Interpreting the history of the Workgroup on Constructive Theology

Christian theology: An Introduction to its Traditions and Tasks

Soon after the meetings began, Ogden suggested that the group collaboratively write a textbook for the purpose of introducing a new generation of students to theology, both historically and in the present. As editors of the first book produced by the Workgroup, Hodgson and King played a directive role in forming the text and shaping its argument. King in an interview with the author expressed that for him, constructive theology meant

shifting the emphasis to the process rather than the product. When I think of systematic theology I think of completed works like Tillich or Barth. It’s all given to you as a system. They no doubt evolved it over time, and that is concealed in the outcome …. I think if we called it systematic theology students would think it’s an accomplished fact and all we have to do is assimilate it. If you call it constructive theology, it invites people into the process. ²

Both stressed the pedagogical function of constructive theological method. In a sense, showing one’s work is as important as showing one’s conclusions. Inviting others into the conversation, prioritizing and centering conversation and collaboration, including with the student or reader of constructive theology, epitomizes the early work of the Workgroup on Constructive Theology and all of the work that has flowed out of it.

Christian Theology: An Introduction to its Traditions and Tasks, the first of the three textbooks published by the Workgroup on Constructive Theology so far, is clearly historically situated as evidenced by its authors and their concerns. The Workgroup was only composed of “fifteen to twenty altogether” at the time, and the project is intended to offer both a look back at tradition and a way forward in theology that emerged over the course of several meetings of the Workgroup. Published in 1982, the book purposefully sets up constructive theology and the project of the Workgroup as being between tradition and the future. As the introduction explains,

The purpose of this work is twofold: (1) to introduce the student of theology to the Christian tradition by setting forth in brief compass its primary shape and substance, and (2) to pose the issues for systematic theology in the present day by showing how that tradition has been challenged and transformed under the pressures of modern thought. ⁴

Throughout the history of the Workgroup on Constructive Theology, a premium has been placed on the importance of finding new ways to teach theology. Even given that all three of these books are “textbooks,” the content is often programmatic. Nonetheless, the information contained in the book is identified as an introduction for the “student of theology” that places the big questions of systematic theology within the context of modern thought. Constructive theology has maintained a conflicted relationship with both liberal theology and liberation theology throughout its history. Many of the topics taken up in the first book are concerned with the problem of identifying a theological third way between traditional Christian theology and the challenges of modern skepticism, empiricism, naturalism, echoing its roots in theological liberalism.

In the introduction to the book, the editors explain that

Our intent is not to write a history of theology, though it will be evident that we attach great importance to the historical development of Christian thought. Neither are we attempting to set forth a full-blown systematic theology, though there is considerable consensus among the contributors to this volume about what the outstanding issues are. Certainly the book is not designed simply as a review of past accomplishments. In an important sense it is meant to set the agenda for future theological discussion. ⁵

The introduction here explicitly contrasts the book that arose out of the meetings of the Workgroup on Constructive Theology to systematic theology. The sense is not that constructive theology sees systematic theology as illegitimate. Rather, the concession is that while there is “considerable consensus” among the participants, a full-blown systematic theology is largely not possible. Further, and perhaps most importantly for the remaining history of the Workgroup, the book is meant “to set the agenda for future theological discussion.” Constructive theology is permanently in the mode of agenda-setting. It intends to propose a way of talking about theology. An important part of that purpose is to explore theologies that are persistently multiplicitous and incomplete. This sort of theological agenda, which maintains a case-by-case approach to theology and produces theology in conversation and cooperatively, is embodied in this first text, and is perhaps its most important contribution to the idea of theology being “constructive.”

A very interesting feature in this first book, which is maintained in the other two books as well, is that despite the rejection of doing theology systematically, the scheme of building theology around traditional theological doctrines is used. Again, in a somewhat apologetic mode, the editors write,

The way in which the book is laid out may initially strike the reader as anachronistic, for we have adopted a very traditional format: the loci of doctrine. This format … rested on assumptions that are now largely discredited, primarily the view of Christian truth as consisting of a deposit of discrete doctrines that have simply to be expounded by the theologian in order to become intelligible …. We have adopted the format as a useful way of making contact with the tradition, but within that structure we have attempted to show how fundamental a transformation the tradition has undergone. Were any one of us to set out to write an actual systematic theology this would not be the format we would employ. ⁶

Despite the protest, this format remains in the two later textbooks as well. Constructive theology maintains a traditional organization. While the individual theologians, in their own books outside the Workgroup on Constructive Theology, may dispense with the use of the loci for constructing their theologies, the cooperative group as a whole employs the organization every time. Constructive theology truly seeks to straddle tradition and contemporary exigencies. It maintains the importance of all of the traditional loci of theology; they all must continue to be dealt with by someone. But no single constructive theology is beholden to try to account for every locus. Constructive theology does not demand completeness or total coherence, as systematic theology does. Theology is constructed by a plethora of voices, each of which is affected by and seeks to affect the tradition. The loci of doctrine are preserved in an effort to critique and reconstruct Christian identity and witness. The loci offer recognizable guideposts around which to begin constructive and reconstructive theological work, even while recognizing the historically contingent nature of the set of doctrines as received and the possibility of reducing or expanding them in light of ongoing Christian history.

McFague, in the epilogue, brings attention to the group’s plurality and openness to ambiguity. She writes,

One distinctive note of the essays in this book is the insistence on pluralism and openness regarding what Christianity is and will be. The hesitancy this perspective engenders is seen in our reluctance or inability to engage in monumental systematic theologies as in the past. Theologians today are less certain than in the past about how to present a metaphysical systemization of Christian faith. ⁷

In fact, this is one of the most persistent and important delineations of what sets constructive theology apart. McFague acknowledges not only a resistance to systematic theology that pretends to be complete and authoritative, but even an “inability.” The grand systems of the past have increasingly become untenable, and our postmodern perspective is inherently suspicious of them. The new paradigm is plural and open. And for constructive theology, that is not a liability, but in fact a very good thing.

Reconstructing Christian Theology

The Workgroup, despite the success and popularity of its first textbook, faced a demographics problem, especially as liberation theology demanded that theology at large account for its historical complacence, or even support, for injustice that hurt large groups of people that were beginning to demand a voice in the theological academy. ⁸ The group had a “white maleness problem” and expanded its number to make up for it. ⁹ In an interview, Rebecca Chopp recounted,

I think [Sharon] Welch and [Catherine] Keller and Mark [Lewis Taylor] and I represented, most of us, people who were already committed to liberation theology or feminist theology by the time we were in grad school …. We were already doing theology from a more political practice perspective. Our teachers had already started talking about revisionist theology and cultural change. We were incorporating that from day one. ¹⁰

The Workgroup has a habit of dialoguing, collaboration, and production, and finally a period of relative nonactivity as the core members change and older members mentor or advise incoming early career theologians. In this case, the Workgroup took a strong swing toward liberation and political change being the heart of its message.

Chopp remarked, “People were having a hard time at their institutions …. When we were together we were really able to engage each other in the thought we wanted rather than having to defend our basic propositions. It was a feeling of moving forward.” Put another way, Mark L. Taylor explained in an interview,

The paradigm that was operative, the dominant thematic when I joined [the Workgroup], was still that there was a major paradigm shift underway. We were shifting into a postmodern era, and a conversation around whether this is a shift within modernity or a shift into postmodernity. And what does this shift mean for the tasks of doing theology? ¹¹

The Workgroup on Constructive Theology provided a place where like-minded theologians were able to develop interdisciplinary connections and progressive theological projects in a way that may not have been embraced in their home departments. The participants in the second instantiation of the Workgroup, which produced the second textbook, brought a concern for liberation, justice, and an acceptance of the cultural move from modernity to postmodernity. Their meetings continued at Vanderbilt University and Princeton Theological Seminary as the group began to formulate a second collaborative text.

The question over whether to do theology around the traditional doctrinal loci once again came up and was the center of serious debate. Though the framework is not as strong as in the first or the third textbook, the group in the end did generally stick to using loci to structure the book, although each locus is expressed by confrontation with a specific contemporary crisis in need of a theological response. Taylor related that “maybe we departed a bit too much from the doctrinal template and took contemporary problematics as our template, and various problematics paired with a doctrine. That was to give a larger role to the context outside of theology, and a larger role methodologically.” Taylor himself would come, in his own individual works, to abandon the doctrinal framework entirely. Nonetheless, the group, working collaboratively, ultimately decided to maintain doctrinal loci as a way of organizing books, though with the explicit connection between those loci and contextual crisis made.

Reconstructing Christian Theology has a very different tone from the other two books composed by the Workgroup on Constructive Theology. Published in 1994, its language is that of crisis. The tone is urgent and unrelenting. Seventeen contributors are listed as well as ten in the preface who were consulted but did not contribute writing, bringing the group up to around 27, more than double than at the time of Traditions and Tasks. The introduction to the book once again emphasizes the many different perspectives that contribute to the text. Rather than a method to unite them, this book claims a pedagogy of liberation/activism as the thing that holds the many different chapters together. ¹² Every chapter but one employs the structure of history, analysis, then reconstruction. Once again, within the context of pedagogy, the doctrines are emphasized: “This book is an invitation for students to delve into Christian theology’s deep and rich traditions, to truly engage in analysis and evaluation of those traditions and contemporary social challenges, and then to bring Christianity’s chief doctrines, reconfigured or reconstructed as hope-filled responses to … ‘crises’ of suffering.” ¹³ One of the dominant concerns of constructive theology is to mediate between history and contemporary challenges. It seems more comfortable this time around with employing the language of doctrine, even while ironically making the logic behind doctrines harder to follow; each doctrine is introduced not on its own, but rather as a subsumed concern in the context of various crises.

Asked what is important in the term “constructive,” Chopp pointed to the departure from methods that had dominated before, remarking,

there are all sorts of ways to have a system. The modern architectonic version is only one way …. I’m a little wary of the systematic thing, If one uses systematic theology to talk about what I call architectonic systems developed in modernity …. I think constructive theology was first a move of anti-essentialism. I think there was that notion in the 19th- and 20th-century assertion that there was there was a common experience. And it’s a rejection of that. We wanted theology to be about changing the world. We liked the mystical-political. The other thing that was constructive is that the very discourse itself was undergoing a real paradigm change. It was going to look a lot more like cultural anthropology and sociology meet religion.

Taylor remarked, “constructive emphasizes imaginative dynamism in all thinking …. [Theology’s] dynamism comes from people who occupy the world in different contextured ways.” With the second convening of the Workgroup on Constructive Theology and the textbook they produced, philosophical and interdisciplinary insights are put toward the purpose of changing the world through theology, and emphasizing the context of theology for the purpose of reconstructing theology in such a way that it changes culture and practice generally. The constructed nature of all theological assertions remains emphasized, the importance of imagination and construction maintained. But construction also enables constructive theology, in a more marked way than in the past, to participate in the critique and reconstruction of the world, itself seen as constructed.

Constructive Theology: A Contemporary Approach to Classical Themes

The third iteration of the Workgroup on Constructive Theology saw theologians being brought in who had observed the group throughout its history and sought to be a part of it. Again, after the second textbook was produced, the group went into a short period of dormancy. Paul F. Lakeland was a doctoral student of Hodgson’s and familiar with his Workgroup activity. Serene Jones was a feminist theologian well plugged into that community, which included Chopp, Catherine Keller, Kathryn Tanner, and many others who had participated frequently in the Workgroup. Former group leadership proposed that Jones and Lakeland be inducted into the group, on the stipulation that they would be co-conveners and co-editors of a third textbook. The work of the newly reconvened group would try to recover some of the theological tradition highlighted in the first book combined with the justice sensibility of the second book.

Lakeland recounted that

I think our approach was very different, just in the way we structured each section …. It wasn’t systematic. It was intended to be structured in such a way that you could see the dialogue and difference going on among and between theologians as they worked. And that was very deliberate. So anyone who used that book could see at the end of the process that there’s a lot of collaboration here but there’s also a lot of space for difference. ¹⁴

Lakeland relates how constructive theology resists systematization, opting instead for a dialogic, open-ended theology and, further, theology in which the dialogue and disagreement are not glossed over for the sake of simplicity or coherence in presentation. From this vantage point, with all three books in view, the insistence that theology must not be opaque, that understanding the sorts of conversations that lead to asserting a position, while also respecting that that position is only one of many possible valid positions, is a cornerstone of constructive theology. This argument has been consistently represented in the works of the Workgroup on Constructive Theology as it has developed its method for theological reflection.

The third iteration also assembled the largest group of theologians that had yet been included in the Workgroup. Lakeland explained that “We wanted people who were ecumenically open as far as theological discussions are concerned. We wanted a mix of races, ethnicities, and genders, and a mix between Protestants and Catholics.” It grew, under Jones and Lakeland, from about 12 to 50. The third group presumed the work of the first two, but sought to rethink the book project in a way that would make it more useful for seminaries and divinity schools. “We wanted to do something different but something people would recognize so we used the classical loci,” said Lakeland. There was a sense after the second book that, though it did very important work, especially in terms of making constructive theology thoroughly steeped in liberationism and justice, the discernible connection to the theological tradition had been obscured. Lakeland further explained:

We were very conscious of the need to have something for seminaries. But the seminaries were changed radically from the way they were during the Workgroup’s earlier work. Many more people in the seminaries were not attached to particular traditions and were not studying for ministry in a particular church …. Many were ambivalent about their own traditions and other traditions and some were ambivalent about religion in general.

The third group, which included many people from the first two group formations, decided that in order to move into the future, constructive theology still needed to look to the past. Firmly reestablishing the doctrinal loci as the anchors of the book, though still ambivalently, recalls both the first book and the overall theological tradition. It also allowed for groups to form organically. Members of the Workgroup coalesced into subgroups that worked on individual doctrines collaboratively. The overall intended effect is a contextualized, multivocal, open-ended demonstration of how theology can be done in a cooperative fashion with an eye toward the future, especially with respect to changing demographics and new crises.

From the outset, Constructive Theology sounds much more like a return to the tone of Traditions and Tasks. Its primary starting point affirms the discursive shift of Reconstructing Christian Theology, but largely does so in a voice that sounds more reflective. As always, it begins with the claim that doing theology today is a fundamentally different task than it has been in the past; doing theology can no longer take many of the claims and beliefs of the past “for granted.” Reasons for this include Enlightenment challenges, discursive challenges, and the recognition that things that seem innate are in fact “constructed,” and a critique of the normative position from which theology is to be done. ¹⁵ The emphasis once again emerges as maintaining a tension between the tradition and the current time. The theological conclusions drawn in this book are not meant to hold for all time, but rather to speak, explicitly, to this time and place.

The third textbook summarizes the theological task, explaining,

We are not interested in merely describing what theology has been; we are trying to understand and construct it in the present, to imagine what life-giving faith can be in today’s world. In doing so, as with any construction job, we are attempting to build a viable structure. In our case, that structure is an inhabitable, beautiful, fruitful theology. ¹⁶

Constructive theology is perpetually ongoing. Including more and more disparate voices is not a goal of the method of constructive theology, but is instead ingredient in the method itself.

The introduction notes the three periods in the development of the Workgroup, roughly anchored by the textbooks. This third phase, the “New Constructive Theology,” “continues to be inspired by the liberal theological agenda expressed in the first set of volumes, and we share the political and social concerns of the second volume as well, but we find ourselves living in different times and speaking to a very different generation of students.” ¹⁷ A few observations can be made about this self-understanding. First, constructive theology “admires” liberal theology, but seeks to distance itself from that theological agenda as it developed in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Further, while it takes the liberationist critiques the second textbook offers seriously, it seeks to move beyond the completely contextualized method of Reconstructing Christian Theology. Constructive Theology, the third book, fully embraces the project initiated in Reconstructing Christian Theology and alluded to in the first, Traditions and Tasks, of seeking the most effective way, in the contemporary world in which theological knowledge cannot be taken for granted, to teach theology to new generations of students in universities, colleges, and seminaries. Critique of the tradition, as noted in the first two books, has become so ingrained and devastating that Constructive Theology moves instead to emphasize the creative nature of working with the tradition. Critique is still central to the project, but with the intention of assembling a “beautiful and inhabitable” structure. Constructive theology does not take as its task to critique other theologies necessarily, but instead critiques the tradition itself when it has not been “life-giving,” inclusive, or emancipative.

Once again, though with a decidedly positive spin this time, the work is organized around the classical doctrines of the Christian theological tradition. The loci are conceptualized as landmarks in theological cartography, which emphasizes their role not as normative but as guides for understanding the theological territory one inhabits and where it lies with respects to the other important questions of theology. Each doctrinal question includes short vignettes that relate the doctrine to everyday life, therefore showing its continued relevance; a history and state of the question to highlight the crucial aspects of the doctrine as it stands today; special questions to highlight challenges that are primarily products of the current world; and an “Issues and Proposals” section that briefly offers future areas of study and somewhat of a propositional section.

For Lakeland, the constructive aspect of constructive theology emphasizes an “inductive” over a “deductive” strategy for doing theology. In conversation, he related that “I think of constructive theology as theology that begins from below, from a particular context, and builds to some level of generalization, while systematic is a term that implies, even if it does not intend, a method abstracting from a particular context and aspiring to formulate universal truths.” The third iteration of the Workgroup on Constructive Theology intentionally incorporated a greater number of Catholic theologians. Lakeland pointed out in an interview that

Catholics even more than the old liberal Protestants recognize systematic theology or foundational theology as the governing areas in the Catholic theological tradition. So when you say constructive theology, or at least when you did some decades ago, people would get nervous. Because constructive sounds like you’re beginning from somewhere else than what you’ve received from the tradition.

Nevertheless, constructive theology has had a strong Catholic presence throughout its history, including people like David Tracy, Roger Haight, John Pawlikowski, Michele Saracino, and others. Constructive theology maintains an inherently ecumenical approach. It views conversation that is wide-ranging in its context and sources as critical to developing theologies for the present. Catholic theology that privileges context and the rethinking of doctrine finds a home in constructive theology.

Jones emphasized the importance of working with tradition in doing constructive theology, but letting go of the defensive or descriptive qualities of systematic theology. ¹⁸ She related how the interests of the Workgroup have changed throughout its history, and yet it has maintained its collaborative ethos, its emphasis on new generations of theologians and theological thinking, and its commitment to the importance of constructive theology informing the quotidian life of individual believers and the church.