340 - Theology and Dialogue: Essays in Conversation with George Lindbeck

Theology and Dialogue: Essays in Conversation with George Lindbeck

Edited By Bruce D. Marshall

Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1990. 302 Pp. $29.95.

As a belated yet appreciative student of George Lindbeck's, I welcome the Festschrift assembled by hislifelong colleagues and students. The essays reflect the full range of his broad interests: his doctoral studies of Duns Scotus and that theologian's enduring engagement with St. Thomas, his focus on the church in its present secular context, his engagement with religious pluralism in the form of conversation with and about Judaism, and, most prominently, his use of social science methods to rethink doctrine, a practice resulting from his tireless service to Catholic-Lutheran dialogue.

The volume's contributions may be grouped by where they are located in regard to Lindbeck's work. The lead essay by David Kelsey and that of the volume's editor, Bruce Marshall, stand behind Lindbeck in that they seek to meet the criticisms of sectarianism and fideism leveled at Lindbeck's suggestion that doctrines be thought of as second-order rules for religious discourse rather than as either propositional truth claims or expressions of universal religious experience. Kelsey defends the public and ecumenical orientation of Lindbeck's use of the metaphors of grammar and culture to describe religious communities. Marshall develops a content-neutral criterion of "assimilative power" for applying Lindbeck's postliberal imperative that the religious text become the vehicle for absorbing the world, instead of the reverse. In contrast to Kelsey, who defends Lindbeck against the charge of sectarianism, in Marshall's hands, Lindbeck's project appears imperialistic, the objection to which the second half of his essay constitutes a defense. Perhaps, this is because, in his desire to rebut the objection of fideism (that is, that Christian theology can take seriously and be vulnerable to alien forms of discourse and can assimilate itself to them), the norm of assimilative power, shorn of its Christian content, becomes a fresh universal principle by which both Christian and non-Christian discourse is to be judged adequate. Now, the integrity of Christian belief resides in its ability to absorb and to be shaped by extra-Christian thought forms, precisely the apologetic move the postliberal stance was designed to challenge! The essay leaves the reader wondering precisely how the postliberal program differs from the liberal program.

Two other contributions seek to pick up aspects of Lindbeck's proposals and carry them forward. Michael Root uses Lindbeck's cultural-linguistic suggestion to develop identifiable criteria for judging genuine ecumenical progress and roadblocks. J. A. DiNoia offers a

344 - Theology and Dialogue: Essays in Conversation with George Lindbeck

basis for a theology of world religions in Catholic perspective. Root offers the helpful observation that Lindbeck's use of the term "doctrine" is puzzling because it treats doctrine as second-order language rather than as first-order assertions about God's relation to the world, a puzzlement that Kelsey's piece overlooks, although he notes that doctrines are rarely straightforwardly formulated. Root uses William Christian's distinction between primary and governing doctrines to suggest that Lindbeck's use of "doctrine" designates the latter: talk about how one should undertake talk about God's relation to the world.

Two interlocutors, one Catholic and one Jewish, face Lindbeck by discussing how Lindbeck's work has enriched their own. Here, the fruit of ecumenical and interfaith encounter is evident. David Tracy augments his own "correlational" theology with the now ubiquitous proposals of narrative theology more precisely associated with Hans Frei than with George Lindbeck. And Peter Ochs finds common cause with Lindbeck for what he calls "aftermodern" Jewish thought, successfully both approaching and avoiding the term "postliberal," which was coined by a Christian. It is not clear, however, why or how H. Cohen, M. Kaplan, A. Heschel, M. Buber, E. Fackenheim, or even F. Rosenzweig, generally identified with the modern outlook associated with Kant and Hegel and even American pragmatism (in the case of Kaplan), have now been transmuted into "aftermoderns." The new terms become "curiouser and curiouser."

Finally, there are four essays that engage in what might be called parallel play with Lindbeck. While there may be shared terms or even more substantive common interests, these essays are relatively independent of Lindbeck's work, pursuing the general interests of their authors. These include a technical essay on Duns Scotus and St. Thomas by David Burrell, a posthumous article categorizing types of narrative reading for theology in recent literary criticism by Hans Frei, an essay on power in Christian hierarchical structures by an Anglican bishop, S. W. Sykes, and an intriguing piece on the origins of modern atheism by Nicholas Lash. Lash argues that the modern apologetic move of defending religious claims on philosophic grounds apart from christological and trinitarian claims, beginning in the early seventeenth century, subverted rather than supported modem attempts to prop up religious claims in general.

As with any group of writers, their styles vary widely. Some, like Kelsey and Marshall, require well-focused attention to follow the intricate flow of the arguments, while Tracy, Burrell, Ochs, and Frei, because they turn to narrower topics within their own subfield or language, are not particularly general reader-friendly. Lash, Sykes, Root, and DiNoia, however, are both readable and rewarding.

ELLEN T. CHARRY

Maplewood, NJ