Trial of the Witnesses: The Rise and Decline of Postliberal Theology (Challenges in Contemporary Theology)

THE TRIAL OF THE WITNESSES The Rise and Decline of Postliberal Theology Paul J. DeHart THE TRIAL OF THE WITNESSES ...

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THE TRIAL OF THE WITNESSES The Rise and Decline of Postliberal Theology

Paul J. DeHart

THE TRIAL OF THE WITNESSES

Challenges in Contemporary Theology Series Editors: Gareth Jones and Lewis Ayres Canterbury Christ Church University College, UK and Emory University, US Challenges in Contemporary Theology is a series aimed at producing clear orientations in, and research on, areas of “challenge” in contemporary theology. These carefully coordinated books engage traditional theological concerns with mainstreams in modern thought and culture that challenge those concerns. The “challenges” implied are to be understood in two senses: those presented by society to contemporary theology, and those posed by theology to society. Published These Three are One: The Practice of Trinitarian Theology David S. Cunningham After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy Catherine Pickstock Mystical Theology: The Integrity of Spirituality and Theology Mark A. McIntosh Engaging Scripture: A Model for Theological Interpretation Stephen E. Fowl Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ William T. Cavanaugh Sexuality and the Christian Body: Their Way into the Triune God Eugene F. Rogers, Jr On Christian Theology Rowan Williams The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature Paul S. Fiddes Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy, and Gender Sarah Coakley A Theology of Engagement Ian S. Markham Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and Theology Gerard Loughlin Scripture and Metaphysics: Aquinas and the Renewal of Trinitarian Theology Matthew Levering Faith and Freedom: An Interfaith Perspective David Burrell Keeping God’s Silence Rachel Muers Christ and Culture Graham Ward Theology in the Public Square: Church, Academy, and Nation Gavin D’Costa Rewritten Theology: Aquinas After His Readers Mark D. Jordan God’s Companions: Reimagining Christian Ethics Samuel Wells The Trial of the Witnesses: The Rise and Decline of Postliberal Theology Paul DeHart

THE TRIAL OF THE WITNESSES The Rise and Decline of Postliberal Theology

Paul J. DeHart

© 2006 by Paul J. DeHart BLACKWELL PUBLISHING 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148–5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK 550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia The right of Paul J. DeHart to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. First published 2006 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd 1 2006 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data DeHart, Paul J., 1964– The trial of the witnesses: the rise and decline of postliberal theology / Paul J. DeHart. p. cm.—(Challenges in contemporary theology) includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-3295-4 (hardcover: alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-4051-3295-7 (hardcover: alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-3296-1 (pbk.: alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-4051-3296-5 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Postliberal theology. I. Title. II. Series. BT83.595.D44 2006 230'.046—dc22 2005030634 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. Set in 10.5 pt Bembo by The Running Head Limited, Cambridge, www.therunninghead.com Printed and bound in Singapore by C.O.S. Printers Pte Ltd The publisher’s policy is to use permanent paper from mills that operate a sustainable forestry policy, and which has been manufactured from pulp processed using acid-free and elementary chlorine-free practices. Furthermore, the publisher ensures that the text paper and cover board used have met acceptable environmental accreditation standards. For further information on Blackwell Publishing, visit our website: www.blackwellpublishing.com

FOR RORY

And when they bring you to trial and deliver you up, do not be anxious beforehand what you are to say; but say whatever is given you in that hour, for it is not you who speak, but the Holy Spirit. Mark 13:11

Contents

Preface 1 Genesis of a Concept: Postliberalism and its Opponents

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Preparation: 1945–54 2 Exploring New Directions at Yale: 1955–64 9 A Tendency Takes Shape: 1965–74 13 The “Yale School” before Postliberalism: 1975–84 18 The Crystallization and Contentious Reception of Postliberalism: 1985–94 32 The Decline of Postliberalism: 1995 to the Present 41 The Goal of the Present Work 53 2 George Lindbeck: Theology and the Ecclesial People of Witness

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Orthodoxy and Society after Christendom 57 Community Definition by Grammatical Rules 67 The Truth of the People of Witness 80 A New Theology for the Ecclesial “Text” 89 3 Hans Frei: Theology and the Christological Object of Witness Concreteness and Identity in the Christological Object 101 Christology and Biblical Hermeneutics 111 Negotiating Perspectives on the Christological Object 128 The “Generosity” of Orthodoxy as an Issue of Method 142

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4 Lindbeck: Elusive Oppositions and the Construction of Postliberalism (I)

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The Conceptual Scaffolding of the Liberal–Postliberal Dualism 148 Ecclesiology and the Verbum Externum 152 Liberalism as “Experiential-Expressivism” 160 Intratextuality 171 Temptations of Opposition 184 5 Frei: Elusive Oppositions and the Construction of Postliberalism (II)

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The Mystery of the Christological Object and Types of Theology 191 The Typology 205 Dogmatics and Apologetics: A Zero-sum Game? 217 Systematic versus Ad Hoc (I): The Case of David Tracy 225 Systematic versus Ad Hoc (II): Irreducible Mystery and the Lessons of Correlation 233 6 The Trial of the Witnesses: The Yale Thinkers “After” Postliberalism

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Fashioning an Alternative to Postliberalism: The Trial 240 Trial as Endurance under Temptation 246 Trial as Experiment 251 Trial as Submission to Judgment 262 The Logic of Proliferation 276 Bibliography Index

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Preface

Thomas Sherlock, Bishop of Bangor, wrote The Trial of the Witnesses of the Resurrection of Jesus in 1729. Directed against Thomas Woolston and calling forth a counter-blast from the unfortunate Peter Annet, this particular salvo in the anti-deism campaign had a loud report, heard in England, on the continent, and even in the colonies. Sherlock lived to see some thirteen editions through the presses: a “best seller.” His brief was to defend the apostles from the charge of falsifying the reports of Jesus’ resurrection; his methods were all too typical of the defenders of orthodoxy during the age of reason. Historian John Hunt complained that the book “had so much of a lawyer’s special pleading, that it was probably the work which suggested Dr. Johnson’s famous remark, that the apostles were once a year tried for forgery and acquitted” (Religious Thought in England, III: 81). Mark Pattison, in his famous contribution to Essays and Reviews, was more eloquent, and more exasperated. One might say that the apologists of [Sherlock’s] day had in like manner left the bench for the bar, and taken a brief for the Apostles. They are impatient at the smallest demur, and deny loudly that there is any weight in anything advanced by their opponents. In the way they override the most serious difficulties, they show anything but the temper which is supposed to qualify for the weighing of evidence. The astonishing want of candour in their reasoning, their blindness to real difficulty, the ill-concealed predetermination to find a particular verdict, the rise of their style in passion in the same proportion as their argument fails in strength, constitute a class of writers more calculated than any other to damage their own cause with young ingenuous minds. (“Tendencies of Religious Thought,” p. 45)

If I have taken the liberty of borrowing Sherlock’s title, it is obviously with no intention of resurrecting the style of Hanoverian apologetics. Pattison

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was right: “A little consideration will show that the grounds on which advocacy before a legal tribunal rests, make it inappropriate in theological reasoning” (p. 43). So I take a different approach to the ongoing twomillennium trial of the resurrection’s witnesses, attempting to bring to light a model of “theological reasoning” which takes with complete seriousness what Rowan Williams has called “the judgment of the world.” Of course theology must in one sense always “advocate” for the faith; but an attorney is not under oath, and is not directly implicated in the jury’s verdict. Theology cast in such a mode finds it fatally easy, as Pattison suggests, to evade the “difficulties” inherent in bearing witness. Forgetting that it can only stand with those in the witness box, it is tempted to imagine itself free from their often agonizing constraints: free to ignore the transcendent elusiveness of the One to whom testimony must be borne, or to fashion that testimony without really hearing the questions and challenges of the world to which it must be directed. The irony of the present is that this illusion of theology mastering the situation of contemporary proclamation without undergoing the rigors of trial before the world is no longer just the preserve of apologists. It can take a less familiar form precisely among the enemies of all apologetic, some of whom proudly wave the banner of something called postliberalism. But that is to anticipate. In 1984 a slim volume appeared from a distinguished theological historian and ecumenicist at Yale, proposing a new way of thinking about theology he dubbed “postliberal.” The scholarly murmur which greeted its arrival grew within a few years to a dull roar. The author, George Lindbeck, was hardly a household name; though well-known at Yale and in the circles of Catholic– Lutheran dialogue in which he had been active, the 57-year-old had certainly not been accounted a seminal figure in systematic theology. The book soon changed that, though its bold proposal for a new way of doing theology was rather innocuously tucked away in the final chapter of what purported to be a study of the way doctrines function in religious communities. This proposal was obviously if obliquely influenced by the work of Lindbeck’s colleague at Yale, Hans Frei, though he, too, was no systematician. Thanks to his pioneering study of the effect of modernity on biblical interpretation, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, he was better known as an historian of post-Enlightenment Christianity. At any rate, it was quickly agreed among interpreters that Lindbeck’s book was synthesizing and systematizing the insights which Frei and others at Yale had been quietly developing for years. The opinion soon established itself that the theological world was witnessing, for good or ill, a new school, a “Yale School” of theology. Under the discernible influence of Karl Barth and Ludwig Wittgenstein, it chal-

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lenged the basic assumptions of the liberal theologies reigning in academic circles. Those perceiving themselves to be under attack were not slow to respond, led by David Tracy of the University of Chicago, one of the most respected theorists of progressive theology in the United States. For over a decade “Yale vs. Chicago” was a familiar theme of discussion in the scholarly journals. As the polemical heat of the quarrel intensified, so too did the lack of agreement over just what the basic issues were. By the late 1990s a sense of exhaustion had evidently begun to set in. The lack of substantive methodological follow-up work from Lindbeck’s pen was exacerbated by Frei’s sudden and untimely death only a few years after the appearance of Lindbeck’s book. He had been working on his own magnum opus which many hoped would clarify the discussion. His death resulted in a lacuna inadequately filled by posthumous publication of scattered notes, papers, and the tantalizing records of his last public lectures at Princeton and at Birmingham in England. Even though the deeper issues remained stubbornly elusive, the opposition obviously had something to do with how theology balanced the twin demands for faithfulness and change, and with the role in striking this balance of modern thought-forms, uncommitted or even potentially hostile to Christian claims. The results of the postliberal intervention are still very much with us. To be sure, the heated discussion among its supporters and detractors which animated the American theological scene during the 1980s and 1990s has tapered off, but there is no sign that the basic oppositions have gone away. Though the label itself is not thrown around nearly as much anymore, the idea continues to lead a somewhat fitful existence despite its invincible vagueness. One of the most widely read textbooks surveying contemporary theology (David Ford’s The Modern Theologians) confidently devotes a chapter to “postliberal theology” following one on its supposed opponents, “liberals and revisionists.” The recent eruption of “radical orthodoxy” (itself complexly but sympathetically related to postliberal trends) has involved the not-so-disguised return of some of the older disputes. I have long been interested in the question of how theology can creatively rethink the Christian tradition and yet contribute to the maintenance of its identity; this was the crux of the quarrel which crystallized around Lindbeck’s and Frei’s thought. Throughout my postgraduate studies at both of the rival “headquarters” (Yale and Chicago), and continuing during my years of teaching at Vanderbilt (a long-time “revisionist” outpost), I have experienced both a continuing fascination with the significance of the “Yale School,” and an accompanying frustration with the categories in which the intriguing but often obscure ideas of its two central

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figures tend to get interpreted. An insufficiently reflective reliance on the categories “postliberal” and “liberal/revisionist” has characterized (and hampered) both sides of the dispute. The prejudices built up over the course of the debate continue to linger in a way I have come to regard as profoundly unhelpful. My motivation to write this book grew out of this mixture of fascination and frustration, combined with a sense that it might now be possible to gain some relative distance and clarity on the disputes. My encounters with students and faculty colleagues have convinced me that the adventurousness, the sense of fresh possibility which I continue to see in the work of Frei and Lindbeck has largely been occluded by the stale repetition of the revisionistpostliberal opposition. On the one hand, sympathetic reception and appropriation of these thinkers, still determined by these now-atrophied polemical categories, has often tended toward a kind of sophisticated but defensively conservative confessionalism or traditionalism. In their turn, progressive critics of “postliberalism” are tempted to see this confessionalist retreat as inevitable, a confirmation of the suspicions they have had all along that Frei and Lindbeck were simply peddling a clever form of repristination. Whether embraced or lamented, their influence remains undiminished if increasingly subterranean. A new and close reading of the work of these two will, I hope, initiate a fresh engagement with their thought, a new appreciation of their openness to theological novelty which will help to rescue their legacy from its association with “postmodern” conservatism. The interpretive angle which will emerge from this reading, imaginatively dominated by the motifs of “witness” and “trial,” is intended to illuminate the perennial tension between conservation and innovation within the Christian tradition of belief and what these have to do with the methods of theology. Witness, the pregnant notion of Christianity as an ongoing act of testimony to the Christ, a traditioned, culturally situated communal interpretive activity which theology seeks experimentally both to extend and orient, is crucial both for reappropriating the contributions of Frei and Lindbeck and for setting up a trajectory which moves beyond the postliberalism they inspired. It will become clear to the reader by the end of the book that Frei plays a somewhat more positive role for me than Lindbeck. There are two reasons for this. First, it was Lindbeck who erected much of the conceptual scaffolding of postliberalism. More than any other idea, his “intratextuality” has been used to police the supposed postliberal–liberal divide. To which I argue: however illuminating “intratextuality” might be as a broad, heuristic image for certain individual and social processes (and even here it is misleading if unsupplemented), as a criterion of theological judgment it is useless. Second, the too easy assimilation of Frei’s project to that of Lindbeck skewed

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interpretation of the former; the discovery of unanticipated depths in his thinking once the optic of postliberalism was abandoned has been the most exhilarating experience for me in writing this book. Viewed from a new angle, Frei affords some powerful if rough-hewn insights into the nature of Christian theology and the way it relates to broader cultural processes. Only in light of these insights do some of Lindbeck’s own contributions also show new promise, in spite of the flaws of intratextuality. In short, the book is designed to dismantle the terms of the postliberal controversy and clear the ground of its cluttered remnants in order to enable a new appropriation of their work. Yet another book on “method” will inevitably appear to some a dismal enterprise. My only apology is that method in theology is inextricably bound up with substantive doctrinal issues, and that relieving some of the methodological obscurities surrounding these two figures will bear dividends in the area of dogmatics. Even so, I am painfully aware of the genuine limitations of this study. It is properly a constructive essay and not a full history of postliberalism, nor a survey of all aspects of the thought of Frei and Lindbeck. My attention has been rigorously directed to the issue of the nature and procedures of theology, leaving much especially of Lindbeck’s earlier work (including some important contributions to the history of medieval philosophy) largely undiscussed. There is something awkward about even such a limited “historical” treatment of events within living memory. Obviously, turning it into a proper history would have required interviews and archival work. Nonetheless, I have tried to write the first three chapters in such a way as to allow their detached use for survey purposes. As for the interpretations of Frei, Lindbeck, and postliberalism in the second half of the book, they are at times impressionistic, though I can only say that the impressions are backed up by readings in the relevant primary and secondary literature which extend well beyond the list of works actually cited (including endless book reviews, a revealing though often ignored source). (Sadly, M.A. Higton’s important study of Frei, Christ, Providence and History, appeared too late for its many insights to be incorporated here.) The final chapter is unavoidably sketchy and speculative, but I believe it indicates some promising directions for future investigation. Much of positive value in this study is owed to the thought of others. Aside from my former teacher Kathryn Tanner, whose criticisms of certain postliberal moves gave me much food for thought, I will only mention Rowan Williams as someone whose theological “voice,” even more than any of his specific positions, has been influential on the overall tone of this study. The “radically orthodox” thinkers have also claimed inspiration from Williams; if my conclusions indicate a rather different theological vision

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than theirs that might be because I am more temperamentally inclined toward the stance of Williams’s own teacher Donald MacKinnon than they seem to be. I hope to explore such differences more in the future. Many thanks are due to Vanderbilt Divinity School for generous leave assistance, to Blackwell Publishers and especially series editor Lewis Ayres, and to Todd Green for sterling assistance in proofreading and indexing. My final word of gratitude must go to my wife, Rory Dicker. To reduce her to the status of a “support” for “my work” would be an insult. She has been for me a sun, a source of warmth, radiance, and unanticipated growth. This book is dedicated to her.

Chapter One

Genesis of a Concept: Postliberalism and its Opponents

When The Nature of Doctrine appeared in 1984, it offered what seemed to many a genuinely fresh proposal for doing theology, appealing in a quite unaccustomed way to a consensus formed in sociological or anthropological circles. Though its author had not previously been much associated with methodological debates in theology, the book was quickly received among English-speaking theologians as the inaugural gesture of an identifiable new trend. It gave this trend the rudiments of a systematic shape, and a name as well: “postliberalism.” In so doing it became the center of a decade or more of intense debate, especially in the United States, over the proper exercise of Christian theology. A smaller group of observers, however, must have sensed that they had heard things like this before; the light would dawn once note was taken of its provenance: Yale Divinity School. Far from being a bolt from the blue, the book’s recommendations for theological renewal might then all too easily appear as merely a programmatic restatement of ideas long nurtured there. True, the name associated with many of these ideas had been that of Hans Frei, a difficult and sporadically published author; but now, it seemed, a longtime Yale colleague had stepped forward to put his house in order. The first task of the present study will be to render an account of this slightly uncertain reception, to situate Lindbeck’s book within a tradition of thought to which it was indebted without failing to recognize it as something quite new and distinctive with respect to that development. To grasp at once the tradition and the novelty will be to begin to understand and evaluate the phenomenon of postliberalism, which in the present study will be understood as follows: “postliberalism,” whether negatively or positively evaluated, is the attempted construction of a distinct approach to Christian theology’s basic procedures and self-understanding which self-consciously and systematically opposes itself to specific and identifiable concepts and methods of academic theology

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(putatively dominant since at least the beginning of the nineteenth century) which are labeled “liberal,” “modernist,” or “revisionist” and which are seen as covertly threatening or undermining the basic theological task of enabling Christian witness.1 Thus postliberalism in the ensuing chapters will indicate a scholarly discourse, an intellectual construction, a framework within which theology and theologians are discussed and evaluated. In order to understand the nature of the question or the challenge postliberalism has put to contemporary discussion, and the way in which it has affected the way Frei and Lindbeck are understood, it will be necessary to provide a narrative reconstruction of the development out of which it arose, and of the scholarly quarrels which gave it the shape which to a large degree it still has. The present chapter will do this by focusing on the two main figures, Frei and Lindbeck. The work of these two Yale colleagues has by now become firmly identified with the idea of postliberalism. Though Lindbeck’s book brought earlier developments at Yale firmly before the theological public in the form of an appropriable scheme, it was the penetrating if inchoate insights of Frei which laid the basic groundwork. For the purpose of tracing the development of these ideas, the period between the end of World War II and the present will, with unavoidable artificiality, be divided into six ten-year periods. Each section will briefly remark on significant factors in the institutional and intellectual background before taking up more specifically the productions of Frei and Lindbeck and their reception; in this way a picture will emerge of that intellectual trajectory which ushered in and shaped the discourse of postliberalism.

Preparation: 1945–54 The decade after World War II saw Hans Frei and George Lindbeck both studying at Yale, first as divinity and then as doctoral students.2 It is certainly arguable that the unique atmosphere of theological education at Yale at this time was crucial for the future directions of their thought. This atmosphere was the collective product of the most influential theological teachers active 1 Lindbeck himself defined postliberalism in somewhat different terms. George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984), 112–13, 135 n. 1. All further references to this book will be in the body of the text in parentheses, with page numbers following the abbreviation ND. 2 For most of the biographical details which follow see especially George Lindbeck, “Confession and Community: An Israel-like View of the Church,” The Christian Century 107, no. 16 (May 9, 1990): 492–6 and John Woolverton, “Hans W. Frei in Context: A Theological and Historical Memoir,” Anglican Theological Review 79 (1997): 369–93.


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there, three of whom will be discussed in a moment. This general feeling differentiated Yale from its chief rivals in a way probably not so easy to discern at the time, but which demands attention given the later careers of Frei and Lindbeck. The top five institutions of higher theological education among American Protestants at that time (in terms of size, influence, and the production of seminary teachers) can each be characterized by their relative openness to socalled Neo-orthodoxy. This deeply influential trend was characterized by a sharp questioning of the methods and assumptions of that theological liberalism which had dominated the German, English, and American theological academies since the later nineteenth century. Associated with European figures like Emil Brunner, Paul Tillich, and Karl Barth, and with influential Americans like Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr, Neo-orthodox thought found especially congenial homes at Yale Divinity School and Union Theological Seminary. In contrast, it continued to meet stiff resistance throughout the post-war period at the other top theological programs. The University of Chicago staunchly maintained its tradition of “empirical theology” under the influence of Henry Nelson Wieman, just as personalist metaphysics remained the characteristic approach to theology at Boston University, while Harvard’s tradition of liberal unitarianism was distinctly inhospitable to Neo-orthodox influences. These five institutions were arguably the chief trendsetters for the other divinity schools and seminaries.3 In spite of what bound them together over against these other schools, a more subtle distinction could be detected between the intellectual climate at Yale and at Union. The overwhelming influence at Union of its two great thinkers, Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr, produced a brand of Neoorthodoxy notable for its hostility to that figure who over time had come to dominate theological debate in Germany: Karl Barth. While it would be grossly misleading to label anyone on the faculty at Yale a “Barthian,” there was nonetheless a level of respect and understanding granted to Barth’s thought which created an atmosphere in which his work, even when sharply criticized, could be taken seriously as a responsible option. H. Richard Niebuhr is especially important as one who was challenged and intrigued by Barth to a far greater degree than Tillich or his brother Reinhold were. He

3 The five listed were the top Protestant producers of doctorates in religion. See Claude Welch, Graduate Education in Religion: A Critical Appraisal (Missoula: University of Montana Press, 1971), 90–1; Thor Hall, Systematic Theology: The State of the Art in North America (Washington DC: University Press of America, 1978), 60a. See also, especially on Chicago, Conrad Cherry, Hurrying toward Zion: Universities, Divinity Schools, and American Protestantism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 105–6.

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was the dominant theological figure at the Divinity School and one of the three influential Yale thinkers whose vital contributions to the milieu in which Frei and Lindbeck were trained can now be summarized. Niebuhr famously located himself at the intersection of the problems and possibilities bequeathed to theology by Ernst Troeltsch and Karl Barth.4 While fully embracing neither, he was convinced that the way forward for theology lay in somehow doing justice to the very different insights and concerns of both. With Troeltsch he shared a deep conviction of the variety and integrity of historically situated cultures, and of Christian faith in its historically shifting forms as unavoidably embedded within them. The effect of Troeltsch’s historicism on Niebuhr was a relativist and confessionalist orientation in theology, which emphasized the perspectival nature of Christian faith-claims (indeed of all claims), and their situation within the “stories” or historical narratives of the communities and individuals which make them. Correspondingly de-emphasized was any attempt to make systematic apologetic procedures central to theology. In turn, from the early works of Barth still dominating the American scene Niebuhr imbibed a robust suspicion of the late-nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century “liberal” consensus in theology: an epistemological skepticism underlying faith-claims, a bias against metaphysics, and an orientation toward an historically reconstructed Jesus. He also shared with Barth a never-failing emphasis on the “churchly” nature of the theological enterprise; it must never drift too far from its responsibility toward the living community of faith or mistake itself for a merely intellectual exercise. Niebuhr brought to his Yale classes a sensibility still rooted in the German academic tradition of the previous century, and remained untouched by the cultural defensiveness and refusal of the critical intellect characterizing repristinators and fundamentalists. But the radicalism both of Troeltsch’s historicism and of Barth’s Christ-centered ontological realism revealed new horizons. A final point, of some importance for later developments: Niebuhr showed a particular sensitivity to the centrality of “stories” both in the constitution of faithful self-understanding in human selves and communities, and in the scriptural identification of the Christian savior. The two other key theological influences at Yale in this period were

4 H. Richard Niebuhr, The Meaning of Revelation (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1941), xi. For the summary which follows see Hans Frei, “Niebuhr’s Theological Background” and “The Theology of H. Richard Niebuhr” in Faith and Ethics: The Theology of H. Richard Niebuhr, ed. Paul Ramsey (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957), 9–116. These two chapters, which in fact comprise a single continous essay in two parts, will hereafter be cited in the text only as HRN.


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probably Robert Lowry Calhoun and the young Julian Hartt. Calhoun was a church historian whose astonishing erudition and grasp of the entire sweep of Christian thought made a deep impression on many students, including Frei and Lindbeck.5 His influence lay less in his own specific theological positions than in his overall disposition toward and understanding of the nature of the Christian tradition. Although in many ways he remained more an old-style liberal than a Neo-orthodox proponent, he combined a resolute sense of the reality of God confronting yet transcending human knowledge with an equally firm insistence on the coherence, resilience, and continued relevance of the entire living tradition of Christian thought. Frei was later to argue that this combination enabled Calhoun to resist the epistemological obsessions and quasi-idealistic anthropocentrism of Neo-orthodoxy on the one hand, and yet, on the other, to orient theologians toward the continuation of a robust tradition whose irreducible identity over time was precisely what enabled it to continually assimilate the best in its surrounding cultures without losing itself. This notion of a “strong” tradition perpetually responding anew, but in recognizably continuous ways, to a God who remains elusive yet stubbornly “given” was at the heart of what Frei dubbed Calhoun’s “generous, liberal orthodoxy.”6 The philosophical theologian Julian Hartt, who had only recently joined the faculty after receiving his PhD there in 1940, was an influential teaching personality at Yale but (like Calhoun) an elusive presence in the wider academic world due to a reluctance to publish. Hartt’s students learned of the imperative for theology to be philosophically self-aware. He taught them that it was salutary for theology to be brought into invigorating connection with the broader currents of philosophical thought, while at the same time warning that it was not “proper for theologians to make a heavy investment in any metaphysical system.”7 More so even than Calhoun, and in fruitful tension with Niebuhr’s dominant concern with human history, Hartt stressed the need for Christian theology to work out a conceptual vision of cosmic scope, which refused to constrain the theological horizon to humanity and its history but which nonetheless resisted incorporation within established ontological schemes. Hartt also introduced his students to the creative Neo-thomism of the brilliant Anglican philosophical theologian 5 For an appreciation see Hans Frei, “In Memory of Robert L. Calhoun, 1896–1983,” Reflection [Yale Divinity School] 82 (November 1984): 8–9. Lindbeck also explicitly acknowledged the influence of Calhoun (and Niebuhr). See Lindbeck, “Confession and Community,” 496. 6 Frei, “Calhoun,” 9. 7 Julian Hartt, “Austin Farrer as Philosophical Theologian: A Retrospective and Appreciation,” in For God and Clarity: New Essays in Honor of Austin Farrer, eds. Jeffrey C. Eaton and Ann Loades (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications, 1983), 2.

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Austin Farrer. More will be said about this below, but the important point is that Hartt (joined implicitly by Calhoun) brought a critical realism to theological epistemology to balance Niebuhr’s more idealist relativism and perspectivism, as well as a concern for working out an orthodox Christian vision of God in explicit conversation with the best empirical and ontological insights of the day.8 (These insights did not yet include, however, two of the most significant developments which were gathering strength in this decade on the Continent and in England respectively: transcendental Thomism, and ordinary language philosophy.) What did Hans Frei and George Lindbeck bring as students to this rich educational setting? There were some noteworthy parallels in their backgrounds, which placed them in fruitfully oblique relationships to the American brand of mainstream Protestant Neo-orthodoxy (and its German roots) which they encountered at Yale. This “outsider” status is symbolized by the fact that neither was born in the United States; both emigrated from their native lands just before World War II to undertake college education in America. Much can be learned about the thinkers they were later to become by pondering the journeys, personal and ecclesial, which brought them to the United States and to the study of theology at Yale. Hans Frei was of German birth. But as an immigrant to America who combined a secular Jewish lineage with a Baptist upbringing, his reception of the German intellectual heritage was complex and marked by a deep ambivalence. He was drawn to Yale Divinity School after hearing a talk by H. Richard Niebuhr, and after graduation was pastor of a Baptist church for a couple of years before returning to Yale for doctoral study. He began to read deeply in the current, then untranslated work of Karl Barth (this period saw the publication of the later volumes of the Church Dogmatics, III/2, III/3, and IV/1) and was also inspired by Anglican thinkers like William Temple and Charles Gore.9 This reading had two effects. First, both Barth and the Anglican thinkers had theological visions which embraced the cosmos, situating the redemptive history of Israel and the church within large-scale speculative constructions encompassing the creative and providential work of God in the entire natural order. Second, the very different cultural and intellectual traditions shaping the Anglican theologians, combined with Barth’s highly independent and creative reaction against the foundational assumptions of modern theology (which he dubbed “Neoprotestantism”), began to distance Frei from the German academic tradition still dominant within mainstream Protestant theology in the United States. 8 9

For the contrast between Calhoun as a realist and Niebuhr as an idealist, see Frei, “Calhoun,”9. Woolverton, “Frei in Context,” 377.


7

This orientation would continue to mark Frei’s work, later influencing his approach to Christology in particular. At this stage it manifested itself in Frei’s susceptibility to the sophisticated metaphysical and analogical approach of Austin Farrer’s neo-scholasticism, no doubt encountered early on in Hartt’s classroom (HRN, 63–4, 71–2). Farrer insisted on the embodied human self as an integral part of the natural process; he also stressed in Thomist fashion the need to work out metaphysically (but always responsible to Christological and Trinitarian orthodoxy) a rigorous language of conceptual analogy between the finite processes of nature, including human will and personhood, and God as their infinite causal ground (HRN, 71–2). Farrer thus helped alert Frei to two profound limitations of the German romantic and idealist heritage of Schleiermacher and Hegel which had, as Frei saw it, deformed Protestant theology up to his own day. The first was the tendency to isolate the human self and its productions of meaning into an ontologically distinct realm of “spirit”; the second was the transfer of the divine from a cognitive realm accessible to metaphysical (analogical) description and into the role of a transcendental “ground” of the human self, forever cut off from that human cognition now inevitably defined in the Kantian terms of subject confronting object (HRN, 63–4). The transcendental self of romanticism and idealism could be brought into connection with God as its ground only through special modes of non-cognitive “faith” apprehension quarantined from normal patterns of meaningful human traffic with the world. “Revelation” as a non-objective and non-informative “self-disclosure” of the divine was made to interlock closely with the special “faith” disposition of the individual (HRN, 17–21). Frei saw very early that Barth’s own rejection of this entire tradition bespoke a unity with Farrer which ran deeper than the obvious enmity between the former’s unremitting focus on special revelation and the latter’s brand of natural theology. As a doctoral student he plunged into the history of nineteenth-century theology and began writing an ambitious thesis on the critique of Neo-protestantism in Karl Barth’s early theology of revelation. By this time he had been ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church, a move which would make sense in light of a struggle to free his apprehension of Christianity from the stranglehold of Germanic cultural forms. Still laboring on what was to become a sprawling dissertation (“Either one of them would have done,” quipped Niebuhr when Frei finally turned it in), Frei departed for Texas to teach at the Episcopal seminary in Austin.10

10

Ibid., 383.

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George Lindbeck’s intellectual trajectory during this period was different from Frei’s, but he, too, worked his way into the American theological scene very much from the outside. Born the son of Lutheran missionaries in China, Lindbeck did not come to the United States until his college years. As with Frei, the sheer “fact” of differing cultures and their conundrums thus must have become manifest to him from an early age. The external perspective on Western civilization he imbibed by growing up amid the antiquity and beauty of Chinese culture had a relativizing effect; he became aware of Western “modernity” not as an absolute and unquestionable horizon nor as the highest culmination of humanity’s intellectual evolution but rather as one historical and cultural epoch among others. Nor was his experience of Christianity unaffected. In the highly evolved but utterly distinct Chinese setting the public and communal nature of his own Christian tradition was thrown into sharp relief for him. More importantly, the institutional framework within which his faith was nurtured was not the fading but still tacitly presupposed “Christendom” of the West but that of a missionary diaspora; this latter idea would later influence the way he modeled the relations of church to culture in a post-Christian society. A more immediate impact was made by close and unavoidable encounters with practitioners of Roman Catholicism; against this profoundly nonChristian backdrop reckoning with a quite different brand of Christianity was at once more “natural” and yet somehow more “disorienting” than it would have been in America or Protestant Europe. The young Lindbeck not surprisingly became fascinated by profound problems posed to Protestants by Catholicism, problems of Christian identity and doctrinal boundaries. How could Catholicism be so distant from the Lutheran gospel and yet still be so evidently Christian? This problem pursued him to the United States, and in college he immersed himself in prominent Catholic thinkers like Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson, perhaps earning some quizzical comments from his fellow students and teachers at the very Lutheran Gustavus Adolphus College. Inoculated against an unthinking embrace of modernity by his experiences, he had no stomach for those intellectual traditions he now encountered which in effect canonized the “modern” Western experience as sui generis, the cutting edge of historical progress: rationalism, idealism, existentialism (the same strands of thought, so very “German,” which Frei was turning away from in his embrace of Karl Barth’s proto-postmodernism).11 The medievals (including on his reading the reformers!) and confessionalist Lutherans were

11

Lindbeck, “Confession and Community,” 492–3.


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more to his liking. He next attended Yale Divinity School seeking Lutheran ordination but, still haunted by the thought world of Catholicism, he immediately thereafter entered the doctoral program at Yale and specialized in medieval Catholic thought, later going abroad to work with the great medievalists Gilson at Toronto and Paul Vignaux at Paris. Thus in multiple ways Lindbeck’s angle of vision on the cultural contours of Christianity was affected by encountering his cultural surroundings as an outsider; he not only participated while growing up in Chinese culture as Christian, but in the US he participated in American Protestant Christianity as “Chinese,” so to speak. His highly unusual experience of mission-field Lutheranism in communication with an alien and independent culture converged with his wrestling with Catholicism to lead Lindbeck to a more “Catholic” take on the Reformation roots of his own brand of Christianity. Luther’s insights on justification and the living power of the Word of grace must be preserved, but only as internal correctives within a venerable Catholic tradition the basics of which the magisterial reformers never really abandoned: the Christian community united in perpetuating its great dogmatic tradition, embodied vehicle of God’s saving gospel, actualized through the sacramental practices of font and table. The seeds of a unique vision of the church were already planted and encountered fertile soil at Yale: sociologically dispersed and intensely socialized yet united by the great Catholic consensus (properly corrected by the Lutheran stress on the external word of the gospel), that same “strong tradition” delineated by Robert Calhoun which impressed his fellow student Frei.

Exploring New Directions at Yale: 1955–64 By 1955 Lindbeck was completing his dissertation on Duns Scotus and had already started teaching medieval thought in the philosophy department at Yale alongside the young philosopher of religion William Christian. The following year Frei would leave Texas and join the Yale Divinity faculty soon after finishing his dissertation on Barth. The Divinity School underwent a number of important personnel developments during this ten-year period; in spite of the continuity implied by an evident preference for hiring Yale graduates, the intellectual direction of the school began to shift unmistakably as some new teachers began making their presence felt. James Gustafson, another of Niebuhr’s freshly graduated students, appropriated the master’s thought in a way very different from Frei’s and much less open to Barth; he began to teach at Yale in 1955 but would eventually depart for Chicago, an indication of which way the wind was blowing. The Old

10


Testament scholar Brevard Childs arrived from doctoral study in Basel, where theology and the influence of Barth were diffused even among the Bible students. Another harbinger of future directions arrived in 1960: Paul Holmer was among the first thinkers in America to promote Wittgenstein and the ordinary language philosophy gathering strength in England as significant for religious thought.12 In many ways, an era was coming to an end; longtime Divinity School dean Liston Pope stepped down in the same year (1962) that the school had to weather the blow of H. Richard Niebuhr’s death. The next year brought further disruption, as the school’s faculty was split by the installation of a separate religious studies department.13 Pressing questions about the relation of theology to the intellectual culture of the university became impossible to avoid at Yale, as a wedge was now driven between “professional” divinity training and “academic” doctoral study. Frei’s personal relations with his most important Yale teacher deteriorated soon after joining him on the faculty; his enthusiastic embrace of Barth’s radical epistemic realism of revelation and his increasing criticism of Niebuhr’s fealty to an epistemology of faith which seemed too redolent of Neo-protestantism rankled.14 But Frei remained thoroughly engaged with his teacher’s thinking, as was evident in the two lengthy essays (of astonishing and precocious depth) he contributed to Faith and Ethics, a volume honoring Niebuhr. While calling into question the curtailing of full-blooded dogmatic realism due to Niebuhr’s quasi-idealist faith-epistemology, Frei was fascinated by his appeal to the New Testament’s narrated portrait of Jesus Christ as uniquely identifying the person of the savior and concretely integrating his saving attributes. This narratively rendered figure was rediscovered as the criterion against which contemporary theorizations of God’s presence in and action through Christ had to be tested. Frei became convinced that Christology was the key battleground on which the nineteenthcentury Germanic heritage had to be fought; he conjoined Niebuhr’s focus on the portrayed, unique human subject Jesus as soteriological touchstone with Barth’s “high” Christology, where Christ is not simply a revelation or instantiation of God’s salvation but the absolute locus of its worldly possibility and actuality. So for Frei what salvation means can be apprehended only in the story which identifies this human life and death with a divine act. But thencurrent theological thought (including Neo-orthodoxy, and even the earlier 12

On Holmer see Mark Horst, “Disciplined by Theology: A Profile of Paul Holmer,” The Christian Century 105, no. 29 (October 12, 1988), 891–5. 13 Cherry, Hurrying toward Zion, 121. 14 Woolverton, “Frei in Context,” 389.


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Barth) was still burdened with the nineteenth-century attempt to read off the nature of God’s saving act from some quasi-independent anthropological or social analysis of the general “human predicament,” followed by the attempt either to amalgamate the kind of salvation thereby postulated with an historically reconstructed “real” Jesus behind the gospel texts, or else, in the name of historical skepticism and “existential” appropriation, to detach understanding of the saving event from the concrete subject of the gospel accounts (HRN, 104–7). Niebuhr’s rediscovery resisted these prevalent options. It also bore fruit when Frei attempted to locate those historical junctures at which modern theology began to go off the rails, because it helped solidify his suspicion of any attempt to separate an “essence” of religious faith over against its linguistic and dogmatic embodiment in scripture and tradition. Frei’s 1958 article “Religion: Natural and Revealed” is a good indication of where his thought was on this crucial issue. The divorce of faith from its own scripturally-shaped linguistic world by now appeared as a primal theological mistake, its bitter fruit the deficient Christologies of Neoprotestantism and Neo-orthodoxy alike.15 Influences from various directions around this time reinforced these convictions. His colleague Brevard Child’s critique of attempts to recover scriptural meaning in terms of “myth” was suggestive, as was the acute diagnosis of the aporia in Tillich’s symbolist Christology provided by the dissertation of his most promising student, David Kelsey (who on the strength of it was immediately invited to join the faculty).16 Also, around 1964 Frei discovered in his reading of literary theorist Erich Auerbach a new way of articulating the abiding “force” of the scriptural portraiture in terms of its narrative literary structure, over against its role as historical source or as mythical symbolization of religious “truth.”17 At least equally significant, his anti-idealist understandings of the human self and its linguistic nature received decisive confirmation by his discovery of “ordinary language philosophy” in Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind and in Wittgenstein himself, whom Frei began reading “seriously” around 1962.18 15

Hans Frei, “Religion: Natural and Revealed,” in A Handbook of Christian Theology, eds. Marvin Halvorson and Arthur A. Cohen (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing Co., 1958), 314. 16 Brevard Childs, Myth and Reality in the Old Testament (Naperville, IL: Allenson, 1960); later cited in Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 340–1. Kelsey’s dissertation was published in revised form as David Kelsey, The Fabric of Paul Tillich’s Theology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). 17 Woolverton, “Frei in Context,” 385. Cf. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953). 18 Ibid.

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During most of this ten-year period George Lindbeck continued to teach the medieval scholastics in the philosophy department, but theological problems were never far from his mind. His 1961 article “Reform and Infallibility” is a good register of his concerns, and shows that he, like Frei, was becoming particularly concerned with the continuity of Christian identity over time and across cultures. Both were concluding that such continuityin-change must be a function of the tradition-process itself, through (and not in spite of) its fundamentally public linguistic constitution. But Lindbeck at this time was not so much concerned with modes of interpreting scripture as he was with the force of doctrines as markers of communal identity. In the run-up to the Second Vatican Council a new breed of Catholic theologian (often concerned with historical or philosophical retrievals of Thomas Aquinas as weapons against neo-scholasticism) had captured the spotlight, and Lindbeck in “Reform and Infallibility” registered his fascination with the way doctrines were coming to be seen: not as timeless propositional assertions of binding truth but rather as communally-agreed and flexibly interpretable boundary markers. Examining Karl Rahner’s practice, Lindbeck was impressed by a reading of dogma as a largely negative, legislative force, perpetually excluding specific positions even as it allowed a range of acceptable and diverse theological interpretations of its positive content. That content, in turn, was supplied to dogma “from outside,” by the interaction of the community’s readings of scripture within contemporary intellectual and social contexts. The “infallibility” of dogma simply means that it can always be given a true content, whereas the statements it denies or excludes cannot: “to assert that a proposition is irreformably true is logically equivalent to asserting that it is not irreformably false.”19 In spite of the fact that their positive content cannot be determined once for all time, doctrines function collectively as a kind of formal structure determining the proper growth and development of the tradition. These forays into theological interpretation were soon to catapult Lindbeck well beyond the confines of medieval philosophy, when he was named an official observer for the Lutheran churches at the Second Vatican Council. The various reports and articles which he began to write in response to his experiences in Rome beginning in 1962 not only gained him increased notoriety in ecumenical circles; they also revealed the degree to which the role of doctrines in unifying or separating ecclesial bodies, the

19

George Lindbeck, “Reform and Infallibility,” Cross Currents 11 (1961), 352–3.


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intersection of their theological and social functions, had become the central problem of his thinking. All told, 1962 proved a watershed year. The year of the beginning of the council was also when Lindbeck formally departed the philosophy department to become a full member of the Yale Divinity School faculty, where he had already been quite active. Though unnoticed by him at the time, it was also the year in which the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn published his soon to be famous work on scientific revolutions, a book which, as part of a larger trend in philosophy, would provide important stimulation to Lindbeck’s thought during the next period.20

A Tendency Takes Shape: 1965–74 The theological milieu in which Frei and Lindbeck had been trained seemed to be disintegrating during this turbulent period; by its end they would both respond with works in which a clearly distinct and theologically countervailing trend first began to come into focus. The former theological core of the faculty passed from the scene; Kelsey joined in 1965, but Robert Calhoun retired the following year, and Julian Hartt departed for the University of Virginia in 1972. The newly consolidating faculty faced a theological landscape undergoing upheavals every bit as disorienting as those of the society at large. The year 1968 bears great symbolic weight in many contexts, theology among them. A restless search for new freedoms, an agitation for change, had been spreading since the early 1960s, resulting in a bewildering onslaught of intellectual frictions and social perturbations. Resistance to the escalating American involvement in Vietnam and new militancy in the civil rights struggles came to a head that year with the assassinations of Reverend King and Bobby Kennedy. The invigorating period of the Second Vatican Council had issued into confusing developments which took an agonizing turn for Catholic progressives with the release of Humanae Vitae, the stunning papal encyclical condemning any form of artificial contraception. 1968 was also the year of Karl Barth’s death, an event as symbolically potent among theologians as any of the preceding. As if on cue, a series of highly politicized and influential theological manifestos began roiling up from the agitated academy: James Cone’s A Black Theology of Liberation in 20 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edn. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). Originally published in 1962 as part of Foundations of the Unity of Science, comprising the first two volumes of the International Encyclopaedia of Unified Science.

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1970, Mary Daly’s Beyond God the Father and Gustavo Gutierrez’s A Theology of Liberation in 1973. The appearance of a younger theological generation turning its back on its fathers was only half true, as these works and others ( J.A.T. Robinson’s earlier Honest to God and various “Death of God” manifestos could also be included) unmistakably exploited areas cleared by the “big names” of the first part of the century. Naturally, the theological figures (including, even especially, Barth) who genuinely if only half-wittingly prepared the ground for the various “radical” theologies of the late 1960s and early 1970s were the first to be dismissed as passé (a characteristic irony of the history of ideas). But since the end of World War II, the different brands of Neo-orthodoxy among the Protestants and of Nouvelle Théologie among the Catholics, whatever their faults, had been able to hold together adventurous progress in theological understanding with retrieval of the great mainstream traditions of Christian teaching, aggiornamento and ressourcement. As Frei and Lindbeck along with many of their generation saw it, it was just this expansive, creative middle ground that was collapsing before their eyes during these years, threatening to leave theology polarized between conservative repristinators on the right and, on the left, radicalized progressives who seemed prepared to “emancipate” Christianity from the entire doctrinal tradition which had given it its shape.21 Destroying Christianity in order to save it, as it were. The Yale religion faculty certainly involved themselves in varied ways in the political and theological ferment of these years, and Frei and Lindbeck like many of their colleagues were anything but hostile to the agitation for progressive social change. But with respect to the different brands of specifically theological radicalism a sense of deep concern is palpable in their writings, resulting in a quiet but determined resolve to find new paths back to a critical and creative retrieval of the classic tradition. Though similarly probing for a new way forward, each was still working largely independently of the other. But a distinct development with a particular flavor seemed to be emerging which marked the doctoral students Yale began producing around this period. After Kelsey in 1964 followed David Burrell in 1965, Gene Outka in 1967, Stanley Hauerwas in 1969, Charles Wood in 1972, and William Placher in 1975. By 1974, still before overt signs of any mutual influence began to appear, these students’ two most influential teachers had produced early syntheses of their new directions: Frei’s Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, and Lindbeck’s St Michael’s Lectures at Gonzaga University. Previous works during this decade had begun to point the way.

21

See Lindbeck, “Confession and Community,” 494–5.


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Frei’s 1965 article on Feuerbach was an early, admittedly oblique protest against current developments; he implicitly traced the lineage of the radical theologies of that time to Feuerbach’s dubious search for an “essence” or “truth” of Christianity hidden behind, and radically relativizing, its dogmatic development.22 In the 1967 serial publication which would eventually become The Identity of Jesus Christ he developed the philosophical rationale and literary-critical techniques of personal identity description; such description was offered not only as a key to grounding Christological reflection properly in scriptural interpretation, but also as a stern protest against existentialist and other quasi-idealist anthropologies which, their best intentions notwithstanding, implicitly divorced selfhood from its bodily, linguistic and interpersonal matrix.23 Moltmann’s Theology of Hope had made a splash that year. Frei in an important review warmly welcomed it but also used the opportunity to signal his own preference for a more “empirically” oriented approach to understanding providence in history. He clearly preferred the unanticipatable and fragmentary meaning of contingent narratives to the all-encompassing dialectic of history informing Moltmann’s project, inherited from the Idealist and Marxist traditions by way of Bloch.24 But most illuminating are some typically unassuming but pregnant “remarks” (a talk at Harvard from the same year) which identified the questionable trajectory upon which Christology (now clearly marked as his chief dogmatic concern) still found itself and historically diagnosed the early modern shift in hermeneutic sensibility which initiated it. Using an image which Lindbeck would later develop in a far more ambitious way, Frei described this shift as a “reversal” of interpretive direction: the world-view presupposed and rendered by the narratives of the Bible was no longer the framework for interpreting contemporary experience; rather that experience itself, now interpreted on grounds independent of the scriptures, became the horizon within which some kind of sense had to be made of them.25 Seven years later his great study The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative finally put

22 Hans Frei, “Feuerbach and Theology,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 35 (1967), 250–6. The last sentence of the article refers to Feuerbach’s “‘God-is-dead’ theology.” 23 Hans Frei, “The Mystery of the Presence of Jesus Christ,” Crossroads 17/1 ( January–March 1967), 69–96 and 17/2 (April-June 1967), 69–96. 24 Hans Frei, review of Jürgen Moltmann, The Theology of Hope, Union Seminary Quarterly Review 23 (1968). 25 This originally unpublished talk from December 1967 appears as “Remarks in Connection with a Theological Proposal” in Hans W. Frei, Theology and Narrative: Selected Essays, eds. George Hunsinger and William C. Placher (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 26–44. Hereafter, reference to this collection of Frei essays will be in the text as TN.

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these ideas before a larger theological public. This book was mainly noticed at the time for its insistence that pre-critical modes of reading the scriptures were focused by narrative structures, in two senses. First, the entire biblical text was unified in terms of an implicit, overarching story of God’s dealings with human history; second, this larger, more diffuse saga pivoted centrally on the “realism” of the more concentrated narrative accounts of Jesus, especially his death and resurrection. The idea of “realism” here is the result of Frei’s articulation and expansion of the Niebuhrian hints on Christ’s “story” by means of (a) Auerbach’s theory of mimesis and (b) the anti-idealist philosophical investigations of the nature of personal identity in Wittgensteininfluenced thinkers like Ryle and Strawson. But he argued that these recent developments merely brought back into the field of vision what had in fact been the implicit hermeneutic consensus of “classic” Christianity. Frei argued that this tradition of reading was disastrously eroded during the early modern period, and ever since theology has been plagued by its inability to invest the actual narrative shape of scripture itself with any authoritative theological significance, preferring instead an uneasy mixture of mining the Bible as a source for historical reconstructions and hermeneutically “decoding” its language as the symbolic carrier of independently discernible and detachable truths or modes of human existence. (The 1972 dissertation of his student Charles Wood was an important influence here, a Wittgensteinian critique of the entire tradition of hermeneutical philosophy from its origins in Schleiermacher to its culmination in Gadamer.26) But the public tended to focus heavily on the book as a kind of apology for “narrative” interpretations of the Bible in general, largely missing Frei’s very particular concerns to recover the identifiable Christ as the mysterious concretion of God’s saving act and to rescue theology from its fatal dalliance with transcendental anthropologies of the self.27 As with Frei, Lindbeck’s distinct theological voice was growing more assertive in this period, and a number of the pieces of his mature theological vision gradually fell into place. Also like Frei, Lindbeck’s engagement with exciting intellectual developments outside of theology began to have a decisive effect on his thinking. Every bit as engrossed in reading Wittgenstein and ordinary language philosophy as was his friend and colleague, he was

26

Charles M. Wood, “Theory and Religious Understanding: A Critique of the Hermeneutics of Joachim Wach,” referenced in Frei, Eclipse, 342 n. 1. 27 The specifically Christological concerns underlying Frei’s narrative interest, and the characteristic influences upon it of Auerbach and the later volumes of Barth’s Church Dogmatics, were already signaled in his contribution to a Yale symposium on the occasion of Barth’s death. See Hans Frei, “Karl Barth: Theologian,” in TN, 167–70.


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also devouring “constructivist” philosophers of science like Thomas Kuhn and the newly influential interpretive sociologists of religion (like Peter Berger, or Clifford Geertz, whose famous essay “Religion as a Cultural System” appeared in 1966).28 The philosophical analyses of how religious doctrines function which his colleague William Christian was engaged in, downplaying the role of doctrines as independently testable assertorical utterances in favor of their collective role as complex formal patterns shaping communal experience, were another source of inspiration.29 Under the influence of these intellectual currents, there began to surface in essays appearing in the late 1960s and early 1970s a characteristic new shape to Lindbeck’s own investigations of the meaning of Christian doctrines.30 By 1974, when he was invited to give a series of lectures at Gonzaga University, he was able to assemble the varied reflections emerging in these articles into a comprehensive hypothesis on the nature of Christian doctrine. First, he was now advocating a sociologically sectarian self-understanding for the contemporary church. No longer able to find its identity as the orienting symbolic structure of secularized Western societies, the Christian community henceforth should play its vital public roles indirectly, via the intense, often counter-cultural socialization of believers through a catechesis oriented toward a flexible and broad agreement with the great catholic tradition. His understanding of doctrines, in turn, was based on their role in shaping and unifying self-consciously distinct social units defined by and epistemically deploying variants on a common Christian conceptual/ symbolic framework. In these St Michael’s lectures a close and critical engagement with Bernard Lonergan’s theories of religion and doctrine served as the vehicle for this new understanding.31

28 Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion, ed. Michael Banton (London: Tavistock Publications Ltd., 1966). Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Doubleday, 1967). 29 William A. Christian, Sr., Meaning and Truth in Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), and Oppositions of Religious Doctrines (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972). 30 See especially George Lindbeck, “Ecumenism and the Future of Belief,” Una Sancta 25 (1968), 3–17; “The Future of the Dialogue: Pluralism or an Eventual Synthesis of Doctrine?” in Christian Action and Openness, ed. Joseph Papin (Villanova, PA: Villanova University Press, 1970), 37–51; “The Sectarian Future of the Church,” in The God Experience, ed. J.P. Whelan, SJ (New York: Newman, 1971), 226–43; “Protestant Problems with Lonergan on Development of Dogma,” in Foundations of Theology, ed. Philip McShane, SJ (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1971), 115–23; “Fides ex auditu and the Salvation of non-Christians,” in The Gospel and the Ambiguity of the Church, ed. Vilmos Vajta (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974), 91–123. 31 The relationship of these lectures to their later published appearance as part of The Nature of Doctrine is noted by Lindbeck, ND, 12.

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His own studies had convinced him that Rahner and Lonergan were basically right that the role of dogmas in providing identity and continuity for the community could not be understood in metaphysical or propositional terms. Following Lonergan, Lindbeck found their positive, community-defining role not in delivering positive pronouncements as to the true state of reality, but rather as providing a formal system of “rule-like” delimitations of thought and language. The influence of thinkers like Geertz, who saw religion as a semiotic cultural sub-system, a life-shaping semantic traffic in a shared language of symbols, pushed Lindbeck to this conclusion as much as Lonergan’s analyses of the dialectical development of dogma. But on the other hand, Lindbeck’s readings in Wittgenstein and Kuhn led him to a sharp demurral from Lonergan’s transcendental Thomist theories of doctrinal language as the contingent symbolic objectification of God’s self-giving in unthematized internal experiential states. Here he sided with those who saw the decisive function of language as primarily the shaper of experience rather than the expression of it. In a crucial move, Lindbeck turned Lonergan against himself; he conjoined the latter’s own insights on the formal and rule-like character of doctrines with Wittgenstein’s quite distinct notion of grammatical “rules” in order to stress the role of doctrine in the construction of experience. This had the added benefit for Lindbeck of reasserting a good Lutheran emphasis on the necessity of the preached word of the gospel in constituting Christian faith, over against Rahner’s pre-linguistic or ontological notion of “implicit” faith. Thus, in these unpublished lectures the nucleus of his famous book could be clearly glimpsed a full ten years before its publication.

The “Yale School” before Postliberalism: 1975–84 The general direction of thought which had taken hold during the previous period went through its most crucial developments in the ten-year run-up to Lindbeck’s The Nature of Doctrine, which was to put a new rhetoric of “postliberalism” firmly on the map. These developments were both internal, with respect to the thought of Frei and Lindbeck themselves, and external, as observers of the theological scene began to discern and try to name the peculiar flavor of what was coming out of Yale. The external development will be remarked upon at the end of this section. The internal development can best be described as a kind of convergence of thought between Frei and Lindbeck. The two friends had unquestionably been sharing ideas in conversation for years, but it is only in the productions of the decade now being discussed that clear signs of influence begin to appear. It must immediately be empha-


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sized, however, that this convergence, first, was somewhat asymmetrical and, second, in no way overcame the mutual independence of basic outlook and evolution in their thought. The convergence was asymmetrical in that it involved a far more explicit and direct appropriation of Frei’s insights by Lindbeck than vice versa. That Frei also moved closer to Lindbeck’s world of thought during this period is just as evident, but it took the form less of direct appropriation of Lindbeck’s positions than of internal adjustments to his own quite distinct development, and in response to a variety of influences. It is arguable that this was a time in which the thought of the two Yale figures still possessed a certain promising fluidity which would in the eyes of the theological public be “fixed” in a rather specific direction only in the period to follow. The background of these developments was the institutional stabilization of the Yale faculty and an ever sharper sense of its intellectual distinctiveness within the world of academic theology. After the transitions of the preceding two decades a core teaching staff was once again firmly in place and consolidated. The production of significant theologians who would in some way or other eventually be identified with a uniquely “Yale” approach continued: Ronald Thiemann graduated with a doctorate in 1976, the Roman Catholic James J. Buckley in 1977, Bruce Marshall and Kathryn Tanner in 1985, again to name only some of the better known. As in the immediate post-war period, this internal stabilization was reinforced by the very different feel of theological developments outside of Yale. The previous period had witnessed the demise of the “post-liberal” period in the older sense of that word, the decades before and after World War II of various forms of Neo-orthodox revolt against the predominantly liberal Protestant theological consensus and driving a critical recovery of the classical shape of Christian doctrine.32 As previously noted, the result of this dissolution of Neo-orthodoxy broadly construed was an initial turbulence and confusion which by the decade now in view gradually began to solidify into distinctive and recognizable directions. What emerged in progressive theological circles, especially at Yale’s influential rivals Chicago, Harvard, and Union, seemed in fairly sharp contrast to the kind of thought prevalent at Yale. Against a background of increasingly bold or even aggressive political, 32 In the present work the hyphenated form (“post-liberal, -ism”) will always refer to this earlier usage, while the unhyphenated (“postliberal, -ism”) will indicate the specific theological direction as formulated by Lindbeck in The Nature of Doctrine and taken up in the discussions after 1984. This distinction is important, as the two usages are quite different. The meaning of “post-liberal” as used by Frei is roughly equivalent to “Neo-orthodox” and indicates a specific period of theological history which in fact had come to an end well before Lindbeck coined his own distinctive term.

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liberationist, and feminist voices in theology, some younger theorists of theological method like David Tracy, Gordon Kaufman, and Edward Farley began to articulate a sophisticated, more consciously and sharply critical stance toward Christian doctrinal traditions than had previously been countenanced. One should speak of a common wave of influence here with great caution. It is possible nonetheless, without eliding the distinctiveness of the many voices now demanding attention, to say that an influential consensus had emerged around the need for radical reconstruction and “revisioning” of the entire self-understanding of Christianity. Adrian Hastings has captured well the dominant feel of English academic theology in the 1970s, but his remarks illuminate an aspect of the US scene as well. The middle years of the century had been strong on system and orthodoxy, but rather weak on delving into the relativities and uncertainties of the historical record. The new scholarship [of the 1970s], in contrast, was over-prone to appeal to an almost limitless pluralism as the only legitimate conclusion to draw from historical research in both biblical and ecclesiastical history, but it was far better at stressing the complexities of the evidence than at producing thereafter any sort of workable theological synthesis. This was in part because of the ever-increasing skepticism which the leading theologians of the English academic school – Dennis Nineham, Maurice Wiles, John Hick, Geoffrey Lampe, and others – were evincing in regard to all the central dogmas most characteristic of Christianity, the incarnation, the Trinity, even for some the very existence of God.33

This increasing sense of distance from the classical doctrinal traditions (which found very public and controversial expression when the above named group in 1977 aired their views in The Myth of God Incarnate) was not just a result of more aggressive biblical and historical scholarship.34 Especially in the US, the political energies continuing to pour into theological discussion from liberationist and feminist currents heightened suspicion of all established positions and demanded change “without tarrying for any,” certainly not for the tired proponents of an older theology, caught up in endless doctrinal tinkering and Germanic system-building. Even among those more rooted in intellectual exploration of the doctrinal heritage, the mood was very much that of “testing” past formulations for their meaning and relevance in strictly contemporary terms, and then 33 Adrian Hastings, A History of English Christianity 1920–2000 (London: SCM Press, 2001), 649. 34 John Hick (ed.), The Myth of God Incarnate (London: SCM Press, 1977).


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reconstructing them with a free hand (thus in a way radicalizing the thrust of the earlier “demythologization” agenda associated with Bultmann and his followers). “Correlation” was in; a 1977 survey found that Paul Tillich’s Systematic Theology was the most widely used textbook in American seminaries and doctoral programs in theology.35 But even Tillich’s brand of correlation was too timid for the avant garde, and 1975 saw the publication of two influential texts which helped bring the drastic new freedom in the handling of tradition to methodological self-awareness. Harvard’s Gordon Kaufman in his Essay on Theological Method went so far as to abandon entirely correlation with past belief. In its place he embraced a quasi-Kantian agnosticism with regard to the transcendent, leaving all Christian affirmations as purely imaginative constructions to be dismantled and rebuilt solely in response to pragmatic norms for contemporary personal and social amelioration.36 At the University of Chicago, meanwhile, a young Roman Catholic admirer of Kaufman’s earlier work (and student of Lonergan) named David Tracy published what made bid to be a manifesto for the new kind of liberalism: Blessed Rage for Order.37 The latter work is of special interest for two reasons. Less epistemologically and doctrinally radical than Kaufman’s book, Blessed Rage advocated a revamping, not a rejection, of the correlational approach. Interweaving the process theism of Schubert Ogden, the hermeneutic phenomenology of religious experience and symbols developed by Paul Ricoeur, and the appeal to transcendental metaphysical analysis advocated by Lonergan, it proposed the task of theology to be that of bringing together, in a mutually critical way, the deep religious truths at the heart of both the Christian tradition and contemporary “secular” experience. Tracy left no doubt that the result could only be a more systematic and radical questioning and “revisioning” of all traditional positions in light of modern realities. The commitment of liberalism to modern intellectual values was not to be abandoned but rather deepened and made more consistent. To signal its advance beyond both the older liberalism and the Neo-orthodox episode which had succeeded it, Tracy coined the term “revisionist” to indicate the new theological mood.38 (The title would eventually gain some currency, but, oddly enough, its promotion would be largely due to Yale-oriented skeptics of Tracy’s entire conception.) The second reason this work carries special 35

Thor Hall, Systematic Theology, 93a–93b, tables 30–1. Gordon D. Kaufman, An Essay on Theological Method (Missoula, MT: Scholar’s Press, 1975). 37 David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology (New York: Seabury Press, 1975). 38 Ibid., 32–4. 36

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weight is that one of the first to express skepticism was Hans Frei, for whom Tracy’s book assumed a certain negative paradigmatic status almost immediately upon its appearance. His Eclipse of Biblical Narrative had only just appeared the year before to fairly extensive and positive attention, but Frei, increasingly dissatisfied with some of the presuppositions of his earlier thinking on theological interpretation of the Bible, soon gave signs of significant internal adjustments. Meanwhile, questions of theological method began to assume a larger place in his thinking. He was more convinced than ever that structuring theology in terms of the apologetic task of “making the faith credible to modern man” was wrong-headed. His teacher H. Richard Niebuhr, partly influenced by Troeltsch, had inculcated in Frei a “confessionalist” approach which saw Christianity as a cultural unit making appeal to other integral cultural wholes rather than reducing them all to a single logic. Similarly but from another angle, Karl Barth had raised the possibility that understanding faith, as response to the gospel of God’s self-disclosure in Christ, involved no appeal to a “religious” capacity of human beings discernible from analysis of their nature or general history. Working from this dual inheritance Frei began to insist that apologetic endeavors must not carry excessive weight in structuring theological positions; though not forbidden, they should always be situation-specific, unsystematic, and highly varied. Added to this insistence was a rapidly intensifying suspicion of high-powered hermeneutical philosophies like those of Gadamer and Ricoeur. This was of course influenced by his reading of Wittgenstein, and reinforced by a critique of grand hermeneutic theories mounted from a Wittgensteinian platform by his student Charles Wood in his 1972 dissertation. For all their sophistication, such attempts to systematically theorize the elusive and pluriform skill-set of interpretation, and to base on such theorization an entire anthropology of human existence as “understanding,” seemed to him merely the last gasp of the romantic tradition of the transcendent subject.39 Small wonder that David Tracy’s book seemed to crystallize everything Frei was struggling against. Seldom impressed with elaborate intellectual defenses of Christian faith, Frei almost always preferred the tough-minded skeptics (Hume, Strauss, Troeltsch) who questioned the complacencies and 39 These various themes are all touched upon in the preface to the book arising from his 1967 articles in Crossroads on Christ’s presence. See Hans Frei, The Identity of Jesus Christ: The Hermeneutical Bases of Dogmatic Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), vii–xviii. For the deemphasizing of apologetic see pp. xi–xii; for the skepticism of hermeneutic philosophy see p. xvi. The whole preface is important, and highly revealing of the state of Frei’s thinking at the time.


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hidden presuppositions which seemed built into all apologetic endeavors. Van Harvey, with whom Frei was in correspondence around this time, was a contemporary who stood in this lineage; it is entirely likely that Frei would have noted with considerable agreement Harvey’s shrewd criticism of Tracy’s approach.40 That Frei, whose sympathies were with orthodox Christology and a Barthian realism of revelation, could have embraced as his own the critiques of Harvey, a thinker of radically different stamp, is a paradox central to his theological sensibility. Harvey suggested that Tracy’s attempt to bring together “the Christian tradition” and “modern secular consciousness” in a “mutually critical correlation” was only an apparent confrontation, as the putatively neutral philosophical apparatus employed to enable their meeting in fact dictated the terms of their encounter, and thus its results, in advance.41 Thus Harvey seemed to arrive from a very different standpoint at the same position on apologetics which Barth had struggled toward in the 1920s; this dual resonance in Frei’s thought, echoing his teacher Niebuhr’s twin debts to Troeltsch and Barth, will demand more attention later. Frei soon became engrossed in writing a review essay on Eberhard Busch’s biography of Barth, an important piece for marking his intellectual development.42 Three motifs are especially significant. First, Frei emphasizes that Barth saw the Christian community as an integral language-world, possessing a kind of semantic logic all its own, untranslatable into other terms and linked to the Bible’s textual rendition of God in Christ.43 Second, Barth’s thought-forms and writing style in the later volumes of the Church Dogmatics seemed to presuppose that this linguistic realm was incapable of any holistic theoretical restatement. It could only be “conceptually redescribed” in piecemeal ways which remained faithful to its narrative shape, eschewing any comprehensive “explanation” of its possibility in terms of some metaphysical or anthropological scheme supplied by philosophy.44 Third and most tellingly, Frei recounted in sympathetic terms how Barth 40 Van A. Harvey, “The Pathos of Liberal Theology,” The Journal of Religion 56 (1976), 382–91. Jeffrey Stout references this “powerful criticism of Tracy’s fundamental theology” in Jeffrey Stout, Ethics after Babel: The Languages of Morals and their Discontents (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), 315 n. 7. 41 Ibid., 387–9. This is in effect what Frei will later claim to be characteristic of “Type Two” theologies of “systematic correlation.” See Chapter Five below. 42 In a letter Frei relates how, to his surprise, this review “became a preoccupation for weeks.” Cited in Woolverton, “Frei in Context,” 389. 43 Hans W. Frei, Types of Christian Theology, eds. George Hunsinger and William C. Placher (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 158–9. (Hereafter, references to this book will be abbreviated as TCT.) Original publication: Hans Frei, review of Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, by Eberhard Busch, Virginia Seminary Journal 30 (1978): 42–6. 44 Frei, TCT, 60–1.

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had come to reject what might be called the equivalent in his own day of “mutually critical correlation.” Barth attacked it so fiercely because he saw in all such attempts an unwitting replication of the “two norms” thinking of the Nazi Christians (i.e. God’s Word for today in Germany is to be found by correlating God’s Scriptural word with the cultural rebirth being instituted under National Socialism).45 While David Tracy might believe that Tillich’s correlation method needed to be made more consistent and radical, for Frei the impossibility of any systematic “anthropo-theology” of correlation had been proleptically announced forty years earlier. Instead of searching for a religious depth-dimension hidden in modernity, Barth evinced a heartily “secular sensibility” which refused to understand Christianity as the “answer” to any supposedly universal or autonomous human quest for meaning.46 The firm refusal of Tracy’s entire project was one element around which his thoughts on method were beginning to coalesce. (His remarks at any rate were certainly becoming sharper; he privately worried that some comments in a public talk he had given at Union Seminary might be construed as an attempt “to knock David Tracy.”47) But an important historical project he began working on about this time, a study of David Friedrich Strauss, was equally if not more important in helping to galvanize his thoughts in this area.48 A close reading of the first few pages of the essay (completed by around 1981 though not published until 1985) makes startlingly clear how Frei was already formulating his typology of contemporary theological approaches in close connection with his analysis of the disputes in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Germany over the relation of Glaube and Wissenschaft. 45

Ibid., 155–6. On Barth’s secular sensibility see TN, 171–2. 47 Frei to Donald Shriver, February 3, 1978, Hans Wilhelm Frei Papers, Yale Divinity School Library. This and all following references to Frei correspondence or other unpublished archival material are cited from UK scholar Mike Higton’s extraordinarily informative and helpful annotated bibliography of Frei on his website: “Hans Wilhelm Frei (1922–1988),” URL: http:// www.people.ex.ac.uk/mahigton/Frei.html. This will be cited below as Higton Bibliography. The website now also contains a collection of manuscripts and course notes left unpublished by Frei at his death. Unfortunately, this addition came to my notice too late to be used in this study. 48 Hans Frei, “David Friedrich Strauss,” in Nineteenth Century Religious Thought in the West, eds. Ninian Smart, John Clayton, Patrick Sherry, and Steven T. Katz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), I: 215–60. Herafter cited as DFS. A letter from 1981 implies that the article is finished: Frei to William Clebsch, July 15, 1981, Hans Wilhelm Frei Papers, Yale Divinity School Library. Higton Bibliography. Another letter refers to the “three years of misery” devoted to writing it, which would suggest he began work around 1978. Frei to Patrick Sherry, July 5, 1983, Hans Wilhelm Frei Papers, Yale Divinity School Library. Higton Bibliography. 46


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The Strauss essay will demand more attention in a later chapter. What is important here is that it bore methodological fruit in 1983 when Frei gave the Shaffer lectures at Yale, the first public incarnation of his five-fold classification of basic theological options. This typology brought together his concern for the “literal reading” of the gospel accounts with his more recently crystallized reflections on method. Its entire arrangement turned on the question of how a particular theology negotiates its competing loyalties to the linguistic and conceptual world of Christian tradition and the intellectual demands of the academy, what might loosely be called internal and external discourses, and how the decisions made here make harder or easier an interpretive grasp of the shape of Christ’s identity in the gospel narratives. The recent books by Kaufman and Tracy duly found their place in this typology, but the Strauss essay showed that Frei from the beginning also had nineteenth-century forerunners in mind: in the Shaffer lectures the “Radicals” Lessing and Kant spoken of in the earlier-written Strauss piece become “Type One,” Schleiermacher the “Mediator” was the archetype of “Type Three,” and the Pietist Conservatives who flatly oppose Glaube to Wissenschaft foreshadowed “Type Five.” Most tellingly, Hegel’s notoriously ambiguous status, which after his death led to furious disagreements between those reading him either as a “Mediator” or as a “Radical,” had in the Shaffer lectures become a type of its own (“Type Two”), with none other than David Tracy’s Blessed Rage as its contemporary version.49 In addition to the development of the typology of methods, by the year of these lectures Frei’s thinking had completed a shift on another front, once again in response to a stimulus going back at least to 1975. The prodding in this case was provided by the book of a younger Yale colleague and former student: David Kelsey’s The Uses of Scripture in Recent Theology.50 A scant two years after the great achievement of Eclipse Frei can be found admitting his dissatisfaction with the thought-world of that book, a change “partially under the impact of that terribly persuasive book by David Kelsey.”51 Another revealing confession from 1980 gives a more concrete sense of where he saw the problem. Eclipse was not influenced by the deconstructionists; I was far too unwashed literarily to know what they or even their predecessors were up to at that point. On the contrary, I was really naively persuaded that there was such a 49 For radicals, mediators, pietists, etc. see DFS, 216–18. The notes for the Shaffer Lectures are in TCT, 8–55. 50 David H. Kelsey, The Uses of Scripture in Recent Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975). 51 Frei to William Placher, March 24, 1976, Frei Papers. Higton Bibliography.

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p o st l i b e ral i sm and it s op p one nt s thing as a normative meaning to a narrative text, if not to others. Since then I’ve become a bit more jaded under their influence.52

Frei could no longer ignore what struck many readers about his book: the resemblance between his theory of “realistic narrative” (which as an interpretive framework is supposedly provided or “controlled” by the genre and shape of the text itself) and New Criticism and its rhetoric of the “verbal icon.” The vulnerability of an account of meaning as contained “in the text itself,” in abstraction from the imaginative acts of interpreters, became painfully clear to him as he delved more deeply into literary theory. But Kelsey’s 1975 book had already begun moving his reflections in this direction; it showed how the scriptural text contained a plurality of patterns of meaning, the selection of any one of which involved prior construals of the total subject matter on the part of the interpreter.53 Frei’s response was not, however, to search among contemporary literary theorists for a better account to replace New Criticism; it was rather to move his entire understanding of the classical “realistic” reading of the biblical narratives away from suspicious proximity to any grand theory of “meaning” or “textuality.” The new directions of his thinking were made clear in essays from 1982 and 1983.54 They indicate a two-fold determination. Negatively, the contemporary conflict of interpretive theories pointed him to the impossibility of any comprehensive theory of textual meaning and its relation to reference. Meaning and reference are simply too varied and context-dependent, their relationships too shifting and delicate. Instead one must pay attention to the tradition-shaped goals, expectations, and skills defining different reading regimes. Positively, this also meant that all talk of the “literal sense” would have to be much more a matter of traditions of reading shaped by Christian communities and less of theories of narrative. On this matter he also owed a debt yet again to his student Charles Wood. The latter’s The Formation of Christian Understanding (1981) probably helped cement Frei’s shift of attention toward communal interpretive practices by its use of the notion of the “plain sense” of scripture to indicate those meanings which occur in the most natural and unforced way to those socialized into the modes of interpretation regnant in a community at a given time.55 52

Frei to Bruce Piersault, July 8, 1980, Frei Papers. Higton Bibliography. Kelsey, Uses of Scripture, 206 and passim. 54 Hans Frei, “Theology and the Interpretation of Narrative: Some Hermeneutical Considerations,” in TN, 94–116; “The ‘Literal Reading’ of Biblical Narrative in the Christian Tradition: Does it Stretch or Will it Break?” in TN, 117–52. 55 Charles M. Wood, The Formation of Christian Understanding: An Essay in Theological Hermeneutics (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1981), 40, 43. 53


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Whatever its sources, this shift in the theory of the “literal reading” from scripture as narrative “icon” to socialization into a communal praxis had the result of moving Frei closer to the thought-world of George Lindbeck. But around this same time Lindbeck was incorporating in a more overt way Frei’s earlier insights into his own project, as that took clearer and clearer shape leading up to the appearance of The Nature of Doctrine. His 1975 article, “Theological Revolutions and the Present Crisis,” following hard on his St Michael’s lectures, showed just how much of the basic conception of The Nature of Doctrine was now locked in place. Attempting to account for the abiding identity of Christianity throughout its myriad changes, Lindbeck had come to fuse together a set of theoretical elements of quite different provenance. In particular, a strong notion of how decisions about what is rational in the determination of world-views always occur within intellectual “paradigms” (courtesy of Thomas Kuhn) is now joined to an account of religions as akin to Wittgensteinian “language-games.”56 Socialization into a religion’s language-game thus becomes the privileged situation for theological interpretation and critique of that religion. Such internal criticism need not cease to be genuinely rational criticism, but only because definitions of rationality must be seen to be more loose and open-textured than previously thought. One’s grasp of human rationality from within a total religious paradigm will have in some respects (but not in all) a shape incommensurable with norms of reason formulated in a context alien to that religion. But what is most significant about this essay is the way in which Lindbeck is beginning to progress from general theories of the identity of religious communities and the nature of their doctrines toward current questions of theological method. Three years later, the idea in this essay of a “deep grammar” or “inner logic” of the religious language-game as a permanently identifying paradigm of the religion had led Lindbeck to begin taking a more explicit stand on renewing theological practice in a lengthy and important review essay written for a German journal and dealing with several works on theological method.57 In the meantime Lindbeck had absorbed the decisive impact of Kelsey’s Uses of Scripture. Thus the way this book was received in their characteristic ways by both Frei and Lindbeck made it something of a catalyst for what later emerged as postliberalism. Not only did it help to move Hans Frei closer to Lindbeck in emphasizing theological interpretation of the 56 George Lindbeck, “Theological Revolutions and the Present Crisis,” Theology Digest 23 (1975), 313–14. 57 George Lindbeck, “Theologische Methode und Wissenschaftstheorie,” Theologische Revue 74 (1978), 266–80.

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Bible as an inevitably communal and tradition-shaped practice (as opposed to the mere decipherment of meanings objectively given as a function of literary structure), it also sharply increased Lindbeck’s attention to the question of “textuality” and thus moved him in his turn closer to Frei and, in particular, to Frei’s interpretation of Karl Barth.) Following the now established drift of his thinking, Lindbeck in the German essay appeals to contemporary developments in the philosophy of science to divide those currently involved in discussions of theological method into “pluralists” (those who accept the new world of communally dispersed and fragmented perspectives on rationality) and “new general -theorists” (those, David Tracy among others, who are attempting to base theological method on revamped universal theories of truth and interpretation).58 Lindbeck enthusiastically commends Kelsey’s book as demonstrating the impossibility of reducing the plurality of scriptural meaning-patterns to a single hermeneutic theory. But it was Kelsey’s reading of Barth which was to be even more decisive for him. Lindbeck had apparently never made much of a study of Barth, and it would be safer to say that his nascent proposals on the proper way of doing theology owed less to Barth proper than to the picture drawn of Barth’s procedure by Frei and Kelsey (combined, he would later realize, with assumptions absorbed almost unconsciously from his extensive readings of Aquinas).59 But there was an important twist. What had been offered in Kelsey’s book as a merely descriptive account of Barth’s theological hermeneutics, one option among others, was elevated by Lindbeck over its rivals and made a normative prescription. Barth’s peculiar practice was generalized into the paradigm for a more correct way of understanding the theological task; it was what Lindbeck would later call “intratextuality.” In his book Kelsey had insisted that the patterns discerned in the biblical narratives depended crucially on the interpretive context or framework which the reader brought to them. Lindbeck, no doubt stimulated in part by his colleague Brevard Childs’s work on the canonical structuring of the Bible as a built-in interpretive frame, went beyond Kelsey to argue that the kind of “literary” reading practiced in Barth’s later dogmatics meant that the biblical narratives themselves could provide the fundamental framework for their own interpretation. Not only did this move perfectly satisfy, according to Lindbeck, Kelsey’s own strictures on any theological hermeneutics. It gave in addition a sharper profile to Frei’s account in Eclipse of the so-called “reversal 58

Ibid., 271. “[M]y knowledge of him [i.e. Barth] is sadly second-hand.” George Lindbeck, “Barth and Textuality,” Theology Today 43 (1986), 361. On the debt to Aquinas see Chapter Two below. 59


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of direction” in interpreting the Bible which characterized early modernity, where the world became the interpretive framework for interpreting the Bible instead of the Bible providing the framework for interpreting the world.60 The problem for Lindbeck had now become how to reverse that reversal; the mature Barth, on the reading of him which Lindbeck now absorbed from his colleagues, seemed to show how it might be done. One might suspect that Kelsey cherished some reservations with regard to Lindbeck’s appropriation of his work. And indeed, true to the role of a catalyst, Kelsey, in spite of helping to initiate a “chemical reaction” among his colleagues at Yale, never himself seemed fully to participate in it.61 But with the formation of the idea of intratextuality Lindbeck’s own reflections on the current scene in theology and what was wrong with it gained momentum. A series of articles and reviews began to appear after the methodology essay in which Lindbeck with increasing confidence identified a dubious intellectual tradition running back to Schleiermacher and still underlying virtually all contemporary mainstream Protestant theology. Gordon Kaufman, Gerhard Ebeling, Paul Tillich, the Myth of God Incarnate symposium: all were dealt with in quick succession.62 In other words, the idea of a methodological “liberalism” was now solidifying; paramount in characterizing this “great” but now (according to Lindbeck) tottering tradition were, first, its “experiential expressivism” (already criticized as a theory of doctrine in the St Michael’s lectures); and, second, its ignoring or refusing the norm of intratextuality. These reviews by Lindbeck show in particular how the need to set up a clear opposition to “liberals” drives him from this time to play up sharply the relatively static and unified character of the Christian linguistic framework, thereby directly reversing the supposedly dominant “liberal” trend of relativizing language vis-à-vis a perduring Christian consciousness or experience. With this development the last piece of the puzzle had fallen into place. There only remained the actual appearance of The Nature of Doctrine in 1984 (now with

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Lindbeck, “Theologische Methode,” 276. At the very least, the picture Kelsey paints of the relationship between literary judgments about scripture and theological construals of its meaning is more complex and indeterminate than Lindbeck’s deceptively straightforward account. See, for example, Kelsey, Uses of Scripture, 175–8. See also David Kelsey, “The Bible and Christian Theology,” The Journal of the American Academy of Religion 48 (1980), 385–402. 62 George Lindbeck, review of An Essay on Theological Method, by Gordon Kaufman, Religious Studies Review 5 (1979), 262–4; review of The Myth of God Incarnate, ed. John Hick, Journal of Religion 59 (1979), 248–50; “Ebeling: Climax of a Great Tradition,” Journal of Religion 61 (1981), 309–14; “An Assessment Re-Assessed: Paul Tillich on the Reformation,” Journal of Religion 63 (1983), 376–93. 61

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a fateful sixth chapter on theological method added to the discussion of religion and doctrine originating in the St Michael’s lectures) to proclaim the advent of “postliberalism” to the theological public at large. But, to take up the point made at the beginning of this chapter, that public was not wholly unprepared. A final characteristic of this ten-year period from 1975 to 1984 which should be indicated is the dawning recognition on the part of many theological observers that there was a “school” of thought developing at Yale. But the discussions of it which took place at that time are distinct in some important ways from what the tag “Yale school” would come to mean in later debates. First, the name of Lindbeck played scarcely any role in these discussions; second, they were dominated by the recent emergence of the categories of “story” and “narrative” as lively topics in theological discussion. An already vigorous trend among biblical scholars of using literary and rhetorical categories in exegesis met up in the early 1970s with some trendsetting works by theologians. Stephen Crites’s much-discussed essay from 1971, “The Narrative Quality of Experience,” might be taken as a convenient starting point. It was soon followed by Johann Baptist Metz’s “A Short Apology of Narrative” (1973), James McClendon’s Biography as Theology (1974), the British Roman Catholic Brian Wicker’s The Story Shaped World (1976), and (an especially significant harbinger) Stanley Hauerwas and David Burrell’s essay “From System to Story: An Alternative Pattern for Rationality in Ethics” (1977).63 Reflection on the role of narrative in theology had awoken early at Yale; in different ways both H. Richard Niebuhr and Julian Hartt taught the importance of the category of “story,” and Crites witnessed to that. So did Hauerwas. After getting his doctorate at Yale, he had gone to Notre Dame where he eventually combined what he had learned from his Yale teachers with his colleague John Howard Yoder’s politically potent musings on the ethics of Jesus, to begin fashioning a powerful model of the use of orienting narratives in the establishment of identity and in ethical decision-making.

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Stephen Crites, “The Narrative Quality of Experience,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 39 (1971), 291–311; Johann Baptist Metz, “A Short Apology of Narrative,” Concilium 85 (1973), 84–96; James McClendon, Biography as Theology: How Life Stories Can Remake Today’s Theology (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1974); Brian Wicker, The Story-Shaped World (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976); Stanley Hauerwas and David Burrell, “From System to Story: An Alternative Pattern for Rationality in Ethics,” in Truthfulness and Tragedy: Further Investigations in Christian Ethics, by Stanley Hauerwas (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977). The Crites, Metz and Hauerwas/Burrell pieces are conveniently collected in Stanley Hauerwas and L. Gregory Jones, eds., Why Narrative? Readings in Narrative Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 1989).


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It is hardly surprising, then, that Hans Frei’s Eclipse was readily seen as another contribution to a budding “narrative theology” movement; he and some of his colleagues could be seen as a regional variant, the “Yale” branch of this trend. Perhaps the earliest emergence of this idea is in Mark Ellingsen’s 1982 review of Charles Wood’s Formation of Christian Understanding. Ellingsen had been in private correspondence with Frei the year before, and had broached the question of a “Yale School.” Frei’s response was unenthusiastic (“I may not be in agreement on basic issues with some of my colleagues, and I think I am still in the process of developing a ‘position’ . . .”) but Ellingsen went ahead and floated the idea in print.64 He saw in Frei, Wood, Brevard Childs, and David Kelsey a common front in the current debates on “story theology” and narrative hermeneutics of scripture. But Frei had not regarded his work in Eclipse as a kind of “narrative theology.” The temptation to read it as such, combined with the book’s own obscurity about the larger dogmatic (especially Christological) issues really at stake for Frei, began to skew interpretation of him. He found it frustratingly difficult, as some of his private correspondence reveals, to clear himself of misunderstandings, especially the broad accusations of a textualist and confessionalist fideism being leveled at narrative-oriented theologies which, he felt, had nothing really to do with his own position. He made his negative stance on “Wittgensteinian fideism” clear to Patrick Sherry in some withering comments on a student’s dissertation.65 In another letter he finds he must reject the charge, made by James Gustafson and others, that thinkers of his ilk do not make truth-claims.66 Just a few months later he is responding negatively to yet another attempt to “place” him intellectually; he is not a “pure narrativist” or even an “antifoundationalist.”67 Clearly, Frei’s very particular theological interest in “realistic” narrative and the Bible, and the bracketing of his ideas with those of colleagues on the faculty (including Paul Holmer, with regard to whom the “fideist” title came closer to the mark) had landed him in a series of more abstract philosophical discussions about narrative, truth, and fideism. The irony is obvious: his name was becoming strongly connected with the concept “narrative” just at the time he had begun to distance himself from narrative theories as such in 64 Frei to Mark Ellingsen, October 20, 1981, Frei Papers, Higton Bibliography. Mark Ellingsen, “Luther as Narrative Exegete,” Journal of Religion 63 (1983), 394–5. 65 Frei to Patrick Sherry, July 5, 1983, Frei Papers, Higton Bibliography. 66 Frei to Gene Outka, August 8, 1984, Frei Papers, Higton Bibliography. 67 Frei to Gary Comstock, November 5, 1984, Frei Papers, Higton Bibliography. Frei is presumably responding to a reading in manuscript of Gary Comstock, “Truth or Meaning: Ricoeur vs. Frei on Biblical Narrative,” Journal of Religion 66 (1986), 117–40.

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his turn to the dynamics of tradition and communal rules of reading. But more than this, the consequence of the wider interpretation of Yale as harboring a narrative school of thought was that it set the scene for the reception of Lindbeck’s book; it guaranteed that theories of truth and questions of fideism and irrational sectarianism would play a large role in the discussion of that work and, indirectly, in the image of Yale. Most importantly, the idea of a “school” itself would persist, with Lindbeck now seen as the chief spokesman and Frei his ally.

The Crystallization and Contentious Reception of Postliberalism: 1985–94 Over the course of the decade just discussed developments at Yale, insofar as they were amalgamated into a “school” under the vague rubric of “narrative,” were (contrary to his own intentions) associated in discussion chiefly with the name of Frei. But for the period now to be discussed the dominance of Lindbeck’s book and of the many discussions and arguments it occasioned is overwhelming. Indeed, the hue and cry around The Nature of Doctrine for some time drowned out independent attention to Frei, especially his reflections on the nature of theology; to an unfortunate degree, this neglect has continued. At any rate, for good or ill he was from that point on identified in the minds of the academic public, alongside some younger contributors like Ronald Thiemann and Bruce Marshall, with the category “postliberalism,” given currency by Lindbeck’s book.68 The latter was undoubtedly provocative, and on more than one level. It proposed that theologians embrace (in light of current philosophy, anthropology, and sociology) a “cultural-linguistic” theory of religions which downgraded their previously favored assumptions, especially those which had identified religions either in terms of cognitive-propositional worldviews or in terms of the phenomenologically-identifiable affective or experiential states they engendered (ND, 30–45). Second, it also propounded a theory of religious doctrines or authoritative teachings which accounted for their community-defining function entirely in terms of their 68

Ronald F. Thiemann, Revelation and Theology: The Gospel as Narrated Promise (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985); Bruce Marshall, Christology in Conflict: The Identity of a Saviour in Rahner and Barth (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987). Although they received much less discussion than Lindbeck’s book, these works (the former by one of Frei’s students, the latter by one of Lindbeck’s) seemed in much the same spirit, and certainly reinforced the conviction that the approach outlined by Lindbeck really did formulate a conscious and united front of Yale theologians.


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being quasi-grammatical rules of the religious language-game; whatever symbolic or assertorical force they had when put to other religious uses played no role in their strictly doctrinal status (ND, 73–111). As if these theses were not contentious enough, the book threw in as an excursus a complicated if sketchy theory of religious truth which attempted to reformulate and combine aspects of both “correspondence” and “coherence” truth theories (ND, 63–9). But it was the last chapter which charged the discussion of these other matters with a peculiar excitement for some, exasperation for others. For there Lindbeck proposed all of these elements as suggesting a new model for the very practice of theology itself (ND, 112–38). Without returning to pre-nineteenth-century Protestant (or for that matter pre-Vatican II Catholic) orthodoxy, this model would nonetheless break sharply with the “liberal” assumptions upon which most current academic theology in the US and Britain had been premised for a century or more. This gauntlet having been thrown down, the story of the emergence of “postliberalism” as a widely known category almost immediately becomes less a story of the productions of Lindbeck and Frei themselves than of the works of others about them, especially about the former. Consequently, this section will focus on the highlights of the debate before turning briefly to Frei and Lindbeck during this period. By way of preface it should be pointed out that any treatment of the stormy reception of Lindbeck’s book would have to acknowledge the fact of frequent misunderstanding. The force of his various arguments and their connections with each other and with broader trends in theology and philosophy were easily misconstrued; the subtlety of his positions was sometimes missed, and his claims accordingly caricatured. But many astute questions and insightful demurrals were aired as well. Unfortunately, to give an account of the many twists and turns of the discussion in the large secondary literature would demand a book to itself. Suffice it to say that each aspect of The Nature of Doctrine (its theory of religion, its theory of doctrine, its theory of truth, its theory of postliberal theology) was registered, often questioned, and sometimes attacked. The logically independent status of these elements (insufficiently flagged by Lindbeck himself) was seldom noted. Thus in many cases the book’s “position” could be treated as a single, monolithic proposal to be accepted or rejected. Other reviewers would tend to light on one of these elements as the key to Lindbeck or to “postliberalism,” subordinating or ignoring the others. The essential point is that through this extensive discussion a significant proportion of the theological community apparently became convinced that the main point of Lindbeck’s book was to repudiate all

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liberal theology and promote a “turn” to a new “method” under the banner of postliberalism. Once this was established as the framework of discussion (and Lindbeck’s own less than guarded comments in his final chapter provided ample grist for this mill), it was almost inevitable that much of the initial response to his quite complex proposals quickly devolved into the drawing of oversimplified battle-lines. Two moments are especially potent illustrations of this process. A 1985 symposium on Lindbeck’s book in The Thomist contained articles by David Tracy and William Placher which were omens of so much that was to come. Tracy’s uncharacteristically heated rejoinder to Lindbeck was not concerned with the latter’s actual theory of doctrine (which Tracy found congenial) but zeroed in on Lindbeck’s concluding chapter on theology. Tracy mounted a vigorous defense of the centrality in responsible theological method of systematic apologetic and correlation with contemporary culture; along the way he effectively dismissed the charge of “experiential-expressivism” as poorly informed about the current state of theology. Not content with defense he also launched countercharges, speaking ominously of the dangers of “confessionalism” and “relativism” implicit in Lindbeck’s position. Not to be overlooked here is Tracy’s reflexive inclusion of Hans Frei in his strictures; in fact, Frei’s and Lindbeck’s positions are effectively treated as interchangeable variants on a late “Barthianism” which Tracy can scarcely mention without a hint of scorn.69 Placher’s article could hardly be more different in tone. Lindbeck’s book is welcomed as a refreshing wind in an American theological landscape dominated by what Placher calls “revisionism.” Although he uses Tracy’s term here, it functions in this article merely as a catch-all for pretty much everything condemned by Lindbeck. Indeed, Lindbeck’s somewhat scattered and sometimes offhand comments about “liberalism” are here fused by Placher into a portrait of a single entity or method. He simply identifies revisionism with “experiential-expressivism,” along with an appeal to a single, universal religious experience, a tendency “to appeal to process metaphysics,” and the presentation of idealized human possibilities as the focus of scriptural meaning.70 It would probably have been difficult to find many theologians willing to

69 David Tracy, “Lindbeck’s New Program for Theology: A Reflection,” The Thomist 49 (1985): 463, 465. Tracy revealingly but misleadingly includes Holmer among the key Yale influences. 70 William Placher, “Revisionist and Postliberal Theologies and the Public Character of Theology,” The Thomist 49 (1985): 392–416. Like Tracy, Placher expands the treatment of Lindbeck to include a larger Yale “movement” in which Frei takes the most prominent place beside Lindbeck.


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accept this loose conglomeration of characteristics as an adequate description of their work, but Placher in this one article had gone a long way toward establishing the idea of an insurgent “Yale school” of postliberalism confronting a monolithic revisionism firmly in control of American academic theology. Ronald Thiemann’s Revelation and Theology caused a secondary splash that year and reinforced the impression of an aggressive united front emerging from Yale to challenge a regnant liberalism. This is not to say that Placher and others sympathetic to Lindbeck were the only ones to begin seeing the struggle in terms of “Yale versus Chicago.” A recent graduate of Chicago named Patrick Keifert that same year used Lindbeck’s book to identify a school of “narrative-canonical” thinkers at Yale, only to tax it with an ontological skepticism fueling a disastrous confessionalist withdrawal of theology from public discussion and accountability.71 With remarkable swiftness, within a year after the appearance of The Nature of Doctrine, a picture had thus come into focus which, explicitly or implicitly, provided the background for the way Lindbeck and Frei would be discussed, by friend and foe alike, over the next ten years (and to a degree even to the present). With tiresome regularity, the confrontation of “Yale” and “Chicago” would be set up by a Chicago supporter like Gary Comstock or Werner Jeanrond as a struggle for an intellectually responsible and publicly engaged correlationalism, in touch with the latest advances in hermeneutic philosophy, and now threatened by a recrudescence of Barthian orthodoxy, irresponsible fideism, and irrationalist retreat from the rigours of modern criticism.72 The Yale supporters would answer in kind, equipped with their own stock phrases and crude stereotypes of “liberals.” Each side could claim, with fairness, that its position was being caricatured by the other; this should have been a sign that the opposition itself, about which some theologians were prepared to become quite exercised, needed more careful conceptual analysis than it was receiving. Even so, the opposition was eventually granted something like canonical status with the appearance in 1989 of David Ford’s widely used textbook, The Modern Theologians. Turning to its account of the contemporary American scene the reader would find a chapter called “Postliberals” juxtaposed with another one called “Revisionists and Liberals.” It was not exactly encouraging that 71 Patrick Keifert, review of The Nature of Doctrine, by George Lindbeck, Word and World 5 (1985): 342–4. 72 See, for example, Gary L. Comstock, “Two Types of Narrative Theology,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 55 (1987): 687–717; Werner Jeanrond, “The Problem of the Starting-Point of Theological Thinking,” Hermathena 156 (1994): 5–20. David Ford’s response to Jeanrond in the same journal politely and skillfully questions his paper’s stark evaluations and oppositions.

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both chapters were written by scholars manifestly in sympathy with the Yale side! Could the dividing issues be fairly joined, much less examined, under such circumstances?73 Those initial essays of Tracy and Placher, among the earliest influential responses to Lindbeck, were unfortunately prophetic in that both succeeded far better in sounding the call to battle than in helping observers reach an informed consensus on what exactly the battle was about. Both authors had certainly identified important issues, but in a context which made it difficult to move beyond sloganeering and academic name-calling. And there was plenty more where that came from. By 1987 a kind of nadir was reached in another exchange, this time not in a scholarly journal but in the widely read pages of The Christian Century. It also marked a shift in the clamorous reception of Lindbeck as postliberalism became more firmly yoked to the pronouncements of Stanley Hauerwas. The latter had moved from Notre Dame to Duke Divinity School in the year that Lindbeck’s book was published; since that time his own variant on the putative Yale approach had been gaining more and more attention, especially at first among his fellow ethicists. Already in 1985 an alarmed James Gustafson (playing the “Chicago” role to perfection) was issuing warnings about “the sectarian temptation” to which this new theological and ethical orientation had succumbed in the work of Hauerwas.74 In fact, Hauerwas had invested Lindbeck’s carefully moderated statements about “sectarianism” with a sense of crisis, and a cultural combativeness, which were quite his own. Suddenly a recondite discussion of theological method had become a question of the very survival of the church’s witness in a secular culture. The rejection of theological liberalism was subsumed within a rejection of “liberalism” in the socio-political sense, a sweeping denunciation of the very shape of post-Enlightenment society and ethics in the West. Where Hauerwas’s charismatic persona and acerbic voice were influential, theological method no longer seemed quite the main issue. Now the call of postliberalism was addressed to a church threatened with apostasy, with corruption by the “liberal” consensus of the 73 James J. Buckley, “Revisionists and Liberals” and William C. Placher, “Postliberal Theology,” in The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 2: 89–102, 2: 115–28. The one-sided feel of these treatments was enhanced in the first edition of the book by a less than sympathetic treatment of American process theology: Kenneth Surin, “Process Theology,” 2: 103–14. The second edition of The Modern Theologians, published as a single volume in 1997, dropped the treatment of process theology entirely; the Buckley and Placher chapters reappeared more or less intact. 74 James M. Gustafson, “The Sectarian Temptation: Reflections on Theology, the Church and the University,” Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America 40 (1985): 83–94.


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modern Western consumerist and capitalist democracies (and the “progressive” theologies which provided them religious cover). It was a call back from compromise, to be a counter-cultural witness against the blandishments of contemporary American society.75 The introduction of this element into the discussion helped turn what had until then been a fairly recherché dispute among systematic theologians into a more public and incendiary affair. This was played out before a wide audience of clergy and laypeople when in 1987 The Christian Century featured a highly provocative article (“Answering Pilate”) by a closely-allied colleague of Hauerwas’s at Duke, the homiletician William Willimon.76 One commentator has claimed that it was this article, and the letters of response published alongside it, that first lifted Lindbeck’s book out of the relative obscurity of the scholarly review literature and brought it to the attention of a larger theological public.77 Sadly, the discussion of his work in this particular format could have contributed nothing to a genuine understanding of the difficult and subtle theological issues he had raised. Instead the reader was treated in Willimon’s piece to a remarkably crude cartoon version of a heroic postliberalism facing down its supposed theological enemies, traitors to Christian truth. Here was a defiant embrace of a Christian “tribalism” in the name of Christ’s exclusive truth, and the contemptuous dismissal of the futile attempts of all well-meaning “liberals” to avoid the truly radical consequences of their own religious tradition by a pointless invocation of “tolerance” which in fact evaded the genuine pluralism of competing religious claims. The striking of such self-consciously prophetic attitudes was obviously intended to politicize the discussion, and predictably called forth angry rejoinders. None was angrier than a letter from Charles Allen, charging that “Willimon and friends,” those who had “taken an oath of loyalty to the ‘Yale School’,” were actually the ones playing the role of Pontius Pilate, not “liberals.”78 The exchange demonstrates how the rhetoric, positive and negative, surrounding the supposed confrontation between liberalism and postliberalism could take on an almost hysterical tone. The audacious bid by 75

See the response to Gustafson in Stanley Hauerwas, Christian Existence Today (Durham, NC: Labyrinth, 1988), 1–18. 76 William H. Willimon, “Answering Pilate: Truth and the Postliberal Church,” The Christian Century 104, no. 3 ( January 28, 1987): 82–5. 77 Mark Horst, “Engendering the Community of Faith in an Age of Individualism: a Review of George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine,” Quarterly Review [Nashville, TN] 9, (1988): 90. 78 Charles W. Allen’s letter to the editor, along with others responding to the Willimon piece, was published in “A Challenge to Willimon’s Postliberalism,” The Christian Century 104, no. 10 (April 1, 1987): 309.

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Hauerwas to make a status confessionis out of opposition to “liberalism” (now in a broadened sociohistorical sense) pushed theological discussion in the direction of a scramble to take sides in a cultural war; a careful unfolding of the intricate issues at stake between, say, Frei and Tracy could now seem to many beside the point. Fortunately throughout this period there were also cooler heads devoting more careful attention to Lindbeck and his claims. A number of astute assessments were offered, many from scholars who were not unsympathetic to Lindbeck but who refused to become drawn into the “liberals versus postliberals” mêlée. One might single out typically thoughtful responses by Charles Wood or David Ford, wary of the dangers of un-nuanced and negatively charged notions of “liberalism.” Insightful critiques of Lindbeck’s truth theory were provided by Timothy Jackson, and of his regulative theory of doctrine by Lee Barrett. Hans Zorn asked some sharp questions about the uses to which Wittgensteinian grammar-theory was being put. Brian Gerrish used his expertise on Schleiermacher to defend that great theologian from the charge, already become widespread, of “experientialexpressivism.” Rowan Williams and Terrence Tilley, along with Lindbeck’s own colleague David Kelsey, provided penetrating comments on the problems with the model of “intratextuality” which was so central to Lindbeck’s proposed postliberalism.79 As the Sturm und Drang began to die down somewhat toward the end of the period David Ford was able to offer (from the more removed British perspective) a refreshingly modest (i.e. non-apocalyptic) notion of what the Yale School was (or at least should be) about: the unsubstitutable identity of Jesus Christ as the key to Christian particularity on the one hand, and the capacity to generate a “generous orthodoxy” on the other.80 After all the ink spilled over Lindbeck’s postliberal recommenda79

Charles M. Wood, review of The Nature of Doctrine, by George Lindbeck, Religious Studies Review 11 (1985): 237; David Ford, review of The Nature of Doctrine, by George Lindbeck, Journal of Theological Studies ns 37 (1986): 281; Timothy P. Jackson, “Against Grammar,” Religious Studies Review 11 (1985): 240–4; Lee Barrett, “Theology as Grammar: Regulative Principles or Paradigms and Practices?,” Modern Theology 4 (1988): 155–72; Hans Zorn, “Grammar, Doctrines, and Practice,” Journal of Religion 75 (1995): 509–20; Brian Gerrish, review of The Nature of Doctrine, by George Lindbeck, Journal of Religion 68 (1988): 87–92; Rowan Williams, “The Judgment of the World,” in On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 29–43 [first appeared as a 1989 article]; Terrence W. Tilley, “Incommensurability, Intratextuality, and Fideism,” Modern Theology 5 (1989): 87–111; David Kelsey, “Church Discourse and Public Realm,” in Theology and Dialogue: Essays in Conversation with George Lindbeck, ed. Bruce D. Marshall (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 7–33. Some of these pieces will be treated in later chapters. 80 David F. Ford, “Hans Frei and the Future of Theology,” Modern Theology 8 (1992): 207.


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tions, the fact that Ford was clearly recurring more to Frei’s ideas in this meditation should not be overlooked. Alongside all the debates, Lindbeck’s own work continued at a gentle pace. The handful of articles which came out following his book began to explore the notion of “intratextuality” less as a methodological concern and more as an ecclesial dynamic, a way of understanding the nature of Christian identity. Indeed, after an initial essay attempting to clarify his connections with Barth, Lindbeck turned resolutely back to his longstanding doctrinal concern with formulating an ecclesiology for contemporary society.81 In so doing he was also redressing an imbalance noted by his Yale colleague in New Testament Wayne Meeks, who emphasized the danger of treating a “cultural logic” or “symbol system” in ways which detached it from its “social embodiment.”82 Particularly intriguing and fruitful were Lindbeck’s creative retrievals of the biblical imagery of “the people of God,” with the accompanying insights on the impossibility of repristinating New Testament ecclesiological conceptions in the present.83 These also involved sensitive discussions of the consequences for contemporary relations with Judaism and the problem of supercessionism. On the other hand, it cannot be said that Lindbeck’s further comments on postliberalism and intratextuality really clarified theoretically what was already laid out in The Nature of Doctrine. In his essay on Barth he tried to give an intellectual context for his project by offering a somewhat questionable account of the contemporary intellectual landscape in terms of “textuality.”84 In other articles the imagery used continued to play up a sharp distinction between a fixed identifying “code” which could be as it were grasped and held steady against (or used to maintain “control” of) the flux of changing experiences and contexts.85 Especially noteworthy was his enthusiastic endorsement of an article by his student Bruce Marshall which drew strong parallels between Lindbeck’s truth-theory and the teaching of Aquinas. The comparison threw a helpful light on the nature and provenance of Lindbeck’s ideas, but the rather too easy identification of Aquinas’s notion of an infallible and unchanging set of “articuli fidei” drawn from a scripture directly inspired 81

Lindbeck, “Barth and Textuality.” Wayne Meeks, “A Hermeneutics of Social Embodiment,” in Christians among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Krister Stendahl on His Sixty-Fifth Birthday (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), 176–86. 83 George Lindbeck, “The Church,” in Keeping the Faith: Essays to Mark the Centenary of Lux Mundi, ed. Geoffrey Wainwright (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), 188, 192. 84 Lindbeck, “Barth and Textuality,” 362. 85 Lindbeck, “Church,” 192; George Lindbeck, review of God – The World’s Future: Systematic Theology for a Postmodern Era, by Ted Peters, CTNS Bulletin 13 (1993): 15. 82

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by God with the conceptual framework of quasi-grammatical rules envisioned by Lindbeck begged some important questions.86 True, there were signs that Lindbeck was uncomfortable with the conclusions some more enthusiastic supporters of “postliberalism” were drawing from his work. The identifying framework of the Christian religion, he cautioned, clearly could not simply be equated with the particular patterns of belief inscribed in the New Testament. One must also guard against conceiving of the Christian grammatical rules as forming a rigid and “tightly systematic” whole when the imagery of a “web” might be better.87 But as it turned out, such cautionary interventions did not really affect the impasse over his book. On the contrary, his warning that the biggest contemporary threat of “extratextuality” in theology came from liberation interests and not apologetic ones merely cemented the impression in the minds of his enemies that his entire conception of theology was at base reactionary. Though his own name kept coming up in the lively controversies over Lindbeck, Frei continued to pursue his own path almost as if nothing had happened. Significantly, in his own writings he never embraced Lindbeck’s rhetoric of postliberalism, but this was hardly noticed. In fact, Frei’s highly independent intellectual trajectory, never widely grasped from the beginning, had become well-nigh invisible to the broader theological public at least since the appearance of Lindbeck’s book, or even earlier, since the time his work had come to be lumped in with “narrative theology.” His relatively sparse and often obscurely-written publications, combined with his ironic distance from theological trends and a self-effacing personality, had always contributed to this; now Lindbeck’s simplified appropriation of his work threatened to make explicit discussion of Frei himself seem almost superfluous. But as Frei continued to think through the whole problem of his theological typology and the interrelation of “internal” and “external” discourses in theology some curious developments were surfacing in his work which did not easily fit the opposition of liberalism and postliberalism which had rapidly congealed. A deep exploration of the old enmity between Barth and Schleiermacher was a special concern; it resulted in a surprisingly balanced verdict on their relative strengths and weaknesses of method.88 This seems to 86 Bruce Marshall, “Aquinas as Postliberal Theologian,” The Thomist 53 (1989): 353–402; response by Lindbeck, 403–6. The very same year that Marshall was claiming Aquinas as a forerunner of Lindbeck’s postliberalism, David Tracy was invoking Aquinas as the inspiration for his rejection of it! David Tracy, “The Uneasy Alliance Reconceived: Catholic Theological Method, Modernity, and Postmodernity,” Theological Studies 50 (1989): 568. 87 George Lindbeck, “The Church,” 186, 188; “Dulles on Method,” Pro Ecclesia 1 (1992): 56. 88 Hans Frei, “Barth and Schleiermacher: Divergence and Convergence,” in TN, 178–99 (from a talk originally presented in 1986).


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be reflected also in a second version of his typology (the Cadbury lectures in Birmingham, England in 1987) where Schleiermacher’s “type” of theology is more clearly seen to be open to the possibility of a “literal” reading of the gospel narratives (TCT, 83). The significance of this shift will emerge later. But, sadly, Frei never produced the large-scale statement toward which his varied productions were groping; within the year after the lectures he would be dead of complications following a stroke. His last publication took him full-circle, back to the teacher whose thought had challenged him from the beginning: H. Richard Niebuhr.89 Frei’s ability, on display in that article, to grant the cogency of a clearly non-Barthian mode of theologizing perhaps should have given some pause to those who could see in him only one of the masterminds of a new anti-liberal “school.” Toward the end of the period, prompted by his death and also by the posthumous appearance of his collected essays and his typology lectures, some attention at least began to be directed once again toward Frei himself. The resulting book reviews and the contributions by nine different authors to a special issue of Modern Theology (April 1992) devoted to him were certainly welcome, but the whole question of his relation to Lindbeck and the question of postliberalism was not clarified; it persisted as a confusing background to the more specialized engagements with aspects of his work.

The Decline of Postliberalism: 1995 to the Present To many theologically-informed readers, the preceding account of heated disputes over theological method and of camps flying the respective flags of “Yale” and “Chicago” may seem oddly remote, like a piece of ancient history. In general such rapid shifts in scholarly talking-points are common. But is there anything to be learned from the particular factors which marginalized a discussion that had only recently seemed to many so important? Broadly speaking, the whole complex of methodological issues associated with the postliberal project as codified by Lindbeck’s book appeared to fade from view rather quickly and without much fanfare. The period since around 1995 attests to a lack of creative energy along the previously established methodological line of debate, the attempt to dichotomize liberal/ revisionist versus postliberal methods. If the world of theological scholarship began to focus its attention in other areas, that in no way signals that a collective resolution of the issues which had seemed so urgent and divisive had been achieved. It would be more accurate to speak merely of a waning 89

Hans Frei, “H. Richard Niebuhr on History, Church and Nation,” in TN, 214–33.

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of interest in an intransigent confrontation which had seemed to promise large things but which had achieved so little. A sign of the change in climate was the fact that by the millennial year the flow of new articles on Frei, Lindbeck, and postliberalism had become a trickle. A 1999 exchange in The Christian Century between James Gustafson and William Placher (who by that time seemed to have acquired the status of unofficial spokesman for postliberalism90) failed to generate satisfying definitions of either theological tendency or to pin down once and for all the real issues between them.91 Nor did this inconclusive exchange touch off any new discussions along the old lines, undoubtedly bearing witness to the sense of weariness surrounding the issues as previously framed. Lindbeck himself, at this point retired from active teaching, turned mainly to constructive reflections on ecclesiology. He did publish two or three more contributions which continued to register minor variations on the methodological positions laid out in his book. In terms of overall tone there is perhaps discernible a blurring of some of the sharper claims earlier made for “intratextuality.” The production of intratextual meaning, he now took more care to stress, is always a socially-embodied process. Thus the structure of Christian identity remains somewhat “vague” or “indefinite” until enacted, completed socially at a specific site. The Christian “grammar” is no algorithm of uniformity; it will produce “irreconcilably distinct” performances at different social and cultural sites. It follows that theology should not be thought of as the prime locus of intratextuality but is rather a corrective to its varied communal enactments.92 Lindbeck also cautioned against laying too much weight on the “incommensurability” or “untranslatability” subsisting between Christian claims and other cultural configurations.93 At times he found himself in disagreement 90 In 1996 Placher more modestly referred to his role as “unofficial historian of postliberal theology, or ‘the Yale school’,” though reiterating that he remains “somewhat uncomfortable” with the connotations of such “school” language. William Placher, The Domestication of Transcendence (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996): xi. 91 James M. Gustafson, “Just What is ‘Postliberal’ Theology?”; William C. Placher, “Being Postliberal: A Response to James Gustafson”; James M. Gustafson, “Liberal Questions: A Response to William Placher,” The Christian Century 116, no. 10 (March 24–31, 1999): 353–4, no. 11 (April 7, 1999): 390–2, no. 12 (April 14, 1999): 422–5. 92 George Lindbeck, “Atonement and the Hermeneutics of Intratextual Social Embodiment,” in The Nature of Confession: Evangelicals and Postliberals in Conversation, eds. Timothy R. Phillips and Dennis L. Okholm (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 227, 234, 240. George Lindbeck, “Reflections on Trinitarian Language,” Pro Ecclesia 4 (1995): 263. 93 George Lindbeck, “The Gospel’s Uniqueness: Election and Untranslatability,” Modern Theology 13 (1997): 428–9. See also “Response to Michael Wyschogrod’s ‘Letter to a Friend’,” Modern Theology 11 (1995): 210, which lays heavy emphasis on the unpredictability and novelty of intratextual performances.


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with those who had too enthusiastically adopted as a criterion of “orthodoxy” his call for the narrative identification of the Christian God from scripture; this would be to mistake a novel hypothesis for the recovery of some classical “test.”94 But by this time such subtle adjustments, to say nothing of some of the more important criticisms of his project buried in the mass of earlier journal reviews and essays, had scant influence when measured against the fact that The Nature of Doctrine itself had reached a kind of classic status as the manifesto which first synthesized the postliberal project. This status (part of the codification, common in surveys and summations of the current theological scene, of postliberalism as a methodological “option”) ironically went hand in hand with the virtual disappearance of postliberalism as a topic of active discussion and debate. Did this amount to an overall negative verdict on the thought of Hans Frei and George Lindbeck, relegating the influence of their ideas to a passing fashion? A closer look at recent developments would suggest otherwise. If the specific terminology of “postliberalism” and its associated ideas has undoubtedly suffered an eclipse in the past ten years, the broader tradition of creative thought nourished in one way or another by Hans Frei and George Lindbeck has continued and even spread. In other words, postliberalism as the privileged conceptual framework for appropriating these two theologians has quietly dissolved, even as the field of their influence has become, sometimes anonymously or at one or two removes, wider than ever.95 The following brief account will approach this broader influence of the Yale duo in the past several years from three angles. First is the already alluded-to disappearance (again apart from casual usage and broad surveys) of “postliberalism” as a common front with a recognizable conceptual profile. This is true even, perhaps especially, among those sympathetic to the ideas usually associated with Frei and Lindbeck. Second is the dispersal and diffusion of those ideas among several currents of influence. Third is the displacement, again notably among those who might be assumed sympathetic to postliberalism, of creative theological energy away from the conceptual oppositions and methodological concerns which occupied Frei and Lindbeck and their commentators in the period before 1995. One can certainly identify a vague “mood” among many contemporary theologians which, consciously in most but not all cases, resonates with the 94

Lindbeck, “Trinitarian Language,” 263 It must be noted, though, that even if the conceptual framework of “postliberalism” has faded away from most current discussions, it too often continues, as will be discussed later, to exert distorting effects on the way those sympathetic to Frei and Lindbeck receive their ideas. A theme underlying this entire study will be that it is especially Frei’s thought which has been made less accessible due to this hangover. 95

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stances of Frei or Lindbeck. The various shadings of this trend will be outlined shortly, but its overall characteristics would include: a strong orientation toward ressourcement, especially a readiness to rediscover the possibilities in those classical statements on Trinity and Incarnation which had been criticized or ignored by so many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Protestant theologians; a stress on the distinct and concrete social practices instituted in ecclesial communities and the way individuals are formed by them; a rethinking of ecumenical issues, in particular a deeper appreciation of the catholic tradition (and of the catholicity of the magisterial reformers) among protestants thinkers; a determined effort to recover modes of biblical exegesis which had been displaced by historical criticism, including narrative and typological interpretation; and finally, at least among many, a continued or deepened appreciation of the achievement of Karl Barth. The second and third of these might be particularly associated with Lindbeck, the fourth and fifth more with Frei, while the first would characterize both. The striking thing is that the individual strands of this loose amalgam of concerns are currently being discussed and developed with scarcely any sustained attention to the methodological distinctions worked out in detail by Frei and Lindbeck and which dominated the discussions of the previous period. Symptomatically, book reviewers now find it quite possible to discuss many of these trends, and indeed many of the other thinkers earlier associated with postliberalism such as Stanley Hauerwas, Bruce Marshall, or Ronald Thiemann, without using the term “postliberal” at all. There are two reasons for this. First, the trends identified above, whatever their initial inspiration, are no longer explicitly connected with a single movement or methodological framework. Two recent multi-author collections highlight this. One could scarcely hope for a more exclusively Yale-oriented group of authors than that assembled in 1998 by William Placher and Ronald Thiemann for a book of popular essays on theological themes, but one will look in vain for any sign that the authors see themselves carrying forward a common methodological project.96 Similarly telling is the deliberate tentativeness of the 96 Why Are We Here? Everyday Questions and the Christian Life, eds. William Placher and Ronald Thiemann (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1998). The authors include, besides the editors, Kathryn Tanner, David Dawson, Thomas Tracy, John DiNoia, Bruce Marshall, James J. Buckley, Michael Root, William Werpehowski, and George Hunsinger. The introduction (p. 3) indicates the influence on the authors of a shared set of teachers at Yale, and reveals that many of them have continued to meet on a regular basis. The only recent constructive work I am aware of within Yale circles which positively appropriates the notion of the “postliberal” is the little-noticed book by Mark Ellingsen, A Common Sense Theology: the Bible, Faith, and American Society (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1995). He understands himself to be adopting what he several times refers to as “the Postliberal Biblical Narrative model” (e.g., p. 10).


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editors of another set of readings entitled Theology after Liberalism: “In what sense and with what justification the texts collected here can be typified as ‘postliberal’ is very much an open question.”97 One of the editors of the latter volume, George Schner, was himself a product of Yale; though primarily a student of Louis Dupre he was definitely influenced by and engaged with the ideas of Frei and Lindbeck. But the identity of the other editor, John Webster, points toward a second reason for the disappearance of postliberalism as a topic of discussion. Though he acknowledges the influence of Schner, his former colleague in Toronto, Webster was trained in Britain and represents those numerous theologians who, while in some vague sense sharing the already indicated postliberal “mood,” formulated their positions more or less independently of the basic ideas of Frei or Lindbeck.98 Indeed, Britain in the 1980s witnessed a contemporaneous but quite indigenous reaction against the liberalism of the 1960s and 1970s, one associated with such names as Rowan Williams, Nicholas Lash, Andrew Louth, Oliver O’Donovan, and Colin Gunton.99 By the 1990s this originally distinct tradition and that emanating from Yale had become so intermeshed that it became pointless to attribute either a single point of origination or a shared methodological strategy to the larger set of concerns outlined above. So those theologians active today who can be conceived in one way or another as sympathetic to the world of ideas of Frei and Lindbeck, including but not limited to those directly trained by the latter, simply cannot be grouped together as developing a common methodological agenda. Instead, the best image for the ongoing influence of the originary Yale thinkers is that of a river delta. Like a powerful and clear stream which gradually disperses 97

John Webster and George P. Schner, Theology after Liberalism: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000): ix. 98 For the role of Schner as a medium of Yale influence upon him, see Webster’s reminiscences concerning his “close colleague and fellow teacher” (although not named, this is clearly Schner). John Webster, “Discovering Dogmatics,” in Shaping a Theological Mind: Theological Context and Methodology, ed. Darren C. Marks (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2002), 131–2. Though undoubtedly a proponent of theology “after liberalism,” Webster’s attitude to specific “postliberal” positions associated with Lindbeck and Frei can be ambivalent, or even sharply critical. In addition to rejecting Lindbeck’s relative weightings of ecclesial authority versus the authority of the scriptural canon (see below), he also finds repugnant the attempts of the Yale thinkers to read Karl Barth along pragmatic or Wittgensteinian lines, rather than in terms of ontological realism. See John Webster, Barth’s Ethics of Reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 21–32, 219–21. 99 Interestingly, Modern Theology, a privileged forum for so many of the discussions at issue here, originated among British theologians in 1984, the same year as the publication of The Nature of Doctrine. For a fine account of recent British theology which highlights the shift in mood during the 1980s see Rowan Williams, “Theology in the Twentieth Century,” in A Century of Theological and Religious Studies in Britain, ed. Ernest W. Nicholson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 237–52.

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into smaller branches, the characteristic ideas associated with Frei and Lindbeck have spread in several directions, watering a greater area but also becoming more shallow and indistinct as they are simplified and abstracted from their original contexts and mingled with other intellectual sources. Adopting a highly simplified scheme to clarify the complex way in which these ideas have been recently taken up in diverse contexts, one can identify at least five loose strands of influence currently at work, whether singly or in combination, among a number of theologians. There is first the strand associated with the distinctive (and very prolific) contribution of Stanley Hauerwas; indeed, for those who continue to apply the label he is the primary contemporary exemplar of the postliberal. The focus in his work is very much on a counter-cultural social ethic; on the critique of “modernity” and its offspring, the Western liberal societies with their impoverished notions of agency and spirituality; and on the theological restitution of traditional orthodox motifs as the inspiration for those ecclesial communities which must form in their adherents Christian virtues of resistance to the structures of systemic violence and anomie.100 The ethical and communal orientation of the strand under Hauerwas’s aegis blends into the second strand now under exploration, that which focuses on ecclesial practices and the communal formation of individuals in the interest of establishing less individualist and intellectualist approaches to spirituality. An interest in reformulating traditions of contemplation or spiritual exercises to enrich the texture of everyday life in modern societies is commonly in evidence. One might mention here works by William Placher, Ronald Thiemann, David Ford, or the contributors to the 1997 volume Spirituality and Social Embodiment.101 When the emphasis on the communal shaping of individuals is more specifically attuned to the way sacred texts are interpreted a third kind of current interest becomes visible: the search for what might be called a post100 See, for example (selecting from the nine books which he has authored or co-authored in just the past ten years, alongside a flood of articles, sermons, interviews, etc.): Stanley Hauerwas, Wilderness Wanderings: Probing Twentieth-Century Theology and Philosophy (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997); ibid., A Better Hope: Resources for a Church Confronting Capitalism, Democracy and Postmodernity (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2000); ibid., With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2001). The last originated as Gifford Lectures. 101 William Placher, Jesus the Savior: The Meaning of Jesus for Christian Faith (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001); Ronald Thiemann, Religion in Public Life: A Dilemma for Democracy (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 1996); David Ford, The Shape of Living: Spiritual Directions for Everyday Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1998) and Self and Salvation: Being Transformed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Spirituality and Social Embodiment, eds. James J. Buckley and L. Gregory Jones (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997).


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critical hermeneutic of scripture. There are several different modes evident, including Stephen Fowl’s programmatic relating of interpretive skills to community pragmatics, John Dawson’s re-appropriation of patristic figural and allegorical modes of reading, Peter Ochs’s Peirce-influenced brand of “scriptural reasoning,” and the quite varied interpretive deployments of “canon” and “narrative” in the works of people like Christopher Seitz, Luke Timothy Johnson, or Gerard Loughlin.102 Writers working this seam are predominantly united by their hostility to the hegemony within theology of the historical-critical modes of interpretation still prevalent in the guild of biblical studies, and by their determination to retrieve the insights embedded in pre-critical reading practices. A fourth area of concern can be linked to a shift which often results from the latter determination in the balance between the authority of scripture and the authority of the interpretive community. Here there has been some tension between those who draw different emphases from the Yale legacy. On the one hand, there is a stress on the church as the formative setting of all scriptural interpretations, sometimes combined with readings of Luther or Calvin which highlight their fundamental continuity with the classical catholic tradition. The quest for “a catholic and evangelical theology” by those associated with the journal Pro Ecclesia is typical here.103 On the other hand, within an area of broader agreement, there can be a 102 Stephen Fowl, Engaging Scripture: A Model for Theological Interpretation (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998); John Dawson, Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Peter Ochs, Peirce, Pragmatism and the Logic of Scripture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Christopher Seitz, Figured Out: Typology and Providence in Christian Scripture (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001); Luke Timothy Johnson, The Living Gospel (London: Continuum, 2004); Gerard Loughlin, Telling God’s Story: Bible, Church and Narrative Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Johnson is an intriguing instance of the diffusion of “Yale” ideas, involving devious channels of hidden and sometimes conflicting influences. Though trained in Yale in New Testament, he might have seemed an unlikely candidate for classification as postliberal due to his forceful demand for a recovery of “religious experience” as a key concept for biblical interpretation, with a concomitant appeal to the methods of comparative phenomenology of religion. See Luke Timothy Johnson, Religious Experience in Earliest Christianity: A Missing Dimension in New Testament Studies (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998). The word postliberal and the names Frei and Lindbeck were absent from his well-known series of scholarly and popular works, until the 2004 volume cited above, which contains the following in a footnote on p. 159: “It has taken me a long time to recognize the subtle influence on my thinking of Hans Frei, The Identity of Jesus Christ . . . In fact, even in the writing of my book (The Real Jesus), I did not appreciate that I was moving back to a point made so well by Frei.” 103 Efforts toward bridging Luther and Aquinas, such as those by Bruce Marshall and Eugene Rogers, are to be noted (see citations below). On the search more generally for a “catholic and evangelical theology,” see Knowing the Triune God: The Work of the Spirit in the Practices of the Church, eds. James J. Buckley and David Yeago (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2001).

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worry that a shift too far in the direction of the contemporary community of interpretation can lead to the blurring of scripture’s distinctive textual shape, in which is rooted its authoritative corrective or “judging” function over against the community. George Hunsinger or John Webster might be mentioned in this connection,104 and their close association with work on Karl Barth names the fifth and final stream in the broader Yale influence. Sometimes this appreciation of Barth takes the form of detailed studies, as with the two just named, alongside others trained at Yale like Joseph Mangina and Eugene Rogers.105 More generally, Barth, rightly or wrongly, represents for many in the wider circle the great precedent for a prevailing attitude to the legacy of “modern” theology since Schleiermacher, one which sees in its entire history up to recent times (with a few honorable exceptions) a tragic and now dispensable “episode” compromised by flawed theological procedures. The significant thing to remember about the dispersal of interests evident among the trends and names recounted in this all-too-brief survey is that it coincides with the first-mentioned characteristic of the contemporary scene: a marked lack of attention to those methodological concerns of Frei and Lindbeck that were so central to the postliberalism disputes, and the consequent disappearance of the rhetoric and conceptuality of postliberalism itself. Hauerwas, while sometimes acknowledging Lindbeck as a vague inspiration, is arguably far more engaged with and influenced by John Howard Yoder or Alasdair MacIntyre. Frei and Lindbeck are hardly mentioned in his work of the past ten years. The second strand, the orientation toward communal practices, is quite often partially (if vaguely) indebted to Lindbeck’s “cultural-linguistic” ruminations; but his ecclesiological essays are arguably the more significant influence. When it comes to post-critical interpretations of scripture, Frei is the figure most mentioned; but it is almost always Frei the historian and theorist of narrative interpretation and virtually never Frei the analyst of types of theology. The ecumenical concern

104 The former has criticized Lindbeck’s “Thomistic scheme” as giving too much weight to tradition over scripture. George Hunsinger, Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2000), 305–18. The latter has had similar criticisms of the tendency within postliberalism to make scriptural authority a function of ecclesial existence, most recently in John Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), esp. 48–50. 105 Hunsinger, Disruptive Grace; John Webster, Barth’s Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth’s Thought (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 1998); Joseph Mangina, Karl Barth on the Christian Life: The Practical Knowledge of God (New York: Peter Lang, 2001); Eugene Rogers, Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: Sacred Doctrine and the Natural Knowledge of God (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995).


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finds a forerunner more in Lindbeck the “catholic Lutheran” and ecumenist than in Lindbeck the architect of intratextuality. Finally, when Frei is not quoted on the “eclipse of biblical narrative” he is usually being cited for his acute insights on Karl Barth, but the larger methodological setting of his interest in Barth is scarcely alluded to. The foregoing reading of the different angles being explored suggests that even among many thinkers sympathetic to or trained by them, the methodological investments central to the work of Frei and Lindbeck have been increasingly neglected in favor of other concerns. This neglect may be rooted in a lack of interest in methodological questions, or perhaps in the feeling that the issues were sufficiently aired during the earlier debates and the time has come to simply choose sides and move on. But this relative lack of attention to the discussions about the nature of theology which so occupied Frei and Lindbeck is not the whole story. There have been some highly significant developments among those broadly sympathetic to the Yale trend which have helped to move the discussion as to the nature of theology in different directions; it is in fact arguable that precisely these positive developments have helped foster the abandonment of the specific terms of debate on theological method originally distilled from the work of Frei and codified by Lindbeck. So to the earlier rubrics of disappearance (of a unified conceptuality of postliberalism) and dispersal (among several parallel or divergent avenues of exploration) there must be added one of displacement. Some important interventions by members of a younger generation, both from without and from within the circle of Frei’s and Lindbeck’s direct influence, have altered the discussion of the nature of theology in ways which seem to supersede or transform the earlier modes of dichotomizing theology in “liberal” and “postliberal” terms. Probably the biggest displacement originated outside the Yale tradition in the form of so-called “Radical Orthodoxy,” developing mainly out of the broadly parallel British trends mentioned above. Its initial orientation was provided by John Milbank’s mammoth Theology and Social Theory (1990) but it only became ensconced on the American scene around the time of the multi-author manifesto Radical Orthodoxy from 1999.106 Significantly, Milbank had been a close and appreciative (though certainly not uncritical) reader of Stanley Hauerwas in the 1980s and shared with him a pugnacious tone and an aggressively combative vision of a Christian culture resisting 106 John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1990); John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward (eds.), Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (London: Routledge, 1999).

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“modernity.”107 But his extraordinarily ambitious project of course cannot be seen as a mere regional variant on postliberalism. He could easily incorporate emphases from Hauerwas’s radical sectarian critique of liberal capitalist society into his own potent synthesis of the Anglo-Catholic socialism of the “Christendom” tradition, the deconstruction of modern rationality undertaken by the French poststructuralists, and the anti-secular ontology of graced participation associated with the retrieval of pre-baroque Thomism by the Nouvelle Théologie. It is symptomatic that the discussion of Lindbeck in Theology and Social Theory begins by endorsing his call for “a postmodern (or ‘post-liberal’) theology” but quickly turns rather sour: by “convert[ing] metanarrative realism into a new narratological foundationalism” Lindbeck “fails to arrive at a postmodern theology.”108 Peering through the thicket of jargon, two aspects of the “radically orthodox” stance significant for the present discussion are visible from Milbank’s handling of Lindbeck. The first is an unmistakeable kinship in tone and overall goal between postliberalism and radical orthodoxy. Gerard Loughlin’s Telling God’s Story (1996) showed how naturally the two conceptual worlds could be brought into alignment; in his review of that book William Placher exclaimed “if there were a Yale school, on the strength of this marvelous book, Gerard Loughlin would have to be promptly elected president of the British branch.”109 Equally significantly, one of the pillars among the radically orthodox could situate the movement thus: “[I]t seems to me that there are no sharp boundaries between radical orthodoxy and other identifiable tendencies within what one might generically call post-secular theology: one can mention, for example, the Yale School, Radical Traditions at Duke University, and Scriptural Reasoning, associated with Peter Ochs at the University of Virginia.”110 Even if the umbrella term “post-secular” is questionable as assimilating the Yale tradition a bit too closely to the concerns of Milbank and company, the acknowledgement of sympathy is clear. However, just as clear is the displacement of concern in radical orthodoxy away from the particularities of a largely protestant dispute with liberalism in theological method and into the much grander territory of engaging “modernity” as a whole, in all its intellectual, political, and cultural manifestations. The intellectual maneuvers here, and the conceptual resources used to effect them, seem to have little to 107 See his review essay on Hauerwas’s Character and the Christian Life and Against the Nations in Modern Theology 4 ( January 1988), 211–16. 108 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 382, 386. 109 Loughlin, Telling God’s Story; William Placher, Review of Loughlin, Telling God’s Story, The Journal of Religion 78 (April 1998), 286. 110 Catherine Pickstock, “Reply to David Ford and Guy Collins,” Scottish Journal of Theology 54 no. 3 (2001), 406.


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do with postliberalism as classically formulated by Lindbeck. The result of the incursion of radical orthodoxy has been a sense among many theological observers that the protest against modernist accommodation in theology has now found more vigorous and up-to-date champions. At any rate, these recent disputes, while undoubtedly covering some of the same ground as the postliberal discussions, have really done more to move discussion on from Frei and Lindbeck than to revive interest in them. But this displacement also owes much to creative developments closer to home, among some of the more direct heirs of Frei and Lindbeck. Noteworthy first of all have been some works which might have disturbed the all-too-easy association of the Yale legacy with a form of theological reaction. A work like Eugene Rogers’s remarkable Sexuality and the Christian Body, for example, attracted attention not simply because of its adventurous conclusions on homosexuality but more precisely because of the kind of arguments (and the heavy appeal to the classical theological tradition) used to support those conclusions.111 Among other reviewers struck by the procedures he deployed, Kate Sonderegger shrewdly discerned in Rogers’s methodological reliance on “such theoretical models as coherence, narrative, ‘family resemblance,’ and ‘thick description’” the “familiar hallmarks” of Yale influence.112 Rowan Williams correctly saw the “immense importance” of the book to lie less in its immediate topic than in its illumination of “the theological significance of controversy.”113 But the startling mode and context of this illumination of a theme so close to the heart of Lindbeck’s Nature of Doctrine could unintentionally contribute to a larger shift of attention away from the earlier obsession with a liberal/postliberal dichotomy. Serene Jones’s nuanced treatment of feminist themes was another work bearing a Yale stamp which contributed in a similar way to that shift.114 On the purely methodological level, easy dichotomizations were further undermined in a book by David Kamitsuka 111

Eugene Rogers, Sexuality and the Christian Body: Their Way into the Triune God (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). 112 Katherine Sonderegger, Review of Rogers, Sexuality and the Christian Body, Theology Today 59 (October 2002), 494. 113 Rowan Williams, Review article of Rogers, Sexuality and the Christian Body, Scottish Journal of Theology 56 no. 1 (2003), 82. 114 Serene Jones, Feminist Theory and Christian Theology: Cartographies of Grace (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000). In general, the lack of extensive engagement with postliberalism from a feminist perspective has been disappointing. See, however, Sheila Davaney, “Options in Postmodern Theology,” Dialog 26 (1987), 196–200; Amy Plantinga Pauw, “The Word is Near You: A Feminist Conversation with George Lindbeck,” Theology Today 50 (1993), 45–55; Linell Cady, “Theories of Religion in Feminist Theologies,” American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 13 (1992), 183–93; idem, “Identity, Feminist Theory, and Theology,” in Horizons in Feminist Theology: Identity, Tradition and Norms, eds. Rebecca Chopp and Sheila Davaney (Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 1997); and forthcoming work from Mary McClintock Fulkerson.

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which cleverly dismantled the supposedly sharp distinctions between revisionist, postliberal, and liberationist theological procedures by pointing up their common conceptual underpinnings.115 In a quite different way Kathryn Tanner’s 1997 book Theories of Culture worked to shift the earlier emphasis of discussions of Frei and Lindbeck away from the standard concepts invoked to justify a methodological parting of the ways between liberals and postliberals.116 Here was one of the most promising of what would temptingly be christened the “second generation of the Yale school” roundly castigating “postliberalism” for its inadequate grasp of the dynamics of cultural identity as theorized in recent cultural anthropology. The heart of her critique was that the postliberal originators had fallen into a crudely “one-way” picture of cultural interactions, where a sharply bounded religious “culture” is understood to unilaterally transform “external” meanings into “internal” ones while remaining itself autonomous and self-identical. While the fairness of her criticism could be questioned, and in spite of the fact that her treatment of “liberal” assumptions was just as negative, the result was to further displace the older lines of controversy. Still evidently sympathetic in several ways with her teachers, and developing an adventurous variation on Karl Barth’s theology of grace, Tanner had nonetheless helped displace the methodological categories at work among interpreters of the Yale legacy. As a final example of how the methodological concepts operative in the earlier postliberal controversy came to be marginalized even by those operating under the Yale influence mention should be made of Bruce Marshall’s challenging but dense explorations of the Christian notion of truth, culminating in the important book Trinity and Truth.117 Marshall in effect develops an approach from Thomas Aquinas that grounds the truth of utterances about divine matters in the disposition of the utterer as fundamentally formed and oriented by concrete narratives and rituals which “identify” God in highly particular ways. The result is that the truth conditions of all 115 It is surely telling that, in face of the admirable clarity of Kamitsuka’s treatise, its reviewers kept coming to incompatible assessments as to its author’s “real” standpoint. Geoffrey Burn claimed that “[u]nderlying his work is a belief that theology is basically apologetic,” Francis Fiorenza saw the work clearly coming “from a postliberal perspective,” while Mark Wallace interpreted it as “fundamentally oriented toward a liberationist-revisionary model”! This confusion only reinforced Kamitsuka’s point, testifying to the increasing shakiness of the standard methodological oppositions. See reviews by Burn, The Expository Times 111 (September 2000), 425; by Fiorenza, The Journal of Religion 82 (April 2002), 298; and by Wallace, Modern Theology 18 ( January 2002), 131. 116 Kathryn Tanner, Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997). 117 Bruce Marshall, Trinity and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).


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religious speech turn on the maintenance of absolute “epistemic primacy” for the community’s core beliefs. This position is defended through a sophisticated appeal to truth-theoretical developments in recent analytical philosophy (especially Donald Davidson), involving both anti-foundationalist claims that appeal for the truth of beliefs can only be made to other beliefs, and also arguments that the determination of the meaning of utterances is always embedded within already-assumed truth claims. The results are used to chastise most modern academic theologians since Schleiermacher for illegitimately making the interpretation of Christian claims relative to supposedly more basic truths transcending the communal belief system. It is not hard to interpret Marshall’s ongoing work as called forth by a need to conceptually develop and extensively reconfigure his teacher Lindbeck’s fairly vague sketches of “intratextuality,” a key concept in the development of postliberalism. But Marshall himself has dropped the rhetoric of “postliberalism.” Indeed, his radical move to what he regards as the deeper issue of a Christian truth-theory has, in a way quite different in tone but similar in effect to the already mentioned progeny of Yale, contributed to the marginalization of the entire methodological conceptuality at work in previous discussions of Frei and Lindbeck. This is not at all to imply that Marshall’s ideas are not very broadly inspired by claims originally made by Lindbeck for theological truth-theory as ecclesially grounded. But as he himself admits, “[l]ittle of Lindbeck’s own idiom for making these claims remains here.”118 Of all the developments mentioned, Marshall’s remains closest in spirit to the search for a kind of methodological “Archimedean point” from which to transcend the legacy of theological liberalism once for all. It is too soon to tell whether this brilliant monograph (too rich but also too full of claims which need clarification or contestation to be handled here) will succeed in reviving that original dream of postliberalism. But, for reasons which the present work is intended to spell out, not the revival but the abandonment of that dream may in fact be a better way to retrieve Frei and Lindbeck for the future.

The Goal of the Present Work An unfortunate result of the decline of postliberalism as a topic of scholarly engagement in the past decade or so is that the detailed and important questions raised by Frei and Lindbeck on the proper understanding of theology itself have been largely neglected. But to put the matter this way should by 118

Ibid., xi.

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no means imply that those questions were helpfully discussed when the postliberalism debates were at their liveliest. Operating with the assumption that the ideas of Frei and Lindbeck still have much to offer precisely on the question of the way Christian theology is to be properly conceived, the present study nonetheless wishes to bury “postliberalism,” not to praise it. From the decline just recounted it concludes neither that the methodological issues which were then raised have been resolved, nor that those issues are lacking in contemporary relevance. It instead welcomes that decline as an opportunity, an invitation to look with fresh eyes at Frei and Lindbeck on the issue of theology’s nature and method. There are good reasons to doubt that the commonly accepted conclusions concerning the ideas of Frei and Lindbeck generated in the context of the dispute over “the Yale school” and “postliberalism” were at all satisfactory. First, one of the unfortunate consequences of the way Frei and Lindbeck came to wider attention was that they were inevitably read primarily in a manner which abstracted methodological claims from their crucial articulation with basic dogmatic positions. This was exacerbated by the exaggeratedly polemical atmosphere of much of the discussion, where the dispute seemed to be about a new theological “way” or “method” to secure orthodoxy, a kind of “turn” once and for all against all liberalisms and modernisms. Such inflated claims did no more to promote understanding than did reading Frei and Lindbeck in order to distill out methodological guidelines rather than to situate their reflections on theology in the context of their substantive doctrinal concerns. Second, the arguments which engulfed the work of both theologians in the wake of The Nature of Doctrine were premised on a very clear divide between something called liberalism and something called postliberalism. The actual writings of Frei and especially Lindbeck of course did much to invite just such a reading. In fact, this putative divide served as a kind of background framework for the debates, more or less presupposed by many interpreters. However, it should have been realized that the very attempt to set up such a clear opposition was itself a very contentious matter. Far too much of the discussion was about declaring for one side or the other without energetically or skeptically probing the division itself. Thus, the ambiguities and obscurities involved in the way postliberalism was defined, and in the way it constructed its “other” (“liberalism” or “revisionism”) were not sufficiently explored. Third and perhaps most importantly, reading Frei and Lindbeck through the lens of the concept “postliberalism” tended most unhelpfully to merge their different intellectual trajectories, interests, and goals. That there were shared sensibilities and family resemblances among these two and among


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various other Yale thinkers is undeniable. But conceiving of their shared traits in terms of a “school” (a tendency which, as pointed out above, actually predated the appearance of Lindbeck’s book) could too easily obscure their differences and skew interpretations of both. This was especially the case when The Nature of Doctrine was accepted as the essential précis not only of Lindbeck’s contributions to the understanding of theology but of Frei’s as well. To anticipate, it will be one of the negative conclusions of this book that understanding Hans Frei’s deepest concerns has been ill-served by trying to grasp him as a forerunner of postliberalism as defined by Lindbeck. Unfortunately, the decline of postliberalism has tended merely to move these distortions further into the background, out of the light of critical scrutiny. But these imbalances afflicting the main interpretive tradition within which Frei and Lindbeck have been situated demand a new exploration of their work on the nature of theology which foregrounds: the relationship between the thought of these two theologians; the way their methodological proposals are integrated with substantive doctrinal concerns; and the theoretical deficits of the putative divide between postliberal and liberal orientations. These issues will be addressed in the rest of the book. Over the course of that discussion it will be suggested that some other framework than “postliberalism” would be desirable if their insights are to be retrieved. The point is not to combat the postliberal position; there is no such position. Other than as a reference to the “mood” outlined earlier or as a catch-all for a congeries of supposedly Yale-originated tendencies, the term postliberalism has little import for those interested in precise questions of what theology should do and be. At its worst it has become a term of vague abuse or approval, not to say mere hand-waving. For the purposes of the present study, postliberalism is not so much a “school” to be opposed as an air to be cleared or a fog to be dispersed, at least if we are to see more clearly what might still be learned about theology from George Lindbeck and Hans Frei. The following chapters will attempt to reorient the discussion of the nature of theology which Frei and Lindbeck began. It will thus have as its particular focus questions of method; it is in no way an exhaustive survey of their thought. Oriented by the current chapter’s historical contextualization of the entire discussion, the following two chapters will set forth their distinct “visions” of the nature and methods of theology, taking special note of the influence upon them of specific (but sometimes unnoticed) doctrinal positions. Theological method is always itself a dogmatic issue, involving especially questions of ecclesiology (a special concern of Lindbeck) and of Christology as the revelatory disclosure of God (which particularly occupied

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Frei). Chapters Four and Five then argue that those motifs in their thought which lead to a sharp dichotomization of liberal and postliberal approaches are flawed and need to be abandoned or rethought. All four chapters will also contribute to the necessary task of relating their distinct orientations to each other, a task on which far too little effort has been expended in the past. Either each thinker has been discussed individually, without reference to the other, or else the two have been treated together in such a way that their thoughts on method are carelessly allowed to coalesce and are treated as a unit. In light of the reconnecting of their methodological reflections with their dogmatic roots, the dismantling of the falsely dichotomous framework of discussion touched off by some of their formulations, and the rediscovery and exploitation of their genuine differences from each other, the final chapter will lay out some ways in which the insights of George Lindbeck and Hans Frei should orient further discussions of the nature of theology. In this way, the already advanced but mostly unnoticed abandonment of the “postliberal” paradigm which is the legacy of the past decade will hopefully be turned to advantage.

Chapter Two

George Lindbeck: Theology and the Ecclesial People of Witness Orthodoxy and Society after Christendom The history just sketched has made it clear why the names Hans Frei and George Lindbeck often appear in tandem. But this chapter and the next have the task of giving more profile to the really quite distinct thought-worlds of these two close colleagues. The investigation of Hans Frei’s basic orientation as a Christian theologian (which will be taken up in the next chapter) must face the fact that so much of what is significant in his body of work takes the form of scattered and incomplete reflections. But in The Nature of Doctrine the interpreter of George Lindbeck has something like a unified, programmatic statement of his theological vision; its dominance of any discussion of the nature and significance of his thought can hardly be avoided. This is a decidedly mixed blessing, however, for the book is far more complex than is often realized. It is a densely woven set of interrelated arguments and appraisals the basic contours of which are deceptively difficult to grasp. This is due partly to its compactness of exposition, partly to its wide-ranging and controversial implications, and partly to its drawing together into a single whole of at least four more-or-less conceptually independent proposals. It is not surprising that such a sweeping and contentious intervention in theological discussions has invited many attacks from many different angles. It is precisely due to their condensed and programmatic presentation that Lindbeck’s claims about theology have been subjected to far more sustained and detailed discussion and critique than have Frei’s. But because The Nature of Doctrine is in many ways an obscure book, only some of the criticisms have been on target while perhaps the greater part of the discussion of Lindbeck has not been exactly to the point. A fuzziness with respect to the precise implications of his claims for theology hampers many interpretive attempts. As a result, there has been no shortage of triumphant dismissals of

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l i ndb e c k : th e e cc le si al pe op le of w it ne s s

positions which closer inspection reveals are not in fact Lindbeck’s, and the systematic role of the varied components of his argument is usually not pondered with sufficient care. The four proposals interwoven in his book will be treated in turn. Together, these elements articulate the basic theological vision of Lindbeck as dogmatically guided by ecclesiology: the task of articulating the continuity over time of a people of witness, faithfully proclaiming to the world God’s coming salvation revealed in Christ. The elements may be summarized as (1) a sociological sectarianism combined with a catholic ecclesiology, (2) the idea of a religion as a semiotic system, (3) a quasi-Thomist theory of religious truth, and (4) a notion of “intratextuality” based largely on certain interpretations of the theological exegesis of Karl Barth. In the present section, it will be necessary to uncover the first theme more fully in order to set the discussion of Lindbeck’s theology in its proper context. The structure of Lindbeck’s book will then be outlined in more detail before the remaining sections take up in turn the other themes which, in comparison to the first, are more explicitly treated in that work. The first theme entering into Lindbeck’s theological orientation is adumbrated in a startling but typically astute comment made by Hans Frei at a reception honoring the release of his friend’s soon-to-be-famous book. Frei saw in The Nature of Doctrine further proof of that vision of “the orthodox Christian as liberal humanist” which he believed had guided Lindbeck’s work from the beginning.1 This is hardly the image associated with Lindbeck by those who see in him only the mastermind of a sectarian opposition to liberalism, but understanding what lies behind this (perhaps arch but certainly not ironic) observation of Frei’s leads swiftly to the ecclesiological heart of Lindbeck’s life-work. Lindbeck’s theological proposals are situated within and grow out of a global interpretation of contemporary society in the developed Western countries. Lindbeck fully acknowledges the fact that the societal structures of the West are “secular,” that is they no longer depend for their public legitimation upon a socially constructed world of religious symbols shared by a majority of their constituents. Like many other religious thinkers, he has grappled with the question of the long-term survival of religious communities within such societies. He has recognized that Christianity, for example, can no longer depend upon a cultural setting whose practices, once structured by and saturated with Christian meanings, are now ordered by the 1 Hans W. Frei, “Epilogue: George Lindbeck and The Nature of Doctrine,” in Theology and Dialogue: Essays in Conversation with George Lindbeck, ed. Bruce D. Marshall (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 281.


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minimal pragmatic consensus needed to sustain a technologically and economically advanced society characterized by a jostling plurality of value systems and legitimation structures.2 “Christendom,” a hegemonic social order rooted in an official religion structuring the public sphere, is dead. Sociologists of religious knowledge (Peter Berger, for example) make clear the extraordinary difficulty of maintaining long-term Christian identity in such a situation. Even the persistent influence of cultural Christianity which is such a remarkable feature of American public life in comparison with that of Europe cannot mask the essentially secular way in which religious cultures are articulated with the social and economic institutions of the modern West. Lindbeck concludes that the survival of Christian faith depends on a renewal of that self-understanding of Christian churches which characterized the pre-Constantinian age; Christians will increasingly turn to tightly connected and sharply defined communities which are consciously “deviant” with respect to any broader cultural consensus. As long as society is widely permeated by Christian ideas and behavioral patterns, it is not necessary for those who consider themselves Christians to form close-knit fellowships in order to develop or preserve their religious identity. They can be either cultural Christians or even personally committed in a rather individualistic way. But to the degree generalized social support disappears, it becomes necessary for Christians or members of any other deviant minority to gather together in small, cohesive, mutually supportive groups. They must become, sociologically speaking, sectarian.3

The word “sectarian” here (even with its important modifier “sociological,” i.e. not theological) has sometimes invited hostile reactions from theologians, as if Lindbeck were advocating a retreat from societal engagement, an abdication of political and cultural participation in favor of maintaining hermetically sealed subcultures. This, however, is very far from his intention. In a superb essay on the relation between Lindbeck’s ecclesiology and his understanding of theology, David Kelsey has shown quite clearly that this “sectarian” vision of the church simply does not imply the withdrawal from the public sphere imagined by its critics.4 In fact, and to a degree which might seem surprising, Lindbeck advocates a sociological sectarianism not

2

George Lindbeck, “Ecumenism and the Future of Belief,” Una Sancta 25 (1968), 10. George Lindbeck, “The Sectarian Future of the Church,” in The God Experience, ed. J.P. Whelan, SJ (New York: Newman, 1971), 226–43 at pp. 229–30. 4 David Kelsey, “Church Discourse and Public Realm,” in Theology and Dialogue: Essays in Conversation with George Lindbeck, ed. Bruce D. Marshall (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 7–33 at pp. 12–28. 3

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just because it will contribute to the survival of Christianity, but also because he believes fervently that the society at large will benefit. Frei’s enigmatic comment now becomes easier to understand. Societies organized on secular and therefore liberal-pluralist lines undoubtedly represent an important achievement. But according to Lindbeck they will find it increasingly hard to perpetuate themselves because they offer to their citizens no vision of true humanity, they do not “legitimate the human enterprise.” “Where there is no vision the people perish; and as secularism is the absence of visions, it teeters on the knife-edge between chaos and tyranny.”5 In response to this, and inspired by the way the deployment of biblical rhetoric can effect social transformation (he several times invokes the example of Martin Luther King, Jr.), Lindbeck ironically commends sectarian religious communities as the only locations within the secular polis which can both socialize people into the values necessary for its maintenance and provide the symbolic and narrative resources, the lingua franca, to formulate and legitimate the “ethical consensus that pluralistically liberal societies need for their survival.”6 The instrumental rationality dominating the workings of secular cultures cannot “decide about final goals and values.” By their very nature, secular societies cannot propagate those “universal principles of love, brotherhood and justice” upon which they themselves depend for their own flourishing. In the contemporary setting these values are unlikely to inspire the necessary commitment and sacrifice unless they are “seen as objective absolutes rooted in the very nature of absolute reality – in God’s will, if you wish . . .”7 In short, Lindbeck believes only a “sectarian” church resistant to the purely functional and pacified role offered to citizens by the advanced societies, a mixture of individualist withdrawal and consumerist compulsions without transcendental rooting, can provide “an orthodoxy religiously committed to a liberal polity.”8 For present purposes, what is important to grasp in this vision is that for Lindbeck the “humanist,” liberal social values must be harnessed to an ecclesial vision which is sociologically sectarian but also catholic and orthodox. What do the terms “catholic” and “orthodox” signify in this context? The qualification of sociologically sectarian communities as ecclesiologically “catholic” is a crucial counterbalance; Lindbeck means by it communities “embracing a wide variety of classes, races, theologies, liturgies and styles of life, and . . . unified, rather than splintered into competing groups.”9 Contrary 5

Lindbeck, “Ecumenism,” 11. George Lindbeck, review of Ethics after Babel, by Jeffrey Stout, Theology Today 46 (1989) 60–1. 7 Lindbeck, “Ecumenism,” 11, 15. 8 Lindbeck, review of Stout, 61. 9 Lindbeck, “Sectarian Future,” 227. 6


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to a catholic ecclesiology in this sense would be a schismatic one, in which divisions were propagated by absolutizing disagreements over “secondary elements” rather than emphasizing a unity based on a common loyalty to Jesus as the Christ of God. The latter phrase signals why a shared notion of orthodoxy is equally crucial. For there must be some minimal consensus identifying these culturally and theologically divergent communities as engaged in the same Christian enterprise. Because of the increasing drive of varied Christian groupings to preserve their identity within a no-longer supportive society a premium will be put on essential, community-identifying beliefs and practices: doctrines. In a truly catholic church “personal morality, communal liturgies [or] social action” cannot provide alternative anchors of unity. A vital corollary of this vision is ecumenism, the need to form a “unified net-work,” regional and world-wide communal linkages which are vital when the churches are “small minorities without special cultural prestige.”10 This vision of Lindbeck’s takes up and merges two models: (1) the mainstream pre-Constantinian “catholic” or “orthodox” Christian movement of the first centuries, and (2) the “diaspora” missionary communities of Lindbeck’s childhood in China. Already in the important 1970 article from which these latter quotations are drawn it is possible to glimpse the outlines of Lindbeck’s future theological project as it arises from his prophetic assessment of the church’s situation in the contemporary West. Fourteen years before The Nature of Doctrine he is speaking of how unity is possible in spite of doctrinal diversity, of how doctrines can be understood as rules, and of the importance for the classic orthodox consensus of “reinterpret[ing] the world in terms of the Gospel” rather than vice versa.11 A catholicity of this sort could preserve unity in spite of great diversity in doctrines because it would be committed to “the infra-doctrinal unity of a common datum, Jesus Christ as known through the scriptural stories, and the meta-doctrinal unity of obedience to a common norm, Jesus Christ as Lord.”12 Those tempted to see in this already a theologically oppressive conservatism might peruse Lindbeck’s remarkable speculations with regard to the surprising and unprecedented forms this “catholic” consensus might take in the future.13 The basic point at issue is the early emergence from an ecclesiological 10

Ibid., 41. Ibid., 48–9, 44, 50. 12 Ibid., 50–1. 13 Ibid., 46–7: “The Trinitarian conceptuality of the post-biblical period could be entirely forgotten and the realities this is meant to express be dealt with in other terms – terms perhaps totally unintelligible from our perspective. If this is granted about so central a dogmatic development as the Trinitarian, then it would appear that none of our present dogmatic formulations can be declared exempt from this process of possible obsolescence and forgetfulness.” 11

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matrix of the various elements which enter into Lindbeck’s mature theological vision; a Christian future dominated by communities dependent upon their own cultural resources to sustain necessarily “counter-cultural” identities naturally invites a theological focus on doctrinal unity in the midst of diversity. A fading Christendom calls for a sociological sectarianism; a sociological sectarianism calls for a catholic ecclesiology; a catholic ecclesiology calls for some notion of orthodoxy (however “generous”); and the combination of sectarian social formations unified by catholic interconnections calls for a strong emphasis upon catechesis and socialization of members. One source of Lindbeck’s mistrust of the “liberal” modes of theology flourishing in the academy of the late 1960s and 1970s shows up immediately against this background. He argues that the increasingly radical theological demolition of traditional teachings (culminating spectacularly in the “death-of-God” theologies) in fact reflects the restless search on the part of Christians for legitimation from a culture that is increasingly unable to grant it. If the drive to accommodate the Christian message is carried too far it becomes “self-defeating”; the deliverances of “radical” theology, putatively seeking connections with secular culture, in fact are of interest only to a desperate minority already within the churches trying to find some rationale for continued commitment to them in spite of a dissolving framework of belief. Genuine outsiders greet such drastic revisions (when they notice them at all) either with amusement or with indifference. “The reaction of genuinely secular men . . . is to shrug and say, ‘If that is what Christians believe, why bother?’”14 Though superior to “still lingering conservatism,” by the late 1960s or early 1970s the drive to accommodation with secular culture had for Lindbeck met its reductio ad absurdum. In the face of this bleak assessment of the theological scene he began to piece together his programmatic response. The Nature of Doctrine is, of course, the culminating formulation of the program he developed. But before investigating its specific claims, two sources of potential obscurity must be identified; both have to do with the particular way Lindbeck proceeds in this book. First of all, Lindbeck approaches the theological utility of his proposal indirectly by means of first establishing the broad philosophical and social-scientific consensus surrounding the particular theories of religion and doctrine it presupposes (ND, 30). This way of arguing tends to obscure, however, the truly theological nature of the problems with which he is dealing. In fact, the roots of

14

Lindbeck, “Ecumenism,” 7.


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his position lie in specifically theological discussions whose results are just below the surface but nowhere explicitly laid out as such; the crucial original format of the first five chapters, public lectures in close engagement with Bernard Lonergan over the theological interpretation of doctrine, has for the most part been effaced (ND, 12). One of the results of this way of framing the discussion is that when the book does treat specific theological issues, such as infallibility or the notion of “fides ex auditu” salvation, it offers them as simple test cases for its theory of doctrine, rather than positively commending them as substantive theological positions. So the interpreter is left with the curious sense that no particular theological positions are being directly advocated (the question is always one of their possibility within the theory of religion and doctrine on offer, not their necessity), and yet that the entire project is theologically driven. In addition to Lonergan, this submerged theological impetus involves important influences from David Kelsey (positive) and Karl Rahner (negative).15 As discussed in Chapter One of the present study, Kelsey’s influence on Lindbeck first decisively emerged in the latter’s 1978 review essay, “Theologische Methode und Wissenschaftslehre.” In his Uses of Scripture, Kelsey had pointed out how theological interpretations of the Bible are always situated within an interpretive theological frame which is both informed by theological decisions and yet at the same time provides the criteria for their assessment. Lindbeck embraces the implied idea that there is no appeal to criteria independent of any theological interpretive frame which could finally settle theological disputes. A theological position (an overall framework formed by a construal of the central Christian “matter” and its accompanying justifying arguments and modes of application) is assimilated by Lindbeck to a “paradigm” in Thomas Kuhn’s usage. “Paradigms are resistant to prompt and definitive refutation, because there is no neutral language in which could be unambiguously formulated generally-valid standards of judgment which could lead to a

15 Careful readers will notice Lindbeck’s mention of both of these influences, especially in the footnotes, but in the main body of the text the theological rationale for his position comes through less clearly than its philosophical or sociological sources. A number of commentators, however, have divined the extent to which the theological agenda of Lindbeck’s book, not exactly hidden but in the main only obliquely indicated, dominates the proceedings. This observation can take a more hostile form, as with David Tracy’s crack about the voice of Wittgenstein being unable to disguise the hands of Barth, or a more sympathetic form, as with Frei’s wry but perceptive suggestion that the whole book is like a Schleiermacherian prolegomenon to a Barthian dogmatics. David Tracy, “Lindbeck’s New Program for Theology: A Reflection,” The Thomist 49 (1985): 465; Frei, “Epilogue,” 279–80.

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decision.”16 Lindbeck understands himself to be following Kelsey when he sides with the “pluralist” understanding of reason and science (associated with Kuhn and Wittgenstein) over against those theologians (like Lonergan, Tracy, or Pannenberg) who still try to employ as a theological criterion this or that form of generally valid interpretive scheme supposedly rooted in the nature of language, reason, or human inquiry itself.17 Though given only the briefest mention, Kelsey’s book helped Lindbeck to crystallize an understanding of theological interpretation which forms a dominant supposition within The Nature of Doctrine. Another example of behind-the-scenes theological influence, this time from a position Lindbeck is reacting against, is provided by Rahner’s “ontological” understanding of salvation. To Rahner’s notion of an “implicit saving faith” which can be actualized apart from any contact with the Christian message, grounded in the ontological structure of an already-graced human nature, Lindbeck opposes (in good Lutheran fashion!) a doctrine of Christian faith as solely available upon confrontation with the language of the gospel. Saving faith is rooted in the contingencies of language and history; it can never be “anonymous” in Rahner’s sense. And rather than equate some kind of faith (implicit or explicit) with the presence of salvation, Lindbeck urges an eschatological understanding whereby Christian faith is the hopeful witness to a salvation “ontologically” located not in the soul of the present believer, but in God’s future. Note how Lindbeck’s position ten years later on the relation of language and experience is here already established on purely theological terms, quite apart from any explicit appeal to Geertz or Wittgenstein. Ontologically interpreted [i.e. in Rahner’s fashion], salvation is primarily an inward grace which is articulated and strengthened by explicit faith. If saving faith comes only through hearing, however, then the process is reversed. Explicit faith in Christ is understood, not as expressing or articulating the existential depths, but rather as producing and forming them.18

The theological underpinnings of Lindbeck’s “cultural-linguistic” model of religion could not be more clearly revealed. In short, the constant need to get clear on what kind of appeal Lindbeck 16 Lindbeck, “Theologische Methode,” 269: “Paradigmata sind resistent gegenüber rascher und endgültiger Widerlegung, weil es keine neutrale Sprache gibt, in der allgemeingültige Maßstäbe der Beurteilung, die zu einer Entscheidung führen könnten, unzweideutig formuliert werden könnten.” 17 Ibid., 271. 18 Lindbeck, “Fides ex auditu,” 116.


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is making at various points in his book (sociological, philosophical, or theological?) is the first challenge facing the interpreter. A second source of obscurity lies in the complex weaving together of various proposals listed earlier. Assessing the argumentative force of The Nature of Doctrine depends on seeing how the proposed theories (1) of religion and doctrine, (2) of truth, and (3) of theology are related over the course of the book. Their systematic location within his argument is significant; in spite of the clear assumption that they are mutually supportive, it does not follow that they rigorously entail one another. The book has a rather “loose-limbed” structure due to the fact that its various elements can stand on their own. This is indirectly attested to by the variety of avenues of attack taken by the book’s critics. Each strand of the overall proposal has been called into question: the viability of the cultural-linguistic view of religion (with its attendant ruletheory of doctrine), the coherence of the theory of religious truth, and the aptness of the “intratextual” view of theology.19 But their logical interconnections have been less attended to. A closely related weakness of many discussions of Lindbeck’s overall argument is that the analogical character of his central theories about religion and doctrine is missed.20 The remainder of this section gives explicit attention to the thematic and argumentative structure of the book in the interest of avoiding the interpretive pitfalls just enumerated. The basic proposal of The Nature of Doctrine is what Lindbeck calls a “cultural-linguistic” theory of religion (the next section of this chapter will be devoted to seeing what this means). Of the six chapters, the first three are devoted to this theory of religion; the next two are given over to exploring the particular “regulative” theory of doctrine which Lindbeck associates with this theory of religion; and the final chapter takes up the question of what Christian theology might look like if it took these theories seriously. But in spite of this formal arrangement, theological questions are in fact already pervasive after the first couple of chapters. The first chapter focuses on presenting the ecclesial and social context which Lindbeck’s theory of religion must engage; the second chapter presents the theory of religion proper, arguing for its superiority to rival theories in strictly social-scientific and philosophical terms. But beginning with the third chapter Lindbeck 19 One might further reinforce this sense of complexity by pointing to Lindbeck’s enumeration of the various sources of his approach (ND, 135). He mentions current trends in the academic study of religion (outside of theology), his long experiences with ecumenical dialog concerning different doctrines, and finally the picture of Karl Barth’s theological procedure mediated to him by Hans Frei, David Kelsey, and David Ford. Each of these sources contributes to different aspects of his overall argument. 20 Kelsey furnishes a salutary reminder in this regard. Kelsey, “Church Discourse,” 23.

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takes up the question of the utility of the theory for the religiously committed; from this point on reflection from within the circle of religious (specifically, Christian) commitment, theology in the broad sense, is the main concern. Chapters Three through Six should be seen as devoted to three questions respectively. Chapter Three asks whether the cultural-linguistic theory of religion can allow the claim made by some religions to be “unsurpassable.” Chapters Four and Five ask whether the regulative theory of doctrine associated with this theory of religion can do justice to certain theological understandings which religious communities have of the status of their doctrines. And finally Chapter Six asks whether these theories can provide a satisfactory construal of the theological task and the criteria of theological description. The three sections below will take up in turn the cultural-linguistic and regulative theories of religion/doctrine, the sketch of a theory of religious truth which appears in Lindbeck’s third chapter, and the intratextual approach to theology which appears in the final chapter of his book. The task is limited to showing how these different elements (as obscurely but deeply informed by a particular orientation on the doctrine of the church) bear on Lindbeck’s way of conceiving the nature and tasks of Christian theology. An overall verdict on the theories of religion or of doctrine which supposedly support this “postliberal” vision of theology is neither needed nor forthcoming. However, this essentially descriptive commentary will not be able to avoid pointing out some unresolved obscurities lurking within Lindbeck’s approach; this must be done in order to see how his specific understanding of theology is and is not supported by his theories of religion and doctrine. To anticipate the next section somewhat, the latter theories ultimately depend upon a cluster of analogies (“Religion is like . . .,” “Doctrines are like . . .”). Many of the most searching criticisms of Lindbeck’s position have taken the form of calling into question one or another aspect of these analogies. Analogies are of course limited by their very nature. Their force in a particular argument depends only on the illuminating or explanatory power of discerning the similarity of two types of thing (say, religions and languages) in some respect relevant to the argument at hand. The central question raised by Lindbeck’s theories is this: Are the specific analogies driving his project apt? Do they illuminate the nature of religion and the doctrines of religious communities in ways which support his argument, without trading on systematic ambiguities? Detailed answers to such questions, important as they are, must be left to specialists in the theorization of doctrine; the question of the usefulness of cultural-linguistic and rule theories is


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logically separable from, and secondary to, the question of the kind of Christian theology Lindbeck is advocating. A broad-stroke treatment must suffice.

Community Definition by Grammatical Rules Lindbeck presents his book as a response to a peculiar phenomenon associated with his years of engagement in interdenominational or ecumenical discussions. Repeatedly, he found that doctrines which were once understood by both sides in a dispute to be sharply divergent, even churchdividing, were now seen as reconcilable. Yet this was achieved neither by drastic changes in the wording of the doctrines nor by devaluing their importance. Lindbeck refers to this important development as “reconciliation without capitulation” (ND, 16). His book is offered to theologians as a new way of understanding their religion and its doctrines which, unlike the previously dominant theories on these matters, can do justice to this phenomenon. It is important to emphasize, following Kelsey, that this new way of understanding religion and doctrine is driven by a central analogy whose utility should be judged by its illumination of this particular problem of doctrinal reconciliation without capitulation. There may well be other aspects of the lives of religious communities which are obscured by this central analogy; its specific uses and limitations should be held in mind. Kelsey’s point requires some elaboration, however, because Lindbeck’s arguments about religion and doctrine are based not on a single basic analogy but on a chain of several analogies. The first analogy is explicitly borrowed from that trend in interpretive sociology and anthropology (associated with figures like Peter Berger and Clifford Geertz) which stresses the character of socio-cultural processes as essentially the exchange and collective elaboration of meaningful symbols.21 A culture (or each of the components making up a culture) is best understood as a semiotic medium or “symbol system.” A culture, in other words, is like a shared language; it is an ensemble of publicly available symbols which function together to structure shared possibilities of communication, interpretation, and experience. As with any semiotic array, the specific symbolic elements, images, concepts, names, etc. depend for their functioning on their relation to each other; hence the term “system” here suggests a broad interconnected pattern but not necessarily something logically deducible

21

See Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 5–10.

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from axioms. There are various cultural subsystems with particular functions which Geertz believed could be understood as symbolic networks: art, ideology, common sense, and religion. Lindbeck draws heavily on Geertz’s most famous analysis, that of religion, to formulate his own “culturallinguistic” approach to Christianity and other religions. The hyphenated form of the modifier is significant. For a long time, of course, social scientists have understood religion to be a cultural phenomenon. The addition of “linguistic” to the term is intended to signal what Lindbeck takes to be the crucial point of interpretive approaches like that of Geertz. Cultural (e.g. religious) processes within a social unit are certainly related to social processes (the functioning and perpetuation of social institutions) and psychological processes (the structuring of the intellectual and emotional possibilities of interactions among individuals). But discerning those relations properly depends on first isolating the integral symbolic systems at work on the cultural level; symbolic exchanges are not mere reflexes of social structures or individual psyches but have their own “logic” due to the meaningful interrelations which constitute them. In short, cultural processes are related to, but not reducible to, social or psychological ones. Interpretive sociology as exemplified by Geertz is determined not to shortchange the dimension of “meaning” in social interchanges.22 Lindbeck on a like note concludes, “It is this relatively greater emphasis on the internal logic or grammar of religions which differentiates what I am calling ‘cultural-linguistic’ approaches to religion from more one-sidedly cultural ones” (ND, 28). Like Geertz and Berger, Lindbeck is also at pains to stress the “objective” character of these cultural complexes into which people are socialized. Of course, symbolic systems such as religions are human products and are perpetuated by human acts. But they nonetheless stand over against any given individual at a given time, confronting him or her as independent institutions. Though produced by collective human experiences, on the individual level they are more shapers of experience than shaped by it.23 To be sure, there is a dialectic operative between religion as a symbol system and the religious experiences of its adherents. The religious culture shapes experiences, but experiential changes in turn feed back into the symbolic system to change it. Barring catastrophic social upheaval, such shifts are presumably gradual and affect the collectivity only in a cumulative way. So a religion both “produces” experiences (grants certain possibilities of 22 Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures, 5: “The concept of culture I espouse . . . is essentially a semiotic one.” 23 Berger, Sacred Canopy, 7–11.


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experience, gives a “tone” to them) and is “produced by” them (it is a cultural product in some degree reflective of the aggregate experiences of the collective). Although Lindbeck acknowledges both sides of this dialectic, he consistently stresses the logical priority of the “produces” rather than the “produced by.” He reasons as follows. Experience cannot exist save as informed by cultural complexes, and even when experiences affect the cultural complex which shapes them, they do so only as “always already” so shaped. And though experience is never “available” other than as culturally informed, the culturally informing elements themselves as public and trans-subjective are relatively more persistent and open to observation. This is the basic presupposition of that “thick description” advocated by Geertz (borrowing a phrase from Ryle) as fruitful anthropological procedure.24 So in the case at hand, religion is always the “leading partner” in the dialectic between religion and religious experience. For those following the cultural-linguistic model, “[i]nstead of deriving external features of a religion from inner experience, it is the inner experiences which are viewed as derivative” (ND, 34). So religion is a cultural phenomenon, and all such phenomena are analogous to languages in that they consist of public, symbolically-mediated interpretive transactions which shape the world experienced by individuals and collectives. Religion, therefore, is a symbolic system. According to Geertz, it is characterized by its ritually-reinforced capacity to synthesize patterns of life with views of reality; human activity is oriented by being assigned a meaning based on the nature of the world disclosed by the religious tradition. But this basic analogy (“A culture, or a cultural phenomenon with its own integrity, e.g. a religious tradition, is like a language”) is joined by Lindbeck to a further one. A natural language depends upon socializing speakers into the proper procedures for correctly (understandably) forming sentences. The basic stock of symbols can issue in an infinite number of wellformed sentences, but only as constrained by a finite set of transformative patterns shared by all the competent speakers. In short, as a semiotic system, language has a grammar. If religion operates semiotically in a similar way, if it, too, involves a stock of symbols deployed according to certain recognized patterns, then a religion, too, must have something like its own “grammar” (ND, 33). With this second analogy in place, Lindbeck can broach his central question, that of doctrine. He takes it as given that a group’s doctrines are “communally authoritative teachings regarding beliefs and practices that are considered essential to the identity or welfare of the group in question” 24

Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures, 12–13.

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(ND, 74). Some of the doctrines of a community may be implicit, not formally defined or promulgated but nevertheless operative; they may be presupposed as obvious, or they may be implications of other teachings eluding conscious formulation. Lindbeck cautions against simply equating the actual doctrines of a community with any given document or creedal formula. But every religious community employs an ensemble of doctrines to demarcate “faithful adherence,” proper belief and practice as a member of the community. The next move in Lindbeck’s chain of analogies is unsurprising. If a religion is like a language, then the doctrines of a religion collectively stand in relation to its semiotic structure in some way analogous to the way the grammatical formulations of a language stand in relation to the basic structural features of that language (ND, 80–1). This claim is the heart of Lindbeck’s book, but grasping the precise nature of this analogy is by no means easy. As a preliminary point the scope and intention of this analogy must be reiterated. Lindbeck is not concerned with enumerating the basic doctrines of Christianity or of any community within Christianity. The specific examples he offers of doctrines (“Jesus is the Christ,” “Jesus Christ was a personal union of two natures,” “Love one another”) are not at all in dispute; he takes it as given that these are broadly acceptable doctrinal statements within Christian communities, however they are theologically interpreted. Furthermore, he is not concerned to argue about which statements should or should not have doctrinal status, nor about what the scope or permanence of this or that doctrinal statement should be (ND, 9–10, 87–8). All of these questions are ultimately matters for theological discussion and communal judgment. His only concern is to articulate theoretically the significance of calling any statement a doctrine. What does it mean to grant doctrinal status to a statement? How does such a statement exercise its doctrinal function? What is it about a doctrine that makes it “authoritative”? In offering a new approach to these questions, he is searching for “a non-reductive framework for discussion among those who genuinely disagree” (ND, 91). In other words, he is not interested in engaging in theological debate about how to interpret specific doctrines; he rather wants to present a new and agreedupon theoretical framework for such debates to insure that disputants can genuinely disagree instead of talking past each other. Lindbeck believes that the previous theoretical understandings of how doctrines function cannot, so to speak, make sense of their actual behavior. One way to approach this theoretical dispute over the status of doctrine is to begin by drawing a common distinction between a doctrine and its formulation. Recall that doctrines are teachings. There are usually different ways to teach the same thing, and it is presumably not necessary to rigidly


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identify a teaching with any specific formula or wording, although some kind of formulation is always necessary and specific formulations can become customary or officially recognized. Presumably, then, doctrinal sentences are particular “expressions” of doctrinal teachings. By definition, there must be something about a doctrinal teaching that is authoritative, something which would hold steady across these variant formulations. Identifying this authoritative element is necessary in order to know whether an alternative wording is indeed a formulation of the same doctrine. Lindbeck does not believe that the authoritative element within church teachings has been accurately identified in the past; this is due to misguided theories about how doctrines function. He offers a simplified categorization of the previously dominant theories based on his threefold typology of theories of religion (ND, 78–80). Some have claimed that the primary function of doctrines (at least doctrines governing belief) is making assertions about reality, conveying true information. On this reading, what makes a statement doctrinally authoritative is the referential link it provides to some state of affairs. Others have seen doctrines functioning primarily as linguistic objectivizations or externalizations of subjective states. What makes a doctrine authoritative is its apt expression of some core experience definitive for members of the community. In both cases, the source of authority for the doctrines is not exactly the words of its formulation but rather what they “intend,” either propositionally asserting the proper truth about God or symbolically expressing a proper existential relation to God; the same doctrine can be differently formulated if it “intends” the same state of affairs or the same internal disposition. There are also more sophisticated ways of combining these two approaches, but Lindbeck believes that either, alone or in combination, is misleading and unhelpful if it is made the key to doctrinal function. Lindbeck’s alternative appeals to the grammatical analogy to formulate what he calls a regulative theory of doctrine (ND, 80–3). A language consists of a recognizable array of symbolic elements (words) along with a set of conventional techniques for their proper employment (a grammar). Analogously, a religion consists in an array of lexical elements (“symbols, concepts, rites, injunctions, and stories”) along with grammar-like techniques for their proper interrelation and application. These grammar-like techniques are doctrines, and are formulated in “doctrinal sentences.” If a religion is like a linguistic idiom or “a comprehensive interpretive medium” that adherents are socialized into and that they deploy from within to give form to experiences and interpretations of reality, then the doctrines of that religion are the guidelines for the proper deployment of the religious categories in thought and action.

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As with grammar literally speaking, considerable mastery of these analogous techniques can coincide in a practitioner with an inability to state precisely which doctrine governs a given case of speech or action. Indeed, Lindbeck emphasizes that “doctrine is an inevitably imperfect and often misleading guide to the fundamental interconnections within a religion” (ND, 81). He seems to mean that the complex of doctrine relates to the deep interconnections within the religious symbolic system in a way which is primarily heuristic rather than constitutive. Doctrines never exhaust the possibilities of a religion; according to Lindbeck they cannot specify every proper usage for every situation and are often riddled with exceptions. There is an unavoidable roughness to them; but some kind of publicly available guidelines for proper usage are simply indispensable. They aid the process of learning and mastering the religious idiom, and they help adjudicate disputes generated by the constantly new applications of the idiom to changing contexts. Careful attention to Lindbeck’s language here suggests that he is in fact working with at least two related but distinguishable senses of “grammar.” On the one hand it refers to the basic systematic interconnections and transformative possibilities inherent in the religion considered as a semiotic system. These may be operative and yet evade definitive formulation. Something like this must be in mind when he says, “The deep grammar of the language may escape detection” (ND, 81). By analogy, then, doctrines (though by definition communally authoritative and operative) can be “implicit” or “unrecognized” (ND, 74). On the other hand, at times “grammar” in Lindbeck’s usage seems to denote something like explicit prescriptive standards of proper procedure. The analogy with linguistic grammar is still no doubt operative in making this distinction. The “deep structure” of a language, the range of transformative possibilities which condition the generation of new sentences, may elude precise enumeration and definition. Even if possible, such an enumeration and definition might have to be in a form of no practical use by actual speakers of the language. Instead, grammar involves “followable” standards of procedure which only indirectly reflect the logic of the language but are “good enough” to enable its perpetuation. This latter sense of grammar appears to furnish Lindbeck’s basic doctrinal analogy. It also marks yet another turn in the chain of analogies which Lindbeck pursues. For grammar considered as a set of standards of procedure is tantamount to a collection of rules. So doctrines, too, may be thought of as formulations or instantiations of followable rules. This is why Lindbeck dubs his proposal a “regulative” theory of doctrine. If the claim that doctrines are “like” rules is another analogy, however, the


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interpreter is again faced with the task of determining just what is “rulelike” about them, remembering that there will also be respects in which they are not like rules. The attempt to do this in detail, however, results in yet another round of difficult questions, some of which have been raised by commentators on Lindbeck’s work. On the one hand, doctrines work to regulate the behavior of Christians. They sometimes do this directly, as when they are in the form of moral imperatives (“Love one another as Christ has loved you!”). But Lindbeck spends far more time and trouble trying to show how other kinds of doctrine, the ones that look like assertions about reality rather than practical exhortations, can also be regarded as regulating behavior. In this case what is being regulated is the linguistic behavior of Christians and their interpretive dispositions toward the world which depend upon that language. This is the point of stressing doctrinal rules as exclusively “second-order” speech; they are language about language, not “first-order” language about the world (ND, 80). What appear to be assertions (e.g. the claim that Jesus is the Messiah or the claims about God in the Trinitarian dogmas) are in fact standards which first-order claims must meet in order to be “properly formed” (i.e. Christian). This kind of “rule-likeness” clearly turns on the sense in which rules regulate conduct, especially in this case linguistic conduct or proper usage. But there is yet another sense in which the rule analogy seems to operate in Lindbeck’s book. For presumably part of the force of the rule analogy is to highlight the “followability” of doctrines. Doctrines could of course be construed as regulating Christian behavior more or less unconsciously, in the way certain sociological principles might be said to “rule” the behavior of collectives in a manner akin to natural laws. But then what function would doctrines serve for actual practitioners of the religion? Relevant here is the distinction between the grammar of the religion proper and the doctrines which guide practitioners in its employment. The “grammar” of the religious idiom involves “rules” which are unconsciously followed by those socialized into the idiom sufficiently to use it competently. But in order to aid this socialization process some explicit formulations of these rules are needed, and these “followable” rules are doctrines. Lindbeck is willing to press the grammar-analogy quite far in drawing this distinction, which results in a distinctly ancillary status for explicit doctrines (ND, 109). The few examples Lindbeck offers to help illustrate the rule-like functioning of doctrines are brief to the point of opacity, but looking at one might help at least indicate the contours of this analogy, as well as the interpretive difficulties it raises. Lindbeck takes as an example the statement “Jesus is the Messiah,”

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showing three kinds of rule it formulates in its normative (doctrinal) usage among Christian practitioners (ND, 81). (1) “Lexically” it indicates a rule which warrants the bringing together of the symbolic treasuries of both Old and New Testaments into a single authoritative source, thus delimiting the proper range of lexical elements of the Christian idiom. (2) “Syntactically” the doctrine functions as a constraint on the generation (in the never ending process of interpreting reality “Christian-ly”) of properly-formed Christian utterances; in this particular case it operates by hermeneutically guiding the reading of the basic Christian material, offering a clue as to how to read Old and New Testament texts together. (3) Finally, it “semantically” guides the proper attribution of Messiah-status to the human figure Jesus of Nazareth; the title “Messiah” is properly used in ways which refer to Jesus. Though Lindbeck does not allude to this, these three senses seem in the case at hand to build on each other. The single doctrinal statement helps establish a rule that (3) no other than the human being Jesus is to be asserted to be Israel’s Messiah, which depends on the rule that (2) the New Testament stories of Jesus and the Old Testament representations of Israel’s hoped for liberation are to be read in light of each other as mutually supporting and interpreting, which finally relies on the rule that (1) the Old and New Testaments should operate together as normative sources. So this single sentence, though in the form of an assertion, operates (when employed as a doctrine) not to make reference to reality but rather to enable and constrain a range of such references by signaling certain “grammatical” rules about the proper Christian meaning of the terms “Jesus” and “Messiah.” Putting aside the not overly helpful use of terms like “syntax” and “semantics” here, the following kind of protest might be called forth in response to the example just given. The determination that these and only these rules are indicated by this one doctrinal sentence or formulation could not possibly be accomplished on the basis of analyzing the sentence itself. This is not because the sentence has an assertorical rather than an explicitly imperative (rule-like) form. Lindbeck points out that most doctrines are not expressed in the literal form of rules but rather are paradigmatic instantiations of rules, standardized examples of their application.25 The point (familiar from Wittgenstein’s reflections on rule-following) is rather that no inspection of such a paradigm in isolation from its actual usage could ever possibly determine which rules it was instantiating; the single statement “Jesus is the Messiah” could potentially be the instantiation of a limitless number of different rules. 25 ND, 81. He interestingly gives as an example of doctrines which are not paradigms the “sola gratia” and “sola fide” clauses operative in classical Protestantism; that is presumably because they must be applied in a range of doctrinal sentences and are not sentences themselves.


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But the worry is misplaced, because Lindbeck does not claim to be discerning the rules on the basis of mere analysis of the doctrinal utterance. Lindbeck, following the basic linguistic analogy, believes that the principal way the Christian rules are learned is by socialization into Christian practices, not by the analysis of doctrinal statements. The latter are necessary adjuncts to the socialization process but they are not its basic medium; doctrines aid proper socialization by providing inevitably oversimplified models of rule-following. On the analogy with grammar, they do not substitute for learning the rules by immersion in the practice, but they aid the process by identifying (usually somewhat “clumsily”) just which rules are being learned by offering standardized and publicly available examples (ND, 79). That is why it takes careful historical study to determine which doctrinal rules might have been operative in the community in order to result in a given doctrinal formulation becoming paradigmatic (ND, 109). These are the basic lineaments of Lindbeck’s “regulative” or “rule” theory of doctrine. Once he has formulated it, he goes to considerable effort to show how the theory, though putatively derived from a non-theological cultural-linguistic view of religion, is useful for theological and ecumenical discussion because it can theoretically articulate the basic positions of the various church groups concerning the status of their doctrines without foreclosing theological judgments as to their rightness or wrongness (ND, 91). He also claims that it can better account for the dialectic of doctrinal continuity and change through varying contexts than its chief rivals, the “propositional” and the “experiential-expressive” or “symbolic” theories of doctrine. It must be noted that Lindbeck freely admits that doctrinal sentences such as “Jesus is the Messiah” are also used in religious contexts as propositions (assertions about reality) and as symbols (linguistic codifications of experiential states). But when they are so used, they are not operating doctrinally, that is to say, not operating as norms regulating the essential patterns of the community’s belief and practice. Any attempt to move from grasping in outline Lindbeck’s rule-analogy to details of application to actual doctrinal history and function pretty quickly raises a host of questions. These questions arise at least partly from the way the analogy of doctrines-as-rules connects with the arguably more basic analogy of a religion as something like a language-with-grammar. Precisely how does a doctrine operate regulatively? Clearly, the way Lindbeck understands rules derives ultimately from grammatical notions and should not immediately be equated with rule-following in other contexts, such as games. But what is the “grammar” of Christianity? Where is it instantiated? How is it made available for practitioners? And how do doctrinal rules precisely relate to this grammar? This nest of significant problems does not

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really find satisfactory answers in Lindbeck’s work, but taking a look at the suggestions he does make will eventually shed light on the way he understands the task of theology. One difficulty concerns the primacy of narrative in Lindbeck’s conception of the Christian grammar. Recall that for Lindbeck Christianity, as a religion, is primarily analogous to a semiotic system; religious semiotic systems are characterized by their provision of symbolic resources for the construal of all of reality in their terms. The religious concern is with the ultimate, that understanding of the self and its practices which aligns it with the order of the world and the will of the power which rules it (ND, 32–3). Christianity provides a categorical framework for construing reality, and this “framework is supplied by the biblical narratives interrelated in certain specified ways” (ND, 80). The question of how the concept “grammar” interacts with the concepts “framework” and “narrative” finds no explicit answer in the book, but the idea seems to be that the Christian scriptures present a normative “instantiation” of the basic “logical” or “grammatical” patterns of the faith. The Bible does not present the grammar as such, but rather an interconnected series of narratives, along with paradigms for their interrelation into a single “story” and for the application of that story to constructing a Christian world-view and orienting life within it. The scriptures thereby “fix” the semiotic core of Christian identity, but they in no way exhaust its various possible configurations and applications. Doctrines in turn “reflect” the abiding identity structure which scripture classically instantiates, “the story [the religion] tells and the grammar that informs the way the story is told and used” (ND, 80). But many obscurities crop up when the attempt is made to account more precisely for the interrelation in actual practice of “story” and “rule.” The reference to an “abiding” framework introduces a related difficulty. Lindbeck clearly sees part of the theological payoff of his grammatical interpretation as the possibility of linking doctrines to a relatively unchanging interpretive framework. He wishes to understand the enormous historical and cultural variety within Christian experience, language, and institutions as the result of applying “the same” framework to differing settings (ND, 39–40). And he believes that doctrines are the vital indicators of this selfidentical framework. But he does not wish simply to identify doctrines with what is always identical in Christianity, since he admits that doctrines can change. How do changing doctrines relate to the more stable logic or grammar he speaks of? Further, just how static is this logic? This is quite difficult to answer, but something like the following might be offered. As already indicated, Lindbeck’s account presupposes two kinds


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of distinction: between the basic grammar (“deep” grammar) and grammatical rules (doctrines) on the one hand, and between grammatical rules and particular doctrinal formulations or paradigmatic instantiations of them on the other. The deep grammar fixed in the canonical writings is that into which believers are socialized in order to become competent practitioners of the Christian idiom. To aid this process, grammatical rules or doctrines are generated by the community, a kind of heuristic precipitate resulting from the continuous application of the deep grammar to changing contexts. These rules change only slowly, as the hidden contours of the deep grammar gradually come to light in new situations. True, their range of application and the conditions of their employment are subject to constant adjustment. They need not be consciously or “tactically” deployed by everyone in the community. These doctrinal rules can and do operate largely unconsciously among those who have “internalized” the basic grammar, but they are also continually raised to the level of conscious reflection and put to regulative use by some in the community (i.e. those engaged, officially or unofficially, in theology). This can only happen when the rules are explicitly formulated. Formulations are constantly being generated; they are the way in which grammatical rules become available to members of the community. Naturally, these formulations presumably can and do shift and multiply with far greater ease than the rules which underlie them (ND, 82–3, 94–6). Thus three levels might be discerned, distinguished by the readiness and rapidity with which they change in the community: the deep grammar of the religion, the socially operative doctrinal rules which indicate them, and finally the specific linguistic formulae in which the rules are communicated. In spite of these elaborations, stubborn ambiguities remain hidden in the grammatical rule analogy, emerging particularly in the distinction between operative rules and a “deep” grammatical structure which the latter merely (and often inadequately) indicate. In Wittgenstein’s usage, at any rate, there is no such thing as a rule that is not always communally available for conscious deployment. Otherwise it would not be a rule (which for him is by definition something people “follow”) but something more like an observable but unintended regularity of collective behavior, or a process emerging inevitably as a function of communal structure.26 But Lindbeck’s account of the emergence of the classic Trinitarian formulae seems to trade on the notion of “rules” which somehow operate apart from the conscious intentions, or even the awareness, of practitioners (ND, 109–10). 26 For an excellent treatment of Wittgenstein on rules and rule following, see Hans-Johann Glock, A Wittgenstein Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 323–9.

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Overall it must be said that the status of doctrines within Lindbeck’s regulative model seems to shift vaguely between the fixity of a self-identical grammar and the multiplicity of formulations in a suspiciously convenient way, depending on the particular point he wants to make. In some places, the grammatical rules are so closely connected to the notion of the deep grammar that they might seem to share directly in the status of the unchanging “logic” of the faith. In other places, the rules are only “clumsy” pointers to this grammar. Or again, in some places doctrines are equated with rules, while in other places they are only “instantiations” of rules which “underlie” them. In light of this, there is considerable irony in Lindbeck’s accusation that the doctrinal theories of Rahner and Lonergan involve “complicated intellectual gymnastics,” since the comparative simplicity claimed for rule theory turns out on closer inspection to be doubtful (ND, 17). In sum, Lindbeck’s brief discussions and examples oscillate too easily between levels of the grammatical analogy without formally clarifying relations between “deep” structures, rules, and rule-formulations. Are “deep” structures an unformulable but operative habitus of communally formed individuals, as Lindbeck seems in one place to suggest (ND, 79)? Or are they (as in the example of the emergence of Trinitarian doctrine) “pressures” brought to bear on communal behaviour as a function of a logic of communal belief floating “over the heads” of individuals? The answer to such questions must await further discussions by others. The importance for this study of the adequacy of the regulative model for understanding how doctrines function is that its difficulties might also have infected the proposals Lindbeck makes about the nature of theology. Lurking in the complexities of the model are systematic ambiguities which might allow the grammatical and rule analogies to underwrite questionable conclusions about the way theology should function. Lindbeck assumes that theologians do not create the doctrines of churches. At most they propose formulations or reformulations of doctrines (ND, 106–7). According to one of his accounts the doctrinal rules themselves seem to grow out of the collective processes involved in the living of the faith by its members; on the aggregate level it is something impersonal, involving no “collective purpose” (ND, 109). The doctrines of a church are what they are; a theologian is not free to pick and choose which doctrines to follow because the doctrines determine what membership in a community actually means, regardless of the wishes of individuals. In other words, theologians as such do not make authoritative decisions about the identity of the community. They come to terms with an identity already there, presupposed by the speech and practice of the community they are a part of.


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But this must mean that the community’s doctrinal rules do not present themselves to theologians for assessment or direct verification. What, then, is their role in the theological task? The drift of the discussion in Chapter Six of Lindbeck’s book would seem to indicate that it is one part of the theological task to try and discern the shape of the “deep grammar” of Christian faith through description and analysis of the basic texts of the community (which means examining the use of those texts in the language of worship and the application of both languages of scripture and worship to everyday life). Theologians would then be in a position to examine the actual doctrinal formulations of the community, to determine what rules they instantiate and how well they do so, and to propose alternative formulations if need be. Lindbeck is clear that reformulations of doctrinal rules are often necessary, but only as a way of doing better justice to the rules themselves, not to change those rules. And even here he cautions that long established formulations are not to be discarded lightly. Using the example of the Trinitarian and Christological formulae of the Nicene Creed, he points out that doctrinal paradigms commanding wide consensus are quite hard to come by. They might also have acquired through long usage “liturgical and expressive functions” which have greater importance for the community than the doctrinal rules they instantiate. Finally, he suggests that archaic language can be useful for stating doctrinal rules, since there is less temptation to equate formulation and rule; a foreign conceptuality granted “official” and unchanging status encourages a kind of algebraic approach to the creedal formulas. It positively invites the healthy “unofficial” reformulation of the rules they creedally exemplified, a process constantly and necessarily underway in their application to everyday life in different contexts (ND, 95). Another task of theology suggested by Lindbeck’s discussions is examining the range of application of rules and the conditions under which they do and do not apply, thereby clarifying their status within the community over time (valid under all conditions or only some, reversible or irreversible, etc.). In other words, all doctrines are in some sense “necessary” or “essential” by definition for a community’s identity, but they might be so only for a specific time or under specific circumstances (ND, 107). There is one last sort of relationship between theology and doctrine which emerges from Lindbeck’s account. Although as already said the theologian cannot pass judgment on the validity of a community’s doctrines as such (if she or he truly wishes to be a theology of and for that community), the theologian is free to formulate theories as to just how the doctrines are true, how the Trinitarian statements about God, say, might be articulated through a particular metaphysical conceptualization of divine being (ND, 106).

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This leads directly into the difficult matter of the relative truth of theological proposals. Lindbeck’s regulative account means that the ultimate test for proposed theological reformulations of a given doctrine cannot be a matter of appealing to a particular account of their reference to reality. There will always be more than one such account possible. As he puts it, which Trinitarian theory “really” corresponds to God’s reality is “unanswerable this side of the Eschaton” (ND, 106). Theology is free to employ varied epistemological and metaphysical considerations in its interpretations of doctrines, but it is mistaken if it uses these directly to “refute” or call into question the doctrines themselves. Instead of shifting doctrines being seen as more or less adequate formulations of some accessible metaphysical or cosmological reality, Lindbeck proposes shifting ontological schemes employed as interpretations of more permanent communal rules of discourse. In short, a theology which accurately understands its role will always seek to be faithful to a doctrine even as it seeks to reformulate it, and faithfulness means enabling its proper operation as a grammatical rule for the community. “The terminology and concepts of ‘one substance and three persons’ or ‘two natures’ may be absent, but if the same rules that guided the formation of the original paradigms are operative in the construction of the new formulations, they express one and the same doctrine” (ND, 95). And if a particular theological account of a doctrine’s truth successfully upholds that doctrine’s regulative function, then the account will be one of several possible “doctrinally correct” accounts which can be judged as to their relative adequacy vis-à-vis each other. But again such adequacy will involve no direct epistemological or experimental test; none are available. The ultimate test is what might be called a quasi-pragmatic one. “Which theory is theologically best depends on how well it organizes the data of Scripture and tradition with a view to their use in Christian worship and life” (ND, 106). How is this less than precise statement to be understood? The examination of Lindbeck’s regulative theory of doctrine has now reached a point where more detailed treatment is needed of the way he understands the concepts of “truth” and “theology.” The next section will examine Lindbeck’s proposed truth theory before the final section returns in detail to his proposal for a better kind of theological practice.

The Truth of the People of Witness It should be kept in mind that Lindbeck’s discussion of truth claims in religion (ND, 63–9) occurs before his treatment of doctrines. One might


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summarize his position by saying that he wishes to deflect the question of truth away from the “middle range” of doctrines themselves (communally authoritative teachings taken individually) and instead refer it either to the religion as a whole, as an entire idiom or semiotic symbol system (the “macro” level), or else to the “first-order” utterances of religious believers (the “micro” level). But in discussing religious truth Lindbeck is careful to maintain the approach which will afterward characterize his discussion of doctrine as well. Just as is the case with his grammatical and rule theories, so too for his reflections on religious truth he does not initially propose a theological rationale. Instead, he introduces them as a way of interpreting religious truth that is in accordance with a cultural-linguistic theory of religion, and only as a following step does he ask whether theologians or members of a religion will also find it usable (ND, 46). The bulk of Chapter Three of his work, concluding with the “excursus” on truth, is given over to discussing how a religion which accepted a cultural-linguistic description of itself might continue to understand itself to be “true,” or even “unsurpassably true.” Lindbeck is initially not interested in promoting any particular notion of truth or unsurpassability; he simply wants to show that there are some such notions which are both theologically viable and nevertheless compatible with the cultural-linguistic theory of religion, and therefore remove a potential obstacle from the use of cultural-linguistic theory by theologians (who are assumed to be believers). However, some points which are important for understanding the characteristic shape of his recommendations for theology arise from the discussion. What follows is merely a brief indication of some of these points; a full analysis and evaluation of his briefly sketched suggestions about religious truth would require a great deal of space. Lindbeck’s discussion is based on distinguishing three different senses of truth: categorial, intrasystematic, and ontological. Roughly speaking, his scheme works like this (ND, 63–6). A religion, as has been said, is a system of tradition-shaped practices and beliefs which forms as a whole an interpretive scheme for apprehending and relating to what is of ultimate reality and importance. Thus any religion involves a set of basic concepts or categories which enable construal of and reference to the Good and the Real. The practitioners of this religion are those who can and do with at least minimal competence employ these categories in shaping their lives, with whatever degree of success. The religious goal of this employment is a proper alignment (a “correspondence” of being) between the individuals using the categories and the ultimate goodness or reality identified by those categories. So for a monotheistic religion like Christianity the concrete scenario for religious truth Lindbeck portrays is one in which there is an

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ontological correspondence of a human self with the being of God. Lindbeck understands this correspondence in actualist and performative terms. That is, corresponding to God is more like an event to be realized than an acquired state; and this realization is a function of the concrete actions of the persons involved, a matter of their performance. The realization of this situation of religious truth involves a conjunction of the three kinds of truth listed above. One may speak of the “ontological” truth of a religious utterance, or of its correspondence to reality, only on the condition that it is a product of or contributes to the total correspondence to God of the self who utters it. And this can only occur if the utterance is “intrasystematically” true. Hence, the total event of the utterance (the words used, the context in which they are used, and the intention with which they are used) must present a conformity both with the total pattern of normative Christian language and with the “forms of life,” the proper practices, associated with that language pattern. Any breakdown in these coherences is sufficient to impair the intrasystematic truth and hence the ontological truth of a Christian utterance. Lastly, the system of language and practice itself, the total idiom within which the utterance occurs, must itself be properly aligned with reality; the concepts or categories provided for referral to the ultimately real must indeed be adequate to it. But it seems that this adequacy for reference must be understood again primarily in pragmatic rather than conceptual terms. A religion’s (categorial) truth consists in its providing a system of semiotic and practical resources enabling (intrasystematic) utterances whose (ontological) truth “is only a function of their role in constituting a form of life, a way of being in the world, which itself corresponds to the . . . Ultimately Real” (ND, 65). It is not the intention here to analyze further or assess this highly involved proposal of Lindbeck’s; it has received a level of attention in the secondary literature out of proportion to the modest space it occupies in his book. What are more important are some implications of this theory of religious truth for Lindbeck’s understanding of theology. The first concerns the associated “agnosticism” signaled by Lindbeck’s appeal to the scholastic distinction between significatum and modus significandi (ND, 66–7). Presupposing a situation of ontologically true utterance, the attribution of, say, goodness to God is not dependent for its truth upon any concept of “goodness” actually possessed by a human language-user. The human “mode of signifying” goodness does not semantically connect in any accessible and positive way with the “signified” goodness possessed by God’s being. It is true that God is good, and hence false that God is evil; but what makes God good cannot be positively determined by analysis of any humanly available concept of goodness. All such analysis might achieve is to point out the various ways in


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which our human concept of goodness cannot correspond to divine goodness. This leaves, however, a zone of semantic indeterminacy, a kind of protective cloud obscuring positive conceptual determination of the divine essence. The strong resonance of this account with the understanding of analogical reference familiar from St Thomas and his interpreters is obvious and intentional. To restate, the truth of a religious proposition involves an invincible cognitive deficit of a unique kind. Knowing something to be true without ever being able to specify how it is true might suggest an abandonment of epistemological realism; the very notion of correspondence seems to lose its significance. But as was seen Lindbeck wants to maintain as viable the idea of the mind corresponding to something real beyond itself. In the case of true religious utterances the cognitive deficit is balanced by a pragmatic surplus. The assertion of God’s goodness is part of a moment of correspondence of the whole self to God. Its conceptual role is practically subordinated to its function within the shaping of an individual in accordance with the goodness analogically indicated. The goodness signified by our attribution of goodness to God corresponds to something real in God; hence our utterance “God is good” can be true. But this signified goodness cannot be equated with our modes of signifying it. This does not make these modes arbitrary. The humanly accessible concepts of goodness used in signifying God’s goodness are crucial, in spite of their purely analogical nature, because they help to determine human dispositions toward God. And that in turn furthers the correspondence of selves to God’s goodness in spite of their inability to specify conceptually what this correspondence consists in. In other words, Lindbeck claims that his “performative” proposal of the truth of religious utterances allows their propositional truth in the sense of helping to create an (always mysterious) conceptual correspondence indirectly by imbedding it within a larger correspondence of the entire person (ND, 64–5). This remarkable proposal invites a number of questions. For example, the total inability to specify the conceptual content of God’s goodness would seem to make it impossible to determine just what kind of growth in goodness (humanly-understood) would constitute an increase in the self ’s correspondence to God. Also, the relation between analogical truth and pragmatic truth remains vague. Does the belief that God is good (and the determination to act accordingly) bring about a correspondence of self to God because the statement “God is good” is true, albeit in a way which can never be specified? Or rather is the statement “God is good” true because it furthers that practical correspondence of self and God? Lindbeck’s

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affirmation of the compatibility of a “performative-propositional” theory of truth with a Thomist “agnostic” theory of analogy suggests that he is not simply equating the two, reducing the truth of analogy to the truth of performance. But until the manner of their relation is specified further, the jury must remain out on their actual compatibility. At any rate, the theologian presumably must be aware always of the doubly pragmatic nature of religious language. Religious utterances within a religious system of language can only be assessed to the degree that their use creates dispositions in religious practitioners in accordance with the ultimate goodness envisioned by the system. To test the (ontological) truth of a religious utterance is a matter of gauging its (intrasystematic) coherence with the total pattern of language and practice. But the categorial truth of that total pattern itself can only be presupposed, not itself tested, by the theologian (since she or he is assumed to be an adherent of the religion). The only test of categorial truth is the living of the pattern itself, the ongoing test of the religious symbol system’s ability to provide illumination and orientation for life and account for anomalous experiences.27 The theologian’s role here is presumably that of continually making the symbol system accessible in new ways to practitioners in new experiential and practical contexts. But the ultimate success of this theological task is rooted in the “categorial” truth of the religion itself, a truth which can either be affirmed or denied but never measured against some more allencompassing or more fundamental set of criteria. A religious practice can be true both in the sense of shaping lives in accordance with the religion and in the sense of proving inexhaustibly incorporative of new experience; the first kind of truth is within the context of the religion, the second the truth of the religion itself vis-à-vis other encompassing or totalizing symbol systems, religious or not. That both kinds of truth are in some way linked to the actual correspondence of individuals and their religious categories to the shape of ultimate reality is theologically presupposed, and patient of many theoretical articulations, but never capable of demonstration. A second implication for theology of Lindbeck’s theory of religious truth has to do with the truth status assigned to theological discourse. His entire understanding of truth clearly privileges the situation of a religious practitioner employing the symbolic resources of the semiotic system in making judgments about his or her own proper disposition toward the divine in a given situation. In other words, it is language as applied to life or concrete experience which is the proper locus of religious truth. This is first-order 27

ND, 131. Lindbeck’s idea of the “cumulative testing” of a religious tradition stems especially from Basil Mitchell, The Justification of Religious Belief (London: Macmillan and Co., 1973).


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language, whereas it was seen that religious language functioning doctrinally is not being so used; it is rather employed to regulate or guide this firstorder usage. This presumably means that doctrines themselves cannot, properly speaking, be true or false. At most one might say that doctrines work as practical guides to the grammatical structure of a religion, and that structure as a whole might or might not possess categorial truth. The doctrinal authority accorded a statement lies in this grammatical function, not in its being a true proposition. The same sentence, of course, might in one situation be a doctrinal utterance and in another a religious utterance proper. In the latter case “Jesus is the Messiah” might be true depending on the situation and intention of the user, but in the first situation the doctrinal use of the same phrase has the task (as part of the entire complex of grammatical rules) of helping to delineate the range of proper and improper usages in that second case. As such it is neither true nor false in itself.28 But something similar must be said about theological language. The only situation concrete enough to support a correspondence between language and religious reality is that of a given individual on a given occasion in a given context making proper use of a religious utterance, setting up some resonance of the entire self with the divine reality. But even though the theologian is concerned with investigating, understanding, and perpetuating such situations for a given social and historical setting, he or she does so at one level of abstraction from these situations. This does not mean, of course, that qua religious believer the theologian cannot also be engaged in first-order religious practice. But when engaged in theological practice properly speaking, i.e. reflective interpretation of religious practice, the alignment of self and God would be a background or tacit accompaniment to a second-order investigation. And this means that theological utterances or sentences possess an indeterminacy with respect to religious truth similar to that of doctrines. One may investigate the sentence “Jesus is the Messiah” in order to determine its systematic relation to other sentences, one may seek to determine which grammatical rules it instantiates, one may try to determine the range of conditions under which such rules apply, or one might try to propose a theory linking the sentence as a proposition to some construal of history or even reality as a whole. But in none of these cases is the sentence being employed in a context of determinate religious truth. Lindbeck is aware of the counter-intuitive nature of these claims. Indeed 28 In the now famous example of the Crusader using “Christus est Dominus” as a war-cry in battle, the pragmatic falsity of the utterance pertains, of course, only to its first-order use in a particular context, not to its doctrinal function (ND, 64).

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he emphasizes the sharp contrast here with ordinary modes of thinking about doctrine and theology, especially as the latter have been shaped by the ideas of a religion as a collection of true or false propositions, and of theology as an examination testing the truth of these propositions and offering more accurate reformulations in light of some relatively independent access to reality. But on a cultural-linguistic interpretation of religion the propositional quality of theological theories is rendered problematic and at best indirect. As he summarizes, in “[t]echnical theology and official doctrine . . . one rarely if ever succeeds in making affirmations with ontological import, but rather engages in explaining, defending, analyzing, and regulating the liturgical, kerygmatic, and ethical modes of speech and action within which such affirmations from time to time occur.”29 The third and final implication of Lindbeck’s proposal on religious truth for his notion of theology will emerge by looking closer at the notion of categorial truth. In the article “Aquinas as postliberal theologian” referred to in the previous chapter, Bruce Marshall first defended Lindbeck’s complex truth theory against a Thomist critic as being quite compatible with, indeed a version of, the position of Thomas Aquinas.30 Thomas analyzes the notion of true faith in God into three kinds of relation between the intellect and the faith object. The intellect (1) truly corresponds to God as the content or material aspect of the object of faith only (2) when it coheres with the formal aspect of that object, the articles of faith revealed by God, and (3) when it is properly moved by the will, that is when this act of knowing is imbedded within the overall disposition of trust and obedience. Marshall’s discussion reveals that Lindbeck is formulating in more up-to-date language the position of Thomas: any correspondence of the mind to God only occurs by way of intra-systematic categories (the articles of faith) and in a situation where the self is disposed to make the God so known the end or practical orientation of the will.31 The historical plausibility of Marshall’s interpretation of Aquinas is of less interest here than the fact that his reading of Lindbeck’s intentions received the latter’s enthusiastic approval.32 With this approval Lindbeck ended up 29 ND, 69. See also ND, 68, where it is claimed that religious sentences obtain sufficient “referential specificity” to be ontologically true or false only in determinate settings. 30 Marshall is responding to Colman E. O’Neill, “The Rule Theory of Doctrine and Propositional Truth,” The Thomist 49 (1985), 417–42, which maintains that Lindbeck’s position is incompatible with that of Thomas. 31 Marshall, “Aquinas as Postliberal,” 370–6, 384–7. 32 See Lindbeck’s glowing response in the same journal immediately following Marshall’s essay, pp. 403–6. “He makes me understand both myself and Aquinas better than I had done before” (p. 403). Especially revealing is Lindbeck’s comment that Aquinas was a much deeper


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openly endorsing a position on the categorial truth of religion which had been only implied in The Nature of Doctrine itself. In that book he stated that it might be the case “that there is only one religion which has the concepts and categories that enable it to refer to the religious object, i.e., to whatever in fact is more important than everything else in the universe” (ND, 50). The merely hypothetical language is resolved by Marshall, apparently with Lindbeck’s agreement, into a positive claim: unique categorical truth. Only Christianity is categorially true, and therefore uniquely possesses the capacity for ontological truth: “[O]ntological truth in any other religion or worldview is not even conceivable.”33 But it could be countered that in terms of Lindbeck’s truth-theory itself this is a gratuitous assumption. Even theologically, the assertion of Christianity’s categorial truth would not of itself imply the categorial falsity of any other religious scheme or world-view. This is not because different religions might share the same categories, or themselves be subsets of some larger, encompassing categorical framework. Marshall correctly understands that Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic understanding emphasizes the “irreducible particularity” of categorial schemes. The categories of Christianity are “irreducibly particular” and “untranslatable” between other schemes because they are tied to specific and highly concrete narratives and communal practices, and anyway the separate elements of the categorial scheme are highly conditioned by their systematic interrelationships within that scheme.34 The point being made here is a influence on the position of The Nature of Doctrine than perhaps even he had realized (pp. 405–6). Lindbeck’s approval aside, Marshall’s interpretation of Aquinas strikes this author (a non-expert) as intriguing but not completely convincing. That there is a definite resemblance between Thomas’ three truth-components (credere Deum, credere Deo, and credere in Deum) and Lindbeck’s (true utterance or use, intrasystematic coherence with grammar, coherence with appropriate practice) seems clear. But do Aquinas and Lindbeck understand the interrelation of these elements or their relative importance in the same way? It appears rather that Aquinas tends to make appropriate practice more of an adjunct to accepting the articles of faith, whereas Lindbeck does the opposite, subordinating grammatical coherence to concrete practices. That is, for Aquinas proper practice is judged by submission to the articles of faith, whereas for Lindbeck grammatical rules are an inevitably inexact precipitate out of Christian practice and can always be trumped by the concrete choices of skilled practitioners. The key is the different status assigned to revealed articles of faith on the one hand, and grammatical rules on the other. Lindbeck can hardly grant the kind of stability and clarity to the rules that Aquinas accords to the creed, not least because he lacks the particular idea of supernatural revelation (via both the scripture and the church’s teaching office) that Aquinas presupposes. One can, however, concede that Aquinas’s notion of the articles of faith is exercising a hidden interpretive pull on Lindbeck’s rule-conception which is unwarranted by Lindbeck’s explicit pronouncements. 33 Marshall, “Aquinas as Postliberal,” 362. 34 The point about untranslatability is made strongly in Lindbeck, “Gospel’s Uniqueness,” 424–31.

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different one. Different religions might be simultaneously categorially true, not because of an overlapping of categories, but rather because entirely different sets of categories might well enable reference, in different ways, to one and the same religious object or reality. The notion of one and only one categorially true religion is not incoherent on Lindbeck’s grounds, but neither is it a necessary implication. Why would one care to assert it? One could claim that God’s reality is so closely coordinated with or corresponds to the unique categorial system of Christianity that only that system can be used to produce the religious goal of conformity of persons with God’s reality. But on what grounds would one assert this? Thomas, of course, relies on a doctrine of supernatural revelation to make a close cognitive link between the Christian categories (articles of faith) and God’s reality. This confers on them quasi-propositional precision in spite of their undeniably analogical nature, and this allows a stress on the intellectual side of the act of faith which gives a more ancillary role to the will as a register of desire and sincerity. But for Lindbeck the categorial scheme of Christianity is more an adjunct to pragmatic performance, and he does not offer a “strong” doctrine of revelation to anchor the particularity of this categorial scheme in God’s reality. One may grant that some particular conceptual scheme in conjunction with some particular practical performance of it is necessary to enable the shaping of lives in accordance with the locus of ultimate reality, God. One could also grant that there are an infinite number of schemes and performances which do not enable such shaping. But the infinitely rich and elusive nature of the divine reality combined with the undeniable cognitive gap opened up by the insufficiency of our conceptual and linguistic resources would still make it unnecessary and perhaps perilous to lay much theological weight on the claim that one and only one set of performed categories is capable of forming human selves in this way. There is in this protest no assumption that any performed categorial scheme is as good as any other in aligning lives with the divine; there is only the demand that it be shown theologically why only one scheme is capable of doing so at all. There might indeed be indispensable elements for a conceptual scheme to allow true correspondence to God, but what puts one in a position to enumerate them? Limited to the pragmatic testing of the always inadequate modes of signifying provided by their own religious scheme, human beings have neither the capacity nor, so it would seem, the incentive to specify the precise range of categories and concepts whose faithful use will result in the conforming of persons to God. Conceding this in no way relativizes the categorical truth of the Christian scheme; it simply means that Christian believers are unable to discount the possibility that


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God is shaping human persons through non-Christian categories in conformity to the same Ultimate truth definitively incarnated in Christ. By endorsing Marshall’s initial reading of his work, Lindbeck seems to assume that the specificity and untranslatability of religious categorical schemes makes the business of categorical truth a zero-sum game: Christianity’s categorical truth can only mean the categorial falsity of the rest.35 It was Aquinas’s doctrine of revelation which forced him to conclude to one and only one proper (because inspired) religious categorial scheme (formulated in the Christian creed). But Lindbeck’s account in The Nature of Doctrine offers no comparable claim, nor does it demand it. Indeed, his insistence on agnosticism as to how human categories connect up with God, even granting their high level of particularity and their rootage in the concrete narratives of the Christ, should, one would think, lead to great reluctance to speculate about which alternative schemes might also allow proper correspondence to the same reality. It is perhaps not inconceivable that even two religious schemes that appear highly contradictory from a human perspective can both enable this. The intention of the preceding excursus has not at all been to assert this positively, but to caution against seeing in the exclusive claim of Marshall approved by Lindbeck a necessary correlate of the idea of categorial religious truth. The Christian theologian, as a believer, will of course assume the truth of the Christian categorial scheme (by the very act of living it); but Lindbeck’s discussion of the theologian’s judgments at least in The Nature of Doctrine does not directly fund all-or-nothing assertions about the relative truth of other religious schemes.

A New Theology for the Ecclesial “Text” Having developed the cultural-linguistic theory of religion and the regulative theory of doctrine, Lindbeck in the final chapter of his book asks about the kind of self-understanding theology should develop if it is to reflect these theories. Although he speaks of the “implications” for theology of a 35 Note that only the languages of Israel and the Christ provide the semantic resources to definitively name or identify the ultimate truth which is God. See Lindbeck, “Gospel’s Uniqueness,” 444. But granting this, does it follow that God conforms selves to the divine truth only through such naming or identification? Again Lindbeck’s own pragmatic-agnostic account of truth would make it difficult to see why this must be the case. Christianity might be the only proper language of witness to God, but that would not make it the only categorially true religious scheme, unless one equated the exclusive resources granted to Christianity for its witness to God with an exclusive capacity to shape persons in conformity with God. Only Christians speak properly of the coming salvation; but do only they taste it in this world?

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cultural-linguistic approach, the connections between his proposals about theology and his previously discussed theories are more ambiguous than the straightforward language of “implication” might suggest (ND, 112). The key concept characterizing Lindbeck’s model of theological understanding is that of “intratextuality.” But the relationship between a cultural-linguistic view of Christianity and an intratextual form of Christian theology seems neither exclusive nor necessary. The relationship is not exclusive for the simple reason that theologians whose views on religion and doctrine are more “propositionalist” or “experiential-expressivist” can do, and in fact have done, theology intratextually, as Lindbeck points out (ND, 123). It is not necessary because that would imply explaining a unique mode of theological procedure as a necessary structural correlate of a theory of religion or doctrine; but it is unclear how these could be related with this kind of rigor. Thus Lindbeck is satisfied with the claim that his intratextual view of theology is “compatible with” cultural-linguistic theory (ND, 114). As influenced by the reflections on religion and doctrine outlined above, Lindbeck’s concept of intratextuality seems their natural accompaniment, and indeed it is. But he did not derive it from those theories. His formulation of the concept of intratextuality depends instead on certain influential interpretations of Karl Barth’s practice of theological exegesis by Hans Frei, David Kelsey, and David Ford (ND, 135, 138 fn. 35). Before describing intratextuality as his own controversial proposal for the proper practice of theology, Lindbeck stipulates some noncontroversial or generally agreed upon presuppositions. Theology is concerned with the “explanation, communication and defense of the faith” (ND, 76). Commitment to a particular faith, its community, and its traditions is what makes it theology; the need to explain, communicate, and defend it, however, calls for theology to offer interpretations of the faith which are normative and critical. That is, commitment to the truth of a faith often demands critique or imaginative reconstruction of this or that aspect of it. As has already been said, theology is not the production of doctrine, and most theologians offer proposals which do not restrict themselves to the communally essential or identifying beliefs and practices. Theology will indeed also involve explanations or justifications or defenses of those beliefs and practices, but these operations upon doctrine do not themselves have the communal authority of doctrine (ND, 106). So theology has the task of identifying and describing the essential features of a religion in a normative way; it does not criticize the basic structure or identity of the communal faith, but it does re-envision it in ways enabling its proper exercise in a given context. And that in turn can and often will entail criticizing aspects of


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current belief and practice in the name of what is more foundational or essential. To set up his argument Lindbeck makes one more proposal he takes to be relatively uncontroversial. There are three basic kinds of criteria by which theological interpretations are judged. Good Christian theology will present constructions of the faith and its proper beliefs and practices which are at once (1) faithful, (2) applicable, and (3) intelligible. Lindbeck points out that different specializations have arisen within theology, each with one of these criteria as a special concern, but any theology worthy of the name tries to do justice to all three criteria (ND, 112). What do these criteria mean, and how are they to be applied? Only at this point does the general consensus break down and competing visions of the nature of theology and its procedures take over. That is, Lindbeck wants to partition different construals of theology according to the different ways they understand what it means for their own proposals to be faithful, applicable, or intelligible. He will offer his own approach to these criteria, one consonant with a theology that takes seriously the cultural-linguistic theory of the Christian religion. This proposed approach involves new construals for each criterion, encapsulated in a key concept: faithfulness is to be understood as intratextuality, applicability as futurology, and intelligibility as skill. The most important concept here is without doubt that of intratextuality; as will be seen, it determines the way other two concepts, futurology and skill, are to be understood. But before seeing what intratextuality means it is important to grasp the kind of argument Lindbeck is constructing in this final chapter of his book. It does not turn on showing that the kind of theology being described somehow meets the three theological criteria better than other kinds, that it offers interpretations of Christianity which are “more faithful” or “more applicable” than other kinds of theology. The point is more subtle than that. Such direct comparisons of different theologies are largely impossible because each kind of theology will understand the criteria themselves in different ways. For example, only two theological interpretations which share a common understanding of what it means to be faithful can be directly compared in light of the criterion “faithfulness.” But when altogether different types of theology are in question, as here, the conflict arises over the very meaning of the criterion itself, or how to apply it. So the appeal Lindbeck makes for his theological proposal in Chapter Six is more indirect. This theology is the appropriate accompaniment to a cultural-linguistic theory of religion and a regulative theory of doctrine. Its attractiveness, at least in this particular book, is linked to the plausibility of those theories (though not logically implied by them) (ND, 113).

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The adjective “intratextual” is a modifier of the general activity of the systematic theologian, which is on Lindbeck’s understanding primarily a descriptive activity. Systematic theological proposals are to be judged faithful or not to the extent that they offer a proper description of the Christian faith, however adventurous the terms of that description may be. Lindbeck’s concern that the theologian be confronted with the objective and normative aspect of the faith as the presupposed conceptual arena for his or her activity finds expression here. Lindbeck is not unaware that this “description” should leave a great deal of space for theological creativity and critique (ND, 115).36 But that space is always bounded by the normative shape of the Christian “logic.” So the theological goal of meeting the criterion of faithfulness will be met by describing the Christian faith intratextually. But what does this mean? The idea of theological intratextuality that Lindbeck operates with is demanding and multivalent. As background to the following it might be helpful to keep in mind a distinction that is not always strictly maintained in Lindbeck’s discussion; sometimes intratextuality appears as a first-order religious activity of Christian practitioners, while at other times it is clearly a second-order theological reflection on that activity. Some such distinction would seem necessary to state the proper relation of theological reflection to Christian practice, but Lindbeck’s accounts leave only a vague impression of the differences involved. This is especially evident from one of Lindbeck’s few discussions of intratextuality after the publication of his book.37 Intratextuality as a Christian practice is there described in a way which does not distinguish clearly between Christian religious practice and Christian theological practice. As a religious practice, Lindbeck sees it as involving an immersion in the linguistic and imaginative world of the scriptures, but also as an accompanying intention of responding faithfully to the divine claim perceived to be the organizing center of this world. This response in turn involves both discerning the identity of the God making this claim, and also “inscribing” one’s entire world into the scriptural world unified by reference to this God, interpreting the former in terms of the latter. When one turns to the description of intratextuality as a specifically theological practice as described in The Nature of Doctrine, it is possible to recognize both a considerable overlap with this other description (obviously

36 Tanner, however, correctly warns that danger still inheres in the language of theology merely “describing” or “reflecting” the community’s practice: it “deflect[s] attention from the contestable character of any particular [theological] proposal.” All description is also interpretation, hence involves judgments. Tanner, Theories of Culture, 73. 37 Lindbeck, “Barth and Textuality,” 374–5.


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because the theologian is also a believer) and also certain differences appropriate to a more consciously critical and reflective practice. More clarification would be needed to specify just what separates second-order (theological) intratextuality from first-order intratextuality. But clearly the theologian as believer is engaged in both, and the second-order enterprise is for the sake of the first-order living of the faith. To put it crudely, theology practices intratextuality as a descriptive practice in order to enable the intratextuality inherently involved in the communal practicing of the religion to “work better” in its specific circumstances.38 Lindbeck of course wants to describe the theological practice of intratextual description in a way which links it to his previous theoretical construal of the Christian religion as a cultural-linguistic symbol system. Three characteristics of Christianity so understood provide in turn three aspects of an intratextual Christian theology. For purposes of the present discussion these three will be referred to in a shorthand way as the “semiotic,” “realityencompassing,” and “scriptural” aspects of theological intratextuality. It will become evident that in each case the meanings of the noun “text” and the preposition “intra” shift somewhat. For the first aspect, the understanding of Christianity as a cultural symbolsystem with its own integral depth grammar is central (ND, 114). Following on this, as an aspect of theological faithfulness “semiotic” intratextuality means that the normative description of Christianity, the grasping or delineation of its meaning, must pay attention to the uses of Christian language in actual religious practice in order to lay bare the idiomatic system of meanings being applied in changing situations. The search for the unity and identity of the religion will therefore mean neither attempting to better align its claims with their ontological referent, nor trying to isolate a set of common experiences which unite the users. In line with Lindbeck’s understanding of religion, Christian theology will describe Christianity normatively as akin to a person-shaping language employed for interpreting the world and life, not primarily as a collection of speculative propositions, and not as a set of symbolizations of internal states. For the “semiotic” dimension of intratextuality, the “text” is the religion itself as a self-contained system of public meanings exemplified in practice, while the directional prefix “intra” signals the determination of normative description to grant semantic priority to this medium, constantly returning to it (instead of to speculative or psychologizing schemes) as the locus of Christian identity. 38 That a great deal more than good theology is involved in constituting intratextual Christian practice is clear from his comments in ND, 124: theory takes a back seat to the fundamental sociological demand for communities of “intensely socialized” readers.

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The second aspect of theological intratextuality, called here “worldencompassing,” stems from the realization that the Christian religion, like other religions, cultures in general, or even natural languages, is a symbol system rich, variegated, and reflexive enough to organize “totalizing” understandings of the whole of reality (ND, 114–15). That is, a religion provides, or claims to provide, the symbolic resources for illuminating and systematizing human experience as a whole, combined with the continual impetus to attempt such global interpretations (due to the communal and individual drive it inspires for alignment with the ultimately real and good). In response to this, Christian theology will strive to be intratextual in a second sense: by appropriating or fashioning concepts which give coherence and plausibility to this never-ending envisioning in Christian terms of the world as currently experienced by the community. In this way the task of describing the Christian symbol system spills over into the task of describing the world, the immense range of shifting experiences of reality, in a way that is organized, informed, and given meaning by that system. The word “creative” is necessary here because Christian theology will be driven again and again to new understandings of the same Christian symbol system in order to perpetuate its continued application under changing conditions. For “world-encompassing” intratextuality, the “intra” now refers not just to locating Christian “meanings” within the semiotic web (the “text”) that constitutes them, but also to “drawing the world into” that “text” in a way which aids faithful Christian practice.39 The third and last aspect of theological intratextuality discernible in Lindbeck’s discussion is introduced by the claim that the major “cross-cultural” religious traditions all “have relatively fixed canons of writings that they treat as exemplary or normative instantiations of their semiotic codes” (ND, 116). One can readily see that the possession of such an official inscription of the semiotic system of the religion alters the possibilities of the first two aspects of theological intratextuality. Both the “semiotic” and “worldencompassing” intratextual procedures would find it very difficult if not impossible to move from the purely descriptive to the more normative moment of theological construal of the faith in ways which “held steady” the faith’s identity through time if they did not have an acknowledged and

39 Lindbeck does not understand this mode of intratextuality to be especially theological in nature. Through the thicket of Geertz quotations on p. 115, he tries to portray it as an implication of the kind of cultural anthropology which has informed his model of religion. There is reason to doubt, however, whether this second kind of intratextuality really finds the kind of analogue in Geertz’s account of the “thick description” of symbol systems which Lindbeck discerns. See Chapter Four below.


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publicly accessible exemplar of the originating or generative use of the semiotic code. Indeterminacy is not eliminated, of course, because the text will always be open to different interpretations. But Lindbeck is confident that interpreting the canonical Christian scriptures “in terms of the meanings immanent in the religious language of whose use the text is a paradigmatic instance” will still serve as a crucial “control” on faithful theological interpretation (ND, 116). His presentation of a range of interpretive proposals toward this end (ND, 116–22) manifestly owes much to ideas developed by David Kelsey and Hans Frei (realistic narrative, agent-rendering, typological exegesis, etc.). The crucial point is that a classic kind of “literal” interpretation of the scriptural narratives, even granting the validity of modern historical criticism, can provide an authoritative interpretive framework for understanding contemporary experience in a faithfully Christian way. If Christian faith means “absorbing” the world into the “text” (construing contemporary experience as components of the drama of human and divine interaction found in the writings), the theological significance of the “intra” is to mark the correct “direction of interpretation.” No matter how varied the experiential inputs, no matter how “strong” may be the required misreadings of one’s contextual situation, the theologian is charged with testing contemporary applications to guard against an all-too-easy “reversal” of this direction. “There is always the danger . . . that the extra-biblical materials inserted into the biblical universe will themselves become the basic framework of interpretation” (ND, 118). This final, “scriptural” aspect of theological intratextuality means continually returning to the written canonical text and rigorously seeking to locate for a new situation the normative network of meanings identifying God’s saving interaction with the world, disentangling it (to the degree possible) from the accumulated applicative readings of the past. The close relation between each of these three aspects of theological intratextuality is manifest. All three pivot around the idea of a relatively fixed structure of meanings embedded in Christian practice. They propose in turn (1) identifying and properly describing that structure without relativizing it by appeal to something “more basic” accessed through metaphysical speculations or phenomenological accounts of experience, (2) conceptually linking that structure up with the total range of experience as an organizing framework, and (3) continually refining this description and application through recourse to scriptural exegesis. This complex concept of intratextuality is Lindbeck’s paradigmatic proposal for properly construing the theological criterion of “faithfulness” to Christianity. His proposals about the other two criteria (applicability and intelligibility) are quite clearly developments of this basic concept of

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intratextual faithfulness. This is entirely characteristic. Rather than playing off faithfulness and, say, intelligibility against each other as two equal, competing criteria (in the manner of Ogden, for example), Lindbeck’s tilt is clearly toward faithfulness as the prime theological virtue without which applicability and intelligibility become pointless.40 A Christian theology that is not faithfully Christian is a dubious achievement, no matter how applicable and intelligible it might be. More than this, faithfulness decisively shapes how intelligibility is to be understood, but not vice versa. How is the criterion of “applicability” to be understood on Lindbeck’s model? A theology must produce understandings of the religion which reinforce its relevance and practicality in concrete situations. The invocation of “futurology” as the guiding concept for understanding this practicality points beyond formal or methodological considerations to the strong futureorientation of Lindbeck’s soteriology (ND, 124–8). His major concern here is to prevent what he sees as another common but damaging interpretive “reversal” in practical theology, presenting a formally similar threat to intratextuality. A futurological approach to the practice of the faith means working to discern in a contemporary context those possibilities and junctures where Christian practitioners can become actively engaged as a sign pointing toward or furthering the salvific vision of the future “encoded” in the Christian interpretive scheme.41 This means that good practical theology does not start with a “neutral” examination of contemporary experience and then shape Christian action and expectation into an adjunct to the hopes and aspirations of the culture at large. Lindbeck sees in such a procedure another form of that “reversal of direction” which subordinates the Christian interpretive scheme to some other one. He also apparently associates it with the questionable assumption that “present experience” is “revelatory” in a way determinative of Christian practice, rather than simply a pragmatic challenge to which Christian practice must respond (ND, 126). Lindbeck’s discussion of the third criterion of theological performance, intelligibility (ND, 128–34), is, like the earlier ones, quite brief. (One can assume that he intends to offer in this final chapter of The Nature of Doctrine 40 See Schubert Ogden, On Theology (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1986), 1–21. The terms he uses are “appropriateness” and “credibility.” 41 The ideas of “pointing to” and “furthering” are not identical, of course, and the juxtaposition of them here is deliberately ambiguous. It replicates Lindbeck’s own refusal to decide in this setting on the important question of whether Christian actions in the present are “anticipations” of God’s future (witnesses or “signs” in Barth’s sense) or rather “preparations” for that future (cooperating in some sense in the advent of that future). See ND, 125.


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not detailed methodological prescriptions but general impressions intending to give the “flavor” of what good theology looks like under postliberal conditions.) Characteristically, Lindbeck treats intelligibility as in fact a special problem of applicability, so that foundational or apologetic theology is seen as an adjunct of practical theology. The concept “skill” points to this emphasis on Christian practice. Indeed this orientation combined with intratextuality makes the very terms “foundational” and “apologetic” somewhat problematic for the way theology should address itself to the problem of intelligibility. According to Lindbeck, the predominant approach to making the Christian faith intelligible has involved mounting a general apologetic; this seeks a “foundational scheme” within which religious language can be evaluated, and which also makes possible the “translation” of traditional meanings into currently intelligible terms (ND, 129). His sweeping rejection of this whole set of ideas should be no surprise given the influence on him (discussed in Chapter 1 above) of anti-foundationalist critiques in the wake of Wittgenstein. Instead of addressing the problem of intelligibility by deploying a “philosophical theology” or a general apologetics, Lindbeck deflates the theoretic pretensions of such exercises in so-called “fundamental theology” by reducing them to a matter of performance. The credibility of the faith “comes from good performance, not adherence to independently formulated criteria” (ND, 131). All Christian theology does indeed seek to maximize the descriptive intelligibility and rationality of Christian utterances, beliefs, and practices. But according to Lindbeck’s proposals, when it properly understands itself it can only do this in varied, problem-specific ways with the goal of credibly dissolving the intellectual obstacles to the Christian assimilation of experience in a specific context. Since for Lindbeck there are no generally accessible, theory-neutral canons of rationality there can be no appeal to an encompassing or “foundational” cognitive procedure to mediate in principle between the Christian world of meaning and other cultural worlds. Rather, theology seeks to commend the intelligibility of the faith to outsiders by, in effect, inviting them to become insiders; it is a matter less of “translation” than of “catechesis.” As he puts it, “Instead of re-describing the faith in new concepts, it seeks to teach the language and practices of the religion to potential adherents” (ND, 132). Lindbeck insists that his understanding cannot be credibly charged either with “relativism” or with “fideism.” He is suggesting neither that cultural worlds are incommensurable ghettos of meaning, nor that appeals to rationality are merely arbitrary. A responsible theology will always be sensitive to the constraints of rational discourse; but “these constraints are too flexible

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and informal to be spelled out in either foundational theology or a general theory of science” (ND, 131). Reason is not relativistically reducible to one’s categorial scheme, but it is always conditioned by it and only deployable from within it. The inescapability of this conditioning insures that no formal and final adjudication of schemes is possible from a neutral, grounding standpoint. However, a religious semiotic system is constantly undergoing what might be called collective pragmatic experimentation. Confirmation or disconfirmation occurs through an accumulation of successes or failures in making practically and cognitively coherent sense of relevant data, and the process does not conclude, in the case of religions, until the disappearance of the last communities of believers or, if the faith survives, until the end of history. (ND, 131)

In the meantime the role of theology is continually to help the religion to negotiate this cumulative process, not through a global apologetic nor through the wholesale transfer of Christian symbols into some currently plausible system of thought, but through the practice of “ad hoc” apologetics (ND, 129). Apologetics is moved from the central interpretive process of the religion to its margins, where its intratextual assimilative practice encounters dissonances and aporias and stands in need of conceptual adjustments. With the basics of Lindbeck’s overall theological orientation now in view, the way in which his proposals grow out of his basic dogmatic orientation to an ecclesiology of the people of witness can be briefly suggested. Intratextuality is a way of locating theology as an integral practice of the church understood as a people witnessing to God’s coming salvation, once that people is understood as itself constituted by a symbol system. The goal of Christian theology is to aid the “incarnation” in concrete Christian communities of the symbolic networks carrying Christian identity by means of intratextual interpretive practices.42 Theology will continually offer descriptions and re-descriptions of the Christian faith which make accessible its system of symbols for the transforming orientation of contemporary practitioners, in ways which both avoid distorting the system itself and illuminate the context of practice. Thus theology helps to make possible transformative conjunctions between 42 See Lindbeck, “Atonement,” 1996, 226–31 for a more detailed account of what he (following Wayne Meeks) calls “intratextual social embodiment.”


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the community and the social, political, and intellectual spheres defining its context. This involves “thickly” describing the Christian symbol system in practice, discerning its “deep grammar” through the doctrinal “rules” informing the beliefs and practices of the community, and testing needed reformulations of the rules against the scriptural narratives of saving God and human response which “encode” the generative moment of the semiotic system. The theological practice Lindbeck propounds will generate critical and creative construals of the Christian faith; their success or failure is not arbitrary but is subject to proximate and ultimate forms of testing. Proximately they will be judged by the three theological criteria as construed in the manner just described. Theological descriptions will be judged faithful by their adherence to the modes of intratextuality. They will be judged applicable by their success in correlating a hoped for future with action in the present, by adjusting the latter to the former. And they will be judged intelligible by their skill in conceptually guiding the Christian interpretive process in ways which maximize the assimilation of contemporary experience. The ultimate test is simply the cumulative process itself, which means the ongoing maintenance of the church’s witness. Christianity will live or die by its capacity to continually reshape a people of witness in everchanging situations and deepen its encounter with the Good and True. Theology subserves this communal endeavor. When Lindbeck decided upon the name “postliberal” for this theological vision, he admitted that it was one of several which would be appropriate. “Postmodern,” “post-revisionist,” and “post-neo-orthodox” were other candidates, but he chose to highlight the opposition of this kind of theology to the “method” of theological liberalism as he understood it (ND, 135 fn. 1). The notion of “liberalism” operative here will need further examination in Chapter Four, but for now it can be said that Lindbeck definitely associates it with making the semiotic code of Christianity relative to some more basic experiential level (“extratextuality”) and elevating apologetic “translation” to a central critical procedure, enabled by encompassing “foundational” theoretical schemes. The alternative he offers is “postliberal” because it marks a later stage of intellectual development than that which informed the classical liberal approach. As was pointed out in the first chapter, this christening established itself quickly in discussions of the nature of theology. In this way Lindbeck inaugurated the move from the idea of the “post-liberal,” used to refer to the period initiated by the “dialectical theology” and its revolt against the nineteenth century, to the idea of the “postliberal,” calling to mind a proposed turning point in contemporary theological sensibility, a sharp departure from the just mentioned “liberal” assumptions about

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theological practice.43 In so doing he gladly acknowledged the influence of his colleague Hans Frei, with the result that Frei’s writings came to be seen as undergirding the postliberal project Lindbeck had defined. But the origins and dogmatic orientation of Frei’s vision of theology are quite distinct from those of Lindbeck, as will be seen.

43 The relation between these usages in Lindbeck’s work is unclear. As late as the crucial German review article he could still use “post-liberal” in the same historical sense as Frei. George Lindbeck, “Theologische Methode und Wissenschaftstheorie,” Theologische Revue 74 (1978), 266–80 at p. 267 (“Nach-liberalen Theologien”).

Chapter Three

Hans Frei: Theology and the Christological Object of Witness Concreteness and Identity in the Christological Object Attentive readers of Frei’s body of work will have noticed the predominance of three themes which run continually through his writings, early to late, often interweaving with each other. They are Christology, the narrative interpretation of the Bible (especially of the gospels), and the proper mode of doing Christian theology. Although the second of these three has typically received the most prominent treatment in discussions of Frei, it is in fact more helpfully seen as a kind of integrator of the first theme (arguably the genuine center of gravity of his oeuvre, though often remaining in the background) with the third. What follows, it should be kept in mind, is not a comprehensive overview of Frei’s thought, but an attempt to understand how his work as a theologian weaves these themes together, and why.1 This chapter will offer reflections on the way (often neglected by interpreters) that Hans Frei’s characteristic formal vision of the nature and tasks of theology is shaped by substantive dogmatic commitments, mainly Christological in nature. It is worthy of note that at the beginning and the end of Frei’s publishing career stand important engagements with the work of his teacher H. Richard Niebuhr. Over the course of his career, Frei remained warily fascinated with Niebuhr’s approach to theology, and most especially with the way in which Niebuhr grappled with problems of Christology. Niebuhr’s all-too-brief hints in Christ and Culture (“Toward a Definition of Christ”) served as a catalyst for Frei’s own treatment of the Christological 1 For other reflections on Frei’s achievement as a whole see William C. Placher, “Introduction,” and George Hunsinger, “Afterword: Hans Frei as Theologian,” in TN, 3–25, 233–70; and David F. Ford, “Hans Frei and the Future of Theology,” Modern Theology 8 (1992): 203–14.

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f re i : th e c h ri stolog i cal ob j e c t of w it ne s s

problem.2 Frei understood Niebuhr’s Christology to be groping toward a response to what the former dubbed the methodological or epistemological “monophysitism” which dominated the way Christology had been conceived by the generation which revolted against nineteenth-century liberalism in the pre-war period (Bultmann, Tillich, the early Barth, etc.).3 Frei sees Niebuhr in Christ and Culture attempting a “definition” of Christ which will offer a way of taking seriously the gospel narratives, one that moves beyond the epistemologically-driven positions current when he was writing (and that even contrasts with his own earlier suggestions in The Meaning of Revelation). The prevailing approaches were either, on the one hand, some kind of continuation of the liberal construction of Christology on the basis of an historically recovered “psychology” of Jesus, or, on the other, a Neo-orthodox reaction against the former which typically resulted in “the complete divorce of historical exegesis from Christology” (HRN, 115). In the passages which so intrigued Frei, Niebuhr understands Jesus to be a single “moral” personality who, in the perfection of his human responsive openness to God’s will, is also the embodiment or enactment of that divine will among and toward all humanity. It is precisely as the specific human being portrayed, speaking specific words, acting in specific ways, and undergoing a specific fate, that Jesus is the Christ; he unifies in his personal story both the disposition of God toward humanity and that of a perfected humanity toward God. He is thus one with humanity and one with “the Father,” and both of these aspects are accessible only through the gospel portraiture of his identity. Frei at a very early date assesses the promise of Niebuhr’s insight in words which are very suggestive of his own later development: The being of the person Jesus Christ is not – as it is for the psychologizing school – an ineffable state of awareness behind act and teachings; nor is the full personal being inaccessible to us – as it is for the theologians influenced by form criticism. The unity of the person of Jesus Christ is embedded in and immediately present to his teaching and practice. It is the focus of unity in the teaching and acts of the Lord. (HRN, 115)

2

H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper and Row, 1951), 11–29. HRN, 106. The accusation of monophysitism is that only the divine and not the human nature of Christ is being taken with full seriousness. The dogmatic intentions of the Neoorthodox theologians notwithstanding, in their actual practice Frei sees a methodological inability, often influenced by the skepticism of form-critical approaches to the gospels, to give the biblical portrayal of the words, acts, and identity of the concrete Jesus of Nazareth any significant role in their Christological positions. 3


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Three themes which will loom ever larger in Frei’s later writings are adumbrated in this statement. First there is what might be called an inclination to “materialism.” From early in his career Frei reacted strongly to the dominance in modern theology of quasi-idealistic modes of thought. Under the influence of philosophers like Gilbert Ryle as well as the Karl Barth of the later Church Dogmatics (especially volumes III and IV) Frei came to reject with increasing insistence any picture of the human self as a “ghost in the machine,” a hidden and elusive presence hovering somewhere behind the embodied words and acts of a person’s concrete life. The second theme is his closely-related insistence on the “accessibility” of the “full personal being” of Jesus in opposition to a form-critical dissolution of any link between the portraits of Jesus and his historical reality. At issue here is the question of the way access to reality is always mediated by differing descriptions, which need careful interrelation through delicate and non-systematic interpretive procedures, no one being foundational to any other. In the case of Christology this takes the form of attempts to link the gospel portraiture to historical reconstructions in a more positive way than the skepticism of form-criticism but without engendering fruitless historical “quests” for the real Jesus “behind” the texts. The third theme discernible here is the suggestion that in determining the relations of divine and human in Jesus Christ one must begin with their concrete unity, with the depicted person in his “teaching and acts.” In the approach represented by Niebuhr it is precisely as a portrayed concrete individual that Jesus “holds together” the aspects of humanity and divinity; these must be “read off ” of the narrative depiction of his person and its story (HRN, 114–15). These three themes will now be taken up in more detail, as they are each in different ways paradigmatic of the way in which Frei’s Christological vision pervades all aspects of his thought. Frei’s kind of “materialist” bias can be dealt with briefly. It is of course hardly unusual in recent philosophy or social theory, but he was one of the first among theologians to begin exploring the consequences of taking with the utmost seriousness the public and embodied nature of selfhood. As is true generally, for him the idea is closely linked to the notion of language. On the one hand language is a public performance, possible only within the matrix of social webs of meaning, but on the other it is tied inextricably to the very constitution of individual self-consciousness. Frei was insisting half a century ago in his early essays on Niebuhr that this intimate connection of private thought and public performance, inner and outer, must call into question the “psychologizing” assumptions which had dominated nineteenth-century exegesis of the gospels and indeed the entire romantic tradition of hermeneutics.

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The idea pervading these earlier trends was that what was important about Jesus must not be linked too closely to the unreliable “outer” reports of the gospel stories, tendentious as they are and laden with miraculous elements. Rather it is his “personality,” his “messianic self-consciousness,” his “characteristic disposition” which is crucial for his saving role as the Christ. It is the selfhood of Jesus as the reconstructed core “behind” his spottily reported public career (once the latter has been critically sifted) which is the locus of any revelation of God in him (HRN, 112–14). Frei was certain that this entire approach was wrong-headed, especially because it gave such short shrift to those parts of the gospels which had been central throughout the period of pre-modern (or pre-critical) exegesis, namely the passion and resurrection narratives. What he sought and found both in Niebuhr’s tentative reflections and on a more massive scale in the exegetical work of Barth’s later dogmatics was a way of insistently aligning Christological reflection along the narrative sight-lines which the gospel writers bring to bear on Jesus; this implies taking as the object of Christological reflection not an ineffable psychological disposition but rather the identifiable “self ” of Jesus as constructed in and through his public words and deeds, his very concrete interactions with his circumstances, followers, and enemies, and his ultimate fate.4 The second theme, Frei’s emphasis on the “accessibility” of Jesus by means of the gospel portrayals, is obviously related to the first, that of the material and public (not private and “ghostly”) reality of the self; it also has complex linkages with other aspects of his thought. The presuppositions about the relation of language and reality built into it will be visited again shortly. For the purpose of considering his Christology, one need only emphasize two implications of this accessibility. 4 For the discernment, very characteristic of Frei, of an important shift between the earlier volumes of Barth’s Dogmatics see, for example, HRN, 106 fn. 111 and HRN, 111. Because Frei also accepts the thesis classically stated by Hans Urs von Balthasar (based on statements of Barth himself) of a shift from “dialectic” to “analogy” in Barth’s thought around the time of his book on Anselm, the result is an interesting three-fold periodization of Barth’s thought: the early Barth up to the Anselm book, followed by a “middle” Barth roughly coinciding with the first two volumes of the Church Dogmatics, and finally the mature Barth of Volumes III and especially IV, typified by the more narrativist approach to Christology of his “Royal Man” section as classically analyzed by David Kelsey in The Uses of Scripture in Recent Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), 39–50. Under Auerbach’s influence, Frei comments that in these later volumes Barth has become “more Dantesque” and “mimetic,” TN, 168. The entire thrust of Frei’s The Identity of Jesus Christ: The Hermeneutical Bases of Dogmatic Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975) shows that he also saw a convergence between this anti-gnostic kind of portrayal of Jesus’ identity and the basic stance theological anthropology should take toward human identity in general, seeing it in terms of embodied and enacted selfhood. Thus he regarded the portrayals of Jesus as an important contribution toward a proper theological anthropology.


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First, there is the notion that reality is only grasped by human beings under some linguistic description or other. But rather than push this linguistic perspectivism to skeptical conclusions as is often done, Frei calmly affirms that human subjects really do have access to the reality so described. Language, that is, is “adequate” to reality; it should be seen not as a fundamentally distorting medium blocking access to the world but as the inevitable yet sufficient organ of such access, suited to finite and embodied beings such as ourselves.5 Of course, and this is the second point, such a perspectivism implies that there can and often will be more than one linguistic rendering of a given reality. In the case at hand there are, for example, various ancient textual or “literary” depictions of Jesus Christ as well as critical reconstructions of that story based on the canons of historical research. How are these kinds of descriptions related? Which should have priority for theological or Christological purposes? As will be seen, such questions penetrate very quickly to the heart of Frei’s discussion of theological method. For now it is sufficient to note their provenance in the Christological problem. This second theme of accessibility immediately ushers in the third theme, the demand that the revelation for faith of the truth of both God and humanity is to be found where they meet in the public “material” story of the human being Jesus as accessible through its confessionally-oriented portraiture. The “Chalcedonian” logic already at work behind the previous two themes now comes clearly into the light. Fealty to the ancient creedal notion of the two natures unified in Christ’s person without separation or confusion manifests itself at various points in Frei’s work (HRN, 115). It evidently lies behind the understanding of the depicted person of Jesus as embodied in a story but capable of complementary re-descriptions; from one perspective he is the active “persona” of God within history and from another perspective an individual human being. This one story is also capable, as already noted, of yet further re-description in light of the historical-critical treatment suited to any ancient composition. The crucial thing for Frei is that for theology these re-descriptions cannot be reduced to one another, as if one were more basic than another. Their unity lies not in their conceptual ordering within a single theory but rather (and only) in the written portrait itself, the aesthetic object upon which their interpretations converge. Frei understands this to be implied by the Christological approaches of both Niebuhr and Barth (HRN, 107; TN, 169). The third and final strand of his Christological vision, however, is the result of Barth’s influence alone. 5

See the important discussion in response to Frank Kermode at TN, 109–10.

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In his weighty doctoral dissertation on Barth’s break with the thought patterns of nineteenth-century liberalism, Frei used the word “relationalism” to describe that set of epistemological presuppositions within theology which Barth thought had to be overthrown. To oversimplify, the problem as Barth saw it was that theology at least since Schleiermacher had treated the apprehension of God as a distinct but established component within the basic structure of subjectivity. Although never given as an ordinary object, God (according to this way of thinking) could be dealt with as a correlate or content of consciousness whose relationship to cognitive structures could be grasped and fixed through elaboration of a theological epistemology. For Barth this was to commit the cardinal theological sin of making God’s revelatory action relative to, and in fact (because the nature of that relativity can be determined by us) subject to the structures of human consciousness instead of totally determined by the omnipotent intention of the divine revealer. Revelation thus becomes a datum uncovered by anthropological analysis. The “realism” of such an approach is one comfortably placed and delimited by a critique of the human subject’s own capacities. But the Barthian realism of revelation was more thoroughgoing, rejecting this anthropocentric view: “Barth’s radical realism, for which the Word of God alone is the ground of the knowledge of God, must regard this relationalism or critical realism as the common (and erroneous) basis of most academic theology in the nineteenth century.”6 This notion lies at the heart of Barth’s “analogy of faith”: any coming together of God and the world or humanity, any interaction between them either on the ontic or epistemic level, must be a matter of grace alone and therefore in no way determined by nor dependent on the capacities of the world or humanity. Any human apprehension of the act and reality of God must, no doubt, always take the form of articulating some kind of analogy with worldly acts and realities; but Barth argued that when such analogies are indeed formulated, it is always and only on the basis of God’s unanticipatable intervention within the world or history and never on the basis of some given structure discernible beforehand from the human side as stably and mutually participated in by God and the world.7 The Barthian doctrine of the analogy of faith underlies most of the basic theological decisions in Barth’s Church Dogmatics. Though it does not play the same obsessive role in Frei’s thought, it gave a decisive twist to the way Frei approached all Christological issues. 6 Hans Frei, “The Doctrine of Revelation in the Thought of Karl Barth, 1909–1922: The Nature of Barth’s Break with Liberalism” (PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1956), 214–15. 7 For a helpfully brief account of Barth’s analogia fidei see George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 283 fn. 2.


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Echoes of the Barthian suspicion are audible when Frei discusses the way the unity of divine and human within the person of Jesus Christ should be understood. For Frei insists that this unity is offered to reflection only in the personal identity configured by the evangelist’s portrayals; faith’s understandings of God and humanity apart from this event are in effect abstractions from that concrete union. This privileged site of divine–world encounter must be the basic datum for the Christian theologian. To put it even more strongly, it is axiomatic in the sense that any approach to conceiving what kind of event it is and how it is possible cannot be grounded in some putatively independent apprehension of God and humanity and their possibilities. This is what Frei is referring to when he says that Barth grounded the possibility of the incarnation solely in God’s being (TN, 169). God is its sole ground in fact, but also, as Frei puts it, “logically” as well. That is, it is not just that God alone effects the incarnation, and it is not just that the ground of possibility for this event lies in God alone and not in the world. Rather, even the very possibility of a given human being’s adequately thinking this event, of grasping it for what it is, likewise lies in God alone. Any conceptual portrait of the shape of the event of the incarnation, any intellectual penetration of the confession that the historical human being Jesus is the Christ of God can only get off the ground on the basis of inspection of the contours of the event itself. The incarnation is not understood by taking some supposed prior apprehensions of God and humanity and awkwardly trying to fit these two incommensurable quantities together. Nor does faith’s grasp of Jesus as the Christ rely on determining the nature of his divinity on the basis of some independently perceived human need for redemption; the gift of the Christ is conceptually prior to any understanding of the need for it (TN, 170–1; TCT, 154). Where God is concerned, a “Ptolemaic” epistemology reemerges, so to speak, in defiance of Kant’s “Copernican revolution.” For Barth and Frei, faith’s knowledge of God in Jesus Christ is not a function of the shape of the human subject’s experiential equipment, anthropological reflections, or perceived existential needs. A uniquely robust “objectivity” is operative in proper Christological reflection. It is considerations of this kind which lead Frei to call for a more “metaphysical” determination of Christ’s person (HRN, 116). By this he means abandoning approaches centered on the human subject, and instead basing all attempts to conceptualize the relationship of humanity and divinity in Jesus on the personal (“hypostatic”!) unity as objectively portrayed. That is, the theologian must avoid the typical moves of modern theology, immediately subordinating the conceptualization of God-in-Christ to the supposedly “prior” question of how human subjects as such might be capable, given

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their constitution, of such apprehension. Learning what makes Jesus the Christ must fundamentally orient itself from textual interpretation of the New Testament. His divinity must not simply be seen as the reverse side of a perceived human need for redemption, nor is it to be indissolubly linked to a special kind of faith-apprehension. To Frei, these latter moves always smacked of the kind of apologeticallydriven anthropocentrism which so dominates modern theology. The theological account of God’s revealing act occurs in the form of a peremptory demand for it to address “the human predicament” as already theorized in this or that way; thus the outlines of God’s act fall under the obscuring shadow of this prior conceptualization. Frei complains that God’s act in Christ has again and again been reduced to the adjunct of one or another particular cultural or existential quest for meaning and redemption.8 Indeed one of the most remarkable motifs of Frei’s thought over time has been his attempt to recover some kind of gap between an object and its subjective apprehension. The rush to “tame” the object cognitively or to tailor it to the demands of the subject must be resisted; one must linger over its own shape, its resistance and strangeness, its “over-against” quality. There will be more opportunities to see this motif at work, but here it is of concern as part of the final strand woven into Frei’s Christology. The three themes just discussed come together collectively to inform Frei’s characteristic orientation to questions of identity. The claim underlying his book The Identity of Jesus Christ was that the question of the identity of Jesus Christ is theologically prior to the question of the presence of Jesus Christ.9 What is the force of this contrast of identity and presence? Modern theology in the wake of the turn to the subject has tended in just the opposite direction, subordinating the question of his identity to that of his presence. The question of the presence of Jesus Christ can be broadly understood to mean how he relates to the world of everyday human existence, the common world which people accept as the basic context for whatever affects them. This problem of how Christ is present to contemporary consciousness has been typically addressed from two different directions. First, it has been seen as the question of his saving efficacy. Asking how Christ saves, how he can be conceived as “with” human selves today in a real and powerful way, is one way of asking about his presence. The other way is to concentrate on his historical factuality, his presence as past event. What kind of convincing portrait 8 See TN, 27–30 for the most vigorous and pointed statement of Frei’s bill of indictment against modern theology. 9 Frei, Identity of Jesus Christ, 4–5.


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can be historically reconstructed of his actuality? How can this figure be located within the same social, temporal, and material existence which is now understood to be the common experience of historical beings? Frei is by no means maintaining that these are pointless or fruitless questions. Indeed both may be quite necessary in certain theological contexts. What he objects to is the way in which the question of the textuallyportrayed identity of Jesus as a concrete individual, a person, has all too often been swamped by prior considerations either of his saving significance now or of his historical factuality then or (typically) some combination of both. The different modes of connecting these two kinds of presence (and weighing their relative theological importance) have driven modern Christological accounts, ranging from strictly coordinating a critically reconstructed “historical Jesus” with his saving “message” for people now, to the other extreme of conceiving his saving significance in such a way that the question of the factuality of his life becomes more or less irrelevant. What Frei learned from Niebuhr and the later Barth enabled him, he believed, to avoid this fruitless oscillation entirely. His own particular contribution to the problem, beyond that of his intellectual masters, was to see that questions of Christ’s presence could only be answered in a theologically relevant way by elaborating the conceptual and hermeneutical tools needed to address the question of “personal identity” and its objectivity in a rigorous way. Nonetheless, he saw in this task a development of the different but complementary attempts of Barth and Niebuhr to vindicate the centrality and adequacy for Christology of the New Testament portraiture of Jesus (TN, 88). The different but complementary kinds of Christological “concentration” in Barth and Niebuhr were not the only inspiration for Frei’s investment in the issues of Christ’s identity. In a well-known passage in the preface to The Meaning of Revelation Niebuhr had surprisingly yoked together Karl Barth and Ernst Troeltsch as his prime influences.10 Frei, too, learned from Troeltsch, though the importance of this figure does not lie for him any more than for Niebuhr in the procedures or results of Troeltsch’s work in systematic theology. What Niebuhr taught Frei to admire about Troeltsch was instead the latter’s hard-headed historicism. Indeed, Frei’s sympathy for the skeptical conclusions of a thinker like David Friedrich Strauss, or for the approach of Van Harvey in The Historian and the Believer, can be understood in a similar way.11 10 H. Richard Niebuhr, The Meaning of Revelation (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1941), xi. 11 On this sympathy see Chapter One above.

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Frei learned from Troeltsch the importance of apprehending the past as past, grasping it “literally” in its foreignness and eschewing a quick assimilation of its concerns to our own. This led to the characteristically toughminded way in which Troeltsch (again like a Strauss or a Harvey) dealt with any sign of apologetic special-pleading or dogmatic distortion in the historical investigation of Jesus Christ. This is one manifestation of that “non-apologetic” approach to theology’s encounters with cultural realities outside the circle of Christian faith which Frei found so inspiring in both Troeltsch and H. Richard Niebuhr (HRN, 13, 61). Troeltschian historicism could serve as an unexpected negative reinforcement of the positive theological path laid out by Niebuhr and the later Barth, because all three agreed that the predominant attempt of the nineteenth century to locate Jesus Christ’s authority for theological reflection in a plausible historical reconstruction of his biography was hopeless. The attempt at historical grounding could end in only one of two ways. An historically valid picture might indeed result, but it would be too slender and ambiguous to support sufficient theological elaboration. On the other hand, forcing from the scanty evidence a portrait of Jesus which could support faith’s confession of him as the Christ tended inevitably to corrupt the delicate procedures of historical judgment. For Frei the abandonment of providing historical-critical foundations for Christology involved not only embracing the rejection by Barth and Troeltsch of the old quest for the historical Jesus classically portrayed by Schweitzer. Their stance also proleptically called into question the so-called “new quest” of the 1960s and 1970s which attempted to recover the existential self-consciousness or disposition of Jesus based on an historical method augmented by complex hermeneutical maneuvers. To Frei this new quest was faced with precisely the same dilemma as the old. Of course, it was in addition an irritant to Frei’s anti-idealist sensibilities; trying to isolate the “core” of a person’s subjectivity is dubious both in its philosophical presuppositions and in its understanding of historical judgments (TN, 37–9). But in this rejection of historical grounding for Christology Frei, as already mentioned, did not want to fall into the opposite extreme, usually identified with Bultmann but visible also in thinkers like Gogarten or even the Karl Barth of the early “dialectical” period. Here the connections within Christology between the gospel portraits and historical criticism have become almost completely severed. The classically central insistence that Jesus Christ the present savior was one and the same person as Jesus of Nazareth, a Palestinian Jew of the first century CE made such cavalier handling of the question of historical criticism theologically unsustainable. Though Frei was convinced that historical research could not possibly


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ground Christology, this did not mean that the latter could subsist without any positive relationship whatsoever to the former. Frei was convinced, following his readings of Barth, Troeltsch, and Niebuhr, that Christological progress beyond these dead ends was possible only by directing Christological investigation toward the problem of identity. But following this through became the major intellectual challenge of at least the first half of his career. Granted that the problem of the identity of Jesus Christ logically precedes that of his presence (either his spiritual presence as our savior or his reconstructible factuality in the past), then where is that identity available for discernment in a way logically separable from current faith-apprehension or historical evidence? The New Testament as collective portrait, no doubt. But then with what interpretive tools must the canonical texts be approached to allow that identity reliably to “appear” as an authoritative object for the theologian? Only with the discernment of Christ’s identity could theology turn to theorizing his mode of presence or actuality, first in the salvific sense (“now”) and then in the historical sense (“then”). But how exactly was identity-description to inform these theorizations, especially on the sensitive issue of factual reconstruction? These questions which Frei’s basic Christological orientation forced on him soon led him into a large-scale historical and conceptual engagement with biblical interpretation and a preoccupation with the so-called “literal sense.”

Christology and Biblical Hermeneutics It is further testimony to the already noted continuity of Frei’s basic theological concerns that the contours of his later hermeneutic position can be found laid out surprisingly early, in a single quotation from his 1967 talk at Harvard. Shall we, as it were, radiate out from the gospels with their firm meaning (in the interaction of character and circumstance) to the earlier and later story (that of the Old Testament and that of human history since Jesus Christ)? Or shall we reverse the procedure and move from the wider or narrower context of history and experience . . . to the gospels for deeper insight on that wider context and the pre-understanding of it that we bring with us? I doubt that the latter procedure will yield much significance from the gospel story. Why not proceed the way the church has traditionally done? (TN, 42–3)

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Although it is certainly the case that Frei was not always as careful as he might have been in defining just what he meant by technical terms like “the literal sense,” careful attention to his various writings suggests that in this case at least four ideas are operative in the various uses of this phrase. All are present in the quotation above. “The literal sense” can be used as a kind of shorthand indicator of Frei’s entire theological hermeneutic of scripture. Frei himself preferred to see the principles involved as a coherent but loose conglomeration, not tightly systematized but gathered under the rather “baggy” historical concept of the “literal sense.” The first element in Frei’s understanding of scriptural interpretation is signaled by the remark about “interaction and circumstance” being the “firm meaning” of the gospel accounts of Jesus. This is of vital importance, as it points directly to the primary meaning that Frei almost always has in mind when he uses the word “literal” with regard to the Bible: the “ascriptive literalism” which sees in the gospel stories the depiction of a concrete subject whose attributes (though in the case of Jesus Christ of universal human import) are understandable only as located in their firm embeddedness within this unique person and his story. The second component of Frei’s approach to scripture is using the identity description assembled by the gospel portraits interpreted “literally” as the hermeneutical clue to the overall unity of the scriptures in general. This is that illumination of the “earlier” story Frei speaks of; this application of the gospel portraiture to the scriptural history of Israel involves a combination of privileging certain narratives and linking them by means of a broadly typological or “figural” kind of interpretation. The third aspect of his approach is its appeal to a certain kind of ecclesial tradition of biblical reading; the hermeneutic of the literal sense, in spite of the sophisticated conceptual elaboration needed for its contemporary appropriation, is for Frei “what the church has traditionally done.” The final ingredient is the hardest to pin down but important for Frei’s views on theological method. The meaning of the gospel stories must “radiate out” to illuminate not just the rest of the Old and New Testament text but also the “later story” of all human history, including the believer’s own. How this is supposed to occur, and the fate of theories of reference in light of this procedure, are complex matters which will be turned to after discussion of the first three elements. The first element of Frei’s theorization of the “literal sense,” the demand that theology grasp the gospels as “realistic” narratives, has become very commonly associated with his name. Those especially whose knowledge of his work is limited to the two monographs which he saw to completion during his lifetime (The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative and The Identity of Jesus


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Christ) will understandably see in this the key to his thought. But the subtle ramifications of what he means by the adjective “realistic” are easy to lose sight of. A “realistic” narrative for him is first and foremost one in which human individuals are depicted in their complexity and depth, enmeshed in their interpersonal and social settings, both acting and being acted upon within a unified temporal pattern of events.12 Frei’s fascination with the entire question of “narratives” can be reduced to this one aspect: their capacity to “render” personal subjects in this way. This is because for him the basic function of the gospels, to put it plainly, is to tell the reader about someone. Their essential role within scripture is to give the properly concerned reader access to the particular human being Jesus of Nazareth confessed as the Christ of God. This is why Frei precisely as a theologian gave such weight to the literary skill involved in reading a narrative specifically as such. Over his career he waged a continual war against what he saw as the heavy-handedness of global interpretive theories of “reading” in general. The development of philosophical hermeneutics, originating with Schleiermacher and the milieu of German romanticism, had by Frei’s time taken it farther and farther away from the humdrum task of actually reading different kinds of text and into the speculative realms of an anthropology centering on “understanding,” linguistically-mediated subjectivity, and a transcendental search for the “meaning of meaning” (TN, 88–9). Frei’s thorough skepticism whenever he treats of this tradition is palpable; his misgivings were both philosophical and theological. Influenced by the more “pragmatic” interpretive theories of Wittgenstein and Austin, he turned away from the attempt to offer an “explanation” of literary interpretation grounded in a (usually quasi-idealist) theory of subjectivity. He simply did not believe there could ever be a general theory of textual meaning or understanding, at least one that would be of much use in actually 12 Frei always claimed that it was Auerbach who opened his eyes to the possibility of seeing “realism” of this sort in the scriptural narratives. Usually cited in this connection is the first chapter of Mimesis (“Odysseus’ Scar”) containing Auerbach’s famous comparison of the sacrifice of Isaac episode in the Hebrew Bible with the recognition scene from the Odyssey: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 3–24. But Cornel West in his generally favorable review of Frei’s Eclipse astutely asserts that in fact Frei’s notion of realism must owe more to the analyses of identity, intention, and action associated with Ryle, Strawson, and Hampshire than to Auerbach’s Hegelian concept of realism, which latter involves “the unfolding of underlying processes and forces within a changing social context in the literary form of mixed styles.” Nonetheless, West rather overplays the distinction between Auerbach’s dependence upon “the Hegelian reality/appearance distinction” and Frei’s reduction of the scriptural accounts “to mere history-like narratives.” Cornel West, “On Frei’s Eclipse of Biblical Narrative,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 37 (1983): 299–302.

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interpreting a real text. Interpretation is a skill or set of skills, highly flexible, irremediably contextual and conditioned both by the concrete object of interpretation and by highly variant traditions of interpretive practice (TN, 33). If for him it is mistaken philosophically to search for a hermeneutic “supertheory” in which the highly divergent tasks of reading posed by different genres and interests could be reduced to variants on a single model, it is no less misguided when it comes to the specific texts and interests driving theological interpretation. Here the interest noted earlier to “save” the object from premature assimilation by the subject again comes to the fore. The New Testament texts are quite capable of being understood without invoking an encompassing horizon of “Meaning” (portentously capitalized); nor does the interpretation of their message necessarily involve some kind of existential self-involvement with or commitment to their content. All that is needed here, as with any other text, is a loose set of guiding principles of reading which are organized anew by the demands of each encounter with a concrete text (TN, 39). Those relatively unsystematized reading skills which guide the composition of or competent response to a “realistic narrative” were for Frei a perfect candidate for this more humble approach to theological interpretation. Such skills depend upon a set of interpretive categories which are highly formal; that is, they allow the contours of the text itself with its genre “cues” to have a determinative role in the process of understanding whereas the heavy machinery of “Hermeneutics” in effect already knows what it will find no matter what a given text says: “Meaning.” Also, contrary to the tendency of particular global theories of reading to become hegemonic and competitive with each other, letting the shared, low-level conventions informing both the production and reading of a genre like realistic narrative have a greater role in determining the reception of the text (Frei understood that these are never completely determinative of an act of reading) would help avoid a mere chaotic proliferation of incompatible interpretive modes which would fracture any community of scriptural interpretation.13 It was by means of this identification (and protection from dubious philosophical theorization) of the genre conventions of realistic narrative that Frei became able to link his concern with Christological identity to the question of biblical interpretation in theology. The delineation of identities in interaction with other identities and with their overall context is just what characterizes the genre, and the rediscovery of this as both the literary

13

Frei, Identity of Jesus Christ, xvi–xvii; TN, 31–2.


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and theological focus of the gospel narratives leads to the demand that they be read as realistic narratives.14 Frei in the 1970s went into some detail to try to specify more carefully the nature of the concept “identity” and the modes of its description. An identity-description of a person depicted in an account of his or her actions and interactions through a temporal sequence (that is, in a story) can take two overlapping and complementary forms: rooting characteristic actions in intentional attitudes, or grasping the emergent subject as the convergence point of utterances, acts, and reactions to events. This is the procedure Frei used in The Identity of Jesus Christ (and the lectures on which the book was based) to illustrate how the gospel accounts render the character Jesus as a concrete and recognizable individual, especially in the climactic crucifixion and resurrection sequences. The next level of Frei’s hermeneutic theory now becomes accessible. The theoretical resources of literary theory and the philosophy of identity enable Frei to recover from its modern “eclipse” the peculiar way the gospels deal with the figure of Jesus. It is this supposedly “classical” way of reading the gospels, raised up again to theological consciousness, which in turn decisively influences what Frei means by the key phrase “literal sense.” For Frei, to read the gospel stories precisely as stories, centered on the particular character of Jesus (but not forgetting that his interactions with other characters, including God, are essential to his identity) means to see that whatever saving efficacy Jesus has is a function of his concrete and inalienable personal identity. The Jesus Christ of the New Testament is not the contingent symbolization of some eternal principle, divine–human reconciliation for example. He is not an illustration of God’s disposition toward humanity. He is the enactment, the actualization of that disposition, and that precisely as the recognizable human individual he is. This narrative reconfiguration of the Chalcedonian two-natures conceptuality Frei has in mind when he says that rediscovering the narrative dimension of the gospels leads to the recognition of a “high” Christology at work in the New Testament texts (TN, 32). Understanding this unique ascription of saving significance to the person of Jesus, whether or not one in faith commits oneself to that ascription as true, is nothing mysterious. It is simply a matter of reading the texts in the way they were intended to be read by the authors who wrote them and the communities that preserved them. 14 To be more accurate, “realistic narrative” is one generic aspect of the gospel texts, more prominent in some parts (e.g. the crucifixion–resurrection sequence) than others (e.g. the birth narratives).

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This is what the texts “mean”; again, whether they are “true” is another question entirely. In other words, one can come to learn from these texts “who Jesus is” as a depicted character without having to answer the question of whether this depiction refers to someone real beyond the text, and if so, how.15 The difficult question of reference will return later. But enough has been said to see that Frei always has what he calls “ascriptive literalism” in mind when he uses the adjective “literal”: whatever the New Testament intends to proclaim concerning God’s saving act is inextricably wedded to the personal career of the single, narratively identified person, Jesus of Nazareth. The saving transaction or relationship which Christians believe subsists between human beings and God is neither a temporally free-floating fact nor a general state of affairs; it must be “ascribed” to Jesus the Christ, and is inscribed in his story (TCT, 141–2). A second component of Frei’s “literal sense” can be dealt with more briefly. Since reading for the literal sense is a strategy for appropriating the biblical texts as the common and unified scripture guiding the church, there must be some principle involved in this practice which allows the disparate parts of the Bible (including the great complexes of the Old and New Testaments as wholes) to be read as in effect one book. But clearly “ascriptive literalism” itself is insufficient for this, because most of the Bible does not consist of narrative, much less “realistic” narrative. Frei’s response to this is to 15 That this point is often missed by readers of Frei is partly due to the misunderstanding of his claim, formally reminiscent of the ontological argument for God’s existence, that the Jesus whose identity is properly recognized from the gospel portraits can only be conceived of as alive and present, that is as resurrected. This may strike many readers as bizarre and extravagant, but it need not be so perplexing. Frei is simply asserting that the resurrection accounts are integral to the stories which render Jesus Christ’s identity for the reader. In these stories the return from death in an exalted state due to the action of God is a necessary structural element in his total portrayal, making this “character” the person he is throughout the entire narrative. Just as one does not and cannot know Alice as anyone other than the one who passed through the looking-glass, so one does not and cannot know Jesus Christ as anyone other than the one who suffered crucifixion but was raised again. One is not thereby “compelled” to believe that the resurrection actually occurred. But the proper way to deny the resurrection is not to say that Jesus Christ was not raised (since the story of his raising is part of how we know who “Jesus Christ” is), but rather to say that the raised Jesus Christ is a fictional person, as opposed to a reconstructed “historical” Jesus of Nazareth. In making this claim Frei is evidently less concerned with unbelievers (whose denial of the resurrection is completely unproblematic from this formal point of view) than with those believers who think they can bracket the truth of the resurrection yet still grasp who Christ is. Such a bracketing for Frei would precisely block their full grasp of the identity of the one they claim to believe in. Note that Frei’s position depends ultimately on a literary judgment, namely that the resurrection accounts are indeed truly and indissolubly integrated with the overarching story sequence in which Jesus Christ’s identity is depicted. It also implicitly relies on the claim that we have no access to Jesus Christ independent of these accounts.


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point out how in fact a narrative structure or “story-line” is nonetheless implicit and presumed throughout virtually all of the biblical texts, whether they individually are narrative in genre or not. The scattered narratives of the Old Testament provide an implicit frame which loosely organizes and contextualizes legal and cultic regulations, prophetic oracles, liturgical exercises, and proverbial wisdom. In a similar way, the New Testament both presupposes this implied sweep of Israel’s depicted history and attaches a further development of the story-line to it. In light of the gospel of Christ, a grand sequence (creation–election–conquest–monarchy–prophecy–exile– advent of the messiah–re-conception of Israel and God’s promises) emerges to guide scriptural reading.16 There is of course nothing particularly “realistic” (in the sense discussed above) about this narrative frame. But for a Christian reading of the unified scripture of Old and New Testaments the realistic gospel portraiture of Jesus Christ can and should provide the interpretive key to the overall story-line (TN, 122). The story of Christ is not just central as the culmination of the earlier story which first makes it possible to see the earlier framework narrative in a newly illuminating way, though for the first Christians it was that, and still can be for Christians today. It can also link up more directly with particular stories in the rest of the Bible through an interpretive practice which Frei (again following some suggestions of Erich Auerbach) calls “figuration.”17 It was said that one of the basic points about a realistic narrative is that its “point” is nothing other than the story itself as revelatory of the characters in it and their interactions. In such narratives the portrayal of identities in development and conflict is constitutive of the final significance of the composition; it is not a mere vehicle for the illustration of some general idea or the delivery of an edifying moral point (in the manner of allegory). But through the device of figuration, Frei believes that classical Christian interpreters were able to take up earlier narratives of the Old Testament, even especially those scattered “patches” of realistic or quasi-realistic narrative (in some of the patriarchal accounts, for example, or in the annals of the monarchy) into the master-narrative of Jesus the Christ without denying their own proper reality or integrity. In Frei’s understanding of figural (or alternatively, typological) interpretation, there is a resonance or correspondence in the meaning patterns of two 16

Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 2. 17 Frei’s account of figuration draws on Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (New York: Meridian Books, 1959), 11–76.

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different narratives, whereby the pattern of one narrative becomes the lens through which an echoing or answering pattern is discerned in the other narrative. In classical or pre-critical exegesis, the narrative of Jesus the Christ became the grand pattern for discerning a shape in the stories of Israel which transcended (without denying) their own temporal sequence.18 The source of this resonance between differing narratives is “transcendent” because it is not grounded in historical causation; what the earlier account depicts is not historically connected to what the later depicts, say as one of the conditions which enters into an explanation of the latter’s occurrence. The meaning-patterns of the stories are understood to be connected only through the same God’s providential and self-revelatory guidance of their different events. Of course, with the rise of modern exegesis this approach seemed to be unavoidably negated by an interpretive method which fixed all biblical texts exclusively within the horizon of their critically-reconstructed human settings and composition. Frei seems to have believed on the contrary that figuration and historical criticism were in fact not utterly incompatible, but he never really elaborated a typological hermeneutic for contemporary interpretation (in light, that is, of historical criticism). In fact, the recovery of pre-critical typological reading of the Old Testament does not play much of a part in his later writings on the literal sense; the question of how to relate the realistic narratives of the gospels to the rest of the Bible is tantalizingly suggested but soon laid aside. However, the real importance of the idea of figuration for Frei turned out to be located elsewhere. It became a model for that “forward” illumination of the histories of contemporary believers which will be dealt with below as the fourth and last ingredient of Frei’s theological hermeneutic or overall understanding of “literal sense.” Before that, there is the third aspect of Frei’s “literalism”: the literal sense of the Christian scriptures (the overarching unifying story keyed to the ascriptive narrative identification of Jesus) is also historically the “plain” sense for the community which assigns scriptural status. Frei always claimed that the privileging of ascriptive realism and figural unification in scriptural reading was no innovation but rather a theoretical elaboration of a “classical” ecclesial understanding of the Bible. His best known book, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, is an intellectual history which details the early modern dissolution of that putative consensus which defined Christian theological readings of the Bible from the patristic period through the medieval, reformation, and post-reformation periods.

18

Frei, Eclipse, 27–9.


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Underlying this historical argument is the theological point that there are privileged modes of reading its scriptures to which a believing community will be committed. For a religious group to have a common foundational text always involves a tendency to socialize its members into certain ways of understanding and reading that text. Selected out of the many possible readings and meanings which can be found in any text, interpretations of its scripture which are “normative” for the religious community thus tend to cluster around a specific reading or way of construing the basic unity and significance of this text. In effect, readers in the community approach the text with certain shared expectations correlated with certain interpretive skills; the sense they derive from the text is seen as so natural that it can be called the “plain” sense of the text (TN, 104). Frei’s students Charles Wood and Kathryn Tanner helped to develop this idea of the “plain” sense in theological interpretation.19 Frei himself was less interested in elaborating its dynamics. He simply wanted to emphasize the point that the “plain” sense of the Bible during the entire pre-critical epoch incorporated those elements which have already been discussed (ascriptive realism and narrative unification of the canon).20 In other words, for most of Christian history the plain sense and the literal sense were identical; they diverged with the eclipse of biblical narrative and the rise of criticism. The understood corollary to this historical claim is that theology today should strive to bring them together again in a new way. Frei always equated the literal sense with the plain reading dominating classical Christian consciousness. But earlier in his career he had depended in his theoretical elaborations of the literal sense on certain modern literarycritical theories (such as Auerbach’s concept of realistic narrative, or New

19

See Charles M. Wood, The Formation of Christian Understanding: An Essay in Theological Hermeneutics (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1981), 43–8; Kathryn E. Tanner, “Theology and the Plain Sense,” in Scriptural Authority and Narrative Interpretation, ed. Garrett Green (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), 59–78. 20 “Plain sense” and “literal sense” can sometimes be used more or less interchangeably, but caution is called for. That is because the “literal reading” or “sensus literalis” (defined by the ascriptive literalism of the gospel accounts used as the figurally unifying center for organizing the entire scriptures into a narrative) need not be, and in fact no longer is, the “plain sense” in the sense of the dominant or unquestioned interpretive approach of the community using the text. Thus Frei did not equate them, though he eventually came to incorporate “plainness” into “literalness” as one of its classical components (TCT, 104). Even in the pre-modern period there were fluctuations over time in Christian understandings of the literal sense, as Frei learned from Brevard Childs, “The Sensus Literalis of Scripture: An Ancient and Modern Problem,” in Beiträge zur Alttestamentlichen Theologie: Festschrift für Walther Zimmerli zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Herbert Donner (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1976), 80–93. But he thought this variety always functioned more or less within the broad parameters outlined above.

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Critical understandings of the text as a meaningfully enclosed and selfcoherent artifact or “icon”). As pointed out in Chapter One, with the passage of time he began to caution that in fact the literal sense of the Christian Bible is not completely captured in these general theoretical terms but must be discerned in the actual interpretive practices of Christian communities over time (TN, 143). At the same time, he became less confident that the text itself could “determine” its own normative reading in quite the strong way he had earlier suggested; communal traditions and socialization played a more necessary role than he had realized.21 Nevertheless, the classic “plain” sense was undoubtedly for him the literal sense of the Christian scripture. And this meant not only the combination of ascriptive literalism and the narrative-figural unity of Old and New Testament already discussed, but also a fourth element linked to them: the interpretative authority or “initiative” of the scripturally-depicted world in the believer’s construal of self and history. A more careful look at the way the classic literal consensus on scripture was “eclipsed” will serve as an approach to this difficult but crucial final component of Frei’s hermeneutic stance. As Frei recounts the story, the key to the breakup of the literal sense in general was the displacement of the hermeneutically foundational “ascriptive” literalism of the gospels. To condense his account drastically, a shift in cultural sensibility (rooted in the seventeenth century but firmly and widely taking hold only in the eighteenth) led to a growing confidence in the ability of human subjects to apprehend their common world in its integrity and reality quite apart from any traditionally-shaped religious construal of it. Frei several times mentions three manifestations of this new sensibility which particularly affected the interpretation of the Bible: “empirical philosophy, Deism, and historical criticism.”22 Empiricism here refers not to any specific philosophical school but to a much broader intellectual trend whereby appeals to the “immediate” deliverances of experience became the final warrant for the apprehension of reality and the construal of its basic categories. In this way one attempted to build up an account of the meaningful world apart from any particular linguistic or conceptual frame of interpretation. Next, deism (again broadly conceived) reinforced this tendency within theology by radically question-

21 The tightrope he thought he had to walk here is nicely captured in the letter referred to above in Chapter One. Though having become more skeptical (under the influence of deconstruction) of the notion of a single normative meaning, he nonetheless stubbornly resists the “wild” and “pompous” relativisms associated with recent critical theories. Frei to Bruce Piersault ( July 8, 1980), Frei Papers, Higton Bibliography. 22 Frei, Eclipse, 11.


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ing any miraculous disruptions of experiential continuity; the world could be brought under epistemic control because God’s relation to it was now rendered so static as to be experientially innocuous. Finally, historical criticism began to treat all literary accounts of the world of the past as evidence, potential “sources” for the reconstruction of a true picture of the past which is always relatively detachable from the interpretive concepts of those accounts. They provide access to the past, but no longer on their own terms. They must be critically sifted for their contribution to the further construction of the emerging picture of the common human world embracing past and present, a world now being more surely grasped in its basic contours and in principle quite separable from the construals of it which characterize the earlier accounts.23 The result, Frei insists, could only be that the gospels came increasingly to be interrogated using categories which occluded their true function: rendering the identity of Jesus as the Christ of God. As these developments took hold, theologians (and increasingly believers more generally) no longer looked to this individually portrayed subject and his story to grasp the central clue of the dynamic relationship of God and humanity. The “world” literarily portrayed in the gospels was no longer the inclusive frame within which all other accounts of the common world of experience and history were situated. Instead, the gospels were more and more understood as one set of sources among others, whose theological significance lay not in the identity portrayed or the story told but rather in the “real” historical events of which the texts merely provide an indispensable but unfortunately tendentious presentation.24 Liberals and conservatives differed on how much of the text was reliable in presenting these events of course, but they agreed more or less that such a presentation was its function. The problem was that the increasing thrust of historical questioning toward events “behind” the text meant that theology looked right past the genre of the gospel portraits themselves, which involved an inextricable web of historical reportage, legendary elaborations, and faith-perspectives in the service of conveying to belief the concrete identity of the savior.25 This inevitably led to the long and desperate series of attempts to coordinate a “Jesus” reconstituted through this new style of historical investigation with a “Christ” understood as a unique and salvific 23

See the concentrated account of this development in Frei, Eclipse, 4–8. Frei, Eclipse, 54–60. 25 Frei would no doubt follow Barth in claiming that this very categorization into separate elements is itself a later construct of modern scholarship, and premised upon the eclipse of the original sense. See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1958), IV, 2: 478–9. 24

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divine being, event, or principle. But, Frei argued, the only unity accessible to believers which these two quantities ever had or could have was in the identity portrait of the individual Jesus Christ itself; yet the literary skills necessary to “read” this portrait were pretty much abandoned or forgotten by professional theology from the eighteenth century on.26 This is not the place to rehearse the whole long story; a glance into The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative will suffice to show the reader the complexity of the topic as an episode of intellectual history. There is no question here of an attack by Frei on the theological importance of historical criticism as such or the legitimacy of its methods. The issue instead is the difficult one of the theological status of such criticism: what stance toward or use of historical reconstruction should be involved in theological readings of the gospels as scripture? The answer for Frei turns out to be vitally important but impossible to state in simple terms, though his rejection of the typical answers offered by modern theology is clear enough. It involves two related issues. If one is to take the literal sense with renewed seriousness in theology, Frei says, one must clarify both the role of reference in this reading, and also the question of what he calls the “direction” of interpretation. To tackle these two questions, a crude schematization of some of the different elements involved in understanding a text will be useful. The following definitions of sense, significance, reference, and application might be stipulated. First, “sense” represents the basic syntactical and semantic elements involved in understanding the individual written sentences of the text. “Significance” is tied to the question of what kind of text one is dealing with, as cued by recognizable formal categories. For example, is the text non-fiction or fiction? If it is fiction, is it serious or satirical? Is it allegorical or realistic? These questions could be multiplied with ease; they point to those formal aspects of a text upon which the intentions of authors, the traditions of genres, and the expectations of properly skilled readers converge. “Reference” refers to the way a reader grasps meaningful representative connections between the text and the realities of the world which transcends it and within which the text meaningfully situates itself. Some broad expectations concerning the referential force of a text are usually already involved in discerning the kind of “significance” it has. (The question of how referential force is involved in the determination even of “sense” has been for some time the burden of much deep philosophizing, but thankfully it can be skirted in this discussion without too much loss.) Finally, “application” is, crudely speaking, the use to which one puts one’s understanding 26

Frei, Eclipse, 10–12.


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of the text, the role this text and an individual’s reading of it play in that individual’s conduct of life with its experiences and choices. One might understand “significance” as “meaning-for-any-competent-reader” while “application” is more particularly “meaning-for-me (or my group).”27 That all four of these categories are partially overlapping and thoroughly interrelated can be granted without denying the usefulness of a rough separation for analytic purposes. It is not being claimed that Frei uses these terms in this way, only that they provide a convenient way of illuminating some points he labors to make. In terms of the above schematization, Frei’s fundamental point about the literal sense of the gospels might be described in the following way. Their “significance” is that of confessional identity portraits; they relate the happenings surrounding a concrete figure of the past in the belief that as a concrete person he was and continues to be the fundamental salvific gesture in the world of the creator God worshipped by Israel. The “significance” of this portraiture is not first and foremost allegorical (illustrating or embodying timeless religious truths) nor historical (providing a biography of a revered first-century Jewish religious figure). The “significance” of the portrait is confessional: it offers this figure clothed in the ultimate significance of the divine disposition toward the world. Seeing this “significance” is a matter not of having faith but simply of being a competent reader. Faith is a response, a matter of “application.” That is, with the proper literary and historical sensitivities one can grasp this “significance” of the gospels and then make any number of “applications” of it, but in the original social location in which these sensitivities were developed, the Christian churches, this kind of reading was to a large degree conjoined with “application” of them as the scripture of the community. And that means in some sense sharing the commitment to Jesus Christ evinced in and by the texts themselves. The texts offer a “world” in which Jesus is the Christ of God and therefore the fundamental determinant of both what is identified as divine and how it is properly responded to. A competent reader can grasp this world, but the believer is invited to share this world, enter it as his or her own, use its scriptural depiction as the essential orientation and illumination of the world encountered here and now. With this preliminary account in place, the two questions of reference and the “direction” of interpretation may be taken up in turn. Through scattered and fragmentary discussions Frei seems to suggest two reasons, one 27 Something like this distinction, but formulated in terms of “meaning” versus “truth-forus,” seems to be at work in TN, 40.

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general and one particular, as to why the question of the referential force of the gospel texts will have to be difficult to answer. Generally, he is convinced that linguistic or textual reference is an elusive matter in and of itself. True to his pragmatic and Wittgensteinian instincts about language, he says that reference is a somewhat fluid and varied phenomenon. It cannot be reduced to a logical function of the “sense” of meaningful sentences nor can it be “fixed” in much detail by means of a generic theory of reference (TN, 144, 209–11). Resorting once again to the terms of the heuristic picture of reading suggested above, something like the following summary can be gleaned from Frei’s brief asides on this matter. One should consider the question of “reference” on a case-by-case basis as the product of particular encounters between texts formally configured in certain ways and readers both unconsciously shaped and consciously disposed to read them in certain ways (TN, 159–61). If there are invariant modes of “reference” on the semantic level of certain kinds of sentences (the level of “sense”), they nonetheless have an open texture which enables them to make varied contributions to the meaning of a text based on the particular constellation of “significance” and “application” brought to bear in a specific act of reading. This general problem of reference is further complicated in the case of reading the gospels as scripture by the particular difficulty that any properly theological interpretation cannot avoid the question of God. This question itself involves both general concerns as to how language can refer to God at all and particular issues surrounding the fact that discourse about God is already ingredient in the identity portraiture of Jesus as the Christ. Taking God seriously is not just a matter of “application.” The problem of language about God already occurs on the level of what is being called the “significance” of the texts, since God is operative as a quasi-character in the narrative renderings of Jesus Christ’s person. God’s relation to Jesus is in fact decisive for his identity as the Christ. Beyond that formal or literary identification, Frei wants to insist that faithful Christian “application,” a commitment to these texts as scripture and thus an attempt to adopt their perspective on things, implies that successful identification of and reference to God in general is guided by the concrete role played by God in the particular story of Jesus’ person. In other words, Christian apprehension of the identity of Jesus as the Christ, dependent as it is on the gospel narratives, is also the central clue to meaningful language about the God Christians witness to. But if that is so, the first priority for theological interpretation of the gospels (and by extension of the scriptures generally) is grasping the identity of Jesus the Christ as portrayed; only on this basis would it be possible to begin probing the ques-


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tion of the referential force of the texts in question. A prior commitment to this “applicative” truth of the portraiture of Jesus as the Christ would have to direct inquiry into the question, not of identifying who these stories are about (any competent grasp of the story’s “significance” can get at this, quite apart from specific “applicative” commitments), but rather of how much this character’s story overlaps with reality. For example, which events depicted need to represent or refer to actual historical events for the story’s Christian confession to be viable?28 To bring this too-hasty discussion to a conclusion, these considerations suggest that for Frei the textual “sense” and “significance” of the gospel accounts of Jesus become the focus or foundation of the way scripture functions to norm Christian belief. As a confession of and a witness to the incarnation of God in Christ, Christian faith for Frei commits itself to a “reading” of the world and of God centered on the portrayed identity of Jesus. Who God is as savior and who human beings are as recipients of and respondents to that salvation are to be found here. To put it another way, the “direction of interpretation” is thus not “from the world to the text”; that would suggest resolving the portrayed divine-human identity into more general categories (“God,” “human,” “world,” etc.) already available. The proper “direction” is instead “from the text to the world,,” which implies that a Christian “application” of the text uses it to provide fundamental categories for construals of God and world and their relation. That means, however, that for the particular “applicative” context of Christian faith the question of the integral narrative function of the texts in identifying Jesus 28 Frei nowhere lays out matters in this systematic form, but see especially TN, 108–14, 139–45 and TCT, 84–7. It is not simply fortuitous that these New Testament texts deal with God through the medium of realistic narrative. Their self-placement within the trajectory of the history of God’s dealings with humanity through Israel naturally suggests a continuation of the narrative patterns already set up in the Old Testament scripture. But beyond this, as David Kelsey suggests, there is a connection between a narrative treatment of God’s modes of relating to our world and what must be the “utter singularity” of those modes (due to the fact that God’s relation to the world is not just contingently but conceptually unique, i.e. there can logically be only one instance of it). “Only narrative provides the type of discourse adequate to give a uniquely individuating description of God as an unsubstitutable personal identity, that is, of God as singular.” David Kelsey, “Biblical Narrative and Theological Anthropology,” in Scriptural Authority and Narrative Interpretation, ed. Garrett Green (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 187), 139. Indeed Frei refuses any rift in principle between God’s humanity in Jesus and the linguistic or textual proclamation of that event. He has some fascinating remarks (contra Frank Kermode) which assimilate an incarnational Christology to a view of language which sees it not as a distorting and alienating barrier between humans and truth but as a “fit” vehicle of truth. Against the quasi-gnostic bias which sees an alienating “fall” into language Frei proposes that language might be created in such a way that truth itself can be “linguistic or verbiform” (TN, 109–10).

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Christ is logically prior to the question of the “reference” of any specific element in the narrative.29 To sum up, if the choice is made to read the texts as Christian scripture (a matter of “application”) this reading will have to be primarily guided by their literary shape, their “sense,” and “significance.” But then if the question of “reference” is tackled on that confessional basis (and Frei maintains that it will be impossible theologically to avoid the issue of “reference” completely), it will always have to be directed by or subordinated to what is first learned about the identity of the central figure Jesus. Frei believes that the richness and depth of this portrait will in fact support complex and perhaps shifting determinations of “reference” in specific instances, but in theology all such determinations should be constantly tested against the portrait itself (its “sense” and “significance”) and will be guided by the prior commitment to the person portrayed as the Christ of God (which is part of what “applying” it as scripture means) (TCT, 141–5). One potential source of confusion should be addressed. Frei in some earlier works like Eclipse invokes the language of reference in what seems to be a different way. For example, he clarifies his insistence that for realistic narrative “the story is the meaning” by making the further claim that “the texts do not refer beyond themselves.”30 He means that in identitydescription narratives the meaning of the text is precisely the figure portrayed, not some “moral” or “idea” to be for which the figure stands in as a symbol or cipher. In the case of Jesus Christ Christians are ultimately dependent on the New Testament’s textual portrayal for any recognition of him. Hence the text and the meaning of the text cannot be pried apart, as if the text were one contingent mode of access to the meaning among others, because the meaning is a person whose identity description is a unique function of just this text, encoded in its language alone. But saying “the text does not refer to itself ” is misleading, and as he engaged more carefully in the question of reference in later texts he dropped such language lest it suggest that the question of the relationship of what is portrayed to reality is religiously irrelevant. In fact, Frei sees theological interpretation always walking a tightrope between an ambitious theorization of textual or linguistic reference which treats the scriptures as instances of a general class of “religious” discourse on the one hand, and a purely pragmatic dissolution of the entire question of historical reference on the other (TN, 166). This long detour on the question of reference was necessary to provide 29 See TN, 42–3 for one of the earliest statements on the question of “direction.” See also Frei, Eclipse, 5. 30 See, e.g., Frei, Eclipse, 280.


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the proper background for understanding Frei’s claim (the fourth component of his overall theological hermeneutic) that in the literal sense the proper “direction of interpretation” must be from text to world, not world to text. Reference concerns the way in which relationships between language and reality contribute to the meaning of linguistic events or artifacts, including texts. For a text to be meaningful, some determination of reference is necessary. But for Frei, it cannot be determined by a general theory of reference in such a way that all meaningful referential questions might be settled in advance; it must be done in an “ad hoc” manner (i.e. on a case-bycase basis), highly sensitized to both the formal shapes of texts and the contexts of their application. Such contexts can include traditional modes of reading and communal goals for reading. This is one reason why the question of the reference of the gospel accounts is so tricky. The fact that in their application as Christian scripture the gospel texts intend to allow the ultimate reality of God and world through the story Christ to become “visible” for belief obviously complicates the reference question for theology, because of the utterly unique mode of relationship which must subsist between God and worldly reality. But the more immediate result for the reading of scripture as scripture is that the way in which referential connections are set up between text and world should be guided by the unique subject Jesus and his story. Seeking to understand the semantic connections between text and reality involves a piecemeal “adequation” of their respective categories by working painstakingly outward from the text and allowing its categories the initiative in the process. This “directionality” of scriptural interpretation (from text to world) is rooted finally in the way Frei’s “literal sense” deploys (following Niebuhr) the Chalcedonian logic of hypostatic union on the level of textual interpretation. The portrayed personal subject Jesus Christ must dominate the way his predicates are understood, especially the predicates “human” and “divine” (TCT, 141–2). The realistic and ascriptively literal character of the gospel portraits of Jesus is the textual inscription which corresponds to the hypostatic union: the rendered person is the mode of access to the ontological person (TN, 209). It is only at this point in the discussion that the basic questions of theological method as they appeared to Frei can begin to be treated in their proper dogmatic context. For it is the authority for Christian faith in God of the personal divine-human concreteness of the object of witness as authoritatively preserved in the literally-interpreted scripture which sets the basic theological problematic for him. The ontological unity of divine and human as referent is accessed only through the concrete literary unity of the storied Jesus. But this specific determination of the proper reference or reality status of this story is merely one among others. And these others

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might have a necessary role of their own in theological interpretation. The Jesus-portrayal may “refer” merely in the manner of a fictional character, or it may refer to some historical, factual person, or it may refer to a hypostatic union of human and divine natures (TCT, 143). Frei naturally believes that the last referent should have priority in theology if it is responsible to the scriptural status of the story, but not exclusive priority. After all, it is part of the very logic of the incarnation that the subject Jesus must also have been an actual human person who lived within a specific historical context. Hence the story of Jesus as the Christ must have certain referential connections to the actual, shared historical world. This means that theology cannot and should not claim to make faith invulnerable to historical questions. Historical criticism’s use of the gospels simply as sources is (or should be) by its very nature religiously uncommitted, and hence cannot guarantee such referential connections between story and history as will assure Jesus’ status as the Christ. But it is quite able to call such connections into question, even to such a degree that his status as Christ for faith would likewise have to be called into question by the believer. Obviously, Frei is convinced that this latter possibility has not in fact occurred. But as a theologian he must acknowledge the hugely significant fact of its possibility in principle. In this way the question of how the theologian relates the faithful perspective of commitment to the Christ to the demands of an “uncommitted” discourse like historical method becomes unavoidable. And this turns out to be the initial point from which Frei explores the entire question of theological practice. In effect, Frei as a theorist of theology expands his particular suggestions about the relation between the gospel portraiture of Jesus and historical criticism into a set of general reflections about the connection in theology between the “internal” perspective of a theological discourse committed to truth of God in Christ and those “external” perspectives contained in discourses not so committed.

Negotiating Perspectives on the Christological Object As mentioned in the first chapter, Frei’s sudden death in 1988 prevented a definitive presentation in print of his typology of theological approaches. Instead, the notes from different public lectures were lightly edited and posthumously assembled into the volume Types of Christian Theology. It is in his discussions of this typology that the question of internal and external perspectives in theology is explicitly broached, so this section will have to treat, with relative brevity, of the typology. Only what is useful for indicating Frei’s own overall theological approach will be delineated. For purposes


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of orientation it can be noted that the representatives he usually had in mind for the five types are: Type One, Gordon Kaufman; Type Two, David Tracy; Type Three, Friedrich Schleiermacher; Type Four, Karl Barth; and Type Five, D.Z. Phillips. His discussions of these thinkers as such are not at issue here, but will become relevant in Chapter Four when the typology is dealt with more extensively. Frei’s typology begins with the observation that Christian academic theology in the modern West (his primary concern) has always subsisted in tension between two demands: first, that it find a stable and accepted place within the ensemble of disciplines comprising higher intellectual culture (“the academy”) and, second, that it offer a responsible description of the beliefs and practices of a specific religious community (Christianity) from a position committed to or sharing in those beliefs and practices (TCT, 19–21). On the whole, theology has been reluctant to release itself from either commitment, and this Janus-faced vigilance has imposed a peculiar shape on the negotiation of internal and external perspectives involved in theology. The tension between internal and external perspectives within academic theology has become steadily sharper as perspectives uncommitted or even hostile to religious belief have become institutionalized within the structure of academic learning; these have been thought to provide more encompassing and less distorted criteria for knowledge of reality. In view of this, Frei offers a spectrum of five types of theology representing a continuum of ways of relating the practice of Christian self-description to its intellectual environment of uncommitted perspectives, especially to the common claim of these perspectives to provide fields-encompassing criteria of meaning and truth incumbent on all responsible thinkers. Acknowledging, then, that the beliefs and practices of the Christian community (and many of the objects to which they refer) can be described either from a stance of internal participation or from a stance of external observation, Frei’s question centers on how these two types of description have been related within theology itself. Type One and Type Five stand at the poles of the spectrum (TCT, 28–30, 46–55). Loosely speaking, the former devalues the role of communal selfdescription in theology to the extent that the internal–external distinction is effectively dissolved, while the latter divides discourses internal to a community of commitment from all external discourses so sharply that they are simply juxtaposed, one contributing nothing to the meaning of the other. In both cases, the tension between internal and external perspectives within the belief and practice of the Christian community is slackened and plays no constitutive and fruitful role in theological reflection.

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The three middle types, in contrast, assign external perspectives a positive role in theology by variously conceiving as theologically productive their relation to the internal commitments of Christian truth. In Type Two, it is believed that both internal and external perspectives on Christian beliefs and practices in their integrity can be creatively harmonized through appeal to general criteria of meaning (which may be anthropological-existential or metaphysical) (TCT, 30). Although the integrity of both internal and external discourses is preserved, in effect a broad overlap of meaning is negotiated between them by subsuming the internal discourse under a set of externally-legitimated criteria holding generally for all religious experience and discourse. Type Three, like Type Two, tries to find resonances or overlaps between those discourses arising from within the community’s faith-commitments and those employing external or non-committed descriptions of the same phenomena. Unlike Type Two, however, it does not appeal to an externallylegitimated set of categories to structure the encounter in a systematic way. Such an ordering of the encounter would imply that the external categories were in effect encompassing for both internal and external description, whereas Type Three expects reciprocity of mutual illumination without subordinating one set of categories to the other. It looks for fragmentary overlaps between internal and external, appealed to on a case-by-case (“ad hoc”) basis (TCT, 38). Finally, Type Four shares with Type Three a skepticism that the encounter of internal and external perspectives can be systematized, but it insists that in these encounters there must nonetheless be an ordered priority of one over the other. Reversing Type Two, it is the internal perspective and its categories which become the encompassing or subordinating framework, the arbiter in the exchange of meanings. For Type Four, any illumination within theology provided by uncommitted perspectives on the beliefs of the Christian community comes by means of their strict subordination to that community’s faith-committed categories (TCT, 38–9). Types Two, Three, and Four thus all grant the importance of external perspectives and categories within the task of Christian self-description. Indeed, all three types demand the theological use of such categories, but the rules of that usage differ. A slightly more detailed look at these respective rules for usage is in order. For Type Two as Frei describes it, the way theology uses external perspectives is mediated by a systematically-structured set of categories adopted from philosophical reflection. Here the theologian can and must systematically conduct mutually critical encounters between internal and external discourses; but the terms of mutual criticism are ordered by the subsumption of the entire encounter under a guiding philo-


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sophical framework, for example a general hermeneutic of religious experience and language. This systematically coordinates any Christian claim within a putatively more encompassing or “neutral” framework ruled, say, by appeals to “general” human experience (TCT, 31). Type Three involves something more subtle and harder to pin down. It does not attempt to stabilize mutually critical encounters within a systematic framework. To use Frei’s wording, it brings together internal and external discourse “directly,” that is, without the mediation of an already determined set of encompassing categories. Instead, the theologian of this type limits the respective fields of Christian confession and “scientific” investigation in such a way that any real clash is ruled out in principle. Although the positive use made of external categories within theology cannot be made systematic but must always be ruled by pragmatic and situation-specific considerations (i.e. it is “ad hoc” or case-by-case), there is indeed a negative determination in principle: when external and internal discourses overlap the results will usually be mutually illuminative and complementary but at least can never be finally irreconcilable (TCT, 37–8). On this understanding, external and internal perspectives are on the one hand sufficiently compatible that theology may make its own use of external categories and descriptions, but they are on the other hand sufficiently distinct that they cannot fundamentally collide at any point. In fact a sound theology will always be oriented by the principle that any friction between internal confessions and external positions must be resolvable; it must be the product of either theology or the external science misunderstanding itself or the other. But this assumption of final concord is a negative position; it cannot be demonstrated from either the internal or the external perspective. So no move toward a totalizing theoretical account of this always open possibility will be made, as there is no “super-theory” which can systematically coordinate the internal and external worlds of discourse. Their encounter is a “direct correlation,” a continual search for illuminating convergences of meaning but without any general principle (apart from the negative principle or “non-aggression pact”) structuring that encounter once and for all. Type Four, in turn, demands the incorporation of external discourses within theology but always as ordered by theology’s own logic which is one of Christian belief or commitment; they must be subordinated to Christian theology’s own priorities and native concepts. It is important to point out, though, that even in this type there is both a real and necessary use of these uncommitted discourses; their roles will be just as “ad hoc” as in Type Three, just as systematically undeterminable beforehand, but they are no less indispensable for the task of Christian theology. (The meaning of this indispensability will be taken up explicitly later.) Unlike a Type Three theology,

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however, theology in Type Four cannot even determine in principle that internal and external discourses cannot clash; indeed, such a clash is always possible, hence the demand that their incorporation within theology is premised upon their extensive critical restructuring. There is no theological commitment to the integrity of external discourses, only a commitment to use them piecemeal for clarifying purposes, always taking care to deny them any claim to completely subsume Christian truth under their own terms (TCT, 41). To summarize Frei’s typology it will be convenient to suggest a single term for each type which captures the essence of the way that type understands the encounter between internal and external. “Dissolution” of any encounter might describe Type One, while Type Five suggests a “juxtaposition” of integral language-worlds. “Correlation” best describes the unmediated but positive encounters envisioned in Type Three; the asymmetric encounters of Types Two and Four will be dubbed “coordination” and “subordination” respectively. That these tags for Type Two and Type Four have the common root of “order” or “ordering” is deliberate; this suggests that both in effect appeal to some total structuring principle, in the former case putatively “neutral” and systematic (i.e. philosophy), in the latter case unashamedly internal and “ad hoc” (i.e. Christian doctrinal commitments).31 The concern of the present chapter, as already implied, is not to sort out all of the perplexing details of the typology but to understand Frei’s own basic theological stance in light of it. This can be done by triangulating his position based on his comments about the various types. What follows is an interpretive proposal, certainly debatable, concerning a matter upon which Frei never finally declared himself. Roughly speaking, it can be argued that Frei sees Types Three and Four as marking the bounds of a responsible Christian theology. Each has its own promise but its own problems as well; each is likewise threatened by the temptations of its close neighbors, Types Two and Five. (Type One theology does not even come up to the status of a genuine option for Frei; its status as Christian theology is dubious, as it dispenses with the need for a truly “specific self-description of Christianity” [TCT, 29]). This characterization of Frei’s overall position with respect to 31 This terminology is adopted solely for purposes of convenience in analysis; Frei nowhere lays out the options in precisely these terms. In fact, Frei’s own usage varies in confusing ways. For example, he sometimes implies that “correlation” encompasses all three of the middle types; at other times he excludes Type Four from any attempt at correlation; finally, he can strongly suggest that really only Type Three employs a correlation in the strict sense (“direct” correlation). Obscurities in Frei’s lecturing style are partly to blame, but it must be remembered also that Types of Christian Theology is a collection of material representing developments in Frei’s thought over time and never intended for publication in its present form.


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the types needs further discussion, because it often occurs that supporters of Frei implicitly identify him with Type Four, while some detractors misunderstand him as advocating Type Five (or else they implicitly deny any firm distinction between Types Five and Four). The intellectual sources of Frei’s dissatisfaction with Type Two are several, and not particularly surprising in light of his already-sketched Christological and exegetical assumptions. Whatever else Frei absorbed from his close study of Karl Barth’s theology, he was profoundly sympathetic to what he (startlingly) calls Barth’s “secular sensibility.” Simply stated, Barth brought a bluff skepticism to any claim that the given structures, processes or history of nature or (especially) human culture could be read unambiguously as reinforcing or demonstrating the truth of the Christian witness to God (TN, 172). His insistence on God’s unanticipatable grace in revelation did not question the reality and ubiquity of God’s presence and activity in the world outside of faith in Christ, only their accessibility outside of faith as an “independent” source for theology. A natural (though perhaps not inevitable) epistemological corollary of this position is the Christological orientation sketched earlier in this chapter. For Frei just as for Barth, the Christ-event, the reality grounding Christian theology, is not such as could possibly be resolved into or explained without remainder in terms of a conceptual scheme formed independently of it. Frei would understand such a scheme as an attempt to interpret God-in-Christ as an instance in a general class such as “religiously significant event” or “salvific manifestation of deity.” But for Frei, like Barth, the incarnation (however that term is understood in detail) is not an “instance” at all; it is utterly singular (“sui generis”). Hence no frame of reference formulated in terms of other spheres of human experience can be brought to its interpretation without that frame requiring serious and careful reshaping (TCT, 154–5). As a result of this, Frei followed Barth in decrying the great turn in modern theology since the enlightenment period to apologetic modes of theology, which attempted to demonstrate the plausibility (or, in extreme cases, the necessary truth) of Christian claims by appeal to generally available experience or to prevalent philosophical positions. He saw in this an unavoidable tendency to devalue or even dissolve the given content in God’s revelation (classically, the “what” of belief or fides quae) through obsessive attention to the conundrum of accommodating it to modern modes of thought (the problem of how to believe, the fides qua). Frei’s own theological explorations repeatedly turn on the deleterious effects of this apologetic orientation (often expressed within theology by the foundational role of a theological anthropology). As he saw the matter, the

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quest to make faith intelligible in non-committed terms has dominated academic theology in the West even when the formal goal of an apologetic has been supposedly abandoned (TN, 27–30). His Barthian bias in understanding revelation in Christ convinced Frei that Type Two asked of theology something which it could not deliver: a rigorous coordination of Christian doctrine with general experiential categories mediated by a philosophical hermeneutic formulated in externally-plausible terms. Hence the mixture of irony and exasperation when confronted with the pretensions of David Tracy’s “fundamental” theology or of the Ricoeurian hermeneutic at its basis (e.g., TN, 138–9). As with Barth, the energy of Frei’s skepticism concerning the possibility of a systematic “fundamental theology” of this type might also be linked to intellectual commitments not directly theological in nature. As far back as 1967, in his highly revealing review of Moltmann’s Theology of Hope, Frei expressed a decided preference for the more “empiricist” sciences of nature and especially society to those totalizing dialectics of nature and history which he saw as long-dominant within academic theology, mainly due to its being rooted in German intellectual traditions. Grand apologetic schemes in this tradition seemed dominated by “anthropocentric” and “historicist” ideologies which saw both nature and history as “organic wholes” and “unitary processes.”32 Frei insisted that history simply did not offer up such meaningful patterns; the shape to be derived from the human story with its intellectual traditions is far more fragile, fragmentary, and multivalent than the grand narratives uncovered by the dialectic philosophy of history (as variously formulated in idealism and its Marxist progeny). In short, the low level and piecemeal “thick description” practiced in Anglo-American sociology and anthropology was more plausible to him.33 For Frei, the latter allows an insistence on the ineradicable contingency and difference of human histories, which is precisely what calls into question for him the possibility of a systematic apologetic scheme for theology. Neither internal nor external (non-Christian) discourses are capable of being systematically mastered in the fashion which a fundamental coordination of their meanings would suggest. It is far better to allow that enclaves of cultural meaning confront each other in myriad overlapping and surprising ways than to try and constrain such encounters through application of a totalizing ordering pattern providing a philosophical account of their possibility. Considerations such as these have, of course, become a staple of discus32

Hans Frei, review of Jürgen Moltmann, The Theology of Hope, Union Seminary Quarterly Review 23 (1968), 271–2. 33 Ibid.


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sions of that “postliberalism” of which Frei was supposedly one of the guiding lights. For many such interpretations, Frei’s critique of Tracy’s Type Two “mutually critical correlation” or “revisionism” has become one of the most important markers of what “postliberal” means.34 But equally if not more important for understanding Frei (and much more seldom noticed) is his sharp criticism of Type Five, an approach to religious language he associates with the philosopher of religion D.Z. Phillips. The nature of this critique depends upon Frei’s understanding of the different tasks of Christian theology in terms of different “layers” of language and conceptuality, to describe which he employs the distinction of first-order from second-order. Theology is informed by and committed to the proclamation of the Christian gospel, and hence takes as its basic linguistic material the words, symbols, and concepts of Christian scripture and tradition, worship, and prayer. But precisely in service to its commitment it is also charged with reflecting on and ordering this mass of material in order to uncover its interconnections (how it “hangs together,” its “logic”) and to criticize its various formations in the light of responsibility to its defining norm (TCT, 2). This is language about its own language, i.e. second-order reflection on first-order discourse. The norm is made accessible through scripture, but only in a culturally-mediated form which demands constant probing and re-articulation in new cultural terms. And this implies the necessary use of “external discourses.” As a living tradition, a family of related and ongoing cultural concerns, Christianity is constantly drawing into itself discourses which are taken up into an ever-renewed self-understanding of its witness to God-inChrist; it changes them and in turn undergoes change in the process. It is not a sealed treasury of fixed linguistic artifacts that are simply repeated endlessly. Frei in his 1983 Cadbury lectures called this appeal to outside perspectives within theology a “third order” of theological speech, a reflection on secondorder speech in the service of the latter’s reflection on first-order speech.35 34

Frei’s privileging of Tracy as his favorite opponent and Tracy’s energetic ripostes to him and Lindbeck, combined with Tracy’s coining of the term “revisionism,” have together resulted in his identification as the “typical” liberal-revisionist, for example in Placher’s various writings (see Chapter One). 35 See TCT, 43–4. Frei there schematizes Types Two, Three, and Four by the way each relates these three “orders” of theological speech. All three types are concerned to execute the move to a second-order critique of first-order language. In Type Four third-order discourse is rigorously subordinated to the demands of the move from first-order to second-order, while in Type Two third-order discourse becomes determinative of the way first- and second-order speech interact (excessively so, in Frei’s opinion). These are two opposed “flows of interpretation” very similar to those discussed above in the section on theological interpretation of the Bible. With Type Three, the third-order and second-order speech are related more ambiguously, reciprocally correlated without the firm priority of either. This awkward scheme will receive further treatment in Chapter Five below.

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As Frei sees it, the essential problem with Type Five is that rigorously pursued its logic is tantamount to the assertion of theology’s impossibility. If Type One calls into question the possibility of a Christian theology, Type Five calls into question the possibility of a Christian theology. Why? Because the critical traffic between first-order and second-order speech through the use of third-order discourses, which for Frei is definitive of theology, is here ruled out in principle (TCT, 54). That is, in a position like that of Phillips (so-called “Wittgensteinian fideism”), a theory of religious language is operative which defines religious meaning as logically confined to a very strictly demarcated context of language use. Religious concepts are never, for example, used to make assertions about states of affairs in the world (even though their surface grammar may appear to suggest this). Rather, religious words and ideas are ingredient within certain socialized practices of devotion and existential orientation; these are religious precisely in that they are characterized by the use of terms like “God” or “faith” as transcendent reference points for organizing dispositional attitudes and choices in accordance with learned traditional forms. But apart from this pragmatic deployment these terms have no specifiable religious meaning which could semantically “overlap” with the usages of non-religious discourses. In the living of a religious life connections are no doubt constantly made between religious and non-religious language and concepts, but they are strictly on the pragmatic and personal level, incapable of extrapolation from their performative context. Such interconnections are inoperative on a theoretical or generalized semantic level. To put it differently, once rendered sufficiently abstract for theoretical inspection religious and non-religious discourses reveal such sharply divergent aims, contexts, and rules of use that their semantic “overlap” is virtually nil (TCT, 48–50). But for Frei if this account were accurate then there could be no meaningful distinction within religious belief (and hence within theology) between first-order and second-order religious discourse. No critical intellectual purchase on religious language could be gained on the level of theory. No pattern of meaning could be uncovered which transcended personal application, and so no communally available general distinction between good and bad application could be warranted, no conceptual redescriptions of religious attitudes could be weighed for their adequacy, no norm could be isolated to ascertain the way religious language and practice is authorized. But these are precisely the tasks of theology! The logic of Type Five ultimately involves the claim that however meaningful it may be on the existential level, religious talk on the reflective level of generally available concepts (i.e. outside of the circle of immediate committed reli-


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gious practice) must always remain quite opaque and esoteric (TCT, 49). Theology as understood by Frei or (he would argue) the broad Christian tradition would be simply impossible. The implication of Frei’s critique here should not be missed. There is a real gain in the understanding of religiously-committed discourse even for the religious believer when that discourse is brought into meaningful connection with other discourses. The production of religiously available meaning can never be so sharply confined within the circle of use of a single language-game, nor can understanding be reduced so unilaterally to “competent” practice in context. On some level, there must be possible a reflection on competent usage which allows a responsible re-description and critical appraisal of religious language in light of some norm, even a norm internal to the religious practice itself. Apart from such reflective norming practices a religion would be reduced either to simple and endless repetition of the same language, or else to a blind “drift” of religious practice incapable of self-differentiation internally or externally. But how, Frei asks, can this reflectively critical self-description of a community’s language be at all possible without resorting to “alien” linguistic resources? Such resources are no doubt always provisional and inevitably distorting mirrors, but they provide the only possibility of critical self-reflection, the only alternative to a communal-linguistic autism (TCT, 55, 85). In short, Frei’s criticism of Type Five strongly implies that without the continual “borrowing” of external modes of discourse (third-order) there can be no internal reflective guidance (second-order) of a religious tradition of language usage (first-order); there can, in short, be no responsible theology. Without submitting Christian language to controlled conceptual re-description, no authorizing and pattern-inducing norm could even be reflectively glimpsed through the shifting embodiments of practice.36 Types One, Two, and Five are not candidates for describing Frei’s own understanding of theology’s nature and methods. Though not uncritical, Frei’s far more positive discussions of Types Three and Four suggest that it is these types which mark the appropriate range of approaches for a responsible Christian theology. Again it is admitted that some tentativeness in this judgment is unavoidable, because Frei’s own purpose did not demand that he clearly locate his own theological preferences firmly on the spectrum he devised. Not surprisingly, given the manifest importance of Karl Barth for his thought, the tone of his descriptions of Type Four seems to be the most

36 Chapter Six below will suggest that this methodological principle is only fully understandable in light of its links to Christological and Trinitarian issues.

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sympathetic. Indeed, the temptation is strong to simply identify Frei with Type Four and be done with it. But too much haste here will miss some important signals. One keeps coming back to Frei’s unwillingness to let go of the theology of his teacher H. Richard Niebuhr. The latter’s “unique, profound path” between Reinhold Niebuhr’s quasi-liberalism and Barth’s Christocentrism left Frei at the end of his life “uneasy but hopeful” (TN, 229). As pointed out earlier, a close reading might also be able to make out a subtle shift in Frei’s attitude to Type Three. Compare the flat statement in 1983 that Type Four represents the type “most nearly congruent” with the literal sense and its understanding of Christ to the more nuanced claim three years later that “the third and fourth types are best designed to articulate the [classical] consensus in regard to this topical focus [i.e. the literal sense].”37 Karl Barth’s own hostility to Schleiermacher should not lead too quickly to the conclusion that Hans Frei, deeply in harmony with Barth though he was, simply rejected Type Three in favor of Type Four. It is more accurate to take seriously the just-quoted remark and say that for him Types Three and Four mark the boundaries within which to discover the proper use by theology of external discourses, such as the technical conceptual tools of philosophy or of critical historical investigation. The key to this proper use is signaled by Frei’s advice that genuine theology will always involve “cutting one’s philosophical losses” (TCT, 89–90). Type Three and Type Four represent two different ways of cutting philosophical losses in the face of two different threats to theology, but in so doing they are inevitably susceptible to their own respective risks. As stated at the end of the preceding section, the issue of properly interpreting the scriptural narratives about Jesus Christ is not only central to Frei’s theological concerns. It is the doctrinal pivot upon which turns the spectrum of theological method he devised. It is with respect to this crucial point that the respective strengths and weaknesses of Types Three and Four are revealed. The literal sense suddenly reappears as a key issue for understanding the nature of theology. It is well known that Frei saw in Karl Barth’s later theological practice a brilliant rediscovery in twentieth-century theology of the “storied” subject Jesus Christ as the center of theological reflection. But how often is it noted that he could affirm that Schleiermacher, too, was no less insistent on the 37 For the former quote see TCT, 44, for the latter TCT, 5. It is perhaps telling that in the time between these two statements Frei had undertaken his most intensive treatment of the relationship between Barth and Schleiermacher in his essay on their “divergence” and “convergence” (TN, 177–99). The question of the interpretation of Schleiermacher and its significance for the disputes surrounding postliberalism will be dealt with in Chapter Five.


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“ascriptive literalism” of the gospel portraits than Barth (TCT, 76)? This means that both Types Three and Four (unlike the other three types) allow their practitioners to accord the correct status to the figure of Jesus as the common center of Christian continuity, of communal self-description. True, Type Three will seek “an ad hoc correlation of the New Testament portraits with religious consciousness” (for example), or with an historically reconstructed Jesus (TCT, 90). And Type Four will reject the resulting “Christ of faith” identified by means of a theory of religious experience just as it will reject the resulting “Jesus of history” (TCT, 83). But does this mean that the “literal” Jesus Christ will be acknowledged only by Type Four? It might be claimed that only Type Four really does this because it simply “allows the gospels to speak” without interference from “external discourses.” But given the previous account this is obviously too simple. Type Four begins with the narrated logic of Jesus Christ as salvific act of God and only then in a piecemeal way asks about how this portrait lines up with various referential modes (as savior experienced in faith, as historically factual figure, etc.). But according to Frei, even this fragmentary and purely dogmatically guided exploration of referential modes (which would avoid any correlated “external” scheme like a religious phenomenology or historical-critical reconstruction) will nonetheless have to employ various “external” discourses. This is again because contemporary believers simply cannot have an unambiguous understanding of how the portrayed event of God-inChrist links up with their various modes of grasping reality apart from their continual wrestling with the portrait itself, the continual struggle to add understanding to faith (TCT, 84–7). In place of deciding to join one camp or another, Frei offers the following balanced assessment. Schleiermacher’s ad hoc correlation of the New Testament portraits with religious consciousness was beautiful, but he got into deep trouble when he had to relate this literally ascriptive Christ of faith to the Jesus of history. He remained hermeneutically consistent – it was the unity of the ascriptive person, God-related yet historical, that he tried to articulate – but he could not integrate theological description with historical method without effectively undercutting the latter. Barth is more consistent and, I believe, successful than any other modern theologian I know in articulating both the unity and the central significance of the ascriptive subject of the texts at the textual level, but he cannot specify the manner or mode in which the textual statements are historical, while nonetheless asserting that they are. (TCT, 90, italics in the original)

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Frei warns that Type Three must constantly court the failure of particular correlations, but this does not signal the futility of the enterprise. It can never be guaranteed in advance that a particular correlative strategy will be able to hold together in a mutually illuminating way the internal discourse of faith and the external discourse of, to follow the example here, history. Schleiermacher’s correlation of the New Testament portrait with a phenomenology of faith was more successful than his correlation with historical reconstruction. Frei agreed with the great critic of Schleiermacher’s historical Jesus, David Friedrich Strauss, that this latter was a dismal failure. Schleiermacher’s particular attempt to wed the theological details of a religious demand for a salvifically unique figure with plausible historical judgments on the reports of the New Testament text did not work.38 But does this mean that the very attempt itself was misguided or vain from the beginning? Does the risk of a clash inherent in Type Three correlation drive Frei unequivocally into the Type Four camp? It is a risk, surely, but might there be sound theological reasons to essay correlation in spite of the risk? Frei’s response to such questions becomes clearer when his remarkable essay on Barth and Schleiermacher is taken into account, especially the following crucial passage (TN, 196) which bears full quotation. The maximization of the difference between Wissenschaftslehre and theology Barth and Schleiermacher might well . . . have in common. But Schleiermacher might want to ask Barth whether, despite himself, he has not turned maximum difference into incompatibility through the instrument of the subordination of Wissenschaftslehre to Christian-communal critical selfdescription of the community’s language. Without the constant, continuing practice of correlation (although surely it must be without a comprehensive principle of correlation), do not all criteria for intelligibility except the minimal, formal rules of grammar and syntax in fact go out the window for Christian theology? Do not principles like that of non-contradiction become not eschatological but Pickwickian if they have no clear theologyindependent status in their application to theology? Does not Christian theology threaten to turn into the in-group talk of one isolated community among others, with no ground rules for mutual discourse among them all?

The significance of this difficult passage for understanding Frei’s theological vision can hardly be overestimated. The term Wissenschaftslehre refers to general, philosophically-warranted and fields-encompassing criteria of meaning and validity; it may be taken here to refer basically to those external discourses, especially of a technical or academic nature, which theology 38

Frei, DFS, 255.


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typically puts to “third-order” use. Types Three and Four agree on three things. First, the Christian community cannot theologically organize and critique its own language and practice by relying solely on its own traditional linguistic and conceptual resources; it must incorporate external discourses. Second, however, theology can and must maintain its difference clearly over against such discourses. And finally, there can be no principle, no context-independent, theoretically-elaborated rule to govern all correlations between internal and external conceptualities (i.e. Types Three and Four have in common a rejection of Type Two) (TCT, 81–3). But the quotation indicates that Type Three’s insistence on the repeated attempt at correlation in face of the risk of incoherence is driven by a fear that the rigorous subordination of external discourses practiced by Type Four might not allow those discourses sufficient independence. After all, part of their function is precisely their provision of a hard, differential surface of meaning with which, so to speak, the contours of Christian belief can be brought into semantic contact; only the unavoidable “friction” of this encounter makes their employment as critical instruments within theology useful in the first place. Invoking the “eschatological” proviso too quickly (that is, appealing too quickly to the mysterious quality of God’s intervention in this world and the inevitable limits on our theoretical resources in face of it) might remove the very usefulness of insights brought from alien perspectives, of concepts and tools honed through usage in contexts uncommitted to Christian positions. The latter danger is symbolized for Frei by Barth’s twofold insistence that the Christ-event must be historical or “factual” but that the nature of that historicity will completely elude any determination in the generallyaccepted terms of historical criticism. If the term “history” and its associated concepts are used in theology in a manner so “subordinated” to a Christian complex of meaning why, Schleiermacher might ask, is it invoked at all? Is not this appeal really to a “Pickwickian” notion of “history,” in other words, one so ambiguous that it means simply whatever one chooses it to mean? Frei wants to take seriously both threats: the incoherence of internal and external meanings which threatens Type Three and the “stagnation” of internal meanings which threatens Type Four. And he finally leaves the reader with no principled way of deciding unambiguously between the two types. What seems to emerge from Frei’s typological discussion is, to be sure, a deep engagement with Type Four and a perceived need to stress its continued viability and importance for his own particular context, so unhealthily dominated by the “modern” problematic in theology. But this warm appreciation is nonetheless tempered by a cautious awareness of the potential theological value of more theoretically rigorous attempts at correlation as in

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Type Three. Even in failing to correlate external and internal discourses precisely as “equals,” the continual striving itself might serve theology to help ward off the danger which will always threaten Type Four, namely that theology might lose its self-critical edge, might in fact drift into a Type Five invocation of a self-enclosed world of meaning. Which theological strategy one chooses (and some kind of tactical mixture cannot perhaps be ruled out) must be relative to an analysis of the theological situation and the perceived threats to it. Barth’s own construction of a Type Four approach was a contextual response to what he saw as a crisis within modern theology, an anthropologically and apologetically driven accommodation to contemporary thought-categories that threatened to distort or efface the very shape of the incarnate object of witness it claimed to explicate. But even Barth’s continual fascination with Schleiermacher just might, like Frei’s, point to a refusal to finally disavow the legitimate theological concerns behind the Type Three approach. At any rate, for both Types Three and Four as Frei sees it, the commitments of Christian faith can never be fully reconstructed in external discursive terms; a residue opaque to philosophy always remains. Any healthy theology will know when to protect this remainder by cutting philosophical reconstruction short; the concern of Type Three is that this not happen too soon, prompted by faith’s timidity or self-indulgence.

The “Generosity” of Orthodoxy as an Issue of Method This chapter has tried to show that Hans Frei’s theological vision is ultimately rooted in his dogmatic concentration on the unique, personally concrete and scripturally rendered object of Christian witness: Jesus Christ. For Frei, theology in the present context should be “a carefully modulated way of articulating the faith philosophically but therefore fragmentarily, even though in a fit, descriptive fashion” (TCT, 91). Such an articulation will take the form of “reacquiring” Jesus Christ and rediscovering the meaning in the present of the saving act undertaken once and for all in him. The discussion of Types Three and Four has shown that describing the object of faith will always involve appeal to cultural and intellectual resources undefined by the perspective of faith, but also that such appeal is always risky. The theologian must judge when the object in its depths finally evades the conceptual resources brought to bear. “At some point, though not too quickly, philosophical agnosticism has to set in in the interest of full-blooded Christian theology” (ibid.). This is theology “cutting its philosophical losses.”


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Frei sees in Christian theology a continual act of critical reinterpretation on the part of members of a community which has identifiable traditions of belief and practice. His approach is characterized by the demand for a distinction in principle between the meaningful pattern instantiated in this communal practice, its “symbolic world,” on the one hand, and the myriad necessary attempts made to connect it with other beliefs and practices in a single, plausible, and contemporary lived structure. Otherwise put, fides quae and fides qua are not to be confused. Any critique of the faith must always be grounded in an adequate description of its pattern or “logic.” This meaningful pattern itself is taken to center on the identity of Jesus Christ carried by the literal sense of scripture. Interpretations of self, humanity, world, and God are constructed outward from this orienting point, a kind of bricolage incorporating a shifting range of conceptual borrowings and applied intellectual techniques. No theoretical formula will determine the various encounters “on the margin” of this interpretive extension; no philosophy or discipline could conceptually model the bewildering range of meaningful exchange. The corollary of this is an acceptance of the diversity of communities of belief and practice, ruled by stories which, even when they overlap, are finally irreducible to one another. In the end, Frei remains dissatisfied with speculative schemes which forget that they are finally defined by loyalty to a particular set of stories. History is unfinished. The Christian community possesses in Jesus Christ what it believes to be the parable of God’s way with the world, and it offers this to every new situation in the hope of God’s providential presence in a history which nonetheless remains open and contingent.39 Accepting the autonomous and “secular” social world in which he believes Christian communities live, theology for Frei will be anxious not to justify itself in light of some other story, but to understand the story already being lived, extending it step by step into the future. The inspiration which Frei provided George Lindbeck and his proposed postliberalism has been mentioned in previous chapters. And yet the investigation of the present chapter at least suggests that the relationship of Frei’s thought as a whole to those particular ingredients entering into Lindbeck’s theological vision which were formulated as postliberalism is not as straightforward as has been typically assumed. This preliminary judgment is strengthened by the several stumbling blocks which are quickly encountered by the attempt to understand Frei’s basic theological inspiration to be a species of opposition to liberalism. Frei, as far as his writings are concerned, never used the term “postliberal” 39

See Frei, Identity of Jesus Christ, 157–64.

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in the sense which it currently has, namely that of a theological school of thought consciously setting itself over against a rival tendency called “liberalism” or (to use David Tracy’s term) “revisionism.” He does use the hyphenated term “post-liberal” as a concept in the history of theology. But as mentioned earlier, that phrase for him merely denominates the period from the 1920s on, inaugurated by that revolt against many of the theological assumptions of nineteenth-century neo-protestantism which is associated with the early Barth, Bultmann, Gogarten, Brunner, Tillich, the Niebuhrs, etc. He seems to have dropped this usage some time in the 1960s. Of course, it will be replied that he was a Lindbeckian postliberal avant la lettre, but this must remain a contested issue until the nature of the supposed liberal–postliberal opposition can be explored more thoroughly. Even so, the reader of Frei might ponder the lack of pejorative rhetoric associated with the concept of liberalism as such. To be sure, he was quite certain that the particular historical trajectory of liberal theology, the one originating in nineteenth-century German protestantism, culminating in the various Ritschlianisms, and finally succumbing to various assaults in the inter-war period, harbored deep flaws. That he saw aspects of this trajectory continuing to provide questionable background assumptions to some of his contemporaries is also unquestionable.40 But on the other hand, in the context of a discussion with evangelical theologians he could affirm plainly “I am not anti-liberal,” and continue on to say that contemporary theology needs a “generous orthodoxy” which would combine elements of liberalism and evangelicalism (TN, 208). In his typology of theological options he seems to suggest that both liberal and conservative doctrinal results can be associated with any of the three middle (and most viable) theological types. Liberalism as a specific historical constellation of ideas (indicating the dominant consensus of mainstream academic theology in Germany and America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, before the “Neo-orthodox” revolt) is one thing; but liberalism as a general reference to the perennial impulse within theology for the systematically critical rearticulation of doctrine is another. Rather than postliberal, the phrase “generous, liberal orthodoxy” which he applied to the stance of his teacher Robert Calhoun more nearly captures his ideal: faithfulness to the scripturally-rendered object of witness, the event of God-in-Christ, but necessarily refracted through its constant redescription in conversation with theology’s changing contexts. In fact, Calhoun never abandoned liberalism. According to Frei, the two elements 40 John Woolverton, “Hans W. Frei in Context: A Theological and Historical Memoir,” Anglican Theological Review 79 (1997): 369–93 at pp. 383–4.


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which enabled this remarkable conjunction in Calhoun were first the basic realism of his theistic intuitions, never losing sight of God’s “objectivity” (an insistence that God is “independent and prior to all that we say and do”), and second his “vision of a living, integral and open-ended Christian tradition, a strong tradition” which was built up through “countless cultural contributions then and now.”41 Frei’s own thought tries to bring about a similar conjunction of these two, a series of cultural convergences upon a “given” or “objective” textual portrait of God conjoined with a strong tradition of communal reading. The strength of the tradition is not its rigidity but its incorporative power; it can be a protean, “language-shaping force” because its shifting patterns continually pivot on the socially practiced “reading” of God-in-Christ. There are elements in Lindbeck’s thought which are similarly generous, but they are ill-served by the conceptual apparatus constructed to promote a postliberal turn in theological method. One of the preliminary results of this chapter must be the suspicion that assimilating Frei’s theology too quickly to Lindbeck’s postliberal proposal will lead to distortions. In the important and insightful critique of some of the guiding ideas associated with postliberals contained in Kathryn Tanner’s Theories of Culture, the individual shape of Frei’s own thought seems to get lost somehow, with unfortunate results. As part of her larger argument against “the idea of a self-contained and selforiginating identity for Christianity,” Tanner accuses postliberals (loosely defined as followers of Frei and Lindbeck) of making the negotiation of Christian identity a purely “internal” discourse to which external perspectives play only a negative and optional role. While there is no positive relation in principle between internal and external [language] uses, there is also no need in principle to insist upon a simple opposition between the two. Developing the connections here – whether of resemblance or contrast – is, however, a purely ad hoc, optional matter; developing them is certainly not a condition for understanding Christian uses, nor is it more than of occasional service in highlighting the distinctive features of Christian claims to particular outsiders.42

However relevant this indictment might be in regard to other thinkers associated with postliberalism, it cannot be regarded as an adequate description of the Frei investigated in this chapter. 41 Hans Frei, “In Memory of Robert L. Calhoun, 1896–1983,” Reflection [Yale Divinity School] 82 (November 1984): 8–9 at p. 9. 42 Kathryn Tanner, Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 106.

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For Frei “developing the connections” between internal and external discourses is not “optional” at all, it is indeed (pace Tanner) “a condition for understanding Christian uses.” Again, for Frei there is most definitely a “positive relation in principle” between internal and external uses, even if that relation itself cannot be captured in a single theoretical model or made systematic. The burden of his argument with Phillips is precisely that Christian identity is not a “self-contained and self-originating” generation of meaning within the community, but is the product of a continual and necessary traffic with cultural perspectives external to the community. Christian identity for today must be “found” in this encounter, even if for Frei the identity of the object of witness has a relative resilience and “givenness” over against faith’s necessary interpretive appropriations. Frei’s claim that the “ad hoc” use of external discourses is needed to “make accessible” and even to “understand” the tradition-shaped, internal language of Christianity in no way suggests an “optional” or “occasional” procedure, as Tanner suggests.43 Tanner’s critical treatment of some postliberal assumptions is acute. But any attempt like hers to make Frei a typical representative of postliberalism (as she defines it) unavoidably leads to a one-sided selection or accentuation of certain themes in his thought which must be contested. This is because for Frei theology must reckon with the fact that, even though it always lives from Christian faith understood as contemporary witness to its object, the identity of Jesus Christ as inscribed in the gospels, there is nevertheless no single logic determining once and for all the form of this witness. The possession of the scriptural portrait and a tradition of reading it are in themselves insufficient to define Christian identity with the precision needed for application in a concrete situation. That must be determined “on the ground” and constantly renewed. And beyond this, the particularly encompassing nature of Christ’s identity as encoded within the gospel narratives, the way in which he is self-identified, for example, with the experiences of the outcast and the downtrodden, should mean that the plumbing of those human depths is itself part of coming to know the identity of the Christ. Frei at least gestures toward a position like this in his tantalizingly brief discussion of Matthew 25:40. “I think a Christian case can be made that we have not met the textual Jesus until we have also met him, as Søren Kierkegaard said, in forgetfulness of himself or incognito in a crowd” (TCT, 136). 43

Frei, TCT, 55. It is telling that both of the citations from Frei that Tanner offers to back up her assessment (TCT, 45–6, 161) are in fact Frei’s accounts of the position of Karl Barth. As has already been shown, for all of Frei’s sympathy with a Type Four approach, it does not represent the full range of responsible possibilities for theology. A very real question which must be left aside here is the accuracy of Frei’s understanding of Barth, as well as the fairness of Tanner’s verdict even on Type Four.


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Should this be taken to mean that cognizing the Jesus Christ of the text is in some way dependent on re-cognizing him in the world of human history? That because the one portrayed in the gospels is the one open to all humanity, then the textual rendering of his identity is a schema which invites and demands a never-ending application to the infinite matter of the world beyond the community of witness? “The task of the re-description of Jesus will remain unfinished as long as history lasts” (TCT, 146). Tantalizingly brief as they are, these comments of Frei certainly do not suggest that the encounter with the “other” is merely accidental to the construction of Christian identity. The previous chapter showed how Lindbeck’s dogmatic interest in making the ecclesial shape of the people of witness the key ingredient in theology led him to the proposal of a new postliberal move. He claimed Frei as one of the chief inspirations for this project; Frei himself certainly did not distance himself from Lindbeck, and indeed on at least one occasion warmly acknowledged in print Lindbeck’s influence (TN, 152 fn. 36). But the present chapter, which traced the way in which Frei’s dogmatic commitments in Christology drove his own investigation of the nature of theology, has not suggested the obvious complementarity with Lindbeck’s theological vision which one might expect. In order to explore the significance of this odd mixture of harmony and dissonance, it is time to investigate those elements in the different thought-worlds of Lindbeck and Frei which are the commonly invoked bases of a liberal–postliberal divide.

Chapter Four

Lindbeck: Elusive Oppositions and the Construction of Postliberalism (I) The Conceptual Scaffolding of the Liberal–Postliberal Dualism Chapters Two and Three have discussed in general terms the respective understandings of proper theological procedure of George Lindbeck and Hans Frei, attempting to resituate them within the context of each thinker’s overall theological orientation. Some matters touched on in those chapters must be revisited in this and the next chapter with more care and a sharper critical eye, guided now by the question raised at the end of the first chapter concerning the precise characterization of the supposed liberal–postliberal divide. The story was told there of how the publication of Lindbeck’s book in 1984 helped to crystallize a consciousness on the part of many observers that, for good or ill, a new departure in theological method had been made by Frei and Lindbeck, seconded by some other figures associated with Yale. To be sure, the notion of a theological turn away from “liberalism” was for the most part drawn from Lindbeck’s book; it was scarcely to be found explicitly in Frei. But it is undeniable that commentators were drawing on elements of the theological visions of both Frei and Lindbeck, elements which were clearly motivated by dissatisfaction with what both perceived as widespread but deficient assumptions about the nature and tasks of theology. In this chapter and the next it will be seen how each thinker does in fact attempt to give direction and definition to his reflections on theology not only by positive prescription but also by piecing together a portrait of the kind of theological practice which ought to be resisted. For now, the paired concepts “postliberal theology/liberal theology” will serve as shorthand designations for this juxtaposition of a recommended turn in thinking about theology over against a negatively evaluated counterpart. While speaking of a clear opposition in these terms is initially useful for purposes of discussion,

l i ndb e c k : th e con st ruc ti on of p o st l i b e ral i sm

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and while it indeed accords with an understanding of the theological landscape which was popularized by the quarrels in the wake of The Nature of Doctrine, careful investigation of this opposition will eventually result in skepticism as to its coherence and usefulness. That is, part of the purpose of Chapters Four and Five will be precisely to destabilize this postliberal/ liberal opposition. Although both Frei and Lindbeck devote considerable effort to portraying positions they oppose in order to make their own positions clearer, it is doubtful whether the various sharp divergences they set up will withstand close scrutiny as a collective portrait of something called “liberalism.” Several such divergences, requiring individual treatment, have entered into the rhetoric of postliberalism. The main argument of these chapters will be that there are serious conceptual difficulties in codifying the differences between a liberal method and a postliberal method. Two further questions will emerge in the wake of this analysis. First, to what extent do the positive insights of these two thinkers into the nature of theology finally depend on the coherence of the liberal–postliberal opposition? Second, to what degree can the different uncovered weaknesses and obscurities of their positions be considered as themselves an artifact of this opposition, that is, of the felt need to fix a sharp methodological boundary between their positions and those they are resisting? The treatment below will, by implication at least, suggest answers to both questions. Although this chapter and the next will be materially distinct, marking certain important differences between Lindbeck and Frei, they will be roughly similar in terms of formal structure. Each will begin by elaborating further on the point made in the preceding chapters: basic doctrinal positions, theorizing distinct aspects of the total event of Christian witness, are driving each figure’s formal methodological concerns. Thus (material) doctrinal positions are more crucial than is often recognized, deeply shaping the distinct typologies of (formal) theological options within which a favored position is defined in conjunction with what it opposes. After discussion of the typology associated with each thinker, two crucial sets of opposing ideas will be identified as stemming from each scheme; each of these conceptual dualisms (two especially associated with Lindbeck, the other two more with Frei) have played a role in the conceptual underpinnings of the broader postliberal/liberal opposition. Each of these will be evaluated, and from this assessment will arise some conclusions, culminating in the final chapter, as to what can be learned from the way Lindbeck and Frei conceive the theological task as a component of Christian witness. The final result will be that the entire angle of approach to their work provided by the liberal–postliberal disputes will be displaced by another, more promising point of view.

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Can the basic conceptual oppositions which have structured the liberal/ postliberal juxtaposition be identified in a preliminary way? A brief look at some comments made by Frei and Lindbeck on Friedrich Schleiermacher will allow them to come to view, even as it foreshadows the difficulties built into that juxtaposition. Not surprisingly, the name of Schleiermacher pops up repeatedly in both Frei’s and Lindbeck’s discussions of theology. Correspondingly, those participating in the critical discussion around the “Yale School” have found invoking the “father of liberal theology” almost too convenient: what could be more natural than the presupposition that Schleiermacher encapsulates all those decisions and assumptions that theology “after liberalism” must resist? This is especially true if postliberalism is, as is often thought by both supporters and detractors, a sort of newfangled offshoot of Barthianism. But the matter turns out to be hardly so simple. It has already been seen that Frei’s own attitude toward Schleiermacher was much more appreciative than could be provided for by any view of the latter as the enemy of postliberalism. In fact, an inventory of the ways in which both Lindbeck and Frei (in distinction from more hasty commentators, whether friendly or hostile) describe Schleiermacher reveals a strange but significant fact. All four of the most important conceptual oppositions which will be used to distinguish postliberal from liberal theology come into play in defining this great figure, but they somehow never succeed in installing him unambiguously on one or the other side of the broader postliberal/liberal divide. Consider the following citations, first from Hans Frei. On the one hand, Frei has no difficulty in locating Schleiermacher among those theologians, typical of the modern period, for whom the apologetic task of theology has assumed controlling force, problematically subordinating the dogmatic task. Frei identifies in him a mode of argumentation which utilizes a systematic anthropology in order to locate the possibility of “incarnate reconciliation” within the structure of human being itself; this way of conceiving both the need for and the possibility of salvation in Christ in anthropological terms is called by Frei “the linchpin of the systematic and apologetical enterprises of the modern era” (TN, 174). Resistance to this apparent reduction of dogmatics to a function of apologetics is one important ingredient in Frei’s theological proposals. On the other hand, as was seen in Chapter Three, Frei argues strongly for an interpretation of Schleiermacher as a practitioner of ad hoc rather than systematic correlation. What was pointed out there (and is due for further analysis in Chapter Five) was that Frei sees in this latter distinction a decisive indicator of the ability of theologies to handle adequately the normative


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“literal sense” of the scriptural texts. To be sure, Schleiermacher correlates external, explanatory perspectives on Christian phenomena with descriptions from an internal perspective. But Frei wants to make clear that, unlike David Tracy (or his contemporary Hegel) he does so by means of an “ad hoc conceptual instrument,” quite apart from any encompassing, explanatory system or mediating “supertheory” (TCT, 71, 37). Lindbeck’s comments, though the result of a far more superficial engagement with Schleiermacher’s thought, betray a similar ambivalence. On the one hand, Schleiermacher is perhaps the paradigm case of that experientialexpressive approach to religion and (consequently) theology which Lindbeck is concerned to oppose to his own cultural-linguistic approach. Indeed, the entire tradition of “liberal experiential-expressivist” theology stems from him (ND, 28 fn. 19). On the other hand, Lindbeck finds himself unable to locate Schleiermacher clearly on the “bad” side of his other central evaluative distinction. Both Aquinas the propositionalist and Schleiermacher the “undoubted” experiential-expressivist “were more intratextual in their actual practice than their theories would seem to allow” (ND, 123, italics added). This is a remarkable assessment given the fact that elsewhere Lindbeck virtually identifies “liberalism” with “a tendency to redescribe religion in extrascriptural frameworks” (i.e. extratextual interpretation) (ND, 124). Those accustomed to the usual terms of the liberal/postliberal debate might be startled to hear Lindbeck suggest that “one may even construe Schleiermacher as giving a biblical rendering of the experiential-expressive world of Romanticism.”1 A firm opposition between liberal and postliberal theology seems to become harder to grasp when one admits that an experiential-expressive approach to religion can be “baptized” in an intratextual manner. Something more than mere confusion is at work here. In fact, both theologians have fairly good reasons for these varied assessments. The point rather is that the “case” of Schleiermacher neatly condenses the broader difficulties in the categorization of theology into opposed liberal and postliberal procedures. But for now, these citations from Frei and Lindbeck have brought out four different categorizations which have become familiar from many discussions of the liberal/postliberal divide. Frei recommends a theology centered on dogmatic description rather than apologetic explanation, and one in which the relations between internal and external discourses are ad hoc rather than systematic. Lindbeck urges theologians to abandon experiential-expressivism in favor of a cultural-linguistic approach, and

1

George Lindbeck, “Barth and Textuality,” Theology Today 43 (1986), 368.

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makes intratextuality the very hallmark of theological faithfulness in opposition to extratextual “translation.” Over the course of the postliberalism disputes these categorizations have typically been deployed in varied ways to form a portrait of two divergent theological styles. “Liberal” theology then becomes an amalgam of experiential-expressive and extratextual interpretations of Christianity in the service of a systematic apologetic vis-à-vis modern culture. “Postliberal” theology subordinates ad hoc apologetics to a cultural-linguistic and intratextual interpretive scheme. Heavier stress might be laid on one or another of these characteristics as the key to the postliberal “turn,” with the other criteria implicitly included or perhaps seen as logical implications of the main emphasis. But the curious example of Schleiermacher lurks behind these patterns as a troubling presence, curiously managing to be apologeticcentered, but in an “ad hoc” way, experiential-expressivist, but in an intratextual way, all at once. One can, of course, either accuse Schleiermacher himself of mere incoherence in so grotesquely yoking together opposing tendencies, or more plausibly (but still too easily) simply distinguish as Lindbeck does his unfortunate theories from his competent practice: his was a theology in many ways doctrinally faithful, but only in spite of its own self-conception and method. However, a better way forward will be to revisit and reevaluate the two categorizations associated with Lindbeck and the two associated with Frei. Do they, in fact, collectively point the way forward to a “theology for a postliberal age”? Lindbeck’s position will once again lead off the discussion.

Ecclesiology and the Verbum Externum As discussed in Chapter Two, Lindbeck’s cluttered recital of philosophical and social-scientific trends in The Nature of Doctrine attempts to locate and support his cultural-linguistic approach to religion but has the unfortunate consequence of obscuring the theological concerns which are driving the project. One clear early harbinger of his theological typology was seen in Chapter One to be a 1974 article on soteriology; it disputed Rahner’s notion of anonymous Christianity and other similar positions in favor of an approach retrieving the notion of saving faith as exclusively available through hearing the preached word of Jesus Christ (“fides ex auditu”). This article, parts of which are taken up almost verbatim into the third chapter of The Nature of Doctrine, has the advantage of making clearer than the book itself how theological concerns are working in tandem with selective appeal to non-theological investigations of religious language and culture (such as


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ordinary language philosophy and empirical studies of religious communities).2 Here it becomes quite clear that Rahner’s “concept of implicit faith and the associated theory of religion” is one of the driving theological concerns which lie behind his interest in the academic investigation of religious communities.3 Lindbeck formulates the basic soteriological disagreement with Rahner in the following way. [T]he sola fide ex auditu suggests . . . an eschatological understanding of salvation which contrasts with the ontological interpretation required by the concept of implicit saving faith. Ontologically interpreted, salvation is primarily an inward grace which is articulated and strengthened by explicit faith. If saving faith comes only through hearing, however, then the process is reversed. Explicit faith in Christ is understood, not as expressing or articulating the existential depths, but rather as producing and forming them.4

Theories like Rahner’s, though associated mainly with Roman Catholic theologians, agree with some varieties of the old Protestant liberalism that God is present in the transcendental depths of the religious questings and experiences of all men, and that this general revelation or presence of God is articulated with varying degrees of adequacy in the rituals, ethics, communal structures and world views of the various religions.5

There is no need here to rehearse the reasons which drive Lindbeck to question and ultimately reject this entire approach, though he is careful to claim that his rationale is basically theological and “does not depend on a philosophical position, though it may be helped by some and hindered by others.”6 The point of citing this article is rather to reiterate the material roots of Lindbeck’s formal reflections on types of theological procedure. The salvation of human beings is, on his understanding, their refashioning into selves appropriately related to God, and this shaping occurs in the way

2 The similarity to Frei in preferring Anglo-American philosophical and social-scientific traditions to continental, especially German, ones is indicative of the intellectual atmosphere at Yale. 3 George Lindbeck, “Fides ex auditu and the Salvation of non-Christians,” in The Gospel and the Ambiguity of the Church, ed. Vilmos Vajta (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974), 91–123 at p. 119. 4 Ibid., 116. 5 Ibid., 100. 6 Ibid., 120.

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selfhood itself is always constructed: through language, broadly understood. Christians are those who have begun in this life to experience the new creation which, Lindbeck insists, will be eschatologically offered to all people. But the only way to experience it in this life is “through hearing, learning, and internalizing the language which speaks of Christ.”7 Already clearly adumbrated is the crucial leap from a typically Lutheran stress on the saving word of living human proclamation to an anthropological stress on religions as semiotic networks; indeed, all of the main elements in Lindbeck’s threefold typology of theories of religion are present in this article. Another harbinger is the more or less explicit association of theories of religion with theological positions; “liberalism” is here already being yoked with a position on the way God works through human religiosity. This kind of association is an important plank in Lindbeck’s position in The Nature of Doctrine. But before moving to the typology to make this more explicit, the shape of Lindbeck’s driving theological concern should be more sharply outlined. It becomes somewhat more visible if its systematic location is seen to be not so much soteriology (the immediate concern of the Rahner article) as ecclesiology. As suggested in Chapter Two, his dominant concept of Christian ecclesial existence is that of witness, and the dominant metaphor guiding his understanding of this is that of the church as like a language; ecclesiology, through this concept and metaphor, serves as the point of conceptual conjunction between theories of salvation, Christology, and religious language. Ironically, it is the church’s role as collective witness to the coming reign of God which both restricts saving faith in this life to the ecclesial community responding to Christ and yet rather sharply deemphasizes the ultimate significance of this restriction by orienting faith toward the church’s role vis-à-vis the world (ND, 57). Some light can be shed on this issue by asking how the relation of the church’s witness to the world is understood to relate to God’s salvation of that world. To put it schematically, the church has traditionally understood its proclaiming to the world the good news of God in Christ as the means, and the acquisition of saving faith (through admission to the church) as the end; in Lindbeck’s understanding, it is more true to say that it is the presence of saving faith in the world (forming the ecclesial body of witness) which is the means and proclamation which is the end. Making linguistic competence his fundamental metaphor for Christian existence helps Lindbeck specify both sides of this arrangement. The church is primarily understood as a community identified by and participating in a

7

Ibid.


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common language, the basis of which is the story of Jesus Christ. Because Christian existence takes the form of the continual shaping of selves through the application of a particular, unique and self-identical language, salvation can be construed as located (for now) only in that special linguistic community, the church. But further extension of the metaphor of languageacquisition allows Lindbeck to relativize the soteriological import of this. It is as if the people of witness can expect to receive in this life only that minimal taste of the coming fullness of salvation which allows them to function as a sign pointing to that fullness as a universal eschatological offer. Jesus Christ is the vehicle of salvation, not the church. But only learning to speak the concrete communal language of Christ gives persons the ability to understand or experience Christ’s salvation at all (ND, 60–1). “[T]he Christian language is the only one which has the words and concepts which can authentically speak of the ground of being, goal of history, and true humanity (for one cannot genuinely speak of these apart from telling and retelling the story of Jesus Christ).”8 To be able to speak the language of Christ and to experience the salvation of Christ are one and the same thing. That this assertion of exclusiveness is not a necessary correlate of Lindbeck’s theory of religious truth has already been suggested in Chapter Two. The present chapter will explore somewhat different problems, arising this time from the centrality of the linguistic analogy itself, namely the way in which (very real and helpful insights notwithstanding) it ends up occluding its own limitations and contributing to a misleading understanding of the nature of theology. In his very insightful discussion of this dominant metaphor, David Kelsey suggests that one aspect of the church’s reality which is insufficiently illuminated by it is the church’s relation to God, especially the way in which the church’s language itself stands in need of constant correction from the God it is witnessing to.9 Is not the church’s “language” (the cultural networks of discourse which constitute Christian communities) itself under God’s judgment? The rest of the present chapter can even be understood as an attempt to show the consequences of this limitation which Kelsey has identified, but now specifically with regard to distortions in the way Lindbeck tries to understand differences in theological method. In the process another limitation of the language-metaphor will also become apparent, namely the way in which it invites images of a “direction of translation” which cannot quite 8

Ibid., 117. David Kelsey, “Church Discourse and Public Realm,” in Theology and Dialogue: Essays in Conversation with George Lindbeck, ed. Bruce D. Marshall (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 7–33 at p. 30.

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do justice to the centrality and subtle reciprocities of the church’s cultural traffic with the non-believing world. These limitations come to a head in the way Lindbeck attempts to distinguish good and bad theological procedure using the paired descriptions already mentioned: cultural-linguistic/ experiential-expressivist, and intratextual/extratextual. But first, in order to see how Lindbeck’s dominant metaphor of the community of witness as a culturally-constituted semiotic system (the “verbum externum” demanded by his “ex auditu” soteriology) leads to these ways of evaluating theology, his threefold typology of theories of religion and doctrine needs to be revisited. The basic terms of this typology will by now be familiar to anyone who has read even a brief summary of Lindbeck’s book. In The Nature of Doctrine Lindbeck, admittedly oversimplifying for purposes of clarification, identifies two principal theoretical models which, alone or in combination, have dominated discussions of the nature of religious language, and against which he proposes his alternate, cultural-linguistic model (ND, 16–18). Given the strong interest of his book in doctrines, i.e. those beliefs and practices which unify and identify particular religious communities, his threefold scheme of propositionalist models, experiential-expressivist models, and culturallinguistic models is especially concerned with the relation of the public features of a religion (its symbolic systems of semiotic exchange or “language” broadly understood), to the unity and identity of that religion. In other words, in his dealings with theories of religion the question of doctrine is paramount, how it is that certain linguistic usages can serve to mark the boundaries of communal belonging. This stress on doctrinal function is sometimes missed, and the danger arises of seeing his threefold division as involving mutually exclusive theories of the nature of religious language in general. Lindbeck’s discussion, however, makes it clear that the three models of religion as such simply privilege one capacity of religious language-use, subordinating but not excluding the others.10 However, what begins as a shift in emphasis within an overall conception of the roles of language within religion (say, subordinating language as proposition or symbol to language as person-shaping idiom) soon issues in theories of religious doctrine which are mutually exclusive. Religious language can be propositional, symbolic, or regulative; a theory of how doctrine functions is the selection

10 ND, 19, 80. Lindbeck’s affirmation that a cultural-linguistic model of religion can still involve doctrinal formulations being put to non-doctrinal (i.e. propositional or symbolizing) uses must not be forgotten. Though Lindbeck nowhere makes the claim, there is no reason in principle why the cognitive and experiential-expressivist models of religion could not similarly allow some kind of role to those other functions of religious language which are less than central for identifying religion itself.


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of one of these roles as the key to those kinds of language which determine and carry communal identity over time. With this special perspective in mind, his definitions of the types can be phrased in the following way. On the cognitive or propositionalist model, what ultimately identifies and unifies a religion is a particular ensemble of truth-claims about what is ultimately real and finally important. While these truth-claims may undergo varied formulation over time, and receive varied conceptual explication and defense, they provide the crucial access to what gives the religion its wholeness and coherence: some kind of true reference to a state of affairs. Thus the identity of a religion is located in the particular theoretical or cognitive access it affords to ultimate reality; the attitudes and dispositions it recommends follow on that basis. On Lindbeck’s understanding, such a model does a good job of accounting for why doctrines would tend to remain stable, but cannot account for the way in which they do nevertheless undergo considerable change that cannot be regarded as simply “reformulation” of the self-same propositional truth (ND, 16, 80). On the experiential-expressivist model, what ultimately identifies and unifies a religion is, by contrast, not located in the referential function of religious language (though this is not necessarily denied) but rather in its ability to provide objectivization or public articulation of the inner encounter or relation between human subjects and the divine or salvific, an encounter or relation understood as logically or constitutively (not temporally) preceding all linguistic articulation. What gives a religion its wholeness or coherence is this characteristic encounter or relation to the ultimate, and the role it plays in giving a particular “shape” to human subjectivity and activity (ND, 16). Religious doctrine, then, has the function of expressing this shape in varied ways, not of providing direct or “true” reference to the divine itself or mediating the saving encounter of the self with the ultimate. Lindbeck sees in this model the opposite weakness of the propositional one. Language here gives access to internal dispositions, not to objective states of affairs; its forms can and will therefore be far more allusive and flexible than is possible with propositional reference. These shifting forms may occasionally be “frozen” in communally authoritative formulae, but far from carrying the identity of the community these formulae are a constant risk to that identity. The community is given its shape by the internal dispositions of its members, and these must always be expressed in new forms as the cultural setting changes. In short, on this model it is the doctrinal changes in the community which are unproblematic, while any stubborn adherence to specific doctrinal formulae must be seen as a dangerous misunderstanding of their function (ND, 17). Finally, Lindbeck proposes his own cultural-linguistic model which, it

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will be recalled, is intended to account more adequately for both sides of the dialectic of doctrinal continuity and change. To be sure, religious language is indeed used to make reference to ultimate states of affairs and to give expression to religious subjectivities. These are important functions, but they do not play the essential role in identifying the community-defining continuities which are the concern of doctrine. For this purpose the relevant dimension of language is neither reference nor symbolization but semantic interconnection. What identifies the religion is a “lexicon” of narratives and rituals and quasi-grammatical rules for their use which collectively form an “idiom” or linguistic medium through which human life and the universe can be construed (ND, 80–1). Significantly, for purposes of understanding doctrine Lindbeck stresses the persistence of the “grammatical” pattern of this idiom, and its relative isolation from the social and psychological processes with which it is undoubtedly intertwined in actual practice (ND, 82; 28 fn. 16). Once doctrines are understood in their true function as usage guides for this religious idiom, then the curious oscillation between preserving fixed forms of speech and yet allowing seemingly extreme flexibility in their theorization makes more sense. Understanding doctrines either as propositional truths or as symbolic expressions is therefore, according to Lindbeck, superfluous. This typology of religion and doctrine turns out to have a decisive impact on the way Lindbeck categorizes and evaluates different understandings of theology. Lindbeck is surely on solid ground when he declares that any theology “is to some degree implicitly or explicitly dependent on ideas derived from one or another theory of religion” (ND, 10). And in the early chapters of his book he has offered a typology of theories of religion which, typically for such schematic presentations, is both highly simplified and directed toward solving a fairly specific problem (in this case, continuity and change in religious doctrine). But the claim that theologies are dependent, implicitly or explicitly, on some theoretical construal of religion does not of itself license the assumption that a particular threefold typology of theories of religion will helpfully correspond to a threefold typology of kinds of theological method. And yet precisely this assumption is quietly made, with no argumentative fanfare, at the beginning of the final chapter of The Nature of Doctrine. The particular theories of religious language identified by the threefold typology are now, with suspicious ease, aligned with a threefold typology of approaches to the theological task: “preliberal propositionalist, liberal experiential-expressivist, or postliberal cultural-linguistic” (ND, 112). Unfortunately, this single, seemingly offhand sentence has sometimes served theorists of postliberalism as the key to a map of the modern theological landscape, past and present. It is as well to remember first of all what


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Lindbeck does and does not mean by the terms “preliberal,” “liberal,” and “postliberal” as used in this context. The remarkable grouping of “Lutheran confessionalists of the Erlangen school” alongside “some ‘Death of God’ theologians” under the common heading of “liberal” signals clearly enough that “liberal” here is not being used in the everyday sense (i.e. of a theological position proposing extensive changes to inherited traditions of belief and practice). In Lindbeck’s terms, it seems, one could be methodologically “liberal” yet come to conservative doctrinal conclusions. “[M]ethodological liberals may be conservative or traditionalist in theology and reactionary in social or political matters” (ND, 135). Theological conservatives such as those of the Erlangen school can use and have used a method originally formulated by theological liberals and employed it to generate conservative conclusions. In other words, the qualifier “methodological” reminds the reader that these terms indicate three general theological approaches to a religion, not the specific results or recommendations for belief which may eventuate from their application (and which may just as well be innovative as traditional). In the criteriological terms which Lindbeck devised to define the theological task, the terms preliberal, liberal, and postliberal represent the way in which adopting a particular theory of religion supposedly leads to characteristic understandings of faithfulness, applicability, and intelligibility, the basic goals of theological discourse. Notably, while the discussion of doctrine, the bulk of Lindbeck’s book, tended to treat propositionalism (the “preliberal” option) as the more serious opponent, when it comes to options in contemporary theology in the final chapter the critique tilts toward the “currently regnant forms of liberalism” (ND, 10). The upshot of Lindbeck’s treatment of liberal theology as a natural outgrowth of the symbolic or “experiential-expressive” theory of doctrine has resulted in discussions of postliberal theology adopting “experientialexpressivism” as a key designation of what needs correction, with the opposite theological orientation defined as “cultural-linguistic.” The other major formula of opposition formulated by Lindbeck and taken up into the postliberalism disputes, intratextual-extratextual, also arises from the concerns embedded in his threefold typology, albeit in a more roundabout way. As discussed in Chapter Two above, assimilating the unity and continuity of the Christian religion to that of a common language informs the three aspects of theological intratextuality defined by Lindbeck: semiotic, realityencompassing, and scriptural.11 Offering a theologically faithful description of such a linguistic community is supposed to mean, first, understanding its

11

For this particular terminology, see Chapter Two above.

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concepts in terms of their own intrasystematic usages. Second, given the role of a religious language as a framework for ultimate orientation, this means appropriating those usages which can encompass and structure one’s experience of all reality. The third aspect, scriptural intratextuality, seems naturally to follow from accepting an authoritative collection of texts which afford a paradigm of the grammatical system of the ecclesial “language” and its use in construing the world. In short, the weaknesses or failures of preliberal and liberal theological methods in Christianity are traced by Lindbeck to their inadequate grasp of the fundamental cultural-linguistic nature of the Christian religious community and the regulative, “grammatical” role of its doctrines. As a result, they succumb to the temptation of “extratextuality,” failing to locate the identity of Christianity in its immanent linguistic network and instead subordinating the Christian idiom either to an ultimate reality to which it more or less truthfully refers (in “preliberal,” propositional theology), or else to an abiding depth-experience it more or less adequately symbolizes (in “liberal,” experiential-expressive theology). In the final chapter of his book, it is evidently the liberal forms of theology which are seen by Lindbeck as most in need of challenge, and their particular brand of “extratextuality” is defined in terms of “experiential-expressivist” theories of doctrinal language. Experientialexpressivism is thus only one kind of extratextuality (this is sometimes forgotten in discussions of Lindbeck’s position) though it is clearly the kind he sees as the biggest current threat. The two basic oppositions (culturallinguistic/experiential-expressive and intratextual/extratextual) are at any rate conceptually distinct and demand separate evaluation.

Liberalism as “Experiential-Expressivism” Lindbeck perhaps did not anticipate that his yoking together of experientialexpressivist theories of religion and liberal theologies, an arguably rather casual and imprecise suggestion for heuristic or illustrative purposes and putatively subordinate to the main point of his book, would draw so much attention. He had made it before in the articles leading up to the publication of the book. But in the agitated discussions which arose in the wake of The Nature of Doctrine, the handy and clear-cut concept of experientialexpressivism was easy to take up as a rhetorical weapon by those who were taken with Lindbeck’s promotion of a postliberal theological program; it was accordingly the object of the sharpest repudiation by others, especially those who felt the concept was directed at them. The concept needs further elaboration, along with an account of some important critical reactions to it.


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In the 1970s and 1980s (when The Nature of Doctrine was conceived and written) Lindbeck regarded “experiential-expressivist” theories of religion as both protean and pervasive, taking a bewildering variety of forms but nonetheless recognizable as a connected set of assumptions dominating contemporary theology (in notable contrast to other scholarly disciplines concerned with religion, which had largely moved away from them). He described it this way: [W]hatever the variations, thinkers of this tradition all locate ultimately significant contact with whatever is finally important to religion in the prereflective experiential depths of the self and regard the public or outer features of religion as expressive and evocative objectifications (i.e., nondiscursive symbols) of internal experience. (ND, 21)

This trend had dominated the academic and theological study of religion ever since Kant’s critiques called into question transcendent metaphysics and the direct referential force of religious language which had supported more propositionalist views of religion. As theological exemplars of this tradition Lindbeck explicitly mentions Schleiermacher, its most important theological initiator, and, on the contemporary scene, Bernard Lonergan, Karl Rahner, and David Tracy (ND, 38). The first thing to notice prior to evaluating the idea of experientialexpressivism is that Lindbeck’s description of it surreptitiously combines two components. The first is essentially a soteriological claim: saving “contact” with the ultimate (for Christians, God) is associated with elements of the human self or of its experience that are in some sense logically prior to reflection.12 The second is a claim about the role of language in such a scheme: it affords a kind of public expression which is logically posterior to the already-constituted religious experience of the subject who uses it. These claims are in fact logically separable. The second claim follows naturally on the first only if one equates “prereflective” with “prelinguistic,” so that meaningful contact of the self with the divine is in no way mediated or made possible by the self ’s linguistic constitution in general or, alternatively, 12 The idea of a relation to the divine which enters into the very constitution of the precognitive self is associated, of course, with Schleiermacher. Thus Lindbeck’s notion of “experiential-expressivism” could be interpreted as another formulation for what Frei in his discussions of Barth’s break with the nineteenth century calls “relationalism,” though the negative emphasis is significantly different. For Frei the problem is that relationalism represents the anthropological domestication of the graced objectivity of revelation; for Lindbeck, the problem is that experiential-expressivism makes faith pre-linguistic in character.

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its location within a particular linguistic community. Language would thus be restricted to the role of providing symbols for “expressing” this “prior” contact with the divine with the self. It seems possible to allow, however, that encounter with God might play a decisive role in structuring experience in a way which affects but does not depend upon conscious reflection (i.e., is prereflective) and yet nevertheless join to this the claim that membership in given linguistic networks is decisive as a medium or condition for its occurrence (i.e., is not prelinguistic). Lindbeck, at any rate, believes that the two claims go together in the tradition he is describing. His dismissal of experiential-expressivism and his counter-argument that language is a necessary condition for religious experience are too sketchy and underdeveloped to be compelling on their own terms. Positively (ignoring a tentative aside wondering whether the capacity for language-use might even shape the pre-experiential bases of sensory and physical competence) his main assertion is that conscious experience is simply impossible except in some symbolically articulated form. It follows that if symbols only inhere within public, intersubjective systems, then a private symbol-system is impossible, and hence too a private religious experience. Even if it is not logically contradictory to posit such a private experience, it is at least unnecessary: what appears to be such could always be explained as a tacit or unthematic awareness of what is nonetheless a linguistically-structured experience (ND, 38). Regardless of the merely suggestive quality of these theses, their point is to render both suspicious and superfluous any appeal to some sort of deep ontology of the prereflective subject. The sparseness of Lindbeck’s refutation along with his adverting to Wittgenstein and other philosophers both imply that he is mounting no independent argument but merely situating his position within a broader philosophical tradition of post-Wittgensteinian critique of the romantic and idealist philosophies of cognition and language and their heirs. The heart of his argument is to be found elsewehere, in his insistence that experiential-expressivist theories are unnecessary not just on the general level of philosophical or anthropological accounts of religion but on the theological level of the analysis of doctrine as well. It is part of the thrust of Lindbeck’s entire book, after all, to assert that a cultural-linguistic theory of religion more successfully accounts for doctrinal dynamics without any appeal to private experience (ND, 84). Experiential-expressivism as Lindbeck sketches it is deliberately quite vague; the simplicity and generality of the description signal its status as a broad typological category encompassing widely diverse positions. In other words it is almost less a “position” itself than a broad tendency, even a cultural atmosphere. As such, the concept of “experiential-expressivism” may


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as well be granted a broadly heuristic value. However, its usefulness as a touchstone for more precise questions of what to embrace or avoid in theology would be seriously compromised if it could be shown that it offers such a simplistic portrait that virtually no one can recognize in it the actual positions of, say, Schleiermacher, or Rahner, or Lonergan, or Tracy. Several of the more careful reviewers of The Nature of Doctrine, some of them even inclined to be sympathetic to Lindbeck’s overall position, felt it necessary to raise just this question as to the utility of the category “experientialexpressivism.” Does it obscure the positions of actual theologians more than it illuminates them? Lindbeck himself admits that the sophisticated positions on doctrine of Rahner and Lonergan, at least, are not so easily reduced to one or another term of his typology. They actually combine experiential-expressivist and propositionalist characteristics. Lindbeck does not really show how this is the case, or how it is even possible. He does say that these hybrid or “twodimensional” positions are superior in that they do justice to the elements of continuity and change in doctrinal development in a way neither propositionalism nor experiential-expressivism can do by themselves. But he complains, again without further elaboration, that they cannot convincingly combine their two positions because in trying to do so they must “resort to complicated intellectual gymnastics” (ND, 17). It does not inspire confidence in the fairness of Lindbeck’s judgment that the positions which he admits are his strongest rivals receive such brisk treatment. At any rate, he confines himself to showing up the weaknesses of propositionalism and experiential-expressivism individually; supposed attempts to combine them are then too easily dismissed as overly complicated. One obvious riposte would be to invite detailed examination of Lindbeck’s favored regulative theory in its actual application to doctrinal history; as has been previously remarked, the result might involve considerable “intellectual gymnastics” of its own! A more substantive reply, however, would focus on the adequacy of Lindbeck’s actual characterization of Rahner’s and Lonergan’s positions as afflicted by “experiential-expressivism.” Two formidable reviewers who have done this are David Burrell and Nicholas Lash; both welcome Lindbeck’s views on doctrine in broad outline even as they question the usefulness of his typology in grasping the concrete theological approaches of one or the other of these thinkers.13 13

For the following see David Burrell, review of The Nature of Doctrine, by George Lindbeck, Union Seminary Quarterly Review 39 (1984): 322–4 and Nicholas Lash, review of The Nature of Doctrine, by George Lindbeck, New Blackfriars 66 (1986): 509–10.

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Lash suspects that Lindbeck’s treatment of Rahner’s theory of “anonymous” Christians (ND, 56–7) is a mere “travesty,” based on a confusion of Rahner’s account of “basic” human experience with the “categorical” nature of saving faith in the Christ. Burrell, for his part, thinks that it is Lindbeck’s treatment of Lonergan which is deficient; he argues that “a ‘performative’ reading” of Lonergan’s basic position on the “depth-structure” of human subjectivity is itself a necessary condition for understanding the fundamental role of language. Of course, these criticisms would have to be substantiated through detailed exegesis, but they add plausibility to the suspicion that the polemical requirements driving the category of experiential-expressivism have resulted in an oversimplified schema which does not so much bring out the general shape of specific theological positions as substitute its own crudities for their subtleties. The resulting straw-man is, of course, effortlessly knocked down. At the very least, it is probable that Lindbeck’s characterization of Rahner and Lonergan as over-complicated “hybrids” might itself be an artifact of the inability of an over-simplified typology to do justice to concrete theological positions, whatever its utility as a broad categorization of historic theories of doctrine.14 Of course, a defender of Lindbeck might reply that the inadequacies of his treatment of more sophisticated “two-dimensional” positions could be admitted without weakening his basic argument against experientialexpressivism itself. This is true, and it is a helpful reminder that the criticism of Lindbeck being offered is not premised on a defense of the experientialexpressivist position on religious language as set forth. It is rather concerned to question the usefulness of the category itself in understanding the theological positions Lindbeck wants to resist. This can be brought out more clearly by looking at the other two cases, which might be expected to be less complicated and more straightforward than the “two-dimensional” examples of Rahner and Lonergan. As pointed out in Chapter One, the printed rebuffs of two University of Chicago scholars, Brian Gerrish and David Tracy, to Lindbeck’s book did much to cement the unhelpful impression of a “Chicago–Yale” divide in theology. The specific points at which they questioned Lindbeck have been, however, less discussed. Both proceed by plausibly deflecting Lindbeck’s polemical theological application of his category of experiential-expressivism, Tracy by defending himself, Gerrish by discussing Schleiermacher. Tracy’s response to Lindbeck’s book has become a favorite citation in the discussion, probably as much for its pithy quotations as for its content (the

14

See Burrell, review of ND, 322, for a similar suggestion.


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tone was, for him, uncharacteristically testy).15 Trying to respond to Lindbeck on various levels in a limited space, the article inevitably feels rushed and fires at several targets at once; there are some “misses” as well as some palpable “hits” against Lindbeck, but Tracy’s main point on the issue at hand is easily summarized. The category of experiential-expressivism is both outof-date and inadequate. It is out-of-date because since at least the early 1970s those criticisms of the romantic-idealist tradition of language which Lindbeck introduces as novelties have been widely and explicitly taken up by theologians who nonetheless remain “liberal” in orientation. Tracy refers explicitly to theologians influenced by hermeneutical theory, as well as various political and liberationist currents. Tracy’s irritation with Lindbeck springs from his impression that, however illuminating his discussion of doctrine (and Tracy registers cautious appreciation for the “rule” theory), his specifically theological recommendations are culpably ill-informed on the current state of the discussion. (The origins of Lindbeck’s basic position in lectures from the mid-1970s might be recalled here.) What is more, Tracy with some justification points out that Lindbeck’s (unfortunate) theological proposals do not necessarily follow from his (promising) doctrinal theories. And as for the accuracy of the accusation of experiential-expressivism itself, Tracy insists that those, like himself, who are informed by the philosophical tradition stemming from Gadamer can comfortably meet Lindbeck’s strictures; they, too, reject any “unidirectional”concept of language merely “expressing” a “primal” or “foundational” level of private experience.16 Tracy is not content with defending himself but moves on to counterattack. He suspects that the real roots of Lindbeck’s opposition to those theologians he tries to brand with the label “experiential-expressivist” are not philosophical at all; it is not the incoherence of their theories of language and experience which trouble him, but their openness to more radical revision of the dogmatic tradition. There is obviously some truth to this, even if the irritated countercharge of “Barthian confessionalism” is finally more revealing of Tracy’s attitudes than Lindbeck’s.17 But the present task is to probe how

15 David Tracy, “Lindbeck’s New Program for Theology: A Reflection,” The Thomist 49 (1985): 465. 16 Ibid., 463–4. Tracy also suggests that more careful research into earlier “experientialexpressivist” figures like Schleiermacher and Tillich has revealed more nuance on the relation of experience to language than Lindbeck allows. He unwittingly echoes Lindbeck’s assessment of Schleiermacher when he speaks of the latter’s actual performance as superior to his theory. 17 Ibid., 465–6. As already noted, the influence of Barth on Lindbeck is strictly limited, and Tracy does not even bother to engage Lindbeck’s explicit refutation of the charges of “relativism” and “fideism” at ND, 129–32. ”Lindbeck’s New Program,” 465–6.

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ripostes to the accusation of “experiential-expressivism” have raised plausible doubts as to its cogency. In the case under discussion, Tracy sees in the conceptual weaknesses of the category itself not only a signal of Lindbeck’s disengagement with progressive theological currents but also an indication of a deeper problem in the way language and experience are understood to relate to each other. Tracy in effect exploits the already indicated “seam” between the two claims which are juxtaposed in Lindbeck’s notion of experiential-expressivism. He cheerfully joins Lindbeck in abandoning any notion of language as simply posterior to the process of subjectivity (the second claim); but not for a moment does this call into question the propriety of “hermeneutic philosophy,” with its continued investment in transcendental theories of the subject as informed by “classical” insights into the “non-empiricist notion of experience.” (By the latter Tracy means those insights into the transcendental structure of subjectivity which are informed both by the Continental tradition and by the epistemologies of American pragmatism.) In so doing he implies that the hermeneutic tradition has shown how historicity and language may be admitted to a constitutive role in the constitution of temporal experience, indeed of selfhood itself, without simply abandoning reflection on the deep structures of the understanding subject as such.18 Thus Tracy can claim that the hermeneutic trajectory actually does better justice than Lindbeck to the dialectic of language and experience. It rejects the “unilateral” movement from grounding experience to expressive language which Lindbeck sees as the hallmark of experiential-expressivism, but it also rejects what Tracy sees as Lindbeck’s own equally unilateral move from a “foundational” linguistic network to a derivative, constructed experience. The similarity to Burrell’s point about the need for an account of “inwardness” on Lonergan’s lines is notable (and hardly surprising given Tracy’s debts to Lonergan), but more important is the picture that is here emerging.19 No less than Tracy, Lindbeck too admits that the relation of language to experience is a dialectical circle, with each side of the relationship shaping the other in specific and complicated ways. On the one side there is the subjective equipment of the language user, combining generic (“natural”) cognitive structures with the unavoidably historical and communal categories of experience; on the other side there are the meaningful networks of public signs which both shape those communal categories and yet which themselves are reshaped in their constant deployment by language-users. 18 19

Ibid., 463–4. Burrell, review of ND, 324.


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Neither Lindbeck nor Tracy, presumably, would deny that both sides in mutual relation are necessary to account for the concrete phenomena of human culture. The real issue, Lindbeck says, concerns which side of the dialectic, language or experience, is “the leading partner” (ND, 33–4). A few phrases at least hint at how he might specify what it means for language to “lead”: he alludes all-too-briefly to “logical priority,” or to one side being relatively “unchanging” vis-à-vis the other, or even to one side being akin to a preexisting “form” as opposed to a mere “material” substrate dependent on being “informed” for its existence (ND, 34–5). These allusions, though indicative of what Lindbeck has in mind, do not really succeed in exchanging imagery for conceptual precision. But the issue as it affects theology can be made more explicit by saying it apparently turns on which part of the dialectic, language or experience, provides a norm against which the other side can be measured. On this understanding the substance of Lindbeck’s case against “experiential-expressivism” is that it makes experience “logically prior” when it is really language which should be awarded primacy. That is, Lindbeck resists experiential-expressivism because it posits access to some “basic” stratum of experience (say, through transcendental argumentation or phenomenological description) which is capable of relative abstraction from its embodiment in communal or traditional language. The resulting isolation of a “foundational” or “grounding” element in or level of communal experience from its reciprocal engagement with the communal language is designed to provide a sufficiently secure platform for assessing and criticizing the adequacy of that language. Lindbeck’s preferred alternative can be specified as the precise opposite of this. On the cultural-linguistic understanding it is the semiotic “code” which is the “foundational” or “grounding” element shaping experience; it is isolable only through “thick” description of the community’s symbolic constitution of its immanent world of meaning, guided through the application of an authoritative instantiation of that meaning, the scripture. The position Lindbeck opposes discerns within the cultural process of communal self-perpetuation a characteristic “shape” to its experience which must relativize and “control” linguistic usage. The position he argues for finds the characteristic “shape” of the community’s identity to be located in the codes guiding linguistic usage, which must in turn generate and “control” shifting patterns of subjective experience. What is striking in either case is the way a descriptive account has shifted imperceptibly into a search for norms. Although Tracy and Lindbeck might seem to be arguing about which theory best describes actual cultural processes, the theological problem of how to insure the faithfulness of a

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community to its own identity haunts the entire discussion. To say that experience is “foundational” to its dialectical partner language, or vice versa, is not to deny the necessity of both elements in their mutually reciprocal conditioning; it is to locate which element furnishes a theological touchstone, which point in the dialectical circle can be used to assess the proper direction of the communal process as a whole, which helps the believer or the theologian to identify healthy from aberrant developments in the community.20 But Lindbeck’s primary discussion of experiential-expressivism invokes the authority of philosophy and social science to suggest its failure, thereby emphasizing its descriptive inadequacy. This allows the deep connections with the problem of normative theological judgments to remain in the background. Anthropologists, after all, try to describe a particular community and its practices; their concern with the symbolic systems has nothing to do with locating some persistent identity to judge the “faithfulness” to the community’s “identity.” The very notion of a culture or a religion being “faithful” to some core identity would surely be rejected by most anthropologists as meaningless. In sum, the discussion of Tracy’s response to Lindbeck has revealed another reason why the oft-invoked category of experientialexpressivism provides a meager payoff for methodological discussions in theology. It does not provide the terms in which to distinguish a “liberal” from a “postliberal” theology, not just because it cannot do justice to the complexity of the actual theologians it purports to describe, but also because it fails to articulate in a methodologically precise way the real point at issue: competing definitions of communal faithfulness. A final example of a telling retort to the accusation of experientialexpressivism will further strengthen this judgment, Gerrish’s criticism of the way Lindbeck’s book characterizes the “father of liberal theology.” Like Tracy, Gerrish exploits the “seam” in Lindbeck’s definition of experientialexpressivism between experience as “prereflective” and as “prelinguistic.” Lindbeck insists that language is a condition for religious experience, while not denying that there may be prereflective experiences (pp. 36–7). But it is difficult to see how this insistence could differentiate his position from

20

It is this criteriological sense of “foundational” that is Lindbeck’s real enemy in the discussion of experiential-expressivism, not the apologetic sense assumed by Burrell in his review. Pace Burrell, it is not clear that Lindbeck’s case against experiential-expressive theology has in fact specified as an “inherently liberal” strategy the search for a “ground” for Christian belief and practice which allows it to be “justified to unbeliever and believer alike.” Burrell, review of ND, 324. The question of apologetics versus dogmatics will be taken up again in the context of Chapter Five’s discussion of Frei.


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Schleiermacher’s. In Schleiermacher’s view, doctrines do not express a prelinguistic experience but an experience that has already been constituted by the language of the community.21

To put this another way, if experiential-expressivism is defined as locating within the individual an unarticulated but integral experience of the divine upon which diverse symbolizations follow as a mere adjunct, then close study of Schleiermacher cannot acknowledge experiential-expressivism (some similar-sounding turns of phrase notwithstanding) as a description of his practice or even his theory. The “private” character of religious experience which Lindbeck’s model implies is quite foreign to Schleiermacher’s dogmatic theology, in which the redemptive experience of God is strictly impossible apart from the linguistic network of the community of faith. Further, Gerrish must reply once again to the endlessly propagated myth that Schleiermacher posits a “universal” religious experience. What in fact Schleiermacher does is to identify a common “element” which makes religious experiences, in all their rich and irreducible diversity, religious.22 This element, a structural aspect of all human self-consciousness, is a component within varied religious experiences but is not itself an experience at all. This raises a related point. A tempting but false implication of the idea of experiential-expressivism has been that it necessarily identifies a universal “experience” shared by all religious people. This implication in no way follows from the experiential-expressivist position Lindbeck has defined, though he does claim that it often “accompanies” it. Later abandoning this caution, however, he made things easier for himself by treating the refutation of this kind of universalism as itself tantamount to refutation of experiential-expressivism.23 Careless sympathizers have followed him in this unfortunate move. The result of the varied responses just surveyed does not speak well for the coherence or usefulness of the category of experiential-expressivism, at 21

Brian Gerrish, review of The Nature of Doctrine, by George Lindbeck, Journal of Religion 68 (1988): 87–92 at pp. 89–90. 22 Ibid., 89. 23 For example, on page 32 of ND Lindbeck says that the “underlying unity of religious experience” is “the most problematic element in [Lonergan’s], as in other, experiential-expressive theories.” The clear implication is that such a problematic assertion of trans-religious experience burdens these theories as such, in spite of the fact that only a few pages before (ND, 23) he had admitted that appeals to a “core” universal experience are “suggested, though not necessitated, by an experiential-expressive approach.” Given Gerrish’s analysis of the putative founder of this approach, one might even want to question whether anything in experiential-expressivism as technically defined by Lindbeck “suggests” the notion of a universal religious experience. Be that as it may, a refutation of universal experience, though it saves the postliberal thinker much exertion, cannot pass muster as a refutation of experiential-expressivism.

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least on questions of theological method. The suspicion quickly arises that any use of it as a definition of a type of theology (as opposed to a theory of religious doctrine) would have to qualify the category to the point of disintegration. But perhaps experiential-expressivism is not quite the central theological issue that its prominence in Lindbeck discussions would indicate. There are in fact good grounds for not regarding the dubious experiential-expressive account of theological “liberalism” as the real foundation of Lindbeck’s proposals for a “postliberal” theology. Here returns to mind the curious claim already mentioned that Schleiermacher was able to “baptize” experiential-expressivism, in other words turn it to uses which are “intratextually” faithful. The opposition “experiential-expressivist/culturallinguistic” does not (though this is often assumed) coincide with the opposition “extratextual/intratextual” in identifying the postliberal departure Lindbeck is trying to formulate. But the preceding discussion has helped to identify something the two sets of oppositions have in common. Lindbeck is grappling with the dialectic of change and continuity in Christian belief and practice, and formulates the cultural form of its perpetuation as the interplay between a public system of signs on one side and shifting subjectivities and their experiences in changing contexts on the other. The theological problem which occupies him is that of the accessible locus of stability and identity for the community within this concrete process. As was seen, his basic move is to see the “carrier” of continuity as locatable within the semiotic code that rules the symbolic idiom which defines Christianity, not in the ultimate states of affairs it is used to reference nor in the transformed modes of human existence it symbolizes. In its function of defining the identity of the community itself, the semantic network is “prior” to either of these usages of it. Herein is made clear once again the dominant metaphor for participation in the community earlier noted: the sharing of a common language. But the current discussion is leading inexorably to the following conclusion: even if it is granted that a culturallinguistic model provides a more fruitful and less misleading model for describing a religion, it does not in itself lead to the identification of a new way of doing theology, nor do those other theorizations of religion which are displaced neatly link up with rival theological procedures. In short, the schematic way Lindbeck sets up the opposition of culturallinguistic and experiential-expressive models leads almost imperceptibly not just to an inadequate description of a “liberal” theological method, but more importantly to a questionable formulation of a “postliberal” theology which must oppose it. In the questionable account which results, the basic flaw of liberalism is isolating a prelinguistic experience as the norm for faithful description over against mutable linguistic objectifications; it follows


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that the proper goal must lie in the opposite direction, in the isolation of a linguistic “code” as the persistent actual norm over against changing experience. The question, though, is whether the linguistic analogy for ecclesial processes, its legitimate insights notwithstanding, is funding a misleading model of theological judgment. Can the linguistic “grammar” of the community’s practice in fact be isolated in a form usable as a theological criterion? Can it be seen as a categorical framework “into” which external meanings must be incorporated? This is the question more clearly raised by Lindbeck’s second and more fundamental category for defining postliberal theology: intratextuality.

Intratextuality The discussion of intratextuality in Chapter Three above highlighted the complexity of the concept in Lindbeck’s usage. Recall that intratextuality was proposed as the key to a postliberal type of theology (a theology which internalizes and consistently applies the basic lessons of a cultural-linguistic theory of religion); it gives its own particular content to the basic formal theological criterion of “faithfulness” (and indirectly conditions the other two criteria as well). Systematic theology must be intratextual in practice if it is to offer a “faithful” description, that is an interpretive account of Christian faith and practice for the present situation which is in continuity with the religion’s own internal essence and goal. It should also be recalled once again that Lindbeck identifies three senses in which a postliberal theology will seek to be intratextual, which were above dubbed “semiotic,” “realityencompassing,” and “scriptural.” A critical assessment of the category of “intratextuality” must probe each of these separately. The first aspect of intratextuality, the “semiotic,” is intended to be a restatement for theological purposes of the basic claim of the “interpretive” tradition of social science, namely that understanding a culture or a religion as a symbolic system involves giving priority to the particular network of public signs meaningfully applied by participants in their everyday practice. Only when this traffic in meanings has been registered and described in terms of its own regularities will it be possible to link up cultural practices with their roles in the psychology of individuals or in the functioning of social institutions. This first sense is relatively uncontroversial for present purposes; the following discussion will focus instead on the second two senses of intratextuality for Lindbeck, and especially on the way they are understood to be related. Lindbeck writes in a way that implies his notion of “reality-encompassing” intratextuality is in effect merely an elaboration of what Geertz means by

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“thick description” (ND, 115). But it is not at all clear that Geertz has in mind what Lindbeck does, namely “describing everything as inside, as interpreted by the religion.” A “thick” description according to Geertz is one in which social interactions are not simply delineated (in a kind of “behaviorist” fashion) according to their visible manifestations but interpreted in light of the meanings they have for participants based on the “imaginative universe” of symbols shared by them. To use his well-known example, a peculiar twitch of one eye is understood as a “wink” only when it is “thickly” described as part of a shared convention of meaning: it is an act (not a physical reflex) because it is a sign.24 But however necessary it is for the observer to imaginatively “enter into” this world of shared conventions and explore its contours in order to understand the culture’s interpersonal functioning, this is always and only in the service of understanding what is “going on” in this culture as observed. The anthropologist need not be an actual participant in the traditions and conventions in question, their concomitant world-view and ethos, in order to do this; nor does he or she have any vested interest in “living” this culture to the extent of making it the basic framework for interpreting all reality. Lindbeck’s discussion does not signal clearly that Geertzian anthropological “thick description” is here being theologically “thickened” quite a bit more; it now includes creatively exhibiting the “full range of the interpretive medium” by imaginatively re-describing the world and oneself in terms of the communal network of meaning being described (ND, 115). This is in fact another instance of surreptitiously blurring the distinction between description and norm. That is, the turn has been made, with insufficient theoretical explanation, from describing a framework of meaning to adopting it as one’s own basic perspective, accepting it as authoritative for belief and practice. Describing a particular interpretive framework as it becomes visible in the interactions of people in a shared cultural context is something quite different from, as it were, inscribing oneself into it, interpreting one’s own reality as a subject, including all the events one encounters and the courses of action one proposes for oneself, all in terms of that framework. In fact, it is not to be taken for granted that both things could actually be done by the same person at the same time. At first this might seem counterintuitive. Doesn’t the second practice, it could be asked, in fact presuppose the first? Is it not the case that one must have a description of the cultural framework in order to “apply” it to reality? But on further reflection these questions betray an excessively crude picture of cultural processes. It is 24

Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 5–10.


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actually more likely that only a person sufficiently “outside” a cultural framework of meaning (like an anthropologist studying it) would be in a position to draw out the “network of meaning” from the actual social events which embody it. Actual participants in the culture are too deeply socialized into it, too imbedded in the concrete interplay of meaningful everyday acts which helps construct their “world” to easily abstract a symbolic code or “logic” of their own actions. Any assessment of the feasibility of Lindbeck’s notion of “world-encompassing” intratextuality as a theological practice will have to grapple with this difficult relationship between, on the one hand, accounting for a culture in terms of a discernable and descriptively isolable semiotic network and, on the other, actually immersing oneself into that exchange of meanings on a lived basis as an agent formed by and helping to form that culture. There is a further kind of troubling question introduced by the third aspect of intratextuality, the “scriptural.” The theologian qua theologian (assuming at least some capacity to suspend or step back from the “everyday” unreflective practice of belief) must not only uncover the “logic” of his or her community’s actions, abstracting a meaningful symbolic system from its concrete life; he or she must also measure or compare this logic of current meaningful practice to its supposed instantiation in another cultural context, collectively rendered through the canonical documents of the community. Lindbeck understands the New Testament documents to be the written results of the early community’s applications of that selfsame grammatical code or framework that gives Christianity its unity and identity over time. In this conjoining of the second (“world-encompassing”) kind of intratextuality with the third (“scriptural”) kind Lindbeck seems to envision the ability to derive from the New Testament texts a single, systematic set of ways of generating “Christian” interpretations of one’s cultural surroundings which is of sufficient clarity and detail to guide and norm the theological interpretations demanded of the present community. Two kinds of question might be put to this notion of intratextuality. First, does the motley collection of documents in the canon in fact exemplify a single network of interpretive semiotic applications which can be unambiguously derived from them? Second, and this is the more crucial point, can the way this set of varied applications engages with cultural givens be subsumed under the single master-image of “absorbing the world”? That is, do they in fact form a “system” with the kind of coherence and mutual co-implication that would make sense of a clear distinction between “intratextual” and “extratextual” interpretations? This last question takes one back beyond its “scriptural” aspect to the entire concept of “intratextuality” as a whole.

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The first question, one might say, focuses on the “text” aspect of intratextuality, while the other concerns difficulties with the determination of a “direction” of interpretation (the “intra” part). The first question, then, might take forms like: “Is there just one normative sense of the text?”; “Is there in fact ‘a’ biblical story?”; “Isn’t the text into which the world is absorbed itself plural, the product of competing interpretations?” Questions of this first kind really cause less of a problem for Lindbeck’s idea of intratextuality than questions of the second kind. This is because he is quite careful not to claim too much for the idea in terms of textual hermeneutics. The usefulness of the intratextual model for theology is not, in his opinion, compromised by the fact that it cannot generate automatic consensus about the “text” in question (ND, 122). In fact, the very attempt to “norm” a “world-encompassing” thick description in the present setting by appeal to the “code” discerned in the textual products of a past “classical” instance of such description makes irreducibly pluriform results unavoidable. Why is this? These texts, forming the New Testament canon, are the written product of complicated communal interpretations of the thencontemporary world in light of the event of God in Christ. But to disentangle from the varied cultural materials in which they are embodied those interpretive principles originally involved and their framework of interconnections would be an undertaking of almost unimaginable difficulty. The anthropologist trying to study the meaningful interconnections of the sign system of a “primitive” society she is observing has crucial advantages: active informants who participate in the cultural process and can generate internal interpretations of it, for example, and the fact that the process is currently ongoing and can thus provide a “laboratory” in which the observer’s particular “readings” of the sign system can be tested and corrected. But the original living cultural context of the New Testament documents has disappeared forever; only the fossilized literary product of these original interpretive processes, or rather a small selection of them, remains. The search for the normative sense on Lindbeck’s understanding is supposed to be the search for the semiotic system or “code” which generated these canonical results; but of course even this small collection of texts can support any number of plausible construals of that code. The code is certainly not available “on the surface” of the text, and there is little control against erroneous judgment apart from patient and repeated persuasive appeal to the text itself.25 25

If the retort is made that in fact the current Christian community is the relevant control group, then this could only mean that the current interpretive system informing the linguistic practice of Christian communities is the touchstone for discovering the original semiotic system of the New Testament, in which case it is impossible to see how the latter could serve to “norm” the former.


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Intratextual interpretations, in short, will be unavoidably plural; multiple “intratextualities” will have to jostle for position within the theological community. Any determination of the normative sense of the scripture will depend on a construal which is inherently disputable, and determined by an array of situation-conditioned judgments. The “framework” of interpretation to be “derived” from scripture will vary accordingly. But this is finally no objection to Lindbeck, for he is certainly not claiming that a single “correct” framework would occur to any properly formed reader merely from careful inspection of the New Testament. As he acknowledges, its derivation would instead have to be the product of considerable interpretive struggle, and different interpreters would disagree on its shape. Lindbeck energetically affirms that theological consensus is never “forced” on the community of interpretation by a supposedly straightforward appeal to the text. But then just what benefit does he expect from the adoption of an intratextual theological approach to the Bible? To see what he is and is not claiming for it, it might be helpful to pick out from his very concentrated discussion three ways in which differing theological positions might result from appeal to a common text. First of all, an intratextual construal of the normative sense of the scripture is obviously only one option among several. Other theologians will appeal to the historical events recorded in the text, the moral injunctions and ideals which can be gleaned from it, or the ideal of community pictured there, or the symbols and myths which can give contemporary guidance and inspiration. Lindbeck makes the important point that doctrinal correctness alone cannot decide between these ways of understanding the status of authority. “They may all be formally orthodox in the sense that they are reconcilable with Nicaea. . . . [F]or most purposes theological issues are more crucial and interesting than doctrinal ones” (ND, 119–20). Intratextuality can only be recommended over these others on the strength of its actual performance in guiding the community’s life. But, second, even when there is agreement on pursuing the normative sense of scriptural intratextually, there will be different results because of disagreement on just what the norm is. An intratextual approach “tries to derive the interpretive framework that designates the theologically controlling sense from the literary structure of the text itself ” (ND, 120). But disputes will immediately break out. What is the best way to identify the relevant unit of interpretation and its boundaries? Even if this is agreed upon, what is the best characterization of this literary structure? In short, even formal agreement on an intratextual approach to reading scripture as norm will result in different (perhaps even incompatible) material formulations of the norm. Third and finally, even when there is material agreement

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on such a proposal, theologians will apply this common norm to their common world only by means of selective and different perspectives on that world, resulting yet again in materially competing theologies. But the common acceptance among theologians of an intratextual approach to the authority of scripture would still, in Lindbeck’s opinion, be a great gain. It would leave the normative force of the text less vulnerable to the whims of the latest hermeneutical devices, all of which may be applicable to and to some degree illuminative of this or that aspect of scripture, but whose immanent presuppositions and agendas might, in ways hard to discern, be at odds with those of the believing community. The proliferation of interpretive approaches to the New Testament, even formally orthodox ones, is in principle infinite. Some variety in the construal of scripture is inevitable; an infinite variety of equally valid constructions is pointless chaos. The point of accepting an intratextual approach, which demands close attention to the literary shape of the texts as encoding the intentions behind their canonization, is not to avoid theological arguments on what is normative but to give such arguments a consensual scope, a common framework assumption about where to look for that normativity (ND, 119–20). Searching for the “grammar” by which the early communities ordered their perceived realities under the lordship of the Christ would then become the common goal against which the success or failure of the varied interpretive constructions proposed could be measured. The main point is to insure some kind of coherence between, on the one side, the world-interpreting framework under the control of which the documents were produced by the primitive community and, on the other, the text-interpretive framework the contemporary theologian uses to locate the normative sense. There is no denial here of the unavoidably contested status of “the” text or “the” story; there is only the attempt to make such contests meaningful in terms of a common goal and argumentative context. To sum up, the worry that Lindbeck’s notion of intratextuality is vitiated by an attempt to transcend or short-circuit the struggle of scriptural interpretation is largely misplaced. On his understanding, intratextuality would be seen as a way of giving a defined theological meaning to that struggle, not a way of evading it. But this leaves unaddressed the second question raised above, that of the whole notion of an identifiable “direction of interpretation” suggested by the prepositional prefixes “intra” and “extra.” The difficulties with the idea of an intratextual/extratextual opposition which arise at this point are far more intractable than those examined so far. The image of “absorbing” the world which informs this opposition rests on an unhelpful and misleading conception of the way the Christian church


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engages in the very cultural processes constituting it. The image may indeed be suggestive of a selected aspect of these processes, but its limitations demand supplementation by other images. What must be strongly questioned is its proposed role as a kind of master concept, formulating the essence of theological faithfulness and articulating the central evaluative distinction between (supposedly) an unhealthy “liberal” method and a healthy postliberal one. As pointed out in Chapter Two, in Lindbeck’s broader usage of the term, intratextuality is much more than a way to understand theological criteria. It is a way to understand the entire communal process which a religion like Christianity consists in. If any community as such is involved in socially constructing the “reality” it collectively experiences, intratextuality is the peculiar way this is supposed to happen in those communities that seek faithfulness to some persistent identity through appeal to a normative text. All members of the Christian community, not just theologians, should be engaged in “socially embodying” the scriptural witness by “inscribing” their experiences into the scriptural world and putting into practice the results in guiding and shaping their concrete social existence.26 They can do this simply because the richness, complexity, and all-encompassing vision of the world delineated in scripture allows it; it shares these traits with any number of other great classics, religious or not. They should do this, however, because they acknowledge in this text the embodiment in some sense of God’s word, that ultimate call to which they must respond in every circumstance.27 But according to Lindbeck’s conception the theologian has the important task of monitoring this continual process, guiding it in such a way that the world really is “absorbed” into the text and not vice versa; at each point in the social construction of reality the elements of experience and meaning must be, on this model, inserted into the biblical framework, “baptized” into it. Though, as conceded above, there will be rival theological formulations of this biblical framework vying for attention, the crucial point is that no rivalry will be brooked from a non-biblical framework of understanding when it comes to the Christian assembly of its world-view. That error is what Lindbeck calls “extratextuality,” the subordination of the scriptural network of meanings to an “alien” understanding (ND, 118, 125–6, 132). The kind of theology he promotes will help to see that this does not happen by offering guiding interpretations of current reality which are intratextually faithful, 26

George Lindbeck, “Atonement and the Hermeneutics of Intratextual Social Embodiment,” in The Nature of Confession: Evangelicals and Postliberals in Conversation, eds. Timothy R. Phillips and Dennis L. Okholm (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 226–7. 27 Lindbeck, “Barth and Textuality,” 374–5.

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conformed to the scripture as the normative textual exemplar of the baptism of culture into the confessed lordship of Christ. The project, with its neat opposition between two “directions” of interpretation, sounds simple enough, and is intuitively appealing in the face of insecurities about the maintenance of faithful Christian witness. But closer examination quickly reveals unsuspected difficulties. A glance at three different assessments of intratextuality, formulated independently but convergent in insight, will throw some light on the severe problems inherent in trying to formulate the task of theological faithfulness in this manner. The penetrating criticisms offered by Rowan Williams, Miroslav Volf, and Terrence Tilley positively emerge out of less inadequate imaginings of the role of the Christian community in its cultural engagements. But the purpose here is to delineate the negative ways they distance themselves from a conception of theology in purely “intratextual” terms, and to see if a common root of their shared discomfort can be uncovered. In his essay “Postmodern Theology and the Judgment of the World,” Rowan Williams insists that the imagery of intratextuality skews the point of Christian engagement with culture. Such engagement is “essentially missionary” in character, an invitation by the church to the broader culture and society in which it is fundamentally involved. By inviting all people to redescribe their personal and collective projects in light of the social forms of the church responding to God in Christ, the church is always “working towards the point where these new self-descriptions can be seen as possible and intelligible.”28 As an essentially missionary body, the church therefore is not just judging the world but being judged by it as well. What Williams envisions is not so much trying to translate an already securely possessed language into an alien idiom as it is learning to speak of the Christ in new situations, situations which highlight the contours and limits of the already given forms of the Christian symbol system in unsuspected and finally uncontrollable ways.29 What is troubling for Williams is the way in which the imagery of intratextuality suggests an internal realm of assured meaning which protects itself through a one-sided processing of the “alien” which guarantees semiotic “mastery” at each step, never exploring its resonances with the selfinterpretations of others on their own terms. But for him the church, of its very nature, is always riskily “outside” itself. This does not imply the giving up of its own language, but its continual testing and refinement instead: “We are discovering whether there is any sense in which the other lan28 29

Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 32. Ibid., 38–9.


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guages we are working with can be at home with our theology.”30 This is neither to “translate” some abstract content into a foreign idiom (i.e. extratextuality) nor to triumphantly subsume that idiom under our own scheme (i.e. intratextuality) but to “rediscover our own foundational story in the acts and hopes of others [so] that we ourselves are reconverted.” The final chapter will explore the positive implications of ideas like these for conceiving of the theological task after “postliberalism,” but for now what is to be noted is Williams’s discomfort in the face of an account that pictures theological engagement with the cultural environment as a unidirectional subsumption within its own carefully policed boundaries of the “external” self-interpretations of others: I am both interested and perturbed by the territorial cast of the imagery used here – of a ‘framework’ within whose boundaries things – persons? – are to be inserted. Is this in fact how a scripturally informed imagination works?31

Miroslav Volf registers a similar note of skepticism in his article “Theology, Meaning and Power.” For him, the metaphors which cluster around the notion of intratextuality, such as “absorbing” the world, and reversing the “direction of conformation [sic],” systematically obscure the unrelieved indeterminacy marking the relationship between “Christ and culture” (to recall H. Richard Niebuhr’s phrase). These metaphors “suggest a general way of relating to the culture as a whole: you either absorb it, or are absorbed by it”; but in fact, “it is difficult to say who is absorbing whom at any given moment.”32 Volf adds that the reason the encounter of Christians with given cultures cannot be schematized in this way is twofold: “first, since you are never outside the wider culture, that culture is part and parcel of who you are; second, the wider culture is not a monolithic whole but a differentiated network of beliefs and practices.” Volf has surely put his finger on what is askew with the image of intratextuality, but his identification of its problematic assumptions needs supplementation. The second reason he gives, the differentiated character of the wider culture, which implies that “there are only numerous ways of accepting, transforming, or replacing aspects of a given culture from within,” would not of itself eliminate the claim that the church always maintains the semiotic priority of its “grammar” in spite of these varied encounters. Lindbeck 30

Ibid., 39. Ibid., 29. 32 For this and the two following quotes see Miroslav Volf, “Theology, Meaning, and Power,” in The Future of Theology: Essays in Honor of Jürgen Moltmann, ed. Miroslav Volf, Carmen Krieg, and Thomas Kucharz (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), 101. 31

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could also agree with the claim that the wider culture always enters into the makeup of the church itself, but still insist that there is a single “logic” ruling faithful incorporation. But Volf has nevertheless correctly identified a questionable central presupposition at work in intratextuality, namely that one should be able unambiguously to distinguish within the cultural interchanges which define Christian existence a “controlling” position and a “controlled” one. Both Williams and Volf agree with Lindbeck that there is indeed a constant drive of the church to link up its linguistic practices with those of its wider cultural environment, but they question the model of an identifiably Christian framework of meaning absorbing various “alien” meaningstructures. This is misleading for Williams because the goal and result of this social and cultural engagement of the Christian community is not the unilateral conversion of the world’s meaning into the Church’s but the collective conversion of both world and church toward converging visions of human wholeness. It is misleading for Volf because it implies a clear distinction between a dominant framework and a subordinated one, a distinction which is simply not given in cultural practice. What both authors seem to imply in different ways is that the notion of intratextuality as a model for theological faithfulness depends for its plausibility on an ability to abstract from the practice of Christian community a stable conceptual structure or criterion by means of which the kinds of knowledge, the collective projects and world-views, in fact all the varied “worlds” of other cultural configurations can be “mastered” and reconfigured. Such mastery would involve a constant “asymmetry” in all “faithful” cultural encounters: the “Christian” moment can maintain a certain priority at each point because it can be identified with a conceptual framework (either implicitly in practice or explicitly in theological judgment), isolated in its characteristic structure, and held steady through a theoretically unlimited set of cultural permutations. The identity of the community, it turns out, simply is this conceptual framework; it imposes a characteristic shape on all the varied cultural complexes taken up into it but always remains distinguishable from them. The simplistic imagery perhaps trades on an implausible analogy with quite different sorts of symbolic transaction, as when foreign words and phrases are translated “into” a natural language, or when variables are inserted “into” an algebraic function. A glance at Terrence Tilley’s important article “Incommensurability, Intratextuality, and Fideism” might help pinpoint the problem with this image of carefully controllable exchanges, deeply attractive to a community anxious for its identity. Tilley mounts an effective, point-by-point critique of the assumptions


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which seem to underlie intratextuality, focusing on the idea of “a” religion as a network of meanings determined by a single, integral semiotic framework. His charge, turning Lindbeck against himself, is that intratextuality is actually incompatible with the “basic insight of a cultural-linguistic model of religion, that the meanings of concepts are determined by their place in the semiotic system which the community uses.”33 Any religion, including Christianity, which has transcended a single societal setting to become the religious culture informing widely varying social entities has by that very fact shown the ability to encompass divergent “logics” of cultural practice. But Lindbeck’s scheme implies that the differences in meaningful practice between the various culturally and historically situated Christian communities must be sharply and in a qualitative way distinguished from the differences between any such Christian community and a non-Christian cultural network. The unavoidable implication is that a single Christian conceptual framework is capable of regulating “proper” Christian cultural practice and insuring that different cultural instantiations of Christian belief all “mean” the same thing. Tilley responds that whatever unites these differing networks of meaningful practice, it is unlikely to be a single framework of meaning which can both “commensurate” them all and at the same time decisively differentiate them from any non-Christian system of meaning. Those cultural elements which are the identifiable markers of a religious tradition, including a normative selection of texts (if any), are simply incapable by themselves of patterning a single, perpetually distinctive yet self-identical cultural practice. In order to be understood and put into practice such cultural elements must already have been linked up with, inserted into, some already constituted communal cultural network. They have found a purchase and a role within a society or group only because their meanings have found resonance within an established cultural practice which, by that very fact, has to a large degree constituted the assembly of Christian materials as a particular system at that site. In other words, rather than envisioning the elements of Christian tradition as themselves “already” constituting a single system, Tilley claims in effect that they only become meaningful by entering into already constituted cultural systems informing the collective practice of social groups. It is no doubt true that in this way Christianity over time helps to shape, perhaps decisively, what such a culture “means,” but the crucial point is that the opposite is no less true: the cultural elements so shaped in turn determine 33 Terrence W. Tilley, “Incommensurability, Intratextuality, and Fideism,” Modern Theology 5 (1989): 87–111.

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decisively what Christianity “means” at that location.34 The distinctive cultural elements of Christianity as carried by tradition no doubt temporally precede any concrete instantiation in practice, but their configuration into a decisively identifying framework of meaning for a group of practitioners is consequent upon such concrete instantiation, and so cannot determine “beforehand” the shape of that configuration. So the “systematic” configuration of the semiotic elements involved in any Christian cultural activity is always constituted to a decisive degree by the peculiar configuration of its concrete cultural environment. And Christianity (or any other “major” religion for that matter) will consist in a profusion of such distinctively situated cultural systems. Tilley asks pointedly: “[D]o American and Israeli Jews have the same semiotic system? . . . Do St Augustine, St Thomas, Luther, and Lindbeck live in the same culturallinguistic framework?”35 In short, a single system of meaning which could unify and commensurate every cultural instantiation of Christianity is a chimera, and the social-scientific principles Lindbeck himself adduces should already have led him to see this. Can a common element be discerned in the different questions put to Lindbeck’s intratextuality by Williams, Volf, and Tilley? All could be said to be broadly sympathetic with Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic approach to theorizing religious practice. But all see this basic insight actually threatened by the notion of intratextuality as Lindbeck characterizes it, because the latter suggests an already finished framework of meanings sufficiently fixed and discernible by practitioners to unilaterally control and assimilate any influx of “external” meaning. The “grammar” of any Christian community of practice would thus be an infallibly recognizable variant of an already available communal identifier; it would be seen less as the product of the particular configurations of that community and more as a transcendent template or program which is “applied” by its practitioners. In this way, the plausibility of the foundational image of intratextuality depends heavily on suppressing the concrete negotiation of meanings which makes up actual Christian practice, or any cultural practice for that matter. This negotiation cannot be reduced to the replication and application of a systematic Christian framework of interpretation, because the very systematic form of any communal Christian practice is dependent both upon the contingent cultural network of meanings within which it assumes a concrete form and upon the wide range of its tactical employments by Christian practitioners. These employments will vary because they are 34 35

Ibid., 97. Ibid., 96.


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matters of judgment never straightforwardly determined by the cultural elements of the Christian tradition themselves. Some such common awareness underlies the different critiques. Thus Williams stresses Christian identity as constantly rediscovered in the cultural negotiations demanded by mission. Volf points out that the give-and-take of this cultural traffic is too complex and indeterminate to allow a final decision on which side is doing the ordering and which is being ordered; in fact, each “side” both orders and is ordered. Tilley comes closest to identifying the basic flaw, that of a single, identifying (and theologically identifiable) logic or grammar or conceptual frame which can be grasped and deployed as a criterion of faithfulness within the cultural networks in which it is actualized. The focus of the preceding paragraphs has not been on the plurality of texts, but on the assumption of a systematically discernible “directionality” in all Christian interpretive practices. Not the “text” in intratextuality has been at issue but the “intra.” (The suspicion is strong that this idea represents a transformation by Lindbeck into a criteriological principle of that rough metaphor of “directionality” by which Hans Frei tried to capture the broad cultural shift from pre-modern to early modern biblical interpretation.) The deeper problem with the concept of intratextuality is not that construal of the text in question (whether this refers to the actual semiotic code informing present communal practice or the “normative” code instantiated in scripture) is always contestable, but rather that no hard and fast distinction seems possible between interpreting a world into a text (intratextuality) and interpreting a text into a world (extratextuality). The directional imagery of “into” and “out of ” and the accompanying notion that one must choose between them are such blunt instruments conceptually speaking that they almost immediately send astray any more detailed account of the meaning of Christian faithfulness. For what does the ability to make such a distinction presuppose? It presupposes a systematic network of concepts and practices, tightly coherent and richly interconnected in highly determinate ways, and inscribable in a normative textual form. How else could that slender collection of documents called the New Testament encode a single cultural logic of which Chinese Nestorians, Nigerian Aladura practitioners, Polish Catholics, Guatemalan Pentecostals, and American High Church Lutherans variably instantiate? How else could the theologian be able to discern and measure distortions in the “shape” of this framework consequent upon its use in interpreting “alien” experiences or traditions? How else would one be able to judge just when such distortions amounted to a “breaking” of that minimal systematic interconnection and a consequent “reversal” of the direction of interpretation? The semiotic networks informing Christian belief and

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practice are simply too plural and informal, too contingent and locally constructed, to allow the notion of intratextuality the role Lindbeck apparently wants to give it.

Temptations of Opposition The scope of Lindbeck’s contribution to theology is fortunately not limited to the heralded but flawed formulation of a new turn in theological methodology, a way of conceiving the tasks of theology sufficiently distinguishable from the dominant modern norms to warrant the claim of an opposition between “liberal” and “postliberal.” But his name is for now almost universally linked with this claim. The real value of his investigations, both in general and in The Nature of Doctrine, will hopefully come to be seen elsewhere, especially in his work on the church as a people of witness. One could point in the latter connection to his important early studies in ecumenical dialog and his intensive investigations of Roman Catholic theology; to his acute diagnoses of the quandaries of Christian communities in secular cultures; to his creative rethinking of the nature and function of religious doctrines; and finally, to his passionate and intriguing recent forays into constructive ecclesiology, focusing on the problematic of the “people of God” and its consequences for Christian–Jewish relations. As for his reflections on the nature of theology, there is still much to learn from and ponder, not least in The Nature of Doctrine. Centering the task of the theologian on discerning the guiding logics of communal Christian belief and practice and creatively construing the present situation in those terms, carefully situating and limiting the role of ontological interpretations of doctrine, clarifying the nature of theological practices as parasitic upon and answerable to specific cultural sites of “ordinary” Christian language: many promising insights remain to be explored in these areas. But this chapter has attempted to call sharply into question one aspect of his work: the utility and adequacy of a liberal/postliberal distinction in theological understanding. The foregoing examination of the terms Lindbeck has provided for the formulation of this distinction have done little to inspire confidence. Dissecting his proffered cultural-linguistic/experientialexpressive and intratextual/extratextual dichotomies has in fact uncovered the same questionable move: the attempt to locate the identity of Christianity and the norm of theological faithfulness in a master conceptual framework of definable shape which (1) somehow transcends the sites of its widely variant practical instantiation; and which (2) interconnects and configures with criteriological precision the cultural elements of the Christian


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tradition, encoding the formal “shape” of Christianity to be preserved despite differing cultural inputs. Calling this fundamental move into question would have to result in the destabilization of the entire liberal/postliberal dichotomy, at least as Lindbeck sets it forth in his famous book. In fact, it is possible to argue that what pushed Lindbeck into the cul-de-sac of representing religions as “codifiable” was in fact this very intention of inaugurating, or at least marking, a distinct theological turn. Behind the larger agenda of The Nature of Doctrine, its rethinking of the nature of doctrinal change and continuity, there is, as the discussions above have emphasized, a supposedly secondary but very deep motive. Already in the foreword Lindbeck betrays this when he promises as a by-product of his investigations of doctrine a theological proposal at odds with “currently regnant forms of liberalism.” The singular advantage claimed for this proposal is that “stronger criteria can be formulated than are often supposed possible for distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate (or orthodox and heterodox) developments and adaptations” (ND, 10, 12). The nature of this advantage becomes clearer when he later asserts that socalled “hybrid” theologies like Rahner’s and Lonergan’s avoid some of the difficulties of either pure propositionalism or pure experiential-expressivism, but nevertheless are “weak in criteria for determining when a given doctrinal development is consistent with the sources of faith” (ND, 17). But it is only in the sixth chapter that the reader receives the outlines of this theological proposal; it is manifest there that the promised “stronger criteria” for normative judgment are to be provided by nothing other than Lindbeck’s proposal of a new conceptualization of theological faithfulness: “intratextuality.” Although he begins with the descriptive insights of a culturallinguistic model of religious communities, he pushes his understanding of Christian identity as a quasi-grammatical semiotic framework gradually in the direction of a criteriology designed to clarify a distinctively “postliberal” theology. As has been seen, however, the move from description to criterion is fraught with difficulty. The acknowledged fact of the logical priority of semiotic networks in religious communities of practice does not in itself justify the idea of a normative symbol system encoded in scripture against which the shape of contemporary cultural transactions could be measured. Only if the systematic shape which determines those transactions could be specified beforehand by an earlier archetypal semiotic scheme which as it were “automatically” commensurates all later Christian ones (and excludes all inauthentic or non-Christian ones) could the search for “stronger criteria” of faithfulness hope to locate them in a normative semiotic system as “intratextuality” promises. Only in this way could the intratextuality of

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“thick description” which Geertz speaks of become the criteriological intratextuality of theological faithfulness which Lindbeck prescribes. The conceptual mediator between descriptive and normative intratextualities is evidently Lindbeck’s yoking together of two ideas: that of a worldabsorbing master narrative (drawn especially from Frei’s understanding of scripture), and that of a regulative architecture apprehended through doctrine (which merges Lonergan’s analysis of dogma, Wittgenstein’s grammatical rules, and Aquinas’s articula fidei). Not only are thick description and normative intratextuality not the same, their very compatibility is open to question, and cannot be assumed. The urge to assimilate them is traceable to Lindbeck’s normative theological concerns, which at each point have been a partially hidden influence on his descriptive theories of the role of language in religious practice. In this way the genuinely illuminating points of cultural-linguistic theory are to some degree vitiated by the need to overthrow “liberal” theological method. To accomplish this, the logical priority of public semiotic elements in situated communities has to be transformed illegitimately into the normative priority of an historically transcendent “Christian” semiotic system. Consider once again the varied images by which Lindbeck tries to capture the peculiar sort of priority being accorded the Christian symbolic system. Each one is determined by the need to allow a clear determination of a “direction of interpretation,” for if this need is not met then criteriological intratextuality will not work. This happens straightforwardly with the use of “code-like” imagery itself, since “[t]his stress on the code, rather than the . . . encoded” overplays the automatism of the “generation” of Christian subjects with Christian experiences, and underplays the crucial role in defining what is Christian of concrete and indeterminate judgments by the human actors in specific situations (ND, 35). Similarly, the image of the cultural elements of religion as “form” and the experience of enculturated persons as “matter” is useful for Lindbeck’s purposes because “matter exists only insofar as it is informed” and hence “form has priority” (ND, 35). But note the implication that the priority of the “forming” cultural elements lies in their existence apart from any particular material (i.e. concrete, historically situated) substrate. The symbolic network thus risks floating free of its actual uses by persons “on the ground,” in spite of the fact that Lindbeck is aware that this is a dangerous misunderstanding (ND, 115). He adapts Frei’s understanding of typological insertion of present experiences into the Christian “story,” but this only succeeds in raising all the more insistently the question of whether the cultural elements of Christian tradition can indeed systematically encode “extratextual” realities in a uni-


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lateral way. Lindbeck asserts that “it is the religion instantiated in scripture which defines being, truth, goodness, and beauty, and the nonscriptural exemplifications of these realities need to be transformed into figures . . . of the scriptural ones” (ND, 118). It is the normative drive to preserve a specifiable “direction of interpretation” which has suppressed the multiple difficulties of an account in which the scriptural side is supposed to maintain a constant conceptual priority in the plural and particular fusions of scriptural semantic worlds with non-scriptural ones. But as has been discussed, it is in fact only via these very fusions that the scriptural conceptuality becomes meaningful in the first place. To be sure, the cultural elements of the Christian tradition may be accorded a kind of cultural priority in that they form and mark in varied ways the social groups which take them up into their constructions of reality; in this way are formed, too, the selves socialized into these groups. These elements can suggest diverse ways by which they may be meaningfully “linked up” with other cultural realities, but the elements themselves, including the scriptural texts, cannot systematically “norm” those linkages by providing a world of meaning which absorbs all others. In an article from an earlier period in his thinking, Lindbeck had outlined a rather less ambitious but more plausible way of understanding normative Christian identity. In “The Future of the Dialogue” from 1970 he spoke of the conditions for the unity of the church over time and across cultures as consisting in the “infra-doctrinal” acknowledgement of the common givenness of the identity of Jesus in the gospel stories, combined with the “meta-doctrinal” obedience to the common norm of his lordship.36 His later attempts to define intratextual faithfulness in a more rigid manner appealed to Geertzian symbolsystems and Wittgensteinian grammatical rules, giving the somewhat specious appearance of added criteriological precision. But this attempt, with its accompanying (or motivating) bid to ground a “postliberal” theological turn, is retrograde with respect to his earlier, looser conception. Echoes of this more modest early understanding of faithfulness nonetheless remain in some of his later comments on intratextuality. Consider in conclusion the following description of what theologies sharing an “intratextual norm of faithfulness” would hold in common: [T]hese theologies could agree that God is appropriately depicted in stories about a being who created the cosmos without any humanly fathomable

36 George Lindbeck, “The Future of the Dialogue: Pluralism or an Eventual Synthesis of Doctrine?” in Christian Action and Openness, ed. Joseph Papin (Villanova, PA: Villanova University Press, 1970), 37–51 at pp. 50–1.

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reason, but – simply for his own good pleasure and the pleasure of his goodness – appointed Homo sapiens stewards of one miniscule part of this cosmos, permitted appalling evils, chose Israel and the church as witnessing peoples, and sent Jesus as Messiah and Immanuel, God with us. . . . [They would attempt to] describe life and reality in ways conformable to what these stories indicate about God. (ND, 121–2)

This could be read in a less “high-powered” way as a variant on the earlier “meta-doctrinal” conception of faithfulness, fleshed out by broad appeal to Barth’s “agent-rendering” construal of scripture mediated to Lindbeck by Kelsey and Frei. If this is all that Lindbeck means by intratextual faithfulness, it is hard to see much objectionable in it (however one might want to quibble about interpretive details and precise wording); but it is also hard to see much to get excited about either, for the more modest conception could never in itself have supported the instauration of a “theology for a postliberal age.” But, as the present chapter has argued, the hunt for such bigger theological game ended up marring the methodological conclusion of The Nature of Doctrine. The wrong turn is taken when Lindbeck grounds “postliberalism” on the claim that “these stories” about God do not simply invite conforming responses but can actually be used to determine what “conformable” means in a given situation: by discerning the semiotic system they supposedly exemplify and applying it as a conceptual scheme for the construction of contemporary reality. This is borne out in another way by the questionable claim (discussed in Chapter Two) that the Christian conceptual scheme has such a self-coherence and exclusiveness, derivative of the highly particular stories which “encode” it, that it and it alone allows “categorial” truth in religious belief and practice, and hence must be systematically irreconcilable with the events of truth engendered under any other encompassing world-view or vision of the ultimate. The specificity of a founding narrative has become the “incommensurability” of a conceptual framework. But in fact it is questionable that merely the “particularity” of the stories of Israel and Jesus ground this bold assertion, in spite of what Lindbeck and Marshall claim.37 It is rather a product of the attempt to use the insights of Kuhn, Wittgenstein, and interpretive sociology to revamp the notion of articula fidei as a system of interpretive axioms (only without the appeal to direct divine inspiration of classical theology). Lindbeck’s way of justifying this 37

See the discussion of this in Chapter Two above.


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exclusivity falls to the ground in face of the fact that the cultural logics investigated by interpretive social science simply do not have the tight coherence of mathematical or logical systems. In the words of Richard Rorty: “Alternative geometries are irreconcilable because they have axiomatic structures, and contradictory axioms. They are designed to be irreconcilable. Cultures are not so designed, and do not have axiomatic structures.”38 In sum, responding to the scriptural world and the God depicted there, and finding the cultural linkages with the present which allow communities to “live” in that world, do not bring with them the implication of a master conceptual scheme which only knows two mutually exclusive relations to “the world”: absorb or be absorbed. To conclude, when intratextuality becomes a theological criterion of faithfulness demands are placed upon the semiotic networks informing Christian practice which they cannot bear. The multiplicity of such networks over time and space do indeed identify their communities as Christian and shape their participants accordingly. But their detailed patterns derive from the negotiation of Christian identity in reliance upon the God depicted in scripture. They do not do this as variations upon a common conceptual framework given beforehand, unilaterally deconstructing all cultural givens and reconstructing them strictly on their own terms. The intratextual model obscures the fact that it is faithful identity itself which must be under constant construction in the life of Christian cultures; hence Tilley’s accusation that intratexuality “construe[s] the continuity and unity of Christianity as something found, not made.”39 Tilley offers his own more helpful image of the cultural activity of Christian witness: it is not “constituting a single world into which all others are absorbed” but “bringing Jesus Christ to life in every world.”40 This pregnant image points the question of communal identity back in the direction of Christology and Hans Frei. Chapter Three showed Frei’s particular concern with Christian identity as a function of the identity of the Christ; 38

Richard Rorty, “Solidarity or Objectivity?” in Post Analytic Philosophy, ed. John Rajchman and Cornel West (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 9, cited by Tilley, “Incommensurability,” 97. Lindbeck continued to wrestle with the notion of the exclusivity and incommensurability of the Christian framework of meaning. By 1997 he is responding to Donald Davidson’s well-known critique of supposedly untranslatable “conceptual schemes” by claiming that the untranslatability of the Christian grammar is not a formal characteristic but a result of the incompleteness and indeterminacy of the scheme apart from its contextual instantiations and uses. It is doubtful, however, that this more modest sense is really compatible with the more exuberant earlier vision of a unique and world-encompassing “logic” derived from the scriptural narrative. 39 Tilley, “Incommensurability,” 103. 40 Ibid., 104.

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the ultimate unity of the people of witness is to be sought first in the object of their witness. But was not Frei undeniably the originator of key ideas which fed into Lindbeck’s postliberalism proposal, and which continue to be used in the construction of the liberal–postliberal opposition? In the next chapter these ideas must be examined with the same critical eye which was turned on Lindbeck’s. Though once again some negative conclusions will have to be drawn, the results will also put Frei at something of an angle to Lindbeck; the supposedly direct road from Frei to “postliberalism” will veer off in a different direction.

Chapter Five

Frei: Elusive Oppositions and the Construction of Postliberalism (II) The Mystery of the Christological Object and Types of Theology Chapters Two and Three attempted to lay out the basic theological orientations of Hans Frei and George Lindbeck, their motivating dogmatic concerns and their related yet distinct expectations concerning valid theological procedure. With the ground thus prepared, Chapter Four began a more critical engagement with Lindbeck’s writing on theology in order to uncover and assess the basic concepts in terms of which he proposed a new theological “moment,” that of “postliberalism.” The present chapter essays a similar task with regard to those conceptual oppositions gleaned from Frei’s work which have likewise found use in the construction of “postliberalism.” This topic will require close attention to his writings on typology. Because of the nature of these writings and the questions being put to them, some obscurity will be unavoidable, and some of the claims made will be in the nature of interpretive conjectures. The texts central for understanding the topic at hand combine some of Frei’s best writing (e.g. the splendid essay on David Friedrich Strauss) with some of his worst (especially the posthumously published notes for his Shaffer lectures, though it is hardly fair to compare these with finished publications). As was the case in Chapter Three, deriving firm results from Frei’s work on the matter in question demands something wider-ranging and more synthetic than a comparable examination of Lindbeck, as Frei never produced a programmatic essay gathering and systematizing his suggestions for theological procedure. But that no such production appeared is hardly surprising. In fact, it would only be perceived as a deficit if one granted the common assumption that he and Lindbeck were collaborating in the definition of a new, “postliberal” option now offered to contemporary theologians.

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f re i : th e con st ruc ti on of p o st l i b e ral i sm

But there is precious little evidence that the basic categories in terms of which Frei (sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly) organized and evaluated kinds of theological procedure were deployed by him in the service of such a mission. The previous chapter tried to show that Lindbeck’s two basic categorial disjunctions (experiential-expressive vs. cultural linguistic models of religion and doctrine, and intratextual vs. extratextual modes of theological interpretation) are either dubious in themselves or at least inadequate to demarcate an identifiable “liberal” theological method in theology from a “postliberal” one. The present chapter will likewise be critically concerned with the two disjunctions which frequently crop up in Frei’s discussions of theology: apologetic vs. dogmatic orientation, and systematic vs. “ad hoc” modes of correlation between theological and non-theological discourses. Although it has proven very tempting to marshal these supposed alternatives, alone or in conjunction with those suggested by Lindbeck, in support of the notion of a “turn” to postliberalism in theology, it is actually doubtful that such a move properly reflects the distinctions Frei was trying to draw. As a result, the tone of this chapter will differ somewhat from that of the previous one. The inadequacy of Frei’s concepts to fund “postliberalism” is less central to their evaluation, and their promising aspects can be more easily detached from the dubious aspects of that project. These differences notwithstanding, this chapter will follow a course formally similar to that of Chapter Four: first laying out the basic terms of his typology in detail in light of his special doctrinal focus, then taking up in turn the two basic evaluative disjunctions at work in his discussions of the nature of theology. A preliminary outline of Frei’s fivefold typology of theology was provided in Chapter Two, with the limited intention of laying bare the grounding of his vision of theology in his dogmatic (i.e. Christological) concerns. It will now be necessary to amplify this conclusion by means of a more detailed investigation of this typology with the goal of relating more closely how the various assessments of forms of theology unfold from decisive material positions in Christology. Once the basics of the typology have been grasped it will then be easier to see how Frei’s two basic evaluative disjunctions are or are not to be connected to it. Frei’s theological work always went forward predominantly in the guise of explorations in intellectual history; his dogmatic concerns tended to emerge somewhat indirectly, through the exposition of other thinkers, past or present. His own understanding of the current theological situation as well as his deep sympathy with the thought of Karl Barth naturally led him into penetrating engagements with nineteenth-century German theology and its continued trajectory into the present (even as he remained


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keenly aware of the way a Barth or a Farrer challenged and troubled that tradition). At the time of his death Frei was working slowly and sporadically toward a major essay in historical theology, one that would critically explore the shifts in the understanding of Christology which marked the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially in the German and English linguistic realms. The typology was intended as an exercise in classification pursuant to this large-scale Christological statement (TCT, 1–2). Hence the typology is a curious product, something of a conceptual torso; it is obviously meant to be suggestive rather than definitive, an interpretive tool in the course of being shaped. It must be handled with singular care not only because no finished form of it is extant (it is pieced together from various lecture notes), but also because Frei intended it to serve both descriptive and evaluative purposes. Because the way he chose to divide the five different theological types is inextricably connected with his own dogmatic concern with Christology and its modern history, it is not only possible but positively necessary to situate the typology against this doctrinal background. Accordingly, before arriving at an interpretation of the types themselves an account must be provided showing how the substructure of dogmatic Christology determines the aim, the form, and the evaluative substance of the typology. It will be proposed first that the aim of Frei’s typology was probably prompted by reflection on the achievement of David Friedrich Strauss. Second, the formal delineation of types owes most to Frei’s engagement with Schleiermacher, especially as read through the lens of Strauss’s polemic against Schleiermacher’s correlation of dogmatic Christology with historical investigation (though Barth’s questioning of Schleiermacher is also never far from his thoughts).1 Finally, it will be argued that the varying assessments which Frei offers on the viability of the different types will be shown to have their origin in a classic notion of the Chalcedonian “mystery” of the incarnation to which Frei has given a special narrative inflection. Once these three interpretive coordinates are in place the details of the typology itself will make more sense. Strauss is conspicuously absent in Frei’s marvelous 1957 conspectus of the nineteenth-century tradition of German academic theology, perhaps because, as he later put it, Strauss was not a particularly original thinker.2 1 Frei significantly states in a letter that he is considering making his essay on Strauss the key to his upcoming Shaffer lectures. Hans Frei to William Clebsch, July 15, 1981, Frei Papers, Higton Bibliography. 2 Hans Frei, “David Friedrich Strauss,” in Nineteenth Century Religious Thought in the West, eds. Ninian Smart, John Clayton, Patrick Sherry, and Steven T. Katz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), I: 215.

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Though everyone knew his work, he founded no school. Even so, as early as 1965, in his article on Feuerbach, Frei began to intimate that Strauss, along with skeptics like David Hume, had truly set the proper terms of the challenge which contemporary theology must face. In his scarcely veiled critique of the “God-is-dead” radicalism then fashionable, Frei suggests that current Christian theology has misidentified the deepest challenge to its continued existence. Just when it should be grappling with hard-nosed critics of religion and theism in the materialist and empiricist traditions it continues to be entranced by the threat of “radical” trends beholden to the Feuerbachian tradition of “decoding” Christian claims as disguised versions of its “real” anthropological truth. What Frei values in thinkers like Strauss is just his refusal to separate sharply, in the manner of Feuerbach’s sympathizers as well as of the Christian apologists responding to him, “dogma” (the public, tradition-shaped linguistic substance of Christianity) from “religion” (the supposed anthropological core or truth hidden in the depths of human self-disposition).3 Some comments in a 1976 letter to Van Harvey make it clear that Frei, tired of modern theology’s evasions, wished to revisit the direct encounter between the biblical faith-portraits and assertions of historical factuality which Strauss had brokered.4 According to Frei, Strauss had understood that the logic of Christian belief in the incarnation could not simply exclude the question of fact claims where Jesus is concerned. Like Troeltsch later in the century and Harvey in the present, Strauss had in the early 1800s already come to skeptical conclusions regarding the attempts of his contemporaries to reconcile historical judgment and faith-claim. Frei, without sharing their finally negative conclusions, nonetheless sees in their work an acute grasp of the basic issue and a telling critique of inadequate responses to a challenge with which theology is still faced; he is every bit as scornful as they are of the various maneuvers to avoid this challenge or set it aside which result in nothing but “trivial affirmations.”5 It was around this time that Frei began work on one of his finest achievements, a full-scale essay on Strauss for the multi-volume collection Nineteenth Century Religious Thought in the West.6 As Frei read him, Strauss had refused to sidestep the collision looming 3 Hans Frei, “Feuerbach and Theology,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 35 (1967), 250–6 at pp. 255–6. 4 Hans Frei to Van Harvey, June 22, 1976, Frei Papers, Higton Bibliography. 5 Ibid. Compare his comments on “methodological monophysitism,” HRN, 106ff. The foundational role given (by both liberals and conservatives) to the historical Jesus ultimately gave way to his marginalization in neo-orthodoxy (under the impact of Schweitzer and formcriticism). 6 In a letter to one of the editors of the project Frei indicates that he has begun work on the article. Hans Frei to John Clayton, June 12, 1977, Frei Papers, Higton Bibliography.


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between Christology’s traditional claims and contemporary intellectual culture, or to muffle its shock through apologetic filtering of the dogmatic content. This very stubbornness unmistakably appealed to Frei, similarly perhaps to the way in which the radical conclusions of Franz Overbeck appealed to the younger Barth, and for the same reason: both kinds of critique involved a badly needed disrupture of confident liberal mediations between faith and modern culture. It is illuminating to see Frei’s own longterm investigation of Christology and theology as consciously taking up in a new way Strauss’s project: With enormous skill Strauss not only sorted out the various contemporary theological options for relating the categories faith and Wissenschaft but breathed life into their bloodless methodological subsistence by making their very meaning virtually dependent on the ways they were deployed in connection with the answer to the single overriding theological issue of christology.7

One could hardly wish for a better précis of what Frei himself hoped might result from his own unfinished lifework.8 Frei’s typology, not yet formulated at the time of the above quotation, is unmistakably adumbrated in the reference to Strauss’s laying out of the varied possible relations between communal faith-claims and the discourse of the academy. But equally significant is the insistence here that Strauss’s formulation of the options is itself an abstraction from his more foundational and concrete theological engagements with the problem of Christological confession. Frei’s later deployment of theological options would depend, in just the same way, on assessing the actual attempts and achievements of other theologians against the measure of his own, largely implicit Christological position. That Strauss’s project provided fundamental orientation for Frei’s own is further confirmed by a glance at how the formal categories of the latter’s typology pivot upon the very thinker whose Christology had a century before come to fascinate (and infuriate) Strauss: Schleiermacher. Frei himself said that the terms of his typology were inspired by reflection upon Schleiermacher (TCT, 70). But it might be more accurate to say that 7

Frei, “Strauss,” 224. There are indications, however, that Frei did not wish the historical aspect of his project to be confined to intellectual history. One way he wanted to expand his scope was to examine how Christological ideas reflected those broader social forces initiating large-scale shifts in cultural “sensibility” in this period. See, for example, Hans Frei to Van Harvey, September 24, 1979, and Hans Frei to William Placher, December 19, 1979, both in Frei Papers, Higton Bibliography. 8

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it was the very different but equally sharp questions put to Schleiermacher by Strauss (echoed later by Troeltsch) and by Karl Barth that suggested to Frei a novel arrangement of theological options. Oversimplifying, one might say that the basic question put to Schleiermacher by Strauss had to do with the success of a particular exercise in “correlating,” on the one hand, the status assigned to Jesus Christ by the church, that community characterized by the experience of his redemptive power with, on the other hand, a portrait of Jesus Christ assembled according to purely historical judgments of factuality. The basic question raised by Barth, in turn, had to do with the manner in which Schleiermacher envisioned and related the Christian theologian’s responsibility to two different kinds of community: on the one hand the church, on the other hand the university, the community ruled by Wissenschaft. The challenges to envisioning theological procedure that are involved in the different queries of Strauss and Barth are obviously closely related, yet not simply identifiable. What is important here to recognize is that together they provide the essential parameters of Frei’s typology. The latter can thus be understood to arise out of considering how Schleiermacher’s Christology tried to meet the challenges Strauss and Barth had identified, and why (according to them) he failed. According to Frei, it was Strauss who first formulated the modern Christological problem as one of trying to fit together pictures of Jesus drawn according to potentially incompatible canons of judgment. This was famously expressed as the opposition between the “Jesus of history” and the “Christ of faith,” and Strauss perceived that it was Schleiermacher’s peculiar conception of the theological task which forced this opposition into new prominence.9 While Schleiermacher insisted on the mutual independence of dogmatics and history as modes of judgment, he demanded equally that theology’s viability depended on their independently formulable results being brought into some kind of convergence. The nature of Christian faith-claims about Jesus Christ demanded such a convergence without determining beforehand, by way of some overall formula or theory, what the convergence would look like. There was no short cut: for Schleiermacher the two discourses of faith and history had painstakingly to be correlated and, ideally, harmonized, with due care to infringe on the principles of neither. It was the concern of Strauss throughout his later critique of Schleiermacher to show that Scheleiermacher failed in this harmonious correlation, indeed that he had to fail. His historical

9

Frei, “Strauss,” 250–1.


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judgments had not, in fact, been independent as he imagined; his portrait of the historical Jesus was determined at one point after another by the dogmatic demands of faith, not by the sober and probabilistic weighing of the evidentiary value of the ancient texts.10 Strauss had in an uncompromising and classic way theorized the tension between faith’s affirmations about Christ and the historian’s reconstruction of Jesus, and Frei made this into the first of the two central concerns of his typology (TCT, 21–3): How does Christian theology negotiate what might be called “internal” and “external,” (i.e. confessionally committed and confessionally uncommitted) perspectives on the same Christian texts, beliefs, or practices? Karl Barth could be said to have raised a related criticism of Schleiermacher in his own way, only with an opposed verdict. Schleiermacher had failed disastrously to theorize the significance of Jesus Christ, not because he had corrupted historical judgment by dogmatic special pleading, but because he had already compromised his dogmatic judgment from the start by the very insistence on a convergence with independent historical or philosophical positions. This particular example for Barth simply points to the prior, more basic issue: the dual orientation (and potential divided loyalty) of theology. To use terms familiar from the German intellectual tradition, is theology finally a practice of faith, or is it a “science”? Is the community to which it bears ultimate responsibility the church or the academy? In the academic theological tradition since Schleiermacher, theology found itself trying to be responsible both to the community of Christian belief and to the community of academic inquiry. Barth had reformulated this issue with renewed sharpness and radicality, forcing a new theological confrontation with it. On the particular issue of interpreting Schleiermacher, Barth expended much effort trying to figure out whether the former himself gave responsibility to the church’s witness its proper weight, or whether on the contrary he was essentially doing a covert kind of philosophy and thus illegitimately subordinating confessional or dogmatic theology to general intellectual demands (TN, 187). He was always suspicious that the latter was more likely, but earlier assurance on this point gave way to greater perplexity (and more generosity) toward the end of his life. It was this ambiguous verdict from Barth’s final years, especially as formulated in his “Concluding Unscientific Postscript” on Schleiermacher, which suggested to Frei the other central concern of his typology (TCT, 19–21). Granted that in the dominant trajectory of academic theology following Schleiermacher (which Frei sometimes refers to as the “Berlin” tradition) the dual character of theology (ecclesial

10

Ibid., 251–3.

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and academic) was more or less a given, does a Christian theologian define his or her task predominantly as an ecclesial or as an academic one?11 To recapitulate, the suggestion was first made that the aim of Frei’s Christological project was to link, in a manner reminiscent of Strauss, various failed or promising approaches to the Christological problem to different ways of conceiving the theological task itself in its broader cultural setting. It was next proposed that Schleiermacher’s Christology, and the questions of its collapse raised by Strauss and Barth, encapsulated in classic form the issues which Frei used to formulate his differing “types.” But, to turn from the descriptive to the evaluative, Frei’s own Christological tendencies pervade the judgments he renders on each of these types; these tendencies, already intimated in Chapter Three, must be outlined before characterizing the typology itself. Frei’s Christological orientation remained constant throughout his career: a basic faithfulness to the Chalcedonian formulae, understood formally as pointing to the incarnation as “mystery,” and materially as derivative of the gospel narratives rendering Jesus’ identity. Although Frei does not, save in a few instances, take up the rhetoric of “mystery,” its use seems warranted in trying to capture the elusive way his concern with the gospel narratives shapes his conception of what is promising or dangerous in theological method. But to understand how his Christological instincts directly informed the evaluations built into his typology, the theme of mystery must be supplemented by two other themes: first, the broadly Wittgensteinian flavor of Frei’s philosophical sensibility, and second, his commitment to the hermeneutics of narrative, both of which condition his Christological retrieval of the mystery defined at Chalcedon. The philosophical sensibility might be the best place to begin. There are at least three themes of central importance to Frei’s work as a theologian which can, in one way or another, be characterized as Wittgensteinian, broadly speaking. (They permeated large circles of the English-speaking academy from the 1950s on, so it is not necessary to claim that Frei absorbed them directly through the first-hand study of Wittgenstein’s writings which he began around 1962.) The first of these themes is one already familiar from the discussion of Lindbeck.12 “Reason,” the canons of what constitutes

11 When Frei configured Barth’s question into the second axis constituting his typology, he defined the “scientific” or academic status of theology in terms of its relation to “philosophy.” Frei used this catch-all word to mean those discourses broadly accepted in the world of intellectual culture, discourses which typically claim to offer categorizations of reality or criteria of truth based on the application of reason to generally available experience. 12 See Chapter Four above.


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correct thinking, cannot be grasped and formulated as a set of timeless and transcendent principles of universal scope, free from interpretive negotiation. Otherwise put, the criteria of rationality, by which are judged human efforts to interpret or explain their world and conduct their behavior accordingly, are always already embedded within communities of traditional linguistic practice, and are subject to constant reformulation and reinterpretation across differing contexts. The consequence of this insistence that reason and language are mutually implicated, or at least the one of most concern to Frei, is that one must not expect that the manifold practices of the varied languages which constitute the ability of human beings to relate meaningfully to their world and to each other could ever be “explained” by a single theory. The practice of reason is complex and unsystematic, and far too much a local and improvisatory affair to submit to an exhaustive schematization that would hold unambiguously in every context. And in no instance is this truer than in the way human beings interpret the meaningfulness of texts. As a result, Frei responded to any attempt to incorporate without remainder the traditional reading practices of, say, a particular historically shaped religious community into the general categories of a global hermeneutic theory, one that purported to tell just how religious language does and does not “mean,” with stubborn skepticism. It even seems that the presumptuousness of the very attempt, as in hermeneutic theories of the school of Ricoeur, was an irritant to him.13 The second quasi-Wittgensteinian theme naturally resonates with the first. If human interpretations of the world must always originate within the practices of specific and highly context-dependent linguistic communities, then all traffic with the world itself is mediated by the varied signifying processes of human language. As Frei liked to put it, reality is only available “under” or by way of one or more possible linguistic descriptions of it.14 This might be called a principle of linguistic “perspective.” It is not claimed that the common world is illusory or unavailable; it is only said that our view of the world is always a view from somewhere particular within the world, and that this “somewhere” is itself not determined purely by the individual’s choice, but is also partly a function of his or her being communally, which means culturally and historically, located. Frei believed that the relatively unproblematic reception of the world from within a culturally-dominant descriptive framework characterized all pre-modern thinking; certain early 13 For a typical example of this, see his treatment in TN, 130–7. Frei thought that Deconstruction was tailor-made to destabilize and disrupt the confident theories of “understanding” propounded by hermeneutics. 14 The actual formulation seems to have sprung from Frei’s analysis of Barth. See TCT, 161.

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modern thinkers, in their growing consciousness of this situatedness, attempted to throw it off as a kind of tyranny and initiated a search for some direct access to reality which could undermine all linguistically-sedimented prejudice and tradition in the name of a universal reason.15 The third and last philosophical theme important for Frei’s characteristic approach to the Christological mystery is really a concomitant of the first two. For if rational and interpretive practices are always embedded within traditionally-shaped linguistic communities, and if the very world humans inhabit is always “processed” through particular descriptive frameworks, then it is a short step to the claim that subjectivity itself is constituted through linguistic interactions, and is hence much more a “public” affair than any age-old dualism of spirit and matter can account for. The self cannot be metaphysically isolated from the signifying practices of bodies in community. It was earlier suggested that this philosophical rejection (especially mediated by Ryle) of all “ghost in the machine” pictures of the self pervaded all Frei’s thinking. The main point is that from this basic position Frei derived a deep-seated suspicion of the metaphysics of “the subject” understood as a hypostasized unique and utterly private perspective on all that is not-self (including other selves).16 Frei saw Kant as the classic initiator of this particular cognitive orientation, which quickly reached a brilliant flowering among the romantics and idealists, but which sadly continued to linger in theological and broader cultural circles (especially in the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics) in spite of increasingly telling attacks upon it. Frei’s determined resistance to the pretensions of global hermeneutic theories (along the lines of Gadamer or Ricoeur) finds another source here; he was convinced they represented a hangover of romantic notions of the self (TN, 33, 131). This is a convenient point at which to turn to a second theme, that of narrative, which informed Frei’s approach to the incarnation as mystery. His embrace of the just-described philosophical position naturally led to a stress on the ways the human individual is not a self-generating monad but takes its characteristic shape or identity only in intercourse with other persons and with the contingent forces of circumstance. “Realistic” fiction 15 This is an extrapolation, of course, from Frei’s account of the classical function of biblical narrative in providing access to the world of divine–human interaction, and of the early modern abandonment of such narratively shaped receptions of “reality” (opening a gap “between the narratively depicted and the ‘real’ world”). See Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 3–6. 16 Hans Frei, The Identity of Jesus Christ: The Hermeneutical Bases of Dogmatic Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), viii.


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was the narrative approach most closely attuned to this non-idealistic notion of the self (TN, 59). For Frei, the particular human individual cannot be exhaustively described in general categories, but neither can she be consigned to a mysterious realm of impermeable privacy. The individual must be “rendered,” observed, and depicted in her interactive landscape. Individual identity is never punctually given but is a trajectory defined by forces. It takes time; unfolding as a story, it requires narrative depiction. The particularities of this narrative orientation, and its Christological motivation, were discussed in Chapter Three: Frei’s interest in realism; his development of tools for the analysis of the literary “rendering” of individual character; his following of earlier clues from H. Richard Niebuhr; and the way all of this was developed into an historical thesis about the classical dominance of the “literal sense” of scripture and the breakdown of that dominance in early modernity. The point here is that with the notion of the narrated individual identity of Jesus Christ in the gospels, Frei had found what he regarded as the foundational dogmatic datum for Christian theological reflection. This was his way of following the direction first pointed out by H. Richard Niebuhr in “Toward a Definition of Christ.”17 But the way Frei understood this datum to function in theology, or, alternatively, the way he expected a proper theology to dispose itself toward this datum, is determined by the logic of “mystery,” the third theme central to understanding the evaluative thrust of his typology. The basic idea behind the notion of a mystery is that the human mind, when striving to understand a fact or claim in which the infinite God is involved with the finite world, is immediately confronted with an inadequacy or ineptness of its basic conceptual categories and analytic procedures. But, crucially, this inadequacy does not entail the mere collapse or dissolution of those categories or procedures, as with the absurd. There is a kind of sublimity to a mystery which does not simply repel reason but rather draws it further and further in; it tempts reason with an elusive, fascinating yet threatening richness of content, an unimaginable concentration of significance. It is not its lack of intelligibility but rather its very excess of intelligibility which makes such extraordinary demands upon human thought and language, indeed induces a kind of intellectual vertigo (often symbolized by the language of “abyss”).18

17

See Chapter Three above. Cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica Ia.12.1: “Since everything is knowable according as it is in act, God, Who is pure act without any admixture of potency, is in Himself supremely knowable. But what is supremely knowable in itself, is not knowable to some other intellect, on account of the excess of the intelligible object above the intellect.”

18

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The theme is a perennial one in Christian theology. Henri de Lubac offers a usefully concise formulation, based on the idea that mystery usually takes the form of having to hold together in the mind different claims whose connection is at once demanded and yet unattainable. “[A mystery] presents that character of lofty synthesis whose final length must remain impenetrably obscure to us. It will forever resist all our efforts to unify it fully.”19 If mystery is accepted as a genuine phenomenon, that is if a theologian does not simply dismiss its possibility out of hand, it initially demands care in recognition and delineation of scope (which means not hastily invoking mystery simply to cloak inadequate rigor of thought). Once identified, thought must then neither turn away from it in despair nor attempt to solve it as a kind of puzzle or problem. Mystery confronts reason with its own boundary, but only when reason truly attempts to grasp its mysterious rationale, trying to make those connections which elude it. Thus de Lubac is at pains to emphasize that it is not a matter of merely accepting some authoritatively proffered “contradiction” or “paradox” and then turning to other matters; the continued exercise of reason is called for; in the context of an existence faithful to the mystery, it begins to make what seemed sheer contradiction less intractable. Some aspect of the higher rationale is glimpsed even if never fully grasped.20 In the end, what is involved here is a variation on the theme of faith seeking understanding. The concept of mystery resolves this famous phrase into two claims: only the one who has faith will be in a position to seek an understanding of the mystery of revelation, but, just as important, only that encounter with revelation is truly faithful which is also and always the most vigorous striving to understand it. Frei’s treatment seems to presuppose that the Chalcedonian formulation (the one person Jesus of Nazareth as truly God and truly human without separation or confusion) is indeed an adequate pointer to a genuine mystery. Thus that ancient definition properly grasped will confront reason with a reality neither completely opaque nor reducible to transparency; it will instead invite and demand an ever-renewed incursion of faithful reason into its depth.21 The words Frei borrowed from Austin Farrer to define this phenomenon have unsuspected resonances with the deep structure of his thought, as will be seen: a mystery is “indefinitely penetrable by reason.”22 19 Henri de Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 1998), 171. 20 Ibid., 173. 21 For invocations of the Chalcedonian formula, see for example Frei, HRN, 115–16 and “Strauss,” 254. 22 TCT, 90.


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For Frei Chalcedon is only a derivative formulation, ultimately beholden to the New Testament portrait of Jesus. The narratives comprising the synoptic gospels function as the indispensable locus of, and the adequate vehicle for, the Christological mystery upon which theological reason is called to reflect (TCT, 124–5). They comprise that irreplaceable identification of the Christ against which theology has to measure any and all of its own Christological interpretations or speculations; and they are adequate to this demand, that is they are “good enough” for the church to identify its object of witness.23 Theology according to Frei is best served when it is reminded both of the nature of this object of its theological reflection (the mystery of the utterly unique identification of God with the history, subject to narration, of a single human individual) and of the nature of the subject of theological reflection, faithful human reason (always situated within or maneuvering between communal-linguistic perspectives). The notion of mystery, the Wittgensteinian strictures on reason, and the conventions of realistic narrative thus converge to issue in some of his basic axioms of Christological interpretation. Although nowhere collectively defined by Frei, the following discussion will be premised on the claim that these axioms provide the tacit conceptual basis of Frei’s assessment of the five theological types according to their ability to recognize and honor the “literal sense” of the gospel narratives, and thus of his determination of the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable theological procedure. Roughly speaking, the philosophical theme has helped determine the nature of theological subjectivity, the theme of mystery conditions Frei’s understanding of the Christological object of theology, and the theme of narrative defines the scriptural medium of their encounter. The different canons or rules at work in Frei’s Christological thinking can be thought of as involving different pairings of the above themes. The first canon brings together the mystery of Jesus’ divine–human unity and narrative: the gospel narratives must be read as delineations of the unsubstitutable character Jesus Christ. Whatever Christian faith means by salvation is to be connected to the presence of God in this figure, but this figure precisely as “rendered” by these “realistic” narratives (in the technical sense employed by Frei). The saving predicates assigned to Christ are only mutually coherent and understandable when seen first in their deployment in this individual’s story, not when, for example, they are grasped as derivations from some analysis of the general human predicament. Theology will always shoot wide of the mark when the Christ becomes a composite figure built 23 For the best discussion of the scriptures as providing “sufficient” or “good enough” reference to the object of witness, see TN, 209–10.

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up to be the bearer of previously derived saving characteristics; he is first and foremost a rendered individual, and whatever is universally saving about him can only be read off of or measured against this portrait. Another canon springs from combining narrative with Frei’s philosophical assumptions about situated rationality: Christian theology can find no access to the phenomenon of salvation by Christ or to Christ himself which lies “behind” this concrete portrait, which might be used to relativize it, or which is “projected” in front of this portrait, as an already possessed human possibility which Christ merely awakens or enables in us. The reality of the Christ is only accessible to Christian faith (and theology) under this particular narrative description, which in turn should provide ultimate orientation within the world. Thus the ancient community’s modes of description of Christ (or of God for that matter) enshrined in scripture are irreducible, and would only be destroyed if an attempt were made to supplant them with another description using terms drawn straightforwardly from another linguistic realm. Finally, two more rules seem to combine the themes of philosophy and mystery; they are the result of bringing together the mysterious nature of the Christological object and the situated nature of the interpreting subject. First: the gospel texts can and do function religiously without a precisely specifiable mode of reference (TN, 208–9). This is not to say that the gospels do not refer to realities beyond themselves, but rather that the way they do so is systematically elusive. This is first because one is dealing with a set of events partially constituted by the uniquely indefinable mode of God’s presence. All categories inevitably become “logically odd” when applied in such a situation. But the elusiveness of reference is for Frei also a kind of principle of the philosophy of language he supports. Given his views on how language works, he believes there can be no theory of “meaning” as such, and hence no unified, systematic way of relating the force and usage of words to some specifiable connection to non-linguistic reality. The point is not that offering theories about the reference of the gospel accounts is forbidden, only that they must remain tentative and heuristic, not global and reductively determinative. The religious meaning of the gospel accounts remains intact in spite of the inability to exhaustively define their connections with the real, but such connections must nonetheless be posited and theologically theorized. The point contained in this third rule or canon might also be seen as a particular instance coming under a more general rule, a fourth axiom of Frei’s Christology: for theological interpretation of the Christ-event, description and not explanation remains the operative ideal. By an explanation Frei means a theory purporting to “place” or determine all possible relevant descriptions of some phenomenon. An explanation is a kind of “super-description,” one that claims to organize other descriptions of a phenomenon and account for


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their relations to each other (TN, 61). But for Frei neither the incarnation itself nor the textual rendering which canonically mediates it to believers is subject to such a super-description. Here again Frei consistently pleads for restraint on the part of the theologian; “tentative” and “fragmentary” remain his watchwords. The attempt to describe in other words and concepts the Christ-event is a necessary task if it is to be grasped at all, but let such attempts proliferate, let them be held lightly, and let no exclusive claims be made for them.

The Typology The preceding guidelines for Christological interpretation, distilled from Frei’s various writings, have in common an emphasis on the difficult givenness of God-in-Christ; the unfathomable event itself precedes and relativizes all attempts to situate it comfortably within available schemes of thought. It ultimately evades all such attempts even as it continually and imperatively summons them. The particular ingredients of Frei’s Christological thought which have been discussed (the Wittgensteinian ascesis of situated reason, the logical obliqueness of mystery, and the rediscovery of narrated identity as the fragile but adequate textual vehicle of that mystery) are in their different ways appropriations of a Barthian refrain often on Frei’s lips: let possibility follow actuality! All thinking about the possibility of God’s redemptive act in Christ must always humbly follow the contours of its actual occurrence as confessed in the tradition of the Church (which is not to say that the very terms of that traditional confession may not themselves need supplementation and reformulation over time in light of what they point to). It will become clearer in the two following sections, which explore his two basic methodological disjunctions, how Frei’s fixed attention of this rule of thumb permeates his assessments of the theological types. All that remains in the present section is to further probe the structure of the typology itself and the assumptions built into it.24 The limited intentions of the typology should be held in mind from the 24 As stated earlier, there is no “authorized” version of Frei’s typology, no single text which comprises his definitive statement. The primary writings setting it out were intended for delivery as lectures, exacerbating Frei’s rather casual approach to precision and consistency of conceptual language. What follows thus cannot restrict itself to simple rehearsal of what Frei says about the typology. It is an interpretation of what seems to be going on, sometimes for convenience adopting terms other than Frei’s own. Misrepresentation is always possible, of course, so readers seeking more detail should measure this presentation carefully against Frei’s own statements.

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beginning. Not only is it an unfinished product, undergoing continual rethinking and elaboration by Frei in the years before his death, it is also subordinate to a larger Christological project which is not extant. Its scope is confined in two ways. First, it claims to describe a range of options possible within a single, broadly influential but by no means universal tradition, what can be called the “Berlin” tradition of academic theology. In this tradition negotiating the differing demands of what David Tracy calls the “publics” of church and academy is characteristically constitutive of, not accidental to, the theological task.25 Second, and this is often overlooked, the typology is ultimately designed to organize methodological options with respect to their handling of a specific dogmatic issue: Christology, along with its grounding in scriptural interpretation. Frei’s own firm positions on such matters should warn the reader that descriptive and evaluative intentions are concurrently operative in the typology. A final limitation of the typology is that it oscillates, at times confusingly, between discussion of the five types understood as formal possibilities on the one hand, and discussion of individual theologians as representatives of the types on the other. As a result, the interpreter is confronted not only with formal questions (Are the grounds for distinguishing one type from another sound? Are they consistent across the typology?) but with material questions concerning the exemplary theologians. For example, does the figure under discussion actually represent the type he (they are all male) is assigned to? Is the characterization of his theology accurate? Are multiple representatives of a given type mentioned, and if so can they plausibly be grouped together? More generally, can the concrete decisions of specific theologians, especially figures of the depth, power, and influence of those instanced in the typology, be helpfully generalized as instancing formal, imitable options available for use by others? Questions of the latter kind are made more difficult to answer due to the fact that Frei apparently had both contemporaries and figures from earlier centuries in mind in formulating the types. The major representative of Type One is Gordon Kaufman, but Frei also sees Kant as an earlier representative (TCT, 58). With Type Three, it is the earlier figure, Schleiermacher, who does the main work in the discussion; but Frei hints that Tillich might be a possible contemporary candidate (TCT, 3, 68). For Type Two Frei seemed to yoke his primary example, David Tracy, with Hegel as an earlier 25 TCT, 119–20. Frei is quite serious that other options exist, as indicated by the popping up in this context once again of the remarkable figure of Farrer. At any rate, for him the mainstream, modern academic tradition of theology (with its peculiar brand of “Christocentrism”) cannot be regarded as an ultimate horizon. Cf. Frei, “Strauss,” 255.


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counterpart, a problematic move which will be discussed later.26 These choices are all debatable, but their evaluation could only be part of a total assessment of the typology itself which would transcend the scope of the current investigation. Suffice it to say that Frei’s assignment of specific theologians to their respective types raises all kinds of questions. These will be kept at bay except to the extent necessary for illuminating the issue of immediate concern: how the typology helped to generate certain decisive methodological disjunctions which have come to be associated with postliberalism. It will be recalled that the five types are supposed to form a spectrum. This would ordinarily mean that the options run along a single axis between polar extremes. Frei, however, freely admits to the “messiness” of his typology, to the fact that more than one issue is determining where the options fall (TCT, 27). Although some of the subordinate issues will be noted on occasion, attention must focus on the two main axes. The first and most prominent axis concerns the balance between what for present purposes will be called the “academic” and the “ecclesial” character of theology. The academic character of theology not only registers the degree to which the world of contemporary learned culture forms the primary audience or “public” to which theology addresses itself. It also stresses the extent to which theology as itself a learned discourse is beholden for its usefulness and plausibility to the accepted state and organization of contemporary knowledge. As an abbreviation, Frei usually dubs the totality of such authoritative, non-theological intellectual discourses “philosophy.” In so doing, he does not have in mind those accounts by non-theological disciplines of the particular phenomena associated with Christianity (and which might be perceived as potentially in direct “competition” with theology); this kind of “external” discourse will be dealt with below. But when Frei speaks of the external discourse of “philosophy” he has his eye on the overall shape of contemporary learned discourses in general. The “philosophy” with which theology in the academy must reckon has a material and a formal sense (TCT, 20). Theology must relate itself to philosophy materially considered, 26 The assimilation of Hegel to a Type Two position is strongly implied by Frei’s choice of language. He claims that for Type Two “[e]xternal and internal descriptions of Christianity are two aspects whose conceptual convergence is made possible by the same underlying transcendental philosophical structure” (TCT, 3). Elsewhere he calls such a structure a “super-theory,” and when describing Schleiermacher’s Type Three position he explicitly contrasts him with Hegel on the grounds that the latter possesses such a philosophical structure enabling systematic mediation: “In contrast to Hegel, he has no supertheory or system by which to mediate between religion-neutral historical descriptions and Christian religious descriptions of the same events” (TCT, 37).

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by which is meant schemes for organizing reality which appeal to (in principle) universally available experience (“metaphysics” for short). It also situates itself with respect to philosophy formally considered, general norms for the meaningfulness of ideas and the coherence and plausibility of argumentation which claim to encompass all fields aspiring to the status of knowledge (“criteriology” in Frei’s parlance). In effect, the more “academic” a theology is, the more beholden it understands itself to be to philosophical metaphysics or philosophical criteriology. On the first, academic-ecclesial axis structuring Frei’s typology, then, theologians or types toward the left-hand side of the spectrum place a greater stress on the academic pole, while further to the right-hand side the ecclesial character is emphasized. In the latter case, the community or public which “grounds” the work of theology, which sets its basic parameters and goals, is not the academy but the church. This not only involves conceiving the theological task as predominantly conditioned by the specific history and shape of the Christian community and the essential pattern or complex of beliefs and practices which are understood to characterize that community. It also means that the theologian’s intellectual goals are subordinate to the practical goal of responsibly participating in, perpetuating, and critically guiding this community. Frei’s typology, intended to reflect the central tension of the “Berlin” tradition, presupposes that an undertaking which completely abandoned either the academic or the ecclesial orientation would no longer be theology in the relevant sense. As Frei sees it, this is a threat to inhabitants of the polar extremes of the spectrum, Types One and Five. Running in approximate parallel to this academic-ecclesial axis is another one. This axis organizes theological options on the spectrum according to the way they negotiate or inter-relate internal perspectives on Christian phenomena (histories, communities, beliefs, or practices) with various external perspectives on those same Christian phenomena. (These will be the specific disciplinary perspectives potentially rivaling theology mentioned above, as opposed to the general “philosophical” atmosphere.) Frei does not trouble himself to specify the relationship between this second determinant of his spectrum and the first one. The basic distinction is that the first axis concerns the relation in theology between specific Christian concerns and general intellectual demands, while the second axis concerns the adjudication of differing interpretations of specifically Christian matters from internal and external perspectives (TCT, 21). Discourse about Christian matters from an “internal perspective” will here mean conscious responsibility to criteria of faithfulness or commitment to the Christian message and mission, while discourse from the “external perspective” involves canons of rational adequacy not determined by Christian commitments. The first, it


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might be said, is more the stance of the participant, the second more that of the observer. To sum up how the two axes work: the location of a theological “type” on the first, academic-ecclesial, axis is intended to represent the stress laid on theology’s general intellectual responsibilities versus its practical and Christian-specific responsibilities; placement on the second axis (which for convenience will here be labeled “perspectival”) is supposed to show the degree to which, in a given theological “type,” discourses on Christian phenomena from an internal or committed perspective (internal discourses) are understood to control, or conversely to be controlled by, discourses on the same phenomena from an external or uncommitted perspective (external discourses). Frei mentions three examples of external discourses on Christianity which theologians have used (TCT, 22–3): phenomenology of religion (e.g. Schleiermacher’s reflections on “feeling” and religious language, or Tracy’s use of Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology); sociology (e.g. the interpretive approach to social and cultural structures of Weber and Geertz, favored by Frei); and history (e.g. the historical investigation of Jesus as a first-century figure, a perennial theological issue in the modern period).27 Clearly, though the two axes are distinguishable in theory, for Frei and his typology they overlap so much in practice that they can function together to define a single spectrum of kinds of theological practice. As stated in Chapter Three, the types are numbered one through five; the figures instantiating each type are usually Gordon Kaufman, David Tracy, Schleiermacher, Barth, and D.Z. Phillips respectively. As already indicated, Frei’s production is not just a neutral classificatory device, but encapsulates evaluative tensions; it reveals, so to speak, not just a descriptive structure but a normative dynamic. A grasp of both aspects will be needed to discern how the typology relates Frei’s basic dogmatic concern with the Christological 27 In addition to these two most important axes of Frei’s typology, there appear several other issues which he tries, somewhat haphazardly and confusingly, to track across the five different types (TCT, 23–6). For example, he is interested in the way in which both internal and external discourses on Christian matters might be beholden to a general philosophical criteriology, thus indicating one of the overlaps between the two axes. Another set of issues focuses on the theory of religious language on offer by the specific theologians he is examining. Questions of concern here include the relation of the objective and the existential aspects of Christian language (“fides quae” versus “fides qua”), the nature of the referent of religious language, and the irreducibility or relative untranslatability of the community’s particular idiom. (In this and in other cases it is difficult to tell if Frei thinks the view of religious language in question is necessary to membership in one of the types or is rather a contingent matter of the specific theologian chosen as an example.) Although these different variables do indicate some of the concerns animating his typologization and will sporadically appear in what follows, it would be a needless burden to try to map them consistently across the spectrum.

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mystery to the two disjunctions of theological method (apologetic vs. dogmatic predominance, systematic vs. ad hoc ordering of internal and external perspectives) which will be the concern of the remainder of the chapter. By “structure” is meant the basic descriptive architecture, how the types are plotted on the two main axes. But “dynamics” refers to the way the different types as discussed by Frei seem to be, as it were, subject to attraction or repulsion, “tempted” by or “threatened” by their neighboring types. Uncovering these tensions is the surest way of discerning the evaluations latent in his account of the theologians, and thus of decoding what is at stake in Frei’s methodological disjunctions. The structure of the typology may be summarized this way. With respect to the academic-ecclesial axis, Frei claims that in Types One and Two the general claims and norms of learned discourse give theology its primary justification and legitimation while for the other three types the balance is tipped the other way: they understand the mission and shape of theology more in terms of the church’s goals than in terms of the academy’s. But this axis, though mentioned first in Frei’s presentations, does not admit of finer distinctions; it really only suggests one distinction (two “left” types over against three “right”). Only with the second axis can the more precise distribution into five types occur. Otherwise put, on the spectrum running from academic to ecclesial, the distinctions between Types One and Two on one hand, or between Types Three, Four, and Five on the other, seem to be differences of degree rather than kind. If this were the only criterion, more precise methodological differentia between, say, Types One and Two would be hard to pick out. The academic-ecclesial axis seems in fact designed to deliver only one cutting distinction among theological practitioners, but it is one of great importance to Frei: academic theologians versus ecclesial theologians. That means Type Two theologies and all to their “left” confront Type Three theologies and all to their “right.” Frei was especially struck by statements of David Tracy to the effect that theology is best understood as a form of “philosophical reflection,” and opposed them sharply to Schleiermacher’s insistence that theology does not fall within the structure of academic sciences but is a “positive” discipline ordered to training church leaders (TCT, 30, 35). As telling as these utterances were for Frei’s Type Two/Type Three distinction, and indeed for the very formulation of the first axis, if the second axis were not operative, a different reading could perhaps assign the tension between the statements as much to rhetorical differences as to truly divergent conceptions of theology. Hence the need for a second axis. Frei is convinced that the distinction between a Tracy-type theology and a Schleiermacher-type is not a matter of rhetoric but is structural, and crucial. It is only with the inclusion


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of the second, perspectival axis that this becomes evident, and the five-fold structure of the typology really becomes visible. To see what is truly at stake in this second axis, it will be useful (once again systematizing Frei’s loose usage) to characterize the different patterns of relating internal and external discourses using two terms: overlap and comparability. If there is an “overlap” between internal and external discourses, that means that the Christian theologian believes it possible, or perhaps even necessary, for theology to operate simultaneously in the distinct linguistic and conceptual worlds of committed and uncommitted perspectives on Christianity.28 That is, in spite of the fact that history or sociology or phenomenology constitute semantic realms apart from the tradition-shaped language of prayer and worship, creed and dogma, the theologian believes that there can be meaningful traffic between the concepts of the one sphere and the concepts of the other. Where overlap is granted, the canons of historical judgment, for example, can be meaningfully applied to some of the material confessed by Christian faith without the immediate assumption of category error. Again, a phenomenology of religious consciousness may not mean precisely the same thing by “faith” that a dogmatic treatment intends, but the two “faiths” need not be mutually exclusive in meaning. In short, the theologian can use and understand both together, taking advantage of their distinctiveness, using them to approximate the same referent from different angles (TCT, 37–8). With the introduction of the idea of overlap the five-fold scheme begins to unfold, because overlap can be denied in two ways, and these represent the polar extremes of the second axis. Type One in effect refuses to grant any distinctive status within theology to its community’s defining discourse 28 It is very important for all that follows that the “overlap” in question be seen as a matter of the self-conscious and specialized procedures of the theologian, not of the general cultural interactions which make up Christian practice as a whole. Presumably no one will deny that so-called “external” discourses are continually operative at all levels among the everyday thoughts and actions of Christian “insiders.” As practitioners of their religion, Christians simply qua believers (whatever their investment in theological reflection) are always both “outside” and “inside” insofar as their intentions and views of the world are constantly permeated and shaped not just by the committed discourse of their religious community but also (and crucially) by the myriad other non-committed discourses which go into simply being inculturated persons of their time and place. Frei’s point in specifying whether different theological types do or do not methodologically appropriate the “overlap” of external and internal (chiefly on the level of intellectual discourses) thus does not deny the fact that such an overlap is always operative among believers no matter what the theologian does with it. The issue is rather the kind of theological cogency and availability which different types grant to the external discourses which are undeniably present, the way they are or are not deemed accessible (precisely as external) to the reflective and critical discourses of theology, and what force and function they are granted in theological procedure.

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as an irreducible linguistic network. For this kind of theology, the language of tradition and confession of the specific Christian community is simply the symbolic elaboration and specification of a generally available intellectual structure (a “world-view”). The difference in perspective between being committed or uncommitted to that world-view does not drive any semantic divergences in linguistic usage that the theologian must negotiate (TCT, 29–30). At the opposite extreme, Type Five exaggerates the semantic divergence between internal and external instead of dissolving it like Type One. Here the language of religious belief must always be seen as a function of highly determinate personal dispositions within strictly defined contexts of practice. To try to speak meaningfully of religious realities in non-religious language is thus made impossible by definition. To ask, for example, about the historical factuality of Christ’s miracles or about the ontological status of God is immediately to betray one’s misunderstanding of the scope of religious language usage. A judgment of fact means playing a different language game altogether from that of prayer, so different in fact that not even rough terms of translatability between them are possible (TCT, 47–8). Type One, then, refuses any semantic overlap between internal and external discourses by denying the significant distinction between them; Type Five refuses it by confining their meaningfulness to strictly different contexts of use, thus absolutizing the distinction.29 In contrast, Frei asserts that Types Two, Three, and Four do admit the semantic overlap of perspectives as ingredient in all theological reflection. He suggests that for these types such an overlap must be allowed for the enterprise of Christian theology to be possible at all. But if on the perspectival axis the attitude to overlap of perspectives distinguishes the three middle types from the extremes, what differentiates these middle three from each other? That is where a second idea comes in, that of (as it is being called here) “comparability.”30 Only those three middle types which accept the overlap of perspectives find themselves faced with the further question of comparability. To say that overlapping internal and external discourses are comparable 29 Another way of putting this is that for Type One the existential meaning of the basic Christian concepts (fides qua, the committed status or “insider perspective” of the languageuser) contributes nothing of basic importance to their objective meaning (fides quae) for the theological task of interpreting and criticizing Christian language. For Type Five at the opposite pole, it is rather the existential meaning or fides qua which so totally rules the linguistic realm of the committed believer that any notion of an objective meaning or fides quae is subsumed, if not dissolved entirely. 30 Again this is following an occasional but hardly fixed or consistent usage of Frei’s. The term “overlap” appears at TCT, 55.


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means that a theory can be proposed whereby their semantic differences can be systematically mapped, their ranges of reference precisely specified with respect to each other, and their kinds of meaningfulness relative to one another defined by a more general theory of meaning which encompasses them both. Comparability means the systematization of overlap. For Frei, this is the ambitious agenda defining Type Two over against Types Three and Four: Type Two posits the possibility and necessity of “systematizing” the relationship between internal and external discourses, providing an “explanatory theory” for their overlap. Types Three and Four, theoretically more modest, are united in denying the possibility of this move for the theologian; the incomparability of internal and external, in spite of their overlap, means that the semantic relations between internal and external discourses cannot be comprehensively accounted for in systematic theoretical terms. Such overlaps as occur are always context-dependent and only fragmentarily specifiable, though no less real for that. Because their availability is never finally specifiable or completely predictable by any theory but only exploitable on a case-by-case basis for relatively “local” purposes, Frei refers to the theologically affirmed relationships between internal and external discourses as, according to Types Three and Four, “ad hoc” (context-bound, case-by-case) rather than systematic (TCT, 3).31 The denial of any possible systematic theorization or explanation of the semantic relationship of internal and external discourses does not mean that the nature of that relationship cannot be subject to more general conceptual analysis or description. In fact, the very denial by Types Three and Four that the highly contingent patterns of the varied relationships of inner and outer discursive perspectives on Christianity can be rendered systematic is itself a general descriptive determination or characterization. Both types deny the “positive” or explanatory determination of the relationship proposed by Type Two, but they do specify certain “negative” or delimiting conditions of the relationship. It is just their different ways of describing the negative conditions of overlap (in spite of their common rejection of comparability) which distinguishes Types Three and Four, the final typological distinction in need of specification. 31

Frei, TCT, 3. In effect, as the discussion at TCT 81–2 shows, Frei uses the term “ad hoc” in opposition to the term “systematic.” Thus in the course of those two pages Barth is named as a practitioner of ad hoc subordination, Schleiermacher of ad hoc correlation, and Tracy of systematic correlation. In the terms introduced above, for Type Two the direct conceptual “comparability” of overlapping internal and external discourses allows their systematic correlation; for Types Three and Four, the insistence that overlap is intellectually exploitable only in ad hoc modes is a result of denying this comparability.

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To explain this, explicit attention to Schleiermacher and Barth as the representatives of Types Three and Four (or at least to Frei’s characterizations of them) can no longer be avoided. Although Schleiermacher proposes no grand theory which would bring into any precise semantic alignment or hierarchical ordering the distinct linguistic fields of Christian doctrine on the one hand and the various relevant academic discourses on the other, he does insist that the theologian must seek out correspondences and convergences in their assertions. Such a convergence is mapped by no theory; it is neither an assured possession nor a foundation, but an ideal or desideratum. This search for convergences as an ever-to-be-renewed and context-dependent activity without the pretension of a theory claiming to coordinate all their possible forms is what Frei calls “ad hoc correlation.” It is premised on Schleiermacher’s simultaneous affirmation of the autonomy and reciprocity of internal and external discourses (TCT, 67). Dogmatic discourse does not “ground” academic (e.g. philosophical or historical) discourse, nor is it grounded by it; but the two mutually inform and illuminate one another (even though they cannot, if they understand themselves aright, clash). Karl Barth, disputing with Schleiermacher, does not believe this particular negative determination of the internal/external relation is workable. On Frei’s reading Barth insists, to use the language introduced above in Chapter Three, on the “subordination” of all external discourses by the theologian. The Christian theologian simply cannot, qua theologian, place such a confidence in the perspective of external discourses as grants them autonomy and reciprocity in the theological sphere, as Schleiermacher does. To do so, in fact, is already to have unwittingly subordinated the logic of Christian discourse to external norms (TCT, 81). With this final distinction of Type Three from Type Four, the basic descriptive structure of Frei’s typology is now in place. But as already alluded to, Frei’s own fundamental choices as a theologian have built evaluative tensions into the descriptive categories; only these judgments tell the fuller story of the relations of his types to one another and so they must be brought to the surface for inspection. Recall that one of the key questions informing the typology from the beginning was the degree to which various models of theological procedure are or are not open to the literal sense of scripture (meaning especially the gospel narratives) (TCT, 18, 19). Openness to the literal sense is crucial for determining Frei’s preferences among the types. That being said, it has to be accounted a weakness of Frei’s discussions that he does not elaborate more fully on the reasons why a given type can or cannot do justice to the literal sense of the gospel accounts. But he does at least provide some indications. As pointed out earlier, the use of external


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discourses for re-describing the gospel narratives in new contexts is necessary for the continued theological availability of their literal sense.32 This immediately insures that Types One and Five will be “inhospitable” to the Christologically determinant sense of the New Testament, as they deny in different ways the theologically fruitful overlap of internal and external languages. This is not the whole story, however. For all three middle types accept overlap, and yet remarkably Types Three and Four are seen by Frei as amenable to the literal sense, while Type Two is not (TCT, 6). Frei is convinced from his readings of Hegel and David Tracy that they are quite blind to what both Schleiermacher and Barth see: the concrete person Jesus Christ and the absolute soteriological significance of his identity as the focus of the gospel’s “literal” narrative rendering. It would seem, therefore, that Frei was trying in his sharp separation of Type Two and Type Three (on both of the main axes of the typology) to account for these different material (Christological) results in formal (methodological) terms. In short, to Frei’s way of thinking the theologies of Tracy and Schleiermacher must betray such significantly different sensitivities to the “literal” Christ of the gospels because they have crucially different notions of theological method or procedure. It is impossible to overstress the importance of Frei’s interpretation of Schleiermacher for this entire theological conception. Schleiermacher’s Type Three is not just graphically the midpoint of the typology but conceptually the pivot upon which it turns. Frei strongly suspected that something about the way Type Two systematically “controls” the overlap between the internal discourses of Christian faith and external perspectives by appeal to philosophy ends up covertly subordinating the former to the latter. This in turn disastrously impedes apprehension of the hermeneutic key to the New Testament. Hence he wants very much to interpret Schleiermacher in such a way that he is doing something quite different from Tracy, that he forms in effect his own “type.”33 The result is that this puts Type Two, not Type Three, into direct opposition to Type Four’s subordinating approach to external discourses. The need to keep Schleiermacher’s theological type in the “good” zone accounts as well for the curious interplay between the two main axes of the typology. In terms of the perspectival axis Type Three remains precariously 32

See Chapter Three above. Frei is openly aware that he is pushing his interpretations of Schleiermacher in a specific direction; he believes it to be the correct angle to take on a complex thinker, but knows his reading, though defensible, is not the obvious or only one. See TCT, 70. 33

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perched in the middle, but, according to the ecclesial-academic axis, it is firmly on the right-hand (or “ecclesial”) side of the typology. By thus locating Schleiermacher Frei moves significantly beyond Karl Barth’s rejection of the former. Barth’s opposition to Schleiermacher amounted to a straightforward opposition to any strategy of any kind of correlation, any attempt to give a theological function to external discourses which preserved their relative autonomy. But therein lies the great significance of Schleiermacher’s special place in the typology. Frei wants to locate the truly cutting distinction between sound and questionable theological procedure not, with Barth, between Schleiermacher’s correlation and Barth’s subordination, but rather between Tracy’s supposed “systematic” correlation on the one hand, and, on the other, two legitimate forms of its denial: Schleiermacher’s “ad hoc” correlation and Barth’s “ad hoc” subordination. In sum, Frei’s interpretation of Schleiermacher as unsystematic and open to the literal sense is one of the hidden but essential dynamic pressures built into his typology: it conditions the strong urge to assimilate Schleiermacher to Barth by driving Schleiermacher away from the Type Two project. But there is another pressure operative, one which likewise ends up forcing the types of Schleiermacher and Barth closer to each other: the dangerous proximity, alluded to in Chapter Three above, of Type Four to Type Five. If Schleiermacher must be interpreted in a way that moves his project, in spite of all differences, closer to Barth’s, this has the effect not only of driving a wedge between Tracy’s brand of correlation and Schleiermacher’s, but also of bringing into relief the similarity of Schleiermacher and Barth over against D.Z. Phillips in their common insistence on the necessity for theology of semantic interchange between internal and external discourses. Frei’s own, admittedly contested, reading of Schleiermacher is thus at the heart of the typology, and at the heart of his own understanding of what is promising and what is dangerous in theology. He might, and in fact does, have a number of serious objections to Schleiermacher’s specific theological positions. But all the same he is determined to defend, with due caution, the legitimacy of Schleiermacher’s basic theological intentions on the general level of method. Schleiermacher’s failures as a theologian are not the inevitable result of a flawed general conception of the theological task but must be traced to certain specific philosophical assumptions and dogmatic decisions which have since come to appear questionable. The merely descriptive structure of the typology takes on a somewhat different appearance when its evaluative dynamics are taken into account. Frei’s construal of Schleiermacher as a distinct option or type has opposed “magnetic” effects on its neighboring types: it repels Type Two strongly, yet acts as a sort of attractor for Type Four, luring it away from the theological


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dead end represented by Type Five. It is as if, for Frei, Types Three and Four form their own, mutually stabilizing pair. It now begins to seem less surprising that for Frei these two types share a common openness to the literal sense of the gospel portraits which the other three types are lacking (TCT, 6). In fact, it is being suggested here that this perceived hermeneutic affinity between Schleiermacher and Barth on the material issue of Christology likely led to the bold determination that there simply had to be, on the formal level of method, a more important distinction between Types Two and Three (in spite of their shared concern for correlation) than between Types Three and Four (in spite of Barth’s notorious hostility to Schleiermacher). Most discussions of Frei as a methodological thinker, especially in the context of the postliberalism disputes, have not given due weight to the role played in the typology by the hermeneutic of the literal sense, and the resulting ambiguity of Schleiermacher. The remainder of this chapter now has the task of showing how the two methodological disjunctions drawn from Frei’s work which have typically entered into descriptions of “postliberalism” connect with the just-described distinctions and evaluative tensions inscribed within his typology. The first such disjunction (dogmatic versus apologetic orientation) is in Frei’s thought largely a function of the relation of Schleiermacher to his neighbor on the right, Barth. The other disjunction (ad hoc versus systematic correlation) is in turn a matter of distinguishing Schleiermacher’s project from that of his left-hand neighbor, Tracy. Discussing each in turn will allow a better assessment of the nature of the disjunctions, but will also call into question their use in the construction of postliberalism.

Dogmatics and Apologetics: A Zero-sum Game? This section will argue that the attempt to appropriate Frei’s reflections on apologetics and dogmatics to help define a postliberal turn away from liberal theology does not work because it depends on making into a principled opposition what Frei understands as a matter of tactical choice. Returning yet again to Frei’s wrestling with the Schleiermacher/Barth confrontation will confirm Schleiermacher’s ambivalent status on this issue, in spite of Frei’s awarding him the title “father of modern apologetics.” This status in turn points up related ambiguities in the concept of apologetic itself which will have to be kept in mind in assessing Frei’s life-long distaste for apologetic strategies. To be sure he laments the suffocating, defensive atmosphere of argumentative self-justification within which so much modern theology has moved. But as a matter of technical procedure, what is more narrowly

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unacceptable to Frei is what he calls basing theology on a “foundational” apologetic. Upon closer examination, this conception will turn out to be parasitic upon the more basic systematic/ad hoc distinction. The first putative disjunction will thus be largely dissolved, leaving the second disjunction as the better indicator of the fundamental methodological decision Frei wishes to force on his contemporaries. Frei’s remarks about the apologetic mindset ranged from amused to acidic. Earlier discussions have shown that he shared with Barth, Troeltsch, and H. Richard Niebuhr a robust suspicion of the intellectual gymnastics involved in appropriating cultural and intellectual materials to justify Christian belief to some imagined impartial observer. For skeptics like these the apologetic mentality is prey to a twofold weakness. On the one hand it tends to corrupt what ought to be straightforward judgments about the content of Christian proclamation, masking from itself those parts perceived to be less intellectually palatable; on the other hand, its engagement with its cultural environment insensibly descends into special pleading, finding it impossible to take the objections to Christianity, which might reveal important and interesting differences between Christian and non-Christian discourses, with full seriousness. It seeks (always with tacit expectations of success) a secret affinity between the “heart” of the gospel and the “heart” of contemporary culture; and, marvelous to relate, it always finds it. From his earliest writings Frei lamented the enslavement particularly of modern theology to apologetic projects. Of course, theology in its typically “modern” guise (apologetic in aim, anthropological in organizing principle, and Christological in doctrinal content) pre-dated Schleiermacher. But Frei had to admit that the latter’s formulation of and solution to this modern problematic (in terms of a “relationalist” doctrine of revelation and a Christology centered on Jesus’ “self-consciousness”) proved extraordinarily influential from the early nineteenth century on.34 His work gave a classic stamp to the modern apologetic project. Had Frei’s theological vision been a mere duplication of Barth’s, he could at this point have dismissed Schleiermacher’s theological strategy as a dead end. But things were never that simple. Even as his typology began to germinate in the early 1980s Frei could be found praising Schleiermacher for sharing a prototypically Barthian insight: that the “first task” of the Christian theologian is “to give a normative description rather than positioning himself to set forth or argue Christian truth claims” (TN, 100). And yet this somehow sits alongside his role as apologetic pioneer: his characteristic way

34

See, for example, Frei, HRN, 13; TN, 28, etc.


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of using the concepts of a philosophical anthropology to argue the general intelligibility of the need and possibility of redemption through Christ represents “the linchpin of the . . . apologetic enterprises of the modern era” (TN, 174). Is it simply a curious irony that Schleiermacher, though he defined the apologetic strategy of an entire theological era, did so as a primarily dogmatic theologian? As it turns out, the question of whether Schleiermacher is primarily a dogmatic or an apologetic theologian can receive no definite answer. In so far as he insists on a correlation between Christian claims and the external discourses of the academy his theology can be construed as hopelessly apologetic, and Barth certainly did so. But Frei bases his case for reading him primarily as a dogmatician on a number of points he regards as more basic: Schleiermacher’s insistence on Christianity as an irreducible “languageforming” power which incorporates external discourses into its own semantic realm (TN, 100), his warning that the use of concepts from philosophical anthropology in the introduction to his dogmatics is not foundational but “borrowed” for heuristic purposes (TN, 192), and his assertion of the “positive” orientation of theology toward the practical goal of church leadership (TCT, 70–1). So Barth and Frei seem to be reading the role of apologetic in the father of modern theology in different ways. Frei has no quarrel with Barth’s classic definition of apologetic as the attempt to demonstrate that the relationship between the tenets of Christian faith and those of the learned culture of one’s time do not exclude one another (TN, 180). Christian faith-claims, that is, are shown to be defensible in general intellectual terms, as possible (the more cautious apologetic move) or even as necessary (the bolder move). It is the burden of Barth’s complaint that Schleiermacher’s dogmatic decisions, even when his undoubted intention is to accord final authority to the object of faithful witness, always seem deformed from within by the hidden force of tacit apologetic decisions. But in spite of his shared suspicion of apologetic, other considerations compel Frei to greater sympathy with Schleiermacher. One way to account for this is to highlight a potential ambiguity in the notion of apologetic. Perhaps the procedure inherent in any practice of apologetic should be distinguished from what is commonly thought of as an explicitly apologetic aim or intention. The procedure always involves arguing for some sort of theologically useful alignment between the conceptual resources of the uncommitted culture on the one hand and the material of Christian belief on the other. But the aim of this procedure might be something other than apologetic. That is, it might have some other purpose than demonstrating to the non-Christian culture at large the plausibility of

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Christian belief in that culture’s own terms. It might also be undertaken for more strictly dogmatic reasons, namely in the interests of using the concepts and insights of external discourses in order to help the community of those already committed to faith grasp and restate for their context the elements of Christian discourse and witness. Put another way, the intention behind making a rational (i.e. arguable) coordination between the specific deliverances of Christian faith and generally available intellectual resources might be internally heuristic rather than externally probative. Its first intent might be to integrate and stabilize the self-understanding of witness rather than to convince or refute the outsider. Thus those tactical maneuvers within theology broadly definable as “apologetic” cannot be properly assessed apart from the strategic theological intentions with which they are carried out. These considerations should be kept in mind when interpreting the tension between Frei’s qualified support of Schleiermacher’s theological intentions and Barth’s critique of the latter’s theological results. Barth’s censures are based on his blunt assumption that every form of correlational practice is as such a form of apologetic, and that apologetic commitments inevitably distort the dogmatic task. But Frei is able to bring more nuance to the discussion of Schleiermacher. He gives more weight to Schleiermacher’s primarily dogmatic intentions. Though he depends upon correlation (an apologetic procedure broadly construed), he does so with the heuristic intention of delineating and creatively reaffirming the dogmatic content of Christian faith. Far from this kind of apologetic necessarily impeding the dogmatic goal, it would be a necessary component of it, a moment within dogmatics itself. It would, in fact, be an instance of exploiting that “overlap” of internal and external discourses which Frei argues is a characteristic not just of Schleiermacher but of Barth as well. There is indeed evidence to suggest that Frei wanted to engage in a qualified defense of Schleiermacher. As was revealed in Chapter Three, the zone of what is theologically acceptable for Frei is not coterminous with Type Four but rather involves a qualified acceptance of Type Three as well. At this point, the thread of that discussion must be picked up again. Frei perceptively argues that Barth’s assessment of correlation in Schleiermacher was unwittingly shaped from the outset by certain submerged presuppositions, unacknowledged inheritances of the nineteenth century he was rebelling against: a conflation of the categories of revelation and redemption, and a consequent tendency to focus rigorously on the particular relation of Christology to epistemology as the touchstone of any authentic theology (TN, 174–5). But looking at Barth’s practice in the later Dogmatics, Frei discerns a lessening in his fixation on these points, which also introduced some flexibility into his earlier firmly negative reading of


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Schleiermacher. Frei evidently wants to push this reassessment even farther than Barth did (TN, 186). For Barth’s sweeping rejection of correlation in any form finally seemed to him unnecessary and excessive. First, it is unnecessary because, unnoticed by Barth, two kinds of correlation coexist in Schleiermacher, one of which is far less susceptible to the risks which supposedly warrant the rejection of the whole enterprise. Second, it is excessive because it is rooted in a justified epistemological concern which threatens however to become exaggerated; Barth’s bias kept him from grasping the way in which the theological practice of correlation might even be a protest against the very excess which undermines his own epistemological insight. With regard to the first point, the unfortunate result of the early Barth’s theological break with liberalism was that it rendered him insensitive to the flexibility of Schleiermacher’s correlating strategies. Barth’s suspicions were fastened particularly on Schleiermacher’s attempt to correlate the Christian understanding of the work of the savior with an interpretation of sin drawn from the universally available experience of the frustration of the higher self-consciousness. Barth’s newfound radically theological epistemology tended to demand a strong doctrine of revelation modeled on the reformation doctrine of justification; the neo-Augustinian emphasis of the reformers on prevenient grace in the sphere of the will was now to be transferred to the realm of knowledge as well. From such a position, Schleiermacher’s construing the saving significance of Christ by appeal to a universal category of sin explicable in general anthropological terms (a move repeated by innumerable theologians after him) had to appear guilty of a kind of epistemic synergism, a cognitive form of “works-righteousness.” It did not, that is, grant complete semantic priority to the concrete event of God’s self-revelation; honoring this priority would demand deriving the logical structure of the saving act exclusively from faith’s grasp of the sui generis character of its divine origin, and in no way from the general conditions of the human recipient. But instead of relying on this faith-apprehension Schleiermacher’s correlating approach to soteriology hankered for a bogus intelligibility and plausibility through appeal to a prior anthropology of sin. Barth’s Christocentrism together with his epistemic obsession naturally led him to see this as the deepest flaw in Schleiermacher’s thinking, and to pattern all correlating moves on this kind of apologetic resort to universal experience (TN, 183). On the specific soteriological point, Frei could agree. Schleiermacher’s correlating the heart of his doctrine of redemption with a universally available experience of sin was indeed an unfortunate instance of grounding the intelligibility and plausibility of dogmatic contents in external discourses. But Frei refuses to stop there. The doctrine of revelation, pace Barth, is logically

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quite separate from that of atonement. Failing to see this, Barth has also failed to see that on the issue of revelation Schleiermacher’s correlation takes a different form, and is not of the “grounding” kind operative in his soteriology. To reappropriate the meaning of God’s self-revelation to human beings and their response in faith, Schleiermacher does employ a correlated phenomenology of religious feeling (Gefühl). But he does this merely to indicate or anthropologically “locate” (not ground or explain) the properly Christian apprehension of God’s revealed presence to the believer. The point is not that Frei would himself approve of this specific example of the correlation of internal with external, but rather that he wants to draw attention to it as a kind of correlation which is not of the strong, grounding sort that characterizes Schleiermacher’s soteriological theories. Barth, immersed in his own concerns, paid no attention to this differentiation in correlative strategy; the result was a needlessly exclusive identification of correlation as an apologetic concern for general plausibility outside the circle of faith, playing into the suspicion that any form of correlation inevitably undercuts the proper primacy in dogmatics of God’s utterly unique self-revelation (TN, 183–4). The second point at which Frei questions Barth’s dismissal of correlation goes more to the heart of Barth’s radical epistemology itself, with its rigorous application of the Reformation logic of prevenient redemptive grace to the epistemic conditions of revelation. For Barth, human cognitive capacities are utterly taken up and reconfigured by the sui generis act of divine revelation. He does not deny that revelation is in itself reasonable in a higher sense; the created order of human intellect is not simply negated by the grace of revealed truth. For this reason, Barth can grant the possibility that human categories and concepts will prove relatively adequate to grappling with this event, but he warns that the act which brings about such adequation is exclusively divine, transcendent not immanent. The human cognitive apparatus is seized and reconstituted by an act of grace. Because this is an event in which God acts directly to “bring to an end” the constructed world of the natural subject, perfecting cognition only by neutralizing its immanent capacities, knowledge of God is always “eschatological.” Because human beings can never know just how the criteria of their worldly language will fit the central data of the faith, Barth speaks of the referential capacity of that language itself as incapable of true reference without its graced subsumption by God in particular acts of secondary revelation. Frei shares much of the Barthian suspicion driving this scheme. He too rejects any notion of linguistic reference to the divine realities which extrapolates from a supposed referential “thrust” immanent in human language itself (TN, 163). But Barth inferred from this actualistic doctrine of “graced” or


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“eschatological” reference the impossibility of any correlation of internal and external discourses, in spite of their admitted overlap. For him, that is, there could be no talk of the “autonomy” and “reciprocity” of external and internal discourses within dogmatics; the immanent, “natural” logic of nonbelieving discourses will unavoidably be “broken” by their theological appropriation. Correlation, on the other hand, means seeking a referential convergence upon the object of faith in which categories foreign to faith make a real, material contribution. For Barth, the risk of marring theology’s fragile grasp on the contours of revelation is simply too great; Schleiermacher’s attempt to “borrow” intelligibility and plausibility from general conceptual resources in their integrity evades the dogmatic imperative. But Frei, even while granting the risks inherent in the practice of correlation, rounds on Barth in the guise of a hypothetical Schleiermacher and suggests that the Barthian position is not free from self-defeating dangers of its own (TN, 196–7). What if the clash in dogmatic discourse between “worldly” and “faithful” meanings always potentially threatening Schleiermacher’s ad hoc correlation were deemed not significantly more dangerous to theology than the opposite risk of an evacuation of all worldly meaning such as haunts a subordinating strategy like Barth’s? If Barth cannot grant any “clear, theology-independent status” to the generally accepted concepts and criteria of intelligibility he wishes to use, is not his making all reference “eschatological” reference tantamount to the secret denial of any “overlap”? Would not Type Four end up a disguised version of Type Five? Frei appeals specifically to the “external” concepts of “history” and “fact” which Schleiermacher and Barth both invoke in reference to Jesus, especially his resurrection (TCT, 90–1). Theology will be troubled either way it turns. If Type Three risks a “Jesus of history” account which cannot comfortably connect up with the risen “Christ” witnessed to by faith, then Type Four in affirming resurrection risks the invocation of concepts like “history” and “fact” to which it can give no “cash value,” closing off too quickly the possibility of a tentative specification of their reference. Schleiermacher’s retort to this is, if the appeal to external semantic resources involves no real access of meaning within theology, it is simply otiose. Thus Frei’s hypothetical Schleiermacher insists that only some attempted correlation of autonomous internal and external discourses as a “constant, continuing practice,” an admittedly experimental groping toward some coherence between Christian meanings and general categories, can avoid the risk of theological autism which threatens Barth’s position (TN, 196). Which thinker has the better of this dispute? The truly significant point is that Frei in effect refuses to decide. The implication can only be that both Schleiermacher and Barth represent risky strategies, but that these opposed

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risks are the unavoidable shoals between which theology must carefully negotiate a passage. They mark out between themselves the space of the inherently unstable and unfinished practice of theology itself. They represent two kinds of answer, mutually qualifying each other and exposed to complementary dangers, to the central question of humanly conceiving the divine mystery: how can merely human concepts be bent toward the mystery of God revealed without breaking them? Frei’s refusal to cast his lot exclusively with either Type Three’s “ad hoc” correlation or (for him the more congenial option) Type Four’s subordination is a matter of principle, another instance of the victory of the “ad hoc” and contextual over the systematic and general. The theologian can only find a place along the spectrum encompassing both types which works best in a given context, which practically articulates the faith with minimum loss of intelligibility. In the final analysis, Frei undoubtedly believed that Barth’s decision against correlation was salutary for its time and place, but could not represent a once-and-for-all determination of correlation’s theological illegitimacy (TN, 175). In short, the decision between correlation and subordination is a tactical one, a matter of theological judgment based on the concrete situation of the theologian. The only principle which holds true across any context is that the “cutting of philosophical losses” will always be necessary at some point. If this analysis of Frei is plausible, then it instantly problematizes any deployment of his disjunction between the dogmatic and the apologetic moments as a stark either/or for theological method. The relation of dogmatic and apologetic cannot be a simple matter of principle because in spite of all his strictures against the dominance of the apologetic mindset, Frei cannot in the end provide a way of firmly differentiating a legitimate concern for intelligibility from an illegitimate one. At the very least, the admission of Type Three correlating procedures as in principle legitimate certainly makes it unlikely that some formal or methodological rule will be found to prevent apologetic methods from “dominating” dogmatic ones, thus rescuing theology from “liberalism.” The closest Frei comes to a kind of regulative principle on this issue is when he complains of modern theologians making the “logic of belief ” subordinate to or a function of the “logic of coming to believe” or “exercising belief ” (e.g. TN, 30). But to say this should not happen is a maxim, not a criterion. Only a specific judgment within a specific context can decide if it has occurred, if apologetic has trumped dogmatic. But the preceding discussion suggests that the very idea of a direct competition is misleading. The problem with trying to set up dogmatics and apologetics in basically disjunctive terms is that they are not comparable quantities of a zero-sum


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game. Conceiving a liberal/postliberal opposition in terms of a struggle for dominance between apologetics and dogmatics makes them exclusive quantities; it tries to present the abstract and empty idea of opting for “more” of one than the other as a substantive methodological choice. Application to concrete decisions of theological procedure would quickly unmask this “principle” as vague to the point of vacuity. It would be better simply to admit that the vital overlap of internal and external discourses means that any theology, even that of Karl Barth, always involves “apologetic” procedures in at least the broad, heuristic sense of using the language of Canaan to speak the truths of Israel. At any rate, the thrust of the preceding forces the conclusion that the enemy of good theology for Frei simply cannot be seen as correlation or apologetic in themselves. Rather, theology goes off the rails when either of these becomes “systematic” or “grounding” rather than “ad hoc.” In this way the investigation is inexorably driven toward the second disjunction.

Systematic versus Ad Hoc (I): The Case of David Tracy Of the distinctions between types of theology mapped by Frei’s typology, none appeared to him more crucial for the contemporary context than that between Type Three and Type Two, between (as he judges) the “ad hoc” correlation practiced by Schleiermacher and the “systematic” correlation recommended by David Tracy. The potential for confusion which stems from using individual theologians as stand-ins for broad options or “types” reaches its height in the unfortunate selection of Tracy, and not just because unlike canonical figures of the past (who are beyond raising protests) he is a still-living and developing thinker who has proven more than ready to dispute Frei’s interpretations of his work. A long digression is unfortunately necessary in order to disentangle two issues: the primary one is the precise nature of the formal distinction between Type Two and Type Three, while the secondary one is the decision which casts Schleiermacher and Tracy as material embodiments of that formal divide. The latter, however, has for too long tended to cloud the former. The case will be made in this section that Frei’s readings of the opposition between Tracy and Schleiermacher is so fraught with difficulties that it must be laid aside. Only then will the ground be cleared for a more concise discussion in the final section of the formal methodological issue at stake (i.e. systematic versus ad hoc correlation). Frei chose David Tracy to be the paradigm of an influential kind of correlation or apologetic which needed to be firmly resisted in the name of the basic positions outlined at the start of this chapter. The lively tension

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between Frei and Tracy came for many to seem a microcosm of the entire liberal–postliberal dichotomy. Some discussion of it cannot be avoided, but only in the interests of clarification, not with the intention of “taking sides” (since precisely the point at issue is to deny that the standard dichotomy meaningfully encapsulates their differences). The first step must be to disentangle the different levels on which Frei resists Tracy’s theological approach. That Frei’s disagreements with Tracy were so extensive, operating on the philosophical, exegetical, and methodological levels, made the appearance of a total opposition plausible.35 Philosophically, the problem is that Tracy relies heavily upon thinkers like Schubert Ogden and especially Paul Ricoeur who, as Frei sees it, posit quasi-idealist anthropologies of “selfunderstanding” which drastically underestimate the way subjectivity is constituted by diverse, contextually localized, and historically contingent cultural-linguistic networks (TCT, 60–1). Frei insists that the interchanges of “meaning” within and between these networks shift, overlap, and clash in myriad, unanticipatable ways; they are not abstractable “events” of meaning which can be systematically interrelated but improvisatory and culturally embedded practices. They are simply not subject to the kind of categorization and hierarchization common to the philosophies of “understanding” to which Tracy’s theology is indebted. Exegetically, Frei objects to the way Tracy’s use of a hermeneutic of “limit-experiences” and disclosive events of “meaning” misconstrues the unique salvific significance of the Christ-event. The constitutive determination of the latter by the particular gospel identity portraits is not given proper respect; instead it is “regionalized” within the general categories of “classic” and “religious meaning.” Tracy must do this, because his theological procedure depends on tracing the hidden affinity between the basic act of trust at the heart of contemporary “secular” existence and the theistic mode of being-in-the-world salvifically re-presented in the symbol of the Christ (TCT, 62–4). In light of this, Frei diagnoses Tracy’s preference for this kind of misguided exegetical approach in terms of a methodological imbalance; his misreading of the gospels springs from a peculiarly highpowered apologetic demand at the heart of his conception of theology (TCT, 32–3, 69). Encapsulated in the formula of “mutually critical correlation,” it seems to imply a theoretical platform from which to systematize the semantic relationship between internal and external discourses and render judgments of adequacy on the dogmatic formulae of Christian witness from a putatively uncommitted framework of meaning justifiable 35 The way Tracy formulated the rhetoric of “revisionism” as a new and distinct theological option no doubt made it easier for Frei to cast him as representative of a distinct “type.”


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before the academic “public” (in Tracy’s case, the “platform” in question is a metaphysic of transcendental reflection which interlocks with his hermeneutic of understanding). The disagreements are significant, to be sure. But this seeming case of opposition across the board is more complex than initially appears. Are the three levels of Frei’s opposition of equal cogency for the methodological issue at hand between Types Two and Three? It would seem not. First, Frei’s philosophical point about the dubiousness of a phenomenology of understanding like Ricoeur’s would surely count against Schleiermacher’s romantic anthropology of self-consciousness as well. Frei was certainly aware of the genetic relationship between these “external” phenomenological discourses favored by both Schleiermacher and Tracy (TCT, 31). And yet Schleiermacher’s theology does not seem to be as lowered in Frei’s estimation by its appropriation of this dubious philosophical tradition as Tracy’s is. It must therefore be the different inner-theological role that Tracy’s theology gives to phenomenology which provoked Frei’s skepticism, not the problems inherent in the phenomenology of religious experience itself. Tracy’s questionable philosophical preferences by themselves cannot account for Frei’s resistance. Perhaps the real issue is that Tracy’s theology cannot do justice to the literal sense of the gospel portraits. But making this exegetical issue the key becomes difficult in light of Tracy’s later embrace of Frei’s position on the dogmatic centrality of the narratively figured Christ of the gospels.36 On its face, this move strongly suggests that the road between methodological presuppositions like Tracy’s and blindness to the literal sense simply cannot be as short and undeviating as Frei assumes. Of course, it could be argued that Tracy’s seeing the light on the gospel narratives might be due to some tacit adjustment in his earlier assumptions about theological method. But if such a shift had occurred it would merely highlight in its turn another inadequacy of Frei’s discussion of Tracy, namely his almost exclusive reliance on Blessed Rage for Order (1975) for his portrait of Tracy the theologian. Tracy’s ideas about theology have not stood still since that first programmatic volume, even if he has arguably shown a tendency to downplay the extent of the changes. Even if that makes Frei’s fixation on this early programmatic statement more defensible, the fact remains that Frei’s attempt to ground his opposition to Tracy in the latter’s failure to grasp the literal sense cannot be the heart of the matter. It seems the real opposition between Frei and Tracy is not a matter of 36 David Tracy, “On Reading the Scriptures Theologically,” in Theology and Dialogue: Essays in Conversation with George Lindbeck, ed. Bruce D. Marshall (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press 1990), 35–43.

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philosophy or exegesis. It comes down to the methodological question of the proper kind of correlation in theology. But even here a straightforward confrontation proves elusive, because Tracy refuses to grant that Frei has characterized his theological procedure properly. An attempt must be made to determine more closely just what Frei means by accusing Tracy of a “foundational” or “systematic” correlation, as opposed to the kind of “ad hoc” correlation he discerns in Schleiermacher’s theology. Frei’s distinction between three “orders” of speech in theology will once again come in handy. It will be recalled that first-order speech represents the primary, tradition-shaped language of the Christian “story,” the language of prayer and praise codified in scripture and liturgy and enacted in daily Christian existence. Second-order speech represents theological reflection and its various contextually-oriented reconfigurations of this language, attempts to restate in new terms the import of that basic discourse of faith to guide proper first-order usage. Third-order speech in turn represents concepts operative in external, non-theological discourses which are appropriated by theology in order to enable the task of conceptual reconstruction. The idea, then, is that theology represents the employment of third-order speech in order to provide conceptual resources for the traffic between firstorder and second-order speech. Frei tries to characterize the differences between Types Two, Three, and Four in terms of variations on this basic account. Though not entirely successful, the discussion definitely illuminates the issues as he saw them. As he puts it, for Type Four, usage of third-order speech is strictly governed by the internal move from first to second order, while for Type Two the so-called “flow of interpretation” is reversed (TCT, 43–4) To speak more concretely, in Frei’s Type Four, second-order theological activity takes the form of “conceptual re-description”; its use of third-order discourses is a kind of bricolage, subordinating them as multiform, fragmentary patterns of thought rigorously to the demands of creatively but faithfully replicating the revealed “form” mediated by first-order Christian speech. Type Two, by contrast, makes second-order activity into a kind of “explanation” because a third-order conceptual structure is systematically applied in order to determine the universal significance of first-order speech in its “external” terms. This fixes theoretically the possibilities and forms of any transition from firstto second-order speech. That is, a third-order master theory of religious “meaning” is applied to map and order (in principle) all possible second-order conceptual re-descriptions of the first-order material. The essential contrast is that for Type Four, the first-order linguistic practice has an inviolable structure which determines how second-order re-description uses third-order external resources; by contrast, for Type Two, third-order external resources


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are controlling, determining how second-order activity acquires, identifies, and re-describes the significance of the first-order discourse. Though this vague schema will certainly not be mistaken for a precise description, it does point to two important questions. First, where does Type Three fit if it is not Type Two? Second, just what is “systematic” or “foundational” about the approach of Type Two, and why does Frei resist this characteristic? Frei claims that Type Three is a theology of “correlation” in what he regards as the proper sense (TCT, 69). This means it is “ambiguous” as to the question of the opposed “directions of interpretation” represented by Types Two and Four (TCT, 44). Perhaps he is saying that a thinker like Schleiermacher is not ruled consistently by a single “direction” of interpretation, but decides on a case-by-case (i.e. ad hoc) basis when to allow the external discourse to shape the passage from first- to second-order speech more thoroughly, and when by contrast to let that re-describing movement control external usages. But this is hardly more than imagery, leaving an undeniable blurriness in the differentiation of Type Three from Type Two. Another way Frei states the issues involved might bring them into clearer focus. [U]nlike Tracy, Schleiermacher knows no higher correlation in scriptural exegesis than the correlation of normed Christian language, on the one hand, and Christian religious experience on the other hand. Unlike Tracy, Schleiermacher could not subsume the two sides of this correlation under a higher synthesis, such as a theory of re-presentation of a possible mode-of-being-inthe-world for present actualization, and think that he had exhausted the sense of the text, especially a Christological text. (TCT, 66)

There are three things in particular to notice in this description of Schleiermacher’s practice of theological interpretation. First, dogmatic interpretation of the Christological language of scripture is the paradigm case of theological interpretation, as is true throughout. Schleiermacher, it could be said, is using a third-order discourse (in this case, a phenomenology of religious experience) as part of one pole of a second-order correlative activity, the task of which is re-describing the first-order scriptural rendering of Christ’s person and work. Second, although the phenomenology itself is an external discourse, it is being used to grasp and configure internal (Christian) experience of Christ’s significance, in order to correlate it with the scriptural or doctrinal description of that experience (“normed Christian language”). Third, it is to be understood that this correlation is a form of heuristic comparison, not a rigorous conceptual synthesis or an exhaustive translation of one side into the other. And the external discourse (the phenomenology

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of religious experience) in use is merely articulating one side of the correlation, not explaining the interaction of the two sides through reduction to a common theoretical language. Frei wants to argue that for Schleiermacher (as exemplifying Type Three), the second-order interpretive “traffic” involved between first-order confessional language and first-order experience involves the heuristic application of third-order concepts for refiguring and comparison, but not a third-order explanatory theory which would state the “real meaning” of the first-order complex in “more adequate” nonconfessional terms. What is important for Frei here is that the first-order language of scripture retains its autonomy and status as properly basic, as that against which any theoretical reconfigurations must be measured, and in comparison with which all such reconfigurations remain imperfect, approximate, or partial. Third-order categories are being employed by secondorder faithful reflection to probe the form of first-order speech, to bring its contours into relief, but not to reduce it to a theoretical master language. For purposes of correlation, the first-order language is being re-described but not “explained.” Frei intends this example to illuminate two sides of the contrast with Type Two (supposedly instantiated by Tracy). First, Schleiermacher is using external discourses to coordinate meanings within the internal semantic realm of faith-experience itself, not to coordinate internal faith with external experiences. External categories are invoked descriptively in order better to describe the unique internal correlation between the portrait of the Christ and the pious consciousness of the Christian. This contrasts clearly with what Frei says elsewhere about Tracy’s Christological practice, which attempts more ambitiously to define the salvific significance of Christ in terms of generally available experiences of meaningfulness, limitorientations of human subjectivity as such (TCT, 62–3). Second, the general phenomenology of religious experience in terms of which Schleiermacher describes Christian faith-experience does not itself provide the terms for an exhaustive conceptual explication of the significance of Christ for faith. Frei sees here no systematic framework in which the meaningful mediation in the believer between the Christ-portrait and its contemporary experiential reception is reduced to single conceptual order or explained. But Tracy’s error is to employ just such a framework (TCT, 66). Though Tracy’s third-order phenomenological scheme is in itself similar to Schleiermacher’s (albeit more sophisticated), his use of it makes all the difference: he attempts to subsume the textual portrait as a general instance of religious meaningfulness and coordinate it systematically with a portrait of the interpreting subject as “religious” consciousness. Such at any rate is Frei’s understanding of what Tracy is up to. The ini-


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tially raised question can now be tackled: how much of this Type Two strategy is simply set up by Frei in abstract opposition to his Type Three, and how much can actually be gathered from analysis of David Tracy’s writings? Only a full-length study of Tracy which was also well-informed as to Frei’s approach could hope to answer the question decisively.37 But enough can be said here to suggest that the quarrel between the two men had best not be relied upon to illuminate the significance of Frei’s methodological bias. First, the choice of Tracy as exemplar of the Type Two approach was unfortunate, both for reasons mentioned earlier but also because a better candidate was available: Hegel. His philosophy of religion provides a far more convincing example of using a single, philosophical framework (the original “supertheory”) to mediate and subsume the encounter between Christian representations and general concepts. Indeed, certain passages in Frei’s Strauss essay might indicate that Hegel’s example played a role in helping Frei formulate the Type Two category.38 Some suspicion of Frei’s portrait of Tracy would be in order if the latter were being assimilated too closely to Hegel, but in addition Frei might have been tempted to widen the gap separating Tracy from Schleiermacher too much. Frei has to admit that his own reading of Schleiermacher must face a stiff challenge from interpretations such as that of B.A. Gerrish which would place him in closer proximity to Type Two (TCT, 70). The way Tracy uses philosophical and other external discourses may not, in other words, diverge so sharply from Schleiermacher’s practice. Frei’s differentiation between Tracy and Schleiermacher is also entangled in the hard question of the status of the prolegomena to the latter’s dogmatics. Frei claims they are “not part” of theology, while Schleiermacher only says they are not part of dogmatic theology; they combine the results of non-theological discourses (ethics, philosophy of religion) with those of a theological but non-dogmatic one (apologetics).39 One gets the strong sense that later distinctions and concerns are being imported into Frei’s interpretation of Schleiermacher; questions which have come to seem urgent in the wake of Karl Barth are

37 For a promising attempt at comparison see M.A. Higton, “Hans Frei and David Tracy on the Ordinary and the Extraordinary in Christianity,” Journal of Religion 79 (October 1999): 566–91. 38 See, e.g., the echoes of “Type Two” terminology in reference to Hegel: Frei, “Strauss,” 218, 221, 245. 39 For an example of this see Hans W. Frei, “Epilogue: George Lindbeck and The Nature of Doctrine,” in Theology and Dialogue: Essays in Conversation with George Lindbeck, ed. Bruce D. Marshall (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 279. Frei confuses the true claim that the prolegomena are not part of dogmatics with the false claim that they are not part of theology. For Schleiermacher, dogmatic theology is only one kind of theology among others.

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being put to a thinker whose concerns are quite different. At any rate, the parts of Frei’s reading of Schleiermacher which remain most open to challenge are precisely those which might blunt a sharp divide between the latter and Tracy. These are all reasons for not allowing the cogency of Frei’s distinction between Types Two and Three to rest on the adequacy of his portrayal of the differences between Tracy and Schleiermacher. The distinct possibility that Frei misunderstood Tracy’s theological intentions is the last and most weighty reason. There are certainly indications that Frei and Tracy are talking past one another in their different assessments of the need for a “systematic” role of apologetic in theology. For Frei, talk of a systematic apologetic inevitably means, as laid out above, using some interpretive scheme originating in an external perspective to transpose the internal meanings of the tradition without remainder into generally (externally) available experiential or cultural terms. In this way, that external interpretive scheme is “foundational” to the Christian semantic scheme it explicates, while the latter is reduced (in the technical sense) to a regional exemplification of it (TCT, 3, 30). Tracy, however, flatly denies that this is his intention or his practice. He claims that the general interpretive schemes he uses are ultimately responsible to the concrete manifestation of Christian truth; as with Schleiermacher, such schemes provide abstract categories in which to conceptualize some semantic overlap between specifically Christian phenomena and some other cultural complex. As Tracy sees it, Frei has mistaken the logic of his (Tracy’s) use of these general categories. The relation of a general category (“classic,” for example) to a specific Christian phenomenon (the gospel narratives) is not a relation of concrete to specific; that would mean that the general category “classic” is the actual locus of determinate meaning or semantic density for the theologian while the particularly Christian concept “gospel” becomes merely a regional instantiation of the category. No, Tracy insists that for his own theological practice it is the category “gospel” which is the real concrete datum and the more general category “classic” does not provide its semantic essence or ground but simply locates it heuristically within a more encompassing (hence more abstract) framework of understanding.40 Taking this retort into account would immediately lead one to suspect that Tracy’s insistence on a “systematic” apologetic in theology most likely does not mean what Frei takes it to mean. In Tracy the “systematicity” of the apologetic is due to the constitutive (as opposed to merely accidental or adjunctive) role of using external schemes to acquire and critically delineate 40

Tracy, “Reading the Scriptures,” 59 fn. 16.


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the object of Christian witness. Apologetic must be systematic precisely because it is an organic part of theological procedure itself; its role, that is, must be brought into a systematic and not casual interrelation with the other components of theology. But this usage of “systematic” differs from Frei’s. For Frei a “systematic” correlation means the incorporation of Christian meaning without remainder into one particular encompassing philosophical framework. For Tracy it means merely that the strategy of correlating Christian meaning with some conceptual scheme or schemes must be an integral (not accidental) part of any self-conscious and critical theological practice. A correlation could thus be systematic in Tracy’s sense without being systematic in Frei’s sense. The upshot of this discussion would not, however, move Schleiermacher into Type Two (as with Gerrish’s reading) but rather would see Tracy’s theology falling comfortably within Type Three.

Systematic versus Ad Hoc (II): Irreducible Mystery and the Lessons of Correlation Tracy’s theological mistakes (from Frei’s point of view) could in light of the above discussion be traced to faulty execution of a basically sound undertaking, not to an inherently flawed “type” of theological method. His particular failures of judgment on the central issue of the biblical Christ could consistently be conceived in terms of a Type Three understanding, imbalanced perhaps by an excessive resistance to the corrective “gravitational pull” of Type Four, resulting in a dangerous yearning for a bold apologetic, or an exaggerated “Type One” deference to philosophy. Regardless, the preceding considerations have striven to detach the issue of the systematic/ ad hoc disjunction from Frei’s remarks about David Tracy. The formal issue, of course, still remains: there might well be such a thing as a Type Two approach to theology, and it might well be just as dubious an undertaking as Frei claims it to be, even if one declines to make David Tracy a practitioner of it. But before turning to formulate what is ultimately at stake in Frei’s choice of ad hoc over systematic correlation, the results already achieved can be further used to highlight the problems inherent in making the Type Two/Type Three disjunction, which is Frei’s way of separating bad from good theology, coincide with a disjunction between “liberalism” and “postliberalism.” If the ghost of Hegel must be conjured up to fill the role of Type Two representative vacated by Tracy, how plausible does it become to see in the Type Two theological approach (a systematic correlation of internal and external meanings in Frei’s sense) a current option not only endemic among

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“liberal” theologies but defining their status as liberal? As a result of the previous section, the postliberal attempt to make normative use both of Frei’s account of Type Two and of his choice of Tracy as villain faces an unpalatable choice. If David Tracy is made the archetypal practitioner of contemporary liberalism, one must somehow deal with the awkward fact that his sequestration from Schleiermacher’s “type” (to which Frei is arguably receptive) is very much in question. But, on the other hand, if the Type Two option is made the defining characteristic of a monolithic liberalism, how can Tracy not be included in it? In the first case, the boundary between Type Two (bad) and Type Three (not bad) becomes fuzzy; in the second case the boundary becomes distinct again, but the dangerously “liberal” Tracy is left roaming about in the sanctioned space of Type Three. Either way, the use of Frei’s systematic/ad hoc disjunction as a litmus test for distinguishing liberal from postliberal is thrown seriously in doubt. It would be better simply to abandon this typological distinction as serving the postliberal cause at all and admit that various kinds of theological liberalism can operate in Type Three (and why not even in Type Four?). Frei’s third type is peopled with thinkers, Schleiermacher and Tillich to name two, who would surely qualify as more liberal than postliberal, among those who find it important to make such judgments (TCT, 68–9). And a more charitable reading would hesitate to exclude even the “revisionist” David Tracy from this camp. Of course, Frei need not find acceptable any of their specific proposals for the critique and recasting of Christian symbols and concepts. But their failures would have to be attributed to something other than being in the wrong “type” or choosing the wrong method. But even though it has proven just another cul-de-sac on the supposed road to postliberalism, Frei’s distinction between systematic and ad hoc correlation in itself might still prove an important insight into the nature of theology. With the distractions of Tracy and postliberalism now cleared away, this insight can come to view. At the root of the distinction between Type Two and Type Three theology lies the question of what Frei calls the specific “irreducibility” of the Christian semantic network (TCT, 43). “Reduction” generally means the semantic analysis of some symbolic complex in order to resolve it completely into the terms of some other (usually either simpler or more comprehensive) symbolic complex. It is thus “explained” in the sense that its specificities are all accounted for and mapped as part of the generic range of some underlying configuration of elements or causal factors. For Frei, what sets Types Three and Four firmly apart from Type Two is their fundamental affirmation that the basic elements semantically ordering the Christian symbolic network cannot be


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transposed without remainder into the terms of some other semantic order. The first-order language which constitutes the Christian symbolic network can and does change over time, but it does so by incorporating elements of other discourses into its own semantic field of use. The theologian cannot invoke a theory resolving this world of meaning into a configuration of more basic, generically available or purely “rational” meanings without destroying the patterns in which that world consists. It is Frei’s insistently repeated claim that just such a reduction is implied when theology turns to a single theoretical account which would provide unambiguous terms of translatability or rules of transformation between the Christian semantic field and discourses originating outside of that field. This is what he means when he refers to a “systematic correlation” of internal and external discourses. Because the possible terms of the encounter of cultural fields are here being determined by a theory claiming to order both sides of the transaction, Frei is unwilling to concede that this is really correlation at all (TCT, 69). Frei also has such theoretical pretensions in mind when he defines a Type Two approach as “grounded” or “founded” in a philosophical scheme (TCT, 38). Frei’s opposition to such procedures follows inevitably from the position outlined at the beginning of this chapter. Philosophically, his commitment to the dispersal of reason across specific zones of linguistic practice would demand significant and unpredictable semantic distortions in the transfer of terms between discourses. Theologically, the element of intractable mystery introduced into Christian discourses when unique divine dispositions are made ingredients in the founding historical events would have to render the incorporation of these events into more general schemes of interpretation fragmentary and imperfect at best. In the end, theology is basically a matter of rereading in always changing contexts those scriptural texts which render the object of Christian faithfulness. The failure of general theories of “reading” in this instance provides the paradigm for Frei’s entire approach to the question of internal and external discourses in general. The literal reading of the Christian texts as a traditional practice remains prior to any general theory. The latter must fit the former, not vice versa. It is case-specific (confined to selected texts) and context-specific (a skill sedimented in the traditions of particular communities). The “oddity” which clings to any attempt to restate the literal sense, the ambiguity which cannot be resolved in terms of any general theory, is not a flaw but the healthy recognition of an irremediable lack of “fit” between internal and external semantic worlds. It is the generally accepted role of dogmatic prolegomena, or alternatively of “fundamental theology,” to specify how theological reflection relates to

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and employs widely shared intellectual resources which themselves originate outside the circle of Christian truth. For Frei, Type Four (Barth) incorporates the prolegomena themselves into dogmatics; external resources are thus denied a truly autonomous range of critical operation within theology. It might be said that Type Two, though, does the opposite. It incorporates dogmatic reflection into fundamental theology, allowing it no apprehension and critique of the tradition that is not already theoretically ruled by philosophical or other general concepts or reflective practices. As for Type Three, Frei gives the following account: Schleiermacher, by contrast, had suggested that prolegomena are distinct from theology, and when they are done properly they serve not as rigid presuppositions, axioms for arguments, or the assignment of theology to a more general logical class, but as mobile, connected thoughts helping to transport the reader’s mind, mayhap her heart, into the communal context in which dogmatics is done.41

In other words, Frei draws a sharp contrast between appealing to general theories heuristically, in a way which grants and uses them in their integrity but leaves them “outside” theology, and wedding theology to some general theory which supposedly authorizes its reflective and critical appropriation of Christian meaning. The former practice “borrows” schemes which are applied theologically to map and hence secure the specificity of the Christian symbolic world, while the latter in effect dissolves that specificity. The former contents itself with discovering clarifying analogies or family resemblances between Christian thought-forms and general categories; the latter seeks (and finds) a complete transposability between them. The crux of the distinction turns on the irreducibility of the meanings imbedded within the semantic network which constitutes Christian practice. Once this irreducibility is granted, then it follows, not that there is no semantic overlap between internal and external, or Christian and non-Christian perspectives, but rather that that overlap cannot be exhaustively explicated by any single theory. The theologian accordingly does not seek a single conceptual idiom within which Christian and non-Christian perspectives, and the different ideas and symbols informed by them, can be translated or transposed into one another. At most a fragmentary and case-specific conceptual analogy is sought, a sort of semantic family resemblance. Both Type Three and Type Four are engaged in the search for such analogies, only their expectations 41

Frei, “Epilogue,” 279.


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differ with respect to how distant the best analogies will be. One is more hopeful, the other more pessimistic, so to speak. The portrait of Type Two which Frei paints contrastingly suggests a theology expecting and finding a semantic correlation between internal and external perspectives which is more than analogous and heuristic; in the interest of academic respectability and apologetic plausibility, it illegitimately transforms the necessary critical retrieval and transformation of tradition from a search for creative but tentative conjunctions with contemporary culture to a theoretical amalgamation of the two. Thus philosophy consummates theology. In conclusion, it should be clear by now that using the evaluative oppositions built into Frei’s typology of theology in support of Lindbeck’s construction of a postliberal–liberal theological divide is a mistake. Frei’s typology maps neither liberalism nor a methodological rejection of it. Intratextuality is certainly one way of trying to conceive of a purely “Type Four” theological practice; it is in effect Lindbeck’s understanding of Karl Barth’s subordinationist dogmatic method in “cultural-linguistic” terms. But Frei’s reconstitution of the possibility of and rationale for a practice of ad hoc correlation should therefore be seen as the refusal of any one-sided picture of “absorbing” external discourses. Insofar as postliberalism is constructed through a blunt opposition between intratextuality and extratextuality, Frei’s attempt to think the relationship of Schleiermacher and Barth in a more positive way contributes not to the confirmation of postliberalism, but to its deconstruction. The discussion of apologetic and dogmatic in the third section of this chapter further makes the case already begun in Chapter Three. Frei shares with Barth the overriding concern to do theological justice to the Christological object of witness, but his own position simply cannot be identified with Barth’s. Following this, the fourth section questioned Frei’s selection of David Tracy as the exemplar of systematic correlation. On this point, Frei is too exclusively influenced by Tracy’s Blessed Rage for Order, too suspicious of any reliance upon Ricoeur, too convinced that Tracy’s theology mimics the ambitions of Hegel, and finally too sure that a failure to grasp the literal sense of the gospels can be accounted for by assigning him to a distinct type of theological method. Tracy’s “systematic” apologetic may not, in the end, be the same as Type Two systematic correlation. But the point is moot, for the real point of interest for this study lies in Frei’s rejection of the latter in the conviction that the truth of theology lies somewhere in the space marked out between Karl Barth’s practice and ad hoc correlation. It is not accidental that Frei uses the theological interpretation of Christ’s resurrection as a test-case in delineating this space of constitutive tension within which a proper theology must find itself. The reason no ultimate

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or principled theological resolution between Barth and Schleiermacher is possible is precisely because of the mysterious character of the object of Christian faith, the dead man who lives. The problem of accessing the object in its mystery is the hidden scaffolding of Frei’s typology. Barth wants to affirm the reality of the resurrection; but to do that, he can hardly refuse to buy into the conceptual apparatus surrounding assertions of factuality. Schleiermacher’s account of the resurrection no doubt went too far in the appropriation of the assertion of factuality, thus collapsing part of the mystery of faith’s Christological object. But despite this collision, inevitable at some point, between the mystery and the conceptual resources employed in its articulation, an attempt like his at their correlation might be a needed counterweight to the opposite danger facing Barth: the assertion of the event’s factuality in a manner so qualified as to be meaningless. Barth would risk intelligibility to protect the assertion, while Schleiermacher’s search for intelligible reformulation endangers the assertion. The twin dangers are constitutive of theology itself and cannot be methodologically neutralized. To return to Frei’s telling phrase, the theological articulation of the object of witness must at some point “cut its philosophical losses” (which Types One and Two fail to do), and yet not too soon (the failure of Type Five). Type Four’s magnetic pull draws Type Three away from the temptations of Type Two, while Type Three likewise lures Type Four out of too close a proximity to Type Five. One can make the same point using Farrer’s description of a mystery as “indefinitely permeable.” The necessary interrelation of apologetic and dogmatic moments (in the sense specified in the third section above) speaks to the mysterious object’s permeability to reason, while the rejection of systematic correlation accompanied by the suspended choice between Schleiermacher and Barth (as set out in the previous section and elsewhere) is a matter of the fact that this is always an indefinite permeability. Mystery is never comprehensible, but mystery always invites the varied forms of reason into itself; only in the particular venture, launched from a particular cultural site, can understanding glimpse the contours of what limits it. The zone of engagement between mystery and reason, and its extent, cannot be known and mapped beforehand. In short, the theological discovery of the right balance between either too “eschatological” or too “immanent” a linguistic articulation of the object of witness remains an ongoing task. It is not the assured result of applying proper method. This reading of Frei is the place to begin an alternative approach to “the Yale School” beyond postliberalism. When successful correlations occur between the concrete word of witness and whatever more general intellectual constructions prove amenable and necessary, the immanence of human language and the infinite surplus of transcendent meaning


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find their elusive and temporary but fitting union. The community of witness then truly points the world to the object of witness. Each such moment is like a “little” eschaton, an anticipation of final meeting. The creation of these alignments of human words with the Word made flesh is ultimately assigned in Christian belief to the Holy Spirit. The final chapter will therefore have to account for the built-in tensions of theological judgment now coming into view pneumatologically, and not just as a function of human limitations. Only in that way can the promise of Frei’s still undeveloped ideas begin to be redeemed.

Chapter Six

The Trial of the Witnesses: The Yale Thinkers “After” Postliberalism Fashioning an Alternative to Postliberalism: The Trial The preceding four chapters have offered a close reading of the work of Hans Frei and George Lindbeck in order to address three concerns raised at the end of the first chapter. The first concern arising from the story of the rise and fall of postliberalism as a cause célèbre was an interpretive context so oriented toward questions of method that the deep doctrinal concerns of Lindbeck and Frei and their close connections with their reflections on method were too often neglected. In Lindbeck’s case, attention to these connections suggested that the theological center of his work is to be found in the elaboration of a doctrine of the church as the pilgrim people of God. The identity of this people was bound up with their function of witnessing to the salvation first revealed in Christ but only fully manifest at the end of all things. In the time “between times” the church is thus neither the dispenser nor even the possessor of salvation in its plenitude; it is rather that body of people recreating the shape of Israel into the future, among whom the language of the coming salvation is haltingly spoken, the Kingdom fragmentarily experienced. But the purpose of this foretaste of salvation is not the privileging of the witnesses but the empowering of their mission. The people of God thus turns inward to remember and adore the divine Word made flesh only then to turn outward, going into “the world,” pointing to what God has done in Christ, and embodying in practice the world’s own future available in him by way of anticipation. The ecclesiological orientation of Lindbeck’s work is usually closer to the surface of his writings than the Christologically-focused concern animating Frei’s largely historical investigations. While Lindbeck reflects upon the people of witness, it is the object to which they witness which can just be glimpsed as the organizing force behind Frei’s scattered oeuvre. In his work

th e yale th i nk e r s “a f te r” p o st l i b e ral i sm

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on the history of nineteenth-century thought, in his engagements with Schleiermacher, Barth, and Niebuhr, in his explorations in biblical narrative, and in his forays into methodological typology: the consistent concern is always with securing an appropriate theological stance toward the inaugural event of the incarnation, in all its mysterious concreteness. Frei measured theologies by their ability to appropriate those concepts from their intellectual milieu which would enable a creative rediscovery in the present context of the one who, though transcending all descriptions, is nonetheless continually offered to human faith in the gospel’s rendering of his identity. The mysterious depth of that identity is properly marked off by the Chalcedonian formula of true humanity and true divinity in personal unity. As Chapters Two and Three showed, each one’s sense of proper theological procedure was decisively shaped by these dogmatic concerns. Chapters Four and Five turned to a second issue emerging from the history of postliberalism, the attempted formulation of a firm liberal–postliberal opposition. Two methodological oppositions were extracted from the matrix of each theologian’s reflections on the way good theology happens. In both cases, the anxieties produced by the contemporary threat of a total dissolution of Christian identity, and the accompanying desire to register some kind of sharp break with those modes of theology seen to be abetting this dissolution, led to some highly misleading formulations. The temptation to make the criteria for contemporary judgments of faithfulness to the Christian message seem more fixed and objective than they really could be seems to have hampered their efforts to one degree or another. Warrant could too easily be found in their writings for a model of theological judgment which excessively internalized the determinant factors as always already possessed within the communal sphere of belief. The acknowledgment that faith is inevitably put into practice through the closest engagement with its cultural, political, and intellectual location was given insufficient weight. Because the nature of discerning faithfulness to the Christ as a cultural negotiation between numerous overlapping complexes of meaning within and beyond the communal bounds was not given its due, the contingency and plurality of Christian judgments specific to a given “site” was downplayed. At times, the underlying model came dangerously close to the mere proper application of criteria of faithfulness already “given” beforehand, which would automatically insure Christian identity. In short, a vision of the identity of the community of witness as autonomously generated rather than interlocutive seemed to lurk behind some of their claims. Such a crude picture was almost certainly contrary to their intentions; countervailing

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statements can be found indicating that neither understood theology to be in possession of an “algorithm” of orthodoxy. Nonetheless, the flawed methodological oppositions they proposed made a veering off in this direction, especially by enthusiastic followers, difficult to withstand. Just at this point, however, it is necessary to begin distinguishing Frei and Lindbeck. The third issue obscured during the postliberalism disputes, the relationship between the ideas of Frei and Lindbeck, has been an implicit concern of the entire study so far. It is time to address it explicitly. Undoubtedly, George Lindbeck’s The Nature of Doctrine laid before the public in accessible form some characteristic developments of earlier thinking at Yale. But the proposal of intratextuality as the key to a break with a monolithically defined liberalism unfortunately encapsulated the weakest aspect of those developments. The book was an over-ambitious and premature synthesis which sent later discussions off in the wrong direction, initiating a restless attempt among interpreters to identify, “fix,” and then defend (or refute) a liberal–postliberal opposition in theology. This methodological imbalance was further aggravated by an intriguing theory of doctrines as “grammatical rules” which unfortunately left the process of change in the communal framework of meaning only sparsely accounted for. The result was an understandable, if superficial, reading of “Yale theology” as merely peddling a sophisticated brand of repristination. The adventurous possibilities for rethinking classical doctrinal positions at which Lindbeck had earlier hinted were naturally lost sight of.1 The clamor which eventually developed over Lindbeck’s proposal of a postliberal theology had both friendly and hostile interpreters playing the same fruitless game: some or all of the four conceptual dichotomies gleaned from his and Frei’s writings were deployed in various combinations to construct a methodological watershed for contemporary theology. Sadly, these 1

Just how far he is from repristination, from setting up timeless formulae, is easy to miss. But see for example George Lindbeck, “The Future of the Dialogue: Pluralism or an Eventual Synthesis of Doctrine?” in Christian Action and Openness, ed. Joseph Papin (Villanova, PA: Villanova University Press, 1970), 37–51 at p. 47: “There seems to be no vital reason for supposing that any world or concept translatable into Nicea’s homousion will be part of theological equipment of this hypothetical church of a million years from now. The Trinitarian conceptuality of the post-biblical period could be entirely forgotten and the realities this is meant to express be dealt with in other terms – terms perhaps totally unintelligible from our perspective.” Of course, in the short term he would argue there are good reasons not to abandon a formula which has secured such long-term and widespread assent (ND, 95). Part of the worry that the Yale thinkers must favor conservative theological results springs from inadequate attention to their strictly methodological understanding of liberalism, which could see Erlangen confessionalists as practitioners of experiential-expressivism (Lindbeck, ND, 113), or locate Carl F.H. Henry in the same “type” as David Tracy (Frei, TCT, 3).


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very oppositions, as the previous two chapters have shown, were either incoherent or else inadequate to the task of marking a liberal–postliberal “break.” The assumption behind the present chapter is that exclusive attention to them actually obscures some of the more insightful contributions of these thinkers. It is time for the controversial framework within which their work came to be discussed (and which puts such a premium on just these dichotomies) to be abandoned. Some setting of theological assumptions other than that of “postliberalism” is needed which can do justice to the full richness and promise of their writings. The proposal here is that the interpretive framework within which better questions can be put to Lindbeck and Frei will center on witness, the people who are charged with it, and that to which they must bear testimony. Calling into question the assumptions of the postliberalism/liberalism disputes will also invite reconsideration of the relationship between Frei and Lindbeck. The previous tendency to think of them as united proponents of a “school” of thought was tantamount to incorporating Frei’s thinking without further ado into the project proposed by Lindbeck’s famous book. The proposals which follow almost amount to a reversal of this “direction of interpretation”! At least with respect to reflection on the nature and task of theology in light of the notion of witness to the Christ, reappropriating the ideas of these two theologians and pointing the way to future work along their lines should be a matter of uncovering what has been obscured in Frei’s theological vision and seeing how Lindbeck might fit into it, rather than enlisting Frei as a proponent of postliberalism as defined in The Nature of Doctrine. First of all, what does each contribute to this interpretive alternative to postliberalism? It makes sense to return again to the fundamental dogmatic concerns of Lindbeck and Frei. In the former one can find a vision of the church as a community of witnesses, the totality of whose vision cannot be subject to proof or refutation at any given point, but which amounts in practice to a perpetual, lived experiment throughout history. It is always subject to verification as an ongoing venture which can either approve itself to people in their struggles or not (ND, 131). Also, Lindbeck’s conception of a community which witnesses to God’s salvation but which does not claim to fully possess or administer that salvation, suggests an important distinction (not separation) between the Holy Spirit’s “sanctifying” activity and, so to speak, its “semantic” activity. The church exists not to monopolize God’s saving work but to announce its meaning, a single “space” of embodied interpretation, pointing to what is happening in many other “spaces.” The Spirit is at work on the ecclesial site through the always human work of witness, taking the form of a “processing” of worldly meaning by the church,

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but one which is always and at the same time the transformation of the church by worldly meaning. Frei’s contribution, in turn, pivots not surprisingly on the way the Christological object of the church’s witness is made available to it; for the church can only know that it is pointing to God’s kingdom by again and again pointing to Christ. Not only has Frei rightly identified the inalienable hermeneutic centrality of the “rendered” Christ of the New Testament as the criterion or norm of the church’s witness. He has also, in his prolonged concern with theological method, gradually revealed the necessity of the church’s semantic investment in its cultural location, precisely because of the need to “reacquire” the Christ from ever new cultural vantage points. The theological activity of enabling witness in the present location, far from being the autonomous application of a codifiable, enduring interpretive framework, is better conceived as the always unfinished interlocutive process of rediscovering the Christ in light of the “ad hoc” encounter with the church’s cultural sites. Bringing these ideas of Lindbeck and Frei together should lead to a model of the ecclesial witness and of the theological labor which serves that witness surprisingly distinct from that associated with “postliberalism” or “intratextuality.” Let it be called a “trial of the witnesses of the resurrection.” Three distinct connotations cluster around the term “trial” as used here. First, a trial is a situation demanding patience or endurance. Second, to undergo a trial is to be submitted to the judgment of a public of some sort. Third, one can engage in a trial in the sense of testing or “trying” something (or oneself) through a tentative process, an experiment. How, then, is faith’s witness understood as “trial”? In the first case, bearing witness to the resurrected one is a matter of endurance, and in a quite specific sense: the church must constantly expose itself to the trauma of its own remaking and that of its utterances. And yet throughout this it must somehow maintain its tenacious grip on the precious object of its witness, without seeking relief through the tempting reduction of its elusively mysterious character. For the Christian community to realize the dream of a “generous, liberal orthodoxy,” resisting any call to quarantine its institutions and doctrines from criticism, is no mean feat. Witness must be generous at the very least because to say the same thing in a new space, one must say something different; it must be orthodox because it always intends to speak the one word of the Christ, and it cannot speak that word anew except by always hearing it from those who spoke before. A human tradition, witness cannot be “preserved”: it must self-creatively endure. Church witness, second, always has the form of experiment. As Rowan


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Williams memorably puts it, theology is about “experimenting with the rhetoric of its uncommitted environment.”2 And insofar as theology ventures to seek an understanding for faith at a specific cultural site by risking “ad hoc” correlation, this experimentation will be the testing of the degree to which its internally generated language can be enriched and illuminated by the varieties of knowledge, the comparative perspectives, the clashing interpretive frames of its cultural and intellectual settings. Third, Christian witness, as mission, witness in and to specific historical and human “sites,” involves submission to judgment. The word of the Christ must be heard at this location, which means that the witnesses can only turn outward to the world as the only place where the effectiveness of their witness is to be judged. Thus, determining the way of witness in word and deed in a specific cultural situation is not only and unavoidably a collective negotiation, it is one in which the church does not decide its course by retiring “in camera.” This is precisely because of its mission, its “sending out,” the fact that it must allow the semantic permeation of its borders in the full critical engagement of the social and cultural logic of its site. As will be seen, understanding this third sense in particular also requires theology to explore the relation of the Holy Spirit to human cultural activity. The dimensions of Hans Frei’s thought foregrounded in preceding chapters provide the most illuminating connections with this proposal; its elaboration will appeal chiefly to his ideas. His reflections on the nature of theology especially can appear in a new light when plotted against the three dimensions of the trial of the witnesses of the resurrection: endurance, experiment, submission to judgment. Although this trial refers first not to theological practice but to the practice of the faith itself, what is expected or demanded from Christian theology can never be separated from some model of the community’s witness, how it engages as a human cultural practice with other such practices and how God may be understood as active in and through that engagement. In other words, theological methodology is contingent on decisions which are themselves already matters of theological interpretation. Frei himself had learned this from Niebuhr and Barth. A great deal of attention has been paid to Frei’s intellectual debts to Barth, but the fashioning of an alternative set of interpretive assumptions which is being attempted will shift focus, reckoning with the comparatively neglected connections between Frei and H Richard Niebuhr, his most challenging mentor early and late.

2

Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), xiv.

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Trial as Endurance under Temptation This first dimension of the trial of Christian witness is undoubtedly the one most clearly developed in the work of Frei and, for that matter, of Lindbeck as well. It underlies an inspiration common to both, to which allusion has already been made. David Ford once helpfully characterized the “Yale” tendency this way: the combination of (1) a stress on the unsubstitutable identity of Jesus Christ with (2) the search for a “generous orthodoxy.”3 Frei at any rate could have gladly acknowledged the role of H. Richard Niebuhr in pointing him toward this felicitous combination. For two of the most crucial stimuli to Frei’s own thinking were, first, Niebuhr’s anti-apologetic or confessionalist orientation and, second, his rediscovery of the concrete shape of Christ’s personal identity rendered in the gospel accounts as that against which Christological interpretations must always seek to measure themselves. Taken together these two emphases define Christian witness as the faithful meditation upon the mystery of the Word made flesh in ever new situations as a way of extending an identifiable tradition of Christian language (the sedimentation of earlier meditations on the Christ) into the future. To take the latter point first, Frei believed that with his turn back to the “story” of Christ Niebuhr had pointed most promisingly to a way out of the Christological deficits which had plagued both nineteenth-century liberalism and the “post-liberal” or Neo-orthodox generation which had rebelled against them. To revisit a story told earlier, the basic problem concerned how to do justice to the divine and human elements in Christ. The approach of the later liberal or mediating theologians who dominated German theology (typified by Ritschl) was in a way a simplification (and psychologization) of Schleiermacher’s position. Jesus’ unique connection with God was supposed to be an aspect of his human self-consciousness; it was capable of being inferred from the gospel reports, though not subject to decisive proof, by historical research (HRN, 113–14). By the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth this approach had come under enormous strain. On the one hand, Troeltsch had complained that it simply replaced the old notion of miraculous violations of natural law with an internalized miracle: a unique, sinless self3 David F. Ford, “Hans Frei and the Future of Theology,” Modern Theology 8 (1992): 207. Ford has consistently been the most penetrating of Frei’s commentators (latterly joined by his student Mike Higton). He is virtually alone in noting Frei’s typological location between Types Three and Four and grasping some of its significance. See David Ford, “On Being Theologically Hospitable to Jesus Christ: Hans Frei’s Achievement,” Journal of Theological Studies, NS, 46 (October 1995), 544.


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consciousness in Jesus which was inexplicable in historical terms and apparently cut off from the causal chain of historical and psychological laws (HRN, 56). On the other, New Testament critics like Wrede came to question whether the historical Jesus in fact ever claimed to be the messiah or to have a unique God-relation (HRN, 110–11). The Neo-orthodox revolt against the liberals, typified by the early Barth and Bultmann, embraced these skeptical results but could only do so at the cost of replacing the historically inferential and psychologizing Christology of the liberals with an approach which seemed to make no use whatsoever of the actually depicted individual Jesus of Nazareth. Both Bultmann and the younger Barth isolated Christ from history, the latter by stressing his objective function as God’s word of revelation, the former by merging the revelation in Christ with the subjective response of later faith (HRN, 111–12). Either way, Frei saw, the concrete person of Jesus depicted in the gospels need make little if any contribution to Christological thinking. While the liberal psychologizing approach had been unable to keep the divine and human separate as two unconfused and integral moments of the person Jesus, this “monophysitism” inherent in post-liberal methods seemed unable to bring them together. Frei understood early on that Niebuhr’s tantalizingly underdeveloped insight could lead out of this dead end; his own later work on the narrative identity of Christ was the attempt to flesh it out. To recall the earlier discussion again, Frei was also driven in this direction by loyalty to the mysterious nature of the Christ-event as marked out and preserved by the Chalcedonian creed. The later volumes of Barth’s Church Dogmatics made their own contribution as well. In time, Frei could develop a picture of Christian witness as consisting in careful and determinedly repeated attempts to discern the objectivity, the “hard surfaces” of God’s self-gift in the concrete narrative depiction of the personal identity of the Christ. The witnessing people must endure in this, resisting those attempted dissolutions of that mystery, or distractions from it, which Frei diagnosed in his readings of the history of modern Christology. (Lindbeck would share this approach to Christology by default, as it were; a devotion to classic orthodox positions, however creatively they must be reformulated, was ingredient in his thought from early on, and involved no detour through neo-orthodoxy or the methodological disputes of modern Protestant Christology.) This Niebuhr-inspired reconfiguration of Christological orthodoxy by way of textual rendering (the enabling background to which was perhaps Niebuhr’s acceptance of a confessional rather than apologetic aim) was one side of Frei’s “Yale” approach. The other side, according to Ford, was the search for “generosity” within this orthodoxy. Here, too, a resonance with

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the notion of the trial of endurance under countervailing pressures can be heard. For Frei’s understanding of theology’s path amounts to an often painful and never completed process of grasping the mystery through the established teaching which preserves it, without allowing the mystery’s own authority to become an absolutizing aura around the teaching. The trial of endurance which the witnesses undergo is to walk this tightrope: to discern how the doctrinal tradition maps out the space of the mysterious act of God to which they witness but without wielding the rhetoric of mystery to shield the doctrines from critical scrutiny. For Frei, this commitment naturally harmonized with Niebuhr’s approach to Christian culture as having its own distinctness and integrity (instead of apologetically reducing cultural differences to putatively common propositional or experiential structures). It also flowed from Robert Calhoun’s vision of a Christian tradition whose strength and persistence was precisely rooted in its richness and flexibility, its ability to remake itself in every cultural encounter yet still remain identifiably itself. (Again, a clearly similar commitment to this enduring balance suffused almost the entire body of Lindbeck’s work, played out in his careful attention to the interplay of stability and change in doctrinal history.) Though the elaboration of the foregoing dynamic (Christian witness’s “trial” in the sense of endurance) has mostly appealed to Frei’s ideas, Lindbeck cannot be said to differ significantly on the matters at issue here, as some asides have indicated. This relative harmony has its roots early in their careers, in a common response to environing theological developments (already touched on in the first chapter of this study). The twofold “Yale” approach nicely formulated by David Ford has a common ground in both thinkers: their reaction against those modern theological developments premised on a divorce between, to use Frei’s terms, religion and dogma.4 Each readily concedes the need for constant adjustment and critique of the church’s language and practice in response to changing contexts. What they protest against, however, is any attempt to relativize the church’s tradition-shaped communal language, the symbolic sedimentation of its past interpretive endeavors and decisions, as a dispensable husk over against a “spiritual” essence of the faith directly accessible in the present (whether the latter takes the form of a phenomenology of saving faith or some distilled ethical vision). 4 Hans Frei, “Feuerbach and Theology,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 35 (1967), 250–6 at p. 253. See also Hans Frei, “David Friedrich Strauss,” in Nineteenth Century Religious Thought in the West, eds. Ninian Smart, John Clayton, Patrick Sherry, and Steven T. Katz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), I: 218.


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Such a move would subject “dogma” to a critique based on the employment of the supposedly more fundamental category, “religion,” some principle of Christian truth only accidentally or instrumentally related to its communal and historical linguistic embodiment. The allergy of Frei and Lindbeck to this way of thinking is traceable not only to a profound indebtedness to paradigm figures, such as Karl Barth and Thomas Aquinas, whose theologies refused such a cleavage. In addition, they were formed by an academic milieu in which philosophy and the social and historical sciences had become hostile to bold appeals to “reason” or “spirit” or “value” or “historical essence.” They were taught instead to think of all human phenomena, including the religious, as in the first instance socially and linguistically situated, essentially “public” and institutionally embedded. Both Frei and Lindbeck suspected that too many of their theological contemporaries were still employing, admittedly with greater sophistication, the same old model of understanding and criticizing tradition and dogma through an appeal to “faith,” i.e. religion. They responded in similar ways to this shared suspicion, by developing theological procedures which both deemphasized the systematic role of apologetic reconstruction and took with the greatest seriousness the mediation of Christian identity through the community’s tradition-shaped language. Indeed, both tried to recover the sense in which Christian theology precisely as a cultural practice must always be an ecclesial practice, the critical interpretive procedures of which were in service of reengaging the tradition-process in the present and extending it into the future. Their complementary imaginative updatings of the dynamics of this practice remain among their most important contributions. To link up more explicitly with the overall orientation of the present chapter, one could say that in these updatings both Frei and Lindbeck sought to clarify the normative form of witness and criticize contemporary theology on that basis. What does resituating theology more firmly within the dogmatic tradition have to do with witness and its “trial”? To answer this question a distinction should be drawn. Conceiving the normative form of Christian witness involves both the norm of witness on the one hand, and the trial of witness on the other, the latter being a matter of what will be called witness’s “situation.” “Norm” here means the ultimate authoritative given according to which faith, and theology in the service of faith, must seek to pattern themselves. One can say that Christian witness has one and only one norm properly speaking: the presence of God in the human story of Jesus Christ. Thus there is only one thing Christian witness is witness to. But the crucial point is that precisely because witness to the Christ is also and always witness for the world (including the church itself insofar as it is inextricably part of the

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world!), even exclusive loyalty to this one norm cannot mean that the norm itself is the only active force giving particular form to its witness. Rather, the demand to bear witness to this norm as the liberating word in a potential infinity of social, cultural, historical situations properly brings witness under a complex of different kinds of pressure from the varied “sites” of its occurrence. Witness is “normed” by Jesus Christ alone, but it is “tried” at its site. Christ may be God’s Word once spoken for all time, but only the cultural negotiations at the different sites of witness determine if the church’s witness (in both language and praxis) to that Word is heard, and heard rightly. The three senses of the trial of witness under discussion in this and the next two sections may be understood as corresponding to three kinds of pressure to which Christian witness is subject as it takes form in situ. The “endurance” aspect of the trial treated in this section refers to the unrelieved strain involved in the witnessing community recalling itself creatively but persistently to the mystery of the gospel and the traditions which bear it, without seeking the false relief of reduction. The refusal of Frei and Lindbeck to separate faith and dogma means that any such witness must actualize particular cultural-historical sites: it only occurs at specific points on the ongoing cultural trajectory of a tradition of dogmatic language. That is, part of the givenness of any situation in which Christian witness occurs is the particular confluence of trajectories of tradition, feeding into witness at that site and offering to it a limited but multiple set of mediations of the object of witness. In effect, both Yale thinkers sought to remind certain contemporary theologians that witness, and hence theology, is always situated not just in terms of the unbelieving “context” or non-ecclesial cultural “environment.” Witness is also always dogmatically “situated,” which means it is subject to a peculiar pressure from the tradition-shaped forms through which its object of witness may become visible to it. Both Frei and Lindbeck correctly saw that the object of witness is always mediated through a doctrinal tradition, a quasi-organic history of slowly shifting agglomerations of communally authoritative positions, pivoted upon interpretations of that elusive presence enmeshed in the biblical texts. Their shared promotion of this position against models of theological method which in their eyes implied the evasion of this mediation was tantamount to a renewed acknowledgment in contemporary theology of what is here being called the trial of endurance. But as soon as attention is directed to the other two aspects of the trial of the witnesses, matters of detail and emphasis in their different paths begin to assume greater importance, and the conceptual underpinnings of a supposed “postliberal” turn must come under increasing strain. In their attempts to distance themselves from what they saw as the aporias of the modern theo-


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logical tradition, the other kinds of pressure to which witness is subjected were not sufficiently accounted for, throwing open the door to the false dichotomizations criticized in the previous two chapters. But little-noticed elements in Frei’s thought, more readily visible once he is removed from the context of the postliberal quest formulated by Lindbeck, point beyond their shared limitations to embrace the reality of these other forms of the trial. There is more to the trial of the witnesses than creative faithfulness to the mystery mediated by tradition. The two other senses of “trial” concern not the dogmatic “situation” of witness as laid out in this section, but its missionary “situation.” In fact, the two kinds of situation condition each other: contemplation of the Word made flesh, it will turn out, is inseparable from mission to the world.

Trial as Experiment With the introduction of this sense of the trial of the witnesses the weaknesses inherent in the concept of “intratextuality” show up in a new and glaring way; in response, another look at the surprising insights opened up by the previous chapter’s discussion of Frei and “correlation” is demanded. There it was revealed how Frei insisted (with Karl Barth and against D.Z. Phillips) that the appropriation of “external” cultural materials was a necessary element in any normative discernment of the shape of the literally depicted Christ, that is, in any way which could allow the community’s current self-understanding to be critically measured against itself. More tellingly however, Frei’s continued engagement with Schleiermacher pushed him beyond exclusive identification with Karl Barth’s “type” of unilateral theological subordination of the appropriated elements of external “philosophical” meaning. Tentative, fragmentary and “ad hoc” correlations of the type practiced by Schleiermacher (whatever one’s verdict on his particular actual attempts) simply cannot be ruled out by theology.5 Frei seems to refuse a principled choice here, cautiously opting for a point suspended between Barth and Schleiermacher (or perhaps oscillating between them depending on the situation of the theologian). But just this refusal to resolve the matter one way or the other must put Frei in implicit tension with any attempt to give “intratextuality” a 5 It will be recalled that “correlation” in Frei’s sense refers to the theological practice whereby interpretive illumination of the structure of belief is anticipated from the attempted articulation of it in terms of philosophical or other “external” schemes of thought. Both internal and external conceptual structures are granted a certain integrity and autonomy.

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fundamental criteriological role in theological method. For the latter can be seen as nothing other than an outgrowth of Barthian subordinationism: the internalization of external culture is always seen as completely controllable by a complex of unilaterally available “Christian” meaning. The ultimate cultural determinants of Christian identity are totally provided in advance. Frei, as a troubled moderator of the Barth–Schleiermacher debate, finds himself straining (almost, it sometimes seems, in spite of himself!) toward something more open-ended than intratextuality. After all, “ad hoc” correlation means more than the optional, occasional or purely tactical adoption of “foreign” elements “into” an already given Christian “framework.” It involves as well an element of unavoidable risk to Christian identity. Christian meaning must be worked out anew without presupposing the comforting clarity of a stark confrontation between “Christ” and “culture”; there is only a kind of operative processing or continual “conversion” whereby environing complexes of meaning, themselves oblique or indifferent to the Christian gospel, are always ingredient in and necessary for the very cultural appropriation and articulation of that gospel by the faithful. Here, too, the influence of H. Richard Niebuhr on Frei cannot be discounted; much of Frei’s work on the typology of Christian theologies can be seen as a more subtle elaboration on the typology of interactions between “Christ and culture” which Niebuhr laid out in his famous book, with the “conversionist” position of Niebuhr giving Frei special food for thought.6 So behind Frei’s refusal to disallow the claims of “ad hoc” correlation lie the challenges put to him not only by Schleiermacher but by his former teacher as well. What picture of witness emerges when ad hoc correlation becomes an option? The community of witness, ideally guided and corrected by the cumulative work of theologians, is engaged in the ongoing retrieval of its object of witness: God in Christ. But this retrieval process, and therefore the identity of the community of witness, of Christianity itself at a specific site, is always unfinished. It takes the form of a communal struggle to critically reacquire the “form” of that to which it owes allegiance, the object of its faith and witness, in and through the “borrowed” materials obtained through social and cultural negotiation at its historical, socio-political, and cultural site. If the allowance of some kind of correlation must push the way this process is conceived in a more complicatedly “inter-textual” than simply 6 Frei’s position on the necessity of external discourses for the articulation and self-understanding of Christian faith can thus be seen as a development of Niebuhr’s “conversionism,” where worldly culture and Christian faith are not opposed quantities but coexist in a necessary symbiosis. See HRN, 65–6.


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“intratextual” direction, this brings Frei into potential conflict not just with Lindbeck but also with certain elements unmistakably present in his own thought. Is his vision of the production of Christian meaning finally autonomous and not interlocutive? The question is a delicate one. The strong emphasis Frei unquestionably lays on what he calls the irreducibility of Christian language might seem to push him toward a model of autonomy, but that would be premature.7 It can be granted that the basic pattern of Christian understanding in a community at any given time has a semiotic integrity of its own which can never be exhaustively retranslated into “external” terms. It can even be conceded that the communal meanings generated in the course of living out the Christian tradition in a specific time and place bear peculiar patterns of semantic interconnection which decisively qualify the “external” cultural elements that are its unavoidable medium. But such admissions need not issue into the fallacy of making Christian culture autonomous in the sense being criticized. An identifiable socio-cultural complex (such as a Christian community in a given time and place) will inevitably be open to the entry of “external” cultural elements (that is, language unqualified by or foreign to the shared commitments of its practitioners). But it is arbitrary to see in this a dangerous infection. Indeed, the constant traffic in such external elements should be seen as simply indispensable for the continued functioning of this cultural entity, decisively qualifying and reshaping its ongoing identity as it perpetuates itself. It is a kind of “respiration,” one aspect of the very metabolism of any living cultural body. But that cannot mean that the community’s language is thereby reducible to these elements, any more than it can be claimed that the community’s language is somehow “really” unchanged by their input. Their precise range of meaning now becomes a function of their being reconfigured into new patterns in a specific communal context and their employment for purposes specific to that context. To insist as Frei does that Christian identity cannot be reduced to the cultural elements which make it up (all of which are originally “external”!) is not to deny that those elements enter decisively (precisely in their externality) into the ongoing evolution of that identity. Nonetheless, Frei himself seems to have been insufficiently aware that his justified stress on irreducibility could and should have been detached from a dubious socio-cultural model of ecclesial identity as autonomous or internally self-generated. In fact, to the degree that he remained reliant upon such a model of a “tight-bounded” and semantically autonomous 7 Frei repeatedly refers to the “integrity” and “irreducibility” of the Christian community’s language, e.g. TCT, 158.

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Christian culture, Frei was not fully pursuing the directions in theological method which his work had unexpectedly begun to open up in the late 1980s. Had he followed out more carefully the consequences of his own hesitation between Types Three and Four (or his qualified embrace of both), and had he weighed more carefully his own recognition of the necessary role of external discourses in the identification of the object of Christian witness, he might have kept the idea of irreducibility conceptually distinct from that of cultural autonomy. At any rate, the claims in his later writings taken to their logical conclusion are in conflict with such autonomy. More than that, they even blur somewhat the distinction which Frei made so sharp, between identifying the shape of the faith (the dogmatic task) and theorizing its site-specific appropriation and application (the apologetic task). These remarks can be briefly fleshed out by returning to Frei’s relationship to Niebuhr. Precisely because the impact of Karl Barth on Frei was so unquestionably profound, one would be justified in directing attention all the more closely to those points at which Frei is implicitly or explicitly distancing himself from Barth. H. Richard Niebuhr (similarly to Schleiermacher) represented a methodological option which demanded Frei’s respect, and yet which vigorously refused some fundamentally Barthian moves. Frei was fascinated by at least three aspects of Niebuhr’s theology. The first and most obvious has already been discussed: Niebuhr’s insistence on the integral “story” of the Christ as the concrete given against which Christological proposals are to be measured pointed Frei beyond approaches based either on juxtaposing independent saving predicates with speculative historical reconstructions or on forms of “methodological monophysitism.” On this point there is no tension with Barth (the later Barth, at least). On the contrary, Frei saw here a hidden convergence between Niebuhr and the gradually accumulating volumes of the Church Dogmatics. The second intriguing aspect of Niebuhr’s theological practice, in contrast, is interpreted by Frei as a direct challenge to Barth: Niebuhr refused to follow Barth’s view of theological language and the use in theology of “general” human concepts. (The next section will discuss Niebuhr’s third challenge to Frei, his tentative forays beyond the Christocentrism ironically shared by both the modern tradition and that tradition’s greatest critic, Barth.) Taking into account Frei’s attitude to this disagreement might throw a new light on his ambivalence (discussed in the previous chapter) toward the “subordinationism” of Type Four. It amounts to a tacit recognition on his part of an aspect of theological interpretation to which the metaphor of intratextuality fails to do justice (the unfinished and interlocutive, as opposed to autonomous, nature of Christian identity).


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What was the issue between Niebuhr and Barth? The following quotation is elusive but of great import in determining how Frei saw the matter. Barth once said, in characteristically biblical as well as Hegelian terms, that all we have to apply for theological interpretations are our own concepts, but that they themselves must die and rise again before they can be applied to their subject matter. Here Niebuhr said no. This was a miracle not at our disposal. (TN, 228)

These sentences should be parsed carefully. Barth’s imagery is designed to support his “subordinationist” view that every instance of human language (with its attendant conceptualities) that is “borrowed” by the Christian community to witness to Christ must be so radically alienated from its unbelieving context, so “broken” in its original meaning, that it undergoes a kind of semantic death and resurrection. Clearly, only the act of God, the Holy Spirit, can ultimately effect such a transformation. But the question is, just what kind of interpretive act on the believer’s part is an invitation, an allowal, a “prayer,” through which the Spirit can effect this (since the Spirit is precisely God acting in us)? Niebuhr, with Barth’s hostility to the use of broad interpretive schemes in exegesis no doubt in mind, takes Barth to mean that the Spirit’s transformation of worldly meaning is keyed to the theologian’s practice of hermeneutic subordination. The community (or the theologian standing in for it) must itself recognize the yawning gap of meaning between “general” external usages and the particularity of the object of witness, Jesus Christ. It must sufficiently “master” the “foreign” conceptualities and their difference from revelation if there is to be hope of partial coherence with the subject. On this reading of Barth, the “baptism” which such external language undergoes presupposes a drastic, controlling suspicion of any given human meaning, tantamount to a denial that human meaning as such actually contributes to the hearing of the Word.8 In response, Niebuhr (as Frei understands him) concedes that ecclesial application of the world’s language and thought to the task of witnessing to

8 Lewis Ayres in a private communication helpfully wonders whether this summary picture of Barth’s hermeneutic position might in fact be a caricature. A perusal of the discussion in Church Dogmatics I: 2, pp. 727–36 does suggest that Barth’s understanding of theological interpretation is more sophisticated than Frei’s account of it (or of Niebuhr’s response) seems to allow. Even if some justification can be found for Frei’s wording here, the relationship in Barth between the Spirit’s transforming work and the human exegete’s subordinating work, and the extent to which the latter must disallow any correlation in order for the Spirit to successfully operate, remains an obscure area of Barth’s thought which demands further study.

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the Christ will always involve a transformation of that language. But precisely because this “baptism” of all concepts is first of all a divine (and hence uncontrollable) activity and not a specifiable interpretive practice of the community itself, it need not constrain the expectations and practice of theological appropriation of human philosophical schemes in quite the way Barth supposes. Niebuhr’s query to Barth seems to be, differently phrased, the very question which Frei’s Schleiermacher puts to Barth’s pure “Type Four” vision of theology. Is the object of revelation so semantically absolute that no broad complex of human meaning can really resonate with it or illuminate it? Will it accept in tribute only piecemeal, radically reconfigured or recontextualized fragments of meaning? There is an issue of Trinitarian theology here which admittedly takes one well beyond Niebuhr’s own explicit comments but which would seem to be in line with the direction in which Frei is moving. Does the Spirit as it moves human interpretive acts of witness truly use these to contribute to the construction of the incarnate Son’s meaning for us, or does it simply submit itself to a meaning already finished, awaiting only fragmentary echoes? That is, Frei’s quotation throws into relief Niebuhr’s refusal of a Christomonist understanding of God’s saving action, the consequence of which in Barth’s conception of theology is a drastic collapse of general structures of meaning and their forceful “baptism” into the one symbol or image of the Christ rendered in scripture. By claiming that this is not a feat believers themselves can perform, Niebuhr is in effect suggesting that the Christian interpretive activity is better understood as an experimental living in and through worldly conceptualities, a use of them which doesn’t involve “killing” them as the presupposition of that use. Barth’s notion implies a kind of “digestive” internalization by the Christian community of “foreign” meanings; their non-Christian semantic force seems to be dissolved before being completely reconstituted for use within the Christian body. But Niebuhr’s theology suggests that Christian meaning is always more of an interplay, an improvisation which speaks somewhere at the margin between “converted” and “unconverted” culture: an interlocution. In short, in terms of his typological scheme Frei interprets Niebuhr as a practitioner of “ad hoc” correlation rather than Barthian subordination. Niebuhr suggests that ecclesial interpreters are constantly testing out or experimenting with the language their culture makes available (especially intellectual culture for professional theology), not uncritically, but rather in the hope that God will work in and through the community’s appropriation of these cultural means, in their very difference, in order to align them with the object of witness. Laying aside the question of the fairness of Niebuhr’s or even Frei’s


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reading of Barth, a guess can be made at what was worrying them. Barth’s subordinationist interpretive practice, combined with his Christomonist view of God’s saving activity, comes dangerously close to imagining the church’s cultural interchanges as the collapse of the richness of human meanings into the one figure of the incarnate Christ. Human history in its creativity, contingency, and tragedy becomes somehow diminished in its reality, pared down to a set of lesser echoes or distorted exemplifications of the truth of Christ, with that truth (and this is the crucial point) understood not so much as the unfathomable drama of God and humanity played out in Jesus but as a possession of the church, a message distilled from the canonical portraits of the drama. The prospect opened up by Frei’s “uneasy but hopeful” reading of Niebuhr, then, would suggest something more along the lines of an ongoing activity of God in the always-unfinished expanding or unfolding of the meaning of the Christ; and it is through those very diverse general processes of human meaning, and as ingredient in those cultural sites at which the church proclaims its witness, that God is effecting this semantic unfolding. The issue, then, concerns the way the community’s witnessing to the particular presence of God in Jesus Christ is understood to relate to those concepts or languages or general interpretive schemes which have not arisen within the witnessing community but which are always already culturally operative alongside or, just as frequently, within the community. Barth insists on a radical subordination of meanings to the scriptural figure of the Christ as a way to witness to the all-encompassing nature of God’s act in him. Niebuhr in response tempers this Christomonism by appealing to the existence of “other mysterious forms of the logos asarkos, not only in the world’s religions but in its philosophies too.”9 Niebuhr does not wish to see the inexhaustible universality of Christ’s being in and for all humanity simply “contained within” the canonically witnessed historical and personal particularity of his incarnation, as he thinks Barth does.10 He wants instead to keep Christ’s incarnate particularity and his pneumatological universality in a delicate balance, to see in Jesus Christ both the “unique, non-generalizable instance” of the perfected unity of human and divine, and the one who in his particularity “shares” his significance out

9

TN 228. Italics added. For some fascinating though sketchy explorations of the relationship between revelation in Christ and human meaning-making see Cornelius Ernst, “Theological Methodology,” in Cornelius Ernst, Multiple Echo, ed. Fergus Kerr and Timothy Radcliffe (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1979), 76–86. The language of “containment” comes from Williams, On Christian Theology, 94. 10

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into the infinite diversity of human meanings, becoming “the image of mediation between God and human beings in history” (TN, 229). As Frei sees it, this Christological differentiation from Barth allowed Niebuhr’s embrace of that practice of theological correlation with external meanings which Barth spurns. In Niebuhr’s ethics, for example, this translates into not flatly demanding the dying and rising of the “general concept of ‘man’,” its hegemonic “appropriation and transformation in [the] unique Christological image.” Instead, Niebuhr wants to say that “Christian ethics are sufficiently part of a larger conceptual totality to allow comparison” with non-Christian ethical conceptions (TN, 228). And “comparison” here means he can allow the clash of meanings between particular and general to illuminate and expand an evolving Christian image of faith, instead of subordinating all putatively “incommensurate” ethical images to the explication of an image already fully given and available in the scripturally-rendered Christ. Frei’s worry is that Barth applied a legitimate insistence upon the prevenience of God in human salvation too crudely to the semantic sphere, so that the attempt to interpretively correlate the Christ-event with the wider world of independent human meaning-making must smack of pelagianism or synergism. (The correctly perceived dangers of “two-norms” thinking, irretrievably linked in Barth’s mind with the Nazi perversion of Christianity, no doubt played a role in rigidifying his position.) But one can grant with Barth that any successful witness in human language is a matter of that language’s appropriation by God (and thus that even semantically the human is justified through grace alone) without drawing the consequence for theological procedure that all correlations with “worldly” meaning lead to anthropocentric perversions of witness.11 Conversely, Frei learned from consideration of Niebuhr (and in another way of Schleiermacher) that to be open to correlation means that the saving meaning and activity of the Christ is always in one sense “unfinished” until it is appropriated at myriad human sites; and this happens because uncommitted human meanings are brought to the image of the Christ to draw out, in ways which cannot be anticipated, its depth of meaning through the 11 Frei was every bit as suspicious as Barth was of attempts to locate in language as such a semantic or referential “thrust” toward transcendence or God. See TN, 163–5. This applies to all human language, whether involved in a Christian cultural configuration or a non-Christian one. True reference to God always involves a gracious act of condescension on the part of the one referred to. But this proviso cannot without further ado be turned, as Barth seems to do, into a stricture against any importing of unsubordinated “external” meaning into Christian witness. In fact, the “actualistic” logic of semantic grace operative here would suggest that even internalized or Christianized meanings possess no permanent advantage in speaking the truth of God, and that the divine appropriation of human witness need not exclude the theologian’s human appropriation of non-Christian meaning in service of that witness.


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interpretive activity of faithful witness to him in their context. The desired path for theology becomes one between a purely “universal” theology (where the image of the Christ is reduced to a mere allegory for general concepts or a relativized symbol of a universal saving activity) and a purely “particular” theology à la Barth (where every conceptuality is baptized into the already grasped particular in such a way that its difference and its generality are collapsed into it). The issue is how to understand the prevenience of grace in the sphere of the creation of meaning. H. Richard Niebuhr affirms divine prevenience but not in such a way that the event of the Christ has in itself already foreclosed all possibilities of its human interpretive reception and creative appropriation. As Frei puts it, “Between [Reinhold Niebuhr’s] liberalism [i.e. the prevenience of human action] and Barth’s consistent Christocentric prevenience, [H. Richard] Niebuhr’s radically monotheistic affirmations had to wind their own unique way” (TN, 228). It should be remembered that the traffic in “external” meanings (always keeping in mind the limits of this spatial metaphor) is not simply a matter of (perhaps optional) apologetic ploys directed to the world beyond the church. It is very much a part of the way the witnesses themselves come to grasp the identity of the one they are witnessing to, that particular facet of his inexhaustible richness of significance which only becomes visible from just this perspective, or the way he becomes present at just this site. The image of contrasting yet converging perspectives on the object already applied by Newman and Bushnell characterizes not just the witness of scripture or the classical tradition. It is being extended into the future as new sightlines are opened up through critically appropriated external discourses.12 Rowan Williams, in a passage already referred to, has captured this dimension in his 12 For Newman in his profound Oxford sermon on “The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine,” the analysis or unpacking of the original impression made by God’s revelation is a matter of slow and painstaking thought by communal trial and error. The image is that of collective responsibility toward a mysterious but given object with depth, multiple dimensions, and various aspects; but it is available only through the fragmentary and oblique media of dogmas which are akin to a kind of remote linguistic groping of an object not directly seen. See John Henry Newman, Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford between AD 1826 and 1843 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), esp. 329–31. In a similar way, Horace Bushnell, when speaking of human language about God’s revelation, employs the metaphor of multiple partial perspectives on an object mutually supplementing and correcting each other, but he ties this explicitly to a Trinitarian economy of revelation whereby God cannot be revealed directly in one object but as the eternal repository of all form has the power to re-present himself in the world through the oblique interactions of two or more counteracting finite realities. Dogmatic language can only reflect this pattern. See Horace Bushnell, “Concio ad Clerum: A Discourse on the Divinity of Christ,” in Horace Bushnell, ed. H. Shelton Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 170–80.

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own way. He speaks of “a theology experimenting with the rhetoric of its uncommitted environment” as involving “a considerable act of trust in the theological tradition, a confidence that the fundamental categories of belief are robust enough to survive the drastic experience of immerson in other ways of constructing and construing the world.”13 The precise reversal here of Lindbeck’s imagery of intratextuality cannot be missed; the resonance with Tilley’s words about the Christian witness involving “bringing Christ to life in the world” should also come to mind.14 This is part of “the essential restlessness in the enterprise of Christian utterance” but it involves more than apologetics narrowly conceived, that is theology’s seeking “to persuade or commend, to witness to the gospel’s capacity for being at home in more than one cultural environment.” The trial of the witnesses in the sense of the experiment of ad hoc correlation is more than just a matter of apologetic commendation to the world; it is about “actively illuminating and modifying the concrete historical discourses of its environment, and of being renewed and extended by them.”15 It is a therapy necessary for the health of witness itself. Frei’s comments about theology’s need for “third-order” or “external” discourses to effect the critical retrieval of the Bible’s literal identity portrait of the Christ makes it clearer that the “renewal” of Christian language Williams speaks of is in fact a renewed discovery of the object of witness itself. Perhaps Frei learned from Moltmann that even the tradition stemming from Barth could be open to the “unfinished” nature of Christ’s identity. It is the ongoing process of witnessing to Christ in multiple sites which unfolds his meaning and power through history; hence Frei’s comment (echoing Kierkegaard) that one comes to adequate understanding of the biblical Christ only when one also meets him “incognito” in the human encounters of the present (TCT, 136).16 The picture emerging here of witness as requiring experimental engagement with the world of human meaning suggests an unsuspected depth in Barth’s famous maxim that proclamation must occur with the Bible in one 13

Williams, On Christian Theology, xiv. Terrence W. Tilley, “Incommensurability, Intratextuality, and Fideism,” Modern Theology 5 (1989): 87–111 at p. 104. 15 Williams, On Christian Theology, xvi, xiv. Italics added. 16 See also Hans Frei, The Identity of Jesus Christ: The Hermeneutical Bases of Dogmatic Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), 154–65 for some obscure but powerful meditations on the relation between the presence of Jesus Christ, the Church, and the discovery of fragments of meaning in the unfinished nature of history. For an excellent account of how Frei saw these ideas feeding into the necessary political dimension of all theology, see M.A. Higton, “‘A Carefully Circumscribed Progressive Politics’: Hans Frei’s Political Theology,” Modern Theology 15 ( January 1999), 55–83. 14


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hand and the newspaper in the other. As far as theological exegesis is concerned, the notion of the “literal” sense of the gospel texts will undoubtedly demand supplementation (though not necessarily correction) in light of this picture. This is a difficult problem for future investigation, but one negative consequence for theological method seems unavoidable. Rather than the image offered by intratextuality of the identifying narratives constituting a “conceptual frame” into which “external” experiences are “inserted,” this reading of Frei would suggest that the identity of Christ contained in the scripture is fully discerned only when seen together (“stereoptically,” so to speak) with the contemporary human situation in which he must be proclaimed. The object of witness inscribed in the Bible must be seen “from the side” of his encounter with the world of past and present; thus every literal reading is at the same time a lateral reading, a triangulation between a (relatively) fixed text and a shifting site. Scripture’s authority is in no way weakened by this complication; no responsible theology can be done that is not fundamentally guided by its witness. But the paradigm image of this guidance would picture the Bible operating less as a map than as a pole-star: a fixed and necessary point of reference for all navigation, the stable point in ever new triangulations with the horizon of one’s situation. In sum, the trial of the witnesses in the sense of “experiment” amounts to an always unfinished retrieval or “reacquisition” of the object of witness effected through (as Frei never tires of cautioning) “tentative” and “fragmentary” engagements with the cultural site. It is an ongoing testing of the current word of witness through convergence with the linguistic and conceptual and intellectual structures which already permeate and surround it at a given cultural location. Theology simply enters into this testing in a more disciplined and self-aware manner. This experimental process is part of the way the tradition or conversation which is Christian witness (a conversation in which political action, too, is an indispensable and most eloquent “speaking”) is extended from the past into the future. But a final question remains. On what basis does the community of witness expect that the word of the Christ will be heard among the uncommitted? By a “miracle” of the Spirit, undoubtedly; but the Spirit is at work through human acts. What possibility from the human side corresponds to conversion to the gospel? Further, how can it be that it is precisely in the encounter with the still uncommitted that the meanings of the Christ are revealed not only to the world but to the church itself? What does it mean that Christ is God’s inexhaustible word in (potentially) every human site? The time has come to discuss how the activity of God is to be understood as working in and through the cultural processing or “conversion” which is Christian witness.

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Trial as Submission to Judgment In the previous section, some of Frei’s ideas were developed along lines which opened up a second sense of the trial of witness. The latter does not take the form of dressing up an already possessed truth in “foreign” garb to make it palatable to outsiders; it is an experimental trial, a testing of its own grasp on the object of witness through the semiotic negotiation which is mission. Through speaking and thinking carefully and tentatively through the words of outsiders the witnesses do not just convert that language into something new; they are themselves converted, turned back to apprehend the Christological object in a new way, to glimpse its depth from yet another angle. This sense of trial as experiment, however, already gestures toward a third and final aspect of the trial of the witnesses. They turn to the world not in order to master or absorb it but to speak to it an understandable word; moreover, only this encounter with the church’s “other” determines if the word of the witnesses is heard. The way the particular word of the Christ as uttered in language and praxis takes shape in and transforms a site, the way it is heard by those outside the community of witness, is crucial. Thus there is a submission to judgment on the part of the church; the judgment of the world is the echoing back to the witnesses of the word they have spoken, and often (the divine irony at work!) it is only through this echo in the world that they can understand what they have really said. It should be axiomatic that the word of Christian witness is and can only be the proclamation of the divine life offered in Jesus Christ; but it is no less true that the word must be spoken in such a way that it can be heard, here and now. This trial of the witnesses is therefore a submission to the judgment of the world, but also by means of this a submission to the judgment of God’s living Spirit. The Spirit is not only a gift to the church; it is the agent of conversion to the church. Hence, Christians must affirm that God’s Holy Spirit is active on both sides of the human activity of witness, both in the right speaking of the word of Christ and in the right hearing. If (as the previous section has proposed) it is true that the word of witness is an inter-locution at the boundary of church and world, and if it is also true that the hearing of that word always means a productive cultural convergence of already converted and as yet unconverted elements, then the role of the Holy Spirit cannot be confined to the body of witness but must be at work on both sides of the boundary of belief. Christian theology seeks to balance on one side the church’s enduring hold on the mystery mediated by tradition (the first sense of trial) and on another side the necessary experimentation with worldly meanings which


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extends that tradition, and thus unfolds that mystery, through mission (the second sense). Wherever the believing community in its “situation” finds the shifting equilibrium point between this pressure from the center and this pressure from the periphery, between trial as endurance and trial as experiment, there it is itself: the people of witness. Theology exists to help the community of a given time and place to find this point, but theology’s selfunderstanding will be askew if it fails to set these human activities within some picture of how God is at work in them. Thus understanding the life of Christ in the world through the church means at once broadening the focus of God’s activity beyond the incarnation of the word in a human life; it requires bringing this together with God as source of the whole cosmic process and, particularly, with God as the Spirit at work in the cultural processes of both the witnessing community and the world with which it exists in cultural symbiosis. The total scope of Jesus Christ as God’s definitive act on behalf of the world extends beyond the incarnation of the Son; it must be theorized as a Trinitarian event. This is where the third sense of trial begins to take shape. Frei’s publications offer only the most scattered and brief hints on these matters, but these clues unmistakably suggest engagement with Niebuhr even as they strive to go beyond him. Frei saw how Niebuhr tried to counter Barth with an understanding of the prevenience of grace that was more theocentric than Christocentric. But this salutary refusal to collapse the saving act of God in the world too drastically into the incarnation itself led to a preference for a “monotheist” conception which seemed to Frei to leave the notion of “theos” in question dangerously undifferentiated. On this issue, Frei detected in Niebuhr’s thought a promising possibility linked with a troubling lacuna. In his 1957 essays, Frei had already identified the incipient Trinitarianism of Niebuhr’s thought which helped Niebuhr avoid the pitfalls of the modern tradition’s uncomfortably tight focus on Christology. Frei argued that it was a steady emphasis on God the Father as source of all being and value, and more pointedly as the one who limits and relativizes all particular human histories and values, which permitted Niebuhr to break at least to some extent both with the “relationalism” of the nineteenth-century view of revelation as well as with the latter’s “Neo-orthodox” critics. Niebuhr wanted to affirm God’s gracious prevenience without reducing the sphere of exercised divine power to human history or the divine–human relationship.17 He thus appealed to

17

HRN, 75–6. To develop this line of thought Frei believed Niebuhr would have to become more open to the question of analogical language. Frei naturally had Farrer in mind on this point. See HRN, 72.

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God’s role as ground of the cosmos to relieve the overwhelming concentration on God’s role as the incarnate savior in history. Frei found this movement toward Trinitarianism promising, but finally insufficient, for two reasons. First, he questioned Niebuhr’s straightforward subordination of Christology to theology, his use of “radical monotheism” to trump the role of the Son in too flatfooted a way (TN, 221).18 Second, and more importantly, Frei in his last article on Niebuhr (1988) explicitly if all-too-briefly raised the question of the (rather underdeveloped) role of the Holy Spirit in Niebuhr’s thought. In his struggle to maintain the prevenient initiative of God in human meaning and existence, Niebuhr always stressed the figure of the human being as responsible, that is, as always responding to God’s prior act. But once the Spirit is taken into account, one can no longer simply play off against one another God’s actions and human actions as if they were competing or mutually exclusive quantities. One comes to consider the sense in which God acts in, with, under, or through human acts. Thus serious attention to the Spirit would have to complicate Niebuhr’s simple scheme of prevenient divine call and autonomous human response; yet his work provided only dispersed pneumatological hints which cried out for further elaboration (TN, 225). Frei’s reflections on Niebuhr suggest one way these hints might be pieced together. The problem which Niebuhr bequeaths to theology on his reading is that of modeling the role of God’s Spirit acting in and through the human cultural processes of which the church is a part. This happens in such a way that the possibility of a correlationist theological strategy remains open. Such a pneumatological development would allow the interpreter of Niebuhr to see how his insistence that human acts are always responses to divine initiatives might cohere with the recognition of the Spirit’s prevenient activity in and through human acts, especially (and this is the methodological point) in those human interpretive acts which comprise the stuff both of Christian witness and of the theology which reflects upon it. Yet another tortuous but pregnant remark of Frei alludes to the delicacy of this bringing together of human and divine act. There is no causal law and no law of theological perspective that would allow “response” to become part of a matched pattern of the interaction-in-one of divine and human agencies. . . . The center of the “disequilibrium” lies in the question whether “interpretation” is to be understood finally as a wholly

18 Interestingly, Frei here suggests that this move replicates a dubious Christological tendency implicit in the Reformed tradition from the time of Calvin.


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autonomous response or whether, like agency, it is under the mysterious pattern of the divine Spirit. (TN, 225)

In the end, Frei’s own answer to this question is not in doubt. He must have felt that Niebuhr, too, would have to accede to the providential role of the Spirit even in the human act of theological interpretation itself, precisely in view of Niebuhr’s own practice of theological correlation. Such correlation demands an ongoing search (in defiance of Barth’s warnings) for general categories capable of bringing the particular significance of the Christ into mutually comparative and illuminating conceptual relationships with the broader world of human meaning. But given divine prevenience, theology could expect to find such relationships only if cultural activity outside the church were itself already open in some way to divine truth, presupposing some work of the Spirit. Cautioned by Barth’s stern warnings but unable to discard Schleiermacher and Niebuhr, Frei seemed to glimpse in the methodological possibility of “ad hoc” correlations a genuine Trinitarian issue, the demand for a cautiously “hopeful” pneumatology of culture. “Trust in God . . . but tie up your camel,” says the old Arab proverb. Faith in divine providence in history in no way excludes the fact that it is human beings who make that history. Talk of God’s Holy Spirit is a way of bringing human act and divine act together in a single, mysterious movement. In the church, Christians proclaim and (ideally) manifest forms of human being together, in word and deed, which transcend the possibilities of the human, which replicate the divine life. Yet human possibilities are never idle, they have their role to play even as they are taken up into divine movement. This presents Christian practitioners with a problem demanding the most delicate theological and practical judgment: discerning where this activity of the Spirit may be expected and hoped for, what acts may seek to lay themselves open to it, how hope in its sending may take practical shape. The impact of such questions on, say, Christian political ethics has long been evident; but the praxis of theology is no less at issue. If any kind of faithful act should be seen as epiclesis, prayer for God’s prevenient activity, one’s conception of that tissue of human interpretive acts called theology cannot remain unaffected. And different models of where the Spirit breathes will fund different images of the theological task. Frei’s “uneasy but hopeful” readings of Schleiermacher and Niebuhr should be understood in just this way. The need for a theory of “semantic prevenience” or “graced meaning” such as Barth demands is not in question; human language gestures toward God’s truth only when God acts to enable it. But granting Barth’s point on this does not automatically generate a

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subordinationist theological method like his. He assumed that God graciously illumined human language only when the general complexes of meaning carried by them were recast to conform to the shape of the scripturally delineated Christ-event. But it could also be that human understandings outside the circle of faith can, even in their Christian appropriation, maintain an integrity Barth did not allow as a pneumatological unfolding of revelation’s meaning rather than a Christological reduction of it. The “semantic pelagianism” Barth feared is nonetheless a real possibility, unless theology begins to think carefully about how, and where, the Spirit might be conceived to be at work in human cultural processes. Niebuhr’s practice implied that the “resurrection,” the transformation of worldly symbols into fit vehicles for witness to the Christ (their “dying and rising”) is a divine miracle not to be identified with unilateral Christological subordination. This, it can now be seen, was not simply a polemical point. It was a declaration of what might be called semantic hope, hope in God’s Spirit at work abroad. It is a fragile assurance that the world of human meaning both within and beyond the church is already potentially open to God’s future. Barth was correct in a way that all pointers to the kingdom, wherever they occur, are pointers to God’s salvation in Christ. But for Niebuhr this is true only eschatologically and by way of anticipation. Barth’s theological practice of appropriating meaning exclusively through subordination seems to imply that all such pointers in fact already “belong” to the church as reflective of aspects of the portrayed Christ. Niebuhr’s correlationism presupposes a community of witnesses part of whose mission is to identify these pointers and cultivate them wherever they are found, discovering in them (through experimental, “hopeful” appropriation) unexpected anticipations of the coming Kingdom. In this way they can enlarge the sphere of Christ’s meaning rather than being pared down to the shape of a Christological understanding already possessed. Such, at any rate, are some thoughts suggested by the way Frei sets up the Niebuhr–Barth encounter. So rather than choose between a theology exclusively ruled either by generalized meanings or by particularized (Christological) ones, a thinker like Niebuhr combines them in a theology witnessing to the particular meanings of the Christ by means of the general meanings which are available. Mutually enriching and illuminating correlations between the language, symbols, concepts, and even patterns of ideas of the faithful community and those of the world can be sought precisely because the human significance of the Christ is inexhaustible, not because all human meanings are already “available” in him. Christ is not so much a “container” of all


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human meanings as a mathematical operator or chemical catalyst, capable of entering into innumerable combinations with already structured human meaning and transforming them within, thereby accumulating new depth of significance in the process.19 The theologian’s practice of engaging and experimentally adopting the world’s meanings in their very difference in the hope that they are able to reveal the church’s own meanings to itself in a renewed form is itself part of the further unfolding of the inexhaustible significance of Christ. It is an act of faith similar to Abraham buying his burial plot in the land which will only be “his” centuries after his death. The interpretive act of the theologian is here already caught up in an act of faith in the power of God’s Spirit, which is also the power of the eternal Word active in cultural forms not yet catalyzed through encounter with the absolute form of its enfleshment. By now the course of thought inspired by Frei’s typology has moved well beyond the latter’s terminological sphere. It might be helpful to reconnect them. Niebuhr should surely be seen as a practitioner of a Type Three theology of correlation. Recall that this kind of correlation, on Frei’s model, is not “systematic.” It trusts no general theory, say a phenomenology of the religious “event” or a hermeneutic of “religious meaning,” to mediate and control the varied encounters of internal and external discourses. As “ad hoc,” it instead lets varied temporary categories be built up pragmatically on the occasion of the varied semantic encounters, each one answerable to and operative for the specific occasion itself. However, though Type Three and Type Four both refuse to make coherence with autonomous frameworks of meaning a straightforward criterion of Christian thought, they part company because Type Four simply abandons the exercise of trying to test its coherence with them at all. It cannot really let itself be challenged by attempts to reconstruct their external perspectives, granting them a certain validity and autonomy, within its own internal one. Type Three, however, insists on just this submission, at least as a kind of continual experiment. The present section has proposed that even to entertain the possibility that this correlation will be fruitful for faith involves theology in a more “hopeful” view of the Holy Spirit’s work in the cultural interchanges at the church’s semantic margins. One might say that both Type Three and Type Four have “sacramental” theories of how worldly language can become faithful witness, but Barth sees the Spirit’s acts in a more “actualist” (or “occasionalist”) fashion while a correlationist like Schleiermacher, trusting in the Spirit to move internal and external

19

Williams, On Christian Theology, 93–4.

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discourses toward convergence through the human interpretive history itself, has a more “substantial” sacramentalism.20 The extended discussion above has been intended to show, through intersecting dogmatic and methodological reflections, why there must be a third aspect of the trial, why witness (and hence theology) demands a missiological submission to the judgment of the world as to the effectiveness of its word. It has also tried to state why this is not just about communicating with “outsiders” but is simultaneously part of the “inside” task, providing a renewed access to or grasp of the object of witness mediated through tradition. But theology can only concede such a role to the non-Christian sphere of meaning on one condition: it must posit God’s Spirit as already at work in the human production of meaning, opening up culture from within to enable a creative conjunction with the word of Christ as it makes its way through history. This reconstruction of Frei’s elusive vision of proper theological procedure pays tribute once again to the insight that theological method is no prolegomenon but is itself already a dogmatic problem. Hence the path through which Frei delicately threads his way can be mapped in terms of Trinitarian dogma. In line with his fundamentally Barthian sensibilities he seeks to avoid subordinating the Son to the Spirit (the dogmatic aspect of the danger threatening correlation when it attempts to become too exhaustive or definitive). But the “ad hoc” correlations of Schleiermacher and Niebuhr in the end forced a hearing, complicating simplistic appeals to Barth; his rigidly subordinationist theology runs the opposite risk, that of subordinating the Spirit to the Son. In fact, Frei thereby does justice to Barth’s own concession late in his life that a theology of correlation like Schleiermacher’s might be sympathetically read as a theology of the Holy Spirit.21 The dogmatic framework within which he understands the best guiding images for the practice of Christian theology holds in balanced tension a Christology of incarnational mystery with a pneumatology of culture.22 20

Though the point cannot be argued here, it seems that Kathy Tanner’s powerful development of Barth’s notion of grace so stresses the freedom of God’s condescension in semantically connecting the Word with human words that a kind of “occasionalism” seems hard to avoid (i.e. the connection between God’s Word and human words begins to look sheerly arbitrary from the human point of view). See Kathryn Tanner, Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), esp. 149–51. 21 Karl Barth, The Theology of Schleiermacher: Lectures at Göttingen, Winter Semester of 1923/24, ed. Dietrich Ritschl, trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 1982), 278–9. The citation here is to the “Nachwort” penned by Barth for a 1968 anthology of Schleiermacher’s writings; it is included in the above volume, in George Hunsinger’s translation, as “Concluding Unscientific Postscript on Schleiermacher.” 22 Nor are the interests of the Father forgotten. Another side of Niebuhr was the emphasis


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Striking this balance between Christology and pneumatology is the dogmatic key to the various senses of the trial of the witnesses; it points to the creativity of God’s Spirit in cultural acts as the justification for the experimental appropriation of worldly meaning to bring to life at a new site the mysterious object of witness, the Christ mediated through tradition. Beyond this, the interconnection of Christ and Spirit in the medium of culture opens up another vital insight into Frei’s entire theological quest, when that quest is read in terms of an attempted correction and extension of his Niebuhrian inheritance. For Frei’s way of effecting this interconnection must in the last part of this section be examined from the perspective of the mysterious grand synthesis of Karl Barth and Ernst Troeltsch which his teacher was seeking. Frei did not believe Niebuhr found it, nor did he fancy he himself had succeeded where his old mentor had failed. But he did think he could see further down the path. Niebuhr famously prefaced The Meaning of Revelation with a claim that has proved an interpretive crux ever since. Students of theology will recognize that Ernst Troeltsch and Karl Barth have also been my teachers, though only through their writings. These two leaders in twentieth-century religious thought are frequently set in diametrical opposition to each other; I have tried to combine their main interests, for it appears to me that the critical thought of the former and the constructive work of the latter belong together. If I have failed the cause does not lie in the impossibility of the task. It is work that needs to be done.23

There are signs throughout his body of work that show that Frei, too, saw this bringing together of Troeltsch and Barth as work that “needs to be done.” A final glance is in order at those remarkable 1957 essays on Niebuhr, so rich in clues as to the guiding impulses of Frei’s later thought. Frei agreed with what he believed to be Niebuhr’s insight: “Troeltsch and Barth seem to climax respectively the historical and the systematic Problematik of the [nineteenth-century German] academic tradition of Protestant theology” (HRN, 64). For Frei, the systematic and historical problematics were linked, owing to their common origins in the idealist and romantic milieu of the earlier part of the century. on God as creator of a cosmos whose workings cannot be reduced to the terms of human history. Human redemption must be set within the context of the world as a whole; it cannot be isolated from a cosmic vision if God is truly the creator. Farrer’s work, too, reminded Frei of this. See Frei, HRN, 97–9, and cf. 63–4 n. 89. 23 H. Richard Niebuhr, The Meaning of Revelation (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1941), xi.

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The systematic issue was that theology had come to be characterized by an “agnostic” (i.e. non-objective and non-cognitive) approach to faith in God which removed it from the sphere of ordinary epistemic processes into a special, isolated realm of religious “awareness” which could make no publicly compelling claims. This was connected to a “relationalist” approach to revelation in which God is always and only known not as real over against the subject but in a pre- or non-objective relation to human consciousness. The dubious payoff is that revelation becomes a relationship with God which is constitutive of human consciousness or reason as such, and thus an always available “given” rather than a gracious event. Frei believed it was the later Karl Barth of the Dogmatics who first called this scheme thoroughly into question by opting for a radically realist view of revelation, where God is capable of graciously becoming an object to human knowledge in Christ. This also led to a recovery of some notion of conceptual descriptions of the infinite God on analogy with aspects of the finite world, a notion of analogy abandoned at least since the Kantian critique of metaphysics but vital in Frei’s opinion to reconstituting any concrete conception of divine being. The historical problematic, the other side of the nineteenth-century legacy, consisted of a cluster of problems: how to relate the unique character of an historical event or entity with the relativity demanded by its complete interconnection with other historical events; how to relate the positive or objective, impersonal elements of historical judgment with the personal, evaluative role of the historian; and finally, the whole problem of determining the “essence” of an historical entity, its mode of continuous identity through change (HRN, 21–7). Troeltsch radicalized historical reflection in theology, and in so doing searchingly criticized the way theology had taken up and attempted to resolve these issues. He stressed the relativity of all historical events with renewed consistency, refusing any definition of Christianity or revelation which secretly traded upon their removal or isolation from the universal web of historical causality. He fought against the division between objective history and subjective evaluation, theorizing in a subtle way their unity in the concrete act of historical judgment. Finally, he more or less dissolved the entire notion of the “essence” of an historical entity if that be understood as an objectively continuous element, either abstracted through observation of particular changes or discerned as a dialectical pattern or logic shaping development overall. These judgments shook the foundations of much established theology, liberal and conservative, at the turn of the century. Frei was convinced that the key to understanding Niebuhr’s achievement lay in grasping the latter’s claim to be merging the interests of Barth and Niebuhr, the two giants who had so differently but so insightfully perceived


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and tried to transcend the aporias of the nineteenth century. In turn, grasping Frei’s verdict that Niebuhr had not quite done sufficient justice to either thinker and that a new approach was needed might be just as important a key for understanding Frei’s theological career. In other words, Frei wanted new strategies which would allow him to travel the same path as Niebuhr, but with more consistency. He laid out that path in the following extremely important passage. It seems that the critical mind of Troeltsch saw in culture the hidden majesty of the same God whom the constructive mind of Barth saw revealed in Jesus Christ. Niebuhr in his “double wrestle” with Christ and culture has learned from “the critical thought of the former and the constructive work of the latter,” and has sought to combine their interests in the framework of a conversionist theology for which the creative logos is the very Redeemer who converts to himself and to the Creator who is at one with him, in infinity and time, the straying historical creatures who despite their tragic errors and contrary wills still portray the good toward which he has made them. (HRN, 94, emphases added)

The reference to Niebuhr’s “conversionism” alludes to his insistence that the culture and religious faith of Christian believers is always the product of the constant transformative interaction between the gospel of the Christ and the “religion” and “faith” always naturally and culturally part of historical human beings. In a manner reminiscent of De Lubac’s understanding of human nature as always already “graced” by God’s call, Niebuhr spoke here of a natural (but culturally elaborated) disposition toward the absolute value which is like a theocentric “material” substrate that in the church must always be “informed” by a Christocentric faith in specific historical revelation.24 Both elements are always present in Christianity, and proper account must always be taken of both. The upshot is that “Christ” and “culture” do not confront each other like given wholes or entities. Christianity is the process of culture being converted by Christ, which in actuality means the operation of already Christianly configured cultural elements upon other cultural elements, whereby both are transformed. This insight that conversion is itself a cultural process provides Niebuhr with a way to mediate the concerns of Troeltsch and Barth. The same majestic movement of God is revealed in human words, in the creative multiplicities of culture, and in the individual historical enfleshment of the

24 For a statement of this position see Henri de Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 1998), 54ff.

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eternal Word. Troeltsch was a cultural and religious relativist because he “looked for the direct impingement of God within history in the inmost ‘essence’ of each culture.” The infinite God is at the heart of all finite cultures and religions, and relates to humanity through them; Frei says that Troeltsch “sees a series of relationships between God and his creatures, each one direct and independent of the others, each with a form peculiar to itself ” (HRN, 60). However, contrary to Hegel, Troeltsch explicitly denied any unifying dialectical pattern discernible by human reason in these modes of presence. Rather, the only logic discernible is the aesthetic one of diversity-in-unity, each participant in each culture valuing it for its own sake and its own insight.25 Niebuhr drew the anti-apologetic corollary. Because all cultures are already related to God as such, their truth is not simply a disguised form of the truth Christians already have. The hasty assimilations between Christian and non-Christian language worlds essayed by the apologist will succeed only in obscuring their mutually illuminative interaction. But Niebuhr did not stop there. Bringing Barth into the picture, he identified the creative Word of God which Troeltsch saw operative in every culture with the Word that became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. Seeing in this one human story the creator God’s archetypal utterance into the natural-cultural world allowed Niebuhr to understand witness to the gospel as the process whereby the mysterious God creatively at work in the world at large is “converted” by Christian faith into the Father of the Son. Because Niebuhr appealed to the participation of the logos, the Word, in the creation, he could see the creative Word at work in all space and time, but also in a special way in the creativity of all human cultural acts. The “conversion” effected in Christian faith means that the “mysterious forms of the logos asarkos” active throughout human cultures are “linked up” with the Word once made human flesh (to which, in the view of faith, they are ultimately but mysteriously ordered). Frei welcomed this insight, but divined that, though the agency of this linkage was clearly the Holy Spirit, Niebuhr never elaborated the requisite pneumatology. This, it is being proposed, is what lies behind Frei’s complaint that Niebuhr would have combined Barth’s and Troeltsch’s concerns more convincingly had he followed both more consistently. For Frei (and this perspective is illuminating for Frei’s entire intellectual journey), genuinely to get beyond the conundrums of the 25 This is the “Wittgensteinian” reason for Frei’s denial of systematic correlation. The other reason is the mysterious character of the incarnate Word as the object of witness. Frei’s insistence that any correlations be ad hoc thus springs both from a Troeltschian understanding of culture and from a Barthian understanding of Christ.


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nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would mean joining Troeltsch’s radical historicism (in which historical and cultural difference is not a problem to be overcome but itself a vector for God’s infinite truth) and Barth’s radical realism of revelation (in which God’s prevenient encounter with all humanity is graciously and proleptically “objectivized” in a single, historical and cultural concretion of personal identity). Frei’s work dared to follow up more consistently the insights of both Troeltsch and Barth, thereby supplementing a two-fold deficiency in Niebuhr. For on the one hand, the latter in the end could not follow Troeltsch’s turn to a general, unified philosophy of culture because his existentialist approach kept him loyal to a dualistic historical epistemology, one where faith remains dependent upon a non-theoretical, internal “valuing” apprehension (HRN, 92–3). Frei in his turn could ironically do better justice to Troeltsch by the very un-Troeltschian move of rejecting all dualisms which played off the “spiritual” against the “material” or “inner” against “outer” history. For him, the being of the human self and the presence of the divine Word in history are matters of the apprehended surfaces and public interchanges of history, not an ontology of “Geist.” This is why Frei increasingly sought to incorporate his explorations in intellectual history into more institutional and structural, or even “materialist” accounts of history. On the other hand, Niebuhr could not go the way of the mature Barth because of his vestigial “relationalism” which refused to countenance any gap between the givenness of divine revelation and its existential apprehension in faith (HRN, 86–7). As a result, Niebuhr remained far more influenced by the early “dialectical” Barth who refused any objectivication of God in revelation, but his student Frei gratefully followed the later Barth’s turn to the notions of graced objectivity and analogy. A skeptical rejoinder to Frei might be that the proper response to Niebuhr’s failure to bring Barth and Troeltsch together is not to try harder but to abandon the attempt altogether, simply accepting the prima facie irreconcilability of the two great figures. But this perhaps betrays a misunderstanding of the kind of meeting between them that was sought. The intention was never to unite the particular dogmatic conclusions of the two thinkers, which are indeed utterly divergent. It was rather to find a way of entering into their deepest insights and concerns in such a way as to show that the clash between Troeltsch’s insight into human culture and Barth’s fidelity to orthodox doctrine need not have happened. Admittedly, of course, Frei was no more able than Niebuhr to pursue the path to its completion. His contribution was the conviction that a more fully developed pneumatology was needed to reconcile Troeltsch’s historicism and Barth’s revelationism. This would be possible because of the hidden presupposition shared by these

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two different orientations. The symptoms of this secret convergence are their common hostility to systematic apologetic, their “confessionalism” and the accompanying “secular sensibility” which wants to let Christianity be Christianity and the world be the world. What Niebuhr saw, and taught Frei to see, was that something like the “logic of Chalcedon” (in which the one concrete historical Christ is at once fully God and fully human, without confusion or separation) underlies a conception of divine dealing with the world which could connect elements of Troeltsch’s historicist relativism and Barth’s revelational realism. Thus Troeltsch rejects making the divine presence something “in” Jesus, an adjunct to or unique aspect of his humanity, such as the internalized miracle of a superhuman God-consciousness. Barth embraces exactly the same position, but puts it to very un-Troeltschian use in his account of the incarnation: a fully historical human person, constituted by all the usual intersecting natural and cultural relationships, was as such appropriated into the being of the eternal God as the projection outward in, to, and for the whole world of God’s eternal self-utterance. Where Barth and Troeltsch meet is in the idea of a God who is capable of acting not just through the causal chains of the world but especially through the delicate overlapping patterns of cultural processes, without “breaking” them. God’s presence and revelation do not “punch a hole” in the world; God meets humanity, both in Christ and in culture, not apart from but in the very historical contingency of the human act. The mystery of God in cultures (Troeltsch) and the mystery of God in a human being (Barth) are thus two sides of one and the same mystery. From this angle, Frei’s theological work can be seen as a piecing together of the Trinitarian framework which would support some of Niebuhr’s intuitions about theology, but which the latter was unwilling or unable to provide. Though this task remained largely implicit and unfinished, the result looks something like the following. The Holy Spirit is not only the bond between Father and Son in eternity; in the world as well it is the bond between creation and redemption because it is the mediator between the participation of human cultural agents in the processes of semantic creation and in the revelatory event of the Christ. This offsets the dangers of the Christomonist view of divine activity which many, including Niebuhr, have suspected in Barth; grace here can seem less the perfecting of nature than its annihilation and replacement. At any rate, it is the Holy Spirit which is the continual bringing together of the Word abroad and the Word made flesh, and this activity occurs through the cultural acts of the body of witness as it performs its converting work at the margins between belief and unbelief. With each new processing


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of cultural elements, never quite anticipatable beforehand, a new facet of the shape of the redeemer’s original appearance is revealed to them. This hidden conjunction in culture, the fact that the Word incarnate in Jesus is also “out there” in humanity, the Word among words, is the key to the inexhaustibility of the gospel of the Christ, its ability to find itself at home again and again, constantly outwitting human-imposed cultural obstacles.26 Theology self-reflectively engages this community-wide process of conversion or witness by monitoring it, mapping it, guiding it, questioning it, or anticipating its next move (all such anticipations and experiments being themselves “checked” in the long run by the church’s own collective experience and decision). In spite of the sad fact that his urgent questions and criticisms in the end soured relations with his most important teacher, Frei’s work will scarcely be understood if no account is taken of the ways he remained an attentive student. Though enthralled by Barth’s massive achievement, Frei could not deny the cogency of Niebuhr’s vision. Niebuhr’s notion of “conversion” and his practice of “ad hoc” correlation planted a seed in Frei; it not only bore fruit in a refusal to accept Barth’s verdict on Schleiermacher as final, it ultimately dislodged Frei’s theology from a fixed and comfortable spot in his own typology. The angle of vision opened up on Frei’s work in these last pages does not begin to answer all of the questions which arise. But it does point theology back to that work which still, to echo Niebuhr, “needs to be done”: to grasp the secret affinity between Barth and Troeltsch which was the inner motor of H. Richard Niebuhr’s thought. His students seemed unable to hold together his vision, pursuing one side at the expense of the other. Thus it is at least partly true that Frei provided a kind of Barthian counterweight to those disciples of Niebuhr (like Gordon Kaufman or James Gustafson) 26 Can one attempt to reduplicate in the pneumatological sphere the logic of Karl Rahner’s Christological claim that created human being is the constitutive “real symbol” in the created order of the eternal Logos? That is, can theology glimpse in the collective creativity of human cultural exchange the “real symbol” of the eternally creative unity-in-difference of Father and Son which is the Holy Spirit? As Rahner sees it, the human being Jesus is the temporal projection of God’s eternal self-utterance, for which projection human nature, creaturely analogue or symbol of the Word’s generation, is the vehicle. Perhaps then the ecclesial act in history, which unites the witnessing people with the varied human sites of otherness in an endless conversion of both to God, should be seen as the temporal projection of God’s eternal love, the bringing together of otherness into fecund new configurations for which the created real symbol is the proliferation of human cultural creations. For Rahner’s Christology see, for example, Karl Rahner, “The Theology of the Symbol,” in Theological Investigations IV, trans. Kevin Smith (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, Ltd., 1966), 221–45; Karl Rahner, The Trinity, trans. Joseph Donceel (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 1997), 32–3.

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who manifestly privileged the elements inspired by Troeltsch. But it is perhaps a truer mark of what he had learned from Niebuhr that Frei could never be completely satisfied with a mere confrontation between Troeltsch and Barth. He pressed forward to the pneumatology of culture which eluded Niebuhr, and in so doing reminded Christian witness and theology of its need to hear (in Rowan Williams’s phrase) “the judgment of the world.”

The Logic of Proliferation In light of the above discussed trial of witness in its various senses, what sort of theological account of the structure and historical course of the people of witness, the church, might be expected? There is no place at the end of this already lengthy book for even a rudimentary ecclesiology, but there is a need for a final reminder that George Lindbeck’s contribution to a future theology need not be diminished by the dismantling of postliberalism. The trial of the witnesses with its presupposed pneumatological account of cultural processes, for the articulation of which Frei’s work has provided the chief impetus, invites a return to Lindbeck’s ecclesiological insights by way of an unlikely detour. The clue is found in Troeltsch. Thus the universal law of history consists precisely in this, that the Divine Reason, or the Divine Life, within history, manifests itself in always-new and always-peculiar individualizations – and hence that its tendency is not towards unity or universality at all, but rather towards the fulfillment of the highest potentialities of each separate department of life.27

If this general reflection from the end of Troeltsch’s life were to be applied more specifically to the church as an historical phenomenon, the result would look strikingly like the structure of ecclesial process as brilliantly theorized by Michel de Certeau, grounded in its “inaugural rupture” and continually replicated according to the logic of “not without.”28 The image seems almost the opposite of Teilhard de Chardin’s famous “omega point,” the evolutionary bearing of all cosmic developments toward their concentrated 27

Ernst Troeltsch, Christian Thought, Its History and Application (London: University of London Press, 1923), 14 (cited at Frei, HRN, 58). 28 See Michel de Certeau, “Le Mythe des origines” and especially “La Rupture instauratrice,” both in La Faiblesse de croire, ed. Luce Giard (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1987), 53–74, 183–226. For a partial translation of the second piece, see Michel de Certeau, “How is Christianity Thinkable Today?” Theology Digest 19 (1971): 334–45.


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locus of meeting in Christ. Whatever the truth on the metaphysical level of the principle “everything that rises must converge,” Certeau claims that in the realm of the human history of the gospel and its institutions Jesus Christ is rather the fount of inexhaustible creative diversity. Like the branches of a tree, the concrete patterns of discipleship and witness show an ever increasing ramification and elaboration, a propagation of differences, as they push out into the space of history. Such imagery resonates with the account of the trial of the witnesses; whatever unity is possessed by Christian faith on earth, its proliferating responses in situ to its multi-faceted trial suggest that it will not be premised on assimilation to a single social or cultural complex. One might see in this historical ramification of witness to the Christ an echo of Thomas Aquinas’s image of creation. On the ontological level, creation represents the refraction of infinite being into the multiplicity of created things, like white light broken up by a prism. Only in the divine being itself is the power of difference not expressed as finitude, as de-finition; the play of infinity, unity, and difference which is God’s being is projected into creation as an explosion of finite forms, crystallizations of aspects of that being which is a living whole in the creator.29 Similarly, on the level of human history and culture, the divine Word made flesh calls forth as its echo in human lives a system of multiplying differentiated responses. While the Holy Spirit is the transcendent engine of this multiplication, its immanent mechanism is the structure of human social and cultural history itself, as a field of respondents who themselves are defined both by finitude and by creativity. But does this uncontrollable exuberance finally doom the church as a unified historical body? Certeau himself seems to have come very close to arguing this, but the theological results might well be judged intolerable.30 29 In chapters 28–36 of the first book of the Summa Contra Gentiles Aquinas premises the ability to speak without equivocation about God on the analogy between finite, created beings as limited receptacles of differentiated, fragmentary aspects of the infinite and unified perfection of the divine being. See St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Book One: God, trans. Anton C. Pegis (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), 135–50. That this creative refraction is also the “projection” into history (as Trinitarian economy) of the eternal patterns of the Triune Godhead is a usage gathered from Herbert McCabe. See Herbert McCabe, “The Involvement of God,” in God Matters (Springfield, IL: Templegate Publishers, 1991), 39–51, esp. 48–51; Herbert McCabe, “Aquinas on the Trinity,” in God Still Matters (London: Continuum, 2002), 36–53, esp. 52–3. 30 For an account of Certeau’s estrangement from the institutional Church and some of his more radical pronouncements on the matter, see François Dosse, Michel de Certeau: Le Marcheur Blessé (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2002), 200–20. A reading of this lengthy biography in its entirety shows what an extraordinarily complex problem is posed by the question of Certeau’s final status vis-à-vis the Christian faith.

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At this point Lindbeck can be reintroduced as a necessary supplement to this account. The church whose end Certeau prophesied was pictured by him as a kind of “container” of belief standing over against “culture” or “society.” His quiet, gradual disengagement from the monolithic public institution of French Roman Catholic Christendom was a prophetic sign. But perhaps the church never was such a container, and should not have been so conceived by theology. Certeau was right that the practices of belief are themselves cultural acts, always part of or “in” the regnant culture even as they creatively subvert that culture from within.31 But it must be said that the very “subversive dispersal” of belief which he speaks of can only be “carried” by institutions, perhaps better modeled as cells, base ecclesial communities, sites of “cult” as Troeltsch says.32 Bringing Lindbeck’s ecclesiology into play one would have to speak of “the church” as an amalgam of “sites,” not delimiting the cultural practices of faith as a whole but rather providing space for their liturgical catalysis. Certeau is right: Christ is not “in” the church, his meaning and truth are not “contained” there as in a jar. But the church is where the practices of belief are imprinted on those who are sent out. The church comprises those sites in which the cultural dispersal of belief is initiated and to which the witnesses keep returning, looping back to that place of intense socialization and ritual formation into the identity of the incarnate God, the same one who is to be “brought to life” in their proclamation, their re-creative engagement with their cultural location. The ecclesiological visions of Certeau and Lindbeck each supply the other’s lack: without deep orientation toward subversive symbiosis with the larger cultural field Lindbeck’s cult groups would tend toward withdrawal into self-protective enclaves, but the dynamic of Certalien cultural dispersal without the focus of cultic community would peter out into mere self-dissolution. This development of Lindbeck’s ecclesiology in a “dispersive” direction corresponds to the embedding of Frei’s more open-ended views on theological practice within a pneumatology of cultural acts. These moves, or something like them, are needed to retrieve the genuine insights of both theologians from their inherent drift toward the “auto-generation” of Christian identity. Hans Frei declared that his theological ideal was for a “generous, liberal orthodoxy,” nor would Lindbeck demur. But understand-

31 For samples of Certeau’s thinking on the end of the church as the “container” of faith and the “dispersal” of acts of faith into culture, see Dosse, Certeau, 204–5, 218. 32 Ernst Troeltsch, “The Significance of the Historical Existence of Jesus for Faith,” in Ernst Troeltsch: Writings on Theology and Religion, ed. and trans. Robert Morgan and Michael Pye (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990), 190–7.


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ing the contributions of these thinkers through the established categories of intratextuality and postliberalism is not only, as has been argued, dubious in itself, premised as those concepts are on a view of Christian identity as codifiable rather than unfinished, and on Christian community as semantically autonomous rather than interlocutive. Such an understanding seems to go against the grain of a truly liberative appropriation of “right belief.” The conceptual framework proposed here as more adequate, the trial, more readily indicates the methodological parameters of a theology whose ideal is a “generous, liberal orthodoxy,” and connects this theology to particular ways of envisioning both the structure and circumstances of the self-proliferating community of the gospel, and the role of the Spirit in its modes of cultural practice. Such a theology will be “orthodox” because the witness it serves is a witness to the resurrected one, that is to that individual human life and death which has been transfigured through God’s power into the proleptic shape of the total presence of the divine life in human history. But such a theology cannot be anything but “liberal” in the sense of always open to the re-articulation of the meaning of the resurrected one as the fundamental act of God. It must be liberally “generous” precisely because the witnesses of the resurrection are on trial, because the Christian life as testimony to God’s life in Christ in fact must be an ongoing and inescapable trial. To speak of Christian faith or existence as a witness to the resurrection points again to that concern for Christological orthodoxy, and for incorporating into theology the epistemological discipline imposed by its character as mystery, which characterizes both Lindbeck and Frei. As was seen at the close of the previous chapter, this means a determination to take up the discourses of reason in their local forms; it means acknowledging that the gamble of trying to think the mystery is a necessary risk, one of deciding just how deeply reason may in a given form and on a given occasion penetrate into it. But it also led to a parting of the ways, because Frei reckoned more deeply with the contribution which reason in its specific cultural configurations must make to the restructuring of Christian identity itself. The destabilization of any criteriological notion of intratextuality such as Lindbeck sought seems inescapable. It is this more thoroughgoing role of the world’s meanings in the very constitution of the meanings of the church’s witness that is articulated in the various facets of the trial of the witnesses. The particular ideas assembled into the framework offered here are hardly original. An important paper of Rowan Williams on the theological criticism of doctrine, for example, nicely indicates the strait gate of witness envisioned here. Against too simplistic a “revisioning” of tradition like that

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of Maurice Wiles he insists that doctrinal critique must acknowledge that theology is not completely self-transparent, that it is inescapably situated within tradition-shaped religious practices, that it must struggle toward clarity on the non-revisable status of some of its axioms. But such critique cannot be evaded, precisely because faith’s basic axiom is Jesus Christ as the divine “interruption” of our worlds of meaning, including our theological worlds. Hence the theologian is called to weigh the balance of literal and metaphorical in doctrinal language, to uncover those biases of power which inscribe themselves in it and cripple it, to test it for conceptual contradiction or sheer nonsense.33 This is only one example. Many others could be named whose work might also be important in helping flesh out the vision of theological practice informing the present study. One could point to Kathryn Tanner’s profound admonitions on the nature of culture, and her powerful argument that churchly identity is a site-specific negotiation with the world beyond the church and not a self-generated stability. The problematization of ecclesial “autonomy” achieved in her challenging Theories of Culture has been an important stimulus at several places in this study. Ingolf Dalferth’s insights on the necessity of reconstructing external perspectives within the internal perspective of the community might also prove fruitful.34 The list could go on, because what is at issue is the identification and recommendation of a broad shift of theological perspective, not the discovery of a “new” method. In conclusion, conceiving of theology as the trial of the witnesses honors the ideal of a generous orthodoxy by attempting to place accents on both the norm of witness and the trial of that witness. An orthodox Christian theology has and can have only one ultimate norm, the once enfleshed Word of God whose presence is disseminated into human communities through the praxes of the Spirit. But this uniquely normed witness is also multiply “tried” at its sites. Acknowledging the seriousness of this trial does not introduce a second norm. In fact, part of the trial itself is just that strict vigilance which allows the historical and cultural situation to try the communal witness but not to surreptitiously evacuate the normative status of the Word made flesh. One of the unfortunate impressions arising from unqualified talk of a “mutually critical correlation” is that it can suggest “two-norm” thinking. The object of witness and the site of witness bring structurally distinct criti33 Rowan Williams, “Doctrinal Criticism: Some Questions,” in The Making and Remaking of Christian Doctrine (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 239–64. 34 Tanner, Theories of Culture, passim; Ingolf Dalferth, Theology and Philosophy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, Ltd., 1988), esp. 127–48.


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cal pressures to bear on the tradition-shaped beliefs and practices which are the stuff of witness; they are not competing norms. Once admitted, the hard fact that church language does not just critique the world’s language but is also critiqued by it should not drive theology to a speciously symmetric model of its responsibilities. Only by differentiating the distinct forces exerted (to oversimplify) from within by the norm and from without by the trial can theologians seek those points of equilibrium which will help form effective witness in the space and time given to it. Postliberalism was betrayed by an understandable concern with reconnecting witness to its norm into downplaying its trial; it could acknowledge the ongoing lived testing of the faith in everyday lives but not the correspondingly unfinished nature of Christian identity which complicates all tests of theological faithfulness. The theological practices which serve the ecclesial community are indeed like essays in how to enable the conversation (or argument) which is Christianity to “keep going.” Theologies seek ways of extending the tradition from its past into the various futures which confront it. They must help the Christian community (and be helped by it!) to find the right words and acts which properly balance the outward thrust of the normative object of witness with the specific contours of receptivity and resistance which confront that impetus, always in the hopeful expectation that the Spirit will be at work precisely at this site of cultural encounter. “Incorporating” the world “into” the Christian “text” is a dangerously misleading image of this operation. If the previous chapters are right, Terrence Tilley hit upon the better image: “bringing Christ to life in the world.” Kierkegaard warned that faith is everywhere accompanied by the dialectical. Whether it is a word, a sentence, a book, a man, a society, whatever it is, as soon as it is supposed to be a boundary, so that the boundary itself is not dialectical, it is superstition and narrow mindedness. In a human being there is always a desire . . . to have something really firm and fixed that can exclude the dialectical, but this is cowardliness and fraudulence toward the divine.35

Faith and theology too often scurry under some false shelter of certainty to avoid the dialectical, the slippery and self-subverting character of every human witness to God in Christ. But the reduction of the mystery to humanly manageable proportions is itself another kind of flight from the

35

Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to ‘Philosophical Fragments’, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), I: 34–5.

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dialectic of faith. Thus it is the temptation of both self-consciously “conservative” and self-consciously “liberal” theologies to short-circuit the agonizing trial of witness, suppressing one or another of its dimensions. The work of Frei and Lindbeck initiated an important conversation in which this insight was tentatively voiced, only to be drowned out by triumphant cries that “liberalism” had at last been routed. To reinitiate this conversation in a different register, with the earlier cacophony now a receding echo, has been the modest attempt of this book. Theology, buffeted by the internal pressures driving it, will no doubt continue to list between conservatism and liberalism, because the good news both must be and yet cannot be “repeated.” Perhaps, therefore, the theologian should be wary of such labels. When one or the other is selfconsciously taken up as a defining orientation, it is too often the symptom of a damaging fixation on the specter of its opposite. In such ways theology may evade the trial of the witnesses of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, but it thereby quits the court where its own faithfulness must be decided. Better that it be true to itself, and stand with the witnesses. Either way, the trial goes on.

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“Theology and the Interpretation of Narrative: Some Hermeneutical Considerations,” [1982] in Theology and Narrative: Selected Essays, edited by George Hunsinger and William C. Placher. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993: 94–116. “The ‘Literal Reading’ of Biblical Narrative in the Christian Tradition: Does it Stretch or Will it Break?” [1983] in Theology and Narrative: Selected Essays, edited by George Hunsinger and William C. Placher. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993: 117–52. “In Memory of Robert L. Calhoun, 1896–1983.” Reflection [Yale Divinity School] 82 (November 1984): 8–9. “Epilogue: George Lindbeck and The Nature of Doctrine.” [1984] in Theology and Dialogue: Essays in Conversation with George Lindbeck, edited by Bruce D. Marshall. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990: 275–82. “David Friedrich Strauss.” In Nineteenth Century Religious Thought in the West, edited by Ninian Smart, John Clayton, Patrick Sherry, and Steven T. Katz, 3 vols, I: 215–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. “Barth and Schleiermacher: Divergence and Convergence,” [1986] in Theology and Narrative: Selected Essays, edited by George Hunsinger and William C. Placher. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993: 178–99. “H. Richard Niebuhr on History, Church and Nation,” [1988] in Theology and Narrative: Selected Essays, edited by George Hunsinger and William C. Placher. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993: 214–33. Types of Christian Theology, edited by George Hunsinger and William C. Placher. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992 (contains previously unpublished material from 1983–87)

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Dalferth, Ingolf. Theology and Philosophy. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988. Davaney, Sheila. “Options in Post-modern Theology.” Dialog 26 (1987): 196–200. Dawson, John. Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Ellingsen, Mark. “Luther as Narrative Exegete.” Journal of Religion 63 (1983): 394–413. —— A Common Sense Theology: the Bible, Faith, and American Society. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1995. Ernst, Cornelius. “Theological Methodology.” In Multiple Echo, edited by Fergus Kerr and Timothy Radcliffe. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1979: 76–86. Fiorenza, Francis Schüssler. Review of Theology and Contemporary Culture, by David Kamitsuka. Journal of Religion 82 (April 2002): 297–8. Ford, David. Review of The Nature of Doctrine, by George Lindbeck. Journal of Theological Studies ns 37 (1986): 277–82. —— “Hans Frei and the Future of Theology.” Modern Theology 8 (April 1992): 203–14. —— “On Being Theologically Hospitable to Jesus Christ: Hans Frei’s Achievement.” Journal of Theological Studies, ns 46 (1995): 532–46. —— The Shape of Living: Spiritual Directions for Everyday Life. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1998. —— Self and Salvation: Being Transformed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Fowl, Stephen. Engaging Scripture: A Model for Theological Interpretation. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. Geertz Clifford. “Religion as a Cultural System.” In Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion, edited by Michael Banton. London: Tavistock Publications, 1966: 1–46. —— “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.” In The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973: 3–30. Gerrish, Brian. Review of The Nature of Doctrine, by George Lindbeck. Journal of Religion 68 (1988): 87–92. Glock, Hans-Johann. A Wittgenstein Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996. Gustafson, James M. “The Sectarian Temptation: Reflections on Theology, the Church and the University.” Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America 40 (1985): 83–94. —— “Just What is ‘Postliberal’ Theology?” The Christian Century 116, no. 10 (March 24–31, 1999): 353–4. —— “Liberal Questions: A Response to William Placher.” The Christian Century 116, no. 12 (April 14, 1999): 422–5. Hall, Thor. Systematic Theology: The State of the Art in North America. Washington DC: University Press of America, 1978. Hartt, Julian. “Austin Farrer as Philosophical Theologian: A Retrospective and Appreciation.” In For God and Clarity: New Essays in Honor of Austin Farrer, edited by Jeffrey C. Eaton and Ann Loades. Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications, 1983: 1–22.

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Harvey, Van A. “The Pathos of Liberal Theology.” Journal of Religion 56 (1976): 382–91. Hastings, Adrian. A History of English Christianity 1920–2000. London: SCM Press, 2001. Hauerwas, Stanley. Christian Existence Today. Durham, NC: Labyrinth, 1988. —— Wilderness Wanderings: Probing Twentieth-Century Theology and Philosophy. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997. —— A Better Hope: Resources for a Church Confronting Capitalism, Democracy and Postmodernity. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2000. —— With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2001. Hauerwas, Stanley, and David Burrell. “From System to Story: An Alternative Pattern for Rationality in Ethics.” In Truthfulness and Tragedy: Further Investigations in Christian Ethics, edited by Stanley Hauerwas. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977: 15–39. Hauerwas, Stanley, and L. Gregory Jones (eds.). Why Narrative? Readings in Narrative Theology. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1989. Hick, John (ed.). The Myth of God Incarnate. London: SCM Press, 1977. Higton. M.A. “‘A Carefully Circumscribed Progressive Politics’: Hans Frei’s Political Theology.” Modern Theology 15 ( January 1999): 55–83. Horst, Mark. “Engendering the Community of Faith in an Age of Individualism: a Review of George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine.” Quarterly Review [Nashville, TN] 9, (1988): 89–97. —— “Disciplined by Theology: A Profile of Paul Holmer.” The Christian Century 105, no. 29 (October 12, 1988): 891–5. Hunsinger, George. How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. —— “Afterword: Hans Frei as Theologian.” In Theology and Narrative: Selected Essays, by Hans W. Frei, edited by George Hunsinger and William C. Placher. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993: 233–70. —— Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2000. Jackson, Timothy P. “Against Grammar.” Religious Studies Review 11 (1985): 240–4. Jeanrond, Werner. “The Problem of the Starting-point of Theological Thinking.” Hermathena 156 (1994): 5–20. Johnson, Luke Timothy. Religious Experience in Earliest Christianity: A Missing Dimension in New Testament Studies. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998. —— The Living Gospel. London: Continuum, 2004. Jones, Serene. Feminist Theory and Christian Theology: Cartographies of Grace. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000. Kaufman, Gordon D. An Essay on Theological Method. Missoula, MT: Scholar’s Press, 1975. Keifert, Patrick. Review of The Nature of Doctrine, by George Lindbeck. Word and World 5 (1985): 342–4.

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Index

Allen, Charles 37 Aquinas, Thomas 12, 39–40, 52, 83, 84, 86, 88, 151, 186, 249, 277 Auerbach, Erich 11, 16, 117, 119 Barrett, Lee 38 Barth, Karl (see also Frei, Hans: typology, categories, Type Four) 3–4, 6, 7, 8, 10–11, 13, 14, 22, 23–4, 28–9, 39, 40, 44, 48, 49, 52, 58, 90, 102–7, 109–11, 129, 133–4, 138–42, 144, 150, 165, 188, 192–3, 195–8, 205, 209, 214–25, 231–2, 236–8, 245, 247, 249, 251–2, 254–60, 263–76 Berger, Peter 17, 59, 67–8 Boston University 3 Brunner, Emil 3, 144 Buckley, James J. 19 Bultmann, Rudolf 21, 102, 110, 144, 247 Burrell, David 163–4, 166 Busch, Eberhard 23 Calhoun, Robert Lowry 5, 9, 13, 144–5, 248 Calvin, John 47 Chicago, The University of, and the “Chicago School” 3, 19, 21, 35, 36, 41 Childs, Brevard 10, 11, 28, 31 Christian, William 9, 17

cognitive-propositional model. See Lindbeck, George: cognitivepropositional model Comstock, Gary 35 Cone, James 13 Crites, Stephen 30 cultural-linguistic model. See Lindbeck, George: cultural-linguistic model Dalferth, Ingolf 280 Davidson, Donald 53 Daly, Mary 14 Dawson, John 47 “death of God” theologies 62, 159, 194 deism 120–1 De Certeau, Michel 276–8 De Lubac, Henri 202, 271 Duns Scotus 9 Dupre, Louis 45 Ebeling, Gerhard 29 Ellingsen, Mark 31 empiricism 120 Erlangen School 159 experiential-expressivist model. See Lindbeck, George: experientialexpressivist model extratextuality. See Lindbeck, George: extratextuality Farley, Edward 20 Farrer, Austin 5–6, 7, 192–3, 202, 238

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Feuerbach, Ludwig 15, 194 Ford, David 35, 38–9, 46, 90, 246, 248 Fowl, Stephen 47 Frei, Hans biblical hermeneutics 15–16, 22, 26–7, 48, 101, 111–28 Christology 7, 10–11, 15–16, 23, 101–28, 142–7, 189–90, 193–205, 206, 217, 240–1, 244, 246–7, 254, 256–61, 264, 268 “accessibility” 101, 104–5 “materialism” 101–104 “teaching and acts” 101, 105–8 and historical criticism 44, 110–11, 118, 120–8, 139 legacy 45–53 life and thought, overview of 6–7, 9–11, 15–16, 18, 22–7, 31–32, 40–1, 43–6 pneumatology 256, 262–76, 278–9 typology 24–5, 40–1, 48, 128–47, 193, 195–239 academic–ecclesial axis 207–17 ad hoc versus systematic correlation 150–2, 192, 210, 213–17, 218, 225–39, 252–4, 256, 260 apologetic versus dogmatic orientation 150–2, 192, 195, 210, 217–25, 254 categories: Type One (Kaufman) 25, 129, 132, 136, 137, 206, 208, 210–17, 233, 238; Type Two (Tracy) 25, 129–35, 137, 206, 210–17, 225–39; Type Three (Schleiermacher) 25, 129–32, 137–42, 206, 210–17, 220, 223–4, 225–39, 254, 267–8; Type Four (Barth) 129–33, 137–42, 210–17, 220, 223–4, 228, 233–9, 254, 256, 267–8; Type Five (Phillips) 25, 129, 132–3, 135–7, 142, 208, 210–17, 238 perspectival axis 207–17 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 16, 22, 165, 200

Geertz, Clifford 17, 18, 64, 67–9, 171–2, 185–6, 187, 209 Gerrish, Brian 38, 164, 168–9, 231, 233 Gilson, Etienne 8, 9 Gogarten, Friedrich 110, 144 Gore, Charles 6 grammary, analogy of. See Lindbeck, George: grammar, analogy of Gunton, Colin 45 Gustafson, James 9, 31, 36–7, 42, 275–6 Gutierrez, Gustavo 14 Hartt, Julian 5–6, 13, 30 Harvard University 3, 19 Harvey, Van 23, 109–10, 194 Hastings, Adrian 20 Hauerwas, Stanley 14, 30, 36–8, 44, 46, 48, 49–50 Hegel, G.W.F. 7, 25, 206, 215, 231, 235, 272 historical criticism. See Frei, Hans: and historical criticism Holmer, Paul 10, 31 Hume, David 23, 194 Hunsinger, George 48 intratextuality. See Lindbeck, George: intratextuality Jackson, Timothy 38 Jeanrod, Werner 36 Johnson, Luke Timothy 47 Jones, Serene 51 Kamitsuka, David 51–2 Kant, Immanuel 25, 107, 200, 206, 270 Kaufman, Gordon (see also Frei, Hans: typology, categories, Type One) 20, 21, 25, 29, 129, 209, 275–6 Keifert, Patrick 35 Kelsey, David 11, 13, 14, 25–6, 27, 28–29, 31, 38, 59, 63, 67, 90, 95, 155, 188 Kierkegaard, Søren 146, 260, 281 King, Martin Luther 13, 60 Kuhn, Thomas 13, 17, 18, 27, 63–4, 188

i nde x Lash, Nicholas 45, 163–4 Lessing, G.E. 25 Lindbeck, George cognitive-propositional model 32, 71, 90, 151, 156–7, 158–60, 163–4 cultural-linguistic model 32, 48, 64, 65–100, 151–2, 156, 157–60, 170 ecclesiology 9, 17–18, 39, 42, 48, 58–62, 152–60, 240, 243–4, 276–8 experiential-expressivist model 29, 32, 34, 38, 71, 90, 151–2, 156–7, 158–71 extratextuality 40, 99, 151–2, 160, 170, 177–8, 179 first-order speech 73, 81, 84-85, 92–3 futurology 91, 96, 99 grammar, analogy of 27, 68–80, 85 intelligibility 91, 96–8, 99 intratextuality 28, 29, 38, 39, 42, 48–9, 53, 58, 65, 90–9, 151–2, 159–60, 170, 171–90, 237, 242, 244, 251–2, 260, 279 reality-encompassing 93–5, 171–4 scriptural 93–5, 171, 173–4 semiotic 93–5, 171, 174 legacy 45–53 life and thought, overview of 8–9, 12–13, 16–19, 27–30, 32–41, 42–6 religion, definition of 81 rule, analogy of 71–80 second-order speech 73, 81, 85, 92–3 on secularism 58–62 soteriology 64, 152–55, 161–2 truth, theory of religious 38–9, 80–9 categorial 81–5, 86–9, 188 intrasystematic 81–4 ontological 81–4, 87 Lonergan, Bernard 17–18, 21, 63, 64, 78, 163–4, 166, 185 Loughlin, Gerard 47, 50

295

Louth, Andrew 45 Luther, Martin 9, 47 MacIntyre, Alasdair 48 Mangina, Jospeh 48 Maritain, Jacques 8 Marshall, Bruce 19, 32, 39, 44, 52–3, 86–7, 89, 188 McClendon, James 30 Meeks, Wayne 39 Metz, Johann Baptist 30 Milbank, John 49–51 Moltmann, Jürgen 15, 134, 260 Neo-orthodoxy 3, 5, 6, 10–11, 14, 19, 21 Neo-Scholasticism 12 Neo-Thomism 5 New Criticism 26 Niebuhr, H. Richard 3–4, 6, 7, 10, 16, 22, 23, 30, 41, 101–5, 109–11, 127, 138, 144, 179, 201, 218, 245–8, 252, 254–9, 263–76 Niebuhr, Reinhold 3, 138, 144, 259 Nouvelle Théologie 14, 50 Ochs, Peter 47, 50 O’Donovan, Oliver 45 Ogden, Schubert 21, 96, 226 ordinary language philosophy 6, 10, 11, 16, 152–3 Outka, Gene 14 Overbeck, Franz 195 Pannenberg, Wolfhart 64 Phillips, D.Z. (see also Frei: Hans, typology, categories, Type Five) 129, 135, 136, 146, 209, 251 Placher, William 14, 34–5, 36, 42, 44, 46, 50 postliberalism, definition of 1–2 Radical Orthodoxy 49–51 Rahner, Karl 12, 18, 63, 64, 78, 152–3, 154, 163–4, 185 Ricoeur, Paul 21, 22, 134, 200, 209, 226, 227 Ritschl, Albrecht 144, 246

296

i nde x

Robinson, J.A.T. 14 Rogers, Eugene 48, 51 rule, analogy of. See Lindbeck, George: rule, analogy of Ryle, Gilbert 11, 16, 69, 103, 200 Schleiermacher, Friedrich (see also Frei, Hans: typology, categories, Type Three) 7, 16, 25, 29, 38, 40–1, 48, 53, 106, 113, 129, 138–42, 150–2, 163, 164, 168–70, 193, 195–8, 206, 209–10, 214–33, 234, 236–8, 246, 251–2, 258, 265, 268 Schner, George 45 Schweitzer, Albert 110 Second Vatican Council 12, 13 Seitz, Christopher 47 Sonderegger, Kate 51 Strauss, David Friedrich 23, 24–25, 109–10, 140, 191, 193–8 Tanner, Kathryn 19, 52, 119, 145–6, 280 Temple, William 6 Thiemann, Ronald 19, 32, 35, 44, 46 Teilhard De Chardin, Pierre 276 Tilley, Terrence 38, 178, 180–3, 189, 260, 281 Tillich, Paul 3, 11, 21, 29, 102, 144, 206, 234 Tracy, David (see also Frei, Hans: typology, categories, Type Two) 20, 21–2, 23, 24, 25, 28, 34, 36, 64, 129, 134–5, 144, 163–8, 206, 209–10, 215, 225–34, 237 transcendental Thomism 6, 18 Troeltsch, Ernst 4, 22, 23, 109–11, 194, 196, 218, 246, 269–76

truth, categorial. See Lindbeck, George: truth, theory of religious, categorial truth, intrasystematic. See Lindbeck, George: truth, theory of religious, intrasystematic truth, ontological. See Lindbeck, George: truth, theory of religious, ontological typology. See Frei, Hans: typology Union Theological Seminary 3, 19 Vignaux, Paul 9 Volf, Miroslav 178, 179–80, 182–3 Weber, Max 209 Webster, John 45, 48 Wicker, Brian 30 Wieman, Henry Nelson 3 Wiles, Maurice 280 Williams, Rowan 38, 45, 51, 178–9, 180, 182–3, 244–5, 259–60, 276, 279–80 Willimon, William 37 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 10, 11, 16, 18, 22, 27, 31, 38, 64, 74, 77, 113, 124, 136, 162, 186, 187, 198–200, 205 Wood, Charles 14, 16, 22, 26, 31, 38, 119 Yale Divinity School and the “Yale School” 1–6, 9–10, 12, 13, 14, 19, 30–2, 35–8, 41, 45, 50–2, 54–5, 150, 238, 242, 246, 248 Yoder, John Howard 30, 48 Zorn, Hans 38

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