"The Nature of Confession: Evangelicals and Postliberals in Conversation"

Edited by Timothy R. Phillips and Dennis L. Okholm

InterVarsity

216 pp.; $15.99, paper

What is postliberalism, and why should anyone outside the admittedly influential but small group of theologians who occasionally call themselves "postliberal" care?

Like most intellectual movements, postliberalism's exact date of inception cannot be pinpointed. Perhaps 1974 is as good a date as any. That is the year Yale theologian Hans Frei published his magisterial "The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative." In great historical detail and with formidable erudition, Frei argued that modernity had misled the church in its use of the Bible. The Enlightenment motivated skeptics and Christians alike to read Scripture with the aim of trying to get at what lay behind the text, asking questions such as "How much of the real [i.e., historical] Jesus do we get in the Gospels?" and "Can scientifically informed people really believe the Bible's account of Creation?"

Frei contended that, by way of contrast, Christians before modernity did not read the Bible to get behind the text so much as they read it to get at the truth in the text. For them, the Bible absorbed and redefined the world on biblical terms. Frei hoped that modern Christians (he wrote before "post" was a prefix to every other academically uttered word) might, for their own day and in their own way, recover such a premodern strategy of reading Scripture. He later indicated possible directions of such an attempt in "The Identity of Jesus Christ" (1975).

But it fell to a colleague to coalesce the movement and take it to a new stage. George Lindbeck taught alongside and conversed intensely with Frei for decades. Significantly, he also immersed himself in anthropology (especially the work of Clifford Geertz) and kept up with philosophical arguments in the pivotal contemporary field of epistemology. In 1984 Lindbeck published "The Nature of Doctrine." With this book he gave the name "postliberalism" to the kind of theology he and Frei were fostering. He also cast in bold relief the potential relevance of postliberal theology in what was coming increasingly to be called a postmodern age.

Lindbeck's acumen in anthropology and epistemology (alongside his robust commitment to ecumenical Christian dialogue) enabled him to argue, without shame or hesitation, that Christianity has its own sort of "culture" and "language." As the supposedly universal and acultural rationality of the Enlightenment and classical liberalism came under increasingly damaging attack, Lindbeck powerfully suggested that Christian theology did not have to be "liberal" in that sense. The world, as postmoderns would have it, is construed (or even "constructed") through one lens or another--why not that of the Bible?

Through the work of Frei and Lindbeck, and such of their students as Stanley Hauerwas, William Placher, and George Hunsinger, postliberalism has played an important part in forcing confessional Christian concerns back onto the agenda of professional theology in North America and Western Europe. Renewed attention to the Trinity, biblical narrative, and ecclesiology owe much to postliberalism.

Early evangelical engagement with postliberalism was wary. But as younger evangelical theologians have loosened their grip on what they would regard as a modernist epistemology, they have imagined possibilities of fruitful conversation with postliberals. In that spirit, the 1995 Wheaton Theology Conference invited George Lindbeck and George Hunsinger to the Wheaton College campus. There they engaged in conversation with predominantly evangelical theologians, including their fellow conference keynoters, Gabriel Fackre and Alister McGrath.

The issues discussed, often in heady technicalities, were of fundamental significance. Postliberals sometimes sound like social constructionists in their methodological description and theologizing. How then and to what extent, in their judgment, do we have access to truths that are not socially constructed? And granted that postliberals think Christianity is "true," do they see it as true only for Christians? How and why commend the faith to those of Muslim, Hindu, and other religious "cultures"?

These are profound questions, and critical evangelical thinkers will maintain a degree of wariness. But it is clear from the conference essays--now published in "The Nature of Confession: Evangelicals and Postliberals in Conversation," edited by Timothy R. Phillips and Dennis L. Okholm (InterVarsity)--that many evangelicals have also arrived at an awareness of the complications attending such favorite modern concepts as "objectivity."

So even theologians at conservative schools like Dallas Theological Seminary, such as Stephen Spencer, suggest that evangelicals and postliberals may discover "rich resources in each other's theology" and should heed "mutual critiques." Kevin Vanhoozer, an evangelical teaching at the University of Edinburgh, believes that evangelicals and postliberals "share a common interest in maintaining biblical authority and confessional orthodoxy and in criticizing modern liberal attempts to revise the gospel in the light of contemporary culture." Because this is the case, he thinks the evangelical-postliberal dialogue is of "vital concern to evangelical identity."

Postliberals, for their part, have responded with perhaps surpassing enthusiasm. Hauerwas considers the dialogue a "remarkable conversation" and its results "a wonderful gift to the church universal." Lindbeck's response is revealed in the closing words of the following transcript of the panel discussion that capped the conference. That discussion brought together Lindbeck, Hunsinger, Fackre, and McGrath for a summary examination of the conference dialogue. A reticent man, Lindbeck ordinarily does not offer words unless they are solicited. But as the panel's moderator drew the conversation to a close, Lindbeck raised his hand and asked if he might squeeze in one last word. And then he suggested that if postliberalism has a future, that future may lie with evangelicals.

--Rodney Clapp

A Panel Discussion:

George Lindbeck,

George Hunsinger,

Alister McGrath,

and Gabriel Fackre

George Lindbeck: I have six points. First of all, it struck me as this conference proceeded that comparing postliberals and evangelicals is very much like comparing apples and oranges. Postliberals happen to be a collection of individuals engaged in what scientists call a research program, whereas evangelicals are members of communities, institutions, movements that are historically associated with inerrancy controversies, on the one hand, and conversionist revivalism, on the other. At least in North America, I think that would be a fair characterization of evangelicalism.

Second, the particular research program that postliberals are engaged in can be characterized as an attempt to recover premodern scriptural interpretation in contemporary form. "Premodern" means three things. It means before modern foundationalism. Another thing that premodern here means is before scriptural reading was molded and distorted, in many cases, by the inerrancy and inspiration controversies. In other words, postliberalism is agnostic about these controversies and positions that come out of them, just as premodern scriptural interpretation was. Finally, premodern means before modern individualism. The individualism of conversionist revivalism tended in various ways to modify the classical tradition of Scripture reading. To speak of individualism in this context means that postliberalism tries to divorce itself from the antiecclesial, the anti- or low-sacramental, and the anti- or noncreedal ways of reading Scripture that have prevailed on the modern evangelical side.

The contemporary aspect of the postliberal research program is the acceptance of biblical criticism, but placing it in a very subordinate role as far as the theologically significant reading of Scripture is concerned.

The third overall point is that this postliberal research program overlaps, to some extent, with goals that an increasing number of evangelicals have. These would include the renewal of evangelicalism, in Alister McGrath's terms, a recovery of the Christian heritage--especially the Reformation heritage. If you are going to talk about the postliberals being concerned about recovering heritage, I suppose you would say that most of them want to recover both the Reformation and Catholic heritages.

My fourth point is that, looked at from this perspective, the complaint voiced a number of times about the lack of substantive theological work on the postliberal side is misplaced. It's misplaced because the research program is one regarding methods of reading Scripture, not specifically regarding the development of any single theological outlook. If I do theology (and I have done a fair amount of substantive theology), it's Lutheran theology in the Lutheran confessional tradition. For George Hunsinger, it's in the Reformed confessional tradition.

The fifth point is that, from the postliberal point of view, the question that arises for evangelicals is: How many of the modern distinctives of evangelicalism can evangelicals omit in their attempt to recover the fullness of the Christian heritage as it developed in the premodern period? In this regard, I find myself very far to the right, theologically, of most evangelicals. I knew this before, but I became more conscious of it at this conference. I'm much more creedal than most of the people here. I place more emphasis on creeds, confessions, and dogmas. I'm sacramentally realistic in a way that free church people are not. I have a much higher ecclesiology than most of the people here. So for me, it's not at all a dialogue between the Left and the Right. It's much more complicated than that.

The last point that I'd like to make, which in some ways is the most important to me, is that it is understandable that my name should come up with numbing frequency in this conference. I happen to have introduced into the public domain the word postliberal, though I didn't intend to name a research program or a movement. And I happen to be, I suppose, the senior living member of the group that is willing to call itself postliberal. But if you are going to talk about the decisive figure in this particular research program, it's clearly Hans Frei by a very large margin. He is the major figure. But because it is a research program in a rather limited area, a methodological research program, Hans Frei doesn't have disciples. There is no school of theology that is a Freian school of theology. What we are is a group of collaborators in a common research program that may or may not have a promising future. I am sure that the goal has a promising future. But the question is whether or not our particular way of trying to recover the premodern heritage of Scripture reading in contemporary form will succeed wholly over the long run.

George Hunsinger: First, there is a danger here of getting ourselves into a situation where the more things change, the more they remain the same. We've heard a lot at this conference about foundationalism and antifoundationalism. We've heard about semiotic and nonsemiotic systems--a lot of technical, philosophical, and sociological terminology. It's good to know this terminology. It's good to be able to use it, but this is a relative good. It's even a lesser good. And if this kind of thing takes off and takes over, it will defeat what all of us are most concerned about. So I make a plea here especially to the evangelicals. If you start using technical jargon at the expense of what we've been calling first-order discourse (i.e., the ordinary language of the church), what's going to happen to us poor postliberals?

In this regard, I would like to comment on the distinction between first-order and second-order discourse. I see a danger in the way this distinction has sometimes been used. I would like to suggest that this be seen as a merely relative distinction. No statement is entirely first-order or second-order. Any statement somehow is making both moves at one time--sometimes predominantly or almost exclusively one way, sometimes almost exclusively the other.

Think, for example, of what Karl Barth is doing in the Church Dogmatics. Is that first-order discourse or second-order discourse? It changes from place to place. Sometimes you actually get personal address in a very Kierkegaardian sense, and other times he is making rather technical moves. But the one is never very far from the other. Hans Frei used to talk about how Barth is teaching us to rediscover a language and relearn it simply by immersing ourselves in it. This first-order or second-order distinction can get out of hand, and we don't want to pit the discourses against one another. We don't want to say, for example, that we hear only second-order discourse from the podium and only first-order discourse from the pulpit. We would be bewitching ourselves in the way that Wittgenstein warned us against if we let the distinction function for us in a dichotomized way.

So I would urge that along with becoming methodologically sophisticated and mastering these external languages, we keep them under theological control. To those who are theologians I would say, immerse yourself in the work of at least one great theologian. Barth is not for everyone here, I'm sorry to say. So immerse yourself in Calvin. Immerse yourself in Luther. Immerse yourself in Aquinas or Augustine. Of course, any of these theologians will have some kind of technical apparatus. But it's deeply embedded in another form of discourse, which is where it finally belongs. It needs to be used more provisionally and eclectically than it will be if we set that external language up independently and then constantly use it as a norm that controls and validates our theology (which is what happens in theological liberalism).

One last point along these lines: I'm very encouraged by what I have heard at this conference. In preparing for it I read some things about Bernard Ramm and his book After Fundamentalism. I came across a quotation from James Daane of Fuller Seminary, saying that it will take generations before Karl Barth gets over the bad press he has had in the evangelical community. But this conference shows that it's not taking generations, and that's enormously encouraging.

Gabriel Fackre: My comments are under the general heading "Reading the Minutes of the Last Meeting." I was helped greatly by Hal Knight's paper saying that issues faced today between postliberals and evangelicals may have their roots in Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley. I think it's helpful in a number of ways to read these past minutes of the Christian tradition.

That's learning from the old debates on fiducia and assensus. Another learning from the past is how ecclesial traditions shape the conversation about what postliberalism is, about what evangelicalism is, and how the two converge or diverge. For example, there are different kinds of postliberals. George Lindbeck has said flat out how much of a Lutheran and evangelical catholic he is. And George Hunsinger comes at postliberalism from the Reformed tradition. I really think the difference between the Reformed and the Lutheran sensibility is a difference over finitum capax infiniti, whether or not the finite is capable of receiving the infinite. Lutherans believe it is. God is in solidarity with us in Christ and in the Eucharist.

The Reformed tradition instead stresses finitum non capax infiniti. It is wary of the domestication of God in the Eucharist. So you have Calvin's spiritual real presence but somehow not the same consubstantiality that the Lutherans stress. When I hear George Lindbeck talking about his interpretation of postliberalism, I hear a Lutheran version of it, in which God is enfleshed in Christ. That enfleshment continues in community and its sacramental, liturgical, and confessional life. That's a Lutheran version of postliberalism. On the other hand, I often hear a Barthian Hunsinger holding a little bit of reserve about this. And then in comes Stanley Hauerwas, who depends on John Howard Yoder's Anabaptist reading of postliberalism, and you get yet another dimension. In evangelicalism, meanwhile, we have the dispute between David Wells and Clark Pinnock, which is really a replay of the Calvinist-Arminian debate, now in a new and interesting form. So it helps me to think of ecclesial traditions as informing these matters.

My final observation about remembering the minutes of the last meeting relates to something that Miroslav Volf spoke about in his paper. I have in mind the struggle in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the hermeneuticians of suspicion (Marx and Freud and Nietzsche). I read that engagement through the eyes of Reinhold Niebuhr, who drew on Marx and Freud and Nietzsche but did it from within the language and faith of the gospel. So he appropriated these traditions and said that's really a way of talking about sin and finitude. That is how these secular commentators can remind us, in this discussion between evangelicals and postliberals, that there are historical matrices; this isn't just a debate among ideas. There are social, political, economic factors--finitude and sin--at work in these two traditions. And we ought to be more aware of them.

Finally, we haven't said much in these three days about Bosnia and Oklahoma City and the O. J. Simpson trial. I think we worry about the liberal tendencies to rush to incorporate issues of justice and peace in matters of theology. We are wary of being trapped into letting the world's agenda reformulate the faith. But the Lord Jesus Christ rules over the marketplace and the courthouse as well as the soul and the church. Something of what we have been saying ought to have implications for the marketplace and the counting house and the judge's chamber.

Alister McGrath: I find George Lindbeck's categorization of postliberalism as a research program very helpful. Going back and reappropriating the premodern is something from which evangelicals can learn. There are treasures waiting to be retrieved and reappropriated--such as Edwards, the Wesleys, Calvin, and Luther. The Reformation itself in one sense can be seen as going behind the medieval period to rediscover parts of the patristic heritage. And perhaps we as evangelicals can begin to go behind modernity and rediscover a wealth of things that we've overlooked in our tradition. I think writers like Thomas Oden are encouraging us to do this. In this light, the strategy of seeing postliberalism as a methodology is actually very helpful and has caused me to revise my estimation of it.

But I think, as Jeffrey Stout once said, that talking about methodology is like clearing your throat. You can only do it for so long until you lose your audience. In the end, I think that we will want to know where postliberalism goes, where this research program will take us. It is right to ask what happens when we start applying these methods. In one sense, it is premature for me to try to anticipate where it might go. But I can raise two issues that I think evangelicals will want to discuss as this conversation goes on.

One of them is the whole issue of revelation and authority. In making this point, I don't want you to see me as necessarily critiquing postliberals. I am saying that it is an area of divergence between evangelicals and postliberals. Further exploration and discussion would be both helpful and appropriate.

The other issue is something that we haven't really touched on at all. It has to do with evangelism. Certainly evangelicals see the active proclamation of the gospel as integral to our understanding of Christianity. One question for future discussion is whether or not postliberalism will enable us to evangelize in that it enables us to understand the way in which religions function. But does such an understanding actively enable us to commend Christianity to others? What is the motivation for evangelism in this context? What is it about the Christian story that commends it above other stories?

Fackre: George [Lindbeck], I'd be interested in your responding to Alister's comment, because as I read your views on fides ex auditu ["faith comes from hearing," Rom. 10:17] I saw that, for you, hearing the word has soteric import, which suggests that there may be grounds in your theology for the importance of evangelism. Is that a fair statement?

Lindbeck: This presents the question of how one understands evangelism in a more ecclesial sacramental setting in contrast to--not necessarily in opposition to--a more conversionist and revivalistic setting. I spent 17 years of my life in China, growing up as the child of missionaries. I have been reminded frequently of the Chinese situation, which, as I experienced it, was very much like that of the early church. In the first three centuries of the Christian era, evangelism took place because people wanted to associate themselves with this community of Christians that they found attractive. Years of catechesis preceded baptism. In China it took years and years, as the Chinese themselves would later say, for them to absorb the language, the understanding ("the world-view," to use abstract Christian terms) that enabled their minds to become conformed to the mind of Christ well enough for them to begin thinking like Christians. That's a very different kind of evangelism from the evangelism that grew up in nominally Christian cultures such as those in the West. So any differences we have on evangelism are not strictly postliberal versus evangelical at all. It is rather a matter of how we as Christians ought to evangelize now in the West, caught as we are in the middle of an agonizing transition from Christendom to post-Christendom.

Hunsinger: Professor Lindbeck's bringing up China reminds me of the difference between Hudson Taylor and Timothy Richard as missionaries to China. I think part of the postliberal sensibility would be to try to embrace both of them rather than to polarize and make us choose. As individuals, we might have to choose whether we want to go one way or another, but each path is commendable and necessary in its own way, and not everyone can do everything. So let a hundred flowers bloom.

I think of the book by William Hutchinson, "Errands to the World," which is a study of the English-speaking missionary movement. The final chapter focuses on some differences between John Stott, on the one hand, and Lesslie Newbigin, on the other. My sympathies are generally with Newbigin on matters that seem to separate them. But I don't see why that should keep me from a very agreeable appreciation of someone like John Stott. Evangelicals seem to be the ones who want to turn this into an either-or. It's better not to make it a forced option, better to see it all as somehow perhaps in God's inscrutable providence, something that different communities are given to work at simultaneously and somewhat antagonistically, but all finally moving toward the same goal.

Fackre: I want to stay on this one more inch: Does the proclamation of the gospel, whether by word or sacrament, in community or proclamation, have soteric weight for the postliberal research project? Or is it something else? I think that's what Alister was pressing, and I thought, George, that your comments on fides ex auditu and the Lutheran emphasis on hearing the word in order to have saving faith would represent a convergence here.

Lindbeck: I misunderstood your question, Gabe. There's a very interesting conceptual problem--not to say a deeply critical Christian kerygmatic problem--of how to combine this genuine hope for the salvation of all without in any way dogmatically asserting that it's going to happen, of combining it with the fides ex auditu emphasis on the proclamation of the word and explicit decision for Christ. And I don't want to pursue that question now. If you want to identify it as the challenge to postliberals, that's all right with me, but I think it's not a challenge distinctively to postliberals.

McGrath: Here the issue that we're trying to explore relates to what I see as an aspect of the postliberal enterprise. Let me put it this way: what reasons might I give for saying to, for example, a Muslim that I believe that the community, the narrative, within which I stand has merit over his or hers? That kind of issue would certainly be of interest to evangelicals.

Lindbeck: That clarifies the problem, Alister, and the slogan that has become popular among postliberals is the slogan of ad hoc apologetics. There is no general answer to your question. Normally, those who turn to Christ consider Christianity as a live option after other options have collapsed. One doesn't argue people to faith--we would agree with that, as you indicated in your paper. Why Christianity rather than another faith? The answer depends on the character of the questioner and the character of the questions he or she raises. In regard to some Muslims you might say, Look, this is why I recommend Christ rather than Muhammad to you. To other Muslims you might present a different set of reasons. As Hans Frei expressed it, there is no single logic of coming [to faith]. There is a logic of belief. There is a structure of Christian faith. But the ways in which God calls us through the Holy Spirit to come to believe are so varied that you cannot possibly make generalizations. I would add: people are inevitably committed to working within a given conceptual cultural language system. We Christians think, look, and argue from within the faith. There is no way of getting outside the faith to objectively compare different options. Why follow Christ rather than someone else? I find myself thinking very much along the epistemological lines of Alasdair MacIntyre.

After the panelists fielded questions from the floor, George Lindbeck offered a final comment: "I have not expressed fully enough my enormous gratitude for this conference. I will also say that if the sort of research program represented by postliberalism has a real future as a communal enterprise of the church, it's more likely to be carried on by evangelicals than anyone else."

*****************************

Reprinted from "The Nature of Confession," edited by Timothy Phillips and Dennis Okholm. Copyright 1996 by Timothy Phillips and Dennis Okholm. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, Illinois 60515.

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS & CULTURE

July/August 1996, Vol. 2, No. 4, Page 26

bcjul96mrj6B40266618