Introduction

To many, linking the two words ‘critical’ and ‘theology’ will seem at best a tautology. After all, since Saint Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, theology has been regarded firmly and explicitly as second-order reflection, which is of necessity ‘critical’ if it is genuinely reflective. And yet there is a sense in which this understanding of theology—and this understanding of reflection—as in some sense one single identifiable discipline is very uncritical. Some of the more recent developments in narrative theology, for example, do not lend themselves to such a generalised analysis. A concern with hermeneutic theory, too, leads one at least to doubt the notion that ‘theology’ is ‘always’ the same sort of enterprise; one need only consider the diversity of ‘local’ theologies in Central America, or Black Africa, to recognise the possibility of there being many different interpretations of ‘theology’. David Tracy’s magisterial study, The Analogical Imagination (London 1981), in which the vexed question of the relationship between theology and cultural pluralism is addressed, is arguably the finest recent examination of these issues.

What I want to do in this short essay is to reflect upon our modern definition of ‘theology’, and to consider to what extent it is genuinely critical. To facilitate this, I will concentrate upon two texts: Tracy’s The Analogical Imagination; and John E. McPeck’s Critical Thinking and Education (Oxford 1981). In the light of their work, I will advance some ideas and suggestions concerning the way in which theologians might conceivably go about their tasks.