By Schubert Ogden
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WHAT IS THE PROPER TASK OF THEOLOGY?
Schubert M. Ogden
I propose to answer this question by considering it as the first of four questions, the other three of which must also be considered if the first is to be answered at all adequately.
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In general, to be reflective means to take something that appears to be the case and then to ask deliberately, methodically, and with a view to giving reasons for one's answer whether it really is so. But there is also work for reflection to do whenever something is said to be the case, as is in fact done in the more spontaneous witness of faith on which theology critically reflects. Thus theology, properly so called, is the deliberate, methodical, and reasoned attempt to determine what is meant by the Christian witness of faith and whether or not this witness expresses, as its claim to decisiveness implies, the ultimate truth about human existence. On my view, both the nature of human beings as such and the claim implied by Christian faith itself demand this attempt to determine the meaning and truth of the witness in which faith spontaneously finds expression. But these also seem to me to be the sufficient conditions of the theological task, there being no necessary conditions of its possibility other thqn than the given witness of faith constitutive of the historic Christian community and the given fact of human existence as including our distinctive capacity of fully reflective understanding, and hence of asking, among other things, about the meaning and truth of this witness.
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The method of any reflective discipline is primarily determined neither by its data nor by its object but by its task, which is to say, by the question it asks and seeks to answer. This becomes evident in the case of theology from the consideration that the same data and object on which it critically reflects may also be reflected on from the standpoint of other, more of less different questions -- e.questions—e.g., the question asked by the philosophy of religion, or philosophical theology, as distinct from Christian theology, or the question asked by a human science like sociology insofar as it becomes the sociology of religion. But, if an answer to the second question of the method of theology depends on answering the first question as to its task, the task of theology is not fully understood until one has understood its method.
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Like the method of theology, the criterion for assessing its adequacy is determined by its proper task, which means, of course, by the twofold question it asks and attempts to answer. Thus the criterion of theological adequacy is itself twofold in character. Both aspects of the criterion, however – appropriateness as well as understandability – are in different respects situation-invariant and situation-dependent. They are situation-invariant in the sense that, regardless of the historical situation, theological assertions to be adequate must be both appropriate and understandable. And yet both aspects of the criterion are aiso also situation-dependent in the sense that their specific requirements are always a function of some specific historical situation.
Thus what may be said to be appropriate to the Christian witness in one time and place may not be said to be so in another. This is clear, for instance, from the consideration that the apostolic witness, which is the norm of appropriateness, can no longer be identified by us today with the traditional canon of the New Testament. In creating this canon, the early church was guided by the criterion that that alone can be finally normative for the Christian witness which is "apostolic," in the sense of being original witness to Jesus as the Christ. Given the historical methods and knowledge generally available until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the early church's judgment that the writings comprising the New Testament canon were in this sense apostolic was a reasonable judgment. But, given the methods and knowledge available to us today, we now recognize that this judgment is, in fact, more or less mistaken. None of our New Testament writings as such is in the strict sense of the word "apostolic." At the same time, literary critical analysis of these writings, and especially form-critical study of the Synoptic Gospels, enables us to establish, within limits, what should be judged apostolic witness by the early church's own criterion of apostolicity -- namelyapostolicity—namely, the so-called Jesus-tradition, or "the Jesus-kerygma," that makes up the earliest layer of the Synoptic tradition. It is by reference to this apostolic witness that we today, in our historical situation, must determine the appropriateness of theological assertions.3
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Here, again, it is precisely the task of theology, in the sense of the question it asks and attempts to answer, that proves to be determinative. For the context of theology, just like its method and criterion, is determined by its proper task. Among the other things this implies is that the question often discussed of where theology properly belongs -- whether belongs—whether in the church or in the academy, and, if in the latter, whether with philosophy or with history or with the special sciences or with the arts -- is arts—is not a fruitful question. For theology properly belongs wherever it is in fact located by the twofold question that is sufficient as well as necessary to constitute it as a distinct field of human reflection.
But this is not all that can be said about theology's context, and it is only by considering what may be called its several contextual factors that the theological task itself can be fully understood. For the present, however, it must suffice to say that the several factors that go to make up the context of theology all fall into one or the other of two groups, which reflect the twofold question that theology asks and tries to answer and, behind that, its necessary and sufficient conditions as a process of reflection in the Christian witness of faith and the human existence for which that witness claims to be decisive, and hence true. Thus one may distinguish such factors as the following as belonging, respectively, to the two groups: (1) revelation, faith, church, the apostolic witness, Scripture, tradition; and (2) experience, reason, culture, religion, academy, history, philosophy, the special sciences and the arts. It should be evident that, in pursuing this fourth question of the context, or the contextual factors, of theology, one must perforce retread the ground covered only by all the loci of traditional prolegomena -- not prolegomena—not only the locus on theology, but also the loci on revelation, on faith, and on Holy Scripture.
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2 See my essay, "The Point of Christology," The Journal of Religion, LV, 4 (October 1975), 375-395.
3 This is true, I should maintain, even if a proto-form of "the Christ-kerygma" should prove to be at least as early as "the Jesus-kerygma" documented by the Synoptic Gospels. For it is in the Jesus-kerygma that the Jesus who is the subject of all Christian witness, and hence the explicit source of all that is theologically normative, is attested without explicit christological predicates—the Christ-kerygma as such, as Willi Marxsen has shown, being merely implicit in the "that" of the Jesus-kerygma, as distinct from its "what." Because all explicit christological predicates not only interpret their subject but, more importantly, are also to be interpreted by it, it is the Jesus discernible precisely in the Jesus-kerygma by which the appropriateness of all explicit christology and, consequently, all other theological claims must finally be judged. See further Willi Marxsen, Das Neue Testament als Buch der Kirche (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1968), pp. 108 f., III (English translation by James E. Mignard as The New Testament as the Church's Book [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972], pp. 112 f., 115).
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