Lindbeck - The Nature Of Doctrine

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Lindbeck (who)

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Post-liberal systematician. Ecumenicist.

Lindbeck was born in 1923 in Luoyang, China, the son of American Lutheran missionaries. Raised in that country and in Korea for the first seventeen years of his life, he was often sickly as a child and found himself often isolated from the world around himself.

He attended Gustavus Adolphus College, graduating with a BA in 1943. He went on to do graduate work at Yale University, receiving his BD in 1946. After his undergraduate work he spent a year at the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies with Étienne Gilson in Toronto then two years at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Études with Paul Vignaux in Paris. He earned his PhD from Yale in 1955 concentrating on medieval studies, delivering a dissertation on Franciscan theologian John Duns Scotus.

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Lindbeck (context)

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Lindbeck is driven by explaining the agreement among historically distinct doctrinal positions, which normal doctrinal approaches cannot explain.

The liberalizing tendencies of modern theology that base doctrine in immediate inner experience are too relativistic to explain the sharp contrast inherent in different doctrinal situations.

The cognitive approach to doctrine, with its "once true, always true" mentality, cannot explain the agreement evident in ecumenicism.

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Lindbeck (thesis)

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Doctrine viewed as rules of discourse used by a religious community enables intra-religious ecumenicism in the face of contradictory doctrinal formulations.

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Lindbeck (Key Concepts)

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Religion: like a language, a "comprehensive interpretive schemes, usually embodied in myths or narratives and heavily ritualized, which structure human experience and understanding of self and world" (32-33)

Doctrine: rules of religion like grammar is to language. They regulate how people talk and act within a religion.

Religious Practice: performance is the foundation of religion and doctrine

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Lindbeck (major influences)

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Clifford Geertz-cultural anthropologist
Ludwig Wittenstein-philosopher of langauge

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Lindbeck (Truth)

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3 types of truth:

Categorical truth: concepts fundamental to making something (e.g., doctrine) intelligible. Categories come from myth narratives of religion and are believed by the community to correspond to reality.

Intrasystematic truth: the appropriate use of the right categories, where right means adequate. Lindbeck explains that “utterances are intrasystematically true when they cohere with the total relevant context, which, in the case of a religion when viewed in cultural-linguistic terms, is not only other utterances but also the correlative forms of life.” The language of a religion must conform to the practice of the religion.

Ontological truth: correspondence of something to reality created by the coherent performance within a particular system. Ontological truth requires both the categories that allow for meaning and the performance that provides coherence within a religious system.

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Lindbeck (Trinity, Christ, etc.)

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The truthfulness of all doctrines depends on meeting certain conditions:

1) The community in which the doctrine is asserted must possess the categories that make doctrine meaningful.

2) There must be coherence between the language of the doctrine and the action associated with the doctrine. If the doctrine authorizes an action consistent with the overall religion, it is true.

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Lindbeck (CLT and ecumenicism)

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Just as grammar changes in a culture over time, so doctrine changes over time. Groups that were historically distinct doctrinally can experience unity through a greater understanding of how doctrine functions in religious communities.