Ricoeur’s Contribution to Fundamental Theology

RICOEUR'S CONTRIBUTION TO FUNDAMENTAL THEOLOGY FUNDAMENTAL THEOLOGY as an essential dimension of the total theological project is specifically the rational justification of hope (1 Peter 3: 15) . The imperative for a new fundamental theology has been issued by Karl Rahner as formal-fundamental theology, Bernard Lonergan as foundational theology, Johannes Metz as practico-political theology and Wolfhart Pannenberg as theological anthropology.1 The exigency for a new fundamental theology has arisen with the advent of historical consciousness in which the traditional conception and universal acceptance of established authority has become questionable. Authority, whether biblical or ecclesial, brought to historical consciousness is rendered problematical . Whether kerygmatically proclaimed or magisterially promulgated, the universal claim to aibsolute truth of Christianity is not ipso facto acceptable but debatable. A new fundamental theology would differ from the old fundamental theology in that its justification would be founded, not on the self-assertion of extrinsic authority, but upon radical experience and critical reflection. It is characterized by the passsage from a naive faith through critical self-appropriation of its integral presuppositions toward a post-critical, second naivete. The project of this paper is an exploration in and a delineation of the thought of Paul Ricoeur, at once by vocation a 1 Cf. Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations I (Baltimore: Helicon, 1961), pp. 17-21; Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), pp. 131, 267-!W8; Johannes B. Metz, Faith in History and Society (New York: Seabury), esp. pp. 8-81; Wolfhart Pannenberg. Basic Questions in Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), p. 90. 578 574 PETER J. ALBANO, C.M. philosopher and by confession a Christian of the Reformed tradition , as a substantial and significant contribution to a new fundamental theology. This project I propose to pursue from a threefold perspective . The first, Construction,,,presents Ricoeur's philosophical .. ,tJ anthropology in the light of the necessary conditions requisite to a fundamental theology: the second, Confrontation, presents Ricoeur's response to the critique of religion by the masters of suspicion, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, in a hermeneutic of the recovery of meaning as a dialectical apologetic of hope; and third, Concentration, presents Ricoeur's thought on the question of God, the possibility and limitation in knowing and naming the Mystery as the ground of hope. I. Construction The necessary conditions requisite in the construction of a fundamental theology are that man be a being in hope, i.e., the essentially free other of God's possible self-communication, as the existentially exigent desire for the salvific Other and as the eschatologically reconcilable openness to the absolute Mystery. Man is fundamentally the intersection within of freedom, fault and transcendence that constitutes his being as hope. That there is a correspondence between Ricoeur's basic project of the philosophy of the will and the requisite themes of a comprehensive theological anthropology appears in the outline of that project: Vol. 1: The Voluntary ancl the Involuntary: Freedom ancl Nature Vol. II: Finitude and Culpability: Pt. A: Fcillible Man; Pt. B: The Symbolism of Evil Vol. III: The Poetics of Transcendence The project is unfinished. Volumes I and II are completed; Volume III, presently in process. RICOEUR's CONTRIBUTION TO FUNDAMENTAL THEOLOGY 575 I. FREEDOM Man, essentially structured, is for Ricoeur the free other of God's possible self-communication. He is incarnate freedom. He is a conscious being-in-theworld . In Freedom and Nature, Ricoeur undertakes a pure phenomenological investigation, an eidetic description of man's essential being. He brackets, in the manner of Husserl's epoche, the existential experience of fault and the symbolic projection of transcendence. The abstraction is necessary to provide an understanding of man in his fundamental possibilities proffered equally and universally to innocence and fault. It represents, as it were, a common keyboard of human nature on which mythical innocence and experiential guilt play in different ways.2 Ricoeur describes the reciprocity of freedom and nature in man in a dialectical mediation. The separation of body and soul as thought by the Cogito, an epistemic dualism, is overcome through a dialectical reintegration. The Cartesian split of man into res cogitans and res extensa is re-thought in its fundamental unity. The three moments...