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Pastoral theology

From Ricœur to Wulff to Hutsebaut: The Development of the Post-Critical Belief Scale

DOI: https://doi.org/10.52097/wpt.10682  [Google Scholar]
Published: 2026-09-29

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to explain and critique the development of the Post-Critical Belief Scale (PCBS), which is employed in the implementation of the Enhancing Catholic School Identity (ECSI) project in various countries. The rationale behind the project is that, in a secularized and pluralistic society, the optimal option for a Catholic is to have a post-critical faith. The PCBS is a diagnostic tool used by the project to assess the Catholic identity of staff and students in Catholic schools. The first part of the essay presents the PCBS, with its categories of literal belief, literal disbelief, relativism, and post-critical belief. It then explains the importance of Paul Ricœur’s concepts of second naïveté, symbol, demystification, and demythologization for the development of the PCBS. Next, it looks at how David Wulff adopts and adapts Ricœur’s ideas to develop a heuristic schema of views in the psychology of religion. Following this, it shows how Dirk Hutsebaut uses Wulff’s schema as a basis for developing the PCBS. Then it presents some serious problems in the PCBS, focusing specifically on its categories of relativism and post-critical belief (second naïveté). This is followed by a brief reiteration of six fundamental flaws revealed in the analysis of the PCBS; 1) Ricœur’s understanding of false consciousness and 2) demythologization, 3) Wulff’s Protestant assumptions about biblical hermeneutics, 4) the partial rather than full adoption of Ricœur’s schema by Wulff and Wulff’s schema by Hutsebaut, 5) the different and incommensurate perspectives of Ricœur, Wulff, and Hutsebaut, and 6) the universalization of personal experience by Ricœur, Wulff, and Hutsebaut. The essay concludes by presenting the fundamental theological flaw of the PCBS, its inability to distinguish between natural faith and supernatural faith, caused by its lack of any theology of grace.

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