Introductory

Since its publication in 1985 George Lindbeck's The Nature of Doctrine has come to be widely regarded as a profound and suggestive treatment of a broad range of issues which lie at the forefront of current debates in theology and religious studies. Its wide reach notwithstanding, the book is two-pronged in respect of its substantive theses. Lindbeck is concerned in the main to do two things. Firstly, he sets out to formulate a ‘cultural-linguistic’ model of religion. This undertaking is avowedly ‘non-theological’ (p. 46). Secondly, he wants to develop a meta-theological option, a ‘way’ of doing systematic or dogmatic theology, which he calls an ‘intratextual’ theology (pp. 112ff).

The ‘cultural-linguistic’ or ‘regulative’ model is, in Lindbeck's eyes, less unsatisfactory than its two principal competitors for the status of a properly-constituted theory of religion. The two rivals in question are ‘cognitive-propositionalism’ and ‘experiential-expressivism’ (to use Lindbeck's designations).

Proponents of the ‘cognitive-propositionalist’ model take religions to be essentially, but not necessarily exclusively, forms of speech and action focused on a mind-independent sacred or divine reality. Religious doctrines are ‘cognitive’ inasmuch as they embody truth-claims, at least in some part ‘about’ this reality, which are genuinely informatory.

Proponents of ‘experiential-expressivism’, by contrast, generally do not view religions as cognitive enterprises. They tend invariably to regard religious doctrines as non-assertorial and non-discursive entities, expressive or evocative of the interior life of the faithful person.