From Theology to Theological Thinking

3. Philosophy, Theology, and the Task of Thinking

We can affirm without any shilly-shallying that Scholastic theology is a scientia. And because the University was universitas scientiarum, we can propose the equivalence of scientia and university discipline. This suffices for the epoch. This will also suffice later, after the appearance of the concept of science , if we are content to assign to theology a place among the various kinds of knowledge (knowledge does not mean science) handed on in the University. These various kinds of knowledge are not necessarily sciences in the modern sense of the term. Philology, history, the critical reading of texts, are all a matter of knowledge without being a matter of science. They are certainly “sciences” if we refer to the vast semantic field of the German Wissenschaft. And if we do, we can always appeal to the distinction between the “sciences of nature” (to which it is necessary to tie the a priori sciences, logic and mathematics) and the “sciences of the spirit” in order to find the most appropriate niche in which to place theological work. Schleiermacher’s response to the scientism of the Enlightenment ineluctably led here. On the one hand, there is a positivity to Christianity, a “Christian fact” about which we can speak in a “scientific” manner (geisteswissenschaftlich ): we can write about and interpret its history. On the other hand, there is a positivity to Christian experience, and for want of speaking in recto about the Absolute to which it claims to adhere, we can always scrutinize this experience and interpret three R Philosophy, Theology, and the Task of Thinking 64 from theology to theological thinking theology as a science of experience (for lack of being an experiment : a psychology of religious experience, and finally of Christian experience, will serve here as the unshakable foundation). The theology of this sort is nothing less than a “science of the spirit.” (And it becomes the work of the understanding, verstehen , for lack of being able to be explained, erklären.) In Schleiermacher and his century, theology explains to cultivated minds, then to believers interested in understanding their faith, what they can believe and what they do when they believe. Theology therefore rightfully remains an academic discipline (which does not prohibit it from being banished from universities every now and then). To define it as scientia is impossible after the Galilean and Baconian revolution, unless we were to translate scientia as discipline. In Hegelian terms the word can mean an “experience of consciousness.” The realization of such an experience is a “science” in German, but in German alone. However, it is not a science for those who from now on oversee the meaning of this word and the totality of scientific practices. And this could suffice to redefine in a new context the relation of theology and philosophy—less numerous, after all, are the philosophical enterprises that claim scientific legitimacy.1 Let us mention as a sort of preliminary the effort of T. F. Torrance, as brilliant as it is moving.2 Could theology, despite everything, be counted among the sciences? Torrance’s tactic in what he does not hesitate to call a “philosophy of theology ,” and refuses to call simply a theological epistemology, is seductive. “After all”—after the modern concept of science is imposed, theology could very well satisfy the requirements of this concept. Modernity has produced an entity or two, first the “object,” then the “fact.” Theology itself appeals to facts, let us say phenomena, and its mission is to let them appear as such starting from themselves—a possible definition of objectivity. The normative concept, science, is only present in the plurality of sciences, thus in the plurality of modes of objectivity and of our ways of reaching an agreement with objectivity. But if one admits that there is a general theory of scientific knowledge or philosophy, theology, and the task of thinking 65 a universal model of scientificity, and Torrance does it without reserve, then the modern discrediting of theology could very well not be scientific because it bypasses a fundamental mode of objectivity, that of the revealed God, and of a fundamental mode of knowledge that we reserve for this revelation. Theological Science pleads for the scientific character of theology, not by leading its method back to this or that other scientific discipline, but by manifesting the adequacy of what theology knows and the manner by which it is known.3 Theology (and...