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Another nature of doctrine: George Lindbeck, Kathryn Tanner and Christian identities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2021

Ed Watson
Ed Watson*
Affiliation:
Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Email: edward.watson@yale.edu
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Abstract

Theorists such as Stuart Hall have problematised the idea that identity is something that remains essentially the same across time. Since doctrine has been cast as that which safeguards Christian identity, this provokes the question: what role can doctrine play if this is the case? Critiquing George Lindbeck's The Nature of Doctrine in light of Kathryn Tanner's work on rules suggests that doctrine cannot regulate, constitute or generate the necessary conditions for Christian identity. Doctrine can, however, still play a role in generating Christian meaning without regulating identity by determining how concepts are formed in Christian community.

Keywords

doctrineStuart HallGeorge LindbeckrulesKathryn Tanner
Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 74 , Issue 3 , August 2021 , pp. 262 - 273
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Hall, Stuart, Familiar Stranger: A Life between Two Islands (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), p. 16Google Scholar.

2 Ibid., p. 63.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 Hütter, Reinhard, Suffering Divine Things: Theology as Church Practice (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2000), p. 57Google Scholar; cited in Helmer, Christine, Theology and the End of Doctrine (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2014), p. 16Google Scholar.

6 Helmer, End of Doctrine, p. 23.

7 Cf. Helmer, End of Doctrine, pp. 149–50.

8 For recent critical analyses of Lindbeck, see Mike Higton, ‘Reconstructing The Nature of Doctrine’, Modern Theology 30/1 (2014), pp. 1–31; and Simeon Zahl, ‘On the Affective Salience of Doctrines’, Modern Theology 31/3 (2015), pp. 428–44. Hugh Nicholson also stages an encounter between Lindbeck and Tanner in ‘The Political Nature of Doctrine: A Critique of Lindbeck in Light of Recent Scholarship’, Heythrop Journal 48/6 (2007), pp. 858–77. Nicholson focuses on what doctrine should be used for in the political sphere, rather than what doctrine is in its own terms. Even though this latter question is related to questions of use, this is an importantly different question to the one pursued here.

9 George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984), p. 16.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid., p. 18.

12 Ibid., p. 19.

13 Ibid., p. 48.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid., p. 74. This claim is nuanced by a distinction between ‘operative’ and ‘formal’/‘official’ doctrines, within which ‘operative’ doctrines are those in fact ‘necessary to communal identity’ (Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine, p. 74) whilst ‘official’ doctrines are functionally inoperative in this regard. It is unclear whether or not the ‘necessity’ here is that of being (a) properly or truly Christian, or (b) Christian at all. There are passages which suggest that Lindbeck holds certain doctrines to be constitutive of Christian identity per se, such that if one rejects them, then one is no longer Christian. This is a substantially harder argument to maintain, however, and runs counter to other impulses in his thought. I am therefore going to read Lindbeck as concerned with the conditions of proper or true Christian identity – not what it is to be Christian at all, but what it is to be within the unified bounds of Christianity whilst still allowing for ecumenical variety.

16 Cf. Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine, p. 62.

17 Ibid., p. 96.

18 Ibid., pp. 84–5.

19 Ibid., p. 96.

20 Ibid., p. 79.

21 Ibid., p. 84.

22 Ibid., p. 81.

23 Ibid., p. 95.

24 Though not central to this paper's argument, it worth noting that there seems to be a contradiction between Lindbeck's claims that (a) doctrines are often ‘exemplary instantiations or paradigms of the application of rules’, and (b) that ‘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’. In the former, doctrines answer to different identity conditions than the rules whose applications they exemplify (i.e., different doctrines may instantiate the same rule). In the latter, however, the rules determine the identity of the doctrine, such that if two formulations instantiate the same rule they therefore count as expressing the same doctrine. If this is a contradiction, Lindbeck cannot coherently maintain the distinction between ‘rule’ and ‘doctrine’ necessary for his account of how doctrines can preserve their identity across diverse formulations.

25 Kathryn Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1988), p. 12.

26 Ibid., p. 15.

27 Ibid., p. 17.

28 Ibid., p. 5.

29 Kathryn Tanner, Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1997), p. 139. ‘Post-liberals’ here includes Lindbeck.

30 Tanner, God and Creation, p. 41.

31 Ibid., p. 12.

32 Ibid., p. 50.

33 Ibid., p. 12.

34 Cf. ibid., pp. 29, 49.

35 Ibid., p. 18.

36 Ibid., p. 27.

37 Ibid., p. 26.

38 Ibid.

39 Ibid., In Tanner's extended words, ‘Christians do not construct … from the bottom up what they say about God and Jesus or the nature of things in relation to God; instead, they use in odd ways whatever language-games they already happen to speak’ (Tanner, Theories of Culture, p. 113). Perhaps the easiest way of articulating this is by noting that the terms used in scripture are not, and almost by definition cannot be, distinctively Christian – they are terms used by other cultures, Jewish and Gentile, through which Christians begin to reach certain strange beliefs.

40 There is a slight tension here with Tanner's appeal to whether something is ‘authentically’ Christian. This might represent a contradiction between God and Creation and Theories of Culture. It is also possible, however, that the concept of being ‘authentically’ Christian can be disengaged from the notion of necessary conditions for Christianity, insofar as ‘authentic’ entails a degree of self-coherence that isn't tied to what the ‘self’ in question necessarily is. This would be consistent with her emphasis in The Politics of God on the normative but non-deterministic character of Christian belief. Cf. Kathryn Tanner, The Politics of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992), pp. 7, 18.

41 Tanner, God and Creation, p. 22. Tanner is here working on the basis of Stephan Körner's ‘The Impossibility of Transcendental Deductions’, The Monist 51 (1967), pp. 317–31.

42 Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine, p. 18.

43 Tanner, Politics of God, p. 45.

44 Tanner, Theories of Culture, p. 139.

45 Ibid.

46 Ibid.

47 I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for noting this possibility.

48 Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, p. 113.

49 Tanner, God and Creation, p. 26.

50 Tanner, Theories of Culture, p. 113.

51 Ibid.

52 Hall, Familiar Stranger, p. 16.

53 Tanner, Theories of Culture, p. 67.

54 Ibid., p. 114.

55 For a more thorough overview of identity writ large, see Jorge Larraín Ibañez, ‘The Concept of Identity’, in Antonio Gomez-Moriana and Mercedes Duran-Cogan (eds), National Identities and Sociopolitical Changes in Latin America (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 1–29.

56 Helmer, End of Doctrine, p. 112.

57 Ibid., p. 168.

58 Ibid., p. 126.

59 Cf. Gottlöb Frege, ‘Sense and Reference’, The Philosophical Review, 57/3 (May 1948), pp. 209–30.

60 See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, rev. 4th edn (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), §§28–32, where Wittgenstein problematises the idea that ostensive definition (defining a term by showing what it refers to) can fix the meaning of a term. ‘Concepts’ in Helmer's sense could only have their meaning fixed by fixing their referents, which leaves the how and the background of this reference – both of which are essential to meaning – underdetermined. This relates to terms which refer to publicly available phenomena. Cf. also Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §§293–304, which problematises the idea that concepts for non-public phenomena, such as faith, can mean what they mean by virtue of their referential usage.

61 Hall, Stuart, Cultural Theory, 1983 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), p. 121Google Scholar.

62 Ibid.

63 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Grammar (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1974), p. 75Google Scholar.

64 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 123.

65 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Remarks on the Foundation of Mathematics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), p. 39Google Scholar.

66 I am extremely grateful to Eboni Marshall Turman, David Kelsey, Brendan Kolb, Wendy Mallette, Luke Zerra, and Samuel Ernest, who read early drafts of this paper and improved it immeasurably with their generous and critical feedback. I am also grateful to Kimberly Randall, Linn Tonstad, Kathryn Tanner, Paul Anthony Daniels and Emily Theus, conversation with whom was integral to the development of this argument. Finally, my thanks to the two anonymous readers for the Scottish Journal of Theology for both their time and the care with which they read this article.