George Lindbeck and The Israel of God: Scripture, Ecclesiology, and Ecumenism (Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue) 3030747565, 9783030747565

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George Lindbeck and The Israel of God Scripture, Ecclesiology, and Ecumenism

Shaun C. Brown

Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue Series Editor Mark Chapman Ripon College University of Oxford Oxford, UK

Building on the important work of the Ecclesiological Investigations International Research Network to promote ecumenical and inter-faith encounters and dialogue, the Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue series publishes scholarship on such engagement in relation to the past, present, and future. It gathers together a richly diverse array of voices in monographs and edited collections that speak to the challenges, aspirations, and elements of ecumenical and interfaith conversation. Through its publications, the series allows for the exploration of new ways, means, and methods of advancing the wider ecumenical cause with renewed energy for the twenty-first century. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14561

Shaun C. Brown

George Lindbeck and The Israel of God Scripture, Ecclesiology, and Ecumenism

Shaun C. Brown First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) Garland, TX, USA

ISSN 2634-6591     ISSN 2634-6605 (electronic) Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue ISBN 978-3-030-74756-5    ISBN 978-3-030-74757-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74757-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

This book began as my PhD dissertation at Wycliffe College and the University of Toronto. First of all, I want to thank my supervisor, Professor Joseph Mangina, as well as my other TST committee members, Professors Ephraim Radner and John Berkman, for their encouragement, feedback, and support throughout my PhD program. Thanks to my University of Toronto examiner, Professor David Novak, and external examiner, Professor James J. Buckley, for their willingness to join the committee and their helpful feedback. I want to thank the libraries at the University of Toronto, Christ the King Seminary, Emmanuel Christian Seminary at Milligan University, and Yale Divinity School for assisting me in tracking down George Lindbeck’s work. In particular, I want to thank the Special Collections staff at Yale Divinity School for accommodating me on my visit. I also want to thank David Kiger, theological librarian at Emmanuel, for digitizing the cassette tapes of the Kershner Memorial Lectures that Lindbeck gave at the Seminary in 1988. Thanks to Dr. Philip Kenneson for informing me of the lectures’ existence. I have had the opportunity to present some of this material at academic conferences. I want to thank the organizers of the Ecclesiological Investigations Unit at the American Academy of Religion; Lonergan on the Edge; the Canadian-American Theological Association Interdisciplinary Conference; the International Conference for Collaborative Philosophy, Theology, and Ministry; the Centre for Advanced Research in Catholic Thought at King’s Western University; and the Toronto School of Theology Graduate Students Association Conference. I also want to thank v

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my co-chair in the Ecclesiology and Social Ethics Study Group at the Stone-Campbell Journal Conference, Kate Blakely, as well as one of the co-founders of the group, Dr. John Nugent, for allowing me to present a synopsis of my dissertation at the 2018 conference. Thanks also go to Dr. John Mark Hicks for helping me better understand Alexander Campbell’s perspective on the Jews and how my work relates to my own tradition. I want to thank my parents, Frank and Betsy Brown and Cindy and Daniel Merkovsky, for supporting me throughout my education and as I’ve revised this book for publication. Last but not least, I want to thank my wife, Sherri Lynn O’Neal Brown, for her support as I have worked on this project, as well as our daughters, Adalyn Hope and Emilia Annalee. While I worked on this dissertation, George Lindbeck died on January 8, 2018. While I never had the chance to meet him, I have spent the past 15 years reading and benefiting from his writing, and the past 5 years delving into his work more deeply as I prepared to write this book. I also benefited from the opportunity to study with two of his students, Professors Mangina and Radner. I feel as though I have had the opportunity to study with him indirectly. While I was a student at Johnson University, those of us in the Stone-­ Campbell Movement commemorated the bicentennial of the Cane Ridge Revival and the writing of The Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery, as well as the centennial of the division between the Disciples and Churches of Christ. Then while I was in seminary at Emmanuel, we celebrated the bicentennial of Thomas Campbell’s Declaration and Address. These commemorations instilled in me a passion for Christian unity, and I was drawn to the “free church catholicism” of William Robinson, Frederick Kershner, and Dean E. Walker through professors at both institutions. Close to the time I finished my dissertation, I heard Lindbeck’s voice for the first time through the recordings of his lectures at Emmanuel, and was moved as I heard him say this of Alexander Campbell: “Whatever the problems that his vision of Christian unity had, … he did have one thing emphatically right. His vision of unity made the Bible central, and any authentic and worthwhile effort to bring Christians together must follow his example in that respect.” I dedicate this work to Lindbeck’s memory.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Method and Overview   5 A Note on Supersessionism  11 2 Church and Israel in Historical Perspective 17 Scripture  18 The First Three Centuries  19 Christendom  23 The Reformation  25 Modernity  27 Post-Holocaust  32 3 The Catholic Protestant: Vatican II and the Church and Israel in Parallel 37 Background to Vatican II  39 The Council  41 Types of Ecclesiologies  44 Church and Israel in Parallel  50 Diaspora Church  60 Conclusion  65

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Contents

4 The Role of Scripture in the Christian ­Community 67 Retrieval  68 Narrative  77 Intratextuality  88 Consensus 100 Conclusion 104 5 The Old Testament as Ecclesiological Textbook107 Election 115 Law and Gospel 123 Conclusion 127 6 Jesus the Christ as Israel’s Only Fulfillment129 Jesus the Messiah and Son of God 130 Jesus Christ as Savior and Example 137 The Atonement and Justification 142 Eschatological Fulfillment 146 7 Christian Mission151 Witness 151 Catechesis 162 Cultural Mission? 167 Baptism 169 Holy Spirit 171 Discipleship and Missional Ecclesiology 176 Conclusion 178 8 Further Ecumenical Implications179 Princeton Proposal 180 Consequence 1: Peoplehood 188 Consequence 2: Communal Repentance 189 Consequence 3: The Role of Individuals and Individual Communities 196 Ecclesial Structures 201 The Eucharist 207 The Church as Israel and Other Ecumenical Proposals 211

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9 Conclusion215 How to Read The Nature of Doctrine 217 Areas for Future Research 221 Conclusion 223 Bibliography225 Index243

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything! As for those who will follow this rule—peace be upon them, and mercy, and upon the Israel of God. (Galatians 6:14–16)1

George Lindbeck laments that his work, in particular his widely read The Nature of Doctrine (ND), has often been read apart from its ecumenical focus.2 For example, in two symposia on ND, one in Modern Theology and the other in The Thomist, some contributors do not mention ecumenism at all,3 some mention Lindbeck’s work as an ecumenist but do not engage

 Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations will come from the NRSV.  George Lindbeck, “Forward to the German Edition of The Nature of Doctrine,” in The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age, 25th Anniversary Edition (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), xxix–xxxii. 3   Lee C.  Barrett, “Theology as Grammar: Regulative Principles or Paradigms and Practices,” Modern Theology 4, no. 2 (January 1988): 155–172. Though ecumenism is not discussed, Kenneth Surin does discuss interreligious dialogue. See “‘Many Religions and the One True Faith’: An Examination of Lindbeck’s Chapter Three,” Modern Theology 4, no. 2 (January 1988): 187–209. 1 2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. C. Brown, George Lindbeck and The Israel of God, Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74757-2_1

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this aspect in depth,4 and only two essays, one by James J. Buckley and another by Geoffrey Wainwright, focus upon ecumenism in any depth.5 ND, as well as Lindbeck’s writings on infallibility, justification, and related topics in the 1970s and early 1980s, must be understood in the background of what German scholars of the time called Konfessionskunde, which he translates as “comparative dogmatics or symbolics,” or “comparative study of the major theological dogmatic traditions in Christendom.”6 In a 1967 interview with Patrick Granfield, Lindbeck said that he anticipated a course in comparative dogmatics being his regular lecture course from that point on. Lindbeck says that while he prepared to write a work of comparative dogmatics, he was troubled by discussions of doctrine and what doctrine is. He says, “They did not adequately reflect the tacit understandings embedded in operative practices either in the ecumenical present or in the non-ecumenical past.”7 He therefore wrote ND as “a preliminary to a larger work, a comparative dogmatics which would deal in comprehensive detail with the present status and future possibilities of overcoming the ecclesial divisiveness of historical doctrinal differences between the major Christian traditions, Reformation, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox.”8 His understanding of comparative dogmatics, however, shifted in the years after ND’s publication. He thus concludes his “Forward to the German Edition of The Nature of Doctrine” by saying: 4  Gordon E. Michalson, “The Response to Lindbeck,” Modern Theology 4, no. 2 (January 1988): 107–120; D.Z. Phillips, “Lindbeck’s Audience,” Modern Theology 4, no. 2 (January 1988): 133–154; Stephen N.  Williams, “Lindbeck’s Regulative Christology,” Modern Theology 4, no. 2 (January 1988): 173–186; David Tracy, “Lindbeck’s New Program for Theology,” The Thomist 49, no. 3 (July 1, 1985): 460–472; Colman O’Neill, “The Rule Theory of Doctrine and Propositional Truth,” The Thomist 49, no. 3 (July 1, 1985): 417–442; William C.  Placher, “Revisionist and Postliberal Theologies and the Public Character of Theology,” The Thomist 49, no. 3 (July 1, 1985): 392–416. It should be mentioned in Placher’s case that his primary concern in his essay is to respond to revisionist critiques of Lindbeck. 5  Geoffrey Wainwright, “Ecumenical Dimensions of Lindbeck’s ‘Nature of Doctrine,’” Modern Theology 4, no. 2 (January 1988): 121–132. Even here, however, Wainwright spends significant time expressing his concerns about Lindbeck’s apparent anti-realism. James J. Buckley, “Doctrine in the Diaspora,” The Thomist 49, no. 3 (July 1, 1985): 443–459. 6  Patrick Granfield, “George Lindbeck,” in Theologians at Work (New York: MacMillan Company, 1967), 152. 7  Lindbeck, “Forward to the German Edition,” xxix. 8  Ibid.

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As far as my own work is concerned, it has become clear to me in the last decade, not least because of the discussions prompted by this book, that a comparative dogmatics needs to take a different form than I originally envisioned. It should start with ecclesiology and, included in that, with what might be called “Israel-ology.” The two cannot be separated in a scriptural narrative approach: Israel and the Church are one elect people, and rethinking their relation is fundamental to ecumenism. This thinking must be theological, i.e. based on Scripture as it functions in communities for which the scriptural witness to the God of Israel and of Jesus is authoritative. It makes use of analyses such are found in the present work, but is not based on them.9

This shift in his thought led to a change in how he taught his comparative doctrine course at Yale. By at least 1986, he began focusing primarily on ecclesiology. Then in the spring of 1994, the same year he wrote the “Forward to the German Edition,” he taught a class at Princeton University entitled “The Church as Israel.”10 Lindbeck argues, “Ecclesiology and ecumenism are inseparable.”11 He contends for this position even though the ecumenical movement has often pushed issues concerning the nature of the church, or the relation of the churches to the church, to the side, instead seeking to focus on smaller, more achievable steps.12 Lindbeck seeks in his Israelology to remedy this situation. He says: This modern turn away from Israelhood by both traditionalists and liberals has been unfortunate for ecumenism and ecclesiology. Judging by the history that we shall review, the search for unity goes awry apart from a sense of the church as Israel, and the understanding of the church as Israel suffers 9  Ibid., xxxii. Ephraim Radner credits Lindbeck with the proposal “that ecclesiology be renewed in the form of ‘Israelology’” in order to better “make sense of the Church’s actual life of historical sin, suffering, and the demands of popular formation.” Church (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2017), 122. 10  Syllabi for Rel 728a: Comparative Doctrine at Yale (years 1986, 1987, 1989, 1990, 1991, and 1992) and Rel 361: The Church as Israel from Princeton were retrieved by this author from the Lindbeck archive at Yale Divinity School. 11  George Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel: Ecclesiology and Ecumenism,” in Jews and Christians: People of God, ed. Carl E.  Braaten and Robert W.  Jenson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 78. 12  This has changed in recent years with the publication of The Church: Towards a Common Vision, Faith and Order Paper No. 214 (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 2013).

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in the absence of concern for visible unity. So it has been in the past, and there is no reason to suppose it will be different in the future unless the understanding of the church as Israel is somehow renewed.13

Lindbeck says that his proposal, that the church retrieve its identity as Israel, is a linguistic one.14 This is consistent with his discussion of ecumenism elsewhere. For example, in “Ecumenical Imperatives for the 21st Century,” Lindbeck makes four concluding points, each of which deals with communication and the church’s ability to communicate. First, he says that in the twenty-first century, there will be a need for “global communities of communication.” Second, the church is already to some extent such a community, and to an “unparalleled extent.” Third, “this communicative community lives by interconfessional and intercontinental argument—or, if you prefer, ecumenical dialogue—over what it means to be faithfully Christian in word and deed.” Fourth, Jesus Christ is the focal point of these ecumenical dialogues between Christians and churches.15 He says, “Language molds experience, and apart from reference to Israel, Christian discourse (and to a lesser extent practice) has difficulty resisting the individualistic or spiritualistic volitization of unity.”16 Apart from this retrieval, the church has difficulty communicating, which makes its agreements and disagreements difficult to articulate. In order to effectively communicate, the church needs a shared language. He says, An Israel-like ecclesiology does not imply any particular systematic theory of the church’s nature and purpose nor specific prescriptions for its organization and practice, but rather, metaphorically speaking, a vocabulary and grammar for redescribing, re-assessing and re-experiencing all aspects of communal life including theories and prescriptions. This vocabulary and grammar consists of the narratives and other material, normed by the canonical witness to Christ, which tell of God’s people before, during, and after (so those who acknowledge tradition would say) the New Testament period. As in any communicative idiom, these provide resources, not algorithms for  Ibid., 80.  Peter Ochs similarly argues that for Lindbeck, it is a hermeneutical one. See Another Reformation: Postliberal Christianity and the Jews (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011), 40, 51–52. 15  George Lindbeck, “Ecumenical Imperatives for the 21st Century,” Currents in Theology and Mission 20 (1993): 365. 16  George Lindbeck, “An Israel-like Church (or The Language of Community and Unity): Scripture, Ecclesiology and Ecumenism in a Postmodern Age,” 9. 13 14

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meaningful utterances such as sentences. What is said, in other words is determined, not only by vocabulary and grammar, but by the purposes, skills, and situations of those who use the language. Zion’s tongue can be employed aptly or inaptly, falsely or truly like any other semiotic system; and those who use another language in which the church is not Israel-like may in some situations be more faithful to the heart of the biblical message.17

While he acknowledges that Israel-like ecclesiologies can indeed be problematic, he argues that an Israel-like idiom “has a comparable superiority” due to its “greater scope and efficacy than those now generally employed.”18 Lindbeck’s work on church–Israel relations can be seen in two phases. The first phase, as seen in a few pieces while he was an observer at Vatican II, interprets the church and Israel in parallel. His second phase, from the late 1980s–early 2000s, can be divided into two sub-phases. Lindbeck begins by discussing the church as “Israel-like.” While he continues to use this terminology, he comes to augment his position slightly, saying, “‘Seeing the church as Israel’ is better because it suggests that there is a sense in which it really is Israel and not merely similar.”19 Lindbeck hoped to write a short volume on this proposal,20 but unfortunately it has not yet been published.

Method and Overview Postliberal theology generally asserts, as Nicholas M.  Healy says, that “theological method should be determined as much as possible by its subject matter if the latter is not to become irremediably distorted.”21 I will follow this approach by exploring Lindbeck’s work in dialogue with Scripture, Christian history, worship, Christian practices, and the ecumenical movement. While I will engage history and historical sources, which is appropriate given Lindbeck’s training as a historical theologian, this is a work of constructive theology.  Ibid., 10–11.  Ibid., 11. 19  George Lindbeck, “Performing the Faith: An Interview with George Lindbeck,” Christian Century (November 28, 2006): 29. 20  George Lindbeck, “Paris, Rome, Jerusalem: An Ecumenical Journey,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 41, no. 3–4 (Summer-Fall 2004): 408n44. 21  Nicholas M. Healy, Church, World and the Christian Life: Practical-Prophetic Ecclesiology, Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1. 17 18

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The difficulty with researching Lindbeck’s thought is that Lindbeck did not write many books. Most of his individual academic writings are occasional pieces that appear in journals and edited volumes. He often repeats himself, sometimes word for word, in various publications. Even one of his most read works, The Church in a Postliberal Age, was compiled and edited by James J. Buckley. Fortunately for scholars interested in Lindbeck, one of his students, Bruce D. Marshall, has compiled a complete bibliography of his writings that can be found in the 25th anniversary edition of ND. ND is one of the most widely read theological works published in the closing decades of the twentieth century. Many have read ND, but not read any of Lindbeck’s other writings. Or if they have read any of Lindbeck’s other works, they have read them through their reading of ND. Lindbeck, however, expressed frustration with how ND was received because, as noted earlier, few reviewers and responders read ND within the context of his ecumenical work. Lindbeck acknowledges that this is partly his fault. Though a short volume, ND is several volumes in one: a “pre-theological” book that advocates a cultural-linguistic understanding of religion; a critique of trends in modern theology, both conservative and liberal; an analysis of contemporary cultural and philosophical trends; a proposal for a type of theological ressourcement; a response to his decades of ecumenical work; a prolegomenon to comparative dogmatics. Because of its reception, Lindbeck argues ND is “peripheral to my main concerns.”22 Due to ND’s widespread readership, however, it cannot be ignored within a treatment of Lindbeck’s work, but it must be read within the context of Lindbeck’s life and work, rather than used as a lens by which to read Lindbeck’s other writings.23 Lindbeck says that while ND and his work on the church as Israel are “intelligible independently of each other, they are nevertheless continuous parts of a single project.”24 He says, “They both grow out of an effort to understand and assess contemporary efforts to overcome the doctrinal 22  George Lindbeck, “Ecumenisms in Conflict: Where Does Hauerwas Stand?,” in God, Truth, and Witness: Engaging Stanley Hauerwas, ed. L.  Gregory Jones, Reinhard Hütter, and C. Rosalee Velloso Ewell (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2005), 212. 23  Bernhard A. Eckerstorfer, “The One Church in the Postmodern World: Reflections on the Life and Thought of George Lindbeck,” Pro Ecclesia 13, no. 4 (Fall 2004): 400; Robert Charles Greer, “Lindbeck on the Catholicity of the Church: The Problem of Foundationalism and Antirealism in George A.  Lindbeck’s Ecumenical Methodology” (PhD Dissertation, Marquette University, 2000), v–vi; Ochs, Another Reformation, 36. 24  Lindbeck, “An Israel-like Church,” 17.

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barriers which have historically separated Christian confessional families. The first deals primarily with pre-theological background issues, while this second study attempts to get on with the properly theological task.”25 To further clarify how he distinguishes “pre-theological” from “properly theological,” Lindbeck likens the difference to the Catholic differentiation between fundamental and dogmatic theology.26 Lindbeck assumes a cultural-­linguistic framework in his work on the church as Israel without apology. In that sense, Lindbeck says that his work on the second volume can help make sense of ND. At the same time, he says, “the background warrants and legitimations outlined in the first book are neither necessary conditions nor compelling premises; and thus it is quite possible that a pre-theological framework more congenial to the present work could be developed, or that a reader might find this work persuasive quite part from background considerations of any kind.”27 He therefore distinguishes between the pre-theological background and the theological foreground within these two books. The pre-theological background is influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Aristotle, Richard Rorty, Alasdair MacIntyre, Peter Berger, and Clifford Geertz. The foreground, Lindbeck contends, would appeal to those influenced by Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar on the theological side and Robert Alter and Frank Kermode on the literary side. He notes that few will appreciate both the background and foreground but is certain that some may agree with the first volume while disagreeing with his anticipated second volume or vice versa.28 In order to write about Lindbeck’s ecclesiology, one cannot focus upon his ecclesiological writings in isolation from the rest of his work. As Lindbeck himself argues, “a full-scale ecclesiology” would discuss “the people of God as worshiping community created by the Father and the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit, constituted by the proclamation of the gospel in word and sacrament, and bearing fruit in works of suffering love.”29 Also, due to the centrality of Scripture to Lindbeck’s ecclesiology, it will require an analysis of his understanding of and use of Scripture, Christology, soteriology, sacramentology, and eschatology. While some of  Ibid.  Ibid., 17n6. 27  Ibid., 18. 28  Ibid., 19. 29  George Lindbeck, “The Church,” in Keeping the Faith: Essays to Mark the Centenary of Lux Mundi, ed. Geoffrey Wainwright (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), 191. 25 26

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the discussions in this book do not always explicitly discuss Israel, such as Lindbeck’s retrieval of a classical hermeneutic in Chap. 4 or his emphasis upon Faith and Order ecumenism in Chap. 8, his project, both inside and outside of ND, cannot be understood apart from these emphases. One must also take note of two communities that Lindbeck participated in. First, the study of Lindbeck’s ecumenical work must also give attention to his distinctly Lutheran perspective and emphases. Though Lindbeck was, among other things, a scholar of contemporary Roman Catholic life and thought, he remained a committed Lutheran. Though he is a generous and charitable reader of the Catholics he engaged with, he remained critical of several aspects of Catholic thought and has distinctly Lutheran answers to theological questions. Second, Lindbeck spent much of his life as a member of Yale Divinity School and Yale University. His colleagues and students were significant dialogue partners within his work. He engaged in dialogue with and was influenced by scholars of the Bible and early Christianity like Nils A. Dahl, Brevard Childs, Richard Hays, and Wayne Meeks; scholars of Christian history and historical theology like his teacher and mentor Robert Calhoun and Jaroslav Pelikan; and theologians like H. Richard Niebuhr, Hans Frei, David Kelsey, Bruce Marshall, Kendall Soulen, and Ephraim Radner. While other books have been published that discuss Lindbeck in connection with postliberalism,30 or in connection with other topics,31 no volumes have, until this point, been published that focus primarily upon Lindbeck’s emphasis upon the church as Israel. Peter Ochs has fortunately provided a chapter-long treatment of Lindbeck’s work on the church as Israel in his book, Another Reformation: Postliberal Christianity and the Jews. Therein, Ochs “introduces and tests one hypothesis: that as demonstrated through the efforts of a recent movement of Christian theology, there is a way for Christians to rededicate themselves to the gospel message and to classical patristic doctrines of the church without at the same 30  For example, Ronald Michener, Postliberal Theology: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Bloomsbury T & T Clark, 2013); Paul J. DeHart, The Trial of the Witnesses: The Rise and Decline of Postliberal Theology (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006). 31  For example, Jane Barter Moulaison, Lord, Giver of Life: Toward a Pneumatological Compliment to George Lindbeck’s Theory of Doctrine (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007); Jeremiah Gibbs, Apologetics after Lindbeck: Faith, Reason, and the Cultural-Linguistic Turn (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2015); David Trenery, Alasdair MacIntyre, George Lindbeck, and the Nature of Tradition (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2014).

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time revisiting classical Christian supersessionism.”32 He identifies this movement as postliberal Christian theology. In order to test this hypothesis, Ochs provides a discussion of those he considers to be the primary postliberal theologians in the United States (George Lindbeck, Robert Jenson, and Stanley Hauerwas) and the United Kingdom (David Ford and Daniel Hardy), each of whom disavow supersessionism. He also provides treatments of two outliers, thinkers who share various features with the above postliberals, while still maintaining some supersessionist claims (John Howard Yoder and John Milbank).33 Ochs argues that Lindbeck’s theological project is a reformational one—one that seeks to continually reform the church in light of the Gospel witness to Jesus Christ in order to reunite the divided church. Ochs says, “Integral to the Gospel witness is the Gospels’ reading of the Old Testament, and integral to that reading is the place of Jesus Christ within the salvation history of the people Israel.”34 Ochs further argues that there are four axes of Lindbeck’s project: ecclesiological, scriptural, non-supersessionism, and methodological. Lindbeck historically and theologically studies the church and its disunity. He does so by understanding Scripture as the church’s “reformational guide.”35 In order to repair the disunity of the church, the church must first repair its relation to Israel, or the “hermeneutical schism between the Gospel story of Jesus Christ and the Old Testament narrative of the people of Israel.”36 He also points to some methodological tools that can assist the church in bringing about this repair. Ochs later said of Another Reformation, “The first chapter was on George Lindbeck, and I took the elemental features of George’s postliberalism as a template against which to measure and compare the postliberalisms of all the others.”37 This book shares certain features with and is indebted to Ochs’ work, but it takes a different path. Chapter 2 analyzes Lindbeck’s genealogy of 32  Ochs, Another Reformation, 1. See the discussion of supersessionism later in this chapter for some clarification of the term. 33  Ochs has not convinced everyone that Ford and Hardy should be identified as postliberals. See Joseph L.  Mangina, “Hanging on with Chalcedon,” Living Church, January 15, 2014, https://livingchurch.org/2014/01/15/hanging-chalcedon/ 34  Ochs, Another Reformation, 36. 35  Ibid., 39. 36  Ibid., 40. 37  Peter Ochs, “Being with George Lindbeck’s Being-With,” Pro Ecclesia 27, no. 4 (Fall 2018): 384.

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how the church has understood its relationship with Israel. This genealogy describes how the church has at different times appropriated, expropriated, minimized, and rejected its identification with Israel, and discusses why a reassessment of this relationship is needed. In addition to a cursory treatment of the New Testament and the earliest Christian communities, this genealogy describes how the Church Fathers, Charlamagne, Thomas Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and nineteenth-century liberal theologians like Schleiermacher understood the church’s relationship to Israel. It then closes by discussing how the Holocaust has changed the way Christians address these issues. Chapter 3 focuses upon Lindbeck as a witness to and interpreter of Vatican II; especially regarding Lumen Gentium and Unitatis Redintegratio. This period includes his essay, “A Protestant View of the Ecclesiological Status of the Roman Catholic Church,” in which Lindbeck argues that there is a sense in which the Roman Catholic Church is “more fully the Church” than Protestant churches, though it may “be more unfaithful to the gospel than are the reforming movements which it has expelled.”38 He makes this argument by discussing a parallel between Israel and the church. Lindbeck’s continued engagement with the Roman Catholic Church in this period led to his emphases upon the church as the “messianic pilgrim people of God” with a mission to be a witness to the kingdom and of the church’s sectarian future. Chapter 4 pertains to Lindbeck’s understanding of the role of Scripture in the Christian community. This will deal with four principal terms in his thought: retrieval, narrative, intratextuality, and consensus. He seeks to retrieve a classical way of reading Scripture in order to recover the church’s identity as Israel. He is less interested in narrative as a general category than in the role that the particular narratives of Israel and Jesus play in the formation of the Christian community. He then divides intratextuality into two aspects: (1) Scripture as its own interpreter (scriptura sui ipsius interpres) and (2) the need for the church to socially embody the narrative of Scripture. Lindbeck also sees the retrieval of precritical exegesis as having ecumenical possibilities; it can assist the church in building consensus. Then, Chaps. 5 and 6 will discuss Lindbeck’s later development of an “Israel-ology.” The principal role of the first of these chapters will look at the Old Testament as an ecclesiological textbook, looking at the ways that 38  George Lindbeck, “A Protestant View of the Ecclesiological Status of the Roman Catholic Church,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 1, no. 2 (Spring 1964): 243.

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God elects and forms a people for himself. The second of these chapters will focus on Jesus as the Messiah and fulfillment of Israel. The next two chapters will deal with responses to Lindbeck’s work from two directions: from evangelicals on the one hand and from those who emphasize Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation (JPIC) on the other. Chapter 7 will therefore discuss Lindbeck’s understanding of the church’s mission, which includes a discussion of the church’s communal witness and catechesis. Chapter 8 will then address some further implications of Lindbeck’s ecclesiology for Christian ecumenical work. This later discussion will also briefly address the implications of Lindbeck’s project for Jewish-Christian dialogue.

A Note on Supersessionism Before moving on, I must provide a clarifying note on the term “supersessionism.” Not everyone defines supersessionism in the same way.39 As Terence Donaldson notes, “‘Supersessionism’ is used to lump together a variety of attitudes towards scriptural Israel and contemporary Judaism that should be differentiated.”40 Christian theologian Kendall Soulen, Christian New Testament scholar N.T.  Wright, and Jewish theologian David Novak thus offer typologies to distinguish between the various forms of supersessionism. In The God of Israel and Christian Theology, Soulen differentiates between punitive, economic, and structural supersessionism. Punitive supersessionism is the view that “God abrogates God’s covenant with Israel (which is already in principle outmoded) on account of Israel’s rejection of Christ and the gospel.”41 While punitive supersessionism is more polemical, Soulen argues that economic supersessionism is a greater problem for the contemporary church, for while economic supersessionism does not necessarily include hostility toward the Jews, “it logically 39  N.T. Wright, for instance, expresses frustration with what he perceives to be an “anti-­ Christian polemic in which anything, absolutely anything, that is said by way of a ‘fulfillment’ of Abrahamic promises in and through Jesus of Nazareth is said to constitute, or contribute to, that wicked thing called supersessionism’, the merest mention of which sends shivers through the narrow and brittle spine of post-modern moralism.” Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2013), 784. 40  Terence L.  Donaldson, Jews and Anti-Judaism in the New Testament: Decision Points and Divergent Interpretations (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2010), 21–22. 41  Soulen, The God of Israel and Christian Theology, 30.

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entails the ontological, historical, and moral obsolescence of Israel’s existence after Christ.”42 It thus greatly impacts the way Christians read Scripture. So, while Christians may come to reject the anti-Semitic or antiJudaic posture of punitive supersessionism, they may still maintain the view that the church has displaced Israel. Soulen demonstrates this in his discussion of structural supersessionism. There he introduces what he calls the “standard canonical narrative” of Christian Scripture. This standard model centers around four key episodes: creation, the fall, Christ’s incarnation and the formation of the church, and the consummation of all things. Within the standard model, these four events are the foreground of the Bible, while the rest of Scripture, including everything from Genesis 4–Malachi, is relegated to the background.43 Soulen argues, “The standard model is structurally ­supersessionist because it unifies the Christian canon in a manner that renders the Hebrew Scriptures largely indecisive for shaping conclusions about how God’s purposes engage creation in universal and enduring ways.”44 This standard model is even reflected in almost every historic Christian confession of the church, including the ecumenical creeds from the Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople. Wright divides his typology into hard, sweeping, and Jewish supersessionism. He associates hard supersessionism with some early Christian writers who, “ignoring Paul’s warnings in Romans 11 against gentile arrogance, did appear to teach that Jews were now cast off for ever and that gentile believers had replaced them as the people of God.”45 Within this view, Jewish people have been closed out of the church. This view gained supporters in the fourth and fifth centuries, but has not been held by anyone of note in the western church since the 1950s. Wright argues that “if there really is such a thing as real, no-nonsense ‘supersessionism’, this, I suggest, is what it might look like.”46  Ibid.  Soulen says, “The term background is not intended to suggest that God’s way with Israel necessarily receives a quantitatively small amount of exegetical and theological attention in comparison with the foreground. That is sometimes but by no means always the case. The point is rather a qualitative one. The term background points to the fact that God’s history with Israel plays a role that is ultimately indecisive for shaping the canonical narrative’s overarching plot” (ibid., 32). 44  Ibid., 31. Emphasis original. 45  Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, 805–806. 46  Ibid., 807. 42 43

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Next, Wright discusses “sweeping supersessionism,” which he associates with some post-Barthian scholars like Ernst Käsemann, J.  Louis Martyn, and Douglas Harink.47 He says, “This is the sweeping claim … that what happened in Jesus Christ constituted such a radical inbreaking or ‘invasion’ into the world that it rendered redundant anything and everything that had gone before—particularly anything that looked like ‘religion’, not least ‘covenantal religion.’”48 So in this view, Israel has not been transformed into the church, but it has been made irrelevant because of the apocalyptic revelation of the gospel. Third, Wright discusses Jewish supersessionism, which can be seen in Qumran and similar communities in the first century. This view claims that God has worked to renew his covenant with Israel and that he has done so through that community. These communities saw themselves as the focal point of God’s work of renewal and they viewed most Jews with suspicion. Other Jews were welcome to join, but they would need to go through a time of testing and live up to the expectations of the community. Wright concludes, “In this form there is not a Jewish replacement but a Jewish fulfillment.”49 Novak defines Christian supersessionism as “the theological conviction that the Christian Church has superseded the Jewish people, assuming their role as God’s covenanted people, Israel.”50 He notes that on the 47  Wright thinks it is ironic that Harink largely follows Käsemann and Martyn, but also accuses Wright of supersessionism (ibid., 808n108). See Douglas Harink, Paul Among the Postliberals: Pauline Theology Beyond Christendom and Modernity (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2003), Chap. 4. Therein, Harink argues that while N.T.  Wright is indebted to the “new perspective on Paul,” which can be called a “thoroughgoing attempt to reverse the deep and long-standing conviction that Paul was the first anti-Judaistic theologian” (151), that Wright “nonetheless provides a vigorous supersessionist reading of Paul on Israel’s election” (152). Harink argues that Wright defines God’s election of Israel in functional terms— Israel was elected to save the world, and it failed in that task, while the Messiah, Jesus, succeeded. So while Wright does critique the stereotype that the Jews were legalists or sought to earn salvation by works, he critiques the Jews for hoarding the covenant and argues that the church has replaced Israel as the true people of God (156–157). The church is then tasked with taking “Israel’s story (a ‘Jewish’ story), whose ending is Christ, to the nations” (158). In addition, Harink argues that his apocalyptic reading of Paul is not supersessionist. He argues, “God’s apocalyptic action in Jesus Christ both encloses and sustains God’s irrevocable election of the Jews as his people” (152). It is beyond the scope of this project to adjudicate this dispute. 48  Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, 807. 49  Ibid., 809–810. 50  David Novak, “Supersessionism Hard and Soft,” First Things 290 (February 2019): 27.

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surface, such a view is a core Christian belief, and this would make fruitful dialogue between Jews and Christians impossible. He argues, however, that there are two different kinds of supersessionism: “hard” and “soft.”51 The former makes dialogue impossible, while the latter does not. Novak says, “Hard or maximal supersessionism asserts that God has elected Christians to displace the Jews in the covenant between God and His people.”52 This view assumes that Christianity supersedes Judaism and that Jews must abandon Judaism and convert to Christianity. Novak argues that there is also a Jewish form of hard supersessionism. Within this view, Christianity is not a development that arises out of Judaism, but a regression—one that moves back into paganism, polytheism, and idolatry. Judaism thus does not have a connection to Christianity.53 Both Christian and Jewish hard supersessionism do not allow for Jewish-Christian dialogue. Novak argues, “In any realistic dialogue, Jews cannot expect Christians to jettison supersessionism altogether. A complete denial of supersessionism leaves Christians unable to affirm Christianity as having brought something new and fuller to the ancient covenant between God and Israel. Without some kind of supersessionism, Christians have no cogent reason for not going back to their Jewish origins.”54 The inverse is also true for Jews. Supersessionism, in this sense, is an inner supersessionism—an explanation for why Christians remain Christians and Jews remain Jews. Novak refers to this as a “‘soft’ or minimal supersessionism.”55 There are multiple Christian forms of this, but within each of them, it is argued that Christianity does bring something new, but that does not mean that God has set the Jews aside as his people. Ultimately, Judaism will be superseded by Christianity because all Jews will come to recognize Jesus as the Messiah. There is also a Jewish form of soft supersessionism, which can be seen in thinkers like second-century Rabbi Joshua ben Hananiah or 51  George Hunsinger utilizes Novak’s typology in “After Barth: A Christian Appreciation of Jews and Judaism,” in Karl Barth, the Jews, and Judaism, ed. George Hunsinger (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2018), 60–74. 52  Ibid., 28. 53  Novak elsewhere refers to this as “Jewish counter-supersessionism.” See David Novak, “From Supersessionism to Parallelism in Jewish-Christian Dialogue,” in Jews and Christians: People of God, eds. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 96. 54  Novak, “Supersessionism Hard and Soft,” 28. 55  Ibid., 29.

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medieval philosopher Maimonides. This view argues that the righteous of the nations will have a part in the world to come, will be made honorary Jews in the world to come, by following God’s universally binding law.56 Within Jewish soft supersessionism, Christians are not polytheistic idolators, though Christianity is seen as “a watered down version of Judaism for the Gentiles.”57 Novak argues that soft supersessionism is indeed preferable to hard supersessionism, but “even soft Christian supersessionism leaves Jews with the unsettling feeling that Christians are looking upon us as eventually becoming what Christians already are.”58 It leaves them with the concern that Christians are engaging Jews not as they are currently, but as they will eventually become, and vice versa. This also makes Jewish-Christian dialogue difficult. Novak argues that there can be a different kind of soft supersessionism that better allows for dialogue. Within this view, Christianity did not arise out of Judaism, but rather “both Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism come out of, and thereby supersede” Second Temple Judaism, or what he calls “Hebraic Monotheism.”59 Thus, it is incorrect to think that Jews only have the “Old Testament” while Christians have both an “Old” and “New Testament.” Instead, Christians and Jews both have the Old Testament/Tanakh, and they both also have a “new testament”— Jews have the Oral Torah, written down as the Talmud, while Christians have the New Testament, which could also be called the “Christian Talmud.”60 These two traditions cannot be completely different and separate. Instead, “there is commonality and difference. The two traditions are separate but interrelated, and this dialectic must be made until the end of the world.”61 56  Ibid, 29–30. There, Novak also says, “On the other hand, [Rabbi Joshua ben Hananiah’s] colleague, Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, thought the world-yet-to-come will be an exclusively Jewish domain. He could be called a Jewish hard superessionism” (29). 57  Ibid., 29. 58  Ibid., 30. 59  Ibid., 30. Robert Jenson makes a similar argument in “Toward a Christian Theology of Judaism,” in Jews and Christians: People of God, eds. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 5. 60  Novak, “Supersessionism Hard and Soft,” 30. See also Jenson, “Toward a Christian Theology of Judaism,” 3. 61  Novak, “Supersessionism Hard and Soft,” 30. It is thus not a “zero-sum game” in which either Christians are right and Jews wrong or vice versa. But this also avoids theological relativism, for it acknowledges that God is ultimately the one who will bring about judgment and the world to come.

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Lindbeck describes supersessionism as the belief that “Christians alone are now the true Israel, the chosen people, because God has rejected the Jews.”62 His definition thus overlaps with Soulen’s punitive and Wright’s and Novak’s “hard supersessionism.” Lindbeck’s definition also includes Soulen’s economic and structural forms of supersessionism, as well as Wright’s characterization of sweeping supersessionism. He raises concerns with the minimization of the Old Testament in Christian theology, not only for reflection upon the nature of the church, but also for the doctrine of God and Christology. Lindbeck clarifies his definition further by differentiating between expropriation, the claim that the church replaces the Jews as Israel, and appropriation, the claim that the church is Israel “without replacing the Jews.”63 Lindbeck associates supersessionism with expropriation, but not with appropriation.64 It could be argued that Lindbeck is, according to Novak’s definition, a soft supersessionist.65 He does argue that through Christ, God has instituted a new age and that Christians should not minimize their distinctive theological claims in order to have dialogue with Jews. It should be noted, however, that Lindbeck’s project avoids other forms of supersessionism.

62  Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel,” 79. See also Ochs’ definition of supersessionism: “a Christian belief that with the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ, Israel’s covenant with God was superseded and replaced by God’s presence in the church as the body of Christ.” Another Reformation, 1. 63  George Lindbeck, “Postmodern Hermeneutics and Jewish-Christian Dialogue: A Case Study,” in Christianity in Jewish Terms, ed. Tikva Frymer-Kensky et  al. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), 110. 64  Jenson similarly says, “‘Supersessionism,’ in the current semi-technical sense, is not the church’s claim to be Israel. It is the theological opinion that the church owns the identity of Israel in such a fashion as to exclude any other divinely willed Israel-after-Israel.” “Toward a Christian Theology of Judaism,” 5. 65  In a personal discussion with this author, Novak did liken Lindbeck’s differentiation of expropriation and appropriation to his hard and soft supersessionism.

CHAPTER 2

Church and Israel in Historical Perspective

Perhaps the real test of theological authenticity is the capacity to incorporate the history of Israel and God’s people and treat it as one’s own. (Andrew F. Walls)1

Lindbeck’s discussion of the church as Israel centers upon three main theses: First, by neglecting its identification as Israel, the church has brought about various ecclesiological and ecumenical problems. Second, retrieving this identification will bring about certain solutions to those problems. Third, the postmodern context may make such a retrieval possible.2 Lindbeck sets out five eras of “use, misuse and non-use of church-as-Israel discourse before coming to its possible future in connection with intra-­ Christian ecumenism.”3 These eras are Scripture, the first three centuries, Christendom, the Reformation, and modernity. Lindbeck contends that the church has taken a few different stances on the relationship of the church to Israel within these five eras. As noted in the introduction, he differentiates between those who have expropriated  Andrew F.  Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996), 15. 2  Lindbeck, “An Israel-like Church,” 7. 3  George Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel and the Future of Ecumenism: Lecture One: Israel-Likeness Unites and Disunites” (Wycliffe College, Toronto, Canada, October 23, 2001), 2. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. C. Brown, George Lindbeck and The Israel of God, Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74757-2_2

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and appropriated the identity of Israel. In addition, he notes that some Christians through the ages, such as Marcion in the ancient world and Schleiermacher in the modern, have in different though related ways rejected the connection of Israel and the church, while others have neglected or minimized the question altogether.

Scripture4 Descriptions of the church as Israel go back to the beginning. The earliest Christians had their geographical center in Jerusalem, and the church was led by Torah-observant Jews. Though they came to approve Paul’s mission to the Gentiles, they understood the church as “the beginnings of the enlarged Israel foretold by Isaiah and other prophets when all nations will throng upward to worship on Mount Zion.”5 While later Christians, like the second-century author of the Epistle to Diognetus, called Christians a “third race,” Lindbeck argues that the earliest Christians understood the relation of Israel and Gentile Christians differently. Instead, they believed Gentile converts are absorbed or grafted into Israel (see 1 Pet 1:10; Rom 11:17–34; Eph 2:11–21).6 In doing so, they did not act in un-Jewish ways, for the Judaism of the time already included “patterns of universalism” by which Gentiles may come into relationship with the God and people of Israel.7 These Christians “identified the church as Israel and employed their only Bible, the Jewish scriptures christologically interpreted, to shape their communal existence.”8 He here points to passages of the New Testament, like 1 Corinthians 10:1–11, in which the warnings given to Israel are also given to the church. Israel sinned and suffered judgment, and Paul writes of these events so that the church does not suffer the same fate.

4  The section on Scripture will be discussed briefly here because it will be given an extended treatment in Chaps. 5 and 6. 5  George Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel: Ecclesiology and Ecumenism,” in Jews and Christians: People of God, ed. Carl E.  Braaten and Robert W.  Jenson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 83. 6  Ibid. 7  Donaldson, Jews and Anti-Judaism in the New Testament, 23; Terence L.  Donaldson, Judaism and the Gentiles: Jewish Patterns of Universalism (to 135  CE) (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007), passim. 8  Lindbeck, “An Israel-like Church,” 7.

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Lindbeck acknowledges that the New Testament does not always speak univocally on these matters. While one can read the New Testament in a non-supersessionist way, it is sometimes hard to reconcile the New Testament’s teaching on these matters, even within the same author. For example, Paul’s language about unbelieving Jews sounds very different in 1 Thessalonians 2:14–16 than in Romans 9–11.9 At the same time, however, he notes that a consensus is growing within biblical scholarship, reaffirmed by official church statements, that the New Testament, and the Christian Bible as a whole, does not teach supersessionism.10 Those readings that assume various New Testament passages, like Matthew 21:43, teach supersessionism have ignored the fact that the first Christians were Torah-observant Jews.11

The First Three Centuries This situation changed in the decades after the destruction of the temple in AD 70. At this point, Gentile and Jewish Christians were divided from the synagogue, and it became increasingly difficult for Jewish and Gentile Christians to remain in communion with one another due to cultural and linguistic differences. This led to a significant shift in the constitution of the church. As Jaroslav Pelikan notes, “According to tradition, only one of the writers of the New Testament, Luke, was not a Jew. As far as we know, none of the church fathers was a Jew.”12 A range of views of the church and its relation to Israel existed as the church ceased to be a sociologically Jewish sect, and its membership shifted from predominantly Jewish to predominantly Gentile. For some early Christian writers, Jews were expected to abandon Torah observance and their Jewish identity. Some others came to believe “the church can be Israel without Jews.”13 For example, the Letter of Barnabas rejects the 9  George Lindbeck, “The Church,” in Keeping the Faith: Essays to Mark the Centenary of Lux Mundi, ed. Geoffrey Wainwright (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), 186. 10  George Lindbeck, “What of the Future? A Christian Response,” in Christianity in Jewish Terms, ed. Tikva Frymer-Kensky et al. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), 362. He does note the existence of modern exceptions to this rule, like in dispensationalism (363–364). 11  Ibid., 359. 12  Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol. 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 12. Pelikan does note that Hermas and Hegesippus may have been Jews. 13  Lindbeck, “Church as Israel Lecture One,” 4.

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notion that unbelieving Jews remain a part of God’s people. Michael W. Holmes says in his introduction to the letter, “With respect to Israel and God’s covenant, the author of Barnabas asserts that Israel forfeited the covenant because of idolatry (4.8; cf. 16.1–2), disobedience (8.7; 9.4; 14.1–4a), and ignorance (they interpreted Mosaic laws literally, rather than ‘spiritually,’ as intended [10.2, 9]). Now, he claims, Christians are the true heirs of the covenant (4.8; 6.19; 13.6; 14.4b–5).”14 Lindbeck says, “Completely forgotten was the need for Torah-observant Jewish participation in the church if it is to be truly Israel in the new age.”15 While the language is missing from the New Testament, they came to see the church as the “New Israel that had replaced the Old.”16 He contends, however, that these shifts “cannot be flatly condemned as simply unfaithful. They were the historically (i.e., contingently) necessary conditions for the church’s appropriation of Israel’s story.”17 Such expropriations seem philo-Semitic in comparison to Greco-Roman prejudices against the Jews or those of Gentile Christians who rejected an identification as Israel. Chief among these “rejectionists” was Marcion. He was a biblical literalist who denied the multivalency of Scripture and argued that the Old Testament could not reveal the God of Jesus Christ. The Old Testament instead presents an angry and vindictive god, “a deity who bungled in creating the world and thereby filled it with misery and evil.”18 This contrasts with the peaceful and loving God present in the New Testament, and so this deity must not be the Supreme God, but a lower deity, and thus the Jewish Bible must be false. Lindbeck says, “Marcion’s solution to the problems raised by his critique was to replace the Jewish Bible with a bowdlerized New Testament and to postulate, beyond the lower creator god worshiped by the Jews, a semi-gnostic highest god from whom Jesus came, and who is so far above the creaturely realm as to be blameless for its sorry state.”19 This understanding of God, the universe, and the gospel did not allow for a positive assessment of Israel or an identification of the church with Israel.

14  Michael W.  Holmes, “The Epistle of Barnabas,” in The Apostolic Fathers: English Translations (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1992), 271. 15  Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel,” 83–84. 16  Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel Lecture One,” 5. See also Lindbeck, “Church,” 187. 17  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 187. 18  Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel,” 84. 19  Ibid.

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Many found Marcion’s anti-Jewish message appealing. Some scholars argue that Marcionites may have been as numerous as catholic Christians throughout the Roman Empire. If one adds together the Marcionites, other Gnostic Christians, and those who followed the teaching of Barnabas and the Letter to Diognetus, “it may well be that most gentile Christians in much of the second century did not think of the church as Israel.”20 Lindbeck argues that, partly out of a reaction to Marcion, a shift occurred in the middle part of the second century led by some Christian communities who still emphasized and oriented themselves around the Old Testament. They read the Old Testament in the light of Jesus Christ, included anti-Marcionite texts in the expanded biblical canon, and they underwent a time of “Israelization,” coming “to view the church, Christ’s body, in increasingly Israel-like terms.”21 Though Adolf von Harnack denies that Christianity ever became a “religion of the book,” this period of time brought it close.22 Lindbeck says, “Thus it was that the most Israel-like part of the Christian movement, the Great Church as it is commonly named, outdistanced rival forms of Christianity in the one hundred and fifty years after Marcion. By the time of Constantine, it comprised the great majority of Christians.”23 Lindbeck sees Harnack’s writing as particularly important, though neglected, for comprehending the early church’s understanding as Israel. Harnack says, The conviction that they were a people—i.e., the transference of all the prerogatives and claims of the Jewish people to the new community as a new creation which exhibited and realized whatever was old and original in religion—this at once furnished adherents of the new faith with a political and historical self-consciousness. Nothing more comprehensive or complete or impressive than this consciousness can be conceived. Could there be any higher or more comprehensive conception than that of the complex of  Ibid., 85.  Ibid. 22  Adolf von Harnack, The Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries, trans. James Moffatt, Second, Enlarged and Revised Edition., vol. I (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1908), 279. See 279–289. Pelikan also argues that this period of time was a “re-Judaization” of the Christian faith. The Christian Tradition, 25–26. He says, “The growth of cultic, hierarchical, and ethical structures of Christianity led to the Christianization of many features of Judaism” (25). He also argues that Christian appropriation of Israel’s Scriptures helped them survive after the destruction of Jerusalem (26). 23  Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel,” 85–86. 20 21

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momenta afforded by the Christians’ estimate of themselves as “the true Israel,” “the new people,” “the original people,” and “the people of the future,” i.e., of eternity?24

Harnack says that this self-understanding strengthened the church’s resolve in the face of attacks from their critics. Lindbeck says, however, that Harnack’s account is incomplete, and so he seeks to build upon Harnack’s work by emphasizing the role of the Old Testament in “contributing to its sense of being a single, unitary people.”25 Lindbeck emphasizes the “crucial unifying power of the church as Israel.”26 This unity came from the typological and Christological reading of the Jewish Scriptures. He says, “The gentiles who entered this biblical world developed in the course of time a Christian analogue to the Jewish sense of being a single people.”27 This does not mean Christians had a uniform understanding of what it means for the church to be an Israel-like community. Different Christians in different social and cultural settings understood the church as Israel in different ways. Tertullian and Cyprian in Carthage and Clement and Origen in Alexandria may have seen the church as Israel, but “their visions were in part incompatible because of differences in the culturally conditioned lenses through which they looked.”28 Lindbeck argues, however: What they lacked in ethnic cohesion was surpassed by, in their view, an even greater unity: Israel was for them the body of Christ. Those who belong to it are members of one another no less than of Jesus; and through Christ Jesus, they share in the most intense and intimate of all unities, that of the triune God. To desert this community is sadder than the betrayal of family, and Christians are called to follow the example of the prophets and of Jesus by surrendering life itself rather than separating themselves from God’s elect and beloved people because of attacks from within or without.29

24  Harnack, The Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries, 240–241. See also 241–278. 25  Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel Lecture One,” 9. See Lindbeck, “Paris, Rome, Jerusalem,” 406–407. 26  Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel,” 86. 27  Ibid. 28  Ibid., 82. 29  Ibid., 86–87.

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Their understanding of being a single people allowed separate Christian communities to mutually care for and correct one another. They developed a rule of faith, as well as a unified understanding of ministry, liturgy, and church structures. Lindbeck argues that this arose as much from their reading of the Old Testament as much as the New. While other scriptures, such as the Qur’an or Buddhist texts, have also formed and shaped multi-­ ethnic communities, “The people-and-unity creating power of the Jewish scriptures as read by early Christians seems, with one exception, unparalleled.”30 Without the expropriation of Israel’s identity by these Christians, “Gnosticism would have wholly triumphed, the Marcionite rejection of Israel’s Scriptures and Israel’s God would have become universal among Christians, and the Nazi heresy that Jesus was not a Jew would have become orthodoxy from the second century on.”31

Christendom Lindbeck argues that the situation for the church changed significantly in 312, and here, he argues, “Seeds of failure … were concealed in the harvest of success.”32 He says, “Catholic Christendom … continued to practice the same basic interpretive strategies in both East and West throughout the middle ages, though now the applications were very different from before.”33 As the Christian faith went from being a religio illicita to an imperially favored faith, Christians came to see emperors differently. While they were previously associated with Pharaohs, Eusebius identified Constantine’s victory over Maxentius at Milvian Bridge with Moses and the drowning of Pharaoh’s troops in the Sea.34 Lindbeck notes that one can understand Eusebius’ enthusiasm, for the church went from a time of persecution and marginalization to being imperially favored, and because

 Ibid., 87. Lindbeck says that the exception is rabbinic Judaism.  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 187. He further says, “Because these modifications were the only available alternative to utter subversion of the christological center, they can be regarded, despite their magnitude and consequences, as scripturally faithful interpretations of the story of the church.” 32  Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel,” 88. 33  Lindbeck, “An Israel-like Church,” 7–8. 34  Eusebius, “The Life of the Blessed Emperor Constantine,” in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, vol. I, Second Series (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1890), I.XXXVIII. 30 31

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of this, “Christians couldn’t help but see a very different reflection of themselves in the mirror of Israel.”35 Years later, Christians began identifying emperors with David. Christians continued to use strong language against their Jewish and pagan interlocutors as persecuted Christians became persecuting Christians. Lindbeck says, “Power relations had been reversed, and what had been cries of anguish in the mouths of the helpless became incitements to violence against the newly defenseless when repeated from positions of strength.”36 Lindbeck still attempts to maintain, however, that the era is not fully anti-­ scriptural. He instead compares the era of Christendom to that of the Israelite monarchy, “which God consented to contra coeur (1 Samuel 8), and yet also mightily used to preserve his people and prepare for the Messiah.”37 While he does not defend all aspects of the Christendom church, Lindbeck concludes that it helped to preserve the gospel amid the empire’s struggles with the barbarian hordes and the formation of western civilization. This era reached its zenith during the reign of Charlemagne, who set himself up not only as Holy Roman Emperor, but as a Davidic figure. He slaughtered thousands of Saxons and then gave the survivors a choice between baptism and death.38 Lindbeck argues that the parish system that Charlemagne established helped lay the foundation for western civilization, but with it came the princely control of the church. He says the reactions to this “ecclesiology led to a reaction that tilted the Western church toward a papal model whose scriptural warrants, such as they were, were necessarily drawn from the New rather than the Old Testament (from, for example, Matt. 16:18).”39 As ecclesiology moved in this direction, “The practice of the church as Israel weakened, and sometimes the name dropped entirely.”40 For example, Thomas Aquinas “never refers to the church as ‘new’ or ‘true’ Israel, much less as ‘Israel’ tout court (although it is clear when he speaks of the church as the populus dei, the people of God, that Israel is the prototype).”41 Lindbeck says, however, “Seeing the people of God in the mirror of Old  Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel,” 88.  Ibid. 37  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 188. 38  Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel Lecture One,” 15. 39  Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel,” 89. 40  Ibid. 41  Ibid. 35 36

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Testament sometimes continues even when the language of church as Israel is little used.”42 He concludes that in the era of Christendom, the understanding of church-as-Israel split into two streams: one dealt with Christian people in their civil life, and the other referred to the church as an ecclesiastical and worshiping community.

The Reformation Lindbeck notes that the Protestant Reformation did not bring an end to the identifications of the church and/or Christendom with Israel. Luther and other Reformers still viewed emperors and kings as Davidic figures, and various nations depicted themselves as Israel. The ecclesial identification also continued. Lindbeck notes, however, that the Reformation led to a shift in church-as-Israel discourse. Rather than uniting Christians within a common body politic or within the church, “it now divided Christians from one another more than it unified, it sharpened the swords with which they fought each other rather than lending itself to reconciling roots.”43 Catholics and various types of Protestants claimed exclusive Israelhood, and in particular the identity of the southern kingdom of Judah or a remnant, for themselves, while identifying their opponents with the idolatrous northern kingdom, Babylon, or other groups. For example, Martin Luther identifies the papacy with the Babylon that took the Israelites into exile, saying that “the papacy enslaves the church with three ‘captivities’—the withholding of the cup from the laity, transubstantiation, and the sacrifice of the mass.”44 Elsewhere, he refers to his opponents as Pharisees.45 John Calvin, according to Lindbeck, “reshaped and revitalized an Israel-like understanding and experience of the church.”46 For example,  Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel Lecture One,” 16.  Ibid., 17. 44  Martin Luther, “The Babylonian Captivity of the Church,” in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, ed. Timothy F. Lull and William R. Russell, Third Edition (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2012), 196. Calvin also makes an analogy to Babylon. See Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T.  McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, The Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), IV.2.12. Because Luther is treated at greater length elsewhere, he is treated briefly in this chapter. 45  Martin Luther, “On the Church and the Councils,” in The Annotated Luther, Volume 3: Church and Sacraments, ed. Paul W. Robinson (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2016), 382–383. 46  Lindbeck, “An Israel-like Church,” 8. 42 43

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Calvin says, “Those who turn to the cultivation of true godliness are said to inscribe their names among the citizens of Jerusalem.”47 He uses imagery from the Old Testament to reflect upon, and lament, the state of the church in his time. Calvin says that the church is “called ‘catholic,’ or ‘universal,’ because there could not be two or three churches unless Christ be torn asunder [cf. 1 Cor. 1:13]—which cannot happen.” Rather, the elect are all united to Christ as one body. He says, “Although the melancholy desolation which confronts us on every side may cry that no remnant of the church is left, let us know that Christ’s death is fruitful, and that God miraculously keeps his church as in hiding places. So it was said to Elijah, ‘I have kept for myself seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee before Baal’ [1 Kings 19:18 p.].”48 Again, in the next chapter, Calvin discusses how the Roman church should be viewed, and he does so by drawing an analogy from Old Testament Israel. He says, “Come now, let the papists deny if they can— however much they extenuate their faults—that the condition of religion among them is as corrupt and debased as it was in the Kingdom of Israel under Jeroboam. But they have a grosser idolatry. And in doctrine they are not one droplet purer, but actually even more impure in this!”49 Calvin says that the prophets did worship and pray along with the assembled people of Israel. Though the priests of the time were unworthy of their office, they did not meet away from Solomon’s temple for sacrifices. Calvin, however, reiterates that these prophets were still “not compelled to any superstitious worship; indeed, they were obligated to nothing that had not been instituted by God.”50 He defends the separate meetings of Reformed Christians by arguing that it would be impossible to worship with the Roman church without participating in idolatry. He does, however, acknowledge that vestiges of the true church may remain among the church under the papacy just as it did among the Jews. He says: God had once for all made his covenant with the Jews, but it was not they who preserved the covenant; rather, leaning upon its own strength, it kept itself alive by struggling against their impiety. Therefore—such was the certainty and constancy of God’s goodness—the Lord’s covenant abode there.  Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, IV.1.4.  Ibid., IV.1.2. 49  Ibid., IV.2.9. See the wider context in IV.2.7–11. 50  Ibid. 47 48

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Their treachery could not obliterate his faithfulness, and circumcision could not be so profaned by their unclean hands as to cease to be the true sign and sacrament of his covenant.51

Calvin says just as God preserved his covenant with the Jews despite unfaithfulness, so he preserved his covenant with the church even though it was “oppressed by the tyranny of the Antichrist.” He did so through two means: “First he maintained baptism there, a witness to his covenant; consecrated by his own mouth, it retains its force despite the impiety of men. Secondly, by his own providence he caused other vestiges to remain, that the church might not utterly die.”52 Conversely, Ephraim Radner notes, “Catholics … could also make use of divided and assaulted Israel, but in their case to cast the Roman Church in the figure of a chosen people victimized by their own children.”53 Lindbeck says that as tensions escalated, and both Protestants and Catholics claimed the title Israel for themselves, “the resulting polemics discredited Israelhood.”54 These contrasting claims hardened and became irreconcilable. Lindbeck even argues that the so-called wars of religion would not have taken place apart from this rhetoric. He concludes, “It was thus partly in reaction to these monstrously divisive enormities that the theological (though not the nationalistic) use of Israel-like discourse was increasingly abandoned after the Reformation.”55

Modernity Lindbeck argues that the full break from Israel-language for the church came in the seventeenth century. This break had “double-edged effects. This weakening, to its credit, made it easier for Christians to affirm religious freedom, living with denominational pluralism, and eschew ecclesial triumphalism. On the other hand, a sense of common Christian peoplehood has largely disappeared.”56 He argues, “Since then the use of the Old  Ibid., IV.2.11.  Ibid. 53  Ephraim Radner, The End of the Church: A Pneumatology of Christian Division in the West (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 30. Radner notes this practice among figures like Robert Bellarmine, Jansenist Jean Hamon, and Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (30n50). 54  Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel Lecture One,” 17. 55  Ibid., 17–18. 56  George Lindbeck, “Comparative Doctrine: Ecumenism and Narrative Ecclesiology: The Prospects for an Israel-like Church,” 1990, 4. 51 52

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Testament interpreted by the New as the basic ecclesiological text has largely disappeared across the whole range of positions from fundamentalist to liberal, traditionalist to non-traditional.”57 It did not confine itself to one or a few denominational traditions, but spreads the gamut from Roman Catholics to those in the radical Reformation. Christians came to see the New Testament as the exclusive source to develop their ecclesiologies. Theologians gave increased attention to issues of when Christ founded the church, and each of these answers led to very different ecclesiologies. For example, Roman Catholics sought to defend their ecclesiology, and the papacy, by pointing to Jesus’ words to Peter: “And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church” (Matt 16:18). Various Protestant groups identified the beginning of the church with other events, such as Jesus’ baptism or Pentecost. Each of these answers reflected a discontinuity, rather than a continuity, between Israel and the church. They also came, under the influence of the Enlightenment, to see the church or the synagogue not as a group of people, but “Judaism and Christianity … as religions that individuals believed in and/or practiced.”58 In other cases, Christians did not even look to the New Testament or the Christian tradition to understand or bridge their differences. In reaction to the wars that plagued Europe, they came to reject anything within Christianity resembling or coming from Judaism. In this, they rejected the designation Israeliticam dignitatem and saw Jewish faith as “primitive, tribalistic, legalistic and intolerant.”59 Those aspects of the Old Testament deemed good, like the Ten Commandments, were seen “as simply crude expressions of truths available in principle to all human beings through reason and experience.”60 This led some modern figures to renew a Marcion-like rejectionist position on how Christianity relates to Judaism. Instead of expropriating Israel’s identity by seeing the church as a people that replaced Israel, they understood Christianity as a “universal religion that had outgrown its anachronistic adherence to the Old Testament particularism and was now becoming more and more a universal, independent, tolerant,

 Lindbeck, “An Israel-like Church,” 8. See Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel,” 79.  Lindbeck, “What of the Future?,” 360. 59  Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel Lecture One,” 19. 60  Ibid. 57 58

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individualistic and thus superior faith.”61 An example of this can be seen in Friedrich Schleiermacher, who says, “Christianity does indeed stand in a special historical interconnection with the Jewish mode of faith. Yet, as to its historical existence and its aim, the way it is related to Judaism and heathen modes of faith is the same.”62 Lindbeck argues that within the modern period, this distaste for Judaism grew even though Jews, as individuals, became more socially acceptable.63 While the churches under the influence of this rejectionist position continued to use liturgy and hymns with references to Israel, Judah, Jerusalem, or Zion, and they use these words to refer to the church, Lindbeck says, “they have become dead metaphors devoid of the typological realism they once possessed.”64 They came to speak of fulfillment not as God fulfilling his promises to his people, but “in terms of the impersonal patterns of evolutionary progress according to which one religion provides the conditions for the emergence of a better and higher one. Fulfillment now applies to religions, not peoples.”65 Lindbeck says that all of the modern supersessionisms that developed, “from the least offensive to the most vicious, vehemently repudiate the Israel-likeness of the church. They grant that Christianity originated in Judaism but hold that it has mutated into a radically new reality.”66 During this same period, as in the Reformation era, various nations and ethnic groups came to identify themselves with Israel: “Christians—ranging from British Israelites to Dutch, Swedes, and Poles, and outside Europe, from South African Boers to Americans—have represented their nations, but not the church, as somehow Israel-like.”67 For example, Conrad Cherry says, “The belief that America has been providentially chosen for a special destiny has deep roots in the American past, and it is a  Ibid. See Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel,” 90.  Friedrich Schleiermacher, Christian Faith Volumes One and Two: A New Translation and Critical Edition, ed. Catherine L.  Kelsey and Terrance N.  Tice, trans. Terrance N.  Tice, Catherine L.  Kelsey, and Edwina Lawler (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2016), § 12. See also Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Dispisers, 2nd ed., ed. and trans. Richard Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 113–115. There he refers to Judaism as a “dead religion” (113). 63  Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel Lecture One,” 19. 64  Lindbeck, “What of the Future?,” 360. 65  Ibid. 66  Ibid., 361. 67  Ibid. 61 62

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belief that still finds expression in our so-called ‘secular age.’”68 Cherry expounds upon the development of American civil religion and demonstrates that in order to express this notion of America’s chosenness, Americans have, from Jonathan Edwards to Martin Luther King, Jr., used biblical imagery to describe America. Various people have said that the American people have been delivered by God from the Pharaoh of Britain, portrayed George Washington as a Moses or Joshua or Abraham Lincoln as a Christ-figure, or argued that America will play a special role in God’s eschatological work.69 They saw the United States as, in G.K. Chesterton’s words, “a nation with the soul of a church.”70 Scott Bader-Saye refers to these American claims as a “national supersessionism,” and notes that these views continued in Ronald Reagan’s references to the United States as a “city on a hill” and Bill Clinton’s calls for a “New Covenant.”71 Within the United States, African American Christians, from the days of slavery in the antebellum period on, “lived imaginatively in a world shaped by biblical stories largely drawn from the Old Testament.”72 They drew upon the stories of Israel’s exodus from Egypt or Jericho in their storytelling and the writing of spirituals. Lindbeck notes that “this continues to inform their sense of community but not their theological understanding of church life.”73 Lindbeck notes that African Americans are not alone, among marginalized groups or their advocates, in identifying themselves as Israel. Latin American liberation theologians have used the Exodus narrative to understand their movements, and social gospel advocates in nineteenth-century America identified themselves with the Hebrew prophets. For example, liberation theologian J.  Severino Croatto sees the Exodus as “the key event that models the faith of Israel,” the interpretive key for the rest of

68   Conrad Cherry, “Introduction,” in God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny, ed. Conrad Cherry, Revised and Expanded Edition (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 1. 69  Ibid., 11–12. 70  See Sidney E. Mead, The Nation with the Soul of a Church (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 48–77. 71  Scott Bader-Saye, Church and Israel After Christendom: The Politics Of Election, Radical Traditions: Theology in a Postcritical Key (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), 65–66. See 67–69. 72  Lindbeck, “Postmodern Hermeneutics and Jewish-Christian Dialogue,” 110. 73  Ibid.

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Israel’s Scripture.74 It is also a text that has a “reservoir” and “donation-­ of-­meaning” that is “unlimited,” and therefore it has “unique hermeneutical possibilities for Latin American theology.”75 He then moves on to see the exodus event as an announcement of liberation for us, the oppressed peoples of the Third World. We are enjoined to prolong the Exodus event because it was not an event solely for the Hebrews but rather the manifestation of a liberative plan for all peoples. According to a hermeneutical line of thinking it is perfectly possible that we might understand ourselves from the perspective of the biblical Exodus and, above all, that we might understand the Exodus from the vantage point of our situation as peoples in economic, political, social, or cultural “bondage.”76

He says that if the church does not involve itself in this work of liberating oppressed peoples, it shows that it is “‘asleep’ in its interpretation of the Gospel and does not understand the situation of dependence and oppression of our peoples.”77 Lindbeck does not completely reject projects like Croatto’s. He says, “Admittedly, sometimes associating Israel with something other than the church has good, but ultimately limited consequences.”78 In other cases, groups identifying themselves as Israel have led to disastrous consequences, “as when it is predicated of ‘Christendom,’ or of a ‘Christian’ nation, or, worst of all, of a race, as in the case of the apartheid Boers in South Africa.”79

74  J.  Severino Croatto, Exodus: A Hermeneutics of Freedom, trans. Salvator Attanasio (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1981), 12. 75  Ibid., 13. 76  Ibid., 15. This does not mean that Croatto ignores other aspects of liberation, like Christ’s work to liberate us from sin, the law, and death, which he calls the “three alienations” (67–79), but his primary focus is to understand “the spiritual liberation that Christ made possible for us in a political way” (79), to “liberate human beings oppressed by social and religious structures” (80). He says, “Today we can interpret the Exodus and the paschal mystery only from the perspective of our situation as dependent and oppressed peoples, or as persons dominated by the power structures” (81). 77  Ibid., 10. 78  Lindbeck, “What of the Future?,” 363. See Lindbeck, “Postmodern Hermeneutics and Jewish-Christian Dialogue,” 110. 79  Lindbeck, “What of the Future?,” 363.

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Post-Holocaust Christian reflection on Israel and the Jews has shifted in the aftermath of the Holocaust. “More and more Christian communions, not least the Roman Catholic Church, have officially affirmed that God has not revoked his covenant. Jews even today remain his elect and beloved people.”80 For example, the First Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam in 1948, just three years after the end of World War II, says: In the design of God, Israel has a unique position. It was Israel with whom God made His covenant by the call of Abraham. It was Israel to whom God revealed His name and gave His law. It was to Israel that He sent His Prophets with their message of judgment and of grace. It was Israel to whom He promised the coming of His Messiah. By the history of Israel God prepared the manger in which in the fullness of time he put the Redeemer of all mankind, Jesus Christ. The Church has received this spiritual heritage from Israel and is therefore in honour bound to render it back in the light of the Cross. We have, therefore, in humble conviction to proclaim to the Jews, “The Messiah for Whom you wait has come.” The promise has been fulfilled by the coming of Jesus Christ. For many the continued existence of a Jewish people which does not acknowledge Christ is a divine mystery which finds its only sufficient explanation in the purpose of God’s unchanging faithfulness and mercy. (Rom. 11:25–29)81

The document goes on to reiterate, “Anti-semitism is a sin against God and man.”82 Within two decades, Vatican II recognized that while many Jews in the first century did not accept the gospel, “the apostle Paul maintains that the Jews remain very dear to God, for the sake of the patriarchs, since God does not take back the gifts he bestowed or the choice he made.” The Council said that Jews and Christians “have a common spiritual heritage,” and that the Council “wishes to encourage and further mutual understanding and application. This can be achieved, especially, by way of biblical and theological enquiry and through friendly discussions.” While the  Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel Lecture One,” 2. See 20.  “The First Assembly of the World Council of Churches,” in The Theology of the Churches and the Jewish People: Statements by the World Council of Churches and Its Member Churches (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1988), 6. 82  Ibid. 80 81

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Council says that the church is “the new people of God,” it acknowledges that God has not rejected the Jews. It also critiques any and all forms of anti-Semitism and reaffirms that the Jews are not responsible for Jesus’ death. Rather, “The church always held and continues to hold that Christ out of infinite love freely underwent suffering and death because of the sins of all, so that all might attain salvation.”83 In light of this reassessment, Lindbeck argues that it has become safe, and “perhaps even mandatory,” to reappropriate a discussion of the church as Israel.84 He defines this retrieval as a “biblically mandated universal.”85 He defends this reappraisal, saying, “The emotions that have motivated the rejection of supersessionism in our day may well have come mostly from horror at the Holocaust, but this rejection would not have been possible without historical-critical ground-clearing.”86 Lindbeck notes that many in a post-Holocaust environment would treat the retrieval of the identification of the church as Israel with disdain, and for good reason. It has been associated with the worst forms of supersessionism. He acknowledges that “church-as-Israel discourse has almost always been anti-Jewish.”87 It is seen as vicious, as a major contributor to the Shoah, the Holocaust. Supersessionist beliefs that Christians alone are now the true Israel, the chosen people, because God has rejected the Jews, once pervaded Western culture and must be counted among the historical sources of the anti-Semitism that made Auschwitz and comparable crimes possible. If it had not been for conceiving the church as Israel, so the argument runs, Western societies and churches 83  Austin Flannery, ed., “Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions: Nostra Aetate,” in The Basic Sixteen Documents Vatican II: Constitutions, Decrees, Declarations: A Completely Revised Translation in Inclusive Language (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2014), § 4. Hereafter NA. Bruce D.  Marshall refers to NA § 4 as “the Church’s basic charter both for subsequent relations with the Jewish people and for theological understanding of the place of the fleshly descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the saving plan of God.” “Christ and Israel: An Unsolved Problem in Catholic Theology,” in The Call of Abraham: Essays on the Election of Israel in Honor of Jon D. Levenson, eds. Gary A.  Anderson and Joel S.  Kaminsky (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 333. 84  Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel Lecture One,” 2. See Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel,” 79–80, 90–91. 85  Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel,” 91. 86  Lindbeck, “What of the Future?,” 362. 87  Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel Lecture One,” 1. See Lindbeck, “What of the Future?,” 362.

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would have better resisted the Nazi efforts to exterminate all Jews everywhere. In view of these horrors, any suggestion that the concept has a positive aspect has become taboo.88

Lindbeck notes that even some Christian theologians who do believe that Christianity has replaced Judaism do not want to make the claim that the church is Israel. At the same time, however, Lindbeck notes, “The discarding of ecclesial Israelhood has not diminished supersessionism. Perhaps, then, the retrieval of the premodern understanding of the church as Israel will accomplish what modern, progressivist theologies have not.”89 Lindbeck thus makes this argument for reappropriation under certain constraints. Christians must disconnect the understanding of the church as Israel from anti-Judaism and supersessionism by seeking to appropriate, and not expropriate, the identity of Israel. He reiterates that it would be “indecent” for the church to again seek to expropriate Israel’s identity, and thereby to “deny the Jews their birthright.”90 Christians must recognize the harm that supersessionism has done to both Jews and Christians. While many, like Pope John Paul II, have recognized the harm supersessionism has done to Jews and have called the church to repentance,91 Lindbeck says, “neither he nor anyone else has spoken much of the harm done to the church and to intra-Christian unity by supersessionism, and when it comes to the need for the retrieval of an understanding of the church as Israel, absolutely everyone, as far as I know, has been silent.”92 Lindbeck recognizes that the chances of the church retrieving this understanding of the church as Israel are not great. He says, “The psychosocial trends in both high and popular culture run counter to community 88  Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel,” 78–79. See Lindbeck, “An Israel-like Church,” 13–14. Lindbeck also notes a second set of difficulties in retrieving an understanding of the church as Israel: “The use of stories of Israel to shape Christian communal existence is thoroughly unmodern” (14). This will be discussed at more length in Chap. 3. 89  Lindbeck, “What of the Future?,” 361. 90  Ibid., 362. 91  For a helpful treatment of John Paul II’s teaching on Judaism and the Jews, see Bruce D. Marshall, “Elder Brothers: John Paul II’s Teaching on the Jewish People as a Question to the Church,” in John Paul II and the Jewish People: A Jewish-Christian Dialogue, eds. David G. Dalin and Matthew Levering (Lanham, MD: Sheed & Ward, 2008), 113–129. 92  Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel Lecture One,” 20–21. See Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel,” 80; Lindbeck, “Paris, Rome, Jerusalem,” 406–408. Lindbeck acknowledged the Christian benefits of rethinking the church/Israel relationship in “The Jews, Renewal and Ecumenism,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 2, no. 3 (Fall 1965): 471–473.

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and to a sense of a common and chosen peoplehood such as Christians once had and Jews to some extent still retain.”93 He argues, however, that supersessionism undermines the foundations of the Christian faith, for it affects not only the church but also the church’s understanding of God. He says, “To affirm, as supersessionism does, that God has revoked his covenant with Israel, is to assert that God does not keep his word, does not abide by his promises.”94 Lindbeck argues that “the churches desperately need this emphasis for their own intramural and ecumenical health.”95 The rest of this volume will explore Lindbeck’s attempts to explore the relation of the church and Israel, beginning with his attempt in the 1960s to see the church and Israel in parallel before moving on to his later work on the church as “Israel-like” or “as Israel.”

 Lindbeck, “Comparative Doctrine,” 10.  Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel Lecture One,” 21. 95  Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel,” 80. 93 94

CHAPTER 3

The Catholic Protestant: Vatican II and the Church and Israel in Parallel

At all times and in every nation, anyone who fears God and does what is right has been acceptable to him (see Acts 10:35). He has, however, willed to make women and men holy and to save them, not as individuals without any bond between them, but rather to make them into a people who might acknowledge him and serve him in holiness. He therefore chose the people of Israel to be his own people and established a covenant with them. (Lumen Gentium)1

There are three primary reasons why a study of Lindbeck’s later emphasis upon the church as Israel must include a discussion of his work within and around Vatican II. First, his invitation to be a delegated observer to the Council marked a transition in his career from a primary focus in medieval theology and philosophy to contemporary Catholic theology, LutheranRoman Catholic dialogue, and ecclesiology and ecumenism in general. As Bruce Marshall says, “Lindbeck might have remained primarily a historian

1  Austin Flannery, ed., “Dogmatic Constitution on the Church: Lumen Gentium,” in Vatican II: The Basic Sixteen Documents: Constitutions, Decrees, Declarations: A Completely Revised Translation in Inclusive Language (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2014), § 9. Hereafter LG.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. C. Brown, George Lindbeck and The Israel of God, Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74757-2_3

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of medieval thought had it not been for the Second Vatican Council.”2 The invitation proved advantageous for Lindbeck, for he argues that a significant reason for his study of medieval philosophy and theology stemmed from his interest in becoming a specialist in contemporary Catholic developments.3 He concludes, “It was as if my life were being designed in preparation for my later ecumenical work, even though I was oblivious to ecumenism.”4 Vatican II left a definitive mark on everything Lindbeck wrote for the rest of his career. Second, Lindbeck considers the 1960s the pinnacle in the emphasis upon unitive ecumenism. In New Delhi, India, in 1961, the World Council of Churches released what many consider the definitive statement on the goal of the ecumenical movement. Then at Vatican II, the Roman Catholic Church fully entered the ecumenical scene. Lindbeck argued as early as 1976, “It is often noted by observers of the ecumenical scene that the popular enthusiasm generated by Vatican II has rapidly faded. The cause of Christian unity is no longer greeted with the enthusiasm which it once evoked.”5 Third, in this period, Lindbeck made his first attempt at an Israelology. Though his later Israelology differs in some respects from this first attempt, it demonstrates that his attention to the relationship of the church to Israel occupied his thought much earlier in his career than is generally assumed. To better understand this first Israelological attempt, this chapter will also explore Lindbeck’s description of the shifts in Roman Catholic ecclesiology and the “sectarian future” of the church. The purpose of this chapter is not to provide an overview or assessment of the Council and its documents, but rather to survey how Lindbeck’s work interacted with and was stimulated by the Council. 2  Bruce D. Marshall, “Introduction: The Nature of Doctrine after 25 Years,” in The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age, by George Lindbeck, 25th Anniversary Edition (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), ix. 3  John Wright, ed., “‘I Pray That They Might Be One as We Are One’: An Interview with George Lindbeck,” in Postliberal Theology and the Church Catholic: Conversations with George Lindbeck, David Burrell, and Stanley Hauerwas (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012), 56–58. 4  Lindbeck, “Paris, Rome, Jerusalem,” 393. Lindbeck was not previously opposed to ecumenism per se, but he lacked interest in the pan-Protestant interdenominationalism he saw in China and in the Student Christian Movement. 5  George Lindbeck, “Two Types of Ecumenism,” in Wisdom and Knowledge: Essays in Honor of Joseph Patin, vol. 2 (Villanova, PA: Villanova University Press, 1976), 371.

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Background to Vatican II Lindbeck argues that so-called traditional monarchical understandings of the church are a rather recent development. They were not even undisputed at Vatican I.  They stem from the Counter-Reformation and may have become widespread only through the work of Robert Bellarmine in the seventeenth century. This ecclesiology was not only monarchical, but also “static, juridical, and externalistic.”6 For Bellarmine, the church is a society “as visible as the Commune of Rome, or the Kingdom of France, or the Republic of Venice.”7 Though Lindbeck also defends a view of the church as a visible and political society, his view differs from Bellarmine’s, for Bellarmine saw the church as a “perfect (i.e., complete) society,”8 thus demonstrating certain Platonic tendencies.9 Monarchical ecclesiological views like Bellarmine’s served as an apologetic for Roman Catholic ecclesial structures against Protestant critiques.10 Lindbeck argues that in the nineteenth century, changes in understandings of human society developed through the growth of historical awareness, philosophical romanticism, and idealism, and an implicit Aristotelianism led to a rethinking of the nature of the church. Roman Catholics like John Henry Newman, Johann Adam Möhler, and Matthias Joseph Scheeben, as well as Protestants like Friedrich Schleiermacher, thought of the church as “comparable to a developing organism in which the inner life, the ‘spirit’ (of a nation, for example), is of decisive importance.”11 Their study of patristic sources and dependence upon Paul’s image of the church as the body of Christ strengthened their work. It took time, however, for the Roman Church to accept their views. Vatican I rejected a proposal to define the church as the “Mystical Body of Christ,” and while it left room for later developments, it also dogmatized 6  George Lindbeck, “Ecclesiology and Roman Catholic Renewal,” Religion in Life 33 (1964): 388. See George Lindbeck, The Future of Roman Catholic Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970), 29–30. Hereafter FRCT. 7  As quoted in Lindbeck, “Ecclesiology and Roman Catholic Renewal,” 388. 8  Ibid., 392. 9  George Lindbeck, “A Protestant View of the Ecclesiological Status of the Roman Catholic Church,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 1, no. 2 (Spring 1964): 258. Lindbeck sees a trace of this in Augustine’s City of God “even though his is a remarkably historical view when it is contrasted with the classical outlook from which he drew his intellectual tools.” Lindbeck places the blame more upon writers like Pseudo-Dionysius. 10  Lindbeck, “Ecclesiology and Roman Catholic Renewal,” 389. 11  Ibid.

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papal infallibility and reaffirmed Bellarmine’s view of the church. Thus, the new views of the church were not as widely accepted until after World War I.12 Lindbeck believes the reform and renewal within the Roman Catholic Church began with Pope Leo XIII. Leo opposed the identification of the Roman Church with royalism, acknowledged the appropriateness of certain aspects of the socialist agenda, sponsored biblical and archaeological research, reversed prohibitions of private Bible reading among the laity, and spoke of Protestants as “most beloved brethren.”13 Such progress has increased; however, it has not been without disruptions. Liturgical reforms that encouraged congregational participation in the mass began with Pope Pius X, and he, along with Pope Pius XII, was responsible for further liturgical and biblical renewal.14 Lindbeck argues that in the newer ecclesiological perspectives, “The church as mystery was set over against the church as institution, the church of love against the church of law, and a spirit-filled community against a legally constituted society.”15 While controversy arose concerning these developments, Pius XII sought to incorporate aspects of the newer perspective while not jettisoning a juridical understanding of the church. For example, in Mystici Corporis Christi, Pius XII says, “One must not think, however, that this ordered or ‘organic’ structure of the body of the Church contains only hierarchical elements and with them is complete; or, as an opposite opinion holds, that it is composed only of those who enjoy charismatic gifts—though members gifted with miraculous powers will never be lacking in the Church.”16 Pius XII recognizes a variety of  Lindbeck, “Ecclesiology and Roman Catholic Renewal,” 389.  George Lindbeck, “Roman Catholicism on the Eve of the Council,” in The Papal Council and the Gospel: Protestant Theologians Evaluate the Coming Council, ed. Kristen E. Skydsgaard (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1961), 68. 14  Ibid., 73; George Lindbeck, “The Future of Roman Catholic Theology in the Light of the First Session of the Second Vatican Council,” Dialog 2 (1963): 248. 15  Lindbeck, “Ecclesiology and Roman Catholic Renewal,” 389. 16  Pope Pius XII, Mystici Corporis Christi [Encyclical on the Mystical Body of Christ], § 17, accessed January 24, 2017, http://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_29061943_mystici-corporis-christi.html. Prior to Vatican II, Lindbeck anticipated that Mystici corporis would “undoubtedly provide the framework for the dogmatic constitution which will be proposed to the Council.” “Reform and the Council,” Lutheran World (1962): 311. Lindbeck notes, however, that Pius XII only goes so far within the document, which “attempted to neutralize the new concepts by saying, in effect, that these simply refer to the inner reality of the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Church is 12 13

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ministries in the church: those who receive Holy Orders, those who accept the evangelical councils or devote themselves to works of mercy, married people, and godparents; clergy and laity. These reforms continued through Pope John XXIII, the convener of Vatican II, as well as his successor, Pope Paul VI.

The Council It is commonly noted that the theology of Vatican II incorporated two motivations—aggiornamento and ressourcement—both of which emphasize change. In regard to aggiornamento, Lindbeck argues that the Roman Church has come to have a new attitude, or an increased openness, toward the modern world. The Catholic Church seeks to communicate the Christian message in ways that are intelligible to modern people. In one sense, Protestants can look at these attempts at updating as a way for the Roman Catholic Church to “catch up” with the rest of Christendom. He notes, however, that Protestants also need to address many of the same questions.17 Also, there is “a movement of ressourcement, ‘back-to-the-sources,’ which manifests itself in the biblical, liturgical and patristic revivals. There is a real and widespread passion to bring the church’s life and theology into harmony with early Christianity.”18 Lindbeck notes that these two motivations are not necessarily mutually exclusive. He argues that the present age is one in which people recognize the need for “both adaptation and faithfulness to the sources,” and this allows for reforms such as still to be understood in its outer aspects as essentially the kind of fundamentally juridical society which Bellarmine thought it to be. This, at least, is the interpretation of the intention of this encyclical which is suggested by the works of its original drafter, Sebastian Tromp, who to this day remains one of the right-hand men of Cardinal Ottaviani in the Holy Office.” “Ecclesiology and Roman Catholic Renewal,” 389–390. 17  George Lindbeck, “Reform and Infallibility,” Cross Currents 11, no. 4 (September 1961): 345. Lindbeck says, “New questions are being raised for which Protestants, like Catholics, have no definite answers.” Examples include what to do about scientific and technological developments, atomic war, population growth, racial justice, and the family. “Church and World: Schema 13,” in Dialogue on the Way: Protestant Report From Rome on the Vatican Council, ed. George Lindbeck (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1965), 231.See George Lindbeck, “Pope John’s Council: First Session,” in Dialogue on the Way: Protestant Reports From Rome on the Vatican Council, ed. George Lindbeck (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1965), 20–22. 18  Lindbeck, “Reform and Infallibility,” 345.

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liturgical renewal.19 Lindbeck’s prognosis, however, “is that because the Council is part of a dynamic, ongoing process, it is the new theological emphases which are likely to prove the most significant as a basis and guide for further developments.”20 In addition to those twin themes, Lindbeck says there are two competing tendencies in contemporary Catholic thought. First, there is an increased emphasis upon “central Christian realities,” which leads him to argue there is a “genuine ‘evangelical revival’ within the Roman Church.”21 This tendency stems from the increased focus on biblical study noted earlier. This has included a willingness to learn from non-Catholics and increased cooperation between Protestant and Catholic biblical scholars. The liturgical renewal movement is also connected with this evangelical revival because the liturgy has come to be seen as the proper context for instilling a biblical orientation.22 Lindbeck argues that the Roman Church’s emphasis upon the irreformable character of doctrine is not as restrictive as Protestants have generally assumed. He points to examples of Catholic theologians, like Louis Bouyer and Hans Küng, who have articulated doctrine in a “sounder” or “more ‘Lutheran’” direction.23 Lindbeck also points to Karl Rahner and Küng who emphasize a flexibility in dogma, even acknowledging that “dogmas are inadequate, sometimes egregiously inadequate, statements of revealed truth.”24 He points to Catholic rethinking of the doctrines of limbo, justification, and the role of Scripture saying, “When the Bible is taken as seriously as the above remarks suggest, it cannot help but have a transforming influence in all areas of theology.”25 So the concern is not with Catholic doctrinal inflexibility, but instead with whether doctrinal developments “will be in the direction of increasing faithfulness to God’s word, or away from it.”26  George Lindbeck, “Ecumenism and Liturgical Renewal,” Una Sancta (1964): 9.  FRCT, 4. Lindbeck argues this is the correct understanding for two reasons. First, “the majority of most active drafters and interpreters of the documents understand them as favoring fresh approaches.” Second, the significance of past councils “has been determined by what is new in them, by the redirection they have given the thinking of the church.” 21  Lindbeck, “Roman Catholicism on the Eve of the Council,” 61. 22  Ibid., 72–75. 23   George Lindbeck, “The Evangelical Possibilities of Roman Catholic Theology,” Lutheran World 7 (1960): 142–143. 24  Lindbeck, “Reform and Infallibility,” 346. 25  Lindbeck, “The Evangelical Possibilities of Roman Catholic Theology,” 148. 26  Ibid., 150. 19 20

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Second, there are “contrary movements,” both in popular piety and in official documents like Munificentissimus Deus (1950), which introduced the dogma of the Assumption of Mary. Lindbeck says that this doctrine is “without biblical warrant. This has inevitably aroused fears that, despite the biblical renewal, future dogmatic developments may be increasingly independent of Scripture.”27 The Roman Catholic Church is a diverse body, and some areas of the world place a greater emphasis upon the first tendency, while other areas emphasize the second. He says, “Future developments within Roman Catholicism depend in large part on which of these two attitudes prevail.”28 Lindbeck argues that for the Protestant, there is a temptation to emphasize the former tendency and ignore the latter, but to have a balanced view of contemporary Roman Catholicism, one must take account of both themes. While in places like the United States doctrinal discussions between Catholics and Protestants have become more civil, there is a cooperative search for the fullness of truth, a greater recognition of Christian brotherhood, and a common opposition to secularism, the second tendency reminds Christians that real irreconcilable differences remain.29 So while Protestants and Catholics held to a variety of perspectives about the council, ranging from optimism to pessimism to skepticism, Lindbeck held to a moderate optimism, both during and after the Council, even in the midst of his own disappointments with the Council’s slowness.30 While acknowledging the danger of making predictions, he projects that the future of Catholic theology will belong to the “avant garde”—the “progressives” such as Karl Rahner, Yves Congar, Jean Daniélou, and Hans Küng, whom he argues were the most influential theologians at the Council.31 27  Lindbeck, “Roman Catholicism on the Eve of the Council,” 79. Lindbeck does note concerning the Marian doctrines and others that Protestants find problematic, “there are more, as well as less, evangelical ways of adhering to the Roman position.” “The Evangelical Possibilities of Roman Catholic Theology,” 152. 28  Lindbeck, “Roman Catholicism on the Eve of the Council,” 88. Lindbeck extends hope that the Council’s discussion of a hierarchy of truths may lead to increased Christian unity. FRCT, 106–108. 29  Lindbeck, “Roman Catholicism on the Eve of the Council,” 61–64. 30  For example, George Lindbeck, “The Second Vatican Council: II,” Christianity and Crisis 22, no. 16 (October 1, 1962): 164–168; George Lindbeck, “Reform, Slow but Cautious,” Concordia Theological Monthly 35, no. 5 (May 1964): 284–286. 31  Lindbeck, “The Future of Roman Catholic Theology in the Light of the First Session of the Second Vatican Council,” 245–246.

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Types of Ecclesiologies Lindbeck notes a few different ecclesiologies came to dominate in the postwar period, and each can be seen within Lumen Gentium. This is largely because Lumen Gentium is “a highly ambiguous document,” in part due to the compromises that needed to be made.32 Lindbeck, however, also calls the document a “watershed in the history of the Roman Catholic Church,” and “the fullest dogmatic statement on the nature of the church that has ever been formulated by any Christian body.”33 While Lindbeck says that Lumen Gentium includes contributions from various ecclesiological perspectives, he argues, “a relatively coherent doctrine of the church requires that one or another of the fundamental motifs be made systematically central, because otherwise there will be unresolved conflicts between different possible lines of interpretation.”34 He therefore looks at the distinct perspectives represented at the Council. There is the continued emphasis upon the church as the (mystical) body of Christ. Lumen Gentium says, “For by communicating his Spirit, Christ mystically constitutes as his body his brothers and sisters who are called together from every nation.”35 Lindbeck argues, however, that this type of ecclesiology has decreased in influence: “Further historical study has made it clear that even though ‘body of Christ’ is important for St. Paul and the early fathers, still it does not represent their fundamental conception of the church.”36 Lindbeck also expresses a concern that an “incautious use” of describing the church as the mystical body can lead to an “‘obliteration of all distance, … the effacement of all difference’ between Christ and the Church.”37 In the face of the decreased emphasis upon the church as mystical body, three perspectives emerged. First, some have embraced a discussion of the church as the “‘people of God’ on the grounds that this notion is ecclesiologically fundamental for the Bible and the early fathers.”38 Lumen Gentium devotes Chap. 2 to a discussion of the church as the people of God. Lindbeck expresses a 32  George Lindbeck, “A Protestant Point of View,” in Vatican II: An Interfaith Appraisal, ed. John H. Miller (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966), 219. 33  Ibid. 34  Ibid., 221. 35  LG § 7. 36  Lindbeck, “Ecclesiology and Roman Catholic Renewal,” 390. 37  Ibid. 38  Ibid.

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concern that “people” is term that can be used in various ways. He, however, still sees it as an important description: It stresses the historical-eschatological aspect of the church in contrast to the ontological aspect which is underlined by the “body of Christ” image. In the latter, it is Christ’s continued presence in and through the church which is thrown into relief, while “people of God” reminds us that the church, like Israel, is a wanderer through time, moving toward the eschatological kingdom, subject to historical vicissitudes and sometimes unfaithful to the Lord. It is hard to think of the body of Christ needing reform, whereas the pilgrim people of God is obviously the ecclesia semper reformanda.39

Second, French Dominicans like Yves Congar describe the church as “mystery” or as “interior community of the saints in faith and love.”40 For example, Congar says in Divided Christendom, “The oneness of the Church is a communication and extension of the oneness of God Himself. The Life which is in the bosom of the Father is not only communicated within the Godhead itself, thus constituting the Divine Societas of the Three Persons of the Blessed Trinity; it is further communicated to creatures by grace, to angels first and then to men.”41 Lindbeck does clarify that for advocates of this perspective, the exterior dimensions cannot be separated from the interior. For them, “The visible church … is most vividly present, most fully actualized, in the worshiping community, especially in the celebration of the Eucharist. Juridical and magisterial institutions are secondary and instrumental rather than fundamental.”42 The over-emphases upon the hierarchical elements of the church in previous centuries “have not altered the essential constitution of the church.”43 Third, German Jesuits such as Karl Rahner have come to emphasize a sacramental ecclesiology. Rahner says, “By the very fact of being in that way the enduring presence of Christ in the world, the Church is truly the fundamental sacrament, the well-spring of the sacraments in the strict  Ibid., 391.  Ibid. 41  Yves Congar, Divided Christendom: A Catholic Study of the Problem of Reunion, trans. M.A. Bousfield (London: The Centenary Press, 1939), 48–49. 42   Lindbeck, “Ecclesiology and Roman Catholic Renewal,” 391. For example, see Congar, 63. 43  Lindbeck, “Ecclesiology and Roman Catholic Renewal,” 391. 39 40

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sense.”44 Lumen Gentium engages this type within the first paragraph, describing the church as “a sacrament—a sign and instrument, that is, of communion with God and of the unity of the entire human race.”45 Within this framework, the emphasis is placed upon the external, rather than interior, aspects of the church. Lindbeck says, “Like the individual sacraments, the church is described as the visible and efficacious sign of invisible grace.”46 He notes, however, that this view of the church does not ignore the interior aspect. Because this grace must be understood as the reconciliation and union of man with God and man with man, the sacramental theory can equal the communio ecclesiology in the emphasis it places on the interior communion of the saints. In another respect it is superior. The exterior elements of the church are not only said to cause the interior grace, as the communio theory asserts, but the nature of this causation is specified as sacramental symbolization. This means the central question is that of effective symbolization.47

The church is therefore meant to visibly witness to God’s grace, and for that reason, it is important for the church to be unified, and for the church’s liturgy, service, structures, and communal life to effectively communicate—to enable the church to witness to Christ and serve humanity.48 Lindbeck and Warren Quanbeck thus note, “This new vision of the church embraces not only its internal life, but also its relation to the world.”49 Lindbeck notes that within these perspectives on the church, there is a tension between two views of the universe. The first one is a classical 44  Karl Rahner, The Church and the Sacraments, Quaestiones Disputatae 9 (Herder and Herder, 1963), 18. 45  LG § 1. 46  Lindbeck, “Ecclesiology and Roman Catholic Renewal,” 392. 47  Ibid. 48  Lindbeck, “Ecclesiology and Roman Catholic Renewal,” 392–393; FRCT, 48, 56–60, chap. 4. Rahner says, “The Church exists in the full sense, in the highest degree of actual fulfillment of her nature, by teaching, bearing witness to Christ’s truth, bearing the cross of Christ through the ages, loving God in her members, rendering present in rite in the sacrifice of the mass the saving grace that is hers.” The Church and the Sacraments, 20. 49  George Lindbeck and Warren A. Quanbeck, “Paul VI Becomes Pope: Second Session,” in Dialogue on the Way: Protestant Report from Rome on the Vatican Council, ed. George Lindbeck (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1965), 51. See Lindbeck, “Church and World,” 231.

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“two-­story” or “three story” view of the universe.50 This view is a “relatively static, perpendicular contrast between the two sharply different levels of created reality, an immaterial and timeless heaven above, and the realm of temporality beneath.”51 When discussing this classical view as a “three story” view, he says that the lowest level is the material one, the second story is an immaterial one of angels and supernatural realities, and at the highest point, God is beyond the “supernatural but created heaven above.”52 Connected with this view of the world is a dualistic anthropology in which salvation is primarily individualistic, and it “consists of souls, one by one, escaping—or being catapulted—from here into heaven above.”53 While historical events, like Christ’s incarnation, may provide the means for this escape, this view, in general, makes history unimportant.54 Within the second view, creation is conceived as “a single whole, a historical-evolutionary development, culminating in a total transformation when all things are united in Christ and God becomes all in all.”55 This view emphasizes the “modern sense of the historical character of existence.”56 Also, salvation is understood as corporate and cosmic, working itself out “in and through history,” and the church has a distinctive role to play.57 While this view is modern in various respects, Lindbeck argues it “is a more biblical one emphasizing the eschatological history of 50  Lindbeck says two story in “A Protestant Point of View,” 220; “A Framework of Catholic-Protestant Disagreement,” in The Word in History: The St. Xavier Symposium, ed. T. Patrick Burke (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1966), 106; “The New Vision of the World and the Ecumenical Revolution,” Religious Education 62, no. 2 (April 1967): 85–88. He says three-story in “Ecumenism, Cosmic Redemption, and the Council,” in Ecumenism, the Spirit, and Worship, ed. Leonard Swidler (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1967), passim. He mentions both options in FRCT, 12ff. Bernard Lonergan makes a similar argument that there is a shift from a “classical” to modern view of the world in “The Transition From a Classicist World-View to Historical Mindedness,” in A Second Collection, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan vol. 13, ed. Robert M. Doran and John D. Dadosky (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 3–10. 51  Lindbeck, “A Protestant Point of View,” 220–221. 52  Lindbeck, “Ecumenism, Cosmic Redemption, and the Council,” 64. See FRCT, 12. 53  Lindbeck, “Ecumenism, Cosmic Redemption, and the Council,” 64. See FRCT, 12–14, 30–31. 54  FRCT, 14. 55  Lindbeck, “Ecumenism, Cosmic Redemption, and the Council,” 65. 56  Lindbeck, “A Framework of Catholic-Protestant Disagreement,” 109. 57  Lindbeck, “Ecumenism, Cosmic Redemption, and the Council,” 65. Lindbeck says, “Not since the early days of the church, perhaps since Irenaeus, has the mainstream of the Catholic tradition spoken in such realistically eschatological terms of a universe which is

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salvation.”58 He says, “For the Bible, the great divide is not the vertical ontological contrast between material and immaterial, natural and supernatural but the horizontal, temporal contrast between the two ages of the same world’s history.”59 The Council also expresses this eschatological perspective in Lumen Gentium, which calls the church the “pilgrim church.” Chapter 7 begins by saying, “The church, to which we are called in Christ Jesus, and in which by the grace of God we attain holiness, will receive its perfection only in the glory of heaven, when the time for the renewal of all things will have come (Acts 3:21).”60 The church is already holy in a very real sense, but that “sanctity … is true though imperfect.”61 The church is “at once holy and always in need of purification,” and it “follows constantly the path of penance and renewal.”62While the final age has begun and God has begun the work of renewing the world, “the pilgrim church, in its sacraments and institutions, which belong to this present age, carries the mark of this world which will pass, and it takes its place among the creatures which groan and until now suffer the pains of childbirth and await the revelation of the children of God.”63 Lindbeck says: heading not towards total destruction, not toward annihilation, but towards cosmic redemption.” FRCT, 25. 58  Lindbeck, “A Protestant Point of View,” 221. While this view makes room for evolutionary theory, Lindbeck says, “This is not at all the same as an immanentism which substitutes evolution, creative or otherwise, for God. The final manifestation of the Kingdom will not be an earthly achievement; it will burst disjunctively into history from above just as it began in Jesus Christ, not as an emergent novelty, but as God’s transcendent act. Yet, according to this application of eschatology to the modern world view, God is now guiding all the processes of nature and history in preparation for the fulfillment, just as all history before Christ was preparation for Him who came in the fullness of time and as the fulfillment of all times.” “A Framework of Catholic-Protestant Disagreement,” 110–111. 59  FRCT, 13. 60  LG § 48. 61  Ibid. 62  Ibid., § 8. See Austin Flannery, ed., “Decree on Ecumenism: Unitatis Redintegratio,” in Vatican Council II: The Basic Sixteen Documents: Constitutions, Decrees, Declarations: A Completely Revised Translation in Inclusive Language (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2014), § 6. Hereafter UR. Lindbeck notes, “Admittedly, it is never explicitly said that the church has sinned, but the theological foundations for such a confession are clearly present.” FRCT, 35. Rahner goes further than the Council here by saying that the church is the “ecclesia semper reformanda in capite et in membris, the Church always needing reform in head and in members.” The Church After the Council, 28. Later in this same volume, Rahner says, “the church now appears as the sinful Church of sinners” (71). 63  LG § 48.

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Because it is a pilgrim people journeying from one epoch to another and from one culture to another, it is seen as deeply involved and affected by the vicissitudes of history, not as skimming lightly over the waves of change. This image of the people fits in with our contemporary awareness that the church is an historically and sociologically concrete community subject in one dimension of its being to the same laws of change as any other society.64

Views of the church as a “divine and changeless institution” fit more into the first view, while concepts like the church as the pilgrim people of God fit better into the second view. Some other views, like the church as mystical body of Christ, can fit into either framework.65 Lindbeck argues that to understand the Council’s discussion of the church and its role in the world, one must understand this “new vision of the world.”66 For within the Council documents, “The church and its mission as well as the coming of Christ are described chiefly in the context of the history of salvation rather than of a two-story universe.”67 Also, within Lumen Gentium is an increased emphasis upon the role of the laity in the church and collegiality.68 Bellarmine and those that followed him identified the church with the institution, and thus their understanding of the church did not include the laity, who were seen as “passive recipients of the ministrations and guidance of the clergy.”69 Vatican II, however, calls the clergy not to direct the laity, but instead to equip the laity. Lindbeck says, “The clergy would be the ministers of the ministers, the servants of the servants of Christ in the world.”70 Herein the Council moved away from a primarily hierarchical view of the church to one in which emphasizes various spheres of church life.71 Lindbeck speaks highly of Lumen Gentium and other Council documents in many respects. For example, he argues Lumen Gentium and  FRCT, 34.  Lindbeck, “A Protestant Point of View,” 221. 66  FRCT, 9. 67  Ibid., 23. 68  Lindbeck and Quanbeck, “Paul VI Becomes Pope,” 50. See O’Malley, 62. 69  FRCT, 30. 70  Lindbeck, “Church and World,” 237. For example, see LG § 18: “Christ the Lord set up in his church a variety of offices whose aim is the good of the whole body. Ministers, invested with a sacred power, are at the service of their brothers and sisters, so that all who belong to the people of God and therefore enjoy true christian dignity may attain to salvation through their free, combined and well-ordered efforts in pursuit of a common goal.” 71  Lindbeck and Quanbeck, “Paul VI Becomes Pope,” 59–60; FRCT, 87–88. 64 65

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Unitatis Redintegratio make “ecumenism central to the purpose of the church in a way that is not in traditional views of the mission of the Church.”72 He goes so far as to say, “The Roman Catholic Church is now doctrinally committed to the urgency of the ecumenical enterprise more thoroughly than any other church.”73 Also, he sees the claim that the church “subsists in” rather than “is” the Roman Catholic Church as an improvement.74 He, however, remains concerned that the Council identifies the church too closely with God’s final kingdom. Lindbeck says, “It does not so much as hint that the coming of the kingdom stands over against the church as judgment (e.g., Rev. 2–3), and not only as deliverance, victory, and fulfillment.”75

Church and Israel in Parallel In 1964, Lindbeck published an essay entitled, “A Protestant View of the Ecclesiological Status of the Roman Catholic Church.”76 Therein, Lindbeck attempts a thought experiment to determine if a Protestant can accept the Roman Catholic Church’s ecclesiological claims and still remain Protestant. Lindbeck sees this as an ecumenical imperative because of Roman Catholic ecumenists who are conversely attempting to discern if they can affirm the self-claims of Protestant churches. To do so, Lindbeck explores two theses: (1) The claim that the Catholic Church “has an ecclesiological character which makes it in important respects a fuller manifestation of the Church than are Protestant churches” (243). (2) A church with a higher ecclesiological status can “be more unfaithful to the gospel than are the reforming movements which it has expelled” (243).77 Lindbeck acknowledges that this thought experiment may appear absurd at first glance. He argues, however, that Luther and the earliest  Lindbeck, “A Protestant Point of View,” 229.  FRCT, 80. 74  George Lindbeck, “A Definitive Look at Vatican II,” Christianity and Crisis 25, no. 23 (January 10, 1966): 295; FRCT, 84. 75  Lindbeck, “Church and World,” 246. 76  Subsequent citations of this essay within this chapter will be cited parenthetically. 77  Lindbeck clarifies this second thesis more by saying, “This second thesis simply proposes the general principle that substantial infidelity in life and even doctrine is not incompatible with a privileged ecclesiological status, and that consequently a thorough-going Protestant can maintain that the Roman Catholic Church is more fully a church than is his own denomination, even while maintaining that it is right to remain outside of it because it is unfaithful” (243). 72 73

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Reformers held very similar views: “For the Reformers in the first decades, the ‘Roman’ Church was the one and only true catholic church in the West…. They insisted that they had no intention of founding a new church, but simply of reforming the old” (244).78 The earliest Reformers even understood the necessity of ordaining ministers as a “temporary expedient” until the reform and reunion of the western church. Lindbeck says, “The Catholic Church was for the early Protestants the one and only church, it was their home church, it was their ecclesiastical homeland— but it was under enemy occupation” (244). Because the Roman Church continued to expel those who sought to reform her, it was necessary to form a government, an ecclesiastical order, in exile. But the Reformers at first no more thought of this as a new, second church than De Gaulle thought of his war-time regime as a replacement, a substitute for France…. Their claim was not that they represented the only legitimate regime, but rather that theirs was a legitimate interim order until such time as reforms made it possible to rejoin the homeland. (244–245)

Lindbeck notes, however, that these early views did not persist. Protestants came to no longer view the Roman Catholic Church as the homeland. Rather, “Catholicism became the country of Egypt, and they thought of their own churches as the Promised Land” (245).79 Later, another shift in viewpoint arose among certain Protestants. They now view their churches as “independent nations,” but at the same time are willing to acknowledge that the Roman Church is also a nation like them. He calls this viewpoint the “‘federal’ doctrine of the visible unity of the church” (245). Lindbeck asks if Protestants can recapture the view of the earliest Protestants. He does so while still agreeing with the traditional Protestant 78  He says, “They very early began to suspect that the Orthodox in the East had an equal claim to catholicity and apostolicity, so we must put in the qualification ‘West.’” 79  Lindbeck elsewhere distinguishes between Reformers, such as Luther, who saw the Reformation as a corrective, and second-generation Reformers, like John Calvin, who described the Reformation as “constitutive of a new type of Christianity” or as “re-establishing the original order of the church.” See Granfield, “George Lindbeck,” 153. Lindbeck agrees with the corrective interpretation of the Protestant Reformation. He says, “I cannot conceive of Protestantism as a separate branch of Christendom. We must consider Protestantism as a reform movement within the Universal Church, and its purpose is to assist in the formation of circumstances that make its separate existence unnecessary. It works toward eventual reunion” (154–155).

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critiques of Rome. This critique expresses concern that the Catholic doctrine of infallibility, in particular papal infallibility, leads to a denial that the church is “creatura Verbi, the creature of the Word of God. It denies that Christ is effectively the head of the Church” (247).80 He does not believe with the federalists that the reunion of the church requires all churches to an equal amount of repentance. Instead, he argues that the Protestant, who values the Roman Catholic Church may “paradoxically, find it easier to denounce its crimes” (248). The Roman Church may indeed need more reform than other Christian bodies. Lindbeck says it is possible to hold this view because of the increasing awareness that the visible and invisible are inseparable and reciprocally related. Any inwardly real unity, including the greatest of all which we have in Christ, strives to manifest itself outwardly, or it is not real. Furthermore, the visible unity is the means by which the invisible is nourished. Visibility has a sacramental character in the sense that it is both sign and cause of inward grace, of the res. (248)

He notes, however, that visibility cannot be reduced to individual behavior, for an individual’s behavior is conditioned by various social factors, including ecclesial ones. For contemporary Christians, “it becomes impossible to believe that the unity Christ promised and willed for his church is a purely spiritual and inward love. There is no such thing. Love is not love unless it takes concrete social and, where appropriate, organizational shape” (248). Lindbeck argues that early Christians were insistent upon providing an institutional means for the preservation of unity. They did not simply rely upon charismatic leaders. Even Paul sought to have his apostolic vocation recognized by the church in Jerusalem. He concludes, “For those who are imbued with the outlook fostered by empirical historiography and empirical sociology it is difficult simply to condemn the ecclesiological 80  Lindbeck elsewhere has a more nuanced view of infallibility. He says as early as 1960, “It is becoming clearer and clearer that the Roman Catholic Church’s emphasis on the unalterable and irreformable character of its dogma does not have anywhere near as limiting and restrictive an influence on theological development as has generally been supposed” (“The Evangelical Possibilities of Roman Catholic Theology,” 142.) And again in 1961, “In comparison to most post-Tridentine theology, contemporary Roman Catholic thought displays an astonishing flexibility” (“Reform and Infallibility,” 145). See also George Lindbeck, Infallibility, Pere Marquette Theology Lecture (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1972).

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developments of the first centuries and of later periods as a fall from gospel simplicity” (249). Processes of institutionalization and tradition exist in every human community, and to object to these processes is to “object to the Incarnation, as Roman Catholics like to remind us, and as Protestants are increasingly inclined to agree (within limits)” (249). Contemporary Christians cannot skip over the past two millennia and have a “direct relation to the early church…. The history of the Catholic Church (as, indeed, of the Jews also) is our history, and we cannot repudiate it without impairing our relation to God’s action in history” (249). On this basis, Protestant theologians from non-episcopal traditions have come to recognize the historic episcopate as “both a sign and means” of “this unity and continuity of the church” (250). Lindbeck argues a similar argument can also be advanced about the papacy. So, while Protestants tend to be offended by the Roman Church’s notion of an “ecumenism of return,” Lindbeck acknowledges that for the catholic Protestant there is a sense in which it is appropriate. He argues, “The full restoration of visible unity can occur only by the reincorporation of Protestantism into the re-united Catholicism of East and West. The Orthodox and Roman Catholics have something which Protestants lack. They have visible institutional continuity with the early church, and this, under proper circumstances, fosters also an inner continuity” (251). That does not mean the Roman and Eastern Churches would not, in this reunited church, also undergo significant reform. Lindbeck argues, All parties in a truly Christian re-union would undergo tremendous changes in their comprehension of both the center and the fullness of the gospel, and in their concrete practice, organization and psychology. There would, of course, be great diversity within the re-united church, but the originally Roman and Orthodox parts might come to differ as much from their present shape as they now differ from the churches of the early, pre-Constantinian era, and the originally Protestant segment would become as different from contemporary Protestantism as this is from the 16th century Reformation. (251–252)

He also acknowledges the global church by pointing to the role of African and Asian forms of Christianity in this future united church. While privileging the Roman and Eastern Churches and their continuity with the ancient church, Lindbeck also emphasizes the important contribution Protestantism can make to the future united church. Just as

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Protestant ecumenists can come to appreciate their “mother church,” Catholic ecumenists can and do acknowledge the Protestant case against Rome. They can concede “that aspects of the heritage of the mother country have been best preserved and developed in the new ecclesiastical settlement” (253).81 They can even say some who were driven out of the Catholic Church did the right thing, for one should be willing to “take the risk of excommunication out of loyalty to Catholic truth” (253). One thing the Catholic ecumenist cannot admit is the permissibility of setting up a government in exile, for the government in Rome is the only legitimate one. Lindbeck notes that one criticism of the position he has outlined so far is that his approach appears to create “an impossible disjunction between ‘faithfulness’ and ‘churchly character’” (254). The Roman Catholic argues that ecclesial superiority entails an immunity to “substantial infidelity,”82 while the Protestant says that her own church’s (possibility of) superior faithfulness gives her church a higher ecclesial status than Rome’s. This opens Lindbeck’s view to criticism from both sides. He offers a counterargument to the typical Catholic and Protestant views by exploring the parallel between Israel and the church. He says, “It seeks for an approach which will make it possible to affirm that just as Israel remained the elect and chosen People of God even when it was radically unfaithful, so also does the Church” (255). He defends this view in eight points. First, Lindbeck points to the fact that the Jews remain God’s covenanted people even when unfaithful. Paul indicates in Romans 11 that they remain an elect people even after Christ. “They continue to be the covenanted race because, in the jargon of the schools, their eschatological role and significance is not lost even when they are unfaithful…. God often used Israel against the will of both the masses and their leaders” (256). They possessed a certain indefectibility, but this did not guarantee they would remain faithful. The indefectibility stemmed entirely from God’s faithful and unfailing promises to his people. God did not abandon his people in times of unfaithfulness, and though they did not fully understand their role, God continued to provide “tangible memories” of Abraham’s calling, such as circumcision or the Law and Prophets. Through these memories, Israel was the chosen people through whom Christ and the new creation came. Lindbeck then asks if the same claims can be made  See UR § 4; FRCT, 83–84.  This term was used by Pope Paul VI at the beginning of the second session of Vatican II.

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of the church. Doing so means that the church’s self-understanding is “necessarily obscure.” The church does not know how God “is using its tragic history, full of both triumphs and disasters, to prepare for the future Kingdom, for the second coming of Christ” (256). As a part of this first point, he proposes that the papacy may be parallel to the Israelite monarchy, which was permitted by God due to Israel’s unbelief, but also was used by God to preserve the people of Judah and to bring about the Messiah. The monarchy was thus both a human and a divine institution, and Lindbeck notes that Protestants and Catholics may come to see the papacy the same way.83 He also notes, “The prophetic protest (even that of Jesus) was intended to purify, not subvert, the traditional institutional orders, and yet the establishment killed or drove out those whom God had sent” (257). One can draw an analogy between the relationship of the prophet to the establishment to the relationship of sects to established churches that does not provide comfort to either. Second, Lindbeck asks if the parallel between Israel and the church can extend to “the possibility of comparably grave infidelity” (257).84 He reiterates again that the church, like Israel, is indefectible, and also that the church has been promised the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit. “It is a continuation of the true, the spiritual Israel, and it is the body of Christ” (257). He notes that if one thinks only of these descriptions of the church, then “substantial faithfulness to the gospel” appears to be “an essential property of the Church,” and a community that lacks that faithfulness ceases to be part of the church (257). Lindbeck notes, however, that other descriptions of the church in the New Testament seem to allow for the possibility of “substantial unfaithfulness.” For example, in Revelation 3, the Lord says to the church in Sardis, “I know your works; you have a name of being alive, but you are dead” (1b). And to the church in Laodicea, the Lord says, “I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth” (15–16). Lindbeck notes, “The fact that these are genuine churches is taken for granted, but they are also, to 83  See George Lindbeck, “Papacy and the Ius Divinum: A Lutheran View,” in Papal Primacy and the Universal Church, Lutherans and Catholics in Dialogue V, eds. Paul C. Empie and T. Austin Murphy (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Publishing House, 1974), 193–208; George Lindbeck, “Lutherans and the Papacy,” Journal for Ecumenical Studies 13, no. 3 (1976): 368–378. 84  See Lindbeck, “Ecclesiology and Roman Catholic Renewal,” 392.

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continue with the quotation, ‘wretches, pitiable, poor, blind and naked’ even though they boast, ‘I am rich, I have prospered and need nothing’ (3:17)” (257–258). Revelation 3 is not an isolated incident in the New Testament. Paul also critiques the unfaithfulness of genuine churches within his letters. For example, in Romans 11:20–21, Paul says, “So do not become proud, but stand in awe. For if God did not spare the natural branches, perhaps he will not spare you.” Lindbeck concludes: These passages, it seems to me, indicate at least the possibility of making a scriptural case for the view that a church, even while losing none of its character as a church, can be in some respects substantially unfaithful to its Lord. It would appear that much the same violent paradoxes can apply to the New Israel as the Old. Both, for instance, are described as brides, and both, it would seem, can be unfaithful, whoring after false gods. In both cases, there will always be a faithful remnant, but this does not apply to the people as a whole, nor to their leadership. (258)

Lindbeck does not deny the significance of descriptions of the church such as “body of Christ,” but he argues that just as Israel can be identified as a people by certain physical marks such as the Torah or circumcision, so the church can be identified by physical marks such as baptism and a confession in Christ. They are both socio-historical communities capable of betraying their raison d’être, while still having a “self-identity … constituted by the visible marks of this raison d’être” (258). Lindbeck, however, does not deny the differences between the church and Israel. He says, “Christ has literally come. The new age has literally begun” (259). The Old Covenant people have never been described as the body of Christ. Lindbeck seeks to reconcile these two lines of thought by on the one side taking seriously the “historical realism” of the biblical text and “the fact that the local churches (which are presumably the only places the Church is ever visible) seem to remain unambiguously the communities of the People of God, just as Israel does.” On the other side, Lindbeck emphasizes the radical newness of churches that “surpass and fulfill Israel” (259).85 Third, Lindbeck argues that traditional ecclesiologies offer little help, either of the Catholic or Protestant variety, in describing the church in the same historical sense that one describes Israel. He actually sees Protestant theology as more closed to the idea of the church as “the concrete,  Lindbeck later denies that the church fulfills Israel.

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thoroughly historical People of God” due to a tendency in certain Protestant circles to contend that “the visible institutionalized aspects do not belong to the essence of the Church at all” (260).86 This leads some Protestants to say that the visible institution can be unfaithful, but not the “Church itself” (260). Fourth, Lindbeck looks to Rahner’s sacramental definitions of the Church as “a way of getting out of this impasse” (260). According to Rahner, Christ is the “basic sacrament,” and the church is then “the sacrament of Christ.” Lindbeck summarizes Rahner’s view of the church saying, “Its own seven sacraments, together with its proclamation, institutional forms, moral action and all other aspects of its visible life and being, constitute the particularizations of the sacramental sign which is the Church itself” (261). Therefore, for Rahner, people without saving faith who participate in the visible rites of the church are still members of the Church. This means that the Church is not equivalent to the “interior communion of saints,” but rather exists for its sake. Lindbeck acknowledges that such a perspective may offend Protestant sensibilities, but “it can be made to stress that the church is the people of God in the same thoroughly concrete way that Israel is.”87 The church does not exist for its own sake, but rather for a mission: “to be an adequate, efficacious symbol, a transparent testimony, to God’s saving love in Jesus Christ” (261). This mission differentiates the church from all other peoples.88 Lindbeck sees this sacramental view of the church as coherent with his discussion of the church/Israel parallel: “It is one and the same thing to describe the Church as sacramental and to describe it as fundamentally a concrete historical people” (262).

86  He notes, “Those who follow Luther and Calvin have placed more emphasis on visibility, maintaining that the Church becomes visible when God acts in the preaching of the gospel, the administration of the sacraments, and in concrete deeds of obedience.” Elsewhere Lindbeck gives this summary of the Reformers’ position: “The Reformers, even though this is not true of many of their successors, recognized that the visible unity of the church is part of the normative pattern of the existence of a Christian community, but they believed that it was less damaging to abandon this than to compromise with the works’ righteousness and other corruptions of late medieval Catholicism” (“Reform and Infallibility,” 351). Lindbeck also offers a critique of pietism detached from the church in “The Confessions of Ideology and Witness in the History of Lutheranism,” Lutheran World 7 (1961): 391–392. 87  Lindbeck, “Ecclesiology and Roman Catholic Renewal,” 392. 88  Lindbeck says that the church “is not self-contained, and it cannot be thought of as existing for its own sake as so often happens in the case of a state.” “Ecclesiology and Roman Catholic Renewal,” 392.

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Fifth, point four assists in discussing not only the church but Israel as well. Lindbeck looks at a particular quotation from Rahner: “The Church in her visible historical form is herself an intrinsic symbol of the eschatologically triumphant grace of God.”89 Lindbeck says of this, “Clearly this can be said not only of the Church, but of Israel…. Yet this does not minimize the difference between the Old and the New People of God” (263). The Old Israel, according to Lindbeck, points back to God’s covenant with Abraham and forward to the coming of the Messiah and “the eschatological triumph of God’s grace” (263). It does so less clearly than the church does, however, because the church points back to the Incarnation and forward to the second coming and the complete manifestation of God’s victory. Sixth, Lindbeck argues the similarity and difference of Israel and the church can be described as the distinction between the res sacramenti and the sacramentum tantum. He says, “Just as circumcision and baptism have a similar nature on the level of sacramentum tantum, but not of res sacramenti, so also with the Old and New People of God” (263). Just as circumcision and baptism are both physically tangible, but due to human sinfulness can be less fully effective, “The historically perceptible People of God may be present even when the res sacramenti is largely absent because of human sin” (264). Even when unfaithful the People of God under both the Old and New Covenant do not cease to be God’s people, but rather exist as God’s unfaithful people, “They may be so unfaithful that they gravely distort the message of salvation in their manner of life” (264). They only remain the People of God “because they are indelibly marked in their community life by signs which point to God’s grace, by signs which point to what God has done in the Old Testament and in Christ, and by what he will do in the Second Coming” (264). As long as a community continues to confess Christ’s name, Lindbeck concludes, it “cannot escape being part of the historically perceptible People of God, even when its profession of faith is largely hollow and its interpretations gravely distorted. The sacramentum tantum, the memory and the hope, is engraved upon the people and becomes fruitful again when obstacles are removed” (264). Seventh, Lindbeck connects the sacramental approach to the church with “the importance of the visible, structural unity and continuity of the Church” (264). From Lindbeck’s point of view, historical continuity is an  Rahner, The Church and the Sacraments, 39.

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important symbol, but it does not guarantee faithfulness to the gospel. It does not work magically. A church with apostolic succession can “deprive this sign of its proper effect by making itself the master, rather than the servant, of the apostolic message as witnessed to in Scripture” (265). Lindbeck argues a Protestant can say this while acknowledging the benefits of Roman Catholic structural continuity and hoping for the reformation and reunion of the Church. Lindbeck says, “He can hope the visible institutional continuity will again become what it was in the early centuries, a truly and efficacious sacramental sign of faithfulness to the apostolic message and of the Church’s union with Christ as his body” (265). Lindbeck notes that something similar can be said about Eucharistic unity, for, “eucharistic fellowship is the normal way of fostering the reality of unity among Christian believers…. When divided at the table of the Lord, the Church is a pitifully defective symbol of God’s salvation, of the fact that in Christ all men are in principle reconciled with God and with each other, and that at the end of time they will be manifestly reconciled” (265). Eighth, Lindbeck asks how the ecclesiological status of the Catholic and Orthodox churches compares with Protestant ones. He says, “Our thesis will be that although ‘essentially’ there is no difference in the ecclesiological status of the various churches, there is a non-essential, but still important, sense in which Catholic and Orthodox churches have a higher rank” (266). Lindbeck comes to this conclusion because “Essences are not susceptible of degrees” (266). Every community that qualifies as a church is a part of “the Church” or “the People of the New Covenant” and is essentially and equally a church (267).90 Lindbeck also argues that in addition to a church’s essential qualities, churches have “accidental” differences: “Using Aristotelian language, one might say that they differ in the degree to which they actualize their common essence” (268). For example, “Some forms of sacramental celebration more adequately symbolize the grace which they effect than  Lindbeck does say, “There may be border line cases which are hard to identify, but there are no degrees of membership…. There may be other classes of communities which resemble churches more or less closely, and in reference to them one can speak of degrees of ecclesiological status, but they are not ‘really’ churches” (266–267). Border line cases, for Lindbeck, may include extreme liberal Protestant groups or the “German Christians” under Nazi Germany. Lindbeck also recognizes that not everyone defines the word “church” as he does. For instance, some only define their own community as “church.” He says, “Our own definition of ‘church’ is so broad that it presumably includes all the specifically Christian ecclesial communities which normally call themselves ‘churches’” (267). 90

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do others” (268). So, a less improved Eucharist, for example, is still essentially and equally a Eucharist; however, it is inferior in its accidents. Lindbeck argues the accidental status of an ecclesial community stems from “all that goes to make up its visibility,” and includes both its “‘charismatic’ and ‘institutionalized’ aspects.” There is a sense in which the charismatic aspects are more important, for the institutional elements “should be completely in service of works of love and prophetic proclamation” (268). He says though, “Despite the instrumental character of the institutionalized aspects of a church, it is fundamentally through them that its ecclesiological status must be judged” (268). This is because the charismatic quality of an ecclesial community can vary greatly over time. Lindbeck concludes that in doctrine, catholic Protestants like himself do not believe their Protestant churches have a lower ecclesiological status than the Roman Church. The Roman Church is in some sense heretical, and while the Reformational churches may have “doctrinal deficiencies,” they have not “dogmatized positive error” (269). In fact, the Protestant churches, with their emphases on the solas, have made significant doctrinal advances. He concludes, “It is, then only in reference to ‘organizational structures’ that the catholic Protestant accords a higher ecclesiological status to Catholic and Orthodox churches than to his own” (269). The “organizational structures” that Lindbeck refers to are the continuity and unity that began in the early church and continued “under God’s providential guidance” (269). Though the organizational developments may have been corrupted at certain points, they have a continuing value. Not only the Protestant churches, but the Roman and Eastern churches are impoverished because of the church’s divisions. He concludes that the Protestant communities should see themselves as reform movements within the Church and that their institutional existence is justified. At the same time, “they should be eager to sacrifice their own institutional autonomy whenever this can be done without imperiling the witness to these truths” (270).

Diaspora Church Connected with Vatican II’s aggiornamento, Lindbeck discusses the recognition of many at the Council and in the early postconciliar years that the church has moved into a post-Constantinian period. While some residual Christian traits remain in traditionally Christian cultures, the church

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will no longer dominate entire societies.91 There are a range of possibilities of how this will look, from indifference to hostility, toward distinctive confessions of faith.92 While he remains cautious in his prognostication, Lindbeck argues that the contemporary church is in a “period of transition,” and, “As a result, proposals come to us in the guise of predictions.”93 Against those who think the future church will be an avant-garde church that is accommodationist, that is “an open and theologically relativistic movement of revolutionary or counter-cultural type,” he says, “I anticipate a sociologically sectarian future in which the exclusivist claims of the orthodox mainstream of the Christian tradition are maintained, even if reinterpreted.”94 In making this argument, Lindbeck draws upon a biblical image: the church as a diaspora community. In this, his emphasis resembles Karl Rahner’s thought in The Christian of the Future and The Church After the Council.95 This line of thinking also comes into Lumen Gentium: “While on earth it journeys in a foreign land away from the Lord (see 2 Cor 5:6), the church sees itself as an exile.”96 Though the church was “catholic” in the sense of including people from different classes and ethnic backgrounds, “it consisted of a small strongly deviant minority, unsupported by cultural convention and prestige, within the larger society.”97 This sectarianism was a sociological rather than ecclesiological sectarianism. Later, when the majority of people within the empire became Christians, there were times in which, as was the case with groups like the Montanists and sociological and ecclesiological sectarianism coincided, as a minority group insisted upon a “narrow interpretation of Christianity and to recruit its adherents from a single 91  Lindbeck, “The Future of Roman Catholic Theology in the Light of the First Session of the Second Vatican Council,” 248; Lindbeck, “Pope John’s Council,” 20; Lindbeck, “Church and World,” 235; George Lindbeck, “The Sectarian Future of the Church,” in The God Experience: Essays in Hope, ed. Joseph Whelan (New York: Newman, 1971), 226–242; Lindbeck, Infallibility, 3. 92  Lindbeck, “The Sectarian Future of the Church,” 229. 93  Ibid., 226. 94  Ibid., 226–227. 95  Karl Rahner, The Christian of the Future, Quaestiones Disputatae 18 (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967), 77–101; Rahner, The Church After the Council, 49–52. See George Lindbeck, “The Thought of Karl Rahner, S.J.,” Christianity and Crisis 25, no. 17 (October 18, 1965): 212–213. 96  LG § 6. 97  Lindbeck, “The Sectarian Future of the Church,” 227.

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racial, social or cultural group.”98 In the period of the Reformation, Roman Catholics likely saw Protestant groups as being theologically, but not sociologically, sectarian. Lindbeck asks, “What will happen if we move into a period when once again catholic or ecumenical Christianity which emphasizes a comprehensive and internally diversified unity will itself be sociologically sectarian?”99 He looks to the early church to answer this question, arguing, “with the exception of Judaism, Christianity probably has greater resources in its tradition for sectarian existence than any other world religion.”100 Lindbeck proposes a few theses. First, the Christianity that survives in an increasingly post-Christian culture will be “sociologically sectarian, sharply distinguished from society at large, and continuing to make the traditional Christian claims regarding the unsurpassable finality of revelation in Jesus Christ.”101 For Christians to maintain faith in particular orthodox claims, they cannot look at faith individualistically; they must instead “gather together in small, cohesive, mutually supportive groups. They must become, sociologically speaking, sectarian.”102 A certain type of exclusivism or absolutism is “a necessary though not sufficient prerequisite for Christian survival in a de-Christianized world.”103 Indeed, one of the early church’s greatest strengths was its sense of belonging. Lindbeck imagines that this Christian survival, sense of belonging, and ecclesial

 Ibid., 228.  Ibid. 100  George Lindbeck, “Ecumenism and the Future of Belief,” Una Sancta 25, no. 3 (1968): 6. He then says, “The Bible does not anticipate that the Church will ever be anything except a little flock until the end of time. From this point of view, majority rather than minority existence is anomalous for Christians.” 101  Lindbeck, “The Sectarian Future of the Church,” 228. See Lindbeck, “Ecumenism and the Future of Belief,” 4. Philip D. Kenneson, in part building upon Lindbeck, argues that there are six different contexts in which one can use language related to sects or sectarianism: sociological, ecclesiological, theological, epistemological, legal, and media. Beyond Sectarianism: Re-Imagining Church and World, Christian Mission and Modern Culture (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1999), chap. 1. 102  Lindbeck, “The Sectarian Future of the Church,” 230. 103  Ibid., 231. Lindbeck also says, “In the absence of exclusivist claims, Christians would not be socially deviant enough to qualify as sects.” See George Lindbeck, “The Future of Dialogue: Pluralism or Eventual Synthesis of Doctrine?,” in Christian Action and Openness to the World, ed. Joseph Papin (Villanova, PA: Villanova University Press, 1970), 51. There Lindbeck says, “The diaspora church will need desperately to be united—far more desperately than the church in the age of Christendom.” 98 99

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continuity may be in a place and time very different than the church’s contemporary experience: This Christianity would, of course, be in the far future, perhaps a few million years from now. Christian orthodoxy is committed to believing that even then there would be a community, a church, which would be identifiably Christian. It would exist in a situation unimaginably different from the present. The planet on which we live might have vanished. Men might be living in immeasurably distant stellar systems or galaxies. Their physical setting, their flora and fauna, might have no resemblance to the seascape and landscape, the plants and animals, of old mother earth. Intellectual culture, the social environment and perhaps even the genetic constitution of these distant descendants of ours might be far more different from our own than we are different from the first muttering ape men. Perhaps, as Huxley predicted, embryos will then grow in artificial wombs, not in their mothers’ bodies. Perhaps individuals will live for hundreds or even thousands of years. Maybe telepathy will be a tool of concretely controllable communication so that humanity will be knit together with unimaginable intensity and extensity. Or, on the other hand, perhaps mankind will have split into various branches which have lost touch with each other in the vastness of stellar space.104

Yet these Christians will continue to confess faith in a crucified and risen Lord, engage in similar liturgical practices, and have sacred scripture in some form.105 Second, a catholic or ecumenical sectarianism will have an advantage over “‘divisive’ or ‘schismatic’ varieties.”106 Lindbeck defends this thesis saying, “A Catholic position which embraces variety is internally more consistent, and in that sense plausible, than a schismatic position.”107 Christians root their exclusivist claims not in secondary things, but in the person of Jesus Christ, and thus “allow for pluralism and that unity in love which includes the really diverse (as were Jewish and Gentile Christians in the first generations, and Eastern and Western Christians in later periods).”108 Christians in the ancient church were accepted not only in one locale, but within churches wherever they migrated. A catholic  Lindbeck, “The Future of Dialogue,” 45.  Ibid., 45–46. 106  Lindbeck, “The Sectarian Future of the Church,” 228. 107  Ibid., 237. 108  Ibid. 104 105

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sectarian church has an advantage over schismatic groups, for as the need for a sense of belonging increases, such a church “would be able to supply an experience of community which many would treasure above all price”; it would have a wider appeal to people across cultural barriers.109 Third, Lindbeck discusses what the church must do to instantiate this catholic sectarian vision.110 On this, Lindbeck remains somewhat pessimistic, “for none of the current institutional developments favor ecumenical sectarianism.”111 The current institutional structures of the major Christian bodies developed to serve establishment churches. Though he still believes a catholic or ecumenical sectarianism has an advantage over schismatic forms of Christianity, he acknowledges that the schismatic groups may indeed be the ones to maintain the identification “Christian.”112 Ecumenical sectarianism will require “deliberate action of the major churches,” such as “new types of parishes, religious orders and secular institutes.”113 He, however, remains unconvinced that the current denominations will do this because it could lead to the elimination of their own group. The current institutions therefore prevent such moves. Lindbeck, however, does not end this discussion on a pessimistic note. He says: [D]e-Christianization, if it comes, may well take a very long time, thus providing the opportunity of all kinds of preparatory developments. Perhaps we will not stumble into the future with only divisive sectarians to carry the Christian banner. Further, given the pressures of a hostile environment, a new and catholic ecumenism might coalesce out of schismatic fragments. The empirical grounds for these projections may be slim, but then, after all, I am not only a sociologist or only a theologian, but a would-be believer, and this sometimes sparks transcendent hopes that God will unite and strip his Church for action in whatever times or trouble may lie ahead.114

This emphasis upon the church as sectarian does not only pertain to the church’s internal relation, but to its relation to the world as well. Lindbeck argues, “In this new situation the only way to exert an effective Christian  Ibid., 239–240.  Ibid., 228. 111  Ibid., 240. 112  Ibid., 240–241. 113  Ibid., 241. 114  Ibid., 242. 109 110

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influence is for the church to serve human needs as humbly and self-­ forgetfully as did Christ himself.”115 There is an increased emphasis upon the church as “the church of the poor.”116 Lindbeck says, “Perhaps one might say that in contemporary Catholicism a Franciscan theologia paupertatis is beginning to replace the old theologia gloriae.”117

Conclusion In his analysis of Vatican II, Lindbeck tends to place greater emphasis upon the Roman Church’s possibility to change and update the gospel. In this, Lindbeck remained “cautiously optimistic” about the Council. He reiterates that the time leading up to the Council was the golden age of American Catholicism. Catholicism became the largest and most powerful of American minorities, with strong schools and seminaries, the first Catholic president, and Catholic film protagonists played by stars like Spencer Tracy and Ingrid Bergman. Lindbeck says: For the overwhelming majority of observers, both Catholic and non-­ Catholic, the Council made an astonishingly good beginning. Secularists joined in acclaiming the aggiornamento, the new openness to the world; and Protestants enthusiastically greeted the passing of the Counter-Reformation, the concern for what Hans Küng called the legitimate demands of the Reformers, the return to the Bible. Almost everyone—not least Albert C. Outler and other Protestant observers at the Council (including myself)— forecast a great upsurge of Christian vitality and faithfulness within the Roman Catholic communion.118

115  Lindbeck, “Church and World,” 235. See Lindbeck, “Ecumenism, Cosmic Redemption, and the Council,” 64–66. 116   Lindbeck, “Ecclesiology and Roman Catholic Renewal,” 393. See Lindbeck, “Ecumenism and the Future of Belief,” 14–15; Rahner, The Church After the Council, 28. 117  Lindbeck, “Church and World,” 236. He says, “This is by no means identical with theologia crucis, but it must be recognized as giving authentic expression to a central element of the gospel.” See LG § 8; FRCT, 48–49. 118  George Lindbeck, “The Crisis in American Catholicism,” in Our Common History as Christians: Essays in Honor of Albert C.  Outler, ed. John Deschner, Leroy T.  Howe, and Klaus Penzel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 48–49. Both Bruce Marshall and Bernard Eckerstorfer see this essay as representative of this shift in Lindbeck’s thought. See Marshall, “Introduction,” x–xi; Bernhard A.  Eckerstorfer, “The One Church in the Postmodern World: Reflections on the Life and Thought of George Lindbeck,” Pro Ecclesia 13, no. 4 (Fall 2004): 407–408.

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By 1975, Lindbeck’s tone changed. He says that much of what transpired after the Council is the reverse of what he and others projected. He contends, “The aftermath of Vatican II can be read as disastrous.”119 Visible piety, church and Catholic school attendance, and commitment to priestly and religious vocations declined. Open dissention and confusion over how to implement the Council’s reforms wreaks havoc. He says, “The progressive avant garde is basically the Catholic wing of contemporary Western liberalism and has all the elitist defects of the liberal establishment.”120 The Roman Catholic Church is not alone in experiencing these difficulties, but Lindbeck concludes, “both the sharp contrast with the recent past and the sheer intensity make Roman Catholic difficulties seem far greater than those of other major Christian bodies.”121 Lindbeck did not completely lose hope, however. He projects that while Catholicism in the United States and elsewhere may at first be substantially weakened by conciliar changes, “eventually the liturgical and biblical renewals in particular will be assets in forming a new and more Christian Catholic culture.”122 He argues this will be more likely as the church becomes a diaspora community. He still sees various developments of Vatican II, such as the emphasis upon the church as the messianic pilgrim people of God, as positive, but notes that these developments can be interpreted in various ways by various camps within the Roman Catholic Church. Lindbeck says, “There is no publicly persuasive way of showing who is the faithful Catholic simply because the Council is equivocal on these and a whole range of other questions.”123 These changes in understanding led to shifts in Lindbeck’s approach to the interpretation of Scripture.

 Lindbeck, “The Crisis in American Catholicism,” 49.  Ibid., 53. He clarifies this statement further saying, “In short, the process of reforming popular Catholicism started by the Council is draining it of its communal, cultural, and religious substance. Traditional Catholicism may have needed reform both for worldly reasons and from the point of view of the original Christian message, but not at the cost of administering cures worse than the disease.” 121  Ibid., 49–50. 122  Ibid., 58. 123  Ibid., 60. He notes, “This ambiguity, it should be remembered, was for the most part deliberate. In order to get as wide a consensus as possible, the new and old were simply placed side by side in the new documents, leaving open the question of whether the new is to be interpreted in terms of the old or vice versa.” 119 120

CHAPTER 4

The Role of Scripture in the Christian ­Community

[T]he sacred word is a precious instrument in the mighty hand of God for attaining to that unity which the Saviour holds out to all. (Unitatis Redintegratio)1

In his emphasis upon retrieval, Lindbeck does not merely seek to retrieve Reformers like Martin Luther, medievalists like Thomas Aquinas, or church fathers like Augustine, though he does in different ways draw upon their work. Lindbeck argues that the church needs to recover or retrieve something lost from its memory: its identification as Israel. Though the church continues to sing of this identity as Jerusalem or Zion in its hymns, it has become a dead metaphor for most Christians. Lindbeck notes, however, that this retrieval does not entail “repristination or replicationv.” Instead, “It inevitably involves change, especially when it is a matter … of making explicit what was before largely implicit.”2 Lindbeck sees this as a historical task and one that involves constructive and critical theological work. He says, “What historical work unearths can be tested and reformulated in terms of faithfulness to the sources (ressourcement) and appropriateness to the present (aggiornamento).”3  UR § 21.  Lindbeck, “Comparative Doctrine,” 6–7. 3  Ibid., 7. 1 2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. C. Brown, George Lindbeck and The Israel of God, Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74757-2_4

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In order for this retrieval to take place, the church’s identification as Israel “must be both acceptable and advantageous, both defensible against objections and constructively useful.”4 Lindbeck argues that in order for the church to identify itself as Israel in a non-supersessionist way, the church must come to retrieve a “premodern narrative-typological” way of interpreting Scripture, but in such a way that it is not anticritical. Lindbeck argues that this reception and reintegration of the identification of the church as Israel can aid in redeveloping a communal language, which would be ecclesiologically and ecumenically promising. This chapter will introduce Lindbeck’s approach to Scripture by focusing on his use of four key terms: retrieval, narrative, intratextuality, and consensus.

Retrieval Lindbeck argues denominationalism, or “the recognition that divided Christian churches even within a single locality can each be a genuine ecclesial community with a right to separate existence and to recruit members on a voluntary basis,” enabled modern ecumenism’s existence.5 This understanding of denominationalism first developed among seventeenth-century Independents associated with the Westminster Assembly and then developed further in the colonies of Maryland and Rhode Island. Ecumenical practice, however, began in the nineteenth century with the evangelical revivals. Protestants of various stripes partnered with one another in various mission and social reform projects, such as the sending of missionaries, the publication and distribution of Bibles, Sunday Schools, and societies devoted to causes like abolition. Protestants within societies like the Student Christian Movement minimized denominational difference, and that “made interdenominational cooperation possible.”6 This Protestant evangelicalism combined with theological liberalism led to the beginnings of the modern ecumenical movement in the early twentieth century, as exemplified in conferences like the International  Ibid., 16.  George Lindbeck, “Two Kinds of Ecumenism: Unitive and Interdenominational,” Gregorianum 70, no. 4 (1989): 648. See George Lindbeck, “Ecumenical Theology,” in The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology in the Twentieth Century, ed. David F. Ford, vol. II (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 256. 6  Lindbeck, “Ecumenical Theology,” 256. See Lindbeck, “Two Kinds of Ecumenism,” 648–649. 4 5

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Missionary Conference in 1910 and Stockholm Life and Work Conference in 1921. Lindbeck says, “The goal was for the churches to work, live, and (for many) commune together even while agreeing to disagree on many matters of faith and order.”7 At this stage, however, ecumenism remained interdenominational. Anglicans in the early twentieth century were the first to advocate for unitive ecumenism, and this emphasis was strengthened by Orthodox participation in the ecumenical movement. Unitive ecumenical concerns developed further through the initial Faith and Order Conference in Lausanne in 1927, the formation of the World Council of Churches in 1948, major ecumenical statements that stem from the New Delhi statement on unity in 1961, and the entrance of the Roman Catholic Church into ecumenism following Vatican II. Lindbeck goes on to say, There is now, at least on paper, a consensus in the organized ecumenical movement that God willed unity of the church involves more than interdenominational cooperation and inter communion between autonomous bodies divided in faith and order. This does not mean uniformity is desirable. There may be great variations, as even Rome now insists, in practice, worship, organizational structures, and doctrinal formulations, but the differences must be compatible or reconcilable.8

This has been the case in both bilateral and multilateral statements since Vatican II. Despite this unitive consensus, Lindbeck remains concerned about the interdenominational ecumenism that has gained in influence since Vatican II, that has led to a shift in emphasis from ressourcement to aggiornamento. Lindbeck argues that when he was a student in the 1940s and 1950s, ressourcement appeared to be the future trend in theology. “It was the way of escape from tired liberalism or oppressive fundamentalism for Protestants, and from neoscholasticism for Catholics.”9 This was seen among conciliar progressives who appealed to the church fathers on the Catholic side, such as de Lubac, Congar, Rahner, Küng, and Ratzinger, and from “neoorthodox” Protestants, like Karl Barth, who appealed to the Reformers. Both Protestant and Catholic advocates of ressourcement agreed “that it is  Lindbeck, “Ecumenical Theology,” 257. See Lindbeck, “Two Kinds of Ecumenism,” 649.  Lindbeck, “Ecumenical Theology,” 257. See Lindbeck, “Two Kinds of Ecumenism,” 649. 9  Lindbeck, “Ecumenical Theology,” 258; Lindbeck, “Two Kinds of Ecumenism,” 650. 7 8

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possible to read the Bible in ways that are both faithful to the historic faith and yet also critically historical.”10 Lindbeck says, however, that emphases upon ressourcement have waned while the call for aggiornamento has increased. He points not only to the increase in contextual and liberationist theologies, but also to “‘hermeneutic’ approaches” and interreligious theologies that question or reject the unsurpassability of Christian faith. These various postconciliar theological movements differ from one another, but within each of them, the visible unification of the historically institutionalized church is of secondary importance. It is hard from their perspectives to see the relevance of church unity to liberation struggles, or to the search for hermeneutic understanding, or to the promotion of human unity through interreligious dialogue, and this tends to make them indifferent or hostile to the doctrinal and structural concerns of ressourcement.11

Some Catholic advocates of these new approaches appeal to Vatican II’s emphasis on aggiornamento to defend their positions. They make aggiornamento “the primary theme of the council, and they use it to interpret the other two major conciliar emphases on Scripture and the early church and on continuity with the specifically Roman tradition as it developed after the first centuries.”12 Rather than seeing Dei Verbum as the central document of the Council, they instead place Gaudium et Spes as the central document. Lindbeck notes that while emphasis upon unitive ecumenism has decreased, other forms of ecumenism have arisen in its place. In fact, “The way theologians do their work is more ecumenical than ever before.”13 Various “interconfessional coalitions, movements, and interest groups” have arisen, and “Theologians are less and less restricted by ecclesiastical frontiers. The methods they use, and the themes they treat, and the conclusions they reach are increasingly transconfessional.”14 For example, Protestant scholars read Catholic biblical scholars like Raymond Brown or theologians like Hans Urs von Balthasar not primarily as members of the  Lindbeck, “Ecumenical Theology,” 259; Lindbeck, “Two Kinds of Ecumenism,” 651.  Lindbeck, “Ecumenical Theology,” 259. See Lindbeck, “Two Kinds of Ecumenism,” 651. 12  Lindbeck, “Ecumenical Theology,” 259. See Lindbeck, “Two Kinds of Ecumenism,” 651–652. 13  Lindbeck, “Ecumenical Theology,” 260; Lindbeck, “Two Kinds of Ecumenism,” 652. 14  Lindbeck, “Ecumenical Theology,” 260. See Lindbeck, “Two Kinds of Ecumenism,” 652. 10 11

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Roman Catholic Church, but as fellow Christians, and “they agree or disagree with them in ways which transect ecclesiastical boundaries. We are no longer surprised … that Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox theologians are often closer to each other in basic theological orientation than they are to many members of their own communions.”15 Despite the closeness that theologians work with each other across denominational boundaries, Lindbeck concludes, “it would be a mistake to conclude from this that church unity is immanent. Interdenominational ecumenism and the weakening of distinct ecclesiastical identities which often accompanies it can have the effect of making the unification of the churches less appealing or more difficult.”16 The interdenominationalism of nineteenth-century evangelicalism did not lead to unity, and their twentieth-century successors have often opposed the ecumenical movement because it is a distraction from “the saving of individual souls.”17 Lindbeck notes, however, that this anti-ecumenical interdenominationalism is not unique to evangelicalism, but is a marker of Protestantism. Many Protestants see the denominations as interchangeable and belong to several denominations in their lifetimes. This interdenominationalism is “content to stop short with mutual respect, cooperation and intercommunion.”18 This type of ecumenism is reinforced by this shift to aggiornamento and “world-oriented” ecumenical perspectives that have come to the forefront within the World Council of Churches. Those who advocate justice, peace, and the integrity of creation (JPIC) have come to see traditional Faith and Order ecumenism, as seen in Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry or in Lutheran-Roman Catholic dialogue, as a distraction from justice concerns. This is all occurring despite their impressive achievements. “Theology, to repeat, is less unitive though more interdenominational.”19 Lindbeck argues that this situation likely arose for two reasons. First, the sociological roots of ressourcement, on both the Protestant and Catholic sides, were shallow. He says,

 Lindbeck, “Ecumenical Theology,” 260; Lindbeck, “Two Kinds of Ecumenism,” 653.  Lindbeck, “Two Kinds of Ecumenism,” 653. See Lindbeck, “Ecumenical Theology,” 260–261. In “Ecumenical Theology,” Lindbeck uses the terms “formal” and “procedural” ecumenism as synonymous with unitive and interdenominational ecumenism. 17  Lindbeck, “Ecumenical Theology,” 261; Lindbeck, “Two Kinds of Ecumenism,” 653. 18  Lindbeck, “Ecumenical Theology,” 261. 19  Lindbeck, “Two Kinds of Ecumenism,” 654. 15 16

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Ressourcement on both sides of the confessional divide was the product of small and formidably learned theological elites who had mastered modem scholarship yet also learned to live in the world of the sources and to understand modem problems from that perspective. Most of those who followed them, however, did not have the same rootage in Scripture and the pre-modem heritage. They were not so steeped in the thought and the spirituality of the sources that they could, so to speak, absorb modernity into historic Christian outlooks, and thereby view present reality through the spectacles, the lenses, of Scripture and early tradition.20

Ressourcement was initially seen as the only alternative to fundamentalism/ traditionalism and to nineteenth-century liberalism, but even when turning to neo-orthodoxy or to la nouvelle théologie, much postconciliar theology sought to update the faith and address modern concerns rather than return to Christianity’s roots. When their attention shifted away from ressourcement to aggiornamento, it also shifted away from a concern for Christian unity. Those who emphasize aggiornamento and JPIC may welcome church unity, but only insofar as it is instrumental to the unification of humanity. This is true not only for Protestants involved with the World Council of Churches, but for Catholics as well. Catholics may come to a similar conclusion by pointing to Lumen Gentium’s emphasis upon the church as a “sacramental and efficacious sign of the coming unity of all humankind.”21 Lindbeck notes that those who, like himself, continue to emphasize ressourcement do not necessarily reject calls for justice, but they also do not see the unity of the church as an instrumental good. Rather, work for unity is for them a divine imperative which Christians are bound to obey even when they are unable to see what practical effects it might have. Jesus’ prayer that his followers be one “so that they world may believe” (John 17:21) is not conditional on Christians seeing how unity contributes to that end. Thus unitive ecumenism is optional for one group and necessary for the other.22

 Lindbeck, “Ecumenical Theology,” 264. See Lindbeck, “Two Kinds of Ecumenism,” 655.  Lindbeck, “Ecumenical Theology,” 265; Lindbeck, “Two Kinds of Ecumenism,” 656. 22   Lindbeck, “Two Kinds of Ecumenism,” 656–657. See Lindbeck, “Ecumenical Theology,” 265–266. 20 21

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Second, Lindbeck says that those who advocated ressourcement have come to read Scripture almost exclusively by way of historical criticism: “The interpretation has become the province of specialized scholars rather than a communal enterprise in which all theologians, as well as lay folk, have a part.”23 He does not deny the indispensability of historical criticism for the study of the Bible and for returning to the sources, but he argues, historical criticism “by itself it provides little positive guidance on how to meet new challenges.” He thus argues that contemporary neglect of historical criticism by those who emphasize aggiornamento is understandable, for it “gives little help in meeting contemporary challenges.”24 Lindbeck thus argues that those who stress ressourcement and unitive ecumenism should not simply lament recent theological trends that emphasize aggiornamento. He says, “These movements have directed attention to contemporary problems and to biblical insights which otherwise would have gone unnoticed. Christian engagement with Marxism and feminism, for example, has helped open eyes to what the world is and what Scripture says.”25 He indeed argues, “The renewal of a communal tradition involves almost by definition ressourcement and aggiornamento.”26 What he opposes is what he calls “unmediated aggiornamento,” which he defines as “the updating of faith and practice by direct translation into presumably more intelligible and relevant modern idioms and actions.”27 He says of these recent movements of aggiornamento, One may think that these insights need to be incorporated into another framework in which faithfulness to the sources rather than present relevance is primary, and yet be grateful for them. For this perspective, recent theological trends are not a defeat for unitive ecumenism, but a challenge which may in the long run contribute to the fullness and faithfulness with which reunited churches find guidance in Scripture and tradition.28

He notes, however, that if this is to take place, “there is need for better ways of reading the sources. Familiarity with them does not by itself  Lindbeck, “Ecumenical Theology,” 265.  Ibid.; Lindbeck, “Two Kinds of Ecumenism,” 656. 25  Lindbeck, “Ecumenical Theology,” 266. See Lindbeck, “Two Kinds of Ecumenism,” 657. 26  Lindbeck, “Comparative Doctrine,” 6. 27  George Lindbeck, “Confession and Community: An Israel-like View of the Church,” Christian Century 107, no. 16 (May 9, 1990): 494. 28  Lindbeck, “Ecumenical Theology,” 266. See Lindbeck, “Two Kinds of Ecumenism,” 657. 23 24

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provide guidance to new situations.”29 Christians do not need completely new and unforeseen ways of reading Scripture in order to relate Scripture to the present or to these social challenges. Rather, Christians can look to previous generations of Bible readers, because for them, “Narrative and typological interpretation enabled the Bible to speak with its own voice in new situations.”30 Lindbeck defines postliberalism as “an attempt to recover premodern scriptural interpretation in contemporary form.”31 By premodern, he means three things. First, the reading of Scripture prior to the development of foundationalism.32 Lindbeck says that a nonfoundational approach to biblical inspiration does not seek to provide “an explanation or theory of why the Bible is authoritative or how it comes from God, but simply a reiteration of the primacy of the text.”33 Lindbeck also points out in his discussion of a non or prefoundational doctrine of Scripture, “It is as foolish from this perspective to seek foundational justifications (as is done in systematic apologetics) for employing the scriptures of one’s own tradition as it is for utilizing the language of the society in which one lives.”34 Second, premodern refers to the time before “scriptural reasoning was molded and distorted, in many cases, by the inerrancy and inspiration controversies.” Lindbeck says postliberal theology is “agnostic about these controversies and positions that came out of them, just as premodern scriptural interpretation was.”35  Lindbeck, “Ecumenical Theology,” 266. See Lindbeck, “Two Kinds of Ecumenism,” 657.  George Lindbeck, “Scripture, Consensus, and Community,” in Biblical Interpretation in Crisis: The Ratzinger Conference on Bible and Church, ed. Richard John Neuhaus (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), 86. 31  Timothy R.  Phillips and Dennis L.  Okholm, eds., “A Panel Discussion: Lindbeck, Hunsinger, McGrath & Fackre,” in The Nature of Confession: Evangelicals & Postliberals in Conversation (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 246. 32  Ibid. 33  George Lindbeck, “Hans W. Frei and the Future of Theology in America,” December 2, 1988, 8. See George Lindbeck, “Hans Frei and Biblical Narrative: The Prospects for a Postmodern Anselmianism,” November 22, 1989, 9–10. In both these essays, Lindbeck cites Ronald Thiemann, who says that Scripture should be “treated as a gift of prevenient grace.” He also points to Thomas Aquinas, “who treats the doctrines of revelation as grounded in, but not grounding, the authority of scripture.” “Hans W. Frei and the Future of Theology in America,” 18; “Hans Frei and Biblical Narrative,” 23–24. 34  Lindbeck, “Hans W. Frei and the Future of Theology in America,” 7; Lindbeck, “Hans Frei and Biblical Narrative,” 8. 35  Phillips and Okholm, “Panel Discussion,” 246. 29 30

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Third, premodern refers to a time before individualism and the rise of “conversionist revivalism.” Lindbeck says, “To speak of individualism in this context means that postliberalism tries to divorce itself from the antiecclesial, the anti- or low-sacramental and the anti- or noncreedal ways of reading Scripture that have prevailed on the modern evangelical side.”36 While scholars are often dismissive of the devotional or spiritual readings of Scripture, Lindbeck notes the importance of devotional readings “to the degree that they have escaped fundamentalist, liberal, and historical-­ critical influences,” and thus resembles premodern reading strategies: “The Bible continues to be treated by those who use it to guide their lives as a self-referential interglossing whole with multiple and changing applications in varying situations.”37 Despite the respect Lindbeck gives to devotional reading, he remains concerned that “popular Bible reading, where it persists, has become increasingly individualistic and/or sectarian.”38 He thus argues that the church needs to develop skills, in connection with its worship and liturgy, in order to “make of scripture a communally and personally interesting, followable, and powerful text.”39 He notes, however, that this retrieval of premodern, precritical exegesis does not deny the importance of historical criticism, but instead it involves “placing it in a very subordinate role as far as the theologically significant reading of Scripture is concerned.”40 In his earlier work, Lindbeck argued that historical criticism of the Bible is “of fundamental ecumenical importance.”41 He later has some ambivalence about historical criticisms ecumenical helpfulness and argues the method has a negative or “ground-­ clearing” function.42 It is to “make impossible many of the traditional arguments for post-biblical developments and positions.”43 It is  Ibid.  Lindbeck, “Hans W. Frei and the Future of Theology in America,” 8; Lindbeck, “Hans Frei and Biblical Narrative,” 10–11. 38  Lindbeck, “Hans W. Frei and the Future of Theology in America,” 9; Lindbeck, “Hans Frei and Biblical Narrative,” 11. 39  Lindbeck, “Hans W. Frei and the Future of Theology in America,” 9; Lindbeck, “Hans Frei and Biblical Narrative,” 11. Lindbeck believes literary theory can assist in this development. 40  Phillips and Okholm, “Panel Discussion,” 246. 41   FRCT, 113. See Lindbeck, “Pope John’s Council,” 20–21; George Lindbeck, “Ecumenism and the Future,” 13. 42  Lindbeck, “Ecumenical Theology,” 265. 43  George Lindbeck, “The Bible as Realistic Narrative,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 17, no. 1 (Winter 1980): 82. 36 37

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“absolutely indispensable in keeping theologians and the church honest.”44 For example, Protestants and Catholics can no longer cite Matthew 16:18 as a prooftext to settle disputes over the papacy.45 Or, to provide another example, the historical-critical project helped modern Christians reread the relationship of church and synagogue.46 Historical criticism in and of itself, however, is not capable of bridging past divisions.47 Secondarily, historical criticism can influence the “theological-literary interpretation of texts.”48 Lindbeck also argues that “traditional exegesis can accommodate historical-critical conclusions,” but not the other way around.49 Lindbeck sees the postmodern context as an opportune time to retrieve precritical exegesis. There is an increased interest among biblical scholars in the “literary features, social and communal functioning, and canonical unity of the scriptural text.”50 This has led to a more positive attitude toward premodern exegesis.51 He also argues, “Postmodernism is compatible with scripturalism because it has taken the linguistic turn.”52 He notes that this retrieval has already begun prior to these developments. Lindbeck believes that the beginning of a retrieval of classical hermeneutics can already be seen in the work of Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar. He says:

 Ibid., 85.  Ibid., 82. Lindbeck clarifies this further, saying, “Yet this negative conclusion does not, of course, settle the issue, because it is always possible to discover new arguments. Catholics, for example, may no longer hold that the historical Jesus founded the papacy, but they can maintain that this institution is a God-willed and irreversible providential development.” 46  Lindbeck, “Scripture, Consensus, and Community,” 85–86. 47  George Lindbeck, “The Reformation Heritage and Christian Unity,” Lutheran Quarterly 2, no. 4 (Winter 1988): 499. Lindbeck says, “If Christians are to be guided towards unity, so the Reformers would say, they need to place themselves within the total community of faith and read the authoritative sources as witnesses in their entirety to Jesus Christ who in his very humanity is Immanuel, God with us, and is alone to be trusted and obeyed in life and death.” 48  George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age, 25th Anniversary Edition. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 108. Hereafter ND. 49  Lindbeck, “The Reformation Heritage and Christian Unity,” 499. See George Lindbeck, “The Gospel’s Uniqueness: Election and Untranslatability,” Modern Theology 13, no. 4 (October 1997): 438. 50  Lindbeck, “Ecumenical Theology,” 268. 51  Lindbeck, “The Gospel’s Uniqueness,” 439. 52  Lindbeck, “Hans W. Frei and the Future of Theology in America,” 6; Lindbeck, “Hans Frei and Biblical Narrative,” 7. 44 45

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Here are twentieth-century theologians whose use of the Bible is more nearly classical than anything in several centuries and who yet are distinctively modem (e.g., they do not reject historical criticism). Both are wary of translating the Bible into alien conceptualities; both seek, rather, to redescribe the world or worlds in which they live in biblical terms; both treat Scripture as a Christ-centered and narrationally (or, for von Balthasar, “dramatically”) and typologically unified whole; and in both the reader is referred back to the biblical text itself by exegetical work which is an integral part of the theological program. In short, these two theologians inhabit the same universe of theological discourse as the fathers, medievals and Reformers to a greater degree than do most modem theologians.53

Because they depended upon Scripture in similar ways, differences between them can be decided in reference to Scripture; whereas for theologians who do not have such a dependence upon Bible, differences between them cannot be settled through biblical study. This is despite the fact that their approach(es) to Scripture have not been adopted widely by their devotees.54

Narrative Lindbeck says, “I am chiefly indebted to Hans Frei for my understanding of narrative and its place in Scripture,” in particular his 1974 book The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative.55 He argues that Frei is attempting to do in a 53  Lindbeck, “Ecumenical Theology,” 268–269; Lindbeck, “Scripture, Consensus, and Community,” 98. See Lindbeck, “The Gospel’s Uniqueness,” 440. 54  This has, at least in the case of Barth, changed in recent years. A few recent volumes have focused upon Barth as an exegete. See, for example, George Hunsinger, ed. Thy Word is Truth: Barth on Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012); Daniel L.  Migliore, ed., Reading the Gospels with Karl Barth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2017); and Ben Rhodes and Martin Westerholm, eds., Freedom Under the Word: Karl Barth’s Theological Exegesis (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2019). For a study on Balthasar as a postcritical exegete by one of Lindbeck’s students, see W.T.  Dickens, Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theological Aesthetics: A Model for Post-Critical Biblical Interpretation (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003). 55  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 202n9. Lindbeck says, “I also owe much to two other colleagues, David Kelsey and Brevard Childs, and to those, beginning with Henri de Lubac and Jean Daniélou, who have contributed to a better understanding of the functions of typology in patristic and medieval exegesis.” Lindbeck, “Scripture, Consensus, and Community,” 75n2. For a discussion of postliberal theology in dialogue with nouvevlle théologie, see John Wright, “The Silent Shifting of Tectonic Plates,” in Postliberal Theology and the Church

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postmodern situation what Barth did in a modern situation.56 Frei begins that book arguing, “Western Christian reading of the Bible in the days before the rise of historical criticism was usually strongly realistic, i.e. at once literal and historical, and not only doctrinal or edifying.”57 While other approaches to reading Scripture, such as the spiritual or allegorical senses, were permissible, they could not violate the literal sense. The literal sense held primacy.58 As Jason Byassee says, “The rule that nothing can be argued allegorically from scripture that is not also present literally is as old as Origen.”59 Frei also argues: Most eminent among them were all those stories which together went into the making of a single storied or historical sequence. Long before a minor modern school of thought made the biblical “history of salvation” a special spiritual and historical sequence for historiographical and theological inquiry, Christian preachers and theological commentators, Augustine most notable among them, had envisioned the real world as formed by the sequence told by the biblical stories. That temporal world covered the span of ages from creation to the final consummation to come, and included the governance both of man’s natural environment and of that secondary

Catholic: Conversations with George Lindbeck, David Burrell, and Stanley Hauerwas, ed. John Wright (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012), 11–53. Within that same volume, Lindbeck speaks of his experience studying in France in 1950, during which he met Daniélou, and his interest in other theologians associated with nouvelle théologie, like Yves Congar. Wright, ed., “‘I Pray That They Might Be One as We Are One,’” 58–60. It should be noted that influence between Frei and Lindbeck did not only go in one direction. Frei says in a footnote about The Nature of Doctrine, “I wish to acknowledge my profound indebtedness to this book and to its author.” “The ‘Literal Reading’ of Biblical Narrative in the Christian Tradition: Does It Stretch or Will It Break?,” in The Bible and the Narrative Tradition, ed. Frank McConnell (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 77n36. 56  Lindbeck, “Hans W. Frei and the Future of Theology in America,” 6; Lindbeck, “Hans Frei and Biblical Narrative,” 6–7. 57  Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), 1. 58  Frei, “The ‘Literal Reading’ of Biblical Narrative in the Christian Tradition,” 36, passim; Hans W. Frei, “‘Narrative’ in Christian and Modern Reading,” in Theology and Dialogue: Essays in Conversation with George Lindbeck, ed. Bruce D.  Marshall (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 151. 59  Jason Byassee, Praise Seeking Understanding: Reading the Psalms with Augustine, Radical Traditions: Theology in a Postcritical Key (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), 39.

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environment which we often think of as provided for man by himself and call “history” or “culture.”60

This mode of reading Scripture continued in western Christendom and was bolstered in the era of the Renaissance and Reformation.61 Such a way of reading Scripture had three key elements. First, when readers discerned that a given biblical story should be read literally, “it followed automatically that it referred to and described actual historical occurrences.”62 Frei, however, differentiates this from modern attempts to see the literal sense “as evidence that it is a reliable historical report.”63 Second, “if the real historical world described by the several biblical stories is a single world of one temporal sequence, there must in principle be one cumulative story to depict it.”64 The various biblical narratives make up one narrative and, “The interpretive means for joining them was to make earlier biblical stories figures or types of later stories and of their events and patters of meaning.”65 While not losing their own “literal meaning or specific temporal reference, an earlier story (or occurrence) was a figure of a later one.”66 Old Testament narratives have their fulfillment in the New Testament. “The Jewish texts are taken as ‘types’ of the story of Jesus as their common ‘antitype.’”67 The narratives of Jesus are, therefore, the central and unifying narratives within Christian Scripture. Frei argues, “It was a way of turning the variety of biblical books into a single, unitary canon, one that embraced in particular the differences between Old and New Testaments.”68 This figural reading did not violate the literal sense of the biblical text, but instead “figuration or typology was a natural extension of literal interpretation.”69 This way of reading Scripture reaffirmed the primacy of the literal sense. Third, since the biblical world is identical with the “one and only real world, it must in principle embrace the experience of any present age and  Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, 1.  Ibid., 18–37. 62  Ibid., 2. 63  Ibid. 64  Ibid. 65  Ibid. 66  Ibid. 67  Frei, “Literal Reading,” 39. 68  Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, 2. 69  Ibid. 60 61

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reader…. He was to see his dispositions, his actions and passions, the shape of his own life as well as that of his era’s events as figures of that storied world.”70 As an example of this, Frei briefly discusses the narrative of creation and the fall of humanity (Gen 1–3). He notes that the story has a narrative integrity of its own, but it also, as Paul and other Christian interpreters have noted, exists as a part of the overarching narrative of Scripture and creation. Then, figural exegetes have also read the narrative as a part of human experience. Christian exegetes adapted the narrative of Scripture to new situations, but “in steadily revised form it still remained the adequate depiction of the common and inclusive world until the coming of modernity.”71 In the rest of The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, Frei sketches how this mode of interpretation broke down. He says the breakdown began in the seventeenth century among radical interpreters like Spinoza and among some conservative interpreters like Cocceius, but the breakdown developed further in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through the development of empiricism, Deism, and historical criticism on one side and romanticism and pietism on the other. Within this new mode of interpretation, “There is now a logical distinction and a reflective distance between the stories and the ‘reality’ they depict.”72 Biblical interpreters came to see “its meaning is detachable from the specific story that sets it forth.”73 For this reason, Frei tends to discuss the realistic narratives of Scripture as “history-like.” For example, in The Identity of Jesus Christ, Frei says: In other words, whether or not these stories report history (either reliably or unreliably), whether or not the Gospels are other things besides realistic stories, what they tell us is a fruit of the stories themselves. We cannot have what they are about (the “subject matter”) without the stories themselves. They are history-like precisely because like history-writing and the traditional

70  Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, 3. See Frei, “The ‘Literal Reading’ of Biblical Narrative in the Christian Tradition,” 40. 71  Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, 3–4. 72  Ibid., 5. See ND, 105. 73  Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, 6. Frei says this is true for both liberal and conservative interpreters of the Bible.

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novel and unlike myths and allegories they literally mean what they say. There is no gap between the representation and what is represented by it.74

Christians, for example, affirm Jesus’ resurrection even though it cannot be historically or empirically verified.75 While previously seen as an extension of the literal reading of Scripture, these modern readers illegitimized figural reading. This happened for three reasons. First, the “verbal or literal sense was now equated with the single meaning of statements.”76 This disallowed the possibility that a text could have multiple or fuller meanings. Second, reading the Bible as a unified text “appeared different from, if not incompatible with, the self-­ confinement of literal reading to specific texts.”77 Third, scholars no longer saw figural reading as a proper way to unify the biblical canon. Instead, “Literal reading came increasingly to mean two things: grammatical and lexical exactness in estimating what the original sense of a text was to its original audience, and the coincidence of the description with how facts really occurred.”78 The chief question, for both conservative and liberal readers, was “How reliable are the texts?”79 Conservatives argued for the factuality of the texts, while liberals argued that the Bible must be read in the same way as other books, “and that ancient writings containing miracle reports as well as reports of unexperienceable happenings have to be reconstructed in the light of natural experience and explanatory theory.”80 For both camps, the conservative inerrantists and the liberal historical critics, “the narrative meaning had collapsed into the factual and disappeared.”81 Frei attempts, as Lindbeck notes, a “postcritical retrieval of classic ways of reading the Bible which were widespread until well past the

74  Hans W. Frei, The Identity of Jesus Christ: The Hermeneutical Bases of Dogmatic Theology, Updated and Expanded Edition. (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2013), 11–12. This does not mean, however, that all of the Bible is realistic narrative. 75  Hans W. Frei, “On Interpreting the Christian Story,” in Reading Faithfully Volume 1: Writings From the Archives: Theology & Hermeneutics, ed. Mike Higton and Mark Alan Bowald (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2015), 79–80. 76  Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, 7. 77  Ibid. 78  Ibid. 79  Ibid., 8. 80  Ibid., 18. 81  Lindbeck, “Scripture, Consensus, and Community,” 83.

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Reformation.”82 A key aspect of Frei’s retrieval is the emphasis that while modern interpreters came to divide meaning and narrative, “Meaning and narrative shape bear significantly on each other.”83 Frei argues that the narrative shape of, for example, the Gospel accounts, is indispensable to the subject discussed. Therefore, for Frei, “He is not Jesus Christ apart from that story of his.”84 In addition, Frei emphasizes the biblical canon as a unified canon, and “Figural interpretation, then, sets forth the unity of the canon as a single cumulative and complex pattern of meaning.”85 He follows Luther and Calvin in having a “literary-literal” rather than a “grammatical-literal” sense. So instead of a doctrine of verbal plenary inspiration, Frei says, “the biblical narratives described and depicted precisely what they meant to describe and depict.”86 This means, “When the reformers said that they found Christ in the Old Testament as both Luther and Calvin said, this was in no sense an allegory for them, it was a figural interpretation of the Old Testament.”87 It is important to note that while Frei emphasizes narrative in his work, he has, as Lindbeck argues, “resisted the tendency to develop a general hermeneutical theory of narrative (sometimes even an anthropology) which is then applied to the Bible. Each text should be interpreted in its own terms: the Bible has its own hermeneutics.”88 In addition, “Communal traditions, as Frei was inclined to think, give to the scriptures which they formed and which form them a logic and corresponding interpretive

 Lindbeck, “Frei and the Future,” 2; Lindbeck, “Frei and Biblical Narrative,” 1.  Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, 11. 84  Frei, “On Interpreting the Christian Story,” 78. 85  Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, 33. 86  Frei, “On Interpreting the Christian Story,” 75. 87  Ibid., 75–76. Frei and Lindbeck both maintain this distinction between allegory and typology or figural interpretation. 88  Lindbeck, “Scripture, Consensus, and Community,” 82n3. See Lindbeck, “Hans W. Frei and the Future of Theology in America,” 12; Mike Higton, “Forward,” in The Identity of Jesus Christ: The Hermeneutical Bases of Dogmatic Theology, by Hans W. Frei, Updated and Expanded Edition. (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2013), xi; Joseph L. Mangina, “Retrieval, Repair, and the Possibility of a Christian Humanism,” Pro Ecclesia 27, no. 4 (Fall 2018): 391–392. Frei would want to emphasize the plural “hermeneutics” here, for different hermeneutical rules may apply to different genres and texts. He says, “I hope nobody thinks of something called ‘narrative sense’ as a kind of hermeneutical absolute.” Frei, “The Specificity of Reference,” 105. See also 106–107. 82 83

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strategies which are unique.”89 Frei and Lindbeck also critique the notion of utilizing a general hermeneutic with regional applications; however, they do not deny that general hermeneutical theories, even deconstructionist ones, may be “useful selectively.”90 Frei speaks critically of “story” or “narrative theology,” which he argues has its roots in the intersection of Christianity and certain forms of psychology. This type of theology depends upon a general understanding of human nature or religion. “It is almost invariably—covertly or overtly—a theory that texts are variable, written instances that really express a fixed, universal, and interiorized personal condition of consciousness.”91 In a Christian narrative theology, it involves the telling of one’s own story alongside the telling of a narrative such as Jesus’ death upon the cross, which in certain liberal or neo-orthodox forms is “the equivalent of revelation-as-event.”92 He points, as examples, to Paul Tillich and David Tracy. For the former, “Symbols, myths, and stories evoke in us our ultimate concern.”93 For the latter, “Symbols (and stories as symbolic 89  Lindbeck, “Hans W. Frei and the Future of Theology in America,” 12; Lindbeck, “Hans Frei and Biblical Narrative,” 16. 90  Frei, “Literal Reading,” 59. Frei says in this context, “It is doubtful any scheme for reading texts, and narrative texts in particular, and biblical narrative texts even more specifically, can serve globally and foundationally, so that the reading of biblical material would simply be a regional instance of a universal procedure.” For critiques of a general hermeneutics or a general theory of narrative in Lindbeck, see “The Gospel’s Uniqueness,” 433; “Unbaptized God: The Basic Flaw in Ecumenical Theology, by Robert W. Jenson, 1992; Review Essay,” Pro Ecclesia 3, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 237. Frei and Lindbeck point to Paul Ricoeur as an example of someone who has both a general theory of narrative and attempts to regionalize a general hermeneutic. See Hans W. Frei, “Letter to Gary Comstock, November 5, 1984,” in Reading Faithfully Volume 1: Writings From the Archives: Theology & Hermeneutics, ed. Mike Higton and Mark Alan Bowald (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2015), 36; Frei, “‘Narrative’ in Christian and Modern Reading,” 158–159; Lindbeck, “Scripture, Consensus, and Community,” 82n3. Frei defends his use of literary theory, saying, “As for the New Criticism, a literal reading of the Gospels is appropriate under its auspices, but only because and to the extent that it is in fact a disguised Christian understanding of them and not a reading under a general theory, nor even a more low-level theory of meaning than the general hermeneutical scheme.” “The ‘Literal Reading’ of the Biblical Narrative in the Christian Tradition,” 67. 91  Frei, “‘Narrative’ in Christian and Modern Reading,” 161. In a letter to his friend, John Woolverton, Frei expresses a concern that his writing would be identified with “story theology.” Hans W.  Frei, “Letter to John Woolverton, April 26, 1978,” in Reading Faithfully Volume 1: Writings From the Archives. Theology & Hermeneutics, ed. Mike Higton and Mark Alan Bowald (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 30–31), 30. 92  Frei, “‘Narrative’ in Christian and Modern Reading,” 161. 93  Frei, “On Interpreting the Christian Story,” 70.

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expressions in narrative form) are the natural linguistic expressions for expressing human ‘limit situations’ or ‘limit experiences’ by which he means very much the same thing that Tillich does: concerns and expressions that cannot, as I say, be reduced to pure conceptual form.”94 This kind of theology seeks to encapsulate and repeat Protestant theology from Kant to Schleiermacher and understands theology as “an expression of … the religious character of humanity.”95 It begins with a general or universal anthropology and then seeks to draw certain theological conclusions from it in narrative form.96 Within this understanding of theology, statements about God are indirect. They are not really statements about God’s essence or character, but rather statements about God and humanity in relationship.97 Frei says, “Whatever the merits of this enterprise, it is quite different from an inquiry into the conditions for reading the narrative texts of the Bible as texts—and from any theology that would find the latter a ‘foundational’ task.”98 One can clearly see the influence of Frei upon Lindbeck’s discussion of narrative, though differences remain. While both of them emphasize the unity of the biblical canon, Lindbeck places more emphasis upon the overarching narrative of Scripture.99 The canon of Scripture, Lindbeck argues, possesses a “typological and Christological narrative unity in ways which are imaginatively rich, conceptually exact, argumentatively rigorous, and forever open to the freedom of the Word, to new understandings.”100 While Lindbeck emphasizes narrative, he does not minimize or ignore the other genres present within the biblical canon. He rather argues that the overarching biblical narrative holds together the various materials 94  Ibid. It should be noted that this piece was originally presented in 1976 and that Frei is interacting with the early David Tracy of Blessed Rage for Order. 95  Ibid. Frei’s description of “story/narrative theology” has similarities with Lindbeck’s description of experiential/expressivism in The Nature of Doctrine. 96  Frei, “Letter to John Woolverton,” 30–31. 97  Frei, “On Interpreting the Christian Story,” 71. 98  Frei, “‘Narrative’ in Christian and Modern Reading,” 161. 99  While one can see Frei discussing a premodern understanding of a cumulative narrative within The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, as cited earlier, he later comes to have misgivings about such a concept. Especially in his later writing, Frei discusses how Christians should read biblical narratives, but not the “biblical narrative.” See ibid., 160–161. 100  George Lindbeck, “Barth and Textuality,” Theology Today 43, no. 3 (October 1986): 362. See George Lindbeck, “The Church’s Mission to Postmodern Culture,” in Postmodern Theology: Christian Faith in a Pluralist World, ed. Frederic B.  Burnham (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), 41.

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present within the biblical canon, such as the “poetic, prophetic, legal, liturgical, sapiential, mythical, legendary, and historical.”101 Apart from the “narrative meaning,” the unity of the biblical canon and the function of central Christian doctrines that guide the church’s reading of Scripture (e.g., Christological and Trinitarian ones) are lost.102 Lindbeck cites David Kelsey, who says that for Karl Barth, the Bible is like a “vast, loosely-­ structured, non-fictional novel.”103 Lindbeck again cites Kelsey, who argues that for Barth, “scripture is taken to have the logical force of stories that render a character, that offer an identity description of an agent.”104 Lindbeck says this has implications both for how Christians understand God and for how they live: [Narrative] has historically been treated in mainstream Christianity as the primary biblical literary device by which the God of Israel and of Jesus has identified and characterized himself in relation to human beings in such fashion as to guide the shaping of their thoughts and lives, under the impulse of the Holy Spirit, into conformity with his being and will.105

The primary purpose of Scripture is not to describe “what actually happened,” provide doctrinal propositions, or symbols of religious experience, though, as Lindbeck notes, “it may do these things as well.”106 For example, parables like the prodigal son are able to help us understand who God is in relation to creation. Therefore, “the ability to depict who

 Lindbeck, “The Bible as Realistic Narrative,” 84; ND, 106.  Lindbeck, “Scripture, Consensus, and Community,” 82–83. 103  David H.  Kelsey, Proving Doctrine: The Uses of Scripture in Modern Theology, Trinity Press Edition. (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1999), 48. Lindbeck cites this in “Realistic Narrative,” 84; ND, 106–107. 104  Kelsey, Proving Doctrine, 48. Lindbeck cites Kelsey in “The Bible as Realistic Narrative,” 48; ND, 107. In both places, Lindbeck says that the God is the person that is given an “identity description,” but within this section of Proving Doctrine, Kelsey speaks of Barth’s discussion of Jesus Christ as “Risen Lord.” 105  Lindbeck, “Letter to Robert M.  Adams,” 2. See ND, 107; Lindbeck, “Scripture, Consensus, and Community,” 82. 106  Lindbeck, “The Bible as Realistic Narrative,” 84–85. Lindbeck says, echoing Frei, “Given this canonical intent, it is not surprising that the Bible is often ‘history-like’ rather than ‘likely history.’” See Lindbeck, “Hans W. Frei and the Future,” 10; Lindbeck, “Hans Frei and Biblical Narrative,” 14. See Lindbeck, “Frei and the Future,” 10; Lindbeck, “Frei and Biblical Narrative,” 14. 101 102

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and what God is like in creation is not in every case logically dependent on facticity.”107 Lindbeck argues there are two benefits to an emphasis upon the canonical narrative of Scripture. First, it allows more weight to be given to the Old Testament. He says, “The fundamental identity description of God is provided by the stories of Israel, Exodus, and Creation. The identity description is then completed or fulfilled by the stories of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, but the latter stories must be read in the context of what went before.”108 The narratives of Jesus’ life are the climax of the biblical story, and in the Gospels, Jesus as the “Son of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the same strong sense that the Hamlet of Shakespeare’s play is Prince of Denmark.”109 He sees this as an improvement over historical-­ critical approaches that focus primarily upon “what actually happened.” For example, such approaches tend to ignore the canonical importance of events like the exodus because so little can be known from the time period it is purported to have taken place. Because of this, modern readers of Scripture often miss the literary parallels between, for example, the exodus account and the Gospels’ accounts of Jesus. Second, Lindbeck argues, “when looked at canonically rather than historically-critically, the purpose of the gospels is not at all to provide information for its own sake about the earthly Jesus, but rather to tell about the risen, ascended, and now-present Christ whose identity as divine-human agent is irreplaceably enacted in the stories of Jesus of Nazareth.”110 Christ is also, for Lindbeck, the center of the biblical narrative, and the person who gives the biblical text its narrative unity. This Christological center differentiates Christian interpretation of the Old Testament from the Torah-centered Rabbinic interpretation of the Tanakh.111 Lindbeck notes that a strength of Frei’s emphasis upon realistic narratives is that it “can better incorporate the strengths of precritical Bible reading without excluding historical criticism, i.e., without lapsing into either countercriticism or paracriticism.”112 This differentiates the postcritical form of biblical study from its precritical forbearers.113  Lindbeck, “The Bible as Realistic Narrative,” 85. See ND, 108.  Lindbeck, “The Bible as Realistic Narrative,” 85. See ND, 107. 109  ND, 107. 110  Lindbeck, “The Bible as Realistic Narrative,” 85. 111  ND, 66; Lindbeck, “Barth,” 362. 112  George Lindbeck, “Dulles on Method,” Pro Ecclesia 1, no. 1 (Fall 1992): 57. 113  ND, 108. 107 108

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In addition to the influence of Frei, as well as other Yale colleagues like David Kelsey, Lindbeck’s own Lutheran background plays a role in his understanding of narrative. Luther says, “The gospel is and should be nothing else than a chronicle, a story, a narrative, about Christ, telling who he is, what he did, said, and suffered.”114 Shortly after, Luther sets Jesus within the context of the entire Christian canon, Old and New Testaments, by saying, “The gospel is a story about Christ, God’s and David’s Son, who died and was raised and is established as Lord. This is the gospel in a nutshell.”115 Lindbeck says, “It is narrative, rather than dogma, which is epistemologically and motivationally of central importance for Luther.”116 This does not mean that dogmas are unimportant for Luther, rather they are useful to guide the interpretation of the Bible’s narratives and to form people as Christians. These dogmas or doctrines, however, “lose their meaning when abstracted from their narrative and practical settings.”117 Lindbeck also differentiates his own theology and understanding of God from Robert Jenson. He extends the criticism of general theories of narrative to Jenson, arguing it “is likely to have unfortunate consequences when it is made a guide to biblical interpretation.”118 Connected with this, Lindbeck critiques Jenson’s (and Ebeling’s) attack on substance metaphysics and traditional attributes of God such as impassability or upon the communicatio idiomatum.119

114  Martin Luther, “A Brief Instruction on What to Look for and Expect in the Gospels,” in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, ed. Timothy F. Lull and William R. Russell, Third Edition. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2012), 71. In the same context, Luther treats “story” and “discourse” as more or less interchangeable. 115  Ibid., 72. 116  George Lindbeck, “Martin Luther and the Rabbinic Mind,” in Understanding the Rabbinic Mind: Essays on the Hermeneutic of Max Kadushin, ed. Peter Ochs, South Florida Studies in the History of Judaism 14 (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1990), 147. 117  Ibid., 148. 118  Lindbeck, “Unbaptized God Review,” 237. 119  Ibid., 235; George Lindbeck, “Article IV and Lutheran/Roman Catholic Dialogue: The Limits of Diversity in the Understanding of Justification,” Lutheran Theological Seminary Bulletin 61, no. 1 (1981): 44–45.

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Intratextuality Related to Lindbeck’s discussion of narrative is his introduction of the term “intratextuality.” He argues, “The task of descriptive (dogmatic or systematic) theology is to give a normative explication of the meaning a religion has for its adherents.”120 He places this intratextual methodology in opposition to “extratextual” approaches to theology. He says, “The latter locates meaning outside the text or semiotic system either in the objective realities to which it refers or in the experiences it symbolizes.”121 Within his cultural-linguistic understanding of theology, “meaning is immanent. Meaning is constituted by the uses of a specific language rather than being distinguishable from it.”122 So, for example, to understand what a word like “God” means in a given context, one must see how it operates therein rather than determining what “God” means first and then reading that definition into that context. Lindbeck uses the term “intratextuality” in a few different ways. First, he uses it to refer to the self-interpreting character of Christian Scripture (scriptura sui ipsius interpres). For Lindbeck, “Scripture is interpreted in light of Scripture, and the biblical canon is read as a single interglossing whole.”123 Lindbeck notes that this type of intratextual reading can happen in a variety of ways. He notes three examples. One could read the Bible in search of certain propositional doctrines (e.g., Westminster Confession), concepts within the text (biblical theology movement), or for symbolism (Ricoeur). While the biblical canon does contain propositions, concepts, and symbols, he centers his understanding of intratextuality, firstly, upon the overarching narrative of Scripture from creation to consummation and, secondly, upon the “more intramundane and realistically told stories of God’s chosen ones centering and culminating in Jesus Christ.”124 The story of Jesus provides “the hermeneutical key to the whole,” and figural reading assisted in holding together a unified canon.125  ND, 99.  Ibid., 100. 122  Ibid. 123   George Lindbeck, “Atonement & The Hermeneutics of Intratextual Social Embodiment,” in The Nature of Confession: Evangelicals & Postliberals in Conversation, ed. Timothy R.  Phillips and Dennis L.  Okholm (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 226. 124  Ibid., 228. 125  Ibid. 120 121

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Secondly, Lindbeck uses the term “intratextuality” to say that “all of reality is interpreted in this same scriptural light—the biblical world absorbs all other worlds.”126 The Bible is “the interpreting framework for all reality.”127 This builds upon Frei’s third marker of precritical exegesis: that the biblical world is identical with the “one and only real world” and that “it must in principle embrace the experience of any present age and reader.”128 Christians used typology not only to unify the canon, but to “embrace extrabiblical reality.”129 For example, King David was not only seen as a type of Jesus, but later readers also saw David as a model for kings like Charlamagne and Charles V.130 Unlike allegory, however, typology did not “empty the Old Testament or postbiblical personages and events of their own reality, and therefore they constituted a powerful means for imaginatively incorporating all being into a Christ-centered world.”131 The Bible is not simply used as a metaphor for contemporary events. Lindbeck says: It does not suggest, as it is often said in our day, that believers find their stories in the Bible, but rather that they make the story of the Bible their story. The cross is not to be viewed as a figurative representation of suffering nor the messianic kingdom as a symbol for hope in the future; rather, suffering should be cruciform, and hopes for the future messianic.132

Lindbeck cautions against allowing “extrabiblical materials” to become “the basic framework of interpretation.”133 That was the mistake of the Gnostics, who, among other things, transformed the crucified and risen Messiah of the Gospel accounts into a mythological figure due to their overdependence upon certain strains of Hellenistic thought. Catholic Christians did not fully escape these dangers, but “often read Scripture in 126  Ibid., 226. This echoes what Lindbeck said a decade earlier: “It is the text, so to speak, which absorbs the world, rather than the world the text” (ND, 104). 127  ND, 77. 128  Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, 3. 129  ND, 103. 130  Lindbeck says, “Thus an Old Testament type, filtered through the New Testament antitype, became a model for later kings and, in the case of Charlemagne, provided a documentable stimulus to the organization of the educational and parish systems that stand at the institutional origins of Western civilization.” Ibid. 131  Ibid., 103–104. 132  Ibid., 104. 133  Ibid.

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so Hellenistic a way that Jesus came to resemble a semipagan demigod.”134 The church needed some exegetical rules to prevent such abuses, and Lindbeck argues that the insistence of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, as well as Luther and Calvin, on the primacy of the literal sense provided it. Lindbeck notes, “Whatever the failures in actual execution, and there were many, the interpretive direction was from the Bible to the world rather than vice versa.”135 Lindbeck does not simply limit this to the words on a page, however. He says, “Christians are to see all things in relation to God, or, in the words of Scripture, ‘Do all to the glory of God’ (1 Cor. 10:31) and ‘Take every thought captive to obey Christ’ (2 Cor. 10:5).”136 Christians cannot relate all things to God, however, apart from Scripture. He notes, “For Thomas Aquinas, the Bible is the ultimate authority on how to relate everything to God, and Calvin was fond of the comparison of Scripture to spectacles that comprehensively correct the vision of those who wear them.”137 This enables Christians to look at the world outside of the church correctly, and also aids them in communal self-criticism. Lindbeck points to Karl Barth as an example of the latter, as he “not only rejected the oath of allegiance to Hitler and the Nazi worldview but also, and no less vehemently, Christian compromises with those evils.”138 This means, as Marshall notes, that even when applying a hermeneutic of charity, not all practices or beliefs cohere with Christian faith. So, in an example like Barth’s criticism of Nazi ideology, “the discourse in question is ‘absorbed’ into the world by being denied any legitimate place within it, that is, by being held false.”139 Under the umbrella of this second understanding of intratextuality, Lindbeck introduces three related terms. First, he discusses the importance of “habitable texts,” or texts that can “supply followable directions for

 Ibid.  Ibid. 136  Ibid., 132. See Lindbeck, “Barth and Textuality,” 369. There he says, “Theologians who find some system of thought useful are thereby mandated to transform it and absorb it into the biblical intratextual world.” 137  ND, 133. See Lindbeck, “Atonement,” 227; Lindbeck, “The Gospel’s Uniqueness,” 429. 138  ND, 133. 139  Bruce D. Marshall, “Absorbing the World: Christianity and the Universe of Truths,” in Theology and Dialogue: Essays in Conversation with George Lindbeck, ed. Bruce D. Marshall (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990) 77. 134 135

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coherent patterns of life in new situations.”140 While noting that a habitable text does not necessarily have to have a “primarily narrative structure,” it helps. Classical biblical hermeneutics, practiced among both Jews and Christians, came into being during a time in which habitable texts were needed. He says, “Not only did the monotheistic character of their sacred book give it universal scope and unity, and not only did the long history and diversity of the writings give it extraordinarily wide applicability in varying circumstances, but it had directive force and communitybuilding power far superior to the philosophical systems that were its only real rivals.”141 The followability of Scripture appealed to the masses, and Christianity grew, in part, because of it. Lindbeck contends that this can be the case again, for, “much contemporary intellectual life can be understood as a search for such habitable texts.”142 Second, and related to this notion of a text’s habitability or followability, Lindbeck borrows the term “hermeneutics of social embodiment” from his Yale colleague Wayne Meeks.143 Meeks argues, while interacting with the last chapter of The Nature of Doctrine, that “a hermeneutical strategy entails a social strategy.”144 Meeks defends this thesis by saying: That is true because, on the one hand, texts do not carry their meanings within themselves, but “mean” insofar as they function intelligibly within specific cultures or subcultures. Where an adequate social context is lacking, the communication of the text is frustrated or distorted. On the other hand, to understand the text is … to be competent to use the text in an appropriate way. Perhaps it is not too much to say that the hermeneutical circle is not completed until the text finds a fitting social embodiment.145

140  George Lindbeck, “The Search for Habitable Texts,” Daedalus 117, no. 2 (Spring 1988): 155; Lindbeck, “Scripture, Consensus, and Community,” 97. 141   Lindbeck, “The Search for Habitable Texts,” 155–156; Lindbeck, “Ecumenical Theology,” 268; Lindbeck, “Scripture, Consensus, and Community,” 97. 142  Lindbeck, “Ecumenical Theology,” 268. See Lindbeck, “The Search for Habitable Texts,” 155; Lindbeck, “Scripture, Consensus, and Community,” 97. 143  Lindbeck gives Meeks credit for this term in “Atonement & the Hermeneutics of Intratextual Social Embodiment,” 227. 144  Wayne A.  Meeks, “A Hermeneutics of Social Embodiment,” Harvard Theological Review 79, no. 1–3 (July 1986): 183. 145  Ibid., 183–184.

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Lindbeck builds upon Meeks by arguing that this social embodiment is an “ecclesial embodiment.”146 He says, “A theological way of making this point is to say that the Bible exists for the sake of the church…. The purpose of the Old and New Testaments is the formation of peoples who live in accordance with God’s commands and promises and embody his will for the world…. The Bible, from this perspective, is a tool or collection of tools for the upbuilding of the body.”147 Truth is self-involving. Paul asserts that “no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor 12:3b). Lindbeck says, “Luther frequently insists in a similar vein that I cannot genuinely affirm that Christ is ‘the Lord’ unless I thereby make him ‘my Lord.’”148 He goes on to say, “For Christian theological purposes, that sentence [‘Jesus’ or ‘Christ is Lord’] becomes a first-order proposition capable … of making ontological truth claims only as it is used in the activities of adoration, proclamation, obedience, promise-hearing, and promise-keeping which shape individuals and communities into conformity to the mind of Christ.”149 This is the context in which one should understand Lindbeck’s famous illustration of the crusader. He says that when a crusader calls out “Christ is Lord” while cleaving the skull of an infidel, his statement is false, for “it contradicts the Christian understanding of Lordship as embodying, for example, suffering servanthood.”150 As Bruce Marshall says, “the use of words in sentences fixes their meaning,” and this use includes the practical and social setting in which sentences are used.151 Therefore, the sentence “Christ is Lord” means something different in the mouth of the Crusader than it does when used in a context of worship and praise, or, as Marshall argues, in the mouth of St. Francis of Assisi. Marshall says, “What St. Francis means presumably includes a life wholly devoted to self-sacrificial redemptive service of a suffering world—the sort of life dimly mirrored in his own servant existence as a follower of Jesus of Nazareth—while the crusader apparently means by ‘est Dominus’ a life of militant knighthood,

146  Lindbeck, “Atonement & The Hermeneutics of Intratextual Social Embodiment,” 226. Emphasis added. 147  Ibid., 227. 148  ND, 52. 149  Ibid., 54. 150  Ibid., 50. 151  Bruce D.  Marshall, Trinity and Truth, Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 192.

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devoted to conquest by violence.”152 Practice, as Marshall notes, has “considerable epistemic bearing.”153 This does not mean, however, that the practices of a speaker make a statement true, and thus in this case make Christ Lord. Instead, Marshall argues that “what people do when they utter this sentence determines what the sentence itself means. It is therefore beside the point to emphasize that Christ’s lordship fails to depend on the practices of those whose Lord he is, since the issue at hand is not whether Christ is the Lord, but whether the sentence ‘Christus est Dominus’ is, as spoken, true.”154 Third, Lindbeck discusses the gospel’s “untranslatability.” By this, Lindbeck does not mean translation of the Bible from Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic into modern natural languages. Rather, Lindbeck says, “To the degree that religions are like languages and cultures, they can no more be taught by means of translation than can Chinese or French. What is said in one idiom can to some extent be conveyed in a foreign tongue, but no one learns to understand and speak Chinese by simply hearing and reading translations.”155 People come to learn the grammar of Christian faith much like how they learn a language, through practice. Languages “provide a model or metaphor for understanding communal traditions of textual interpretation,” which can include the study of western classics or religious texts.156 Within precritical exegesis, as the world was absorbed into the text, Christians could utilize Platonism or Aristotelianism by assimilating and Christianizing them.157 They attempted to, as mentioned earlier, “Take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Cor 10:5). In much of modern theology, the direction has been reversed. Rather than absorbing or assimilating philosophy or science into the biblical world, “the biblical message is translated into contemporary conceptualities.”158 The results  Ibid., 192–193.  Ibid., 193. 154  Ibid., 193–194. 155  ND, 115. 156  Lindbeck, “Comparative Doctrine,” 21. 157  Lindbeck, “Scripture, Consensus, and Community,” 86–87. He says, “The inescapability of this task of putting non-Christian thought to Christian uses needs to be emphasized. Even theologians who want to be entirely biblical cannot avoid it. Luther, despite his detestation of Aristotle, continue to employ, often quite consciously, the ockhamist Aristotelianism in which he had been trained, and there is not a little Platonism in Calvin’s thought.” See ND, 86–87; Marshall, “Absorbing the World,” 78–83. 158  Lindbeck, “Scripture, Consensus, and Community,” 87. 152 153

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have not always been negative. In some cases, it has helped people maintain Christian faith that they otherwise would have rejected. Lindbeck doubts, however, that such translation possesses evangelistic promise. Attempts to translate the biblical message create more problems than they solve. If one reads the Church Fathers, medieval figures like Thomas Aquinas, or the Reformers, reading their references to Scripture alongside their texts, “one’s understanding of what they are saying is enriched.”159 He notes that this is often not the case with modern thinkers. One could, for example, “learn to think well in [Karl Rahner’s] categories while remaining biblically illiterate. This is impossible in the case of Augustine, Luther (pace Ebeling), or Aquinas (pace the neo-Thomists or even Gilson).”160 Lindbeck’s critique of translation does not necessarily mean he completely excludes apologetics, but apologetics “must be of an ad hoc and nonfoundational variety rather than standing at the center of theology.”161 Brevard Childs is critical of Lindbeck’s second definition of intratextuality for two reasons. He says, “For my part, I am unconvinced that this is the way the Bible actually functions within the church. The proposal of the text creating its own world—some would call it a fictive world—into which the reader is drawn has its origins far more in high church liturgical practice than from the Bible.”162 He does not believe this understanding of the Bible coheres with the message of either testament, which emphasizes that “God’s word enters into our world to transform it.”163 He does, however, acknowledge with Lindbeck that the Bible possesses a “very concrete, earthly quality which is not different from human experience.”164 Lindbeck does not completely deny Childs’ charge that the Bible may not actually function within the church in the way that he describes it. He says, “There are fewer and fewer people for whom the truly real world in which they live and think is that defined by the stories of Israel and of

 Ibid.  Ibid. 161  ND, 115. 162  Brevard S. Childs, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflection on the Christian Bible (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992), 21. Childs extends this criticism to Hans Frei, David Kelsey, Wayne Meeks, Stanley Hauerwas, and Richard Hays. 163  Ibid., 22. 164  Ibid., 21. 159 160

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Jesus.”165 Lindbeck observes the increasing lack of Bible knowledge among the student body at Yale Divinity School. When he arrived at Yale in the 1940s, “my fellow students could generally be counted on to have been well socialized in distinctively Christian beliefs and practices, to be familiar with biblical content even when they were from Quaker or Unitarian churches to an extent which is now exceptional even from those of fundamentalist backgrounds.”166 The situation has since drastically changed, as many of his students lack sufficient understanding of Christian beliefs and practices. This is the case even though ministerial candidates are likely in greater need of biblical literacy and spiritual formation than in the past. Lindbeck notes that this phenomenon is not limited to seminary students and ministerial candidates at places like Yale Divinity School, but to western society in general. Gallup Poll data in the late 1980s says American society is not becoming less Christian. A greater percentage of people claim to be Christians or to have born-again experiences. He says, “Yet all strata are being debiblicized including professedly biblicistic ones.”167 In best-selling book Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah and associates note that within evangelical circles there is an increasing emphasis upon an individual faith that sees Jesus less as savior or redeemer, and more as “the friend who helps us find happiness and self-fulfillment.”168 Lindbeck argues that this “therapeutic expressive individualism” is thus displacing biblical discourse.169 He says, “When compared to Billy Graham back in the ’fifties, Bible-thumping TV preachers seem extraordinarily casual about what the book actually says. Playing fast and loose with the Bible needed a liberal audience in the days of Norman Vincent Peale, but now, as the case of Robert Schuller illustrates, professed conservatives eat it up. 165  Lindbeck, “Hans W. Frei and the Future of Theology in America,” 10–11; Lindbeck, “Hans Frei and Biblical Narrative,” 14. 166   George Lindbeck, “Spiritual Formation and Theological Education,” Theological Education 24 (Supplement 1) (1988): 15. Lindbeck says further, “I am not saying, be it noted, that students were more theologically conservative in the 1940s (at Yale, they were not), but that on both the theological left and theological right, some degree of spiritual formation was present” (15–16). Lindbeck evidence here is not only anecdotal. He bases it upon his research in University Divinity Schools: A Report on Ecclesiastically Independent Theological Education (New York: The Rockefeller Foundation, 1976). 167  Lindbeck, “Barth and Textuality,” 369. 168  Robert N.  Bellah et  al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (New York: Perennial Library, 1985), 232. 169  Lindbeck, “Barth and Textuality,” 369.

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They do not know enough Scripture to notice the difference.”170 This lack of biblical literacy has continued and increased from when Lindbeck discussed it in the 1970s–1990s. Lindbeck argues that this lack of biblical literacy brings with it two related problems. The first one pertains to language. He argues, “There was a time when unbelievers and believers alike shared a common scriptural language. They could communicate, even when they did not agree, on a whole range of issues on which our society, having lost the linguistic and conceptual means, perforce remains silent.”171 Lindbeck points as an example to the discourse of Abraham Lincoln. Though Lincoln did not call himself a Christian (or a non-Christian) and was not a regular church attender, he utilized biblical language of sin and forgiveness and spoke of both God’s mercy and judgment, and he was understood by his audience. He says, “The proslavery party resisted his message, but they understood it, and tried to reply in kind: that is, they sought to legitimate their position biblically.”172 Lindbeck says that the same, to a lesser extent, can be said of the discourse of Martin Luther King Jr. and Reinhold Niebuhr in the twentieth century. He notes that when Karl Barth wrote and spoke, “he presupposes an audience which is well-informed about the Bible however disastrously they misread it.”173 He says that if a politician in the contemporary context were to speak as Lincoln did in, they would be largely misunderstood.174 The second problem that stems from the lack of biblical literacy is that “imaginative living within the Bible has also become difficult.”175 The intratextuality discussed earlier has largely vanished, though “dead biblical metaphors” remain: “We speak of so and so, for example, as a Martha, a Mary, a Samson, a Solomon, or a Judas. This is quite different, however, from imaginatively inscribing the world in the biblical text and troping all that we are, do, and encounter in biblical terms.”176 Brent Strawn has more recently argued, “Unfortunately many Christians—whatever their age—appear to experience arrested development” when it comes to  Ibid., 370.  Ibid. 172  Lindbeck, “The Church’s Mission to Postmodern Culture,” 47. Lindbeck contrasts this with the language used surrounding apartheid. 173  Lindbeck, “Barth and Textuality,” 369. 174  Ibid., 370; Lindbeck, “The Church’s Mission to Postmodern Culture,” 48. 175  Lindbeck, “Barth and Textuality,” 370. 176  Ibid., 370–371. See Lindbeck, “The Church’s Mission to Postmodern Culture,” 38. 170 171

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biblical literacy. He notes that this is particularly true of the Old Testament. He argues, “Without further language training, practice, and instruction, such individuals are left without a primary-school-level capacity to engage with the Old Testament, including its moral dilemmas.”177 Lindbeck argues that in past times, even unbelievers saw the world imaginatively through scriptural lenses. For example, Thomas Huxley spoke of “justification by verification,” rather than Paul’s justification by faith.178 The same is true for various novelists, poets, and playwrights within the western canon, such as Dante, Milton, Bunyan, Wordsworth, and even Shakespeare, whose imaginations were shaped by the Bible. He says, “There is a sense in which most of western literature is midrashic commentary; one does not have to be a Jungian to agree with the conclusion reached by Northrop Frye … : that the basic substructure of the literary imagination of the West is biblical.”179 Lindbeck argues the same has remained true for black preachers. He quotes Henry Mitchell, who said: The black preacher is more likely to think of the Bible as an inexhaustible source of good preaching material…. It provides the basis for unlimited creativity in the telling of rich and interesting stories (about the biblical characters), and these narrations command rapt attention while the eternal truth is brought to bear on the black experience and struggle for liberation. The Bible undergirds remembrance and gives permanent reference to whatever illuminating discernment the preacher has to offer.180

177  Brent A. Strawn, The Old Testament Is Dying: A Diagnosis and Recommended Treatment, Theological Explorations for the Church Catholic (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2017), 173. 178  Lindbeck, “Barth and Textuality,” 371. Lindbeck elsewhere says, “Even the deists and atheists of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, who for the first time made the high culture of the West avowedly non-Christian, were imaginatively saturated with scripture.” “The Church’s Mission to Postmodern Culture,” 38. 179  Lindbeck, “Barth and Textuality,” 371. See Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (Toronto: Academic Press Canada, 1982). 180  Henry H.  Mitchell, Black Preaching: The Recovery of a Powerful Art (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990), 58–59. Cited in Lindbeck, “Barth and Textuality,” 371; Lindbeck, “The Church’s Mission to Postmodern Culture,” 42. Lindbeck argues this is not only the case in historic black preaching, but in the present. Lindbeck says, “In the United States, if I may judge the example of some of the students I have had, [classical biblical hermeneutics] remains particularly powerful in black churches.” “The Gospel’s Uniqueness,” 431.

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Lindbeck notes that this description of black preaching sounds remarkably similar to rabbinic, patristic, reformational, and puritan biblical exegesis.181 People in previous periods were also shaped by other sources. Lindbeck says, “The poorly catechized masses lived also in a world of hobgoblins, fairies, necromancy, and superstition” and “the educated classes, everyone, not least devout Christians, had their imaginations shaped by the pagan classics of the Greeks and Romans, to a degree we tend to forget.” Despite this, Lindbeck argues: The text above all texts was the Bible. Its stories, images, conceptual patterns, and turns of phrase permeated the culture from top to bottom. This was true even for illiterates and those who did not go to church, for knowledge of the Bible was transmitted not only directly by its reading, hearing, and ritual enactment, but also indirectly by an interwoven net of intellectual, literary, artistic, folkloric, and proverbial traditions…. There was a time when every educated person, no matter how professedly unbelieving or secular, knew the actual text from Genesis to Revelation with a thoroughness which would put contemporary ministers and even theologians to shame.182

Childs’ second critique deals with Lindbeck’s reading of Karl Barth. He argues that Barth’s emphasis upon the “strange new world within the Bible” does not involve “drawing a community of faith into the world of the Bible.” Instead, Barth emphasizes the fact that Scripture “bears witness to a reality outside the text, namely to God, and through the biblical text the reader is confronted with the Word of God who is Jesus Christ.”183 Lindbeck responds to both of these charges: upon his reading of Barth and that his view of Scripture neglects the ways in which Scripture witnesses to external reality. To address the first one, he draws upon Richard Hays’ work in Moral Vision of the New Testament. Lindbeck introduces Hays’ reading of Barth by first saying, “Biblical narrative is fundamental for the shaping of Christian life.”184 Hays says:

 Lindbeck, “The Church’s Mission to Postmodern Culture,” 43.  Ibid., 38. 183  Childs, Biblical Theology, 22. 184  George Lindbeck, “Postcritical Canonical Interpretation: Three Modes of Retrieval,” in Theological Exegesis: Essays in Honor of Brevard S.  Childs (Grand Rapids. MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 33. 181 182

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By virtue of his attentiveness to narrative patterns, Barth values the biblical stories as paradigms. In particular, the story of Jesus Christ functions in Barth’s theology as the single definitive template for obedience and authentic humanity. The “identity of authority and freedom” that is accomplished in the person of Jesus Christ “becomes normative for what is demanded of us.”185

Like Lindbeck, Hays too argues that within this framework, Barth invites people to enter “the strange new world within the Bible.”186 In response to the second part of this critique, it is true that Lindbeck and Frei both have their hesitancies about modern theories of revelation or inspiration. For example, Lindbeck says, “The historical evidence indicates that biblical authority prospered among Christians without such theories until the seventeenth century, and among Jews, down to the present.”187 This does not mean, however, that Lindbeck denies the role that Scripture plays as a witness. He says, “Interpreting Scripture for its witness to God in his dealings with his creatures is an inseparable part of premodern Bible reading, and no responsible attempt at retrieval can exclude it.”188 Lindbeck sees this emphasis upon Scripture as witness as important because it helps retrievalists “escape the anthropocentric and/ or subjectivist reductionism of contemporary hermeneutical strategies, which make God dependent on human needs and desires.”189 As a Lutheran, Lindbeck sees Scripture as a verbum externum, an external word, which as a whole includes “the verbal, sacramental, and behavioral witness to Jesus Christ.”190 Lindbeck, however, raises a concern about 185  Richard B.  Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New Creation, A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics (San Francisco: HarperOne, 1996), 237. Lindbeck cites this quotation in Lindbeck, “Postcritical Canonical Interpretation,” 33–34. 186  Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament, 237. 187  Lindbeck, “Hans W. Frei and the Future of Theology in America,” 18. 188  Lindbeck, “Postcritical Canonical Interpretation,” 31. 189  Ibid., 32. 190  ND, 130. See George Lindbeck, “Modernity and Luther’s Understanding of the Freedom of the Christian,” in Martin Luther and the Modern Mind: Freedom, Conscience, Toleration, Rights, ed. Manfred Hoffman, Toronto Studies in Theology 22 (New York/ Toronto: Edwin Mellen Press, 1985), 12. Here, Lindbeck associates this position with the Reformers. Lindbeck does not deny, however, that the verbum internum, “(traditionally equated with the action of the Holy Spirit) is also crucially important,” but within his model, “it would be understood in a theological use of the model as a capacity for hearing and accepting the true religion, the true external word” (ND, 20.) He later says, “Faith, so the cultural-linguistic interpreter would say, comes from the acceptance and internalization of

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treating the Scripture as witness mode as primary: “It is not as clear that doing so is anywhere near as successful in providing guidance to Christian communities as its proponents would like to think. To the extent Scripture is construed as pointing Godward, it does not directly address human beings.”191 In addition to making room for a discussion of the Bible as witness, through interactions with Nicholas Wolterstorff and his volume Divine Discourses: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim That God Speaks (Cambridge University Press, 1995), Lindbeck, in his later work, also incorporates a discussion of Scripture as authorial discourse.192 All three modes of postcritical retrieval, “narrationally structured symbolic worlds,” witness, and authorial discourse “are needed, and when taken in isolation … they wrongly appear mutually exclusive or contradictory.”193

Consensus Lindbeck says that the retrieval of premodern ways of reading Scripture has ecumenical potential; that classical ways of reading Scripture have “consensus-and-community-forming potential,” which he argues is deeply needed.194 He does so through a discussion of the sensus fidelium—the sense of the faithful, which “persists in relative independence of professional theologians. It is nourished by Scripture as transmitted through liturgy, preaching, catechesis, personal reading, and the general culture; and it is sustained by communal bonds which are sociological and ethnic as well as specifically ecclesial.”195 If the sensus fidelium is strong, then “communal authority survives hermeneutical conflict among the teachers of the church…. The interpretation best adapted to the instinct of faith will then the external word…. The salvific role of the Holy Spirit is to join hearers and potential hearers (publicly and communally and thereby internally) to the Word who is Jesus Christ rather than to offer the gratia Christi in hidden ways to all human beings in only some of whom does it become public and communal fellowship with Jesus” (130). Lindbeck elsewhere argues that the Spirit does not work apart from the external word. See “Theologians, Theological Faculties, and the ELCA Study of Ministry” Dialog 28 (1989): 205. 191  Lindbeck, “Postcritical Canonical Interpretation,” 32. Lindbeck notes that Childs is aware of this difficulty (32–33). 192  Ibid., 40–48. 193  Ibid., 26. 194  Lindbeck, “Scripture, Consensus, and Community,” 74. 195  Ibid., 89.

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ultimately triumph even if it is initially a minority one.”196 Scripture is at the center of this sensus fidelium because “communal authority, in the Christian sphere, depends on consonance with the Bible.”197 Without this common text, “social cohesion becomes more difficult to sustain and depends more on bureaucratic management, the manipulation of public opinion, and ultimately, perhaps, totalitarian force.”198 Despite differences that exist among Christians on issues related to tradition and a magisterium, all Christian groups agree on this point, be they Protestants with an emphasis upon sola scriptura, Orthodox who follow the patristic tradition of Scripture’s primacy, or Roman Catholics, who as Verbum Dei contends, see the magisterium as having a servant role in relation to Scripture.199 Lindbeck argues that an example of this can be seen within the early church. While it was initially “Old Testament-oriented,” the church soon became largely Gentile in membership. Despite this, they, analogously to the Jews, came to see themselves as a single people “bound together by ties of mutual helpfulness, responsibility, and openness to each other’s correction. Because of this, they were able to cooperate in developing, not only congruent versions of a single rule of faith and a common enlarged canon, but also unified, though not uniform, ministerial, liturgical, and disciplinary patterns and structures.”200 These early Christians were better able to claim the name “Catholic” than sects like the Marcionites. The Scriptures they recognized became the Christian Bible, and thus “in this sense the church is prior to the Bible. Yet, on the other hand, it was Scripture—initially Hebrew Scripture read christologically which had the consensus, community, and institution-building power to make of these communities the overwhelmingly dominant and therefore Catholic church.”201 Arguments that prioritize the Bible make as much sense as those that prioritize the church. He concludes, “No choice is necessary, however: it is best to think of the coinherence of Bible and church, of their mutually constitutive reciprocity. It was, furthermore, the church as sensus fidelium, not as separately institutionalized magisterial authority, which  Ibid., 91.  Ibid., 90. 198  Ibid., 96. 199  Ibid., 90–91. Lindbeck says in a footnote within this context, “I here follow the general view that although Vatican II did not explicitly reject a two-source interpretation of Trent’s statements on Scripture and tradition, it nevertheless favors a one-source construal” (91n6). 200  Ibid., 78. 201  Ibid. 196 197

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was decisive in this process. Those writings which proved profitable in actual use among the people were the ones which were included in the canon.”202 Lindbeck notes, however, that the situation has changed because the canon is now closed. The church does not form Scripture, “but is rather formed by it.” At the same time, however, “the Bible’s community-­ forming role … is not independent of community. It helps constitute the ecclesia only when interpreted communally in accordance with a community-constituting hermeneutics.”203 Yet this hermeneutic continued to play a role within the church well into the Middle Ages, even for the illiterate masses. In that time, “The laity learned the fundamental outline and episodes of the scriptural drama through liturgy, catechesis, and occasional preaching,” and they came to see the world through that formation.204 The church made many missteps along the way, which continued into the time of the Reformers: various teachers legitimated liturgical and devotional abuses, inquisitions, crusades, and anti-Semitism, “Yet the Bible within the classical framework resists definitive capture by even communally self-interested misreadings.”205 The church was reminded, through Scripture, that just as God’s judgment came upon the disobedient people of Israel, it could come upon them (1 Cor 10). They were called to remain loyal to their community and its leaders “even if they are unbelieving high priests.”206 The Reformation, and the excommunication of Luther and others by the Roman Catholic Church, brought about a crisis for the church. It became difficult to maintain an emphasis upon the sensus fidelium with a divided church. Yet even after the division, one can continue to see glimpses of the consensus-building power of Scripture. He points as an example to the early Reformed tradition. Though it had scattered churches throughout Europe and in North America, “They constituted a  Ibid.  Ibid., 78–79. 204  Ibid., 79. 205  Ibid. 206  Ibid., 80; George Lindbeck, “Problems on the Road to Unity: Infallibility,” in Unitatis Redintegratio: 1964–1974-Eine Bilanz Der Auswirkungen Des Ökumenismusdekrets, ed. Gerard Békés and Vilmos Vajta, Studia Anselmiana 71 (Frankfurt: Lembeck/Knecht, 1977), 108. See Acts 23:35. Lindbeck acknowledges the difficulty that Luther did not follow Paul’s advice in Acts. 202 203

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self-­consciously united communion held together by nothing except a common approach to Scripture.”207 They continued to read the Bible ecclesially and classically, looking to it for guidance to shape their lives, and through an emphasis upon preaching and Bible study, “the laity in many congregations came to know the Bible from Genesis to Revelation with a thoroughness never equaled before or since.”208 Yet, their reading of Scripture had its share of flaws: they sought to formulate an unchanging system of doctrine based upon a hyper-Augustinian doctrine of double predestination that “obscured God’s mercy and, as Lutherans complained, unwittingly undermined the Reformation sola gratia and sola fide.”209 Their success in building consensus was limited because “they did not unite the Reformation churches.”210 The Reformed even came to divide among themselves.211 Lindbeck argues that a classical, but not anticritical, way of reading Scripture can come to inform the sensus fidelium, but only given certain conditions: The condition for this happening is that communities of interpretation come into existence in which pastors, biblical scholars, theologians, and laity together seek God’s guidance in the written word for their communal as well as individual lives. Their reading of Scripture will be within the context of a worship life which, in its basic eucharistic, baptismal, and kerygmatic patterns, accords with that of the first centuries. They may differ in their views of the de iure divino status of the threefold pattern of ministry and of the papal institutionalization of the Petrine function, but not on the legitimacy of these forms of ministry as servants of word, sacrament, and unity, nor on the fundamental character of the ministerial office as divinely instituted to feed and lead God’s flock. There will be in these communities a renewed sense that Christians constitute a single people chosen to witness among the nations in all they are, say, and do to the salvation that was, that is, and that is to come, and guided by God in his mercy and judgment and in their faithfulness and unfaithfulness, toward the promised consummation.  Lindbeck, “Scripture, Consensus, and Community,” 80.  Ibid., 81. 209  Ibid. 210  Ibid. 211  Ibid., 82. Lindbeck argues, “Most of the Protestant divisions after the sixteenth century originated among the Reformed, and the loss of the classic interpretive pattern is largely responsible.” He notes that the loss of the classical way of reading Scripture was not restricted to them, but existed throughout western Christendom. 207 208

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They will care for their own members and will also be deeply concerned about Christians everywhere. Openness to receive and responsibility to give help and correction from and to other churches will be embedded in their institutional and organizational fabrics.212

So within the sensus fidelium, disagreements will continue. Lindbeck does not advocate for the consensus forming power of Scripture naively. He notes that within the contemporary context, “there seems to be less and less communal sense of what is or is not Christian.”213 This is true not only across denominational lines, but within single congregations. He says, “Knowledge of the Bible (which is transmitted through general culture, folklore, proverbs, catechesis and liturgy, as well as direct Bible-­ reading and preaching) is in decline. The use of Scripture is not part of people’s lives, and thus reading and hearing it (when they do read and hear it) has little impact.”214 Christians lack a common language by which they can resolve differences. While one can see any number of reasons why this situation has arisen and how the situation can be improved, “the need for more and better knowledge of the Bible is not likely to be denied.”215 This lack of biblical literacy is another argument for why one should avoid “translation theology.” Such theology is “doubly pluralistic and thus doubly unlikely to contribute to the formation of a coherent ‘sense of the faithful’ whether biblical or nonbiblical.”216

Conclusion Despite the difficulties the church faces in forming a people with biblical fluency and a sensus fidelium, Lindbeck says that the church should not lose hope or be discouraged. Scripture permits and even encourages us to dream dreams and see visions. Barriers have been erased, retrieval has begun, and we can begin to imagine far more than was possible a mere generation ago that Roman Catholics,

212  Ibid., 99–100; Lindbeck, “Ecumenical Theology,” 269–270; Lindbeck, “Two Kinds of Ecumenism,” 658–659. 213  Lindbeck, “Scripture, Consensus, and Community,” 74. 214  Ibid., 75. He says, “Perhaps this is why the change to the vernacular and the renewed emphasis on Scripture at Vatican II seem to have done little to make the Roman Catholic sensus fidelium more biblically informed.” 215  Ibid. 216  Ibid., 88.

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Eastern Orthodox, and heirs of the Reformation will learn to read the Bible together as the Christ-centered guide for themselves and their communities. God’s guidance of world and church history has sown the seeds for the rebirth of the written word, and it is for believers to pray, work, and hope against hope that God will bring these seeds to fruition through the power of the Holy Spirit.217

The type of retrieval that Lindbeck envisions, one that can bring about consensus, is a linguistic and ecclesial one. It provides for the church “a vocabulary and grammar for redescribing, re-assessing and re-experiencing all aspects of communal life including theories and prescriptions.”218 Single language conversations have a superiority over multilingual ones, and translation often brings about confusion, especially when the differences between the two languages are not known. For example, the churches’ responses to Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry “compounded confusion by eliciting a bewildering variety of not only contradictory but apparently incommensurable reactions.”219 A shared language is needed, and the classic understanding of the church as Israel could provide that idiom.220

217  Lindbeck, “Scripture, Consensus, and Community,” 101. See Lindbeck, “Ecumenical Theology,” 271; Lindbeck, “Two Kinds of Ecumenism,” 659–660. 218  Lindbeck, “An Israel-like Church,” 10. 219  Ibid., 11–12. 220  Ibid., 12. Lindbeck says, “It is not that the classic tongue would automatically decide the issues raised by BEM, but it would provide a vocabulary and grammar by means of which they could be more profitably discussed. That is why retrieval is necessary.”

CHAPTER 5

The Old Testament as Ecclesiological Textbook

If the Church is, or has, a culture of her own, then the Church’s claim somehow to be Israel must also be a claim somehow to continue the culture of Israel. (Robert Jenson)1

Lindbeck argues that in order for an ecclesiology to have an ecumenical advantage, it must “be consistent with the total witness of Scripture as this centers on Jesus Christ. Without this, it can be neither catholic nor ecumenical.”2 There are occasions in which certain scriptural perspectives must be abandoned for Christians to be more faithful to the central message of the gospel (e.g., New Testament tolerance of slavery), and non-­ biblical formulations, such as the Christological formulas of Nicaea and Chalcedon, may at times be necessary due to heretical misuses of Scripture. While the same may be true of the doctrine of the church, Lindbeck concludes, “The burden of proof is on those whose fundamental categories

1  Robert W. Jenson, “Christ as Culture 1: Christ as Polity,” in Theology as Revolutionary Metaphysics: Essays on God and Creation, ed. Stephen John Wright (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2014), 182. 2  George Lindbeck, “The Church,” in Keeping the Faith: Essays to Mark the Centenary of Lux Mundi, ed. Geoffrey Wainwright (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), 181.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. C. Brown, George Lindbeck and The Israel of God, Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74757-2_5

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for thinking about the church are nonbiblical.”3 He acknowledges that Scripture describes the church in various ways and that readers’ pre-­ understandings determine what they take as relevant data, but in order to avoid “squaring this circle,” he says, “we shall … proceed on the doctrinally and ecumenical mandated hypothesis that the Church was primarily the people of God in the biblical writings, and ask what that meant.”4 He clarifies this further by defining the church as “the messianic pilgrim people of God typologically shaped by Israel’s story.”5 He sees strong evidence for the hypothesis that the church is fundamentally the messianic pilgrim people of God. Early Christians were a Jewish sect that came to accept Jesus of Nazareth as the crucified and risen Messiah, and while they began to welcome Gentiles into their fellowship without the requirement of circumcision, “this did not diminish their desire to maintain their legitimacy as Jews.”6 They derived their communal self-understanding from the Old Testament, which “functioned as the ecclesiological textbook except where it was trumped by the New,” and they interpreted the text as Jews.7 Lindbeck says, It was natural that they should understand their communities as ekklesia, ̄ as qahal, the assembly of Israel in the new age…. Thus the story of Israel was their story. They were part of that people of God who lived in the time between the times after the messianic era had begun but before the final coming of the kingdom. Whatever is true of Israel is true of the Church except where the differences are explicit.8

Lindbeck sets four guidelines for reading the New Testament testimony to the church in light of this perspective. First, “early Christian communal

3  Ibid., 182. See also George Lindbeck, “The Story-Shaped Church: Critical Exegesis and Theological Interpretation,” in Scriptural Authority and Narrative Interpretation, ed. Garrett Green (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), 163. 4  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 182. 5  Ibid., 179. 6  Ibid., 182. See also Lindbeck, “Story-Shaped Church,” 169. 7  Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel,” 81. 8  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 182–183. Lindbeck says of ekklesia ̄ and qahal, “For once philology and etymology cohere with broader historical considerations.” See Lindbeck, “The Story-Shaped Church,” 169; Brevard S.  Childs, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflection on the Christian Bible (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992), 429.

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self-understanding was narrative shaped.”9 Images like “body of Christ” or the traditional marks of the church as “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic” cannot be defined first and then used to determine what is and what is not “church.” Rather Lindbeck asserts, “The story was logically prior. It determined the meaning of images, concepts, doctrines and theories of the Church rather than being determined by them.”10 Connected to the narrative shaped understanding of the earliest Christian communities was the understanding that “church” referred to “concrete groups of people” and not to “something transempirical. An invisible Church is as biblically odd as an invisible Israel.”11 Apart from a narrative whole that draws the various descriptions of the church in the New Testament together, the descriptions “fragment into distinct and perhaps incompatible ecclesiologies.”12 References to the church as “holy” or as “bride of Christ” within the New Testament were references to “empirical churches in all their actual or potential messiness.”13 For this reason, Lindbeck critiques what he calls “traditional ecclesiologies,” whether they derive from Catholics, Protestants, or sectarians. These ecclesiologies, even if they have some “scriptural authenticity,” tend to depart from both Israel’s story and “the referential primacy of empirical communities.”14 While these ecclesiologies define the church denotatively as “event or mission or liberating action or the communion of Christ’s justifying grace,” and while they tend to critique notions of the church as invisible, their main referent is not to a people. Lindbeck says, “What for the Bible are predicates are in these modern outlooks turned into subject terms.”15 These ecclesiologies do not refer to “empirical churches in all their concreteness. These latter are rather imperfect manifestations, realizations, participations or thematizations of the Church’s true, eschatological reality.”16 Lindbeck thus prefers a “narrational” rather than “systematic” ecclesiology. Lindbeck is also careful to note that an emphasis upon the church as the people of God “does not necessarily indicate a return to either narrative or  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 183.  Ibid. See Lindbeck, “The Story-Shaped Church,” 165. 11  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 183. 12  Ibid., 186. 13  Ibid., 183; Lindbeck, “The Story-Shaped Church,” 165. 14  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 188. 15  Ibid., 189; Lindbeck, “The Story-Shaped Church,” 173. 16  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 189; Lindbeck, “The Story-Shaped Church,” 173. 9

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denotative concreteness.”17 At times, “people of God” is used as an attributive rather than a denotative term. For example, in his Images of the Church, Lindbeck’s Yale colleague Paul Minear seeks to delineate various images or pictures of the church and their interdependence, one of which is the people of God.18 A notable exception to this is another of Lindbeck’s Yale colleagues, Nils A. Dahl, who argues, “To say that the church is the people of God is not simply to name one metaphor among other qualifications of the church. The idea of the people of God is implied in the very conception of the Church: the ekkle ̄sia tou theou is the assembled laos tou theou.”19 Second, for early Christians, “Israel’s history was their only history.”20 They did not yet have a New Testament or sources of church history. While they read the Old Testament in the light of Christ, it served as their “sole ecclesiological textbook.”21 John Behr argues that much of this continues into subsequent generations of Christians. He notes that in On the Apostolic Preaching, the New Testament documents, though known and recognized as Scripture, are not foundational for Irenaeus. Rather, “The whole content of the apostolic preaching is derived … from the Old Testament.”22 Behr argues that Irenaeus is not alone in this. He says, “Scripture for the apostolic fathers, as in the New Testament itself, refers to the writings of the Old Testament: the Gospel is still very much a proclamation.”23 He cites as an example a passage in Ignatius of Antioch’s Philadelphians, in which he says, “If I do not find [it] in the archives,” by which he means the Old Testament, “I do not believe [it to be] in the Gospel.”24 Third, the early Christians appropriated the whole of Israel’s story, not just the favorable parts or those who refer to a faithful remnant. Lindbeck says, “All the wickedness of the Israelites in the wilderness could be  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 203n13.  Paul S. Minear, Images of the Church in the New Testament (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 11–13. 19  Nils Alstrup Dahl, “The People of God,” Ecumenical Review 9, no. 2 (January 1957): 154. 20  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 183; Lindbeck, “The Story-Shaped Church,” 165. 21  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 183; Lindbeck, “The Story-Shaped Church,” 165. 22  John Behr, “The Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching,” in On the Apostolic Preaching, by Irenaeus, Popular Patristics Series 17 (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997), 8. 23  Ibid., 9. 24  As cited in ibid., 10. 17 18

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theirs.”25 The paradigmatic example of this is in 1 Corinthians 10. There Paul says that “our ancestors” were all in the wilderness with Moses. They all “were under the cloud, and passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink that followed them, and that rock was Christ. Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them, and they were struck down in the wilderness” (vv. 1–5). Some of them became idolaters, engaged in sexual immorality, put Christ to the test, and complained, and they were destroyed. Paul says in verses 6 and 11 that these things were written “as examples” (NRSV) or “warnings” (RSV), as τύποι or τυπικῶς, as “types,” in order to “instruct us” (11). Paul says, “So if you think you are standing, watch out that you do not fail” (12). Lindbeck says, “The lesson to be drawn from these verses is that for Christians to practice being the church as Israel is for them to apply to their own community what they read about Israel in the Tanakh, the Old Testament.”26 The church is to see itself “in the mirror of O.T. Israel in the light of Jesus Christ.”27 So, as Bonhoeffer argues, in order to read the Bible seriously, the church must come to not only read the Bible “for ourselves,” but “against ourselves.”28 Paul uses similar imagery in Romans 11:17–24. He says that some of the “natural branches,” Jews, have been cut off from the tree, and that believing Gentiles, “a wild olive shoot, were grafted in their place to share the rich root of the olive tree.” He warns these Gentile believers, however, not to boast that they have been grafted in place of these unbelieving Jews. He says, “They were broken off because of their unbelief, but you stand only through faith. So do not become proud, but stand in awe. For if God did not spare the natural branches, perhaps he will not spare you” (vv. 20–21). He also reminds them, “Even those of Israel, if they do not persist in unbelief, will be grafted in, for God has the power to graft them in again” (v. 23).

 Lindbeck, “The Church,” 184; Lindbeck, “The Story-Shaped Church,” 166.  Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel,” 81. 27  George Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel and the Future of Ecumenism: Lecture One: Israel-Likeness Unites and Disunites” (Wycliffe College, Toronto, Canada, October 23, 2001), 3. 28  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ecumenical, Academic, and Pastoral Work: 1931–1932, ed. Victoria Barnett, Mark S. Brocker, and Michael B. Lukens, trans. Anne Schmidt-Lange et al., Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 11 (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2012), 378. 25 26

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Lindbeck notes that while such ways of depicting the church have not always been emphasized in official doctrine, they have survived liturgically. As an example, he cites a hymn written by John of Damascus: Come ye faithful, raise the strain of triumphant gladness! God has brought his Israel into joy from sadness, Loosed from Pharaoh’s bitter yoke Jacob’s sons and daughters, Led them with unmoistened foot through the Red Sea waters.29

Those who received this hymn did not see this imagery as mere metaphor, and neither did African American slaves who sang similar hymns. Lindbeck says, “More important, both groups passed through the Red Sea waters in baptism and become members of the community that is the body of Christ, partakers of the very flesh and blood of the one who is the summation of Israel.”30 Fourth, early Christians saw Israel and the church as one people: “There was no breach in continuity.”31 Lindbeck illustrates this point further saying, “The French remain French after the revolution, the Quakers remain Quakers after becoming wealthy, and Israel remains Israel even when transformed by the arrival of the eschaton in Christ. The Church is simply Israel in the time between the times.”32 While Paul does speak of those Jews who have been cut off from the root, Lindbeck argues, “it does not alter the identity of the people of the promise.”33 He says, drawing on the work of Krister Stendahl, “So strong was this sense of uninterrupted peoplehood that the only available way to think of gentile Christians was … as ‘honorary Jews.’”34 As Paul says in Ephesians 2: So then, remember that at one time you Gentiles by birth … were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and  As cited in Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel,” 81.  Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel Lecture One,” 3. 31  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 184; Lindbeck, “The Story-Shaped Church,” 166. 32  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 184; Lindbeck, “The Story-Shaped Church,” 166–167. Lindbeck goes on to say, “Discontinuity and nonidentity are problems in the New Testament, not for the Church per se, but for unbelieving Jewry on the one hand and gentile Christians on the other. The apostle Paul says of the first group in Romans 11 that they have been cut off, but that this can happen does not differentiate them from Christians. Churches also, as we have already noted, can be severed from the root.” “The Church,” 184–185. 33  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 185; Lindbeck, “The Story-Shaped Church,” 167. 34  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 185; Lindbeck, “The Story-Shaped Church,” 167. 29 30

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strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us…. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. (vv. 11–14, 19–20)

Those who were foreigners from Israel have been included into the covenant of Abraham through the new covenant of Christ. This, for early Christians, “did not … constitute the formation of a different people but rather the enlargement of the old.”35 The Pauline literature is not alone in speaking of the church this way. For example, though 1 Peter was likely primarily addressed to Gentile Christians in the five Roman provinces of modern-day Turkey, the author refers to them using terminology from the Old Testament. He begins by calling them “exiles of the Dispersion” (1:1), and this imagery of the church as aliens, strangers, and exiles continues elsewhere in 1 Peter (1:17; 2:11). Eugene Boring and Fred Craddock argue, “The Dispersion (Diaspora) is a technical term for the scattered (NIV) people of Israel who live as Jews throughout the world, united not by having a homeland but by belonging to the chosen people of God. The author addresses his Christian readers as inheritors of this status.”36 Verse 2 then tells them that they are “chosen and destined by God the Father and sanctified by the Spirit to be obedient to Jesus Christ and to be sprinkled with his blood.” Boring and Craddock say here that “1 Peter considers the Christian community, as members of the renewed Israel, to be the continuing people of God.”37 As the text goes on, the author utilizes Passover imagery, in particular references to Jesus as a pascal lamb who delivers God’s people from the old way of life (1:14–23). The text of 1 Peter also refers to the people using priestly language. They are told, “as he who called you is holy, be holy yourselves in all your conduct; for it is written, ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy’” (1:15–16). They are reminded that God has “purified their souls,” which “echoes the  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 185. See also Lindbeck, “The Story-Shaped Church,” 167.  M.  Eugene Boring and Fred B.  Craddock, The People’s New Testament Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 725. 37  Ibid. 35 36

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biblical word found 34x in the LXX, used of the consecration of priests, Levites, Nazirites, and the people of Israel as a whole.”38 Indeed the addresses are told, “Let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (2:5). And a few verses later, it says, “you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (2:9). Lindbeck does not deny that the people of God look different in this new age, but Israel also looked different in the wilderness than it did under the judges, under the kings, or in exile.39 The people of God have new special features and functions in this new age: “Who and what the people is becomes more fully manifest now that the Messiah has come. The bride of Yahweh is the bride and body of Christ. The Spirit is now offered and may be poured on all flesh as it was not before (Acts 2:17ff).”40 The identity of the people, however, remains. There is, according to Lindbeck, “not a New Israel.”41 The use of these four guidelines did not persist within the church. This resulted from two factors. First, there was a “hardening of opposition” between synagogue and church. This led Jewish Christians, like the author of the epistle of Barnabas, to argue that unbelieving Jews are no longer a part of God’s people. Lindbeck says, “Faithfulness became the mark of election, and election, conversely, became conditional on faithfulness.”42 Second, the church became almost entirely Gentile, and so it became increasingly difficult for the church to see itself as “naturalized citizens in the continuous, uninterrupted commonwealth of Israel.”43 This led to the understanding that the one people of God was two peoples: the old (Old Testament Israel) and the new (the church). Christians ceased applying all of Israel’s story to the church. For example, in reading 1 Corinthians 10, “They have focused selectively on the favorable prefigurations Paul mentions—on Christ the rock, on manna as type of the eucharist, on baptism under the cloud—and have neglected his more numerous warnings of the punishments for disobedience to which  Ibid., 729.  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 192. 40  Ibid., 185–186. 41  Ibid., 186. 42  Ibid.; Lindbeck, “The Story-Shaped Church,” 171. 43  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 187. See also Lindbeck, “The Story-Shaped Church,” 171. 38 39

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Christians are liable.”44 In reading the Old Testament, Christians no longer saw critiques of Israel’s unfaithfulness as applying to the church. This led to the development of a medieval hermeneutical rule that Ephraim Radner paraphrases from the work of Rupert of Deutz: “all good elements in the texts (e.g., consolations, etc.) should be referred to Jesus Christ and his Church, while all the bad elements (e.g., sufferings, punishments) should be referred to the Jews and to human sin in general.”45

Election Instead of rooting the church’s identity in her own faithfulness, Lindbeck first says that “the identity and being of the Church rests on God’s election.”46 David Novak defines election as “the choice by one person of another person out of a range of multiple candidates. This choice then establishes a mutual relationship between the elector and the elected, in biblical terms a ‘covenant’ (berit).”47 Novak notes that while Baruch Spinoza sought to invert the biblical doctrine of election so that Israel elects God, the traditional view of election states that God elects Israel.48 Within this traditional view, as Michael Wyschogrod notes, “The relation between God and his people is not a symmetrical one.”49 For Lindbeck, the God who elects Israel and the church is the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus; the God revealed in Scripture. Lindbeck argues, “When the church is identified by its faithfulness rather than by God’s election, Christian communities look for some property within themselves that ensures God will continue to acknowledge them as his own.”50 The church should not look within themselves, however, but within the free will of God. Just as God was under no compulsion to create,

 Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel,” 91.  As cited in ibid. Originally in Radner, The End of the Church, 292n30. 46  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 192. 47  David Novak, The Election of Israel: The Idea of the Chosen People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 23. 48  Ibid., 22. Novak elsewhere notes that Schleiermacher also argues that Israel elects God. “From Supersessionism to Parallelism in Jewish-Christian Dialogue,” 98. 49  Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith: God in the People Israel, First Jason Aronson Inc. Edition. (Lanham, MD: Jason Aronson, 1996), 57. 50  Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel,” 92. 44 45

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God was under no necessity to call Abraham, choose Israel, bestow the Torah, send his Son, the Jewish Messiah, that the world might live, open the ranks of the chosen people to the uncircumcised nor, finally, to promise in and through these acts to establish his reign at the end of time. These events are interlocking and interdefining so that the full significance becomes more and more as one considers them together.51

While one cannot understand election apart from Christ, “the Old Testament accounts of Israel are basic. They, more than the New Testament, tell what it means to be God’s chosen people; and what they predicate of Israel, it will be recalled, also applies to the church unless there are biblical indications to the contrary.”52 The Reformation emphasis upon “sola gratia, the unconditionality of grace, is seen most clearly in God’s choice of Israel. It has two aspects: first, there was no reason for the choice and, second, it is irrevocable. God is faithful; he cannot break his promises; he must fulfill his oath.”53 Lindbeck points to Deuteronomy 7:6–8 to illustrate the unconditionality of God’s election of Israel: “For you are a people consecrated to the Lord your God: of all the peoples on earth the Lord your God chose you to be his treasured people. It is not because you are the most numerous of peoples that the Lord set his heart on you and chose you—indeed, you are the smallest of peoples” (JPS). He notes that Christian and Jewish readers can agree that God does not choose Abraham because of his virtue. He cites Novak, who argues there is “no clue as to why God elects Abraham and his progeny or as to why Abraham obeys the call…. Any righteousness attributed to Abraham is seen as subsequent not prior to God’s election of him.”54 Lindbeck follows Novak and prioritizes God’s decree over human action. “Even when Israel (and the church as part of Israel) is de facto desperately unfaithful and unlovable, election is not revoked. Looked at in canonical context, God’s call and covenant remain unconditional for Israel no matter what its behavior.”55 This emphasis can also be seen in the Old Testament, for both Ezekiel and Hosea depict idolatrous Israel as an adulterous spouse. Lindbeck says, “In whoring after false gods, so Ezekiel in  Lindbeck, “The Gospel’s Uniqueness,” 441.  Ibid. 53  Ibid. 54  Novak, The Election of Israel, 115. See also Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, 213. 55  Lindbeck, “The Gospel’s Uniqueness,” 442. 51 52

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particular affirms, Israel becomes worse than the heathen nations—corruptio optimi pessima est, as the pagan poet puts it—but God does not abrogate his covenant.”56 There is also New Testament evidence, both in Paul and in Revelation 1–3, for the irrevocability of Israel’s election. For example, In Romans 11:28–29, Paul says, “As regards the gospel they are enemies of God for your sake; but as regards election they are beloved, for the sake of their ancestors; for the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable” (emphasis added). Lindbeck draws upon the work of Michael Wyschogrod in developing this understanding of Israel, election, and (un)faithfulness. Wyschogrod says that Hashem takes the initiative in electing and loving Israel, and despite continued unfaithfulness, Hashem continues to love Israel like a parent loves a child.57 He says, “The history of Israel, was, like the history of man, from the beginning, a history of disobedience.”58 God intended all of humanity to be his people, but due to humanity’s sin, God elected a smaller group of people through whom God as “an example to the rest of humanity with the final goal remaining the reconciliation of humanity,” but Israel often acted like the rest of humanity.59 Wyschogrod argues that Christian theology has almost exclusively focused upon Israel’s unfaithfulness. Indeed, he says, “there is nothing more important that I have learned from [Karl] Barth than the sinfulness of Israel.”60 He says, however, one cannot look at Israel’s unfaithfulness in isolation from its faithfulness.61 He says, “There is nothing but faithfulness on God’s part but it is not the case that there is nothing but unfaithfulness on Israel’s part. Along with the unfaithfulness, there is also Israel’s faithfulness, its obedience and trust in God, its clinging to its election, identity, and mission against all odds.”62 While God takes the initiative in loving 56  Ibid. See also George Lindbeck, “Ecumenical Directions and Confessional Construals,” Dialog 30 (1991): 122. See also George Lindbeck, “Response to Michael Wyschogrod’s ‘Letter to a Friend,’” Modern Theology 11, no. 2 (April 1995): 206. 57  Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, 120–124. Jews sometimes refer to God as “Hashem,” which is Hebrew for “the Name.” 58  Ibid., 183. Wyschogrod considers Israel’s unfaithfulness not only in Scripture, but in the contemporary world, because most Jews today do not observe the Torah. 59  Ibid. 60  Michael Wyschogrod, Abraham’s Promise: Judaism and Jewish Christian Relations, ed. R. Kendall Soulen, Radical Traditions: Theology in a Postcritical Key (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), 223. 61  Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, 120, 184. 62  Wyschogrod, Abraham’s Promise, 223–224.

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Israel, Israel loves God in return, though it may at times take a time of punishment to lead them to repentance.63 He says, The general message is clear. Israel’s election is irrevocable. If and when Israel sins, it is punished, even severely. The people will be expelled from their land and sent into exile. But this punishment will not destroy Israel, and it will not last forever. God’s love for Israel will return, and a reconciliation will take place. God will bring back the exiles from wherever they are and reestablish the kingdom as before.64

Lindbeck argues that Wyschogrod’s writing has been important for him in coming to not only understand Israel, Jews, and Judaism, but also understand his own Christian faith. He thus argues that Wyschogrod’s book, The Body of Faith, is “ecclesiologically foundational.”65 As the church came to believe it had replaced Israel as God’s people, they created an ecclesiological problem for themselves. “Having denied by their supersessionism that Israel remains God’s beloved despite its unfaithfulness, they could not claim the irrevocability of God’s promises on the church’s behalf.”66 This is true for both Catholics and Protestants. For Catholics have assumed that the church, in and of itself, does not sin. They have relegated sin to the church’s members. Protestants, meanwhile, have at times argued that when the church sins and lacks faithfulness, it ceases to be church. Lindbeck says, “Both positions, it can be argued, are triumphalistic. They make impossible that combination of unbreakable communal loyalty despite unflinching recognition of unbearable communal sins characteristic of Jesus and the prophets.”67 He thus makes a revolutionary proposal by applying simul justus et peccator to not only individuals, but the church.68 He argues that while Luther did not make this move 63  Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, 120. Novak also discusses the “human side of election,” or the response of the people to the electing God (117–118). 64  Wyschogrod, Abraham’s Promise, 65. Wyschogrod says further, “Could the enemies of Israel succeed in eliminating the last vestiges of the Jewish people from the world? I do not believe so. If that were to happen, it would constitute a clear falsification of biblical faith” (66). See also 94, 151, 174, 179–187, 223. 65  Lindbeck, “Response to Wyschogrod,” 205. 66  Lindbeck, “The Gospel’s Uniqueness,” 443. 67  Ibid. 68  Joseph Mangina says, “Lindbeck was nowhere more Lutheran than in his willingness to acknowledge ecclesial sin!” “Retrieval, Repair, and the Possibility of a Christian Humanism,” 396.

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explicitly, it is a logical extension of his thought, for Luther affirmed that the Roman Church remained the church even under the papacy. Lindbeck says, It was horribly flawed, and yet it continued to be an earthen vessel which contained gospel treasures through which saving faith could be truly communicated despite all the obstacles placed in its way. The vessel is the bearer of the communio sanctorum in time and space. It consists of sociologically and historically concrete mixed communities which constantly betray or rebel against the gospel.69

Second, “the elect communities are stamped by objective marks,” such as eating and drinking in the Eucharist, circumcision or baptism, the recitation of the shema or the creed, “which are both blessing and curse depending on how they are received.”70 An example of this can be seen in 1 Corinthians 11:29–30, in which Paul says, “For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves. For this reason many of you are weak and ill, and some have died.” Third, Lindbeck argues that “election is communal. Individuals are elect by virtue of visible membership in God’s people.”71 Though God begins by electing an individual person, Wyschogrod says, “In the case of Israel, the relationship that started with Abraham, the individual, soon becomes a relationship with a nation that becomes the elect nation.”72 For Wyschogrod, an individual can only be understood within their national setting. For him, Judaism is not a voluntary association of people who affirm a set of propositions or beliefs, but a people.73 Wyschogrod seeks to dissuade Jews and Christians from becoming a part of what he calls the “the ‘I’ generation.” He argues that while some good has been done in recognizing the image of God within individuals, “God has set human

69   Lindbeck, “Ecumenical Directions and Confessional Construals,” 122. See also Lindbeck, “Response to Wyschogrod,” 206; George Lindbeck, “Church Faithful and Apostate: Reflections from Kansas City,” Lutheran Forum 28, no. 1 (Lent 1994): 18. 70  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 192. See 1 Corinthians 11:29. 71  Ibid. 72  Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, 68. 73  Ibid., 68, 174–175; Wyschogrod, Abraham’s Promise, 51. Novak agrees, arguing, “Election is primarily generic and only secondarily individual. Abraham is elected as the progenitor of a people. Every member of this people is elected by God and every member of this people is called upon to respond to his or her generic election” (117).

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beings in communities. And among these, the community of Israel is central.”74 Lindbeck argues that this sense of belonging to a common peoplehood, which even secular Jews have maintained but Christians have mostly lost, should be recaptured and would make a difference in how Christians relate to others, but even more so how they relate to one another within their communities. This understanding of the church as a people better allows for communal self-criticism. “It implies that Jews and Christians can be maximally critical of their own communities without disloyalty, as is abundantly illustrated by their own scriptures.”75 Fourth, the church’s mission is to “witness to the God who judges and who saves, not to save those who would otherwise be damned (for God has not confined his saving work exclusively to the Church’s ministrations).”76 This calling to be witnesses in the world began with God’s call to Abraham: “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen 12:2–4). Wyschogrod says that the election of Israel is a sign not only of God’s concern for Israel, but of humanity as a whole.77 This theme continues elsewhere in the Old Testament, as in Isaiah 42:6, in which it says Israel shall be “a light to the nations.” Lindbeck notes, “The New Testament applies this verse to Jesus; and Jesus, in turn, tells his followers they are ‘the light of the world’ (Mat. 5:14) or, in the words of Ephesians, ‘light in the Lord’ (5:8).”78 Lindbeck notes that God has multiple aims within creation, but “at least one aim in choosing Israel, Jesus and the church is the redemption of the world.”79 While Lindbeck has such a high view of election and its unconditonality, that does not mean that he rejects the possibility and reality of apostasy. As mentioned elsewhere in this chapter, disobedience may lead to persons being severed from the root (Rom 11:21). He says, Portions of the chosen people may lose their identity, they may be destroyed as was the Northern Kingdom, but that does not alter the unconditionality  Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, 253.  Lindbeck, “The Gospel’s Uniqueness,” 443. 76  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 192. 77  Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, 68. 78  Lindbeck, “The Gospel’s Uniqueness,” 443. 79  Ibid. See also Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, 103–104. 74 75

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of the election of those which remain recognizably Jewish or Christian even when they apostatize. God chastises them when they err—indeed, he does this with special severity—but as his chosen ones, beloved above all nations.80

Lindbeck notes that there are three possible views of apostasy. The first view sees faithfulness and apostasy as mutually exclusive. A person or a church is either faithful or apostate, and not a mix of the two. In the second view, which he calls the “double-perspectival” or “bifocal” view, the church is simultaneously faithful and apostate, justified and sinful. He says, “When judged by God’s law they are apostate, but faithful from the eschatological perspective of the Gospel promises.”81 While Lindbeck does not affirm the first view, the second view is consistent with Lindbeck’s discussion of the church above and of the early Lutheran Reformers. Those Reformers did not seek to break communion with Rome, but waited for Rome to excommunicate if communion would be severed. Yet, as Luther reminded the sectarians in his treatise “Concerning Rebaptism” of 1528, the church under the tyranny of the Renaissance papacy (which as the anti-christ was worse than apostate) remained the church. Within her is found the one, holy, catholic and apostolic communion of saints. Everything we have, Luther says, came from her. She recited the creed, prayed the Pater Noster, preserved the riches of the life-giving sacraments and holy Scriptures even if she dreadfully misused them. She was not apostate though ruled by the Scarlet Woman, the Whore of Babylon, and that is why it was apostasy to sever oneself voluntarily from her.82

Lindbeck argues that contemporary evangelical catholics like himself can learn from this approach, and should seek to remain within their own churches. Lindbeck also offers a third approach to apostasy, one in which faithfulness and apostasy “are thought of as mixed together in varying proportions.”83 This view may resemble the church of Laodicea in Revelation 3, of which the text says, “So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth” (v. 16). While the text speaks in such a harsh way toward the Laodiceans, it is also  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 190. See also Lindbeck, “The Story-Shaped Church,” 171.  Lindbeck, “Church Faithful and Apostate,” 18. 82  Ibid. 83  Ibid. 80 81

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clear that God has not abandoned the church there, but rather seeks to correct it. Verses 19–20 say, “I reprove and discipline those whom I love. Be earnest, therefore, and repent. Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me.” Lindbeck says, “One can scarcely call this church faithful, and yet it is not simply apostate. It continues to be part of the elect people whom God has chosen to be his witnesses and with whom he continues to plead even when they are faithless.”84 Lindbeck goes on to argue that Laodicea most clearly resembles the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) as he observed it at its biennial conference in Kansas City in August 1993. He says, “Indiscriminate inclusiveness in which faithfulness and apostasy are heedlessly conjoined even in worship results in insipidity. Punishment is to be expected but, as in the case of Laodicea, for the sake of repentance.”85 He warns the ELCA that if it continues to wither, it, like the Northern Kingdom, may be cut off from God’s people. He also argues that as Revelation does not call individual members of the church in Laodicea to leave their church and start a new community, that faithful members of the ELCA are called to remain and work on behalf of their church. To discuss another example of apostasy in the modern period, he says, “Theologically, and perhaps empirically also, the first thing to say about the Holocaust is that it was an onslaught by apostates from one part of God’s elect people (viz., the church) against another part (viz., Israel).”86 One cannot compartmentalize the Nazi crimes from the fact that they were ex- or post-Christians. They rejected the election and calling upon their lives, and they turned that hatred upon the Jews. Lindbeck summarizes his ecclesiological perspective by saying, My own surmise is that the vision of the church which God is seeking to impart now at the end of the twentieth century will seem Calvinist in its emphasis on election (though now communally rather than individually focused), Lutheran in its application to the church (and not simply to persons) of the simul justus et peccator, Eastern Orthodox in the centrality of worship, of the lex orandi, for theology and life, and patristic Catholic in the pattern of church government. Perhaps the overall impression will be more  Ibid., 19.  Ibid. 86  George Lindbeck, “Election, Christian Apostasy, and the Holocaust,” 1971, 1. 84 85

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Jewish, more in continuity with the Old Testament understanding of the people of God, than anything in Christian ecclesiology since, for example, Romans 9–11, 1 Cor 10, and Eph 2.87

Because of this, he argues that there needs to be a “re-Judaizing” of Christianity.

Law and Gospel More so than other Christian groups, Lutherans have emphasized the relationship of the law to the gospel. In Lindbeck’s discussion of the relationship of the two, he seeks to challenge popular conceptions of Martin Luther. Many have viewed Luther as primarily a “theological controversialist,” as someone seeking to critique and overturn. Lindbeck instead argues that the emphasis should be placed upon Luther as a pastor and catechist. He says, “According to this depiction, Luther offered his theological ideas only in the context of his recommendations for practice.”88 Lindbeck thus seeks to analyze Luther from the perspective of parishioners rather than historians and theologians. Lindbeck argues that Luther’s Large and Small Catechisms “provide the most authoritative normative description of Reformation Christianity as a religion of the population at large.”89 He notes that a treatment of Luther’s Reformation that focuses on the Catechisms would differ greatly from typical scholarly treatments that emphasize Luther’s controversialist writings, for, “In the Catechisms, the theological issues of justification by 87  Lindbeck, “Ecumenical Directions and Confessional Construals,” 123. Lindbeck previously gave a shorter version: “The Church thus sounds Catholic in its comprehensiveness, Calvinist in the unconditionality of its chosenness, and Lutheran in its possibilities of unfaithfulness while remaining genuinely the Church; but the total effect, not surprisingly, is more Jewish than anything else” (“The Church,” 192–193.). Elsewhere, Lindbeck also adds this view of the church is “Roman in its acknowledgment of the legitimacy of developments such as the papacy.” “Comparative Doctrine,” 24. He also says in this context that these characteristics do not necessarily make this view of the church more acceptable, but more controversial. 88  Lindbeck, “Martin Luther and the Rabbinic Mind,” 141. Lindbeck says that one can see that the pastoral/catechetical side of Luther overwhelms the controversialist side by perusing the table of contents within Luther’s collected works. He says, “The bulk of them are devoted to pastorally-oriented sermons, commentaries, table talk, letters, and, of course, the catechisms.” 89  Ibid., 143.

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faith alone, of the total corruption of fallen human nature, of double predestination, and of the opposition between law and gospel are never mentioned expressis verbis.”90 The Catechisms do not place a strong emphasis upon the Christian faith as reducible to beliefs apart from works, or of the individual apart from community, or subjective experience apart from liturgical practices. While acknowledging Luther’s later anti-Semitic polemics, Lindbeck argues that Luther’s work resembles certain rabbinic practices as described by twentieth-century Conservative rabbi Max Kadushin.91 Luther centered his catechisms upon the five topics of the Ten Commandments, Apostle’s Creed, Lord’s Prayer, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper, which roughly correspond to “the rabbinic concepts of torah, the shm’a, the amidah, circumcision and the Passover seder.”92 Lindbeck argues, “The crucial test of Luther’s similarity to the rabbis is his attitude toward law.”93 This on the surface appears challenging because Luther is commonly said to have placed a great disjunction between law and gospel. In some of his controversial writings, Luther argues that the Christian life is freedom from the law as both a demand and accusation. Even for those redeemed by Christ, who are simul totus justus et totus peccator, the law still plays this dual role. Even though they are free, they are still in bondage. Lindbeck encapsulates this perspective by saying, “They are, so to speak, bilocated, living both in the coming eschatological kingdom and in the present age when the messianic reign has begun but is not yet consummated. It is thus that they are totally under the heteronomous and condemnatory law and yet, at the same time, totally liberated from the law.”94 Though the simul is intended to dissuade antinomianism, some Lutherans have stressed this law/gospel distinction to the point that they have emphasized gospel at the expense of the law, leaving no room for a  Ibid.  See Ochs, Another Reformation, 24–25. There Ochs argues, “Kadushin’s analysis of the virtues or value-concepts bears analogies with what Lindbeck labels a ‘cultural-linguistic’ approach to understanding scriptural interpretation” (25). 92  Lindbeck, “Martin Luther and the Rabbinic Mind,” 144. Lindbeck cites the work of Peter von der Osten-Sacken and says, “The traditional ordering of topics may, as a matter of fact, be influenced by Jewish catechisms for gentile proselytes in the first centuries of the C.E.; and, interestingly enough, the Jewish ones which appeared from 1587 until well into the 19th century were indirectly influenced by Luther’s” (144n7). 93  Ibid., 149. 94  Ibid., 150. 90 91

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discussion of the law as “a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” (Ps 119:105). Lindbeck notes that some more recent scholars concerned with avoiding anti-Semitism have argued that Calvin’s understanding of a third or didactic use of the law enabled him to be more positive about the law and Israelite religion than Luther. He says, [Calvin] interprets their religion in its own reality as a typological anticipation and preparation for Christ rather than making it, as Luther tends to do, a mere shadow of the coming promise. This helps account for the historically much greater emphasis in Reformed than Lutheran circles on the continuity between the two covenants and the enduring affinity between Judaism and Christianity.95

Lindbeck argues that when one looks at the Catechisms, one gets a different and more nuanced picture of Luther. “The theological polemic against the law is absent, and Luther meditates on the commandments at length and not without pleasure.”96 Luther treats the Ten Commandments first in both the Large and Small Catechisms and spends nearly half of the Large Catechism discussing the Commandments. This leads Lindbeck to conclude, “The Luther of the Catechisms is, at least quantitatively, primarily a halakhist, just as were the rabbis of the Talmud.”97 Lindbeck defends this perspective with five points. First, Luther “never called the Decalogue ‘law’ (lex/Gesetz) in the Catechisms, but, rather, instruction or teaching (doctrina) of the type which can variously be termed praeceptum, Gebot, and mandatum.”98 Within the Catechisms, Luther does not refer to the God’s commands as “law.” He reserves that term to refer to human commands. Second, Luther saw the Ten Commandments as “the complete guide for human life.”99 Third, Luther saw the commands as “the only reliable way of knowing 95  George Lindbeck, “Luther on Law in Ecumenical Context,” Dialog 22 (1983): 274. Lindbeck says further, “It is not surprising that the Reformed have been the least anti-­ Semitic—indeed, often philo-semitic—of the major Christian traditions. For many in our day this is a powerful consideration in favor of something like Calvin’s rather than Luther’s view of the law; and after Auschwitz, Lutherans cannot be indifferent to the argument.” 96  Lindbeck, “Martin Luther and the Rabbinic Mind,” 151. 97  Ibid. 98  Ibid. 99  Ibid., 152.

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God’s will for human life.”100 Fourth, “Luther treated the denigration of uncommanded works as liberating, rather than limiting.”101 He argued that humans tend to invent their own commands in order to avoid the impossibility of perfectly following God’s laws, but then see their own commands as oppressive by seeing the fulfillment of these human laws as necessary for salvation. Luther therefore believes, “The divine law therefore liberates from the expectation of fulfillment.”102 Fifth, “Luther nowhere suggested that humanity’s inability at present to fulfill the commandments perfectly is any reason for not trying.”103 He encourages people to do their best to follow them, arguing they will benefit from doing so. Luther does not even note until the end of his exposition of the Decalogue that it is impossible to perfectly fulfill them, and he does so in passing. Lindbeck says that for Luther, “They are not a tyrant from which one escapes to the gospel as quickly as possible, but a treasure to be constantly cherished and for whose sake the gospel itself is given.”104 In addition to discussing the Ten Commandments within the Catechisms themselves, Luther says in a letter to Peter Beskendorf that in addition to reading and praying through a psalm, the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and if he has time another passage in the Gospels or Paul, he prays through the Ten Commandments. Luther says praying in such a way is necessary to guard oneself from sin. In this context, he cites Psalm 1: “Blessed is he who meditates upon his law day and night.”105 He prays through the Ten Commandments by breaking down each commandment into four parts: “I think of each commandment as, first, instruction, which 100  Ibid. Lindbeck notes that this kind of knowledge is different from “knowing who God is, which knowledge comes only through historia, or aggadah.” 101  Ibid. 102  Ibid. Lindbeck argues that the human commands that Luther likely hand in mind were “the suffocating medieval panoply of ascetic, monastic, and religious practices, which, he argued, were unwarranted by Scripture and turned people away from ‘all that God wishes us to do or not to do,’ namely, the Ten Commandments” (152–153). 103  Ibid., 153. 104  Ibid., 154. In this context, Lindbeck cites Luther, who says, “Therefore it is not without reason that the Old Testament commands men to write the Ten Commandments on every wall and corner, and even on their garments. Not that we are to have them merely for a display, as the Jews did, but we are to keep them incessantly before our eyes and constantly in our memory.” 105  Martin Luther, “A Practical Way to Pray,” in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, ed. Timothy F. Lull and William R. Russell, Third Edition (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2012), 34.

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is really what the Lord God demands of me so earnestly. Secondly, I turn it into a thanksgiving; third, a confession, and fourth a prayer.”106 For example, with the first commandment, he begins by thinking of God’s instruction to put him first and trust him. Second, he thanks God for his provision and care. Third, he confesses his sin and his idolatry. Fourth, Luther says that he prays: O my God and Lord, help me by your grace to learn and understand your commandments more fully every day and to live by them in sincere confidence. Preserve my heart so that I shall never again become forgetful and ungrateful, that I may never again become forgetful and ungrateful, that I may never seek after other gods or other consolation on earth or in any creature, but cling truly and solely to you, my only God. Amen, dear Lord God and Father. Amen.107

He sees practices such as this as a necessary aid in learning to obey God’s commands. Luther acknowledges that while justification is by faith alone, “this faith is itself commanded and is for the sake of the commandments.”108 Lindbeck concludes this discussion by arguing that as Christians increasingly become a minority within their own cultures, in order to avoid sectarianism, “Christianity will need to follow the historic, mainstream practice of seeking guidance, not primarily from the Sermon on the Mount in isolation from the Tanakh, nor from the spirits of the Zeitgeist, but from the Decalogue interpreted from the New Testament.”109 He argues that Martin Luther, as well as some modern rabbinic reformers like Kadushin, can assist Christians in this task.

Conclusion Lindbeck sees Israel’s Scripture as having the capacity to form the identity of the church in a variety of situations. He argues, History shows that Israel’s story has unique ability to confer communally significant meaning on whatever happens: it has, one might say, unrivaled power to encode successfully the vicissitudes and contradictions of history.  Ibid., 36.  Ibid., 37. 108  Lindbeck, “Martin Luther and the Rabbinic Mind,” 155. 109  Ibid., 164. 106 107

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Christianity, it can be argued, has urgent need to make greater use of the same biblical tale if it is to be comparably tenacious and flexible in maintaining its identity as a people irresistibly called (and ineluctably failing) to witness by selfless service of all humankind to the universal though thoroughly particular God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Jesus.”110

While some have sought to engage this history by minimizing the Christological distinctives of the Christian faith, Lindbeck rejects this move, for Jesus Christ is the only fulfillment of Israel—the one who fulfills the law and the prophets (Matt 5:17).

110

 Lindbeck, “The Church,” 190–191.

CHAPTER 6

Jesus the Christ as Israel’s Only Fulfillment

“Christ” is a title, and therefore is itself meaningful only within a particular culture, in this case the culture of Israel.1 (Robert Jenson)

In a 1997 article, Mike Higton came to the conclusion: “where Lindbeck had a cultural-linguistic theory Frei had Christology.”2 Higton notes that, unfortunately, the work of Hans Frei is often read in the light of The Nature of Doctrine, even though Frei’s work “differs significantly” from Lindbeck due to his “more subtle and Christologically focused” methodology.3 He sees Lindbeck as proposing a secular theory of religion and doctrine and then seeking to apply it to theology. He says, “We could bring in a social theorist like Bourdieu, who could all too pertinently critique the first-order/second-order distinction, the talk of rule-governed behavior, the implicit distinction of cultural system from the lived situation; and if the critique worked we would have devastated Lindbeck’s position without so much as nodding in the direction of theology.”4 He goes on to argue that Frei is not susceptible to the same critique because of how he roots his theology Christologically, while the same cannot be  Jenson, “Christ as Culture 1,” 181.  Mike Higton, “Frei’s Christology and Lindbeck’s Cultural-Linguistic Theory,” Scottish Journal of Theology 50, no. 1 (1997): 95. 3  Ibid., 83. 4  Ibid., 86. 1 2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. C. Brown, George Lindbeck and The Israel of God, Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74757-2_6

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said for Lindbeck because when he refers to Christology, he does so illustratively and not substantively.5 While Higton is indeed correct that Frei’s work should not be read through the lens of The Nature of Doctrine, he acknowledges in a 2013 essay, “Reconstructing the Nature of Doctrine,” “I was wrong.”6 He says there that it is possible to read The Nature of Doctrine as “a sketch of a postliberal theology of doctrine—a postliberal theological construal of the kind of reasoning needed for fruitful ecumenical engagement.”7 Lindbeck, in The Nature of Doctrine, “offers a postliberal repair of an ecumenical culture hobbled by its liberal entanglements.”8 Lindbeck’s ecumenical work has its own Christological focus, and this can be seen in Lindbeck’s discussion of Christ’s person and atoning work, as he seeks to recognize a unity in diversity. This ecumenical work involves understanding Jesus Christ not only in light of the Gospels, but through the Old Testament Scriptures and God’s work among the people of Israel and its continuation in the church. He argues, “Jesus Christ is the center, touchstone, matrix—that is, womb—of these [ecumenical] discussions.”9 The chapter will begin by discussing Jesus as both the Messiah of Israel and the Son of God, before moving onto a treatment of Jesus as savior and example, and then conclude with eschatology.

Jesus the Messiah and Son of God In Matthew 16:16, Simon Peter confesses, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Lindbeck says of this passage, “For most Christians down through history, this confession says that Jesus is equally and unitedly the messiah of Israel and the incarnate Son of the living God.”10 He notes, however, that the Christological and Trinitarian creeds have not maintained the symmetry of these two teachings, the particular and the universal. The name Christ or Messiah moved from being an honorific  Ibid., 94.  Mike Higton, “Reconstructing the Nature of Doctrine,” Modern Theology 30, no. 1 (January 2014): 30n98. 7  Ibid., 30. 8  Ibid., 16. 9  Lindbeck, “Ecumenical Imperatives for the 21st Century,” 365. 10  George Lindbeck, “Messiahship and Incarnation: Particularity and Universality Are Reconciled,” in Who Do You Say That I Am? Confessing the Mystery of Christ, ed. John C. Cavadini and Laura Holt (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), 63. 5 6

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title to being a part of Jesus’ proper name: Jesus Christ. In this, the “two interwoven strands of christological discourse have separated, and one of them has largely disappeared from doctrinal formulations even if not from hymnody and liturgy.”11 Christians have only recently come to see this minimization of Jesus’ messiahship as a problem. At the same time, however, some of the ways contemporary theologians have sought to reemphasize Jesus’ messiahship are problematic and do not assist in maintaining the balance between the two. Lindbeck says, “My basic suggestion is that, formally considered, messiahship singularizes incarnation and incarnation universalizes messiahship.”12 He clarifies this further, saying, “Messiahship singularizes because there can be only one messianic person, coterie, or age,” while incarnation, “by itself … lacks singularity as is perhaps most vividly manifest in the proliferation of incarnate deities in Hinduism. If the divine can be enfleshed, then there seems nothing to prevent this from happening over and over again.”13 Lindbeck connects these two strands of Christology, messiahship and incarnation, with so-called Christology from below (horizontal) and Christology from above (vertical). The emphasis upon Jesus’ messiahship is needed because Christologies from above have historically had difficulty explaining why the Second Person of the Trinity had to be incarnate as a Jewish man in first-century Palestine rather than in another form. Conversely, the emphasis upon incarnation is needed to emphasize that Jesus is not simply another good teacher, but the Son of God. Both emphases are strengthened when the symmetry is maintained, and both lose when one or both are minimized. Both emphases are present in different places within the New Testament. John and Paul place greater emphasis upon incarnation while Mark, Luke, and Matthew place more emphases upon the messianic. While historical criticism tends to argue that one should not seek to reconcile these two emphases, exceptions exist to this rule within the biblical studies guild. He points, as an example, to his Yale colleague Nils A. Dahl, who “argues that Jesus’ crucifixion as ‘King of the Jews’ occasioned, not a break with a pre-­ existent view of messiahship, but the forging of the multiple first-century messianisms into a unified and specifically Christian New Testament

 Ibid., 64.  Ibid. 13  Ibid., 64–65. 11 12

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understanding.”14 He then points to the work of William Horbury, who understands the New Testament’s Christological proclamations as having their root in quasi-incarnational messianic hopes within the Old Testament. He also notes Jewish scholars Jacob Neusner and Michael Wyschogrod, who discuss, in slightly different ways, the centrality of God’s embodied presence among the people of Israel within the Jewish Scriptures. He still says, however, that the historical-critical emphasis upon a text having a single meaning determined by its original context places limits upon the method’s ability to reconcile messiahship and incarnation. Instead, scholarship needs a broader focus that pays attention to literary concerns as well as the multiple senses of Scripture emphasized within precritical exegesis.15 One can see the earliest examples of a shift from messianism to incarnationalism within the pages of the New Testament. Paul likely emphasized incarnation as a part of an apologetic for his Gentile mission, and this focus also exists within the prologue to John’s Gospel. While it has its benefits, the focus upon Jesus as universal “tended to displace the particularistic messianic expectations of Israel as the primary praeparatio evangelica.”16 Jesus’ messiahship could not be fully excluded for the church to oppose Marcion and insist upon the Old Testament as Christian Scripture, but it was minimized, and this minimization continued and climaxed in Nicaea and Chalcedon. Lindbeck argues that the difficulty of maintaining the symmetry of particular and universal in Christology has parallels in ecclesiology, eschatology, and soteriology. One of the problems with the mainstream emphasis upon Jesus’ universality at the expense of his particularity is that the soteriological focus is upon “spiritualization more than visible transformation. It abstracts the Savior and those he saves from the particularities of their historical and communal situations: salvation is conceived in terms that are both universalistic and individualistic, as a spiritual reality that is basically the same for all individuals everywhere.”17 While discussions of the church as an institution are maintained, its “this-worldliness” is neglected: “it deprives the redemption for which Christians hope of its temporally

 Ibid., 68.  Ibid., 69. 16  Ibid., 71. 17  Ibid., 73–74. 14 15

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futuristic and this-worldly social aspect, and reduces it to individualistic other-worldliness.”18 Swinging to the opposite extreme and minimizing incarnationalism to emphasize messianism also comes with its share of problems. Lindbeck argues, “Messianisms have tended throughout church history to be as one-sided as the incarnational hegemonies that they oppose, and, as could be expected of protest movements, much more divisive.”19 As these messianisms lack an emphasis upon universality, “the individual is lost in the communal, the universal in the tribal, and the spiritual in the material.”20 While great emphasis is placed upon the church’s revolutionary or transforming role in the world, it often comes with a violent strain or an “imagining” of “the revenge of the saints in the last days.”21 This demonstrates further the need for a reconciliation between messiahship and incarnation, between the particular and the universal, in order to provide mutual correction. Messianic Christologies are currently more widespread, with the possible exception of the Joachimites in the Middle Ages, than any time since the early church. The “collapse of incarnational hegemony” that began near the time of the Reformation but did not become dominant until centuries later, as illustrated by the Socinians and other critics of Christological and Trinitarian dogma, as well as the rise of historical criticism, made this increased interest in messianic Christologies possible. Many of these modern and contemporary messianisms, as seen within certain theologies of hope or liberation, have an aversion to incarnationalism, and thus do not make a reconciliation between messianism and incarnation possible.22 In bringing about a reconciliation between the messianic and incarnational strands, the church should not deny the dogmas enshrined in Nicaea and Chalcedon. The church should recognize the significance of these ecumenical achievements. In The Nature of Doctrine, Lindbeck argues that they are indicative of three rules or guidelines that were operative for those Christian communities. First, they advocate a “monotheistic principle,” which says, “there is only one God, the God of Abraham, Isaac,  Ibid., 72.  Ibid. 20  Ibid., 74. 21  Ibid. 22  Ibid., 77–80. 18 19

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Jacob, and Jesus.”23 Second, they point to a particular person, Jesus of Nazareth, “who was born, lived, and died in a particular place and time.”24 Third, they include what Lindbeck calls “Christological maximalism: every possible importance is to be ascribed that is not inconsistent with the first rules.”25 These rules led Christians to affirm that Jesus is the Messiah, “unsurpassably Immanuel, God with us, both in history as we know it and in that consummation of history when the Messianic age which has begun in him is fully manifest.”26 In addition to these rules, these creedal formulations, especially those of the Nicene Creed, continue to possess extremely important liturgical, formative, and unitive functions for the contemporary church.27 Worship, for Christians, has throughout history been Trinitarian.28 He also says, Lastly, and rather oddly, archaic and even unintelligible conceptuality may in some ways be better fitted for the statement of general rules than is language alive with contemporary meaning. Unfamiliar concepts can more easily be treated as replaceable. They function as “x’s,” blanks, or open variables to be filled by whatever symbolic or intellectual content is most effective in a given setting. An updated version of the creed, in contrast, is less likely to invite believers to worship, proclaim, and confess the faith in their language rather than its own.29

Therefore, the church must acknowledge that these creedal statements do not exhaust what can be said of Jesus. They must be supplemented with an emphasis upon Jesus as Israel’s Messiah. Lindbeck says, “Christians need to turn to the Old Testament more intensely than they have ever done in order better to understand salvation, and inseparable from that, their Savior, Jesus Christ.”30 This will allow Christians to better understand the relation of horizontal and vertical, and what it means to confess Jesus as Israel’s Messiah and the incarnate Son of God.  ND, 80.  Ibid. 25  Ibid. 26  George Lindbeck, “Doctrine in Christianity: A Comparison with Judaism” (presented at the American Theological Society Meeting, Princeton, NJ, April 25, 1987), 14. 27  ND, 81. 28  Lindbeck, “Doctrine in Christianity,” 14. Lindbeck later says, “I am one of those who find it difficult to think of the christological and trinitarian developments which led to Nicea and Chalcedon as an intellectualization of Christianity, as a matter of turning it into a religion of ideas rather than of worship and conduct” (17). 29  ND, 81. 30  Lindbeck, “Messiahship and Incarnation,” 82. 23 24

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Lindbeck points to the example of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who grew concerned with the neglect of a public and social understanding of salvation and an emphasis upon “religiousness,” which Lindbeck defines as “something very much like the spiritualizing inwardness” that is seen in “the modern turn to the subject.”31 Bonhoeffer’s solution was for Christians to read the Old Testament, for the New Testament read apart from the Old “can easily be twisted into a source and defense of the very religiousness which is the danger.”32 This turn to the Old Testament, however, cannot be selective and fragmentary. Christians should not follow advocates of the social gospel who emphasize the prophets or liberationists who emphasize the exodus at the expense of the rest of the Old Testament. Instead, Lindbeck contends, “Christians should saturate themselves in the piety of the Old Testament as a unified whole…. When it comes to the understanding of what God wants human beings to be, the Old Testament is fundamental and the New Testament is commentary.”33 As the Messiah, Jesus is “the climax and summation of Israel’s history,”34 as well as “the fulfilment of Old Testament promises.”35 He recapitulates Israel in himself. Lindbeck makes this argument in his earlier work, saying, “It is asserted that all God’s acts in history from the call of Abraham and the exodus from Egypt to the New Testament period are summed up in Jesus Christ, in his life, death, and resurrection.”36 So, Christians not only read the Old Testament in order to better understand Jesus, but they understand the Old Testament and Israel through Jesus.37 Or as Richard Hays similarly says, “We learn to read the OT by reading backwards from the Gospels, and—at the same time—we learn how to read the Gospels by reading forward from the OT.”38 31  Ibid., 81. Lindbeck credits Kendall Soulen for this understanding of Bonhoeffer (86n23). See The God of Israel and Christian Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1996), 17–18. 32  Lindbeck, “Messiahship and Incarnation,” 81. 33  Ibid. Lindbeck thus concludes that the Old Testament “is not sufficient in itself. Although it is now an indispensable guide to the reading of what for the first Christians was their only Bible, it is incapable of being rightly construed as an independent body of writings.” 34  Lindbeck, “Scripture, Consensus, and Community,” 75–76. 35  ND, 67. 36  FRCT, 70. See also Frei, The Identity of Jesus Christ, 131, 138, 148. 37  Lindbeck, “Scripture, Consensus, and Community,” 75–76. 38  Richard B. Hays, Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness (London: SPCK, 2014), 4.

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Lindbeck says, “The doctrine that Jesus is Messiah … functions lexically as the warrant for adding the New Testament literature to the canon.”39 This makes a profound difference for the church. It is through Christ that Gentiles are made citizens of the enlarged Israel (Eph 2:12).40 Also, as she gathers to worship, for, “It is Christ himself who, embracing the whole reality of God’s redemptive action, is present and communicates himself in the liturgy.”41 The greatest difference between Lindbeck’s early and later Israelology is on the question of whether the church fulfills Israel. In his earlier work, he says that the churches “surpass and fulfill Israel.”42 In his later work, Lindbeck argues that as the church became largely Gentile, it ceased applying all of Israel’s Scriptures to themselves. They came to understand Israel as if it were a type, not only of Christ or of the coming kingdom, but of the church. This made the church “the antitype, the fulfillment.”43 He comes to reject this understanding, saying, Despite most later exegesis, the relation of Israel’s history to that of the church in the New Testament is not one of shadow to reality, or promise to fulfillment, or type to antitype. Rather, the kingdom already present in Christ alone is the antitype, and both Israel and the church are types. The people of God existing in both the old and new ages are typologically related to Jesus Christ, and through Christ, Israel is prototypical for all later Israelite history in much the same way that the exodus story, for example, is seen as prototypical for all later Israelite history.44

He says further, “in being shaped by the story of Christ, the church shares (rather than fulfills) the story of Israel.”45 He thus argues that the relationship of church to Israel should be seen as one of prototype to ectype, original to copy.46

 ND, 67.  Lindbeck, “Scripture, Consensus, and Community,” 75–76. 41  FRCT, 70. 42  Lindbeck, “A Protestant View of the Ecclesiological Status of the Roman Catholic Church,” 259. 43  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 187. 44  Lindbeck, “The Story-Shaped Church,” 166. See also Lindbeck, “The Church,” 184; Lindbeck, “Messiahship and Incarnation,” 82. 45  Lindbeck, “The Story-Shaped Church,” 166. 46  Lindbeck, “The Gospel’s Uniqueness,” 434–435. 39 40

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Jesus Christ as Savior and Example This emphasis upon Jesus as both Messiah and Son of God influences Lindbeck’s discussion of the atonement. Jesus’ death upon the cross is “the center of the center: it is central to the central narrative” of the biblical text.47 Jesus’ death is prefigured by the Old Testament and presupposed in the epistles and Revelation in the New. The narratives of Jesus’ birth and ministry in the Gospels climax in this saving event, and “it is as the Crucified One that Jesus rose, ascended, abides with us now and will come again…. In the Gospel accounts, accommodated to human understanding as they are, person and work coincide.”48 Jesus’ identity as fully human and fully divine, as Messiah of Israel and universal Son of God, is revealed most clearly in Jesus’ saving work. Lindbeck argues: In view of this inseparability of person and work, it is not surprising that the atonement, despite great differences in representation, has not been a distinct subject of controversy leading to dogmatic decisions in any of the major traditions. The affirmations about Christ’s person incorporated in the trinitarian and christological creeds have been sufficient to set the guidelines for acceptable atonement teachings. What was decisive for church fellowship was that the cross is necessary for salvation, not the explanation of how or why.49

This does not mean that all theologies of the atonement are created equal, but that no theory could claim to be the only proper and sufficient view of the atonement. The New Testament authors use two primary images for Christ’s atoning work: liberation and reconciliation. The first depicts humans as in bondage to evil and Jesus as the one who liberates humanity from captivity to sin and death, with death being the last enemy to be destroyed (1 Cor 15:26). Within this image, “Evil is something we undergo rather than

47  Lindbeck, “Atonement & The Hermeneutics of Intratextual Social Embodiment,” 231. See George Lindbeck, “Justification and Atonement: An Ecumenical Trajectory,” in By Faith Alone: Essays on Justification in Honor of Gerhard O. Forde, ed. Joseph A. Burgess and Marc Kolden (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), 211. 48  Lindbeck, “Atonement & The Hermeneutics of Intratextual Social Embodiment,” 231. See Lindbeck, “Justification and Atonement,” 211. 49  Lindbeck, “Atonement & The Hermeneutics of Intratextual Social Embodiment,” 231. See Lindbeck, “Justification and Atonement,” 212.

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undertake.”50 Conversely, the reconciliation image includes a “focus on human complicity in evil.”51 Liberation from sin and death is not fully sufficient, for humanity also needs to be reconciled with God. While the liberation image focuses upon Christ as victor, reconciliation focuses upon Christ as sacrifice and victim. Death, in turn, is not just an enemy of God, but a consequence for sin. These two images coexist within Scripture, sometimes being placed side by side in the same pericope. For example, in Colossians 2:13–14, Paul begins with the image of reconciliation, saying, “And when you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross.” He then in verse 15 uses a liberation image: “He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it.” Lindbeck argues that this does not indicate a “passion for paradox,” but rather, the clusters of images serve as interpretations of the narratives, and narrative tensions are not paradoxical (or much less contradictory) except when transposed into putatively primary rather than properly interpretive images or concepts. This is a benign transmutation as long as one remembers that the meaning of the concepts and images is in this context inseparable from the story, and thus avoids the essentialist mistake of supposing that the meaning of the story is better expressed in the images or concepts. It is the narratives, we recall, that primarily identify and characterize the biblical God and through which we have access to Jesus Christ as personal agent. This is why images and concepts, liberation and reconciliation, are to be understood by means of the stories, not the other way around.52

Unfortunately, this narrative priority was not fully maintained in Christian history. Rather, different ages tended to emphasize one image or another. For example, liberation images dominated in the patristic period and reconciliation images dominated in the West after the eleventh century. Lindbeck notes, however, that a certain degree of flexibility existed in different times and places, and that these differences were not church dividing.

 Lindbeck, “Atonement & The Hermeneutics of Intratextual Social Embodiment,” 232.  Ibid. 52  Ibid. 50 51

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Despite this, the contemporary church faces a crisis in its discussion of the atonement as western Christians critique and abandon Anselmian views of the atonement.53 For centuries, a penal substitution view dominated the western church, and not only for ill. Many Christians were nourished in their faith through this teaching. It led them to love God and their neighbor, shaped piety and missionary fervor, led to revivalism and reform movements, and led opposition to the slave trade among both Protestants and Catholics in various ways.54 Though penal substitution still remains dominant among traditionalist Roman Catholics and some evangelicals, an increasing number have come to question and/or abandon it. This abandonment is not new, but something that H.  Richard Niebuhr observed when he said of some views of the atonement among mainliners in the early twentieth century, “a God without wrath brought men and women without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministration of a Christ without the cross.”55 Lindbeck argues that part of the cause for this is, “Our increasingly feel-good therapeutic culture is antithetical to talk of the cross.”56 This is true, for Protestants, among evangelicals and mainliners alike. In addition, there are also other cultural and economic factors that emphasize self-­ indulgence. Others have come to reject such views because of the misuse of atonement theology to tell abused women or oppressed people groups to accept their suffering. Others, however, have questioned penal substitution for confessional reasons, or in a post-Holocaust context to avoid depicting Jews as “Christ-killers.” Lindbeck notes that Gustav Aulen’s Christus Victor “is less than fully reliable on Anselm and Luther, but it made my generation of theological students intensely aware that what we had learned about the atonement in Sunday school and confirmation class was based on a theory that had not

53  Ibid., 233–235; Lindbeck, “Justification and Atonement,” 205–206. Lindbeck uses the term “Anselmian” or “Anselmic” to differentiate later views of the atonement that build in certain ways upon Anselm’s work from Anselm’s own views. He, in fact, refers to penal substitution as a distortion of Anselm’s views. 54  Lindbeck, “Justification and Atonement,” 205. 55  As cited in Ibid. Lindbeck also notes that this distaste for satisfaction and/or penal substitution is not unique to the modern period, but can be seen in Peter Abelard’s work in the Middle Ages. 56  Lindbeck, “Atonement & The Hermeneutics of Intratextual Social Embodiment,” 236; Lindbeck, “Justification and Atonement,” 207.

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existed for the first millennium of Christian history.”57 It also had not been central for some of the West’s greatest teachers, such as Luther and Aquinas, and even John Calvin did not see it as the central atonement motif. Lindbeck says that he, like many in his generation, initially approved of Aulen’s third alternative between penal substitution and moral influence views of the atonement, but he and others came to have reservations because it was difficult to preach and teach on a popular level, and so a vacuum was created in which there was a lack of atonement teaching within churches.58 His second concern is that for many scholarly advocates of the Christus Victor motif, “it has come to be understood in revelational rather than soteriological terms.”59 Lindbeck argues that within a revelational context, salvation is primary defined as “being grasped by the truth,” and so within this context, “it is perhaps inevitable that Christ is encountered chiefly as Model to be imitated rather than Savior to be trusted.”60 Lindbeck observes that this view reverses the proper order. Jesus is first Savior and then Example. He says, [Jesus] is trusted and loved as the One who saves from sin, death and the devil, and it is from this trust and love that there arises a longing to be like him in his life and death. Theologies of the cross that stress the imitatio Christi have their place, but that place is not with atonement but with what Calvinists call the third use of the law, and with what Luther, if I may coin a phrase, might call a Christian’s use of the first use of the law.61

In emphasizing Jesus as Savior before Example, Lindbeck follows Luther, who says in his essay, “A Brief Introduction on What to Look for an Expect in the Gospels,” that the church should come to understand Christ in two ways. “First, as an example that is presented to you, which you should follow and imitate.”62 Christ shows his followers how to live, 57  Lindbeck, “Atonement & The Hermeneutics of Intratextual Social Embodiment,” 236. See also Lindbeck, “Justification and Atonement,” 208. 58  Lindbeck, “Justification and Atonement,” 208. Lindbeck says, “The attempt to replace the medieval Western emphasis on Christ as victim with the patristic stress on Christ as victor has failed on the popular level.” 59  Lindbeck, “Atonement & The Hermeneutics of Intratextual Social Embodiment,” 237. 60  Ibid. 61  Lindbeck, “Justification and Atonement,” 209. See also Lindbeck, “Atonement & The Hermeneutics of Intratextual Social Embodiment,” 237. 62  Martin Luther, “A Brief Instruction on What to Look for and Expect in the Gospels,” in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, ed. Timothy F.  Lull and William R.  Russell, Third Edition. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2012), 72.

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pray, and love and serve others. Luther says, however, “this is the smallest part of the gospel…. The chief article and foundation of the gospel is that before you take Christ as an example, you accept and recognize him as a gift, as a present that God has given you and that is your own.”63 Luther says that one must first accept Christ as gift and blessing, as the one through whom God saves, makes people Christian, and nourishes faith, before accepting him as example.64 Lindbeck says, “It seems self-evident to most Christians who have interiorized the faith that love of Jesus best flourishes when it is believed that he died that sinners might live (or, emphasizing the Reformation pro nobis, that you might live, and I might live, and all humankind might live) and that without his freely offered and utterly agonizing death, none of this would and will happen.”65 A minority of Christians down through the centuries of Christendom have “lived these convictions with deep i­ ntensity, but those who have are a major source of whatever glimmers of Christlikeness have shone amidst the sins of Christendom. These lovers of Jesus are much of the leaven in the lump, of the faithful remnant, of the salt that saves the church from insipidity or worse that constantly threatens it.”66 He asks where this devoted service to God could possibly come apart from an “atonement-centered love of Jesus.”67 Apart from this emphasis, the church will not have heroes of the faith like Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Mother Theresa to emulate. He argues that “interiorizing the message of Christ’s atoning death is a necessary condition for Christian vitality.”68 Apart from this message the church cannot pass the pragmatic test: “You will know them by their fruits” (Matt 7:20). He notes as well, however, that the message of Christ’s atoning work is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for this fruit. There are many ways of preaching the gospel that do not distill passionate and committed faithfulness within Christian communities. He notes, “Christ’s death understood in unreconstructedly substitutionary ways has legitimated revolution as well as reaction…. The atonement, in short, has  Ibid.  Ibid., 72–73. 65  Lindbeck, “Atonement & The Hermeneutics of Intratextual Social Embodiment,” 237. See also Lindbeck, “Justification and Atonement,” 213. 66  Lindbeck, “Justification and Atonement,” 213–214. See also Lindbeck, “Atonement & The Hermeneutics of Intratextual Social Embodiment,” 238. 67  Lindbeck, “Atonement & The Hermeneutics of Intratextual Social Embodiment,” 238. 68  Ibid. 63 64

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been the source of vitality for exceedingly diverse agendas across the political spectrum from left to right.”69 Lindbeck argues, however, that the solution for the church is not to abolish discussions of the cross and Jesus’ death, but rather to reform the church’s preaching, teaching, and liturgy.70 Lindbeck commends an approach to the atonement that is orthodox, dogmatic, and reliant upon a classical hermeneutic, but at the same time modern in the sense that it has an awareness of historical particularity and cultural diversity. He says that in this “generous orthodoxy,” Its practitioners will know, as their ancestors in the faith could not know, of the variety of biblically legitimate ways of proclaiming the saving power of Christ’s death in the church’s past. They will be open to new ways of telling one and the same story of redemption in unprecedented settings, and at the same time they will have resources in tradition as well as Scripture for distinguishing between fruitful and unfruitful retellings. The truth that God speaks differently to his people in different situations through one and the same scriptural words is self-evident from the perspective of a critically retrieved understanding of premodern hermeneutics.71

Such an approach can help bring together Christians from diverse backgrounds, as well as break out of conservative-liberal binaries.

The Atonement and Justification In order to discuss further how Jesus is Savior, Lindbeck turns to a topic important for Lutherans like himself—justification. He argues that in the modern period, the atonement and justification are often treated separately from each other. As an example, he points to the two-volume Christian Dogmatics, a work composed by Lutheran scholars and edited by Carl Braaten and Robert Jenson. This work divides dogmatics into 12 loci, and while the atonement and justification are both authored by the same person, Gerhard Forde, the atonement is examined in the context of  Lindbeck, “Justification and Atonement,” 210.  Lindbeck, “Atonement & The Hermeneutics of Intratextual Social Embodiment,” 238–239. 71  Ibid., 240. He also clarifies this discussion, as well as what he elsewhere means by (un) translatability: “Adaptability to different audiences and contexts is more a matter of interpreting different cultural and historical worlds in the language of Scripture and tradition than of translating that language into contemporary conceptualities (as most modern theology has done, not despite itself, but as a matter of principle).” “Justification and Atonement,” 217. 69 70

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the work of Christ, locus 7, while justification is considered in relation to the Christian Life, locus 11.72 Lindbeck also notes the absence of a connection between the two in ecumenical statements. Lindbeck argues, against the modern practice, that they should be kept together. They were discussed together in light of each other in the past, but twentieth-century ecumenical dialogues largely ignored the deep connections between them. He notes the commonalities that existed between the Reformers and those in the Catholic Counter-Reformation on the relationship between the atonement and justification. Both sides tended to emphasize Christ as Victim rather than Victor, though a variety of atonement motifs were utilized.73 The emphasis was placed upon Christ’s death to the point that “Christ’s atoning death was seen as almost the whole of his saving work.”74 Also, “Both parties in the Reformation debates agreed that the atonement is a necessary cause or condition of justification not only as an event in the order of executive reality, but also as an object of faith in the cognitional or subjective order.”75 They all agreed that Christ’s death is necessary for the forgiveness of sins and that Christ’s work is not only the necessary but also the sufficient condition for justification. Lindbeck says, “Luther in particular emphasized that atonement and justification can be seen as correlative aspects of the single reality of God’s redemptive action.”76 This could be seen in Luther’s utilization of the medieval mystics’ notion of the “blessed exchange.” Lindbeck explains Luther’s views further by saying, What God does to Christ in cross and resurrection he also does to sinners in word and sacrament through the Spirit’s gift of faith. In both cases he slays and makes alive. Justifying faith has Christ as its object in such a way that it is Christo formata, formed by Christ. In view of this intimate union, the 72  See Carl E.  Braaten and Robert W.  Jenson, eds., Christian Dogmatics: Volume Two (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1984). Lindbeck notes that elsewhere, Forde does make the connection between the two. 73  Lindbeck, “Justification and Atonement,” 185, 187. Lindbeck sketches a history of this division on pages 192–204. Though he is critical of this division, Lindbeck still, in general, speaks positively of these modern ecumenical statements concerning justification, of which in some cases he is a contributor. 74  Ibid., 185. 75  Ibid. 76  Ibid.

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necessity and sufficiency for salvation which belongs to Christ also belongs to faith, for they make ‘one cake’ and are united as are the fire and the metal in glowing iron.77

In this, Christians are not only united with Christ’s work, but with his person. Lindbeck here is interested in not only what Christians believe, but in the embodiment and proclamation of the gospel.78 He paraphrases Forde by saying “to proclaim the gospel is ‘to do’ it.”79 It is not enough to simply communicate information that justification is sola Christi or sola fide. Rather, “to proclaim or do the gospel is to pronounce the te absolvo whereby faith is created and forgiveness takes place.”80 One can illustrate how this works in terms of J.L.  Austin’s discussion of “speech-acts” or “performative utterances.”81 Lindbeck says, “The gospel in its proclamatory role is like a marriage vow, or judicial verdict, or last will and testament; it does not describe but instead creates or ‘performs’ the reality it utters.”82 This performative understanding allows for a diversity of approaches to justification, from the forensic/juridical to the Finish emphasis upon theosis. He says, “The one thing necessary is the proclamatory or performative—not, to be noted, the descriptive—sola fide: God in Christ alone is to be trusted for salvation—not anything else, not even the ‘faith, virtues or merits’ that we may acknowledge ‘God working [in us] by grace alone.’ This is the norm by which everything is to [be] judged.”83 77  Ibid., 186. Lindbeck says, “This pericoretic imagery makes it difficult to understand why justification was disputed and atonement was not.” 78  Lindbeck, “Atonement & The Hermeneutics of Intratextual Social Embodiment,” 221. 79  Lindbeck, “Justification and Atonement,” 188. 80  Ibid. 81  See J.L.  Austin, Philosophical Papers, ed. J.O.  Ormson and G.J.  Warnock, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 233–235; J.L.  Austin, How to Do Things With Words, ed. J.O. Ormson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). 82  Lindbeck, “Justification and Atonement,” 188. 83  Ibid., 189. This more positive assessment of theosis, and its use by the Finish school, is in marked contrast to Lindbeck’s earlier work. In 1967, Lindbeck said, “I am enough of a Lutheran to believe that the greatest thing on heaven and earth is the forgiveness of sins, and cannot help but read with dismay the offhand remarks, even of Catholic theologians with whom I am in great sympathy, to the effect that salvation is not simply a matter of the forgiveness of sins but rather of the divinization of man. Karl Rahner, for example, has said this, and in his case I am sure that what is involved is not so much a fundamental disagreement but rather what, from my point of view, is an extraordinarily limited use of the phrase ‘forgiveness of sins.’ The forgiveness of sins, after all, is the breaking down of the middle wall of

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Also, in socially embodying the gospel, Christians must recognize their own complicity in Jesus’ crucifixion. As noted in the previous chapter, for the earliest Christians, “All the wickedness of the Israelites in the wilderness could be theirs.”84 The same can be said not only of the people of God in the Old Testament but those in the New as well. For example, commenting on Jesus’ parables in Luke 15, Fred Craddock says: In texts in which Jesus is facing opponents, we who deal with these so easily, but certainly not intentionally, preach and teach them as the voice of Jesus rather than as those who need to hear the voice of Jesus. This does not mean we must label ourselves Pharisees and scribes, but it does mean we realize that these texts were written not simply out of historical interest in the religious community surrounding Jesus but primarily because these texts addressed a church with the problems herein associated with Pharisees and scribes. There is no room to say, “Lord, I thank thee that I am not as they were.”85

Luther makes a similar argument concerning Jesus’ crucifixion in a 1519 sermon. He says that some in his day meditated upon Christ’s passion by “venting their anger on the Jews,” and in particular, upon the wickedness of Judas. He says, “That might well be a meditation on the wickedness of Judas and the Jews, but not on the sufferings of Christ.”86 Luther instead argues that one should contemplate Christ’s passion by not blaming Jews, but with the awareness that one’s own sin put Jesus on the cross: “You should get it through your head and not doubt that you are the one who is torturing Christ thus, for your sins have surely wrought this.”87 Here partition between man and God, it is the reconciliation of humanity to God, it is their unification in personal love and communion. Surely, this is the essence of what is meant by divinization, and this, to be sure, is something with which Karl Rahner agrees.” “Ecumenism, Cosmic Redemption, and the Council,” 78. 84  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 184; Lindbeck, “The Story-Shaped Church,” 166. 85  Fred B.  Craddock, Luke, Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching, 1990, 184. Thanks to Rev. Dr. Herbie Miller for this reference. 86  Martin Luther, “A Meditation on Christ’s Passion,” in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, ed. Timothy F.  Lull and William R.  Russell, Third Edition (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2012), 126. 87  Ibid., 127. The editors note here, “Luther’s attitude toward the Jews reflects common views in the late-medieval and early modern Europe society. And it finds occasional expression in his works. Relatively early his career, his position was one of benevolent hope of converting them to Christianity. This is reflected in this treatise, as well as in his That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew (1523), LW 45: 195–229. Over the years his position took a more

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Luther attempts to echo Peter’s words to the crowds on Pentecost: “Therefore let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:36). This led the crowds to ask, “Brothers, what should we do?” (2:37). Lindbeck says, “The point, put starkly, is that faith alone can save the murderers of the Lord. Only the victim can forgive, and when the victim is God incarnate his forgiveness encompasses all forgiveness and can be trusted to the uttermost.”88 Lindbeck hopes that future ecumenical ­discussions of justification will “turn from the anthropological correlates to a fuller consideration of their Christological and soteriological reference.”89

Eschatological Fulfillment Eckerstorfer notes that while Lindbeck’s earlier ecclesiology emphasizes salvation as communal and cosmic, “unfortunately, the cosmic dimension remains underdeveloped in later writings which, in the postliberal mode, gives way to an underestimation of the salvific role of the world and correspondingly of God’s presence in human culture.”90 While the cosmic and eschatological plays a larger role in Lindbeck’s earlier work, they are not fully absent from his later writing. He argues that not only does Jesus’ atoning work have a cosmic scope but also “devotion to the One to whom one owes one’s life has cosmic scope and force.”91 In an essay originally presented and published in French, and then translated and included as an afterward to the 25th anniversary edition of The Nature of Doctrine, Lindbeck does address the relation of soteriology to eschatology. His words here also have implications for understanding the church as a pilgrim people. He argues that his cultural-linguistic violent turn, because of the refusal of the Jews to acknowledge Jesus as the Messiah. This is evidenced in his treatise of 1547, On the Jews and Their Lies, WA 53:(412) 417–552.” Thomas Kaufman argues that while Luther’s view on the Jews did indeed shift, that he was not consistent in his speech about the Jews in the early period. Kaufman says that Luther stated “at roughly the same time that the Jews ‘crucified’ Christ; they deserved their misery. They had ‘always been Christ’s greatest enemy’ and would not grant that he was God, ‘enduring sin and death, but they continue to live in their sins.’” See Luther’s Jews: A Journey into Anti-Semitism, trans. Lesley Sharpe and Jeremy Noakes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 47. 88  Lindbeck, “Justification and Atonement,” 190. 89  Ibid., 215. 90  Eckerstorfer, “The One Church in the Postmodern World,” 406. 91  Lindbeck, “Atonement & The Hermeneutics of Intratextual Social Embodiment,” 238.

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approach to theology seeks to avoid “the presentism or implicit realized eschatology of an individualistic experiential-expressive inwardness in favor of a prospective outlook appropriate to a communal (indeed cosmic) futuristic eschatology.”92 Instead, his approach emphasizes the communal nature of salvation and that this salvation has “broken into the present from the future above all in Jesus Christ and in the communities that publicly witness to him,” but this salvation will not come to its fullness until the consummation and end of history, when “all humanity and—indeed, all creation—will acknowledge him as King of Kings and Lord of Lords.”93 Jesus Christ is, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians, “the first fruits of those who have died” (15:20). He is the second Adam, and just as death and sin came through that first man, so resurrection comes through the second Adam, “for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ” (v. 22). In the end, Christ will destroy every ruler and authority, the last of which is death. In that time, God will subject all things to Christ, and then, “When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who put all things in subjection under him, so that God may be all in all” (v. 28). David Yeago argues that a challenge for contemporary Christian theology, especially in light of the Holocaust, is how to account for these Christological claims in light of the shame that comes from the church’s supersessionistic past. Some have responded to these issues in problematic ways. For example, Rosemary Radford Ruether says, Our theological critique of Christian anti-Judaism … must turn to what was always the other side of anti-Judaism, namely Christology. At the heart of every Christian dualizing of the dialectics of human existence into Christian and anti-Judaic antitheses is Christology, or, to be more specific, the historicizing of the eschatological event…. Christ becomes the vengeful instrument to persecute that people who hoped for his coming and who fail to recognize in such a Christ their own redemption. But is it possible to purge Christianity of anti-Judaism without at the same time pulling up Christian faith? Is it possible to say “Jesus is Messiah” without, implicitly or explicitly, saying at the same time “and the Jews be damned”?94

 ND, 131.  Ibid. 94  Rosemary Radford Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism. (New York: Seabury Press, 1974), 246. 92 93

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Ruether goes on to answer these questions with the acknowledgment, “The most fundamental affirmation of Christian faith is the belief that Jesus is the Christ.”95 Ruether, however, roots Christian anti-Semitism and the errors of Christendom in the “historicizing of the eschatological,” the attempt by Christians to say that the Messianic era arrived with Jesus Christ.96 Ruether seeks to reformulate this understanding by seeing Jesus as a faithful Jew who lived and hoped in anticipation of God’s coming Kingdom, and that, “Ultimately, God will vindicate his hope.”97 She likens Jesus’ resurrection to a reduplication of Exodus, saying that it provides a foundation for Christian hope, and reaffirms Jesus’ hope. His followers in the church, in turn, reaffirm his hope. Ruther argues, “But this hope was not finally fulfilled either in his lifetime or in his death…. The messianic meaning of Jesus’ life, then, is paradigmatic and proleptic in nature, not final and fulfilled.”98 In this, Ruether rejects or minimizes distinct Christian claims about Jesus in order to have common ground with Jews. Bader-­ Saye expresses concern that Ruether’s view has not only denied Christian particularity, but Jewish particularity as well.99 Bader-Saye says, “Given that neither Novak nor Wyschogrod welcomes a dedivinized Jesus as particularly helpful for Judaism or Jewish-Christian dialogue, one wonders what is really gained by the Christian move to jettison traditional Christological and trinitarian claims.”100 Yeago says, “The hallmark of all these hasty responses is their common reduction of the universal significance and eschatological finality of the  Ibid.  Ibid., 248. 97  Ibid., 249. 98  Ibid. See also 256–257. 99  Bader-Saye, Church and Israel After Christendom, 77–78. Bader-Saye comes to the conclusion that Ruether’s position is an “experiential-expressivist” one that “interprets Jesus as the paradigmatic expression of the experience of eschatological hope…. Ruether affirms that other paradigms, such as the Exodus, will provide the same symbolic and evocative function for other religions. Only when Christians will come to realize that Easter means the same thing as Exodus will they finally be able to end their anti-Jewish polemic. This construal, however, does no favors to the Jews, for it relativizes Jewish claims of chosenness just as much as it does Christian claims about Christ” (78). 100  Ibid., 80. Ochs refers to Ruether’s position as “the prototypical response of liberal, modernist Christianity. Reiterating the Enlightenment argument, she concludes that Christology itself is the problem: since it necessarily engenders supersessionism, Christians are faced with the either-or choice of affirming classical Christology or freeing themselves of the evils of supersessionism.” Another Reformation, 2. 95 96

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particular Jew Jesus Christ.”101 As another example, he points to Kendall Soulen’s The God of Israel and Christian Theology. Therein, Soulen argues that Jesus is the “victorious guarantee of God’s end-time fidelity to the work of consummation.” This is a twofold claim: Jesus is victorious because God vindicates Jesus in the resurrection, and he is also a guarantee “because while everything about Jesus pertains to God’s eschatological reign, Jesus himself is not that reign in its fullness. Jesus is only the ‘first fruits of those who have died’ (1 Cor 15:20). Paul does not say that in Christ all of God’s promises are fulfilled but rather that they are confirmed.”102 Soulen again later reiterates this point: “Without doubt everything turns on Christ, but not everything concerns Christ. Redemption is for the sake of consummation, not consummation for the sake of redemption.”103 Yeago is critical of this move because in it Soulen downgrades Jesus’ role so that “he is seen as guaranteeing the final consummation of God’s reign through his act of ‘redemption,’ but not as being himself the consummation in person…. In other words, Christ is a means to an end beyond himself, the Way but not the Truth and the Life.”104 While Soulen believes this approach allows him to avoid Christian triumphalism and understand the eschaton as the fulfillment of both Christians and Jews, Yeago says Soulen has “severed the Kingdom from the particularity of Jesus.”105 Soulen instead relates the consummation to a “reign of wholeness, righteousness, justice, and peace.”106 Yeago says of this, “He is reduced to describing” the coming Kingdom “in terms of abstract values … which have no essential connection with either the Church or Israel.”107 Yeago is not alone in this critique. Scott Bader-Saye says, “The lingering question for Soulen’s Christology is this: If Jesus does not inaugurate Israel’s redemption but only confirms it, then how is Jesus different than other faithful Jewish witnesses?”108 Soulen says, “Jesus’ story is grounded in God’s work as Consummator by means of genealogy (Matt 1:2–16; Luke 101  David S. Yeago, “The Apostolic Faith Part II” (unpublished, n.d.), 121. Cited with permission from the author. 102  Soulen, The God of Israel and Christian Theology, 165. 103  Ibid., 175. 104  Yeago, “The Apostolic Faith Part II,” 121n30. 105  Ibid. 106  Soulen, The God of Israel and Christian Theology, 176. 107  Yeago, “The Apostolic Faith Part II,” 121n30. 108  Bader-Saye, Church and Israel After Christendom, 83.

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3:23–38).”109 While Jesus shares much of this genealogy with others, Soulen contends that the message of Jesus takes on a “distinctive character on Jesus’ lips: it becomes gospel, an unambiguous proclamation of good news.” It has this uniqueness because of two characteristics of Jesus’ expectation and proclamation: “First, Jesus trusted God’s reign to consummate the economy of mutual blessing between God and the house of Israel, and therefore between God and the nations as well. Second, Jesus trusted God’s reign to consummate Israel and the nations in a manner that reclaimed, redeemed, and restored the lost.”110 Bader-Saye notes, however, that neither of these characteristics is unique to Jesus, for many faithful people in Abraham’s lineage share these characteristics. While Soulen could go on to point to Jesus’ willingness to die, Bader-Saye again notes that there are other examples of Jewish martyrs. Again, while Soulen can point to Jesus’ resurrection, he also says that Jesus is the first fruits. Bader-­Saye concludes, “All that Soulen says about Jesus seems amenable to an adoptionist Christology, and thus it is unclear what might make us worship Christ…. Soulen’s discussion of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection does not require that we attribute to Jesus any more than that he was an extremely faithful Jew, trusting in God’s promises and living the way of blessing faithfully even unto the cross.”111 So, while some have argued that Christians should minimize Christological distinctives to create common ground with Jews, Lindbeck resists this impulse while also seeking to avoid the supersessionistic perspective that the church fulfills Israel. Lindbeck avoids falling under the same criticism as Soulen by maintaining an explicit commitment to creedal orthodoxy and supplementing it with an attentive eye toward the entire canon of Scripture.

 Ibid.  Soulen, The God of Israel and Christian Theology, 159. 111  Bader-Saye, Church and Israel After Christendom, 83–84. In defense of Soulen, he does say in the preface of The God of Israel and Christian Theology, “Some readers may be tempted to judge the constructive part of the book according to whether it seeks to vindicate classical ecumenical affirmations in the areas of Trinity and christology. They will discover that I do not attempt to address that question in these pages. Instead I limit myself to the exposition of what I take to be the theologically more basic claim, namely, the God of Israel has acted in Jesus Christ for all. The proposal sketched here does provide, I think, a framework that can accommodate the truth of classical trinitarian and christological affirmations, but that is a claim I hope to develop elsewhere” (xi). Soulen does seek to explore these issues further in “Hallowed Be Thy Name! The Tetragrammaton and the Name of the Trinity,” in Jews and Christians: People of God, ed. Carl E.  Braaten and Robert W.  Jenson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 14–40 and The Divine Name(s) and the Holy Trinity, Volume 1: Distinguishing the Voices (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011). 109 110

CHAPTER 7

Christian Mission

In the end, may God be merciful to us and may God’s face shine upon us, that God’s way might be known on earth and his saving power among all nations. (Martin Luther)1

Lindbeck’s approach to ecclesiology opens him up to criticism from both the right and the left. Those on the right may come to criticize him for a perceived lack of emphasis on evangelism. Those on the left may criticize him for his approach to ecumenism. The next two chapters will respond to these criticisms. This chapter will discuss Lindbeck’s understanding of Christian mission by focusing upon his treatment of witness and service, catechesis, and baptism. It will then close with a pneumatological corrective to Lindbeck’s ecclesiology. The concluding chapter will then discuss some further ecumenical implications of Lindbeck’s project.

Witness Lindbeck says that the church’s mission is to “witness to the God who judges and who saves, not to save those who would otherwise be damned (for God has not confined his saving work exclusively to the Church’s  Martin Luther, “The Freedom of a Christian,” in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, ed. Timothy F.  Lull and William R.  Russell, Third Edition (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2012), 427. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. C. Brown, George Lindbeck and The Israel of God, Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74757-2_7

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ministrations).”2 Throughout the Old Testament, from the calling of Abraham to the prophets, it is emphasized that Israel is “a light to the nations” (Isa 42:6). The New Testament then reapplies this theme by saying that Jesus is the light that came into the world (John 1:9). In addition, Jesus tells his followers, “You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid” (Matt 5:14). Lindbeck notes that God has multiple aims within creation, but “at least one aim in choosing Israel, Jesus and the church is the redemption of the world.”3 The Messiah plays a different role than God’s people, for while the Messiah comes to redeem the world, God’s people communally witness to salvation. Lindbeck says, “Witnessing to salvation is a matter of pointing all things to the true God who, in view of what we have called untranslatability, can be rightly identified only in the unique language of the elect peoples.”4 The emphasis upon God’s people as a witness to salvation, rather than as a means of salvation, allows the church to avoid triumphalism while remaining faithful to the Bible; to maintain a biblical understanding of election while avoiding arrogance and pride.5 Lindbeck argues that God does in this time, the time between the times, what God did before: “choosing and guiding a people to be a sign and witness in all that it is and does, whether obediently or disobediently, to who and what he is.”6 So while the church’s identity does not rest in her own faithfulness, her primary mission is still “to be a faithfully witnessing people.”7 The church is called “to be a light to the nations primarily by the quality of their communal life rather than by the quantity of their individual converts.”8 Lindbeck sees his position that “the Bible on the whole is exclusivist in regard to communal witness even if not individual salvation” as having merit. Nowhere in the Old Testament is any nation other than Israel seen as “especially beloved of God as a means of blessing to all peoples.”9 The New Testament echoes this: “salvation is from the Jews” (John 4:22). And  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 192.  Lindbeck, “The Gospel’s Uniqueness,” 443. 4  Ibid., 444. 5  Ibid. 6  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 192. See Lindbeck, “Spiritual Formation and Theological Education,” 28. 7  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 194. 8  Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel and the Future of Ecumenism: Lecture One,” 24. 9  Lindbeck, “The Gospel’s Uniqueness,” 445. 2 3

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again, “For in the first place the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God” (Rom 3:2). Also, Paul, echoing Isaiah 45:23, argues that every knee will bow to the Jewish Messiah, Jesus (Phil 2:10; cf. 1 Cor 15:26ff). While the Old Testament does at times say that foreign rulers, like Cyrus, have salvific significance (e.g., Isa 45:1, 13),10 and that God may choose people other than Israel for specific tasks (Amos 9:7), “it does not warrant pluralism…. The communities which God uses in public history as witnesses are in their self-understanding in the Abrahamic line.”11 Lindbeck identifies two primary ways in which the church witnesses to God’s salvific work. First, God desires from the elect people, and from all of creation, “praise, doxology, joy in God and God’s creation. From this it follows that the fundamental witness of the elect peoples to the coming Kingdom is being communities which whole-heartedly laud and bless the Holy Name.”12 This praise of God should not be based solely upon what God has done for us (pro nobis), but as the rabbis maintained, God should be loved for God’s own sake. Praise takes place not only within a worship service, but in obedience to God’s precepts and commandments. One does not obey these commands for some instrumental or extrinsic good, such as merit or the development of virtue, but because obedience to God’s commands has its own intrinsic benefits. “They are their own reward and for that reason meritorious, virtue-producing, and neighbor-­ benefiting.”13 Lindbeck argues, “Doxologically-minded Christians, needless to say, agree. God’s self-communication occurs in and through the church’s liturgical, communal and diaconal practices as these are done for their own sake in praise of God, not for some extrinsic good. Faithful witness is doxology and vice versa.”14 He compares the relation of praise of God and service of outsiders to discussions of the relation between faith and works in Reformational theology: “the second is a necessary by, in one sense, accidental by-product of the former.”15 The church’s witness differs depending upon the given circumstances, which the church cannot control. The church’s way of life will lead to 10  In that same context in Isaiah 45, however, it is reiterated, “Israel is saved by the Lord with everlasting salvation/you shall not be put to shame or confounded to all eternity” (v. 17). 11  Lindbeck, “The Gospel’s Uniqueness,” 445. 12  Ibid. 13  Ibid., 446. 14  Ibid. 15  Ibid.

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diverse responses. Lindbeck says, “Faithful witness will sometimes attract converts, but in other situations it will repel them, and exactly the same can be said about unfaithfulness.”16 Rowan Greer notes, for example, that early Christians were, to use Tennyson’s phrase, “‘broken lights’ that reflected dimly the ineffable glory of God,” and these lights “in various ways mended human lives.”17 Through the witness of the church, sinners came to faith and baptism and their lives were changed. While they may have spoken hyperbolically in some cases about the extent of the church’s sanctity, church fathers like Justin Martyr and Origen saw these mended lives as “the best apology for the truth of the Gospel.”18 Faithful witness, however, can lead to persecution and death. Christian de Chergé and the Cistercian monks of the Abbey of Our Lady of Atlas in Tibhirine, Algeria, provide a modern-day example of this.19 Also, sin and disunity obscures the church’s witness and negatively impacts the credibility of the gospel. While it is difficult, and maybe even impossible, to provide a general principle for how elect communities witness to God, Lindbeck provides two guidelines. “First, communal faith is fundamental. It is not only individuals but communities.”20 He says in this context that Israel and the church are called to “not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God” (Ex 20:7). What it means to faithfully witness to God cannot and should not be judged by the world’s standards, for it can lead to persecution and martyrdom. Lindbeck says, however, that this call for faithfulness need not be carried out recklessly, but “must be exercised with prudence.” Lindbeck thus provides a second guideline: “It may sound repellently ethnocentric, but the survival and welfare of the chosen people is a criterion distinguishing between the prudent and the imprudent.”21 He notes that such a concept may be foreign to Christians, but is still maintained by Jews. This is especially the case after the Holocaust. Lindbeck notes that premodern Christians thought in these terms. They prayed for the church more fervently than they did for the nations in which they lived, and had more  Ibid.  Rowan A. Greer, Broken Lights and Mended Lives: Theology and Common Life in the Early Church (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986), 2. 18  Ibid., 15. 19  See Christian Salenson, Christian de Chergé: A Theology of Hope, trans. Nada Conic (Trappist, KY: Cistercian Publications, 2012). 20  Lindbeck, “The Gospel’s Uniqueness,” 446. 21  Ibid., 447. 16 17

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concern for the poor in their midst than for those outside the church. They also understood, however, that their welfare was connected to the nations in which they dwelt. They were thus instructed in the New Testament to pray for those in governing authority (1 Tim 2:1–2). Lindbeck says, Because of the community in its corporate existence which is chosen by God to witness to the world, members have responsibilities for each other and for their own people as a whole which do not extend to society at large or to other groups. Premodern supersessionist Christians in some ways spiritualized the notion of the church as Israel, but much of its sense of concrete peoplehood remained.22

The second way that the church witnesses to the world is in “her serving role in our religiously pluralistic world. Her motives are not disinterested; she serves others in part for her own sake.”23 While there is some multivalence in the use of the term “servant” within the Old Testament, there are definite references to Israel as YHWH’s servant. Israel is called “my servant,” and told, “You are my servant; I have chosen you and not cast you off” (Isa 41:8–9). Two chapters later, it says, You are my witnesses, says the Lord, and my servant whom I have chosen, so that you will know and believe me and understand that I am he. Before me no God was formed, nor shall there be any after me. (Isa 43:10)

Some passages also reaffirm God’s salvific action among his people: “The Lord has redeemed his servant Jacob!” (48:20). Others proclaim that Israel is the people “in whom I will be glorified” (49:3). Various other passages in the servant songs of Isaiah and in other prophetic texts continue these themes God’s election of Israel, God’s continued faithfulness to Israel, and Israel’s calling to serve and witness to God (Isa 42:1–9; 44:1–2, 21; 45:4; 52:13–53:12; 54:17; 56:6–8; 63:17; 65:8–9, 13–15; Jer 30:10; 46:27–28).24  Ibid.  Ibid. 24  New Testament texts associate Jesus as the servant in the case of Isaiah 42 and 52:13ff, and some of the references to YHWH’s servant clearly refer to a particular prophet or a king 22 23

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To expound upon this further, Lindbeck points to the exilic or diaspora reality of both Israelites and early Christians. He does so because the contemporary church’s context is most like that of the people of Israel in exile or the early church than any intervening period.25 The prophet Jeremiah says to the exiles in Babylon, “Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (29:5–7). Here the prophet is reminding them to have concern for the sustenance of their community, as well as for the cities in which they live. They are reminded, as Lindbeck says, “They will be served by what benefits Babylon.”26 Similar passages arise in the New Testament as well. For example, in 1 Peter, the author refers to his audience as “the exiles of the Dispersion” (1:1), and he tells them, “If you invoke as Father the one who judges all people impartially according to their deeds, live in reverent fear during the time of your exile” (1:17). He says, “Beloved, I urge you as aliens and exiles to abstain from the desires of the flesh that wage war against the soul. Conduct yourselves honorably among the Gentiles, so that, though they malign you as evildoers, they may see your honorable deeds and glorify God when he comes to judge” (2:11–12). In order to conduct themselves honorably, they are instructed to honor the governing authorities in the Roman world: For the Lord’s sake accept the authority of every human institution, whether of the emperor as supreme, or of governors, as sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to praise those who do right. For it is God’s will that by doing right you should silence the ignorance of the foolish. As servants of God, live as free people, yet do not use your freedom as a pretext for evil. Honor everyone. Love the family of believers. Fear God. Honor the emperor. (2:13–17)

like David. See John Goldingay, “Servants of Yahweh,” in Dictionary of the Old Testament: Prophets, ed. Mark J. Boda and J. Gordon McConville (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2012), 700–707. 25  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 190. Though Lindbeck continues to speak of the contemporary church as a diaspora, some of his later writing speaks of it with more ambivalence. 26  Lindbeck, “The Gospel’s Uniqueness,” 447.

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After providing instructions for various members of households, they are told, “have unity of spirit, sympathy, love for one another, a tender heart, and a humble mind. Do not repay evil for evil or abuse for abuse; but, on the contrary, repay with a blessing. It is for this that you were called—that you might inherit a blessing” (3:8–9). While they may inherit a blessing from not retaliating when persecuted, the author does not guarantee they will move forward without further persecution. Rather, he encourages them saying, But even if you do suffer for doing what is right, you are blessed. Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated, but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord. Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence. Keep your conscience clear, so that, when you are maligned, those who abuse you for your good conduct in Christ may be put to shame. For it is better to suffer for doing good, if suffering should be God’s will, than to suffer for doing evil. For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. (3:14–18a)

While in the past they lived as Gentiles, they are called to live disciplined lives, loving and serving one another for the glory of God (4:1–11). Again, they are told not to be surprised if they are persecuted, “But rejoice insofar as you are sharing Christ’s sufferings, so that you may also be glad and shout for joy when his glory is revealed” (4:13), and “if any of you suffers as a Christian, do not consider it a disgrace, but glorify God because you bear this name” (4:16). At the same time, however, they are reminded that if they suffer, it should be for the right reasons: “If you are reviled for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the spirit of glory, which is the Spirit of God, is resting on you. But let none of you suffer as a murderer, a thief, a criminal, or even as a mischief maker” (4:14–15). He also instructs the elders in the community to humbly oversee, serve, and care for their flocks, and to be steadfast in the face of suffering (5:1–11). A part of this role as servant within the world, Lindbeck notes, includes service to people of other faiths. He says: Seeking and praying for the welfare of the earthly cities in which Christians live cannot be separated from concern for the religions without which these societies could not in many cases survive. It is on how these religions sustain these societies that the world-wide diaspora of peoples of biblical faith is

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increasingly dependent for the peace without which they cannot freely and communally glorify and witness to the Name which is above every name. Thus helping other religions is imperative. The service of God and neighbor in this case intersects with communal self-interest.27

Christians are to serve their neighbors regardless of whether or not this service leads to conversions. Lindbeck speculates, on the basis of passages like Amos 9:7–8, that “nations other than Israel—and, by extension, religions other than biblical ones—are also peoples elected (and failing) to carry out their own distinctive tasks within the world.”28 If this is the case, then God has not tasked his people within Israel and the church with every task pertaining to the coming kingdom. If this is indeed the case, “Christians may have a responsibility to help other religions make their own particular contributions, which may be quite distinct from the Christian one, to the preparation for the Consummation.”29 Therefore, the Christian missionary task may involve calling Marxists, Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists to become better Marxists, Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists. Lindbeck clarifies this, however, by saying, “although admittedly their notion of what a ‘better Marxist,’ etc., is will be influenced by Christian norms.”30 While the primary motive may not be to convert others, conversions may happen as a by-product of the church’s sacrificial witness and love for people inside and outside of the church.31 Lindbeck says that he is not alone in advocating such views. He points to Nostra Aetate, Vatican II’s Declaration on Non-­Christian Religions. Within this document, the Council says, “Ever aware of its duty to foster unity and charity among individuals, and even among nations, [the church] reflects at the outset on what people have in common and what  Ibid., 448.  ND, 40. Amos 9:7–8 says, “Are you not like the Ethiopians to me,/O people of Israel? says the Lord./Did I not bring Israel up from the land of Egypt,/and the Philistines from Caphtor and the Arameans from Kir?/The eyes of the Lord God are upon the sinful kingdom,/and I will destroy it from the face of the earth/—except that I will not utterly destroy the house of Jacob, says the Lord.” Lindbeck makes this argument cautiously, saying, “This obviously is a biblical argument for a practice of interreligious dialogue that was unthinkable in biblical times and that the Bible nowhere discusses, either to approve or disapprove” (41). 29  Ibid. 30  Ibid. 31  George Lindbeck, “Are There Limits to Religious Pluralism? If so, Why?” (presented at the IJCIC-WCC Consultation, Harvard University, November 25, 1984), 9. Within this presentation, Lindbeck affirms pluralism in the sense that he affirms religious freedom. 27 28

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tends to bring them together.”32 They do so with the acknowledgment, “Humanity forms one community,” and this is so because of God’s creative and providential work.33 The Council affirms that while the church “rejects nothing of what is holy and true in these religions,” it does not advocate pluralism, but instead proclaims that “Christ who is the way, the truth and the life (John 14:6).”34 The Council then provides this directive: The church, therefore, urges its sons and daughters to enter with prudence and charity into discussion and collaboration with members of other religions. Let Christians, while witnessing to their own faith and way of life, acknowledge, preserve and encourage the spiritual and moral truths found among non-Christians, together with their social life and culture.35

Lindbeck says that the vision of witness that he articulates is “Jewish sounding…. It is above all by the character of its communal life that it witnesses, that it proclaims the gospel and serves the world.”36 This changes the way that the church views evangelism. He says, “The mode of evangelization that this approach sustains is that of Christians arousing curiosity by their mode of life and being prepared to answer those who ask about the reasons for the hope that is in them.”37 It is also necessary that the church consist of many types of human beings. Galatians 3:28 says, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Similarly, Colossians 3:11 says, “In that renewal there is no longer Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all in all!” Lindbeck argues, however, that “sheer numbers are, at most, of tertiary importance.”38 In light of Paul’s discussion of the gospel being open to Jews and Gentiles, Michael Wyschogrod reflects upon Paul’s understanding of how  NA, § 1.  Ibid. 34  Ibid., § 2. 35  Ibid. 36  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 193. 37  George Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel and the Ecumenism of the Future: Lecture Two: Israel, Non-Christian Religions and Dominus Iesus” (Wycliffe College, Toronto, Canada, October 23, 2001), 22. 38  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 193. 32 33

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Christ allows Gentiles to enter the community apart from circumcision. He says, noting Deuteronomy 28, that the following of the Law includes both blessings and curses. He says that for Paul, “Because of the Christ event these penalties were no longer applicable. When Paul says in Galatians 3:13, ‘Christ brought us freedom from the curse of the Law by becoming for our sake an accursed thing,’ he does not mean that Law is a curse…. He does mean that there is a curse attaching to disobeying the holy Law.”39 Paul obviously does not think the entire Law is a curse because he says, “the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good” (Rom 7:12). Wyschogrod says, “Paul must have been aware that the Law of Moses was never thought of as obligatory for non-Jews.”40 This does not mean God, in Jewish understanding, was indifferent to the moral lives of Gentiles, but instead that they were called to follow the “Noachide commandments” from Genesis 9, which Wyschogrod calls “the Torah of the gentiles.” He says, “They are under obligation to it as the Jews are under obligation to obey all of the Torah. A gentile who obeys the Noachide Law pleases God and has a portion in the world to come. For this reason, it is not advisable for gentiles to convert to Judaism since, once circumcised, the gentile becomes a Jew and is under obligation to obey the whole Torah as are all Jews.”41 Though Jews permit Gentiles to convert, they discourage them from doing so because they place themselves not only under the blessings of the law, but under the curses as well. In this, Jews differentiated between Ger Toshav, or “the indwelling stranger,” and Ger Tzedek, a Gentile convert to Judaism. Wyschogrod argues that for Paul, Christ creates a new category: “gentiles who were not circumcised and not obedient to the Torah but who were still not excluded from the house of Israel.”42 They have been, as Paul argues in Romans 11, grafted in. Paul thus discouraged Gentiles from submitting to circumcision, because by converting, they reject the way into the people of Israel opened to them by Christ (Gal 4:2). Paul is thus, in a sense, more continuous with rabbinic Judaism than his opponents who expected Gentiles to become Jews in order to follow Jesus.43  Wyschogrod, Abraham’s Promise, 188–189.  Ibid., 189. 41  Ibid., 190. 42  Ibid., 191. 43  Ibid., 192–193. 39 40

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Lindbeck extends this understanding to what it means for non-­ Christians to convert to Christianity. He says, “Christians have as much reason as Jews to eschew heedless invitations to outsiders (whether rootless or adherents of other religions) to bear the burdens of election. The possibilities of damnation as well as of salvation are increased within the people of God.”44 As 1 Peter 4:17a says, judgment “begin[s] with the household of God.”45 Lindbeck says, “The Bible gives us no warrants for saying that all those who do not become Christians are, in any case, excluded from the coming kingdom, although it cannot be said of them as of Christians that salvation, the kingdom, is already present among or in them (Luke 17:21).”46 Also, Lindbeck provides the reminder that the New Testament nowhere assumes that Christians “will become a majority before the end of history, much less convert the world.”47 In his attempt to reconcile the solo Christo with the salvation of non-­ Christians, Lindbeck rejects the route suggested by Karl Rahner and others. This view argues that God has already made salvation present to “anonymous Christians”: “They identify the prereflective, inarticulate experience of the divine, which they hold is at the heart of every religion, with the saving grace of Christ.”48 Lindbeck instead offers an eschatological or “prospective” view, which argues that, postmortem, every person will be confronted in the eschaton by Jesus. He says, “According to this view, saving faith cannot be wholly anonymous, wholly implicit, but must be in some measure explicit: it comes, as Paul puts it, ex auditu, from hearing (Rom. 10:17).”49 Not only must one hear the word and understand it  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 193.  Lindbeck says, “When one considers these and related passages, one sometimes gets the impression that the Bible balances Cyprian’s claim that there is no salvation outside the church (extra ecclesia nulla salus) with an at least equally emphatic insistence that the beginning of damnation, of deliberate opposition to God, is possible only within the church, within the people of God: Jesus pronounced his woes (and wept), it will be recalled, over the cities of Israel, not those of the Gentiles. On this view, there is no damnation—just as there is no salvation—outside the church.” ND, 45. 46  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 193. See Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel and the Ecumenism of the Future: Lecture Two;” George Lindbeck, “Dominus Iesus: A Lutheran Perspective” (presented at the One Path to God?, Andover Newton Theological School, May 16, 2001). 47  Lindbeck, “Are There Limits to Religious Pluralism?,” 10. 48  ND, 42. 49  Ibid., 43. Lindbeck advocates for this second position humbly. He says, “Each of these options can appeal with varying degrees of persuasiveness to early scriptural or patristic models” (42), and that “both options, it seems, can be made consistent with Scripture and tradi44 45

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to come to faith, but to reject it as well.50 Lindbeck thus concludes, “The purpose of that presence of salvation, furthermore, is witness, and it is up to God to add whom he will to the company (Acts 2:47).”51

Catechesis Lindbeck notes that Jesus chastised the Pharisees because they “cross sea and land to make a single convert, and you make the new convert twice as much a child of hell as yourselves” (Matt 23:15).52 He reminds contemporary Christians to avoid following the Pharisees example. He does so by focusing on some of the ways that Christians have sought to practice evangelism, particularly after Constantine legitimized the Christian faith within the Roman Empire. Christians took on the practice of mass conversions, both among barbarian groups and in modern missions. Lindbeck cautions against such practices and instead calls the church to follow the early Christian practice of extended catechesis. While some who place primary emphasis upon adding numbers to the church may not agree with his approach, he contends it has been the primary way Christians throughout the centuries have transmitted the faith to others. Here he points to examples like Ambrose, John Chrysostom, and Cyril of Jerusalem, who insisted on catechism in response to mass baptisms within the Roman Empire.53

tion and with contemporary need for interreligious dialogue” (43). He, however, argues that the second view, due to its emphasis upon fides ex auditu, has the advantage. He also finds the second view more consistent with his cultural-linguistic approach. He makes a similar argument in “Fides Ex Auditu and the Salvation of Non-Christians: Contemporary Catholic and Protestant Positions,” in The Gospel and the Ambiguity of the Church, ed. Vilmos Vajta (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974), 92–123; “Unbelievers and the ‘Sola Christi,’” Dialog 12 (1973): 182–189. 50  ND, 45. See also 54. 51  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 193–194. 52  Lindbeck, “The Gospel’s Uniqueness,” 435. Here Lindbeck says, “It was said that the synagogue unlike the church had no universalist aspirations and did not seek to win the heathen, but it is now general knowledge that this is too simple. Jews also were in the business of converting pagans, and some did this with an eagerness which some Christians found unseemly. Why else would the words of Jesus criticizing Pharisees for their proselytizing zeal (Mat. 23:15) have been preserved?” 53  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 194, 204n18. Lindbeck differentiates this practice of proselytizing from the work of others, like Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley, who sought, in revivalism, to call unfaithful Christians to faithfulness. Lindbeck concludes that while they used some questionable methods, the purpose of their work was “unimpeachable” (204n18).

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Such an emphasis upon catechesis, as mentioned in the previous chapter, is also an important part of Lindbeck’s own Lutheran tradition. Lindbeck says that Christians cannot boast in their faith, for according to Paul’s emphasis upon fides ex auditu, “explicit faith is understood, not as expressing or articulating the existential depths, but rather as producing and forming them.”54 Even for mature Christians, they are just beginning the process of being conformed to Christ—just beginning to “speak Christian.” And while Christians are given the Holy Spirit as a pledge, they will not fully participate in the kingdom, fully love God with their entire being and their neighbors as themselves, until the eschaton. Lindbeck says, “What distinguishes their love from that of the non-Christian is, not its present subjective quality, but rather the fact that it is beginning to be shaped by the message of Jesus’ cross and resurrection.”55 Lindbeck cites Luther who says, “we do not yet have our goodness in re, but in fide et spe.”56 For this reason, Christians must resist pride, for they have “by grace just begun to learn of the one in whom alone is salvation, but in moral and religious quality they are like other human beings, worse than some and better than others.”57 While some may criticize this cultural-linguistic understanding of conversion as “merely fictive or imaginary,” and thus not ontological, Lindbeck resists this charge. Those in Christ have come to live in the light. He sees the linguistic analogy here as helpful. Toddlers, regardless of whether they speak a primitive or sophisticated language, speak in much the same way: they speak of their needs and their reactions in basic ways. He says, however, that the language the child learns to speak can open up any number of options for them in the future, from isolating them in a tribe to opening them up to a promising future. Lindbeck says that within this analogy, all human beings are toddlers, whether Peter, or Paul, or the veriest infant in Christ. The decisive question regarding them is whether the language they have begun to learn ex auditu is that of Jesus Christ, that of true humanity, or something else. Is, for example, the love about which they feebly stutter, and which they are just beginning to understand and hope for, defined by Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, or in some other way?58  ND, 46.  Ibid. 56  As cited in ibid. 57  Ibid. 58  Ibid., 47. 54 55

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This learning of the language of Christian faith involves the learning of cognitive information, such as memorizing the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments, and learning about the sacraments of the church and the testimony of Scripture. Speaking Christian, however, also includes training in the practices and life of the church so that Christians can socially embody the faith. For example, people can only come to know what the term “God” signifies by being trained in how it is used within Scripture and the church, for as Wittgenstein argues, “The functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects.”59 Therefore, Wittgenstein argues, “The teaching of language is not explaining, but training.”60 Lindbeck paraphrases this by saying, “Hammers and saws, ordinals and numerals, winks and signs of the cross, words and sentences are made comprehensible by indicating how they fit into systems of communication or purposeful action, not by reference to outside factors.”61 He says that this was in particular true for early Christians. For them, “Beliefs were integrated into a rich matrix of powerful communal practices and thus acquired meaning and, in a sense, verification.”62 This training must, then, take place within the church. As Philip Kenneson argues, “The best way to ‘learn’ the Christian faith is to immerse one’s self into a community of competent practitioners who are themselves involved in internalizing the grammar of the faith, even if they can articulate little formal doctrine.”63 While many contemporary Christians think one must come to believe the faith in order to decide to belong to the church, for many pagan converts in the early church, “the process was reversed: they first decided and then they understood.”64 For many and diverse reasons, these converts were attracted to the life and witness of the Christian community and “submitted themselves to prolonged catechetical instruction in which they 59  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. P.  M. S.  Hacker and Joachim Schulte, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte, 4th edition (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), § 11. 60  Ibid., § 5. 61  ND, 100. 62  George Lindbeck, “Theological Perspectives: The Waxing and Waning of Religious Belief” (CUNY, November 12, 1987), 4. 63  Kenneson, Beyond Sectarianism, 23. Kenneson goes on to say, “knowledge is best understood as local knowledge, and that acquisition of knowledge cannot be separated from initiation into and formation by a community whose convictions, practices, and narratives grant that knowledge its intelligibility” (24). 64  ND, 118.

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practiced new modes of behavior and learned the stories of Israel and their fulfillment in Christ. Only after they had acquired proficiency in the alien language and form of life were they deemed able intelligently and responsibly to profess the faith, to be baptized.”65 After the Christian faith became the dominant one in the Empire, delaying baptism until after a time of catechesis ceased, but the emphasis upon catechesis and maturation in the faith continued “in diluted form.” The church continued to shape the lives of people, they moved from immaturity to maturity, and her members came to see and experience the world in the light of the biblical narratives of Israel and Jesus. Lindbeck argues, “Western culture is now at an intermediate stage, however, where socialization is ineffective, catechesis impossible, and translation a tempting alternative.”66 People continue to tell pollsters that they are Christians even though they deny central tenets of the faith. They think that knowing some of the language of faith or a few narratives is equivalent to knowing the Christian faith. To quote George Costanza in the Seinfeld episode, “The Conversion,” “I know the basic plot…. Yes you know, the flood, and the lepers, and the commandments and all that.”67 The church has accommodated itself to the point that it is shaped by the dominant western culture more than it shapes that culture. Lindbeck says, “This makes it difficult for them to attract catechumens even from among their own children, and when they do, they generally prove wholly incapable of providing effective instruction in distinctively Christian language and practice.”68 Churches have often failed to properly catechize people, and so whole social groups became nominally Christian. Membership in the church became easy. The emphasis upon bringing as many into the church as possible was reinforced by the belief, justified or not, that there is no salvation outside of the church. Such a practice led to disaster when Christendom faded, for, The churches now increasingly consist of people who have been culturally and linguistically dechristianized and yet retain a residual attachment to the ancestral faith. Return to stricter standards of membership seems imperative if distinctively Christian identity is to be maintained, but this means aban Ibid.  Ibid., 119. 67  Tom Cherones, “The Conversion,” DVD, Seinfeld (NBC, December 16, 1993). 68  ND, 119. 65 66

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doning the notion that it is the church’s business to entice as many as possible by catering to whatever is currently popular whether on the conservative right or the progressive left.69

It is a mistake to respond to the church’s failures at evangelization by concluding that the church’s primary purpose is to serve humanity or the world at large. Lindbeck argues, “Christians are responsible first of all for their own communities, not for the wider society. It is by the quality of their communal life that God wills them to be a light to the Gentiles.”70 This does not mean the world lacks importance, but rather that the church’s purpose is to witness to the nations by “being the body of Christ, the communal sign of the promised redemption, in the time between the times.”71 The church cannot neglect its internal life by focusing on the world, for if it does, it damages its witness to the world. Lindbeck concludes, “Its primary task should be to build up sisters and brothers in the faith, not to liberate the oppressed everywhere; and it is only through performing this task that it becomes a liberating force in world history.”72 Lindbeck argues, “This makes mutual responsibility of all for all crucial to the church’s witness.”73 In both the Old and New Testaments, the people of God are called upon to look out for the distressed and correct those who have gone astray. Christians must be careful to distinguish this internal concern for Christ’s body from social concern. He concludes, “Perhaps the only way out is a people-of-God perspective in which the mutual concern of all the churches for each other’s worship, faith, fellowship and action becomes of paramount importance precisely for the sake of missionary witness to the world.”74 If in the future the church becomes a small minority, it will need to form Christian communities that “cultivate their native tongue and learn to act accordingly.”75 He argues, however, that until that day comes, the church will likely not strengthen its drive to properly catechize its members.

 Lindbeck, “The Church,” 205n18.  Ibid., 194. 71  Ibid. 72  Ibid. 73  Ibid. 74  Ibid., 195. 75  ND, 120. 69 70

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Cultural Mission? Alongside the discussion of how the church should catechize its own members, Lindbeck also argued in the late 1980s that the church has a “cultural mission.” In this discussion, Lindbeck laments the lack of biblical literacy in contemporary western society. He says, “Modernity has been deeply prejudiced against treating a classic as a language or lens with many meanings or uses with which to construe reality and view the world.”76 He notes, however, that with postmodernity, the situation has changed. This can be seen from historians or philosophers of science like Thomas Kuhn to literary theorists and philosophers like Jacques Derrida. He says, “The intellectual climate is changing, and the one we are now entering is congenial to the close reading of texts,” including Christian ones, “in order to see what the world looks like in and through them.”77 While he questions whether the church can take advantage of this new situation, he sees this time as an opportunity to promote biblical literacy within broader society. He sees this as a particularly important calling because of “the lack of effective alternative modes of public discourse.”78 He says, “With the loss of the Bible, public discourse is impoverished. We no longer have a language in which, for example, national goals (that is, questions of meaning, purpose, and destiny) can be articulated.”79 The other possible modes of discourse that exist within American society, whether of utilitarian, therapeutic, or individualist variety, are of little help. Though he doubts such a thing will happen, he argues that a Christian or biblical mode of discourse may help American society have a common mode of public discourse. Lindbeck concludes this discussion of the church’s cultural mission by saying, “Christianizing culture is both important and dangerous.”80 While no explicit command is given in the biblical text, no Great Commission for creating Christian societies, “cultural needs may at times be as urgent as physical ones and, furthermore, in one sense are more basic.”81 Lindbeck’s discussion here comes out of his increased ambivalence with his earlier emphasis upon the church as a sectarian community. He says  Lindbeck, “The Church’s Mission to Postmodern Culture,” 50.  Ibid., 51. 78  Ibid., 52. 79  Ibid., 47. 80  Ibid., 53. 81  Ibid. 76 77

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that as a child of Chinese missionaries, he always had a sense of uneasiness about Christendom.82 He says, however, “I am having uncomfortable second thoughts. The waning of cultural Christianity might be good for the churches, but what about society? To my chagrin, I find myself thinking that traditionally Christian lands when stripped of their historic faith are worse than others. They become unworkable or demonic.”83 He says, “When Christian influence lapses, seven devils worse than the one originally expelled may well rush into the swept and garnished emptiness.”84 So while calls for a “Christian America” or Pope John Paul II’s calls for a “Christian Europe” still make Lindbeck uncomfortable, he says that due to the revolutionary events he has witnessed in the twentieth century, such as the fall of communism or the reforms with the Roman Catholic Church, he “cannot rule these out as impossible.”85 He argues, however, that the church should not seek to have such an influence directly, for “a Christianity faithful to its origins does not seek cultural and the consequent social power” because such attempts to coopt power are “forbidden to the servants of a crucified Messiah.”86 He says that the church’s forgetfulness of this prohibition was “the great sin of the Church during the age of Christendom.”87 He does not, however, see Christendom as a total aberration, for God used the church to Christianize cultures in the past. Lindbeck acknowledges, however, that God may not do so again in the future, and that his previous prognostications for a future diaspora church may indeed be correct. Regardless, Lindbeck concludes, “Relearning the language of Zion is imperative whatever the cultural future of the church.”88 82  See Lindbeck, “Confession and Community,” 492. Here he says, “I came to think that apostate Christians were much worse than non-Christian Chinese, as the Nazis were proving. Thus China laid the groundwork for a disenchantment with Christendom that led me 30 years later to hope for the end of cultural Christianity as the enabling condition for the development of a diaspora Christianity.” See also Eckerstorfer, “The One Church in the Postmodern World,” 404. 83  Lindbeck, “Confession and Community,” 495. 84  Lindbeck, “The Church’s Mission to Postmodern Culture,” 53–54. Here he points to Nazi Germany as an example. 85  Lindbeck, “Confession and Community,” 495. 86  Lindbeck, “The Church’s Mission to Postmodern Culture,” 54. 87  Ibid. 88  Ibid., 55. See also Lindbeck, “Confession and Community,” 495. There he says, “Renewal depends, I have come to think, on the spread of proficiency in premodern yet postcritical Bible reading, on restructuring the churches into something like pre-­

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Stanley Hauerwas critiques aspects of Lindbeck’s perspective within his book, Unleashing the Scriptures: Freeing the Bible from Captivity to America. He concedes to Lindbeck that a lack of Bible knowledge within American society may indeed lead to a lack of common discourse, or to speeches like Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. He disagrees, however, that more awareness of the Bible within society will lead to better policy. He says, “I remain quite convinced as few societies have had more people who knew the text of scripture than Germany. It did not provide much resistance to the Nazis.”89 Lindbeck later acknowledges in a festschrift essay for Hauerwas that his criticism “seems to me on target. I still think, as I have argued in that essay, that biblical literacy is culturally important, but I should have anticipated his counterevidence and added that, apart from the influence of faithful communal witness, widespread knowledge of Scripture in a society may be the opposite of beneficial.”90 He says that through Hauerwas’ influence upon him, he sees “no clear disagreement between us on the question of Christendom and cultural and diaspora Christianity.”91

Baptism Lindbeck not only discusses baptism as a Lutheran and sacramental realist, but in connection with the church as Israel. He does so by asking why baptism, and not some other ritual, serves as the rite of initiation into the church. He notes that New Testament authors used imagery from the Old Testament to discuss baptism. For example, New Testament authors connect baptism with the Israelites passing through the sea on dry land (1 Cor 10:1–2) or with Noah’s family being saved in the flood (1 Pet 3:20–21), and call baptism a “spiritual circumcision” (Col 2:11–12). The church fathers continued to build upon this imagery. Then, Thomas Aquinas “said that circumcision communicates the same grace as baptism; both rituals are prefigurations that God uses to create the same reality. Thus what happened to Israel in Abraham’s call and circumcision and in the Constantinian organizational patterns, and on the development of an Israel-like understanding of the church.” 89  Stanley Hauerwas, Unleashing the Scripture: Freeing the Bible from Captivity to America (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1993), 155n7. 90  Lindbeck, “Ecumenisms in Conflict,” 214n3. 91  Ibid. One area of disagreement that remains between Lindbeck and Hauerwas on war. See ND, 71.

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Exodus from Egypt happens to the church, and what happens to the church in Christ happened to Israel.”92 Lindbeck here concludes, “The Old Testament’s contribution to the church’s understanding of baptism is fundamental; without it, for instance, it is hard to see how the baptism of infants could have become universal: there are no explicit New Testament precedents.”93 He notes, however, that as the modern period began and the New Testament replaced the Christologically interpreted Old as the primary ecclesiological textbook, Christians across the various traditions no longer saw themselves as Israel and the universal acceptance of infant baptism waned. He notes that adult or believers’ baptism accounts for roughly half of baptisms among contemporary Protestants, and its practice has increased among Catholic and Orthodox populations as well. He says, “Modernity has changed the way people think of church, and as a result infant baptism has become a familial or social affair instead of a public, community-creating event.”94 He sees the decreased emphasis upon the church as Israel as in part responsible for the lack of a sense that the church is an elect community. He says, However, retrieving this image cannot, by itself, restore the church’s sense of community. The prevailing ethos of American culture is individualistic, and churches have thus become voluntary societies of like-minded individuals. Such “communities” are too weak to support the adoption of the biblical image of the church as Israel. Nonetheless, the loss of this image has had enormous consequences, ranging from failures to act to utter disasters. Bringing back the image of the church as Israel may repair these failures and block future disasters.95  Lindbeck, “Postmodern Hermeneutics and Jewish-Christian Dialogue,” 109.  Ibid. 94  Ibid. 95  Ibid., 109–110. Lindbeck’s comments here raise questions about the extent to which churches that exclusively practice adult or believers’ baptism can accept his account of the church as Israel. Those who maintain that practice, as Lindbeck acknowledges, do so because “baptism upon personal profession of faith is the most clearly attested pattern in the New Testament documents” (Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, Faith and Order Paper No. 111 (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1982), § 11). This affirmation that people come to, and are not brought to, baptism by no means necessitates the view that baptism is solely an individual and not a communal or ecclesial practice. Those in believers’ baptism traditions can and do continue to affirm, along with BEM, that baptism is instituted by Christ to be practiced as a sacrament by the church: “Baptism is the sign of new life through Jesus Christ. It unites the one baptized with Christ and with his people” (para. 2). Those in the Stone-­ Campbell Movement, for instance, have continually affirmed this. For example, British Church of Christ theologian William Robinson says, “As to Baptism, it was not a mere obedi92 93

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Holy Spirit As mentioned in Chap. 4, Lindbeck does note that the church looks different in this age than the people of God have in the past. This is in part because the Messiah has come, but is also because “the Spirit is now offered and may be poured on all flesh as it was not before (Acts 2:17ff).”96 Both Cheryl Peterson and Jane Barter Moulaison critique Lindbeck because other than this brief comment, the Holy Spirit is largely absent from Lindbeck’s ecclesiology. Peterson appreciates Lindbeck’s emphasis upon a narrative ecclesiology and the continuity between Israel and the church, but remains surprised that in light of these emphases, Lindbeck largely neglects the role of the Holy Spirit within the book of Acts and within the biblical canon as a whole.97 Peterson also notes two other distinctives between the church and the rest of Israel: (1) the church’s proclamation of Jesus’ life and ence to the arbitrary will of Christ, neither did it simply admit into some local or universal society. It did this, for it admitted the baptised into the Body of Christ, the Church of the living God, which was the sphere of salvation, and normally of the Holy Spirit’s operations. But it was also in order to the remission of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit: it was a burial with Christ and a resurrection in the likeness of His resurrection; it was the birth of water spoken of in John’s Gospel, and as such, was indeed the ‘bath of regeneration.’ It was the first act, signifying the complete surrender of the whole being to Jesus Christ as Lord, and as such was to be followed by a whole life of active obedience to His will. It translated a man into a new relationship to the Godhead—changed his state—and introduced him into the sphere of grace—the Divine Society” (What Churches of Christ Stand For, Third Edition (Birmingham: Berean Press, 1946), 58–59). They can continue to affirm the Old Testament images for baptism affirmed within the New Testament documents, and like Lindbeck, have concerns with American depictions of the church as a voluntary society. See, for example, this book written by two thinkers associated with the Stone-Campbell Movement: Philip D. Kenneson and James L.  Street, Selling Out the Church: The Dangers of Church Marketing (Nashville TN: Abingdon Press, 1997). It is a mistaken assumption that because parents within believers’ baptism traditions delay baptism for their children, they want their children to grow up and decide for themselves what faith to follow. They assume their children will submit to baptism, share in the church’s faith, and follow Christ just as Thomas Aquinas expected that “as capacity for free choice and intention develops in children that they will come to ‘own’ their faith” (Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt, Holy Teaching: Introducing the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2005), 283n17). 96  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 186. 97  Cheryl M.  Peterson, Who Is the Church? An Ecclesiology for the Twenty-First Century (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), 105 and 117n35. It is also surprising that given Lindbeck’s emphasis upon a narrative ecclesiology, he does not spend more time expounding upon narrative texts like Acts.

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ministry and (2) the centrality of the forgiveness of sins to proclaiming that message and forming Christian community. In addition, Jesus tells his disciples “that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem” (Luke 24:47). Peterson summarizes this critique, saying, Rather than define the church’s mission by its practices, as Lindbeck’s cultural-­ linguistic method seems to warrant, the narrative of the New Testament defines the church by the movement of the Holy Spirit in its proclamation. This movement not only enables these practices but also a new life in Jesus’ name, lived out in koinonia, at the heart of which is the gift of forgiveness of sins and the breaking down of personal, cultural, and social barriers.98

Barter Moulaison echoes this argument, by saying, “For, without the Spirit’s work, mere practices are lifeless.”99 Also, both Peterson and Barter Moulaison have concerns about treating the church solely as Israel. Barter Moulaison says, “Specifically, as I shall argue, the Pentecostal event of the Church urges the Christian theologian to consider the manner in which the Spirit disrupts the continuity of Israel, not necessarily in a supersessionist manner but nevertheless in ways that will fundamentally challenge Israel’s self-understanding as the universal mission to the nations is inaugurated.”100 Peterson has a similar critique, and it provides a helpful corrective to Lindbeck’s ecclesiology: “At Pentecost, the Holy Spirit gives the church a distinctive identity and calling within Israel as a part of God’s people.”101 Peterson says that within Acts, the Holy Spirit plays three roles for the church. First, the Spirit guides the church’s mission. In Acts 1, Jesus tells his followers, just prior to his ascension, to wait in Jerusalem for “the promise of the Father,” for “John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now” (1:4–5). They will be empowered by the Holy Spirit and “you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (1:8).  Ibid., 105.  Jane Barter Moulaison, Lord, Giver of Life: Toward a Pneumatological Complement to George Lindbeck’s Theory of Doctrine (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007), 129. Barter Moulaison’s critique of Lindbeck on this front involves not only his ecclesiology but also his entire theological and ecumenical methodology and practice. 100  Ibid., 108. 101  Peterson, Who Is the Church?, 106. 98 99

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Peterson notes that Luke’s pneumatology resembles the Old Testament’s descriptions of a “Spirit of prophecy” (e.g., Gen 41:38; Num 24:2; Judg 3:10; 6:34; 1 Sam 10:10; Neh 9:30; Isa 48:16; Ez 2:2, 3:24; Hos 9:7; Mic 3:8). At the same time, however, Luke does not neglect the Spirit’s soteriological role, for the restoration of Israel (1:6) plays a key role in LukeActs. This too follows the Old Testament, for, “The Old Testament prophets attributed the restoration of Israel to the working of the Spirit (Isa. 32:15, 44:3, 59:21; Ezek. 36:27, 37; 39:29; Hag. 2:5; Zech. 4:6, 6:8, 2:10). During the exilic and postexilic periods, the coming restoration and renewal were articulated primarily in terms of a transformation and renewal of the people by the Spirit.”102 In Acts 2, the Spirit is poured out upon the gathered followers of Jesus like “tongues of fire,” and the people began to speak in the native languages of those gathered in Jerusalem (2:3–4). Peter cites the prophet Joel, saying, In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters will prophecy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. Even upon my slaves, both men and women, In those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophecy. (2:17–18)

Peter’s sermon, as well as other passages in Acts, connects this pouring of the Spirit with forgiveness of sins and the renewal of life (Acts 2:38, 5:31–32; 10:43: 11:18; 10:43). Peterson also notes that the Spirit empowers the church to proclaim the word, even in the face of persecution. For example, in Chap. 5, when Peter and the apostles are brought before the high priest, the council, and the elders of Israel, they are reminded that they were told to cease proclaiming the name of Jesus. Verses 29–32 then say: But Peter and the apostles answered, “We must obey God rather than any human authority. The God of our ancestors raised up Jesus, whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior that he might give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. And we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him.”  Ibid., 108.

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Peterson notes here that not only does the Spirit empower them, but witnesses alongside them. Second, the Spirit is the “‘verifying cause’ by which certain groups are incorporated into God’s eschatological people.”103 This leads to the breaking down of barriers. The story of Cornelius and his household exemplifies this. Acts 10 says that Cornelius is a “centurion of the Italian cohort” and a “devout man who feared God with all his household” (vv. 1–2). Cornelius has a vision telling him to send men to summon the apostle Peter to his house (vv. 4–8). Peter in turn also has a vision in which he is told to kill unclean food and eat it, to which Peter demurs, saying, “By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is profane or unclean” (v. 14). Then, however, the voice says to him, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane” (v. 15). As Peter puzzled over the meaning of this vision, the Spirit said to him, “Look, three men are searching for you. Now get up, go down, and go with them without hesitation; for I have sent them” (vv. 19–20). Shortly after, the men from Cornelius arrived to summon him, and the following morning, he went with them to see Cornelius. After Cornelius recounted the story of his vision, Peter responded, “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him” (vv. 34–35). Peter then began to recount the message of Jesus to Cornelius’ household (vv. 35–43), but while he was speaking, “the Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard the word. The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles” (vv. 44–45). Peter then said, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” (v. 47). Peter also says something similar as he recounts this story to the believers in Jerusalem 11:15–17: “And as I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell upon them just as it had upon us at the beginning. And I remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said, ‘John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’ If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?” Similar events of the Spirit also occur among the Samaritans in Acts 8 and upon the “disciples” in Acts 19:1–10. The spread of the gospel to new peoples is recounted in the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15. While some at the Council argued that Gentiles must 103

 Ibid.

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accept circumcision in order to follow Jesus, Peter, Paul, and Barnabas testified to the Council what they had witnessed among the Gentiles as they have accepted Jesus. James then connects this acceptance of the gospel of Jesus with Israel’s restoration, as he cites Amos 9:11–12, saying: After this I will return, and I will rebuild the dwelling of David, which has fallen; from its ruins I will rebuild it, and I will set it up, so that all other peoples may seek the Lord— even all the Gentiles over whom my name has been called. (vv. 16–17)

Peter said that they should put no undue burden upon these Gentile believers, and the Council agreed with him, and they sent a letter to these Gentile believers, which says, “For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to impose on you no further burden than these essentials: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from fornication. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well” (vv. 28–29). Third, the Spirit sustains these early Christian communities and draws them into communion with God and with one another. As Acts 2:42 says, “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship (koinonia), to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” Luke describes this common life further in verses 43–47: Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.

Peterson notes that in a second description of the church’s communal life, seen in 4:32–37, the word koinonia is not used, but the church is said to be “of one heart and soul” (v. 32) and that “the description of their shared common life strongly echoes the description in Acts 2:42–47.”104 This  Ibid., 110.

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second description also comes immediately after a passage in which it says, “When they all prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken; and they were filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God with boldness” (4:31). The Spirit also brings judgment upon those who put their own greed before the community’s life (5:1–11). Peterson says that the Spirit continues to grow and sustain this community as it expands into new geographical regions, functioning as “the primary missionary in this movement.”105 Peterson argues not only that the Spirit is the “primary missionary,” but also that the church “finds its identity in the activity of the Holy Spirit.”106 For this reason, she begins her ecclesiology here. While some Protestants have been leery of rooting ecclesiology in pneumatology, Peterson argues that Luther did not demonstrate this reluctance. In the Large Catechism, Luther discusses the church in the context of the Third Article on the Creed, the article on the Holy Spirit. He says that the Holy Spirit makes a Christian holy, and does so, “Through the Christian church, the forgiveness of sins, and the life everlasting.”107 The Spirit enables the preaching of the Word. Apart from the Spirit, no one can acknowledge Jesus is Lord, and there is no church. Luther says, “For where Christ is not preached, there is no Holy Spirit to create, call, and gather the Christian church, and outside it no one can come to the Lord Christ.”108 Peterson argues that Luther here “follows a narrative structure, drawing out the story of salvation in which the Holy Spirit acts as the character who enables the church to live out the new life given in Christ’s resurrection as ‘the communion of saints’ in the ‘forgiveness of sins.’”109

Discipleship and Missional Ecclesiology Those from Christian traditions that place a greater emphasis upon evangelism may struggle with aspects of Lindbeck’s thought—in particular, his claim that “Christians have as much reason as Jews to eschew heedless invitations to outsiders (whether rootless or adherents of other religions)  Ibid., 111.  Ibid., 6. 107  Martin Luther, “The Large Catechism,” in The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, ed. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001), 416. 108  Ibid. 109  Peterson, Who is the Church?, 121. 105 106

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to bear the burdens of election.”110 If damnation is only possible within the church, why attempt to evangelize others and open them up to the possibility of damnation? Nevertheless, there is much in Lindbeck’s thought that can benefit them. Robert Webber notes that the International Consultation on Discipleship, which consisted of 450 church leaders from 54 countries, met in Eastbourne, England, in September 1999. The statement produced by the Consultation noted that many Christian converts fall from their faith, that the church has “growth without depth,” and that many within the church do not live lives of holiness. The Consultation concludes that in the Great Commission, Jesus calls the church not to make converts, but to make disciples. They define discipleship as “a process that takes place within accountable relationships over a period of time for the purpose of bringing believers to spiritual maturity in Christ.”111 To improve in this, they argue the church must reconnect discipleship and evangelism, reassess their current practices and structures in evangelization, see the local church as the context in which witness and discipleship occur, affirm the practice of mentorship, see the Holy Spirit as teacher, and call all Christians to live in submission to God’s kingdom.112 Webber seeks throughout his volume, Ancient-Future Evangelism, to respond to the Consultation by calling upon the church to reappropriate the ancient church’s practice of catechesis in order to have a holistic view of discipleship. While there are obvious differences between the projects of Webber and Lindbeck, they share this common emphasis upon the need for the church to catechize disciples rather than simply making converts. They also both understand that while there does need to be an initial process of catechesis when people decide to follow Christ and join the church, discipleship is a lifelong process within the context of the church as a witnessing and worshiping community. Lindbeck also shows in his work here that he has certain commonalities with missional ecclesiology, and thus would be of interest to theologians and ministers associated with the Gospel and Our Culture Network, Missio Alliance, and other similar organizations. First, Lindbeck shares the concern of some, like Darrell Guder, that an overemphasis has been placed  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 193.  Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Evangelism: Making Your Church a Faith-Forming Community (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2003), 13. 112  Ibid., 14. 110 111

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by some within the Christian tradition upon salvation as primarily in the future and in heaven. Second, both focus upon the church as a witnessing community. Third, Lindbeck agrees that Christian witness is embodied communally and not only by individuals. Fourth, while Lindbeck does, as a Lutheran, place an emphasis upon preaching, he also does not limit witness to preaching, but sees it as a part of the church’s communal life and worship. Fifth, Lindbeck also attempts to describe the witness and mission of the church holistically, rather than limiting it to forgiveness or some other similar feature.113

Conclusion In his project on the church as Israel, Lindbeck emphasizes Israel’s and the church’s communal role as witness to the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus, the triune God revealed in Scripture, and to the salvation that God brings. God calls upon his people to be “a light to the nations” (Is 42:6; cf. Matt 5:14), to witness to the true light (Jn 1:9). Israel and the church witness to God through service to God, God’s people, and the world (in that order). This witness and service may lead to an increase in numbers, but it may also lead to persecution. Christians should not seek to convert people in mass, but instead to retrieve the ancient practice of extended catechesis; to train people to “speak Christian.” He also calls upon the church to recapture baptism as a “community-creating event.”114 While Lindbeck does argue that the church is Israel in the new age, he does not spend significant time discussing the role of the Holy Spirit in the life of the church. For this reason, Cheryl Peterson and Jane Barter Moulaison have sought to augment Lindbeck’s project through an increased focus on the Holy Spirit. This chapter engages their constructive critiques in connection with the book of Acts. Lindbeck’s project on the church as Israel would be useful not only for those focused upon ecumenism, but also for those more fully engaged in issues related to Christian discipleship and missional ecclesiology.

 For a brief description of Guder’s work, see Peterson, Who Is the Church?, 88–90.  Lindbeck, “Postmodern Hermeneutics and Jewish-Christian Dialogue,” 109.

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The word of the Lord came to me: Mortal, take a stick and write on it, ‘For Judah, and the Israelites associated with it’; then take another stick and write on it, ‘For Joseph (the stick of Ephraim) and all the house of Israel associated with it’; and join them together into one stick, so that they may become one in your hand. And when your people say to you, ‘Will you not show us what you mean by these?’ say to them, Thus says the Lord God: I am about to take the stick of Joseph (which is in the hand of Ephraim) and the tribes of Israel associated with it; and I will put the stick of Judah upon it, and make them one stick, in order that they may be one in my hand. (Ezekiel 37:15–19) I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world. (John 17:20–24) I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. C. Brown, George Lindbeck and The Israel of God, Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74757-2_8

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patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all. (Ephesians 4:1–6)

Previous chapters have discussed ecclesiological and ecumenical aspects of Lindbeck’s Israelology. Lindbeck argues that the church needs to retrieve and appropriate the identity of Israel in order to build consensus. In order to do so, they must look to the Old Testament as an ecclesiological textbook, thereby taking account of the entire canon of Christian Scripture. They must also come to see Jesus as the embodiment of Israel, supplementing creedal orthodoxy with an emphasis upon Jesus’ messiahship. The church is then called to socially embody and witness to God’s saving work in Christ, baptizing, catechizing, and making disciples. While the church is called to witness to the triune God’s saving work, a problem exists that obscures that witness: the division of the church. This chapter will discuss some further ecumenical implications of Lindbeck’s project by putting his emphasis upon the church as Israel in dialogue with his contribution to the Princeton Proposal for Christian Unity, a statement sponsored by the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology.1 It will then discuss three ecumenical consequences that Lindbeck argues stem from his project on the church as Israel: peoplehood, communal repentance, and the role of individuals and individual communities in ecumenism. The chapter will then close with a discussion of ecclesial structures, the Eucharist in the divided church, and the relationship of the church as Israel to communion ecclesiology.

Princeton Proposal In a 2005 essay, “Ecumenisms in Conflict,” Lindbeck gives a brief sketch of the history of the ecumenical movement from 1950 onward, giving particular emphasis to convergence ecumenism as represented in New Delhi (1961), Vatican II’s Unitatis Redintegratio (1964), Baptism, 1  Lindbeck said in 2004, “Among the other ecumenical activities in which I have been engaged in the last dozen years, the most important is the so-called Princeton Proposal.” “Paris, Rome, Jerusalem,” 406n40.

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Eucharist, and Ministry (1982), and the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (1999). Lindbeck notes, however, that as time has gone on, both convergence and noncovergence (Life and Work) forms of ecumenism have weakened. Lindbeck argues, “The renewal of unitive ecumenism will have to come from within Christian communities without the support of external pressure.”2 Lindbeck then asks what type of unitive ecumenism should predominate. He gives as options two recent proposals for the future of ecumenism. One—the proposal of Michael Kinnamon—represents the current “ecumenical establishment,” while the other—that of the “Princeton Proposal” (PP)—represents some “outsiders” to ecumenism. Lindbeck was a participant in the writing of PP, and favors the ecumenical approach given therein.3 Lindbeck notes three particular hypotheses that the two proposals have in common. They both lament the neglect of unitive ecumenism and the reduced emphasis of a theological basis for Christian unity. They also both argue that while the church’s disunity damages the church’s witness, “the church’s unity is an end in itself,” and not simply a means to world evangelism or social work.4 Lindbeck argues, however, “Unanimity [between the two proposals] disappears, however, when one turns to the relation between this unitive part of the ecumenical task and its other aspects.”5 For Lindbeck, the most important disagreement between Kinnamon and PP deals with the relationship of Faith and Order to Life and Work. 2  Lindbeck, “Ecumenisms in Conflict,” 224. An abbreviated version of this discussion can be found in George Lindbeck, “The Unity We Seek: Setting the Agenda for Ecumenism,” The Christian Century 122, no. 16 (August 9, 2005): 28–31. 3  Lindbeck, “Ecumenisms in Conflict,” 224. In addition to Lindbeck, the signatories of PP, sponsored by the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology, were Methodists William Abraham and Geoffrey Wainwright; Presbyterians Mark Achtemeier and Bruce McCormack; Roman Catholics Brian Daley and Susan K. Wood; Orthodox John H. Erikson and Vigen Guroian; Lutherans Lois Malcolm, Michael Root, William G. Rusch, and David Yeago; Episcopalians R.R. Reno and J. Robert Wright; and Evangelical Telford Work. (Root and Reno later became Roman Catholics.) The statement is included in Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson, eds., In One Body Through the Cross: The Princeton Proposal for Christian Unity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003). Kinnamon’s proposal was published in The Vision of the Ecumenical Movement and How It Has Been Impoverished by Its Friends (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2003). Subsequently cited as PP. 4  Lindbeck, “Ecumenisms in Conflict,” 225. 5  Ibid.

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Kinnamon sees three principal problems with PP.  First, he thinks PP does not sufficiently celebrate diversity within the church. Second, Kinnamon argues that PP does not properly question the credibility of the apostolic tradition, particularly due to its “oppressive” history. Third, Kinnamon believes that PP neglects the church’s ministry of justice, and therefore downplays Life and Work ecumenism. Kinnamon says, The Princeton Proposal operates out of a God-church-world paradigm: the church must get its act together in order to carry the message of wholeness and reconciliation in the world. Many contemporary Christians who care about things ecumenical think more in terms of God-world-church: the church participates in God’s reconciling mission in the world and thereby discovers something of its own unity. The movement has got to insist that these are not either-or.6

Lindbeck summarizes Kinnamon’s position as saying, “Faith and Order (the cooperative search for unity) and Life and Work (the cooperative service of, e.g., justice) are coequal ends in themselves, for they issue from distinct paradigms,” but are also “inseparable because they reciprocally reinforce each other.”7 PP, on the other hand, argues that the God–church-world paradigm that Kinnamon criticizes is the only proper paradigm, and “Faith and Order therefore takes precedence over Life and Work in somewhat the same way that faith takes precedence over works in Reformation teaching.”8 PP calls for a renewal of the biblical ecumenical vision expressed in the 1961 “New Delhi Statement on Unity.” Paragraph two of the New Delhi statement has particular importance in this call: We believe that the unity which is both God’s will and his gift to his Church is being made visible as all in each place who are baptized into Jesus Christ and confess him as Lord and Saviour are brought by the Holy Spirit into one fully committed fellowship, holding the one apostolic faith preaching the one Gospel, breaking the one bread, joining in common prayer, and having a corporate life reaching out in witness and service to all and who at the same time are united with the whole Christian fellowship in all places and all 6  Michael Kinnamon, “Can These Bones Live?,” Christian Century 120, no. 18 (September 6, 2003): 38. 7  Lindbeck, “Ecumenisms in Conflict,” 226. 8  Ibid.

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ages in such wise that ministry and members are accepted by all, and that all can act and speak together as occasion requires for the tasks to which God calls his people. It is for such unity that we believe, we must pray and work.9

The New Delhi statement here spells out three fundamental areas in which the church should be united. First, the church should have unity in faith and doctrine by “holding the one apostolic faith preaching the one Gospel.” PP says, “When truth and unity are played against one another, both are represented.”10 A lack of doctrinal discipline has often brought about disunity, but conversely some denominational renewal movements create division in relation to structural unity. An emphasis must be placed upon both. Second, the church should have a common life of service: “a corporate life reaching out in service and witness to all.” In this, PP encourages shared service and missionary efforts between different traditions and discourages the practice of “sheep stealing.” All of this should be centered upon common prayer.11 Third, the church should have reciprocity in membership and ministry by being “united with the whole Christian fellowship in all places and all ages in such wise that ministry and members are accepted by all.” It notes, however, that mutual recognition of ordination or full communion agreements are not in and of themselves sufficient, for these arrangements can often prevent concrete and visible unity within local churches. PP says, “Until leaders of local churches see their members as baptized into the whole people of God, there will be no visible unity of all in each place.”12 PP also argues that there are proper steps that can be taken to bring about unity, and recognizes that the achievements the ecumenical movement has already made are great and important. 9  “New Delhi Statement on Unity,” § 2. https://www.oikoumene.org/en/resources/ documents/assembly/1961-new-delhi/new-delhi-statement-on-unity. Accessed December 17, 2015. See PP, §§ 15, 46–56. 10  Ibid., § 47. 11  Ibid., § 52. PP also calls for caution and discernment in this shared service, for service “can disintegrate into mere ideological commonality rather than genuine Christian cooperation.” The church should take care not to allow “secular principles and expertise” to “supersede Christian principles of discernment as the basis for cooperation…. The result is a party mentality founded in political ideology rather than unity grounded in the Christian imperative of justice and charity” (§ 51). 12  Ibid., § 53.

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The gospel has indeed been taken to every corner of the world. Separated churches have made genuine progress toward doctrinal agreement. From being divided in their prayers, Christian communities have discovered greater mutuality in worship of God, and have come to draw widely on the liturgical and devotional resources of each other’s traditions. Churches have begun to consult together in matters that effect their common life; their ministers have begun to give pastoral care across institutional boundaries. In these and other ways, the “unity which is both God’s will and his gift to his Church” is indeed “being made visible.”13

PP also notes, however, that the ecumenical movement still has a long way to go, and that these achievements “must be sustained and enhanced.”14 PP says, “The way of obedience will require of our churches disciplines of self-sacrifice which we pray the Spirit may inspire, for we are redeemed only as the Spirit reconciles us ‘in one body through the cross’ (Ephesians 2:16).”15 PP thus does not see diversity as a good in and of itself, and understands Christian unity as “a gift of God” given “through the Holy Spirit,” a vocation of the church, a “permanent and central aspect of Christian life,” “an acknowledgment of God’s present authority and activity,” and “a promise for the future.”16 There are, therefore, two poles of Christian unity: (1) the current “bond of faith and communion in Christ” that already exists among believers and (2) God’s continuing calling to “draw us toward a deeper common life of reconciliation, mutual love, and shared labor, in which Christ’s prayer might fully be answered: ‘that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me, and have loved them even as you have loved me’ (John 17:23).”17 The second type depends upon the first for its existence. The New Testament makes a deep connection between unity and mission. PP says, “The Epistle to the Ephesians presents the whole Christian mystery as the mystery of God’s unification of all things in Christ (1:10), which takes form most concretely in the reconciliation of Jew and Gentile  Ibid., § 18.  Ibid. 15  Ibid., § 1. 16  Ibid., §§ 2–7. 17  Ibid., § 8. PP does not approach Christian unity with a sentimental naivety, but notes various obstacles, particularly structural and institutional ones, that currently prevent full visible unity. See §§ 9–10, 24–25, 28–29. 13 14

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‘in one body through the cross’ (2:16).”18 God has already brought about this reconciliation, and he has called his church to conform its life to and take up the ministry of reconciliation (Eph 1:20–23; 2:4–7, 13–16, 21–22; cf. 2 Cor 5:11–21). PP argues that the cosmic vision sketched out within Ephesians is displayed in the union of Jew and Gentile within the church. PP also points to Jesus’ high priestly prayer in John 17, which it calls “the charter-text of modern ecumenism.” It notes three things about this text. First, the church’s unity must be visible in order that it can be seen by the world. Second, Jesus’ prayer shows that “salvation, unity, and witness are intertwined.”19 To receive the gift of salvation is to be brought into unity with God and the church, and through that to be a witness to the world. Third, PP connects Jesus’ prayer in John 17 with Jesus’ commandment in John 15:12: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” Also, just as John 17 roots the unity of believers in the unity of the Father and the Son, Jesus’ command that his followers love one another is rooted in the love of the Father and Son: “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love” (15:9). Jesus also gives this new commandment in John 13:34–35. There, it also says that this love must be visible: “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” Christian unity, however, is not only connected to the church’s mission and witness but is a good in and of itself. PP says, “Unity is not merely a means to mission, but rather a constituent goal: God gathers his people precisely in order to bring unity to a divided humanity.” Therefore, the church should not accept disunity as normal, for to do so would cause the church to “turn away from the mission God has given to us.”20 While greater willingness to accept those in separated communities as fully Christian is in many ways a positive development, PP reiterates “friendly division is still division.”21 The church’s disunity is still “a counter-­ testimony to the gospel.”22 The New Testament not only encourages Christians to maintain unity but also warns against the dangers of disunity. For example, in 1 Corinthians 1, Paul calls upon the Christians in Corinth to “be in agreement and that  Ibid., § 27.  Ibid., § 28. 20  Ibid., § 19. 21  Ibid., § 44. 22  Ibid., § 12. 18 19

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there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same purpose” (1:10). He does so because of a report from Chloe’s people that “there are quarrels among you” (1:11). They are divided into different parties that claim Paul, Apollos, Cephas, or Christ as their leader. While Paul is committed to knowing “nothing … except Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (2:2) and the wisdom of God (2:7), they are committed to human wisdom. PP says of Paul’s discussion of the Corinthians’ disunity, “Alongside the preaching of Christ there is inevitably now ‘boasting’ (1:31) in the special virtues of the group, and the cross of Christ is ‘emptied of its power’ (1:17).”23 PP argues that the contemporary church should heed Paul’s warnings, for, “The spiritual failure of Christianity in the modern era stems in many ways from ongoing division.”24 PP then notes three ways in which the church’s disunity, and its complacency about that disunity, threatens the church’s mission. First, various Christian communities often emphasize what differentiates their group from other Christian groups rather than emphasizing what they hold in common. This leads them to identify as “Roman Catholics or Lutherans or Methodists, or a ‘family-oriented’ congregation or an ‘inclusive’ or ‘traditional’ congregation first, and Christians only second.”25 This has led to a kind of “tribalization” of different Christian communities, with each group treated as a kind of ethnic community.26 Second, churches in various locales often uncritically participate in the power and class struggles of that region that divide people from one another. So rather than overcoming these divisions and bringing about unity between divided peoples, “churches may reinforce their divisions.”27 In the United States, the most visible example of this is the division between white and black churches, but other less visible divisions based upon class or other cultural differences also exist. Third, attempts to maintain unity within a given tradition may lead to further divisions from Christians in other traditions. It may lead people to emphasize loyalty to a given tradition over loyalty to the gospel.28 PP says it does not make these observations in order to criticize current forms of Christian unity. It says, “Nonetheless, the pervasive and debilitating consequences of division must not be ignored.”29  Ibid., § 30.  Ibid., § 31. 25  Ibid., § 32. 26  Ibid., § 42. 27  Ibid., § 33. 28  Ibid., § 34. 29  Ibid., § 36. 23 24

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Division impedes the church’s ability to authoritatively teach the faith because of its inability to agree on what constitutes the apostolic witness. The church, therefore, cannot agree on how to order its common life. This leads to distortions of the gospel message, and it creates confusion for those inside and outside of the church. This is exacerbated by the phenomena of “church shopping” within North America and other similar contexts. Different church traditions, styles of worship, and forms of communal life are treated as consumer options.30 PP concludes, “The instability and confusion which Christian division introduces into normative teaching and the ordering of practice in our churches can be overcome only if we commit ourselves to the cause of visible unity.”31 Disunity wounds the church, undermines the church’s mission, and negatively impacts the church’s ability to teach the faith.32 Unity, however, does not entail uniformity. Rather, “The unity of the church is rather the paschal unity of those who have been assigned to one another by a common Lord and summoned to a shared task.”33 Since Christian unity is paschal unity, it must not be abstracted from the message of the gospel. Christian unity must thus have a doctrinal basis, and also include witness, service, worship, and prayer.34 Lindbeck concludes his discussion of the two proposals saying, “Without Life and Work, Faith and Order is dead, but without the primacy of Faith and Order, Life and Work is deadly; it becomes a countersign of the church, ‘simply another arena for pursuing political agendas,’ to use Kinnamon’s own words.”35 Lindbeck perceives Kinnamon’s proposal as saying that “disaster threatens only when Faith and Order is forgotten,” but as PP emphasizes, “the marginalization of Faith and Order that has occurred in the ecumenical movement is inescapable once Life and Work is legitimated by the world-sets-the-agenda-for-the-church paradigm.”36 Therefore, Lindbeck argues that PP is the preferable option if one must choose one or the other.37  Ibid., §§ 37–40. See Kenneson and Street, Selling Out the Church, passim.  PP, § 43. 32  Ibid., §§ 31–43, 57. 33  Ibid., § 23. See also §§ 30–31. 34  Ibid., §§ 46–51. 35  Lindbeck, “Ecumenisms in Conflict`,” 226. 36  Ibid. 37  Lindbeck does not completely dismiss Kinnamon, however. He notes, “Even if one does not think his synthesis is viable, one can respect his motives. He is trying, it may be sug30 31

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Consequence 1: Peoplehood Lindbeck argues that his proposal of the church as Israel brings with it “three ecumenically important consequences.” Each of these consequences connects with PP. He says, “First, as in Judaism, individuals are called to be part of the community, not primarily for their own personal salvation (though rejection of the call can be damning), but in order to contribute to the world’s redemption by their membership in the body of Christ, the enlarged Israel, which God has unconditionally chosen to be his light to the nations for the redemption of the world.”38 Therefore, both election and salvation apply to the community first and to the individual second.39 In making this claim, Lindbeck reacts against the tendency within theological liberalism to reject the notion of a chosen people as a form of “primitive tribalism.”40 He reaffirms Israel as an elect people and the church as the continuation of Israel. Early Christians developed a sense of peoplehood analogous to the way that Israel had, and Lindbeck calls upon the church to retrieve and reappropriate it. He sees this sense of peoplehood as important to bringing about unity among God’s people. PP argues that God has formed a people “in order to bring unity to a divided humanity.”41 Because of the church’s role in bringing unity to divided people, the church cannot accept disunity as normal. PP calls the church’s division “sin, which is visited upon the churches in their own internal weakness and unfaithfulness.”42 And again later, “Sin divides us against ourselves (Romans 7:15–22).”43 Fortunately, however, the gospel does not only pertain to individuals, but to communities. PP says, The gospel is a public proclamation through which the Holy Spirit summons men and women from their locations within the human world to gather around a common center, the crucified and risen Jesus Christ. This gested, to make room in the ecumenical tent for the weaker brothers and sisters of whom Scripture tells us we should take special care. Moreover, it is not only these sisters and brothers but also the ecumenical cause that would suffer if JPIC concerns were simply excised” (227). 38  Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel,” 93. 39  Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel Lecture One,” 23–24. 40  Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel,” 79–80. 41  PP, § 19. 42  Ibid., § 1. 43  Ibid., § 19.

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movement takes concrete social form in the gathering of the Christian assembly. In turn, the church becomes the corporate agent of the gospel’s continuing proclamation of unity.44

PP draws this insight from 1 Peter 2:9, in which the church is called “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, God’s own people,” and they are called to “proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.” The prophets of the Old Testament anticipated this movement of people (Isa 2, 66; Joel 3; Zeph 3; Zech 8) and the New Testament reflected further upon the unity between Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female, Barbarian and Scythian, rich and poor around Jesus Christ (Gal 3:28; Col 3:11; Jam 2:1–5). There is thus a sense in which the church should celebrate its diversity and the differences of gender, class, ethnicity, and giftedness within the church. At the same time, PP rightly cautions that an emphasis upon diversity can be “easily conscripted to sinful purposes.”45 PP then says, “The apostolic message does not affirm diversity for its own sake. It calls men and women of every human origin into a holy community and confers on them a new, shared identity in confession of the crucified and risen Lord.”46 Christians, as members of the body of Christ, must continue to analyze and discern what unites and differentiates them from one another in order to promote growth (Eph 4:15–17). They must eschew both sectarianism and indifference and affirm a common life of agape, which is “more than sentiment or inward attitude. It is a common life into which we must enter.”47 And this new common life that Christians share is “sanctified by the Holy Spirit, with apostolic form and content.”48

Consequence 2: Communal Repentance Lindbeck then says, “Second, it follows from unconditional election and the world historical mission the church shares with Israel that communal repentance for the disunity of Christians with the Jews is both possible and imperative.”49 As previously noted, Lindbeck sees 1 Corinthians 10 as a  Ibid., § 20.  Ibid., § 22. 46  Ibid., § 23. 47  Ibid., § 24. 48  Ibid., § 25. 49  Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel,” 93. 44 45

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paradigmatic text in understanding the church as Israel. He contends that while Paul sees the church in the mirror of Israel, later Christians came to see only the favorable language in the Old Testament as pertaining to the church. Lindbeck argues, “The Christian reluctance to be as communally self-critical and penitent as Old Testament Israel (and much contemporary Judaism) remains alive and is a major barrier to non-­ supersessionist retrieval.”50 He says further, “The difficulty of communal repentance was increased by the supersessionist conviction that the covenant with Israel has been revoked.”51 The church came to believe that just as God cast off Israel, God would cast aside unfaithful churches. In this view, individuals can repent and ask for God’s mercy, but communities cannot. This view of conditional election led to an increase in divisiveness: groups in error cannot continue to be a part of God’s people. Also, Lindbeck warns that rooting God’s election in the church’s faithfulness can lead to triumphalism. So this problematic way of interpreting Scripture, combined with a supersessionist triumphalism, inverted election, and a lack of a sense of the church’s peoplehood led to a neglect of repentance as a communal practice. One can see within the Scriptures numerous cases of prophets calling upon Israel, as a people, to repent. For example, in Deuteronomy 30:1–10, Moses reminds the people to keep in mind the blessings and curses given in the preceding chapters. Moses tells the people to repent and obey God. He says that if they do so, even if the people are scattered and in exile, God will have compassion and gather the people if they repent. He says, echoing the Shema, “Moreover, the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants, so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, in order that you may live” (v. 6). Isaiah 1:2–20 focuses upon the need for Israel to repent of its sin, or what Brevard Childs calls “God’s demands for a radical reversal.”52 There is, as seen in verses 18–20, both a reassurance of God’s willingness to forgive and provide, but also a warning that “if you refuse and rebel, / you  Ibid., 92.  Ibid. 52  Brevard S. Childs, Isaiah: A Commentary, The Old Testament Library (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 20. 50 51

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shall be devoured by the sword” (v. 20). Then 1:21–31 says that Israel will be refined by God through discipline. Other sections of Isaiah focus on repentance. For example, much of Isaiah 28–33 deals with Israel placing their trust in other things, like other gods (28:15, 18), oppression (30:12–14), or alliances with other nations or military strength (30:15–16; 31:1), and calls upon them to repent and place their trust in God. They are told, “In returning and rest you shall be saved” (30:15), and again, “Therefore the Lord waits to be gracious to you; / therefore he will rise up to show mercy to you. / For the Lord is a God of justice; / blessed are all those who wait for him” (30:18). They are also reminded, in passages like Isaiah 58:1–8, that simply going through a repentance ritual is not sufficient. These rituals must be accompanied by a change in behavior. One can find similar discussions and calls in the other biblical prophets of the Old Testament, and these calls continue in the ministries of John the Baptist, Jesus, and the early church in the Gospels and Acts (e.g., Matt 3:2, 4:17; Acts 2:38). We not only see calls to repentance, but also depictions of Israel corporately repenting. For example, in Nehemiah 8, Ezra assembled the people together and “brought the law before the assembly, both men and women and all could hear with understanding…. He read it facing the square before the Water Gate from early morning until midday, in the presence of men and the women and those who could understand; and the ears of all the people were attentive to the law” (8:2–3). Ezra was joined by other men who helped give the law of God “with interpretation. They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading” (8:8). They instructed the people not to mourn, “For all the people wept when they heard the words of the law” (8:9). They instead instructed them to eat and drink and send portions to the poor. They then celebrated the festival of booths (8:13–18). After the celebration, however, the people “were assembled with fasting and in sackcloth, and with earth on their heads. Then those of Israelite descent separated themselves from all foreigners, and stood and confessed their sins and the iniquities of their ancestors” (9:1–2).53

53  For more on repentance in the Old Testament, see Joel R.  Soza, “Repentance,” in Dictionary of the Old Testament: Pentateuch, ed. T. Desmond Alexander and David W. Baker (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 684–687; Mark J. Boda, “Repentance,” in Dictionary of the Old Testament: Prophets, ed. Mark J.  Boda and McConville, Gordon J. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 664–670.

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PP says, “We all suffer from the wounds of division.”54 These wounds damage various aspects of the church’s life. PP therefore calls upon the church to examine itself and develop corporate, penitential disciplines and habits.55 Just as the apostle Paul was willing to suspend his freedom in the gospel for the sake of others, PP calls upon the churches to do the same. To further the cause of Christian unity, churches will need to “renounce the selfishness and insularity that we all dislike and easily see as sinful. It will also require our churches to embrace a spiritual poverty that has the courage to forego genuine riches of a tradition for the sake of a more comprehensive unity in the truth of the gospel.”56 Though Lindbeck insists that his project primarily concerns intra-­ Christian relations, he notes that it also has implications for Jewish-­ Christian dialogue. Indeed, in a sense, he says, “Jewish-Christian relations can be understood as ecumenical rather than interreligious.”57 Lindbeck is not alone in making this claim. While Barth’s work has its supersessionist remains, he says, “Even the modern ecumenical movement suffers more seriously from the absence of Israel than of Rome or Moscow.”58 In addition, Joseph Ratzinger argues, “I am convinced that the question of when the final union of all Christians will come about remains, in fact, unanswerable. One must not forget that this question also includes the question of the union between Israel and the Church.”59 Lindbeck reaffirms throughout his later work that God has not revoked his covenant with Israel, and calls the traditional supersessionist view “scripturally indefensible.”60 Lindbeck is also not alone in calling for the church’s repentance for the church’s treatment of the Jews. In a letter written to Cardinal Cassidy, Pope John Paul II says, “Therefore she encourages her sons and daughters to purify their hearts, through repentance of past errors and infidelities.  PP, § 70.  Ibid., § 70–71. 56  Ibid. 57  Lindbeck, “Paris, Rome, Jerusalem,” 405n38. See Ochs, Another Reformation, 39. 58  Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.3.2 (London: T & T Clark, 2004), 878. 59  Joseph Ratzinger, Church, Ecumenism, & Politics: New Endeavors in Ecclesiology, trans. Michael J. Miller (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008), 119. Lindbeck cites J.-M. R. Tillard as saying, “The first schism, and the most weighted with consequences, is without any doubt the rupture between Israel and the Church, a rupture in the Church of God.” As cited in Lindbeck, “Paris, Rome, Jerusalem,” 405–406n38. 60  Lindbeck, “Paris, Rome, Jerusalem,” 408. 54 55

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She calls them to place themselves humbly before the Lord and examine themselves on the responsibility which they too have for the evils of our time,” which includes the Shoah.61 The Roman Catholic Church’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews also says, At the end of this Millennium the Catholic Church desires to express her deep sorrow for the failures of her sons and daughters in every age. This is an act of repentance (teshuva), since, as members of the Church, we are linked to the sins as well as the merits of all her children. The Church approaches with deep respect and great compassion the experience of extermination, the Shoah, suffered by the Jewish people during World War II. It is not a matter of mere words, but indeed of binding commitment.62

The Commission then quotes from an address given by Pope John Paul II: “We would risk causing the victims of the most atrocious deaths to die again if we do not have an ardent desire for justice, if we do not commit ourselves to ensure that evil does not prevail over good as it did for millions of the children of the Jewish people … Humanity cannot permit all that to happen again.”63 Lindbeck argues that those who have not heard the gospel “live theologically in the time before Christ, incapable of either acceptance or rejection.”64 He extends this further by saying, “Furthermore, post-­ biblical Judaism which has not heard the gospel (and how can it hear in view of Christian persecution?) lives theologically before Christ and cannot be equated with the unbelieving Jewry of which Paul speaks. Nothing in [Paul’s] account prevents us from saying that the synagogue, like remnants in ancient Israel, is at times more faithful to God’s will and purposes than are unfaithful churches.”65 He also points to Paul’s words in Romans 11:29: “The gifts and calling of God irrevocable.” God has not cast the Jews aside, and they continue to remain a part of the overarching narrative of God’s people. Acknowledging the church as Israel does not necessitate

61  Commission for Religious Relations With the Jews, We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, 1998, accessed January 29, 2018, http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_ councils/chrstuni/documents/rc_pc_chrstuni_doc_16031998_shoah_en.html 62  Ibid. 63  Ibid. 64  Lindbeck, “The Story-Shaped Church,” 168. 65  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 185. See also Lindbeck, “The Story-Shaped Church,” 168.

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denying Israelhood to the Jews.66 He includes himself among those Christians who “have finally realized they do not want a world without Jews.”67 Lindbeck concludes, “Unbelieving Jewry will ultimately be restored.”68 Or again, “Ultimately … in what for Judaism will be the First Coming and for Christianity, the Second, the church and Israel will in extension coincide. All things, and climactically death, as Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians, will be subject to Christ, and Christ to God, so that God may be all in all (15:24–28).”69 Lindbeck also argues that appropriating the identity of Israel “frees [Christians] to hear God speak not only through Old Testament Israelites, but through postbibical Jews.”70 While Christians claim the Old Testament as Christian Scripture, this does not necessitate that they deny the legitimacy of Jewish interpretation of their shared text, the Tanakh, even when Christian and Jewish interpretation cannot be easily reconciled. Christians can turn to Jews for aid in how to read Scripture, and also on how to survive as a diaspora community in a post-Christendom world. This does not mean that Christians should mimic rabbinic Judaism, but that some of their strategies can instruct the church in its reading of Scripture. There is some precedent for allowing contradictory interpretations to stand alongside each other, rather than forcing harmony between them, in rabbinic interpretation. Lindbeck sees this practice as important not only for recognizing the legitimacy of Jewish interpretation of Scripture, but for resolving issues that divide Christian communities from one another. Also, as Christians maintain a repentant stance in their willingness to learn from Jews, Christian anti-Judaism will wane.71 Lindbeck also briefly addresses the place of Jews in the church. While he refers to Jews for Jesus as a “dubious phenomena,” he argues that as long as the church remains almost exclusively Gentile, it will be difficult for the church to retrieve an understanding of the church as Israel.72 While Jews and Gentiles are reconciled by Christ in the “enlarged  Lindbeck, “What of the Future?,” 359–360.  Lindbeck, “Response to Wyschogrod,” 206. In this same piece, he says further, “You will further observe that on this view of the chosen people, the whole of Israel, includes non-­ Christian Jews as well as gentile and Jewish Christians.” 68  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 185. 69  Lindbeck, “Response to Wyschogrod,” 206–207. 70  Lindbeck, “What of the Future?,” 364. 71  Ibid., 365; Lindbeck, “Messiahship and Incarnation,” 81–82. 72  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 191. 66 67

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commonwealth of Israel” (see Eph 2:12), they are united “without … losing their respective identities.” He makes this case by arguing, “It is precisely because they remain distinct that they can be the paradigmatic instance and portent of the unification without homogenization of humankind in God’s coming kingdom.”73 The church, made up of Jews and Gentiles, exists as a transforming and serving movement within the messianically enlarged Israel in this time between the times. It is as “a servant to the circumcised” that Christ enabled the gentiles to “glorify God for his mercy” (Rom. 15:8–9). One might say that the church, contrary to historic Christian suppositions, exists for Israel, not Israel for the church. Israel subsumes the church, not vice versa. Or, to the use the technical language in which the tradition discussed these matters, the church is not the antitype, the fulfillment, and Israel the type, but Christian and Jew together are the (at present grossly marred) type of the antitype which is the coming kingdom.74

Lindbeck has no interest in attempting to proselytize Jews. He in fact tells Michael Wyschogrod, “It is as unecumenical for me to try and make you a Christian as to attempt to convert a Roman Catholic to Lutheranism.”75 He notes that Wyschogrod is also disinterested in attempting to convert gentiles to Judaism. At the same time, Lindbeck notes that just as Wyschogrod would not refuse to allow a Gentile to convert to Judaism, so Lindbeck would welcome into the church those Jews who have “come to know Israel’s God through Jesus.”76 He notes, however, that doing so may create some strain between Christians and Jews.77 Lindbeck says it is not for him, but for Jews to decide whether or not they welcome his non-supersessionist understanding of the church as Israel. He points to the words of Jacob Neusner, who says, “The Church long ago identified itself as Israel and, through the shared Scriptures, with

 Lindbeck, “Response to Wyschogrod,” 206.  Ibid., 207. 75  Ibid., 208. 76  Ibid. He also sees Torah observance as an option for these converts, but not, as Wyschogrod argues, an obligation (207–208). It is important to note that Lindbeck’s friend and colleague, Hans Frei, was raised in a secular Jewish family. 77  John Wright, ed., “Israel, Judgment, and the Future of the Church Catholic: A Dialogue Among Friends,” in Postliberal Theology and the Church Catholic (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012), 120. 73 74

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Israel. In our day, all the more so, the Church joins suffering Israel.”78 Lindbeck then concludes, “To this I would add only the obvious comment that the church can do this only by learning to see itself once again in the mirror of Israel while, in contrast to the past, fully acknowledging that the covenant with the Jews has not been revoked.”79 Some other Jewish scholars, like Peter Ochs, see some promise in Lindbeck’s project. Ochs refers to the non-supersessionist Christian theology that Lindbeck and others advocate as indicative of “another reformation.”80

Consequence 3: The Role of Individuals and Individual Communities His next point then deals with individuals within the community: “Third, and finally, the biblically mandated role of individuals in helping the church to become penitent is that of suffering and rejoicing on behalf of the church.”81 As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12:26, “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.” PP agrees with Lindbeck on this point, arguing that “the burdens of disunity are shared by all,”82 and in addition that “all churches and Christians are called to be agents of unity.”83 Individual Christians and churches, however, have different roles and responsibilities, and “each must do that which is within its competence.”84 Each Christian and each Christian community has been affected by division in different ways. The contributors of PP note that because they speak from but not for their churches, they have more freedom to speak, while others who are official representatives of their churches have certain restraints.85 PP also notes that local churches, either in the form of congregations, diocese, or presbyteries, also have a particular role to play. They must see themselves as agents of unity and should be concerned for other churches in their areas. PP also argues, “Local churches should find structured ways 78  Jacob Neusner, Christian Faith and the Bible of Judaism: The Judaic Encounter with Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1987), xiv. 79  Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel,” 94. 80  Ochs, Another Reformation. See especially his treatment of Lindbeck on pp. 35–62. 81  Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel,” 94. 82  PP, 36. 83  Ibid., § 57. 84  Ibid. 85  Ibid., § 58.

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to be responsible to one another in mission.”86 In addition, various denominational structures can play a key role in ecumenism through bilateral dialogues and service. They must, however, be aware of the ways in which they can maintain division through a “will-to-survival that consistently limits ecumenical action.”87 PP then turns its attention to ecumenical bodies like the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States and the World Council of Churches. While these councils have in the past played key roles in ecumenical circles, PP says, “they have become increasingly irrelevant to the pursuit of unity, as political and social agendas have pushed aside concern for unity in the confession of the faith and the sacraments.”88 This has occurred as Faith and Order concerns have been pushed to the side. PP calls upon these councils to reembrace the centrality of visible unity as seen in the New Delhi statement. PP then addresses worldwide organizations like the Lutheran World Federation or Methodist World Council. It notes the ways in which they have served as ecumenical agents in the past, especially through participation in bilateral dialogues with the Roman Catholic Church. PP raises a concern, however, that these bodies may, like denominational structures, become too concerned with insular concerns and not see themselves as being in service to the entire church. PP says, “These bodies must see themselves as agents of unity among those who share their common tradition, but also on behalf of the wider church. They must recognize their provisional status.”89 PP then points to a few Christian traditions and notes the particular roles they may play within the ecumenical movement. First, they point to the Roman Catholic Church, the largest Christian body, and therefore an important player in these discussions. While some Christians are troubled by its papal claims, PP says, “the bishop of Rome is also the only historically plausible candidate to exercise an effective worldwide ministry of unity.”90 It then calls upon the pope and the magisterium to teach the faith in such a way that it is capable of reaching and shaping Christians in other communions. PP provides three suggestions for how the Roman Catholic Church can accomplish this. First, it must not return to a pre-Vatican II,  Ibid., § 59.  Ibid., § 60. 88  Ibid., § 61. 89  Ibid., § 62. 90  Ibid., § 65. 86 87

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anti-Protestant, polemical posture. Second, the pope should live up his title as servus servorum Dei (“servant of the servants of God”) by self-­ sacrificially serving what Unitatis Redintegratio calls “separated brothers and sisters.” Third, Roman Catholic magisterial discussions should regularly include non-Catholic consultants and “receive reliable counsel regarding the faith and life of the entire Christian community.”91 Second, PP points to the role of Evangelicals and Pentecostals. It notes first that other churches may “benefit from their vitality, their zeal for evangelism, and their commitment to Scripture.”92 These Christians and churches, through their interdenominational participation, often break down old barriers, form new alliances, and bring a different vision of Christian unity to the table. PP sees five interconnected ways that Evangelicals could contribute to and receive from increased ecumenical participation. First, they should not refuse invitations to participate in ecumenical dialogue. Second, they should not assume other Christians have a dead faith, and should instead discern and celebrate Christian faith within other traditions. Third, they should not practice sectarianism, but should instead “practice hospitality and pursue catholicity.”93 Fourth, they should further embrace a fuller apostolic tradition and “recognize the historical legitimacy, charismatic authority, and spiritual vitality of other forms of Christian language and practice.”94 Fifth, they should not see their resources and gifts as only benefiting themselves or their own congregations and denominations but should instead use them to benefit all Christians.95 Third, PP acknowledges the role of Orthodox churches in the ecumenical movement. The Orthodox have emphasized the church’s indivisibility and the problematic nature of denominationalism. PP says, “This witness has been vital to the beginning and authenticity of modern ecumenism.”96 Their continuity with the ancient tradition and emphasis upon prayer and liturgy have also benefited the ecumenical movement. PP also notes, however, that the Orthodox churches have their own “divisive

 Ibid., §§ 65–66.  Ibid., § 67. 93  Ibid., § 68. 94  Ibid. 95  Ibid. PP actually states that it lists four ways, but it uses the word “rather” to introduce each of them, and uses it five times. 96  Ibid., § 69. 91 92

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and nationalistic proclivities,” and that these “should be abandoned.”97 Doing so will not only benefit the Orthodox, but all Christians. In his work, Lindbeck notes the particular role of the Reformational (Lutheran and Reformed) churches in bringing about Christian unity. Lindbeck argues that in the aftermath of Vatican II, anti-Catholicism has waned among Protestants. In this context, Protestants have less and less in common with each, and so the identifier “Protestant” has come to mean less and less. Some type of qualifier, such as “Reformation,” “liberal,” or “fundamentalist” is needed to define what is meant by Protestant. He says, also, that this context calls “Reformation Protestants” like himself to be “more catholic,” and drawing upon imagery from the Old Testament, to “think of themselves as Catholic exiles who now should be welcomed back into the Catholic communion, not despite but because of their Reformation heritage.”98 He argues that the Reformation, even as late as Calvin, did not see itself as anti-catholic, but rather opposed what they saw as medieval corruptions of the older catholic tradition. They saw themselves as “simply a reform movement within the Catholic Church of the West. They argued that they were good catholics who taught nothing contrary to the tradition of the fathers or even, as the Augsburg Confession of 1530 taught it, to ‘the Church of Rome in so far as its teaching can be gathered from its older and better writers.’”99 The Reformers did not see themselves as having created a new church, but as people “temporarily” and “unjustly expelled” from the Roman church. They even delayed in ordaining new ministers for a time until a shortage of clergy forced them to a couple of decades

 Ibid.  George Lindbeck, “Vatican II and Protestant Self-Understanding,” in Vatican II: Open Questions and New Horizons, ed. Gerald Fagin, Theology and Life Series 8 (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, Inc., 1984), 60. See also Lindbeck, “The Reformation Heritage and Christian Unity,” 496. In this, Lindbeck continues to maintain his earlier distinction between a “corrective” and “constitutive” view of the Reformation, affirming the former. See, for example, “An Assessment Reassessed: Paul Tillich on the Reformation,” The Journal of Religion 63, no. 4 (October 1983): 380; “Confessional Faithfulness and the Ecumenical Future: The J.L.  Neve Memorial Lecture,” Trinity Seminary Review 12 (1990): 63–65; “Lutheranism as Church and Movement: Trends in America since 1980,” Lutheran Theological Seminary Bulletin 71, no. 1 (1991): 47; “The Meaning of Satis Est, or … Tilting in the Ecumenical Wars,” Lutheran Forum 26, no. 4 (1992): 22–23. 99  Lindbeck, “Vatican II and Protestant Self-Understanding,” 62. 97 98

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after the Reformation began.100 In particular, he calls his Lutheran tradition to be a “movement of confessional renewal within the Catholic Church of the West” or “an agent of evangelical renewal within rather than outside the ancient churches of the West (and also East) which comprise the great majority of Christians.”101 He does so even though he believes his own denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, “appears to be capitulating to the Zeitgeist and losing the struggle for confessionional integrity for the foreseeable future.”102 He notes that the Reformers made a significant contribution to scriptural exegesis that this was to retrieve “the pre-Reformation conviction that Scripture is primary and is to be christologically interpreted.”103 He says that in this, they did not try and read Scripture apart from tradition, but rather read Scripture by critically engaging voices from the past. He notes some parallels between the Reformers and Verbum Dei, Vatican II’s Constitution on Divine Revelation. He says, “There also the appeal is fundamentally to Scripture christologically interpreted, and tradition is viewed primarily as the Church’s understanding down through the ages of the scriptural witness to revelation.”104 He argues that Christian unity is not possible apart from this stance toward Scripture, for, “There must be some measure of agreement on the way to seek together for what is authentically Christian.”105 Simply trying to derive some kind of “lowest common denominator” is not a sufficient basis for unity. Yet he also says, “It is only when the Bible is studied assiduously and communally within ecumenical rather than divisive interpretive frameworks that we can expect ecumenism to acquire the force of the Word of God.”106 He calls upon Reformation Protestants to retrieve these emphases and to share them with Christians of other backgrounds.

100  Lindbeck, “Vatican II and Protestant Self-Understanding,” 62–63; Lindbeck, “The Meaning of Satis Est,” 22. 101  George Lindbeck, “Ecumenical Directions and Confessional Construals,” 120. 102  Lindbeck, “The Meaning of Satis Est,” 19. See also Lindbeck, “Confessional Faithfulness and the Ecumenical Future”; Lindbeck, “Lutheranism as Church and Movement”; George Lindbeck, “Confessional Subscription: What Does It Mean for Lutherans Today?,” Word & World 11, no. 3 (Summer 1991): 317, 319–320. 103  Lindbeck, “The Reformation Heritage and Christian Unity,” 499–500. 104  Ibid., 500. 105  Ibid. 106  Ibid., 501.

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Ecclesial Structures Lindbeck says, The church consists of those, whether atheists or believers, reprobate or regenerate, who are stamped with the marks of membership in elect communities. Baptism may be easier to ignore than circumcision (though secular Israelis are adept at doing so), but God remembers. Nor does communal degeneracy erase election. The Amhara and the Falasha in Ethiopia may resemble the animist tribes which surround them, but if one admits they are Christian and Jewish respectively, one is obligated to accept them fully as parts, even if defective parts, of the elect people. Similarly, the apartheid churches of South Africa are no less churches than the black ones they oppress, just as 16th-century Catholics and Protestants were part of the same elect people as the Anabaptists whom they jointly slaughtered, and just as the Gush Emmunim and Peace Now advocates, not to mention the warring sects of whom Josephus tells, are and were fully Jewish. To put this point in the terminology of the social sciences, the people of God consists of cultural-­ linguistic groupings that can be meaningfully identified by ordinary sociological and historical criteria as Christian or Jewish (even though their chosenness, needless to say, is known only to faith). This is what is meant biblically, and in the present perspective, theologically by a people.107

Some groups that have quite unbiblical ecclesiologies, such as Quakers and other sects, are “in generally scripturally justified, but they are also deeply problematic.” Despite this, they have “at times been faithful remnants amid the faithless masses.”108 While Lindbeck allows for the church to consist of this big tent, he is not indifferent to church structures. PP also argues that for the church to “realize the unity for which Jesus prayed, they need structures, institutions, and regular practices by which their communion in faith is expressed and formed—structures by which their communion in faith is expressed and formed—structures by which they are gathered together as one people of faith and have access to one another for the sake of mutual care, joint mission, and common service to the world’s needs.”109 PP notes this aware that Christian traditions differ on the importance of church structures. For while Orthodox, Catholics, and some Protestants see certain historic institutional structures as  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 193.  Ibid., 188. 109  PP, § 9. 107 108

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necessary for church unity, Evangelicals and some other Protestants do not. The various members who contributed to the proposal come from each of these groups and have different opinions on what the church’s structures and visible unity should look like.110 Lindbeck provides his own view of church structures in his work on the church as Israel. In one sense, Lindbeck argues that institutional structures of unity and care within the church are “not fundamental.” By this, he means, “Mutual care can be exercised in some circumstances without institutionalized ministries of unity (as, e.g., by the collection for the church in Jerusalem which Paul so energetically promoted).”111 In addition, he argues that a local ministry of word and sacrament is “basic,”112 and has not led to the same kind of division that has been seen over issues of the episcopacy and the papacy, so he focuses primarily on these. Lindbeck seeks to use Israel’s story to address the impasse over church leadership structures. He notes that within the Old Testament, structures of leadership changed when Israel faced new circumstances. The leadership of Moses’ leadership in Exodus–Deuteronomy was followed by that of Joshua and the judges in Joshua–1 Samuel 8. At that point, the people were led by the kings until the exile, at which point the rabbinate developed. He says, “Further, when the kingdom was divided between north and south, both monarchies were for the most part treated in the canonically edited text (even though the final redaction was southern) as legitimate, and worship  Ibid., §§ 9, 45, 54, 63.  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 195. 112  Ibid. Lindbeck argues, “The Reformers shared the early Catholic consensus that the ministry of word and sacrament is divinely instituted, and they also understood ordination as sacramental, i.e., as a rite whereby God in response to the prayers and actions of the community empowers for service. Their objection to calling ordination a sacrament were directed against late medieval views that it conferred a special personal sanctity and made priests members of a privileged caste rather than servants of the gospel…. In any case, the medieval distortions and the later Protestant disregard of the early Catholic consensus are now being overcome among both Roman Catholics (Vatican II) and non-Catholics. In church-oriented ecumenical circles, even if not on popular and ecclesiastical levels, the understanding of the ordained ministry articulated in the Faith and Order Lima document, Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, is now widespread. Further, it has been generally agreed both in the sixteenth century and in the contemporary ecumenical movement that the wider unity of the church should be given synodal and conciliar expression. It is the question of whether it should also be papally and/or episcopally structured which has been the divisive issue” (205–206n20). Lindbeck’s comment here raises questions about how churches should be viewed that do not accept or put into practice the ecumenical consensus of BEM. 110 111

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at Shiloh as well as Jerusalem was acknowledged.”113 He notes that the persisting form of leadership “establishes legitimacy” and that this has “scriptural precedents.”114 He argues that what Christians have to learn from Israel’s story, in this respect, is that debates over church institutions among Orthodox, Roman Catholics, and Protestants are, in one sense, misplaced. He notes, however, that the story of Israel has aspects that support the Roman Catholic position and oppose a kind of Protestant pragmatism that sees issues of church leadership as adiaphora. Lindbeck says, “Israel’s history, like that of any other sizable and enduring people, makes clear that continuity and tradition are functionally important.”115 The institutional aspects of Israel are not only functional, but theological: “It is God who guides his people and orders their common life.”116 This is the case even when God grants the wishes of Israel reluctantly (see 1 Sam 8). Other than during the divided kingdom, God provided leaders and structures for the people to center their lives around and shifts in leadership structure tended not to happen due to internal revolt. Even when the prophets criticized their rulers, they acknowledged their office as divinely appointed. Lindbeck concludes, “In summary, then, leadership structures are treated in the biblical texts as de iure divino, as Catholics would say, and yet as changeable human law, ius humanum, to bring in the Protestant note.”117 Lindbeck argues this narrative understanding of church leadership and structures is, in a sense, open to both Catholics and Protestants. Within it, “The starting point is the conviction that God’s providential guidance of his continuously existing people did not stop with biblical times.”118 This perspective is only possible if one assumes the Spirit has guided the church in the past and will continue to do so in the future. Because of tradition’s importance, the church should not lightly discard leadership structures that God has used in the past: “Ruptures in continuity are to be avoided  Ibid.  Ibid., 196. 115  Ibid. 116  Ibid. 117  Ibid., 197. Lindbeck previously used a similar argument in U.S. Lutheran-Catholic dialogue on the papacy. See George Lindbeck, “Papacy and Ius Divinum: A Lutheran View,” in Papal Primacy and the Universal Church, ed. Paul C.  Empire and T.  Austin Murphy, Lutherans and Catholics in Dialogue V (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Publishing House, 1974), 193–208. 118  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 197. 113 114

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except when absolutely necessary, and even then the search for precedents is important.”119 For this reason, Lindbeck argues that the church should privilege efforts to reform church structures over attempts to jettison them in favor of new ones. Therefore, “The burden of proof is on those who, for example, reject the historic three-fold ministry as this ministry is recommended in the Lima text, Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry.”120 To support this structure, Lindbeck argues that one does not need to demonstrate the superiority of the threefold structure to all other possibilities, “but simply that it can be congruent with the christological center of the faith (which anyone who believes God did not desert his church from the time of the first centuries is bound to admit), and that it is not irrational or impractical (which in view of its present use by some three-fourths of all Christians seems incontestable).”121 Out of respect for the Christian tradition, churches that do not currently have a threefold ministry should “adopt (and adapt) the historic polity for the sake of unity whenever this is practically feasible (which in periods of transition such as the present it often is).”122 This turn to episcopacy is necessary for all within the church who have a concern for ecclesial unity and mutual responsibility.123 At the same time, however, Lindbeck argues that Catholics have made exaggerated claims about their church structures. They have done so by claiming that Jesus Christ and his apostles founded the historic episcopate and that its existence “guarantees the apostolicity of the church’s faith, and is irreversibly indispensable to the bene esse, or plene esse, or even the esse of the church.”124 An understanding of “providentially guided development” must recognize that “the apostolic faith may sometimes be more fully present in nonepiscopal churches,” and that the bishops are not necessary to the church’s esse, while still recognizing the “irreversibility and … necessity” of the historic episcopate “for the well-being or the fullness of being of the church.”125 The episcopate developed early, by the end of the first century, and Lindbeck contends it was “the most successful institutional expression and  Ibid.  Ibid. 121  Ibid. 122  Ibid., 198. 123  Ibid., 200. 124  Ibid., 198. 125  Ibid. 119 120

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support in Christian history of that mutual responsibility which we have seen to be at the heart of the church’s mission.”126 The New Testament tells of times in which Christians, like Paul, called for mutual responsibility among the churches and gathered collections to provide for needy saints in other places (e.g., 1 Cor 16:1–4; 2 Cor 8:1–9:15; Rom 15:14–32). After the apostles died, the church needed a new structure to maintain these connections. He says, “Then the device of requiring each new bishop to be approved and consecrated by neighboring bishops was hit upon, and this developed into an interlocking network covering the Mediterranean world which was both flexible and tenacious enough to contain in a single communion orientations as antithetical as those of Tertullian’s Carthage and Origen’s Alexandria.”127 This structure maintained connections across congregations as instrumental in bringing the Catholic minority into being a catholic majority. It brought about the church’s creeds and liturgies, as well as the canon of Scripture itself. Lindbeck asks if the church sees the authoritative teaching and the scriptural canon as central, then why not also the episcopate? He expresses an understanding and appreciation of the Catholic position in this matter. He says, “Yet, on the other hand, the reader of Israel’s story cannot but observe that the leadership structure in the comparably decisive period of Jewish history did not survive. The question of irreversibility cannot be settled by appeals to Israel’s story. The story provides the framework for reflection, not a formula for automatically settling disputes.”128 Lindbeck argues that the same can be said for the papacy, which divides Catholics from the Eastern Orthodox and other episcopally ordered churches, such as the Anglican Communion. He says, “Many of these, as well as a not inconsiderable number of Protestants, see no difficulty in admitting the providential origins (and, in that sense, divine institution) of the papacy, and they agree that it has greater potentialities for ministering to the church universal than any other existing institution, and yet they resist the contention that Rome must be the center, and that this is irreversibly true.”129 Lindbeck notes that in Israel’s existence, the center of  Ibid.  Ibid., 198–199. He clarifies further, “It is misleading to call this a monarchial or monoepiscopal system, for without the requirement of validation from neighboring churches, one bishop in one place does not unify” (199). 128  Ibid., 199. 129  Ibid. He argues further, “Although they believe it important for the sake of unity to have at the very least a primus inter pares among the bishops, and take it as self-evident that 126 127

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Israel’s life and worship shifted from Shiloh to Jerusalem, and after Jerusalem’s destruction, also existed elsewhere.130 He asks why this could not be the case for the church. This question is particularly poignant as the center of the church’s gravity shifts to the global south.131 This perspective also parallels New Delhi statement, which says, “The achievement of unity will involve nothing less than a death and rebirth of many forms of church life as we have known them. We believe that nothing less costly can finally suffice.”132 PP makes a similar point as well, saying that churches with episcopal structures should come to distinguish between their ministries of oversight and their bureaucratic institutions, which should be seen as “provisional and subject to change.”133 Lindbeck’s defense of the episcopacy is not a call for maintaining the status quo within churches that have bishops, but a call for renewal. He argues that the unifying power of the historic episcopate came from its ability to bring about the unity and mutual responsibility of various local churches. While the episcopate involved a “vertical” element, the historic continuity of the church over time, Lindbeck argues, “It was, rather, the horizontal mutual responsibility for leadership which was the genius of the arrangement, the chief element in its apostolicity.” Despite this strength, “Only traces of this pattern still remain.”134 He argues, “If something approximating this early Catholic episcopate were restored, the resultant worldwide network of tenaciously interconnected yet organizationally self-reliant churches might well have competitive advantages similar to those of the early Catholics.”135 This does not necessarily lead to dismissal of the papacy. Rather, the papacy might be necessary to bring about such an arrangement. Lindbeck says, “To the degree that Rome became the nurturer of a worldwide communion of mutually accountable yet largely autonomous churches, it would prove itself even to some of its sternest both the weight of tradition and contemporary standing point to the Bishop of Rome, yet it seems to them worse than pretentious to affirm as a matter of faith that God will always will it so.” 130  Ibid. He does not deny that Jerusalem continued even in exile and diaspora existence to play a central and unifying role. 131  Lindbeck briefly addresses this shift in “Ecumenical Imperatives for the 21st Century,” 362–363. 132  “New Delhi,” § 3. See also PP, § 15. 133  Ibid., § 63. 134  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 200. 135  Ibid., 201.

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critics the God-chosen center of the whole.”136 Lindbeck argues that churches of the Reformation would welcome this development, for it would fulfill their initial desire to be a reform movement within the church catholic, rather than a separate communion.137

The Eucharist In 1998, Lindbeck was asked to participate in a town meeting on intercommunion held at Yale Divinity School (YDS). The student organizers named the town meeting “Tasting the Eucharist in the Divided Church” after a chapter in Ephraim Radner’s recently published book, The End of the Church: A Pneumatology of Christian Division in the West. Lindbeck says of his presentation, later published in Spectrum, “My remarks were also influenced by that book, not in their details but in their basic claim that the eucharist cannot help but taste bitter in an ecumenical situation such as the contemporary one.”138 He says further, “Christian disunity disfigures all celebrations of the Lord’s Supper no matter how restricted or unrestricted they may be.”139 Lindbeck reflects upon intercommunion and the divided church by reflecting on his years at YDS. He says that when he arrived in the 1940s, 136  Ibid. Lindbeck argues, “Decentralization of the type envisioned here would make possible great variations in Jewish-Christian relations (which, as Karl Barth among others has noted, may well be crucial to the future of the church), in ecumenical developments, and in canon law between different localities and regions. Christians in one area might well be in a position to move much faster on some matters than those in other areas, and this would, of course, be reflected in the candidates they propose to lead them (for initiation of episcopal candidacies would be a local matter as in the early church). If the proposed candidates in a given region were consistently in favor of, e.g., communion with the local Anglicans and/or the ordination of women, and these candidates were acceptable to neighboring churches, Rome would have difficulty in persistently refusing its consent. If it were to do so, to mention one difficulty, some sees might be left vacant indefinitely. The papal role in such a situation could be to mediate between regions of the church that disagreed on such issues so that different local practices could develop without schism. Nothing similar to this, needless to say, is likely to occur in the next generation or two apart from world-historical or ecclesiastical events of the magnitude of World War II or Vatican II. But, on the other hand, there is no reason to suppose that the possibilities of upheaval and change in the next half century will be any less than in the last fifty years” (207–208n29). 137  Lindbeck, “The Reformation Heritage and Christian Unity,” 496. 138  George Lindbeck, “The Eucharist Tastes Bitter in the Divided Church,” Spectrum 19, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 1. 139  Ibid.

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most of the YDS community came from Protestant denominations who had practiced open communion since at least the late nineteenth century. Chapel at YDS only included communion a time or two a semester, and the order of worship resembled nineteenth-century Congregationalism. He says, “The situation, in short, was one in which the Lord’s Supper was for the most part treated as if it were neither bitter nor sweet but rather a bland-tasting anachronism.”140 He does not blame this on intercommunion per se, but in the minimization of the sacraments in much of the Protestantism of the day that made intercommunion easy and possible. As one of the few high church Protestants in the YDS community at the time, Lindbeck says, “It was this down-grading which made much Protestant intercommunion both easy and, if the truth be told, rather bitter for those from more sacramental traditions.”141 He says that this situation changed somewhat by the time he joined the YDS faculty in the 1950s. Some faculty members participated in the early formation of the World Council of Churches and many students likewise participated in the Student Christian Movement. In addition, “The liturgical renewal of that day had as its goal the retrieval of the liturgical heritage of the ancient church.”142 The YDS faculty during this time also adopted the Eucharistic rite of the Church of South India for use in Marquand Chapel. While Lindbeck refers to this rite as “non-­controversially ecumenical,” its adoption still upsets some within the YDS community. He relates an anecdote about a fellow faculty member who disagreed with the use of “This is my body” and “This is my blood” during the distribution of the bread and cup, and assumed that Lindbeck agreed with his concerns. Lindbeck says, “I had misled him about my belief in the real presence by joining in the old quasi-Zwinglian service just as he felt he had misled others in the opposite direction by eating and drinking in accordance with the new South Indian liturgy. Both of us had in our respective ways borne false witness to our faith and were guilty of mendacity—some would say, blasphemy—by signifying fraudulently with sacred things.”143 Lindbeck says, however, that the fear of bearing false witness to one’s faith diminished in the aftermath of Vatican II. For example, he notes that while YDS students in the early 1960s “would have reacted to transubstantiation as both superstitious and cannibalistic were, by the decade,  Ibid.  Ibid. 142  Ibid. 143  Ibid. 140 141

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intrigued and attracted by starkly realistic sacramental language.”144 In the decades since, ecumenical statements on the Eucharist have produced a consensus previously unimaginable. This has led to the perception that open communion in a community like YDS does not require one to bear false witness about their own beliefs. Some thus see intercommunion as “not simply permissible, but obligatory.”145 Lindbeck says that disagreements about intercommunion have been the most painful in his years of ecumenical involvement. He notes his participation in annual dialogues between the Vatican and the Lutheran World Federation that includes theologians and church leaders from around the globe. Warm and close friendships, respect, and theological accord on a number of issues have developed between members on both sides through those dialogues. Lindbeck says, We prayed together daily, but celebrated separately—that is, we attended each other’s eucharists but did not commune. This separation became more troubling year by year as we deepened our agreements on basic issues, not least the eucharist. By the time we reached the specific topic of intercommunion, the pain was agonizing—I use the term advisedly. It was agony not to join at the table of our Lord with those who were among our dearest friends in Christ—closer by far than the vast majority of our fellow Lutherans or Catholics.146

Some in the group wanted to recommend Eucharistic hospitality in special circumstances like those dialogues to their communions, while others did not. Some thought such intercommunion would promote unity and heal division between their two communions, while others thought such thinking unrealistically optimistic. These “pessimists” may agree that the Eucharist can promote unity in some cases, but in the case of those Protestants who minimize the Eucharist’s importance, or see it as a peripheral practice, “it cheapens the eucharist and smothers its unifying power.”147 The optimists argue that some of these concerns with intercommunion are no longer as problematic as they were in the past.  Ibid.  Ibid., 4. 146  Ibid. 147  Ibid. Lindbeck also says, “Moreover, to the extent that intercommunion becomes the practice of a transconfessional avant garde but not of the denominationally divided ordinary membership, it tends to promote an elitist separatism and alienation from church structures rather than unity.” 144 145

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Lindbeck notes that these debates not only involve theology, but pastoral considerations that are always in flux. He says, however, that a general rule can be made: “Whatever the policy, whether that of open or closed communion, the eucharist should be tasted as both bitter and sweet in the divided church.”148 He says that there are objective or ontological reasons for this rule: Because the eucharistic body and the ecclesial body of Christ are inseparable, the divisions which torment the latter are there to be perceived by those who partake of the former. Unhealthy palates may delight in the noxious or be repelled by the wholesome with the result that they triumphalistically and mistakenly sense that the eucharist of their choice, whether open or closed, are unmarred by the church’s disunity. Only the Holy Spirit’s healing of our palates enables us to perceive bivalently in accordance with the truth.149

Lindbeck calls upon the divided church to taste both the sweetness and bitterness present within the Eucharist, and says that whether a communion service is opened or closed is a secondary matter. His own experiences of sitting through closed or separated communion services, such as the times Lutherans and Roman Catholics have celebrated communion separately, have spurred his zeal for Christian unity. He says, though, “If I had not yearned for the sweetness that was also there in the divided eucharist, I would not have tasted the bitterness.”150 He also notes that his experiences of open communion, especially when gathered with Christians from diverse backgrounds, can lead to a greater desire for Christian unity. At the same time, however, there is a danger of missing the bitterness still present in these gatherings. Lindbeck says, “The conclusion, then, is that every decision for or against intercommunion by churches, groups, or individuals may, in God’s good pleasure, be ecumenically fruitful in so far as partaking is both bitter and sweet, but if we taste only the sweetness (perhaps even more than we taste the bitterness) we run the risk of that eating and drinking to our own condemnation of which St. Paul speaks.”151 Lindbeck then comments upon the Roman Catholic guidelines for receiving communion in the light of these reflections. He notes, first, that not even all Catholics are inviting to partake of communion in an  Ibid.  Ibid. 150  Ibid. 151  Ibid. 148 149

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unrestricted manner. Those who have an awareness of unconfessed or unforgiven sin are called upon to refrain, for communion is first of all communion with God, and only secondarily or derivatively with other humans. Lindbeck argues that Protestants and Catholics have historically agreed on this point. Second, non-Catholics are generally not admitted to communion, while Protestants generally admit all baptized Christians to partake. Lindbeck notes that “Protestants are pained by their exclusion, not because they think they are being treated discourteously, but for fear their Catholic friends are dishonoring the Lord’s table, are claiming it as their own, not Christ’s.”152 The Guidelines, however, also include a prayer that because of the common baptism of all Christians, the Holy Spirit may draw divided Christians closer together. Third, while the Guidelines permit some non-Catholics, like the Eastern Orthodox, to partake of communion, the Guidelines also call upon these Christians “to respect the discipline of their own Churches.” Lindbeck sees this call as exemplary. Fourth, the guidelines also address non-Christians, saying that while they are not admitted to communion, they are welcome to the celebration, and also, “we ask them to offer their prayers for the peace and unity of the human family.” Lindbeck too sees this as an exemplary call. While he approves of the open communion practiced by the ELCA, he wishes their guidelines were “equally ecumenical when measured by the taste test.” He says that differences in practice will continue. He concludes, “Pluralism is inevitable, but both those who intercommune and those who do not need to learn to weep together—or at least come as close to doing so as our inhibitions allow.”153

The Church as Israel and Other Ecumenical Proposals Lindbeck understands that no one proposal is a magic bullet that can solve the problem of church disunity. He says, “The recovery of a non-­ supersessionist practice and understanding of the church as Israel is an indispensable though not sufficient condition for ecumenical advance.”154 He acknowledges that his own ecumenical experience was mostly limited

 Ibid., 5.  Ibid. 154  Lindbeck, “The Church as Israel,” 93. Emphasis added. 152 153

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to Lutheran/Roman Catholic relations,155 and he knows that his proposal alone will not bring about the church’s unity and sees ways in which his proposal is compatible with others. Lindbeck does not see his proposal as exclusive to other models of church unity. He sees it as having, to different degrees, a kind of compatibility with the Faith and Order document In Each Place: Towards a Fellowship of Local Churches Truly United, a communion of communions model as seen in some ARCIC dialogues, Karl Rahner’s and Heinrich Fries’ proposal in Unity of the Churches: An Actual Possibility, or in the international Lutheran-Catholic document Facing Unity.156 He concludes: There are yet other possible descriptions of the unity for which to strive. The church’s story is incomplete, and how God will lead cannot be known beforehand. Yet however the goal is described, it must take into account both Catholic and evangelical concerns. The messianic pilgrim people which is the body of Christ in history needs unifying institutional structures. These structures are to be assessed and reformed functionally by the evangelical touchstone of whether they help the churches witness faithfully by all they are, say, and do to Christ, in the power of the Spirit, and to the glory of God the Father. These structures, however, as Catholics stress, are also gifts of God to be gratefully received and obediently used to his glory…. God will lead.157

Lindbeck also provides a sketch of a Lutheran version of “communio ecclesiology” that he believes is compatible with his own discussion of the church as Israel. He says, “One can think of confession of faith, sacrament and service—the three dimensions included in the [Lutheran World Federation’s] description of itself as a communion—as condition, center and consequence respectively.”158 He likens this to the way Lumen Gentium refers to the liturgy as “both summit and source.” He says,

155  Lindbeck says, “Moreover, my ecumenical experience is relatively limited. It has been so heavily focused on Lutheran/Roman Catholic relations that even when I was officially active, I was ill-informed about other dimensions of the global search for unity.” “Ecclesiology and Ecumenism: A Reflection on a Projected Study” (St. Paul, MN, June 5, 1999), 1. 156  Lindbeck was the co-chair of Facing Unity, and he sees it as most compatible with his church as Israel proposal. 157  Lindbeck, “The Church,” 201. 158  George Lindbeck, “The Structure of the Communio,” in Communio and Dialogue, ed. Eugene L. Brand (Geneva: Lutheran World Federation, 1992), 33.

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It is summit because unity in confession and service contributes to and reaches its climax in the full exercise of unity in worship, and it is source because it is chiefly from this gathering together in the proclamation and hearing of God’s word and sacramental participation in his unifying self-­ offering in Jesus Christ that all other unity in the church’s life is derived. The summit and source is, one might say, an end in itself: the church is primarily the liturgical assembly and exists to laud and magnify the triune name. The service of humanity (i.e., the work of love and justice) is an indispensable consequence, but as an overflow or by-product of the eucharistically and baptismally structured union of believers with God in Christ through faith.159

The church’s witness and service to the world stem from its faith. God in one sense uses the church as an instrument in this service, but in another and primary sense, the church exists to “praise, love and obey God for his own sake.”160 He notes, then, that the relation between praise and service is analogous to the relation of faith and works in Lutheran thought. In this, Lindbeck seeks to provide a corrective to a distortion that crept into the Lutheran tradition that made the Confessions “the center rather than the condition of communio.”161 Lindbeck contrasts his version of communio ecclesiology with the service-­centered or instrumental versions of communio that have become more common in ecumenical circles.162 While Lindbeck says that the focus upon service is understandable within the contemporary context, but to make service the “summit and source” is a theological mistake. He says, “Christians must be Christians through faith and the means of grace before they can act together as Christians.”163 It is only through uniting in common faith and worship that churches avoid division in the face of ethical issues. He does not deny that service can strengthen communion, but he says that the “motivation pattern” is different in worship-centered than  Ibid.  Ibid. 161  Ibid. Lindbeck notes that other traditions face other issues. For example, he says, “The Anglican bias has been the reverse of the Lutheran confessionalistic one: consensus in the faith has been neglected though the centrality of common worship through the mutual recognition of sacraments and of ministries has been maintained. In much of neo-Protestantism, in contrast, both consensus in faith and the sacraments lost communal importance” (34n10). 162  Lindbeck says, “The second or instrumental view of communio holds the field by default (or at least it seemed to do so at Curitiba and Canberra according to some of the reports from these LWF and WCC assemblies)” (ibid., 36.). 163  Ibid., 35. 159 160

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in service-centered understandings of communio. He says, “A diakonia-­ centered understanding makes service of humanity the goal, and communio the instrument,” while a worship-centered approach says that “communion in faith, sacraments and service” should be sought “for its own sake as an intrinsically blessed gift (and also command) of God.”164 Lindbeck notes that while service-centered models now predominate, the situation could easily change. He notes the pattern in the United States of connecting social ills with the “widespread collapse of personal morality and the dissolution of the family.” He argues that in light of this recognition, “it becomes persuasive to argue that the church’s greatest contribution to human welfare is in building close-knit interpersonal communities in which God is worshipped and obeyed for his own sake, not because of social (or individual) utility.”165 He argues that the early church did this, as have various monastic communities and even groups like the Quakers, and that the contemporary church can do so again. He says, “Perhaps new contexts will favor a renewal of the conviction that it is precisely by not making communio instrumental that humanity is best served.”166 He further comments on the compatibility of his conception of the church as Israel with communion ecclesiology by saying: The church as Body of Christ emphasized in koinonia theologies is grammatically adjectival to the church as Israel, but it is causally or ontologically primary: it is by being incorporated into the body of Israel’s Messiah that gentiles become members of the Messiah’s people. Such a conceptualization is one way of meeting the Protestant objections of Pannenberg and the Catholic cautionary qualifications of Kasper to the usual forms of the koinonia approach. They risk overlooking that in the analogy between the church and the inner-trinitarian life, as in all theological analogies, similarity is combined with infinite difference.167

 Ibid.  Ibid., 38. 166  Ibid. Lindbeck says, however, “breaking the ecumenical ranks because of the theological instrumentalism (perhaps often more apparent than real) of much of the movement would be wrong” (40n19). 167  Lindbeck, “Ecclesiology and Ecumenism,” 10–11. 164 165

CHAPTER 9

Conclusion

In this work, I have sought to demonstrate the centrality of ecclesiological and ecumenical concerns to Lindbeck’s corpus through a focus upon his description of the church as Israel. The second chapter provides a brief genealogical sketch of how Christians have understood the church’s relationship to Israel. Within his genealogy, Lindbeck argues that there have been a few basic stances that Christians have had toward this issue: appropriation, expropriation, rejection, and neglect. Lindbeck argues that in some way, shape, or form, the church largely identified itself with Israel from the first century until modernity. At that point, due to various political and theological conflicts in Europe, Christians ceased to identify the church with Israel. While some post-Holocaust Christian thinkers have critiqued this identification of the church with Israel and have seen it as contributing factor to Christian anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, Lindbeck notes that the church’s rejection of an identification with Israel did not eliminate supersessionism. He sees the church’s reappropriation of Israelhood as having, within certain constraints, ecumenical benefits. Lindbeck’s work on the church’s relationship with Israel can be divided into two phases. The first phase stems from his work as a Lutheran observer at Vatican II. The third chapter discusses the first phase. In this phase, Lindbeck seeks to discern to what extent Protestants can accept the Roman Catholic Church’s claims for itself and remain Protestant. He does so by drawing a parallel between the church and Israel. In this, Lindbeck asserts © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. C. Brown, George Lindbeck and The Israel of God, Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74757-2_9

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that just as Israel remained the elect people of God despite their lack of faithfulness, so does the church. Chapter 4 begins the discussion of Lindbeck’s second phase. This chapter discusses Lindbeck’s view of Scripture, which he discusses in connection with the history of the modern ecumenical movement. He argues that as the emphasis upon ressourcement has waned, so has the emphasis upon unitive ecumenism. He rejects the rise of an aggiornamento disconnected from ressourcement and calls upon the church to retrieve a classical, narrative-typological approach to reading Scripture. He argues that apart from this retrieval, the church will be unable to identify itself with Israel in a non-supersessionist way, socially embody Christian Scripture, or build ecumenical consensus. Chapter 5 further introduces Lindbeck’s ecclesiology by discussing the Old Testament as ecclesiological textbook and the church as Israel in the new age. Lindbeck argues, “Whatever is true of Israel is true of the Church except where the differences are explicit.”1 He roots his ecclesiology in the narrative of Scripture and emphasizes that the church is a concrete and empirical people. While Christians later ceased applying all of Israel’s story to the church, Lindbeck calls upon the church to reappropriate this narrative. Lindbeck also argues that the church should not root its identity in its faithfulness, but in God’s free election of a people. Chapter 6 discusses Lindbeck’s Christological focus within his theology and in connection with his ecclesiology and understanding of ecumenism. He emphasizes the need for Christians to develop their Christology in connection with the entire canon of Scripture and sees Jesus as both Israel’s Messiah and the Son of God (Matt 16:16). While Christians have generally seen the church as the fulfillment of Israel, Lindbeck argues that Jesus is the only fulfillment of Israel. Jesus is, in addition to being Messiah and Son of God, both savior and exemplar. In connection with these emphases, he draws closer connections between the atonement and justification. He argues that Christians must come to socially embody the message of the gospel in order to be Christ’s witnesses and to further unite with one another. Chapter 7 explores the implications for Christian mission that stem from Lindbeck’s Israelology. He emphasizes that the church, like Israel, is called to communally and faithfully witness to God. It primarily witnesses to God through its worship and secondarily through its service to God, 1

 Lindbeck, “The Church,” 183.

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the church, and the world. While this witness may lead to an increase in numbers, it may also lead to persecution and suffering. Lindbeck calls upon the church, despite the challenges in western culture and the contemporary church, to reappropriate the early Christian practice of extended catechesis. This is needed in order to train people in Christian speech, in the Scriptures concerning Israel, Jesus, and the church, and practices. Lindbeck also emphasizes baptism as a “community-creating event.”2 The chapter then closes with a pneumatological corrective to Lindbeck’s ecclesiology through engagement with Acts. Chapter 8 then discusses some further implications of Lindbeck’s project by putting his work on the church as Israel into dialogue with his contributions to the Princeton Proposal for Christian Unity. He laments the waning of interest in ecumenism and emphasizes the type of ecumenism advanced by New Delhi. He argues that church unity is not simply a means to an end, either social or evangelistic ones, but an end in itself. There are three ecumenical consequences of his project. First, Lindbeck argues that a sense of peoplehood is important to bringing about Christian unity. Second, he argues that the church must repent for intra-Christian disunity as well as its disunity with Jews. Third, Lindbeck addresses the role that individual Christians and churches can have in bringing about Christian unity. Through engagement with the leadership changes in Israel, he addresses Christian difference over church leadership structures. Then, the chapter discusses Lindbeck’s understanding that Eucharist is both bitter and sweet within the divided church. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the compatibility of Lindbeck’s church as Israel proposals with other current ones, most notably that of communion ecclesiology.

How to Read The Nature of Doctrine The argument of this dissertation has meant that I have spent relatively little time on Lindbeck’s famous work, The Nature of Doctrine. As I mentioned in the introduction, I believe that it must be understood within the context of his overall career rather than used as a key to understanding his other writings. Having established the primarily ecumenical and ecclesial thrust of Lindbeck’s project, however, I will now attempt to show briefly

2

 Lindbeck, “Postmodern Hermeneutics and Jewish-Christian Dialogue,” 109.

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how these concerns might inform a more helpful and balanced reading of The Nature of Doctrine. It is important to read the book in relation to both what came before and what came after. This means, first, that it must be understood in the background of Lindbeck’s work as an ecumenist, and in particular with regard to “doctrinal reconciliation without doctrinal change” or “doctrinal reconciliation without capitulation.”3 While some find such a possibility illogical or unlikely, Lindbeck builds upon his previous work and experience to explain the perspectives of ecumenists who say “they have been compelled by the evidence, sometimes against their earlier inclinations, to conclude that positions that were once really opposed are now really reconcilable, even though these positions remain in a significant sense identical to what they were before” (1). So while Lindbeck argues that his approach to the theory of religion and doctrine may be useful for those engaged involved in nontheological study of religion, he argues, “the focus of this book is on intra-Christian theological and ecumenical issues” (xxxiii). In his Pere Marquette lectures, Infallibility, Lindbeck explains how doctrinal reconciliation is possible by drawing upon a few sources: Thomas Aquinas’ and Wittgenstein’s discussions of language, cultural anthropologists like Geertz, and Lonergan’s understanding of consciousness. He says, The conclusion to be drawn is that when Catholics affirm and Protestants deny magisterial and dogmatic infallibility, they are almost certainly not speaking of the same thing and consequently are not contradicting each other in any precisely specifiable sense. Consequently, although their positions are obviously very different, it is not absurd to ask whether they might be reconcilable within a new hermeneutical setting constituted by changes in theology, piety, institutional forms, and the church’s situation in the world.4 3  ND, 1–2. Such an emphasis can be seen in Lindbeck’s work in the 1970s. For example, in Infallibility, he says, “The unity of the churches is not properly attained by surrender, capitulation, or loss of identity on any side” (7). ND will subsequently be cited parenthetically in the body of the dissertation. 4  Lindbeck, Infallibility, 13–14. In ND, he says something similar: “To return to the eucharistic example, both transubstantiation and at least some of the doctrines that appear to contradict it can be interpreted as embodying rules of sacramental thought and practice that may have been in unavoidable and perhaps irresolvable collision in certain historical contexts, but that can in other circumstances be harmonized by appropriate specifications of their respective domains, uses, and priorities” (4).

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Lindbeck carries on this perspective not only in his discussions of infallibility, but also in his discussion of various other issues. He develops his cultural-­linguistic theory of religion and doctrine and emphasizes doctrines as rules not to deny the cognitive or experiential aspects of religion and doctrine, but to sublate them into a theory that can, among other things, make sense of doctrinal reconciliation.5 He also argues a regulative view can help make sense of issues related to doctrinal permanence and change. Lindbeck does not make these claims naively. For example, in ND Lindbeck revisits the issue of infallibility. There he notes that Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants may be able to come to an agreement that infallibility is “immunity from ultimately serious error, an error that divides the church definitively from Jesus Christ” (84). At the same time, Lindbeck acknowledges that given current disagreements on papal infallibility and sola scriptura, it would be difficult to fully reconcile the churches’ perspectives on the issue at hand. He makes the modest claim that the regulative view of doctrine “provides a framework within which ecumenical agreements and disagreements can be meaningfully discussed” (90). Second, ND can be understood as a prologue to Lindbeck’s work on the church as Israel. As mentioned in “Introduction,” Lindbeck originally wrote ND as a prolegomenon to an ecumenical or comparative dogmatics. In the years after the publication of ND, his understanding of comparative dogmatics shifted, and he concluded it must begin with ecclesiology, and in particular, an Israelology. His ecclesiology “makes use of” the cultural-­ linguistic framework.6 As he says in ND: “To become a Christian involves learning the story of Israel and Jesus well enough to interpret and experience oneself and one’s world in its terms” (20). His discussion of what a postliberal theology would look like in Chap. 6 is especially important. There Lindbeck relates faithfulness, applicability, and intelligibility to dogmatic, practical, and foundational theology (98). He shows how his project accounts for each of these types of theology, and 5  He says that “part of the strength of a cultural-linguistic outlook is that it can accommodate and combine the distinctive and often competing emphases of the other two approaches” (ND, 20; see 21–23). He says that within cognitive-propositional, experiential-­ expressivist, and hybrid approaches, “it is difficult to envision the possibility of doctrinal reconciliation without capitulation. Indeed, in the first two the possibility is simply denied: either doctrinal reconciliation or constancy must be rejected” (2; see 3–4). 6  As he says in the “Forward to the German Edition,” “[Israelology] makes use of analyses such are found in the present work, but is not based on them” (xxxii).

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one can see echoes of this discussion in his later work on the church as Israel. First, he discusses dogmatic theology, which he says gives “a normative explication of the meaning a religion has for its adherents” (99). To discuss the role of dogmatic theology, Lindbeck focuses upon faithfulness as coming from an intratextual—as opposed to an extratextual— model of biblical exegesis (99–110). This can be seen in his argument that the biblical narrative defines what is meant by the church as the people of God or the body of Christ rather than predetermining what those terms mean and then reading them into the church.7 Next, Lindbeck discusses applicability. He says, “[Theologies] are judged by how relevant or practical they are to concrete situations as well as by how well they fit the cultural-linguistic systems whose religious uses they seek to describe” (110). This involves futurology, or the attempt to theologically discern how the church should anticipate the coming kingdom of God, but also the attempt to develop forms of life faithful to an intratextual reading of Christian Scripture. This can be seen in Lindbeck’s emphasis upon Christian worship and sacraments. Third, he discusses the intelligibility of a postliberal approach by emphasizing the possibility of ad hoc apologetics and the development of skill, rather than the translation of the Christian faith into a foreign idiom. While some may raise concerns that such an understanding of intelligibility would lead to a “ghettoizing” of Christian theology, Lindbeck denies this charge and argues that such an approach can “free [theology] for closer contact with other disciplines” (115). This can be seen in Lindbeck’s use of social science (Geertz, Berger) or philosophy of language (Wittgenstein) and science (Kuhn, Polanyi), as well as his emphasis upon catechesis and the church as witness to the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus. In each of these three areas, Lindbeck is not only concerned with developing a theology or theological method that is faithful to the past and intelligible in the present, but with the church’s unity. He says, “The reader will recall that the stimulus for this book comes from the conviction that the doctrinal results of the ecumenical discussions of the last decades make better sense in the context of a cultural-linguistic view of religion and a rule theory of doctrine than in any other framework” (121). Then, in the decade after the publication of ND, Lindbeck came to conclude that comparative dogmatics must begin with an understanding of the church and Israel as an elect people. 7

 Lindbeck, “The Church,” 183.

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Areas for Future Research One could, of course, raise several critical questions concerning Lindbeck’s proposal. While he provides a helpful corrective in emphasizing the continuity between Israel and the church, does he sufficiently emphasize the discontinuity that arises in the new age? Does his emphasis upon faith ex auditu conflict with his big tent that includes atheists in the church? Can those in traditions that exclusively practice believers’ baptism accept his account without modification? These questions, and others, can lead to some interesting further areas of study. For example, while Lindbeck references Old Testament motifs and stories like the election of Abraham, the exodus, the division of Israel into the northern and southern kingdoms, the exile, and Israel as an adulterous spouse, his work on the church as Israel spends little time exegeting texts from the Old Testament. He instead focuses primarily on a few New Testament texts (e.g., 1 Cor 10, Eph 2, Rom 9–11) and how these texts draw upon the Old Testament. While I have sought in the pages of this dissertation to supplement his work by exegeting some other passages from the Old Testament, additional work can and should be done on how the contemporary church should read the Old Testament as an ecclesiological textbook. Second, Lindbeck emphasizes, both in his first and second phases, the church as something empirical. So instead of compartmentalizing theological and sociological discussions of the church, Lindbeck’s project argues that theologians must deal with the empirical reality of the divided church theologically. So in addition to the possibility of exploring the relationship of Lindbeck to missional ecclesiology as mentioned in Chap. 6, another interesting area of research would be seeing what areas of convergence exist between Lindbeck and those, like Christian Scharen, who bring together ecclesiology and ethnography.8 One of Lindbeck’s students, Nicholas M. Healy, discusses the need for an ecclesiological ethnography in his writing, and his work could potentially be used as a way to draw Lindbeck into these discussions.9 8  See Christian Scharen, Fieldwork in Theology: Exploring the Social Context of God’s Work in the World, The Church and Postmodern Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015); Christian Scharen, ed., Explorations in Ecclesiology and Ethnography, Studies in Ecclesiology and Ethnography (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012). 9  See Nicholas M.  Healy, Church, World and the Christian Life: Practical-Prophetic Ecclesiology, Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine (Cambridge: Cambridge University

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Third, to what extent can other Christians accept Lindbeck’s discussion of the church as Israel, and with it his application of simul justus et peccator to not only individual Christians, but the church? This may be particularly difficult for Roman Catholics to receive, for while Catholics are willing to ascribe sinfulness to the church’s members, theologians like Charles Journet and Pope John Paul II tend to resist the idea of saying that the church itself is sinful, for the church includes the head of the body—Jesus Christ. Two American Catholic theologians, Healy and William Cavanaugh, have approaches to ecclesiology that are reconcilable to Lindbeck’s description of the church as Israel. Healy critiques John Paul II’s apology for the sins of individual Christians in the Holocaust, rather than the corporate failures of the church.10 Healy goes on to conclude, “It is thus reasonable to hold that acknowledgment of ecclesial sinfulness is an essential part of Christian witness to the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.”11 He affirms, “The eschatological ‘not yet’ reminds us that until the end of the church’s time it remains imperfect and sinful, always ecclesia semper reformanda or semper purificanda.”12 Cavanaugh similarly contends, “The holiness and sinfulness in and of the church should not be neatly divided between visibility and invisibility, the pure and the apostate. As I have argued elsewhere, what we see when we look at the church is not the pure Christ but the Christ who ‘became sin’ for our sakes (II Cor. 5:21).”13 Cavanaugh refers to this as a “pedagogical reading of salvation history,” and notes that others in Christian history have read “difficult passages” in the Old Testament in this way.14 He notes that this pedagogical approach to both the Old Testament and Christian history can be found in church fathers like Irenaeus and in modern theologians like Oliver O’Donovan. While Cavanaugh grants that church history is not Scripture, he also argues that one cannot see church history as discontinuous with the narrative of God’s people c­ ommunicated Press, 2000). Healy also contributed an essay, “Ecclesiology, Ethnography, and God: An Interplay of Reality Descriptions,” to Perspectives on Ecclesiology and Ethnography, Studies in Ecclesiology and Ethnography, ed. Pete Ward (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012), 182–199. 10  Healy, Church, World and the Christian Life, 5–8. 11  Ibid., 9. 12  Ibid., 10. 13  William T. Cavanaugh, Field Hospital: The Church’s Engagement with a Wounded World (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), 160. 14  Ibid., 160–161.

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in Scripture. He argues that Christians should read and understand church history analogously to the way that they read the Old Testament.15 Fourth, Lindbeck says that in developing his Israelology, he makes use of the theory of religion and doctrine that he proposed in ND. He says, however, “They are dispensable when the situation changes or when better intellectual tools are devised for thinking ecumenically in the present post-Christendom and postliberal state of the Church” (xxxii). For example, in Theories of Culture, Kathryn Tanner argues that the cultural anthropology upon which Lindbeck draws, as seen in someone like Geertz, has come under criticism for assuming “that cultures are self-contained and clearly bounded units, internally consistent and unified wholes of beliefs and values simply transmitted to every member of their respective groups as principles of social order.”16 She draws upon later postmodern anthropological models to argue that cultural boundaries are more porous than such treatments suppose, and offers a critique of postliberal theology on this basis.17 Can Lindbeck’s project indeed stand with a different set of sociological and anthropological tools, and if so, what would such an Israelology look like?

Conclusion Lindbeck’s first and second phases in discussing the relation of the church and Israel have a number of similarities. In both attempts, he uses the church/Israel relation to address issues of ecclesial division. He argues that the Protestant Reformation should not be seen as the creation of a new church or churches, a constitutive view, but rather as a reform movement within the church catholic, a corrective view. He articulates an ecclesiology that takes seriously both God’s role in calling and forming a people, as well as the church’s socio-historical existence through time. He discusses the role of the episcopate as an office of unity and allows for the possibility of a reformed papacy as both a divine and human institution. He engages many of the same passages of Scripture (e.g., Rom 9–11), and 15  Ibid., 165. He says, “In both cases sin permeates in abundance and variety; how could it be otherwise when telling a history that is human? In both cases, however, it makes a difference if we do not give priority to the moral reading, but rather see the story as telling how God is acting now to lead humanity to salvation from itself.” 16  Kathryn Tanner, Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology, Guides to Theological Inquiry (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 38. 17  Ibid., passim, but especially 138–159.

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reaffirms that the Jews remain God’s people even when unfaithful. He describes, though in slightly different ways, the church as a diaspora people. Despite these similarities, differences remain. Many of the differences are in tone and language use. For example, he utilizes sacramental analogies (res sacramenti and sacramentum tantum) or discusses the difference between Platonic and Aristotelian ecclesiologies in the first phase, while he drops this terminology in the later phase. He draws more from figures like Karl Rahner and Hans Küng in the early phase, while expressing more concern about their thought in his later work. He is more enthusiastic about the work of aggiornamento in his earlier work, while in his later work, he expresses concern about aggiornamento detached from ressourcement. While he was initially cautiously optimistic about Vatican II, he later came to express concern about the cacophonous ways in which the Council was received. Also, he refers to the church as Israel’s “fulfillment” or describes Jews and Christians as the “Old” and “New People of God” in the first phase, while in the second, he argues that Jesus Christ is Israel’s only fulfillment. Most significantly, within both phases, Lindbeck maintains his commitment to church unity, to his vocation as an ecumenist. His work on the church as Israel, within the context of his corpus as a whole, proves that he is an important and creative voice in Christian theology. It demonstrates that Lindbeck did not relegate himself to issues of method, but instead sought to do constructive theological work in dialogue with Scripture; tradition; the church’s worship and practices; and sociological, literary, and philosophical tools helpful to the theological task. He did not relegate his project to the church, but engaged with the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus; the Triune God who elected a people to be his witnesses in the world. These aspects of his work should determine his legacy.

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Primary Sources: Interviews and Panel Discussions Granfield, Patrick. “George Lindbeck.” In Theologians at Work, 151–164. New York: MacMillan Company, 1967. “Performing the Faith: An Interview with George Lindbeck.” Christian Century (November 28, 2006): 28–35. Phillips, Timothy R., and Dennis L. Okholm, eds. “A Panel Discussion: Lindbeck, Hunsinger, McGrath & Fackre.” In The Nature of Confession: Evangelicals & Postliberals in Conversation, 246–253. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996. Wright, John, ed. “‘I Pray That They Might Be One as We Are One’: An Interview with George Lindbeck.” In Postliberal Theology and the Church Catholic: Conversations with George Lindbeck, David Burrell, and Stanley Hauerwas, 55–75. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012. _______. “Israel, Judgment, and the Future of the Church Catholic: A Dialogue Among Friends.” In Postliberal Theology and the Church Catholic: Conversations with George Lindbeck, David Burrell, and Stanley Hauerwas, 113–132. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012.

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Primary Sources: Archival Material Special Collections, Yale Divinity School Library George Lindbeck Papers, Record Group No. 172 “An Israel-like Church (or The Language of Community and Unity): Scripture, Ecclesiology and Ecumenism in a Postmodern Age.” “Are There Limits to Religious Pluralism? If so, Why?” presented at the IJCIC-­ WCC Consultation, Harvard University, November 25, 1984. “The Church as Israel and the Future of Ecumenism: Lecture One: Israel-Likeness Unites and Disunites,” Wycliffe College, Toronto, Canada, October 23, 2001. “The Church as Israel and the Ecumenism of the Future: Lecture Two: Israel, Non-Christian Religions and Dominus Iesus,” Wycliffe College, Toronto, Canada, October 23, 2001. “Comparative Doctrine: Ecumenism and Narrative Ecclesiology: The Prospects for an Israel-like Church,” 1990. “Dominus Iesus: A Lutheran Perspective” presented at the One Path to God?, Andover Newton Theological School, May 16, 2001. “Doctrine in Christianity: A Comparison with Judaism” presented at the American Theological Society Meeting, Princeton, NJ, April 25, 1987. “Ecclesiology and Ecumenism: A Reflection on a Projected Study,” St. Paul, MN, June 5, 1999. “Election, Christian Apostasy, and the Holocaust,” 1971. “Hans Frei and Biblical Narrative: The Prospects for a Postmodern Anselmianism.” unpublished, November 22, 1989. “Hans W. Frei and the Future of Theology in America.” unpublished, December 2, 1988. “Letter to Robert M. Adams.” “Theological Perspectives: The Waxing and Waning of Religious Belief,” CUNY, November 12, 1987.

Secondary Literature: Lindbeck and Postliberalism Barrett, Lee C. “Theology as Grammar: Regulative Principles or Paradigms and Practices.” Modern Theology 4, no. 2 (January 1988): 155–172. Barter Moulaison, Jane. Lord, Giver of Life: Toward a Pneumatological Complement to George Lindbeck’s Theory of Doctrine. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007.

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_______. “Reconstructing the Nature of Doctrine.” Modern Theology 30, no. 1 (January 2014): 1–31. Mangina, Joseph L. “Hanging on with Chalcedon.” Living Church, January 5, 2014. https://livingchurch.org/2014/01/15/hanging-­chalcedon/. _______. “Retrieval, Repair, and the Possibility of a Christian Humanism.” Pro Ecclesia 27, no. 4 (Fall 2018): 387–398. Marshall, Bruce D. “Absorbing the World: Christianity and the Universe of Truths.” In Theology and Dialogue: Essays in Conversation with George Lindbeck, edited by Bruce D. Marshall, 69–102. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990. _______. “Aquinas as Postliberal Theologian.” The Thomist 53, no. 3 (July 1989): 353–402. _______. “Introduction: The Nature of Doctrine after 25 Years.” In The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age, by George Lindbeck, vii– xxvii. 25th Anniversary Edition. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009. _______. Trinity and Truth. Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Michalson, Gordon E. “The Response to Lindbeck.” Modern Theology 4, no. 2 (January 1988): 107–120. Michener, Ronald T. Postliberal Theology: A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013. Ochs, Peter. Another Reformation: Postliberal Christianity and the Jews. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011. _______. “Being With George Lindbeck’s Being-With,” Pro Ecclesia 27, no. 4 (Fall 2018): 376–386. O’Neill, Colman. “The Rule Theory of Doctrine and Propositional Truth.” The Thomist 49, no. 3 (July 1, 1985): 417–442. Phillips, D.Z. “Lindbeck’s Audience.” Modern Theology 4, no. 2 (January 1988): 133–154. Placher, William C. “Revisionist and Postliberal Theologies and the Public Character of Theology.” The Thomist 49, no. 3 (July 1, 1985): 392–416. Surin, Kenneth. “‘Many Religions and the One True Faith’: An Examination of Lindbeck’s Chapter Three.” Modern Theology 4, no. 2 (January 1988): 187–209. Tracy, David. “Lindbeck’s New Program for Theology.” The Thomist 49, no. 3 (July 1, 1985): 460–472. Trenery, David. Alasdair MacIntyre, George Lindbeck, and the Nature of Tradition. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2014. Wainwright, Geoffrey. “Ecumenical Dimensions of Lindbeck’s ‘Nature of Doctrine.’” Modern Theology 4, no. 2 (January 1988): 121–132.

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Williams, Stephen N. “Lindbeck’s Regulative Christology.” Modern Theology 4, no. 2 (January 1988): 173–186. Wright, John. “The Silent Shifting of Tectonic Plates.” In Postliberal Theology and the Church Catholic: Conversations with George Lindbeck, David Burrell, and Stanley Hauerwas, edited by John Wright, 11–53. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012.

Secondary Literature: Ecclesiology Cavanaugh, William T. Field Hospital: The Church’s Engagement with a Wounded World. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016. The Church: Towards a Common Vision. Faith and Order Paper No. 214. Geneva: World Council of Churches, 2013. Dahl, Nils Alstrup. “The People of God.” Ecumenical Review 9, no. 2 (January 1957): 154–161. Healy, Nicholas M. Church, World and the Christian Life: Practical-Prophetic Ecclesiology. Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. _______. “Ecclesiology, Ethnography, and God: An Interplay of Reality Descriptions.” In Perspectives on Ecclesiology and Ethnography, Studies in Ecclesiology and Ethnography, edited by Pete Ward, 182–199. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012. Jenson, Robert W. “Christ as Culture 1: Christ as Polity.” In Theology as Revolutionary Metaphysics: Essays on God and Creation, edited by Stephen John Wright. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2014. Kenneson, Philip D. Beyond Sectarianism: Re-Imagining Church and World. Christian Mission and Modern Culture. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1999. _______ and James L.  Street. Selling Out the Church: The Dangers of Church Marketing. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1997. Minear, Paul S. Images of the Church in the New Testament. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960. Peterson, Cheryl M. Who Is the Church? An Ecclesiology for the Twenty-First Century. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013. Pope Pius XII. Mystici Corporis Christi [Encyclical on the Mystical Body of Christ], 1943. Accessed January 24, 2017. http://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-­xii/ en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-­x ii_enc_29061943_mystici-­c orporis-­ christi.pdf. Radner, Ephraim. Church. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2017. _______. The End of the Church: A Pneumatology of Christian Division in the West. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998.

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Rahner, Karl. The Christian of the Future. Quaestiones Disputatae 18. New York: Herder and Herder, 1967. ———. The Church After the Council. Translated by D.C. Herron and R. Albrecht. New York: Herder and Herder, 1966. ———. The Church and the Sacraments. Quaestiones Disputatae 9. Herder and Herder, 1963. Scharen, Christian, ed. Explorations in Ecclesiology and Ethnography. Studies in Ecclesiology and Ethnography. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012. _______. Fieldwork in Theology: Exploring the Social Context of God’s Work in the World, The Church and Postmodern Culture. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015. Webber, Robert E. Ancient-Future Evangelism: Making Your Church a Faith-­ Forming Community. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2003.

Secondary Literature: Ecumenics and Jewish-Christian Dialogue Bader-Saye, Scott. Church and Israel After Christendom: The Politics Of Election. Radical Traditions: Theology in a Postcritical Key. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999. Braaten, Carl E., and Robert W. Jenson, eds. In One Body Through the Cross: The Princeton Proposal for Christian Unity. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003. Commission for Religious Relations With the Jews. We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, 1998. Accessed January 29, 2018. http://www.vatican.va/roman_ c u r i a / pontifical_councils/chrstuni/documents/rc_pc_chrstuni_doc_16031998_ shoah_en.html. Congar, Yves. Divided Christendom: A Catholic Study of the Problem of Reunion. Translated by M.A. Bousfield. London: The Centenary Press, 1939. “The First Assembly of the World Council of Churches.” In The Theology of the Churches and the Jewish People: Statements by the World Council of Churches and Its Member Churches, 5–9. Geneva: WCC Publications, 1988. Hunsinger, George., “After Barth: A Christian Appreciation of Jews and Judaism.” In Karl Barth, the Jews, and Judaism, edited by George Hunsinger, 60–74. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2018. Jenson, Robert W. “Toward a Christian Theology of Judaism.” In Jews and Christians: People of God, edited by Carl E.  Braaten and Robert W.  Jenson, 1–13. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003. Kaufman, Thomas. Luther’s Jews: A Journey into Anti-Semitism. Translated by Lesley Sharpe and Jeremy Noakes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

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Kinnamon, Michael. “Can These Bones Live?” Christian Century 120, no. 18 (September 6, 2003): 36–39. _______. The Vision of the Ecumenical Movement and How It Has Been Impoverished by Its Friends. St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2003. Marshall, Bruce D. “Christ and Israel: An Unsolved Problem in Catholic Theology.” In The Call of Abraham: Essays on the Election of Israel in Honor of Jon D. Levenson, edited by Gary A. Anderson and Joel S. Kaminsky, 330–350. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. _______. “Elder Brothers: John Paul II’s Teaching on the Jewish People as a Question to the Church.” In John Paul II and the Jewish People: A Jewish-­ Christian Dialogue, edited by David G. Dalin and Matthew Levering, 113–129. Lanham, MD: Sheed & Ward, 2008. Neusner, Jacob. Christian Faith and the Bible of Judaism: The Judaic Encounter with Scripture. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1987. “New Delhi Statement on Unity.” Accessed April 12, 2018. https://www.oikoumene.org/en/resources/documents/assembly/1961-­n ew-­d elhi/ new-­delhi-­statement-­on-­unity. Novak, David. The Election of Israel: The Idea of the Chosen People. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. _______. “From Supersessionism to Parallelism in Jewish-Christian Dialogue.” In Jews and Christians: People of God, edited by Carl E.  Braaten and Robert W. Jenson, 95–113. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003. _______. “From Supersessionism to Parallelism in Jewish-Christian Dialogue.” In Jews. “Supersessionism Hard and Soft.” First Things 290 (February 2019): 27–31. Ratzinger, Joseph. Church, Ecumenism, & Politics: New Endeavors in Ecclesiology. Translated by Michael J. Miller. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008. Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-­ Semitism. New York: Seabury Press, 1974. Soulen, R. Kendall. The God of Israel and Christian Theology. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1996. Wyschogrod, Michael. Abraham’s Promise: Judaism and Jewish Christian Relations. Edited by R. Kendall Soulen. Radical Traditions: Theology in a Postcritical Key. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004. _______. The Body of Faith: God in the People Israel. First Jason Aronson Inc. Edition. Lanham, MD: Jason Aronson, 1996.

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Secondary Literature: Second Vatican Council Flannery, Austin, ed. “Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions: Nostra Aetate.” In The Basic Sixteen Documents Vatican Council II: Constitutions, Decrees, Declarations: A Completely Revised Translation in Inclusive Language, 569–574. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2014. _______, ed. “Decree On Ecumenism: Unitatis Redintegratio.” In Vatican Council II: The Basic Sixteen Documents: Constitutions, Decrees, Declarations: A Completely Revised Translation in Inclusive Language, 499–523. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2014. _______, ed. “Dogmatic Constitution on the Church: Lumen Gentium.” In Vatican Council II: The Basic Sixteen Documents: Constitutions, Decrees, Declarations: A Completely Revised Translation in Inclusive Language, 1–95. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2014. _______, ed. “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World: Gaudium et Spes.” In Vatican Council II: The Basic Sixteen Documents: Constitutions, Decrees, Declarations: A Completely Revised Translation in Inclusive Language, 163–282. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2014. O’Malley, John W. “Vatican II: Did Anything Happen?” In Vatican II: Did Anything Happen?, edited by David G.  Schultenover, 52–91. New  York/ London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2007.

Secondary Literature: Hermeneutics and Interpretation of Scripture Behr, John. “The Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching.” In On the Apostolic Preaching, by Irenaeus, 7–26. Popular Patristics Series 17. Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997. Boda, Mark J. “Repentance.” In Dictionary of the Old Testament: Prophets, edited by Mark J. Boda and McConville, Gordon J., 664–670. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Ecumenical, Academic, and Pastoral Work: 1931–1932. Edited by Victoria Barnett, Mark S. Brocker, and Michael B. Lukens. Translated by Anne Schmidt-Lange, Isabel Best, Nicolas Humphrey, and Marion Pauck. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 11. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2012. Boring, M.  Eugene, and Fred B.  Craddock. The People’s New Testament Commentary. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004. Byassee, Jason. Praise Seeking Understanding: Reading the Psalms with Augustine. Radical Traditions: Theology in a Postcritical Key. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007. Childs, Brevard S. Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflection on the Christian Bible. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992.

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_______. Isaiah: A Commentary. The Old Testament Library. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001. Craddock, Fred B. Luke. Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching, 1990. Croatto, J. Severino. Exodus: A Hermeneutics of Freedom. Translated by Salvator Attanasio. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1981. Dickens, W.T. Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theological Aesthetics: A Model for Post-­ Critical Biblical Interpretation. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. Donaldson, Terence L. Jews and Anti-Judaism in the New Testament: Decision Points and Divergent Interpretations. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2010. _______. Judaism and the Gentiles: Jewish Patterns of Universalism (to 135 CE). Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007. Frye, Northrop. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Toronto: Academic Press Canada, 1982. Goldingay, John. “Servants of Yahweh.” In Dictionary of the Old Testament: Prophets, edited by Mark J.  Boda and J.  Gordon McConville, 700–707. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2012. Hauerwas, Stanley. Unleashing the Scripture: Freeing the Bible from Captivity to America. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1993. Hays, Richard B. The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New Creation, A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics. San Francisco: HarperOne, 1996. _______. Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness. London: SPCK, 2014. Hunsinger, George, ed. Thy Word is Truth: Barth on Scripture. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012. Kelsey, David H. Proving Doctrine: The Uses of Scripture in Modern Theology. Trinity Press Edition. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1999. Meeks, Wayne A. “A Hermeneutics of Social Embodiment.” Harvard Theological Review 79, no. 1–3 (July 1986): 176–186. Migliore, Daniel L., ed. Reading the Gospels with Karl Barth. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2017. Mitchell, Henry H. Black Preaching: The Recovery of a Powerful Art. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990. Rhodes, Ben and Martin Westerholm, eds. Freedom Under the Word: Karl Barth’s Theological Exegesis. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2019. Soza, Joel R. “Repentance.” In Dictionary of the Old Testament: Pentateuch, edited by T. Desmond Alexander and David W. Baker, 684–687. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003.

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Strawn, Brent A. The Old Testament Is Dying: A Diagnosis and Recommended Treatment. Theological Explorations for the Church Catholic. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2017. Wright, N.T. Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2013.

Secondary Literature: History, Philosophy, and Sociology Austin, J.L. How to Do Things With Words. Edited by J.O.  Ormson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962. _______. Philosophical Papers. Edited by J.O. Ormson and G.J. Warnock. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962. Bellah, Robert N., Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. New York: Perennial Library, 1985. Cherry, Conrad, ed. God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny. Revised and Expanded Edition. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Cherry, Conrad. “Introduction.” In God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny, edited by Conrad Cherry, 1–21. Revised and Expanded Edition. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Eusebius. “The Life of the Blessed Emperor Constantine.” In A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace. Vol. I. Second Series. New York: Christian Literature Company, 1890. Greer, Rowan A. Broken Lights and Mended Lives: Theology and Common Life in the Early Church. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986. Harnack, Adolf von. The Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries. Translated by James Moffatt. Second, Enlarged and Revised Edition. Vol. I. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1908. Mead, Sidney E. The Nation with the Soul of a Church. New  York: Harper & Row, 1975. Meeks, Wayne A. The Moral World of the First Christians. Library of Early Christianity. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986. Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol. 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. Salenson, Christian. Christian de Chergé: A Theology of Hope. Translated by Nada Conic. Trappist, KY: Cistercian Publications, 2012.

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Tanner, Kathryn. Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology. Guides to Theological Inquiry. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997. Walls, Andrew F. The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Edited by P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. 4th edition. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Secondary Literature: Theology and Theological Method Braaten, Carl E., and Robert W. Jenson, eds. Christian Dogmatics: Volume Two. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1984. Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Edited by John T.  McNeill. Translated by Ford Lewis Battles. 2 vols. The Library of Christian Classics. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960. Holmes, Michael W. “The Epistle of Barnabas.” In The Apostolic Fathers: English Translations, 270–327. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1992. Kilby, Karen. A Brief Introduction to Karl Rahner. New York: Crossroad, 2007. Lonergan, Bernard. “The Transition From a Classicist World-View to Historical Mindedness.” In A Second Collection: Papers by Bernard J.F.  Lonergan, S.J., edited by William F.J. Ryan and Bernard J. Tyrell, 1–9. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974. Luther, Martin. “The Babylonian Captivity of the Church.” In Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, edited by Timothy F. Lull and William R. Russell, 196–223. Third Edition. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2012. _______. “A Brief Instruction on What to Look For and Expect in the Gospels.” In Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, edited by Timothy F. Lull and William R.  Russell, 71–75. Third Edition. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2012. _______. “The Freedom of a Christian.” In Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, edited by Timothy F. Lull and William R. Russell, 403–427. Third Edition. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2012. _______. “The Large Catechism.” In The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, edited by Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert, 377–480. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001. _______. “A Meditation on Christ’s Passion.” In Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, edited by Timothy F. Lull and William R. Russell, 126–131. Third Edition. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2012.

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_______. “On the Church and the Councils.” In The Annotated Luther, Volume 3: Church and Sacraments, edited by Paul W. Robinson, 317–444. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2016. _______. “A Practical Way to Pray.” In Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, edited by Timothy F.  Lull and William R.  Russell, 33–38. Third Edition. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2012. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. Christian Faith Volumes One and Two: A New Translation and Critical Edition. Edited by Catherine L. Kelsey and Terrance N.  Tice. Translated by Terrance N.  Tice, Catherine L.  Kelsey, and Edwina Lawler. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2016. _______. On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. 2nd ed. Edited and translated by Richard Crouter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Soulen, R.  Kendall. The Divine Name(s) and the Holy Trinity, Volume 1: Distinguishing the Voices. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011. _______. “Hallowed Be Thy Name! The Tetragrammaton and the Name of the Trinity.” In Jews and Christians: People of God, edited by Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson, 14–40. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003. Yeago, David S. “The Apostolic Faith Part II.” unpublished, n.d.

Secondary Sources: Media Cherones, Tom. “The Conversion.” DVD. Seinfeld. NBC, December 16, 1993.

Index1

A Abraham, William, 181n3 Achtemeier, Mark, 181n3 Aggiornamento, 41, 60, 65, 67, 69–73, 216, 224 Alter, Robert, 7 America, 78n56, 82n88, 83n89, 95n165, 99n187, 169n89, 199n98 Anti-Judaism, 12 Antisemitism, 12 Appropriation, 10, 16, 16n65, 18, 20, 21n22, 110, 215 Aristotle, 7, 93n157 Atonement, 137, 139–143, 139n53, 144n77, 216 B Bader-Saye, Scott, 30, 30n71, 148–150, 148n99, 149n108, 150n111 Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 7, 70, 76, 77, 77n54

Barrett, Lee C., 1n3 Barter Moulaison, Jane, 8n31, 171, 172n99, 178 Barth, Karl, 7, 14n51, 69, 76, 77n54, 78, 84n100, 85, 85n104, 86n111, 90, 90n136, 95n167, 95n169, 96, 96n173, 96n175, 97n178, 97n179, 97n180, 98, 99, 117, 192, 192n58, 207n136 Bauerschmidt, Frederick Christian, 171n95 Berger, Peter, 7 Bowald, Mark Alan, 81n75, 83n90, 83n91 Braaten, Carl E., 3n11, 14n53, 15n59, 18n5, 143n72, 150n111, 181n3 Buckley, James J., 2, 2n5, 6

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. C. Brown, George Lindbeck and The Israel of God, Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74757-2

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244 

INDEX

C Calhoun, Robert, 8 Calvin, John, 10, 25–27, 25n44, 26n47, 51n79, 57n86, 82, 90, 93n157, 125, 125n95, 140, 199 Catechesis, 11, 100, 102, 104, 151, 162, 165, 177, 178, 217, 220 Charlamagne, 10, 89 Cherry, Conrad, 29, 30, 30n68 Chesterton, G.K., 30 Childs, Brevard, 8, 77n55, 94, 190 Clinton, Bill, 30 Comparative dogmatics, 2, 3, 6, 219, 220 Congar, Yves, 43, 45, 45n41, 45n42, 69, 78n55 Consensus, 10, 19, 66n123, 68, 69, 100–102, 104, 105, 180, 202n112, 209, 213n161, 216 Cultural-linguistic, 6, 7, 88, 99n190, 124n91, 129, 146, 162n49, 163, 172, 201, 219, 219n5, 220 D Dahl, Nils A., 8, 110, 131 Daley, Brian, 181n3 de Lubac, Henri, 69, 77n55 DeHart, Paul J., 8n30 Dickens, W.T., 77n54 Displacement, see Supersessionism Donaldson, Terence L., 11, 11n40, 18n7 E Eastern Orthodoxy, 2, 53, 60, 63, 105, 122, 205, 211 Eckerstorfer, Bernhard A., 6n23, 65n118 Ecumenism, 1–6, 1n3, 2n5, 4n15, 5n20, 6n23, 8, 10–12, 10n38,

17, 34n92, 35, 37, 38, 38n4, 39n9, 47n50, 50, 53, 55n83, 62–64, 68–73, 68n5, 68n6, 69n7, 69n8, 69n9, 70n10, 70n11, 70n12, 70n13, 70n14, 71n15, 71n16, 71n17, 71n18, 72n20, 72n21, 72n22, 73n23, 73n25, 73n28, 74n29, 75, 75n42, 75n43, 76n50, 77n53, 83n90, 91n141, 91n142, 100, 104n212, 105n217, 107, 108, 110n19, 111n28, 117n56, 119n69, 123n87, 125n95, 130, 130n9, 133, 137n47, 143, 143n73, 146, 150n111, 151, 172n99, 178–220, 180n1, 181n3, 188n37, 199n98, 200n101, 200n102, 202n112, 206n131, 207n136, 212n155, 214n166 Faith and Order, 3n12, 8, 69, 71, 170n95, 181, 182, 187, 197, 202n112, 212 JPIC, 11, 71, 72, 188n37 Life and Work, 69, 181, 182, 187 Edwards, Jonathan, 30, 162n53 Election, 13n47, 14, 115, 117, 119n73, 158, 224 Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, 15n56 Erikson, John H., 181n3 Expropriation, 10, 16, 16n65, 17, 23, 215 F Ford, David, 9 Forgiveness of sins, 143, 144n83, 172, 173, 176 Frei, Hans W., 8, 74n33, 74n34, 75n37, 75n38, 75n39, 76n52, 77–84, 78n55, 78n56, 78n57, 78n58, 79n60, 79n67, 79n68,

 INDEX 

80n70, 80n71, 80n73, 81n74, 81n75, 81n76, 82n82, 82n83, 82n84, 82n85, 82n86, 82n87, 82n88, 83n89, 83n90, 83n91, 83n92, 83n93, 84n94, 84n95, 84n96, 84n97, 84n98, 84n99, 85n106, 86, 87, 89, 89n128, 94n162, 95n165, 99, 99n187, 129, 129n2, 130, 135n36, 195n76 Fulfillment, 11, 11n39, 13, 29, 32, 46n48, 48n58, 50, 56, 56n85, 79, 86, 116, 126, 128–150, 165, 195, 216, 224 G Geertz, Clifford, 7 Gentiles, 12, 21, 112, 112n32, 124n92, 160, 194n67 Gibbs, Jeremiah, 8n31 Granfield, Patrick, 2, 2n6 Greer, Robert Charles, 6n23 Guroian, Vigen, 181n3 H Hardy, Daniel, 9 Harink, Douglas, 13, 13n47 Hauerwas, Stanley, 6n22, 9, 78n55, 94n162, 169, 169n89 Hays, Richard B., 8, 94n162, 98, 99, 99n185, 99n186, 135, 135n38 Healy, Nicholas M., 5, 5n21, 221, 221n9 Hermeneutics, 4n14, 9, 31, 70, 82, 82n88, 83, 83n90, 88, 90, 91, 97n180, 99, 100, 102, 115, 142, 218 allegory, 78, 81, 82, 82n87, 89 classical hermeneutic, 8, 10, 76, 93, 103n211, 132, 142

245

figural reading, 79–82, 88, 89, 114, 137, 169, 207 typology, 12, 14n51, 77n55, 79, 82n87, 89, 89n130, 111, 114, 136, 195 Higton, Mike, 81n75, 82n88, 83n90, 83n91, 129, 129n2, 130n6 Historical criticism, 73, 75, 77, 78, 80, 86, 131, 133 Holocaust, 10, 32–35, 122, 122n86, 139, 147, 154, 215, 222 I Idolatry, 14, 15, 20, 26, 127 Infallibility, 2, 40, 52, 52n80, 218, 219 Intratextuality, 10, 68, 88–100, 90n136, 220 J Jenson, Robert W., 3n11, 9, 14n53, 15n59, 15n60, 16n64, 18n5, 83n90, 87, 107, 107n1, 129, 129n1, 142, 143n72, 150n111, 181n3 Jewish-Christian dialogue, 11, 14, 15, 148, 192 Joshua ben Hananiah, 14, 15n56 Judaism, 11, 11n40, 14, 14n51, 15, 15n59, 15n60, 16n64, 18, 18n7, 21n22, 23n30, 28, 29, 29n62, 34, 34n91, 62, 87n116, 117n60, 118, 119, 125, 134n26, 147, 148, 160, 188, 190, 193–195, 196n78 Justification, 2, 42, 97, 123, 127, 142–144, 143n73, 144n77, 146, 216

246 

INDEX

K Käsemann, Ernst, 13, 13n47 Kelsey, David H., 8, 77n55, 85, 85n103, 85n104, 87, 94n162 Kenneson, Philip D., 62n101, 164, 164n63, 171n95, 187n30 Kermode, Frank, 7 King, Martin Luther Jr., 30, 96 Kinnamon, Michael, 181, 181n3, 182, 182n6, 187, 187n37 Küng, Hans, 42, 43, 65, 69, 224 L Liberation theology, 30, 70 Lincoln, Abraham, 30, 96, 169 Literal sense, 78, 79, 81, 82, 83n90, 90 Luther, Martin, 10, 25, 25n44, 25n45, 50, 51n79, 57n86, 67, 82, 87, 87n114, 87n116, 90, 92, 93n157, 94, 96, 99n190, 102, 102n206, 118, 119, 121, 123–127, 123n88, 124n92, 125n95, 125n96, 126n102, 126n104, 126n105, 127n108, 139–141, 140n62, 143, 145, 145n86, 145–146n87, 146, 151, 151n1, 163, 176, 176n107 Lutheran, Lutheranism, 8, 37, 40n16, 42, 42n23, 55n83, 57n86, 71, 87, 87n119, 99, 118n68, 119n69, 121, 122, 123n87, 125, 142, 144n83, 161n46, 163, 169, 176n107, 178, 197, 199, 199n98, 200, 203n117, 209, 212, 212n155, 212n158, 213, 213n161, 215 M MacIntyre, Alasdair, 7, 8n31 Maimonides, 15 Malcolm, Lois, 181n3

Marcion, 18, 20, 21, 28, 132 Marshall, Bruce D., 6, 8, 33n83, 34n91, 37, 38n2, 65n118, 78n58, 90n139, 92, 92n151 Martyn, J. Louis, 13, 13n47 McCormack, Bruce, 181n3 Meeks, Wayne, 8, 91, 94n162 Michalson, Gordon E., 2n4 Michener, Ronald, 8n30 Milbank, John, 9 Mission, 10, 11, 18, 49, 50, 57, 68, 109, 117, 120, 132, 151, 152, 167, 172, 178, 182, 184–187, 189, 197, 201, 205, 216 N Narrative, narratives, 3, 9, 10, 12, 12n43, 30, 68, 77, 79–88, 81n74, 82n88, 83n90, 84n95, 84n99, 91, 98, 99, 109, 137, 138, 171, 171n97, 172, 176, 193, 203, 216, 220, 222 New Delhi, 38, 69, 180, 182, 183, 183n9, 197, 206, 206n132, 217 Niebuhr, H. Richard, 8, 139 Nouvelle théologie, 72, 78n55 Novak, David, 11, 13–16, 13n50, 14n51, 14n53, 14n54, 15n56, 15n60, 15n61, 16n65, 115, 115n47, 115n48, 116, 116n54, 118n63, 119n73, 148 O Ochs, Peter, 4n14, 6n23, 8, 9, 9n32, 9n33, 9n34, 9n37, 16n62, 87n116, 124n91, 148n100, 192n57, 196, 196n80 O’Neill, Colman, 2n4

 INDEX 

P Pelikan, Jaroslav, 8, 19, 19n12 Phillips, D.Z., 2n4 Placher, William C., 2n4 Postliberalism, 1n2, 2n4, 4n14, 5, 6, 8, 8n30, 9, 9n33, 38n2, 74, 75, 76n48, 77n55, 130, 146, 195n77, 219, 220, 223 Protestantism, 25, 27, 39–43, 41n17, 43n27, 51, 53, 55, 57, 60, 65, 68, 69, 71, 72, 76, 101, 109, 118, 139, 170, 176, 199–203, 205, 208, 209, 211, 215, 218, 219 R Radner, Ephraim, 3n9, 8, 27, 27n53, 115, 115n45, 207 Rahner, Karl, 42, 43, 45, 46n44, 46n48, 48n62, 57, 58, 58n89, 61, 61n95, 65n116, 69, 94, 144–145n83, 161, 212, 224 Ratzinger, Joseph, 69, 74n30, 192, 192n59 Reagan, Ronald, 30 Reformation, 2, 4n14, 6n23, 8, 9, 9n32, 9n34, 16n62, 25–29, 39, 51n79, 53, 62, 65, 76n47, 76n49, 79, 82, 102, 105, 116, 123, 124n91, 133, 141, 148n100, 182, 192n57, 196n80, 199, 199n98, 200, 200n103, 207, 207n137, 223 Catholic Counter-Reformation, 143 Reno, R.R., 181n3 Ressourcement, 6, 41, 67, 69–73, 216, 224 Robinson, William, 170n95 Roman Catholic Church, 2, 8, 10, 10n38, 25, 27, 28, 32, 37–44, 39n6, 39n7, 39n9, 39n10,

247

40n12, 40n14, 40n15, 40–41n16, 41n17, 42n23, 42n25, 43n27, 43n31, 44n36, 45n42, 45n43, 46n46, 46n48, 50–55, 50n77, 52n80, 55n83, 55n84, 57n87, 57n88, 59, 61n91, 62, 65, 65n116, 66, 69, 71, 72, 76, 76n45, 87n119, 101, 102, 104, 104n214, 109, 118, 136n42, 139, 168, 181n3, 186, 193, 195, 197, 198, 201, 202n112, 203–206, 203n117, 209–212, 212n155, 215, 218, 219, 222 Root, Michael, 181n3 Rorty, Richard, 7 Rusch, William G., 181n3 S Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 10, 18, 29, 29n62, 39, 84, 115n48 Second Vatican Council, 5, 10, 32, 33n83, 37–66, 37n1, 40n14, 40n16, 43n30, 43n31, 44n32, 50n74, 54n82, 61n91, 69, 70, 101n199, 104n214, 158, 180, 197, 199, 199n98, 199n99, 200, 200n100, 202n112, 207n136, 208, 215, 224 Dei Verbum, 70 Gaudium et Spes, 70 Lumen Gentium, 10, 37, 37n1, 44, 46, 48, 49, 61, 72, 212 Unitatis Redintegratio, 10, 48n62, 50, 67, 102n206, 180, 198 Seinfeld, 165, 165n67 Soulen, R. Kendall, 8, 11, 11n41, 12, 12n43, 16, 117n60, 135n31, 149, 149n102, 149n106, 150, 150n110, 150n111 Soza, Joel R., 191n53

248 

INDEX

Street, James L., 171n95 Supersessionism, 9, 9n32, 11–16, 11n39, 13n47, 13n50, 14n53, 14n54, 15n60, 15n61, 16n62, 16n64, 16n65, 19, 29, 30, 33–35, 115n48, 118, 148n100, 155, 172, 190, 192, 195, 211, 215, 216 economic supersessionism, 11, 16, 31, 139 hard supersessionism, 12, 14–16, 15n56, 16n65, 19, 45, 59n90, 70, 170 Jewish supersessionism, 12 punitive supersessionism, 11, 12, 16 soft supersessionism, 14–16 structural supersessionism, 11, 12, 16, 58, 59, 70, 183, 184n17 sweeping supersessionism, 12, 13, 16 Surin, Kenneth, 1n3 T Ten Commandments, 28, 124–126, 126n102, 126n104, 164 Thomas Aquinas, 10, 24, 67, 74n33, 90, 94, 169, 171n95, 218 Tillard, J.-M.R., 192n59 Tracy, David, 2n4, 83, 84n94 Trenery, David, 8n31

W Wainwright, Geoffrey, 2, 2n5, 7n29, 19n9, 107n2, 181n3 Washington, George, 30 Williams, Stephen N., 2n4 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 7, 164n59 Wood, Susan K., 181n3 Work, Telford, 181n3 Wright, J. Robert, 181n3 Wright, John, 77n55, 78n55, 195n77 Wright, N.T., 11–13, 11n39, 12n45, 13n47, 13n48 Wright, Stephen John, 107n1 Wyschogrod, Michael, 115, 115n49, 116n54, 117–120, 117n56, 117n57, 117n58, 117n60, 117n61, 117n62, 118n63, 118n64, 118n65, 119n69, 119n72, 119n73, 120n74, 120n77, 120n79, 132, 148, 159, 160, 160n39, 194n67, 194n69, 195, 195n73, 195n76 Y Yeago, David, 147–149, 149n101, 149n104, 149n107, 181n3 Yoder, John Howard, 9