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A Schleiermacher for Our Time
A Review of David Tracy's On Naming the Present: God, Hermeneutics and Church
By Susan B. Thistlethwaite

David Tracy is clearly the Schleiermacher of our time. A Schleiermacher, to be certain, who has encountered the neoorthdoxy of Tillich and the devastating effects of doing Christian theology after the Holocaust (see chapter 5, "The Holocaust as Interruption and the Christian Return to History"), but in terms of method, clearly a Schleiermacher.

Consider David Tracy's definition of theology from his new book, On Naming the Present: God, Hermeneutics and Church (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1994. 146 pp. $16.95). "Christian theology is a discipline that attempts to correlate the meaning and truth of the Christian fact (its scriptures, doctrines, rituals, witnesses, symbols, etc.) with the meaning and truth of our contemporary experience." While the correlation terminology clearly evokes Tillich, the emphasis on experience harkens back to Schleiermacher.

In his excellent lectures on Schleiermacher, Karl Barth used the image of a bridge to describe what his great teacher/nemesis was trying to do in Speeches on Religion to Its Cultured Despisers. Schleiermacher was trying to build a bridge between the educated cultural elite (that was praise in Schleiermacher's time, not an insult as on the lips of today's anti-intellectual demogogues) and the highest values of the Christian faith. In many ways, Tracy's new book is specifically this bridge-building type of work. Because this bridge must be built in the late-twentieth century, however, Tracy's is a much more intricate and difficult project than was Schleiermacher's. For indeed, some of the bridges that need to be built are exclusively on the Christian side of the divide.

The form of this new work is not irrelevant to the method. Tracy evokes

Susan B. Thistlethwaite is Professor of Theology at Chicago Theological Seminary. She has recently co-edited (with G. F. Cairns) Beyond Theological Tourism: Mentoring as a Grassroots Approach to Theological Education (1994).

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Søren Kierkegaard, who insisted, "the question of a proper genre for expressing authentic religious experience . . . is one too often overlooked by the `theologians.' " Naming the Present contains some new material but is mostly journal articles written over the past decade for Concilium, the international journal of progressive Catholic theology. These essays are occasional pieces directed toward a more general audience than that of The Analogical Imagination. As such, they present Tracy's thought in an accessible, nontechnical form, which allows for many conversation partners to be brought from one side of the bridge to the other.

One of, the great attractions of David Tracy's work in this volume, and indeed in his recent publications in general, is that he takes feminist theology with great seriousness and tries to incorporate its insights and those of other liberation theologies, most explicitly those of Latin American liberation theologians. Since one of the difficulties of the theological method identified as "liberation" is that, in its radical contextuality, it can be misunderstood as "particularist" and hence peripheral to the real task of theology, understood as foundational or universal. What Tracy accomplishes repeatedly in this excellent work, most notably in the astonishing sweep of the first chapter, is to show the social and intellectual locations of all the players in the theological present and to name their differences and commonalities. If I were to suggest one future direction for Tracy in this effort, it would be to note even more differences among feminists (and now womanists) and to include African American men, African liberation theologians, and Asian Minjung theologians much more directly. The beauty of Tracy's approach is that it can be a helpful intraliberation method; he does not merely explain to those outside liberation communities how these theologies from below contribute to the common theological task. This theme is picked up again in the chapter on "The Particularity and Universality of Revelation."

In describing David Tracy as the Schleiermacher of our time, I have not forgotten that Schleiermacher was the founder of Protestant liberalism, while Tracy is a Catholic theologian. Another important bridge that is evident within this volume is that between Catholicism and Protestantism. There is no question in my mind that the old divisions of Protestant and Catholic no longer apply in theological terms. The differences, as the first chapter makes abundantly clear, are among the moderns, the fundamentalists, the neoconservatives, and the postmodernists. Postdenominationalism is a reality. Whether it is Protestant and Catholic fundamentalists uniting over the abortion debate or Sallie McFague and David Tracy employing the same method of critical correlation, the same shift has been made. The old divisions pare gone.

Of course, Catholic concerns are addressed directly in a section on "Roman Catholic Identity amid the Ecumenical Dialogues," but Catholic here refers to both the broad, long-lived institution called the Catholic Church and to universality, or better still, transcendence as grace.

The bridge as theological method has enormous power and sweep. It does, however, have its limitations, as critics of Schleiermacher and his

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heirs have often pointed out. From the perspective of liberation theology, where I locate myself, there are two serious potential difficulties: listening without transforming and love without justice.

That Tracy encounters the first of these difficulties in this work on "naming the present" is betrayed by the pronouns. When speaking of theology and its problems and possibilities in the present, Tracy uses the pronoun "we." "They" is used for fundamentalists, neoconservatives, postmodernists, feminists, and liberation theologians. Who then is the "we"? There is an inchoate sense that there still is a unified subject doing theological work vis-à-vis all these others in the present. But who the "we" is is never made clear and hence not explicitly subject to criticism. I would encourage the use of the pronoun "I" as a way to increase contextuality in this method of correlation.

The second problem is evident in what could be called the constructive element of the; book, available in chapter one as "Mystical-Prophetic Resistance and. Hope" and in chapter nine as "The Catholic Model of Caritas: Self-transcendence and Transformation." The prescription for transformation of the present in a positive direction is stated as "a new solidarity in the struggle for the true time of justice and a communal, theological naming of the present in a polycentric world and a global church led by these new voices." Wonderful. But when the prescription is earned out in the Caritas chapter, we hear a great deal about "theology and the task of con-elation on the reality of Christian love" and nothing at all about justice in a theological sense. One of the things the new voices have been saying is that the liberal emphasis on love is partial and, in that partiality, distorted. "Black theology, then, asks not whether love is an essential element of the Christian interpretation of God, but whether the love of God itself can be properly understood without focusing equally on the biblical view of God's righteousness."¹

It would help Tracy's theological project of correlation if his interactions with liberation theologies would focus more specifically on the works of African American liberation theologians, both male and female. Working as he does on the south side of Chicago, Tracy is in the immediate proximity of numerous such potential dialogue partners.

Correlation is a thankless job. There will always be those claiming their position was distorted in the translation. I do not want my criticisms to overshadow what I think are the real merits of the type of theological work David Tracy does. Most other theologians across the spectrum of theological discourse today are saying that they cannot, or will not, talk to each other. David Tracy consistently talks to everybody, and I mean everybody (the sweep of the scholarship is always impressive), and he insists that they learn from each other. In the present, as he names it, such dialogue is a crucial task, ands. I, for one, am glad he's doing it.

¹ James Cone, "Clod is Black," in Lift Every Voice: Constructing Christian Theologies from the Underside, edited by Susan B. Thistlethwaite (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1990), p. 88.