The nature of doctrine : religion and theology in a postliberal age

236 Pages·2009·1.425 MB·English

by  Lindbeck, George A., Marshall, Bruce D.

THE NATURE OF DOCTRINE
25th Anniversary Edition
THE NATURE OF DOCTRINE
Religion and Theology in a
Postliberal Age
25th Anniversary Edition
GEORGE A. LINDBECK
with a new introduction by Bruce D. Marshall
and a new afterword by the author
© 1984, 2009 George A. Lindbeck
Introduction © 2009 Westminster John Knox Press
First published by Westminster John Knox Press, 1984
25th anniversary edition
Published by Westminster John Knox Press
Louisville, Kentucky
09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18—10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
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The Introduction extensively revises an essay originally published under the title “Lindbeck Abroad,” Pro
ecclesia 15, no. 2 (2006): 223—41. © 2006 Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group. Used with permission
of Roman & Littlefield Publishing Group. The foreword to the German edition of The Nature of Doctrine
was originally published as George Lindbeck, “Foreword to the German Edition of The Nature of
Doctrine,” in The Church in a Postliberal Age © 2003 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids,
Michigan. Reprinted by permission of the publisher; all rights reserved. Also used with permission of SCM
Press. The bibliography is based on the one originally published in Andreas Eckerstorfer, Kirche in der
postmodern Welt: Der Beitrag George Lindbecks zu einer neuen Verhältnisbestimmung. Salzburger
Theologische Studien 16 (Innsbruck and Vienna: Tyrolia-Verlag, 2001), and is used with permission. It has,
however, been revised and updated.
Scripture quotations from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible are copyright © 1989 by the
Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. and are
used by permission.
Book design by Sharon Adams
Cover design by Eric Walljasper, Minneapolis, MN
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Contents
Introduction: The Nature of Doctrine after 25 Years Bruce D. Marshall
Foreword to the German Edition of The Nature of Doctrine
Foreword to the Original Edition
1. Theory, Ecumenism, and Culture: The Proposal in Context
I. The Ecumenical Matrix
II. The Psychosocial Context
2. Religion and Experience: A Pretheological Inquiry
I. An Experiential-Expressive Model
II. A Cultural-Linguistic Alternative
III. The Inconclusiveness of the Comparison
3. Many Religions and the One True Faith
I. Unsurpassability
II. The Interrelationships of Religions
III. Salvation and Other Faiths
IV. Excursus on Religion and Truth
4. Theories of Doctrine
I. Doctrines and Their Problems
II. Grammar and Doctrine, Continuity and Change
III. A Taxonomy of Doctrines
5. Testing the Theory: Christology, Mariology, and Infallibility
I. Nicaea and Chalcedon
II. Marian Dogmas
III. Infallibility
IV. The Superiority of a Regulative View
6. Toward a Postliberal Theology
I. The Problem of Assessment
II. Faithfulness as Intratextuality
III. Applicability as Futurology
IV. Intelligibility as Skill
Conclusion
Afterword: Interreligious Relations and Christian Ecumenism: Revisiting
Chapter 3 of The Nature of Doctrine
Bibliography
Index
Introduction
The Nature of Doctrine after 25 Years
BRUCE D. MARSHALL
I
A quarter century has now passed since George Lindbeck first published The
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Nature of Doctrine. With the passage of time this slim volume has emerged as
one of the most influential works of academic theology to appear in English in
the last fifty years. It would be difficult to find a theologian in North America or
Britain who lacks an opinion on it, often, as the bibliography appended to this
twenty-fifth anniversary edition shows, a published one. To Lindbeck is ascribed
the introduction of a new way of doing theology (“postliberalism”), or, with
Hans Frei, the founding of a new theological school (named for Yale, where they
both taught). In the fragmented, even chaotic, world of contemporary
Anglophone theology, The Nature of Doctrine is one of the few books that
practically everybody thinks they need to know something about.
Lindbeck’s influence, though, now extends well beyond the English-speaking
world. Unusually for a book by an American theologian, The Nature of Doctrine
has been translated into German, and even more unusually, into Chinese and
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Japanese. French and Italian translations have also appeared. With the wider
availability of the book has emerged a substantial and still-growing literature on
Lindbeck in the chief languages of European scholarship, especially English and
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German.
On both sides of the Atlantic, The Nature of Doctrine has seemed to promise a
way forward for Christian theology, Catholic as well as Protestant. In an early
and generally appreciative article centering on Lindbeck and postliberalism from
1990, Cardinal (then Bishop) Walter Kasper drew attention to the freshness of
Lindbeck’s project for his own theological world:
In contemporary German-speaking theology, discussions of genuinely basic issues have
become rare, and where they do occur, they generally turn into tedious trench warfare, a
standoff between conservatives and progressives where the front never moves, or rearguard
actions in battles fought long ago. But the theological scene in the United States appears
willingly to have gone on the move. There one discusses without embarrassment, and generally
in a less politicized way than we do, the aporias, indeed the crisis, into which modern theology
has fallen. And one seeks ways out of this situation that aim not at a restorative retreat into a
precritical epoch but at moving forward into a postcritical or postliberal and postmodern
phase.4
Some have suggested that the book may even offer a breath of life for the
ancient Christian communities now withering in postmodern Europe. There
secularism has diminished public participation in Christian communal life to
levels not seen in Europe since the missionary days of the early Middle Ages,
and Christianity’s accommodation to a hostile or indifferent culture has reached
a point where a noticeable portion of the few who still go to church profess not
to believe in God. Lindbeck’s robust confidence in the church’s ability to
maintain a strong sense of its own identity and tradition, yet in a postmodern and
post-Constantinian way, may be the needed theological response to this
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unpromising situation.
In hindsight it is not difficult to see why the book has had so much impact. Its
scope is remarkably broad. Lindbeck develops accounts of the nature of religion,
of the relationship between Christianity and other religions, of Christian doctrine
and the resolution of historic doctrinal conflict among Christian communities,
and of the nature and tasks of theology. His treatment of these large and basic
theological topics is admirably coherent, without being rigidly prescriptive or
deductive. One can enter at any point and see mutually reinforcing connections
to the other main issues clearly. At the same time Lindbeck’s ideas are strikingly
novel. His cultural-linguistic theory of religions and their truth claims, his
regulative theory of Christian doctrine, and his postliberal approach to theology,
while inspired by theological and extratheological sources that Lindbeck
identifies, overturn the various expectations for thinking about these matters that
were standard in academic theology when the book appeared. Lindbeck
accomplishes all this, moreover, in a volume of less than 150 pages, written in a
compressed but accessible and jargon-free style, with the evident intention of
being understood by its readers (brevity and clarity, one must admit, are not
virtues consistently exemplified by theological books). Before The Nature of
Doctrine, Lindbeck was known outside his native Yale mainly among
ecumenical theologians, in particular for his work on Lutheran–Roman Catholic
dialogue. The book turned its author into one of the most widely discussed
theologians in the world.
To be widely read and influential is not, of course, the same thing as being
agreed with. Much of the reception of The Nature of Doctrine has been critical.
Theologians of all kinds have usually found at least part of Lindbeck’s enterprise
compelling. But this has made what looked to them like dubious features of his
project even more troubling. As a result, while practically everybody has found
something to like in The Nature of Doctrine, many have also found elements
needing serious, even fierce, resistance. Lindbeck himself aptly summarized the
reaction to the work ten years after it first appeared. “The book’s combination of
avant garde conceptualities and commitment to historic doctrine was perceived
as a direct attack on liberalism, on the one hand, and as seductively dangerous to
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conservatism, on the other.”
Here I will offer an account of the main lines along which The Nature of
Doctrine has been read and make some observations about the relationship
between the response to the book and what I take to be the claims Lindbeck is
most concerned to make in it. We can begin, though, by briefly locating The
Nature of Doctrine in Lindbeck’s theological career.
II
George Lindbeck came to Yale Divinity School in 1943, at the age of twenty,
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and received his BD in 1946. By the time he completed his doctorate in 1955 he
had already been on the faculty of the Divinity School for several years. At Yale,
Lindbeck’s main teacher was Robert Lowry Calhoun, a theologian now virtually
forgotten, but a scholar whose comprehensive knowledge of the history of
theology and philosophy reputedly led his students and colleagues to call him
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“the Logos.” Lindbeck’s own early work was in medieval theology and
philosophy. He studied in Toronto and Paris with two of the last century’s most
outstanding scholars in that field, Etienne Gilson and Paul Vignaux, and wrote
his dissertation on Scotus’s doctrine of being, well before the renaissance in
Scotus studies over the last generation. (He once said, in response to an inquiry
about why the dissertation had never been published, that at the time there could
not have been more than six people in the world who would have been interested
in reading it.) His early publications were mostly on medieval topics,
particularly high scholastic philosophical theology.
Lindbeck might have remained primarily a historian of medieval thought had
it not been for the Second Vatican Council. The Lutheran World Federation
asked him to fill one of the positions it had been offered for delegated observers
at the council. Then a junior professor, Lindbeck became an official Lutheran
observer at the twenty-first ecumenical council of the Catholic Church. He spent
most of the period during which the council met (1962–1965) in Rome and other
parts of Europe. Even before the council started, he had begun attending to
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ecumenical questions.
If the opening period of Lindbeck’s career focused on the medieval treatment
of questions in fundamental theology (as it would now be called), his work from
the late 1950s on may fairly be said to focus above all on the church. How
should the Christian community understand its identity and purpose in the
modern world, especially in light of the church’s own past, its (more or less
likely) future, and the scandal of Christian division? From the eve of Vatican II
forward, Lindbeck’s theological project can be seen primarily as an extended
reflection on this question and how best to answer it.
To be sure, this is only a rough way of characterizing the whole of Lindbeck’s
work, which includes, besides The Nature of Doctrine and The Future of Roman
Catholic Theology (1970), over 200 articles and reviews. These cover a
remarkable array of topics, from whether the Truman administration should have
sent an ambassador to the Vatican (yes), to whether Max Kadushin’s view of the
rabbinic mind sheds needed light on Martin Luther’s approach to the reformation
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of Christianity (yes again). Still, most of what Lindbeck has written has a