A step back to go forward

What is Lindbeck doing?- something I should have explained already

Whether Jesus is the Savior of the world might seem a simple question with a clear yes or no answer.

But what makes theology interesting and contested is that there is no agreement on what that “yes” means. Yes, Jesus is Lord may mean that I believe he is because there is adequate evidence that has been verified. Or it may mean that he is because of the peace I now have in my heart and the courage this belief gives me to live my life. Or, it may mean that this “yes” is part of a larger commitment I have made to a church that believes that the Yes to God in Christ hems us in to a larger garment of belief, a whole cloth that speaks to what we believe in terms of how it commits us to a particular community who bears witness to these beliefs.

Christian doctrine is not simply the conversation about the “yes” or “no” of how one answers the question of whether God was in Christ. It is the broader conversation behind this yes or no that explains why, and in what way, a particular answer pertains. “Yes God was in Christ because these ten verses from the Old Testament foretell such an event and are confirmed by ancient near eastern inscriptions” is quite a different answer from “Yes God was in Christ because of the joy that brings my heart.”

I’ve spent the last few years observing what happens when theologically minded people give different forms of “yes” to the question of whether God was in Christ. You might think that this is not such a problem if the core agreement centers on who Jesus is. But it turns out that the three types of “yes” contain within them three different communities whose commitments differ quite significantly. When theologians differ on what their “yes” means, you end up with three entirely different conversations and forms of life.

In his 1984 book The Nature of Doctrine, George Lindbeck suggests that there are three theories of religion with three corresponding forms of doctrine. The first, the cognitivist, emphasizes propositional truth claims.¹ Cognitivists assume that theology functions similarly to philosophy, with a set of realities “out there” that can be grasped at through reasoned reflection. For a cognitive-propositionalist, “if a doctrine is once true, It is always true, and if it is once false, it is always false” (Lindbeck 16).

The second form, the experiential-expressivist, Lindbeck pins to Frederich Schliermacher, though it could be linked to any number of modern thinkers. The key is that this view interprets religion as an “ultimate concern”. Religion is located “in the prereflective experiential depths of the self”, and outer features of religion such as individual churches and their practices are “outer features of internal experience” (Lindbeck 21). They are “nondiscursive symbols” (Lindbeck 21).

            The Experiential-expressivist view could not have developed without modern cultural conditions. Once individualism and religious pluralism became the conditions of modern life, religion became “deobjectified”.² (This is the cultural condition Peter Berger writes about in The Sacred Canopy, which I’d put money on over Charles Taylor, would love to discuss this in the comments).

            It is the conditions of modern life that create the opportunity for both the cognitive-propositional and experiential-expressivist views.

One of Lindbeck’s chief concerns is the plausibility of ecumenical dialogues. It seemed to Lindbeck that the ecumenical effort would be a poorly disguised charade without a coherent view of how doctrine works.³

Ecumenical dialogues seek to work out the knotty disagreements of theological traditions. Their progress at untangling such disagreements often seems to come at the cost of denominational loyalty. In Lindbeck’s words:

“It has become apparent to me, during twenty-five years of involvement in ecumenical discussions and in teaching about the history and present status of doctrines, that those of us who are engaged in these activities lack adequate categories for conceptualizing the problems that arise. We are often unable, for example, to specify the criteria we implicitly employ when we say that some changes are faithful to a doctrinal tradition and others unfaithful, or some doctrinal differences are church-dividing and others not. Doctrines, in other words, do not behave the way they should, given our customary suppositions about the kinds of things they are. We clearly need new and better ways of understanding their nature and function.”⁴

Lindbeck’s pivot from what a doctrine claims to how it behaves is his critical insight. He is working to propose adequate categories to understand how doctrine works.

Ecumenical dialogues, of course, might have a diverse set of concerns (among which doctrinal consensus may be among the lowest). Better understanding of denominational distinctives, friendship, and discussion of historical breaches and misunderstandings are all goals of ecumenical dialogue that hold within themselves none of the direct concerns Lindbeck is considering.

But if doctrine is a concern, participants benefit from a shared understanding of how doctrine works.

Say the dialogue contains two participants, a Roman Catholic and a low-church Protestant, and the topic is the Eucharist.

The doctrines represented are a Catholic view of transubstantiation or a low-church Protestant view of symbolic presence.

If the participants believe that doctrine works to identify and isolate the one true teaching on a religious belief, then the participants in the ecumenical dialogue will likely “agree to disagree”. They will recognize that there are two quite distinct views on the Eucharist represented and will seek greater understanding of the represented views. They might, I suppose, work to articulate a third view that represents the best of the first and second views, but this view, in the final estimation is neither the first or the second. (It should be noted that acquiring a “third view” is not the goal of ecumenical dialogues). Such a third view would be not an ecumenical success but a basic theological failure that bastardizes the historic positions of two ecclesial communities.

In this example, doctrine is a set of cognitive criteria that can be reached through proposition and the exercise of logic. It “works” by communicating truth that can be affirmed or rejected- truth that is “outside” of logic but is available through the use of it. The boundaries of doctrinal truth are fixed, and individuals who adhere to said doctrine (“religionists”) are those who adhere to the stated doctrinal boundaries.

There is a second scenario that might also prevail. Participants in a dialogue might begin with the same Eucharistic disagreement and conclude that what matters about the sacrament is how it allows individuals to engage the divine. Stretching one’s soul toward God, however you do it, is the primary concern of the sacrament. Under such a view, Roman Catholics and low-church Baptists are already in basic agreement when they meet weekly, or, ah, quarterly, to partake. Ecumenical “consensus”, therefore, is on what the liturgical form effects in the life of the believer.

This is a rather punchy and certainly abbreviated version of two views on ecumenical dialogue, but I hope you can discern the deep inadequacy of these two accounts. In the first, no ecumenical work is possible that does not result in a third view of the doctrine that is incompatible with the first and the second. In the second view, doctrine matters hardly at all- what matters is the express experience or emotional transfer that occurs when one encounters the “sacred divine”, however you name it (let’s be honest, usually Her).

When doctrines are thought to be merely cognitive categories to which intellectual assent is required, ecumenical work exists to articulate the doctrinal commitments of each participant, but unless one embraces the views of another participant, consensus or movement on a topic requires moving from one position to a second, modified one. When doctrine is primarily an account of symbolic meaning that effects certain “inner feeling, attitudes, or existential orientations”, religionists that believe quite different things can conclude that their religious experiences are identical.

The choice between these two views seems to be between “informative propositions or truth claims about objective realities” (Lindbeck 16) or “noninformative and nondiscursive symbols of inner feelings, attitudes, or existential orientations” (Lindbeck 16). Ecumenical work either has participants arguing over objective truths or ceding difference to a view of one shared religious experience. Under both views, it is “one truth” that exists above all religious experience- in the first, it is a cognitively accessible set of propositions that can be known through logical argument, in the second, it is “one truth” about human experience that sets out the conditions under which humans might seek to know God, whatever they call her.

Were I still a classroom teacher, this is one of those lectures where I had to backtrack and explain something I should have already explained. What prompted this explanation is Jake Meador’s piece that references Lindbeck. I am glad Jake is reading Lindbeck, and I also think he’s inclined to read Lindbeck and my writing in a way that is peculiarly evangelical.

As I’ve written, Lindbeck is trying to explain what doctrine does. He is evaluating how ecumenical dialogues work, and he does have in mind a view to how they work that will render his participation in them coherent. He wants to explain how what he is doing is neither creating a bastardized form of religion, or making religion into vague feeling. But at no point does Lindbeck suggest his third form as a strategy. (This is not a “third way”!)

Modern churchmen, however, love a strategy. I do understand the desire to find “a way forward”, but I think we are likely to miss what Lindbeck is doing if we are looking to simply apply his work to gain better results. As I’ve written here before, when all is strategy, man becomes merely a means. The goal of this series is to identify how man became a means, and how religion has been oddly complicit with that transformation. Lindbeck’s cultural linguistic theory points not to a strategy but to a form of life where doctrine works in a particular way because it is a language that is spoken, not a strategy that can be applied.

I’d love to hear more from you in the comments. More soon!

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[1] Lindbeck 21.

1. I’ve called this the “cognitive-propositional”, or CP.

2. See Thomas Luckmann and Peter Berger, quoted in Lindbeck, 21.

3. I went to check as I prepared this what the state of the literature is on the history of the ecumenical movement. This volume seems the historical standard. I think this would make a great dissertation for someone who is savvy with both history and philosophy. What I am more interested in is a theological evaluation of such; eg, how has the view of what ecumenism is and what it could accomplish shifted historically.

4. Lindbeck 1.