Lord, Giver of Life : Toward a Pneumatological Complement to George Lindbeck’s Theory of Doctrine [1 ed.] 9781554580699, 9780889205017

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“Lord, Giver of Life”




Editions SR /Éditions SR Editions SR/Éditions SR is a general series of books in the study of religion, encompassing the fields of study of the constituent societies of the Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion / Corporation canadienne des sciences religieuses. These societies are: Canadian Society of Biblical Studies/Société canadienne des études bibliques; Canadian Society of Church Historic Studies / Association canadienne des études patristiques; Canadian Society for Study of Religion/Société canadienne pour l’étude de la religion. General Editors Mary Ann Beavis and Joanne McWilliams

Editions SR Volume 32

“Lord, Giver of Life” Toward a Pneumatological Complement to George Lindbeck’s Theory of Doctrine


Jane Barter Moulaison

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Barter Moulaison, Jane, 1969– Lord, giver of life : toward a pneumatological complement to George Lindbeck’s theory of doctrine / Jane Barter Moulaison. (Editions SR ; v. 32) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 10: 0-88920-501-9 isbn 13: 978-0-88920-501-7 1. Lindbeck, George A. — Criticism and interpretation. 2. Postliberal theology. 3. Theology, Doctrinal. 4. Dogma. i. Title. ii. Series. bt83.595.b37 2007

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© 2007 Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion / Corporation Canadianne des Sciences Religieuses and Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Cover design by Blakeley. Cover photograph by Christine Balderas. Text design by P.J. Woodland. Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.

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This book is printed on Ancient Forest Friendly paper (100% post-consumer recycled). Printed in Canada No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800 - 893-5777. Order from: University of Toronto Press Distribution Services Toll free in Canada and USA: 1-800-565-9523.

For Glenn, Le monde a bien changé …

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Standing before Christ in glory, in agony, or resurrected, it is always words (and thus concepts) that we lack in order to say what we see, in short to see that with which intuition floods our eyes … we do not offer concepts capable of handling a gift without measure and, overwhelmed, dazzled, and submerged in his glory, we no longer see anything. — Jean-Luc Marion


And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward springs— Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. — Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur”

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Contents


Acknowledgements / xi

1 The Spirit Who Saves Pneumatological Efficacy as the Fourth Regulative Principle / 1 Introduction / 1 Three Regulative Principles — and a Fourth / 4 Development of an Argument / 8 Methods and Sources / 10 Conclusion / 12

2 The Spirit and Language Pneumatology and Theological Discourse / 15 Introduction / 15 The Picture of Theological Language That Holds Us Captive / 16 Overcoming Modern Epistemologies: A Theological Rationale / 22 How Are Doctrines Justified? / 26 Conclusion / 31

3 The Spirit and Truth Pneumatology and the Apologetic Task / 35 Introduction / 35 Assessing Religious Truth / 36 Assessing Lindbeck’s Account of the Holy Spirit / 41 McGrath’s Critique of Lindbeck / 49 ix

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Contents Ad Hoc Apologetics / 56 A Soteriological Epistemology / 59 Conclusion / 64

4 The Spirit’s Address Toward a Pneumatological Intratextual Theology / 67 Introduction / 67 Intratextual Theology and the Gospel’s “Untranslatability” / 72 Intentionality / 84 Apophaticism and Pneumatology / 98 Conclusion / 102

5 Life in the Spirit The Church’s Practices and Mission / 107 Introduction / 107 George Lindbeck’s People-of-God Ecclesiology / 108 A Pneumatological Corrective? Reinhard Hütter’s Proposal / 120 The Holy Spirit and the Church’s Mission: A Patristic Alternative / 126 Conclusion / 135

6 Staying with Us The Spirit between Culture and Kingdom, Language and Word / 141 Aspects of a Conversation / 141 More Than Two Men and a Bird: A Pneumatological Complement to the Cultural-Linguistic Model / 145 Conclusion / 151 Bibliography / 153 Index / 163

Acknowledgements




This work represents a commitment of many years, as life took tremendous and varied turns, occasionally through deep valleys, but more often over mountaintops. It would have been a project easily abandoned had it not been for the support from and the conversations with those who travelled with me. I give thanks for the brilliant teaching of the late George P. Schner, S.J., whose encouragement and theological acumen inspired me alternately to change paths, to press forward, and to start again. Joseph L. Mangina nurtured this project from its earliest stages with a rigour and a generosity that far exceeded obligation and expectation. Harold Wells showed great wisdom and kindliness in his capacity as co-supervisor of the thesis that preceded this book. Doug Harink and George Vandervelde offered invaluable counsel and encouragement. I thank the anonymous reviewers, who also had wonderful suggestions for the manuscript that I hope I have heeded in some form. Joanne McWilliam of Editions SR offered no small measure of assistance as I navigated this new experience of authorship. The editorial team at Wilfrid Laurier University Press was entirely helpful and judicious in preparing this manuscript. Fifteen years ago, I took a course in Canadian Church History with an outstanding scholar and teacher who first nudged me in the direction of an academic career. I am grateful beyond telling for Tom Faulkner’s mentoring and friendship ever since.

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I am unbelievably blessed to have been welcomed recently into the Faculty of Theology at the University of Winnipeg. I thank especially my colleagues Paul Campbell, James Christie, Louise Graves, and Arthur Walker-Jones, who somehow manage to add to the overflowing delight of teaching theology. Winnipeg has proven a serendipitous home that I share with my brother, Stan, and sister, Margje, who, having gone “down the road” several years before me, had the good fortune and judgment to make Manitoba (the Maritimes of the West?) their destination. Academic life would be dull indeed were it not for the distraction and laughter shared with close friends. I wish to thank especially my wonderful Lethbridge “sisters.” I thank my good friend Rev. Erin Phillips, who reminds me that the best theology is preached, not taught. Lisa Lambert and Dorothy McKenna of Womanspace Resource Centre challenged my theological myopia as we laboured together with great joy for a “fairer deal” for women in Lethbridge. I believe that I am a better theologian for it. I wish to thank my exquisite children, Luc and Sophie. They have been a source of more light and wisdom than I would have thought possible on this side of the Kingdom. Finally, I wish to acknowledge my most brilliant and rare husband, Glenn Moulaison, whose love is ever of the most robust and tangible kind—most particularly in his graciousness in deferring his own career aspirations for a time.




1 The Spirit Who Saves Pneumatological Efficacy as the Fourth Regulative Principle


Introduction More than twenty years after the publication of George Lindbeck’s book The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (1984), its influence upon contemporary theology can hardly be overstated. Although Lindbeck himself probably never could have imagined it, this slim volume has become seminal in the renewal of theology and has given rise to a generation of scholars who consider Lindbeck’s approach to Christian theology to be, if not foundational, then certainly prototypical of a constructive theological program now known as “postliberalism”—a term that is itself derived from the subtitle of Lindbeck’s book.1 Equally impressive is the array of critical responses that the book has engendered. Theologians as diverse as Miroslav Volf, John Milbank, Alister McGrath, and James Gustafson have offered sturdy and sustained critiques of the postliberal project. This book is an effort to come to terms with Lindbeck’s legacy; but, to be more precise, it is one that seeks to do so in a manner that offers some new insights about the significance of Lindbeck’s project not only to contemporary theology but also to classical doctrinal development, specifically within the fourth century, a period of tremendous doctrinal consolidation and articulation. Why Lindbeck? One reason, by no means minor, is that Lindbeck continues to be sorely misunderstood. Lindbeck’s critics have all too often read The Nature of Doctrine as a foundational theory on theolog1

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ical method. It is not. Lindbeck was engaged throughout his career in the ecumenical movement, particularly in dialogue between Lutherans (his own tradition) and Roman Catholics. For Lindbeck, writing the book was directed at this specific enterprise: he wished to offer a brief prolegomenon to an ecumenical dogmatics. Lindbeck was convinced that the manner in which theologians engaged doctrinal issues in ecumenical dialogue was jettisoning constructive ecumenical discussion itself. Conceiving doctrine as a set of abstract concepts, an approach that Lindbeck deems cognitive-propositionalism (1984,16), enabled theologians to make claims on behalf of the universal validity of doctrinal statements, but it had little success in acknowledging the embeddedness of doctrine within specific historical and liturgical contexts; in other words, this view of doctrine could not account for or permit doctrinal development or change. On the other hand, the view of doctrine as a contingent expression of a more general experience of religious faith, a view that Lindbeck names experiential-expressivism (1984,16), could not make any claims for doctrine’s normativity. This latter approach was, in many ways, more amenable to ecumenical discussion, but such dialogue soon became amorphous and vague, divested as it was of abiding meaning. Lindbeck discerned that the crisis of doctrine was a peculiarly modern one, occasioned by a turn to the individual subject as the arbiter of religious meaning. His return to pre-modern sources compelled him to engage in a now-famous theological thought experiment: suppose we were to think about doctrine neither as abstract and unassailable truths nor as contingent expressions, but rather as the working grammar—that is the underlying rules which permit and condition the articulation of a particular language, the language of Christian faith. This analogy, likening the Church to a linguistic community and doctrine to its grammatical rules, served to illustrate doctrinal language’s rootedness within a complex and particular cultural system, the Church—a far cry from the often solipsistic modern accounts of the nature of doctrine. Such a sturdy view of the task and scope of theology as developed in The Nature of Doctrine inspired its share of admirers. No longer was theology to be indentured to extrinsic discourses: it was enjoined to be robustly confessional, to return to its communal norms, and to ground its self-description within biblical witness. However, Lindbeck’s return to the Bible was no mere ahistorically considered biblicism. Instead he, along with his colleague Hans W. Frei, exposed the problematic assumptions of biblically based theology extricated from communal confession and worship, and thus argued for a retrieval of a pre-modern theology of

Pneumatological Efficacy as the Fourth Regulative Principle

scripture, which saw the Bible as “a Christ-centered narrationally and typologically unified whole in conformity to a Trinitarian rule of faith” (Lindbeck 2002, 204). The Bible was, therefore, not to be excised from the common life of the Church in celebration of word and sacrament. For Lindbeck, a return to pre-modern ways of reading scripture meant precisely a return to the Church as the locus of scriptural interpretation: The priority of the Bible seems at least as plausible as the priority of the Church. No choice is necessary, however: it is best to think of the co-inherence of Bible and Church, of their mutually constitutive reciprocity. It was, furthermore, the Bible as sensus fidelium, not as separately institutionalized magisterial authority, which was decisive in this process. Those writings that proved profitable in actual use among the people were the ones which were included in the canon. (2002, 205)

This sense of the faithful included fundamental principles which were soteriological in significance and which served as the discriminen for scriptural interpretation. Without this common sense, Lindbeck argued, the Church would cease to function as a coherent community. These principles, or doctrines, signify nothing novel in themselves; rather, they are the working guidelines for Christian discourse. Such rules both ensure that the saving logic of the Christian narrative is upheld and rule out those traditions and teachings that compromise the salvific character of the story. It is thus that Lindbeck argues on behalf of a regulative theory of doctrine in his ecumenical prolegomenon, The Nature of Doctrine. Such an account of Church doctrine as at once stable and durable (considered as doctrine’s fundamental content in the form of abiding principles) while also flexible in its ability to speak within a variety of idioms (or forms), held great ecumenical promise because it allowed for appeals to an intrinsic unity across denominational divides. Such a rule-governed account of doctrine as second-order discourse about first-order Christian claims conforms well to pre-modern interpretation. The Church Fathers considered the regula fidei, or rule of faith, to be fundamental to the discrimination of appropriate Christian catechesis, scriptural interpretation, and liturgical practice. It was precisely through the upholding of a regula fidei, or common confession, that the Church could have a broad and catholic impact. However, while the regula fidei, in its various historic manifestations,2 was basic to the various practices of a nascent Church within an unbelieving world, it was not the only authorizing source that the Fathers

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claimed. Alongside the regulation of canon and creed, there existed also a robust account of the work and witness of the Holy Spirit, which was understood with some catholicity in the ante-Nicene and Nicene periods, and yet was central to the theological enterprise and to Church practice. Any account of a theology that seeks doctrinal reconciliation through time and space among Christian communities would seem remiss were it to neglect entirely the work of the Holy Spirit. It is of no small significance, I would argue, that the framers of Christian Trinitarian orthodoxy, who appealed to the regulative authority of creedal statements, were also among the greatest defenders of a theology of the Holy Spirit, which animated doctrinal statements. It is part of the task of this book to draw out the significance of the dialectic that operates within Christian practice between the regulative function of doctrine and the work of the Holy Spirit in the community’s attestation to such regulative principles. Concentration upon the manner in which doctrine itself is caught up in the work of the Holy Spirit will have implications for each of the three major tasks of theology: the interpretation of scripture, apologetics, and practical theology. In each of these three areas of theological inquiry, doctrine has more than a regulative function. The distinct content of doctrinal confession is informed and shaped by an abiding presence Who, in several ways, concretizes its formal principles. Such content renders the regulative principles more than simply “communally authoritative rules of discourse”: more properly, it positively affirms the saving significance of the triune God in its most distilled form.

Three Regulative Principles—and a Fourth Although creedal confession changed significantly in form in the period from apostolic confession to the making of official creeds in the fourth and fifth centuries, Lindbeck argues that the content of these various affirmations was constant. Lindbeck identifies three informally operative rules that collectively governed theological construction and practice in the early Church. The specific content of these rules, which emerged from scripture, remained stable and are described by Lindbeck as follows: First, there is the monotheistic principle: there is only one God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus. Second, there is the principle of historical specificity: the stories of Jesus refer to a genuine human being who was born, loved, and died in a particular time and place. Third, there is the principle of what may be infelicitously

Pneumatological Efficacy as the Fourth Regulative Principle called Christological maximalism: every possible importance is to be ascribed to Jesus that is not inconsistent with the first rules. (1984, 94)

Given the predominance of pneumatological controversies in the fourth century, it is surprising that George Lindbeck identifies only three regulative principles (a principle of monotheism and two Christological principles) that he considers to be operative from the early Church to Nicaea (1984, 94). The Trinitarian character of Christian confession is obvious even from the earliest Christian writings. Within the gospels and the apostolic writings, a distinctively tri-partite structure emerges in Christian confession. Matthew’s injunction at the end of the gospel urges the faithful to: Make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. (28:19) 3

Saint Paul’s benediction in 2 Corinthians has a clearly liturgical and trinitarian refrain: The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, be with all of you. (13:14)

Second Corinthians identifies the Trinitarian nature in the economy of salvation: It is God who establishes us with you in Christ and has anointed us,

by putting his seal on us and giving us His Spirit in our hearts as a first installment. (1:21 – 22) Similarly, 1 Peter offers a succinct triadic formula, which is a clearly soteriological affirmation of the triune God: Who have been 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. (1:2)

Although these very early confessions were Trinitarian in structure, it was not until the fourth century that Church controversies prompted the defenders of the Holy Spirit to specify the Spirit’s precise nature. Athanasius took the lead in defending the homoousion of the Spirit, and the Cappadocian Fathers completed this task. The first defence of the Spirit against the Pneumatomachians, or the “Spirit-fighters,” occurred in a formal manner at the Council of Alexandria, where the subordina-

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tion of the Holy Spirit was officially condemned. In the year 374, Amphilichius, the first cousin of Gregory of Nazianzus and friend to Basil, urged Basil to write a treatise on the subject of the Holy Spirit to clear up any doubt on the subject (B. Jackson 1983). Accordingly, in On the Holy Spirit (dss), Basil argued that the Arian controversy was detrimental to understanding the saving significance not only of the Son, but also of the Spirit: “The heresy of Arius lowered the dignity of the Holy Ghost as well as that of the Son. He taught that the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity are wholly unlike one another both in essence and in glory” ( I ). As with their Christology, the Cappadocians’ doctrine of the Holy Spirit was often articulated responsively in the midst of contending theological claims. However, unlike the Christological controversies, which had “dominated Christian thought from the conflict of Gnostic Docetism in the second century to the Monotheletist and Monenergist controversies of the seventh century, and even beyond, the question of the Holy Spirit was raised, debated, and settled in two decades or so” (Pelikan 1979, 337). According to Pelikan, with the exception of the filioque controversies, the work of Basil and his contemporaries has remained unqualifiedly the orthodox teaching on pneumatology (1979, 338). Intrinsic to the argument of the divinity of the Holy Spirit was the Church’s experience and practice of liturgy. Surprisingly, the Arians also continued the practice of baptizing in the name not only of the Father, but also of the Son and Holy Spirit. Gregory of Nazianzus, in a treatise on baptism, took advantage of this practice to argue that, if one worshiped a creature or were baptized into a creature, the divinization promised at baptism could not be realized (Pelikan 1971, 299). Such arguments from liturgy were evoked to clarify the scriptural ambiguity surrounding the nature of the Spirit. The efficacy of the Holy Spirit in the renewal of the Christian life necessarily attributed to the Spirit identity with God. As Pelikan wrote: The Holy Spirit was God because he did what only God could do. If the creatures were the objects of his renewing, creating and sanctifying activity, he could not belong to the same class of beings as they, but had to be divine. He who filled all creatures had to be “of a different substantia than are all the creatures.” Specifically, as the one who justified sinners and perfected the elect, the Holy Spirit did what was appropriate “only to the divine and supremely exalted nature.” (1971, 215–16)

While Basil of Caesarea remained politically cautious by not calling the Holy Spirit homoousion with the Father directly, Gregory of Nazianzus,

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never one to mince words, wrote: “Is the Spirit God? Yes indeed! Then is he consubstantial? Of course since He is God” (Oration 31). It was the attestation of the Christian Church, which understood itself to be sanctified by the Holy Spirit in baptism and eucharist, that warranted such confident assertions about the Spirit’s divine nature. The Fathers did not dichotomize theology and worship. Both were considered essential Church practices. While one generally can see the normative function of doctrine in circumscribing liturgy, there are also times, such as in the case of the controversy over the divinity of the Holy Spirit, when Church doctrine is challenged to cohere more adequately with communal practice. One of the great values of George Lindbeck’s culturallinguistic view is its emphasis upon communal practice as the nexus within which doctrine and liturgical practice are negotiated. As R.P.C. Hanson observes, “The witness of scripture must be supplemented by, or interpreted in the context of the religious experience of the Church” (1988, 783). While lex orandi lex credendi was certainly operative in this case, as the Cappadocian Fathers effectively constructed their argument based almost entirely upon liturgical practice, it must be remembered that this argument also was grounded in scripture and what was known from earliest accounts of baptismal practices. In other words, the immanent liturgical argument also had to be buttressed by appeals to scripture and tradition in order to be doctrinally coherent. Rowan Williams puts it thus: “Liturgy does not simply determine the shape of doctrine: it is far more the contested material upon which doctrinal reflection must work the subject of rival ‘bids’ for definition. Or, to put it rather more bluntly, liturgy does not settle questions of doctrine; rather it provides the language for argument” (1975, 93). The language of the councils of Nicaea and Constantinople was derived from the Church’s earliest practice. While innovation in the language occurred at a formal level, the basic content of the Creed remained the same as the loose and local confessions of faith of the early Church. The Church’s confession sought to safeguard its soteriological experience which had four necessary features: (1) God Who is one was (2) made perfectly and completely incarnate in Jesus Christ, (3) Who suffered, died, and rose again, and Who, (4) together with the Holy Spirit, offers salvation. Although generally in accord with Lindbeck in his assertion of three regulative principles that are operative in the ancient creeds, I wish also to expand upon his three regulative principles to offer a fourth, which I will call pneumatological efficacy.4 By this I mean that, even in the ear-

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liest of creed-like formulae, there existed a rule about the work of the Holy Spirit in effecting salvation. Although this is often the least-developed rule, it is nevertheless crucial to remember that confessions of faith, even in their earliest forms, generally had a tri-partite structure. I refer to the Holy Spirit’s power as efficacious because it is through the Spirit’s transforming, salvific power in the Church that Its divine nature is known.

Development of an Argument The above exercise in the reconstruction of pneumatological confession is not intended merely to expose Lindbeck’s faulty recollection of historical doctrine; rather, it is meant to consider this surprisingly pre-empted reconstruction of historical doctrine as an intriguing clue as to what might be overlooked within his own constructive theology. Lindbeck’s restriction of the “regulative principles” of early Christian confession will also truncate that which he regards as abiding and permanent in Christian confession. If the paradigmatically instantiating rules offered in the early Church councils were limited to monotheism and Christological confession, the role and function of the Holy Spirit would be clearly limited. However, such a restriction truncates the ecumenical viability of Lindbeck’s project, severing Western theology from Eastern, and cutting theological confession from its ancient roots, even though it was during the period of fertile Trinitarian theological reflection that the four regulative principles served most efficiently in a mutual, self-correcting fashion within theological orthodoxy. In Lindbeck’s work, each area of theological inquiry—liturgical praxis, biblical interpretation, and apologetics—serves to perpetuate the pneumatological oversight. Indeed, the distinctive and personal character of the Holy Spirit is variously compromised in Lindbeck’s project in ways that manifest themselves in each of the categories of assessment to which he subjects the cultural-linguistic model —intelligibility, faithfulness, and applicability.

intelligibility Inevitably, modern discussions of doctrine must account for its standing as credible statements of faith. Questions of authority soon become questions of certainty and validity in the philosophic senses of those words. In the next chapter, I argue that the question of truth, on which the rest of Lindbeck’s proposal stands or falls, takes on a novel urgency in the

Pneumatological Efficacy as the Fourth Regulative Principle

modern period as truth seeks to make its home within the ground of epistemology. While I generally treat the philosophical issues that arise in Lindbeck’s own terms, I also consider the philosophical interlocutors that Lindbeck engages and those who challenge the foundations of his theory of doctrine. Working closely with Lindbeck’s own model of propositional truth in religion, I point to some ambiguities that require positive theological content—specifically, a doctrine of the Holy Spirit.

faithfulness The category of faithfulness is concerned with the ability of a theology to cohere to its instantiating text—the Bible. As Lindbeck writes, “One of the tests of faithfulness … is the degree to which descriptions correspond to the semiotic universe paradigmatically encoded in holy writ” (1984, 116). I explore figural or typological reading of the Bible, as Lindbeck understands it, through his governing metaphor for text-world relations: the text absorbs the world. In Lindbeck’s schema, the biblical text is able to do this because of its intrinsic sufficiency (its catholicity in being able to assimilate diverse worlds) and irreducibility (its specific character as a narrative that cannot be translated into another medium without reduction). However, I suggest, the properties and capacities of the biblical text are not adequately captured by these formal, literary descriptions, and a pneumatological consideration of the dynamics of the biblical address, as God’s intention is made known in narrative form through the Bible, is also needed.

applicability According to Lindbeck, the “applicability” of theology is not to be adjudicated by reference to an external picture of justice or the good life; rather, the specific aims of theology are entirely constituted by its own internal logic. The Church, then, differs substantially in its aim from other communities. Lindbeck advocates an ecclesial self-understanding of the Church as Israel—that is, as a distinct people primarily identified by its special covenant with God. In exploring the value of Lindbeck’s account of the Church, I also demonstrate some of its weaknesses, as I consider the Church’s eschatological mission and the role of pneumatology as the Church is sent out into the world and commanded to inaugurate the Kingdom. It is here, within the Church’s role as a people that is sent, that Lindbeck’s ecclesiology needs further development.

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Methods and Sources use of patristic sources In this project, I engage Patristic authors for two purposes: (1) to support George Lindbeck’s retrieval of key elements of pre-modern interpretation (including the consideration of doctrine in a regulative fashion, the typological reading of the Bible, and the ad hoc apologetics that characterized the Patristic period); and (2) to overcome the deficit of a sustained pneumatology in Lindbeck. There is, first, a rather remarkable cohesion within the Patristic writings that derives from a consistent drive to doctrinal clarity and continuity that is utterly exemplary. Such cohesion emerges in Lindbeck’s reflections on pre-modern theologies with the prominent roles assigned to such practices as catechesis, typological interpretation, and doctrinal regulation within the early Church. It is part of George Lindbeck’s genius that he has so amply and yet efficiently characterized the systematic clarity of orthodox writings in his rather brief explicit reference to them in his own retrieval in service of the cultural-linguistic model. Second, it is important to note that the Niceno-Constantinopolitan period was one of tremendous fertility in the articulation of Trinitarian doctrine by such theologians as Athanasius and the Cappadocian Fathers: Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus. NicenoConstantinopolitan insights into Trinitarian theology derive from ancient, even apostolic confession, and yet pneumatology becomes crystallized significantly through the various controversies surrounding the Spirit during the fourth century. In their response to such controversies, the Fathers defend the divinity of the Spirit in a manner that is highly germane to our purposes: the Spirit is divine because the Spirit saves; salvation could not be efficacious were the Spirit simply a power or a creature. The Cappadocian defence of the Spirit is also significant to our study: the Fathers’ attention to the Church’s practices of apologetics, biblical interpretation, and liturgy was understood and argued in a precisely pneumatological manner. The authority of the Holy Spirit was known in Church practices in a way that marked the Spirit’s efficacy and sovereignty. The Spirit’s role in creaturely and communal attestation was prominent, and, therefore, the concerns over anthropology—the very concerns that Lindbeck’s critics tend to raise—were addressed in classical theology through the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. In this text, Patristic sources are engaged to address particular issues within George Lindbeck’s theory of doctrine—not to provide novel exeget-

Pneumatological Efficacy as the Fourth Regulative Principle

ical insights or sustained analysis. A small renaissance in Eastern Patristic studies, which challenges the prevalent dichotomization of East and West in this fertile period of Trinitarian theological reflection, has been helpful in this edeavour. Scholars such as Sarah Coakley, Verna Harrison, Martin Laird, Lucian Turescu, and David Bentley Hart have been a great boon here for their close inspection of Cappadocian writings and for their refusal to allow the Fathers’ voices to be appropriated for the sake of modern agendas.

engagement of lindbeck’s writings The formal character of The Nature of Doctrine sometimes can obscure the positive theological content of Lindbeck’s other writings. George Lindbeck is a theologian. He is to be much admired for the very seamlessness of his formal proposal in his slim volume, The Nature of Doctrine, and in his various writings in constructive theology. Accordingly, although this analysis engages The Nature of Doctrine more thoroughly than other writings, it also draws liberally from Lindbeck’s various publications, as well as from his Saint Michael’s lectures, which were delivered in the autumn of 1974 at Gonzaga University. These lectures set forth the cultural-linguistic model of religion in its earliest form. They are particularly useful here because, in them, Lindbeck tends to be more explicit about the issue of “truth content” in the cultural-linguistic model than he is in The Nature of Doctrine. Lindbeck’s reference to these lectures in the foreword to The Nature of Doctrine (1984, 12) suggests that his theory had not changed substantially between his delivery of the lectures and his writing of the text. Further assurance of the applicability of the lectures comes from the fact that nothing developed in The Nature of Doctrine would render the lectures obsolete. Responses to Lindbeck’s work by both his critics and his fans have become an important and indispensable area of study in theology in their own right. Any conversation with Lindbeck’s oeuvre would be incomplete without reference to those profoundly indebted to his influence, scholars such as George P. Schner, George Hunsinger, Bruce D. Marshall, William C. Placher, Kathryn Tanner, and Reinhard Hütter. Equally important are the lively critical responses that The Nature of Doctrine engendered—particularly the influential critiques by Alister E. McGrath and Miroslav Volf. McGrath, perhaps the most articulate and prolific critic of Lindbeck’s supposed lack of ontology, is especially troubled by his seemingly anti-realist position: he challenges Lindbeck on his alleged deficit of sustained reflection on questions of truth, and provides a helpful illus-

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tration of common suppositions about the regulative theory of doctrine and its misrepresentation as a type of theological foundationalism (see also Barbour 1990; Bloesch 1994; Childs 1984; Sommerville 1995). Volf, on the other hand, tends to represent what Lindbeck might typologize as a more experiential–expressivist response (see also Pauw 1993; Reynolds 1997; Tracy 2000), and is wary of the hermeticization of the Christian community from other forms of discourse within the cultural-linguistic model. In this respect, he is in keeping with other authors (although he is certainly more sympathetic to postliberalism) for whom theology must conform in some way to a set of experiences that are non-linguistically mediated.5

Conclusion While other writers have critiqued Lindbeck for the formalism of his project (Stout 1988; Thiemann 1986; Williams 2000a), this project is novel in the sense that each of the three clusters of concerns that Lindbeck addresses in The Nature of Doctrine —faithfulness, applicability, and intelligibility—is considered with explicit reference to the third article of the creed, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. What results is a sustained complement to the regulative theory which presses upon the theory’s formalism, and allows its specifically anthropological concerns, those very concerns raised by Lindbeck’s modern critics, to be addressed in a fashion that is thoroughly theological.


notes 1 Gary Dorrien’s introduction to postliberalism is helpful in identifying some of the key theologians influenced by Lindbeck: “Postliberal theology began as a Yale-centered phenomenon. It was founded by Yale theologians Hans Frei and George Lindbeck, who wrote the movement’s founding texts and who (before Frei’s untimely death in 1988) trained most of its key advocates. Prominent figures in the development of the postliberal school have included such Yaletrained theologians as James J. Buckley, J.A. DiNoia, Garrett Green, Stanley Hauerwas, George Hunsinger, Bruce D. Marshall, William Placher, George Stroup, Ronald Thiemann and David Yeago. A generally younger group of Yaletrained postliberals now contributing to the development of postliberalism includes Kathryn Greene-McCreight, Serene Jones, David Kamitsuka, Ian McFarland, Paul McGlasson, Joe Mangina, R.R. Reno, Gene Rogers and Kathryn Tanner. Numerous theologians from different academic backgrounds share

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2 3 4

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key affinities with the postliberal movement; they include William Willimon, evangelical ecumenists Stanley Grenz and Gabriel Fackre, the late Baptist theologian James William McClendon Jr. and British theologians Rowan Williams and David Ford” (2001, 16). For a comprehensive reconstruction of the development of Christian confession from the New Testament onward, see Kelly (1972). This and all subsequent biblical references are drawn from the New Revised Standard Version unless otherwise noted. Gregory of Nyssa speaks of the instrumentality ( e/nergou/nti ) of the Spirit in its therapeutic sense (see dssam). I have avoided this term because of its potential to be used as a subordinationist depiction of the relations of the Godhead. Volf writes, “My point is that in addition to the semiotic dimensions, there are important non-semiotic (‘experiential,’ if you wish) dimensions in the transmission of the Christian faith” (1996b, 57).

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2 The Spirit and Language Pneumatology and Theological Discourse




Introduction The contentions that have arisen over the supposed deficit of ontology in Lindbeck’s theory of doctrine continue to resound, long after The Nature of Doctrine’s publication (see, for example, Bloesch 1994; Childs 1984; McGrath 1990a, 1996a, 1996b, 1997). Such critiques rely upon a pervasive discomfort among theologians who take issue with the notion of Christianity as a “language game” that is hermetically sealed off from other modes of inquiry, including philosophy. Such a view of Christian doctrine, according to Lindbeck’s critics, renders doctrinal claims about the normativity of Jesus Christ a mere rule in one language game among others. Indeed, Lindbeck’s own advocacy of the justification of doctrinal norms through coherence rather than correspondence would seem to perpetuate a picture of theological discourse as a closed system. However, it may be argued that Lindbeck’s critics expect The Nature of Doctrine to offer answers to questions that were never intended. By Lindbeck’s own admission, The Nature of Doctrine was written to solve a very narrow set of problems in a very specific context. The Nature of Doctrine was intended to address a specific context—ecumenism—and to consider a specific set of philosophical presuppositions that are peculiar to modernity. Ludwig Wittgenstein contends that moderns have inherited a faulty picture of language which holds them captive. In The Nature of Doctrine, Lindbeck seeks to address this faulty picture and thus uses Wittgenstein 15

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“therapeutically” in response to certain understandings of the nature of doctrinal language.

The Picture of Theological Language That Holds Us Captive The Nature of Doctrine did not set out to construct a philosophy of religion or a theory of the truth of religious utterances; rather, it sought to serve as a prolegomenon to an ecumenical dogmatics. As Lindbeck acknowledged: As I hinted in later sections, the book I thought I had written was simply 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… Increasingly… I found myself puzzled by the views of doctrine current both in Church pronouncements and in theological and non-theological scholarly treatments of the subject. They did not adequately reflect the tacit understandings embedded in operative practices either in the ecumenical present or the non-ecumenical past. When I employed the usual concepts as I did in various drafts of the projected comparative dogmatics, the results were incoherent. It seemed necessary to develop and justify an understanding of Church doctrine better suited to my purposes before I could proceed. The result was the present slim volume conceived as a prolegomenon to a more substantial study of the ecumenical situation. (2002,197)

The Nature of Doctrine offered a kind of therapy—a leading of the fly out of the fly bottle, to appropriate Wittgenstein’s phrase. However, this therapeutic task is provisional and heuristic: the cultural-linguistic model seeks to give rise to a positive theology. Once led out of the fly bottle, the theologian is enjoined to do the work of theology, using other forms of discourse to be sure, but doing so in such a way that theology is allowed to be theology.

types of understanding of christian doctrine In The Nature of Doctrine, George Lindbeck explores three prevalent paradigms of understanding the nature and function of doctrine, each of which shapes substantially the manner in which doctrine is treated, the authority that doctrine is given, and where the home of such authority is to be found. The first model, the cognitive-propositionalist approach,

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treats questions of doctrine as though doctrine consists in a set of propositions, or truth claims, about objective reality (Lindbeck 1984, 16). According to this model, the data of a religious utterance have to conform to a set of external, universal, and objective criteria. The second model, the experiential-expressivist approach, understands the value of doctrine in its ability to correlate with a set of universal pre-linguistic inner feelings or intuitions. Doctrine is thus understood as an objectification of a common inner religious experience (Lindbeck 1984,16). A third model, a hybrid-complex approach, attempts to combine these two, thus asserting a type of symmetry between the inner experience of religion and its external universal veracity. In addressing the cognitive-propositionalist approach, Lindbeck does not wish to rule out the possibility of doctrines functioning as truth claims about reality. Rather, he makes the case that doctrinal language, when it is functioning specifically as doctrine, has a function which is much more basic than mapping each doctrine to a specific ostensive set of conditions—that is, to regulate Christian discourse in such a manner as to restrict those statements which contradict its central affirmations. Doctrine rules out theologies that are cognitively dissonant with its inner logic. It is in this sense that doctrine is not primarily a first-order statement; rather, it functions more accurately as a second-order rule about first-order discourse. In the experiential-expressive approach, on the other hand, theologies tend to regard doctrinal language as contingent symbolic expressions that are mediated by the distinct experiences of a given, historically situated community. Doctrine aims to express the ineffable, basic religious intuitions; however, given the contingency of our historical situatedness, it does so in discrete manners through time and space. In this schema, doctrines are justified by an appeal to a general human experience, and may change, should the social and historical conditions warrant it. In this view, the deep symbolic core of doctrinal meaning remains the same, in spite of the vagaries and fluctuations of its external expression. Those using the hybrid complex of these two approaches, represented in Lindbeck’s view by such Roman Catholic thinkers as Bernard Lonergan and Karl Rahner, wish to take seriously the insights of the experiential-expressivists in their attention to the social embeddness of religious faith;1 however, they also want to emphasize the permanency and infallibility of specific doctrinal formulations.2 To this end, these theologians assert a kind of correlation to the immediacy of intuition and its transcendent aim, which Rahner defines as the experience “in which what is

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meant and the experience of what is meant are still one” (cited in Lindbeck 1984, 32). In contrast to these three paradigms, Lindbeck offers a culturallinguistic approach to doctrine. Here Lindbeck places emphasis upon those “respects in which religions resemble languages together with their correlative forms of life and are thus similar to cultures (insofar as these are understood semiotically as reality and value systems—that is as idioms for the construing of reality and the living of life)” (1984, 18). In this description, Church doctrine serves as the set of rules which governs the culture that is the Church. Doctrine shapes the appropriate discourse, interpretation, and practice within the community. In the cultural-linguistic model, doctrine has the power to shape, rather than simply to represent, communal norms. Doctrine, in this model, would give definition and direction to communal practice. As Lindbeck puts it, “A religion is above all an external word, a verbum externum, that moulds and shapes the self and its world, rather than an expression or thematization of a pre-existing self or of pre-conceptual experience” (1984, 34).

theology and doctrine It is also important to emphasize the distinction that Lindbeck makes between theology and doctrine. There is, according to Lindbeck, far more heterogeneity within theology than there is within doctrine. Just as the abiding rules of a language’s grammar generally remain stable while the vocabulary of its speakers fluctuates and embodies changes in dialect and idiom, so is it with Church doctrine in relation to theology. Indeed, we might say that it is because of the stabilizing influence of paradigmatic Christian rules (particularly Trinitarian and Christological doctrines) that plurality and creativity within Christian language are made possible. Just as musical creativity does not come from someone sitting down at a piano without knowing the first thing about the instrument and the rudiments of musical theory, so creative genius within theology generally is given to those who have so thoroughly internalized its rules (although possibly in an untechnical manner) that following them seems effortless. According to Lindbeck, theology involves a highly complex set of practices which includes both making propositional truth claims and plumbing the expressive depths of its symbols. Therefore, while doctrines serve primarily as rules, theology might involve myriad skills, practices, and ways of understanding. Theology indeed may be engaged in a plurality of practices which includes the kinds of construction or expression that both the cognitive-propositionalists and the experien-

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tial-expressivists would wish to affirm. However, in the cultural-linguistic model, no foundational claims about the significance for theological practice of either method would be made. Doctrine, when functioning regulatively, makes possible the integrity and unity of theological discourse. As doctrine gives shape and definition to a form of life, ruling out certain interpretations while permitting others, it also can become the paradigm through which the biblical narrative is read and interpreted (a Christological reading of the Old Testament, for example, enabled early Christians to read the text as a cumulative, interglossing unity). Lindbeck’s project is not, then, a critique of the abiding permanence and normativity of Christian language; rather, it addresses the kind of foundationalism which regards the home of that certainty as independent of those central soteriological affirmations. Against such foundationalism, Lindbeck urges a return to a more salient form of authority for the justification of religious beliefs —one where propositional force is not delimited by middle axioms mediated by the knowing or intuiting subject, but rather is located within the world-shaping significance of the religion regarded as a whole.

postliberalism and its critique of modernity Implicit in Lindbeck’s critique of the dominant paradigms for understanding doctrine is a challenge to Enlightenment epistemologies in general. Since the Enlightenment, doctrinal statements have needed to adhere to external, objective criteria to be considered true and religious confession has come to be understood as a private (and perhaps idiosyncratic) expression of religious sentiment, which is thus devoid of truth content. Both of these positions, however, abstract doctrinal confession from its home within liturgical practice and within the Church. While the emergence of Enlightenment liberalism had clear and emancipating implications, its program for liberation from heteronomous authority came at the high price of the erosion of communal bonds in favour of a general, and therefore abstract and amorphous, set of beliefs and values. Within theology, the postulate of a generic religiosity had the effect of loosening communal allegiances and imposing a rather domesticated homogeneity upon the very otherness of God as revealed in scripture. In the place of a God who acts decisively within history, there emerged a prominent and unencumbered Self, unfettered by the constraints of biblical, ecclesial, and divine authority. The Kantian manifesto “sapere aude” soon became synonymous with the injunction to cast off the claims of one’s religion in order to dare to think oneself anew.

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In an efficient commentary on modernity’s influence upon Christian life, Lindbeck writes: The modern mood is antipathetic to the very notion of communal norms. This antipathy can be construed, as it is by sociologists of knowledge, as the product of such factors as religious and ideological pluralism and social mobility.… Doctrines no longer represent objective realities and are instead experienced as expressions of personal preference: some people have an affinity for Buddhism, some for Christianity, some for Catholicism, and others for Protestantism; but, as long as each person is honest and sincere, it makes no real difference which faith they embrace. Inevitably in this kind of atmosphere, communal loyalties weaken and are replaced by an emphasis on individual freedom, autonomy, and authenticity. The suggestion that communities have the right to insist on standards of belief and practice as conditions of membership is experienced as an intolerable infringement of the liberty of the self. (1984, 77)

While Lindbeck is unwilling to pay the high price of liberalism’s freedom, he is willing neither to reject its claims altogether nor to suppose that moderns can escape its grasp. The metaphor that persistently emerges is the absorption of the claims of liberalism, variously manifested within Christianity, by the biblical world. Although we, as moderns, cannot escape liberalism’s gravitational pull,3 we should seek to absorb it within the capacious world-view of scripture, which depicts true freedom and personhood. Lindbeck argues for the pre-eminence of scripture in defining the good, the true, and the beautiful—not through the positing of philosophical arguments but through Christian self-description. Such selfdescription ought to be the primary theological task, as it assumes a priority within the Christian community that refuses to be subordinated to the putatively neutral language of apologetics or foundationalism.

experiential- expressivism If the problem that Lindbeck is addressing is located squarely within the context of the ecumenical debate, then only two of the three models of doctrine really need be considered. Cognitive-propositionalism may be excluded as a possible model for ecumenical dialogue because doctrinal agreement, in this view, is impossible without capitulation. If Church doctrines are considered to be ontologically necessary, then doctrinal change and disagreement are very serious matters. Any attempt to harmonize contending doctrinal positions among denominations would be considered capitulation. Experiential-

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expressivism, on the other hand, would seem to be hospitable to the ecumenical project, given that it affirms the possibility of both continuity and change. However, cracks emerge within this foundation that subvert ecumenical and inter-faith projects: (a) Experiential-expressivism would be able to account for doctrinal change and plurality, but the positive content of underlying unity of religious experiences could not adequately be accounted for; (b) attempts to speak of a putative unity among the religious experiences tend to be rooted in psychological rather than theological descriptions and to emphasize experience and intuition—which is a stark departure from traditional theological norms; and (c) experiential-expressivism could affirm the possibility of change, but would be unclear about the normative content of doctrine—that is, about how the positive content of specific doctrinal expressions could be anything more the collectivization of contingent experience. It would seem that the hybrid-complex model, those approaches which posit a kind of ontological significance to the immediate intuitions and experiences of the religious subject, may be better situated to affirm dogmatic stability for religious language. For these, the content of Christian doctrine is the culmination of the grasping and intuiting of previously unformed religious experiences. Lindbeck cites two modern theologians, Bernard Lonergan and Karl Rahner,4 for whom the object of religious knowledge is correlated with the operations of immediate experience. Lonergan and Rahner take seriously the modern turn to the subject and the historical contingency of all knowing, while at the same time affirming the abiding normativity of Christian doctrine (see Lindbeck 1984, 24). Lindbeck does not refute these positions explicitly. Nonetheless, his assessment of Lonergan and Rahner’s attempt to offer an existential grounding for propositional claims is negative—a position based largely on the pragmatic grounds that they fail to offer an accessible and truly ecumenical prolegomenon to theology: Theories of the third type, which utilize both cognitivist and experiential-expressivist perspectives, are equipped to account more fully than can the first two types for both variable and invariable aspects of religious traditions but have difficulty in coherently combining them. Even at their best, as in Rahner and Lonergan, they resort to complicated intellectual gymnastics and to that extent are unpersuasive. They are also weak in criteria for determining when a given doctrinal development is consistent with the sources of faith, and they are therefore unable to avoid a rather greater reliance on the

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The Spirit and Language magisterium, the official teaching authority of the Church, for decisions in such matters than all Reformation Protestants and many Catholics consider undesirable. (1984,17)

In short, if The Nature of Doctrine’s raison d’être is conceived as a prolegomenon to an ecumenical dogmatics, then it is immediately evident that the experiential-expressivist and hybrid-complex approaches fail to offer an account of theology in which doctrinal continuity and agreement might be affirmed. Instead, both positions fall captive to an epistemologically based foundationalism which exacts doctrinal utterances from their shared and common use. While both approaches seek to secure a foundation for affirming the abiding continuity of theological statements, they do so in a manner in which the particularity of religious language is replaced by generic concepts of truth which are mediated by human consciousness, thereby allowing the positive content of the religion to become ever more tenuous, while the power of its individual arbiter gains greater primacy.

Overcoming Modern Epistemologies: A Theological Rationale Within modernity, the epistemological tradition is so ubiquitous as to escape notice. In a helpful and efficient critique, philosopher Charles Taylor identifies three tenacious repercussions of the modern epistemological tradition which have had particularly deleterious consequences for theology: The first is the picture of the subject as ideally disengaged, that is, as free and rational to the extent that he has fully distinguished himself from the natural and social words, so that his identity is no longer to be defined in terms of what lies outside him in these worlds. The second, which flows from this, is a punctual view of the self, ideally ready as free and rational to treat these worlds —and even some of the features of his own character—instrumentally, as subject to change and reorganizing in order the better to secure the welfare of himself and others. The third is the social consequence of the first two: an atomistic construal of society 5 as constituted by, or ultimately explained in terms of, individual purposes. (1995, 7)

Taylor’s assessment paints the modern era with very broad strokes—a questionable practice for anyone without Taylor’s breadth and depth of insight. Nonetheless, his characterization of modernity does help to articulate clearly the disenchantment with modern foundations that is

Pneumatology and Theological Discourse

only at times alluded to in, yet forms the essential background for, The Nature of Doctrine. Taylor’s tri-partite claim provides a solid foundation for exploring both the manifestations of modernity’s malaise in theology and Lindbeck’s attempt to address it.

the theologian as the disengaged subject In Taylor’s view, the first consequence of the modern epistemological tradition is “the picture of the subject as ideally disengaged, that is, as free and rational to the extent that he has fully distinguished himself from the natural and social worlds, so that his identity is no longer to be defined in terms of what lies outside him in these worlds” (1995, 7). As a result of this understanding, modern theologies, like other discourses, carry with them a picture of the world in which the individual is assigned the role of arbiter of the good, the true, and the beautiful. The task of the theologian increasingly has been regarded as one that is uncircumscribed by the messy entanglements of the Church and tradition. Freed from the heteronomous constraints of social bonds and communal allegiances, both the cognitive-propositionalist and the experiential-expressivist will value the innovative and disclosive, mediated or “discovered” by the private episteme, over the communal and habitual. Theology, then, situates itself in the methodological endeavours of expression or construction, seeking to free itself from the traditional theological yokes of scripture and tradition. As George P. Schner writes: “Construction as radical invention sets aside the receptive and the habitual in the Christian way of life, whether understood as faith, as tradition, or as experience. Thus, the fundamental distinction which marks this construal of theology as construction is the contrast between theology as grounded in faith as trust (the Christian self and community as gift from God) and theology grounded in human reflection, faith as criticism and invention (self and community as self-determining)” (2000, 21). Clearly, much of the impetus for Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic model stems from the modern deracination from communal bonds, especially religions. With the cultural-linguistic model, Lindbeck demonstrates how we are intrinsically linguistic—and hence social—beings and how, with that awareness, the theologian can be alerted to the communal norms that shape and mould what we habitually, as moderns, consider to be prior: Where communal bonds are weak and social structures favour individualism … the self is thought of and experienced with special intensity as an isolated ego. On the intellectual level and even more the

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The Spirit and Language emotional one, it is hard to acknowledge that selfhood is a socially and interpersonally constructed reality. Religious people in particular seem to find it hard to admit that humans are to the core of their beings social animals. Pietistic revivalists, old-style liberals and new age spiritualists differ on many points, but not, for the most part, in their individualism and experientialism. It is for them sacrilegious to think of the most intimately inward as socially shaped, to accord primacy to cultural-linguistic factors over experiential ones or, speaking theologically in Luther’s terminology, to grant the superiority of the external over the internal word. (2002,199–200)

It is to the ascendancy of the private episteme as arbiter of theological discourse that Lindbeck, in part, responds in the theological therapy offered in The Nature of Doctrine.

the theologian’s “punctual self” The twentieth century testifies rather poignantly to the dismal failure of modernity in its social engineering. The second consequence of the turn to the modern episteme, as Taylor identifies it, is the turning inward of moral evaluation from community norms to individual arbitration. The modern punctual self manifests itself theologically as theology becomes ever more associated with the manipulation of sources in order to expedite various political and social ends. Modernity’s confidence in the individual episteme gives rise to a pragmatic sensibility that locates the ethical imperatives of the tradition not as response to divine initiative, but again within radical human construction. Theology must issue in practical ends, which benefit the Church, the world, and the whole cosmos.6 To apply Taylor’s insights to theology, the world is the object that can also be changed for the better,7 according to the intuitions or the rational deliberation of the moral subject: “The second, which flows from this, is a punctual view of the self, ideally ready as free and rational to treat these worlds—and even some of the features of his own character—instrumentally, as subject to change and reorganizing in order the better to secure the welfare of himself and others” (Taylor 1995, 8). The punctual self is enjoined to construct a credible theology that casts off the chains of tradition and biblical witness for the sake of a greater good—which, through scientific method, can be determined and realized. In a poignant reflection on the state of the contemporary Church, Lindbeck critiques not the aims of the social activism in Christianity, but rather the curious penchant of Christians to think of such movements as the Church’s raison d’être:

Pneumatology and Theological Discourse If there is nothing really distinctive about the ministry why not go instead into the Peace Corps or fight for civil rights and peace in Vietnam without the detour represented by the Church? In saying this, I am not disparaging such causes as those of peace, civil rights and revolutionary change. I am simply pointing out that religions, including Christianity, do not survive when made instrumental to either the society’s or the individual’s welfare. As Luther would say, works flow from the faith, not faith from works; or, to put it in more secular language, the role of religion is to provide and to sustain convictions regarding what is ultimately real and good and which legitimate, rather than being legitimated by, certain codes of conduct. (2002, 96)

This instrumental view of theology and, indeed, of Church practice in general, is challenged in a thoroughgoing manner by Lindbeck’s culturallinguistic model of religion.

the church is constituted by individual purposes The third implication of modernity’s focus on the episteme involves the construction of human society as irreducibly governed by an aggregate of diverse individual purposes. Such an atomistic construal of society is characterized by a view of communal allegiances governed, above all, by autonomous choice. One’s allegiances are not to be dictated by the vicissitudes of birthright or cultural formation; rather, they are negotiated according to the canons of discrete and particular choice: [Prior to the seventeenth century] the issue of consent had been put in terms of a people establishing government by contract. The existence of the community was something taken for granted in all earlier versions.… For a post-seventeenth-century reader, an obvious question arises: How does the community get started?… The new theories add to the traditional contract founding government a second one, which precedes it: a contract of association. This is a universal agreement which founds a political community and confers on it the power to determine a form of government…. Previously that people were members of a community went without saying. It didn’t need to be justified relative to a more basic situation. But now the theory starts from the individual on his own. Membership of a community with common power of decision is now something that needs to be explained by the individual’s prior consent. (Taylor 1989, 193)

According to Lindbeck, membership within the Church increasingly has been regarded in such modernist terms where the Church is viewed as a group of like-minded people gathered together because of their various affinities in personal taste, preference, or experience. Lindbeck retrieves

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a sense of communal allegiance as “a more basic situation” in his preferred model of the church Church as Israel. Clearly, the verbum externum as the institution of the Church and the influence that it exerts upon members of a community through its distinct form of life is clearly a model of Church that has fallen out of favour in our contemporary valourization of epistemic judgment.

How Are Doctrines Justified? Understood against such a genealogy of modernity, The Nature of Doctrine can be read as a precise refusal to create yet another foundational theory on the truth content of doctrinal utterances. Instead, as Bruce D. Marshall so amply points out, The Nature of Doctrine concerns itself with a very different kind of task —that is, to consider the manner in which doctrines receive their justification.8 The operative question is not “Are religious utterances true?” Rather, it is “How do we affirm that religious utterances are true?” Given the overwhelming influence of the epistemic tradition—which, as Taylor systematically reveals, is a modern construct —it is little wonder that most critics of Lindbeck wish to contest his theory of doctrine on epistemological grounds. Indeed, it would seem that there could be no other way of justification. However, Lindbeck returns to the kind of justification of beliefs that existed prior to the epistemological turn: rather than being justified by individual arbitration, doctrines seek first in premodern times to conform to communal norms of scripture and tradition. Lindbeck puts it thus: Here, in contrast to the common supposition, one rarely if ever succeeds in making affirmations with ontological import, but rather engages in explaining, defending, analyzing, and regulating the liturgical, kerygmatic, and ethical modes of speech and action within which such affirmations from time to time occur. Just as grammar by itself affirms nothing either true or false regarding the world in which language is used, but only about language, so theology and doctrine, to the extent that they are second-order activities, assert nothing either true or false about God and His relation to creatures, but only speak about such assertions. (1984, 69)

Only in a world where the private episteme is not regarded as the exclusive home of meaning can such norms be considered in any way credible. Because we have a picture of the world which is so thoroughly absorbed by the mentalist’s notion of the truth, critical encounters with

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Lindbeck on the question of truth inevitably fall captive to this dominant epistemologically centred picture.

wittgensteinian ground clearing In a telling review of William J. Abraham’s Canon and Criterion in Christian Theology: From the Fathers to Feminism, George Lindbeck offers the following comments, contrasting pre-modern and modern loci of theological authority: On this early view, Scripture is seen along with other canonized instrumentalities of God’s grace and guidance as chiefly soteriological rather than epistemological. It is classified with, for example, holy icons, holy saints, and holy practices ranging from communal worship and sacraments to individual moral and devotional disciplines. Its basic role is to promote sanctity and discipleship. The epistemological use of Scripture as criterion is in this canonical perspective secondary. If this order is reversed and Scripture is treated as a norm of truth and falsity independent of prior immersion in it as means of grace, divisiveness is inescapable. Epistemic criteria are disjoined, and the Bible, tradition, the Magisterium, reason, and experience become competing rather than mutually supportive authorities. (1999, 68)

According to Lindbeck, modern theology has issued a series of dead ends in its attempt to secure theological meaning in primarily epistemological rather than soteriological grounds. Not only does such a move sever Christian theology from its form of life (i.e., the Church), but it also tends to obscure the very habitual practices that are operative in the individual’s appropriation of scripture and instead seeks to understand the appropriation of religious knowledge in terms that are highly privatized. Furthermore, the efficacy of salvation in Jesus Christ is somehow, according to the epistemological view, made contingent upon an act of human understanding. As Jean-Luc Marion characterizes modern Christian malaise: We believe, or at least we are reduced to having to believe (or not) because, while we have at our disposal many statements or concepts having to do with God (existence, properties, Trinity, creation, etc.) and with Christ (historical reality, death, resurrection, etc.), elaborated to high degrees of subtlety by centuries of tradition and theology, we decidedly lack intuitions that would allow us to validate some, and risk rejecting others. Only by recourse to faith can we fill this deficit of intuition with regard to the proliferation of concepts, unless we bury

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The Spirit and Language it in refusing such recourse.… I believe because, in spite of everything, I want to hold as true that which does not offer intuitive data sufficient to impose itself by itself. I believe in order to recapture the intuition, which God or Christ cannot or will not give to me, of their presence. Thus argues the majority of the credulous —by which I mean experts, scholars, philosophers, and even some theologians. (2002,145)

Faith, rather than being given by a verbum externum, is considered in the epistemologically solipsistic view to be primarily a means of overcoming our lack of direction or convincing intuitions to accord value of some sort to the data of religious experience. The consequence of such a view, as spelled out by Marion, is the utter circumscription of God’s power or will to offer humanity an efficacious saving word. Instead, the intuiting monad is left to adjudicate a viable faith from among the various options: “This argument nevertheless results in a kind of blasphemy…because it makes me, and only me, a ‘knight of the faith’— the singular actor, within the supposed ‘night’ of intelligence, of a faith without reason, who decided, by himself, on the existence of God and the truth of Christ, like a god deciding on God” (Marion 2002, 145–46). The casting of the individual believer as the singular arbiter of religious truth accords no real permanency or normativity to sources outside the self, be they scripture, tradition, or transcendental reason. While it would seem that such a model would permit conciliatory dialogue among persons with different faith perspectives, such dialogue is thwarted because there is no common ground for dialogue—as is the case in a purely experiential-expressivist view. Of course, most experiential-expressivists would wish to affirm low-level claims about religious unity. However, finding a coherent manner of speaking about the unity of religions becomes ever more elusive because, unless it is so nondescript that it fails to affirm anything of substance, speech about the ends of religion invariably echoes a particular religious discourse. This critique of unmediated experience is one that can be buttressed easily by Wittgenstein’s refutation of private language games.“Nothing is more wrongheaded,” argues Wittgenstein, “than calling meaning a mental activity” (1958, § 693). Wittgenstein challenges the notion that meaning is located within the disengaged subject’s mind and is, hence, hermetically sealed from the mind of others. It is this picture of the world, so prominent since Descartes, that holds us captive and creates for us a host of difficulties as we seek to understand understanding. One of the chief problematics of the Cartesian picture of the world is that it attempts to articulate a narrow theory, or set of theories, of how we come to under-

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stand. In Wittgenstein’s analysis of understanding, there are, in fact, myriad ways in which knowledge about the object is mediated, and therefore it is erroneous to suppose that there is only one operation—or even a limited set of operations—that constitutes human knowing and intuiting. A more adequate account of understanding seeks to give an adequate description of the plurality of logics of various realms of discourse. Such logic is contingent upon the particular rules that are given in very specific and diverse contexts or forms of life. As Wittgenstein argues: But how many kinds of sentences are there? Say, assertion, question and command?—There are countless kinds: countless different kinds of use of what we call “symbols,” “words,” “sentences.” And types of language, new language games, as we may say, come into existence, and others become obsolete and get forgotten. (We can get a rough picture of this from the changes in mathematics.) Here the term “language-game” is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life. (1958, §23)

In spite of the multiplicity of types of understanding, Wittgenstein does not refer us to the patterns of individual knowing as though we could chart out a phenomenology of each set of operations for various cognitive tasks. Instead, he refers us to the lebensform, the form of life that constitutes and motivates our knowing and our acting. It is here, within the concrete aims of a community, that our knowing and our acting are meant to serve, and it is here that the criteria for a particular knowledge’s justification are established. Justification of one’s knowing and one’s acting is given by the very logic and aims of the discrete lebensform: it is knowing how, to use Wittgenstein’s linguistic metaphor, to speak a language proficiently, to go on: The criteria which we accept for “fitting,” “being able to,” “understanding,” are much more complicated than might appear at first sight. That is, the game with these words, their employment in the linguistic intercourse that is carried on by their means, is more involved — the role of these words in our language other than we are tempted to think. (This role is what we need to understand in order to resolve philosophical paradoxes.) (1958, § 182)

Wittgenstein goes on to establish that competency within a particular language game is established not through a change in mental state but rather through following the pattern of the language game’s discourse so that its

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rules become habitual. The acquisition of theological understanding is not a change in mental state so much as it is a change in behaviour. As Wittgenstein shows, understanding is not a mysterious inner process; it is ordinarily manifest when individuals are able to employ a given set of rules. Further, such habitual practice cannot be idiosyncratic: one cannot have a private language.9 Instead, one follows the specific rules according to the custom of a given community or form of life. There are a number of ways in which Wittgenstein proves to be an important ally in Lindbeck’s attempt to rid theology of its epistemological excesses. First, against the picture of the disengaged subject, Wittgenstein demonstrates how rationality is located squarely within linguistic and habitual practice. The extrication of the self from the world is impossible, because one cannot stop being a linguistic being and there is no such thing as a private language. Lindbeck’s adoption of the cultural-linguistic model has the heuristic point of regarding a religion as profoundly shaped and governed by communal discourse rather than by individual arbitration. The location of theological justification within language rather than consciousness is a return to classical construals of authority: it was the sensus fidelium that represented the theology of the Church. More fundamental than a “horizon” (as hermeneutical theory would suggest), the social embeddedness of language cannot be overcome. It is within this very linguistic embeddedness that the theologian is situated. Her experience and rational judgment will be shaped in all ways by the medium in which she moves. As Lindbeck puts it: A religion can be viewed as a kind of cultural and/or linguistic framework or medium that shapes the entirety of life and thought. It functions somewhat like a Kantian a priori, although in this case the a priori is a set of acquired skills that could be different. It is not primarily an array of beliefs about the true and the good (although it may involve these), or a symbolism expressible of basic attitudes, feelings, or sentiments (though these will be generated). Rather it is similar to an idiom that makes possible the description of realities, the formulation of beliefs, and the experiencing of inner attitudes, feelings, and sentiments. Like a culture or language, it is a communal phenomenon that shapes the subjectivities of individuals rather than being primarily a manifestation of those subjectivities. It comprises a vocabulary of discursive and nondiscursive symbols together with a distinctive logic or grammar in terms of which the vocabulary can be meaningfully deployed. (1984, 33)

A second and related reason for Lindbeck’s engagement of Wittgenstein at the service of overcoming epistemology in theology is that such

Pneumatology and Theological Discourse

“therapy” allows theology to be theology. No longer does theology need to remain indentured to external discourses; instead, theology can seek its own ends. Theology’s behavioural and pragmatic dimensions need not, for example, conform to an abstract ideal of a universal religion: instead, they can seek to attend to those ends that are not dictated by modernity’s quasi-religious pictures of the good life. Theology can, therefore, be determined thoroughly through the specific idiom of a religion or form of life. As Lindbeck puts it: “It can be argued that the adherents of different religions do not diversely thematize the same experience; rather, they have different experiences. Buddhist compassion, Christian love and, if I may cite a quasi-religions phenomenon, French Revolutionary fraternité are not diverse modifications of a single fundamental human awareness, emotion, attitude, or sentiment, but are radically (i.e., from the root) distinct ways of experiencing and being oriented towards self, neighbour, and cosmos” (1974,13). The third implication of modernity’s focus on the episteme involves the construction of human society as irreducibly governed by an aggregate of diverse individual purposes. These diverse purposes prevail upon individuals to elect a specific outlet which might best cohere with their discrete values or goals. Therefore, Church membership is governed predominantly by autonomous freedom and is unhampered by the constraints of external pressures. Or, if the historicists’ assumptions about the world are taken seriously by moderns (as indeed they generally are in theology), then the task of theology also is to recognize the situatedness of our knowledge and to seek to overcome it through external regulative principles and procedures such as a hermeneutic of suspicion.

Conclusion Lindbeck’s contextualizing of theology is much more radical than modernity’s attempt to use social situatedness as a mitigating factor in theological reflection. Theology is not extrinsic adjudication or judgment; instead, it is a thoroughly intratextual task, and its practitioners are those who have been shaped and moulded by a specific symbolic world. The task of theology is not to accord value to specific utterances according to extratextual norms; rather, Christian theological utterances are justified first and foremost for their ability to cohere with the Christian narrative, which is centred upon the saving work of the triune God. Theology, according to Lindbeck, concerns itself with the “explanation, communication, and defense of the faith within the framework of communal doctrinal agreement” (1974, 76). In other words, in order to justify a claim

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theologically, one turns not to a putatively neutral language, but rather to a community’s own intratextual norms: “Intratextual theology redescribes reality within the scriptural framework rather than translating scripture into extrascriptural categories. It is the text, so to speak, that absorbs the world, rather than the world the text” (Lindbeck 1984, 118). Thus, theological utterances are justified primarily by intratextual norms, not by individual acts of judgment on the part of the theologian about either the cognitive or expressivist content of a discrete theological utterance.


notes 1 This view becomes prominent in the nineteenth century with the emergence of a historicist consciousness. In what he identifies as the “crisis of historicism,” Ernst Troeltsch defined the modern predilection for all matters historical, along with a concomitant sense of the impermanence and contingency of our life-world(s): “We see here everything in the flux of becoming. State, law, morality, religion and art are dissolved in this flux, and intelligible to us only as ingredients of historical truths” (“Die Krise des Historismus,” quoted in McPartland, 2001, 76). Such a characterization of historical existence goes largely unchallenged in experiential-expressivist theologies. 2 “We shall find that doctrines named dogmas are permanent, but our conclusion will not rest on classicist assumptions. Again, we are not relativists, and so we acknowledge something substantial and common to human nature and to human activity; but that we place not in eternally valid propositions but in the quite open structure of the human spirit—in the ever immanent and operative though unexpressed transcendental precepts: Be attentive, Be intelligent, Be reasonable, Be responsible” (Lonergan 1972, 302). 3 Iris Murdoch memorably wrote on the influence of the Kantian monad and its hold upon the modern imagination in these words: “How recognizable, how familiar to us is the man so beautifully portrayed in the Grundlegung, who confronted even with Christ turns away to consider the judgement of his own conscience and to hear the voice of his own reason … this man is with us still, free, independent, lonely, powerful, rational, responsible, brave, and the hero of so many novels and books of moral philosophy” (1970, 80). 4 Lindbeck sums up the Roman Catholic version of experiential-expressivism as exemplified in Rahner and Lonergan thus: “Thus for both there is a pre-linguistic experience of God which is thematized in varied expressive symbolisms in world religions, but in a single normative and partly propositionally identifiable way in Christianity” (1974, 10). 5 See also Jean Bethke Elshtain’s comments on the social implications of the modern valorization of the kind of freedom that Taylor described in relation to the epistemological construal: “Because liberal theory makes the mistake of presuming that all values are simple private values or compounds of private values, it cannot provide, as Robert Paul Wolff has argued, the grounding for

Pneumatology and Theological Discourse

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a life in common. The liberal theory of the individual connects with, and serves to justify, theories of liberation as a freeing of an ontologically ‘free’ self from social constraints. Individuals are said to be ‘free to choose’; their actions are either perceived as private or egotistic or, less frequently, as altruistic acts of supererogation that go beyond the minimal requirements of everyday life. Altruism is the only alternative to self-interestedness within liberal thought, and it remains an individual, not a social value” (1997, 168). See, for example, the functionalist orientation of Beverly Wildung Harrison’s lofty description of the constructive task of theological ethics, offered in thoroughly expressivist terms: “We need liberating spirituality (call it ‘authentic religion,’ if you will) because we require not only a relationally just, nonexploitative society that respects our needs but also an ongoing rebirth of vision, imagination, and hope for cosmic inclusivity. We need human cultures and societies that manifest and sustain aesthetic sensibility, diversity, beauty, and moral passion. We need a spiritual reorientation that encourages love, reverence, and appreciation for all that is creative in nature and human life and culture” (1985, 260). I have selected this passage from Harrison not because she is unique in her assignment of the theological task to a kind of moral arbitration, but precisely because her social ethics are so thoroughly representative of a kind of theological functionalism that predominates in contemporary Christian discourse. How to determine the viability of various theologies to serve a “greater good” is adjudicated variously by theologians like Harrison. Methodological preoccupation is characteristic of such approaches as the theologian “re-orients” Christian spirituality in such a way as to effect desired political and social change. One could read the entire project of revisionist theological ethics, from the Social Gospel on, in the lineage that Charles Taylor offers in his genealogy of modernity as the Lockean punctual self: “Locke thereby places himself in the tradition of theological voluntarism which … was closely interwoven with the rise of mechanism.… The disengagement both from the activities of thought and from our unreflecting desires and tastes allows us to see ourselves as objects of far-reaching reformation. Rational control can extend to the re-creation of our habits, and hence of ourselves. The notion of ‘habit’ has undergone a shift: it no longer carries its Aristotelian force, where our ‘hexeis’ are formed against the background of a nature with a certain bent. Habits now link elements which are no more relations of natural fit. The proper connections are determined purely instrumentally, by what will bring the best results, pleasure or happiness” (1989, 171). Lindbeck offers this interpretation by Marshall his stamp of approval: “Among [Marshall’s] contributions, the major one, however, is systematically to introduce into the discussion the distinction between the ‘truth’ and ‘justification’ of beliefs or propositions. Once the point is made, it is evident that ‘alethiology’ and ‘epistemology’ (to mention a cognate, though not identical, distinction) are, at least in some contexts, partially independent variables” (1989, 403). See the refutation of a “private language game” in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1958), of which § 329 is exemplary: “When I think in language, there aren’t ‘meanings’ going through my mind in addition to the verbal expressions: the language is itself the vehicle of thought.”

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3 The Spirit and Truth Pneumatology and the Apologetic Task




Introduction This chapter is animated by a quest for an adequate account of the relationship between the res significata (the thing that is signified) and the modus significandi (way of signification). Within modernity, we have fallen prey to an account according to which the critical distance between the two cannot be overcome, because the res, after Kant, cannot be adequately known, nor is it an appropriate object of our investigation. This account remains dominant even though many modern theologians (such as Lonergan and McGrath—albeit in different ways) have sought to overcome this distance by positing that there exists a kind of symmetry between human understanding and experience and God’s being, and by attempting to systematically co-ordinate the data of religious experience with divine being. Classical theism has some resonances with the dominant modern position in that, particularly within the Eastern tradition, it has emphasized the inscrutability of the divine. However, for classical theists, such as the Cappadocian Fathers, the purpose of apophatic theology was often a sort of prolegomenon on the gratuity of cataphatic theology: that is, what we can know about God, we know thanks to God’s self-communicating word to us. In classical theism, confidence in epistemic prowess was far more subdued than it is in modernity: God’s nature was known through

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the divine gift of the particular and unsubstitutable event of Jesus Christ, which is at once disruptive and thoroughly transcendent.

Assessing Religious Truth George Lindbeck, an exemplary Lutheran theologian, would, I suspect, in no way wish to subordinate grace to human works. And yet the formalism of his project, which sees performance as the criterion for the justification of individual speech-acts, threatens to do precisely this. Thus, to avoid this threat, a thoroughly Trinitarian account of the truth is essential. Such an account must address three distinct criteria: (a) categorial adequacy, (b) intrasystematic coherence, and (c) the sensus fidelium.

categorial adequacy The influence of the epistemological tradition can be seen most decisively in cognitive-propositionalism (as opposed to experiential-expressivism, which has hitherto been our main concern in overcoming epistemology). Within the tradition of epistemological realism, the justification of religious utterances is regarded as thoroughly occasionalist. Since Descartes, theological statements have been considered to carry propositional weight only in isolation from one another and from a form of life—from the community which affirms them. Lindbeck, however, contrasts this occasionalism with Saint Thomas Aquinas’ classical propositionalism, which is based upon the “analogical fluidities” (1974, 22) that inhere in a religious system. Within the classical-propositionalist framework, then, theological systems —rather than individual utterances—are the bearers of propositional weight. Accordingly, the way to justify such systems lies in assessing their ability to provide an adequate account of human existence. As Lindbeck puts it, the validity of theological systems lies in their categorial adequacy: “The questions raised in comparing religions have to do first of all with the adequacy of their categories. Adequate categories are those which can be made to apply to what is taken to be real, and which therefore make possible, though they do not guarantee, propositional, practical, and symbolic truth. A religion that is thought of as having such categories can be said to be ‘categorially true’” (1984, 48). Categorial adequacy, then, refers to the ability of the religion—considered as an extended proposition made manifest in text, tradition, and ritual—to address the things that it takes to be most importantly true. In this organic sense, classical propositionalism is affirmed. The propositional

Pneumatology and the Apologetic Task

force of religious utterances lies within the entire worldview that is presented as doctrine and gives rise to and sustains a form of life. This view of propositionalism is markedly different from the episodic testing out of discrete theological utterances, which tends to be the picture of religious language that predominates in cognitive-propositionalism. Rather than viewing the entirety of the form of life as an extended proposition, modern epistemological realism tends to parse out utterances and seeks to identify an ostensive reality which lies behind them.1 In contradistinction to this occasionalist treatment of the ostensive reality behind religious language, a picture of the world which is deeply rooted in the epistemological tradition, Lindbeck offers this account of religion’s propositional force: In brief, the proposal is that the propositional and assertoric force of a religion is not to be found in any of its individual utterances considered in isolation, but rather in the religion taken as a whole. A religious or anti-religious outlook understood, in Wittgenstein’s locution, as a language game with its correlated form of life, both pictures and, in so far as it is practised, affirms something about the character of the ultimate, about the widest possible environment, about, in Rahner’s felicitous phrase, the Mystery which surrounds our beginnings and our ends. Each religion and anti-religion, therefore, may be thought of in the unity of its verbal, symbolic and behavioural dimensions as a single, gigantic proposition, and the action of believing and living it is comparable to affirming the proposition, of judging it to be true. (1974, 18–19)

The normative affirmation that is made in this sense of propositionalism is located within the narrative rather than in a set of principles. Hence, one might develop the significance of the truth of the gospel narrative as categorially adequate to redescribe the whole world into its patterns. As Bruce D. Marshall writes: “Categorial adequacy is a significant test for truth in religious discourse, insofar as different religions propose particular and distinctive categorial patterns (such as particular realistic narratives) as indispensable for true speech about what the religion takes to be ‘most important’ or ‘ultimately real.’ Those who lack the relevant categories, to the degree that they lack them, will not be able to make true (or false) statements about what a given religion holds to be in fact the most important thing in the universe” (1990, 72). In terms of categorial adequacy, then, the capacity of the religious system to attend to and shape the diverse experiences of its members is the condition of its truthfulness.

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intrasystematic coherence Lindbeck’s criterion for adjudicating the reasonableness of a religion functions on a collective level; similarly, the criteria for the truth of individual utterances must conform to the capacious and patterned form of life of the collective level. Thus, it is in a practical sense, rather than in an abstract epistemological one, that Lindbeck offers a low-level affirmation of a correspondence theory of the truth of individual theological utterances. Intrasystematic coherence involves coherence with the text, rather than correspondence with an inner state or isolated ideal. However, the text must be understood not only as lexical writ but also as it is read and enacted by the Church. As Bruce D. Marshall writes: A given utterance will ordinarily be judged to be true by adherents of religion to the degree that it coheres with the wider web of belief and practice which constitutes the religion, especially with the paradigmatic patterns of belief and practice encoded in the religion’s scripture. Categorial adequacy alone, however, is not sufficient to guarantee that a given sentence when uttered will cohere in this way, even when that sentence is lexically and grammatically identical with a portion of the religion’s sacred text. That is because the way a sentence is used is decisive for its meaning (in that use), or, more specifically, because the meaning (or interpretation) of a sentence actively held true is fixed by the specific circumstances in which it is held true. (1990, 72)

We have already established that skill is a more accurate and convincing manner than private knowledge or intuition of describing the various ways in which humans come to understand. For Lindbeck, Christian skill is made manifest in deed as well as word. In a fascinating and important interpretation of Wittgenstein, Charles Taylor notes that what moves rule-following within a language game beyond a mere rote set of practices is an adequate recognition of rule-following’s embodied nature. That is to say, understanding is neither a change in inner state (as the epistemological tradition would have it) nor an act of following a blind rule; rather, it is a change in behaviour. This behavioural component speaks to the specifically dialogical character of understanding in Wittgenstein. Theologically speaking, therefore, justification is not so much an acquisition of the proper theological argument so much as it is a conformity of the embodied agent into a social sphere where the actions of that community become second nature. As Taylor writes: “Express rules can only function in our lives along with an inarticulate sense encoded in the body” (1995, 178).

Pneumatology and the Apologetic Task

Here the rather notorious example of the Crusader who cries “Christus est Dominus!” while cleaving the “Infidel’s” skull arises. This story serves both as an example of how a text which is intrasystematically true can be turned into a false proposition because of the marked dissonance between the depicted action and the text, and as a means to evaluate the specific norms that Lindbeck evokes in the justification of religious utterances. The Crusader’s practice is an active example of misunderstanding, in that the embodied and dialogical behaviour becomes a grotesque distortion of the objective patterns of speaking and behaving in Christianity. In identifying this distortion, Lindbeck wrests the justification of individual utterances from the confines of the episteme and places them within the proper context of embodied social life. Thus, in the sense that existential understanding involves the embodied practice of following communal norms, the theological statement “Christus est Dominus” is rendered false in this particular instance. In this example, Lindbeck is adjudicating only the performative truth of a specific speech act—not the possibility of its ontological validity. As Reinhard Hütter argues, one must first distinguish between speech acts and propositions: while the former may be rendered incoherent within a given act, the statement may be true on a propositional level as it corresponds to reality. Hütter puts it thus: Attentiveness is essential here to avoid misunderstanding Lindbeck’s use of this example. What does it mean, one might ask, to say that the statement “Christus est Dominus” is false? Several distinctions must be made here…. As a speech act during the cleaving of the skull, the statement is false in the sense of being conditionally nonsensical, since it condemns either the act and the agent, or it creates an immediate connection between the act and the statement such that Christus does indeed lose the signifier if Dominus is related to what the Crusader does. Or the Crusader completely misunderstands Dominus if Christus is supposed to refer univocally to the person and the work of the canonically attested Jesus of Nazareth. (2000, 53)

It is in the performative sense only that Lindbeck argues that the statement “Christus est Dominus!” is rendered false by the actions of the Crusader. The question is whether Lindbeck would wish to affirm the ontological truth of this statement independent of the practice of speakers. Lindbeck does offer the possibility at times of a modest realism that is attached to theological utterances: “There seems to be no reason, in other words, why the cultural-linguistic theories of religions need exclude, even though they do not imply, the modest cognitivism or proposition-

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alism represented by at least some classical theists, of whom Aquinas is a good example” (1984, 66). As a means of understanding the relationship between the performative utterances of Christians and the truth content of the Christian faith, Lindbeck engages Aquinas’ writings on the assertoric force of statements about God in a sustained, albeit condensed, manner in The Nature of Doctrine. Aquinas, Lindbeck notes, distinguishes between the statements about God made by humans according to the limitations of human reasoning and knowing (the modus significandi) and the actual divine being (the significatum). In our knowledge of God, we speak only through indirect analogy of God’s qualities. In spite of the “informational vacuity” (1984, 67) of human knowledge of God, the faithful are enjoined to make their behaviours correspond to the proposition that God is good, according to the manner that is given in scriptures, even though the nature of that goodness in se remains hidden. As Lindbeck writes on the resurrection: “The significatum of the claim that Jesus truly and objectively was raised from the dead provides the warrant for behaving in the ways recommended by the resurrection stories even when one grants the impossibility of specifying the mode in which those stories signify” (1984, 67). The opacity of the modus signficandi is overcome, according to Lindbeck, in practical living where the Church conforms to the saving narrative as though the significatum were transparent. Paradoxically, the significatum becomes ever more real and present as the practices of the faith are carried out. This empirical manifestation of the plain sense of scripture is inexorably tied to communal norms of right Christian practice.2

lindbeck’s “sensus fidelium” Competence, in a cultural-linguistic model of religion, becomes the empirical test of the appropriation of religious truth by the individual or the community. In his lectures, Lindbeck extends this insight to offer a tentative pneumatology based upon the “test” of the fruits of the Spirit as manifested in practice: The demand for competence is the empirical equivalent of insisting on the Spirit as one of the tests of doctrine. The role of the Spirit, strange as this might seem, is more strongly stressed by our non-theological approach than by many theologies. It is emphasized, however, in such a way as to avoid sectarian enthusiasm…. There are in this approach at least partially objective tests for identifying the Spiritfilled. They must, to recapitulate, be in the mainstream, rather than

Pneumatology and the Apologetic Task in isolated backwaters or ingrown sects uninterested in communicating widely. They must be what in the first centuries was meant by “catholic” or “orthodox” and what we now generally call “ecumenical.” Further, the competence with which they speak must be, to some extent, empirically recognizable. As in the case of native speakers of natural languages, they are not tied to fixed formulas, but rather can understand, speak, and discriminate between the endless varieties of new ways of using both old and new vocabularies. While they may not have formal theological training, they are likely to be saturated with language of scripture and/or liturgy. One might, perhaps, call them flexibly devout, and this is evidence that they have so interiorized the grammar of their religions that they are reliable judges, not directly of the doctrinal formulations (for these may be too technical for them to understand), but of the acceptability of the consequences of these formulations in ordinary religious life and language. (1974, 4)

It is here that Lindbeck offers a glimpse into the positive theological complement that might be offered in a cultural-linguistic model of religion. Most specifically, he offers an account of Church practices that moves beyond formal competency to a sense of the nature of religious assent vis-à-vis the sensus fidelium, while he specifically uses a doctrine of the Holy Spirit as a manner of testing the competency of individual speakers within the Church.

Assessing Lindbeck’s Account of the Holy Spirit In these brief comments on the very suitability of the cultural-linguistic model for a sustained pneumatology, Lindbeck might be read as addressing the very concerns that are raised in this project. In order to assess this, we will first have to establish a couple of things: (a) whether his account of the Holy Spirit is adequate to address the pneumatological concerns previously identified, namely the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit and the personal nature of the Spirit’s address; and (b) the relationship between the sensus fidelium and the transcendent Holy Spirit in the kind of pneumatology that I am advancing here. Lindbeck’s pneumatology will be tested out by reference to three critical sources. The first is the Barthian critique of Lindbeck’s Crusader illustration offered by George Hunsinger. The second is a feminist critique which articulates discomfort at the close identification of the Holy Spirit with Church practices. And the third derives from a return to Taylor’s

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notion of the punctual self as I consider whether Lindbeck’s account of pneumatology retains vestiges of the epistemological tradition.

george hunsinger and the crusader In an important essay entitled “Truth as Self-Involving: Barth and Lindbeck on the Cognitive and Performative Aspects of Truth in Theological Discourse,” George Hunsinger (1993) offers a critique of Lindbeck’s position which challenges Lindbeck’s coherentist view of the truth of individual speech-acts. Hunsinger refutes the premise that there are, in fact, only two options in the justification of religious belief (i.e., performative use or ostensive/ideal referentiality) and points, via Karl Barth, to a third possibility, which is grounded neither in practices nor in the private episteme, but rather in God’s sovereign self-communication: In the same passage where he speaks of human loves as necessary for attesting divine love, Barth also speaks of the truth and reality of God’s love as occurring “primarily and intrinsically” on another and different plane (1958: 813). Presumably, the difference between these two planes of love implies that the validity of utterances about the divine plane can neither be totally established nor totally undermined by the human plane on which they are uttered. In both passages, it would seem, certain theological circumstances are perceived that mitigate against a more complete convergence with Lindbeck. Barth seems clearly to presuppose that the truth and intelligibility of theological claims are in some sense logically independent of the rightness and truthfulness with which they may either be advanced or contradicted on the human plane. (1993, 46)

One might raise the objection that Hunsinger is potentially misreading Lindbeck. Given that, for Lindbeck, the Church is that community which is so shaped by the biblical narrative that it becomes absorbed within it, is it appropriate for Hunsinger to consider Lindbeck’s notion of Church practices merely restricted to the human plane? I think Hunsinger’s critique is valid insofar as there exists a distinct dissonance between Lindbeck’s ecclesiology based primarily upon Church practices and his sense of the Church as an imperfect human community. In other words, should the intrasystematic coherence of practices refer primarily to the natural Church rather than to the Church’s biblical telos? If so, how do we critique Church practices, and how can the Bible persist in any real way to stretch the community? As Hunsinger points out, Karl Barth offers a transcendent explanation of the truth of doctrinal statements that is connected to the world through God’s self-disclosure rather than through the mediation of human prac-

Pneumatology and the Apologetic Task

tices or knowing. Such an account of truth transcends the confines of human positing, through either judgment or practical skill: Why, [Barth] might ask, should the meaning of what the Crusader says (and thus its possible truth) be treated so atomistically? Are there not standard and paradigmatic uses that create a background against which any particular use operates? And why should meaning and truth be treated so anthropocentrically? What exactly establishes the total relevant context? Is it not finally determined by God in such a way that cultural-linguistic considerations (or any other anthropological considerations), however valid they may be on their own plane, cannot be either decisive or exhaustive? (1993, 47)

In contrast to Lindbeck, Barth offers an account of the truth of theological utterances that is grounded within a doctrine of revelation. Such revelation is given in the event of Jesus Christ who is made known through the Bible. Any correspondence theory of truth would need to be oriented toward Christ, as depicted in scriptures, rather than human practices. As Hunsinger states: In Barth’s theology Jesus Christ is indirectly identical with scripture in a way that can never be maintained of Jesus Christ’s relationship with the Church —not even the Church considered in its formal aspect as a correlative form of life —to which the semantic role is assigned of mediating the cognitive truth of theological utterances so that they are brought into correspondence with the divine reality. Regardless of the senses in which that mediation may occur in a context of active relations proceeding from God to humanity and from humanity to God, it is scripture not the Church which serves as the earthly-historical vehicle of semantic correspondence. The semantic features of scripture (as established by divine agency in and through the primitive community) are conceived as a secondary and indirect extension of the mediatorial role exercised by Jesus Christ Himself. Although those semantic features in themselves remain inert until actualized by the miracle of grace (i.e., by divine agency), it is precisely those features which are actualized as the normative witness to the divine self-disclosure. The authority of scripture depends formally on its embodiment of certain Christocentric semantic features even as it depends materially on the event of their divine actualization in the present. (1993, 47)

There are two salient features of Hunsinger’s critique that are worth considering in our assessment of the sensus fidelium as the proper primary locus for a pneumatology. The first is that the historical event of the inbreaking of God’s word in Jesus Christ as codified in Scripture is the

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proper discriminen for the truth of religious utterances. The second is that the miracle of grace vivifies the semantic features of the text for the reader or for the worshipping community. Although Hunsinger does not speak of it this way, both dynamics—the pointing of the lexical writ to the Christ event and the event of divine actualization in the hearing of the Word—are pneumatological events. The disruptive power of the Holy Spirit, in the hearing of the Word and in the historical event of Jesus Christ as mediated by the early Christian community, provides significant concrete force by insisting on the efficacy of divine initiative as constitutive of individual speech acts. This dimension is entirely lacking in Lindbeck’s account, where a sense of givenness of the Church tends to diminish the disruptive capacity of the Holy Spirit.

a feminist critique A similar critique of Lindbeck’s ecclesiological determinism can be made from a feminist perspective. Lindbeck’s position on the self-evidential nature of the ultimacy of Church practices becomes problematic for feminist and other liberation theologies. His writing on infallibility makes the problem particularly apparent: This brings us to the guarantees, the locus, of infallibility. What is the source of the evidence we trust in forming our judgments on disputed points of doctrine? To trust the whole community of competent speakers of a language, as our model suggests, sounds much more Eastern Orthodox than it does either traditionally Protestant or Roman Catholic. Infallibility for the Orthodox belongs to the Church as a whole in so far as it is open to the Spirit and is united in space and time with all the faithful from the scriptural witnesses down to the present. (1974, 19)

While Lindbeck offers certain caveats, such as the union of the Church and the presence of the Holy Spirit within it, this proposition lends itself to many questions and challenges from a feminist perspective. First among these is the question of critical distance from the Church: if infallibility resides within the Church, how might self-criticism emerge? Also significant is the question of power: how might women—and others who have been marginalized within Church structures—be able to transcend the power of the Church, if it is understood, as Lindbeck seems to be suggesting, as the fundamental locus of the Spirit’s work? The issue of power also emerges in terms of pneumatology: does the close alignment of power and practices within Church structures—as is seen in the cultural-linguistic model—not present a kind of truncation of the Spirit’s mission?

Pneumatology and the Apologetic Task

On this third question, the work of Amy Plantinga Pauw is helpful. Her vision expands our understanding of the transforming power of the Holy Spirit by liberating it from the confines of ecclesial exclusivism: Yet at the same time the Spirit discerned according to the pattern provided by the life and death of Jesus Christ exceeds the bounds of the Christian community. The universal scope of the Spirit’s work resists the Church’s perennial tendency to cage it, to turn it into a seal of divine approval given to the Church’s structures and ministries. Christian discerners of the Spirit are to look for exciting and unpredictable anticipations of this larger redemptive incorporation. Ultimately, the groaning creation as a whole is destined to be caught up in the work of the Spirit in order that it too may “obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” (1996, 48)

By regarding the Church as the locus of the Holy Spirit, George Lindbeck offers a premature sanctification of Church structures. Certainly, such an ecclesiology has had deleterious consequences for women and others who remain outside of Church power structures. Despite Lindbeck’s contention that the Church’s infallibility is being compromised by its current fragmentation, the experiences of women strongly suggest that one must emerge from the cultural-linguistic community in order to critique it. One possibility for such an emergence lies in scripture. Perhaps the critical space that is needed for women and other strangers to engage in critical theologies of the Church comes, as Hunsinger has suggested, from understanding the Bible as the trustworthy, yet indirect, self-disclosure of God to humanity in Jesus Christ. If scripture, rather than the Church, were granted such normativity, then perhaps Church practices which perpetuate traditional —and negative —gender ideologies also might be viewed as fallible and subject to pneumatological challenge. Furthermore, there may be resources for critical theology within the intratextual model which have not yet been adequately explored. Lindbeck distinguishes between the saints and the catechumenate in terms of their fluency in the Christian faith. However, a more radical intratextual analysis might also examine the manner in which the very rules of the language game are inscribed upon the very practices of the Church’s members. Have the rules of the game been internalized in such a way as to necessarily place women (and others) in an inferior position within a social hierarchy for reasons other than their skills as practitioners of the Church’s language? Lindbeck may wish to deny that sexism within the Church status is an unconditional rule, but the tenacity of that rule and its accommodation within an intratextual pattern of behaviours is clearly

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evident in an account of the material exclusion of women from the priesthood. Rules such as those which exclude women from priesthood inscribe themselves differently in the actions, patterns of behaviour, and bodily postures of men and women. Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977) pragmatic theory of embodied rule-following offers a more detailed account of the manner in which such social operations are differentially structured for men and women. Bourdieu’s notion of habitus—a generating principle or modus operandi that produces those regular improvisations that can also be called social practice —is very close to Lindbeck’s verbum externum. Both Lindbeck and Bourdieu illustrate the manner in which rules are internalized by the individual so that they become second nature. But Bourdieu goes on to suggest that the complete past which has produced an individual continues to have a profound impact upon the present. He explains that the ways of thinking, perspectives on the world, patterns of perception, and principles of judgment and values at work in a society have all gone into the habitus, which, in turn, becomes manifest in the behaviour and expression of individuals. The embodied consequences of this shaping is partially acknowledged by Lindbeck’s appropriation of Wittgenstein. According to Lindbeck, it is in activity that the “absorption” of the individual into the text is made concrete. Bourdieu describes the process as a “social necessity turned into nature, converted into motor schemes and body automatisms” (1977, 215). The habitus, as the agent’s incorporated experience with the social world, shapes the body, gestures, and bodily stance, where the body functions as a medium in which the habitus expresses itself. And, as a reservoir of social experience, the body is an essential component of the habitus. Sexism within the church, therefore, is most fruitfully explored and exposed not through an examination of beliefs about women’s ministry, but through a kind of phenomenology of embodied practices. For our purposes, it would be helpful to understand the habitus of the Church in terms that are more realistic than Lindbeck’s preferred metaphor, “messianic pilgrim people of God.” If, instead, we recognized the complexity of the Church, then it would become possible to see how the exclusion of women from full participation within the Church serves to somatize women—that is, how it actually writes oppression into the very bodies of the Church’s female members. Within that perception of the habitus of the Church, there is room to understand the power of the Holy Spirit—still intratextually described—as differentiated from Church structures and as a basis for a critical hermeneutics.

Pneumatology and the Apologetic Task

This intratextual and material place for critique is radically different from the abstract principle upon which much of the feminist hermeneutics of suspicion is based. The writing of the text upon the bodies of women within the Church in ways that are materially suggestive of the institutional force of oppression becomes a tangible source for critique. In this pragmatic account, women are seen through the concrete manifestation of their bodies, still excluded from Church practices, and often with an internalized self-deference before male authority within Church structures as opposed to being lumped together based upon the ideological canons of a “common nature” or a “feminine epistemology” or, worse, by “women’s experience.” Here, within this small critical space—located squarely still within the common practices of the Church —it becomes possible to speak of a pneumatology of differentiation rather than of reconciliation. To transpose Bourdieu’s critical theory into a distinctly theological key may suggest that the ability of persons to transcend their habitus within the Church and to reveal its sometimes oppressive hold is a power granted by the Holy Spirit. Bourdieu speaks of persons having such ability within any community as prophets. But, even within Bourdieu’s secular account of the prophetic voice, the ability to see through the determinism of habitus is described in terms that transcend the operations of self-positing. It decidedly is not accorded to a special kind of epistemic intuition.

lindbeck’s “punctual self” In his formal analysis of the performative truth of utterances, Lindbeck engages language philosopher J.L. Austin’s theory of speech acts: “A religious utterance, one might say, acquires the propositional truth of ontological correspondence only insofar as it is a performance, or act or deed, which helps create that correspondence” (1984, 65; italics mine). In a model of religious language that is so unwilling to have discourse about God circumscribed by theories of epistemic certitude, it is surprising that Lindbeck would wish to offer a theory of correspondence based upon human practices. Indeed, such an approach may well “smuggle in” the second implication of epistemological supremacy that Taylor describes as “the punctual view of the self.” While Lindbeck is careful to ground creaturely performance within the context of the Church’s “total pattern of speaking, thinking, feeling, and acting” (1984, 64), is it not possible that, within a deracinated, postmodern Church, those patterns are more closely identified with a very different language game (i.e., liberalism) than they are with scripture?

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If such were the case, then—even though the Crusader’s cry would be in clear violation of the liberal Church’s values —it would be difficult for the Christian to understand, for example, the goal of liberation as a biblical rather than a self-determining project. The performative justification of speech acts could just as easily be collapsed into a kind of theological functionalism which is based upon extratextual norms that are, in Taylor’s words, aimed narrowly at securing “the welfare of himself and others” (1995, 7). If religious utterances are justified by right conduct, then perhaps Lindbeck’s “therapy” does not go far enough in ridding himself of the epistemological tradition and its abiding implications. Certainly Lindbeck would wish to maintain the primacy of grace in shaping and determining such conduct; however, in the end, it is difficult to sustain divine freedom when it is tied so inexorably to practices. As George Hunsinger argues, the truth of theological statements which reveal Christ to be Lord may be independent of the circumstances of the utterances. However, this independence does not make the circumstances arbitrary. The event of God’s self-revelation is the necessary condition for right human performance. God’s agency and human agency are not parts of a zero-sum game; rather, God’s initiative gives rise to human response. It would be artificial, then, to try to determine the precise moment when the miracle of grace issues in proper human performance. Thus, it is sufficient to say that the conditions of speech acts occur in a field that is entirely constituted by divine initiative. As Barth inimitably puts it: Above all [the creature] cannot seek refuge in a separate freedom of choice and control respecting his own being, action, and conduct which still remains to him alongside the choice and control for which he is empowered and to which he is also invited and ordered by God, for a choice and control other than that for which he is freed and to which he is referred by God does not even enter into the question for him, for the man who has become new and different through God’s act. Through his baptism with the Holy Ghost, God has truly beset him behind and before. (1956–75, 4/4: 36)

The Holy Spirit makes performative correspondence possible. Efforts to establish the causality of such correspondence in human practice fail to consider the abundance of the Spirit’s work in each moment of Christian discernment or practice. Lindbeck’s coherentist model tends to regard human performance as the principal causality of the correspondence of utterances. A better theological description of truth correspondence would need to give more detailed accounts of both the independence of

Pneumatology and the Apologetic Task

truth beyond human performance and the agency of the Spirit in individual acts of coherence (in which the Spirit is the subject of the correspondence and the creature’s actions are the predicate). Such a pneumatological correction to George Lindbeck’s account of the truth of performative utterances also serves to distinguish between the normativity of Church and Christ for the correspondence of human speech acts. Church practices conform to scripture and, moreover, to Christ, insofar as the Holy Spirit makes such practices holy. The performative transparency of faithful acts within the Church to the mind of God is not a given; neither is it ultimately determined by the discrete performance of communities. Rather, it is a gift which is at times disruptive and certainly beyond containment. Indeed, as Amy Plantinga Pauw so articulately pointed out, the workings of the Holy Spirit among those who fall outside of the ecclesia are the very signs of the “exciting and unpredictable anticipations of this larger redemptive incorporation” (1996, 48).

McGrath’s Critique of Lindbeck We have thus far established some of the theological limitations of George Lindbeck’s formal account of truth in the cultural linguistic model. We have seen that Christian speech about truth ought to affirm Christ as revealed in scripture. Christology, rather than ecclesiology, ought to be the locus for the infallibility of Christian claims. However, apart from such Christological (and, I would add, pneumatological) realism, is there any other manner in which we might establish or affirm the “truth content” of Christianity? One of Lindbeck’s most prolific critics, Alister E. McGrath, maintains that there is. Taking issue with a purely regulative view of doctrine, McGrath seeks to challenge both the historical and theoretical limitations of Lindbeck’s proposal: The critical question which arises from [Lindbeck’s] approach … is whether theology is simply about the grammar of faith—that is to say, regulation of Christian discourse. To what does this discourse relate? Is there some reality or set of realities outside the biblical text to which the biblical reality relates? Do theological assertions simply articulate biblical grammar, or do they relate to some objective order, irrespective of whether we recognize this relation or not? As we shall see, one central evangelical anxiety concerning the postliberal approach is that it appears to represent a purely intratextual affair, with little concern for its possible relation to external reality. (1996b, 135)

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McGrath is not only disquieted by the seeming lack of ontological reference within Lindbeck’s theory of doctrine, but also concerned that there is no adequate description of the experiential ground of doctrinal attestation that is so thoroughly important to evangelical theology: “For evangelicals, there is something real that lies beyond the text of Scripture which is nonetheless rendered and mediated by that text: the Christian experience of redemption in Christ” (1996a, 40; italics mine). McGrath delineates three disparate functions of doctrine: (a) to be generated by and, subsequently, to interpret the Christian narrative; (b) to interpret experience; and (c) to make truth claims (1990a, 37). The first of these functions is most in keeping with Lindbeck’s theory of doctrine, although Lindbeck’s understanding of the manner in which doctrine interprets the Christian narrative is quite different from McGrath’s. The second and third functions, however, demonstrate significant differences between the two theologians.

interpreting the christian narrative McGrath recognizes the importance of doctrine as a regulator of the Christian narrative, and here, in many respects, offers an account of doctrine which is in keeping with the regulative approach established by Lindbeck. For McGrath, however, the regulation of the narrative by means of doctrine is contingent upon seeing doctrine in conceptualist terms: that is, doctrine stands for something else, and it is this something else behind the doctrine that regulates the narrative. To illustrate the relationship between narrative and concepts, McGrath engages Alessandro Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi, a nineteenth-century Italian novel which, on one level, depicts the romantic story of two people living in the plague-scourged Italian countryside. Read on another level, however, the novel becomes a highly moralistic allegorical tale which: (a) comments on Christian virtues and character in marriage; (b) explores such traditional Romantic themes as the goodness of the land and the intrinsic virtue of peasant life; and (c) functions, through its exploration of the themes of simplicity and nationhood, as a nationalistic precursor, in much the same way that Goethe functioned in anticipating and shaping Germany’s nationalistic aspirations. McGrath sees this novel’s narrative form as “the link between ideas or values and their actualization in history and historical forms” (1990b, 56; italics mine). The narrative gives rise to a “set of aesthetical [and, I would argue, political and theological] principles” that Manzoni is affirming. The narrative is the embodiment of the principles in una società reale and in un tempo particolare della storia. However, those principles are themselves fixed

Pneumatology and the Apologetic Task

concepts which exist behind the text. The particularity that is embodied within the narrative is a cipher for the concepts or values endorsed by the novel. It becomes problematic, however, to apply this analogy to the biblical text—that is, to regard the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ as an embodiment of principles. Christ embodies God, not a set of principles or values—no matter how capacious or wholesome. While McGrath would urge that no concept can adequately capture the experience of the Incarnation, the distance between a concept and individual experience tends to be regarded—in McGrath, as in the hermeneutical tradition—as that which might be overcome by the subjective operations of the reader: “Cognitive theories of doctrine recognize that words are on the borderlands of experience, intimating and signposting the reality which they cannot capture. To apply pejorative epithets such as ‘intellectualist’ or ‘literalist’ to the cognitive-propositionalist approach is to fail to appreciate the power of words to evoke experience, to point beyond themselves to something inexpressible, and to convey an experience that their author wishes to share with his or her readers” (1996a, 31). For McGrath, the experiential surplus that words engender is an essential aspect of the cognitive component of scriptural language. This experience offers the reader something more—a kind of personal assurance to the truth that is disclosed by the narrative. However, because the experience of scripture, as opposed to its literal sense (i.e., Jesus Christ), is of primary significance to McGrath, the relationship between experience and scripture becomes more tenuous. And yet, though the set of principles, or the meaning, to which the narrative points has priority over the narrative, the two are correlated: “Experience and meaning are thus two sides of the same coin, forbidding us to reduce Christianity to bare propositions on the one hand or to inchoate experiences on the other. Every experience includes, and is modified by, interpretative elements” (1996a, 32). In this sense, McGrath begins to look a great deal like Schleiermacher,3 who contends that experience has a predicate, objective dimension. The interpretative elements which modify Christian experience include doctrine, but in McGrath’s approach doctrine is considered propositionally rather than regulatively. Thus, the hermeneutical task of relating experience and meaning is contingent upon a kind of balance that, in the end, seems difficult to maintain: reading increasingly becomes an individual endeavour and scriptural interpretation is loosened from the text’s literal sense.

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interpreting experience Although experience, according to McGrath, is a fundamentally inadequate foundation for the grounding of faith, part of the function of doctrine is nevertheless to be a “net cast over experience.” Among other things, doctrine seeks to interpret a pre-linguistic set of non-specified intuitions (such as yearning for God). These intuitions, according to McGrath, are part of the a priori universal experiences which are fundamental to the grammar of faith. In addressing one such universal experience, alienation, McGrath writes: “The tragic human feeling of alienation from the grounds of our being is thus interpreted as alienation from God, carrying with it preliminary intimations of the possibility of redemption” (1990a, 71). It is difficult to establish whether the experience of alienation, which McGrath views as a key religious experience, exists prior to the narrative’s depictions of creation and fall, bondage and liberation, exile and return, and sin and salvation. Certainly, the biblical notion of alienation is phenomenologically very different from the experience of alienation that is expressed through the Marxist reading of the narrative of early industrialization. From a Marxist perspective—in the dyad of capitalism and revolution—there is both a brute cause of alienation and a fairly unilateral form of overcoming it. Within the biblical narrative—as the banishment of Adam and Eve or the wandering in the wilderness, and Gethsemane all seem to suggest —the sense of alienation is at once voluntary and tragic, while thoroughly conditioned by the memory of grace. Thus, to regard alienation as a common human experience is to neglect the very real differences in its distinct specifications within various narrative worlds. McGrath’s second function of doctrine —intrepreting experience — dramatically abstracts doctrine from its liturgical roots. In the early Church, doctrinal affirmation was thoroughly grounded in liturgical practice. If there were to be a net cast over experience, the experience would be liturgical and communal and, by its very nature, would resist accommodation into a pre-linguistic or unmediated intuition. In this sense, the evangelical emphasis upon individual assent and personal transformation independent of life-forming context appears to be a fairly modern construct. To return to Taylor’s deconstruction of epistemology: “But now the theory starts from the individual on his own. Membership of a community with common power of decision is now something that needs to be explained by the individual’s prior consent” (1989, 193).

Pneumatology and the Apologetic Task

Consent may be the wrong word for the kind of personal testimony that McGrath and other evangelicals wish to uphold as an essential element in the coming to faith. However, without a more robust account of the thoroughly communal socialization that occurs in this process, McGrath’s picture of the believer fails to account adequately for the manner in which religion shapes and moulds our experience of knowing God, and therefore falls prey to the solipsistic fallacies that pervade liberal theologies.

making truth claims In making his final point, that doctrine makes cognitive truth claims, McGrath engages the example of the adoption of the term homoousios at the Council of Nicaea as a refutation of Lindbeck’s strictly regulative view of doctrine. The vigour of the debate that surrounded the adoption of this term can hardly be overstated. According to McGrath, its adoption involves a movement from the narrative to an exposition of the narrative within a given culture’s conceptual framework: The move from the repetition or reiteration of scripture to doctrinal exposition through an already existing language and conceptual framework inevitably carried with it the demand for an engagement with the view, or range of views, of reality already associated with that language and conceptual framework…. There was thus a tendency to fuse the scriptural idiom concerning God with the classical philosophical theistic conventions. The data of scripture and the Christian tradition were thus interpreted in the light of presuppositions, within a hermeneutical framework, alien to their sources. (1990a, 4–5)

The biblical narrative could be transposed into an external idiom without significant loss or reduction, as is the case of homoousios, which was a necessary theoretical device employed against the Arians. The defence of the biblical faith, according to McGrath, required within the context of the Arian controversy the legitimation of Hellenistic philosophical categories: We fail to do justice to the pressures confronting early Christian thinkers if we represent them as simply incorporating pre-existing philosophical or civil views of the divine attributes (such as omnipotence) into their thinking, or allowing that thinking to be shaped by such external influences. A potentially more subtle influence must be acknowledged—the prevailing conventions concerning the nature

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According to McGrath, it is naïve to assume that Christian discourse was unaffected by the pressures of Greek philosophy, including its method and logic. To acknowledge the complexity of the pressures upon Christianity causes some ambiguity about the inner and outer structure of lived Christian discourse. Doctrinal change, then, was seen as dynamic movement where theological clarity was gradually improved: “Most theologians of the medieval period understood dogma as a dynamic concept, a ‘perception of divine truth, tending towards this truth (perceptio divinae veritatis tendens in ipsam)’” (1996a, 30). McGrath’s account of doctrinal change, therefore, welcomes the insights of external discourses not because of their intrinsic propriety, but because human language, even from external sources, has the potential to refer to the reality of God. The cognitive content of the name God, therefore, carries with it a logic to which doctrinal affirmations have to cohere: “To speak of doctrine as ‘truth’ is rightly to draw attention to the fundamental Christian conviction that doctrine has to do with veridicality, rationality, and comprehensive elucidation; nevertheless, it is also concerned with maintaining the possibility of encountering the truth, which the Christian tradition firmly locates in Jesus Christ as the source of her identity” (McGrath 1990a, 79). Lindbeck, on the other hand, would wish to affirm the primarily regulative significance of the term homoousios. Homoousios, so the argument goes, does not specify anything concretely in se about God; rather it will specify appropriate ways of speaking about God. As Michael Root writes on the parallel example of the Christological doctrine emerging at Chalcedon: Lindbeck’s proposal strikes many as odd. When one looks at the Christological definition of Chalcedon, it looks like a statement about the two natures of Christ (i.e., it looks like talk about Christ, not talk about talk about Christ). In fact, almost all the texts we would be inclined to call “doctrinal statements” seem, at first glance, to be examples of first-order Christian discourse. Lindbeck denies neither this appearance nor its truth. The Christological definition of Chalcedon is an example of first-order language about Christ. But as such

Pneumatology and the Apologetic Task it is not a doctrine. It is a doctrine when it plays a certain function in the life of the Church, ruling certain Christological language in, ruling other Christological language out. Rather than saying the definition of Chalcedon is a doctrine, it would be more correct to say that it is a doctrine when it is used in specific ways. (1990, 173)

Lindbeck argues for the importance of regarding the post-biblical innovations as rules rather than propositions: “If these particular notions are essential, the doctrines of the creeds are clearly conditional, depending upon the late-Hellenistic milieu. Furthermore, their irreversibility would then seem to be dependent on the irreversibility of the conditioning circumstances, that is, on Greek philosophy” (1984, 92). Lindbeck wishes to defend the paradigmatic significance of classical Christology, but recognizes that the formal expressions of these statements are historically conditioned, and circumscribed in no small way by their embeddness in Greek philosophy. He overcomes this problem by distinguishing between a rule’s content and its form. The content that homoousios sought to preserve was the “regulative principle” of Christological maximalism—or, as expressed in Athanasius’ succinct formula, “eadem de Filio quae de Patre dicuntur excepto Patris Nomine” (when one speaks about Christ one must ascribe to Him all the things that are ascribed to the Father, except that the Son is not the Father). The regulative character of this statement is self-evident. Rather than offering a first-order proposition, Athanasius offers this formula as an extension of the soteriological logic of scripture read as a canonical unity. Thus, McGrath’s direction of interpretation—from concept or experience to doctrine—is reversed from that of Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic approach. In his description of the dialectical character of doctrinal development, McGrath asserts that it was the doctrine that needed to be justified according to the normative patterns of traditional ideas and images: “The essential move towards doctrinal reflection inevitably entailed creative controversy concerning both the adequacy and the propriety of doctrinal formulations as vehicles for the transmission and affirmation of traditional ideas and images” (McGrath 1990a, 6). To convey these ideas and images adequately, doctrine needed to evolve, and controversy was the motor for such refinement. The occasionalism of McGrath’s understanding of the development of doctrine allows for no sense of continuity between the Nicaenum and the confessions of faith that preceded it. Similarly, for McGrath, it would seem that the cognitive content of the term homoousios exists outside of the realm of the narrative, in some ostensive arena of referentiality. In

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reality, the term was utilized for the sake of upholding the saving logic of Christian kerygma. As Lindbeck writes: “Athanasius expressed the meaning of, for example, consubstantiality in terms of the rule that whatever is said of the Father is said of the Son, except that the Father is not the Son (eadem de Filio quae de Patre dicuntur excepto Patris Nomine). Thus the theologian most responsible for the triumph of Nicaea thought of it not as a first-order proposition with ontological reference but as a second-order rule of speech. For him, to accept the doctrine meant to agree to speak in a certain way” (1984, 94). McGrath’s critique of Lindbeck’s theory of doctrine and his alternate theory on the nature of doctrine have, unwittingly, demonstrated the clear superiority of the cultural-linguistic model as an adequate account of both the genesis and nature of doctrine. However, McGrath’s account does illustrate the need for the cultural-linguistic model to consider both the apologetical and epistemological dynamics of doctrinal confession. It is my belief that both of these projects, which admittedly are underdeveloped in Lindbeck, are best accommodated by an adequate pneumatology.

Ad Hoc Apologetics In contradistinction to apologetics as a foundational enterprise, Lindbeck recommends that, in its encounter with philosophy, theology bring its own logic and engage philosophical discourse critically and provisionally. Further, Lindbeck recognizes that there is no neutral language into which theological discourse might be translated without reduction: The postliberal method of dealing with the problem [of apologetics as translation] is bound to be unpopular among those chiefly concerned to maintain or increase the membership and influence of the Church. This method resembles ancient catechesis much more than modern translation. Instead of redescribing the faith in new concepts, it seeks to teach the language and practices of the religion to potential adherents. This has been the primary way of transmitting the faith and winning converts for most religions down through the centuries. (1984, 131–32)

Lindbeck considers the apologetical task to be primarily one of training, rather than arguing, a person to faith because argument becomes possible only once the language of the faith is learned. However, this emphasis might not fully capture the various activities that were taking place in the process of educating catechumens. Reinhard Hütter gets

Pneumatology and the Apologetic Task

much closer in his description of the apologetical imperative within catechesis: Catechetical theology always exhibits a basic pragmatic-apologetical feature; it is ad hoc apologetics insofar as it orients itself critically in the theological sense toward a given, specific consciousness of truth, considering this consciousness poietically without allowing it to become the normative horizon for the communication of faith. It is precisely in this theological-critical form of the communication of faith that the poietic task remains pathically determined and encompassed. Catechesis as ad hoc apologetics thus does not mean the systematic development or defence of the truth of faith within the truth consciousness of a given age, but a creative willingness to be qualified by the doctrina evangelii such that precisely in the communication of the truth of faith, the truth consciousness of a given age is drawn poietically into and qualified by the doctrina evangelii itself. (2000, 191; emphasis in original)

Although Hütter still emphasizes the primacy of the doctrina evangelii, he recognizes that catechetical theology may also involve encounter with the “truth consciousness of a given age” such that the doctrina evangelii might be oriented, at least partially and provisionally, in this new medium. What this means for our purposes is that catechetical theology can engage—as it has historically done—the culture in such a way that the gospel is brought to bear upon it. This recognition enables catechesis to return to its classical patterning. Lindbeck is quite right: the vast majority of catechesis was through a process of training. However, the appropriation of classical paideia in the catechetical schools, particularly of Alexandria, also engaged apologetical methods in hopes of securing the faith of adherents who were classically trained. As Werner Jaeger states: Clement of Alexandria — the head of the Christian School of the Catechetes — and Origen became the founders of Christian philosophy. It was not a complete system comprising all disciplines such as logic, physics, and ethics, in the Aristotelian or Stoic manner, but it consisted exclusively in what these earlier pagan thinkers had called theology. This theology as such was not what was new in the philosophical thought of the Alexandrians. New was the fact that philosophical speculation was used by them to support a positive relation that was not itself the result of independent human search for truth, like earlier Greek philosophies, but took as its point of departure a divine revelation contained in a holy book, the Bible. (1961, 46–47)

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Jaeger’s interpretation, no doubt, goes too far in the opposite direction.4 He tends to see Christian paiedia as a thinly disguised mode of classical education, while simultaneously emphasizing the apologetical practice of early Christian catechesis, with the consequence of eclipsing almost entirely its liturgical embeddedness. Nonetheless, the diversity and complexity of Christian catechetical instruction, especially in the East, are significant to our study.5 As inheritors of the educational tradition of Clement and Origen, the Cappadocian Fathers consistently used the tools of their formidable classical learning 6 —albeit in an unsystematized way—in an effort to subordinate philosophia to biblical theology. As Gregory of Nazianzus argues: For when we leave off believing, and protect ourselves by mere strength of argument, and destroy the claim which the Spirit has upon our faith by questionings, and then our argument is not strong enough for the importance of the subject (and this must necessarily be the case, since it is put in motion by an organ of so little power as is our mind), what is the result? The weakness of the argument appears to belong to the mystery, and thus elegance of language makes void the Cross, as Paul also thought. For faith is that which completes our argument. But may He who proclaimeth unions and looseth those that are bound, and who putteth into our minds to solve the knots of their unnatural dogmas, if it may be, change these men and make them faithful instead of rhetoricians, Christians instead of that which they now are called. (Oration 29)

Patristic theological method amounts to an engagement of Hellenistic philosophy at the service of Biblical theology. The task of the theologian trained philosophically was, as George Schner puts it, to “borrow from the gentile world conventions of speech whose logic and rhetoric could be at the service of describing and explicating Christian truth, with a complex purpose of pastoral care of the faithful, transmission of the essentials of belief, and public self-defence in the face of misunderstanding and persecution” (2000, 5). The subordination of the specifically biblical idiom to a putatively neutral one concerns Lindbeck. While canons of rationality might be employed, such as non-contradiction, this must take place in a manner that does not diminish or domesticate the Christian narrative: “Antifoundationalism, however, is not to be equated with irrationalism. The issue is not whether these can be formulated in some neutral, frameworkindependent language” (Lindbeck 1984, 130). Catechesis, in Patristic theology, did not seek a neutral language so much as it attempted to bring

Pneumatology and the Apologetic Task

the language of scripture, in an unsystematized way, to bear upon all reality, including the conceptualities that were inherited from Greek systems of thought. It was understood generally that the “rationality” that the Fathers sought to defend and promote was a biblical one, based primarily upon the saving logic of the Christian narrative.

A Soteriological Epistemology The kind of epistemological reserve that I have sought to retrieve through a heuristic reading of Wittgenstein and through the Fathers is not an end in itself. Through Lindbeck’s practical account of language via Wittgenstein, one of the most tenacious pictures of the nature of religious justification has been challenged. If we accept, with Kant, the limits of rational inquiry, then faith is relegated to the emotional and the intuitive: doctrines are not validated by recourse to a theory of truth as external reality but are justified squarely within the confines of individual intuition. Given the ubiquity of epistemological primacy in our notion of faith, we often tend to consider intuition as somehow the “causal connection” of our experience of God and our appropriation of a religion’s concrete expression. But, through his heuristic use of Wittgenstein, Lindbeck overcomes the kind of epistemological solitude that is based upon a construction of faith as an intuition or grasping of a pre-reflective inner ideal. In the phenomenology of coming to faith, Lindbeck urges, religious claims can be justified through distancing oneself from one’s prior experiences and intuitions—which are themselves constructs—and subordinating oneself to the language of faith. With such a subordination to the narrative, rules, and practices of faith, the cacophony of images and impressions might receive a new orientation and significance. Jean-Luc Marion—even though he uses the term concept, which sounds as though he is moving into a type of epistemological foundationalism—offers an interpretation of the narrative of the disciples’ “recognition” of Jesus on the road to Emmaus (Luke 34:13–25) in terms that are very supportive of the observations just made: The disciples do not recognize him because they cannot even imagine the other hypothesis. The dead man is dead, period. Every other possibility finds itself completely excluded, not even considerable. They see nothing —in the sense that one sees nothing in a game of chess if one does not know how to play; they hear nothing —in the sense that one hears nothing (except noise) in a conversation if one does not know the language in which it is being conducted…. Every

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The Spirit and Truth intuition gives itself to them, but their concepts catch nothing of this…. So Christ becomes a teacher. Since they lack concepts, he trains them to a concept. (2002, 147)

Christ “trains the disciples to” the concept of His saving significance. Reading the scriptures, “beginning with Moses and all the prophets” (Luke 24 :27), Christ opens the text demonstrating himself — not an abstract principle —as the hermeneutical key, as the fulfillment of all promises. It is then that the disciples’ “hearts burned within” them (Luke 24:32). Intuition and affectivity are not lost; indeed, they are essential. But they are the response to, rather than the cause of, revelation. Concept, then, as Marion is using the term, is that organizing logic which arises from revelation —a knowing that, rather than being contingent upon epistemological grasping, comes through the gift of Christ’s saving activity. However, this concept does not represent the abolition of intuitions, but offers them their proper ordering. Through this story, the abundant intuitions of the disciples are given their proper orientation, and it is through the saving story that their practices are formed and disciplined. This excursion into Marion’s reading of the Emmaus text is helpful for our purposes because it makes explicit the relationship between faith, practice, and experience in a manner that I think that Lindbeck the Lutheran would in no way wish to challenge, but which is obscured in the example of the Crusader. Practices neither complete or fulfill the concept nor render it propositionally accurate. The concept —that is, the risen Christ—has no need of our practices to render Him efficacious in salvation. Rather, it is because of the event of the concept being rendered intelligible that the disciples are compelled to respond. The second point that might be taken from Marion’s reading of the disciples on the road to Emmaus, the positive role of intuition and experience in theology, is only hinted at in Lindbeck’s writing. Nevertheless, it is central to our inquiry on the Holy Spirit. Given contemporary religion’s overemphasis on intuition, Lindbeck is undoubtedly right to emphasize the external dimensions of religious faith; however, an emphasis upon pneumatology, upon the role of the Holy Spirit in the existential testimony to the saving truth of soteriological statements—“Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32)—invites us to consider the manner in which individual believers receive the soteriological benefit of Christ’s saving work in ways that include their rational knowledge. One should be wary of such excesses of modernity, which tends to regard private assent as ultimately operative in the justification of belief.

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However, it would be equally erroneous to assume that personal assent is inconsequential. Here, a return to the Patristic tradition is most instructive. Within classical theology, particularly within the East, the noetic assurance of Christ’s saving work in the hearts and minds of believers was precisely the consequence of Christ’s soteriological efficacy. An emphasis upon the propositional force of the salvation that is rendered in Christ gives rise to an existential understanding: salvation is also offered for each believer. This assurance may have resonances with what Lindbeck, following Aquinas, calls connatural knowledge —that is, the knowledge that comes from having effectively interiorized a religion. Pre-modern theologies, although not preoccupied with the question of personal experience, require such pneumatological consideration. However, the pneumatological aspect of personal knowledge is underdeveloped in Lindbeck. For the Cappadocian Fathers, the individual movement toward God, or the acquisition of connatural knowledge, was understood with reference to the doctrine of theosis. At first glance, theosis or deification would seem an unlikely doctrine to offer as a complement to a project so thoroughly committed to scrutinizing anthropocentic notions of the truth. Indeed, the historical contentions between Eastern soteriologies of theosis and Western theologies of justification seem to suggest a tension between the respective soteriological emphases. However, these contentions, I believe, represent a misreading of the tradition of theosis, which is a far cry from Pelagian self-positing.

the saving efficacy of jesus christ, logos of god The work of the Holy Spirit and of Christ within the salvation of the creature cannot be divided. The Holy Spirit, according to the Cappadocian Fathers, does not work to unite the Creature with itself, but joins the hearts and minds of believers to Christ. As is written: “The Holy Spirit testifies on Christ’s behalf” (John 15:26). This Christological orientation of the Holy Spirit is made evident in the following passage by Basil of Caesarea: “Therefore, the Lord said to his disciples who were already perfect: ‘No longer do I call you servants,’ but friends; ‘because the servant does not know what the master does.’ Accordingly, it is the privilege of a perfect man truly to recognize the Beloved” (Homily 17). The role of the Holy Spirit is not so much the fulfillment of our intuitions and our experiences as it is the overcoming and re-orienting of them so as to recognize the Beloved. The Spirit’s role is the ordering of experience and intuition anew so as to cohere with the new “concept” that is given. Because new actions invariably ensue, Lindbeck is right to speak

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of this in practical terms; still, the patterns of intuiting and knowing are themselves given a new shape and orientation by the concept.

the salvation of the human logos This cognitive dimension is, at times, underscored in the apophatic theology of the Greek Fathers. The encounter with God renders one’s prior concepts vague and insubstantial. Experience gains a new clarity and an ordering in that which was hitherto opaque and inexpressible. In John Meyendorff’s description: “Eastern Christian theology has often been called ‘mystical.’ The term is truly correct, provided one remembers that in Byzantium ‘mystical’ knowledge does not imply emotional individualism, but quite the opposite, a continuous communion with the Spirit who dwells in the whole Church” (1952, 14). More specifically, within Eastern Christology, part of the pattern of redemption was the assumption of our human rationality by the Son, so that the Son might transform humanity’s fallen reason. This was why the Cappadocians regarded the Apollinarian position as such a distortion. According to Apollinaris, Christ was fully divine—with the exception of His flesh which cloaked His real identity. Jesus retained the divine logos, leaving His mind free from the chaos and humiliation of human reasoning. To this, Gregory of Nazianzus argued that it is precisely through Jesus’ becoming “truly human” in all ways, including in His logos, or rational mind, that He was efficacious in human salvation. For Gregory of Nazianzus, the clinching argument against Apollinaris was soteriological. If Jesus had not assumed a human mind, He could not have been identified so closely with humanity so as to heal it. As Nazianzen argues: “If anyone has put his trust in Him as a man without a human mind, he is really bereft of mind and quite unworthy of salvation. For that which He has not assumed, He has not healed; but that which is united to the Godhead is also saved” (Epistle 101). For the Cappodocians, the question of salvation is not of a partial kind: it includes the entirety of the human. Similarly, salvation is not simply an affair concerning the afterlife. To consider it so would be to deny the efficacy of the Holy Spirit in the present. Christ is at work, through the power of the Holy Spirit, even now perfecting humanity, which is the necessary corollary to His own transfigured perfection. This promise is, according to the Cappadocians, an immanent and unfolding reality in this world.

Pneumatology and the Apologetic Task

the spirit and theosis Theosis, in this view, is not the amplification and celebration of natural human godliness. Rather, it is God’s own initiative, the gospel of salvation itself rendered decisively —though partially and provisionally — within, among other things, human rationality. Through such “putting on the mind of Christ,” human rationality receives its proper ordering so that, by the power of the Holy Spirit, the rational faculties are no longer formless, but given their proper orientation in Jesus Christ. As Jaroslav Pelikan explains: “After these initial discussions, first of the mind as created and secondly of the mind as fallen, Basil turned to address his third point, the power of sanctified reason … ‘The mind impregnated with the divinity of the Spirit,’ he asserts, ‘is at once capable of viewing great objects.… It beholds the divine beauty—though only to the extent that grace imparts and its nature is capable of receiving’” (1994, 294). In acknowledging the movement of the Spirit in the Christian community, Lindbeck’s position nears that of the Cappadocians: “The Holy Spirit which is in them is the pledge of, not the participation in, future glory. They have not yet learned to love God above all things and their neighbours as themselves, for this is what comes at the end of the road in eschatological fulfillment” (1984, 60). While neither the fullness of participation nor a mere pledge, the gift of the Holy Spirit in transforming the minds of God’s people may be better viewed through Cappadocian theology as a pledge even now fulfilled, through the very salvation that Christ offers. Theosis, which is the work of the Holy Spirit, proceeds on the basis of the objective reality of Christ’s self-offering for the sake of humanity. Theosis is not the moral evolution that the essentially autonomous Christian achieves to demonstrate herself worthy of God’s grace; rather, it is the reward of God’s grace—accommodated partially and imperfectly, but nevertheless trustworthily, to the vicissitudes of our humanity. Through the Cappadocian development of the doctrine of theosis, then, theologians may begin to challenge the usual dichotomization of grace and nature, revelation and reason. As Brian E. Daly points out, the accommodation of God within the confines of creaturely capacities signals a nascent transfiguration, rather than an annihilation, of human nature and reason: “The importance of this transformation in Christ, for Gregory [of Nyssa], is of course that it marks the beginning of the transformation in which each of us is called to participate: a transformation of a human into the divine which does not seem to involve, in his

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view, an annihilation of human nature, so much as a suffusion of all of its naturally changeable, ‘fleshly’ characteristics with the stability and luminous vigour of God” (2003, 71).7

Conclusion Lindbeck’s project retains vestiges of the epistemologically prominent picture of the self-determining individual of which he sought to rid theology. However, when brought into conversation with classical theism— particularly as it was articulated by the Cappadocian Fathers—the question of Truth becomes more appropriately nuanced by the workings of the Spirit. In classical theology, the Holy Spirit’s role was considered to be at once a humble and an awesome one. It was humble in that what was revealed was the the One in whom our knowledge was rendered complete, not the Spirit’s self. It was awesome in that the revelation accommodated itself to our own faculties and dispositions, so that the usual categories of subject–object were overcome. In this way, the provenance of human inquiry is not forever closed; rather, in ways beyond the mien of our systematic comprehension, it remains ineluctably and gratuitously open.


notes 1 Wittgenstein refers to this picture of language as a “slab language,” and he uses Augustine’s Confessions (book 1:8) as illustration: “When they [my elders] named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out.… These words, it seems to me, give us a particular picture of the essence of human language. It is this: the individual words in language name objects—sentences are combinations of such names. In this picture of language we find the roots of the following ideas: Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands” (1958, § 1). 2 See also Bruce D. Marshall: “Although he himself does not put it this way, I think Lindbeck’s way of handling the question about the criteria of truth can be fairly summarized by saying that he ascribes primacy to the plain sense of Scripture in the order of justification. By the ‘plain sense’ I mean, borrowing Kathryn Tanner’s definition, ‘what a participant in the community automatically or naturally takes a text to be saying on its face insofar as he or she has been socialized in a community’s conventions for reading the text as Scripture’” (1990, 72–73).

Pneumatology and the Apologetic Task 3 In spite of Schleiermacher’s insistence on the centrality of Christ as the unsubstitutable actualization of perfect God-consciousness, his biblical hermeneutics became ever more preoccupied, not with accounts of Christ’s concrete agency, but rather with his ostensive intentionality. Similarly, reading the Bible after Schleiermacher becomes more and more concerned with inner and private mental states of the reader (Schleiermacher 1997). 4 For example, Jaeger extols the Cappadocians’ learnedness thus: “Gregory’s conception of Christian paideia corresponds to [the] Greek scheme and is practically identical with it so far as propaideia is concerned. That is how Basil and Gregory Nazianzen had received their training at Athens, and that is how Basil later trained his younger brother Gregory of Nyssa after returning from the university. Classical Greek literature was included in this system and so was rhetoric. But what in a Christian education corresponded to the highest level of Greek paideia, the study of philosophy? As Origen had taught his students to read all the Greek philosophers, so the Cappadocians went through a serious study of this part of the classical tradition, and Gregory of Nyssa, the most philosophical of them, no doubt thought it necessary for an educated Christian to follow that difficult path” (1961, 91–92). What Jaeger does not cite in his accounts of the Cappadocian intellectual pedigrees is their rather ambivalent relationship to it. 5 One of the teachers of Christian catechetical method, Cyril of Jerusalem, is exemplary of the inculcative pedagogy that Lindbeck described in the teaching of Christian initiates. As Pamela Jackson reconstructs Cyril’s catechesis: “Cyril’s method of using Scripture in his catechetical homilies is determined by his goal as a preacher: to present the teachings of Scripture in such a way that his candidates will be able to ‘seal by faith’ what they have heard. This ‘sealing’ involves the candidates coming into an experiential faith of deeper knowledge and belief which is manifested in a life-changing obedience to God. To call forth this kind of faith, Cyril sows the ‘seeds’ of scriptural ‘witness,’ etc., which convince of the absolute truth of the gospel, and he cultivates them with the aid of techniques aimed at deepening his hearers’ conviction that this gospel truth applies to them personally by establishing a relationship between them and the figures of salvation history. Cyril’s use of Scripture in preaching thus draws his candidates into a scriptural perception of what God is doing with them in the conversion process and a scriptural language for articulating it, as well as a scripturally centered knowledge and expectation of what He will do for them at the culmination of sacramental initiation” (1991, 450). Cyril’s expansive writing on Christian catechesis (written ca. 351) is the most thorough of the ante-Nicene and Nicene descriptions of the content of Christian catechesis. It is perhaps from here that Lindbeck gains many of his insights about the process in the early Church. Without drawing too sharp a distinction, it would seem to me that the early Catechetical School in Alexandria under Clement and Origen would nuance Lindbeck’s perception of the role of apologetics in the training of new converts. 6 A compelling example of this is the chiding that Basil received from his sister Macrina for being “puffed up beyond measure with the pride of oratory” (quoted in Pelikan 1993, 16). It was Macrina, according to Gregory of Nyssa, who returned both her brothers to the true philosophia of the Christian faith.

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The Spirit and Truth 7 Or, as Daly specifies in this same article, nature and grace did not exist as juxtaposed alternatives to the Eastern Fathers: “It is clear that for Gregory, as for the classical Christology of the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries, the Mystery of Christ is also one of unconfused and undivided union: God the Word making a complete human being his own instrument of revelation and healing for the world, while at the same time enabling that human being to be, most perfectly, what all humans were created to be—fully itself and fully, though always increasingly, a participant in the life and even the qualities of God” (2003, 72–73).

4 The Spirit’s Address Toward a Pneumatological Intratextual Theology


Introduction At the turn of the third century, Tertullian of Carthage defended the canonical authority of the Old Testament against Marcion, the denier of the Hebrew Bible’s significance for Christians. His argument was based upon the hidden and yet fundamental manner in which the scriptures of the Jews were also the scriptures of the “new Israel”: that is, of the community of followers of Jesus the Messiah. Accordingly, Tertullian demonstrated the existence within the Old Testament narratives of “hidden allusions” (Auerbach 1959, 27) to the fulfillment of Israel’s story in Jesus Christ. As Erich Auerbach describes, such figural interpretation was to become the norm for early Christian exegesis: “At all events the aim of this sort of interpretation was to show that the persons and events of the Old Testament were prefigurations of the New Testament in its history of salvation” (1959, 30; italics mine). Lindbeck refers to this interpretative method in The Nature of Doctrine as intratexual theology. An intratextual reading of scripture is one in which the unity of the biblical narrative is organized around the Church’s central soteriological confession. The entire canon, Old Testament and New, is thus read “as a canonically and narrationally unified and internally glossed (that is, selfreferential and self-interpreting) whole centered on Jesus Christ, and telling the story of the dealings of the Triune God with His people and His

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world in ways that are typologically applicable to the present” (Lindbeck 2002, 203). Reading the Old Testament through such a soteriocentric lens enabled Christian readers such as Tertullian to see evidence of God’s saving plan for humanity throughout the Old Testament. Hence, Old Testament characters such as Joshua, Abraham, and Moses were read by Tertullian, and indeed by the majority of pre-modern Christian interpreters from Saint Paul on, as prefigurations of Jesus Christ. For the early Fathers, figural reading was a logical result of the way in which God’s covenantal relationship with humanity in the Old Testament and in apostolic witness was understood. Beneath the literary point was a theological one: to Marcion, it was as though there were two revelations and, therefore, two Gods: the God of the Jews and the God of the Christians. Tertullian refutes such dualism by demonstrating the unity of the economy of salvation, in which Christ is not merely anticipated but operative in the time of the Law and the Prophets: “Suddenly a Son, suddenly sent, and suddenly Christ! On the contrary, I should suppose that from God nothing comes suddenly, because there is nothing which is not ordered and arranged by God. And if so ordered, why not also foretold?” (AM bk. 3, chap. 2). It is because of who God is: that is, one who acts toward the world with a unity and seamlessness of intention (even though that unity might be partially hidden from us creatures) that a figural reading of scriptures is not only recommended but demanded. This insight presses Lindbeck beyond the formalism of his method of intratextual theology toward what Tertullian identifies as the real issue at stake against Marcion: a theology of revelation, compromised and distorted by Marcion’s (and his inheritors’) dichotomization of the Bible. As we work toward advocating a doctrine of revelation as a necessary complement to the formal principles of intratextual hermeneutics, the role of the Holy Spirit in the establishment of the unity of Old Testament, New Testament, and the post-apostolic witness will be made evident. In his monumental work The Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics, Hans W. Frei amply demonstrated that the hermeneutical practice which predominated prior to the emergence of critical biblical interpretation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sought to read the Bible as an interconnected unity: “Figural interpretation, then, sets forth the unity of the canon as a single cumulative and complex pattern of meaning. This pattern is ingredient in the unitary temporal sequence and its stages, and it depends on the successive narrative rendering of the sequence” (1974, 33–34). Not only was pre-critical biblical interpretation character-

Toward a Pneumatological Intratextual Theology

ized by a unity between New Testament and Old, but the Church also sought to conform to the “single cumulative and complex pattern of meaning that scripture engendered” in its common life. It is in this sense that we might say that early Christian exegesis was truly intratextual. On one level, Christians sought in their hermeneutics a harmony within the canon. On a second level, the “text” that was their scripturally shaped life together also sought to conform to the Church’s instantiating and paradigmatically authoritative text, in such a way that a biblical imagination was habitual and ubiquitously apprehensible in everyday living. Unlike the cognitive-propositionalists and experiential-expressivists who seek to make the Bible conform to a set of extratextual criteria, the cultural-linguistic model seeks intratextual coherence in the Church’s utterances. As Lindbeck states: Meaning is constituted by the uses of a specific language rather than being distinguishable from it. Thus the proper way to determine what “God” signifies, for example, is by examining how the word operates within a religion and thereby shapes reality and experience rather than by first establishing a propositional or experiential meaning and re-interpreting or reformulating its uses accordingly. It is in this sense that theological description in the cultural-linguistic mode is intrasemiotic or intratextual. (1984, 114)

Rather than isolating various customs, texts, or traditions and applying them to a pre-conceived framework of meaning, the cultural-linguist seeks to understand the “text” within its form of life, which is a community with a set of discrete religious practices. Reading scripture cannot, therefore, be isolated from Church practices. Preaching and liturgy form the performative nexus within which the text is enacted and lived. In this regard, Lindbeck sees the task of intratexual theology as having deep resonance with the description of cultural anthropology offered by Clifford Geertz, for whom ethnography should offer a thick description (Lindbeck 1984, 115) of the logic of the detailed and informally systematic nature of a religion’s symbolic system. The task of theology is not to prescribe innovative doctrines, but rather to describe appropriate and coherent discourse within the pattern, the informal logic, of its intratextual world. Such theological work is not merely repetition: rather, description involves an inherently creative element.1 Systematic theology’s role is, in large part, to regulate communal discourse according to its own internal norms of discourse as “a single cumulative and complex pattern of meaning” (Frei 1974, 33). That is, systematic theology must prevent those innovations which are

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cognitively dissonant with its inner logic from advancing. It must, effectively, block that which strains against the tradition, while advocating and advancing those practices and interpretations which can be incorporated into tradition without diminishing its inner logic. The intratextual task of theology is at once regulated and regulative, while it is also guided by the Holy Spirit. How then are extrinsic or extrabiblical insights or discourses to be accommodated into the textual world? Lindbeck draws on the metaphor of the text absorbing the world. However, due consideration of the third article of the Creed, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, invites a more dynamic approach to the relationship of world to text that I shall pursue under three categories: sufficiency, irreducibility, and intentionality. These categories are similar to Lindbeck’s general observations on the nature of the intratextual or systematic task. The first two, sufficiency and irreducibility, are captured in Lindbeck’s term untranslatabilty.2 Untranslatability refers to the ability of the scriptural world to absorb other worlds, while it is simultaneously resistant to the efforts of other discourses to domesticate or, in Lindbeck’s metaphor, translate it. Under the category of sufficiency, I mean to address the manner in which the concerns of the world are sufficiently or adequately addressed by the very capaciousness of the text. The second category, irreducibility, denotes that what the Spirit reveals in the reading of scripture is not an abstraction but the concrete and unsubstitutable narrative of God’s saving act in Jesus Christ which cannot otherwise be expressed or described apart from reference to that act. The third and final implication of an at once pneumatological and regulative reading of scripture, intentionality, is in keeping with Patristic understandings of figural or typological readings. It is this third category of intratextual reading of scripture that I find least developed in Lindbeck’s account. It is here that the narrated intention—the term, as I am using it, can be understood both in the common-sense meaning (i.e., having to do with the directives of an agent or an intender) and in the classical sense of an object tending toward its proper end—is implicit in the Church’s reading of scripture. Consideration of the text’s intentionality in figural interpretation will emphasize the thoroughly agential and teleological nature which the text conveys. We can speak of the intentionality of the text as the Church, society, and the cosmos are drawn into the salvation history described therein, and that history is brought to its final consummation. In other words, the concept of intentionality denotes the way in which the figura is not yet perfectly fulfilled and we await its

Toward a Pneumatological Intratextual Theology

fulfillment in the eschaton. The Holy Spirit is still in the process of gathering us together into unity in Christ—a unity that is already operative, but not yet fully manifest, in the biblical narrative. Such an observation, I submit, has four implications for Lindbeck’s proposal. First, the idea of intentionality presupposes an intender, in the sense not of an abstract first cause or reified text but, as the Bible testifies, of the personal God who struck covenant with Abraham, became incarnate in Christ, and dwells among us still by the power of the Holy Spirit. Such a God diminishes the opacity of our understanding through his intentional self-communication. Second, far from absorbing the world, the Bible in the power of the Spirit does something different: it addresses the creature or the community not as a generalized category of world or other, but as the concrete one for whom God’s salvation in Christ is gratuitously given (pro nobis, pro me), thus incorporating the Church and the creature into the saving story itself. Third, within this nexus of personal address, the Bible, by the power of the Spirit, moves the creature or the community toward the fullness of its standing before God and, ultimately, toward its proper eschatological destination. The Spirit, working through the Bible, can be trusted to shepherd the community/creature toward its proper end. It is in this classical sense that we can speak of the intentionality of the Bible. Fourth, our rendering must also be characterized by eschatological waiting; knowing that God is now still partially hidden but will one day be made fully known. Eschatology should attenuate our confidence in our renderings of the way the Bible absorbs the world and the Church. Such awareness should caution Christians’ confidence in the ultimate fidelity of their renderings, and it may even invite them to consider the coherence of the world as a possible nexus for the text’s right rendering. Still, such eschatological attenuation should not release Christians from the responsibility of coherent and faithful response to the divine address that the Bible issues. As an illustration of these points on pre-modern scriptural interpretation, I conduct a somewhat lengthy exposition of what I refer to as the “limit case” of interpretation of the Song of Songs, which I believe illuminates several important issues in the consideration of typological or figural method. I call this a limit case because the allegorical interpretation of the Song has fallen under considerable scrutiny by critics, who argue that this interpretation does great violence to the Song’s original intent. In my examination of Gregory of Nyssa’s Homily on the Song of Songs, I consider the justice of such an argument by trying to understand whether

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Gregory’s interpretation is allegorical or typological, and whether it spirits away the realism of the literal sense of the text. Obviously, this exploration will open up questions about the nature of realism and literal reading and offer some concrete examples of the difference between historical-critical and intratextual exegesis, a concern that is vital to any modern inquiry in hermeneutics.

Intratextual Theology and the Gospel’s “Untranslatability” Intratextual theology, according to George Lindbeck, is possible because of the unique character of the Bible, which he characterizes as “untranslatable” (i.e., resistant to translation into another type of discourse): “It is classically affirmed that every humanly conceivable reality can be translated (or redescribed) in the biblical universe of discourse with a gain rather than a loss of truth or significance [and] nothing can be translated out of this idiom into some supposedly independent communicative system without perversion, diminution, or incoherence of meaning” (Lindbeck 2002, 232). For Lindbeck, the biblical universe of discourse has a dual claim for authority: (a) it is capacious enough that every possibility of the human narrative can be redescribed in the Bible’s own terms (sufficiency); and (b) the biblical narrative resists reduction into another idiom without loss of its internal coherence or significance (irreducibility).

sufficiency Lindbeck describes the first dimension of the term untranslatable thus: “It is classically affirmed that every humanly conceivable reality can be translated (or redescribed) in the biblical universe of discourse with a gain rather than a loss of truth or significance” (2002, 232). This meaning of untranslatabilty is recognizable even in the genre of the biblical narrative as it does not offer entertainment, diversion, or a moral lesson, but rather makes a comprehensive claim upon the reader. The claim of the Bible is absolute, calling for all other claims and loyalties to be relativized. Erich Auerbach, although writing a literary critical analysis of the Bible, recognizes this inherent quality of the Bible: “Far from seeking like Homer, merely to make us forget our own reality for a few hours, it seeks to overcome our reality: we are to fit our own life into its world, feel ourselves to be elements in its structure of universal history” (1952, 14).

Toward a Pneumatological Intratextual Theology

It is not so much that an ideal or ostensive reality is represented in the biblical narratives which purport to speak to our universal human condition; instead, the biblical narrative reveals the very structures of the human condition through a highly particular encounter between God and human characters. The reader is not invited into a narratival diversion; she is invited into the drama where the characters of the Bible are people — not types or symbols—with a distinct culture and set of practices, a community of which she is invited to become a member. This direction of representation runs counter to the common sense of modernity: it is not that the human experience gives rise to the text so much as the text gives rise to human experience. The “turning” of the interpretative flow from the Bible to experience is one that has a long legacy within the Christian Church, and is captured by the exegetical principle of “sufficiency.” Vigorously insisted on by Athanasius (oi, chap. 5),3 the category of sufficiency expresses the way in which the Bible interprets the entire world not simply because of the nature of the biblical narrative as a genre but because of the One whom the Church affirms as the subject of that narrative. This subject is not an ideal or an abstraction but a personal God who reveals himself to be the origin and terminus of all things: the Alpha and the Omega (Rev. 22:13). Athanasius upholds in his use of this term a conviction about the saving efficacy of Christ for the entire world, not only for those who recognize or praise him (see also be, para. 4; cas, para. 6). The efficacy of Christ’s saving act also causes all other wisdom to conform to its own logic: “For this is what the gentiles traduce and scoff at, and laugh loudly at us, insisting on the one fact of the Cross of Christ; and it is just here that one must pity their want of sense, because when they traduce the Cross of Christ they do not see that its power has filled all the world, and that by its effects the knowledge of God is made manifest to all” (cg, 8). The power of the cross of Christ fills the whole world, including the sophisticated world of the gentiles whom Athanasius is refuting. Similarly, Lindbeck claims that because of the intra-semiotic relations among words and texts within the biblical world, the possibility for redescription of the biblical world in novel contexts is infinite. For the saving story of the risen Christ which is the central focus for all narratives—both before and after the canonical gospels—addresses the discrete narratives of the world and inteprets them. As Lindbeck writes: “As in the case of natural languages, the competent speakers of the biblical tongue generate a potentially limitless number of sentences with unprecedented or novel meanings to fit the innumerable and unpredictable contingencies of life in

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space and time. Inexhaustible semantic novelty is compatible with syntactic continuity” (2002, 235). In his letter to the Galatians, Saint Paul offers a prototypical figural reading as he interprets the narrative of Hagar and Sarah (Gen. 16), depicting Isaac as the figura for which the Church becomes the fulfillment: “Now you, my friends, are children of the promise, like Isaac … for freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Gal. 4:28, 5:1). Paul’s Christocentric reading of the Old Testament enabled him to see shadows of Christ in the Hebrew Scriptures (see also Rom. 5:12, Col. 2: 16, 1 Cor. 15:21), thereby seeing the logic of freedom under God’s grace in Christ as operative even in the Law. Christians after Paul continued the practice of figural interpretation, and it was through such biblical practice that the significance of the Old Testament was upheld and defended.4 According to Erich Auerbach, the early Church defined figura as “something real and historical which announces something else that is also real and historical” (1959, 29). The connection between the two, so to speak, was the real or ascriptive sense of the text, which was Jesus Christ. Christ was not read as an afterthought to be interpreted exclusively through the teachings on his life, death, and resurrection: the eternal Christ was present, albeit opaquely, in the Law and the Prophets as well. This central affirmation on the eternal and concrete saving significance of Jesus Christ was codified by the late second century into the regula fidei, or rule of faith. The rule of faith was instrumental not only in defining the canon but also in determining the appropriation of the Jewish scriptures among gentile communities of faith. Figural reading was characterized by a linking of the Old Testament narratives to their fulfillment in Jesus Christ through the upholding of the Church’s most fundamental soteriological motifs and the recognition within the Old Testament canon of the self-same affirmations. In this way, too, the biblical world can be said to be sufficient, for it is engaged in the interpretation not only of the world as external but also, first and foremost, of its inner world: the Bible is its own self-interpreting system. As Lindbeck writes: “Thus, a certain way of reading Scripture (viz., as a Christ-centred narrationally and typologically unified whole in conformity to a Trinitarian rule of faith) was constitutive of the Christian canon, and has, it would seem, an authority inseparable from that of the Bible itself” (2002, 203). The canon was centred upon the saving story of Jesus Christ both pre-figured in the Old Testament and revealed with a new form of clarity in the New. The hermeneutical key for the figural opening up of

Toward a Pneumatological Intratextual Theology

scriptures was the regula fidei,5 or rule of faith. The rule served to organize the Old and New Testaments around what it considered to be of utmost significance: the soteriological drama enacted and celebrated in Christ’s story. As Lindbeck expands: As time went on, an explicit rule of faith and an enlarged canon came into existence. The two developments were synchronically interrelated. The rule of faith, with its various versions, articulated the liturgically embedded Christological and Trinitarian reading of the Hebrew Scriptures; the selection of certain writings out of the many then circulating which claimed apostolic status depended on their usefulness within the context of the sensus fidelium formed by this implicit or explicit rule of faith. (2002, 204)

The function of the regula fidei was to shepherd Christian teaching in ways that were said to cohere with the earliest strata of Christian “eyewitness” testimony. Coherence with that testimony was not an esoteric extraction of secret mysteries, as the Gnostics would have it. Instead, it was profoundly public: Christians sought to make their testimonies conform to the common sense of the community. The basic rules of Christian discourse, whether informally or formally operative, were not considered logically distinct from biblical witness. Indeed, these confessions were considered the necessary rules for proper scriptural interpretation. Those interpretations which were dissonant with the rule of faith were regarded as illegitimate appropriations of scripture. In Patristic writings, the connection between scripture and tradition is extremely tight. Immediately one can see the connection between the regula (for which the Greek word is κανϖν) and the circumscription of authoritative biblical texts. This “rod” or “straight line” was the authoritative body of teachings, handed on by apostolic authority. Those writings which conflicted with the core teachings of the Church were gradually excluded from the body of writings on Jesus. Canonicity and confession are related also in the manner in which the body of canonical writings, like the regula fidei, enjoyed almost unanimous agreement as early as the late second century. As Luke Timothy Johnson writes: For the most part … our earliest evidence shows that there was a rather remarkable degree of unanimity from the start concerning the great majority of the writings. Even so eclectic a thinker as Clement of Alexandria, who was capable of drawing inspiration from anywhere and everywhere, made some of his distinctions on the basis of the Church’s tradition: “We do not find this saying in the four gospels that have been handed down to us, but in that according to the

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The Spirit’s Address Egyptians” (Stromata iii.13). By the turn of the third century, writers as diverse as Irenaeus, Tertullian and Origen have a canon substantially the same as that accepted today. (1999, 600)

To us inheritors of historical-critical scholarship, the unity of scripture and tradition seems foreign, and yet it is precisely such a canonical and organic reading of scripture and tradition that governed Christian reading prior to the modern period.6 George Lindbeck also advocates this sense of scripture in advancing an intratextual approach to theology. For Lindbeck, the Bible is sufficient to describe human reality in all its variety with adequacy and ingenuity; moreover, the Bible is also its own self-interpreting system. In spite of the clear prescription to subordinate the Old Testament stories to the rule, the Church Fathers did not regard the pre-figurative narrative to be arbitrary or inconsequential. The characters within the Old Testament did not function as mere ciphers to that which is revealed within the New. As John David Dawson puts it: “When the figural interpreter describes that relationship, the description cannot be allowed to replace the graphic character of the representations being related. And by preserving the graphic character of the representations, the interpreter also leaves intact (or does not call into question) the historical reality of these persons or events that the text represents as God’s performative utterance” (1998, 188). And yet, the history of Christian exegesis always strains between a literal reading and a spiritual one. Many critics will charge, for example, that the hermeneutical licence that was assumed by the Eastern Fathers, particularly Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, destroys the graphic character of the representations. However, as I shall argue later in this chapter, the graphic character of the text still shapes and determines the spiritual sense in Patristic allegorical interpretation, even in the Alexandrian school. This argument will serve to buttress Lindbeck’s case for the thoroughgoing nature of figural interpretation, while it will also open up some pneumatological issues that arise precisely from the very graphic nature of the representations, as well as the regulated sensus fidelium of the Church. It is such attention to the ordinary details of the text that gives figural interpretation its power. Figural interpretation did not mythologize the Old Testament narrative or ascribe to it a lower and narrowly prophetic role. Rather, it is through the concrete specificity, the graphic character, of both poles that the texts maintained their integrity. Indeed, the very notion of an abstraction or a spiritualization of the story would have been understood as theologically problematic—a violation of God’s real

Toward a Pneumatological Intratextual Theology

and concrete covenant with Israel, both through the Law and later among his messianic people. According to Erich Auerbach, it is the realism of the initial historical level (or figure) that distinguishes Christian figural reading and gives it its power. For Christians, the figural-level sense of the Old Testament was not swallowed up or “absorbed” into its fulfillment; rather, it was precisely within the agential identity of the Old Testament characters that the text made sense: A figural schema permits both its poles—the figure and its fulfillment—to retain the characteristics of concrete historical reality, in contradistinction to what obtains with symbolic or allegorical personifications, so that figure and fulfillment—although the one “signifies” the other—have a significance which is not incompatible with their being real. An event taken as a figure preserves its literal and historical meaning. It remains an event, does not become a mere sign. The Church Fathers, especially Tertullian, Jerome and Augustine, had successfully defended figural realism, that is, the maintenance of the basic historical reality of figures, against all attempts at spiritually allegorical interpretation. (1952,195–96)

The spiritual character (of the text) did not reside in the subordination of a literal figure to a non-literal meaning that would, in the fashion of all binary oppositions, supersede or supplant it: “Only the understanding of the two persons or events is a spiritual act, but this spiritual act deals with concrete events, whether past, present or future, and not with concepts or abstractions; these are quite secondary, since promise and fulfillment are real historical events, which have either happened in the incarnation of the Word, or will happen in the second coming” (1984, 53). To recognize the figure in the fulfillment is a striking reversal of our usual habits of thought: rather than looking at the figure (Joshua) and seeing the fulfillment (Jesus), one looks at the fulfillment (Jesus) and sees in him the figure (Joshua). Sufficiency, intra-canonically construed, is not the same as Christian supersessionism. To state that the Bible is a self-interpreting “cross-referencing, interglossing semiotic” system (Lindbeck 2002, 235) does not create a canon within a canon, with some texts diminished and others lifted up. Rather, according to pre-modern exegesis, all parts of the Bible contribute importantly to the cumulative depiction of its subject. It is within this narrative’s depiction of God and God’s people that God’s identity, and consequently all other identities, are made known. There is no need for an external hermeneutical key to open up the scriptures, although low-

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level aids, such as literary and rhetorical devices, and later historicalcritical methods, are employed in the service of intratextual hermeneutics. This becomes even more evident as we examine the sufficiency of the biblical narrative in its encounter with post-figurative representation in the Church. The direction of figural interpretation, both intracanonical and toward the Church in the present, has important implications for practical theology. The sufficiency of the biblical text read according to the rule of faith promises to interpret not only the Old Testament but also the “text” which the New Testament engenders: the Church. These comments on intra-canonical reading are vital not only in understanding hermeneutics but also, more broadly, in the working of the biblical canon in a post-canonical ecclesial context. The Bible seeks to interpret all reality into its own categories, and therefore stretches forward in time to embrace the Church, present and future. It is thus that the Christian Church interpreted its persecutions and its victories persistently through the lens of the Christian saving story. Cross and empty tomb were the abiding horizons in the interpretation and understanding of the Church’s story. As Lindbeck describes the practice of biblical appropriation, even within the non-literate contexts of the Middle Ages: “The Bible classically interpreted can shape communal and personal identities even when (in contrast to the early Church) almost all lay folk are illiterate. The laity learned the fundamental outline and episodes of the scriptural drama through liturgy, catechesis, and occasional preaching. The drama defined for them the truly real world, and within it they inscribed their own reality” (2002, 205–206). Theologically speaking, the work of the Holy Spirit conforms heart and mind to Christ, and clearly such mediating, reconciling work is necessary for a figural reading of the entire canon. However, such a unifying rendering of the text, although attributable to the power of the Holy Spirit, is possible only through the simultaneous regulation of the canon through the regula fidei. Without such regulation, a spiritual reading may well be loosened from its appropriate home of meaning. As Curtis W. Freeman writes: “The recovery of spiritual exegesis requires an openness to the Holy Spirit through the communal discipline of prayer (rule number one), but it also demands that the performance of scripture be coherent with the enacted convictions and social practices of the community that remembers Jesus (rule number two)” (1996, 173). In order to make a case for the sufficiency of the biblical narrative post-biblically, we need to establish what, precisely, Lindbeck means by

Toward a Pneumatological Intratextual Theology

text. Unlike post-structuralists, who tend to speak of textuality as an all-encompassing trope, Lindbeck is much more specific. He would not be able to affirm, with Jacques Derrida, “qu’il n’y a pas de hors-texte.” Indeed, textuality has a literal meaning for Lindbeck: the text is the Bible.7 On the other hand, the “text” of which Lindbeck speaks is not merely the Bible as a lexical and closed system. Rather, the home of that system, the Church, is also, for Lindbeck, text. Church practices are intratextually coherent only insofar as they conform to the Bible —the Church’s “paradigmatically encoded Holy Writ” (1984, 117). And yet, those Church practices that exist in conformity to scriptures are also encompassed within the world of the text. Although non-literary, such practices as sacraments are integrated into his now metaphoric use of the term textuality. As Bruce D. Marshall writes: “The ‘categories’ of a religion are syntactic as well as lexical; they include not only the characteristic vocabulary of a religion but also normative patterns for deploying that vocabulary in story, teaching, exhortation, invocation, and so forth (patterns which Lindbeck often calls the ‘grammar’ of a religion)” (1990, 71). To be more specific: for Lindbeck, the canonical Bible is a complete and entirely sufficient text which has successfully shaped and moulded its community of readers: the Christian Church. Through its common practice of reading and making the text its own, the Church, in its practices, can also be said to be a textually encoded community, with specific gestures and practices that are derived from the Bible and give expression to its narratives. With the term textuality, Lindbeck is signalling this text, the Bible, which is first and foremost the text of the Church, where it is both heard and enacted. It is to this text, the Bible as the Church’s book, that Lindbeck refers when he speaks of the power of the scriptural world to “absorb the universe.” Or, in Lindbeck’s words, the Bible/Church is “a kind of cultural and/or linguistic framework or medium that shapes the entirety of life and thought” (1984, 33). It is not only the Church’s tradition qua doctrinal formulation that Lindbeck intends in his term textuality. The text also refers to the Church’s practice. Church practices —the liturgical enactment of the eucharist and baptism, the preaching of the word—are the precise contexts within which the scriptures were to be heard, and therefore they too importantly contribute to the text. But even more than this, the lex orandi has a practical priority in theological description, in Lindbeck’s estimation, over the lex credendi. What the Church declares in its public worship will shape that which it confesses in its doctrine. As Lindbeck puts it: “Those who believe in God’s guidance of the Church will first seek to

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hear God’s word in the community’s interpretation” (1996a, 224). The practice of scriptural interpretation within the Church becomes necessarily a part of the textual tradition: The strictly intratextual meaning of the cross, for example, is indefinite and vague … until it is completed by such social-ritual-experiential enactments as taking up the cross, or bearing a cross, or being baptized into Christ’s death so that we might rise with him. Wayne Meeks … puts it this way: to ascertain the sense of a text “entails the competence to act, to use, to embody” in a particular social setting “the universe rendered or signaled by the text.” (Lindbeck 1996a, 227)

Intratextuality involves the confluence of the biblical world and its social embodiment within the Church—past, present, and future. Intratextuality involves tradition, therefore, in its broadest sense. Some critics of Lindbeck have charged that such a unitive view of the Bible and its form of life, the Church, obscures the manner in which the Church differs from the biblical world and is, in many respects, in need of conversion to it. This important concern will be taken up in the following chapter as I examine Lindbeck’s ecclesiology in greater detail. However, an important dimension of this critique may be identified in Miroslav Volf, who finds Lindbeck’s metaphor of absorbing the world too facile a view of text–world relations that fails to address the manner in which Christianity requires a broader, non-textual account of its culture as a form of life. Volf is especially concerned that the language of textuality might serve as a cipher to conceal the very real nature and dynamic of power which is the “whole realm of nonsemiotic forces into which a religious semiotic system is embedded” (1996, 57). As Volf writes: The crucial theological question is, How does the Spirit work? To point back to the Christian semiotic system with its corresponding practices would constitute only part of the answer, though an extremely important part. The fuller answer consists of the interplay between semiotic and nonsemiotic dimensions in the life of the Christian church. Think of the stories at bedside and the radiance of a face reflecting the love of Christ, words of admonition and the silent holding of the hand of a person in pain, eating and drinking the bread and wine, worshiping the one true God, holiness and failure, manipulation and the sword, the blood of the martyrs, the lives of the saints, hypocrisy and lust for power among church dignitaries and the rest of us, and economic interests and political machinations. My point is that, in addition to semiotic dimensions, there are

Toward a Pneumatological Intratextual Theology important nonsemiotic (“experiential,” if you wish) dimensions in the transmission of the Christian faith. (1996, 57)

Taking up Volf’s challenge will enable me to examine whether the Patristic notion of the sufficiency of the biblical narrative is adequate to inscribe even non-semiotic forces such as power, might, and oppression, which are, according to Volf, the irreducible contexts of the religious semiotic system. The first observation that one could make about Volf’s assessment of Lindbeck is that, while it seems to recognize the capacity of the term textuality to include “corresponding practices,” the recognition is superficial insofar as the experiences cited are regarded as extratextual or non-semiotic. The experiences that Volf cites do not exist alongside, behind, or in front of the biblical world, but are very necessarily conformed into that biblical world. Power cannot be understood as an abstraction for Christians: it is always to be viewed, judged, and held up against Christ’s vulnerability to and triumph over “powers and principalities” upon the cross. Of course, the Church as an institution has not often known the humility that both the theologia crucis and the theologia gloriae should properly engender. In Lindbeck’s terms, there is a great disparity between the paradigmatic instantiations of redemptive language and the Church’s fluency. But this makes the intratextual model all the more urgent. By embracing, rather than fleeing from, the intra-semiotic system (in which the cross is utterly central), we understand the putatively nonsemiotic instantiations of power—both outside the Church and within it. In this case, the interglossing, self-referencing system that we examined in terms of intra-canonicity in the preceding section also interprets us in our various power relations. To return to the questions raised by Volf’s argument: How might one know the face reflecting the love of Christ or the power of contending political machinations apart from the cross? How can Christ’s love be made manifest without one’s having first been given the words, indeed the Word, to make sense of the polyvalent impressions of the world? Can one extricate the face aglow from the stories read and heard? Are not the stories the necessary condition for the face reflecting the light of Christ? It is perhaps in this way that the Athanasian category of sufficiency may best be understood. Sufficiency, in the Athanasian approach, refers to the power of the scriptures to become the measure by which all other knowledge is judged; it is not a denigration of that which is outside scripture. In his concern that there be some surplus of experience that resists accommodation

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into the text, then, Volf is —in a profound way —not taking seriously enough the power of God to employ the text to transform, judge, and illumine even those experiences which seem to be outside of it. Volf does, however, grant to the Holy Spirit the power to mediate persistently between the world and the text, reconciling and at times blurring the distinctions between them. It might seem that the “intratextual-cum-extratextual” world (Volf 1996, 52) mediated by the Spirit would be in keeping with the type of rejoinder that I am advancing here as I consider the pneumatological deficiencies of Lindbeck’s proposal. Not so. The rehabilitation of the Spirit in intratextual exegetical and practical theology cannot escape the gravitational direction given by the rule and canon in interpretative practice. Without the regulation of a coherently articulated soteriology, the person of the Spirit becomes ever more nebulous. Were the Spirit simply a mediating presence from text to world, what sort of salvation would be effected—apart, perhaps, from the illusory creation of a mediating principle to make Church-world interchange more expedient? The power of the Spirit in an intratextual theology is the power not to transcend the semiotic system but to return us to it, at times removing the scales from our eyes so that human power, among other things, may be fully revealed.

irreducibility The second feature of George Lindbeck’s term untranslatability signals the manner in which the biblical text resists translation. Lindbeck wishes to ascribe to the biblical narrative a priority and independent coherence that does not fit neatly into other types of description. Like postmodern theorists, Lindbeck doubts that there exists a language game that can serve as a neutral and adequate interpretation of scripture; indeed, he points to the evidence of the various modernist attempts to apply the text to the world to demonstrate how the text itself becomes domesticated by any such language game. Thus, Lindbeck advocates an intra-semiotic redescription of the narrative (i.e., re-describing the text within its own home or language game) and contends that use of an extrinsic language in theology must remain at the service of the text (scripture). As Lindbeck eloquently puts it: “Cross and resurrection define the really real, the fullness of God’s own identity. Dying and rising with Christ are not metaphors, but rather the literal truth which shapes all action, thought and experience into conformity to the One in whom alone full humanness resides” (1996b, 362). This realism refuses to be reduced into another, putatively more neutral, framework:

Toward a Pneumatological Intratextual Theology Intratextual, or text-immanent meaning is constituted by the text, not something outside of it such as Marxist, Freudian, or Nietzchean causal or genealogical explanations in terms of economic, psychological, or power factors. Nor is it only extratextual referents, (human) authorial intention and extratextually known ideas presumed to be present in the text allegorically or otherwise.… This does not deny that we project our ideas into the Bible and then think that these are part of the immanent or intratextual meaning, but when reading intratextually, we struggle against this reflex instead of consciously employing extratextual meanings as hermeneutical keys. (Lindbeck 1996a, 227–28)

doctrine and the untranslatable text The dual nature of Lindbeck’s definition of untranslatability—irreducibility and sufficiency—is in keeping with Patristic understandings of the Bible. Both principles are necessary to a figural reading of scripture. Without the text’s sufficiency, it could not hope to address other forms of life. Because the text is sufficient, it can adequately redescribe both the Old Testament and the experiences of the Christian community in the postbiblical period. Similarly, because of the Bible’s irreducibility, its resistance to translation into other forms of discourse, figural reading actually prevails. The Bible does not teach a moral or spiritual lesson: instead, it tells a story. Any efforts to reduce it ultimately end up missing the mark. Figural reading predominated in the Patristic era precisely because of the concreteness of the characters of the biblical narrative: of God who is made incarnate in Jesus Christ, and of His people, whose characters are not types or symbols but are, like their Creator in whose image they are made, irreducibly realistic. Further, both poles of Lindbeck’s category of untranslatability—irreducibility and sufficiency—speak in a formal manner to the regulative nature of Church doctrine in an intratextual theology. Doctrine regulates the reading of past, present, and future narratives and organizes these around the saving logic which it upholds and defends. Doctrine enables a communal cohesion, while it simultaneously challenges those readings of the text and tradition which threaten the coherence of the community’s narrative. In this sense, doctrine can be the tacit or explicit logic that renders the continuity which we have understood in terms of sufficiency possible. Doctrine is also that which offers a world-view in summary form in a manner that is untranslatable. Other rules cannot be substituted for doctrinal rules without diminishing the community’s

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self-understanding. However, regulative principles, no matter how efficacious, are not sufficient alone to address and transform the world in the profound manner that I believe Lindbeck is seeking to capture in his metaphor “the text absorbs the world.”

Intentionality In an important essay on Erich Auerbach and intratextual theology, John David Dawson points out the significance of God’s authorship of the Bible and its implications for the Christian figural reader. Within the biblical text, God is both enactor and interpreter of the past persons and events depicted by the text. They have meaning and significance because they are the idiom in which God acts 8 and speaks: Although one may refer to a figure “announcing” its fulfillment, it is ultimately God who does the announcing, for a person or an event is a figura precisely because it begins an extended divine utterance that embraces subsequent persons and events. “Figuralness” denotes the status of things as significant —not in themselves and not in their meanings —but insofar as they are in all their concrete reality, the enacted intention of God to signify. If Jesus is the fulfillment of Joshua, it is because both Joshua and Jesus are moments within a single divine intention to signify. Discerning that intention as a literary congruence, the figural reader makes explicit the similarities by which otherwise separate events are related to one another as moments in a single, divine utterance. (Dawson 1998, 187–88)

Figural union is neither the result of an act of the reader nor a self-conscious “fusion of horizons”; rather, it is implicit within the biblical text itself. Historically the congruence in narratives, for example between Hannah’s song and Mary’s Magnificat, was explained by the seamlessness of intention of God who infused scripture with pre-figurations of the consummation of His people’s story in Jesus Christ: “When the figural interpreter describes that relationship, the description cannot be allowed to replace the graphic character of the representations being related. And by preserving the graphic character of the representations, the interpreter also leaves intact (or does not call into question) the historical reality of these persons or events that the text represents as God’s performative utterance” (Dawson 1998, 188). Because scripture is God’s performative utterance, the unity between the canons is a given. An example of the importance of upholding a unity of God’s intention may be seen in Athanasius’ writing about the injunc-

Toward a Pneumatological Intratextual Theology

tion to sacrifice in the Levitical laws and God’s denial of their efficacy in Isaiah 1:11–12. Athanasius defends the unity and non-contradiction of God’s intention thus: Now it is the opinion of some that the Scriptures do not agree together or that God, Who gave the commandment, is false. But there is no disagreement whatever, far from it, neither can the Father who is truth, lie; “for it is impossible that God should lie,” as Paul affirms. But all these things are considered plain to those who rightly consider them, and to those who receive with faith the writings of the law. Now it appears to me—may God grant, by your prayers, that the remarks I presume to make may not be far from the truth —that not at first were the commandment and the law concerning sacrifices, neither did the mind of God, Who gave the law, regard whole burnt offerings, but those things which were pointed out and pre-figured by them. For the law contained a shadow of good things to come, and, “Those things were appointed until the time of reformation.” (Letter 19, Easter, 347, para. 3)

Athanasius affirms that the same God speaks through the Law and the Prophets —thus affirming a doctrine of revelation that locates the authority of the non-contradicting, cumulative narrative in God’s intentional self-communicating word. Many will argue here that Athanasius, writing in a pre-critical era, cannot be used as an exemplar of a doctrine of revelation. With a naïve and pre-scientific understanding of the authorship and the historical embeddedness of the various texts of the Bible, Athanasius glosses over important differences in intention among the human writers of the Bible. Therefore, modern scholars would, for example, invite the critical reader to examine the social context behind the text in which the injunction to sacrifice or not sacrifice was variously issued. Lindbeck would affirm that we cannot go back to a pre-critical naïveté, in which we simply ignore the insights of historical criticism. However, Lindbeck also cautions that historical criticism does not exhaust the religious meaning of the text: 9 Athanasius’ reading notwithstanding, the text is not to be treated in isolation from the tradition that it engendered. Historical-critical method may be employed in an ad hoc fashion, but it cannot engender a rule of faith (e.g., the normativity of “suspicion”) which would replace the central soteriological affirmation of the Church from its earliest beginnings. George Lindbeck sees classical biblical hermeneutics as well positioned to absorb other types of criticism into itself: “The classic hermeneutics … is intrinsically unrestricted. Its task, as we have

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observed, is to interpret all reality religiously by capturing the universe in the embrace of biblical language. Modern methods of interpretation are part of the booty and are to be used like other treasures of God’s good creation to glorify Him and bring all thoughts into captivity to Christ” (2002, 241). Lindbeck sees no reason why intratextual hermeneutics cannot accommodate historical-critical insights. In the case of sacrificial injunctions, God’s differing commands in Leviticus and Isaiah may well be explained by historical context, but such explanation does not preclude the unity of divine intention nor its cumulative patterning, in which the sacrifice of Christ is anticipated as “such a high priest, holy, blameless, undefiled, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens. Unlike the other high priests, he has no need to offer sacrifices day after day, first for his own sins, and then for those of the people; this he did once and for all when he offered himself” (Heb. 7:26–27). Still, Lindbeck tends to defend the priority of classical interpretation in a formal manner, arguing for its capacity to “interpret all reality religiously.” Perhaps the significance of a unified and cumulative sense of scripture might better be defended through a positive theology that signals that it is in God’s very nature to communicate adequately and fittingly. Further, one may wish to affirm that the text is cumulative not merely because of any literary quality, but because history is rendered complete in the risen Christ. Finally, one might attest with the Fathers that the opacity of the text is removed through the power of the Holy Spirit who is efficacious in revealing the presence of the risen Christ as He appears within the Old Testament and within our own lived contexts. Such a Trinitarian hermeneutics is not a prolegomenon for right reading of scripture; rather, it is part of the same idiom for reading the biblical narrative intratextually.10 Here, Lindbeck’s term absorbing the world as a metaphor for text–world relations seems to be most seriously deficient. The text — that is, the story of Jesus Christ—is the sufficient and irreducible manner in which the life, death, and resurrection are known. To speak of a textual absorption of the world is to betray the very agency and intentionality to which the text refers. Although not one and the same, the text remains in proximate relationship to the Word which is the ultimate source of our salvation. Indeed, one might say the text is a figura, a close mimesis, of the Word made flesh. In this sense, the manner of speaking of text-world relations should reflect precisely the intentional agency of the Word who saves us. What is required in any assessment of the rela-

Toward a Pneumatological Intratextual Theology

tion between the text and the reality it describes is a theology of revelation. In this way, Karl Barth represents a modern author who captures the Patristic notion of intentionality in its distinctly theological, rather than formal, sense. Barth offers an important corrective to Lindbeck’s fairly abstract and apersonal language of absorbing the world. Contrasting Lindbeck’s reading with Barth’s, Ronald F. Thiemann writes: Barth is interested in Scripture as self-interpreting text because he |sees Scripture as the vehicle of the self-interpreting Triune God … it is Barth’s view of revelation that warrants his intratextual view of theology. Without that doctrine of revelation, or its functional equivalent, textuality, intratextuality, and self-interpreting texts have no theological force … Jesus Christ as God incarnate is God’s sacramental presence among humankind, but even that sacramental presence cannot be known directly, for God is known in Jesus Christ only through the witness of the biblical narrative. (1986, 379)

Like the Fathers, Barth grounds his exegesis in a robustly Trinitarian theology. This theology arises from God’s self-description within the narrative itself, not from a study of the literary genre of the biblical narrative. Barth, like pre-modern exegetes, does not look for the author’s intention behind, alongside, or in front of the text; rather, he understands the text as the enacted intention of God’s self-communicating word with humanity. The notion that the intention of the author is separate from what is actually achieved in her writing is decidedly modern. In literary criticism, W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley (1976) exposed the Romantic penchant for looking for the author’s intention behind the words of the text, specifically within the biography of the author, as the intentional fallacy. An analogous movement within Romantic historical criticism sought to explain the meaning of the New Testament by reference to the hidden intentions of the “real Jesus.” Patristic hermeneutics, following Aristotle, acknowledged no such cleavage between intention and form. On the contrary, the Fathers saw the the author’s intention as inseparable from what she achieved – that is, they contended that the author’s intention is made known through the text itself, not through the reconstruction of her putative motivations. Theologically speaking, it is because God reveals Godself in history that God’s intentions can be known. This is seen clearly in Athanasius’ writing on how the hidden God is revealed within the world and is so known to us by His effects: “For often the artist, even if he is not seen,

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is known from his works. And as they say about Phidias the sculptor that his worlds through the symmetry and mutual proportion of their parts reveal to those who look at them Phidias even if he is not present, in the same way one must know from the order of the cosmos its Maker and Creator, God, even if He is not seen by the bodily eyes” (cg, 22). Clearly, the trustworthy, sacramental nature of God’s self-disclosure in the world which is intrinsic to a Patristic, particularly Eastern, theology of revelation is significant to our study of figuration. Although God is hidden, God can be known by His works. A word of caution must, however, be issued here: the apophatic theology of the Eastern Fathers urged restraint in human confidence in our ability to understand God entirely through the material world. Indeed, as Gregory of Nyssa states: “Because our reason in this manner must grope in the dark, clearly no one can complain if its conjecturing leads our minds to a variety of conclusions” (oied). What is needed is scripture which serves—in a manner that breaks through the opacity of the world—as a means for revealing God’s intention enacted in Jesus Christ. And here, we are returned to the regula fidei which serves as a map of sorts, locating God’s unique manifestation within the world. Insofar as text and world cohere with the rule of faith, the darkness and the ambiguity of which Gregory of Nyssa speaks is overcome. Such restoration of vision and purpose through Scripture was regarded precisely as the work of the Holy Spirit: believers are empowered to recognize God’s salvific work in Jesus Christ not only in the prefigural narratives of the Old Testament but also in the post-figurative experiences of the Church where Christ is made known. In other words, both poles, the regulative and the pneumatological, are needed for a truly intratextual theology. The formal principles of figuration, guided by the Church’s confession, or the regula fidei, uphold the continuity of the biblical narrative, but they do not offer the properly pneumatological appropriation of the narrative and its accommodation to the particularities of our own stories. In what follows, I shall examine two examples of biblical interpretation, one modern and one ancient, in an effort to locate more precisely the work of the Holy Spirit in the appropriation of the biblical narrative.

the limit case: intentionality and interpretation of the song of songs In 1778, in his Lieder der Lieben, Johann Gottfried Herder wrote what is probably the first of the modern natural interpretations of the Song of Songs. In it he eschewed what he considered to be the dualistic allegories

Toward a Pneumatological Intratextual Theology

of pious interpretation of the Song of Songs, opting instead for interpreting the canticle as a voluptuous love song celebrating such Romantic ideals as sensuality, nature, and beauty. Two centuries later, Herder’s followers abound. Indeed, today’s orthodoxy consists of a view of the Song as a plain-sensical celebration of erotic love. Any meaning that transcends this realm, according to such critics, is a betrayal of the Song’s (or songs’) intent. Particularly problematic, according to such interpreters, is the linkage of the Bride to Israel (or worse, the Church) and the Bridegroom to God (or worse, Jesus Christ). In what follows, I will trace with some care the natural argument and its critical perceptions of the allegorical tradition of the Song of Songs, through the interpretation of the critic André LaCocque. There are many interpreters whom I could have chosen, but LaCocque seems particularly germane to this project as he spurns the Christological or Israelological readings of the text, and yet becomes wedded to what I will argue is a far more abstract and distant regula fidei than anything offered by the Fathers. LaCocque’s analysis centres upon the quest for a hidden intentionality of the author, which lies behind its canonical usage and interpretation. Indeed, LaCocque believes that the most promising manner of interpreting the Song of Songs is actually antithetical to a figural or canonical rendering of the text. He is, therefore, very critical of Brevard Childs’ canonical specification of the text as a source for its interpretation. For LaCocque, the Song of Songs represents a stark rupture from the rest of the canon: “Childs is statistically and objectively correct when he says that human love is never celebrated in the Bible for its own sake. Let us not exclude the possibility of the Song creating a precedent! Barring oneself from new avenues, as does Childs in this instance, may foreclose access to the meaning of the text” (1998, 238–39). Against Childs’ canonical reading, LaCocque argues for an idiosyncratic and novel interpretation of the Song. However, the idiosyncracy and novelty are of a partial kind, for LaCocque acknowledges the cadences and the allusions to Hebrew poetry which certainly locate the Songs as identifiably within the Hebrew liturgical tradition,11 even though it has marked affinities to other Near Eastern literature. LaCocque postulates that the author of the Song of Songs was a woman who used prophetic and “spiritual” language in a subversive fashion, in order to do precisely the opposite of what the Fathers say that the Song does. According to LaCocque, the Shulamite thumbs her nose at the ascetical and the bourgeois, even as she uses their own language against them. In this way, she celebrates

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a purer religion where eros will not be subordinated to divine love: “Carnal love is here no mimetic duplication of a primordial divine archetype. All utilitarianism, even religious, is excluded.… For the purpose of praising eros, the poetess dared adopt a language that prophets and some priests had traditionally used to describe metaphorically the intimate relations between God and people. Put in a nutshell, it is a language accepted into the religious realm by virtue of its figurative usage” (LaCocque 1998, 247–49). In LaCocque’s view, there can be no ulterior significance to the natural text. The text is what it is as the lovers are what they are. Although such an interpretation would seem to be hospitable to the resolute realism that has been central to the biblical narrative, this seeming realism is, in fact, something of a cipher for a hermeneutical practice in which intentional retrieval is governed by the precise dispositions and cultural prejudices of the interpreter. According to LaCocque, the manner in which one can access the original (and hence, “authentic”) meaning of the text is through a reconstruction of the social mores, beliefs, and contexts that might have influenced the human author. In this way, LaCocque distinguishes between what the text is saying and what it means. As LaCocque argues, the real meaning of the text can be accessed only through the subordination of its religious language and its canonical setting, as the interpreter seeks the real author behind the text. The words of the text do not say what they mean; rather, they point to a hidden and subversive meaning. In spite of the reverence of tone of the Song, LaCocque maintains: “We are in a setting of total irreverence. The author ironically uses expressions that had become sacred in a Yahwistic context. The Song is not a booklet for a pagan hierogamy. Nor is it an allegory for the use of the straightlaced on the intimate relations between God and Israel (even less, between Christ and the Church). It is an exaltation of eros; it speaks of free love, untamed and even, to a certain degree, clandestine” (1998, 262). Such a rupture between what a text says and what it means is a peculiarly modern phenomenon within the history of exegesis. Hans Frei describes this phenomenon thus: The location of meaning outside the statement and inside the author’s intention is complemented by a similar condition at the other end of the reach of the notion of meaning. There it is located, once again, not merely in the words but in the external reality to which the words refer. When this view is applied to the interpretation of scripture, the implication is obvious. At both ends of the spectrum the use of

Toward a Pneumatological Intratextual Theology language is governed by a sense of the setting for meaningfulness that is quite different from what had hitherto been prevalent in exegetical practice and accompanying theory. The immediacy of the world depicted and rendered accessible by the biblical words, and the rich but orderly and interconnected variety of levels of meaning they presented, faded away. Instead, the connection between language and its context is the reality of the author on the one hand and of the single, external reference of the words on the other. (1974, 79)

Rather than reading the Bible as a whole, modern interpreters, and LaCocque is exemplary among them, loosen the text from its situatedness in the canon and seek another mooring in order to stabilize it; this is, in LaCocque’s case, the world of the author, construed variously in terms of the Shulamite’s social setting and, alternately, her consciousness, as her rebellious and impertinent agenda are masked by the conventional imagery, diction, and ceremoniousness of a Jewish epithalium. As LaCocque argues: The Israelite was not by a long shot thinking of amusing her public. She wanted to shock. “Solomon” is reduced to the risible dimensions of an Ahasuerus in the book of Esther. The family and the familiar guardians of women’s chastity, namely the “brothers” and the night watchmen in the Song, are largely outdone by events over which they have lost control. Those who consider the future marriage of their son or daughter as a commercial transaction are derided. The institution in general is swept aside and the event of love is glorified. (1998, 253; italics mine)

The burden of the meaning of the Song, according to LaCocque, is located within the reconstruction of the author’s intent. It is here that the multivalent, and at times perplexing, images and voices of the Song are stabilized. Indeed, there can only be one interpretation, if LaCocque is right, and that interpretation resides in the voice behind the poem, that of the Shulamite extolling “free love.” According to LaCocque, the Fathers’ allegorical method resulted in the domestication of the sensual level of the text in their embarrassment over its overt sexuality: It is clear that the author wrote a song, a romance, which quickly became an embarrassment for her fellow Jews (and, later, for Christians). However, it is well known that a handy principle of interpretation of something deemed scandalous by diehard conservatives is the recourse to allegory.… It seems that the more a love scene is daring, the more likely it is to be interpreted mystically. Origen, says

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As Frei points out, the particular tactic of historical criticism employed by LaCocque severs the interpretation from the traditions of interpretation before it. Biblical language and the tradition of interpretation serve only to confound and beguile the reader away from the text’s ostensive reference—or, perhaps, it is only through negation of the tradition that the text’s reference, its impertinent parody, can be known. Thus, LaCocque alleges that he is able to rid himself of the abstract and decontextualized rendering of the text by the tradition of its interpretation. He does so not only, as some have argued, with specious warrant from the text itself,12 but also in a manner that itself imposes a foreign set of presuppositions and mores upon the text. LaCocque is, of course, not alone in his circumscription of the Song to an immanent erotic celebration, but the interpreters with whom he shares this view are intriguingly contemporary. As Ricoeur so wonderfully writes: In my opinion, it is to [a] major cultural change that we must attribute the almost universal triumph of the erotic reading of the Song of Songs, which has become the dominant reading. Of course, this reading is largely traceable to changes that have occurred within the sphere of exegesis itself. But it would have been naïve to believe that the transformations that have taken place on the level of modern culture have no effect on the history of reading. In fact, they belong in two ways. First… the search for the original meaning independent of any engagement on the part of the reader is not some atemporal, ahistoric attitude, but itself stems from a history of reading. Next, the triumph of the erotic sense, taken as self-evident, is itself a fact of reading, where the technical changes within the exegetical field and cultural changes affecting public discourse about sexuality reinforce one another.… May I add a final somewhat mischievous dig that the reading proposed in this volume by André LaCocque, which places the Shulamite among the “subversives,” itself arises from a “subversive” reading that we might take as typically modern? (1998, 294–95)

Toward a Pneumatological Intratextual Theology

The stabilizing voice of the text may not be regarded as the timeless siren call of the Shulamite, enjoining all the repressed faithful to cast off their chains; instead, that call may issue more truthfully from the very mores of a certain period of “subversives” whose construction of sexuality becomes the regulative principle deciding the meaning of the text. In this way, the reading of a critic such as LaCocque can be seen as more tersely allegorical and removed from the text than the so-called allegorical interpretative method of the Fathers, whom LaCocque eschews for their abstruseness. In contrast, the Fathers —particularly Gregory of Nyssa, whose exegesis on the Song of Songs was important in shaping Christian reception of the text —were governed by the literal sense in their interpretation in a manner that is far more “realistic” than the methods employed by critics such as LaCocque. Recent careful scholarship on the Fathers’ so-called allegorism, particularly that of Origen and Gregory of Nyssa (who was influenced by Origen), has challenged the canards of critics such as LaCocque, who maintain that the allegorical method was a handy tactic employed to hide the resolute and provocative eroticism of the Song and to impose a unity on the canon. In the following examination of Gregory’s interpretation of the Song, I hope to underscore the striking contrast between classical and modern notions of intentionality. The classical notion looks toward an intended telos to the text as determined by God’s economy of salvation; the modern notion looks behind the text, seeking a singular and hidden intention of a human author. In his contrastive reading of the Homeric heroes and the characters in the Old Testament, Erich Auerbach writes of the relentless realism of the Old Testament characters. These characters are not types or symbols; they resist identification with any moral principle or ideal. They simply are who they are: Fraught with their development, sometimes even aged to the point of dissolution, they show a distinct stamp of individuality entirely foreign to the Homeric heroes. Time can touch the latter only outwardly, and even that change is brought to our observation as little as possible; whereas the stern hand of God is ever upon the Old Testament figures; he has not only made them once and for all and has chosen them, but he continues to work upon them, bends them and kneads them, and, without destroying them in essence, produces from them forms which their youth gave no grounds for anticipating. For they are bearers of the divine will, and yet they are fallible, subject to misfortune and humiliation— and in the midst of their misfortune and

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The Spirit’s Address in their humiliation their acts and words reveal the transcendent majesty of God. (1952, 18)

It may be, and indeed has been, argued that the Song of Songs is anomalous within the Old Testament, because the characters within it lack the specificity that is characteristic of Old Testament figures. Whatever remains of their “stamp of individuality” is easily dissolved into a pattern of interpretation where they simply “stand for” something else. Gregory of Nyssa, however, does not approach the characters in this way. In spite of their lack of specification by name or by voice, Gregory attributes to them a concreteness that exists precisely through the desire of the Bride for the Bridegroom. Far from shying away from eros, Gregory considers it to be the very vehicle for the knowing and experiencing of God. As the daughters of Jerusalem pine: “Tell us of your Beloved and of his nature. Give us, you who are filled with loveliness, ‘beautiful among women,’ a means to recognize him. Indicate to us the one whom you seek, and teach us by what signs this unseen lover can be found, that we may know him by the shaft of love which wounded your heart and intensified your desire for him through sweet pain” (hss). Through the sensuality of the images, the longing of the characters is expressed in vivid terms. Gregory of Nyssa’s interpretation of the Song moves toward its proper object: desire for God. And yet the “sweet pain” that the daughters pine for is not spiritualized; it retains a decisive stamp of earthy and sensual love. This love becomes the vehicle for a higher ardour, but not in such a way that the sensual ardour is obfuscated or subordinated. Sexual desire is not overcome or thwarted; rather, it is ordered toward its proper end, which is, according to Gregory, most perfectly fulfilled in God. Even in the description of deity as Bridegroom, the eroticism is not lost. As Gregory writes: The text now before us gives us the same exhortation. It does not merely offer advice regarding love, but through the ineffable mysteries it philosophizes and offers an image of the pleasures of life as a preparation for its instruction. The image is one of marriage where the desire for beauty acts as intermediary. The bridegroom does not initiate the desire according to normal human custom, but the virgin anticipates the bridegroom without shame, openly makes her passion known and prays that she may enjoy the bridegroom’s kiss. (hss)

In his careful exegetical essay on Gregory of Nyssa’s Homily on the Song of Songs, Martin Laird writes of the noetic-erotic orientation of the Bride as the movement of the “education of desire.” The Bride moves from

Toward a Pneumatological Intratextual Theology

erotic longing to a quest for her Beloved within the darkness of the bridal chamber. The consummation of desire comes about, according to Gregory, not through self-positing, but through pathos, or receptivity.13 It is for this reason that the apophatic language of darkness surrounding the Holy of Holies, the wedding chamber, is so vital to Gregory of Nyssa’s soteriology. Faith, not knowledge, compels the Bride to the chamber. Through the subordination of her perceptions and her prior knowledge, her desire receives its proper training. However, the object of the Bride’s receptivity is not veiled in darkness, but is positively revealed in Gregory’s exegesis, in Trinitarian terms. The darkness of the wedding chamber and the opacity of the Song itself as an analogue are not illumined through the Bride/reader “filling in the silences,” but are enlightened through revelation, offered in the triune story of salvation. As Laird writes: “For Gregory of Nyssa, Solomon’s tutelage is from first to last Trinitarian. The erotic Beauty of the Word in Scripture attracts desire that is excited and inflamed by the Spirit. The divine Archer shoots the Spirit-moistened arrow of the Son. Penetrated by the arrow, she is ever moving repose and becomes a vehicle of presence for all to see. At rest in the Bridegroom’s embrace, she is at the same time, shot forth in mission for all the daughters of Jerusalem” (2003, 90). Gregory’s reading of the Song of Songs is realistic and erotic rather than dualistic—it does not suppress the material level of the text in favour of its spiritual meaning—and it has an eschatological orientation, which is governed by a coherent Trinitarian soteriology as the pilgrim is “trained” through eros. However, it must be acknowledged that in his mystical reading of the text, Gregory does indeed assume hermeneutical licence which may be said to strain against the intratextual reading that Lindbeck, in his desire to retrieve figural reading, advocates. Gregory’s reading would seem to violate what is understood to be the primacy of the literal sense of the text. Nonetheless, Gregory’s allegorical method, as a limit example of allegorical exegesis, retains a realism through the literal sense that is derived from the soteriological rule which the Fathers used to govern all reading of scripture. In his exposition on the literal sense in premodernity, Hans W. Frei offers these comments: “The literal meaning of the text is precisely the meaning which finds the greatest degree of agreement in the use of the text in the religious community. If there is agreement in that use, then take that to be the literal sense. The point here is that the greatest degree of agreement on the applicability of the literal sense, whatever it might be, was in regard to the person of Jesus in the texts.… So the first sense

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of the literal reading stems from the use of the text in the Church” (1992, 15). The community is not just any community reading the Bible; rather, it is defined by its adherence to rules that articulate the specific salvific content of scriptures. The Church appealed to this sense in its reading of scripture not by positing an alien framework upon individual texts, but by reading the text as governed by specific rules concerning the cumulative, saving plan to which scripture as a whole conformed. It is in this regulated and canonical practice of interpretation that Gregory of Nyssa interpreted the Song of Songs. His interpretation of the text was governed by the “tradition,” the regula fidei, which was also operative in the interpretations which preceded him. Passages from scripture were not excised and asked to speak on their own, as critics such as LaCocque would have it; instead, scripture was governed by the tradition that surrounded it, including the sensus fidelium and its canonical milieu. It is inaccurate, therefore, to consider the literal sense to be merely the majority rule of the immanent community. Community is a specific community, governed by soteriological principles and reaching back to its earliest confessions of faith and its canonical context, where soteriology might be more straightforwardly defined. This doctrinal fulcrum of exegesis explains why Gregory saw the Song of Songs, first and foremost, as a religious song, and why he regarded the Song’s intentionality as necessarily soteriological. The doctrine of revelation that is implicit in such figural reading involves an affirmation of the unity of intention and form within scripture. In other words, God reveals Himself within scripture in such a way that His soteriological efficacy is known from the text itself. As Hans Frei puts it: The literal sense is that it is the fit enactment of the intention to say what comes to be in the text. This understanding of the literal sense does not say that the text wrote itself, and that therefore you can simply take it as it is 14 —no, there’s an admission by and large that texts are written by authors, human or divine, for that matter. But what is interesting is that the intention and its enactment are thought of as one continuous process —one intelligent activity, not two —so that you cannot for this purpose go behind the text to ask separately about what the author meant or what he or she was really trying to say. You had better take it that the author said what he or she was trying to say. (1992, 15–16)

While it was self-evident to Gregory that the Song of Songs would be about God’s salvation rendered in triune form throughout the text, it

Toward a Pneumatological Intratextual Theology

was not self-evident how that revelation would proceed, or how the specific characters of the Song would be inscribed into God’s saving plan. In these ways, referring to the textual structure was of primary importance. Gregory of Nyssa’s exegesis of the Song of Songs is meticulous in this regard. In his exegesis, he carefully and painstakingly refers to the text, particularly its sequence of revelation. The point is more theological than it is exegetical. God’s intention is acted in the words and form of scripture, and not behind them. In her careful study of Gregory of Nyssa, Morwenna Ludlow writes: Gregory thinks that there is a sequence (akolouthia) in the form of the text itself, not merely in the meaning underlying the text.… Consequently, with regard to history and the text of scripture, akolouthia means that God is acting in it: the word akolouthia is almost synonymous with oikonomia in Gregory’s writings.… Consequently, Gregory’s exegesis is focused on finding the overarching aim (skopos) of a text, which is revealed in the akolouthia of the words, phrases and other units of which the text is made up. Although Gregory sometimes uses the word skopos impersonally … underlying this meaning is his assumption that the skopos is the divine purpose of the text. (2002, 53–54)

The reason Gregory is so painstaking in his attention to the various details of the text is that the text is the trustworthy account of God’s salvific will in the human economy. The oikonomia of God in the world is inseparable from God’s skopos in the biblical narrative. And yet Gregory of Nyssa appears to be offering more than this fairly formal affirmation of Scriptural authority. Gregory is also demonstrating how the internal dynamic at the heart of the skopos of the text have a power to embrace both the Song’s characters and readers in the divine oikonomia. Indeed, the Song of Songs is paradigmatic of the verticality of the text in reaching into the reader’s world and incorporating her into the mystery of salvation. In this sense, the Bridegroom’s hand reaches out not only to the Bride but also to us, the readers. Gregory affords an occasion to reflect upon what a reading of the “spirit” of the text may offer in the amplification of the “letter” in ways that press beyond the rather assimilative and homogenizing metaphor of absorbing the world. According to Martin Laird, the purpose of the Song, in Gregory’s theology, is pedagogical. It is a training of the entire person—mind, body, and spirit—in the knowledge of God’s redemption in Jesus Christ. The language functions on a variety of levels, but this heuristic sense of the text remains the same: the Bridegroom (Christ) seeks union with the Bride,

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even as the Bride seeks union with him. The longing of the Bride in heart, mind, and body is only requited in his embrace, as the goal of theosis, or deification, is begun within her. We, the readers, are also ignited to such desire and, it is to be hoped, are offered the promise of Christ’s theotic redemption through our reading of scripture. As Laird writes: To interpret the Song of Songs is to be drawn into the Holy of Holies. The imageless silence of the sanctuary is the innermost reality of the sacred text whose sole purpose is to lead the soul to union. We have seen that Gregory sees in this a rather explicit pedagogy for this very purpose.… Filled with erotic images of passionate love, the Song of Songs educates the soul to long for and commune with the divine beauty of the Bridegroom. Noetic-erotic grasping poses a problem and must be taught to abandon control; for, in the inner sanctuary of divine presence, there is no object for desire or concept to grasp. She must learn to enter, desire enflamed, with open palms of unknowing. (2003, 90)

This is a vivid example of the very personal address of the text that, again, seems underdeveloped in Lindbeck’s account of text-world relations. The text does not simply absorb the world; rather, because it is issued from the God who loves us, its address embraces, trains, and even saves us, insofar as the text is illumined by the Spirit who saves.

Apophaticism and Pneumatology There is a way in which the apophaticism of the just-given commentary on Gregory of Nyssa’s divine pedagogy obscures the kind of intratextual reading that is advanced by Lindbeck and advocated in this chapter, for a realistic approach to scripture read as a cumulative unity seems to be undermined by the darkness of apophaticism. If scripture culminates in such a darkness, is it possible at all to affirm its trustworthy nature? And, furthermore, if the canon is to be read as a unified whole, might not a secret pedagogy such as Gregory’s represent a dénouement rather than a culmination of its akolouthia? I do not think so. The darkness of the wedding chamber signals a limitation to our grasping, not God’s. This is not a Kantian limit, the threshold of which human inquiry cannot trespass. Instead, Gregory maintains in the apophatic imagery the impossibility of containing God within human conceptuality, and therefore draws us back to the text in order to be united with God. Revelation transcends all boundaries, be they mystical darkness or Kantian limits,

Toward a Pneumatological Intratextual Theology

as the Bridegroom is made fully known within his chamber and within the text itself. This revelation is not an esoteric mystery offered to those few who prevail into the chamber; rather, it is made manifest in the saving hand generously held out to those whom God loves. As Rowan Williams writes: We do not encounter God in the displacement of the world we live in, the suspension of our bodily and historical nature. There is indeed a sense in which we meet God in emptiness and silence, in the void of Good Friday and Holy Saturday, in the darkening of the sense and spirit in prayer; but we should not allow the weighty and important language of ‘God at work in our nothingness’ to deceive us into thinking that Good Friday is not history or that the soul in the night of contemplation ceases to be bound up in its material creaturehood. God acts in emptiness by bringing resurrection and transforming union, not by lifting us to “another world.” (2000a, 207)

This engagement of a limit example of Patristic interpretation demonstrates two points. First, Patristic exegesis—which maintained, even at its outermost limits, the integrity of the thing interpreted —was thoroughly intratextual. That is, the Bible was read as a cumulative and interglossing whole, where scriptures were opened up not through the positing of alien interpretative keys but through the saving story which was communally held and confessed. In these respects, Lindbeck’s retrieval of figural method is largely in keeping with the exegetical practices of the Fathers. Second, there are specifically pneumatological concerns surrounding the spirit as well as the letter of scripture. The Spirit works fully in concert with the text, incorporating the narratives in an interglossing unity while also incorporating the reader into its saving oikonomia.

god addresses the creature/community through the text The provocative example just retrieved from the history of exegesis should serve also to demonstrate the inadequacy of Lindbeck’s preferred metaphor for text–world relations, the text absorbs the world. The creature or community is transformed not through the absorption of the self or the community into the biblical text, but through a personal address (which Gregory depicts in the most intimate of fashions) that is given precisely through and within the concrete nexus of the creature’s/community’s own true identity.15 The truth of one’s own standing as a creature of God is embedded within the narrative itself. It is not so much that

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the reader finds her story within the biblical story; rather, it is within the biblical story that her own story is properly and decisively formed, thereby granting her an appropriate account of her meaning and purposefulness.16

god moves the creature/community toward its proper end through the text This latter component, purposefulness, is another feature of the intentionality of figural reading. Unfortunately, the purposeful end of the narrative, both already and not yet complete in the history of salvation, is also not adequately captured by the rather static metaphor of absorbing the world. Theologically speaking, it is the function of the Holy Spirit to gather up all things and bring them to their proper ends within the economy of salvation. The Holy Spirit has a telos: to bring Creation to its proper completion. This teleological orientation unfolds precisely from the direction given by the soteriological unity of the biblical narrative. The spirit of the text thus also touches upon and completes our own little stories —not through the homogenizing process of world-absorption, but rather through the transfiguration of those stories. In this transfiguration, the true identity of the reader/interpretative community is made concretely manifest.

god’s self-disclosure awaits eschatological fulfillment beyond the text The transfiguration of the creature through God by means of biblical address should offer the creature and the community the existential assurance that emerges from the gift and freedom of God’s self-communicating word. Yet such transfiguration remains incomplete. Eschatology should not only affirm the dynamic and cumulative unfolding of the biblical narrative but also attenuate any confidence Christians have that we have fully understood. It may even undermine the territorialism of the imagery of the Bible as the Church’s book absorbing the world. In his substantial and sympathetic critique of Lindbeck’s position, Rowan Williams points to the possibility of the world existing not as foe but as ally to the biblical world. Indeed, it is through pneumatology that the boundaries between “text” and “world” become less distinct than the territorial cast of Lindbeck’s metaphor would seem to affirm. Awareness of the still-incomplete nature of our own redescription of the biblical narrative as we await God’s further revelation invites the Christian reader to a humble and anticipatory posture in her encounter with the text. It may well even mean that the Christian may be converted

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anew by the text. As Rowan Williams writes, Christians may even so “rediscover our own foundational story in the acts and hopes of others that we ourselves are reconverted and are also able to bring those acts and hopes in relation with Christ for their fulfillment by the recreating grace of God” (2000b, 329). Although I suspect that Lindbeck would in no way wish to deny the possibility of such a redirective exchange between text and Christian sojourner, I would argue that his preferred metaphor of absorbing the world does not speak to such a dynamic possibility, which cannot be captured by a positing of the text’s relationship to the world. It is better advanced through a positive redescription of the indirect yet trustworthy congruence of the biblical word and the Word to whom it witnesses. At this point it would be tempting to argue that, given the open-endedness of the scriptural world as it awaits its eschatological fulfillment, a plurality of possibilities for its fulfillment may be envisaged. In modern and ancient sources alike, the recovery of a pneumatological reading can give rise to a multiplicity of interpretations of the biblical narrative. However, such a view fails to recognize that the unity of intention, so thoroughly argued for in our intra-canonical recovery of typological reading, is no less operative in post-canonical responses to scripture. Although much more will be said about this theme in the next chapter, Lindbeck is an important corrective to perceptions of “applied theology” as of a different order or moment from systematic or biblical theology. Any practical theology that sees itself as independent of that unitive narrated intention simply encourages a zeal for a kingdom which is rent from the specificity of the narrated promise of the triune God. As in ancient Montanism, a kingdom without such specificity becomes problematized as the “signs” of the world are loosened from the literal sense, thus creating a vision of the kingdom which has little to do with the Kingdom that Jesus proclaims. Pneumatology, according to orthodox teaching, returns the reader to the soteriological core of the Bible, and therefore discriminates between those interpretations which are intratextually coherent and those which are not. As Karl Barth writes: “It is the Holy Spirit who upholds the community.… But according to the defiant saying in Ephesians 6:17, that ‘sword of the Spirit’ which protects and defends [the community] is the Word of God” (1956–75, 4/2: 673–74). Testimony of the Spirit is not a private intuition; rather, it is inextricably entwined with regulative governance of the biblical text. Such reading seeks to conform to the enacted intention of God through faithful attending to the Word.

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Conclusion In his writings on intratextual theology, George Lindbeck recovered important elements of pre-modern, particularly Patristic exegesis. Guided by the regula fidei, tacitly or explicitly upheld, the early Christian communities organized their biblical interpretation around what they considered of utmost significance. Such a reading revealed to Christians that the Old Testament was their own scripture: it was the “One Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ” who was operative within the Law and the Prophets, and whose saving plan for humanity is rendered transparent through the Christologically centred saving narrative. Similarly, the post-apostolic Church found that it was the inheritor of a saving narrative where its own life and times were read post-figuratively as bearing faithful witness to that same saving story. Such a sense of deep continuity is well developed and articulated in Lindbeck’s intratextual approach to systematic theology. However, because Lindbeck tends to rely on formalistic literary analyses of intratextual reading, his theory does not always measure up to the very theological rationale that governed the Fathers’ sense of the propriety and necessity of figural interpretation. It is because the Holy Spirit is present and efficacious in the life of the Church that the unity of the Godhead and the unity of past, present, and future are represented so seamlessly. Although any student of Lindbeck should be wary of foundational claims regarding hermeneutics, it is perhaps appropriate to affirm that both the regulative authority of the text (the letter) and the Spirit, as understood in Trinitarian rather than abstract terms, should work together in a mutual, self-corrective way in the appropriation of scripture. An account of the intentionality of the Holy Spirit who is efficacious in the hearing of the Word in pointing the interpreter/interpretative community back to its Christological centre presses beyond the formalism of Lindbeck’s expositions of intratextual reading.


notes 1 Lindbeck writes on the intrinsic elasticity of description, and hence the possibility of a plurality of creative and yet orthodox Christian descriptions, as follows: “It is easy to see how theological descriptions of a religion may on this view need to be materially diverse even when the formal criterion of faithfulness remains the same. The primary focus is not on God’s being in itself,

Toward a Pneumatological Intratextual Theology for that is not what the text is about, but on how life is to be lived and reality construed in light of God’s character as an agent as this is depicted in the stories of Israel and of Jesus. Life, however, is not the same in catacombs and space shuttles, and reality is different for, let us say, Platonists and Whiteheadians. Catacomb dwellers and astronauts might rightly emphasize diverse aspects of the biblical accounts of God’s character and action in describing their respective situations. Judging by catacomb paintings, the first group often saw themselves as sheep in need of a shepherd, while the second group would perhaps be well advised to stress God’s grant to human beings of stewardship over planet Earth” (1984, 121). 2 “A comprehensive way of life and thought is one that (a) ‘translates’ every conceivable human reality (b) while being ‘untranslatable’ into any other conceivable reality. This ‘double claim of comprehensiveness’ — (a) and (b) —is what Lindbeck calls ‘untranslatability’ in his essay” (Buckley 2002, 224). Lindbeck chooses this term, I suspect, because he wants it to cohere with his overall trope within a cultural-linguistic method. I am somewhat wary of it because translation is not always reduction; in fact, it can often be amelioration, or at least an equally viable alternative. Reduction captures more fully, I would argue, the kind of violence that can be done to the scriptural narrative when “translated” poorly. 3 See also Athanasius, Contra Gentes, chapter 1: “The tokens of truth are more exact as drawn from Scripture, than from other sources.” 4 I will leave to the side, for a moment, the implicit charge of supersessionism in this practice of interpretation. Auerbach certainly makes a strong case that Paul subordinates the Law to the Gospel, regarding the Law as merely a weak foreshadowing of things to come: “As a whole [the Old Testament] ceased for [Paul] to be a book of the law and history of Israel and became from beginning to end a promise and prefiguration of Christ, in which there is no definitive, but only a prophetic meaning which has not been fulfilled, in which everything is written ‘for our sakes’… and in which precisely the most important and sacred events, sacraments and laws are provisional forms and figurations of Christ and the Gospel” (1959, 51). Contemporary Pauline scholarship tends to regard the so-called supersessionism within Paul as contextually driven by the unique challenges facing gentile converts. See, for example, L.T. Johnson: “One should not lose sight of the fact that in all of this Paul has been addressing gentile converts from paganism. That is to say, Paul’s statements should be placed in this context: the specific arguments serve the purpose of keeping the Galatian gentile Christians from circumcising. These arguments should not be construed as Paul’s declaration on Judaism as such” (1999, 336). I prefer to take up the question of the Church’s relationship to Israel in the next chapter as I deal with George Lindbeck’s ecclesiology. For now, I would challenge Auerbach’s dichotomous reading of Law and Gospel in Paul along the lines of Johnson, while addressing the charge of the supersessionism of figural interpretation implicitly in the latter sections of this chapter as I examine how figural interpretation in Patristic practice actually leaves the figurative level — the Old Testament narratives — intact.

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The Spirit’s Address 5 The notion of the regula fidei or kanwn in its original sense was “a straight rod” or “line” as it was used in the New Testament (2 Cor. 10:13, 15; Gal. 6:16). By the beginning of the third century, creed-like statements or rules of faith were actively rehearsed as a guarantor of correct Christian teachings in summary form. Rules of faith were generally not fixed or static. Indeed, at times the term rule of faith seems to imply broadly “apostolic teachings” or “the tradition.” Their flexibility invited adaptation to the particular needs of the community. The rules of faith were employed to rule out heretical teachings, to instruct catechumens, and to serve as standards for the interpretation of Scripture. The catechetical setting in which Christians learned the regula fidei was a preparation for baptism, and culminated in the three questions posed to the baptizand. The rather intensive preparation that preceded baptism involved the preparation of the implications and significance of the questions which would be asked in baptism. Irenaeus supports this connection between the regula fidei and Christian initiation when he speaks of “the rule of truth … received through baptism” (ah, i, 9:4). 6 As Curtis W. Freeman puts it: “When it comes to the reading of Scripture, postliberalism has called for a reassessment of the underlying assumptions of the historical-critical method and for the subordination of biblical criticism to the narrative unity of the Bible. The individual trained in historical and linguistic skills with the goal of recovering the objective meaning of the text apart from its theological message has been replaced as the hermeneutical arbiter by the ecclesiastical community that exercises the classical strategy of reading the Bible. The use of typological and figural devices supplies a canonical unity insofar as the story is told within the social and linguistic context of a community that possesses a distinctive set of beliefs and practices— namely the Church” (1996, 165). 7 “Finally, in the instance of religion more than any other type of semiotic system, description is not simply metaphorically but literally intratextual. This is true in some degree of all the world’s major faiths. They all have relatively fixed canons of writings that they treat as exemplary or normative instantiations of their semiotic codes. One test of faithfulness for all of them is the degree to which descriptions correspond to the semiotic universe paradigmatically encoded in holy writ” (Lindbeck 1984, 116). 8 See Thomas Aquinas, ST Ia, Iae; Q. 1, art. 10: responsio: “The author of Holy Writ is God, in whose power it is to signify His meaning, not by words only (as man also can do), but also by things themselves. So, whereas in every other science things are signified by words, this science has the property, that the things signified by the words have themselves also a signification. Therefore that first signification whereby words signify things belongs to the first sense, the historical or literal. That signification whereby things signified by words have themselves also a signification is called the spiritual sense, which is based on the literal, and presupposes it.” 9 “Yet, to return to the obvious, critical history is constructively helpless. In the absence of any functional equivalents to the classic canonical, grammatical (or doctrinal), narrational and figural interpretive strategies which we earlier sketched, it possesses no means of its own to move from what texts

Toward a Pneumatological Intratextual Theology

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meant in the past to what they can and should mean now for believers. It is thus incapable of providing communally persuasive guidance in the present for Christian faith and life, and the hermeneutical supplements devised to repair its failures (most brilliantly, perhaps, by Bultmann) are also unsuccessful. Non-fundamentalist mainstream churches are now reaping the bitter fruits of its interpretive paralysis” (Lindbeck 2002, 242). As Brevard Childs writes: “Christians have always understood that we are saved, not by the biblical text, but by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ who entered into the world of time and space” (1984, 545). See especially: “Just as ‘Solomon’ is used ironically in the book as though the author were putting out her tongue at the ‘Establishment,’ so do the formulas of conjuration parody the religious language and make fun of it. The same applies to the obvious comparison between ‘My beloved is mine, and I am his’ (2:16; 6:3; 7:10), and ‘I am your God and you are my people’ in Leviticus 26:12 (Ezekiel 36:28; 37:27)” (LaCocque 1998, 255). See Paul Ricoeur’s (1998) response to LaCocque’s exegesis on The Song of Songs. Although I disagree with Ricoeur’s conclusions, as he tends to argue on behalf of a destabilized and polysemous rendering of the world in front of the text, I am appreciative of his identification of an intentional fallacy in LaCocque and the consequences for this, as the text is naturalized in LaCocque’s reading. I am also appreciative of Ricoeur’s close knowledge and inspection of Patristic allegorical interpretation, particularly that of Origen, as he refuses to regard the Patristic use of allegorical method merely as a means of covering up the embarrassing carnality of the Song. Pace Mary Daly, Hélène Cixous, and company. The language of Gregory of Nyssa’s interpretation of the Song of Songs, while not denatured in terms of sensuality, may present a few challenges to contemporary feminists. And yet, Patristic scholars such as Sarah Coakley and Verna Harrison find feminist promise within Cappadocian theology, particularly within the writings of Gregory of Nyssa. Gregory writes on the Bride’s receptivity, passivity, and penetration in this Song; however, through the Spirit, the Bride is, in an interesting transformation of Pauline language (Rom. 8), adopted in mystical union as sister of Christ. Not only is the Sister/Bride adopted and made heir, but she also becomes the very vehicle for mission as she is made perfect through theotic redemption in Christ. As Coakley argues: “When we untangle these different, even chaotically-related, images, we have the Father as the archer, the Son as the arrow, and the Spirit as that in which the arrow is dipped. The arrow penetrates the soul with the wound of love, just as the Son as the bridegroom also penetrates, takes possession, of the bride. But the bride then herself becomes an extension or replication of the Son’s arrow, since she has been allowed to ‘participate’ in his ‘eternal incorruptibility’” (2003, 10). See also Harrison (1990). This point by Hans Frei offers tremendous insight on the difference between postliberals and some modern evangelical doctrines of inspiration. Another related manner of pointing to the disparity between postliberal and evangelical approaches to revelation involves their respective understandings of intentionality. Whereas intentionality generally is indistinguishable from

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The Spirit’s Address what the text actually achieves, according to postliberals, certain modern evangelicals wish to account for a hidden intentionality that lies behind scripture— so, for example, divine will can be understood as operative through human postulation about the possible motivations for textual anomalies. In this way, inerrantist theologies of scripture look very much like romantic liberal types of historical criticism (such as that of André LaCocque) in their quest for a hidden human intentionality of the biblical author. The only difference, it seems to me, is who the respective modern exegetes, inerrantist or historical-critical, discern to be the “real A/author” of the text. In both cases, liberal and inerrantist evangelical, critics succumb to what literary criticism refers to as the “intentional fallacy.” 15 Again, Karl Barth is instructive as a modern theologian who captures the sense of personal address that is lacking in Lindbeck’s preferred metaphor of absorbing the world: “In Jesus Christ [the Christian] knows and apprehends himself as a member of the world reconciled to God in him, as a man who is justified and sanctified in him in spite of his sin, as a legitimate partner of the covenant fulfilled in him. Believing in Jesus Christ and obeying and confessing him, he simply does the natural thing proper to him as the man he is in Christ and, therefore, in truth. He simply realizes his true —the only truly human possibility.… It consists in the fact that he begins to act on this basis, i.e. on Jesus Christ and as the man he is in him. He believes, obeys, and confesses as, now that Christ has united himself with him, he is united himself with Christ, giving himself to the One who first gave himself to him, and thus choosing him as the starting-point, and therefore the goal of his thinking, speech, volition and action, quite simply and non-paradoxically because this is what he is, because there is no other starting-point or goal apart from him, because in truth he is not outside him but within him” (1956–75, 4/3: 544–45). 16 In a similar vein, see John Webster on Karl Barth: “The reality of Jesus Christ as the self-positing of God includes within itself all other realities, and it is in him and from him that they have their inalienable substance. Barth’s apparent ontological exclusivism is in fact an inclusivism: solus Christus embraces and does not suspend or absorb the world of creatures and their actions” (1995, 28–29).

5 Life in the Spirit The Church’s Practices and Mission




Introduction There is a way in which the entirety of The Nature of Doctrine can be read as a sustained ecclesiology. For in it, the cultural-linguistic model serves a larger, constructive endeavour which seeks a positive description of the Church that is adequate to the ecumenical project but can simultaneously support the Church’s abiding doctrinal claims. The Church is a unique culture, or form of life, with its own distinct set of practices. Far from merely cultural embellishments or idiosyncrasies, its practices are utterly constitutive of its identity. Communal membership is determined not by choice but by something far more basic. The Church’s doctrine and practices function as a sort of a priori which thoroughly constitutes and shapes its members. The corollary to such an insight within the biblical narrative is that the Church is Israel—that is, an empirically identifiable people set apart by virtue of its distinct practices and, more fundamentally, by its election by God. Lindbeck develops the view of the Church as Israel in several significant essays, which will be primary to our concern within this chapter (Lindbeck 1987; 2002, 201–22; 2002, 223–52; 2002, 145–63). This “Israelology” serves as a corrective not only to modern religious voluntarism but also to a set of rather abstract and disembodied proposals for understanding the Church which have gained prominence within contemporary ecclesiology. Lindbeck’s return to the earliest and most .

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fundamental form of the Church’s self-understanding has several benefits within the current context that will be explored within the first section of this chapter. However, while the Church as Israel stands as a significant contributor to ecclesial self-understanding, it cannot be exhaustive as a source for ecclesial reflection. 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. This tension between the specificity of the people of God, on one hand, and its universal mission, on the other, is difficult to maintain. Although Lindbeck is helpful in returning theology to the Church’s primary and concrete identity, he understates its universal thrust in ways that invite pneumatological consideration.

George Lindbeck’s People-of-God Ecclesiology the nature of doctrine In the third section of the concluding chapter of The Nature of Doctrine, Lindbeck explores the question of the applicability of the cultural-linguistic model to the world’s context. It is here that he distinguishes himself most patently from liberal theologians, particularly those whose predominant sense of theological applicability relates to the aims of cultivating the religion’s “viability” or “relevance” for a desired future. Lindbeck begins with a reminder of the implications of the argument that he has been developing all along—that is, the aims of a particular religious language will be discrete and particular according to its own logic. The criteria for measuring the applicability of a religion are given by the very structure of the religion itself, not through the putatively universal construct of a general good. Consequently, religions will demonstrate tremendous variety in what they discern to be the “good life.” Christian theology will, therefore, not be adjudicated for its applicability or relevance according to the canon of what type of good life it considers to be in keeping with the aims of any political or social movement. Rather, the “good life” will be required to be in keeping with the Kingdom of God, the content of which can be known only through its confession. As Lindbeck writes: “In the case of Christian theology, the purpose is to discern those possibilities in current situations that can and should be cultivated as anticipations or preparations for the hoped-for future, the com-

The Church’s Practices and Mission

ing kingdom. In brief, a theological proposal is adjudged both faithful and applicable to the degree that it appears practical in terms of an eschatologically and empirically defensible scenario of what is to come” (1984, 125). The difference between liberals and postliberals is a matter of the direction of conformity: whereas liberals would be inclined to accommodate the doctrine of the kingdom to a plausible scenario or analysis of the current situation as advanced in external disciplines such as political and social theory, postliberals would be inclined to assert the primacy of the kingdom, intratexually described, and accommodate insights from external disciplines to the kingdom’s logic. The challenge of Church relevance, therefore, cannot be addressed without reference first to the Church’s narrated identity. Practical relevance should surely issue from the cultivation of the Christian life, but this aim is secondary to the Christian’s primary responsibility, which is worship of the triune God. As Lindbeck writes: Religious communities are likely to be practically relevant in the long run to the degree that they do not first ask what is either practical or relevant, but instead concentrate on their own intratextual outlooks and forms of life. The much-debated problem of the relation of theory to praxis is thus dissolved by the communal analogue of justification by faith. As is true for individuals, so also a religious community’s salvation is not by works, nor is it faith for the sake of practical efficacy, and yet good works of unforeseeable kinds flow from faithfulness. It was thus, rather than by intentional effort, that biblical religion helped produce democracy and science, as well as other values Westerners treasure; and it is in similarly unimaginable and unplanned ways, if at all, that biblical religion will help save the world (for Western civilization is not world civilization) from the demonic corruptions of these same values. (1984, 128)

Through immersion within “communal enclaves” (1984, 127) that concentrate on their own forms of life in this way, the Church proves itself to be both practical and relevant. This is not done through subordination of Christian confession to the concerns of the world; instead, as Lindbeck urges, righteous action flows from the very gratuitousness of God, who calls a particular people to enter into covenantal relationship. The Church’s primary responsibility is, therefore, doxological: it is praisegiving for such gratuitousness. From within this posture of thanksgiving and communal worship, “supportive of concern for others rather than for individual rights and entitlements, and of a sense of responsibility for the

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wider society rather than for personal fulfillment” (1984, 127), the Church proves most “practical” and “relevant.”

lindbeck’s positive ecclesiology Like The Nature of Doctrine, Lindbeck’s constructive writings tend to concern themselves with the development of a viable and faithful ecclesiology that can be engaged within the ecumenical context. Against idealist and abstract depictions of the Church and those constituted by voluntary affiliation, Lindbeck focuses upon the Church in its present reality: a concrete, historical people set apart because of its specific, durable practices and, more importantly, by virtue of its divine election. It is here that the formalism of The Nature of Doctrine is given some theological flesh. According to Lindbeck, it is only within the phenomenology of election that the witness and mission of the Church can be properly understood. Lindbeck therefore urges a theology of the Church as Israel, which he believes to be most faithful to the very realism or specificity of the narrative’s rendering of God and His people. That is to say, the God of the Bible does not encounter His people in the abstract or within an ideal form of relationality; rather, He calls them in all their concrete and entangled humanity.1 This direction of interpretative flow —that is, from story to world, rather than from world to story—issues also in the prohibition of overarching models or utopian programs which might seek to define the Church. The Church’s empirical reality, which derives from the reality of its election as a distinct people, is at odds with any kind of model which would seek to serve as a prior account of Christian life apart from its narrative of a people called by God. As George Lindbeck writes: “The first … rule for reading is that the Church is fundamentally identified and characterized by its story. Images such as ‘body of Christ,’ or the traditional marks of ‘unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity,’ cannot be first defined and then used to specify what is and what is not the Church. The story is logically prior. It determines the meaning of images, concepts, doctrines, and theories about the Church rather than being determined by them” (1987, 165). The priority of the narrative in shaping the Church checks any impulse to construct a kind of social theory about the Church’s nature. This story demands that human relations be treated in the concrete and not reified or idealized. Such a sturdy sense of elected peoplehood was also prominent in the early mission to the gentiles. As Lindbeck argues, the earliest identity of the Church was of itself as Israel.2 These early Christians affirmed that

The Church’s Practices and Mission

the gentile churches were merely grafted onto this people. Lindbeck argues thus: That Christians thought of the Church as in some sense Israel is a commonplace, but it has generally been supposed that the resemblance, whatever it is, breaks down in relation to the gentiles. 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 into 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 the Pharisees for their proselytizing zeal (Matt. 23:15) have been preserved? … The reason Israel was exemplary in this and other compelling ways was that Christians identified themselves as the same people of God of which the Old Testament speaks with matterof-fact literalism or realism. Their churches simply were Israel — Israel in the new Age, to be sure, and Israel as including the uncircumcised who believed in the Jewish Messiah, but nonetheless Israel. (2002, 237–38)

While the question of whether first-century Judaism had the same depth of missionary fervour as the early Christian movement 3 may be disputed, the main point that Lindbeck is making is an important one. According to the early Church, God’s covenant extends to the followers of Jesus the Messiah in ways that did not negate or deny the synagogue’s claim.

implications In the previous chapter, I critiqued Lindbeck for the formalism with which he engages scripture as a unified canonical whole read intratextually. As I argued, the seamlessness of intention in the Bible cannot be supported exclusively through procedural remarks on the nature of intratextual theology. Instead, what is needed is a doctrine of revelation that affirms the trustworthy nature of God’s self-communication through the biblical word. The reason we read the Bible canonically is that God offers one revelation, not two. Because God is faithful to His people, the Bible can be read intratextually. While Lindbeck does not develop this insight on the unity of intention of God specifically in his doctrine of revelation as thoroughly as one might hope, he does precisely this within his ecclesiology. The corollary to this intratextual insight concerning the importance of the Old Testament in ecclesiology is this: God’s people remains God’s people as God remains God. It is not in God’s nature to revoke covenant, and therefore Christian theologians are compelled to

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consider the manner in which Israel continues to be Israel. Lindbeck speaks of God’s striking covenant with Israel as a singularity: The background for this is an understanding of the universe as permeated with what scientists call singularities — once-for-all events — except that, in contrast to the methodological atheism of science, one and the same cause is assigned to all singularities, viz., the wholly free will of God.… The universe exists only because God freely chose to create it out of sheer good pleasure for no humanly knowable reason whatsoever (and certainly not because of anything we could recognize as a need), not because the divine well-being is thereby enhanced. (2002, 244)

The singular and irrevocable character of God’s calling of Israel also urges Christian theologians to consider the manner in which the Church also is incorporated into Israel’s story. This is precisely what Lindbeck does in his affirmation of the Church as Israel. He takes seriously the stories of the Old Testament and its people and gives voice to the continued covenantal relationship of this same people with its God. In Lindbeck’s view, the gentile churches simply represent a continuation of the same covenant, as these churches are merely incorporated into the historic and irrevocable covenant that God strikes with his chosen people, Israel. Clearly, the early Church also understood itself as inheritor of the covenant of God with Israel. For example, Tertullian’s objection to Marcion’s dismissal of the Old Testament as scripture stands as profound testimony to the level of resistance to the truncation of the Christian story from that of Israel. Further, Lindbeck helps to remind us, the stories of Israel were the first Christians’ only history (2002, 149). It is from these earliest experiences of the Church as a gathered community that the stories of Israel became reinterpreted in light of Christ. It was not until later exegesis that this reinterpretation of the biblical narrative gave rise to a supersessionism which regarded the Church as the rightful inheritor of the covenant, thus displacing the Jews. For the most part, within the first century and well into the second, the sense of continuity between Israel and the Church demanded that the Church be considered the continuation of Israel rather than its fulfillment. As Lindbeck writes, “So strong was this sense of the uninterrupted peoplehood that the only available way to think of gentile Christians was, in Krister Stendahl’s phrase, as ‘honorary Jews.’… This inclusion of the uncircumcised in the covenant with Abraham by means of the new covenant in Christ did not, for the earliest Christians, constitute the formation of a different people but rather the enlargement of the old” (2002, 151).

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The main thrust of early Christian interpretation was to see Christ, and not the Church, as the fulfillment of Israel.4 As we have seen in the previous chapter, the very nature of figural interpretation did not set out to subordinate the primary meaning of the Old Testament texts. This subordination of Israel’s story and the emergence of Christian triumphalism took place gradually within the history of Christianity—and such developments were decidedly at odds with figural exegetical practice. As Lindbeck argues, “Thus, 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” (1987, 166). Reading the scriptures figurally through the regula fidei served to ensure that Israel did not degenerate into a mere cipher. The regula which governed figural exegesis could not possibly sustain the claim that the Church was the salvation of Israel. In other words, it was only when the regulative and typological reading of the Bible was undermined that a supersessionist reading of the Church over Israel could have been at all supported. The practical implications of such interpretation are several and varied. For one, an Israelological ecclesiology affirms that the Church is a real historical community in all its entangled messiness. Those who are called are often called in spite of themselves, through God’s gratuitous sovereign will, rather than by any particular giftedness of the community itself. As Lindbeck writes: Church ordinarily referred to concrete groups of people, not to something transempirical. An invisible Church is as biblically odd as an invisible Israel. Stories of the biblical realistic -narrative type can only be told of agents and communities of agents acting and being acted upon in a space – time world of contingent happenings. Thus to say that it was empirical churches in all their actual or potential messiness of which exalted concepts and images such as “holy” and “bride of Christ” were predicated is an analytic implicate of the primacy of narrative. (2002, 149)

A retrieval of the sense of the election of the concrete community that is the Church enables it to engage in its specific covenantal obligation as people of God. As Lindbeck writes, “The elect communities are stamped by objective marks which are both blessing and curse, depending on how they are received. Eating and drinking, Paul reminds us, can be unto judgment (1 Cor. 11:29) and not only life, and the same applies to circumcision and baptism, the shema and the apostolicum” (2002, 157). In other

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words, along with election comes tremendous covenantal obligation. The model of Church as Israel, therefore, implies a logical injunction against the kind of triumphalism that is characteristic of later Church writing. As Lindbeck puts it: In reference to interreligious relations, this outlook can be developed in such a way as to oppose the boasting and sense of superiority that destroys the possibility of mutually enriching dialogue. One can say that the situation of the Christian is in some respects more, not less, perilous than that of the non-Christian. Judgment begins in the house of the Lord (1 Peter 4:17), and many of the first shall be last, and the last first (Matthew 19:30). 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 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. In this view, there is no damnation —just as there is no salvation—outside the Church. One must, in other words, learn the language of faith before one can know enough about its message knowingly to reject it and thus be lost. (1984, 59)

As a distinct people called into covenantal relations with God, Israel has a formidable obligation. Members within this specific community have no reason to be boastful, for practices from which other communities are exempted are required of them. The duty implicit in such binding practices should serve, argues Lindbeck, as a safeguard for Christians against triumphalist chauvinism. Such a clear sense of covenantal identity, therefore, invites self-criticism within the Church. The Church, as people of God, recognizes its failure to live up to its responsibility as covenant partner with God. However, it recognizes too that acknowledgement of its own sin will enhance, rather than destroy, this relationship. As Lindbeck puts it: An Israel-like self-critical recognition of the possibilities of corruption and unfaithfulness of the community in which one deeply and unshakably participates is self-evidently of both interreligious and intrareligious significance. It helps account for that sense of common peoplehood which Jews, even secularized Jews, have retained through the vicissitudes of history, but which Christians have largely lost — and often, it seems, congratulate themselves on losing. This sense of peoplehood makes a difference both extramurally in relation to other religions, but even more intramurally. The potential for communal

The Church’s Practices and Mission self-criticism embedded in election when this is undergirded by the sola gratia is perhaps unparalleled. It implies that Jews and Christians can be maximally critical of their own communities without disloyalty, as is abundantly illustrated by their own Scriptures. (2002, 246–47)

Self-criticism, particularly in the Church’s relationship to the Jews, is sorely needed, and it is a posture that flows from a deep sense of the utter gratuity of election. After the Shoah, a hospitable Christian theology of Judaism is imperative. One of the implications of the people-of-God ecclesiology for contemporary Jewish–Christian dialogue is that it invites Christians into repentance for their denial of abiding covenantal relations between God and the Jews. As Lindbeck writes: “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 his account prevents us from saying that the synagogue, like remnants of ancient Israel, is at times more faithful to God’s will and purposes than are unfaithful churches” (2002, 151). George Lindbeck’s retrieval of a people-of-God ecclesiology is rooted within the doctrine of justification by grace alone. It is because of God’s gratuitous election that the Church is called to be a people, which is set apart to serve and praise him. However, such election properly gives rise to humility rather than triumphalism, for the Church acknowledges that nothing that it has done on its own accords it its chosenness; instead, the Church as Israel is chosen in spite of itself. The governance of ecclesiology by the rule sola gratia, therefore, frees the Church from false confidence in its own righteousness, while it also allows it to be maximally self-critical, especially in its relations with other religions. The Church’s specific and irrevocable obligation as People of God implied by God’s election of Israel will often place it in a position of distinct tension with the culture that surrounds it. In this sense, as it builds up its own identity in its particular practices, the Church can be said to be sociologically sectarian. Rather than conforming to the aims of the culture, the Church attempts, through its process of socialization, to establish a sufficiently robust form of life to offer an alternative set of human commitments which afford a distinct and often critical ethos within the polis. Therefore, training in the distinct practices of the Church, or catechism, is vital Church practice. As Reinhard Hütter comments: The future of the Church … is that of a “sect,” understanding it in the strictly sociological rather than the theological fashion. In the socio-

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Life in the Spirit logical sense, the Church will become a “sect” insofar as in an increasingly post-Christian society it will increasingly separate itself from that society and continue to maintain the traditional Christian message of the absoluteness and normative significance of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ. In the theological sense, this Church will of necessity be emphatically nonsectarian and essentially ecumenical. (2000, 67)

In no small measure, the future of the Church depends upon socialization into its particular communal outlook. In a non-paradoxical manner, the Church’s ability to contribute to the good of the whole of society will be determined by its fidelity to its own specific communal practices (Hütter 2000, 157). Within our contemporary context, the Church as Israel will stand as a countersign against commodity fetishization, technological idolatry, individualistic self-determination, and the cult of progress. However, it can only do so by building up its members within and through the peculiar narrative of self-sacrificing love in so thorough a manner that the story becomes second nature. Such socialization, then, is not merely blind mimetic duplication. Rather, it means having so firm a footing within the biblical world that the Church’s scandalous challenge to the contemporary world’s various assaults upon humanity will be persuasively and confidently set forth. Lindbeck likens such spiritual finesse to paradigmatic linguistic competence: Having been inwardly formed by a given tradition — by, for example, “the mind of Christ” (1 Cor. 2:16), as Paul puts it— the saint has what Thomas Aquinas calls “connatural knowledge” and what Newman calls the “illative sense” in matters religious. This is quite different from the reflective and theoretical knowledge of the trained theologian, who employs publicly assessable rules and procedures in seeking to distinguish between the good and the bad, the true and the false. Rather, it is like the grammatical or rhetorical knowledge of a poet such as Homer, who could not enunciate a single rule in either discipline, and yet was able to sense as could no one else what conformed or did not conform to the spirit, the unarticulated rules, of the Greek language. (1984, 36)

This communal up-building of members of the Church’s body is, according to Lindbeck, the very essence of its mission and task. The baptism of the nations in the triune name (Matt. 28:19), in today’s context, might be most urgently needed within the very contexts of the Church itself, where communal amnesia results in the substitution of various other forms of discourse for the Christian story: “It is above all by the char-

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acter of its communal life that it witnesses, that it proclaims the gospel and serves the world. This revolutionizes one traditional understanding of proclamation or evangelization. While it is crucial that all kinds of human beings—Greek, barbarian, female and slave as well as Jew, male and free—be fully part of the community, sheer numbers are, at most, of tertiary importance.… The primary Christian mission, in short, is not to save souls, but to be a faithfully witnessing people” (Lindbeck 1984, 159). Lindbeck’s insistence upon the priority of training as the requisite condition for communal life is an important corrective to the various kinds of relativism that exist within the contemporary Church. Regarding the Church as a culture where a particular language is spoken reminds us of the exacting process of initiation to which cathechumens submitted in the early Church. The goal of such instruction was the fluency that can come only through practice and immersion within a form of life. In this way, the experience of socialization has analogies with the learning of rules as exposited by Ludwig Wittgenstein: What has the expression of a rule— say a sign-post—got to do with my actions? What sort of connection is there here? Well, perhaps this one: I have been trained to react to this sign in a particular way, and now I do so react to it. But that is only to give a causal connection. On the contrary; I have further indicated that a person goes by a sign-post only in so far as there exists a regular use of sign-posts, a custom (eine Gepflogenheit). (1958, § 116)

Only insofar as the language of the Church becomes interiorized and habitual to its members, allowing it to be used in a variety of situations, can its members claim to be the people of God. Such a model not only runs counter to the excesses of experiential-expressivism but also liberates religious language from the confines of cognitivist epistemic solitude. In its emphasis upon the behavioural and habitual nature of responding to a rule (in this case, doctrine), as indicated by Wittgenstein, the culturallinguistic model will seek to attend also to non-linguistic semiotic patterns of behaviour, particularly within liturgy. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule-following present a serious challenge to many of our common suppositions about the role and nature of liturgy in the Church. Liturgy often is regarded as the ornamental trappings of Church life to which members seek to have their experience “spoken to.” Or perhaps, as is the case in contemporary liberal Protestant circles, one seeks through liturgical innovation to “find new

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rituals” which promise to attend to the discrete experiences of those (some? all?) who have gathered. The quest for a “causal connection,” or some form of mediating principle which makes the symbolic enactment “speak” to worshippers, is fundamental to such a view of liturgy. Such work, whether characterized as a “liturgical imagination” or the “work of the Holy Spirit,” is predicated upon the postulates that (a) liturgical innovation, rather than habitual practice, will “speak” to individuals; (b) there is a non-linguistic mediation—however understood—that renders the symbol independent of dogmatic confession; and finally, (c) liturgy is a private rather than a public experience. Lindbeck’s model of religion as a verbum externum, which shapes Church practices and functions in their regulation, is a good antidote to these premises. The drive for doctrinal clarity as basic to the ecclesial enterprise is not merely a rationalistic endeavour: indeed, the coherence of doctrinal confession is most fully appreciable within Church practices. Against the construct of the liturgy as the collective embodiment of private spiritualities, Lindbeck offers a pragmatic account of liturgy as habitual, communal practices that are bound to specific linguistic rules which interpret the narrative enacted in the liturgical drama. The individual cathechumen is socialized into this world not through a particular act of consciousness but by faith—which is inseparable from participation within concrete liturgical practice. In this way, Lindbeck’s characterization of liturgy is inextricably bound to doctrine, both of which are publicly, rather than privately, determined. Lindbeck’s emphasis upon Church practice in the cultivation of competent Christians has, in many respects, deep resonances with the practice of the early Church. Lindbeck, I maintain, recovers important insights into early Church liturgical practice that have been largely neglected by contemporary theories of doctrine. According to the cultural-linguistic model, the practice of liturgy is utterly central to the socialization of members within the Church. Liturgy is not the externalization of a prior aesthetic experience, as an experiential-expressivist view would have it. Neither is it communal assent to a set of concepts symbolically manifested. Rather, liturgy concretizes the affirmation given in doctrinal expression. Liturgy exists as the requisite condition of the proper satisfaction of the rule, and is often the primary bearer of the rule’s saving logic, as we have already seen in the case of the rule of pneumatological efficacy. Just as language does not exist apart from a form of life, doctrinal rules cannot exist apart from an embodied community—the Church. In offering this practical account of doctrine, Lindbeck restores doctrinal language to its proper domain, the Church. “What we do,” writes

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Wittgenstein, “is to bring back words from their metaphysical to their everyday use” (1958, § 116). This focus upon the Church’s practices within its contingent contexts makes the Church as people of God a superior starting place for ecclesiological reflection. Emphasis upon the givenness of this community as a real entity with distinct practices, shaped by a set of binding, authoritative doctrines, gives rise to a sense of concrete identity which is often undermined by contemporary theologies. Within such a view of the Church, doctrine and specific practices are indispensable to forming and keeping a people. In spite of Lindbeck’s emphasis upon doctrine and its importance in the formation of Church practices, he seldom expands upon the specifics of Church doctrine and how these specifics constitute Christian life. In other words, even in his Israelology, there still exists a rather vexing and tenacious formalism that stops short of naming the specific content of these core practices. As Reinhard Hütter argues: The ecclesiology implicit in the model does contain highly interesting allusions to the connection between the practice of faith, theological discourse and Church doctrine, opening up at the same time a perspective for understanding theology as the intersubjective poietic pathos inherent to the actualization of faith, as a practice shaped by the central configurations of language and action of the Church, always related to these configurations, and inseparable from them. In this sense, Lindbeck’s model shows us the right path. At the same time, however, its formal character … inhibits any explicit development of the relationship between theology as Church practice and the substantive pathos characterizing the Church itself. The task now is to follow this thread further and in so doing examine and constructively articulate the interior of what Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic model already intends theologically. (2000, 69)

In a sense, Lindbeck’s formalism in his ecclesiological reflections not only truncates the viability of his description of the Church but actually subverts his own aims. The narrative of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ actually shapes that form of life in significant ways that must be acknowledged from the outset of ecclesiological reflection. This specific narrative ought to direct any understanding of the Church, even when considered in the most formal of manners. As Hütter writes: A consistently intratextual theology implies that its “thick description” is so encompassed and shaped by its object that it cannot examine itself thematically without at the same time examining its pathic nature, that is, without understanding itself from the perspective of its object. Hence a consistently intratextual theology cannot really

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Life in the Spirit abstract at all from the “simple talk of God” without falling into self-contradiction. Even in its methodological self-explication, intratextual theology must remain theological, that is, explicitly oriented toward God’s activity. It cannot avoid the question of its pathos. (2000, 63)

In Lindbeck’s defence, one might point to the material remarks he makes about the Church that serve to render concrete the formal dimensions of The Nature of Doctrine. Of special relevance is his theology of Judaism, which he develops with such great care and nuance. Without undermining the concreteness of Lindbeck’s proposal, one might also wish to speak more fully about the specific consequences of the existence of the Church as a people bound together by virtue of its commitment to Jesus Christ, and the universal mission that such commitment entails. There is, of course, a serious danger that taking this step will lead us back to triumphalist supersessionism in our relation to the Jews, and that it may encourage a blunt chauvinism toward other religions. There is also the danger that an emphasis on the universal mission to which the Church is called by the Holy Spirit will lapse into undifferentiated and abstract universalism. Those dangers are real, but they should not allow us to dodge the fact of the Church’s gratuitious and, in important respects, novel identity.

A Pneumatological Corrective? Reinhard Hütter’s Proposal In his Habilitationsschrift, entitled Suffering Divine Things: Theology as Church Practice, Reinhard Hütter seeks to overcome the formalism of Lindbeck’s proposal by offering an account of the Church rooted in the triune life. Although Hütter remains positive in his assessment of the ecclesiological promises of Lindbeck’s writing, he wishes to offer a more in-depth account of the “substantive pathos characterizing the Church itself.” As Hütter writes: “The ecclesiology implicit in the model does contain highly interesting allusions to the connection between the praxis of faith, theological discourse, and Church doctrine, opening up at the same time a perspective for understanding theology as the intersubjective poietic pathos inherent to the actualization of faith, as a practice shaped by external configurations on language and action of the Church, always related to these configurations, and inseparable from them. In this sense Lindbeck’s model shows us the right path” (2000, 69).

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In spite of his assessment of the value of the cultural-linguistic model in sorting out such things as the role of Church doctrine, practices, and theological discourse, Hütter maintains that the model, formally represented, “inhibits any explicit development of the relationship between theology as a Church practice and the substantive pathos characterizing the Church itself” (2000, 69). In mentioning pathos, Hütter evokes the Aristotelian category which means suffering, undergoing change, or being acted upon. Pathos is antonymous with self-positing or independent poiesis. Pathos is the creature’s acceptance and reception of being acted upon by God’s poietic work. Theology, as a Church discipline, must not be primarily involved in autonomous human positing, and yet poiesis is a vital part of theology. For Hütter, the problem of modern theology is that it has been involved in poietic activity without the conditioning of human self-positing through surrender to God’s active presence in the world. Hence theology, as a Church practice, must take on the posture of discipleship, where positing is shaped and determined by self-offering and sacrificial love. As Hütter writes: By understanding pathos as an integral part of poiesis, we view it as an experiential moment of the productively active (productive in the sense of imagination) theological subject. If pathos itself remains determinative of poiesis, however, and if the poiesis of theology remains strictly oriented toward this pathos, then one can derive poiesis from pathos in a twofold manner: first as the poiesis of God underlying the pathos of both faith and theology; second as the poietic pathos of theology as a communicative-representative Church practice. (2000, 34)

If what constitutes theology (and Christian discipleship in general) is a kind of posture to the world that receives its poietic mission entirely from its sense of being acted upon by God, where might theology receive a paradigmatic instantiation of such relationality? Put differently, where is community perceived at once as self-positing and as relationally circumscribed by pathic service? According to Hütter, one sees such an identity and relationality precisely within the triune God. Thus, Hütter considers the viability of communio ecclesiology as a means of understanding the pathic-poietic nature of Christian life together. Communio ecclesiology would seem well equipped to offer just such a pathic-poietic account of Church life, for it regards the Church as an analogy of the social Trinity within whose self-emptying, perichoretic life the identity of each individual person is constituted entirely by its pathos and receptivity to others. Accounts of divine personhood are pathically

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understood, for the divine hypostases are characterized by receptivity. Hütter draws this ecclesiology of being-in-communion in part from the Patristic retrieval of Orthodox theologian John D. Zizioulas,5 whose exegesis of the Cappadocian Fathers emphasized the self-constituting nature of communal relations. As Hütter writes: “The central assumption of this Trinitarian perspective is the logical priority ascribed to the divine ‘persons,’ who can exist only in relation to one another and as such constitute God’s deity, providing thus also the basis of God’s unity. That is, the unity resides in the relation of the persons to one another rather than in some substance logically preceding these persons as whose ‘mode of being’ the latter would then be understood” (2000, 117). This dynamic and relational sense of personhood would seem to bode well for conversations within ecclesiology. Reinhard Hütter’s conviction that such an account of being-in-communion provides a more satisfactory ecclesiology than is offered in the formalism of Lindbeck’s model would seem to open the door for the kinds of pneumatological considerations that I have been pursuing. Indeed, Hütter sees the development of communio ecclesiology as specifically addressing the pneumatological aspects of the Church,which give rise to a vision of the Church as a people called by God and, at the same time, as a community ontologically created by the Holy Spirit. The Church is the gift of the Spiritus Creator, which is communicated from the overflowing abundance of the perichoretic love of the triune God. This community is the special locus for God’s consummation of history as communio draws history toward its final destination. The work and witness of the Church, according to Hütter, are the works of the Holy Spirit, who mediates between the Godhead and the Church, allowing for the overflowing of perichoretic inter-triune relations within core Church practices. The Church is, in Hütter’s view, enhypostatically bound to the Godhead by the Spirit. Therefore, the division between the two koinoniai is overcome through the mediation of the Spirit: the Spirit’s work becomes “identical with distinct practices or activities, institutions, offices, and doctrines” (2000, 119). In other words, the works of the community are not simply analogically related to the works of the Spirit; the Church’s works are the material, Spirit-granted charismata. As Hütter explains: “The poiemata of the Spirit, however, the core Church practices, inhere in the salvific-economic mission of the Spirit. That is why the reference here is to the pneumatological enhypostasis of the core Church practices” (2000, 133). Such a model of Church life would seem well disposed toward a more fully pneumatological account of the Church. However, one of the per-

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ils of communion ecclesiology as a model is that it threatens the very concreteness and particularity of the Church that we celebrated in Lindbeck’s ecclesiology. In moving from an Israel ecclesiology toward a rather idealistic account of the Church as offered in a model of koinonia, we move from an account of the Church as concrete toward a model which may offer a premature conflation of the distinct koinoniai, and perhaps a premature sanctification of Church practices. Furthermore, while the communio ecclesiology that Hütter develops shows some promise in moving closer to a pneumatological description of the Church, it does so in a manner that first establishes an overarching motif of relationality, based upon rather loose biblical warrant, and seems to impose this motif upon the Church, occasionally at the expense of its concrete reality. Nicholas Healy makes this point when he writes on the perils of the substitution of a model or blueprint 6 of the Church (such as the Church as koinonia) at the expense of the Church as a concrete community: To the extent that modern ecclesiology is governed by an abstract, rationalistic, and overly theoretical approach, it makes it difficult for theologians to acknowledge the realities of the Church’s concrete identity. Ecclesiology is misguided if it attempts to construct, on the basis of a single model or principle, a systematic blueprint for the Church that applies normatively always and everywhere. Such a blueprint can be very powerful and replete with profound theological language. Yet it may well prove to be a harmful response to the ecclesiological context and thus practically and prophetically false. Ecclesiology is not a doctrinal theory that can be worked out without close attention to the concrete life of the Church.… Ecclesiology, on this [latter] view, serves the Church in medias res, as a contextually-applicable set of practical-prophetic proposals. (2000, 50–51)

To the extent that Hütter begins his reflections on a pneumatologically oriented ecclesiology with the model of koinonia, we do well to observe Healy’s warnings. For what we might lose in this account is the concreteness for which we celebrated Lindbeck. Thankfully, however, Hütter’s reliance on the model of koinonia is provisional. It serves perhaps as a sort of heuristic for opening up the conversation about the relationship between the Spirit and Church practices. However, once he has established the Church’s ontological rooting in the Holy Spirit, an argument with which we may well contend, he moves from there to consider the eschatological dimension of that identity, which remains yet incomplete. This eschatological attenuation allows Hütter to turn to the Church in its concrete specificity in a manner that does not diminish its

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sacramental, albeit provisional, character: “Although Church doctrine and the core practices definitely do not ‘possess’ the Holy Spirit in any way such that they simply coincide with its activity, they nonethess do constitue the indispensable ‘mediate forms’ of its activity through which the Holy Spirit guides the Church to truth” (2000, 128). Here we can see Hütter’s reflections on Church practices as the Spirit’s poiemata are nuanced in ways that move beyond a rather abstract communio ecclesiology. In his consideration of the eschatological dimensions of the Church, Hütter overcomes the prevalent dichotomy between the Church as institution and as event. It is an event, insofar as it is a gift of the Holy Spirit; its durable practices, concreteness, and visibility signal its institutional character (Hütter 2000).

church practices and the poiesis of the holy spirit Although Hütter locates Church practices in ontology, he does not view concrete practices as a mere cipher. Because the koinonia is characterized by self-offering, perichoretic love, the Spirit, as mediator, draws humans and the world into “the triune communion, re-establishing our own relationality and ‘in-forming’ us through faith” (2000, 125). This “in-formation” has a concrete shape: it is Christ Himself who is paradigmatic of pathic activity, and it is Christ’s saving efficacy that forms humans as novae creaturae. The Church’s primary task, as the Spirit’s creation within time, is to draw the creature back to its soteriological centre— that is, the gospel of Jesus Christ—through binding, authoritative doctrines and durable practices. As Hütter puts it: “As paradoxical as it may sound, the core Church practices and Church doctrine, precisely in their binding nature, are essential if the Holy Spirit is to lead the Church to perfect truth and teach it new things by perpetually reminding it of Jesus Christ” (2000, 128). Hütter explores these binding practices through Martin Luther’s description of the Church’s “holy possessions” (2000, 129).7 These are the means by which the creature is sanctified through communal life. As Hütter reminds us, Luther conceived these holy possessions as: (a) preaching; (b) baptism; (c) the Lord’s Supper; (d) the office of the keys, or Church discipline; (e) ordination and offices; (f) public prayer, praise, thanksgiving, and instruction and (g) discipleship in suffering (2000,128). These practices, according to Hütter’s reading of Luther, are central to the shaping of Christian discipleship. What is interesting in Hütter’s analysis is that he underscores the specifically pneumatological character of Luther’s

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holy possessions. These practices are not things that the Church does so much as they are gifts that the Church receives from the Holy Spirit.8 As Hütter writes: Although the human being is always present in these activities, and is always and especially actively present, listening, receiving, responding, praising, and rendering obedience, still this human activity does not constitute these practices. Human activity is always an inherent part of them, but never more than that. The disposition of all seven practices is rather such that in them the human being is always the recipient, that is, always remains in the mode of pathos. The human being remains the one who, through these works of the Holy Spirit, is qualified and receives the new “form,” the one who thus is modelled through the Spirit of Christ, the forma fidei. (2000, 132)

Notice how the forma fidei proceeds within Martin Luther’s description of “holy possessions.” The primary possession of the Church is preaching—the hearing of the Word of God in public proclamation. Reinhard Hütter’s insights into the need for a theology of Church practices which is primarily pathic—that is, attendant upon God’s gratutity—is entirely in keeping with the ecclesiology developed by Lindbeck. In both Hütter and Lindbeck, such pathos is also characterized by attention to the concrete and the specific practices of the Church. Both consider doctrine and liturgy as of the same moment, and regard them as utterly central to Church life. Anamnesis—that is, the narratival remembering within the Church of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ — assumes a special priority in both Hütter’s and Lindbeck’s accounts of the Church, which belongs to a specific and unsubstitutable narrative. Hütter, however, goes beyond Lindbeck in his development of a pneumatological complement to anamnetic Church practices. According to Hütter, the narrative of Christ includes the gift of the Holy Spirit in the event of the Church. This narrative compels Christians to consider the manner in which the Church served, and continues to serve, as Christ’s continued presence among us through the Holy Spirit. It is thus that Hütter turns to communio ecclesiology as a means of understanding the Church as the enhypostasis of the Spirit. While the depiction of the Church as an enhypostatic unity may represent an abstraction from the biblical concreteness of the Church as a distinct people, Hütter’s turning from koinonia to Church practices signals a welcome shift toward the kind of concreteness and realism that is at the heart of Lindbeck’s proposal. Furthermore, in his description of the Church as constituted by the Holy

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Spirit, Hütter qualifies any consideration of Church practices as primarily anthropological or autopoietic: following Luther, he regards anamnesis, specifically the proclamation of the Word, as having a rather singular priority among the Church’s “holy possessions.” There is much to be admired in Hütter’s proposal. And yet, I wonder whether a thick description of the Church as not only constituted by the Holy Spirit but also disrupted and judged by its power might serve to qualify more forcefully Hütter’s ontological identification of Church practices as the enhypostasic work of the Holy Spirit. In spite of the value of Hütter’s proposal, the close correlation that he establishes in identifying the Spirit’s self-offering poiesis with the practices of the Church might warrant attenuation, lest the Spirit’s sovereignty be domesticated. As Joseph Mangina writes: “Positing a relation of identity (however carefully qualified) between the Church’s action and the being of the Spirit seems an unhelpful way of dealing with the problem, partly because it can be addressed more economically in other ways, partly because the conception seems to undercut a sense of the Church’s natural or creaturely existence” (2000, 8). A return to pre-modern commentary may serve here as a means for pneumatological reflection upon the Church that avoids over-systematization.

The Holy Spirit and the Church’s Mission: A Patristic Alternative Were we to return to pre-modern writings seeking a description, rather than a model, of Church life, we would find a great deal with the potential to bear fruit. In a passage which is representative, but by no means exhaustive, of Cappadocian writings on pneumatology and the Church, Gregory of Nyssa writes: In Holy Baptism, what is it that we secure thereby? Is it not a participation in a life no longer subject to death? I think that no one who can in any way be reckoned amongst Christians will deny that statement. What then? Is that life-giving power in the water itself which is employed to convey the grace of Baptism? Or is it not clear to everyone that this element is only employed as a means in the external ministry, and of itself contributes nothing towards the sanctification; and that what gives life to the baptized is the Spirit; as our Lord Himself says in respect to Him with His own lips, “It is the Spirit that giveth life;” but for the completion of this grace he alone, received by faith, does not give life, but belief in our Lord must precede, in order

The Church’s Practices and Mission that the lively gift may come upon the believer, as our Lord has spoken, “He giveth life to whom He willeth.” (dssam)

While this passage does not offer a recipe for Church life per se, there are intimations or marks of Christian community, so typical and so firmly rooted in early Church practice, that are helpful in retrieving sources which offer a more fully pneumatological account of the Church.

anamnesis and epiclesis The first, or logically prior, implication of Gregory of Nyssa’s account is that the Church is a place where the memory of the One who conquered death is upheld: “Belief in our Lord must precede.” Therefore, the Church is first an anamnetic community: it is the place where the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ are remembered through concrete practice, specifically the hearing of the word and the celebration of the sacraments. Because the Church is an anamnetic community, its practices are organized around the specificity of God’s saving work in history, including the calling of a people. This recognition of the fundamentially anamnetic work of the Church is an affirmation of Lindbeck’s ecclesial realism as a starting place for ecclesiological reflection. Core practices in the Church are shaped and sustained by the saving story that the Church proclaims. Here the seamlessness of God’s intentional and teleological activity within the concrete history of the “people of God” is remembered and celebrated in worship. In Hütter’s terms, the Church is primarily engaged not in its own poiesis but in celebrating that of God. However, the poiesis that is recounted and enacted within the Church is of a particular kind—it is poiesis that is characterized by self-emptying love, by God’s self-sacrifice in Jesus Christ upon the cross for the sake of humanity. It is only through this life freely offered that the Church comes to be that place where, in Gregory of Nyssa’s words, it “is no longer subject to death.” This depiction of the nature of Christian election as suffering servanthood is an essential element of consideration of the Church as an elected people which Lindbeck has not yet developed.9 This empirical community, paradigmatically shaped by Christ’s own suffering, in turn has concreteness in the shape and posture of its life together, which is one of self-offering love. This storied sense of the Church’s identity is not adequately captured in a model, but rather is displayed within the core practices of a concrete people that together remembers Jesus. As Rowan Williams writes:

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Life in the Spirit Sacramental practice seems to speak most clearly of loss, dependence, and interdependence, solidarities we do not choose: none of them themes that are particularly welcome or audible in the social world we currently inhabit as secular subjects. We are told, in effect, that the failure to see ourselves and find ourselves in one or another kind of corporateness is a failure in truthfulness that is profoundly risky. Our liberty to choose and define ourselves as individuals or as limited groups with common interest is set alongside the vision of a society in which almost the only thing we can know about the good we are to seek is that it is no one’s possession, the triumph of no party’s interests. The search for my or our good becomes the search for a good that does not violently dispossess any other —and this not on the basis of rights whose balance must be adjudicated, but because of a conviction that the creative regard calling and sustaining myself is precisely that which sustains all. (2000a, 219)

Within such communal remembering, within such anamnesis, the community receives its identity as a people that is united together for no other reason than its allegiance to the One who was crucified and risen. This calling of a people in the event of the Church is not to be confused with voluntarism; for it is a more basic arrangement than that. It is properly and decidedly election—but it is election into a new kind of humanity, where basic relations of family, community, and peoplehood are at times disrupted and the boundaries of human relations are extended to the farthest reaches of the earth. Such an observation would seem to offer more of a Christological than a pneumatological correction to Lindbeck’s work. However, as should already be clear, the presence of sustained reflection on Christology is generally a guarantor of sustained reflection on pneumatology within Cappadocian theology, and vice versa. This is evident in the very close relationship within orthodox liturgies between the recounting of the Christian saving story and the invocation of the Holy Spirit: the anamnesis and the epiclesis. The Eastern Fathers see in the anamnetic rehearsal of the saving story a complementary moment: the Church’s epiclesis. From the remembering of the narrative, the eucharistic liturgy invokes the coming of the Holy Spirit to enter into the celebration of the community, “in order that the lively gift may come upon the believer” (dssam). The Church is, therefore, at once an anamnetic and epicletic community: through remembering the events of salvation in history, it also asks that the Holy Spirit enter into its own story, transforming it and making God’s will transparent in its contingent activities, in its material life. The pathic mission of God’s people—suffering for the sake of others—is

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known through its collective remembering, but it is made possible only through the coming of the Holy Spirit. It is here, with the bread broken and the blood poured out, that the Church receives its identity. Communio, then, is not a model of community so much as it is a contingent and irreducible narrative. It is only through subordination to the angularities of the narrative (that is, within anamnesis) within practical life together that the Church receives, through the gift of the Holy Spirit, the very intimation and promise of universal reconciliation. This is no blueprint for right relations; it is a gift.

eschatological waiting The second implication of Gregory of Nyssa’s description of a community of persons “no longer subject to death” is that the Church is also an eschatological community. This observation is intimately tied to the Church’s obligation to epicletic prayer: the Church awaits with pathos the Holy Spirit’s work in making its practices holy. The Church, therefore, is a place which not only engages in distinctive practices but also continually beseeches the coming of the Holy Spirit to gather itself together into one body. This plea for the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is an element that I believe is missing in George Lindbeck’s practical account of the Church. Church practices are not efficacious, but the Spirit’s work is. There is a kind of inevitability to Lindbeck’s theology that needs qualification by the Spirit’s power. For, without the Spirit’s work, mere practices are lifeless. However, while Church practices are not efficacious in themselves, neither are they arbitrary. The Church is the place where God’s Spirit is made manifest through particular mediating acts. And, although we cannot predict decisively and finally where the Spirit will enter into the practice of the Church, we can be assured that it is enhypostasized where, as Gregory puts it, we participate “in a life no longer subject to death.” Without limiting the work of the Holy Spirit to these specific practices, it is necessary to deem those places of encounter through Word and sacrament in the communal anamnesis of Christ the very place where we are incorporated into Christ’s body. Reinhard Hütter’s description of this nuance is most helpful: As an eschatological new creation, it can be described both as “being” and “act.” Its being always remains dependent on the presence of the Holy Spirit, and remains a being in invocation of the Holy Spirit—epicletic being, being that is completely the work of a Spiritus Creator. At the same time, as the world of the Holy Spirit, it is also characterized by duration, concreteness, and visibility, and as such is identical

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Life in the Spirit with distinct practices or activities, institutions, offices, and doctrines. In this way, the work of the Spirit acquires its own, eschatological extension “in time.” (2000, 120) 10

The eucharist serves as a paradigm for the Church’s work insofar as it heralds the eschaton’s in-breaking and seeks to conform to perfect communion. As Hütter puts it: “In believing affirmation, the congregation is taken up ‘even now’ into God’s life, into the communion of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.… By bringing the eschaton into history, the Spirit enables the Church through its sacramental structures to lend presence to the eschaton in history and at the same time to point beyond history” (2000, 120).

the church’s mission We have already moved a good distance from George Lindbeck’s Israelology —his description of a servant Church which is distinct and real, marked by its core practices. We have argued that the people of God must be not only an anamnetic community, but also an epicletic one. It is by the power of the Holy Spirit that Jesus Christ makes himself known in discrete Church practices, such as the hearing of the word, the breaking of the bread, and self-offering service to neighbour. But the direction of this conformity of Christians’ hearts and minds to Christ through the Holy Spirit is thoroughly eschatological: we are being incorporated into the kind of body of Christ that no longer knows differentiation or partiality (John 16:13). While there may be dangers in anticipation of an eschatological community at the expense of the “historical” Church, there is also danger in the truncation of the Church’s mission to its intramural practices. Basil of Caesarea, commenting on the pneumatological mission of the Church, offers what might again be some practical comments on the Church’s teleological orientation which may be read as a challenge to Lindbeck’s proposal: For, He who is assembling and summoning all by the proclamation is the paraclete, the Spirit of Truth, who brings together through prophets and apostles those who are saved; of whom, since their sound hath gone forth into all the earth; and their words unto the ends of the world.’ Wherefore, the Church has been collected from all classes of life, in order that no one may be left without its aid . … At the same time the sharing of the summons is a uniting in peace, so that those who were, up to this time, opposed to each other because of customs might, through gathering together, become habituated to each other in love. Let the rich man know that he has been sum-

The Church’s Practices and Mission moned by the same proclamation as the poor man. “Both rich and poor go together,” he says. Leaving outside the superiority toward the more needy and the insolence of wealth, in this way enter into the Church of God. Let not the rich, then, treat the poor man disdainfully, nor the poor man cower beneath the power of the prosperous. And let not the sons of men despise the earthborn, nor again, the earthborn alienate themselves from them. Let the pagans become accustomed to the inhabitants of the world, and let the inhabitants of the world through charity take them to themselves as guest friends by covenant. (Homily 19)

Some practical implications in Basil’s description of the eschatological mission of the Church sent by the Holy Spirit are helpful in developing a response to Lindbeck’s ecclesiology. According to Basil, the summons has gone out to all the earth, ostensibly calling not only those who have been “socialized with highly particular outlooks” but also those from diverse, even contentious, backgrounds to “unity in love” as the goal of theosis is made manifest in concrete form in the community. This is quite different from Lindbeck’s view that the mission of the Christian community is “responsible first of all for its own communities, not for the wider society” (2002, 159). Lindbeck writes: “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” (2002, 159). One might consider the eschatological deficit of Lindbeck’s position that the Church is to be called to an intramural mission. While it is certainly the case that the Church must attend primarily to its own discourse in its encounter with the world, it is not the case (from a biblical and Patristic perspective at least) that it must listen solely to its own native speakers. Such a restriction is not only a limitation of the Spirit but also a violation of the saving narrative in which the “neighbour” is revealed to be the Samaritan (Luke 10:30–35). Certainly, if the Cappadocian Fathers are at all instructive 11 on Christian ethos, being a light to all nations requires Israel also to bring that light to bear upon the world, demanding justice for social relations not only within ecclesial walls but also within the world at large: “Let not the rich, then, treat the poor man disdainfully, nor the poor man cower beneath the power of the prosperous.” 12 The inner testimony of the Spirit which accompanied doctrinal assent in the believer also has an external dimension, for the Spirit bears fruit in Christians’ lives, which became a visible sign of salvation. These fruits were works of charity. If we are to take

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Basil’s homily seriously, such works are not limited to the confines of the Church (“And let not the sons of men despise the earthborn, nor again, the earthborn alienate themselves from them”). Rather, the Christian is clearly enjoined to go out into the world, as an emissary of Christ’s saving Word. The work of the Spirit requires that Israel bring her light to all nations, for the eschatological vision is one of unity of all nations. (“The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. Its gates will never be shut by day” [Rev. 21:24].) The Church has not only an anticipatory role in such witness, but also an active one.

church and polis It is in such a sense that the Christian life can be said to be far more radically public than Lindbeck seems to acknowledge in his Israel ecclesiology. As Reinhard Hütter observes, this public became at once distinguishable from the community of the Jews while it constituted an alternative public which stood at a critical distance from the polis of Rome: Within the public of Israel as the people of God, Pentecost as the poiesis of the Holy Spirit then initiated the ecclesiological public of the ecclesia, the eschatological polis (Heb. 13:14). After initial struggles it became increasingly clear that it was no longer the Torah, no longer life within the binding principles of the mitzvoth that constituted and characterized this public. Rather, it was constituted Christologically and pneumatologically by the kerygma (the doctrina evangelii) and by specific core practices (especially baptism and the breaking of the bread). Alongside these, it was the earliest confessions of faith, the emerging canon, and the episcopal office that came to characterize the Church as an identifiable public, one that quite early came into conflict with the religio-politically constituted public of the Pax Romana. (2000, 162)

The Church forms a new public, one that has a distinct formation, identity, and ethos as Israel but is also eschatologically commissioned into the polis, speaking the various languages of the city (Acts 2:6–11). The story of Pentecost is instructive for our consideration of the Church’s encounter with the various discourses of the city. The Pentecost story is not the reversal of the tower of Babel story: the Holy Spirit does not elicit a kind of linguistic return to a primordial homogeneity or erosion of difference. Instead, particularity in language is maintained while the disciples are empowered gratuitously to speak for a moment in the contingent tongues of the persons gathered in the city. It is in such an unsystematized and con-

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tingent encounter that the Church, by the power of the Holy Spirit, may be called into the city, bearing the self-same confession but nevertheless encountering the stranger as neighbour. This encounter with the other is the gratuitious work of the Holy Spirit, and therefore cannot become a program for translation or conversion. Instead, in its encounter with the world, the Church must attend primarily to the particular logic of its own saving story, while recognizing that such a story cannot be circumscribed by its boundaries. As Rowan Williams writes: The Christian movement, as far back as we can trace it, is a missionary movement: that is, it works on the assumption that it has something to say that is communicable beyond its present boundaries and is humanly attractive or compelling across these boundaries. It assumes that it has the capacity and the obligation to seek to persuade persons from all imaginable human backgrounds that it is decisively relevant to their humanity, that it can deliver from whatever bondage women and men may happen to live under. Its relevance to all depends on its difference from existing patterns of human relations and power. (2000a, 230)

It is in this sense, then, that the Church can become self-critical in a way that is far more radical than the kind of self-criticism that Lindbeck commends through the embrace of an Israel-like identity. For in being willing to engage in the public sphere, the Church may come to recognize that the speaker most competent in Christian discourse may well be the other. As Karl Barth writes: “God may speak to us through Russian Communism, a flute concerto, a blossoming shrub, or a dead dog” (1956–75, 1/1: 54 –55).13 Taking seriously the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit means that the world may, at times, demonstrate competency in Christian discourse in a far more radical manner than the Church’s members. As Rowan Williams writes: If the Church exists, as it does, at an angle to the forms we treat as natural, the temptation is to seek to ignore or abolish these forms; to treat people as though they were not deeply and permanently moulded by their natural and unchosen belonging, to a family or a language group or a political system. But this is manifestly damaging and illusory. The Jesus of the gospels is not a human cipher; any attempt to pretend otherwise simply means that it is not the whole or real person who is brought before God. The persons who are invited in the community of the Kingdom are not “new creations” in the sense of having all their relationships and affiliations cancelled. The question thus becomes how existing patterns of belonging can collaborate with the patterns

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Life in the Spirit of the new community, if at all, how the goals and priorities of these existing patterns are to be brought together with the constructive work of the Kingdom, the Body. (2000a, 236)

Our participations within country, community, or family need not be abandoned for the sake of the gospel. The gospel encounters us precisely through our lives as citizens and brothers and sisters within a human family. A pneumatological rejoinder to Lindbeck’s project may serve to soften the territorial distinctions made between Church and world, not in such a way that the Church loses its critical distance, but so that the Kingdom’s ends are perceived and approximated even within our so-called secular affiliations.

judaism and other religions The recognition of the at once specific and universal thrust of the Church, as paradigmatically evident within the dialectic of anamnesis and epiclesis, may offer some resources for reflection on Judaism and the other religions. It is here that a fruitful Christian theology of Judaism and of other religions might be developed, not through the assertion of a hidden universal but precisely through the contingent logic of communal anamnesis. It is worth pausing to consider this possibility, for Lindbeck rightly cautions Christians against the positing of sharp distinctions between Israel and the Church, a word of caution that one must heed as one considers the Church, even in a qualified sense as I have done, as a pneumatological event. Further, Lindbeck’s understanding of the concrete peoplehood of the Church, as we have seen, has been invaluable in stifling Christian chauvinism in encounter with other religions. Might not the advocacy of the pneumatological mission of the Church to the ends of the earth signal a return to Christian triumphalism? I would argue that, on the contrary, the kind of pneumatological rejoinder I am advancing guards precisely against this supersessionism and triumphalism by subordinating the universal thrust of the Church’s epicletic being to the contingent specificity of anamnesis as the mitigating condition for epicletic reconciliation. Specifically, a pneumatologically oriented ecclesiology, such as the one I have been suggesting, may well have resources to advance a hospitable theology of Judaism and of the religions,14 for in the recognition of the priority of careful remembering, creaturely impulses toward universal and premature reconciliation with the religions are thwarted. This is so because the story that is recounted in Christian anamnesis is not one of universal victory but rather one of defeat, self-emptying, and utter dis-

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possession. It is here that the Christian must begin her reflection upon Israel. Israel’s existence serves as a persistent sign to the Church of its own sinfulness. This sign, I suspect, has been acknowledged by Christians throughout the ages —all too often with resentment. Perhaps it might accord more faithfully with the gospel narrative to regard Israel as the sign not of the Church’s failure but rather of its hope. That is to say, Israel serves as a persistent and humbling reminder that the consummation of the Church is the work of the Spirit, not of human poiesis, especially not in its monstrous attempts to impose a universal solution upon the vicissitudes and angularities of religious plurality. Properly considered, epicletic prayer, while it evokes cosmic reconciliation, does so by teaching Christians pathic receptivity and waiting, not triumphal self-positing. In this manner, the Christian is liberated from the burden of poiesis as she encounters the other. As Rowan Williams writes: “Israel’s resistance to absorption by the Church is a refusal to grant that the meanings of Israel are contained and subsumed in the Christian institution, and that refusal is essential for the truthfulness and the faithfulness of the Church, tempted as it is to claim a distorted kind of reality” (2000a, 103). A similar case could be made concerning both the fragmentation of the Church and the existence of the varieties of religions. The scandal of the Church divided and the world conflicted, according to such a view, is the necessary condition for the honest self-criticism of the Church and for its continued need to be an epicletic body, one that awaits its eschatological destination with the pathic posture of invocative prayer, so that the Holy Spirit might work within the broken and fragile matter that is our lives for holy purposes.

Conclusion The political implications of a radical pneumatology are many. The Church, insofar as it is sent out into the world, is commissioned to speak a liberating word to the polis. This word is not just any word, nor is it just any program for liberation. Instead, the Church confesses “God’s deeds of power” (Acts 2:11) within the world as its liberating word. As such, it is not an independent word, nor is it mere translation into another, more politically viable discourse. Rather, it is a word which is intimately tied to a community of native speakers and directs the world back to this form of life. Christian commitment to the political discourses of the polis must also be attenuated by its eschatological telos, in recognition that the kingdom of God is far greater than any political ideal. Such

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attenuation serves to humble political engagement but not condemn it altogether. The Church must engage the polis, but it must do so in a manner which is critical and ad hoc. There can be no terse identification between the Church’s mission and particular social movements. As Karl Barth put it: “The little revolutions and attacks by which the powers of history seem to be more shaken than they really are can never succeed in limiting, let alone destroying, their power. It is the kingdom, the revolution of which God breaks, which has already broken them. Jesus is their conqueror” (1956–75, 4/2: 544). While it is perilous to identify any “little” movement within history with the sustained and abiding activity of the Holy Spirit, a pneumatology that is indifferent to the world of political power is equally problematic. The role of the Holy Spirit traditionally has been regarded as efficacious within the various contingent spaces of history. While affirming with certainty those areas of the world where the Spirit abides — much less predicting its continued presence—is tantamount to theological disaster, it is also inaccurate to limit the Spirit’s saving work to the sphere of Church practices.


notes 1 As Lindbeck writes: “A corollary of this priority of story was that the ‘Church’ ordinarily referred to concrete groups of people, not to something transempirical. An invisible Church is as biblically odd as an invisible Israel. Stories of the biblical realistic-narrative type can only be told of agents and communities of agents being acted upon in a space–time world of contingent happenings” (2002, 149). 2 Lindbeck wishes to advance an ecclesiology that can sustain fundamental catholic doctrinal claims. Accordingly, among various alternatives such as “sacrament of unity” and “institution of salvation,” Lindbeck judges that “messianic people of God” has greater biblical warrant and ecumenical cash value. Lindbeck proceeds to argue that, although the framing of the Church as prima facie the “messianic people of God” may simply be a place for the beginning of an ecumenically viable ecclesiology, it is nevertheless, in his estimation, a superior place for beginning. It is procedurally jarring that Lindbeck seeks to develop an ecclesiology based upon its ecumenical viability (a case of liberalism being smuggled through the back door?). It is also worth noting that Lindbeck seems to abandon his practice in this case of reading the Bible through advertence to the regula fidei, but instead finds warrant for the use of the model of the Church as Israel from historical-critical insights. I will have to leave to the side whether Lindbeck’s use of historical-critical method here is more than merely ad hoc, and whether it represents a capitulation

The Church’s Practices and Mission to a kind of liberal functionalism for the sake of a viable ecumenical dogmatics. This issue, while interesting, is only tangentially related to the task at hand —that is, reflection upon Lindbeck’s ecclesiology. However, I will hazard the opinion that perhaps a return to the Trinitarian regula would have advanced an ecclesiology with more sustained reflection upon Christological and pneumatological imperatives for the Church’s being. 3 An important caveat to Lindbeck’s confidence in the unity of identity with Israel in the Church’s earliest beginnings may be found in Martin Goodman’s essay “Jewish Proselytizing in the First Century.” Here, Goodman provides a plausible answer to the question of the meaning of Jesus’ rebuke to the Pharisees for what seems like their tremendous missionary zeal. Goodman writes: “What I suggest … is that prose¯lytos in the first century had both a technical and a non-technical sense, and it is in that latter sense that it could quite easily be applied to the Jews. This usage is precisely parallel to that long ago noted for the term ‘God-fearer’ in this period, which often, sometimes apparently as a semi-technical term, referred to gentiles but which was also, perhaps metaphorically used to describe Jews (Feldman 1950). If this argument is accepted, then it will no longer be possible to use Matthew 23:15 as a proof-text —often the proof-text —for a mission by Pharisees and other Jews to win converts to Judaism from the gentile world” (1992, 61–63). 4 It is notoriously difficult to sort out which anti-Jewish writings are directed against the Jews proper and which are directed against “Judaizing Christians”—those embracing the practices of the Law. Even as late as the end of the fourth century, the distinction between Jews and Judaizing Christians is tenuous at best. John Chrystostom’s infamously anti-Jewish sermons are, according to Fergus Millar, “not directed against the Jews of Antioch as such, but against Christians from his congregation who allowed themselves to be drawn into participating in the Jewish festivals” (1992, 117). As Millar argues, the cognitive dissonance between the theologians who conversed with the rabbis and Christendom’s emerging policies aimed at occluding the Jews further and further from public life in the period between the conversion of Constantine and the ban on the Jews’ participation in all public offices in 438 could hardly seem more profound. While theologians solicited rabbinic wisdom, early Christendom inaugurated a pattern of increasing marginalization of the Jews. 5 Zizioulas is considered helpful in his attention to the notion of personhood within the divine oikonomia as an analogy to the kind of personhood the Church should cultivate among its members. That is, personhood as Zizioulas describes it is at once unique and irreplaceable, while at the same time constituted by the very nature of the self-offering, perichoretic love which it enjoys with others. Through his reconstruction of Greek Trinitarian theology, Zizioulas offers an alternative—and an antidote—to the modern construction of selfhood which may be characterized as autonomous individualism. Specific to our current purposes is Zizioulas’ development of an ontology of personhood based upon Cappadocian writings. His reading of the Patristic notion of an ontological “personhood,” which exists prior to substantia,

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Life in the Spirit stands for many, Hütter included, as an anthropological resource which runs counter to both Hellenistic and contemporary presuppositions of the intrinsic priority of the monad —construed respectively as either Ideal Form or Self. As Zizioulas writes: “The bishops of this period, pastoral theologians such as St. Ignatius of Antioch and above all St. Irenaeus and later St. Athanasius, approached the being of God through the experience of the ecclesial community, of ecclesial being. This experience revealed something very important: the being of God could only be known through personal relationship and through personal love. Being means life, and life means communion” (1985, 16; italics mine). Zizioulas’ theology and his retrieval of Cappadocian writing have fallen under considerable scrutiny recently. Scholars such as Lucian Turcescu, David Bentley Hart, and Sarah Coakley have argued persuasively that Zizioulas’ definition of personhood involved modern concerns around such issues as individualism that the Cappadocian Fathers could not possibly have anticipated. Not only were the Cappadocians unconcerned with constructing a “sociology” of the Church, but their writings were also securely grounded within specific contexts which demonstrate that their concerns were theological rather than anthropological. For the Cappadocians, the primary task of Trinitarian theology in an age rife with controversy was the demonstration of how these three distinctive hypostases were also one. Patristic scholar David Bentley Hart urges caution against the appropriation of Patristic theologies in closely analogical fashion for anthropocentric ends: “We must be aware of the analogical interval between those words—such as ‘person’—that we apply to both God and creatures, and always recall that the moral and ontological categories in which human personality is properly described are appropriate only to the finite and composite. The relationality of human persons, however essential it may be, remains a multiple reality, which must be described now in social terms, now in psychological, now in metaphysical; it is infinitely remote from that perfect indwelling, reciprocal ‘containment,’ transparency, recurrence, and absolute ‘giving away’ that is the meaning of the term peri\cwrhsij , or circumincessio (adopted by Trinitarian theology long after Gregory or Augustine, and yet so perfectly suited to the theology of both). For if we forget this interval, we not only risk lapsing into either a collectivist or solipsistic reduction of human relationality—exclusively outward or inward—but we are likely to adopt either a tritheistic or unitarian idiom when speaking of God” (2002, 545–46). 6 Healy also exposes the tremendous variety among those theologians who elect a communion ecclesiology thus: “What governs the usage of ‘communion’ is not so much the model as such but the respective judgments and agendas of the theologians. Thus [Elisabeth Schüssler] Fiorenza invests her use of ‘communion’ with meaning accorded it by her feminist reading of the Church’s history and her agenda for reform. Tillard invests his model with meaning accorded it by patristic theology and his concern for ecumenism and community. Volf’s model is used to develop a Trinitarian ecclesiology for the Free Churches. Boff’s model supports an understanding of the Church as an agent of liberation in solidarity with the poor. Hodgson’s notion of koinonia

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7 8

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is filled out with many of the values and concerns of Western modernity. Each theologian, given her or his agenda and construal, arguably uses the model in the ‘right’ way, and so perceives the flaws in other formulations. Thus, if we agree with their agenda, we will likely agree with their use of the model. If not, not” (2000, 44–45). Hütter is here referring to Luther’s treatise “On the Councils and the Church,” written in 1539. In an important clarification, Hütter points out that popular theological talk about “practices,” in the sense of Alasdair MacIntyre, can only be considered a provisional analogue within ecclesiology, for Church practices, properly considered, are far more than anthropological theories of action. The language of Church practices as the Spirit’s poiemata serves as a helpful rejoinder to those who would speak easily of Church practices in an untheological manner. He has, however, made tantalizing allusions to the possibility of developing this notion in a forthcoming essay. See the conclusion to Lindbeck’s essay “The Gospel’s Uniqueness: Election and Untranslatability” (2002, 252). This dual claim for the durability and disruptive nature of the Holy Spirit seems at odds with the enhypostatic relations of the Trinity and Church as mediated by the Holy Spirit, so vital to the communio ecclesiology that Hütter advocates. The eventful character of the Church and the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit as affirmewd in this statement are rather domesticated by the strictures of a communio ecclesiology. This point of tension might also be seen in the above quotation as he names the Spirit’s work as identical with the Church’s core practices. I would wish to qualify this statement to read, “and as such is concretely and trustworthily (and yet provisionally) made manifest within distinct practices or activities, institutions, offices, and doctrines.” And yet, such a vision of the Church as a community of persons united amidst real and concrete diversity resonates well with Zizioulas’ (1985) accounts of the Church both in its eschatological and in its natural form. While it is no doubt true that Zizioulas may take some liberties in his analogical correlation of the communion of the Godhead and of persons within the Church, his close knowledge of Cappadocian texts on the practical life of the Church such as the one above may well vindicate elements of his ecclesiology. It should be remembered at this juncture that the Cappadocian Fathers considered ascetic poverty a mark of the Christian’s arete or virtue, not simply as a sign of faith as a witness to the kingdom but also as a way of forming habits of right relations among persons. As Jaroslav Pelikan reminds us: “Even while they were speaking about the sacramental mysteries and about the orthodox dogmas, however, the Cappadocians did not lose sight of the moral categorical imperative that the priest’s ‘hands must be made perfect by holy works,’ and that therefore not only the clergy but also the laity had to go beyond the externals of liturgical observance to authentic holiness. The words with which the Sermon on the Mount concluded, contrasting the man who built his house on a rock with the man who built his house on sand, were for Gregory of Nazianzus a warning to those casual converts who did not take

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Life in the Spirit faith and its imperatives seriously. Just before those words stood the warning of Christ, ‘you will recognize them by their fruit,’ which for Gregory of Nyssa provided a norm of every doctrine (pase¯ s didaskalias), meaning also every orthodox doctrine, by which to measure whether anyone who held to it belonged to “the recipients of salvation according to the standards of the Church” (1993, 31). 13 To be sure, these examples represent limit cases within Barth’s theology: even if God does speak through such media, these must be tested in light of the scriptural Word. Still, the acknowledgment of the limit case is significant, for it reminds us that revelation occurs in God’s freedom —not in the selfenclosure of Christian language. 14 Although the logic remains the same in my argument for Christian encounters with Judaism and other religions, I have self-consciously resisted conflating them, because of the nature of Christianity’s special relationship with Judaism.

6 Staying with Us The Spirit between Culture and Kingdom, Language and Word


Aspects of a Conversation Bringing Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic model and his constructive theological writings into conversation with classical theology reveals important convergences and divergences. Lindbeck’s “research program” helps to retrieve a pre-modern sense of theological investigation that runs counter to much of our modern common sense. The shift toward a cultural-linguistic understanding of religion, as formulated in The Nature of Doctrine, has implications for apologetical, biblical, and practical theology. Lindbeck rejects the modern, epistemologically prominent self as the ultimate arbiter of meaning and of truth, and returns to the sensus fidelium, understood as the sense of the historic Church as it is governed by the biblical narrative, for the justification of religious truth. He further recovers the fundamentally intratextual nature of early Church practice, which read the Bible as a cumulative, interglossing whole governed by the regula fidei. And, with his Israelology (i.e., the election of a concrete people)—a welcome correction to ideal and abstract models of the Church—he counters the modern impulse to consider self-determining choice as the fundamental discriminen for ecclesial participation and returns to a more basic situation as characteristic of Church membership.

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However, what Lindbeck resolves in his writings on the nature of doctrine can sometimes obscure those very things which he wishes to preserve —namely, the efficacy of the Spirit working through and within the grammar of faith in each of the theological areas named above. As I have argued, the cultural-linguistic theory, left as a formal typology, contains a kind of immanentism that is at odds with Lindbeck’s overarching theological project, which seeks to defend orthodox Trinitarian confession. Doctrines, while they function regulatively, are also caught up in the work of the triune God and, as such, testify beyond themselves. As the Spirit works in and through doctrine, rules lose their formal character and become integral to Church practices.

faith and reason Lindbeck’s discussion of the justification of religious utterances is undertaken within a context of the pre-eminence of an epistemologically prominent picture of truth. That is to say, since modernity, the truthfulness of a proposition generally is adjudicated according to the operations of the individual thinker. Given contemporary religion’s overemphasis on intuition and cognition, Lindbeck is undoubtedly right to emphasize the external dimensions of religious faith. At the same time, however, an emphasis upon pneumatology invites us to consider the manner in which the individual believer receives the soteriological benefit of Christ’s saving work in ways that include her rational knowledge. Traditionally, the power to accommodate such objective knowledge within creaturely subjectivity was ascribed to the Holy Spirit. An emphasis upon the propositional force of the salvation that is rendered in Christ may give rise to an existential understanding that such salvation is offered also for oneself. In general, this dimension of personal knowledge is underdeveloped in Lindbeck, while pre-modern theologies, although not preoccupied with the question of personal experience and knowledge, nevertheless enable us to reconsider experience’s validity within theology. It is also worth our while to attempt to retrieve such sources so that individual understanding and knowing may not be undermined. The common themes that have arisen through this conversation suggest not only a lack of pneumatology in Lindbeck’s theology but, more specifically, a tendency in his writings to allow the Spirit to be subordinated to the role of an auxiliary mediator working predominantly within the Church to assist in salvation. Classical theology urges us to challenge such a view and consider the Spirit’s role as a dynamic and often disruptive power that blurs the boundaries between such areas as Church and world, reason and faith, scripture and community.

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absorbing the world Within Lindbeck’s description of intratexual theology, there is a kind of territorialism in assessing the relationship of scripture to world that invites pneumatological consideration. Lindbeck posits the Bible over and against the world in his assimilative metaphor of text absorbing the world. As Lindbeck writes: For those who are steeped in them, no world is more real than the ones [the canonical writings of religious communities] create. A scriptural world is thus able to absorb the universe. It supplies the interpretative framework within which believers seek to live their lives and understand reality. This happens quite apart from formal theories. Augustine did not describe his work in the categories we are employing, but the whole of his theological production can be understood as a progressive, even if not always successful, struggle to insert everything from Platonism and the Pelagian problem to the fall of Rome into the world of the Bible. (1984, 117)

This metaphor, as we have seen, tends to diminish the very dynamic quality of biblical address through God’s self-communicating Word. In figural reading, the viability of the territorial picture utterly breaks down. Erich Auerbach, although writing on the subject with the detachment of a literary critic, understands this dynamism as intrinsic to the biblical narrative: In the modern view, the provisional event is treated as a step in an unbroken horizontal process; in the figural system, the interpretation is always sought from above; events are not considered in their unbroken relation to one another, but torn apart, individually, each in relation to something that is promised and not yet present. Whereas in the modern view the event is always self-sufficient and secure, while interpretation is fundamentally incomplete, in the figural interpretation the fact is fully secured to begin with.… Thus the figures are not only tentative; they are also the tentative form of something eternal and timeless; they point not only to the concrete future, but also to something that has always been and always will be; they point to something which is in need of interpretation, which will indeed be fulfilled in the future, but which is at all times present, fulfilled in God’s providence, which knows no difference in time. This eternal thing is already figured in them, and thus they are both tentative fragmentary reality, and veiled eternal reality. (1952, 59–60)

Perhaps the role of the Spirit is not so much the conformity of the world to the text as it is the subjective in-drawing of the Bible’s audience (i.e., the Church) into the heart of its proclamation. God’s speech through the

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prophets seems exemplary of this kind of exchange through the Holy Spirit. It is not in the absorption of the inert prophet but rather in the accommodation of God to the finiteness and particularity of his embodied and sinful existence that God’s Word comes to us. Eternal reality is disclosed in the prophet’s very finitude.

church and polis We have already examined some of the ways in which Lindbeck’s ecclesiology invites pneumatological consideration, lest its task be conceived as merely immanent within the Church’s confines. The Church, according to Lindbeck, is that place where the people of God is primarily involved in its own intramural task of worship and communal up-building: 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. This does not mean that the chosen people is more important than the world. On the contrary, its role is instrumental: it exists in order to witness to the nations.… 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. (2002, 159)

The nature of the relationship between Church and world is also presented in terms of contrasting space. And yet, the boundaries between Church and world have become ever more permeable, ever more indistinct. The polis bears upon the Church in ways both threatening and promising, and this bearing might serve to challenge Lindbeck’s intramural theology. As Rowan Williams writes: The weightiest criticisms of Christian speech and practice amount to this: that Christian language actually fails to transform the world’s meaning because it neglects or trivializes or evades aspects of the human. It is notoriously awkward about sexuality; it risks being unserious about death when it speaks too glibly and confidently about eternal life; it can disguise the abiding reality of unhealed and meaningless suffering. So it is that some of those most serious about the renewal of a moral discourse reject formal Christian commitment as something that would weaken or corrupt their imagination. It may equally be that a Church failing to understand that the political realm is a place of spiritual decision, a place where souls are made and lost,

The Spirit between Culture and Kingdom, Language and Word forfeits the authority to use certain of its familiar concepts or images in the public arena. (2000a, 40)

If the special role of pneumatology is to refer us ever to the heart of the gospel, to God’s love in Jesus Christ, then surely such suffering love spills over beyond the parameters of the Church and into the polis, where “souls are made and lost.” Williams goes on in this essay to remind us of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s words in Letters and Papers from Prison, surely a discomforting challenge to an intramural theology: “Our Church, which has been fighting in these years only for its self-preservation, as though that were an end in itself, is incapable of taking the word or [sic] reconciliation and redemption to mankind and the world” (cited in Williams 2000a, 40).

More Than Two Men and a Bird: A Pneumatological Complement to the Cultural-Linguistic Model It is a commonplace observation and critique of Western theology that the doctrine of the Holy Spirit has been largely eclipsed, serving as a sort of afterthought, a gentle presence, whose role is primarily one of self-effacement in deference to the real actors of the Trinity: God the Father and Son. In good revisionist fashion, a “radical” minister once proclaimed: “There’s got to be more to God than two men and a bird!” This bird, often seen in Western theology as content simply to sing the praises of the Others, will be the subject of these concluding comments as I consider more straightforwardly the promises of a pneumatological complement to the cultural-linguistic model. I shall consider two kinds of approaches to pneumatology within the Christian tradition — one which is sequential and intercessory, and another which speaks more dynamically of the unique salvific character of the Holy Spirit in relation to God’s Word. I have drawn and modified this distinction from a fine essay by Rowan Williams, “Word and Spirit” (2000a, 107–29), where Williams considers, in a sustained manner, the relation of Spirit to Son in the salvation of humankind. In relying upon Williams, my intent is not simply to afford a poor derivative of a brilliant clarification, but to bring to the fore some of the persistent themes of this study and to address the potential of the cultural-linguistic model, when vivified by a sustained pneumatology, to bear fruit in contemporary theological discourse.

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christian spaces In her Massey Lectures, entitled Beyond Fate, Margaret Visser identifies the persistence of classical notions of an individual fated life and their spatial, often linear, representations within the cultural imagination. It was within the confines of this pre-determined space, stretching from birth to death, that the human being was obliged to operate: “What the myths of fate express is the sense that we all have at times that we are not in charge; that events, rules, and systems act upon us, or make us act, in ways not of our choosing.… The diagram metaphor—its very clarity, its self-evidence—leans heavily on the side of inalterability, of the hopelessness of change. The idea of fate as a thread or a rope makes one’s fate into a thing, a lifespan applied to but separate from the person who has to live it, like the road the person cannot but walk” (Visser 2002, 12). According to Visser, such fatalism is prominent still within the modern sensibility, and she exposes throughout her lectures the ways in which the fatal picture of the world “holds us captive,” to paraphrase Wittgenstein.1 For our purposes, Visser’s warnings about the pre-eminence of a fated picture of the world should serve as a word of caution. There is a manner in which Lindbeck’s language about rules, intracanonical interpretation, intratextual theology, intramural Church practices, and text absorbing the world—left solely as a formal typology—can give rise to a sense of fatalism, of human subjects as merely being acted upon. Without a sturdy theological complement to this formalism, faith becomes simply a road the Christian cannot but walk. Within early Christianity, the metaphor of the fatal line was challenged considerably: life was not a journey plodding along to death, its final end; rather, the fatal line was interrupted as the Christian sojourner transcended death and its inevitability through the mediation of Christ. This passing over from death into life served not only to lift the Christian from the grasp of the fatal line toward eternal life but also to overcome another kind of distance: that between God and humanity. Christian Apologists carried on with this spatial metaphor, but with a twist. God intercedes upon our fated path in the form of mediation, through the Son and Spirit, and draws us to Himself, interrupting the Fates in the decisive events of interruptive and dramatic revelation. There is nothing intrinsically wrong or unbiblical about this metaphor. Indeed, the Exodus story adopts precisely this spatial patterning of the journey of a people, and the intervention that saves it from the cruel fate it would have suffered. However, what often happens within Christian

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theology is that Christians fail to understand God’s relation to humanity in ways other than the linearly spatial. God resides at one end of the line; His creatures at the other. Salvation consists in the reconciliation of this polarization as the Christian sojourner/community is moved or returned to God. One of the most problematic repercussions of this spatial imagery is what Willliam C. Placher calls “the domestication of transcendence.” Divine agency and causality are viewed in contrastive terms with those of the creature. The agency of God in interrupting the creature’s life is, therefore, mistakenly seen as rendering human faculties impotent. Placher puts it this way as he contrasts the theism of Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin with modern versions of the spatial image of divine and human agency: Increasingly, Christian writers in the seventeenth century, since they did not want to think of God as utterly beyond their comprehension, thought of God’s otherness in terms of distance and remoteness from the world. Though they did not use the terms, they were in effect contrasting transcendence with immanence. Such a “contrastive” account of transcendence—I am using Kathryn Tanner’s terminology—makes divine transcendence and involvement in the world into a zero-sum game: the more involved or immanent, the less transcendent and vice versa. Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin, however, had a much more radical understanding of transcendence. God is not one of the things or agents among others in the world, to be located either closer or farther away, more involved in interactions or less. Rather, God transcended all our ways of classifying, locating, and relating the things in the world —transcendence in that sense, indeed, is what makes God God. (1996, 111)

Scholars of the classical world, such as Williams and Visser, may wish to take issue with Placher’s argument that the linear and contrastive model is predominantly a modern one. Nevertheless, Placher’s identification of these contrastive schemae within theological depictions of divine and human agency, regardless of their origins, is significant. Divine transcendence, as a theological category, must account for the manner in which divine agency neither destroys human nature nor perfects it in a precisely apprehensible manner through a form of systematic correlation. Indeed, divine agency is complexly related to the agency of creatures; therefore, when we speak of God’s action in the world, we are restricted to analogies. The Cappadocian Fathers are most instructive on this point. As Gregory of Nyssa writes in Homily on the Song of Songs: “Starting from

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certain traces and sparks, as it were, our words aim at the unknown, and from what we can grasp we make conjectures by a kind of analogy about the ungraspable … the human mind is unable to find any description, example, or adequate expression of that beauty” (cited in Ayres 2003, 49). This is more than a statement of piety for Gregory of Nyssa: it is a theological caveat that should attend all reflection on the scrutability of divine will and agency. Although scripture serves as a map of sorts in knowing God truly and in ways fitting to our creaturely dispositions, according to Cappadocian theology, divine transcendence also means that God, in these times in between, is still deeply hidden and not immediately scrutable. Such analogical restraint has important consequences for Trinitarian theology. Gregory of Nyssa refrains from ascribing to the persons of the Trinity precise ontological roles or identities. The love of God in triune form was to be known accurately and truly by its effects, but not in such a way that divine ontological unity was in any way undermined. To speak of the divine agency of discrete persons of the Trinity in a functionalist manner would be to think again in terms of human causality and contingency.2 The unity of will that is at the heart of the perichoretic, inner-triune life is decidedly at odds with the linear model of processions and contrastive agencies. And yet, scriptures do speak of the divine efficacy of the persons of the Godhead in discrete terms. Gregory of Nyssa certainly acknowledged this and was willing to live with the tension. We receive God processionally in terms that signal a differentiation in our creaturely receptivity toward him; this, however, does not mean that God is constituted by a hierarchy of persons. Indeed, the social Trinity, if I might use a very slippery and abused concept, is characterized by a love that knows no division and no hierarchy. As Lewis Ayres observes: In “On Not Three Gods” and elsewhere Gregory does tell us, of course, that we can distinguish the persons with causal language. Now, given the structure of modern readings of Gregory, it is only to be expected that mention of this argument will result in the question being posed “what degree of distinction does this causal language involve?” I suspect that the clearest we can come to the answer that Gregory might give to this question is to say “we do not know.” Scripture demands that we confess a logic of eternal distinction which insists that insofar as we can talk of God as an eternal and distinct reality, so too we can speak of Father and Son and Spirit as eternally distinct realities. At the same time scripture demands that we speak of a unitary divine power and nature, and, for Gregory, it demands of us

The Spirit between Culture and Kingdom, Language and Word analogical talk that attempts to explore the resonances and implications of the character of God’s action as narrated in scripture. (2003, 38)

Eastern Trinitarian theologies teach us about God’s agency by way of indirect analogy. It is because God’s agency is other than our own that we can affirm that God acts in our lives in a manner that does not diminish human agency; indeed, God’s agency is the very condition for our own. As John Meyendorff concludes: “‘Participation’ in God … is the very nature of man, not its abolition. This is the key to Eastern Christian understanding of the God–man relationship” (1974, 154).

the holy spirit as the space in-between A critical re-evaluation of the spatial model for divine agency is necessary in order to arrive at a more substantive pneumatology. One of the chief difficulties of notions of the Trinity, cast in a linear model, is that there emerges a real awkwardness when it comes to the attribution of specific properties to the members of the Godhead. If God were on the far reach of the fatal line, accessible only through mediatorial work, then the role of Christ becomes evident in the story of redemption, but what of the role of the Holy Spirit? As Rowan Williams writes: The model takes it for granted that the two primary terms are “God” and “the world”: the revealing or mediating reality, the “bridge-concept,” must occupy a space between these terms. Secondly, the mediator is posited to answer the question of how God comes to the world; that is, the line runs from God “downwards.” So that, thirdly, the relation between mediator and God is obscure and difficult to state: we do not know what sort of line runs from world to God through the mediator. In short, one of the difficulties in all this is that the understanding of God as such is not affected by the “bridge-concept”: the latter is instrumental to solving a problem which has two clear starting-points. (2000a, 110)

This awkwardness inherent within the spatial metaphor serves as a potential explanation for the eclipse of the Holy Spirit. If a mediator is needed to reconcile the Christian sojourner toward God, what then is the role of the Holy Spirit? Why are two mediators necessary when only one reconciliation is needed? Further, does this not imply, as Williams points out later, a notion of the transcendence of God as one of distance and, all too often, tyranny? Cast in this light, the Holy Spirit’s role—if even considered—is all too often as the humanizing “face” of God, the feminine bird, flying about and smoothing things over between God and His world.

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The challenge of the linear, mediatorial model is dealt with in a variety of ways as Christian Apologists seek to account for the Trinitarian pattern of salvation within a two-fold pattern of revelation. Williams’ analysis of the Apologists’ rather clumsy incorporation of the Holy Spirit into the economy of salvation—where, in most cases, Christ’s redemption is solely efficacious and the Spirit’s role merely auxiliary—is helpful and instructive (2000a, 110–15). God’s relation to the world is not straightforward in the linear pictorial sense, but may be better “perceived”—if that is the right word — aurally. God speaks and creation is differentiated and formed (Gen. 1:3). God offers a name to Moses and it is this name, not his visual manifestation, that is revelatory (Ex. 3:1–15). God speaks through the prophets. God sends his Word into the world, so that “any with ears” might “listen” (Matt. 11:15). God’s voice is heard in Jesus’ baptism, proclaiming him the Beloved Son (Luke 4:22; Mark 1:11). And finally, God sends forth tongues of flame to the disciples, compelling them into the city, with a story, a Word upon their lips, proclaimed in the various tongues of Jerusalem’s people (Acts 2:1–47). Against the linear picture, we have a strong sense of the nature of revelation as having to do more precisely with the gift of the Word that is to be heard, of the story that is to be enacted and participated in. Understood in this manner, the Holy Spirit has less to do with mediation and more to do with referring us to the very heart of that story, to the very heart of God’s address —indeed, drawing us toward the cross, where the eternal and the contingent, the glorious and the humiliated paradigmatically intersect across time and space. It is here, within the story, within God’s address, that the eternal and glorious meet within the confused parameters of our mortal and sinful lives. It is here that the usual categories of subject and object, of mediation and distance are rendered obsolete, and the perceived distance between God and humanity, life and death is vanquished. Within the nexus of this address, there is no place where the creature can distance herself, for God is nearer to us, in Kathyrn Tanner’s felicitous phrase, “than we are to ourselves” (1988, 79). This storied sense of reconciliation, then, offers a more dynamic account of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is that power which draws us to the very heart of the gospel: it is here that the supposed distance between humanity and God is more than merely mediated. God does not simply condescend to our humanity: rather, God out of His great love freely and abundantly offers His very Self as the inner-triune life is enhypostasized within humanity. The Spirit reveals a bond of love that

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already exists even within our own creatureliness. It is the Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, who reveals this God, the one who has taken upon himself the human condition, as already before us and behind.

Conclusion Theology in the Spirit, then, is to be intratextual, drawing us back to the paradigmatically encoded writ—the repository of God’s trustworthy Word to humanity, which gives shape and meaning to our knowing and our behaving. But revelation is something more than this: it is address within the broken parameters of our human story, and within the Church’s embodied and public life. It is an address, as we have seen vividly in the example of Gregory of Nyssa’s exegesis of the Song of Songs, that is so intimate that God is revealed to be as close as a lover’s embrace. The Holy Spirit’s work, then, is not simply inscribing us into that story; rather, the Spirit works to transfigure us through that very story. Such transfiguration issues, for the Christian sojourner, not in the benefit of knowledge or self-assured piety, but in life within community. The Spirit’s work in the transfiguration of the Christian through the hearing of the Word is effected in life together. I hazard now to return to a spatial metaphor: we have come full circle. The cultural-linguistic model has taught us of the priority of practice as the concrete place where the triune God is known and experienced. The complement to such a claim, I suggest, is that this is so because the Holy Spirit refers the Christian ever to a particular story of the intersection of suffering and hope, of vulnerability and triumph, of contingency and eternity. Without this kind of reference to the internal workings of the narrative, the cultural-linguistic model can give rise to a sense of fatalism where both human and divine agencies are insufficiently described. In an elegant, part-exegetical, part-homiletical style, Jean-Luc Marion points to the significance of the Emmaus event (Luke 24:13–35), as God’s “staying with” the disciples in their tangible practices, in their concrete life together: So “he went in to stay with them” (v. 29), in order to give them a sign that cannot be missed, the signification that will at long last give meaning to all the intuitions that up to then had remained scattered and absurd. What signification? No word, no discourse, no sound — except that of the blessing: “taking the bread, he said the blessing, broke it and gave it to them.” At once “their eyes were opened and they recognized him” (v. 30) —because the signification was making

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Staying with Us visible its phenomenon. In other words, they saw that “this is my body which is given for you” and “in memory of me,” and that therefore, since he had promised not to “eat [this Passover], until it is fulfilled in the Kingdom of God” (Luke 22:19 and 15), precisely that very evening in which he is again hearing it, is already part of the Kingdom of God fulfilled in spirit and truth, the Resurrection. (2002, 150)

When we speak of the Holy Spirit, it is inevitable that talk of Church practices should follow, for when we speak of the Spirit’s work among us, we are inevitably speaking of God’s “staying with us” within the contingency and the brokenness of time and space; indeed, within culture and language. Insofar as George Lindbeck has persistently encouraged the Church to be that contingent space which dares to hear the story of brokenness and reconciliation without reduction or distortion, theology owes him a great debt.

notes 1 See, for example, Visser’s compelling analysis of the fatalism of the language of modern genetics: “Fate metaphors are constantly used for thinking about genes. Human beings are said to be ‘programmed,’ with patterns —with governing patterns —inscribed or prescribed by heredity in their dna. People are spoken of as ‘wired’ to think in certain ways. We hear of switches and tracks, underlying networks and blueprints —fate metaphors all” (2002, 119). 2 To think of human causality in the linear model is also potentially damaging. In Margaret Visser’s Massey Lectures, Beyond Fate, the “contrastive” schema within modern, liberal language of rights is powerfully exposed: “The idea of rights, partly because our fatal diagram consists of fences as in a map of farmers’ fields, is modelled on the idea of property: ‘my’ rights. Careless use of the diagram further encourages this metaphor of property: each segment enclosed by a line which is supposed to represent a human person in all of his or her depth, complexity, and freedom, deteriorates into something resembling a flat and passive piece of land, an area with a certain size. Violation of rights therefore turns easily into a form of hybris, the prime metaphor for which is the invasion of a country’s borders, or efforts to move or to ignore the fences around a neighbour’s land. People then make human rights claims as though someone else were treading on ‘my space.’ Litigation becomes a warlike retaliation for an invasion” (2002, 107).

Bibliography




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Index




A

portance of regula fidei, 74, 75, 78; as integral to Christian faith, 2–3, 9; interpretation of (McGrath), 50–51; and metaphor of text absorbing world, 9, 70, 79, 80–81, 84, 86–87, 97–98, 99– 101, 143–44; as needed in liberal society, 20; New Testament, 67–69, 74– 75, 78; Old Testament, 67–69, 74–78, 93–94; pneumatological reading of, 70–71, 86, 88, 99–101; as read and enacted by Church, 38–40, 69; revelation of Jesus Christ through, 43–44, 45, 70, 102; as sensus fidelium, 3; and unity of Old and New Testaments, 19, 67– 69, 77–78, 86, 102, 111, 112–13. See also intentionality of scripture; intratextual theology; Song of Songs; untranslatability of scripture; see also individual books

Abraham, 68, 71 Acts of the Apostles, 132, 135, 150 Alexandria: catechetical school at, 57, 76; Council of (370), 5–6 anamnesis, 125–26, 127–29, 130, 134–35 apologetics, 4, 10; as used in catechesis, 56–59 apophatic theology, 35; and intentionality, 88; and Song of Songs, 98–99 Arianism, 6, 53 Athanasius, 5, 10, 55, 56; on intentionality/unity of Bible, 84–85, 87–88; on sufficiency of Bible, 73, 81–82 Auerbach, Erich, 67, 72, 74, 77, 84, 93– 94, 143 Augustine, Saint, 77, 143

B baptism, 6, 7, 79, 124, 126–27 Barth, Karl, 42–43, 87, 101, 133, 136 Basil of Caesarea, 6, 10, 61, 63, 130–32. See also Cappadocian Fathers; Gregory of Nyssa Bible/Biblical narrative: and creedal confession, 75–76; dichotomization of, 67–68; early use of, in catechesis, 57– 59; figural interpretation of, 67–69, 70– 71, 74–78, 83, 84–85, 88, 102, 143; God’s authorship of, 84–85; and im-

C Cappadocian Fathers, 5–6, 7, 10–11, 35, 58, 61, 62, 122, 147; and writings on Church, 126 –35. See also Basil of Caesarea; Gregory of Nyssa cataphatic theology, 35 catechesis, 56–59, 115–17 categorial adequacy, of religion, 36–37, 38 Chalcedon, Council of, 54–55

163

164

Index • c Christ. See Jesus Christ Christian faith: doctrine, as grammar of, 2; epistemological view of, 28; and reason, 142; saving nature of, 3, 4; as Trinitarian, 3, 4. See also Church; Church, as community of chosen people (Israel) Christological principles, 18, 19; and Council of Chalcedon, 54 –55; in creedal confession, 4–5, 8; and Holy Spirit, 61–62; and religious truth, 43– 44 Church: as anamnetic/epicletic community, 127–29, 130, 134–35; as constituted by Holy Spirit, 125–26; and dangers of triumphant chauvinism, 114–15, 134–35; as eschatological community, 129–30; “holy possessions” of (Luther), 124–25, 126; infallibility/power of, 44–47; mission of, 116–17, 130 –32; and obligation to non-Christian community, 131–32; pathos of (Hütter), 120–26; and pneumatology, pre-modern writings on, 126–35; and polis, 132–34, 135–36, 144–45; as practical/relevant, 109– 10; as shaped by Biblical narrative, 110; and social activism, 24–25; and task of salvation, 124, 131–32; as text, 78, 79; women in, 44–47 Church, as community of chosen people (Israel), 9, 26, 107–108, 110–20, 127, 141; and concept of concrete community, 109–10, 113–14, 123–24; and continuation of covenant with Israel, 110–12; ecclesiology of, 9, 26, 107– 108, 110–20; and “holy possessions” (Luther), 124–25, 126; and interaction with larger community, 115–17, 132– 34, 144–45; and liturgy, 117–18; mission of, 116–17, 130–32; and need for training, 115–17; and obligations of covenant, 114; and relationship with Jews/non-Christians, 115, 131–32, 134–35; sectarian/ intramural nature of, 115–17, 144–45; and self-criticism, 114–15, 133–35; and unity of Old and New Testaments, 112 –13 Church, communal nature of, 2, 3, 7, 107; as casualty of liberal society, 19–20, 23–26; in early Christian era, 75; as marker of relevance, 109–10; and role of Holy Spirit, 10 Church councils. See names of cities

Clement of Alexandria, 57, 58, 75 cognitive-propositionalism approach to doctrine, 2, 16–17, 18, 20, 23; and Bible, 69; and categorial adequacy of religion, 36–37; McGrath on, 51; of Saint Thomas Aquinas, 36, 39–40 communio ecclesiology (Hütter), 121–24 communion. See eucharist confession, creedal, 2, 3; Christological principles in, 4–5, 8; and Church practice, 79–80; monotheism in, 4–5, 8; Nicene Creed, 7, 55, 70; regulative principles of, 4–5, 7–8; saving nature of, 4, 5, 7; and scriptural canon, 75–76; Trinitarian character of, 5, 8; truth of, 19; unchanging content of, 4–5, 8 connatural knowledge, 61, 116 Constantinople, First Ecumenical Council of (381), 7, 10 councils, Church. See names of cities Creed, Nicene, 7, 55, 70 creeds. See confession, creedal Crusader, Lindbeck’s example of, 39, 43, 48, 60 cultural-linguistic approach to doctrine, 2, 3, 7, 11, 118; applicability of, 9, 108–10; assessment of, by Lindbeck, 8–9; communal/social nature of, 23– 24, 30; and competence of practitioners, 40–41, 116–17, 118; and eschatology, 129–30; formalism of, 12, 36, 68, 86, 102, 111, 119–20; and metaphor of text absorbing world, 9, 32, 70, 79, 80–81, 84, 86–87, 97–98, 99–101, 143– 44; and ontology, 11, 15, 50; and pneumatology, 8–9, 10–11, 41–49, 122, 125–26, 129, 142, 145–51; positive theology/ecclesiology of, 16, 41, 110 –11. See also Church, as community of chosen people (Israel); intentionality of scripture; intratextual theology; language; The Nature of Doctrine; untranslatability of scripture cultural-linguistic approach to doctrine, criticisms of/responses to, 11–12, 15, 26–27, 50, 80, 142; by Barth, 87; and danger of fatalism, 146; feminist, 44– 47; by Hunsinger, 42–44; by Hütter, 119–20, 120–26; by McGrath, 49–56; and “punctual self,” 47–49; by Volf, 80–82; by Williams, 100–101

Index • d–h

D Descartes, René, philosophy of, 28–29, 36 doctrine: approaches to, 2, 16–18, 20–22, 23; functions of (McGrath), 50–56; as grammar of Christian faith, 2; justification of, 26–31; and liturgy, 118–19; postliberal approach to, 108 –109; pre-modern approach to, 2–4; saving nature of, 3, 4; stability and flexibility of, 3; and theology, 18–19; and untranslatability of scripture, 83–84; worship/praise of God, as integral to, 109. See also cognitive-propositionalism approach to doctrine; culturallinguistic approach to doctrine; experiential-expressivism approach to doctrine; The Nature of Doctrine

E ecclesiology: of Church as Israel, 9, 26, 107–108, 110–20; communio (Hütter), 121–24; of cultural-linguistic approach to doctrine, 110–11 Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative, The (Frei), 68 ecumenism/ecumenical dogmatics, 2, 15, 16; and experiential-expressivism, 20–22, 28 Enlightenment, 19–20 epiclesis, 127, 128–29, 130, 134 epistemology, modern, 22–26, 52, 59, 141; and religious truth, 36–37 eschatology, 71, 100, 123–24; and Church community, 129–30; and Church’s mission, 130–31 eucharist, 7, 79, 124, 129, 130 evangelical theology, 50, 52–53 Exodus, 146, 150 experiential-expressivism approach to doctrine, 2, 17, 18, 23; and Bible, 69; and ecumenical dialogue, 20–22, 28; and liturgy, 117, 118

F faith, Christian: doctrine, as grammar of, 2; epistemological view of, 28; and reason, 142; saving nature of, 3, 4; as Trinitarian, 3, 4. See also Church; Church, as community of chosen people (Israel) faith, rule of (regula fidei ), 3, 74, 75, 78, 88, 96, 102, 113

165

feminist theology, and critique of Lindbeck, 44–47 figural interpretation of scripture, 67–69, 70–71, 74–78, 83, 84–85, 88, 102, 143 form of life (lebensform), 29, 31, 37 Frei, Hans W., 2, 68, 69, 90–91, 92, 95–96

G God: as Alpha and Omega, 73; as author of Bible, 84–85; and commands on sacrifice (Leviticus, Isaiah), 85– 86; covenant of, with Israel, 111–12; human knowledge of, 40, 73; interaction of, with reader of scripture, 99– 101; and metaphor of linear journey of life, 146–47; of Old and New Testaments, 68, 71, 75–76, 84–85, 111; as perceived aurally, 150; self-disclosure by, 42–43, 48, 87–88, 100–101, 111; theosis, as reward given by, 61, 63–64; and Trinity, 148–49; and use of term homoousios, 53–56 Gregory of Nazianzus, 6–7, 10, 58, 62, 65n4 Gregory of Nyssa, 10, 13n4, 63, 65n4, 65n6, 76, 88, 127; on baptism, 126– 27; on eschatology, 129; on Song of Songs, 71–72, 93–98, 99, 147–48; on Trinity, 148 –49. See also Basil of Caesarea; Cappadocian Fathers

H habitus, 46–47 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 88–89 “holy possessions” (Luther), 124–25, 126 Holy Spirit, 4; Basil’s treatise on, 6; Christological orientation of, 61–62; Church, as constituted by, 125–26; and Church, pre-modern writings on, 126–35; and communio ecclesiology (Hütter), 122–24; defence of, 5–7, 10; descent of, on Pentecost, 132–33, 150; dynamic/disruptive nature of, 44, 82, 142; and eschatological waiting, 129–30; as gift from Jesus Christ, 125; and infallibility/power of Church, 44–47; as mediator, 122, 149–51; and performative correspondence, 47–49; and reading of scripture, 70–71, 86, 88, 99–101; and religious truth, 40– 41; saving nature of, 8, 10, 61–62, 124–26; and semiotics, 82; and transfiguration of Christians, 151. See also pneumatology

166

Index • h–n Homily on the Song of Songs (Gregory of Nyssa), 71–72, 94, 147–48. See also Song of Songs homoousios, concept of: as adopted at Council of Nicaea, 53–56; defence of, 5–7 Hunsinger, George, 11, 42–44, 48 Hütter, Reinhard, 39, 56–57, 119–20, 120– 26, 127, 129–30, 132 hybrid-complex approach to doctrine, 21–22

I individualism: and atomistic view of society, 25–26; and attitude towards faith/truth, 27–28; and modern epistemology, 22–28; in theological context, 19–20 infallibility/power, of Church, 44–47 intentionality of scripture, 70, 84–98; and Barth, 87; and regula fidei, 88, 96; and Song of Songs, 88–98. See also Bible; intratextual theology; untranslatability of scripture intrasystematic coherence, of religion, 38–40, 42 intratextual theology, 31–32, 67–69, 99, 102, 141; and intentionality of scripture, 70, 84–98, and untranslatability of scripture, 70, 72–84 I Promessi Sposi (Manzoni), 50–51 Israel, Church as. See Church, as community of chosen people (Israel)

J Jesus Christ, 7, 32n3, 39, 67–68, 84, 86, 119: authoritative writings on, in scriptural canon, 75–76; humanity of, 62; narrative remembrance of (anamnesis), 125–26, 127–29, 130; as prefigured in Old Testament, 68, 74–75; resurrection of, 7, 40, 59–60, 73, 86, 119; on road to Emmaus, 59–60, 151; sacrifice of, on Cross, 73, 81, 82, 86, 127, 128; as saviour, 59–62, 70, 73–75, 81, 82, 124, 142; scriptural revelation of, as pneumatological, 43–44, 45, 70 Joshua, 68, 77, 84 Judaism, 111, 115, 120, 134–35

K Kant, Immanuel, philosophy of, 19, 59, 98–99 koinonia (fellowship), 122–24

L LaCocque, André, 89–93, 96 language: of catechesis, 57–59; doctrinal function of, 17–18; of faith, 59; and reality of God, 54; as sensus fidelium, 30. See also cultural-linguistic approach to doctrine; intratextual theology “language game,” concept of, 15; and interpretation of scripture, 82; as problematic for women in Church, 45–46; and “punctual self,” 47–48; Wittgenstein on, 28–30, 37, 38 liberalism, 19–20; and view of Church, 108–109 linear journey of life, metaphor of, 146– 47 liturgy: and divinity of Holy Spirit, 6–7, 10; and doctrine, 118–19; of orthodox Church, 128; role and nature of, 117– 18; and scripture, 2 –3, 7, 79; textuality of, 79–80 Lonergan, Bernard, 21–22, 35 Luke, Gospel of, 59–60, 84, 131, 150, 151 Luther, Martin, 124–25, 126, 147

M Marcion, 67–68, 112 Marion, Jean-Luc, 27–28, 59–60, 151–52 Marshall, Bruce D., 11, 12n1, 26, 37, 38, 79 Matthew, Gospel of, 5, 111, 114, 116, 150 McGrath, Alister, 1, 11–12, 35; critique of Lindbeck by, 49–56; on homoousios, 53–56 modernity: epistemological consequences of, 22–26; postliberal critique of, 19–20 monotheism, in creedal confession, 4–5, 8 Moses, 68, 150

N Nature of Doctrine, The, 1–3, 11, 120: as critique of modernity, 19–22; as ecclesiology, 107–108, 110; lack of ontology in, 11, 15, 50; as prolegomenon to ecumenical dogmatics, 2, 16, 22; as response to modern epistemology, 22–26. See also cognitive-propositionalism approach to doctrine; culturallinguistic approach to doctrine; experiential-expressivism approach to doctrine; intratextual theology

Index • n–t New Testament, 67–69, 74–75, 78. See also Bible Nicaea, First Council of (325), 4, 7, 10; and adoption of term homoousios, 53–56 Nicene Creed, 7, 55, 70

O Old Testament, 67–69; characters of, 68, 71, 76, 77, 84, 93–94, 150; figural interpretation of, 67–69, 70–71, 74–78, 83, 84–85, 88, 102, 143. See also Bible Origen, 57, 58, 76, 91–92, 93

P pathos of Church (Hütter), 120–26 Patristic authors, 10–11, 70; and connection between scripture and creedal confession, 75–76; exegesis of, 99, 102, 122; on intentionality, 87; theology of, 58–59, 61; and writings on pneumatology and Church, 126–35. See also intratextual theology; see also individual authors Paul, Saint, 68; letters of: Colossians, 74; 1 Corinthians, 74, 113, 116; 2 Corinthians, 5; Ephesians, 101; Galatians, 74; Hebrews, 86; Romans, 74 Pentecost, 132 –33, 150 Peter, Saint, letters of, 5, 114 pneumatological efficacy, 7–8 pneumatology, 6, 142, 145; and Church, pre-modern writings on, 126–35; and communio ecclesiology (Hütter), 122– 24; and cultural-linguistic approach to doctrine, 8–9, 10–11, 41–49, 122, 125–26, 129, 142, 145–51; dynamic/ salvific approach to, 149–51; and era of Church controversies, 10; of “holy possessions” (Luther), 124–25, 126; of Jesus Christ as saviour, 60–61, 70; and reading of scripture, 70–71, 86, 88, 99–101, 102; sequential/intercessory approach to, 146–49; as way of assessing religious truth, 40–41. See also Holy Spirit postliberal theology, 1; as critique of modernity, 19–20; and view of Church, 108–109 power/infallibility, of Church, 44–47 practices, Church. See Church, as community of chosen people (Israel); cultural-linguistic approach to doctrine; liturgy; sacraments

167 R

Rahner, Karl, 17–18, 21–22 regula fidei (rule of faith), 3, 74, 75, 78, 88, 96, 102, 113, 141 religion: and theology, 30–31; truth of, assessing, 36–41 Revelation, Book of, 73, 132

S sacraments, 79; baptism, 6, 7, 79, 124, 126–27; eucharist, 7, 79, 124, 129, 130 Saint Michael’s lectures (1974), 11 salvation: through Christian faith, 3, 4; through creedal confession, 4, 5, 7; through Holy Spirit, 8, 10, 61–62, 124–26; through Jesus Christ, 59–62, 70, 73–75, 81, 82, 142; and metaphor of linear journey, 146–47; and Song of Songs, 96–97; through Trinitarian orthdoxy, 4, 5. See also Holy Spirit; Jesus Christ scripture. See Bible/Biblical narrative; see also intentionality of scripture; untranslatability of scripture Self, as liberal construct, 19–20 semiotics, 80–81, 82, 117 sensus fidelium, 3, 30, 40–41, 43–44, 75, 76, 141 Song of Songs, 71, 88–98; allegorical interpretation of (Gregory of Nyssa), 71–72, 93–98, 99, 151; apophatic reading of, 98–99; literal interpretation of (LaCocque), 89–93, 96; as pedagogical, 97–98; and regula fidei, 96; and salvation, 96–97; Trinitarian nature of, 95. See also Bible/Biblical narrative soteriology. See salvation sufficiency and irreducibility of scripture. See untranslatability, of scripture; see also Bible

T Taylor, Charles, 22–26, 38, 47–48, 52 Tertullian of Carthage, 67–68, 76, 77, 112 text absorbing world, metaphor of, 9, 32, 70, 79, 80–81, 84, 86–87, 97–98, 99– 101, 143–44 textuality: of both Bible and Church, 78– 79; of Church practices/liturgy, 79– 80; and semiotic/non-semiotic forces, 80–81, 117. See also Bible/Biblical narrative; intratextual theology

168

Index • t–z theologians: as disengaged subjects, 23– 24; and “punctual self,” 24–26, 47–49 theology, 4, 16; apophatic, 35; cataphatic, 35; and doctrine, 18–19; intramural, 144–45; intratextual, 67–69; and modern epistemology, 22–26, 27–28; premodern approach to, 2–3; as regulated/regulative, 69–70; and religion, 30–31 theosis, 61, 63–64, 131 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 36, 40, 61, 116, 147 Trinitarian orthodoxy, 3, 4, 8, 18, 148–49; as articulated by Patristic authors, 10; and communio ecclesiology (Hütter), 121–24; in creedal confession, 5, 8; Lindbeck’s omission on, 4–5, 8; and role of Holy Spirit, 149–51; saving nature of, 4, 5; in Song of Songs, 95; and truth, 35–41 truth, 8–9, 18, 19; and catechetical theology, 57; and categorial adequacy, 36–37, 38; claims to, by doctrine (McGrath), 53–56; in deeds and words, 38–40, 47; of doctrine, 22, 26; individual as arbiter of, 27–28; and intrasystematic coherence, 38–40, 42; Lindbeck on, 26–27, 36–41; and per-

formative correspondence through Holy Spirit, 47–49; and self-disclosure by God, 42–43, 48; Trinitarian account of, 36–41

U untranslatability of scripture, 70, 72–84; and doctrine, 83–84; and irreducibility, 9, 72, 82–83; and sufficiency, 9, 72–82. See also Bible/Biblical narrative; intentionality of scripture; intratextual theology

V verbum externum, 26, 28, 46, 118 Volf, Miroslav, 1, 11, 12, 80–82

W Williams, Rowan, 7, 99, 100–101, 127– 28, 133–35, 144–45, 147, 149 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 15–16, 146; and forms of life, 29; and “language games,” 28–30, 37, 38; as philosophical ally of Lindbeck, 30–31, 59; on rules, 117 women, in Church, 44–47

Z Zizioulas, John D., 122

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