Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology

by David Tracy

In Blessed Rage for Order, David Tracy examines the cultural context in which theological pluralism emerged. Analyzing orthodox, liberal, neo-orthodox, and radical models of theology, Tracy formulates a new 'revisionist' model. He considers which methods promise the most certain results for a revisionist theology and applies his model to the principal questions in contemporary theology, including the meanings of religion, theism, and of christology.

Genres: Theology, Religion, Philosophy

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

David William Tracy was an American Catholic theologian and priest. He was the Andrew Thomas Greeley and Grace McNichols Greeley Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Catholic Studies at the University of Chicago Divinity School. In 2020 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

Reviews

[Marc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tracy is always to be praised for his lucidity in a very difficult field where analytic philosophy and fundamental theology meet. This book is relatively clear, though difficult in key sections. His insights for a revisionist theology and his integration of the process philosophy and theology as a fulcrum for that theology have grounded much subsequent work in the North American and European theological context. His laying out of the fivetypes of contemporary theologies in Christianity (orthodox, liberal, neo-orthodox, radical, and (his own) revisionist, is quite helpful in distinguishing his method from the others. His statement of five theses of revisionist theology and his subsequent analysis of the implicaitons form the core of the book. His efforts demonstrate the insights that have emerged about meaning in a contemporary context, about the interpretation of texts with a hermeneutical eye, and the importance of a method in theology that respects the irreducible pluralism of thought in which we all live and move today. His blunt calls for an intellectual reassessment of the cognitive import of traditional Christian doctrines, symbols, and foundational stories is a strong one and deserves to be heard.

Clearly no fan of fundamentalism, he is sufficiently critical of efforts in the church that do not meet the criteria he sets forth and he is usually humble enough to admit the limitations of his work. There is a tendency to overstate the importance of his effort at times, however. He often admits of rival philosophical applications and models of revisionist theology in the abstract, but is never afraid to take them on in the concrete. The scope of his footnotes denote the breadth of his research. This is a major contribution to fundamental theology, but it is also somewhat dated. The use of "revisionist" is a term that is no longer one that endears, and his analysis of eschatological theologies as simply a subcategory of neo-orthodox, while perhaps true in 1975, does not seem to tell the full story today. However, subsequent works have demonstrated Tracy's intellectual rigor in growing with the thought of the field and this work is to be commended as a helpful exposition of the "spadework" (his term) necessary to do fundamental Christian systematic theology today.

[Jack Hartjes · Rating 5 out of 5]

For Tracy Christian theology is the correlation of the results of the critical investigation of common human experience and the equally critical investigation of the "Christian fact," the texts, symbols, images, and practices of the Christian tradition. Unlike some, for whom correlation means giving Christian answers to secular questions, Tracy believes both sides have answers and questions. There is a religious dimension in common human experience which Tracy describes as the experience of limits--intellectual, ethical, aesthetic, etc. Limit experiences push us beyond literal language. This is a quality of both secular and religious literature. A passage from this book that I like: "...our common experience testifies to the need for ... fictions, myths, images, stories, and symbols. ... we dismiss the seriousness of such fictions at the presumably unwelcome price of impoverishing our own humanity. A clear grasp of that fact is the first step needed to allow one to be willing to listen once again to the Christian story of Jesus Christ." This is heavy reading, and I didn't understand it all; but Tracy is a thinker worth pursuing.

[Shaun Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel like I should give an explanation here for my rating of three. Within Blessed Rage for Order, Tracy gives an excellent summary of revisionist theology. While I acknowledge Tracy's brilliance and his engaging treatment within these pages, my theological sympathies are more on the Barthian and postliberal side, and so I have less concern with "relevance" and a suspicion of correlation as a theological method (though I, with Hans Frei, am ok with certain types of ad hoc correlation). So, I gave this work three stars.