In a Peanuts cartoon, Linus confided to Snoopy, "I have a theory, Snoopy. See what you think of it." Snoopy was all ears as Linus explained: "I have a theory that the 'head beagle' and the 'great pumpkin' are the same person." After Linus left, Snoopy contemplated this proposal and thought with a frown, "That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard!" Then, as he lay back down atop his doghouse, he concluded drowsily, "It sounds like some sort of new theology!"
Since the 1960s, many people have become rightly skeptical of new movements and trends in theology. A quick perusal of the shelves of seminary bookstores reveals an overabundance of new theologies: process theology, theology of hope, liberation theology, radical theology--even clown theology! Who can blame Snoopy or anyone for yawning at still one more new movement in contemporary theology?
Yet, something about the poorly named "postliberal theology," arising primarily out of Yale Divinity School, arouses curiosity. Mainline Protestant theologians calling for a "back to the Bible" movement?
"Postliberal" is not a particularly descriptive label. Neither is "The New Yale Theology" or "New Haven Theology." "Postliberal" simply suggests this theology arises out of liberal theology, yet seeks to go beyond it. Whereas liberal theology elevates modern thought and experience alongside Scripture and tradition as a norm for Christian belief, postliberal theology rejects this move without becoming premodern in its approach. In other words, it refuses to elevate secular thought alongside or above Scripture or return to a wooden, literalistic interpretation of biblical narratives.
Postliberal theology is a form of postmodern theology that rejects the Enlightenment emphasis on the authority of human reason and modern experience. Instead, it seeks to base Christian faith on the identity and presence of Jesus Christ in the narrative-shaped community of God's people. The legitimate basis for all Christian reflection is not "modern culture" or any culture independent of the gospel, but the language and culture of the church created and nurtured by the story of Jesus and his redemptive life, death, and resurrection.
Bruce D. Marshall, a leading interpreter of postliberal theology, emphasizes its commitment to the authority of Scripture: "It is chiefly by appeal to the plain sense of Scripture that the Christian community tests and reforms its own current web of belief and practice." This affirmation is amazing, because it is not expressing the position of a group of evangelicals but the theological method of a relatively new mainline Protestant school of thought.
In April 1995, a conference for dialogue between evangelicals and postliberals was held at Wheaton College's Billy Graham Center. The colloquy attracted hundreds of theologians, pastors, and students and featured presentations and seminars that explored the common ground of these contemporary schools of Christian thought. Some speakers and attenders emphasized the divergent viewpoints of postliberals and evangelicals; and some evangelical critics even questioned those who arranged and encouraged the dialogue due to perceived radical differences between the two camps. This dialogue and debate should not remain the private preserve of a few theologians.
A TEXT-SHAPED WORLD
Most postliberal theologians acknowledge a tremendous debt to a single innovative thinker, Hans Frei, who taught for many years at Yale Divinity School. Frei's books--"The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative" (1974) and "The Identity of Jesus Christ" (1975)--laid out the main hermeneutical (method of biblical interpretation) program for postliberalism. The "postliberal" label itself was later coined by Frei's colleague George Lindbeck. Lindbeck's book "The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age" (1984) is taken by many to be the formative work of this New Yale Theology. Others have continued and extended their postliberal approach: William Placher and George Hunsinger (Frei's and Lindbeck's students), along with Garrett Green and Stanley Hauerwas.
What is the basic impulse of postliberal theology? Stated most succinctly, it is that the text absorbs the world. In other words, the canonical narrative of Jesus Christ that is enshrined in Scripture and lived out in the faithful community of Christian believers is what creates "the world" for Christians. There is no non-Christian "world" of language and culture to which the gospel must be conformed in order to be believable. In a very real sense, Christianity is a language and culture through which Christians "see" the world. It provides the interpretive framework for experiencing and knowing life.
This is contrary to the approach of liberal theologies. There the world of non-Christian culture provides the interpretive framework for understanding the "true meaning" of Scripture and the gospel it expresses. In this type of hermeneutic, the world absorbs the text. Theology becomes a constant exercise of trying to keep up with the shifting moods and mindsets of non-Christian cultures. For instance, liberal theology assumes that for secular folk to apprehend Christian faith, the stories and ideas of the Bible must be translated into categories and terms that arise out of modern culture.
Postliberals (and evangelicals) see this as undermining the integrity of the Christian narrative and form of life, thus undercutting the gospel's prophetic function toward cultures. The liberal approach assumes, postliberals argue, that there is some objective, neutral cultural experience to which even Christians should reshape the story of Jesus Christ.
Learning only this much about postliberal theology might lead conservatives to wonder: "What's new about this? We've been saying much the same against liberal theology for this entire century!" But postliberals are critical of conservative theology, too.
In order to understand postliberal theology's critique of conservative theology, it is necessary to go back to Hans Frei's foundational proposal, which informs much narrative theology. In "The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative," Frei explored the idea of the "true meaning" of Scripture and rejected all modern tendencies in hermeneutics. He charged that both liberal and conservative theologians and biblical scholars seem obsessed with discovering the "true meaning" of Scripture outside the narrative itself.
In "The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative," Frei attempted to demonstrate that both liberal and conservative theologians of the modern era have committed the same sin against the Bible: they have separated the biblical words and narrative from some supposed "real meaning" of Scripture. In their obsession with "objective truth" and apologetics (defending Christian truth against the "acids of modernity"), both liberals and conservatives have falsely opposed "fact" to "fiction" and then looked for the "true facts" of Scripture apart from its own literary integrity.
Liberal biblical scholars and theologians took the "myth approach" to biblical interpretation; they sought to discover the true meaning of Scripture's "myths" in universal human experiences, such as feeling utterly dependent on someone or something infinite. Frei condemned this approach (embodied especially in nineteenth-century thinkers Friedrich Schleiermacher and G. W. F. Hegel) as a serious violation of Scripture's integrity: for these liberals, "the meaning of the narrative is something other than the narrative shape itself. There is, for this whole point of view, simply no way of dealing with descriptive or narrative shape without shifting its meaning to a more profound stratum. The documents mean something other than what they say."
Taking this approach, liberal theology can virtually dispense with the narrative of Scripture and replace it with a religious-philosophical description of the human experiences that Scripture mythically represents. This is the result that Frei saw as virtually inevitable and destructive to true Christianity.
Christian faith is not about universal human experiences--religious or otherwise--but the story of God interacting with humans in unique and unpredictable ways. Liberalism was embarrassed by the historylike character of Scripture, but according to Frei, that is essential to Scripture's nature and function in shaping the Christian form of life.
Frei also believed much conservative theological interpretation ended up violating Scripture's integrity in a way very similar to liberalism. Instead of settling for Scripture as historylike narrative that contains its meaning in itself, conservatives (he argued) transferred its "true meaning" to objective historical events and timeless truths to which it points. The result, he argued, was very similar to that of the liberal hermeneutical project: it became possible to replace Scripture with dogmatic propositional statements about what "actually happened." Apologetics and dogmatics, then, replaced biblical narrative.
In contrast to both liberal and conservative hermeneutics, Frei asserted that the true meaning of Scripture is what it says. There is no "gap" between words and meaning when it comes to realistic narrative, and that is the best category for understanding what the Bible is. In Frei's own words, "If one uses the metaphorical expression 'location of meaning,' one would want to say that the location of meaning in narrative of the realistic sort is the text, the narrative structure or sequence itself."
HISTORY OR JUST GOOD STORIES?
A recent "Time" magazine cover portrayed Moses angrily smashing the table of commandments after discovering the idolatry of the Hebrews at the foot of Mount Sinai (Dec. 18, 1995). The cover story's headline read, "Are the Bible's Stories True?" The article presented recent historical and archaeological evidences for and against the "truth" of mostly Old Testament narratives about Abraham, Moses, and Jeremiah. This "Time" cover story helps focus what is at stake in the debates between liberals, postliberals, and evangelicals.
Frei and postliberal theologians would argue that this impressive set of essays was written almost entirely with the mindsets of liberals and conservatives in view. The fact that most critical scholars today find little historical or archaeological evidence for the actual historicity of Abraham or the narratives about him is treated as a triumph for liberal theology. For liberals, the miraculous stories in Scripture are "fiction" but "true" in some religious or philosophical sense.
On the other hand, the fact that many critical scholars now believe the evidence of historical research and archaeology supports the existence of David and Jeremiah is treated as a triumph for conservative theology. The "truth" of Scripture is dependent on its being "fact" and not fiction.
Frei, were he still alive, would argue that both approaches are wrongheaded. For Frei, the truth of the narratives about Abraham, for instance, is not dependent on their referring to either authentically universal human experiences or facts of time-and-space history. It is all well and good for critical scholars to engage in this kind of research, Frei would argue, but the informed biblical scholar should concentrate on the main question: How is God identified in these narratives, and what does that identification contribute to the overall portrayal of God's character in the church's canon?
Frei's point is that the Christian does not need to await the arrival of the most recent issue of "Time" or "Biblical Archaeology Review" in order to know just how much "stock" to put in the Bible or in liberal or conservative theology. The authentic Christian will live in and from these narratives no matter what the evidence of critical scholarship indicates. These narratives are her world; for her, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is palpably alive and real whether critical scholarship says the patriarchs ever lived or not. And that blessed naivete is as it should be.
This is what is meant by postliberal theology as a "back to the Bible" movement in mainstream Protestant theology. For Frei and his followers, the Bible is much more than one (or even the) Christian "classic." It is the narrative in which and from which the Christian community lives, moves, and has its being. Its overall story, characters, events, and language are irreducible and irreplaceable.
THE GRAMMAR OF FAITH
Many questions arise about postliberal hermeneutics, and here we will deal with two that are of special concern to evangelicals: What role, if any, does doctrine have? and, What is the status of historical event for Christianity? On the surface, at least, it would seem that this "Bible alone" kind of theological hermeneutics rules out both as having no real importance.
Lindbeck's "The Nature of Doctrine" attempted to answer the first question. Just as Frei had defined the "true meaning of Scripture" against liberal and conservative hermeneutics, Lindbeck defines the "true nature of doctrine" against liberal and conservative approaches.
Lindbeck labels the liberal understanding of doctrine "experiential-expressivism," which means that it reduces doctrines to expressions of human religious experiences. One problem with this understanding of doctrine, according to Lindbeck and other postliberals, is that it cannot take Christian truth claims seriously enough. It tends to reduce theology to anthropology.
Lindbeck labels the conservative concept of doctrine "propositional-cognitivist," which means that it treats doctrines as objective descriptions of realities "beyond" the narrative of Scripture. One problem with this idea of doctrine, Lindbeck avers, is that it tends to elevate propositional statements above the words of Scripture so that they take on a life of their own--and very often a life that is impervious to criticism or change.
Lindbeck proposed a third alternative to these dominant Protestant understandings of doctrine, which he labeled "cultural-linguistic." In this theory, doctrines are "rules" or "regulations" that govern Christian speech and life. They are "second-order statements" compared to the language of Scripture itself, and, unlike the latter, they are changeable and highly contextual.
In this account, doctrines are like grammatical rules governing the way a particular language is to be spoken and written. Such rules of grammar do not refer to some reality outside the language. In the same way, doctrines, according to Lindbeck, do not refer to some reality--either God-in-himself or universal human experiences--outside the first-order language of Scripture and the Christian form of life shaped by it:
Just as grammar by itself affirms nothing either true or false regarding the world in which language is used, but only about language, so theology and doctrine, to the extent that they are second-order activities, assert nothing either true or false about God and his relation to creatures, but only speak about such assertions. ("The Nature of Doctrine")
So much for doctrine. What, then, of a postliberal account of historical reality? At first blush, it seems that Frei and his followers (including Lindbeck) would be disinterested in "what really happened" in time and space outside the realistic narrative of Scripture. However, that is not the case. In "The Identity of Jesus Christ," a slim volume written shortly after "The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative," Frei attempted to address this issue of Scripture's link with "outer history." He also addressed it in response to some critical questions raised about his hermeneutics by certain evangelicals, including Carl F. H. Henry.
In "The Identity of Jesus Christ," Frei attempted to show that the crucial aspect of Christianity is the presence of Jesus Christ in and to the community of his followers. Jesus' presence to his followers is through narrative--it is a "narrated presence." Many critics of Frei's approach stop there and dismiss it as "story theology"--a kind of symbolic-mythological account of Christianity that totally psychologizes the gospel and disconnects it from time- and-space realities outside the pious imagination. But the entire intent of "The Identity of Jesus Christ" is in the opposite direction. There Frei attempted to show that the identity of this character of the gospel story, and thus his presence to us now, is inseparable from a historical resurrection.
Frei and other postliberal, narrative theologians of the Yale variety make no bones about the fact that much of the narrative of Scripture is "historylike" without needing to be historical. This is an all-important distinction to them. But in at least this one instance, Frei argued that the actual historical nature of a narrated event is essential to the narrative itself. The narrative is about Jesus Christ--it delineates his identity and presence as Savior.
According to Frei, the gospel narrative about Jesus Christ is neither a story-shaped veil hiding a "truer" metaphysical explanation of human redemption (the liberal approach), nor a textbooklike history lesson in what really happened (the conservative alternative). It is irreducibly literature. Literature, like art, must be kept separate from explanatory schemes and theories for the sake of its integrity. However, Frei happily admits that the particular nature of this narrative--the gospel story that identifies Jesus Christ--forces us to ask: "Did the resurrection really take place?" This is because this story clearly identifies its main character by means of the historylike story of his being raised from the dead and becoming "present" to his followers by means of that event:
The narration [of the passion-resurrection] is at once intensely serious and historical in intent and fictional in form, the common strand between them being the identification of the individual in his circumstances....What the accounts are saying, in effect, is that the being and identity of Jesus in the resurrection are such that his nonresurrection becomes inconceivable.
Given the identity of Jesus in the gospel story, then, "however impossible it may be to grasp the nature of the resurrection, it remains inconceivable that it should not have taken place." But did Frei mean that Jesus' resurrection is to be understood as factual (outside the narration) and bodily? Yes. Frei made that unmistakably clear: Given the character of Jesus and the narrative that identifies him, the believer in Jesus must "affirm that the New Testament authors were right in insisting that it is more nearly correct to think of Jesus as factually raised, bodily, if you will, than not to think of him in this manner."
Frei resisted rational apologetics, but surprisingly affirmed that "there is a kind of logic in a Christian's faith that forces him to say that disbelief in the resurrection of Jesus is rationally impossible."
It has been important to quote rather lengthily from Frei to clear up misconceptions about both postliberal and narrative theologies. At least Hans Frei--in many ways the "father" of both of these interrelated types of postmodern theology--clearly believed that there could be, and indeed must be, a connection between the gospel story and "time and space" history--at least in the event of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. No resurrection, no Jesus! And that is based not on historical evidences or rational apologetics but on the structure of the narrative itself.
THE EVANGELICAL DIFFERENCE
Evangelicals and postliberals find much in common when they meet as they did at the Wheaton Theology Conference in April 1995. Above all else, they affirm one another's devotion to Scripture; thus, they are both "back to the Bible" movements in theology. Many postliberal theologians, however, see the majority of evangelicals as "premodern" in their attachments to objective, propositional revelation and literal historicity of Scripture's stories. They fear that this leads inevitably to a divorce between Scripture and the explanatory schemes and theories that get built up into systematic theologies and rational apologetics based on propositional truth claims that end up replacing the literary form of Scripture.
Evangelicals, on the other hand, are uneasy about postliberal theology's general disinterest in Christianity's "objective truth" and the Bible's "space-and-time historicity." To most of us, the Yale theologians seem to go too far with postmodernism's "incredulity toward metanarratives." That is, they appear ambiguous and ambivalent regarding the question of Christianity's universal truth status relative to competing accounts of "the ultimate nature of reality."
Evangelicals should have no problem affirming Lindbeck's statement of the "second-order nature" of doctrinal affirmations. Doctrine cannot replace the narrative-shaped revelation of God in Scripture. On the other hand, we want to know more about the truth-status of affirmations in this postliberal account of doctrine. To date, anyway, postliberal theologians have not explored sufficiently the nature of heresy. When a self-identified "Christian" denies the sole lordship of Jesus Christ and affirms "other lords and saviors," is he merely "breaking a rule" or violating truth and affirming a lie?
Finally, evangelicals wish postliberals would come clean about the relationship between narrated revelation (revelation as literature) and time-and-space history. If the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ as historical and not just historylike is essential to the structure of the gospel story, why are not other events so closely linked with his identity in that story? The postliberals' answer to this remains unclear and unconvincing.
It took quite a while for me to discern that the pastor of the church we were attending was theologically liberal. That was because he preached stirring, biblically based sermons and delivered meticulous Bible studies. I gradually began to detect, however, that he did not necessarily believe that the "truth" of the biblical stories he loved to explore and explain had any connection with objective time-and-space history. During a private conversation one Sunday morning, he revealed his true hermeneutical impulses to me: "You know," he stated, "I don't really think it matters whether any of these beautiful stories of the Bible describe what actually happened. All that really matters is their transforming power in people's lives." My family and I left that church within weeks.
Postliberal theology would remind my former liberal pastor that he ought to rediscover the meaning of Scripture in its identification of God rather than in pragmatic results. But he needs to go one step further. Evangelicals need to encourage postliberal theologians to reconsider and rediscover the historical nature of the "mighty acts of God" recorded and interpreted in the biblical narratives. While the Scriptures' main purpose may be to identify God and their major contribution may be to create the interpretive world out of which God's people live and move and have our being, they also purport to tell us that our God is intimately and immediately involved in our time and space and cannot be reduced to the main character in a wonderful epic story.
As a "back to the Bible" movement in contemporary mainline Christianity, postliberal theology is to be valued and applauded by evangelicals. Perhaps we can even learn something about the natures of Scripture and doctrine from it. At the same time, we ought to reach out cautiously to these brothers and sisters across the mainline-evangelical divide and challenge them with the insights and wisdom of our own tradition.
Roger E. Olson is editor of "Christian Scholar's Review" and professor of theology, Bethel College and Seminary, Saint Paul, Minnesota.
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