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Locality and Catholicity: Reflections on Theology and the Church

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

John Webster
John Webster
Affiliation:
Wycliffe College, Hoskin Avenue, Toronto M5S 1H7
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Extract

Why is theology good for the church? One authoritative contemporary answer runs like this: theology is good for the church to the extent that it aims at a description of the linguistic and conceptual world of Christian faith normatively set forth in Holy Scripture. Theology, on this model, is ‘intratextual’ or ‘intrasemiotic’, offering a ‘thick description’, a kind of ethnography of the public, intersubjective meaning routines of Christianity, most of all as they are instantiated in Scripture which is the encoding of the ‘semiotic universe’ of Christian faith. Viewed as such, theology is a close cousin to what Clifford Geertz calls ‘interpretive explanation’: it is a discipline which ‘trains its attention on what institutions, actions, images, utterances, events, customs … mean to those whose institutions, actions, customs, and so on they are’; as such, it furnishes‘systematic unpackings of the conceptual world’ of Christian faith.

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , February 1992 , pp. 1 - 18
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1992

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References

page 1 note 1 The terms are, of course, those of George Lindbeck in The Nature of Doctrine. Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia, 1984), p. 114.Google Scholar

page 1 note 2 Ibid., p. 116. The term ‘thick description’ comes to Lindbeck from Gilbert Ryle via Clifford Geertz: see Geertz's, essay ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’ in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), p. 3–30.Google Scholar

page 1 note 3 Geertz, C., ‘Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought’ in Local Knowledge. Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York, 1983), p. 22.Google Scholar

page 1 note 4 The procedure is explicit in his introductory remarks to The Identity of Jesus Christ The Hermeneutical Bases of Dogmatic Theology (Philadelphia, 1975)Google Scholar, where Frei urges that ‘a sharp distinction be observed between dogmatic theology and apologetics’ (p. xi). See furiher Frei's various interpretations of Barth: the relevant sections of ‘Niebuhr's Theological Background’ in Ramsey, P., ed., Faith and Ethics. The Theology of H. Richard Niebuhr (New York, 1965), pp. 9–64Google Scholar; the 1969 lecture on ‘Karl Barth — Theologian’ in Dickerman, D. L., ed., Karl Barth and the Future of Theology (New Haven, 1969), pp. 5–12Google Scholar; ‘An Afterword’ in Rumscheidt, H. -M., ed., Karl Barth in Re-View (Pittsburgh, 1981), pp. 95–116Google Scholar, and ‘Barth and Schleiermacher: Divergence and Convergence’ in Duke, J. O., Streetman, R. F., ed., Barth and Schleiermacher: Beyond the Impasse? (Philadelphia, 1988), pp. 65–87Google Scholar. See also the essay m‘The “Literal Reading” of Biblical Narrative in the Christian Tradition: Does It Stretch or Will It Break? in McConnell, F., ed., The Bible and the Narrative Tradition (Oxford, 1986), pp. 36–77.Google Scholar

page 2 note 5 Ogden, S., ‘What is Theology?’ in On Theology (San Francisco, 1986), p. 3Google Scholar. The examples could be multiplied: see, for example, Gilkey's, LangdonMessage and Existence. An Introduction to Christian Theology (San Francisco, 1979), pp. 7–65Google Scholar, or Tracy's proposal in Blessed Rage for Order. The New Pluralism in Theology (New York, 1975)Google Scholar that ‘the revisionist theologian is committed to what clearly seems to be the central task of contemporary Christian theology: the dramatic confrontation, the mutual illuminations and corrections, the possible basic reconciliation between the principle values, cognitive claims, and existential faiths of both a reinterpreted post-modern consciousness and a reinterpreted Christianity’ (p. 32; see further pp. 43–63). If the weight in this earlier work by Tracy falls on ‘possible basic reconciliation’, later work is somewhat less confident, as the emphasis on ‘critical correlation’ in The Analogical Imagination. Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York, 1981)Google Scholar shows: see, for example, pp. 24, 374–6, 405–8. Tracy notes this shift to ‘an explicitly hermeneutical position’ amongst revisionist theologians (himself included) in ‘Lindbeck's New Program for Theology: a Reflection’, Thomist 49 (1985), p. 463Google Scholar: this article as a whole shows with some success that the postliberal critique of revisionist theology is somewhat undifferentiated.

page 3 note 6 Ibid., p. 4.

page 3 note 7 See, for example, Ogden's notion of ‘original revelation’ in ‘On Revelation’, ibid., pp. 22–40.

page 3 note 8 Lindbeck, , The Nature of Doctrine, p. 129.Google Scholar

page 3 note 9 Geertz, C., ‘The Way We Think Now: Toward an Ethnography of Modern Thought’ in Local Knowledge, p. 151.Google Scholar

page 3 note 10 Contrast this with Ogden's rejection of the notion of theology as a positive science: ‘On Theology’, p. 3.

page 3 note 11 ‘A religion is above all an external word, a verbum externum, that molds and shapes the self and its world, rather than an expression or thematization of a preexisting self or of preconceptual experience’: Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, p. 34.

page 4 note 12 Ibid., p. 136.

page 4 note 13 The difference can easily be seen by comparison with Schreiter's, R.Constructing Local Theologies (New York, 1985)Google Scholar: for Schreiter, it is context which localises; for the postliberal, theology is local in that the semiotic structure of the Christian faith is highly determinate, resisting assimilation to other systems.

page 6 note 14 The Nature of Doctrine, p. 116.

page 6 note 15 Ibid, p. 117.

page 6 note 16 Surin, K., ‘“The weight of weakness”: Intratextuality and discipleship’ in The turnings of darkness and light Essays in philosophical and systematic theology (Cambridge, 1989), p. 215.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 7 note 17 Tilley, T. W., ‘Incommensurability, Intratextuality, and Fideism’ Modern Theology 5: 2 (1989), p. 97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 7 note 18 Ibid., p. 96.

page 7 note 19 See ibid., pp. 104f, on Lindbeck and the ‘pure text’.

page 7 note 20 Kelsey, D. H., ‘The Bible and Christian Theology’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion 48 (1980), p. 386Google Scholar. Kelsey should not be interpreted as espousing a purely horizontal or functionalist account of biblical authority. His account is underpinned by proposals about the ‘relation of God to Scripture. One way (but not necessarily the only way) in which the eschatological rule of God impinges on persons’ lives is through God's “use” of the uses of Scripture in activities comprising the common life of the Christian community’: ibid., p. 396.

page 8 note 21 Full discussion of this point would require interaction with theorists of the reception of literary texts, such asIser, W., The Act of Reading (Baltimore, 1978)Google Scholar and Jauss, H. R., Towards an Aesthetics of Reception (Minneapolis, 1982)Google Scholar. For an introduction to some of the issues, see Freund, E., The Return of the Reader. Reader-Response Criticism (London, 1987)Google Scholar. Some initial theological orientations in these issues can be found in Jeanrond, W., Text and interpretation as categories of theological thinking (Dublin, 1988) pp. 104–128Google Scholar; Fiorenza, F. Schüssler, Foundational Theology. Jesus and the Church (New York, 1985), pp. 118–122Google Scholar; Tracy, D., The Analogical Imagination, pp. 115–124Google Scholar; K. Surin, op. cit, pp. 213–21 (on ‘church poetics’); C.Walhout, ‘Texts and Actions’ in Lundin, R. et al. , The Responsibility of Hermeneutics (Grand Rapids, 1985), pp. 31–77.Google Scholar

page 8 note 22 The a-political character of both Lindbeck's and Frei's hermeneutical theory is striking. For accounts of how (textual) discourse cannot be abstracted from forms of social relation and domination, see Thompson's, J. B. fine collection of Studies in the Theory of Ideology (Cambridge, 1984)Google Scholar, and Eagleton's, Terry account of ‘textuality’ and ‘reception’ in Waller Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London, 1981), pp. 114–130.Google Scholar

page 8 note 23 Williams, R., ‘Postmodern Theology and the Judgment of the World’ in Burnham, F., ed., Postmodern Theology. Christian Faith in a Pluralist World (San Francisco, 1988), pp. 93, 95.Google Scholar

page 9 note 24 Ricoeur, P., ‘The hermeneutical function of distanciation’, in Hermeneutics and the human sciences (Cambridge, 1981), p. 139.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 10 note 25 Eco, U., ‘The Poetics of the Open Work’ in The Open Work (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), p. 12.Google Scholar

page 10 note 26 Lindbeck, G., ‘Barth and textuality’, Theology Today 43 (1986), pp. 375, 374.Google Scholar

page 11 note 27 Williams, R., ‘Does it make sense to speak of pre-Nicene orthodoxy?’ in Williams, R., ed., The Making of Orthodoxy. Essays in Honour of Henry Chadwick (Cambridge, 1990), p. 17.Google Scholar

page 11 note 28 Eco makes a parallel point in specifying the limits of the ‘openness’ of the work of art: ‘The possibilities which the work's openness makes available always work within a given field of relations… We can say that the “work in movement” is the possibility of numerous different personal interventions, but it is not an amorphous invitation to indiscriminate participation. The invitation offers the performer the opportunity for an oriented insertion into something which always remains the world intended by the author’: op. cit., p. 19.

page 11 note 29 Williams, R., ‘Does it make sense to speak of pre-Nicene orthodoxy?’, p. 18.Google Scholar

page 12 note 30 This, of course, is the core of Barth's protest against Bultmann, and the reason why he uses the language of ‘Spirit’ in Church Dogmatics IV to accomplish what Bultmann hoped to achieve in the programme of ‘existentialist interpretation’, namely the retention of the realm of subjectivity.

page 13 note 31 For an excellent brief statement of this problem, see Stout, J., Ethics after Babel. The Languages of Morals and their Discontents (Boston, 1988), pp. 163–188.Google Scholar

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page 13 note 33 Tracy, D., ‘Lindbeck's New Program for Theology’ p. 365Google Scholar. For a further account of the points at issue here, see Placher, W., Unapologetic Theology. A Christian Voice in a Pluralistic Conversation (Louisville, 1989), pp. 154–174Google Scholar, and two essays by the same author: ‘Revisionist and Postliberal Theologies and the Public Character of Theology’, Thomist 49 (1985), pp. 392–416CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Postliberal Theology’ in Ford, D., ed.. The Modem Theologians (Oxford, 1989), vol. 1, pp. 115–128.Google Scholar

page 13 note 34 Frei, H., The Identity of Jesus Christ, p. 5.Google Scholar

page 13 note 35 ‘Lindbeck's New Program for Theology’, p. 472.

page 14 note 36 Barth, K., Church Dogmatics IV/3.2 (Edinburgh, 1962), p. 735.Google Scholar

page 14 note 37 Ibid., p. 736.

page 15 note 38 van O. Quine, W., Quiddities. An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary (Cambridge, Mass., 1987) p. 111.Google Scholar

page 15 note 39 Yoder, J. H., The Priestly Kingdom. Social Ethics as Gospel (Notre Dame, 1984), p. 40.Google Scholar

page 15 note 40 Further specification of some of these issues can be found in, e.g. Root, M., ‘Truth, Relativism, and Postliberal Theology’, dialog 25 (1986), pp. 175–180Google Scholar; T. W. Tilley, op. cit.; Werpehowski, W., ‘Ad Hoc Apologetics’, Journal of Religion 66 (1986), pp. 282–301.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 15 note 41 Church Dogmatics IV/5.1 (Edinburgh, 1961), p. 122.Google Scholar

page 16 note 42 Maclntyre, A., Whose justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, 1988), pp. 387fGoogle Scholar. Smith, J. A. puts the same point neatly: ‘it is the perception of incongruity which gives rise to thought’: ‘Map is not Territory’ in Map is Not Territory. Studies in the History of Religion (Leiden, 1978), p. 294.Google ScholarPubMed

page 17 note 43 Op. cit., p. 3.

page 17 note 44 Placher, W., Unapologetic Theology, p. 169.Google Scholar