Looking for a New Equilibrium in Theology

Abstract

In my role as both reviews editor and now as editor for this journal over the course of the past seven years, I have been struck repeatedly by a trend in theological books and articles. Theology as a large-scale, systematic, and comprehensive endeavor would appear to be on the wane if not in outright decline. Instead, more and more theologians work on reflective interrogation of particular social realities and forms of human experience. In a postmodern environment in which grand metanarratives and large-scale synthetic projects have been discredited, much contemporary thinking moves in the direction of the local, the unique, the ironic, the embedded, the embodied, and the concretely limited. Universal claims are widely and even enthusiastically disparaged as reflecting hidden power agendas or failed epistemologies—except, ironically, perhaps, for the universal claim that all universals are pernicious and dead. The current cultural environment tends to looks askance upon the very project of ‘‘systematic’’ theology, particularly if it aims to make claims of a universal, transcontextual nature. Could theologians like Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Karl Rahner, and Hans Urs von Balthasar—white European males all—have been among the last specimens of a soon to be extinct breed of theologian? Depending upon one’s theological point of view and, perhaps, one’s social location, one will either celebrate or lament the end of such large-scale, comprehensive ways of doing theology. While laments of such a demise do sound forth from quarters, the multitude of enthusiastic voices for identity theology done in the mode of the particular have very nearly drowned them out. We seem to live in an era theologically in which the pendulum is swinging dramatically from the universal to the particular and from what Cornell West might call ‘‘deodorized’’ theology to theology done in relation to actual human bodies. In reflecting on these matters, Wilhelm Windelband’s century-old distinction between ‘‘nomothetic’’ and ‘‘ideographic’’ approaches to intellectual work comes to mind. In Windelband’s terms, a nomothetic approach to the study of some