On theology

No American theologian of the twentieth century, and perhaps no other American theologian of any century, has pursued the nature and task of Christian theology with the particular clear-mindedness and stunning rigor that characterizes every page of Schubert Ogden's _On Theology_. Composed of a number of essays, Ogden's book addresses the most fundamentally important questions of what was once called "theological encyclopedia", but in the modern era has come to be known as theological methodology: the norms and sources of theology, the nature of revelation, the authority of scripture, the relation of theology, and the theologian, to reason, etc. Ogden's viewpoint on these matters is informed, in turns, by the work of Rudolf Bultmann, the great German theologian, Charles Hartshorne, perhaps the pre-eminent American metaphysician, and Stephen Toulmin, a British analytic philosopher of enormous reputation and stature. Ogden argues that theology, as distinct from Christian witness, is the fully critical reflection on the adequacy of Christian witness to the decisive significance of Jesus Christ. No Christian intellectual can afford to ignore Ogden's achievement in _On Theology_; and, for the same reasons, no anti-religious intellectual can either. Ogden's vision of theology demonstrates once and for all that Christian theology is irreducibly essential to the faith and life of the Christian religion, as well as showing the precise ways in which it, like non-religious forms of human inquiry, deserves a place in the public conversation about the value and meaning of ultimate reality.