By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
Debriefing After Writing My Paper for the Potthoff Group
1. Why is doing theology in a less rather than a more critical way really a way of bearing witness? Because it cannot be adequately distinguished from witness—particularly not, from bearing witness indirectly, by teaching, as distinct from bearing witness directly, by proclamation. This is so, at any rate, assuming that even doing theology less critically is, as I argue, doing theology in a strict rather than a broad sense and therefore doing it critically.
2. I've long argued not just that doing theology has to depend on certain resources, but also that its tasks are its own, and that they are inalienable. But, in the nature of the case, the resources on which doing theology has to depend are mixed. In critically interpreting the meaning of bearing witness, it has to depend, obviously, on the resources available from critical historical reflection generally. On the other hand, in validating the credibility of bearing witness, it is necessarily dependent on critical philosophical reflection, and, therefore, on that of professional philosophers as well as that of professional theologians.
3. Would it be appropriate, perhaps, to distinguish clearly and explicitly between the sources of critical reflection and its resources? Its sources are the experience, or experiences, that provide its only ultimate, or primal criteria, if it is to be more rather than less critical, which is to say, critical on the secondary level of critical reflection and proper theory rather than on the primary level of self-understanding and life-praxis. Its resources, on the other hand, are all the formulations of the experience, or experiences, primary and secondary, that critical reflection has to depend on in order to retrieve its sources so as to determine what its ultimate criteria really are.
17 August 2009
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