In this post, I continue my brief discussion of Kathryn Tanner’s book Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology. Installment one is here, and two is here.

From this postmodern platform, Tanner levels a strong critique of correlationist and postliberal theologies. Taking correlation alone for the moment (and particularly because it remains so influential within Catholic theology in the United States), her criticisms of correlation are essentially twofold:

[1] Correlation treats culture as a repository of universal human experiences, whether existential questions or limit experiences, to which the Christian message is correlated. However, theology should not presume the presence of universals “underneath” a cultural situation but should prioritize the particular methodologically. Correlation, in other words, tends to treat cultures too idealistically and ahistorically. Tanner is not arguing ipso facto against “common human experience and language,” to use the phraseology of David Tracy (in Blessed Rage for Order). However, one cannot do specific theology with such an assumption, as it dishonors the concreteness of the culture. “Common cultural processes there may be, but generalizations about them are constructed out of a comparison of particulars” (Theories of Culture, p. 66).

[2] Correlation suggests that the Christian message, texts or symbols are pure data that generate, at least initially, their own meaning. Because this method depends on linking together Christianity and culture, faith and life, message and situation, or classic text and limit-situation, correlation proceeds as if Christian doctrines, symbols or texts arise more or less independently of culture, enabling the correlationist theologian to correlate two “independently generated wholes” (p. 107). What are left unaccounted methodologically are the particular ways that culture has influenced Christian texts, or better, the way that Christian texts, symbols, and doctrines are thoroughly cultural in their production, always situated between and among various cultures. It is not as if a Christian text springs purely to the methodological table with its ownmost world to disclose or pattern of praxis to inaugurate. Rather, all Christian claims are cultural products, all the way down, in their production, maintenance, and interpretation. In Tanner’s fine formulation: “One does not first determine a distinctively Christian message or lens for viewing the world and then bring it, subsequently, into relation with other cultural practices for, say, apologetic purposes; those other cultural practices are there from the beginning as the materials out of which the very Christian message or lens is constructed… A kind of apologetics or polemics with other cultures is internal… to the very construction of Christian sense” (p. 116).

In a sense, Tanner’s critique of correlation is that it overrelies on notions of purity and univocality: that culture is reducible to a set of pure questions that speak with one accord in a coherent address to theology; that theological texts blossom uncontaminated by culture to yield a claim, a prophetic challenge, or a world. Correlation does not adequately deal with difference, specificity, history, heterogeneity, with culture as irreducible contestation over the significance of materials. Correlation does not deal fully enough, that is, with the conditions of reality.

It could be said that Tanner shows us one way in which all theology is theology of culture. Because theology is a cultural practice — from the writing of gospels to this very text composed on my laptop computer in specific places in Cambridge, Massachusetts and New York City — it necessarily makes use of materials (practices and their concepts, tropes, themes, concerns, styles, problematics, analyses, symbols) already at play in the cultures in which theology makes its place. Tanner’s challenge to theologies of correlation is substantial and even foundational, going to the very heart of what makes correlation correlational.

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