Critical Theology: Questions of Truth and Method. - book reviews

Christian Century, March 13, 1996 by Robert H. King

THE CURRENT religious climate does not encourage serious theological reflection. It is confrontational, emotionally charged and given to absolute claims on behalf of particular view-points. The whole world seems to be experiencing a kind of "Balkanization" along religious lines.

Against this background Gareth Jones addresses major theological issues from a dispassionate, critical perspective. Author of a previous work on Rudolf Bultmann, Jones is an Anglican theologian on the faculty of the University of Birmingham, England. Though his book is not allied with any particular theological tradition or movement, it does not ignore the current social context or the historical antecedents that have brought theology to its present crisis.

The work is organized along both an historical and a systematic axis. The historical trajectory is limited to the 20th century, beginning with the Barth-Harnack debate over theological method in the early 1920s; extending through the christological reflections of Bonhoeffer, the systematic work of Moltmann and Rahner, and the liberation theology of Sobrino; and concluding with the revisionist theology of David Tracy.

This highly selective history is largely guided by Jones's systematic agenda, which centers on three important issues: how to make truth claims about God in the context of religious pluralism; how to speak creatively and constructively about Jesus Christ as the self-revelation of God; and how to do both in a way that seriously engages the thinking of our contemporaries. Jones is probably more successful on the first two points than the third, if only because the book is written in a style not likely to be accessible outside the academy.

On the issue of truth claims about God, Jones begins with "mystery." He means to place Christian theological discourse in the context of religious experience generally, to acknowledge at the outset that there are other ways "God" than the Christian way, and to make clear that no way of speaking of God can fully capture or contain the subject. God is both present and absent, accessible to all but not fully knowable to any: this is the first principle of critical theology.

Jones likens this mystery to time with an ontologically complete past dimension, an epistemologically incomplete present dimension, and a future dimension that is semantically open to new meaning. The Christ event gives definitive status to this mystery. Yet Christology as an expression of critical theology has its limits. The Christ event may be "ontologically complete," but only from the perspective of a faith that humbly acknowledges its own inadequacy. Epistemologically the Christ event is always incomplete, a "moving image" whose meaning is constantly unfolding. It is one of the tasks of critical theology to construct this meaning anew.

Jones considers rhetoric the principal goal of critical theology and the "practical duty of the Church." Mystery by itself would reduce us to silence; mystery as defined by the Christ event opens up the possibility for meaningful discourse. But this remains only a possibility apart from rhetoric, which brings the language of faith into the current situation and deploys the arts of persuasion on its behalf. With rhetoric there is always the danger of distortion, manipulation and deceit, yet without it the church cannot live up its calling to be a witness to the sacramental presence of God in the world.

Critical theology occupies a precarious position between relativism and realism, a position that H. Richard Niebuhr staked out over 50 years ago in The Meaning of Revelation. Post-modernism has pushed the balance increasingly toward relativism, so that in academic circles it is now difficult to make any kind of religious truth claim. Jones tries to redress the balance.