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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 November 2008
I argue that Lindbeck's notion of religion as a cultural-linguistic system may be profitably considered in the light of contemporary socio-linguistic concerns orientated towards the critical analysis of real-world language usage. Examples drawn from observation are used to show how, by combining Lindbeck's approach with Critical Discourse Analysis (Critical Postliberalism), extrasystemic features of religion and religious language can be perceived which link with a basic (R1–R2) dialectic. The latter can be correlated not only with the observable product of socio-theological grammars in believing communities today, but also with salient features of the gospels. Regional and other culturally related variations appear within limits to be accommodated by the model.
1 Higton, Mike, ‘Frei's Christology and Lindbeck's Cultural-Linguistic Theory’, Scottish Journal of Theology 50/1 (1997), p. 86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Lindbeck, George, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984)Google Scholar.
3 Geertz, C., The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973)Google Scholar.
4 For a critique of Lindbeck's Wittgensteinian influences, see Kallenberg, Brad, ‘Unstuck from Yale: Theological Method After Lindbeck’, Scottish Journal of Theology 50/2 (1997), pp. 191–218CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In addition, recent work along a more traditional theologico-philosophical line has been brought to admirable fruition in Pecknold, C. C.'s Transforming Postliberal Theology: George Lindbeck, Pragmatism and Scripture (London: T & T Clark, 2005)Google Scholar.
5 Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine, p.40.
6 Commentary on Lindbeck's thesis has also highlighted the fact that, unlike the latter, Geertz stresses the issue of interrelatedness: ‘we move “back and forth between” religious and nonreligious worlds’, Miroslav Volf (quoting The Interpretation of Cultures, p. 119), ‘Theology, Meaning and Power: A Conversation with George Lindbeck on Theology and the Nature of Christian Difference’, in Phillips, T. R. and Okholm, D. L. (eds), The Nature of Confession: Evangelicals and Postliberals in Conversation (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1996), p. 50Google Scholar.
7 Here I shall be quoting from a brief account of integrationalist thought by a prominent British linguist, Michael Toolan, ‘Sociolinguistics, Integrational Linguistics, and the Law of Theft’, a paper delivered at the Sociolinguistics Symposium 2000, University of Western England, Bristol, April 2000 (reference at http://artsweb.bham.ac.uk/mtoolan/cv.html#conferences). See also R. Harris and G. Wolf (eds), Integrational Linguistics: A First Reader (Oxford: Pergamon, 1998), and R. Harris, Introduction to Integrational Linguistics (Oxford: Pergamon, 1998). In the latter Harris asserts: ‘There is no autonomy for linguistics, because we cannot in practice segregate linguistic knowledge from extra-linguistic knowledge. The two domains are integrated, not segregated; and they are integrated in highly complex ways. Our daily experience of communication does not allow us to draw any sharp or constant distinction between them. The study of that integration and its complexity is the proper study of language: there is no other’ (p. 10).
8 Sperber, D. and Wilson, D., Relevance: Communication and Cognition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986; 2nd edn, 1995)Google Scholar.
9 For CDA generally, see van Dijk, T., ‘Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis’, in Cheshire, J. and Trudgill, P. (eds), The Sociolinguistics Reader, vol. 2 (London: Arnold, 1998), pp. 367–93Google Scholar, and Caldas-Coulthard, C. R. and Coulthard, M. (eds), Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis (London: Routledge, 1996)Google Scholar, and O'Halloran, K., Critical Discourse Analysis and Language Cognition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003)Google Scholar. The application of CDA to religious text is illustrated in various of my publications: ‘Enjoying your Worship Experience: Consumerist Religious Discourse in the Late 1990s’, Anvil, 18/1 (1998), pp. 52–9; ‘Seeing the Invisible: Frame-Based Views of Inclusive Religious Language’, Theology, 101/804 (1998), pp. 428–37; (with R. Schroeder and R. Lee) ‘The Sacred and the Virtual: Religious Services in Multi-User Virtual Reality’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (JCMC) 4/2 (1998), http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol4/issue2/schroeder.html; ‘The “Linguistic Physics” of Church: Introducing Critical Postliberalism’, Theology 105/824 (2002), pp. 99–109; ‘Modern Believing and Postmodern Reading: Critical Discourse Analysis and the Worship Song’, Modern Believing 43/1 (2002), pp. 28–38; and ‘Discourse Ecumenism: Doin’ it Long and Doin’ it Large’, Theology 106/830 (2003), pp. 89–98; also my monograph, Religious Language and Critical Discourse Analysis: Ideology, Identity and Christian Discourse Today, Religions and Discourse, vol. 5 (Berne: Peter Lang, 2000).
10 See e.g. the section on relevance theory in Graddol, D., Cheshire, J. and Swann, J., Describing Language (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1994), pp. 127–8Google Scholar.
11 I have published a much-expanded, ‘technical linguistics’ account of my model for the discourse analysis community in ‘Critical Postliberalism: Critical Discourse Analysis as the Basis for New Theology: Helping to Understand the Discourse of Hundreds of Millions Worldwide’, Critical Discourse Studies 2/2 (2005), pp. 165–87.
12 Frames (including the SCF) are addressed in relation to expert system modelling in my earlier article, ‘Seeing the Invisible’. For frames and allied structures, see Brown, G. and Yule, G., Discourse Analysis (Cambridge: CUP, 1996), pp. 241–5Google Scholar. They are cognitive in that they are possessed individually, and socio-cognitive when they form part of social cognition (‘the public mind’). See O'Halloran, Critical Discourse Analysis, for a good summary of current cognitive models of CDA, including recent discussion of ‘best match’ versus ‘best fit’ thinking. I explore avenues for applying this ‘thinking dialectic’ to ecclesiological/theological models in ‘Critical Postliberalism and Social Cognition: Towards a Typology of Church Based on Social Practice’, ARC 32 (2004), pp. 167–86.
13 For T. van Leeuwen's taxonomy of labels, see his ‘The Representation of Social Actors’, in Caldas-Coulthard and Coulthard (eds), Texts and Practices, pp. 32–70.
14 I have considered religious language used in the following: sermons and both modern and traditional prayers; conversations in (and especially after) religious meetings, and interviews with clergy and laypersons; church newssheets and magazines, the religious press and other media, including religious radio and television programmes (the latter on both terrestrial and satellite TV), as well as commercially available religious videotapes; theological works and allied material (e.g. as related to ecumenical activities); material from religious sources on the internet (including services held in Multi-user Virtual Reality); other electronic texts, including texts kindly donated by an individual, and, in particular, the commercially available electronic text of Songs of Fellowship. This is against a background of visiting a reasonably wide spectrum of churches mainly in southern England and Scotland (I have also visited churches in Northern Ireland, Wales and France during my research), against a background of being an adherent of churches in each of the main constituent parts of the UK, as well as in several areas of France.
15 Restoring the Kingdom (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1988). Here it will be assumed that R1/R2 refers to the UK situation unless otherwise indicated.
16 A symptomatic reflection of this fact may currently be obtained by searching the website of the UK central fundamentalist newspaper, The Evangelical Times: www.evangelical-times.org. For example, a search on ‘family’ reveals material reflective of the fact that British fundamentalists tend to actively background rather than foreground ‘family values’ (seen, crudely speaking, essentially as a distraction from the faith).
17 Nature of Doctrine, p.33. Here I am essentially making a similar commentary on Lindbeck's use of this phrase to that made by Alister McGrath, ‘An Evangelical Evaluation of Postliberalism’, in Phillips and Okholm (eds), Nature of Confession, p. 34.
18 The SNF is detailed in both Heather, ‘Critical Postliberalism and Social Cognition’ (2004) and ‘Critical Postliberalism’ (2005). In the latter I also posit a further, subsidiary dialectical distinction, between UK R1A and R1B discourses. R1A is the more rigidly grammatical version of the UK cultural-linguistic system (CLS) which, in rule-of-thumb mode, can be identified by an informant instinctively understanding the ‘litmus test’ question, ‘What do you think about the way people want to go on being parents at church today?’ (This tends to be an incomprehensible question to R1B and R2 (not to mention US) discourse informants.)
19 In 2000 there was a series of commentaries (one my own) in the letters section of the Church Times on a social ‘Freudian slip’ included in their pages (a reference to an incumbent in an ‘important parish’ in London. My contribution (‘Sales Talk that is Out of Turn’, 2 June) pointed out how common such slips are today in religious discourse across a range of social prejudices, especially in relation to consumer-focused, and managerially technologising discourses.
20 ‘Discourse Ecumenism’, pp. 94–7.
21 Rabbi Professor Jonathan Sacks, the UK Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations, makes the observation that Judaism is a religion of the family, while Christianity is a religion of the group. The episode in medio doctorum, together with the series of other episodes in which Christ famously inferiorises his family, appears to resonate with this perspective.
22 In a letter in Theology 105/826 (2002), pp. 293–4.
23 Compare the current R2 church fashion for Sunday Toy services, and Mothering Day services bordering on Moulin Rouge; as well as very subtle features such as e.g. the italicisation of family and youth services in a routine list of forthcoming events which includes the unitalicised listing of Morning Prayer and Communion services.
24 Echoes of this situation can be routinely observed in UK R1 church community contexts. Take the following recent case from an intense charismatic church. A woman came to the front to invite the congregation to attend the dedication of her child at a sister church. As the woman regained her seat, the leader's only comment was: ‘Lots of community things happening’. It was noticeable that, despite the allusion to (plural) ‘things’, no other ‘community things’ were announced at that time; rather the woman's invitation to her child's dedication was being reinterpreted strongly in group terms.
25 In discourse terms the correlated ‘was subject to them’ statement in Luke 2 is a typical example of mitigation familiar within CDA-type studies. Mitigation is often used in ideologically strong texts to partially conceal the ‘blunt edge’ of agenda which might otherwise be felt to be a little too obvious. A similar situation seems to arise in the Wedding in Cana episode which, initially placed, is given precedence within the gospel. At Cana – and in addition to the hagiographical messages signalled denotationally as a central feature – Christ seems to use mitigation in his words to his mother to soften the (in CDA terms) central connotational inferiorisation of her as a social actor to which she is otherwise subtly subjected.
26 In CDA terms, previous gospels' references to Christ's brothers can, in addition to their ‘local meanings’, be linked discursively to this cross episode with Mary and John, highlighting the fact that Christ did have biological male siblings, but that community (R1-type) relationships are preferred.
27 The same judgements tend also to emerge from UK R1 perspectives on the internet and radio output of US Christian parenting organisations, including the Focus on the Family movement whose radio ministry is very widely syndicated, including to the UK.
28 Stout, Jeffrey, Ethics After Babel: The Language of Morals and their Discontents (Boston: Beacon, 1988), p. 163Google Scholar, glossed by Volf, ‘Theology, Meaning and Power’, pp. 45–6.
29 Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine, p. 118.
30 ‘Critical Postliberalism’, pp. 176–9.
