Tracy’s Blessed Rage for Order: A Review Article*

TRACY'S BLESSED RAGE FOR ORDER: A REVIEW ARTICLE * I REMEMBER WELL a winter afternoon in 1964 when, in a New York suburban rectory, David Tracy, our mutual friend Joseph Komonchak and I argued the value of philosophical theology . At the time I was in my first year of graduate theology at Union Seminary and a participant in a seminar on contemporary conceptions of God led by Daniel Day Williams and J. A. Martin. I had sworn off the neo-scholastic philosophy and theology of my seminary days. I could see no connection between them and the ministry I was engaged upon, but my inherited ' classical theism ' had not been replaced or modified by any conception that could be called contemporary. I had retreated to biblicism of a reasonably sophisticated sort. Fathers Tracy and Komonchak urged me to read Bernard Lonergan's Insight. In fact they gave me a copy. I read it, and the reading changed my mind on what the theologically significant issues were and where they lay. Whether as a result of my biblicism or my classical theism now reinforced by chapter XIX of Insight, I spent the semester mystified by the neo-classical or process theism of Professor Williams. A set of lectures by Charles Hartshorne did nothing to ease my mystification. Father Tracy was then a parish priest in Stamford, Connecticut. He returned to Rome the following year and wrote a doctoral dissertation on Lonergan's notion of method. From 1967 to 1969 he was assistant professor of systematics at Catholic University and there wrote The Achievement of Bernard Lonergan. He has since been an associate professor of systematics at the Divinity School of Chicago University. In these years he has published a number of important essays in foundational theology which marked out his own position, distinguished it significantly from Lonergan's, and show the increasing influence of his Chicago colleagues, especially Schubert Ogden. Appreciation of his talents and efforts by the Catholic theological community was made obvious when he was elected president of the Catholic Theological Society for 1976-1977. * David Tracy: Blessed Rage for Order, The New Pluralism in Theology (New York: Seabury Press, 1975). 665 666 WILLIAM M. SHEA Blessed Rage for Order is the outcome of a decade's labor. It is worth the labor. It is not so thoughtful or profound a philosophical interpretation of religion as Louis Dupre's The Other Dimension or W. E. Hocking's The Meaning of God in Human Experience. Nor will it achieve the classical status in American philosophical theology of Josiah Royce's The Problem of Christianity. But it easily rivals and in many respects surpasses the work of Ogden and Langdon Gilkey. It is a well-informed and persuasive analysis of the plurality of positions in theology based on a carefully articulated personal stance that has no trace of the evasion, idiosyncrasy, or common sense eclecticism that characterizes much of the work in the field. It interprets and interrelates the present state of scholarship in a dozen vital areas. It brings into Catholic theology a demand for revision of the theological tradition, presses that demand on the basis of the values of the tradition itself, and does so from a foundation radically different from inherited Catholic theological self-understanding. It forces the issue of truth and its criteria in theological discourse to the center of debate. Issued from that tower of contemporary scholarship in religion, the Chicago Divinity School, it will command the attention of any thinker concerned with the meaning of existence, with religion, with the question of God, and with the nature of theology as a contemporary discipline. It is quite possibly the best work ever done by an American Catholic in foundational theology. CONTENT Blessed Rage for Order is primarily concerned with theological method, with what theology is and does, with the stance and commitment of the theologian, and with the procedures and criteria necessary for a truly contemporary theology. Father Tracy means to define theology and, as he understands it, it is necessarily " revisionist ." In the first chapter the cognitive, ethical, and existential crises of modern theology are outlined. The first we are familiar with: since the Enlightenment...