Transcript HOLY SPIRIT - Erskine College

Introduction to
Systematic
Theology
NARRATIVE THEOLOGY
• Theological movement that arose in the 1970s
and has gained wide acceptance
– Sometimes called the “Yale School”
• It arose in the context of Yale Divinity School
• Key names include Hans Frei, George Lindbeck, Stanley
Hauerwas
– Key texts associated with this movement:
• Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (1974)
• George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine (1984)
– “Narrative theology is based on the observation that
the Bible tells stories about God.” McGrath, Christian
Theology, 200
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NARRATIVE THEOLOGY
• Narrative theology arose within circles that
became critical of liberal Christianity
– Post liberalism is critical of liberal Christianity’s efforts
to determine a common or universal human
experience of religion
– For liberal Christianity, “the impulse, which is
fundamentally apologetic in intent, is to find a
common base for Christian theology and public
discourse by a prior analysis of human knowledge,
culture or experience.” McGrath, An Evangelical
Evaluation of Post liberalism” in The Nature of
Confession, 25
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NARRATIVE THEOLOGY
– Post liberalism is critical of the rationalist
structure (an Enlightenment legacy) that
underlies liberal Christianity
• This is often referred to as Foundationalism- the
idea “that it is possible to base knowledge on
some sort of absolute first principles.” Erickson,
PTF, 17.
• The Cognitivist approach has been out of fashion,
at least since Kant, “For he helped clear the
ground for its emergence (Experiential-Expressive
approach) by demolishing the metaphysical and
epistemological foundations of the earlier regnant
cognitive-propositional views. . . .
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– That ground-clearing was later completed for most
educated people by scientific development that
increased the difficulties of accepting literalistic
propositional interpretations of such biblical doctrines
as creation, and by historical studies that implied the
time-conditioned relativity of all doctrines.” Lindbeck,
Nature of Doctrine, 20-21.
– Postliberalism is critical of the notion that an
individual’s experience may be “placed above or
before the communal religion.” That is, it is in the
community of faith that religious experience is
shaped. McGrath, “Evaluation,” 27.
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NARRATIVE THEOLOGY
– Narrative Theology offers telling criticisms of
the Experiential-Expressive approach.
• “The notion of ‘common human experience’ is
now viewed as little more than an experiential
fiction, in much the same way that ‘universal
rationality’ is now seen as little more than the idle
daydream of reason.” McGrath, “Evaluation,” 24.
• “The principal objection to this theory is its
obvious gross inaccuracy. As Lindbeck points out,
the possibility of religious experience is shaped by
religious expectation, so that ‘religious experience’
is conceptually derivative, if not vacuous.”
McGrath, “Evaluation,” 26
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NARRATIVE THEOLOGY
– Postliberalism is critical of liberal Christianity’s
evacuation of the particularity of Christianity,
considering non-particular versions of
Christianity to be unwarranted constructs
• “Ideas such as ‘religion’ and ‘culture,’ which an
earlier generation of liberal writers happily
appealed to as constituting universal foundations
of nonparticularist forms of Christianity, are now
seen to be fictitious constructs, generally
reflecting a specifically Westerns set of
presuppositions.” McGrath, “Evaluation,” 24
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NARRATIVE THEOLOGY
– William Placher identifies three factors that
contributed to the rise of Narrative Theology
at Yale. “Post liberal Theology” in David Ford,
ed., The Modern Theologians, 2d ed., 344.
• There was an atmosphere conducive to “thinking
about the particularities of individual religious
traditions”
• There was a focus on “the biblical texts as we
have them” (think of Brevard Childs and his
canonical approach to Scripture
• There was interest in “the relations of biblical
texts to the communities that read them.”
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NARRATIVE THEOLOGY
– According to William Placher’s
summary, Narrative Theology has three
major characteristics. (As quoted by
McGrath, “Evaluation,” 23-4).
• “The primacy of narrative as an
interpretative category for the Bible
• The hermeneutical primacy of the world
created by the biblical narratives over the
world of human experience
• The primacy of language over experience”
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NARRATIVE THEOLOGY
• Lindbeck’s Typology seeks to divide
“theological theories of religion and
doctrine . . . into three types.” The Nature
of Doctrine, 16.
– Cognitive/Propositionalist, or the Traditional Way, which
emphasizes cognitive aspects, truth as captured in propositions
– Experiential/Expressive, or Expressively Symbolic, which
focuses on feelings, attitudes, experience- not propositions
– Hybrid, combines above two methods listed above; replaced by
the
– Cultural Linguistic or Regulative approach which
emphasizes the role of the community in the formation of rules
and church doctrine
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NARRATIVE THEOLOGY
• The Cognitive-Propositionalist: This
type “emphasizes the cognitive aspects of
religion and stresses the ways in which
church doctrines function as informative
propositions or truth claims about
objective realities.” NOD, 16.
– Treats religion “as similar to philosophy”
– “The approach of traditional orthodoxies”
– “If a doctrine is once true, it is always true”
– Representative theologians: Charles Hodge,
Wayne Grudem
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• The Experiential-Expressivist: Type
“interprets doctrines as noninformative and
nondiscursive symbols of inner feelings,
attitudes, or existential orientations.” NOD, 16
– “Highlights the resemblances of religions to aesthetics
enterprises”
– “Particularly congenial to the liberal theologies
influenced by . . . Schleiermacher”
– “Insofar as doctrines function as nondiscursive
symbols, they are polyvalent in import and therefore
subject to changes or meaning or even to a total loss
of meaningfulness”
– Representative Theologians: F.D.W. Schleiermacher,
Paul Tillich
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• The Hybrid: This type makes use of “both
cognitivist and experiential-expressive
perspectives.”
– “Equipped to account more fully than can the
first two types for both variable and invariable
aspects of religious traditions”
– “They resort to complicated intellectual
gymnastics and to that extent are
unpersuasive”
– Representative Theologians: Karl Rahner,
Bernard Lonergan
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NARRATIVE THEOLOGY
• The “Cultural-Linguistic” or “regulative”
approach
– “The function of church doctrines that
becomes most prominent in this perspective is
their use, not as expressive symbols or as
truth claims, but as communally authoritative
rules of discourse, attitude, and action. This
general way of conceptualizing religion will be
called in what follows a ‘cultural -linguistic’
approach, and the implied view of church
doctrine will be referred to as a ‘regulative’ or
‘rule’ theory.” NOD, 18
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NARRATIVE THEOLOGY
– “Rules, unlike propositions or expressive
symbols, retain an invariant meaning
under changing conditions of
compatibility and conflict. For example,
the rules ‘Drive on the left’ and ‘Drive on
the right’ are unequivocal in meaning
and unequivocally opposed, yet both
may be biding: one in Britain and the
other in the United States, . . . ” NOD,
18
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NARRATIVE THEOLOGY
– “This stress on the code, rather than the (e.g.
propositionally) encoded, enables a culturallinguistic approach to accommodate the
experiential concern for the unreflective
dimensions of human existence far better that is
possible in a cognitivist outlook. Religion cannot
be pictured in the cognitivist (and voluntarist)
manner as primarily a matter of deliberately
choosing to believe or follow explicitly known
propositions or directives. Rather, to become
religious- no less than to become culturally or
linguistically competent- is to interiorize a set of
skills by practice and training.” NOD, 35
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NARRATIVE THEOLOGY
– “In the Christian case the system is
constituted, not in purely intellectual
terms by axioms, definitions, and
corollaries, but by a set of stories used
in specifiable ways to interpret and live
in the world. The mistake of a primarily
cognitive-propositional theory of religion,
from a cultural-linguistic perspective, is
to overlook this difference.” NOD, 64.
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NARRATIVE THEOLOGY
• Is there any room for propositional
truth?
– Lindbeck’s evaluation of the CognitivistPropositional approach at times sounds like a
caricature and not an accurate
representation. Concerning the cognitivist
embracing of “sets of objectively and
immutably true propositions” he says that
“perhaps only those among whom the sects
chiefly recruit who combine unusual
insecurity with naiveté can easily manage to
do this.” NOD, 21.
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NARRATIVE THEOLOGY
– As McGrath puts it, “to caricature
Christian doctrine as mere wordplay or
as an attempt to reduce the mystery of
God to propositions is to neglect to
appreciate the manner in which words
serve us. In order for my experience to
be communicated to another person, it
demands statement in cognitive
forms.” McGrath, “Evaluation,” 32.
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NARRATIVE THEOLOGY
• Is anybody out there?
– “Lindbeck believes that theology is
concerned with the articulation and
exploration of the intrasystemic aspects of
Christian faith.” McGrath, “Evaluation,” 35
– That is, for Lindbeck, the question is not
whether there is any external referent to
which the words point or refer. Rather, the
question terminates upon establishing the
grammatical construct, or the rule.
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NARRATIVE THEOLOGY
– “The issue is a narrow one. Rule Theory does not
prohibit speculations on the possible
correspondence of the Trinitarian pattern of
Christian language to the metaphysical structure
of the Godhead, but simply says that these are
not doctrinally necessary and cannot be binding.
. . . and, similarly, ontological interpretations of
the trinity do not, nor should not, be made
communally normative for the way Christians live
and think.” NOD, 106
– Here he appears to embrace the postmodern
denial of the correspondence view of reality and
the referent theory of language
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NARRATIVE THEOLOGY
• Yea, hath God said?
– “Throughout his analysis, there seems
to be a studied evasion of the central
question of revelation- in other words,
whether the Christian idiom, articulated
in Scripture and hence in the Christian
tradition, emerges from accumulated
human insight or from the selfdisclosure of God in the Christ-event.”
McGrath, “Evaluation,” 34
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NARRATIVE THEOLOGY
• Whom do men say that I am?
– Who is Jesus Christ for Lindbeck? If
according to Narrative Theology we are
only interested with the meaning of the
text, how does this enable us to escape
a functional Christology, (e.g., Ritschl)
or the flatness of Bultmann’s
Christology?
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NARRATIVE THEOLOGY
• Positively
– Lindbeck offers types of theology that, for the
evangelical, should be mutually supportive and
informative. Neither a strictly rationalist set of
propositions, nor an ambiguous ill-defined
“experience” is sufficient as a foundation for
Christian living. Likewise, the importance of the
faith community in forming our thinking and
framing our language is a needed corrective to
the independent minded late-twentieth century
evangelical. “You cannot have God for your
Father unless you have the Church for your
Mother.” -Cyprian
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Introduction to
Systematic
Theology