Tag: George Lindbeck

Is he wrong? An Easter Question

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George Lindbeck’s willing to say it:

What the good God is doing to the church, it seems to me, is destroying us bit by bit. And I think that God insists God wants us to be united. And destroying each denomination’s identity is precisely the way in which eventually we’ll have to be united.

from Postliberal Theology and the Church Catholic (Baker Academic, 2012), 118.

At least three arguable claims here, it seems to me.

  1. the church is being destroyed
  2. by God
  3. on account of church division

The first claim would be the easiest to develop given the growing literature on the current decline of the contemporary Western church. For instance, HERE.

The third claim, to my mind, would be the weakest. Or maybe I should say, the sort of sociological analyses advancing the first claim seem to point the finger elsewhere, or at least offer a more multifactor explanation. I certainly have my share of ecumenical sympathies, but I’m doubtful church division can bear this weight alone.

I’d venture to say division troubles theologians more than the typical lapsed churchgoer. The latter would conceivably mention church scandal among their reasons for disaffiliation, but I’d suspect division wouldn’t be the first scandal in their minds. Theologians might reply it’s a further measure of the severity of the scandal of division that our consciences have dulled to it, but that could also just tell us decline is overdetermined. There’s plenty more sufficient reasons to pick from out there.

The second claim, though, that God is behind the church’s decline, nonetheless remains a genuinely theological proposal in what’s too often merely a sociological conversation. Is our current trajectory (what would you call the opposite of a Great Awakening?) just a historical trend that ebbs and flows like any other tide, and therefore a big nothing burger, even if temporarily disappointing, or is it an act of God? Is God telling us something? Judging us? 

As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.” Ro 8.36

But if that’s the case, to what new life may we hope to be raised? Lord, into your hands I commit my spirit.

Coordinating Language and Experience

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Coordinating Language and Experience How should we understand the relationship between the contents of human experience and their articulation in language? Must mastery of a language be taken for granted before any particular experience is even available as a possible object of consciousness? Or is it the case that the notion of a pre-linguistic experience is perfectly intelligible? This first pass, […]

Pictures of Doctrine

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Pictures of Doctrine A picture held us captive. (Wittgenstein, PI §115) Doctrines as Propositions A. Unrestricted. Thesis: Doctrines explain reality. Doctrinal supply should meet explanatory demand. Advocate: Alister McGrath Within the context of a scientific theology, the Christian network of doctrines is conceived as a response to revelation, in the belief that such doctrines will possess explanatory potential. [136] The […]

In defense of an irony

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Owen Chadwick has a remark about John Henry Newman that’s left a lasting impression on me, namely, “Newman was an intellectual who distrusted the intellect.” There’s something about this characterization I find highly suggestive. It works not only as a description of how Newman proceeded in theology, but also as a proposal for how much weight we should accord certain kinds of considerations in our theological deliberations today. If you’re curious about what it might look like to take this lesson from Newman to heart, I’d suggest you need not look any farther than the work of Nicholas Lash, himself a Newman scholar. (I’ve tried gesturing to this same point before here). We’d be misinterpreting Newman and Lash if we take them to be advocating for a species of anti-intellectualism, some sort of principled refusal to submit their work to the review of their peers. Quite to the contrary, both theologians are examples of exceptional intellects at work on their craft. What they’re actually engaged in is an effort to overturn reigning prejudices favoring the primacy of the intellect in our understanding of religion.

Fortunately Newman and Lash aren’t alone in this endeavor. We can number other theologians among their ranks. Consider the following passage from Kathryn Tanner:

in the early 1980s […] the main worries of both theologians and philosophers of religion were methodological in nature: to justify religious thought, either by showing how it met the usual standards of meaning, intelligibility and truth endorsed by other disciplines, or (the preferred tactic of Frei and Lindbeck) by showing, with an ironic display of academic rigor, why no such justification was necessary. (Shaping a Theological Mind, Ed. Darren Marks, Ashgate, 2008, 115)

Tanner notes the irony of the rigor Frei and Lindbeck had to exert in order to make the case that university-wide criteria of accountability would be misplaced in theology. Whatever Tanner’s evaluation of their efforts, I’d say Frei and Lindbeck were on the right track. Even when (maybe even especially when) one is setting out to delimit the vocation of humanity’s rational powers, one must do so as thoughtfully, intelligently, as one can, if the critique is to have any chance of sticking. After all, it’s no disservice to reason to apprehend the limits of the intellect’s competencies by way of reasoned appraisal.