What is Constructive Theology?

Histories, Methodologies, and Perspectives

Marion Grau, Jason Wyman, Marion Grau, Jason Wyman

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780567695185
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Theology

This essential introduction to contemporary constructive theology charts the most important disciplinary trends of the moment. It gives a historical overview of the field and discusses key hermeneutical and methodological concerns. The contributors apply a constructive perspective to a wide range of approaches, ranging from biblical hermeneutics and postcolonial studies to comparative, political, and black theology. What is Constructive Theology? shows how diverse and interdisciplinary constructive theology can be by exploring key themes in the field. The contributors explore the porous boundaries between Christianity and other religions, reflect on contextual, liberation and constructive theologies from Africa and from Black British perspectives, explore the connection between embodiment, epistemology and hermeneutics, and take a constructive approach to the dangerous memories and theologies of colonial histories in Belgium and Native Americans in the United States. This sampler of the field will help you rethink theologies and find constructive alternatives.

Part I

Reflecting on the History, Genre, and Theory of Constructive Theology

1

Constructive Theology: History, Movement, Method

Jason Wyman

“Constructive” theology has worked its way into the common parlance of theological scholarship so subtly and over such a period of time that many haven’t noticed how novel of a term and approach to theology constructive theology actually is. But, as everything else, the term, and its presuppositions, has a discrete history and carries with it many implicit and explicit expectations, themes, concerns, and communities. I have written a full narrative and analysis of the history of constructive theology elsewhere.¹ This chapter will incorporate much of that narrative but will specifically dive deeper into the developments and ironies that have led to the contemporary character of constructive theology, especially as it has negotiated interdisciplinarity, advocacy and liberation, and emergent crises in theology and in the world throughout the past fifty years.

Three major periods in the history of constructive theology can be helpfully identified: proto-constructive theology, constructive theology proper as codified by the Workgroup on Constructive Theology, and full-fledged and increasingly widespread constructive theology as it is done at present. Many might be surprised to learn that constructive theology as it is done today has such a short history that is in many ways so well defined, and ultimately that a relatively circumscribed tradition and method can be identified and described, even as constructive theology has often defined itself against traditions and prescriptions about how to do theology. Adding to the confusion, as the adjective “constructive” has become more accepted—there were times when it was hotly contested and fiercely resisted at theological hubs, and even today controversies and struggles arise as to whether theologians and their appointments can be in “constructive theology”—it has been used in such adjunct ways as “constructive” systematic theology,² “constructive dogmatic theology,”³ “constructive Christianity,” and at times as a substitute catchall for liberationist theologies and theologies that explicitly use context and identity as starting points, rejecting the abstracted theologizing from nowhere characteristic of so much historical theology. Constructive theology and constructive theologians have added to this ambiguity as the term “constructive” itself was worked out historically by theologians developing it, who had been trained in “systematic” theology and who encountered resistance to use of the term, or struggled to perceive what made constructive theology unique as it was coming into its own.

The term “constructive” has, in fact, gotten attached to many different theological projects with wildly different ends in mind. “Constructive” is a nondescript enough term, in many ways, and yet attractive enough in its ambiguity to be easily applied to things that may even in some deeper way be contradictory. Yet, constructive theology, as I use it here, and as has been solidified into a unique tradition, ultimately means something very specific. To begin with a basic point, self-naming is important, and whether the word “constructive” was chosen with much deliberation and reflection or not, the growth of the preference for, and at times insistence upon, doing “constructive” theology points to a development important enough to be named. Words and terms that are so persistent can’t be easily overlooked or simply said to be a mostly superficial makeover of older traditions. Constructive theology implies a set of assumptions that took some time to cohere and come to light. It also implies differentiation from other ways of doing theology. In this case, the word “constructive” has most obviously replaced the terms “systematic” or “dogmatic,” two more historically accepted modes of doing theology, and therefore must in some way be distinguishing itself from, and defining itself against, those modes. As a preliminary indication of what I argue distinguishes these ways of doing theology, dogmatic concerns itself with dogma, that is, what it sees as what Christians should confess to believe, and is ultimately responsible to the church itself and the church’s standing before God;⁴ systematic theology, arising out of the emerging modernist insistence on rationality and science in the 1600s, seeks to describe Christianity and its major doctrines in a rigorous, coherent, ultimately logically sound whole;⁵ and finally, constructive theology emphasizes the contingent, transigent, impermanent, and ultimately constructed reality of any theological speech, insisting on foregrounding the imaginatively constructive work that is truly at the heart of theology.⁶ Constructive theology certainly owes a debt to systematic theology and dogmatic theology and is related to them. Nevertheless, it does theological work in a novel way that is rooted in but distinct from either systematic theology or dogmatic theology.

All the same, constructive theology didn’t emerge from nowhere and all at once. It took decades for an amorphous emergent mode of doing theology to become a category, a trend, and ultimately an established and recognized theological community. Following its history, as it emerged and came to reinforce specific assumptions, sources, and ways of doing theology, helps to bring into focus the method that defines it as well as the historical needs and crises to which it responds. Further, understanding the history of constructive theology allows constructive theologians in the present to survey the “from whence” and the “to where” of constructive theological work today.

As a brief overview, theologians start to explore and consider the adjective “constructive,” in limited ways, in the early twentieth century, with the earliest uses being around 1902.⁷ An unknown figure named James Ten Broeke offered a book-length treatment of construction as a mode of doing theology in 1914.⁸ That discourse grew, unevenly, until Bernard Eugene Meland solidified the term “constructive theology” as applied to his own multifaceted and difficult-to-pin-down work. In 1975, a group of theologians centered at Vanderbilt University Divinity School in Nashville formed what they called the “Workgroup on Constructive Theology,” which pooled shared theological and ethical concerns and ended up codifying an approach to doing theology without ever explicitly naming what that methodology was. Through four iterations, which have included around one hundred leading Christian theologians and ethicists, it has employed an interdisciplinary and social-justice/activist/advocacy oriented methodology that has come to define constructive theology as a movement, both inside and outside the workgroup, wherever constructive theologians are found.

Proto-constructive Theology

Use of the term “proto-constructive” points to the fact that many of those who were responsible for the creation of what would become constructive theology were not so self-consciously. Like most meaningful movements, the motivation for founding constructive theology was not to create a new method of doing theology, but rather to engage significant cultural and intellectual shifts in the period in which it emerged. Repeated frequently throughout the history of constructive theology—and even through the present—is an attempt to negotiate a “paradigm shift” in the way the world is understood and engaged with. What makes these theologians and their theologies fall within the purview of the history of constructive theology is that they introduce the sustained use of the concept of construction to the project of theology, and they heavily inform and put in place the basic assumptions of what constructive theology becomes and is.

The first use of “constructive theology” occurs in a book published in 1902 out of Oxford, an unlikely place that nonetheless relates to what constructive theology becomes and helps as an initial foray into discovering the origin of constructive theology. It’s an unlikely place because, barring very few exceptions, constructive theology has been a predominantly US tradition. The book, titled Contentio Veritatis: Essays in Constructive Theology, was put together by six tutors at Oxford University, with Hastings Rashdall being the one who would become the most well known. As the tutors put it in their introduction,

Among younger men and women of fair education, there is a widespread unsettlement and uneasiness. There is a vague feeling that the old Orthodoxy is impossible; people suspect that much that was once commonly believed is no longer tenable, but they do not know how much, nor by what it is to be replaced … The most [this] volume can do is call attention to the need of such a reconstruction, to show that the need is felt, and to indicate some of the lines which they believe it ought to take place.⁹

Anticipating later constructive theology, the book is done collaboratively, is built upon a structure of examining the current state of different theological doctrines and suggesting potential reconstructions, and is future focused and self-avowedly limited in its scope of finality. In the sole review of Contentio Veritatis, William Sanday, a theologian at Oxford, refers to the novelty of the term “constructive theology,” writing,

Two things have struck me more particularly in their book … these are on the one hand a pleasing candor which gives the impression of great sincerity, and on the other hand a certain cheerful optimism which is everywhere more sensible of gain than of loss and which does not take pleasure in the mere act of destroying. The essays are described as “in constructive theology,” and they really are constructive … “Constructive theology,” as the name implies, is a process and not a finished work. “Essays in Constructive Theology” is an appropriate title. What we have been discussing are essays or attempts, some of which really build—and the building has beauty as well as strength.¹⁰

It doesn’t appear that the Oxford tutors or Sanday pursued developing “constructive theology” as a new field or movement in any sustained way, and it’s unclear how the term made the jump to the United States. Interestingly, in any case, Rashdall was connected with Borden Parker Bowne,¹¹ an important theologian in the United States who is most well known for founding Boston personalism, and Sanday published, and his work was frequently reviewed in the American Journal of Theology, published by the University of Chicago and which would later become known as the Journal of Religion. Bernard Eugene Meland, an influential theologian at the University of Chicago Divinity School, as will be related later, is in many ways the first person to concretize the term “constructive theology” as it is used today.

The American Journal of Theology also includes the next clear indication of the emergence of constructive theology in its prototypical form, and the first in the United States, five years after the publication of Contentio Veritatis. Herbert Alden Youtz, a theologian who studied with Borden Parker Bowne and taught at Auburn Seminary, in 1907, wrote a review of Clarence Augustine Beckwith’s book The Realities of Christian Theology: An Interpretation of Christian Experience titled “Current Essays in Constructive Theology,” in which he observed,

Current essays in theology may be roughly classified in two groups: first those which are seeking for an “essence,” a “finality,” or an “ultimate principle of unity” which expresses an unresolvable quantum in all religion, or “essential religion” seen its lowest terms; second those which take current religious doctrines and try to translate them into the terms of the thought-life of today. They ask: What is the meaning or “reality” of this or that doctr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introducing Methods in Constructive Theology
• Part I Reflecting on the History, Genre, and Theory of Constructive Theology
• Part II Body, Text, Interdisciplinarity, and Practice
• Part III Postcolonial Reconstructions
• Contributors
• Index
• Copyright Page