As a college student studying theology in the 1990s, I was inspired by many great theologians of the past, but rather less inspired by those of the present. Theology programs at elite universities often seemed to present the Christian faith as a kind of shag-carpeted, Woodstock version of the real thing. It seemed to me that the theologian was more often asked to accommodate the faith to its cultured despisers in this liberal age than asked to understand it. As a young evangelical, I was looking for theologians who could help me break the stranglehold of liberal Protestantism and its faithless idea of religion as purely personal “sentiment.” That's when I discovered George Lindbeck.
Born in 1923 to Lutheran missionaries in China, George Lindbeck would spend the first seventeen years of his life abroad, and most of the rest of his life at Yale University. Having studied under Etienne Gilson in Toronto and Paul Vignaux in Paris, he wrote his dissertation on the concept of being in Duns Scotus. This was the work of an historical theologian, reconstructing the thought of the past for its own sake, but it was also timely given the recent Continental turn away from being toward “becoming,” and the so-called “linguistic turn” of Anglo-American philosophy. Soon after Yale hired him as an assistant professor, Lindbeck was asked to be one of the Lutheran observers at the newly convened Second Vatican Council. He took his young family to live in Rome for a year of the Council, and it's fair to say it changed the trajectory of his life's work. It was in Rome that he first began to puzzle over how Christian unity could be achieved “without doctrinal capitulation,” as he would put it two decades later in his 1984 block-buster The Nature of Doctrine: Theology and Religion in a Postliberal Age.
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