David Tracy’s Theological Missteps 

The Catholic Church in the United States has lost a great theologian with the recent death of David Tracy on April 29. The list of academic awards he received over the course of his long life is impressive. Encomia have come from every quarter of the theological world, and rightly so. For Tracy was an extraordinary thinker—with a comprehensive theology that few could match.

While I did not know Tracy well, it was always clear to me that he was a kind gentleman. I first met him when I was a seminarian in Rome in the seventies and Tracy—already well known—came to the city to teach a short course at the Gregorian University. One evening, a few of us went out for dinner. Tracy, of course, was delightful company, amusing us with tales from Chicago’s Divinity School, and with the old (if not quite accurate) bon mot, “Chicago is just like New York . . . without Manhattan.” 

Since many have commented on the breadth of Tracy’s achievements, I will not enumerate his accomplishments here. Rather, I would like to reflect on what, in my judgment, were certain missteps in his thought, missteps that led his theology to be less productive for the Church than might otherwise have been the case. Over the years, I sent Tracy various books and articles wherein I (gently) criticized aspects of his thought. Even if he had responded, I doubt he would have found my objections conclusive.

What were these objections? And why did I think (and still think) that Tracy’s theological method moved in directions that failed to support adequately the assertions of Catholic theology?

Christianity has staked a great deal on the notion of revelation as the enduring, saving truth about Jesus Christ. One glance at the dogmatic constitution on revelation promulgated at Vatican II, Dei Verbum, indicates that there is something in the revealed word that Christians consider universal, normative, self-same, and eternal. To take one example, in paragraph 7: “God has seen to it that what He had revealed for the salvation of all nations would abide perpetually in its full integrity and be handed on to all generations.” 

“Identity,” “continuity,” and “perpetuity” are watchwords for the Christian doctrinal tradition, for the proposition that God has “revealed” himself. The philosophical climate in which Tracy wrote, on the other hand, was characterized by terms such as “incommensurability,” “historicity,” “plurality,” “otherness,” and “difference.” The challenge for Tracy was to reconcile universality and normativity with plurality and socio-cultural particularity. Indeed, the task for many theologians has been to argue for a stable and determinate doctrinal meaning over time while also recognizing a variety of social, cultural, philosophical, and linguistic milieux. This is the attempt to allow for “identity-in-difference,” for “unity-in-multiplicity.” One may find attempts to hold together this kind of tension in Catholic theologians such as Walter Kasper, Bernard Lonergan, Yves Congar, and Karl Rahner—as well as in various statements of the magisterium itself.

There is a theory of interpretation that supports this point of view—called reconstructive hermeneutics—which seeks the stable and determinate meaning of texts. So, for example, one can reconstruct the stable meaning of the great Christological affirmations of Nicaea and Chalcedon—although, since one always understands from a unique place in history, various nuances and shadings would necessarily be added. But there would be a fundamental identity between what was taught in the early Church and today. 

This theory of interpretation requires additional assumptions about the universality of human nature—the ontology undergirding reconstructive thinking. But just here’s the rub: For much contemporary philosophy, the entire Platonic-Thomistic-Kantian-Husserlian metaphysical tradition is illegitimate and naive. And if metaphysics itself is now deconstructed, the reconstructive theory of interpretation must also be abandoned. 

Hans-Georg Gadamer, one of the foremost philosophers of the twentieth century, argued that to make the distinction above, between a determinate meaning and a plurality of contexts, is philosophically foolish, failing to understand the radical critique of the metaphysical tradition initiated by Martin Heidegger. Heidegger had shown that the primordial basis of existence is temporality. Consequently, we need to accord full weight to historicity, finitude, provisionality, and contingency. Gadamer accused both classical and Enlightenment thinkers—in their search for ontological foundations—of having left unthought that which is philosophically decisive: historicity and its radical effects. Given this all-encompassing contingency and provisionality, one cannot argue for the recovery of a stable meaning of texts. One can only conclude that there exists a plurality of new and differing interpretations of a text’s meaning over time. Such plurality is demanded by the effects of history and human finitude. 

On its surface, this position sounds as if it borders on relativism. But Gadamer also offers something positive to interpretative theory, something attractive to Catholic theologians. Gadamer upheld the importance of tradition, in the sense that there exists a fundamental unity within history itself. So, he contended, the act of interpretation, while never a recovery of the past, is always a fusion of horizons, an admixture of past and present, allowing for new and different meanings to emerge. While championing plurality, Gadamer was not interested in defending random pluralism. For him, radical relativism is as erroneous as metaphysics, since relativism descends into undifferentiated chaos. 

Given Gadamer’s notion of interpretative plurality, what criteria does he offer for deciding between adequate and inadequate, true and false interpretations? Here, Gadamer developed the notion of the “claim” as a clue to truth. An interpretation is true not because it is commensurable with a stable and determinate textual meaning—as in reconstructive theory. Rather, what is true is what continues to exercise a claim on us in and through tradition and history. Truth emerges from the dialogical encounter with those texts that make a claim on us.

But is the concept of the “claim” a sufficient criterion for exorcising interpretative relativism? Can it establish validity in interpretation? These are the questions that have haunted Gadamer’s thought. For the notion of a perduring “claim” is elusive, making it difficult to distinguish truth from falsity. 

David Tracy, in several of his works, followed Heidegger and Gadamer in their deconstruction of metaphysics and of its interpretative corollary, reconstructive interpretation. Tracy accepted Heidegger’s emphasis on the encompassing nature of historicity and radical finitude. He opposed the search for the stable determinacy of meaning as well as the ontological grounds upon which this quest rests. 

At the same time, Tracy is more sensitive than Gadamer to the danger of relativism. And he asks if interpretative anarchism is not inevitable if one accepts the consequences of radical historicity. Indeed, like Gadamer, Tracy rejects random pluralism noting that the day must come when even the pluralist must utter his “Here I stand.” But how is the pluralist protected from anarchic pluralism?

Tracy again follows Gadamer by accenting the continuity of the “claim” exercised in and through tradition and history. But he recognized that the claim is a “soft” criterion for adequacy—and it also encourages an uncritical attitude toward the tradition. In his search for further criteria for the adjudication of conflicting interpretations, Tracy turned to Jürgen Habermas and his notion of liberative praxis as a supplementary warrant for establishing the relative adequacy of varying interpretations. With the dual criteria of the claim and emancipatory praxis, Tracy believed he could achieve a via media between reconstructive hermeneutics and the relativism of undifferentiated plurality. There would be a certain continuity and identity over time, but without compromising Heidegger’s deconstruction of metaphysics. 

But the crucial question looming over Tracy’s work is this: Is his interpretative theory capable of defending revelation as understood within the Catholic tradition?

Given Tracy’s reliance on Heidegger, Gadamer, and Habermas, his theology, in my judgment, is unable to defend theoretically the material continuity—the self-same identity—of the Christian faith over time. Continuity in Tracy’s thought seems merely formal in kind—the same classic text makes a claim on humanity, thereby releasing itself to further interpretation. But what about the material continuity of the doctrinal content of the faith—the claim that the Christian creed of the fourth century is the same as the creed of the twenty-first? Given his fundamental principles, is such material continuity possible? Or is it, from Tracy’s point of view, little more than a philosophically naive chimera? 

David Tracy thought intensely and well about many issues. And he may have concluded that if theology were to engage fruitfully with the three publics he insightfully identified—the academy, the church, and society at large—then the theology of revelation needed to be re-thought in light of Heideggerian and Gadamerian principles. 

But, in truth, adopting those principles in anything more than a highly qualified way would be ruinous for Christian faith and theology.

Requiescat in pace.