Toward a Postcritical Theology

Many recent books on theology contain proposals for a restructuring of theology on the basis of principles proper to our own age. Various attempts have been made to show that we live in a new era in which the prevalent methods of the "modern" period are outdated. Many such works contain in their titles the term "postmodern" or some near equivalent.

Labels such as "postmodern," "postliberal," and "postcritical" are likely to be rather manipulative. They seem to put unfair demands on people to conform to what the speaker proclaims as the spirit of the age, with the implication that previous approaches are obsolete. But at the same time the prevalence of such terminology indicates a widespread perception that we are moving, or have already moved, into a period radically unlike the past few centuries, necessitating an abrupt shift of theological style comparable in magnitude to the shift that occurred with the dissemination of printed literature in the sixteenth century. Without wishing to exaggerate the discontinuity, I share this perception to some degree. The history of theology over the centuries, I submit, can be clarified by the successive attitudes toward criticism; for example, the precritical, the critical, and the postcritical.

From Precritical to Postcritical

Was there ever a precritical era in theology? In a sense, no. Theology is by its very nature a disciplined reflection on faith, one that attempts to distinguish methodically between truth and illusion and to ground its affirmations on principles rather than on blind impulses. In that sense it involves the use of criticism. In the patristic and medieval periods Greek philosophy, including Aristotelian logic, was used to refute heresy, reconcile the authorities, and establish particular doctrines as consonant with revelation. Everything was measured against divine revelation as enshrined in the canonical Scriptures and in the definitions of popes and councils. But criticism was not leveled at the canonical sources themselves. A privileged position was given to authoritative statements of the word of God. In this qualified sense the theology of the early centuries may be called precritical.

The critical era was ushered in when observation and mathematics were used to overthrow the authority of Aristotle in the realm of science. Francis Bacon and Galileo heralded the arrival of the new science. Shortly afterward philosophers, under the guidance of Descartes and Spinoza, attempted to erect comprehensive systems by adopting a quasi-mathematical method. Beginning with universal methodic doubt, they rejected whatever could not be verified by reduction to self-evident facts and principles. The critical program, after being launched in continental Europe, took an empiricist turn in England with Locke and Hume, both of whom applied their methodology to theological questions. Theologians, in their estimation, would be unwarranted in requiring the faithful to believe anything as true before it had been submitted to the acids of doubt and criticism. A few Protestant liberals and at least one Catholic theologian (Georg Hermes [1775–1831]) accepted the critical program, but the vast majority reacted defensively against it.

One reaction that became popular toward the end of the eighteenth century may be called the paracritical. Critical doubt and rational testing, it was held, were proper and necessary in the sphere of science and speculative knowledge. Faith and religion, however, were assigned to a separate sphere in which sentiment and volition were sovereign. Theology was seen as an attempt to describe and analyze the dictates of religious feeling. This dichotomy between scientific and religious discourse, having received its philosophical charter from Immanuel Kant, prevailed in Lutheran pietism, in nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism, and in Protestant and Catholic Modernism. Indeed, it still flourishes in certain circles influenced by neopositivism and linguistic analysis.

A second reaction to the critical movement was what may be called the countercritical. It strove to fight against criticism with its own weapons. Many theologians contended that the truth of Christianity could be vindicated by a rigorously critical approach to the sources and exact syllogistic logic. This approach, which insisted strongly on miracles as evidential signs, reached its culmination in early twentieth-century apologetics, both Protestant and Catholic. Hilarin Felder, O.M. Cap., in his two-volume work Christ and the Critics, which appeared in German in 1911, undertook to "summon the opponents of the Christian revelation before the bar of fair, unclouded history" and to prove by strict historical method that the Gospels are "in their full extent and in the strictest sense of the word, historical authorities and scientific evidence." The neo-scholastic theology of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while rigorously orthodox, was heavily infected by Cartesian rationalism and mathematicism.

The Critique of Criticism

In the second half of the twentieth century the approach that I call postcritical has been emerging not only among theologians but among philosophers of stature, such as Michael Polanyi, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur. Analogous themes may be found in the sociological writings of Peter Berger and Robert Bellah. Among theologians, authors such as Hans Urs von Balthasar and George Lindbeck are at least in some respects postcritical. Postcritical, indeed, may be used as an umbrella term to include a variety of positions, some more traditionalist and others more innovative. In the following presentation I shall give my own methodological proposals, without attempting to speak for any other theologian. Students of Michael Polanyi will find it easy to detect his influence upon this chapter.

Postcritical thinking does not reject criticism but carries it to new lengths, scrutinizing the presuppositions and methods of the critical program itself. It has drawn attention to the following five flaws.

First, the critical program was animated by a bias toward doubt, with the implied assumption that the royal road to truth consists in uprooting all voluntary commitments. In the estimation of critical thinkers, probity requires one to abandon any convictions that can be doubted rather than to maintain such convictions in the face of possible doubt. This bias was understandable enough in the time of the religious wars, when fanatical overcommitment was a major threat to civic peace, but is a...