Lindbeck’s Vision of the Church

The Thomist 67 (2003): 463-80 LINDBECK'S VISION OF THE CHURCH }AMES MASSA Immaculate Conception Seminary Huntington, New York I. POSTLIBERALISM: A "RADICAL TRADITION" EW PROTESTANT THEOLOGIANS in America deserve to be taken as seriously by Catholic readers as George Lindbeck. The former Yale professor attended three of the four sessions of Vatican II (1962-64) as a delegate of the Lutheran World Federation, and in the decades following the council participated in the key bilateral Catholic-Lutheran dialogues that culminated in the 1999 Joint Declaration on Justification. Lindbeck 's early scholarship in medieval scholasticism had already inclined him to see points of continuity between Catholic authors like Aquinas and Duns Scotus and the later Protestant Reformers. As a Lutheran he has always identified with the evangelical catholicity of the Augsburg Confession (1530), as opposed to those strains of the Reformation more hostile to Catholic sensibilities . Among the graduate students he mentored at Yale are a number of Catholics-some of whom have appeared in the pages of this journal-who have applied his postliberal principles to a number of theological areas. More than a half-century of research and promotion of efforts to restore church unity and foster interreligious cooperation suggest strong sympathies with the goals of Catholic reform engendered by Vatican II. One of Lindbeck's former Roman Catholic students, James Buckley, has compiled a helpful reader that demonstrates the appeal of the Yale scholar's postliberal theology and methodology 463 464 JAMES MASSA to a variety of audiences. The Church in a Postliberal Age belongs to a series of volumes that Eerdmans calls "Radical Traditions."1 The "radical" methodology that Lindbeck employs in the interest of recommitting the adherents of particular faith traditions to the truth claims that shape religious identity and practice has influenced theologians ofvarying Christian confessions, as well as some Jewish and Muslim scholars. Against the homogenizing tendencies of today's liberal culture, the defense of religious particularity and singularity cuts across denominational and cultural differences. The postliberal method, which received its definitive elucidation in Lindbeck's The Nature of Doctrine (1984), places "dogmatic faithfulness" and "practical applicability " ahead of "apologeticintelligibility." Christian theology best serves the church not when it translates the believer's core convictions into a supposedly nonpartisan and universal idiom (preliberal approach), nor when it seeks to illumine the believer's inner sentiments ofwhich those convictions are merely expressive (liberal approach), but rather when it fosters an assimilation ofthe believer into a universe of meaning that is engendered by the biblical story ofJesus and Israel (postliberal approach). Doctrines, as Lindbeck has argued, should be viewed not as primarily informative or symbolic, but instead as regulative of Christian belief, worship, and action in the world. It would be difficult to overestimate the stimulating effect of this postliberal manifesto on a generation of Anglo-American scholars. The impression that Lindbeck had given voice to what some observers thought of as an emergent ''Yale school"-which included his colleagues Hans Frei, David Kelsey, and Paul Holmer-helped to elicit swift reactions from varying and disparate quarters. Charges of relativism could be heard from cognitive propositionalists who read into some of Lindbeck's statements a disregard for the ontological status of dogmatic assertions. Experiential expressivists--or those whom Lindbeck appeared to identify as such-saw his reliance on analytical 1 George A. Lindbeck, The Church in a Postliberal Age, ed. James J. Buckley (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2002). Pp. 252. ISBN 0-8028-3995-9. LINDBECK'S VISION OF THE CHURCH 465 philosophy (Ludwig Wittgenstein) and cultural anthropology (Clifford Geertz) as a smokescreen for a rehashed Barthian style fideism. More recently, deconstructionist minded critics have questioned whether postliberalism's tendency to immunize the biblical story against critiques from the outside does not itselfhide a hegemonic intent to regain the "center" of Western culture which had been lost through post-Enlightenment secularization. Yet other scholars searching for a means of opposing the "acids of modernity" that corrode confidence in communal religion and its particular truth claims have found in postliberalism, and in Lindbeck's cultural linguistic theory in particular, a research program that fosters faithfulness to one's own tribe while avoiding the...