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The Analogical Imagination:
Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism
By David Tracy
(The Crossroads Publishing Company, 1998)
Review By
Richard A. Rhem
Minister of Preaching and Theological Inquiry
Christ Community Church
Spring Lake, Michigan
Publication of Review Unknown
In the Preface to his study David Tracy states the task he sets out for himself:
The need is to form a new and inevitably complex theological strategy that
will avoid privatism by articulating the genuine claims of religions to truth
(p. xi).
He claims that theology, by its very nature, asks fundamental existential
questions because theology reflects on the reality of God, but it must develop
public, not private, criteria and discourse. Recognizing theology addresses three
publics: society, academy and church, each of which demands public criteria and
discourse, Tracy’s main focus is on Systematic Theology, which he understands as
fundamentally a hermeneutical enterprise and his development of that
understanding is to claim,
The issue of both the meaning and truth of religion is related to the
analogous issue of the meaning and truth of art. The central claim
advanced is a claim to both meaning and truth in our common human
experience of any classic. (p. xii).
Tracy recognizes the contemporary emergence of a sociological imagination
which he sees as analogous to the earlier rise of historical consciousness and it is
in such a social reality that the theologian must work. In such a context the
theologian makes his claim.
What is that claim? A claim to public response bearing meaning and truth
on the most serious and difficult questions, both personal and communal,
that any human being or society must face: Has existence any ultimate
meaning? Is a fundamental trust to be found amidst the fears, anxieties
and terror of existence? Is there some reality, some force, even some one,
who speaks a word of truth that can be recognized and trusted? Religions
ask and respond to such fundamental questions of the meaning and truth
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 2 of 20
of our existence as human beings in solitude, and in society, history and
the cosmos. Theologians, by definition, risk an intellectual life on the
wager that religious traditions can be studied as authentic responses to
just such questions. The nature of these fundamental questions cuts across
the spectrum of publics. Lurking beneath the surface of our everyday lives,
exploding into explicitness in the limit-situations inevitable in any life, are
questions which logically must be and historically are called religious
questions.
To formulate such questions honestly and well, to respond to them with
passion and rigor, is the work of all theology. (p. 4)
With such a vision of theology’s work, Tracy sets out to create a space in human
endeavor for such an undertaking. Claiming the common human experience of
encountering a classic in the spectrum of human culture, Tracy points specifically
to the classic in art which is universally recognized. He then claims the same
holds true for the religious experience; there have been religious expressions that
can rightfully be designated classic. As cited above,
The issue of both the meaning and truth of religion is related to the
analogous issue of the meaning and truth of art.
For Tracy, a Christian theologian, the classic religious expression is the event of
Jesus Christ. In Part I Tracy will develop his claim that a religious classic can be
portrayed through reasoning that is publicly recognized – there can be no appeal
to an external norm or private vision. This section he entitles “Publicness in
Systematic Theology.” From there he will go on to apply what he has claimed to
the event of Jesus Christ. Section Two he entitles, “Interpreting the Christian
Classic.”
The Preface announces the major question of Tracy’s The Analogical
Imagination: “In a culture of pluralism must each religious tradition finally
either dissolve into some lowest common denominator or accept a marginal
existence as one interesting but purely private option?” Tracy is not willing to
accept either option. A theological strategy must be found that can articulate the
genuine claims of religion to truth. This is the task he sets for himself: a
responsible affirmation of pluralism through the discovery of public criteria by
which truth can be affirmed.
Theology must develop public criteria of truth and discourse because it deals with
the fundamental questions of existence and because it speaks of God.
Recognizing that the theologian addresses three arenas, society, academy and
church, Tracy insists that the criteria of publicness applies in all three areas.
Theology is the generic name for three disciplines: fundamental, systematic and
practical theologies. Publicness is demanded of each. The primary focus of
fundamental theology is the academy, of systemic theology, the church and of
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 3 of 20
practical theology, society. They differ not only in their primary reference group,
but also in terms of their modes of argument, ethical stance, religious stance and
in terms of expressing claims to meaning and truth.
On the way to a responsible pluralism all conversation partners must agree to
certain basic rules for the discussion. Two constants are present: the
interpretation of a religious tradition and the interpretation of the religious
dimension of the contemporary situation from which and to which the theologian
speaks. In regard to the first, it is incumbent upon the theologian to make explicit
his or her general method of interpretation, to develop “criteria of
appropriateness” whereby specific interpretations of the tradition may be judged
by the wider theological community. In regard to the interpretation of the
contemporary situation, there must be an analysis of the “religious” questions,
the question of the meaning of human existence in the present situation.
There are major differences as well. Tracy addresses the question as to what
constitutes a public claim to truth in the three sub-disciplines of theology.
Fundamental theology’s defining characteristic is “a reasoned insistence on
employing the approach and methods of some established academic discipline to
explicate and adjudicate the truth claims of the interpreted religious tradition
and the truth claims of the contemporary situation.” (p. 62) Various models are
available but whichever model is chosen fundamental questions and answers are
articulated in such a way that any attentive, intelligent, reasonable and
responsible person can understand and judge them in keeping with fully public
criteria for argument. Personal faith may not enter the argument for the truth
claims in fundamental theology.
The systematic theologian’s major task is the reinterpretation of the
tradition for the present situation. Where the fundamental theologian will
relate the reality of God to our fundamental trust in existence (our
common faith), the confessional systematic theologian will relate that
reality to their arguments for a distinctively Christian understanding of
faith. (p. 65)
Christian theology…consists in explicating in public terms and in
accordance with the demands of it own primary confessions, the full
meaning and truth of the original “illuminating event”…which occasioned
and continues to inform its understanding of all reality. (p. 66)
Thus the task of the systematic theologian is an hermeneutical task. The
“illuminating event” Tracy calls a religious classic. As in a classic work of art, the
religious classic contains the possibility of ever new “disclosures.” Classics Tracy
defines as texts, events, images, persons, rituals and symbols which are assumed
to disclose permanent possibilities of meaning and truth. The hermeneutical
theologian seeks to articulate the truth – disclosure of the reality of God
embedded in the tradition for the contemporary situation.
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 4 of 20
There is today a strong case being made by many theologians for the necessity of
any theological theory or argument yielding to the demand of praxis.
Praxis…must be related to theory, not as theory’s application or even goal
as in all conscious and unconscious mechanical notions of practice or
technique. Rather praxis is theory’s own originating and self-correcting
foundation, since all theory is dependent, minimally, on the authentic
praxis of the theorist’s personally appropriated value of intellectual
integrity and self-transcending commitment to the imperatives of critical
rationality. (p. 69)
Tracy states his response to the theologians of praxis as follows:
The very notion of praxis is grounded in a distinction, not a separation;
truth as transformation always also involves truth as disclosure; speaking
the truth is never separable but is distinguishable from doing the truth;
cognitive claims are not simply validated through authentic praxes any
more than causes are validated through the presence of martyrs; the crises
of cognitive claims does not simply dissipate when the shift of emphasis to
the social-ethical crisis of a global humanity comes more clearly into
central focus…. (p. 79)
In sum: fundamental theology seeks metaphysical and existential adequacy to
experience; systematic theology seeks the disclosure of the original “illuminating
event” in the present situation; practical theology emphasizes the necessity of
truth as transformative. Tracy hopes for the possibility of collaboration between
these sub-disciplines and the communal recognition of the real need for all three.
Tracy moves the focus now to systematic theology asking from the perspective of
fundamental theology what one can argue on obviously public grounds for the
public status of all good systematic theology. The question is simply, “Is
systematic theology public discourse?”
It is Tracy’s contention that systematic theology is hermeneutical. This means
that systematic theology’s task is to interpret, mediate and translate the meaning
and truth of the tradition. Where this is not the case, where the notion of
authority shifts from a truth disclosed to mind and heart to an external norm for
the obedient will, theologians can no longer interpret and translate the tradition
but “only repeat the shop-worn conclusions of the tradition.” (p. 99)
Eventually, the central, classical symbols and doctrines of the tradition
become mere “fundamentals” to be externally accepted and endlessly
repeated. (p. 99)
Tracy points to the contrast of an hermeneutical theology:
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 5 of 20
The heart of any hermeneutical position is the recognition that all
interpretation is a mediation of past and present, a translation carried on
within the effective history of a tradition to retrieve its sometimes strange,
sometimes familiar meanings. (p. 99)
How is this done? Recognizing that one begins within a tradition which has
shaped one, that one is socialized, acculturated and thus without the possibility of
finding some position “above” one’s own historicity,
…the route to liberation from the negative realities of a tradition is not to
declare the existence of an autonomy that is literally unreal but to enter
into a disciplined and responsive conversation with the subject matter –
the responses and, above all, the fundamental questions – of the tradition.
(p. 100)
Tracy refers to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s model of conversation as a model for
understanding the dialogue with the tradition.
Real conversation occurs only when the participants allow the question,
the subject matter, to assume primacy. It occurs only when our usual fears
about our own self-image die….That fear dies only because we are carried
along, and sometimes away, by the subject matter itself into the rare event
or happening named “thinking” and “understanding.” For understanding
happens; it occurs not as the pure result of personal achievement but in
the back-and-forth movement of the conversation itself. (p. 101)
…The word “hermeneutical” best describes this realized experience of
understanding in conversation. For every event of understanding, in order
to produce a new interpretation, mediates between our past experience
and the understanding embodied in our linguistic tradition and the
present event of understanding occasioned by a fidelity to the logic of the
question in the back-and-forth movement of the conversation. (p. 101)
Using the model of conversation Tracy shows how one enters into the history of
the illuminating event. When interpreting a classic one recognizes its “excess of
meaning” demands constant interpretation and is at the same time timeless –
“a certain kind of timelessness –namely the timeliness of a classic
expression radically rooted in its own historical time and calling to my
own historicity. That is, the classical text is not in some timeless moment
which needs mere repetition. Rather its kind of timelessness as permanent
timeliness is the only one proper to any expression of the finite, temporal,
historical beings we are….The classic text’s fate is that only its constant
reinterpretation by later finite, historical, temporal beings who will risk
asking its questions and listening, critically and tactfully, to its responses
can actualize the event of understanding beyond its present fixation in a
text. (p. 102)
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 6 of 20
To be understood a classic cannot be repeated; it must be interpreted. Thus Tracy
claims
All contemporary systematic theology can be understood as fundamentally
hermeneutical. This position implies that systematic theologians, by
definition, will understand themselves as radically finite and historical
thinkers who have risked a trust in a particular religious tradition – They
seek, therefore, to retrieve, interpret, translate, mediate the resources –
…of the classic events of understanding of those fundamental religious
questions embedded in the classic events, images, persons, rituals, texts
and symbols of the tradition. (p. 104)
Tracy moves on to the normative role of the classics. He begins with the assertion
“classics exist.” It is true of all cultures. He claims,
We all find ourselves compelled both to recognize and on occasion to
articulate our reasons for recognition that certain expressions of the
human spirit so disclose a compelling truth about our lives that we cannot
deny them some kind of normative status. (p. 108)
Such expressions we call “classic.” Tracy defines the classic thus:
My thesis is that which we mean in naming certain texts, events, images,
rituals, symbols and persons “classics” is that here we recognize nothing
less than the disclosure of a reality we cannot but name truth….some
disclosure of reality in a moment that must be called one of “recognition”
which surprises, provokes, challenges, shocks and eventually transforms
us; an experience that upsets conventional opinion and expands the sense
of the possible; indeed a realized experience of that which is essential, that
which endures. (p. 108)
The experience of a classic work of art is used as an illustration of Tracy’s point.
Citing Gadamer, he writes,
The actual experience of the work of art can be called a realized experience
of an event of truth ....when I experience any classic work of art, I do not
experience myself as an autonomous subject aesthetically appreciating the
good qualities of an aesthetic object set over against me. Indeed, when I
reflect after the experience upon the experience itself, shorn of prior
theories of "aesthetics," I find that my subjectivity is never in control of the
experience, nor is the work of art actually experienced as an object with
certain qualities over against me. Rather the work of art encounters me
with the surprise, impact, even shock of reality itself. In experiencing art, I
recognize a truth I somehow know but know I did not really know except
through the experience of recognition of the essential compelled by the
work of art. (p. 111F)
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 7 of 20
I am transformed by the truth which I encounter. I experience self-transcendence
not as an achievement; rather it happens, it occurs. I am caught up in the
disclosure of the work.
Gadamer uses the phenomenon of the "game" to describe this encounter. In
playing a game I lose myself in the play moving into the "rules" of the game.
The game becomes not an object over against a self-conscious subject but
an experienced relational and releasing mode of being in the world distinct
from the ordinary, nonplayful one. In every game, I enter the world where
I play so fully that finally the game plays me. (p. 114)
This is what happens when one encounters a genuine work of art. One finds
oneself in the grip of an event, a happening, a disclosure, a claim to truth which
cannot be denied.
Tracy notes the process of encountering the text. The first movement is the
reception of the text. Secondly, if the text is a classic it will carry a force that will
claim attention. The third step of interpretation involves the "game" spoken of
above.
The dialogue will demand that the interpreter enter into the back-andforth movement of that disclosure in the dialectics of a self-transcending
freedom released by the text upon a finite, historical, dialogical reader and
received by the text from a now dialoguing reader. (p. 120)
The fourth step involves the larger conversation of the entire community of
inquirers.
To illustrate our claim that an encounter with a classic work of art demands our
attention and discloses truth which we cannot but recognize as an encounter with
reality, Tracy describes the production of a classic. The discussion of that creative
artistic process leads him to conclude:
In the paradigmatic expressions of the human spirit - in those texts,
events, persons, actions, images, rituals, symbols which bear within them
a classic as authoritative status, we find in our experienced recognition of
their claim to attention the presence of what we cannot but name "truth."
... That truth is at once a disclosure and a concealment of what, at our best
and most self-transcending in interpreting the classics, we cannot but
name "reality." (p. 130)
Tracy therefore argues for his contention that the systematic theologian is the
interpreter of religious classics.
Systematic theology intends to provide an interpretation, a retrieval
(including a retrieval through critique and suspicion) and always,
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 8 of 20
therefore, a new application of a particular religious tradition’s selfunderstanding for the current horizon of the community. (p. 131)
Applying this understanding of systematic theology’s task to the specific task of
the Christian thinker, Tracy declares,
In Christian systematics, that self-understanding is itself further grounded
in the particular events and persons of Jewish and Christian history:
decisively grounded, for the Christian, in God’s own self-manifestation as
my God in this classic event and person, Jesus Christ. (p. 131)
But now the crux of the matter is reached: how does the systematic theologian
address the wider public with discussion characterized by “publicness” thus
stopping the retreat of Christian faith into the sphere of privateness and yet
remain faithful to
the radical particularity of the relationship of my gift’s disclosure to the
particular events of God’s action in ancient Israel, in Jesus of Nazareth, in
the history of the Christian church? (p. 132)
Acknowledging the dilemma, Tracy believes it can be overcome. The means of
overcoming the dilemma is the recognition of the public nature of the classic:
grounded in some realized experience of a claim to attention, unfolding as
cognitive disclosures of both meaning and truth and ethically
transformative of personal, social and historical life. (p. 132)
Tracy therefore contends,
Whenever any systematic theologian produces a classic interpretation of a
particular classic religious tradition (as both Barth and Rahner have), then
that new expression should be accorded a public status in the culture…. (p.
132F)
Every classic…is a text, event, image, person or symbol which unites
particularity of origin and expression with a disclosure of meaning and
truth available, in principle, to all human beings. (p. 133)
And again:
Any person’s intensification of particularity via a struggle with the
fundamental questions of existence in a particular tradition, if that
struggle is somehow united to the logos of appropriate expression, will
yield a form of aesthetically sharable public discourse. (p. 134)
Chapter four deals with the interpretation of the religious classics. The classic,
Tracy claims, has these two marks: permanence and excess of meaning. They
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 9 of 20
demand interpretation, never mere repetition nor simplistic rejection. The
interpreter must plunge in, get caught up in the subject matter of the classic.
Engaging a major classic or being engaged by it is to be engaged by the questions
of the truth of existence. This is the task of the systematic theologian – to
interpret the religious classics of a culture.
While many in contemporary culture relegate religious questions to a primitive
state of the race’s development, Tracy raises the question,
Yet what if the authority of religion is not the authoritarianism in our
impacted memories of “religion” but the authority of those authentic,
indeed inevitable fundamental questions about the meaning of the whole
codified in the questions and responses of classical religious texts, events,
images, symbols, rituals and persons? (p. 155)
To be sure, the religions have been purveyors not only of authentic truth but
demonic destructive power. There is a great deal of conflict of interpretations on
the meaning of religion and in the modern period the claims of Feuerbach, Marx,
Nietzsche and Freud that describe religion as “projection” and “illusion” must be
faced. Arriving at one definition for the essence of religion is not possible. Yet
Tracy will not back off; he claims,
The questions which religion addresses are the fundamental existential
questions of the meaning and truth of individual, communal and historical
existence as related to, indeed as both participating in and distanced from,
what is sensed as the whole of reality. (p. 157F)
Religion, Tracy argues, is not just another cultural perspective alongside
morality, art, science, commerce and politics. In its own self-understanding,
a religious perspective claims to speak not of a part but of the whole. (p.
159)
In a very technical philosophical argument Tracy maintains
An ability to partly state – more exactly, to metaphysically state – the
abstract, general, universal and necessary features of the reality of God as
the one necessary existent which can account for the reality of a limit-of,
ground-to, horizon-to the whole disclosed in earlier phenomenological
accounts. (p. 161)
Religion has essential characteristics even apart from a single definition of its
essence and chief among them, Tracy claims, is "a limit-character." There is both
a "limit-to" dimension:
a dimension present in the "limit-questions" of scientific inquiry and
moral striving, and in those experiences (either negative, like anxiety as
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 10 of 20
distinct from fear, or positive, like fundamental trust, wonder and loyalty
as distinct from trust in and fidelity to a particular cause), disclosive of the
"limit-situation" which is the human situation. (p. 160)
and a "limit of" dimension:
The philosophical analyses of fundamental theology, therefore, free the
inquirer to study the possible meanings of such recognized "situational"
limit-experiences as finitude, contingency, mortality, alienation or
oppression and thereby to explicate, indeed to state, the character of that
reality as a limit-to our existence. In that explicit stating of a limit-to, the
inquirer may also be able to disclose or show the existence of a reality here
named a "limit-of" (alternatively horizon-to our ground-of). In its
metaphysical or transcendental form, the analysis can also partly state the
character of that reality of the limit-of. This is the case, in the Western
tradition, when the metaphysical reality of God as the one necessary
existent grounding all reality is explicated as the referent of just such
limit-experiences of a religious dimension to our lives", (p. 160)
Tracy uses Karl Rahner's work to illustrate how this philosophical analysis of
fundamental theology relates to the Christian conviction of the revelation of God
in Jesus Christ.
For Rahner, the philosopher of religion can provide persuasive
philosophical arguments for the necessary existence of an absolute
mystery as ultimate horizon to all thinking and living. If that argument
holds, then Rahner is correct to insist that the human being, now
understood as always already within that horizon of ultimate mystery, can
be redescribed, in his now famous phrase, as a hearer of a possible
revelation from this horizon, i.e., a self-manifestation by the power of
ultimate mystery itself.
In the actual experience of that self-manifestation of God in Jesus Christ,
the Christian believer now, according to Rahner, recognizes that the
concrete revelation is a pure gift or grace from the incomprehensible God
of Love. Then the believer "recognizes" that all reality is graced by that gift:
that all reality partakes in a "transcendental" revelation disclosed in the
categorical revelation of God's own self-manifestation in Jesus Christ; that
revelation, as "transcendental," is always already present in this concretely
graced world; that revelation as "categorized" is present in the gratuity of
God's self-manifestation in the events of "salvation history," decisively
present, for Rahner, in the event of the manifestation of who God is and
who we are in Jesus Christ. (p. 162)
Thus we are hearers of a possible revelation or self-manifestation of the absolute
mystery and for the Christian believer that manifestation has taken concrete
shape in Jesus Christ. In these terms the religious classic
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 11 of 20
may be viewed as an event of disclosure, expressive of the "limit-of,"
"horizon-to," "ground-to" side of "religion." ... religious classic expressions
will involve a claim to truth as the event of a disclosure – concealment of
the whole of reality by the power of the whole – as, in some sense, a
radical and finally gracious mystery. (p. 163)
An experience of such a classic religious expression will carry an authority which
will give to the religious person the conviction
that their values, their style of life, their ethos are in fact grounded in the
inherent structure of reality itself. (p. 163)
Tracy summarizes his contention in this discussion of the interpretation of the
religious classic as follows:
First, a defining characteristic of the situational "religious dimension of
common experience and language" is the "limit-to" character of the
experience itself, whatever its particular existential focus. Second, a
defining characteristic of any explicit religion – more exactly any classic
religious expression – is a “limit-of” character bearing the status of eventgift-manifestation of and from the whole, and experienced as giving the
respondent wholeness. (p. 165)
His approach in pursuing this line of argument – that the religious classic exists,
claims our attention and discloses truth which we cannot but name reality –
presumes an appropriate preunderstanding for the interpretation of religion. He
argues:
If one is guided by a sense for those fundamental questions, if guided as
well by that great modern tradition of interpretation of the sui generis
character of religion ... The interpreter is likely to find relative adequacy in
the kind of interpretations of the appropriate responses to the religious
classics described in different, sometimes conflicting ways by these great
modern phenomenologists of the sui generis character of religion. (p. 168)
... The kind of claim to attention that a religious classic, as religious,
provokes is a claim that discloses to the interpreter some realized
experience bearing some sense of recognition into the objectively awesome reality of the otherness of the whole as radical mystery. The
genuinely religious person (James' "mystics" and "saints"), it seems, do
experience that reality of mystery as the reality of the holy bearing
overwhelming and life-transformative force, (p. 168F)
The religious person speaks of revelation, the self-manifestation of an undeniable
power not one's own or at one's disposal. They cannot but acknowledge the
eruption of a power manifesting itself – a power of the whole revealing the whole.
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 12 of 20
For the whole experienced as radical mystery is experienced as giving itself
in the religious response. The whole, in manifesting itself, is also
experienced as freeing the real self of the respondent to its true freedom; a
freedom where the self's new ethos is experienced as grounded in reality
itself – a reality both disclosed and concealed as the whole by the power of
the whole. (p. 175)
Again Tracy explains the experience thus:
The same sense of radical giftedness both fascinates and frightens as it
shocks and transforms the self to believe what one dare not otherwise
believe: that reality is finally gracious, that the deepest longings of our
minds and hearts for wholeness in ourselves, with others, with history and
nature, is the case – the case granted as gift by the whole; the case
expressed with relative adequacy determined by the intrinsic inadequacy
of every classic religious expression. (p. 177)
We approach now the heart of Tracy’s argument as he discusses the religious
classic under the sub-divisions of manifestation and proclamation. Here he
makes a creative and passionate appeal for a genuinely ecumenically Christian
witness which brings together the strengths of the Catholic, Orthodox and
Protestant traditions rather than the more narrow focus of any single tradition.
Tracy's argument rests on his contention that truth becomes a realized experience
through the encounter with a religious classic. A classic expression encountered
frees oneself from the ordinary attempts to distance the self from any claims that
cannot be controlled as objects over against its own subjectivity.
... The interpreter of religious classics may admit that this classic
testimony bears a claim to truth. That claim is, more exactly, a nonviolent
appeal to the instinct of the human spirit for some relationship to the
whole. (p. 194)
The truth experienced in the classic has the character of event.
When technical rationality reigns, no recognition of the event-character of
truth can occur. Any interpreter of the religious classic must early decide
whether to impose some standards of technical rationality upon all
classical expressions or risk exposing oneself to another mode of
rationality; a mode proper to the thing itself as it discloses itself to
consciousness. We cannot, in fact, verify or disprove the claims of classical
religious expressions through empiricist methods….truth here becomes a
manifestation that lets whatever shows itself to be in its showing and its
hiddenness. (p. 195)
Neither the Enlightenment model of rationality nor traditionalist models of
heteronomy are capable of dealing thus with truth as event, occurrence. They
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 13 of 20
both interpret all claims to truth through the restrictive lenses of techniques
developed by autonomous and heteronomous interpreters. Just as one
approaches a classic in any field, so in religion one must be open to being caught
up in the "conversation," the "game," open to being transformed by the truth of
the whole which finds expression or which discloses itself through the concrete
religious expression.
Fundamental theology warrants the claims to truth of the religious
dimension to existence on ordinary public grounds; systematic theology as
interpretation warrants the claims to truth of a concrete religion on those
kinds of authentically public grounds appropriate to the kind of disclosive
publicness expressed in all classics.
This is the case, moreover, for radically experiential reasons: the realized
experience of the truth-character of the religious classic is an experience of
its purely given character, its status as an event, a happening manifested to
my experience, neither determined by nor produced by my subjectivity. (p.
198)
Tracy describes the structural similarity between the encounter with religious
classics and other classics.
Any classic will produce its meaning through the related strategies of
intensification of particularity and intensification of distanciation in
expression. The first journey of intensification into one's own particularity
will ordinarily free the person (or community) from the limitations of selfconsciousness into a sense of a real participation in, a belonging to, a
wider and deeper reality than the self or the community. That experience
of intensification, like all experience must involve some understanding
and some expression. When the struggle for expression – the second, selfdistancing journey of intensification – finds its appropriate genre, style
and form, then the self is positively distanced from the original experience
in order to express the meaning of that experience. Then a person can
communicate the disclosive meaning to others who may not now share it,
but can share its meaning through experiencing the now-rendered
expression. (p. 199F)
There is a difference between religious classics and other classics, however. It has
to do with intensity. The religious classic is an expression of the whole itself by
the power of the whole.
... The authentically religious impetus is one where the intensification
process is itself abandoned into a letting go of one's own efforts at
intensity. One lets go because one has experienced some disclosure of the
whole which cannot be denied as from the whole. (p. 201)
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 14 of 20
Finally one experiences a sense of resting in the radical and gracious mystery at
the heart of human existence. Such an experience demands expression:
a demand to express that experience and its meaning and truth in a form –
a text, an image, a gesture, above all, a style of life. The demand to express,
to render, to communicate sets in motion the distanciation process
whereby the self distances itself from its own self-consciousness and finds
the proper genre for some expression of that meaning and truth. (p. 201)
Summarizing the process, Tracy claims,
Both the expression and the experience of a religious "limit-of" disclosure
and concealment of and by the whole remains, therefore, intrinsically
dialectical throughout the entire process. The demands of the journey of
intensification into the fundamental questions of the meaning of existence
imply their opposite: a letting-go, a being-caught-up-in, a radical
belonging-to some disclosure of the whole by the whole. And the very
radicality of that belonging-to the whole posits itself by implying its
opposite: I as a self recognize that I am absolutely dependent upon the
whole, recognize myself as in actuality profoundly ambiguous in all my
experience, my understanding, my ability and willingness to live by and in
the radical mystery which envelops and empowers me. As the dialectic
intensifies, this recognition of the disclosure of radical mystery posits itself
as disclosure by implying its opposite: The mystery is also concealed from
me by and in its disclosure as mystery. The revelation is also a revelation
of hiddenness; the flooding, white light of its comprehensibility frees me to
recognize the dark impenetrable incomprehensibility of both the whole
and myself in the whole. (p. 202)
Then comes the command to communicate by incarnating that reality in a word,
a symbol, an image, a ritual, a gesture, a life.
Tracy moves now to discuss the classical forms of religious expression:
manifestation and proclamation. The dialectical process just described,
an existential intensification of particularity, expressing itself through
distanciation in a sharable form – will operate dialectically at every
moment in the process. (p. 203)
But now Tracy makes another proposal regarding religious expression.
When the dialectic of intensification of particularity releasing itself to a
radical sense of participation predominates, the religious expression will
be named "manifestation;" when the dialectic of intensification of
particularity releasing itself to a sense of radical nonparticipation
dominates, the religious expression will be named "proclamation." (p.
203)
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 15 of 20
The words "sacrament" and "word" are usually used to make this distinction, the
former being the predominate expression of the Catholic and Orthodox
traditions, while the latter has been characteristic of Protestantism. The
difference is also pointed out by the terms "mystical-priestly-metaphysicalaesthetic" and "prophetic-ethical-historical." Both types are found in the Hebrew
Scriptures and in the Christian tradition. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
contain both expressions although from the East they may appear more in the
proclamatory mode. Likewise, although the Eastern religions are thought of as
mainly in the mode of manifestation, they too must be understood in the dialectic
of manifestation or proclamation. Tracy moves away from the common
theological designation of the difference – word and sacrament – and uses
instead the terminology of Paul Ricoeur – manifestation and proclamation – in
order to see more clearly how the religious live in this dialectic and cannot be
placed on one side or the other, although, of course, they lean to one pole or the
other. He contends that the manifestation-proclamation dialectic is fruitful for
understanding the complexity and the conflicts in Christian self-understanding,
which is the focus of Tracy's work. This distinction provides the main rubric for
the thought experiment Tracy is setting forth.
Tracy argues that the very positing of manifestation or proclamation implies the
other; each needs the other. He begins his examination of these poles with a
discussion of manifestation. He uses the work of Mircea Eliade as the clearest
example of religious expression as manifestation.
... Eliade' s classic achievement ... paradoxically serves a prophetic
religious role to challenge the dominant prophetic, ethical, historical
trajectory of Western religion in favor of its grounds in the power of
manifestation.... The "archaic" ontology articulated by Eliade becomes the
focal meaning for understanding religion as an eruption of power of some
manifestation of the whole now experienced as the sacred cosmos.
…
By entering the ritual, by retelling the myth, even by creatively
reinterpreting the symbol, we escape from the "nightmare" of history and
even the "terror" of ordinary time. We finally enter true time, the time of
the repetition of the actions of the whole at origin of the cosmos. In illo
tempore, the power from the whole was first disclosed as sacred. ... only by
entering into the originally nonlinguistic manifestations of power of the
sacred in the ritual, the symbol, the festival, the myth, can we participate
in, belong to, a realm disclosed in the other side of the ordinary: a realm
which has manifested itself as sacred, which exposes the ordinary as
profane, a realm which at the same time chooses any ordinary reality –
this rock, this tree, this city, this mountain, this rite – as the medium for
the saturated power of the sacred – the "center of the world." ... (p. 205F)
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 16 of 20
Thus the realm of the sacred can be experienced by being willing to enter the
purely given, that sheer event of manifestation. Tracy maintains that Eliade has
effectively challenged the Western Augustinian assumptions through his retrieval
of the genius of Eastern Christianity:
a theology oriented to and from, not history and ethos, but the cosmos and
aesthetics; a style of religious practice oriented not so much by the word of
scripture as by the manifestations of the sacred in image, icon, ritual, logos
and cosmological theologies; a way of being Christian that both demands a
radical separation from the ordinary via the rituals and myths of the
repetition of the origins of the cosmos and allows real participation in the
manifestations of the sacred available to our "divinized" humanity. (p.
208)
But there is another pole; the pole of proclamation:
Those religious expressions where the power of a word of proclamation
from God in an address to an ambiguous self occurs as the paradigmatic
disclosure of religious reality. (p. 208)
The pole of manifestation brings to expression the sense of participation in the
whole. Yet the very sense of identity in the moment of manifestation implies the
non-identity of the individual, finite self. Therefore the estranged self may be
addressed by a word of proclamation:
A word of defamiliarizing proclamation now experienced by the self as the
transcendent, unnamable Other which has now disclosed itself in word as
like a who: the self of God. ... This God speaks a word of proclamation
whereby and wherein the whole discloses itself in a new manifestation by
the presence of a personal, gracious, acting, judging, proclaiming God.
This God acts in the word-events of ordinary history and time. (p. 209)
This word shatters our sense of participation, disconfirming any complacency in
participation.
To shatter any illusions that this culture, this priesthood, this land, this
ritual is enough, to defamiliarize us with ourselves and with nature, to
decode our encoded myths, to inflict its passionate negations upon all our
pretensions, to suspect even our nostalgic longings for the sacred cosmos,
to expose all idols of the self as projections of our selves and our mad
ambitions, to expose all culture as contingent, even arbitrary. …To make
us recognize that Judaism and Christianity disclose a radical worldaffirmation only because they have first undergone a radical, decentering
experience of world-negation in the kerygmatic, proclamatory word of
address of prophetic religion. (p. 209)
…
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 17 of 20
The self finds that the response to that proclamation by the self and the
people to whom the self belongs is that radical paradigmatic response of
trust and obedience called faith. (p. 209)
The proclaimed word will be expressed in the realm of the secular which was
formerly thought of as profane but now is recognized as the arena in which the
power of the word must be heard.
... The very power of the proclaimed word – a word addressed by God to
both a community and a self, a word of address shattering their security
and their idols – demands that the major expression of one's religious
experience now be found in fidelity through word and deed in this time
and this history to the God who gives that word as enabling command. (p.
210)
The paradigm of proclamation does not eliminate the religious expressions of
manifestation. Without them there is no place for the word to be heard and do its
work. Yet the focus has definitely shifted.
The language of radical participation in the religions of manifestation will
now seem extravagant, sometimes even idolatrous. The rejection of the
ordinary as the separated profane will now, in the proclamation of the
word about the extraordinariness of the ordinary as the central expression
of God's word and action, will now itself be rejected in favor of a classical,
paradigmatic religious ethic of the secular. (p. 211)
The affirmation of the secular in contemporary Jewish and Christian
theology, therefore, is not properly understood as some collapse of
Christianity and Judaism in the face of contemporary secularism. Rather a
secular Christianity and a secular Judaism are, in fact, faithful to the
paradigmatic eruption of a proclaimed and addressing word-event which
founds these traditions and drives them on as their religious focal
meaning. Some desacralization of the claims of participation via
manifestation must occur whenever this kind of world-shattering and
world-affirming paradigmatic religious experience of proclamation
happens. For the very proclamation which affirms time and history and
demands expression in and for ordinary time and history frees Jews and
Christians in and for the world. When the paradigmatic religious power of
that word has become a nostalgic echo, a presupposition that is no longer
an impulse, then the great danger of a merely secularist Judaism, a merely
secularist Christianity, a finally secularist culture emerges. (p. 211F)
But where the proclaimed word is remembered, the word of world-negation and
world-affirmation, the Jew and the Christian are freed for the world. This was the
case in the Reformation according to Tracy. He calls it a classic religious event.
The Reformation was a response to the graced freedom of the Christian before
God's Word in Jesus Christ.
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 18 of 20
Where the paradigmatic power of that word saturates the religious
consciousness with its power, then the negation of all over-claims to
participation, the religious negation of the focus of "magic," "superstition,"
"legalism," and "ritualism" will burst upon any complacent resting in any
religion of manifestation, any non-dialectical solace in a too easy
humanism or any hardened priestcraft. (p. 212)
The word exposes the world's real ambiguity, its possibilities for both good and
evil and it points to a new time, a time of genuine newness, not just the repetition
of the origins of the cosmos. If liberal Christianity loses its sense of the word of
proclamation it loses its religious vitality.
It loses its religious dialectic of the world and the secular and becomes
another decent, ethical vision living in, by and for a world which sets its
agenda and writes the words for its decent, ethical, but ultimately
irreligious tunes. The liberal churches are always in danger of losing their
paradigmatic religious dialectic and becoming only psychological
counseling centers or resources for societal causes. And yet the fidelity of
the liberal churches to the world empowered by their listening to the
Christian word of proclamation compels them, as it must, to aid all
authentic causes of personal wholeness and societal justice. (p. 212)
Tracy points to Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer as leading examples of the
ministry of the paradigmatic word which shatters the idols of culture. Barth so
feared any claim to participation in the transcendent reality that he wanted to
admit of no point of contact; such a view sees a word-centered Christianity
devoid of all manifestation apart from the erupting power of the Word.
Commenting on the two poles, manifestation and proclamation in their recent
exponants referred to here, Eliade, Barth and Bonhoeffer, Tracy declares,
With the same kind of radicality as Eliade, Barth and Bonhoeffer will also
insist, "Only the paradigmatic is the real." Yet their paradigm of the
proclaimed word will drive them into a direct confrontation with the
equally radical "only" of Eliade through its dialectic in and for the world, in
and for time and history. For Eliade, manifestation discloses not an entry
into the secular but an escape from the terror, the nightmare, the banality,
the latent nihilism of ordinary time and history. Not the profane, not the
secular will save us; only an entry into the religion of manifestation, the
worlds of sacred space and the repetitions of sacred time can do that.
Eliade's work serves in the contemporary period as a classic expression of
the power of religion as manifestation releasing its dialectic of the sacred
and the profane and its passionately religious sense of radical participation
in the cosmos through the saturating repetitions of myth, ritual and
symbol. His is recognizably iconic consciousness. In an analogous manner
Barth and Bonhoeffer, with their distinct and sometimes conflicting
positions, represent two contemporary classic expressions of Christian
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 19 of 20
faith as a faith living by the power of the proclaimed word releasing its
dialectic of the word and the secular and its suspicion of "religious
participation" and repetition. (p. 213F)
It is Tracy's contention that we must not be forced to choose one pole or the
other. Christianity does not live by the "only" of Eliade or Barth. It is his purpose
to push beyond these oppositions to find a place where both can be embraced.
Both manifestation and proclamation are necessary to Christian religion.
The dialectic of the Christian religion is one in which the word does negate
any claim to a mode of participation which logically approaches identity or
existentially relaxes into complacency – a dialectic which, in fidelity to the
word, must radically negate all idolatries, yet a dialectic which implies,
includes and demands genuine manifestation. ... Christianity embraces
nature in and through its doctrines of creation – transformed, to be sure,
in the light of the doctrines of redemption and future eschatology. Indeed
Christianity celebrates nature in and through its doctrine of incarnation as
theophanous manifestation – understood, to be sure, only in the light of a
shattering, defamiliarizing cross and a transformative resurrection. (p.
214)
Tracy contends that a Christianity of word without real manifestation stands in
peril of becoming either fanatical or arid and cerebral and abstract. Barth
understood this dealing at length with the doctrine of creation. Manifestation,
Tracy argues, is always the enveloping presupposition of the erupting word of
proclamation.
Manifestation envelops every word from beginning to end, even as it
allows itself to be transformed by the shattering paradigmatic power of the
proclaimed word. But manifestation returns, thus transformed, to reunite
even the secular, the historical, the temporal, the self with the whole
disclosed in nature and the cosmos. A Christianity without a sense of
radical participation in the whole – that sense which Schleiermacher
named the "feeling of absolute dependence," which others name a
fundamental trust in the very worthwhileness of existence – is a
Christianity that has lost its roots in the human experience of God's
manifesting and revealing presence in all creation, in body, in nature, in
spirit, not only in history. (p. 215)
The powerful, eruptive word of proclamation that defamiliarizes us from the
world is yet itself rooted in the enveloping cosmos.
To speak Christian eschatological language is to speak a language where
the religious power of the whole has entered time and history in the
decisive proclamation of this particular word and event, where that power
has freed the "profane" to become the "secular" and has liberated the
present and the future from the exclusive hold of the sacred time of past
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 20 of 20
origin by empowering history and ethical action with religious power. (p.
216)
Tracy points to the sacramental view of Catholic Christianity:
Nature and the secular become sacrament in their transformationsublation by the word, the "prime sacrament" and decisive manifestation
or representation named Jesus Christ. There can be no negation of the
cosmos or nature. Indeed a sacrament is nothing other than a decisive
representation of both the events of proclaimed history and the
manifestations of the sacred cosmos. (p. 216)
If the kerygmatic power of the word in the sacrament is lost, the sacrament
becomes magic. But if the paradigmatic power of real manifestation is lost, the
word alone will not meet the deepest needs and satisfy the deepest longings of the
human heart. Christianity then becomes a righteous rigorism of duty and
obligation.
How can we hold on to both poles and not lose the necessary experience of either
manifestation or proclamation? Tracy believes it can be accomplished but only a
radically ecumenical Christianity can accomplish it.
By themselves, Protestant, Orthodox and Catholic Christianity seem
trapped in historically hardened emphases: unable alone to restore the
power of both proclamation and manifestation in a manner that does not
seem some uneasy compromise. ... This demand for both manifestation
and proclamation is incumbent upon all Christians who recognize the
reality of Jesus Christ as the Christian classic, i.e., as the decisive representation in both word and manifestation of our God and our
humanity. Thus will Christocentric Christians recognize that the
paradigmatic Christ event discloses the religious power of both
manifestation and proclamation ... both Christian manifestation and
proclamation are ultimately rooted in that God whose radical otherness in
freedom posits itself to us as the radical immanence of an all-pervasive,
defamiliarizing, shattering, enveloping love in cosmos, in history, in the
self. (p. 218)
Part II: Interpreting the Christian Classic
Tracy applies the methodological argument of Part I to a distinctively Christian
systematic theology in Part II. He has argued that there is a distinctly religious
classic among the other classics generally recognized and he contends that that
classic status means that the religious classic too has public status. Such religious
classics are “expressions from a particular tradition that have found the right
mode of expression to become public for all intelligent, reasonable and
responsible persons.” (p. 233). He asks then what are the classic texts, events,
symbols, images and persons in a tradition. While in the Christian tradition there
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 21 of 20
are several candidates for classic status, there is one which is the norm of all
others and which provides the focus for understanding God, self, others, society,
history, nature and the whole from a Christian perspective: the event and person
of Jesus Christ. Tracy claims,
One need not be a believer in Christianity to accord it (and thereby its
central, paradigmatic, classic event) authentically religious status: a
manifestation from the whole by the power of the whole. (p. 234)
Christology is the attempt to respond through some interpretation to the event of
Jesus Christ in one’s own situation.
…The Christian interpretation of this classic event recognizes in some
present experience of the event – more precisely, in the claim disclosed in
that event (paradigmatically in experiencing that event in manifestation
and proclamation) as an event from God and by God’s power. To speak
religiously and theologically of the Christ event is ultimately to speak of an
event from God. )p. 234)
The Jesus remembered by the tradition is experienced in the present mediated
through the word, sacrament and action. Jesus remembered as the Christ is the
experience of the presence of God’s own self.
The expression “The event of Jesus Christ” means for the Christian
tradition…that we recognize Jesus in the Christ event as the person in
whom God’s own self is decisively re-presented as the gift and command of
love. The always already reality of a graced world is made present again
decisively, paradigmatically, classically as event in Jesus Christ. The event,
as re-presentative of reality always already present to us as human beings,
is present again as the decisive that it happens. The event as command is
also present as the not-yet-actualized reality internal for each person and
for all history responding to that one decisive event of God. (p. 234)
Tracy will now examine this position to see if it is a relatively adequate
interpretation of the event and, secondly, to understand how this interpretation
differs from alternative interpretations.
The key for the interpretation of the event of Jesus Christ must be the claim
exerted in the present by that event as the claim that it happens now.
© Grand Valley State University
�
Dublin Core
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Richard A. Rhem Collection
Description
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Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar.
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Clergy--Michigan
Reformed Church in America
Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.)
Religion
Interfaith worship
Sermons
Sound Recordings
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Rhem, Richard A.
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<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a>
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives.
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Kaufman Interfaith Institute
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English
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KII-01
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1981-2014
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References
David Tracy. The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism, 1998
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RA-4-19980101
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1998-01-01
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The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism
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Richard A. Rhem
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eng
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Book Review created, delivered, or published by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on January 1, 1998 entitled "The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism ", on the book The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism , written by David Tracy. Tags: Theology, Pluralism, Truth, Meaning, Sacred, Religious Tradition, Nature of God, Nature of Religion, Ecumenical, Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Mircea Eliade, David Tracy. Scripture references: David Tracy. The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism, 1998.
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David Tracy
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Ecumenical
Karl Barth
Meaning
Mircea Eliade
Nature of God
Nature of Religion
Pluralism
Religious Tradition
Sacred
Theology
Truth