This is Part I of my review of Faith Thinking: The Dynamics of Christian Theology by Trevor Hart. This was the first book assigned in my Missional Theology I course at BTS.
Trevor Hart’s Faith Thinking is a prolegomena to Christian theology in the tradition of “faith seeking understanding.” In essence, Hart seeks to envision Christian theology as the extension of a MacIntyreian tradition, utilizing the epistemological resources of “critical realism.”
In his introduction, Hart outlines his project and discusses the contours of “faith” and “theology.” “Faith,” he notes, “will always seek to enter into a fuller and deeper knowledge and understanding of that which matters most to it.” This means that, although faith is situated within a tradition, it is not merely a rote repetition of that tradition. Faith is concerned both with the “internal coherence” of contemporary expressions of the tradition and the “external reference” of those expressions to other sources and facets of knowledge. Faith is integrative. It must “seek . . . to come to terms with the problems and the possibilities of integrating our faith in its various aspects into a wider picture of things entertained by society; thereby inhabiting a more or less integrated world, a universe rather than a multiverse.”
“Theology” is an attempt to understand the object and place of faith. Theology, then, is an effort to understand reality – the universe – from a stance of faith. Christian theology, in particular, tries to “sketch an intellectual contour of reality as it appears from within the stance of a living and active faith in Christ . . . .” If all Christians are called to seek after God’s purposes, then all Christians to some degree or another are engaged in the theological task.
Although Hart does not say so directly, his project clearly is an effort to view Christian theology from the perspective of critical realism. “Critical realism” is an epistemological position that is both realist and critical. It is “realist” in that, as with Enlightenment empiricists and rationalists, it affirms that human beings are capable of true knowledge of a real world that is not merely constructed. It is “critical” in that, as with contemporary postmodernists, it recognizes that all human knowledge is constrained, situated, incomplete, and provisional. In contemporary theology, critical realism is represented in the thinking of Michael Polanyi, Alasdair MacIntyre, Leslie Newbiggin, N.T. Wright, Alister McGrath, and others, many of them referred to by Hart throughout the book.
