Book Review: Theology and the End of Doctrine

Abstract

Theology and the End of Doctrine. By Christine Helmer. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2014. xvi + 196 pp. $35.00 (paper).Christine Helmer has written a book that marks a critical turning point in postliberal theology. To give some background, in The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (WJK, 1984) George Lindbeck hoped bypass the impasses in ecumenical and academic discussions regarding the role of doctrine. Where liberals treated doctrines as correlates of a shared religious experience, conservatives treated them as truth claims about objective realities. Seeking transcend these mutually antagonistic perspectives, Lindbeck developed a typology in order present a third option. Instead of treating theology as an experiential/expressive or a cognitive/propositional inquiry, Lindbeck offered a cultural/linguistic approach that treats theology as the grammar the church employs maintain its own self-understanding.In the thirty years since the publication of Lindbeck's volume, there have been many interpretations of this postliberal project by Christopher Seitz, Ephraim Radner, Kevin Vanhoozer, and Bruce Marshall, among others. However, later iterations have generally accepted Lindbecks characterizations of the current plight of theology and the typology he constructed. They have not wondered why his approach has been so appealing, or what price is paid when theological appeals experience and truth summarily dismissed as a type of reflection no longer viable.By tracing the history behind the impasse Lindbeck inherited, particularly as it appeared in German theology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Helmer offers a crucial restatement of the postliberal project. This enables her nuance what Lindbecks typology too clearly distinguished: appeals experience and truth claims, rather than representing a failed ap- proach, remain essential theology. Indeed, postliberal theological projects that fail provide these connections inevitability signal the end of theology as a meaningful resource for Christians. Theologians, she writes provocatively, are not museum docents whose role is to point out doctrinal artifacts from lost civilizations; rather, they must show how God still has do with humanity (p. 169).Helmer draws key insights from Schleiermacher and Barth retrieve the role of experience and truth in postliberal theology. From Schleiermacher, she argues that experience is always already part of language and culture. Therefore, no account of the latter (experience and culture) is ad- equate without an account of the former (experience). Such an account is found in Schleiermachers New Testament studies of the acclamations of Jesus as the Christ, which illustrate the key role that experience plays in the social construction of consciousness and, by implication, language and culture. …