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Unstuck from Yale: Theological Method after Lindbeck

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Brad J. Kallenberg
Brad J. Kallenberg
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Extract

William abraham criticizes the Yale school of theology for its ‘systematic cultivation of studied obscurantism.’ Abraham does not doubt the intellectual gifts of the Yale theologians, but he chides them for failing to tell us something definitive about God. ‘One hopes for such minimal things from a theologian. After all, that has always been a central element of any serious theology.’

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , May 1997 , pp. 191 - 218
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1997

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References

1 Abraham, William J., ‘still Stuck at Yale’, review of Unapologetic Theology: A Christian Voice in a Pluralistic ConversationGoogle Scholar, by Placher, William C., In The Reformed Journal, 40, no. 8 (1990): p. 19Google Scholar.

2 Nancey Murphy has suggested that the debate between liberals and conservatives is largely the product of their respective allegiance to expressivist and representational models of language. Murphy, Nancey, ‘Textual Relativism, Philosophy of Language, and the baptist Vision’, in Theology Without Foundations: Religious Practice and the Future of Theological Truth, ed. Hauerwas, Stanley, Murphy, Nancey, and Nation, Mark (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1994), pp. 245–270Google Scholar.

3 Theophus Smith charges Lindbeck with lingering reliance upon cognitivist or experiential-expressivist presuppositions because he has failed to exchange explanation for kerygmatic presentation. Cf. ‘Ethnography-As-Theology: Inscribing the African American Story’, in Theology Without Foundations: Religious Practice and the Future of Theological Truth, ed. Hauerwas, Stanley, Murphy, Nancey, and Nation, Mark (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1994), pp. 117–139Google Scholar; esp. p.134.

4 Lindbeck, George A., The Nature of Doctrine (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1984), p. 32Google Scholar.

5 Ibid., p. 18.

6 Ibid., pp. 32–3.

7 Ibid., pp. 41–2.

8 Ibid., pp. 52–55.

9 Ibid., p. 83, emphasis added.

10 Ibid., p. 82, emphasis added.

11 Murphy, Nancey and McClendon, James Wm. Jr., ‘Distinguishing Modern and Postmodern Theologies’, Modern Theologyb, no. 3 (1989): pp. 191–214CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Lindbeck, Doctrine, pp. 113–123; cf. also his excursus on ‘truth’, pp. 63–72.

13 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, trans. Anscombe, G. E. M. (New York: Macmillan, 1958)Google Scholar, §373. Lindbeck is particularly indebted to Paul Holmer's reading of Wittgenstein on this point. See Holmer's, essay ‘Wittgenstein and Theology’, in New Essays on Religious Language, ed. High, Dallas M. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 25–35Google Scholar and his book The Grammar of Faith (San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row Publishers, 1978).Google Scholar

14 Lindbeck, , Doctrine, pp. 60–61Google Scholar.

15 This point is disputed. See, for example, Nicholas Lash, ‘How Large is a “Language Game”?’, Theology 87 (1984): pp. 19–28.

16 PI§§54, 198.

17 PI,§54.

18 Lindbeck, , Doctrine, p. 19.Google Scholar

19 Ibid., p. 114. For a good explanation of Lindbeck's approach see Barrett, Lee C., ‘Theology as Grammar: Regulative Principles or Paradigms and Practices,’ Modern Theology, no. 2 (1988): pp. 155–172.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 Phillips argues that the reality if God cannot be known in a vacuum but only within a religious context. See Phillips, D. Z., ‘On Really Believing’, in Wittgenstein and Religion, ed. Phillips, D. Z. (London, UK: St. Martin's Press, 1993), pp. 33–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and ‘Religious Beliefs and Language Games’, pp. 121–42.

21 Holmer, ‘Wittgenstein and Theology’.

22 Peter Winch states, ‘Religious uses of language…are not descriptions of “an order of reality” distinct from the earthly life with which we are familiar.…These uses of language do, however, have an application in what religious people say and do in the course of their life on earth; and this is where their “relation to reality” is to be sought.’ Cited in Incandela, Joseph M., ‘The Appropriation of Wittgenstein's Work by Philosophers of Religion: Towards a Re-evaluation and an End’, Religious Studies 21, no. 4 (1985): pp. 457–474CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Quotation from pp. 464–5.

23 Lindbeck, , Doctrine, p. 65.Google Scholar

24 PI, §§38, 89, 97. By this phrase Wittgenstein condemned the sort of move made by philosophers such as Russell, Frege, and Tarski who thought they had identified a class of words (e.g., corresponds, represents, etc.) which depicted how ordinary language was governed, as it were, from above.

25 Lindbeck, , Doctrine, p. 68Google Scholar. Lindbeck asserts, ‘one rarely if ever succeeds in making affirmation with ontological import’. Ibid., p. 69.

26 Ibid., pp. 106–8.

27 Ibid., p. 67.

28 Cf. Incandela, ‘The Appropriation of Wittgenstein's Work by Philosophers of Religion: Towards a Re-evaluation and an End’.

29 Austin, J. L., How ToDo Things With Words, ed. Urmson, J. O. and Sbisa, Marina, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962, 1975)Google Scholar.

30 Lindbeck apparently misreads Austin when he refers to Austin's notion of a performative use of speech as if there were other uses speech could have. Lindbeck, Doctrine, p. 65.

31 Maclntyre, Alasdair, Whosejustice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), p. 358.Google Scholar

32 Strawson, P. F., ‘Truth’, in Logico-Linguistic Papers (London: Methuen, 1977), pp. 190–213Google Scholar.

33 Cf. Austin, J. L., ‘Other Minds’, in Philosophical Papers (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1961), pp. 76–116 and ‘Truth,’ pp. 117–33.Google Scholar

34 Austin, J. L., ‘Truth’, in Philosophical Papers (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1961), pp. 117–133Google Scholar. See esp. pp. 121–6.

35 These Austinian themes received strong expression as early as 1975. See McClendon, James Wm. Jr. and Smith, James M., Convictions: Defusing Religious Relativism, New, revised ed. (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1994; reprint. Originally published as Understanding Religious Convictions. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975)Google Scholar.

36 James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience, The Modern Library (New York: Random House, 1902), p. 423.Google Scholar

37 Russell, Bertrand, Introduction to Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Wittgenstein, Ludwig (London and New York: Routledge, [1921] 1992), p. 8.Google Scholar

38 Malcolm, Norman, ‘Wittgenstein, Ludwig Josef Johann’, in Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edwards, Paul (New York, NY: Macmillan Press, 1967), pp. 327–340.Google Scholar Cf. p. 330b.

39 Cf. PI, §§169–70, 191, 197–8.

40 Cf.PI,§30;cf.§§28, 33.

41 PI, §§33–6.

42 Rorty, Richard, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis, MN: The University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. xviii.Google Scholar

43 PI, §421. Cf. also §§43, 569.

44 Rorty, , Consequences, p. xix.Google Scholar

45 Ibid., p.xx.

46 Kripke's uncareful exegesis of PI §§ 189–201 was the content of a lecture originally given at the 25th anniversary of Wittgenstein's death called ‘Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language’ and is contained in a book by the same title (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).

47 I.e., those languages which arise in isolation. Wittgenstein debunks the notion of private language in PI, §§ 243–264. The gist of his argument is that every invention of a private language depends on the prior possession of some other socially generated language.

48 cf. PI, §§19–21.

49 PI,§19.

50 Cited in Rorty, Consequences, p. xx. Wittgenstein himself does not rule out the possibility of animals thinking but seems to say that animal thought would likewise have a ‘linguistic’ shape to it insofar as it must arise wthin the animals' form of life. Dr. Doolittle cannot translate from ‘lionese’ to English because his comprehension of ‘lionese’ is limited by inability to share the lions' form of life. Wittgenstein writes ‘If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.’ PI, p. 223.

51 Fiser, Karen, ‘Privacy and Pain’, Philosophical Investigations9, no. 1 (1986): pp. 17Google Scholar. Quotation taken from pp. 6–7.

52 Lindbeck, , Doctrine, p. 37.Google Scholar

53 Rorty, Richard, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, UK; Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

54 PI,§23.

55 Rorty, Richard, ‘Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth’, in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 145–146. Emphasis added.Google Scholar

56 Cf. Rorty's, Richard introductory chapters in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1–20Google Scholar; and The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, [1967], 1992), pp. 1–53Google Scholar.

57 Metaphysical reductionism is the belief that wholes are nothing but the sum of their parts, a view which implies, further, that the parts have ontological priority. To follow this conclusion to its logical end, only subatomic particles are really real. Murphy and McClendon see metaphysical reductionism as another central feature of the modern period. See Murphy and McClendon, ‘Distinguishing Modern and Postmodern Theologies’.

58 See Peacocke, Arthur R., ‘Reductionism: A Review of the Epistemological Issues and Their Relevance to Biology and the Problem of Consciousness’, Zygon 11, no. 4 (1976): pp. 307–334.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

59 Peacocke, , Creation and the World of Science— (Bampton Lecture Series; 1978) (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 117, 171Google Scholar.

60 Barth, Karl, Credo (New York, NY: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1962), pp. 30–31.Google Scholar

61 Kierkegaard, Søren, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. Swenson, David F. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941) p. 296.Google Scholar

62 The challenge I allude to is, of course, Karl Barth's.

63 Barth, , Credo, p. 34.Google Scholar

64 Cf. Peacocke, Arthur R., Theology for a Scientific Age: Being and Becoming—Natural and Divine (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 44–61, 136–163Google Scholar.

65 Little, Daniel, Varieties of Social Explanation: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Social Science (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), pp. 189–190Google Scholar.

66 Cp. Rom. 8:28.

67 We may never be able to specify a mechanism of divine intervention since our access to causal forces must be viewed from the side of the ‘parts’. It is precisely Peacocke's point that top-down language implies causal forces cannot be specified from the side of the parts.

68 Psalm 22:3. This passage is translated variously. I am not unaware that some commentators argue vigorously for a ‘praises of Israel’ to be read as a metonymy for the temple. In addition, although the participle can carry the sense of ‘enthronement’, I prefer the translation ‘inhabit’ not simply because it nicely illustrates my point, but also because it is statistically more prevalent.

69 See works by Ernst Käsemann, G. B. Caird, Hendrikus Berkhof, and Markus Barth referred to in O'Brien, P. T., ‘Principalities and Powers and Their Relationship to Structures’, The Reformed Theological Review 45, no. 1 (Jan-Apr 1981), pp. 1–10Google Scholar. For treatment of the church as a ‘powerful practice’ in the same vein see: McClendon, James Wm. Jr., Ethics: Systematic Theology Volume 1 (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1986), pp. 173–177.Google Scholar

70 It is not essential to my argument to distinguish one set of top-down causes from another. I think both that the believing community has top-down influence on members and that God has top-down access to the community.

71 Hick, John, Evil and the God of Love (London: Collins, 1968)Google Scholar.

72 Zizioulas, J., Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1985)Google Scholar.

73 Buber, Martin, I and Thou, trans. Kaufmann, Walter (New York, NY: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1970)Google Scholar.

74 Lash, Nicholas, Easter in Ordinary: Reflections on Human Experience and the Knowledge of God (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

75 For a helpful introduction to this biographical approach to theology see McClendon, James Wm. Jr., Biography as Theology: How Life Stories Can RemakeToday's Theology (Philadelphia, PA: Trinity Press International, 1990), pp. 1–23Google Scholar.

76 Murphy, Nancey, Theology in the Age of Scientific Reasoning (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

77 Smith, Theophus Harold, Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America, Religion in America (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar. For a helpful introduction to this method see Smith's formerly cited essay, ‘Elhnography-as- Theology: Inscribing the African American Sacred Story’.