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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 June 2011
When I was completing my book on foundational theology, I presented a paper on the concept of broad reflective equilibrium and foundational theology to a group of colleagues at a conference sponsored by the Association of Theological Schools. This paper summarized the book's concluding section, which dealt with the relationship between contemporary criticisms of foundationalism and a foundational theology employing the method of broad reflective equilibrium. It advanced a systematic and historical argument. Systematically, the section argued that the method of broad reflective equilibrium offered a vision of foundational theology that avoided the pitfalls of foundationalism, overcoming the foundationalism of fundamental theology. It appealed to current discussions about methodology, specifically, the discussions on reflective equilibrium in the philosophy of science and in political ethics. The historical argument appealed to Schleiermacher by relating Schleiermacher's stance on the relationship between systematic and philosophical theology to the conception of a nonfoundationalist foundational theology, employing the method of broad reflective equilibrium.
1 Fiorenza, Francis Schüssler, Foundational Theology: Jesus and the Church (New York: Crossroad, 1984)Google Scholar.
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3 Lindbeck, George A., The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984)Google Scholar. My book and Lindbeck's were discussed together on an AAR panel with a response to Lindbeck's charges against Schleiermacher by Gerrish, Brian, published as “The Nature of Doctrine,” JR 68 (1988) 87–92Google Scholar. See also Brian Gerrish, “Nature and the Theater of Redemption: Schleiermacher on Christian Dogmatics and the Creation Story,” in idem, Continuing the Reformation: Essays on Modern Religious Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), where Gerrish defends Schleiermacher against Ronald F. Thiemann's specific critique of foundationalism.
4 For an assessment different from Lindbeck's, see Frei, Hans W., Types of Christian Theology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992) 34–38Google Scholar; and idem, Theology and Narrative: Selected Essays (eds. George Hunsinger and William C. Placher; New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) 177–98. Frei criticizes a strictly phenomenological approach to religion as “foundational and exclusive” (Theology and Narrative, 99), Frei's evaluation, however, is ambivalent. He cannot, on the one hand, locate Schleiermacher totally within a phenomenological approach. On the other hand, in regard to his correlation between experience and scripture, “Schleiermacher was not at all successful in his attempt” (Types of Christian Theology, 70).
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21 Birkner, Theologie und Philosophie, 33–34.
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53 See Sellars, Wilfred, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” reprinted in his collection of essays, Science, Perception and Reality (1961; reprinted Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1963) 127–96Google Scholar.
54 Ibid., 170; italics in the original.
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