ABSTRACT
There is a realism internal to Christian forms of life, and it comes to expression in both the Christian community and beyond in our pluralist and interfaith contexts. By its world-openness, this realism incorporates into itself the critiques of naive doctrinal realism that have proliferated since the enlightenment. Thus it is a critical theological realism which builds bridges from the reality-making claims of Christian uses of doctrinal sentences to engage counter-claims of other philosophies, religions, institutions, and ways of life. Another way of describing a critical theological realism today is that it joins the gift of Christian hope with the tasks of an apologetic theology carried out "with fear and trembling". Critical realism in Christian context underlines in ways that conventional empiricist and idealist approaches did not, "the importance to Christian belief of experience, community, and an interpretive tradition".
