In another fine essay of remembrance for Avery Cardinal Dulles, George Weigel writes:

Avery Dulles was a self-consciously ecclesial theologian, who made a deliberate decision to “think with the church.” Some imagined this a form of conservatism; if it was (and such labels really don’t work with theology), it was an evangelical conservatism, an intellectual approach inspired by Christ’s instruction, after the multiplication of loaves ands fishes, to “pick up the fragments, that nothing may be lost.” Dulles explicated ancient truths; he stretched our understanding of them a bit; he probed their implications. But he never sought cheap originality or sound-bite fame.