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As its title indicates, the book is concerned primarily with understanding and appraising the main types of Christian theology – more exactly, modern Christian theology – and, therefore, with developing a typology suitable for distinguishing them. The formal structure of Frei's typology is clear enough. Assuming two contrary poles, it allows for five typical positions: a central position in which the two poles have equal status (Type 3); two mediating positions in each of which the posterior status of one pole is determined by assigning absolute priority to the other – the difference between the positions lying in which of the two poles is assigned such priority (Types 2 and 4); and two extreme positions in each of which the two poles are treated as absolutely different and only one of them has any status at all – the difference between them lying in which of the two poles is taken to have it (Types 1 and 5). Yet, if the formal structure of Frei's typology is easily grasped, this is not true of its material contents. On the contrary, I, for one, have had formidable difficulties in clearly understanding what he means by the two poles of his typology.

Wiki MarkupThere are at least two reasons for this. One is his confusing, if not confused, characterizations of the two poles. Thus, in many places, he speaks of them as "the two ways of thinking about theology" (p. 23), or "the two basic views of theology" (p. 27), only to speak of them elsewhere as "the two types of theology," or "the two kinds of theology" (p. 34). But, aside from the fact that the two poles assumed by the typology ought not to be thus confused with any of its five types, these two ways of speaking can be taken as equivalent only on one condition-namely, that any view of theology, or way of
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thinking about it, is and must be itself theological Whether this condition obtains, however, Frei seems at best uncertain, referring to his typology in one place, indeed, as "a piece of conceptual analysis -- – that is, in principle an exercise chiefly _about_ rather than _in_ theology, although in practice the distinction will not always be clear" (p. I; cf., however, p. 8). But even greater difficulties are created by his more specific characterizations of the two poles. Thus, for example, he can refer to the one pole both as "the philosophical kind of theology," i.e., "the kind of theology that \ [is\] related to philosophy as the nearest fellow discipline in the academy" (p. 23), and as itself "philosophical theology," or "a philosophical discipline" (p. 34). Or, again, he can characterize it as "an academic discipline" (pp. 35, 65), or, simply, as "academic," in contrast to the other type of theology, which he characterizes as "church-oriented" (p. 68). Of course, there might be definitions of the operative terms here on which the equivalences implied between them would be intelligible even without the support of ordinary usage. But Frei quite fails to provide any such definitions, either explicitly as such or by implication.

And this is the second reason his typology is hard to understand: his failure clearly to define even his most important terms and his tendency to use them in confusing, if not confused, ways. Thus, oddly enough, he nowhere clearly defines even the crucial term "theology" in such a way that the two poles assumed by his typology could be understood to be contrary ways of understanding and practicing one and the same thing. To be sure, he does from time to time offer what might appear to be clarifications of "Christian theology" in the particular sense in which he himself, as a Type 4 theologian, would want to use it. But even these apparent clarifications generate serious difficulties in understanding.

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