By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
After completing "Present Prospects for Doing Christian Theology," I was at first under the impression that its estimate of such prospects was different from the one with which I had concluded "Toward Bearing Witness" (Religious Studies Review, 23, 4 [October 1997]: 5-8). But the more I thought about it, especially after rereading the earlier essay, the more I realized that the two estimates come to pretty much the same thing, even if their emphases are different.
Their point of convergence is made in the earlier essay when I say, "From all indications theology for the most part will continue to be understood and done as though it were really only another way of bearing witness" (8). But, then, the same point is made in the more recent essay by my argument that the traditional, less critical way of doing theology that promises to predominate also in the future is "really a way of doing something else. It is really a way of bearing witness, inasmuch as it is done on the same primary level of self-understanding and life-praxis on which witness is borne, as distinct from the secondary level of critical reflection and proper theory, on which, I hold, doing theology properly is done" (4).
21 February 2009
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