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Fides Quaerens Intellectum: Reflections Towards an Explorative International Journal of Systematic Theology Volume 8 Number 1 January 2006 Fides Quaerens Intellectum: Reflections towards an Explorative Theology1 HANS G. ULRICH* Translated by Brian Brock2 Abstract: The postmodern critique has rendered traditional justifications of the practice of research incredible. Further, the status of theological research, in which ‘the discovery of new facts’ or the like is at best ambiguous as an aim, must be under question. This article argues that the aim of theological research is to discover what life lived as if theological claims were true might look like. What is theological research? New and old questions In the tangle of scientific discussions, when research emphases are being established and research plans implemented, the question regularly recurs of what is to be considered research. But how earnestly and in what respect do we ask what the ‘practice of research’ means or what are the ways to research within which the different disciplines move and exist – when we no longer talk as if there is a monolithic ‘logic of research’ or a coherent theory of research? Scientific theory to date has hardly begun a (public) discourse in which the formulation of questions and theories has been tested by correspondence or coherence criterion. The description of this understanding of science has been described by Paul Feyerabend, who held up for inspection the science of pluralism as his method.3 But above all, it is Jean-François Lyotard who has successfully * Theologische Fakultät, Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Kochstrasse 6, D – 91054 Erlangen, Germany. 1 Originally published as Hans Georg Ulrich, ‘Fides quaerens intellectum: Überlegungen zu einer explorativen Theologie’, in Karl F. Grimmer, ed., Theologie im Plural. Fundamentaltheologie – Hermeneutik – Kirche – Ökumene – Ethik; Joachim Track zum 60. Geburstag (Frankfurt am Main: Otto Lembeck, 2001). 2With thanks for clarifications to Martin Wendte. 3 Paul K. Feyerabend, Wider den Methodenzwang. Skizze einer anarchistischen Erkenntnistheorie (German edition pending: Frankfurt am Main, 1976). English translation © 2006 Brian Brock. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2006, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA. Fides Quaerens Intellectum 43 indicated that the prioritization of knowledge inquired after, and the way this knowledge is legitimated, is based on the criterion of what is marketable.4 The leading master story of modern research, that we are on the way to the emancipation of humanity, can no longer legitimate the direction of research after Lyotard. In addition, narratives or metanarratives of scientific advance, such as Thomas Kuhn’s description developed in the Structure of Scientific Revolutions,5 do not comprehend many fields and dynamic processes of scientific activity, although people still often speak of paradigms and paradigm shifts. Of course, against Lyotard’s analysis one will want to establish that at least the framing story of technological progress, in which knowledge is produced, still legitimates the search for knowledge to a great extent. Current scientific narratives (and also the problem of the interpretation of such narratives) will not, of course, be analysed here.6 Nor will past discourses and past eras be recalled or even evoked, although the time may be right to consider what of the scientific theoretical discourse has penetrated theology in the last twenty years. One line of theologians, not least of whom is Joachim Track, has engaged in this scientific discourse and also embraced language theory – not to show that theology is also science, by including themselves within scientific theories (although these strategies existed), but to describe theology with their own scientific and linguistic theoretical reflections.7 Thus in Joachim Track’s investigation,8 which we will follow up here, we find a weighty contribution to the understanding of theological language and religious speech, in reference to the theological question of the generation of knowledge in the medium of language. One way forward is to show from the perspective of this history of research how we stand today. Here, however, we will pursue the question of how and in what way we – in theology – should consider formulating anew the question of what theological science and theological research is, can be, or should be. At the moment, the reason for urgency is that theology must formulate research aims or knowledge production in a situation of widespread changes in the context of university research, and above all in a radically changing context of what one calls the ‘scientific community’.9 4 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition. A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). 5Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 6 Aspects of this are found in Jürgen Mittelstraß, Die Häuser des Wissens. Wissenschaftstheoretische Studien (Franfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998). 7 See especially Oswald Bayer, Friedrich Mildenberger, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Gerhard Sauter, Dietrich Ritschl. 8 Joachim Track, Sprachkritische Untersuchungen zum christlichen Reden von Gott (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1976). 9 Compare with the most recent discussion of Christoph Hubig, ed., Unterwegs zur Wissensgesellchaft. Grundlagen-Trends-Probleme (Berlin: Sigma, 2000). English translation © 2006 Brian Brock Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2006 44 Hans G. Ulrich The language of research and knowledge production is ubiquitous, a fact that is rarely questioned in theology. We speak of exegetical research, of Pentateuch research or Pauline research, or of further differentiated research areas. This is similarly true of the other subdivisions of theological research. Self-evidently, what is called research coincides with and overlaps with other areas of research in multifaceted ways – and so the question should be posed whether there is within all these areas something which can be called a special theological research – or whether there is a form of research which needs theological reflection in order to be aptly characterized.10 That scientific theory, like language theory, has enclosed theological reflection is largely beyond dispute.11 There is therefore every reason to ask about a theological understanding of research, and especially to ask about a theological understanding of theological research. Research – ars inveniendi The extensive discourse of scientific theory about research has spawned distinctions which have helped to develop a description of what is allowed to pass as research, one which is already at first sight not without theological explosiveness. The relevant difference within this description can be said to be between searching and demonstration, as Kuno Lorenz has indicated in his article ‘Research’.12 The first definition of research is the investigating of reality so that we ‘become aware’. The other is describing (to safeguard its validity), so that what we have ascertained becomes comprehensible (learning in order to teach).13 One can relate 10 This question must not immediately be turned into the question of whether there is a specifically theological method. Nor must we immediately take up the old question of the relation between theology and the sciences. The initial question, once we are directly in view of the problem – of what is to be called theological research in exegesis, church history, or systematic and practical theology – is used in a reflected, perhaps theoretically comprehensive way, to direct attention to the question of whether the word ‘research’ is reflected in one or more of these senses, and whether, therefore, resolution of the questioning will perhaps depend on theoretical comprehension of the concept. 11 This is articulated in very informative ways in the treatise from Joachim Track, Sprachkritische Untersuchungen zum christlichen Reden von Gott. His language theory is a case of a language critique approach called ‘modified nominalism’ which implies a theological reflection: ‘God and experience are heard together. We are discovering who God is in immediate experiences, which will be enabled and created through God’s history of disclosure. Here our language-critical proposition is affirmed once again by theological reflection; that in immediate experience the understanding and reality of God is at risk’ (pp. 312f.). 12 Kuno Lorenz, ‘Forschung’, in Enzyklopädie Philosophie und Wissenschaftstheorie, vol. I (Mannheim: Metzler, 1980), pp. 663f. Compare also Jürgen Mittelstraß, Die Häuser des Wissens. 13 ‘This is not identified in the mode of producing demonstrations by the logic of coherence (with making systematic equaling making rational, understanding knowledge as English translation © 2006 Brian Brock Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2006 Fides Quaerens Intellectum 45 this difference to the traditional differentiation between the ars inveniendi and the ars iudicandi: research is in the first instance about locating or discovery, and not a single activity of proving, justifying and presenting.14 Research is either the locating of and getting to know objects, the discovery of reality, or representing and converting into terms of the known that which is given. Research aims at discovery, it aims at what is not yet given, at what is not yet identified as given. These reasons open up the problem of a description of research in which theology has an
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