George Lindbeck

The Gospel’s Uniqueness: Election and Untranslatability

This essay is an experiment in looking at the uniqueness of Christianity from the perspective of religions as community-forming comprehensive semiotic systems. Uniqueness in this outlook consists formally of untranslatability and materially of the unsubstitutable memories and narratives which shape communities identities. The thesis is explored that it is now possible to regain in non-supercessionist form the memories and narratives which gave pre-modern non-Marcionite Christianity its community-constituting self-understanding as elect people in such a way as to help transform Christian relations to non-biblical religions in an Israel-like non-hegemonic direction.

Barth and Textuality

“The growing awareness of the importance of texts in our day favors the intertextuality in which all texts interpret each other on the same level, rather than the intratextuality [Barth] in which one privileged text functions as the comprehensive interpretive framework. … A religion, especially a heavily textualized religion such as Christianity, can be expected to survive as long as its Scriptures are not ignored. It has no future except in its own intratextual world. One may hope that more and more Christian theologians, whether Protestant or Catholic, will soon get the message.”

Nominalism and the Problem of Meaning as Illustrated by Pierre D'Ailly on Predestination and Justification

It is difficult in our day to understand the appeal of late medieval nominalism for it seems almost schizophrenic in the way it alternates between opposing emphases. It looked at every theological problem from two radically different points of view: from the perspective of Gods absolute power, and from the viewpoint of what he has in fact ordained. In the first context, nominalism relied completely on the power of philosophy and logic to define (though not to prove) omnipotence, and insisted on the radically individualistic isolation of man before a God of absolute and arbitrary power; but in the second context, these emphases are in effect reversed and stress is laid on fideism, the community and its authority, and, in the case of many nominalists, on the moral autonomy of man vis a vis God. Furthermore, the reconciliation of these contrary tendencies is primarily logical, or even verbal. Yet nominalism so captivated the minds of many theologians that they were quite content with what seems to us a purely external and artificial unity and consistency.

Ethics After Babel: The Languages of Morals and Their Discontents by Jeffrey Stout. Boston, Beacon, 1988. 338 pp.

We recognize in the “confounding of language” and the “scattering abroad” of the people of the earth that take place in the story of Babel (Gen. 1l:l-9) conditions of chaos and confusion that pertain to our own situation, not only in language but also in the moral life. The story may make us nostalgic for a time when “the whole earth had one language and few words,” moral pluralism, too, frightens us. It’s not that we don’t appreciate variety in human life (though some of us seem able to tolerate it only in small doses). But coming into contact with significantly different moral beliefs, norms, and ways of interpreting, speaking, and acting-distinct “moral languages,” to use the shor thand4an make us worry whether any morality can be relied upon as true. Does the diversity of moral languages condemn us to a relativism that leads inexorably to nihilism? Is morality undermined by its own multiplici-