When God is linked with concrete experiences, God can be understood by way of persuasion and argument -- in an appeal to experience, reason or the imagination. Empirical or process theologies stress what is actual, and hermeneutic theologies deal with the possible.
No major religion, properly understood, can accept a privatistic self-understanding. Indeed, theologians of every radically monotheistic religion realize that its fundamental commitment to God demands that we express that theistic belief in ways that will render it public not merely to ourselves or our particular religious group.
David Tracy shares his present theological concern, which is to describe or discover a new hermeneutical practice, which he calls "mystical-prophetic."
It is time to attempt a genuinely dialectical and postecumenical Christian systematic theology faithful to both Protestant principle and Catholic substance. Only a sustained collaborative effort of this sort can hope to produce the kind of public and communicative theology needed now.
The ideal that Aquinas set up for a Christian theology is one that remains as correct in its rigorous demands as it was when first formulated. Thomas Aquinas was a first-rank thinker whose witness to the Christian faith endures, and in addition an authentic saint whose sanctity was sufficiently human to forbid sentimentalizing him.