Theological integrity between reductionism and positivism

The idiomatic phrase ‘Christian thinking’ in the sense of theological cognition means to identify something specific. Its fundamental problem has traditionally been stated something like this: ‘How can human discourse refer meaningfully to a transcendent, incomprehensible and hidden God?’ Theologians of up to a generation ago often called this the most basic ‘formal’ question of theology, and by this they meant to designate the possibility of an introductory theological exercise, in some sense logically prior to the study of specific Christian doctrines per se, in which the question just stated, or the even more concise formulation ‘How is Christian theology possible?’, is given serious consideration as a problem in its own right. As a preliminary or ‘formal’ exercise it was often referred to more technically as a ‘propaedeutic’ or a ‘prolegomenon’ to Christian doctrine. Yet this was not meant in any temporally linear sense as an actual condition or prerequisite for the possibility of engaging meaningfully in theo-logical endeavours. (After all, theology is often practised very fruitfully without a great deal of attention to the question of how the theological enterprise itself is possible.) It was meant, rather, simply to identify, on a level more general than the specific doctrines, certain fundamental parameters or indispensable conditions of thinking within which those doctrines come meaningfully to be engaged.