The Irony of Theology

Abstract

Every so often a book appears on the intellectual scene that reopens basic questions about the character of a scholarly discipline. Thomas Kuhn's work in the philosophy of science was such a text, so too the work of Alasdair MacIntyre for moral philosophy, Michael Foucault in the human sciences, and more recently Charles Taylor on Western conceptions of the self. All of these ventures pose the question of the nature of a mode of inquiry by tracing its historical development. Yet what is most fundamentally under examination in each case is rationality itself. Donald Wiebe's recent book, The Irony of Theology and the Nature of Religious Thought, undertakes an analogous project. Wiebe reopens the question of the nature and status of theology and religious thought with respect to debates about rationality. In this review I want to highlight the main features of Wiebe's argument and engage him around his central claims about rationality. My contention, in brief, is that Wiebe's account of rationality is problematic because he does not adequately differentiate the distinctive claims of practical reason from the other modes of thought he isolates. This makes it difficult on his theory to understand the task of theology, or, for that matter, any humanistic and hermeneutical inquiry. Yet I also contend that Wiebe has properly isolated