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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 June 2011
In the past decade a number of influential theologians have claimed, based on the analogy of modern science, that Christian theology is or should be public discourse, a public discipline which is addressed to all people and which uses criteria acceptable to all. This claim is usually contrasted with a view in which theology is understood as private, subjective, authoritarian, based on faith or a special revelation, and limited to a particular community. In this essay I shall explore in particular David Tracy's claim that theology should be public discourse, point out some difficulties with regard to this claim, and make an alternative proposal.
1 See Tracy, David, “Theology as Public Discourse,” The Christian Century 92 (1975) 280–84.Google Scholar
2 Tracy, David, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1981) 3.Google Scholar
3 Ibid., 4.
4 Ibid., xi.
5 Ibid., 6. See also Tracy, David, “Afterword: Theology, Public Discourse, and the American Tradition,” in Lacey, Michael J., ed., Religion and Twentieth-Century American Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 193–203Google Scholar . For similar views of theology as public, see Neville, Robert C., The Tao and the Daimon: Segments of a Religious Inquiry (Albany: SUNY Press, 1982) 12, 16–17Google Scholar , 21; and idem , Behind the Masks of God: An Essay Toward Comparative Theology (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991) 35Google Scholar ; also Griffin, David Ray, God and Religion in the Postmodern World: Essays in Postmodern Theology (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989) xiv, 8Google Scholar . It should be noted, however, that there are other quite different interpretations of public theology with which we are not concerned here. See, for example, Thiemann, Ronald F., Constructing a Public Theology: The Church in a Pluralistic Society (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1991)Google Scholar.
6 , Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, xi.Google Scholar
7 Ibid. Tracy's many references to pluralism in this volume are, with one exception, to an intra-Christian pluralism. For different reasons for the concern that theology should be public see , Neville, The Tao and the Daimon, 11–12Google Scholar ; and , Griffin, God and Religion in Postmodern Theology, xiiiGoogle Scholar.
8 , Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, 57.Google Scholar
9 Ibid., 85.
10 Ibid., 64-69, and passim. See also Tracy, David, “Defending the Public Character of Theology,” in Wall, James M., ed., Theologians in Transition (New York: Crossroad, 1981)Google Scholar . For another explanation of how theology can be both public and Christian, see , Griffin, God and Religion in Postmodern Theology, 10Google Scholar ; and idem , A Process Christology (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1973) 153–55Google Scholar.
11 , Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, 3, 63, 86.Google Scholar
12 Ibid., 5-6, 51-52, 55, 62-63, 80.
13 Ibid., 6, 18, 21, 63-64.
14 Ibid., 63.
15 Ibid., 18, 21.
16 Ibid., 64.
17 Ibid., 132.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., 58.
20 Ibid., 67.
21 Ibid., 104, 132.
22 Ibid., 66.
23 Ibid., 132.
24 Ibid.
25 Habermas, Jürgen, “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964),” New German Critique 1 (1974) 49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
26 Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (trans. Burger, Thomas and Lawrence, Frederick; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989).Google Scholar
27 See Young, Iris Marion, “Impartiality and the Civic Public,” in Benhabib, Seyla and Cornell, Drucilla, eds.. Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) 64–66Google Scholar . See also Pateman, Carol, “Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy,” in Benn, S. I. and Gaus, G. F., eds., Public and Private in Social Life (London: Croom Helm, 1983) 281–303Google Scholar.
28 Felski, Rita, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989) 165–66.Google Scholar
29 , Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 175, 195.Google Scholar
30 Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge apparently coined the term “counter-public sphere” (Gegenoffentlichkeit). See their book Offentlichkeit und Erfahrung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972) 7-8, 11Google Scholar.
31 Keane, John, Public Life and Late Capitalism: Toward a Socialist Theory of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) 67, 26.Google Scholar
32 Ibid., 29.
33 Ibid.
34 Tracy, David, Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987) 79.Google Scholar
35 Ibid., 73-74.
36 Ibid., 77.
37 Ibid., 78.
38 Tracy, David, “Theology, Critical Social Theory and the Public Realm,” in Browning, Don S. and Fiorenza, Francis Schussler, eds., Habermas, Modernity, and Public Theology (New York: Crossroad/Continuum, 1992) 19–42.Google Scholar
39 Ibid., 19.
40 Ibid., 24.
41 Ibid., 34.
42 Ibid., 25.
43 Ibid.
45 Bernstein, Richard, Philosophical Profiles: Essays in a Pragmatic Mode (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986) 80Google Scholar . I am indebted to Professor Barry A. Harvey of Baylor University for drawing my attention to this passage.
46 Tracy, David, “Theology, Critical Social Theory and the Public Realm,” 23.Google Scholar
47 Ibid.
48 , Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity, ix.Google Scholar
49 Ibid., 79.
50 , Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, 165.Google Scholar
51 Miles, Margaret R., Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West (Boston: Beacon, 1989) 170–72.Google Scholar
52 Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979) 318.Google Scholar
53 , Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity, 18.Google Scholar
54 Ibid., 20.
