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Toward a Theological Understanding of Praxis

Edward Schillebeeckx's recent book, The Understanding of Faith, can be read as a series of exercises in the critical reconstruction of theological hermeneutics. It is not a systematic or exhaustive treatment, but it is significant in representing the effort of perhaps the most cosmopolitan of European Roman Catholic theologians to come to grips with certain problems in theological method that have emerged in light of recent developments in the general field of cultural hermenuetics. Schillebeeckx's range of concern and some of the approaches that he develops seem to bear a family resemblance to similar efforts in the field of cultural hermeneutics advanced by Paul Ricoeur and Gibson Winter, and in theological hermeneutics as in the recent work of Langdon Gilkey and David Tracy. Whatever the reasons for this convergence, it certainly can be taken as encouraging news for those who have found promise in the recent discussions of the problem of interpretation conducted on this side of the Atlantic. An especially important parallel is discerned in Schillebeeckx's willingness to explore the relevance of a praxis criterion for the manifold operations of theological hermeneutics. That he attempts to specify this criterion through a serious discussion of the work ofJuirgen Habermas's critical theory of society is particularly significant, in that Schillebeeckx's discussion of Habermas can be taken as a clue to