Best known for revising ‘Christian categories in view of modern categories of thought’, the christological thinking of David Tracy has received less attention.Footnote ¹ With publication of his reflections on God long-expected, this article, in close engagement with his major work to date, critically correlates his methodological concerns with his christological statements.Footnote ² Since Tracy has not yet published a comprehensive christology, his christological thinking has been synthesised from important, yet fragmentary, contributions. This article first examines Tracy's epistemology, particularly the location of theology, the role of history and the cosmos and the grounds for adequacy and intelligibility. Second, it charts the implications of this epistemology, ultimately suggesting the future development of christology.

Locating theology

Theologians, regardless of their present circumstances, interpret scripture and experience through the ‘witness of the entire Christian tradition’.Footnote ³ Any theology claiming continuity with the original event must be in profound conversation with all that has come before, for knowledge of Jesus requires access to the responses of the early faith communities mediated by the church in scripture and tradition. For David Tracy, constructive theology must, therefore, possess an underlying trust in the tradition. Of course, the primary theological task is to engage in the ‘self-reform, self-correction, self-clarification’ of this tradition.Footnote ⁴

Theology's continual reformation finds expression in particular contributions. Theologians’ responsibilities are individual yet shared. Christian thought, Tracy suggests, affirms the shared, public significance of individual and corporate acts. Actions are always valuable when made for others: ‘I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink’.Footnote ⁵ With methods that are public and sharable, theologians may develop and correct the tradition ‘in terms of the tradition's own call to constant self-reformation’.Footnote ⁶ This collegial purpose is necessary despite the challenges of theology's contemporary fragmentation and challenges on what constitutes the tradition.

Communal theological purpose, Tracy suggests, requires personal encounter. Theology for others avoids the privatisation of engagement with the tradition. Theology for others is concrete in recognising the necessity of attention to the realities of individuals’ lives, particularly those without privilege.Footnote ⁷ In this acknowledgment of the importance of particularity, theologians must recognise their own personal circumstances.Footnote ⁸ Their theology is shaped by their experiences. It is especially grounded in their lives as Christians: ‘community, mysticism, ritual, sacrament, art, even metaphysics’.Footnote ⁹ In correlating the imperatives of real life with the writings of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, theologians may find material genuinely disclosing of God for today.Footnote ¹⁰ Dialectically, when theologians are personally transformed by the event they study, they may present their encounters for others.Footnote ¹¹

If the personal circumstances of the theologian are essential in developing the tradition through engagement with scripture and tradition, there must be recognition that the self is complex. The individual may not act in complete freedom but, rather, acts in ways determined by the specific location of their existence. This may be variously conceptualised, such as sociologist Anthony Giddens's theory of structuration where individuals genuinely make choices but where these choices are limited by the social, economic, cultural and political structures within which the individual acts.Footnote ¹²

In this understanding of the theologian, Tracy's recognition of the human constraints on freedom is not simply a negative suspicion of individuals’ ability to find general truth. It is, instead, a value judgement that the particular is beneficial. Theologians must be open to the risk of being uniquely impacted by the event of Jesus Christ.Footnote ¹³ This is an encounter with a classic that brings forth a ‘new possible mode-of-being-in-the-world’.Footnote ¹⁴ Classics, for Tracy, are ‘certain texts, events, images, rituals, symbols and persons’ that disclose ‘a reality we cannot but name truth’.Footnote ¹⁵ The particularities of theologians do not act against their ability to find truth but are, rather, essential in allowing personalised consideration of the Christian classic.

Tracy calls for an analogical imagination that gains understanding of itself and a true disclosure of universality, through discovering its own particularity in meeting a classic. Meeting a classic unleashes processes of intensification which reveal more of the individual as well as of the classic. This particularity is, ironically, universal in its revelation of something new of the classic.Footnote ¹⁶

Such personalised encounter with the event of Jesus Christ is, nonetheless, grounded in its expression through shared methods and experiences. The primary source of theological understanding is the writing, understood as scripture, which Tracy identifies as the repository of knowledge of Jesus as mediated by the early worshipping community.Footnote ¹⁷ Scriptural interpretation is essential to the creation of any christological statement. Determining the meanings, ‘metaphors, symbols, and “images”’, within these texts is essential in expressing the significance of Jesus Christ for today.Footnote ¹⁸

Theologians’ engagement with scripture is, therefore, hermeneutical. Theologians must recognise in scripture their ‘linguistic “distanciation”’: their distance from both the ‘intention of the author and from its original reception by its first addressees’.Footnote ¹⁹ Tracy recognises that scriptural interpreters, with their own subjectivity, cannot assume to understand the subjectivity of authors’ original intentions nor the subjectivities of the reception of its meaning by the original addressees.Footnote ²⁰ The interpretation of the contemporary reader cannot, therefore, be seen as some form of reconstruction of the historical Jesus or of the apostolic community. An interpretation may, however, act as a re-presentation with new insights, precisely because of the interpreter's current situation.

Re-presentation is the theological goal of engaging with scripture. In Blessed Rage for Order, Tracy considers the New Testament statement Jesus is the Christ suggesting that textual criticism brings: historical methods that allow reconstruction of the texts including attention to the emphases and absences that may reveal much about texts’ creation; semantics that help to ‘determine the linguistic structure of the images and symbols involved’; literary-critical methods that identify ‘the particular literacy genres’ which determine the way in which ‘the images, metaphors, and symbols are structured, codified and transformed’; and hermeneutics proper that explicates the referent from ‘either the sense of the texts or the historical reconstruction of the text’.Footnote ²¹

This criticism is not an end in itself. Identifying the referent does not determine truth-status. Truth is, instead, ascertained by ‘correlating the results of . . . hermeneutical reflections with the results of . . . reflections upon contemporary experience and language’.Footnote ²² These contemporary reflections are necessarily transcendental or metaphysical.Footnote ²³ These reflections are a conscious attempt to examine beliefs: basic presuppositions, which determine the ‘possibility of our existing or understanding at all’.Footnote ²⁴ There is theological development, today, when an interpretation is: grounded in common experience; coherent within the tradition; and coherent with ‘other essential categories of our knowledge and belief’.Footnote ²⁵

This does not diminish the importance of scriptural texts. Reflecting on Jacques Derrida, Tracy contends, indeed, that there is a temptation to downplay the importance of writing for ‘some illusion of full self-presence and full experience of God and cosmos’.Footnote ²⁶ These illusionary tendencies, the ‘hierarchical readings of all reality’, are seen in the continuing focus on preaching, sacrament and mysticism.Footnote ²⁷ These direct experiences are privileged over the written word.

Writing has a particular propensity to be understood in multiple ways.Footnote ²⁸ This ambiguity, Tracy argues, has led to the theological downplaying of writing as writing. Yet, if theology and philosophy place abstractions, such as word, sacrament, religious experience, above the written word then the written word is robbed of its particular power: ‘distance, alterity, difference, materiality, lack of full or simple presence’.Footnote ²⁹ Tracy calls for theology to appreciate the quality of writing as writing that it might act against any idolatrous assumption of full presence; its necessarily contested nature undercutting the claims of fundamentalism.Footnote ³⁰ Of course, fundamentalists may take up Tracy's challenge to value the text and find not ambiguity but plain meaning. The multiplicity of scriptural interpretation, nonetheless, may enrich the whole tradition if particularity in interpretation is understood as valuable.

History and cosmos

Theological statements do not exist in a temporal vacuum. The necessity of individual particularity for theology requires deliberate attention to real events in time. In the editorial of ‘The Holocaust as Interruption’ issue of 1984's Concilium, co-edited with Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Tracy affirms a view of history not as ‘evolutionary optimism’ but as discontinuous and interspersed with interruption.Footnote ³¹ Much of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theology is ahistorial in its focus. It is concerned with ‘Christian self-understanding’ in existential experience and is uninterested in concrete events. Liberal theology's search for universals often utilises the laws of ‘supposedly “value free”’ science, ignoring or dismissing painful exceptions.Footnote ³² For Tracy, neo-orthodoxy, a ‘self-critical moment within the liberal tradition’, grounds history in the Christ-event, but this ‘radical historicity’ paradoxically privatises history, leaving theology anchored to the transcendental and removed from the realities of life.Footnote ³³

In contemporary Christian theology, only the self and God are considered while the world, nature and history have almost disappeared.Footnote ³⁴ If the individual self is recognised as complex and grounded in circumstance, there must be a return to interest in the circumstances of the human situation. Personal well-being, Tracy contends, required wholeness in history and nature.Footnote ³⁵ Theologically: a yearning for personal wholeness cannot be separated from relationship with others or the planet, for this yearning is ‘grounded in the structure of reality itself’.Footnote ³⁶

The God of Jesus Christ, known through the scriptures, is the God who acts in history.Footnote ³⁷ God is understood in the history of Israel, the history of Jesus and believed to act in human history and beyond it. God must be understood in concrete history for, too often, existential and transcendental historicities silence the victims of history and lead to a personalisation of events where resurrection is uncoupled from the cross, becoming merely a vague hope of personal immortality.Footnote ³⁸ Theology must practise self-examination. Catholic theology, Tracy concedes, has not always had ‘the religious sense of history’ as its centre.Footnote ³⁹ Tracy suggests, nonetheless, that Catholic belief has always intrinsically viewed God's faithfulness as embodied in time and experienced in history thus, necessarily, embedded in history. This is seen paradigmatically in Catholic beliefs that the ‘structure, sacraments, and preaching of the believing community’ are not pale imitations of the original event but decisive re-presentations of it.Footnote ⁴⁰ Everything known of God is in human time.

To be reasonable today, theology must engage in cosmology. The collapse of a positivist understanding of science, therefore, has important theological ramifications. In the editorial of the ‘Cosmology and Theology’ issue of 1983's Concilium, co-edited with Nicholas Lash, Tracy asks if it is possible for theology to present the incarnation as being of universal importance when there is no single cosmological narrative.Footnote ⁴¹ Considering the potential for environmental catastrophe, Tracy suggests that theology's often anthropocentric character requires rethinking to be faithful to the tradition.Footnote ⁴² If, classically, redemption and creation are linked in Christian theology, there must be attention to God, self and cosmos.Footnote ⁴³ Cosmological considerations are, of course, grounded in human ideologies and history. The eucharist, Tracy suggests, is nature (wheat/bread, grapes/wine) ‘reshaped by history’; nature given a ‘particular biography’ by the event of Jesus Christ and the church's continual re-presentation.Footnote ⁴⁴ It is in concrete appreciations of history and the cosmos that Tracy believes ‘suffering and oppression’ are fully recognised.Footnote ⁴⁵ Theology must choose to engage with those left out of the official history of advancement and progress.

Adequacy and intelligibility

Central to Tracy's programme is a decision that theology, grounded in history, humanity and the cosmos, must adequately consider fact and possibility. Tracy rejects, for theology, the mainstream view that facts are verifiably actualised possibilities.Footnote ⁴⁶ Tracy presents facts ‘not as the actualization of a possibility but . . . as ritual, as fictional, as symbolic representations of real possibility’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Any genuine possibility that refreshes human understanding is real; for its reality is in the actualised behaviour of individuals not in abstract actualisation of the concept.Footnote ⁴⁸

With challenges from science and postmodernism, Tracy's theological paradigm insists on differentiation between grounds for adequacy and grounds for intelligibility.Footnote ⁴⁹ Adequacy in theology is a concern for the appropriateness of a particular interpretation for the tradition. Intelligibility is a test of its internal coherence or connection to general meaningfulness and truth. Foundational considerations of the existence of God are attempts for intelligibility. Theology's intended audience, equally, will determine its function: foundational theology presents religious meaning in terms philosophically intelligible to the academy; systematic theology, in considering meaning for the church, may engage with all aspects of religious culture including practices, texts and doctrines.Footnote ⁵⁰ For systematic theology, having accepted the existence of God as probable, christological statements must be judged for their adequacy.

The implications of this distinction may be seen in considering, once more, the role of biblical criticism for theology. Historical-critical methodologies are primarily used in establishing adequacy for the tradition. Such methodologies reconstruct texts, for example, in a search for the voices of the early believers, the ‘primary apostolic witnesses’.Footnote ⁵¹ They may also be employed to offer grounds for intelligibility: to provide historical evidence.Footnote ⁵² The search for the historical Jesus, Tracy contends, is a problem for intelligibility.Footnote ⁵³ The Jesus needed by theology is not one reconstructed through historical material, if that were possible, but the Jesus known in the lived correlation of early apostolic witness, and contemporary experience through word, sacrament and action.Footnote ⁵⁴

Literary-critical methods ‘show claims to relative adequacy on hermeneutical grounds for the different classic expressions of the Christian tradition’.Footnote ⁵⁵ They suggest grounds for adequacy in reflecting on the use of ‘proclamation, narrative, symbol and reflective thought’ in the New Testament: adding richness of understanding.Footnote ⁵⁶ Sometimes literary-critical methods are involved as criteria of intelligibility where the Bible is considered as a piece of literature or as a cultural classic.Footnote ⁵⁷Socio-scientific methods bring adequacy for the tradition in stripping away ideology from christological statements. Elsewhere, socio-scientific methods are employed for intelligibility, for example, in challenging the tradition as patriarchal.Footnote ⁵⁸

In these examples, historical-critical, literary-critical and socio-scientific methods ‘serve either as developments or correctives of the tradition’.Footnote ⁵⁹ In terms of adequacy, they allow the development of fuller understandings of the tradition or correct present interpretations through recovering traditional expressions.Footnote ⁶⁰ In terms of intelligibility, traditional interpretations may be challenged in light of new discoveries. A literal interpretation of Genesis is challenged by evolutionary theory; the rise of historical-consciousness challenges understandings of the Gospels as biographies of Jesus.Footnote ⁶¹ Tracy even suggests that the employment of history of religions techniques in the work of Rudolf Bultmann advances adequacy, for it seeks the development and correction of theological interpretation.Footnote ⁶²

Implications for christology

The centrality of Jesus Christ for Christian theology means that, despite not having published a comprehensive christology, Tracy has considered its central themes throughout his work. These may be fully considered in Tracy's expected work on God, with material presented for his Edinburgh Gifford Lectures, ‘This Side of God’.Footnote ⁶³ Nonetheless, binding together Tracy's christological fragments with his epistemological concerns for the location of theology in individuals and history, and for intelligibility and adequacy, may offer useful suggestions for the direction of contemporary christology.

Tracy suggests that ‘the decisive revelation in the Christian construal of reality is understood to be the self-manifestation, or self-presencing, of God in the Logos, the Word – Jesus Christ believed present to the Christian community in word and sacrament as well as in communal and personal experience’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Christ, the revelation of God, is known in continued presence; an attempt to recover the historical Jesus, it has been suggested, is not helpful. Indeed, Christ is only Christ if a contemporary experience of the one God. The general self-manifestation of God in Jesus Christ is always the particular self-presencing of God with its object–subject relationship.

This revelation in Jesus the Christ has been traditionally conceived in the understanding of Jesus as Word of God. This, Tracy makes clear, is both as Word-as-Logos and Word-as-Kerygma.Footnote ⁶⁵ Word-as-Logos is the Christian understanding of reality where there is a uniting of ‘God, cosmos, and humanity in and through the self-presencing Logos’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Word-as-Kerygma is the ‘proclamation/distance/disruption’ of the personified message of God.Footnote ⁶⁷ There are continuing tensions between presence and proclamation: the Gospel of John's ‘Word becoming flesh’ against the Gospel of Mark's eschatological and apocalyptic focus; or, in the twentieth century, Paul Tillich's analysis of Protestant principle where the Word is a ‘disruptive, critical, distancing suspicious proclamation’ and Catholic substance where the Word is the self-presencing Logos.Footnote ⁶⁸ The practices of the churches attest to the embodiment of ideas: Orthodoxy's ‘awareness of God's presence in icon, liturgy’ against western Protestant concerns for presence in proclamation.Footnote ⁶⁹

The proclaimed kerygma interrupts ‘all senses of continuity, participation and rootedness’.Footnote ⁷⁰ These, Tracy suggests, are what constitute paganism for monotheistic faiths. Despite his attention to the particular, Tracy follows neo-orthodoxy's attack on liberal theology's close identification with culture. Tracy is content for some mystery to surround christology, for too close an association between logos and culture may lead to danger. This needs consideration, for Tracy considers cultural particularity as the means of presenting the event of Jesus Christ. It seems that theologians must recognise that if knowledge of the Logos is in individuals and history then insights will be partial and fragmentary. Theological pluralism prevents totalitarian identifications of religion and culture. The ability of the classic event of Jesus Christ to be considered through different philosophical structures and cultures is its power. Over time the continuation of the tradition will provide a framework to identify more or less worthy re-presentations of the event.

Tracy's engagement with other theologians brings forth his commitment to plural views. In Karl Rahner, Bernard Lonergan, Schubert Ogden and John Cobb, Tracy sees adherence to theology's ancient logos tradition. These approaches valorise universality. Jesus, philosophically, is the manifestation of the only God, the God who ‘always already is’.Footnote ⁷¹ These theologies are concerned with the universal, and make prominent fundamental wonder and trust in human beings, in history, and in the cosmos.Footnote ⁷² Another stream of theology stresses the prophetic, apocalyptic and eschatological. These approaches emphasise conflict, contradiction and the ‘negativity of the cross’.Footnote ⁷³ Here is found Hans Küng's ‘dialectic of the “not yet but even now”’ and Jürgen Moltmann's crucified God.Footnote ⁷⁴ These theologians are acutely aware of the reality of suffering in existence. They find in the scriptures and tradition disclosure of the imperative for reformation, aggression, protest.Footnote ⁷⁵ In these christologies of the cross, trust is directed to, and, importantly, by, the future hoped-for and promised.Footnote ⁷⁶ A third stream is found in spirit christologies. In this are found many christologies of Orthodoxy, Walter Kasper and, indeed perhaps, the universal history of Wolfhart Pannenberg.Footnote ⁷⁷

These various approaches are admired by Tracy but, in his constructive work, he calls for theology to embrace all of New Testament expression.Footnote ⁷⁸ This methodology, Tracy believes, allows an appropriate ‘search for the whole’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Theology should not determine one view but, instead, hold together all that is an appropriate reflection on Jesus Christ. Tracy's search for the whole is, however, a search for the grounded and concrete, not the abstract. The concrete is personal, particular theological expression based on true openness to the spiritual classics in individual experience of today's situation.Footnote ⁸⁰

This must be true in considering the incarnation, cross and resurrection. Incarnation, for Tracy, is ‘an envisionment of reality informed by the hope afforded by the Christian construal of reality from the perspective of Jesus Christ’.Footnote ⁸¹ Incarnation, nonetheless, is not a singular event but a continuous process. Hope is a corollary of incarnation. Hope is gained by followers in viewing the world through Jesus Christ. Our location, it has been argued, influences our choices. If Tracy mirrors radically orthodox considerations where God is always incarnate and Jesus brings attention to this incarnation: Jesus points to a ‘love which can fill every person’ as Jesus himself was filled, then Tracy always directs attention to the declared Jesus Christ experienced in Christian community and not any retrieved Jesus of Nazareth.Footnote ⁸²

Traditional understandings of incarnation have suggested ‘the always-already immanent and transcendent reality of God's presence to the world, self and history’.Footnote ⁸³ Today's grounds for intelligibility may disrupt this position for the cosmos is not necessarily viewed as finite and perfectly ordered. Indeed, ‘purely incarnational cosmic theologies do not seem a live option’ because of the reality of evil, suffering and fear.Footnote ⁸⁴ Tracy's response is to stress the totality of revelation. Incarnation must now be understood ‘in the light of the ministry, cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Incarnation cannot be separated from suffering. Protestant theology, it would seem, has often emphasised the incarnation in terms of cross and resurrection in tension with other readings.Footnote ⁸⁶

Incarnation, intimately bound up with the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, is a spur to action: the cross disrupts optimism. If incarnation proper is always-already then the suffering and death of Jesus is ‘a stark reminder of the not-yet’; the cosmos is not complete.Footnote ⁸⁷ Tracy affirms the incarnation as concrete and historical. The extraordinary event of Jesus Christ takes place ‘in the everyday, the stable, the measured, the ordered, the nontensive, nonchaotic world of the ordinary’.Footnote ⁸⁸ It is actualised in the lives of individual believers today.

As he has not offered a comprehensive, systematic christology, the details of how God is involved in the life of Jesus, declared as Christ, are ambiguous in Tracy's work. In The Analogical Imagination, Tracy suggests Jesus as a means by which Godself is re-presented to humanity.Footnote ⁸⁹ The Christian recognises in Jesus the Christ a ‘gift and . . . command of love’, understood as the very character of God.Footnote ⁹⁰ This is a reading adequate for the tradition. It is the experience of individuals, today, in their response to Jesus believed present in their community. Tracy does not make ontological claims: systematic christology cannot offer grounds for general intelligibility. God either exists or does not; for Christians, contemporary experience of the Christ event provides grounds for understanding the nature of this God.

From the incarnation to the cross: at once indicative of the evil and suffering in concrete history, and a reminder that there is still much to do in the world. The cross is the depressingly inevitable conclusion to a life lived on behalf of the oppressed. The cross, today, is the ultimate reminder of the ‘power, pain, seriousness and scandal of the negative’.Footnote ⁹¹ The cross exemplifies that love, in this life, often involves suffering. In its encounter there is disclosure of the true nature of such love: it appears in weakness to the world's power, for Jesus’ ministry and preaching is rejected. The cross is, thus, a statement on human nature, and a revelation to the individual of God's suffering love.Footnote ⁹² Met today it acts to restate the ‘stupidity and obtuseness of human beings when confronted by goodness and courage’ and brings relationship in the ultimate Christian paradigm of the connection of human and divine in God's actions, suffering love, in Jesus.Footnote ⁹³

For the Christian, the cross is followed by resurrection. There must be recognition that, for foundational theology, the resurrection is of ‘low probability’ as it is impossible to verify historically.Footnote ⁹⁴ In its systematic meaning, however, the resurrection, for Tracy, is a declaration of the ‘reality of Christian hope for nature and history alike’.Footnote ⁹⁵ It is the ‘vindication of the ministry and cross of Jesus Christ’.Footnote ⁹⁶ It is real for the Christian, transforming the message of the witnessed Jesus as he is declared the risen Christ. The resurrection provides grounds for a hope that there will be a future without suffering.Footnote ⁹⁷ Resurrection cannot be simply an individualised existential encounter but, instead, must prompt individual action in the present empowered by its spirit of hope.

In his christological fragments, as systematic mediations, Jesus and Christ cannot be separated. In categories of incarnation, cross and resurrection, he is known through individual and communal encounter, engendered by reflection on his person. Christology cannot be abstracted but exists through its expression in particularities. Christology suggests, for Christians, who God is. It reveals incarnation as always-already; Jesus’ ministry and cross as indicative of not-yet-realities; and the resurrection as disclosive of hope.Footnote ⁹⁸ Jesus Christ is, therefore, ‘the decisive clue for a Christian envisionment of God, world, and self, of nature and history, creation and redemption’.Footnote ⁹⁹ The Christian in believing in Jesus as Christ conceives of all reality through the light of that belief.

The direction of christology

The critical correlation of David Tracy's theological epistemology, with his fragmentary constructive christological position, allows suggestions for the direction of contemporary christology. Theologians, it has been argued, bring enrichment to theology through personal responses to the imperatives of the tradition and today's culture. They must possess, with the church, a ‘cumulative identity’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Their engagement with personal and cumulative experience must not be a reactionary return to the past. It must be a deliberate response to today that, nonetheless, is marked by a conscious and grateful recognition of the church's history. Such a cumulative identity trusts that what happens now is as important as what has happened before. Future christology, for Tracy, must preserve and re-present the presence of God in Christ in the present.Footnote ¹⁰¹ This may happen when there is confidence in the tradition; a confidence that will allow the church, in hope, to await God in history.Footnote ¹⁰²

Awaiting God's actions in history is not inaction. With H. Richard Niebuhr, Tracy believes that individuals, despite his recognition that self and freedom are complex and located in circumstance, have ‘sufficient freedom to be responsible to God and to others’.Footnote ¹⁰³ Future christologies will be valid, in this paradigm, if they affirm concreteness in history and nature, empowering individual, other-regarding, action.

One reading of the Christian classic will not be sufficient. It is right to affirm that diversity is, of itself, a good. An attempt to hold together all current interpretation of the classic event may, however, bring richness; just as Jesus Christ must be understood in incarnation–ministry–cross–resurrection; and the Christian scriptures provide normative value, despite arguments on their interpretation. Christological pieces may be brought together from an initial diversity. It has been argued, indeed, that christology cannot be pinned down in any abstraction but exists through its expressions in particularities. This diversity, nonetheless, points to the undoubted Christian classic: the event of Jesus Christ. Any expression of Christianity that will hold within the historical tradition must be an interpretation and re-presentation of this event. The universality of the event of Jesus Christ is only understood, however, through its re-presentation in individuals.

Such particularity is the means for Christianity to genuinely engage with culture. Tracy considers theology as ‘disciplined reflection upon religion in a specific culture’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ This will mean that for religious norms and values to be perceived they will require embodiment in the culture in which they are expressed.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In an increasingly globalised world with hybridisation of cultures, the model for universalism in future christology cannot be a particular cultural expression but must instead be ‘a strong network of interlocking cultural expressions’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

This multiplicity facilitates christology's systematic purpose: presenting knowledge, for the Christian, of the person-like qualities of God. This may happen when modernism's inability to consider human emotion and experience is rejected, and replaced with a framework that actively considers individuals’ love, faith and community. Recognition of these emotions and experiences, it has been argued, still allows for christology to be coherent and intelligible.

Jesus Christ, for Tracy, displays who God is. The believer recognises this in faith and trust, built within the tradition, and validated through her own experience. This claim does not need to be demonstrated through other means to be real and true. Christology does not act as an apologetic means to demonstrate the validity of Christianity.

The purpose of christology for the Christian, and the importance of Christianity's concrete distinctiveness, is well displayed in a concluding example: Tracy's consideration of the remembered Jesus. The memory of Jesus is found in the various expressions of the New Testament, lives lived as imitatio Christi, and the Jesus proclaimed in the sacraments of the church.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ This memory is dangerous and subversive. It is the memory of a harsh love that judges and heals.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ It is, however, the memory of the witnesses who came to believe that the crucified Jesus was the promised Christ. It is the memory of the church that is continually purified. Purified by the techniques and evaluations of science and scholarship; purified by the radical discipleship of current lives; purified by the community of theologians in their critical reflections.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

For this concrete distinctiveness to continue, christology must be focused on the present. The publicness of christology is not just a desperate attempt for relevance; it is essential. Without a focus upon the manifestation, proclamation and action inspired by current experiences of the Christ event, christology becomes a ‘Jesusology’ of the historical person of Jesus, or a ‘supernaturalist mythology’ divorced from the reality of life.Footnote ¹¹⁰ A genuine christology must engender a loving response in the world through other-focus.

Theology of the future will necessarily engage with other religions and worldviews without the loss of a christological focus. Christianity contributes to knowledge of God through Christians’ belief that what they know of God is in Jesus Christ. Tracy's affirmation of plural approaches may, therefore, result in a fairly conservative position for it recognises that ‘the reality of God’ is experienced and understood ‘from within a logos, i.e., a particular horizon of intelligibility’.Footnote ¹¹¹ Theology assumes or argues that religion may bring answers from a particular tradition to questions on the ultimate meaning of human existence.Footnote ¹¹² Tracy's acceptance of critiques of universal knowledge may be understood as a recognition of the limitations of human action and insight. If our understanding is limited and subjective then engagement with our personal experience and the tradition, universality and particularity, may allow the development of a contemporary christology that is adequate for the tradition and intelligible to all.