What is theological method?

The purpose of this brief paper is to highlight what it is a theologian does when he is "doing" theology. In what follows, I will first answer the question: 'what is theological method?' and then provide some of my thoughts on what I think is an apropriate (yet very tentative) thological method.
To define the term 'theological method' proves no easy task. At bottom, this term refers to the preliminaries of theology. What, then, is meant by the preliminaries? The enterprise of theology cannot be reduced to simply the activity of organizing and codifying doctrine. Many fundamentalist theological procedures are guilty of a kind of reductionist activity of organizing what the whole Bible may say on a specific doctrine (e.g., baptism, or predestination, etc). While many conservative, evangelical and fundamentalist theologies (though not all) may be applauded for their taking serious the Scriptures, these traditions sometimes neglect the critical task of also taking time to provide a careful, nuanced and sustained study of the method they employ (it is sometimes said that liberals, on the other hand, only talk about method and never engage in actual exposition of theology).
So what are the preliminaries of theology? The preliminaries of of theology are legion and may not always be easily identified. For a theologian to take seriously the preliminaries means that he must render explicit, for example, hermeneutical assumptions, the relationship of faith and history, epistemological warrants, and authorities (e.g., scripture, tradition, culture, philosophy, recent critical literary tools, etc). Further, taking preliminaries of theology seriously means raising questions regarding the nature of doctrine, especially its relationship to first and second order truth claims and to other disciplines, such as literary studies, philosophy, science etc. I will elaborate on a few these issues below. But as one can see already, theological method is an enterprise that calls attention to a variety of crucial questions that are many times ambiguous and difficult to articulate. Perhaps reviewing a few of the more prominent theologians who have written on this topic may help provide clearer parameters to the subject at hand. I will look at two in particular, David Tracy and George Lindbeck.
Tracy's theory (follwing in line with Paul Tillich's method) has determined that all theology must be "correlational." This means that theology must, if it be a responsible and public discipline, interact critically with culture's latest intellectual tools. Of course, for Tracy, this translates, usually, to the task of reinterpreting theology mostly in light of philosophy and critical-literary tools. For example, he has taken Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutical paradigm of "mode-of-being-in-the-world" to reinterpret the gospels. Thus, in light of Ricoeur's powerful and creative hermeneutical approach Tracy has interpreted the gospels as stories that reveal possibilities of how an authentic life can be lived--that is what any 'classic' can do.
Lindbeck has attempted, on the other hand, to retain more of a concern for the authority of the Christian community. Doctrine, here, need not be necessarily focused on first order truth claims (e.g., is it actually true or not) but rather should be focused on serving a 'regulative' function. This means that doctrine can posit, for the Christian community, regulative grammars and cultural-linguistic systems that explain and shed light on the life-transforming ideas found in tradition and scripture. Lindbeck's theory has been criticized for reducing theology to its own isolated ghetto, that is, being resistant to public interaction with other disciplines, but this criticism is not always valid. Lindbeck still believes that the Christian community can speak on public issues and many times provide a prophetic stance against culture. To be sure, though, he simply does not stress a correlational paradigm in the same way Tracy does. But the Tracy-Lindbeck debate is a conversation for another time.
Allow me to now return to some of the themes I raised earlier. Among all the quesitons that were raised above, hermeneutics plays an especially central role in theological method. How do we interpret an ancient document, the Bible, that has been taken in so many disparate directions with any kind of certainty? Postmodernism has critiqued the Enlightenment' project of object, neutral, theory-free knowledge. So the question of hermeneutics takes on particular nuances that poses a serious threat to objective interpretations. Does scripture simply have a plain meaning? Does the literal sense hold water any longer? Perhaps not, and perhaps the real questions is: how does the theologian interpret scripture without returning to a reductionsit hermeneutic of fitting scripture within one's previous held theological heritage? How does one take the newness and authority of the text of scripture seriously while at the same time take one's assumptions about the text seriously? These questions are not easy to answer and are at the core of theological method.
A second theme that is central theological method is epistemology--and more precisely, foundationalism versus non-foundationalism. Many postmodern theologians seek to rid theology of any Enlightenment pitfalls of certainty and therefore ground epistemic authority in the community--Lindbeck and Edward Farely seem to do this.
And finally, another major theme is the relationship theology has among other disciplines, in particular the social sciences, philosophy and literary studies, as I have already alluded to. Edward Farley has argued, I think in "Ecclesial Church" that theology will simply look parasitic to the other disciplines if it plays by the exact same rules as, for example, the social sciences. The idea here is that many times theology is held to the same standards as a science, social or otherwise and thus the identity of theology is compromised and becomes parasitic. Theology has yearned for the same respect as other disciplines across the curriculum and has then been prone to borrowing its methods from them. Tracy is perhaps, and I stress perhaps, guilty of such a compromise. Instead of relying on other disciplines, theology must persist in forming its own theological identity and its own theological principles and methods. This also is not an easy task. In conclusion, allow me to make a few remarks regarding my own preferences with respect to theological method. Scripture must remain the overall guiding principle when formulating a method. I am an evangelical of sorts, and therefore I am sympathetic to the protestant scripture princple, sola scriptura. I am not, however, a fundamentalist, a conservative or a propositionalist. I think that the some of the social sciences, philosophy and literary critical tools can also be involved in fine tuning an evangelical method (without it being parasitic to them), though not in necessarily the same way as Tracy or Lindbeck involve them. How exactly I am not sure, and at this juncture I must remain in limbo. I just think hermeneutical theory derived from Gadamer, Ricoeur, Von Balthasaar (theo-drama) and Speech-Act theory can be of great help in nuancing how scripture is reinterpreted for our contemporary age. Last but not least, I also possess a great appreciation for tradition, especially the tradition of how scripture has been appropriated througout the ages--orthodoxy, Roman Catholic, protestant, etc. I know that the plural nature of scripture, its pluarity of genre and communicative activities is not limited to my interpretation alone. A conversation with all traditions is also crucial