Transcript
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: We've asked Professor Ronald Thiemann to be the formal respondent to Professor Lindbeck's lecture. Professor Thiemann is a professor of religion at Haverford College, and is the new dean elect at Harvard Divinity School. Some of you already know him as the author of a fine recently published book entitled Revelation and Theology: The Gospel as Narrated Promise. We will give Professor
Thiemann 10 or 15 minutes to respond to Professor Lindbeck's lecture, and then, if he wishes, we will allow Professor Lindbeck to respond briefly to the response, and then we will have questions from the floor.
THIEMANN: Thank you, Dan. Having given me 10 to 15 minutes, I hope I don't take any more than that. I should also mention before I launch into my critical remarks, that the utterance that you heard this evening was somewhat different from the text that I had read, so I may have to soften some of my criticisms, though I don't think withdraw any of them. Let me just proceed to my remarks so I don't take any more than my allotted time. I'm going to be offering my remarks
this evening as an appreciative critic of George Lindbeck. His book The Nature of Doctrine has presented a bold and innovative proposal for our understanding of doctrine, theology, and religion, and has spawned a discussion which might well help to clarify and define the major theological options available to contemporary theologians. At the two most recent American Academy of Religion meetings, the nature of doctrine was being discussed and referred to in a very wide variety of sessions.
Perhaps most encouraging of all is the fact that theologians and theological schools, who rarely talk to one another, have begun to engage in very serious theological conversation about this book and its provocative ideas. And I can imagine no better tribute to a man whose life has been given to ecumenical dialogue and conversation. One of the most important notions introduced in The Nature of Doctrine is that of intratextuality. Intratextual theology,
Lindbeck writes there, redescribes reality within the scriptural framework, rather than translating Scripture into extra-scriptural categories. It is the text, so to speak, which absorbs the world, rather than the world, the text. Or again, a scriptural world is able to absorb the universe that supplies the interpretive framework within which believers seek to live their lives and understand reality. The address we have just heard is a further
expansion and explication of intertextuality, now seen in relation to the theology of Karl Barth. In his brief summary of Barth's position on Scripture, George Lindbeck has suggested that the great Swiss thinker was an intertextual theologian before textuality and the primacy of the written word had become culturally fashionable. Thus Barth, at least on the issue of the primacy of textuality, bears common witness with a rather
unlikely cohort, Jacques Derrida, a suggestion which might well make the ashes in crypt number 14 of section 3 in the Basel Friedhof am Hornli shift in uneasiness. Barth's uneasiness, I want to argue further, might be well grounded. Not because I think he would dislike the company of Derrida. In many ways, I'm sure he would readily agree with the critique of the
metaphysics of presence and would undoubtedly appreciate the French philosopher and literary critic's brash and somewhat anarchistic style, having had one himself. No, the objection would be, I think, to George Lindbeck's linking of the strange new world within the Bible with the concepts of textuality, intratextuality, and self-interpreting texts. In his summary of Barth, Professor Lindbeck has written, "When the text controls communal reading, Scripture
can speak for itself, and become the self-interpreting guide for believing communities." That sentence sounds like a rather pale echo of Barth's rather more robust talk of Revelation as God's self-interpretation. Barth is interested in Scripture as self-interpreting text, because he sees Scripture as the vehicle of the self-interpreting Triune God. Whatever the philosophical problems with Barth's
conception of Revelation, and they are many, as I have, in part, tried to show in the book which was so nicely mentioned in my introduction, Revelation does essential and important work in Barth's theology. George Lindbeck is surely right in saying that Barth's talk of the self-evidence of the event of the knowledge of God is perhaps the most damaging instance of Barth's confusing baptism with birth. But that failing, I think, should not blind us to the fact that it is Barth's view
of Revelation which warrants his intratextual view of theology. Without that doctrine of Revelation, or some functional equivalent, textuality, intratextuality, and self-interpreting texts have no theological force. Clearly Professor Lindbeck's paper does deal with these issues, particularly, in the final remarks, or in the last pages of the text I read. In those last pages, he stresses
with Barth that when God becomes unsubstitutibly identified in the gospel story, God becomes the basic text. But that thought, important as it is, seems almost an afterthought in the paper. Indeed, I think I might have the freedom to say that when I first received the paper, though I received it in a final form, it first ended before those final pages in which Professor Lindbeck spoke so much about God, Christ, and the
Spirit. That is, the paper ended originally before those sections were written. I wonder now if the paper were to be rewritten, in light of those final pages, whether some of the early emphases might not be changed or altered, for I fear there is a real danger in those first 31 pages of the text I read that talk about text begins to stand in place of talk about God. In the few minutes I have remaining, I'd like to offer a somewhat
different summary of Barth's theology, one which shows how questions of text and interpretation follow from the primary concern with God's identity and reality. It is, I think, important to remember that Barth does not conceive of Revelation primarily as the process by which we come
to know God. For Barth, Revelation denotes the content of our knowledge of God, and his reflections concerning the process by which we come to know have a distinctly secondary status. And those comments are, I think, open, amply open, to precisely the kinds of criticism that George Lindbeck has made. For Barth, though, the category of Revelation cannot be separated from God's identity, because Revelation is nothing other than the being of God in verbal form. It is, to use Barth's own language, the reiterated being of God. That is, God's inner Trinitarian being made available in word and history. Thus,
Barth begins his reflection on Revelation and the church dogmatics with a section entitled "The Place of the Doctrine of the Trinity in Dogmatics." He does that not simply to appear stolid and old-fashioned in a notoriously faddish discipline, but because God's Revelation is His triune being, or better, His triune identity. If God is identified solely through Revelation, then theology must begin by reflecting upon God's identity,
and in Christianity that means beginning with the doctrine of the Trinity. The human problem to which Revelation offers a solution is the problem of proper speech about God. How are we sinful human beings to speak of the holy and transcendent God? Barth captured the essence of that dilemma in his famous 1927 essay "The Word of God and the Task of Ministry." "We often speak of God," Barth writes. "We are human, however, and so we cannot speak of God. We ought, therefore,
to recognize both our obligation and our inability, and by that very recognition, give God the glory. This is our perplexity. The rest of our task fades into insignificance by comparison." Barth's well-known rejection of every form of natural theology is based on his conviction that what I have called in another essay "the eternal covenant," that is the belief that the possibility for knowledge of God is grounded in some universal quality of human being,
that that eternal covenant in all its forms finally limits the utter graciousness of God. The possibility for knowledge of God, Barth argues, is grounded not in any human capacity or capability, but within God's own Trinitarian being. The possibility for relation to and knowledge of God is primarily and properly God's own possibility. And that assertion, once again, brings the doctrine of the Trinity to the fore in Barth's thinking.
The triune God lives in self-differentiated relation. The differentiated persons of the triune reality are unified precisely as they participate in one another. And that participation establishes a relation of mutual love and self-knowledge within God's being at intra. Thus, God is knowable in se, that is in God's own inner being. So also God is in loving relation in se, independent of any relation to reality external
to God. God's knowability is not established by God's relation to human being, for God is knowable in se. But God does in an act of sheer grace deign to share that knowability with us. In Christ and in the Gospel, which proclaims Jesus Christ, God shares with us that possibility which is properly God's own, the possibility for knowledge of God and for a loving relation with God.
On the basis then of this Trinitarian view of Revelation, Barth then moves to address the problem of the possibility of theological language and of the issues then of text and textuality. Barth argues that God's Revelation provides the only possible basis for proper speech about God, because God has made Himself available to us in the One Word Jesus Christ, so that we are now enable to undertake an interpretation of that Revelation.
Our speech is truly speech about God if we follow the path which God Himself has laid out for us in His Revelation. Theological interpretation is always an act of faithful obedience in which we submit our powers of mind and imagination to the guidance of the Spirit through the scriptural text, which witnesses to Christ. That interpretive relationship between text and reader is complex, for it involves both the guidance of the Spirit
and a free but obedient act of theological interpretation. Thus, Barth sometimes speaks of Revelation as God's self-interpretation, almost as if to suggest that our interpretive faculties play no role in understanding that Revelation. In the same way he so stresses our obedient response to Revelation that he seems to deny completely any moment of freedom in the interpretive act. So he writes in a wonderful early essay entitled "Fate and Idea in Theology,"
"Faith is not the kind of knowledge in which we can see ourselves as creative. In this knowledge, we must rather see ourselves as obedient. Obedience here must be pure obedience. There can be no question of reciprocity between God's action and our own." On the other hand, Barth can acknowledge fully the need for the full engagement of our intellectual faculties in the task of interpreting God's revelation. So in the
late evangelical theology he writes, "The central affirmations of the Bible are not self-evident. The Word of God itself as witnessed to in the Bible is not immediately obvious in any of its chapters or verses. On the contrary, the truth of the Word must be sought, precisely in order to be understood in its deep simplicity. Every possible means must be used, not the least the enlistment of every device of the conjectural imagination."
Theology, then, is for Barth a hermeneutical activity in which the theologian in the context of the Christian community, in Hans Frei's helpful phrase, a faithful re-description of biblical narrative. Theology is a human activity through which God's revelation manifests itself in human speech. "Thinking and speaking humanly, all too humanly," Barth writes, "yet nevertheless letting
God's word be said. That is the task of theology. It is the task of a theology which granted God's grace thinks and speaks, not about the boundaries of human thought, but with all possible objectivity about God." Barth, of course, though he stresses that the Revelation through Scripture is the Revelation of the being of God, does not simply equate the being of God and the biblical text,
for that would be a denial of God's hiddenness. For Barth, all knowledge of God has a sacramental quality, because we come to know God through a medium which is not God, an external reality which He has chosen as the vehicle for Revelation, namely the humanity of the man Jesus. We cannot know God in any and every piece of creaturely reality, but only where God has freely chosen to reveal Himself. In choosing the humanity of Jesus, He has provided a
sacramental, and thus indirect, access to himself. But there is a further element of indirectness which affects the nature of the theological task. 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. As the history of God's action, and thus of His being, in Jesus Christ
is narrated in scripture, we come to know the identity of Jesus Christ and thereby to know God. Such knowing and consequent speech of God is a reliable reflection of God because God's being is always in God's Christological acts. But this knowing process is always indirect, and thus theology must always rely on the all too human traits of imagination, intellect, and wisdom, as we strive to offer a faithful account of God's Revelation
in Jesus Christ. I've engaged in a somewhat lengthy rehearsal in Barth's view of Revelation in order to try to indicate the complicated way in which Barth might aptly be described as an intratextual theologian. Intratextuality would be an important theological concept for Barth, only if it allows us to address the question of God's identity and reality, both within the Christian
community and within the broader cultural community. It is because I believe that the theological approach George Lindbeck has sketched for us does give us a fresh way of tackling those perennial issues that I find this new quasi-technical language attractive. My fear, however, and I think it was a fear occasionally confirmed by the address we heard tonight, is that these new theological categories might launch us once again into a major
methodological discussion, which will impede our attempt to do theology, that is actually to, to quote Professor Lindbeck, "to inscribe anew the world in which we live into the world of the biblical narrative." Ironically, I'm suggesting that the remarks you've made this evening might run the risk that you yourself have identified in the nature of doctrine. "If post-liberal theology," you wrote, "were to become theoretically popular, the result
might chiefly be talk about intratextuality rather than more and better intratextual practice." The great hope, I think, of the cultural linguistic model, is that it might enable us to do real theology again, in a way which might engage a church and culture which have become increasingly both biblical and theologically amnesiac. If then, the real theological issue -- and I'm coming to an end -- is the challenge
of conforming our lives to the identity and the reality of that God who invites us to share in a world created, redeemed, and reconciled by His grace, then it is not as clear to me, as it is to Professor Lindbeck, that the current cultural emphasis on textuality is much of a resource for that task. You say on page five of the text I had that though modern textuality sees the book of nature as socially constructed
or composed, still that position poses no intellectually grounded objections to the legitimacy or possibility of treating a classic, whether Christian or pagan, as a perspicacious guide to life and thought. I certainly read the current hermeneutical debate quite differently. The deconstructionists are, it seems to me, seeking precisely to deny classical status to any text, by denying that there can be
any form of privileged interpretation. As Frank Kermode has put it so elegantly, "All narratives are essentially dark, and the worlds which they cast up before us are finally unfollowable. World and book," Kermode writes, "are hopelessly plural and endlessly disappointing. Our sole hope and pleasure is in the perception of a momentary radiance before the door of disappointment is
finally shut on us." I do not see how such a view, despite its important focus on textuality, can assist us in recovering self-interpreting texts, though I even have some questions about whether that's the language we want to use, or the single and authoritative universe of biblical discourse. Recently I sat in a huge gathering at a major secular university listening once again
to something I had not heard, perhaps for decades. That is. stirring biblical cadences spoken by Bishop Desmond Tutu. That largely de-Christianized and de-biblicized audience was both moved and convinced by the theological justification the Bishop offered for his position on investment in South Africa. It may well be that many have been previously convinced on other non-theological
grounds, and that they simply found their independent judgments confirmed by the Bishop's Christian warrants. In any case, the experience reminded me, as I think Professor Lindbeck has this evening, that the Christian vision of reality might be most effectively communicated to a de-Christianized and de-Biblicized culture by a combination of righteous action and explicit witness to the God who has reconciled the world unto himself in Jesus Christ.
Again, the critical remarks I offer are done in the context of a deep appreciation of George Lindbeck's work, his many contributions to theology and the life of the church, and in the hope that those of us who try to follow in his train might be graced with just some of the insights and wisdom that he has so consistently shown us. Thank you.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: All right, I think we're ready to have questions now from those of you who have listened so patiently for the last hour and a half. Let me ask you to come to the microphone and briefly identify yourself, just by name. And please make your question as brief and pointed as possible.
If you have a question please come to the microphone so that we can all hear.
TAYLOR: Mark Taylor. I want to thank you first for the rich and in many ways enlightening lecture. The question I want to put can be put in a general way and then perhaps in a more specific way. The general question is what really is at stake for you in calling us to this respect for intratextuality
and the nurturing of intratextuality in Christian communities? What is gained other than the familiarization of the biblical Word in our culture? What is gained ecclesially and socially? The more specific way to put the question -- and I think it's the same question -- is to ask what the ecclesial or communal interests are
of those persons who in their communities value and nurture intratextuality? Another way to put, I think, what is at stake in calling us to intratextuality. I found that to be elusive for me while listening to your lectures.
LINDBECK: I suppose it all depends upon the concrete situation and community with which one's involved. To read the story of -- I'm trying to think of a good example.
I've been in the course of my life involved deeply in four different communities. One of them, Chinese, which is where I was born, spent the first 17 years of my life. The other, a kind of
Lutheran version of premillennial evangelicalism, which is what my parents represented. Yeah, it was a Lutheran version of it. The other was more straight, traditional Lutheranism. The fourth is a deep involvement with Judaism in a variety of ways. Another was Roman Catholicism,
which is where I've spent most of my professional life talking to Roman Catholics. Any single text in the Scripture, and that's where I was trying to think of a good example that could be handled briefly, but I couldn't. Any single text in the Scripture ends up being exegeted differently in each of those five contexts. God is speaking a different world to us, concretely and specifically. I don't know if that helps
at all, because then it has to go and specify circumstances in order to illustrate what one means. The history of exegesis and the history of theology is just full of variant and powerful readings of Scripture, which, it seems to me, one can quickly -- sometimes one says they were all [wet?], but sometimes one says this and that reading radically different were the Word of God through Scripture to those situations.
If I were faster on the uptake, I could give you some good examples.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Did you want to follow up on that, Mark?
TAYLOR: Maybe one way, briefly. At times you used to [speak?] of -- or at least to suggest some of the valuable consequences of valuing intratextuality. Any sense socially or ecclesially what that renewal would be characterized by, other than the re-familiarizing of the church with the written Word and the text?
LINDBECK: Once again, the situation just has to be specified before one can talk about such things, in considerable detail. The Chinese friends that I'm seeing more and more of these days, who lived through the period of the Cultural Revolution,
what renewal meant for them in terms of their social attitudes and responsibilities is so utterly different from what it means to a middle-class American male, such as myself. Do you see what difficulty I have with even beginning to talk about this question in general until one begins specifying the circumstances?
I resonate completely to what was said about Bishop Tutu here, now. I'm not sure that I would think that that necessarily carries over into Nicaragua. Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't. The stereotypes of both and left and right must be rejected, and how they get rejected in detail, one never finds out until one reads the Bible. Sometimes one will agree with the right, sometimes with the left,
never programmatically with either.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 2: Stay right up there, George. May I just follow up on Mark's comment. Yeah, well, did you want a response to that question? I really want to return to your first question, because I think there's something important there.
TAYLOR: OK, I just wanted to underscore that I don't think I was suggesting that there has to be some uniform response to this question that would cut across all conceivable situations in which one might be called on to articulate an answer. The case of Desmond Tutu is an interesting one. One could talk about certain concerns within the South African context that were fundamental and that the language of the Scripture and of the text resonated with and
created in the listeners. Examples would help, and I agree they wouldn't be the same in each context. Go ahead, Dan.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 2: George, you spoke of the four or five different communities that you have lived in, and in terms of which Scripture has been interpreted. I thought that it might be useful to follow up on Mark's question by asking you whether in these cases it was a matter of five different ways in which the worlds, the five different worlds, were absorbed into the text, or whether it was five different ways in which the text was relativized.
Which of those two did you experience, and what made the difference, or what makes the difference between five different ways in which the world is absorbed in the text, and five different ways in which it is relativized?
LINDBECK: I think we're on the verge of engaging in one of the discussions that Ron was warning us against by quoting my own book, talking about the set of images clothed in technical vocabulary, which are meant to then get us involved in reading the Bible with some intensity
and so forth. And then we begin talking about the apparatus, instead of using the apparatus. And I'm not quite sure how to use the apparatus that I've had some responsibility in helping to create. The odd situation of the toolmaker who doesn't quite know how to use the tools that he's been working out.
I got so tied up in that metaphor, by the way, that I knew that I wanted to ask you for an example. I always like to ask for examples. I can rarely come up with them myself, but I like other people to come up with them. And I was wondering if you could give an illustration of the problem that you were raising.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 2: Well, I was just following up on your description. I was just -- you described your own experience as one of having been in a number of different communities. There were cultural differences among those communities, different social situations, different ways of hearing, reading, interpreting the texts. The texts spoke in different ways in each situation, each community. Now,
how does one go about saying whether in these several instances it is a matter of the worlds or communities being absorbed into the text, or the text simply being relativized? It seems to me it could be construed in either way. I'm just curious to know how you would determine what, in fact, is happening.
LINDBECK: And that's -- let's take a somewhat complicated example that I did not inflict on you this evening, but I think is helpful in this context. Thomas Huxley, the famous defender of evolution in the 19th century, propagandist for Darwinian evolution, spoke of justification by verification
rather than by faith. And what's interesting in the way he handled that phrase is the imaginative associations with evangelical reformation understanding of justification. Justification for him still had strong analogies. One listened for the word, one accepted
the word obediently, even when it said what one did not want to hear. One found out what the word was saying by submitting one's hypotheses, one's bright ideas, to testing, to verification, and one accepted the results obediently. Very much a kind of version of certain evangelical understanding of accepting
God's Word in faith. And the fruits that flowed from it were similar. All the virtues of probity, of responsibility, of love for humanity, grew out of the person who was justified by verification, rather than by faith. You might say that here was clearly a situation in which -- a Victorian situation in which unbelieving, agnostic,
and atheist scientists, as well as the believing ones, were living in a world that was imaginatively biblical. And one can't say that the scientific enterprise is any better now because it's been stripped of these religious metaphors. One can't say that it's more humane. As a matter of fact, I suppose one could say that any human work, including science,
is likely to be brutish, and nasty, and perhaps short, if unclothed by some kind of religious understanding, giving cosmic control and meaning to it. But at the same time Thomas Huxley is clearly a case where the biblical notions of justification are being relativized. He was
invoking, he was using this religious language. It shaped his whole understanding of the scientific enterprise, you understand. But nevertheless he was using this Christian language in order to legitimize something that was radically non-Christian. Ultimately the god becomes science rather than Jesus Christ. Science is being divinized. I'm not sure that there was very much difference, however, you see, in the -- the curious thing about it is that
the evangelical scientists of Huxley's day understood the scientific enterprise in rather similar ways. They didn't understand it as a replacement for justification by faith, but nevertheless they viewed it also as a highly moral enterprise, which not only demanded great virtue of the scientific practitioner, but also had tremendous moral consequences in the sense of fruits. Both of them had a very high moral understanding of the scientific
enterprise. In one case you had a matter of the scientific enterprise being absorbed by the biblical world, that would be the believer. In the other case, you had the reverse situation happening, the Bible being relativized, that is to say absorbed into the agnostic world of Thomas Huxley. The moral I draw from this is that
in some specific circumstances, of which I've tried to cite one, it's very easy to say -- no, it's very easy in any moment, as a matter of fact, to say who is doing the -- all right, I'll put it this way, it's very easy when you're contrasting a professed avowed agnostic like Thomas Huxley to one of his fellow countrymen
who was a devout believer, to say who is probably doing the relativizing in which direction. And in the long run, the Huxley kind of thing over the course of a couple generations is an utterly different result, clearly. In a given concrete case, it might be very difficult.
It might be very difficult to say whether some agnostic was substantially in the eyes of God, was having the imprint of Christ put on his science, rather than Christ being relativized by the science. Whereas some professed Christian might in fact have been doing the opposite thing, in other words his Christianity getting
absorbed by his science. Sometimes one might be very doubtful which is happening. Sometimes it might be obvious.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Let's go back to the mic. Is there someone else who would like to ask a question? You?
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 3: Professor Lindbeck, I would like to know what in your conception of intratextuality is the distinctive role of historical criticism? How can we involve this work, or do you separate yourself from it, or how do you deal with this problem? I presuppose
here that we apply a whole set of methods in historical criticism, nevertheless.
LINDBECK: I'm going to sound extremely tiresome. Once again, I find myself longing for examples. Let me just simply say that to stay on the level of generalization, historical criticism gives us very interesting information on how it was likely that the biblical texts came into existence. Looked at from the point of view of belief, this is information as to the way
in which God's providences operated. From the point of view of the way one reads Scripture, over large areas, I'm not saying invariably, but over very large areas, the fact that one adopts a historical critical attitude towards the evolution of the biblical text doesn't mean that the final product is any less an authority than if one had a verbal dictation.
SHIEL: Murray [Shiel?]. A charge that's often leveled against Barth and Barthians is that the theology they're putting forward can have a significant amount of relativism in it. In other words, you could ask the questions; how can we be sure to remain open to the Bible, or how can we distinguish between the commandments
of God and the precepts of man? Do we need to have the tradition of the church along with the Bible in order to put the Bible in a context? Or how would Barth answer a charge of relativism?
LINDBECK: Do you mind if I ask for an example?
SHIEL: A Quaker would say sacraments are totally unnecessary to leading a faithful life as a Christian. An Anglo Catholic or Roman Catholic would say, "You've got to be kidding. The Bible clearly commands us to carry out a sacramental life as part of our life with Christ." In Protestant tradition, especially in tradition of Barth,
some people see a problem in that if the Quaker says, "The inner light is guiding me to understanding," that "the sacraments are an incorrect way of interpreting Christian Scripture," and the Roman Catholic says otherwise. Is there some way of distinguishing?
LINDBECK: Thank you, that helps a great deal. One reads the text, as we have said, in its canonical unity. As centered on the stories about Jesus Christ. Unified
by the overarching narrative and by what technically is known as the typological relationship between types and anti-types, or antitypes. I'm not going to try to unravel complexities, giving illustrations of what that involves in reference to the sacraments. But let me then add a couple of points that are specifically Reformation.
Or one point that's specifically Reformation. The emphasis on Christ as the one through whom salvation comes sola gratia and sola fide, so that an additional hermeneutical rule built into the Christological center is the Augustinian sola
gratia and the Reformation sola fide. Barth is not as -- wants to relativize that in a way that -- or thinks that the Reformers rather over did the formalities of that, I gather, but I think he's in basic agreement. One also reads the Bible with reason, with as much reason as one command
of the forms of reason that are appropriate to reading a text like this, that are available in the culture. One also does this in the community of faith. And within the community of faith means, as Barth says, one takes seriously all Bible readers everywhere, throughout history. Obviously Bible reading of this kind has to be a communal enterprise.
No individual can do it all by himself, herself. Now, when Barth takes up the matter of the sacraments, the fact that he is -- his basic pattern of Bible reading is one that goes back to the mainstream of the Christian church, to the New Testament period. And his concern for listening to all voices to help him hear the Word of God,
means that his discussion of the sacraments is one which even those that disagree have to respect. I'm afraid that there are Christian groups, and I'm afraid that traditional Quakerism would be one of them, which are simply left out in the cold.
Quakerism simply has not read the Bible in the way in which I've just tried to delineate in the case of Barth. And it has not read it with attention to what all other Bible readers have said. But in his treatment of the sacraments, he's sensitive enough to different positions so that I as a Lutheran find myself taking what he has to say very seriously. And there are many contemporary
Roman Catholics who react the same way to him, even when we disagree. The kind of thing that we're talking about is not automatically productive of agreements. The way I formulated it at the very end was in terms of an authoritative overarching universe of discourse within which there can be agreement to disagree, which is not permissive
pluralism, which is able to carry on discussion, even when one does disagree because there's enough fundamental agreement. And what makes Barth so wonderful even for those of us who are not Reformed Christians, and who therefore doctrinally find ourselves tending by tradition to reach conclusions at some points at variance with Barth, what makes Barth so wonderful is that he has been able to show so beautifully
that here is a way of reading the Bible which is a thoroughly traditional and universal one which can be employed in the modern sense in such a way that Catholics and Lutherans and Reformed, who are rooted in the tradition -- rooted in the tradition is absolutely indispensable -- who are rooted in the tradition, can find that Barth is reading the Bible in a way that enables them to really argue with him. Sometimes be
persuaded, and sometimes hope to persuade him. A common universe of discourse, not a machinery for producing agreement. That is to say, uniformity. Now, if you want to call that relativism, you may. I think it's the opposite of relativism.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: We are going to have one more question. I think we should bring this session to a conclusion. Let's keep in mind that there's more to come tomorrow. So let's have one more question, and then that will be the end of this particular session this evening. Would you go to the mic, please?
MOORE: My name is David [Moore?]. I'm a minister of a Presbyterian church in a rural community of Maryland's eastern shore. And a year ago, the adult Sunday school class studied Goodspeed's book on the apostle Paul. And I'm wondering what parallels are there with Paul entering a world that wasn't deeply biblicized, it wasn't even biblical, and it wasn't even Christianized, and
the world that you speak of us entering into, a world that's de-biblicized and de-Christianized. How did Paul do it?
LINDBECK: Would you agree -- just a question here. Wouldn't you agree that what Paul did was read his world in terms of the prophets? It was a very biblical version of the Greek world that Paul came up with, wasn't it? So what's the question?
MOORE: I think you spoke with some anxieties about a world crumbling.
LINDBECK: A world crumbling?
MOORE: A world crumbling. No longer reflecting the biblical tradition, the biblical canon.
LINDBECK: What I was talking about is people forgetting the Bible. How can you biblicize the world if you've forgotten the Bible?
MOORE: Then how did Paul do it?
LINDBECK: He knew the Bible. He knew his Scriptures.
MOORE: He didn't have the Bible. He didn't have the Old Testament. How is that community and public discourse created?
LINDBECK: Yeah, but wasn't it -- all right, let me back up just a little to take a period in church history that we know we can speak of with a little bit more authority. The first centuries, when the church was not yet established, and was sometimes being persecuted. How did people become Christian? They went through a period of catechesis, as you know, which sometimes lasted for several years, and always was a lengthy process, in which
they attended church, they submitted to moral discipline, they learned the biblical stories, and then after a prolonged period came baptism, the final catechetical instruction in baptism. They were finally taught the creed. But they had learned a new language, and a new way of living in the world -- I mean of seeing the world, and living in the world too, of course.
Why did they go to the pain of learning this new language? Usually, it was because the Christian community attracted them. As the Emperor Julian put it, "The Galileans, the atheistic Galileans are winning because they look after our poor as well as theirs." So it wasn't by
putting the Christian message into non-Christian categories that the church grew during those centuries. It was by teaching people who for whatever reason, and the reasons varied enormously, were attracted to the community, by teaching them the biblical language, the Bible. That's the way the church grew. It's the way it's grown in China too, by the way. Yeah. The people who
tried to explain what the faith was all about, or pretended to, in language that was non-biblical were the Gnostics.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Let me on behalf of all of you thank Professor Lindbeck and Professor Thiemann for a very stimulating evening. Tomorrow we begin again at ten o'clock for the chapel service, and at 10:30 Professor Welker, Michael Welker will be giving a lecture in this room. Thank you again.