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Throughout its history right up to the present time theology has been understood and done more as a form of rationalization than as a form of critical reflection. This assumes, of course, the usual pejorative sense of the term "rationalization," according to which it designates the process of giving reasons for positions already take as distinct from the process of determining in a reasoned way whether positions already take are, in fact, as worth taking as they claim to be. If theology has been conceived to have any proper critical function at all, it has been restricted to criticizing particular witnesses of faith by reference to whatever has been understood to constitute normative Christian witness, whether scripture alone or, on some interpretation or other, scripture and tradition.

True, there has been an important difference between classical Roman Catholic and classical Protestant theology. Whereas the first has been assigned the task of rationalizing the positions taken by a particular institutional churchnamely, the Roman Catholic Church-the second has been expected to rationalize the positions of that visible church which, being always only more or less visible in the various institutional churches, can never be silnply identified with any of them. Notwithstanding this difference, however, in neither case has theology been allowed, much less assigned, the task of critcally reflecting on the positions taken by the church in such a way as to ask and answer the more radical question as to their validity. On the contrary, theology has been and, for the most part, still is expected simply to assume the validity of the church's positions and then to occupy itself with giving reasons for them, or, at any rate, arguingft'om their assulned arguing from their assumed validity rather than arguingfor arguing for it -- just this being the sense almost always given to Anselm's famous phrase, taken as descibing theology's task: "faith seeking understanding" (fides qua:rens quaerens intellectum).