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Religious Experience, Human Finitude, and the Cultural-Linguistic Model
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
Abstract
The article argues that the anthropology of the cultural-linguistic model elaborates the radical materiality, historicity, and contingency of religious experience in a way that the experiential-expressivist model does not. More specifically, the article argues that experiential-expressivist thinkers who conceptualize religious experience as having a nonconceptual core which is not constituted by the contingencies of a person's material, social, and historical environments implicitly compromise human finitude. The article also suggests that the cultural-linguistic model will seem threatening to our sense of human freedom as long as we share the modern assumption that material causes and human choices are competing kinds of “things” in the world, rather than being descriptions of the same concrete phenomena from different perspectives and for different purposes, and that the cultural-linguistic model will seem atheistic if one shares the modern view that this-worldly causal efficacy is in competition with God's agency.
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References
1 See Lindbeck, George, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984).Google Scholar Numbers in parentheses within the text of this article refer to page numbers in The Nature of Doctrine.
For the major collections of articles about and in response to Lindbeck's book see Marshall, Bruce D., ed., Theology and Dialogue: Essays in Conversation with George Lindbeck (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990);Google ScholarModern Theology 4/2 (01 1988);Google Scholar and Thomist 49/3 (07 1985).Google Scholar
2 I am grateful to Kathryn Tanner, David Kelsey, and George Lindbeck for their comments on an earlier version of this article.
3 Rahner's anthropology is, of course, only one example of the use of a conceptualization of human subjectivity in order to establish that finite human beings can know God. Kelsey, David (“Human Being” in Christian Theology: An Introduction to Its Traditions and Tasks, ed. Hodgson, Peter C. and King, Robert H. [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985], 167–93)Google Scholar, provides a concise typology of six modern strategies (including Rahner's) that use the modern “turn to the subject” and elaborate the human relationship to God in terms of an analysis of human consciousness. All of these strategies (with the exception of the Barthian strategy, which begins with God's subjectivity and seems to deny human autonomy) share the modern view of human persons as self-constituting, autonomous subjects.
Kelsey's criticism is that these anthropologies “do not engage” explanations of human behavior in terms of psychological, sociological, and physiological analyses. “Even when nature is not treated [by these anthropologies] as something other than the subject and as a threat to it and is instead incorporated into the subject as one pole in the dialectic by which it is constituted, it is still treated as somehow inferior to and a threat to the glory of the subject's other pole (freedom, spirit, or self-transcendence)” (90).
For my purposes in the present article, Kelsey's criticism shows that Rahner's anthropology is not alone in displaying an ambivalence toward human finitude and materiality. Rather, Rahner is, in this respect, representative of modern theological anthropologies. Although Rahner's strategy differs from other theological positions which elaborate the human relation to God in terms of conceptualizations of human consciousness, all of these strategies (including the Barthian strategy) make the modern assumption that human autonomy is diminished or invalidated by explanations of human behavior in terms of psychological, sociological, and physiological analyses. It is because of this common assumption that I criticize experiential-expressivist anthropologies for, in general, compromising human finitude.
4 Rahner, Karl, “Experience of Self and Experience of God,” Theological Investigations, Vol. 13 (London: Longmans & Todd, 1975), 125.Google Scholar
5 See Allik, Tiina, “Karl Rahner on Materiality and Human Knowledge,” Thomist 49/3 (07 1985): 367–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6 There is a tension in Rahner between those parts of his anthropological arguments that grow out of his transcendental anthropology and those parts of his anthropological arguments that grow out of what he calls his concept of nontheological concupiscence, i.e., his affirmation of a permanent complexity, many-layeredness, and spontaneity in human persons, as part of their creatureliness. In the present article, I have emphasized the former strand of Rahner's anthropology. In the latter strand, Rahner not only acknowledges the finitude of human persons as an openness, receptivity, vulnerability, and contingency but also celebrates this aspect of human persons as good and valuable. For further discussion of the latter strand in Rahner's anthropology, see Allik, Tiina, “Nature and Spirit: Agency and Concupiscence in Hauerwas and Rahner,” Journal of Religious Ethics 15/1 (Spring 1987): 14–32Google Scholar, and “Narrative Approaches to Human Personhood: Agency, Grace, and Innocent Suffering,” Philosophy and Theology 1/4 (Summer 1987): 305–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tracy, David, “Lindbeck's New Program for Theology: A Reflection,” Thomist 49/3 (07 1985): 462–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar, claims that the heirs of liberal theology whom Lindbeck puts into the experiential-expressivist camp (including Tracy himself) already acknowledge that human individuals are always embedded in particular linguistic and cultural communities. For Tracy, a slew of hermeneutical and political theologies (that are part of the revisionist or liberal camp of theology) have already accepted and worked through the implications of the fact that both religious and human experience are always mediated through the concrete particulars of an individual's linguistic and cultural setting. I am inclined to think that Tracy overestimates the extent to which his own thinking and that of other revisionist (as well as postliberal) theologians acknowledges the contingency of human selves, but to demonstrate this is beyond the scope of the present article.
7 The desire to provide a sure foundation from which to criticize patriarchal institutions and concepts has also led some feminist thinkers to claim for women a kind of experience that is “natural” and, in effect, invulnerable to the contingencies of finite human lives. See Davaney, Sheila Greeve, “Problems with Feminist Theory: Historicity and the Search for Sure Foundations” in Embodied Love: Sensuality and Relationship as Feminist Values, ed. Cooey, Paula M.et al (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), 79–95Google Scholar, and Allik, Tiina, “Human Finitude and the Concept of Women's Experience,” Modern Theology 9/1 (01 1993): 67–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
8 Much of the resistance to a conception of human persons as open and vulnerable to environmental forces seems to be motivated by an unwillingness to accept the possibility of genuine tragedy in human lives. The theological affirmation of God's goodness by means of the claim that human beings have an invulnerable capacity for free agency, in even the direst circumstances, needs to be replaced by the notion of the dependence of human agency on God's providence. For a discussion of this consequence of the acknowledgment of human finitude and contingency see Allik, “Narrative Approaches.”
9 The acknowledgment of human finitude as the contingency of all human capacities may be conceptualized in terms of the contrast between God's nature as creator and human nature as a creaturely and material nature, but it may also be conceptualized independently of any reference to God. Whether or not God is part of the picture, human finitude, in the sense of openness and contingency, refers to our experience of the arbitrariness and uncontrollability of human lives. This arbitrariness can take the shape of either shockingly disruptive misfortune or of amazing, serendipitous, good fortune. If one is not religious, one refers to this contingency as fate or as chance, but one's construal of human personhood is what determines whether this contingency is lamentable or something to be celebrated. The willingness to acknowledge how easily “things could have been otherwise,” wherever human persons are concerned, and to acknowledge the contingencies of human life as the soil in which even the highest human capacities grow, is to acknowledge human finitude as an openness and contingency that is essential to the goodness of human life.
Within theological anthropology, human finitude and contingency is usually conceptualized both in terms of human dependence on the created world as well as in terms of human dependence upon god as creator. (However, if God is construed as always acting on human beings by acting in the world, then the distinction between these two types of dependence collapses and human dependence upon the created environment is in effect equivalent to dependence upon God's providence.) Thus Christians interpret the contingency of human life in terms of God's providence or in terms of God's grace. The tendency to denigrate this human contingency often comes from an invidious comparison of the human condition with the life of God, which in traditional theology is construed as not contingent upon external events.
10 E.g., O'Neill, Colman, “The Rule Theory of Doctrine and Propositional Truth,” Thomist 49/3 (07 1985): 426Google Scholar, wonders whether the cultural-linguistic model is saying that “man is purely the creature of his environment.” On both theological and anthropological grounds, he finds it unacceptable to say that human beings in their experience of God are radically dependent upon their historical, contingent circumstances.
In Lindbeck's words, “[t]he mere idea that becoming religious might on occasion be rather like achieving competence in the totally nonoptional grammatical patterns and lexical resources of a foreign tongue seems alienating and oppressive, and repugnant to all the most cherished values of modernity” (22).
11 As Wayne Proudfoot shows in Religious Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985)Google Scholar, according to many modern views, it is the originality and autonomy of religious experience, i.e., the fact that it cannot be explained in terms of environmental, bodily, or psychological terms, which makes an experience genuinely religious.
12 Tanner, Kathryn, God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988).Google Scholar
13 Ibid., 124.
14 Ibid., 129.
15 Ibid.
16 See Kelsey, “Human Being.”
17 Of course, adopting the view that material causes and human choices are descriptions of the same concrete phenomena from different perspectives and for different purposes does not rule out the possibility that certain kinds of material causes of human behavior will rule out the possibility of a simultaneous description of the same event as the exercise of free choice.
18 Murphy, Nancey and McClendon, James Jr., “Distinguishing Modern and Postmodern Theologies,” Modern Theology 5/3 (04 1989): 192–214.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
19 Ibid., 199.
20 Rorty, Richard, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
21 Ibid., 23-43.
22 Ibid., 37.
23 Benjamin, Jessica, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon, 1988).Google Scholar
24 Ibid., 184-85.
25 Ibid., 169-70.
26 Ibid., 160.
27 Ibid., 174.
28 The following are representative examples of the view that Lindbeck's formal proposal of the cultural-linguistic model for the study of religion is motivated primarily by his conservative theological concerns:
According to Tracy, David (“Lindbeck's New program,” 465)Google Scholar, “Lindbeck's problems with [the] ‘liberal’ tradition [those theologians who, according to Lindbeck, are the heirs to the experiential-expressivist heritage of Schleiermacher], I suspect, are finally less methodological or formal than his paradigm-analysis would suggest. His problems are substantive or material…. Lindbeck's substantive theological position is a methodologically sophisticated version of Barthian confessionalism. The hands may be the hands of Wittgenstein and Geertz but the voice is the voice of Karl Barth.”
O'Neill, Colman (“The Rule Theory of Doctrine,” 426)Google Scholar wonders whether “a Protestant positivistic theology of the word—with its radical separation of salvation and creation—may not have influenced the application of [Lindbeck's] pretheological theory.”
Wainright, Geoffrey, “Ecumenical Dimensions of Lindbeck's ‘Nature of Doctrine,’” Modern Theology 4/2 (01 1988): 124Google Scholar, also suspects that Lindbeck's proposal of the cultural-linguistic model is motivated by Lindbeck's substantive theological purposes. He wonders whether the externality of the cultural and linguistic patterns to which Lindbeck gives priority squeezes out any role for human experience in the foundation of Christianity: “I suspect that in this matter Lindbeck has been over-influenced by the Lutheran insistence that, whereas all other Christians are content with the Allwirksamkeit Gottes (‘God does everything’), God's glory and human salvation require that God ‘does everything alone’ (Alleinwirksamkeit).”
Placher, William, Unapologetic Theology: A Christian Voice in a Pluralistic Conversation (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1989)Google Scholar, who by and large approves of Lindbeck's approach and postliberal theology, also focuses primarily on epistemological differences between revisionist and postliberal approaches. Placher's discussion of these complex issues is remarkably accessible and lucid. Nevertheless, Placher's discussion can also give one the impression that the only possible reasons to adopt the cultural-linguistic approach to religion and theology have to do with the intelligibility of the Christian faith and with apologetics. Placher represents revisionist theology as motivated by the desire to affirm the public nature of Christian theology and to claim that Christian theology is public only if there are publicly acceptable criteria of truth (18) or descriptions of general human experience (154) that will provide “ways in which Christians can explain what they believe and argue for [Christianity's] truth in ways that non Christians can understand” (154). Placher represents Lindbeck, a postliberal theologian, as motivated by the desire to prevent the Christian message from being distorted by attempts to correlate it to alleged universal criteria for truth or general features of human experience (154). The point of my present article is to show that anthropological issues, independently of one's concerns about Christian apologetics, might lead one to adopt the cultural-linguistic model.
29 Michalson, Gordon, “The Response to Lindbeck,” Modern Theology 4/2 (01 1988): 113.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
30 Ibid., 114.
31 Ibid., 111.
32 Ibid., 112, 116.
33 Reading Lindbeck's arguments for the preferability of the cultural-linguistic model as merely an argument for the incommensurability between the Christian gospel and natural modes of human consciousness is only one way in which commentators evade the anthropological force of Lindbeck's proposals. Another way to do this is to focus so completely on epistemological issues (from a secular philosophical point of view) as to ignore anthropological issues entirely. E.g., Jackson, Timothy, “Against Grammar,” Religious Studies Review 11/3 (07 1985): 241–42Google Scholar, so single-mindedly focuses on the issue of whether Lindbeck has found a viable middle ground between epistemological realism and epistemological pragmatism that he seems to think that the only possible reasons that Lindbeck could have for preferring the cultural-linguistic model are reasons that could make a difference to how one sees this epistemological issue.
34 Michalson, , “Response to Lindbeck,” 117.Google Scholar
35 Lindbeck says explicitly that the popularity of the experiential-expressivist approach to religion does not necessarily imply mediocrity (22).