Constructing Constructive Theology

An Introductory Sketch

Jason A. Wyman Jr.

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781506418605
• eBook ISBN: 9781506418612
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christliche Theologie

To date, constructive theology hasn't been viewed or conceptualized as a movement or trend in theology on its own as a whole. Questions arise as to what constructive theology is, where it came from, why it considers itself "constructive, " and why constructive is something different from the ways in which theology has been done in the past. This book traces the overall historical arc of constructive theology, from proto-movement through the present. Inklings of constructive theology emerged well before it began to take any formalized shape. At the same time, an important shift occurred when a group of theologians decided to create the Workgroup on Constructive Theology. Further, even as the workgroup continues to work collectively, producing textbooks, statements, and methodologies concerning theology, many theologians who are not part of the workgroup or may not even know it exists have adopted the moniker of "constructive theologian." The book also considers the term "constructive" itself, offering possible reasons and historical contexts that led to this distinction being made in contrast to "systematic" theology and its subcategories. Constructive theology speaks to a very specific, historically situated emergence in the academy generally and in theology's attempts to engage those shifts specifically.

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The Workgroup on Constructive Theology

The Workgroup on Constructive Theology, founded in 1975 at Vanderbilt University, has served as an organizational center for the development of constructive theology and a place where its key methodological and thematic proposals have been nurtured and propagated. Most basically, the Workgroup is a collection of prominent theologians that, in various configurations, have gathered periodically over the last forty years and collaboratively published four textbooks and one historical theology reader. Throughout its history, the Workgroup on Constructive Theology has variously defined itself, though never in very stark terms. This is partly intentional as one defining feature of constructive theology is its openness to multiplicity of interpretation within its own tradition. In recognizing the constructedness of theology, it doesn’t presume to have final answers to any of the questions of Christian theology (though it does rule out certain things as beyond the pale).

Gary Dorrien, in a short reflection on the Workgroup on Constructive Theology, writes, “Organized in 1975 to celebrate Sallie McFague’s inauguration as dean, the group’s original Vanderbilt members included [Sallie] McFague, [Peter] Hodgson, [Edward] Farley, [and many others].”^[1] McFague and Kaufman played important roles in the origin of the group. But neither McFague nor Kaufman contributed much to the collective works of the Workgroup. McFague offered a powerful epilogue that briefly suggests constructive theology’s method in Christian Theology: An Introduction to Its Traditions and Tasks. McFague was one of only two women who participated in the early years of the Workgroup, the other being German liberation theologian Dorothee Soelle. Soelle left the group very early on. She criticized the group for its lack of an adequate engagement with liberation theology. Her departure seems to have been due to a combination of that disagreement and the more practical fact of her return to Germany. McFague participated in very important ways in the beginning, but sometimes she distanced herself for fear of being tokenized as the only woman in the group—a problem the group faced with respect to both gender and race, and wouldn’t begin to solve until well into its history. Kaufman never contributed any writing to the books put together by the Workgroup—though he was crucial in its formation, he declined to contribute due to time constraints and disagreement with the format of the book, which he ironically saw as too systematic.^[2] Nonetheless, he provided methodological underpinnings for constructive theology as it would come to take shape. His Essay on Theological Method appeared the same year the Workgroup was founded, 1975, and so partakes in the intellectual environment that resulted in the formation of the group. And it serves, foundationally, as a prolegomenon, alongside works by Edward Farley and David Tracy, for all constructive theology that would come after it—which would be joined with further developments that have given it a distinct character that builds on and adapts these prolegomena’s methodological structures.

Prolegomena for Constructive Theology

Many present day constructive theologians have a hard time pinning down where the term “constructive” comes from when applied to theology. The adjective, introduced to theology with McBee and Ten Broeke, found its formulation as “constructive theology” with Meland. What exactly that meant remained to be clarified, as evidenced by Meland’s ambiguous legacy. Building on this growing movement, the term as it is used today primarily comes out of the methodological proposals of Gordon Kaufman, Edward Farley, and David Tracy at the very moment when the Workgroup on Constructive Theology was being formed. The idea of constructive theology predates these theologians. But the nitty-gritty theoretical justification and analysis of what it means to do theology constructively in a rigorous way had to wait for them.

Gordon Kaufman

In the preface to An Essay on Theological Method, Kaufman states bluntly, “I attempt to show that much confusion is introduced into theological work by the failure to recognize that the notion of God (like the notion of the world) is an imaginative construct built up in quite a different way than the concepts of objects known in and through experience. Theology, therefore, is fundamentally an activity of construction (and reconstruction) not of description or exposition, as it has ordinarily been understood in the past; and the failure to grasp this fact has led to mistaken expectations for theology and to the use of misleading criteria both in doing theology and in assessing its conclusions.”^[3] The fundamental qualities of constructive theology are captured in this sentence and developed throughout the rest of the Essay. Much anxiety manifested in theology in response to the Enlightenment, and a wide variety of strategies were used to plead the case for theology, and Christianity itself, in its wake. Liberal and fundamentalist strains of Christianity continue this discussion in the United States today. Kaufman claims that the fault of these theologies, and in fact theologies that have predominated throughout theological history, is primarily that they have failed to recognize that theology is inherently made up of “imaginative constructions.” Kaufman does not preclude the actual existence of God, but instead argues that human speech about God, and subsequently our beliefs and theological judgments about God and Christianity, are fundamentally language-bound, contingent, and human-made. Like other similar controlling constructs, as in the “world,” constructions about God are indispensible for human beings according to Kaufman, serving to orient and assign value to life, existence, and experience.

As a result of this realization, “a far-reaching reorientation of theological work is needed. As such a change is accomplished, theologians should be able to work with greater self-understanding and sophistication and with more promise of success. The view of theology that emerges here is one of a generally significant cultural enterprise with universal and public standards, not a parochial or idiosyncratic activity of interest only to special groups.”^[4] Kaufman lays the foundation for what I describe as theology that is interdisciplinary and justice/activist oriented by opening the “idiosyncratic” and “parochial” activity of theologians to wider accountability. Theology should be relevant beyond the small circle of theologians who do it. This includes both other academic fields and the public at large. Kaufman’s definition of theology is worth quoting at length:

Theology . . . is not so much devotion to the symbols of faith as the attempt to understand those symbols and the way they function in human life, to criticize and reinterpret them so they will more adequately achieve their purpose, and finally (as I am especially emphasizing in this essay) to reconstruct them, sometimes radically. Theology, thus, like faith, arises out of response to religious symbols and their meaning, but instead of expressing itself in simple trust or devotion it is particularly sensitive to difficulties or problems in the formulation and implications of these symbols. It is a deliberate human activity directed toward criticizing and reconstructing the symbols by which faith lives and to which faith responds. If faith is a gift of God, as it has been traditionally understood, theology is clearly human work, and we must take full responsibility for it. But it is human work that emerges out of faith’s own need for more adequate orientation and symbolization. Such theological activity may reinforce—or it may weaken further—the religious stance.^[5]

Theology, as Kaufman received it and saw it, faced the problem of having naturalized what theology had said about God to the point that it believed those things to be inherently and fundamentally true about God. While the anologia fidei is a classic quality of theology, Kaufman and others argue that over time, served by certain power structures and interests in universalizing specific images of God, these analogies have come to be confused with Godself.

Most basically, all human speech about God is metaphorical and analogical. Theologians construct conceptions of God using the languages available to them, the metaphors that they see to be most effective, and in response to the urgencies of any particular time. Nothing a theologian says about God, or the resulting structure of Christianity, can be confused with representing a one-to-one true statement about God. Importantly, this, for Kaufman, doesn’t mean Christian theology done in this way is any less “Christian,” any less religious. Rather, it is more accountable, more humble, and ultimately more effective because it deals in what Christian theology actually is rather than pretending to be making objective statements about God.

Recognizing theological constructs about God as constructs allows theology, then, to reconsider the effects and ramifications of what has been said about God. Theologies that have cast themselves to be describing the essence of the structures of Christianity, a task exemplified in magnum opus systematic works or dogmatic works that assert articles of belief, tend to form rigid structures that, through habituation, come to be seen as the structure of Christianity, and therefore of God. “Despite all claims that we human beings can never come to know God in his essence, what was in fact presented by theologians was an elaborate scheme of interpretation which set out what it was believed God actually was, and what humanity and the world were, and how they were related to each other.”^[6] Systematic reflection that fits snugly together from beginning to end, in a format that suggests comprehensiveness and revealed to be logically and philosophically consistent, masquerades as objective theological speech. Kaufman rejects his own earlier attempt at such work. The methodological move of working with a single doctrine begins with his insistence on developing the doctrine of God as sufficient for constructing relevant contemporary theology.

What Kaufman accepts from the Enlightenment and modernity is that human reason cannot access direct knowledge about God. This insight, specifically from Kant, demands a reconsideration of what sort of language theology is and what it is meant to do.^[7] Early proto- constructive theology considered the legacy of German idealists like Kant and Hegel, arguing for different degrees of incorporation of their philosophies into Christian theology. Later constructive theologies don’t often name Kant, but the premise of God as construction largely rests on the argument that human beings can speak about God, but that that speech should not be confused with actual knowledge about God. Constructive theology does not agree with Kant that religion’s main usefulness is solely ethics, however. It takes the task of talking about God, conceptualizing God and considering the possibilities of God, as necessities.

Constructing God, without direct knowledge of God, is the basic activity of constructive theology, its primary premise, and ultimately its creative driving force. Engaging the theological tradition, with its constructed qualities reclaimed and highlighted, constructive theology creates space for theology that examines, deconstructs, reconstructs, and repeats indefinitely. No construction of God can or should be considered final. Kaufman, therefore, asserts three “moments of theological construction.” The first is the “explicit development of a conception of the overall context in which experience falls, a concept of the world.”^[8] This throughout the constructive theological tradition takes the form of engagement with other disciplines, using their insights to help construct a conception of the “world” that is more nuanced and more rigorous. The second, the “theologian’s proper business,” is “to construct an adequate concept of God, of that further reality which relativizes and limits the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• The Emergence of Constructive Theology
• The Workgroup on Constructive Theology
• Constructive Theology as Interdisciplinary Theology
• Constructive Theology as Activist Theology
• Constructive Theology as a Method and a Tradition
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index