[ As I prepare for comps, I am generating a few pages of notes on various topics. Here is one set of notes covering George Lindbeck’s The Nature of Doctrine. I have attempted to focus on many, but not all, key concepts in his work. I am posting them online because I have been helped by others works and would like to help others comments and  would like to help others in the same way.Kindly pardon truncated sections or the lack of citation here and there. These are merely personal notes shared to help others and nothing more. There are endnotes. If you come across quotations without an endnote, it likely came out of one of the references in the endnotes. If you find a mistake here and would like to correct something PLEASE do add a comment.  ]

George Lindbeck’s Background

• Born 1923-2018 – son of Lutheran missionaries from America, working in China – the start of his ecumenical awareness is here. . 
• Gustavus Adolphus college (rooted in Swedish heritage). Got his BA in 1940’s and then went to Yale in the 1946. Lindbeck did his PhD on Medieval studies (on Duns Scotus and the concept of being) and completed it in 1955. He remained at Yale until retirement in 1993.
• Shortly after being hired at Yale, he was elected to be a representative of the Lutheran World Federation as an observer at the 2nd Vatican council. He lived in Rome with his family the year of the council. This experience changed his life.  After his return to Yale he continued to work on ecumenics – particularly Lutheran/Catholic dialogue. 
• His ecumenical influences: China, Vatican 2, and Lutheran-Catholic dialogue.
  • Bruce Marshall says that at Yale Lindbeck taught a class on  “Comparative Doctrine,” which focused on the historic doctrinal disagreements among Christians. The Second Vatican Council featured heavily in the course.”
  • R.R. Reno says that while he was in class with Lindbeck, the latter was not keen on pronouncing who was wrong or right when studying certain leaders in church history.  This seems to be reflected still in the Nature of Doctrine. 
• After Vatican 2 Lindbeck was on the hunt for a theological approach more effective in ecumenical work. 
  • He witnessed a polarization between “right” and “left” in both Protestantism and Catholicism along with a decline of any mediating center rooted in “pre-modern communal traditions.”
  • C.C. Pecknold highlights what Lindbeck more cryptically notes in ND,
    
    “that “ecumenical Christians were beginning to claim doctrinal reconciliation without making any apparent doctrinal capitulations  – significant changes were being made but changes that vaguely claimed to be maintaining continuity with the unchanging truth of Christian faith. Ancient issues of permanence and change were raised by these ‘anomalies’ of apparent sudden doctrinal agreement after centuries of genuine, long-standing disagreements. At the theological level, difficult questions about what true reconciliation entails were being asked. Lindbeck’s book was, in part, trying to answer these very particular problems or ‘anomalies’ of the ecumenical movement.” [1] 
• Lindbeck sought a way for both sides to achieve unity without losing what made them unique. A famous line from ND reflecting this goal is “Unity without doctrinal capitulation.” His solution was to reach for a theory (what we now called the Cultural Linguistic theory) used in the social sciences, that he could apply to doctrine. He looked at religion non-theologically and suggests that our theory of religion and doctrine can’t be ecumenically useful if it is implausible in more general non-ecumenical settings.  
• Work with the Cultural-Linguistic theory of religion/doctrine eventually blossomed into the e The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (1984). The book was intended as a prolegomena to a larger work (the latter work was never written)
  

Two Major Approaches/Poles  to Religion/Doctrine:  In terms of book organization, Lindbeck suggests the chapters in ND don’t need to be in the particular order they are in. More important than chapter order, however, is the three-fold  typology he offers for theories of doctrine. Lindbeck suggests that prior to his own day doctrine had been looked at in two major ways (i.e. cognitive-propositionalist & experiential-expressivist) with a few heroic but unconvincing third method that attempted to blend both (e.g. Bernard Longergan). Lidnbeck describes these options and then follows with his own (#3 below) middle way: 

1. Cognitive Propositionalist theory of religion – (objective pole)  approaches to theology involves propositions that correspond to reality. “emphasizes the cognitive aspects of religion and stresses the ways in church doctrines function as informative propositions or truth claims about objective realities” These are evaluated cognitively. (16) Truth, falsity, assent, etc.. eg. Aquinas 
2. Experiential Expressive theory of religion –  (subjective pole)  theology/ religion is an outward manifestation of inner spiritual experiences. This is liberalism – “universal feeling about the ultimate.” Expressivism “interprets doctrines as noninformative and nondiscursive symbols of inner feelings, attitudes, or existential orientations” (16). Here the inner takes priority.  E.g. Schleiermacher2 (Fits more with our individualistic culture keen to respect diversity, self realization, self expression)2.5 Blended approach. A few heroic efforts were made to blend the above two. Lindbeck finds these unconvincing. 

3. Cultural Linguistic Approach. This is Lindberg’s major alternative  to approaches 1 and 2 above. Religions/doctrine can be looked at as neither truth claims (way 1) or so many expressions of subjective experience (way 2) but as rules for how to speak and act in a religious community. This method steps outside of any ontological description and instead gives a functional description.  Lindbeck is primarily concerned with how religion functions in communities – and is less interested in whether it captures what is real.  (More on this later)
   Keeping his three-fold taxonomy in view is essential to not getting lost while reading The Nature of Doctrine. 

Terminology: Post-Liberal Theology (postliberal is somewhat of a catchall term for Lindbeck’s project/method of applying the cultural-linguistic approach to Religion and Doctrine. Again it is Lindbeck’s proposal to push beyond the deadlock of the previous two methods. Lindbeck notes that postliberal could equally be referred to as postmodern, post-revisionist, or post-neo-orthodox.3 It is postmodern in that it harmonizes with other movements in the late 20th century that eschewed metanarratives / foundationalism and instead opened up a space for the equal value of multiple perspectives. Postliberalism is sometimes called narrative theology or The Yale School. Hunsinger (in his Cambridge Companion chapter to Postmodern Theology)  implies that its really not clear who fits into the “Yale School” category other than Frei and Lindbeck. Other books note a Chicago vs Yale debate that waged over postliberalism in the late 1980s. Less disputed is the fit between Frei’s work on Biblical narrative and Lindbeck’s postliberalism. 

The term “postliberalism,” according to George Hunsinger, first showed up in Hans Frei’s (1956) dissertation as a way to describe Barth’s shift from liberal to post liberal. Postliberal means (after liberal) in the sense of (a) modernism followed by Enlightenments attacks leading to (b) liberalism which gave way in the 20th century to (c)  post-liberalism which supplanted Liberalism. Lindbeck is not the first to seek  a middle way between liberalism and conservativism. Consider the following:

1. 1. Mid 19th century “Mediating theology” (tied confessional, pietistic and liberal elements)
   2. Barths’ neo-orthodoxy sought to avoid biblical literalism and liberalism of Schleiermacher and Von Harnack who were guilty of “the plain destruction of Protestant theology and the Protestant church.” 
      1. Emil Brunner’s “theology of crisis” similarly held that liberalism/conservativism had betrayed certain key Reformation principles (e.g. God’s sovereignty and the freedom of the Word.)
      2. Reinhold Niebur argued that fundamentalism made Christian myths into literal realities but liberalism failed to take Christian myths seriously. Both were hopeless. 

George Hunsinger says that Lindbeck’s Cultural linguistic theory is really three theories:  a theory of religion, a theory of doctrine, and a theory of truth. The theory of religion is “cultural” the theory of doctrine is “regulative,” and the theory of truth is “pragmatist.” [4 ] I will insert between the 2nd and 3rd…  a statement about the relationship between experience and language because it helps to understand what he means by “categorical” view of truth. So we will have four key concepts rather than Hunsinger’s three. 

[1] Cultural-Linguistic Theory of Religion – Religions are  “comprehensive interpretive schemes,  (Geertz’s term) usually embodied in myths or narratives and heavily ritualized, which structure human experience and understanding of self and world” (ND, 32). So how is this like a language? Becoming religious is like learning a language. Linbeck suggests that  when one acquires a culture or language they interiorize “outlooks that others have created” and they master “skills that others have honed.” In terms of Narrative theology, religious groups speak and live a “narrative” over time. 

Lindbeck drew on a variety of sources from the social sciences and philosophy as he constructed his cultural linguistic thinking. These included:  

• (a) Clifford Geertz’s anthropology work and application of this idea to religion. It had deeper roots in Marx, Weber and Durkeim. Says Grant Miller Francisco (1999) [5]

• (b)  The later Wittgenstein’s – especially his concept of language games helped to formulate the rule theory of doctrine:  
  • In Philosophical Investigations – Wittgenstein introduces the idea of “language games.” The meaning of language depends on the rule/game being played. Words don’t have substantive meaning in themselves. They derive meaning from the game/context. So for Wittgenstein, a goal of communication analysis is to look at the game being played. [6]
  • Similarly for Lindbeck the linguistic “rules” of the game would be carried over into the way doctrine and religion were conceptualized. In a cultural linguistic framework,  doctrines function “not as (a) expressive symbols or (b) truth claims, but as communally authoritative rules of discourse, attitude, and action” (Nature of Doctrine, 18) 
  • We all have contexts (in a postmodern reality) that we speak from – so – a metanarrative is hard to swallow. 

[2] Rule Theory of Doctrine – If becoming religious is like learning a language, then doctrine can be likened to the rules of grammar for that language. You can’t do whatever you want with the words of a language.  Languages need rules to work properly. Likewise religions need rules (i.e. doctrines) to work.  Doctrines are the communally authoritative rules that govern thoughts, actions, emotions. (ND 18) They are second order, not first order. Remember that for Wittgenstein, the meaning of words in language do not latch directly onto reality in a first order way. One must first determine what language games (this is not a pejorative term) a person is involved in before they can know what words mean. Similarly doctrines do not latch directly onto reality in a first order way. Actually Lindbeck is not denying that they can; but his theory is heavily occupied with role that doctrine plays in a second order way.

Therefore, doctrines, like confessing the Nicene creed, do not serve to make “first order truth claims” (ND 19). “Doctrines regulate truth claims by excluding some [claims] and permitting others but the logic of their communally authoritative use . . . prevents them from specifying positively what is to be affirmed.” (ND 19) The key is that whatever we say or doctrinally, we need to make sure we don’t contradict how Nicea says we have to speak about God.

• Doctrines are not first-order statements about, for example, God, or Christ, or the Church; rather, they are second-order statements which provide the rules for speaking about God, Christ, Church, etc. As such, they make intrasystematic, not ontological, truth-claims (80). Just as the grammatical rules of a language only make claims about how the language in fact works and not about extra-linguistic reality, so doctrines have to do with the correct usage of theological statements without making ontological claims.” Fransisco (see bu.edu article below) 

• Grammar doesn’t tell you what “I love God means” it just tells you you can’t say “I God love”. 

[3] The Inner vs Outer Relationship Between Language and Experiences. Does experience come before language or do we have to have language first to genuinely have experience. Lindbeck is keen to defeat the Experiential-Expressivist view of the relationship between language and experience. The latter group held experience to be primary, and subsequently expressed in a variety of religious experiences. Lindbeck gets at this issue by talking about “inner” and “outer” or “interior” and “exterior.”  

• Interior – Exterior Reversal 

• • • Experiential/Expressivism sees religion as an external/outer  expression/ordering of  a shared internal human experience. The experience is pre-linguistic and internal. It is externally expressed by language. 
    • Cultural-Linguistic approach to religion sees inner experience as deriving from outer/exterior religious systems. We can not genuinely have an experience that we do not have words to express. To be religious is to “interiorize a set of skills [developed by the community through] practice and training.” (ND, 35)

• The key idea here is that it is our acquired language/religion that shapes the experiences we have of reality and not vice versa. 
• Jay Wesley Richards puts it this way:
  
  “A recurring sub-theme is a polemic against experiential-expressivism’s priority of experience over language (a priority he often attributes to modern ism generally). He notes that much recent scholarship has revealed the importance of the acquisition of language for the very possibility of experience: ‘[I]t is necessary to have the means for expressing an experience in order to have it.’ He presupposes the work of scholars like Geertz and Noam Chomsky for support for this claim. Although he admits a dialectical relation of language and experience, he is usually insistent about the priority of the former for the latter: ‘Thus language, it seems, shapes domains of human existence and action that are preexperiential.” [7]

• Liberalism says: Religions are just different words/language, different expressions for our common spiritual experience of the divine. Religion is a purely personal “sentiment.” 
  • Post-Liberalism says: No,  religions are cultural-linguistic frameworks. They provide the conceptual categories and words that make experiences, in the way we experience them, possible. It is not necessarily possible for people in different religions to have the same experiences. It is not necessarily possible for people who share different mother tongues to have exactly the same experiences.  This means liberalism’s universal inner experience of the divine is no longer possible (ND 40) 
  • p 340 “To become Christian involves learning the story of Israel and Jesus well enough to interpret and experience oneself and one’s world in its terms.” 
• This brings us to Postliberalism’s relationship to Postfoundationalism – C.C. Pecknold calls it a postfoundational approach, by suggesting that cognitive propositional and experiential-expressive are two different forms of foundationalism. [8] Expressions find their truth by being grounded foundationally in reality or a real universal religious experience.  

[4] Lindbeck’s Pragmatic Theory of Truth – pragmatism tends to assess concepts in terms of their effects or consequences in life. [9]

• Hunsinger and C.C. Pecknold say that Lindbeck’s view of truth was a pragmatic view of truth while, in contrast, Hans Frei “quietly aligned himself” with  moderate propositionalism.” 10  Lindbeck calls his view of religion a “non-theogical” theory which avoids adjudicating between which religion is more more – but at the same time feels required to make sense of these sorts of claims religions make to “unsurpasibility.” (ND, 46). Lindbeck must obviously deal with truth if he is to succeed in ecumenical work.  Most interreligious dialogue is often dialogue over competing truth claims and thus Lindbeck needed a way around this problem. He opens chapter three of ND by suggesting we might evaluate the “truth” of religions in three ways. Depending on which sense of “true” you go with… will affect what it means for a religion’s claim to be “unsurpassable.” The three options are:
   
  • Cognitively/Propositionally
  • Symbolic Efficacy 
  • Categorical Adequacy  
• [1] Cognitive/Propositional Truth – this is the correspondence view of truth;  what is true is what corresponds to reality through first-order propositions. (ND 63, 69) This is the Orthodox approach to truth. Religion is here  evaluated in terms of how isomorphic it is to reality (or not). (ND 47) Here then, a religion’s claim to be “unsurpassable” religion would be that it most accurately corresponds to reality. The idea is “propositional inerrancy.” (ND 49) Christianity often claims this position.
   
• [2] Symbolic Efficacy. This is the view used by experiential-expressive models of religion. Here truth is more a matter of degree. How well does this this or that religion effectively express/symbolize/capture that one universal inner experience of the divine that is the source of all religion when compared to other religions? Unsurpassibility on this view of truth is harder to express. It’s like asking which painting is unsurpassably beautiful. Something more beautiful could come along. Technically the unsurpassable religion in this sense would be that religion which offered the greatest experience of the divine by the time history ended so that no other faith could come along and offer more symbolically efficacious experience of the divine.  
• [3] Categorical Adequacy – this is the view Lindbeck prefers. It is much harder to capture because we are dealing with adequacy. It helps to start by realizing that views (1) and (2) above can be used to compare religions. We could attempt to say which religion is more effective at symbolizing the inner experience of the real (see view 2). Likewise someone could try to say which faith claims more adequately correspond to reality (1). This is not possible with a categorical adequacy view of truth.  This is probably why Hunsinger suggests this is like comparing two bananas to an apple. [11 ] Here religions are all in different working with completely different categories as they try to capture what they take to be ultimate. Different religions are like different languages. Certain concepts and categories are completely out of place in a different religion. They are incommensurable and can’t be compared.   Religions live out narratives/stories.   They are different ways of describing what those groups take to be most real.
  
  It is almost as if Lindbeck is saying that a religion is true to the extent that its community lives out what they claim to be ultimate and real. He suggests that a religion “as actually lived… may be pictured as one giant proposition.” that is true if people embody the objectives (a vague word to be sure) of their religion in live them out in a way that expresses what that religion holds to be true. The best map or most true map is the map that best helps you get where you are going – regardless of how accurate it is.  

  Pecknold says “Truth for Lindbeck cannot adequately be expressed in either propositional or experiential terms. Lindbeck supposes that truth is best thought of analogically, as an organically ‘lived’ reality. Truth is used in three senses (see below) [12]  The Result of Lindbecks Theory of Truth – Regarding truth: The “cultural-linguistic” model constituted a genuine third way because it claimed that coherentist and correspondence theories of truth need not oppose each other, since a coherentist thesis could eventually be said to correspond to reality as a kind of lived proposition.” [13]
  

Lindbeck doesn’t want to rule out the possibility of propositional truth but he finds a way to make it secondary and dependent upon the other two concepts of truth.  

• Ontological Truth-  correspondence theory of truth – truth that corresponds to reality through first-order propositions. (ND 63, 69)  Often used by the cognitivist view of religion.
  
• Intrasystematic Truth- coherence view of truth – coherence among the parts of the system. “[I]ntrasystematic truth or falsity is fundamental in the sense that it is a necessary though not sufficient condition for … ontological correspondence. A statement … cannot be ontologically true unless it is intrasystematically true, but intrasystematic truth is quite possible without ontological truth. (ND, 64)
  
• Categorical Truth – the adequacy of an ordered set of categories to construe reality and order life. This is like “grammar” or “language game” in Wittgensteinian terms. Bruce Marshal writes that  “Categorical, and intrasystematic truth together are the necessary and sufficient conditions of ontological truth.” (Marshall, 1989, 366)

Regarding Truth, Lindbeck Isn’t Opting for Relativism

V. M. Karkkainen (from personal doctoral seminar notes) states. “Let me say something about correspondence… in response to an earlier comment where one of you suggested that ‘If there is no correspondence can I just pick any view I want.” Let me try to defend Lindbeck a bit. He is against hyper individualism of our culture that makes even truth, let alone lifestyle, a matter of your own choice. He instead says it is the community [that plays a key role in the question of truth] .

Second he’s against allowing experience to dominate religious dialogue because this makes the whole idea of religion some sort of non-discursive, non-thematic thing like Schleiermacher’s feeling of ultimate dependence. He says this is bad for ecumenical dialogue. It is empty.  It merely just accommodates modernity. Lindbeck is looking for a way to ground the NATURE of the doctrine, like the title says, but also the USE of doctrine. He wants to anchor it in the life and practice of the community which necessarily links doctrine with tradition. His proposal is more nuanced than you might first think. One of the liabilities of the book is that it says very little about tradition. You wouldn’t have any religion or practicing community unless there is a tradition. He talks instead of narrative and the story. He speaks of religion as a communal practice of that story.”

Doctrine and Religious Texts: Intertextual vs Extratextual. 

• Doctrines are rules about communal religious life, but they are ultimately sourced in texts like the Bible. What is the relationship between doctrine and text and text then? Does the Biblical text absorb the world OR is the text absorbed by the world? Lindbeck wants the former to occur. Although confusing at first, these two phrases are rather simple: 
• World Absorbs Text: Here we understand what the Bible, or Koran, “means” by adjusting that meaning to beliefs in the modern day world (i.e. the world absorbs the text). Creation science does this with Genesis. Genesis must mean what we understand modern science to be telling us. This sounds like Bultmann’s call to demythologize scripture. You can see how doctrinal meaning would radically change as the world changes or inner experience changes. 
• Text Absorbs the World. Here we step inside the world of the scripture and take it on its own terms. We let it establish its own facts, values, events, etc… and then having inhabited that mindset, we see our world and think about our world with these lenses on. Augustine struggled mightily to do this. Lindbeck suggests this requires a sensitivity to a sort of literal reading of the text (sensus literalis) What is the plain sense of the text taken on its own terms. Pecknold helpfully writes “This is the view scripture as a nonfictional novel, as realistic narrative (‘history-like’). [16]  
  • This latter text-absorbs-world approach gives doctrine needed stability: “It is the intertextual norm of this realistic narrative which counts as faithfulness in matters of doctrinal (or metaphysics, etc) dispute. (Pecknold, 31) 
• Extra-Textual-Meaning: Both Cognitive-Propositional and Experiential-expressivist models of religion locate the meaning of the text externally in the world (outside the text or semiotic system) in personal religious experience or accurate correspondence to the real world. We would not, for example, attempt to force upon a novel contemporary cultural or scientific ideas… if they were foreign to the world presented in the novel. 
• Intratextual-Meaning. Intratextual theology redescribes reality within the scriptural framework rather than translating Scripture into extrascriptural categories. It is the text, so to speak, which absorbs the world, rather than the world the text (ND 118) This idea probably comes from Hans Frei’s Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (1974). Frei had argued that Liberal handling of the Bible had, in all its form/source/text criticism lost sight of (i.e. eclipsed) the basic contained story of the Biblical narrative. 
  • Mark Mann writes “Primacy is given to the scriptural “narrative” (Hans Frei): the Bible is unified by a complex but coherent narrative which centers on the personal agent Jesus, the Bible should not be read by attempting to impose a foreign or independent interpretive framework upon it (remythologizing?); it should be read self-referentially in order to construct a comprehensive vision of life and reality” [17]
  • David Tracy “The hands may be the hands of Wittgenstein and Geertz but the voice is the voice of Karl Barth.” (Tracy, 465)

Lindbeck on Doctrines. In Lindbecks work, “doctrine” and “theology” are not synonymous terms as is normally the case. Furthermore, not all doctrines are treated the same. Communities may have beliefs that seem to fit the profile of doctrines but aren’t actually written anywhere.  Lindbeck recognizes two types of doctrine via a Official/Operational Distinction: 

• Official Doctrines: doctrines that are proclaimed to be valid. These may or may not play an actual role in who fits and does not fit within the community.
• Operational Doctrines: beliefs/doctrines that play a role in deciding who is in/out of the community.  
  • • For example a church group may not claim to hold officially to the Niceanum. They may claim to have no creed but the Bible. However, they would reject from the community anyone who doesn’t hold to the deity of Christ (i.e. true God from true God, begotten not made). The doctrine is still operational even though not official. 

• How do doctrines stay the same while changing over time? There is a fixed-yet-flexible nature of doctrine. As long as the regulative principles at the heart of a doctrine stay the same, the words and concepts that express those regulative principles could theoretically change without loss of the doctrine. Lindbeck suggests that the Nicene creed could, at some subsequent point in history, have been re-written with completely different wording, provided that those words adhered to three regulative principles that Lindbeck (following Lonergan) sees coming out of Nicea: (a) ‘monotheistic principle” (there is only one God) (b) “principle of historical specificity (Jesus was a  real historical person) (c ) principle of “chirstological maximalism” (that ascribes every conceivable importance to Jesus without breaking the first two rules).14 Pecknold writes “these logical rules are what are permanent, not their terminology or concepts in which they are formulated at any given point in history.” He goes on to quote Lindbeck as saying, “the terminology and concepts… may be absent, but if the same rules that guided the formation of the original paradigms are operative in the construction of the new formulations, they express one and the same doctrine … .There may, on this reading a complete faithfulness to classical Trinitarianism and Christology even when the imagery and language of Nicea and Chalcedon have disappeared from the theology and ordinary worship, preaching, and devotion. [15]
  
  Furthermore, the conditions in which a doctrine is held, may change. If our belief on human constitution changes (e.g. body-soul dualism vs monism) then the doctrine of the immortality of the soul 
  • • Unconditionally Necessary Doctrines – “the law of love”, love one another.  It always applies, Christianity is not what it is without it. 
    • Conditionally Essential Doctrines – doctrines that are essential at some times but not others (e.g. pacifism). 

The Lasting Impact of Lindbeck. (more needed)

• • Bruce Marshall was his most famous student.
  • While certain works have been written that make use of postliberalism, C.C. Pecknold says, early on in his monograph, that if there ever was a postliberal school of theology it is gone now. This strikes me as a rather strong claim. Similarly George Hunsinger says “Lindbeck’s ‘rule theory’ of doctrine has not had many takers, nor is it likely to do so.”[18] It seems that writers like Hunsinger and Pcknold have taken and modified Postliberal theology to what they see as more accurate formats. 

 

 

Endnotes

1. C. C. Pecknold, Transforming Postliberal Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2005), 17. 
2. “thinkers of this tradition all locate ultimately significant contact with whatever is finally important to religion in the prereflective experiential depths of the self and regard the public or outer features of religion as expressive and evocative objectifications (i.e. nondiscursive symbols) of internal experience” (ND 21).
3. See: George Lindbeck, 1984, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion & Theology in a Postliberal Age, Philadelphia, PA: The Westminster Press, 113, fn. 1).
4. George Hunsinger, “Postliberal Theology,” in Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology, edited by Kevin Vanhoozer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 44. 
5. http://people.bu.edu/wwildman/bce/mwt_themes_862_lindbeck.htm
6. See https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2018/02/the-bridge-that-george-lindbeck-built
7. Richards, Jay Wesley. “Truth and Meaning in George Lindbeck’s “The Nature of Doctrine”.” Religious Studies 33, no. 1 (1997): 33-53. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20008070.
8. C.C. Peckhold, Transforming Postliberal Theology, (New York: T&T Clark. 2005), 3-4.
9. C. C. Peckhold, Transforming Postliberal Theology, 25. 
10. George Hunsinger, “Postliberal theology” in Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology, ed. By Kevin Vanhoozer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 43. 
11. Hunsginger, “Postliberal Theology”, in The Cambridge, Companion to Theology, edited by Kevin Vanhoozer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 45.
12. This is according to Joas Adiprasetya, 2005 at http://people.bu.edu/wwildman/bce/mwt_themes_862_lindbeck.htm
13. Ibid.
14. C. C. Pecknold, Transforming Postliberal Theology, 29.
15. Pecknold, Transforming Postliberal Theology, 29. 
16. Pecknold, Transforming Postliberal Theology, 31. 
17. See the same people.bue.edu/wwildman/bce/mwt_themes_862_lindbeck.htm link 
18. George Hunsinger, “Postliberal Theology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 50.