confessional tradition (e.g., “law and gospel” for Lutherans) may be difficult to challenge or question from within that tradition in cases where, in light of historical experience, it becomes dated or ethically problematic.
A second sense of the phrase “confessional theology” is distinctively modern, and derives from H. Richard Niebuhr’s The Meaning of Revelation. In that work, he employs the term “confessional theology” to articulate a theological method that accepts the cultural and historical relativism of modern social sciences and yet affirms a distinctive Christian “revelation.” According to that understanding, theology does its proper work when it articulates the language and view of the world that characterizes the Christian faith in all its particularity. Niebuhr’s confessional method, however, recognizes that “self-defense is the most prevalent error in all thinking and perhaps especially in theology and ethics.” Therefore, Niebuhr advocates a theology that concerns itself with finding the communally shared affirmations of Christians. Niebuhr concisely summarizes his method: “[W]e can proceed only by stating in simple, confessional form what has happened to us in our community, how we came to believe, how we reason about things and what we see from our point of view.” Although this use of the term “confessional theology” is Niebuhr’s, there are in this respect clear lines of affinity between Niebuhr’s method and that of Friedrich Schleiermacher.
Although not always labeled confessional theology, Niebuhr’s perspective has wide influence in current theology. Many of Niebuhr’s students (James M. Gustafson and Gordon Kaufmann are two clear examples) approach theological reflection in ways that have deep continuities with Niebuhr. The current emphasis on unapologetic particularity in Christian ethics (e.g., Stanley Hauerwas) stands in a direct line of descent from Niebuhr. Narrative theologies often find at least part of their inspiration in Niebuhr. Not all, of course, would meet equally with Niebuhr’s approval, but they do share fundamental impulses that are in common with his direction.
More broadly, the question of relativism and particularity so clearly stated by Niebuhr lives on in discussions of foundationalism and nonfoundationalism, relativism and objectivism, and postmodernism and theology. Although George Lindbeck, Hans Frei, and William Placher do not use the term “confessional,” many of the same issues lie at the heart of their work.
MARTIN L. COOK
Bibliography
Willard Dow Allbeck, Studies in the Lutheran Confessions.
Nestor Beck, The Doctrine of Faith.
Arthur C. Cochrane, ed., Reformed Confessions of the Sixteenth Century.
Martin L. Cook, The Open Circle: Confessional Method in Theology.
James M. Gustafson, Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective, 2 vols.
H. Richard Niebuhr, The Meaning of Revelation; Faith on Earth: An Inquiry into the Structure of Human Faith (Richard R. Niebuhr, ed.).
Douglas Ottati, Meaning and Method in H. Richard Niebuhr’s Theology; Hopeful Realism: Reclaiming the Poetry of Theology; Jesus Christ and Christian Vision.
Cross-Reference: Narrative Theology, Soteriology, Systematic Theology, Theological Method.
CONVERSION (See SOTERIOLOGY.)
CORRELATION
Theological methods of correlation represent one set of options available within modern Christian thought to meet the permanent obligation upon all theologians to express for their own particular time and place the contemporary meaning of Christian faith.
Distinctive to theologies of correlation are the recognition that Christian tradition and contemporary culture are theologically co-determinative, and the insistence that the two must somehow be made to stand in a relationship that preserves their independence as well as their interdependence. There are, therefore, two conditions that must be satisfied by any theologically adequate method of correlating the claims of historical Christianity and the shared experience of contemporary culture; namely, the autonomy condition and the reciprocity condition.
Theologians of correlation are inclined to seek their theologically legitimating antecedent in the attempts by Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) to repair the fracture in modern culture that resulted from the unresolved conflict between defenders of the older orthodox “supranaturalism,” whose theology had become increasingly anachronistic, and champions of the newer autonomous critical reasoning, who were effectively left with no option but to embrace an increasingly anti-Christian “naturalism.” In response to this stalemate, which he feared would lead both to the intellectual starvation of Christian faith and to the impoverishment of spiritual values within the wider culture. Scheiermacher called for a permanent alliance between historical Christianity and modern learning. According to the terms of this treaty, the interdependence of faith and learning was to be established, but not at the expense of their individual autonomy, so that “faith does not hinder learning, nor learning exclude faith.” Just how to effect the terms of such an accord was Schleiermacher’s dilemma. In current religious thought, the use of correlation as a methodological strategy is preeminently associated with the name of Protestant theologian Paul Tillich and, to a lesser extent, with that of Roman Catholic theologian David Tracy.
Despite differences in detail, their methods of correlation can be described as examples of a postliberal strategy that aims to meet the challenges of modernity, while steering a course between the modernist temptation to identify the Christian message with the dominant ideologies of the day and the counter-modernist temptation to evade the demands of the present, either by retreating to some idealized Christian past or by surrendering to some authoritarian version of Christianity.
Paul Tillich characteristically spoke of Christian theology as a correlation between certain “questions” implied in an analysis of human existence and the “answers” implied in an analysis of the symbols in which the Christian message is expressed. This question-answer schema defines the structure of his Systematic Theology: The question implied in the concept of “reason” is correlated with the answer implied in the symbol “revelation”; the question of “being,” with the answer “God”; the question of “existence,” with the answer “the Christ”; the question of “life,” with the answer “the Spirit”; and the question of “history,” with the answer “the Kingdom of God.”
Tillich’s account of his method has been subjected to exhaustive critical discussion, much of which has concentrated on the adequacy of the question-answer schema. On the one hand, some critics have doubted whether a question from one realm of discourse can ever be appropriately answered from a different realm. A specifically philosophical question can be answered, if at all, only in properly philosophical terms, such that a specifically theological answer could never be correctly correlated with a philosophical question without violating “the autonomy condition” of an adequate correlative relation.
Despite the impression that he himself sometimes left, Tillich’s method of correlation was not intended as a general theory of relations between philosophy and theology. His question-answer schema was instead meant to apply only to certain sorts of theologically significant philosophical questions; namely, to questions that push up against the limits of human reason and experience, questions that Tillich called “ultimate questions.” Among such questions could be counted the Leibnizian puzzle, “Why is there something and not nothing?” Even if these questions should originate within philosophy, they are not capable of being answered within purely philosophical terms. Although some philosophers would hold that they are consequentially
