths and weaknesses in the kinds of metaphysical, aesthetic, and ethical criteria and arguments necessary to determine the relative adequacy of any specific theological position. That we still need fundamental, systematic, and practical theologies I take for granted. That we badly need more explicit reflection upon the kinds of criteria and evidence relevant to each discipline and to their interaction I have urged by this analysis of the kinds of arguments implicit in different theologies. It seems fair to conclude that any theological curriculum designed to assume competence for any single individual, in all the specialties and disciplines needed for the communal theological task, is a curriculum whose hope of success is directly proportionate to its ability to enroll some contemporary Leibniz in it. Yet we need not really despair so easily.

Any theological curriculum can so focus on the modes of argument, the relevant criteria and evidence in the several specialties and disciplines comprising theology, that it serves to foster both truly public discourse and consistently collaborative practice. In a situation where theologians are in some danger of being added to the list of endangered species, I realize that a plea for public discourse and collaborative practice may seem to possess all the excitement of a stifled yawn. Yet seething beneath that great grey western virtue of reasoned public discourse is, I believe, the desire really to hear one another once again and the passion to overhear together the still disclosive and emancipatory power of the Christian tradition.