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No theological perspective has a commanding place or an especially impressive following these days. Various theologies compete for attention in a highly pluralized field, and no theology has made much of a public impact. One significant and inescapable development, however, has been the emergence of "postliberal" theology, a major attempt to revive the neo-orthodox ideal of a "third way" in theology.

For nearly as long as modern theology has existed, efforts have been made to locate a third way between conservatism and liberalism. The idea of a third way was intrinsic to mid-19th-century German "mediating theology," which blended confessional, pietistic and liberal elements. Two generations later, neo-orthodoxy issued a more aggressive appeal for a third way. While insisting that he was not tempted by biblical literalism, Karl Barth began his dogmatics by describing the liberal tradition of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Adolf von Harnack as "the plain destruction of Protestant theology and the Protestant church." Emil Brunner’s "theology of crisis" similarly maintained that in different ways Protestant liberal-ism and Protestant orthodoxy both betrayed the Reformation principles of the sovereignty and freedom of the Word of God. Reinhold Niebuhr took a different tack toward a similar end, arguing that fundamentalism was hopelessly wrong because it took Christian myths literally, while liberal Christianity was hopelessly wrong because it failed to take Christian myths seriously.

Neo-orthodoxy was an umbrella term for various profoundly different theologies. It was embraced in the U.S. by thousands of pastors and theologians, who generally got their theology from Brunner and Niebuhr rather than from Barth. American neo-orthodoxy in the 1940s and 1950s typically meant a compound of Brunner’s dogmatics, Niebuhr’s theological ethics, and the scripture scholarship of the biblical theology movement. This movement, a reaction to the perceived sterility of earlier, purely analytic studies, emphasized the unifying themes of scripture and stressed the revelatory acts of God in history as described in the Bible.

The neo-orthodox movement was stunningly successful in reorienting the field of modern theology. The biblical language of sin, transcendence and the Word of God resumed a prominent place in theological discourse.

But in a remarkably brief period of time, the house of neo-orthodoxy crashed. During the 1960s, the theological giants of neo-orthodoxy passed away, James Barr’s claims about the uniqueness of biblical semantics dismantled biblical theology, and Langdon Gilkey exposed the incoherence of neo-orthodox God-language. Gilkey showed that for all of its condemnations of theological liberalism, neo-orthodoxy construed the meaning of the scriptural "mighty acts of God" in essentially liberal terms. Gilkey later called attention to a secularizing trend in theology -- he called it "death-of-God theology" -- which was led by former Barthians such as William Hamilton and Paul van Buren. Shortly after that, the first currents of liberation theology emerged in Latin America and the U.S., making neo-orthodoxy seem stuffy, provincial and oppressive.

Though postliberals’ connections to neo-orthodoxy are not widely touted in postliberal writings, the connections are significant. The postliberal movement is essentially a Barthian project -- one that, in certain respects, is more deeply influenced by Barth than American neo-orthodoxy was in its glory days.

Postliberal theology began as a Yale-centered phenomenon. It was founded by Yale theologians Hans Frei and George Lindbeck, who wrote the movement’s founding texts and who (before Frei’s untimely death in 1988) trained most of its key advocates. Prominent figures in the development of the postliberal school have included such Yale-trained theologians as James J. Buckley, J. A. DiNoia, Garrett Green, Stanley Hauerwas, George Hunsinger, Bruce D. Marshall, William Placher, George Stroup, Ronald Thiemann and David Yeago. A generally younger group of Yale-trained postliberals now contributing to the development of postliberalism includes Kathryn Greene-McCreight, Serene Jones, David Kamitsuka, Ian McFarland, Paul McGlasson, Joe Mangina, R. R. Reno, Gene Rogers and Kathryn Tanner. Numerous theologians from different academic backgrounds share key affinities with the postliberal movement; they include William Willimon, evangelical ecumenists Stanley Grenz and Gabriel Fackre, the late Baptist theologian James William McClendon Jr. and British theologians Rowan Williams and David Ford.

The school’s founding argument was propounded by Frei in The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (1974). Frei observed that modern conservative and liberal approaches to the Bible both undermine the authority of scripture by locating the meaning of biblical teaching in some doctrine or worldview that is held to be more foundational than scripture itself. Before the Enlightenment, he explained, most Christians read the Bible primarily as a kind of realistic narrative that told the overarching story of the world. The coherence of this story made figural interpretation possible; certain events within and outside of scriptural narrative were viewed as having prefigured or reflected the central biblical events. Jews and Christians made sense of their lives by viewing themselves as related to and participating within the story told in scripture.

Frei argued that during the Enlightenment this sense of scripture as realistic narrative was lost. Because their own rationalized experience increasingly defined for them what was "real," theologians sought to understand scripture by relating it to their own (supposedly universal) "reality." That is, they sought to determine the truth within and about scripture by translating it into the truer language of their own world. The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative offered a richly detailed survey of the ways 18th- and 19th-century theologians overlooked the narrative character of scripture, but fundamentally, Frei argued, there were two main strategies by which modernist (and modernist-influenced) theologians reconstrued scriptural meaning. Liberals looked for the real meaning of the Bible in the eternal truths about God and humanity that it conveyed, while conservatives looked for the real meaning in the Bible’s factual references.

In both cases, the priority of scriptural narrative itself was overturned. Scripture no longer defined the world in which Christians lived in a normative way; rather, the Bible was turned into a source of support for modern narratives of progress or for other doctrinal norms. "All across the theological spectrum the great reversal had taken place," Frei remarked. "Interpretation was a matter of fitting the biblical story into another world with another story rather than incorporating that world into the biblical story."

With the loss of scripture as a grand formative narrative, the Bible became increasingly alien to the church. Its meaning became decipherable only to an academic elite. Liberal scholars looked for culture-affirming eternal truths in scripture and otherwise deconstructed the canonical text into historical-critical fragments. Conservatives and evangelical fundamentalists turned the text into source material for propositions and developed highly artificial harmonizations of conflicting factual statements that created internal "solutions" not found in scripture at all.

Frei gave most of his attention to the varieties of liberalism, but his verdict applied equally to most forms of modern liberal and conservative theology. "No one who pretended to any sort of theology or religious reflection at all wanted to go counter to the ‘real’ applicative meaning of biblical texts, once it had been determined what it was, even if one did not believe them on their own authority," he remarked. The "real" meaning became all-determinative.

Conservatives held out for the literal meaning of various factual references in scripture, and liberals countered that modern science and historical-critical investigations negated literal meaning as an interpretive possibility. In both cases, the sense of scripture as canonical narrative was abandoned.

The seeds of a postliberal third way were planted in this account of biblical interpretation. Frei emphasized the primacy of scriptural narrative for theology. His colleague George Lindbeck added an insistence on the primacy of language over experience and a theory about religion as a cultural-symbolic medium. Drawing on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s analysis of language and the cultural anthropology of Clifford Geertz, Lindbeck’s major work, The Nature of Doctrine (1984), offered an account of contemporary theological options that reinforced and amplified much of Frei’s argument.

Lindbeck argued for a "cultural-linguistic" understanding of religion as opposed to the "cognitive-propositional" and "experiential-expressive" approaches that have, he said, dominated theology during the modern age. Liberal theologies are nearly always experiential-expressive, he argued; they seek to ground religious language upon foundational claims about experiences of religious feeling, moral value, or the like. Most conservative theologies are cognitive-propositional; they claim that doctrinal statements directly or "literally" refer to reality. Lindbeck observed that in their emphasis upon the function of religious language as propositional information about objective realities, conservative theologians tend to confirm the approach to religion taken by most Anglo-American analytic philosophers. Analytic philosophy typically assumes that religious language is meaningful only if it makes universally valid statements about matters of fact in the form of propositions.

Unfortunately for analytic philosophy, no religion can actually be understood on these terms. Lindbeck contended that religious traditions are historically shaped and culturally encoded, and are governed by internal rules. Any explanation of religious belief that disregards these factors will inevitably distort the religious tradition under examination. In the case of Christianity, he observed, it is scriptural narrative that shapes the cultural-linguistic world in which the corporate body of Christ expresses its meanings and seeks to follow Christ. Christian doctrines should not be understood as universalistic propositions or as interpretations of a universal religious experience. Doctrines are more like the rules of grammar that govern the way we use language to describe the world. Christian doctrine identifies the rules by which Christians use confessional language to define the social world that they indwell.

Following Wittgenstein, Lindbeck emphasized the connection between "rationality" and the skillful use of acquired rules. Believers, he argued, can prove the rationality or relevance of their religious tradition (or any tradition) only by skillfully using its internal grammar: "The reasonableness of a religion is largely a function of its assimilative powers, of its ability to provide an intelligible interpretation in its own terms of the varied situations and realities adherents encounter."

Lindbeck’s model of religious understanding did not rule out the possibility of apologetics -- of speaking to people who do not share the linguistic world of Christianity. It ruled out only the kind of apologetic that appeals to reasons that are prior to faith. The logic of coming to believe in Christianity, he contended, is like that of learning a language. Rational arguments on behalf of Christian claims become possible only after one has learned through spiritual training how to speak the language of Christian faith. Moreover, the meaning of Christian language can be found only within scripture. Instead of trying to translate scripture into extrascriptural categories, Lindbeck proposed redescribing reality "within the scriptural framework." In this approach, "it is the text, so to speak, which absorbs the world, rather than the world the text." If theologians allowed the story of the Bible to become their own story, he argued, they would be less preoccupied with making Christianity relevant to the non-Christian world on non-Christian terms.

This principle applied equally to Christian communities: "Religious communities are likely to be practically relevant in the long run to the degree that they do not first ask what is either practical or relevant, but instead concentrate on their own intratextual outlooks and forms of life." Just as individuals are saved by faith, not by works, he reasoned, so are religious communities saved by faith, not by social-ethical success.

Lindbeck cautioned that he was not making an argument for religious withdrawal from social concerns, for faithfulness always bears good fruit in the social realm. It was biblical religion that produced modern science and democracy and other values cherished by Western civilization. But if the world is to be saved from the demonic corruptions of these values, he contended, it will need a revival of biblical religion to accomplish this saving work. Christianity is most redemptive as a force in the world when Christian churches focus their energies on building formative Christian communities that are rooted in the idioms and practices of biblical faith.

It followed for Lindbeck that Christian catechesis is a more appropriate emphasis for churches than the various modern strategies to make Christianity reasonable, attractive or relevant. He pointed out that for the most part, pagan converts to the early church did not absorb Christian teaching intellectually and then decide to become Christians. They were attracted to what they saw of the faith and practices of early Christian communities; only later did they come to understand very much about the faith, after a prolonged program of catechesis made them proficient in an alien grammar and way of life. This is the model that a spiritually serious church should seek to recover in a post-Christian age, Lindbeck suggested: "When or if dechristianization reduces Christians to a small minority, they will need for the sake of survival to form communities that strive without traditionalist rigidity to cultivate their native tongue and learn to act accordingly."

The school of theology founded by Frei and Lindbeck has emphasized the community-forming centrality of scriptural narrative and the countercultural mission of the church. With liberal theology, the postliberal school takes for granted that the Bible is not infallible and that biblical higher criticism is fully legitimate and necessary. With evangelical theology, the postliberal school emphasizes the primacy of biblical revelation, the unity of the biblical canon, and the saving uniqueness of Jesus Christ. In recent years some evangelicals have shown considerable sympathy for the postliberal school (notably Stanley Grenz, Nancy Murphey, Roger Olson and Clark Pinnock); other evangelicals have treated it respectfully while making strong objections against it (such as Donald Bloesch and Alister McGrath).

At the same time, many old-style conservative evangelicals have warned that postliberal theology is but the latest manifestation of a deadly neo-orthodoxy, which is all the more pernicious for its seeming affinity with conservative aims. In an early negative judgment on Frei, Carl F. H. Henry summarized the problem: Narrative theology drives a wedge between biblical narrative (which it plays up) and historical factuality (which it plays down). Moreover, by failing to ground their assertions about scripture in a logically prior doctrine of biblical inerrancy, the narrative theologians undermine their purported desire to uphold the unity and authority of scripture. Narrative theology has no substantive doctrine of biblical inspiration, no objective theory of biblical authority, no objective criterion for establishing religious truth, and only a partial account of scriptural unity. Furthermore, Henry noted, much of scripture consists of nonnarrative material, which makes the narrative category insufficient by itself to account for the canonical unity of scripture. As for the postliberal claim to eschew the experiential subjectivism of liberal theology, Henry charged that in elevating narrative over factuality, narrative theology becomes unable to distinguish truth from error or fact from fiction.

This critique made some telling points, some of which have been registered by others more sympathetic to postliberalism. For example, Harvard theologian Ronald Thiemann, who studied under Frei, objects that the cultural-linguistic model makes talk about the "text" stand in place of Christian talk about God; Yale biblical scholar Brevard Childs rejects Lindbeck’s talk about the text creating its own world. This way of speaking about scripture is rooted in the spiritual practices of the liturgical churches, Childs observes, not "the way the Bible actually functions within the church" -- apparently meaning, in this case, the nonliturgical churches.

Frei never claimed to have worked out satisfactory answers to such criticisms, and Lindbeck doesn’t claim to have done so either. But the postliberal founders have addressed many of these issues. In a pointed reply to Henry, for example, Frei admonished that such terms as "truth" and "reference" and "historical fact," which Henry relied on, are more ambiguous than is often recognized.

Indeed, Henry’s rationalistic evangelicalism epitomized Lindbeck’s cognitive-propositionalist type of theology. To Henry, the metaphors and narratives of scripture carry meaning as religious truths only if they are restated in propositional form. For this reason he regarded scriptural narrative as secondary in importance to the doctrines that scripture contains. Frei countered that this is not a biblical way of thinking. Though the Bible obviously contains multiple literary forms, he observed, it conveys meaning and truth primarily through narrative. Doctrines are conceptual redescriptions of biblical stories; they arise from the stories and point back to them. Though such redescriptions are surely needed in theology, he allowed, they are not the primary basis of theology. Biblical truth is conveyed primarily through stones.

Consider John 1:14: "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth." As a doctrinal statement, he observed, "the Word became flesh" can be understood only through the gospel story. Its religious meaning is not an independent proposition; it is comprehensible only as a sequence enacted in the gospel-narrated story of the ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus.

Frei did not deny that biblical truth is often cognitive or that it is sometimes expressed in scripture in propositional form. His argument against evangelical rationalism centered on its claim that truth can be expressed only in propositional form.

Like Barth, Frei contended that much of scriptural narrative is history-like without needing to be historical. The purpose of the Gospel stories is to narrate the identity of Jesus, he argued. For this reason many of the Gospel episodes function as illustrative anecdotes. They show us the kind of person that Jesus was. The test of their truth is not whether the particular incidents that they describe took place, but whether they truthfully narrate the identity of Jesus to us. The same principle applies to other scriptural narratives.

It followed for Frei (as for Barth) that it is fatally misguided for Christians to suggest that archaeology or form criticism or any other critical discipline should be the judge of how seriously Christian readers take the witness of scripture. The Christian in-dwells the narrative world of scripture and lives through its meanings. She does not decide whether scriptural testimony should be taken seriously on the basis of the most recent issue of the Biblical Archaeology Review. To her, the God described in Genesis is real whether the patriarchs really lived or not.

Does this mean that Frei-style narrative theology simply waves off the question of historical factuality? If biblical narratives do not derive their meaning by referring to historical events or ontological realities, how can biblical theology be anything more than a symbolic or mythical construct? If biblical theology makes no claim at all to a historical basis, doesn’t the narrative strategy simply reduce biblical truth to being merely a good story?

Many evangelical theologians have followed Henry in charging that Frei is hopelessly cut off from historical reality. Others have argued that Lindbeck too settles for a merely descriptive intratextual strategy that makes no normative truth claims.

Critics have also complained that the writings of Frei and Lindbeck are highly formal and that Frei’s prose style is evasive and impenetrable. Alister McGrath confesses that he is "verbally defeated by Frei’s prose, which is the most opaque I have ever been obliged to wrestle with." Frei was apparently incapable of writing in a way that was not highly allusive, elusive and vexatious. His keen intuitive sense of the nuances and complex interrelationships between arguments was evident to his students, but this same gift made it painfully difficult for him to make a clean or orderly account of his arguments. As George Hunsinger remarks, "The tortured syntax so often evident in his prose seemed to be matched only by the profundity of insight which that very syntax seemed at once to promise and yet also so vexingly to withhold."

Frei’s major constructive work, The Identity of Jesus Christ (1975), epitomized these qualities. The book was filled with disjointed fits and starts that tied up his argument and nearly strangled it. Moreover, some of Frei’s more lucid passages were calculated not to give comfort to many readers, especially evangelicals. A strong case can be made that historically the Christian story is not at all unique, he suggested: "This being the case, I shall not attempt to evaluate the historical reliability of the Gospel story of Jesus or argue the unique truth of the story on grounds of a true, factual ‘kernel’ in it. Instead, I shall be focusing on its character as a story." Later he argued that we know almost nothing about the historical Jesus apart from the gospel story and that "it is precisely the fiction-like quality of the whole narrative" of Jesus’ passion and resurrection that makes his identity present to us.

Frei recognized, however, that the Gospel narratives themselves do not support a sharp dichotomy between the gospel story and historical factuality. He noted in particular that the question of historical factuality is raised very forcefully in the stories of the crucifixion and resurrection. Mythical narratives always seek to sacralize fundamental religious symbols, but in the Gospels Jesus insists on the unsubstitutable uniqueness of his person and mission. He does not symbolize any mythical type or theme but is presented as unreplaceable. For this reason, Frei observed, the cross and resurrection story virtually forces readers to ask whether the events it describes actually took place. In other words, in the cross and resurrection story, the bond between the meaning of the story and what Jesus did is very tight, whereas in the story of the woman caught in adultery (John 8: 1-11), the story is true whether or not it actually occurred, because it shows us the kind of person that Jesus was.

Having emphasized that human minds on this side of eternity cannot comprehend the nature of the resurrection, Frei was careful not to make definitive statements about the content of the Easter proclamation. We cannot claim to know the manner of Christ’s presence in his resurrection appearances, he cautioned. Elsewhere he remarked that this was the problem with speaking of the resurrection as a historical fact.

"Of course I believe in the ‘historical reality’ of Christ’s death and resurrection, if those are the categories which we employ," Frei said. The problem is that the language of "historical factuality" is not theory-neutral and does not deserve to be absolutized. "There was a time when we didn’t talk, as many people have talked for nearly two hundred years now, about Jesus Christ being ‘a particular historical event,"’ he observed. "And it may well be that even scholars won’t be using those particular terms so casually and in so self-evident a fashion for much longer. In other words, while I believe that those terms may be apt, I do not believe, as Dr. Henry apparently does, that they are as theory-free, as neutral as he seems to think they are. I do not think that the concept ‘probability’ is theory-neutral. I do not think that we will talk theologically in those terms, perhaps, in another two generations. We didn’t talk that way three hundred years ago.

To say that the resurrection must be a "fact" of "history" is to make history contain something that obliterates its boundaries. If the resurrection actually occurred, it is an event without analogy. "History" as a category is too impoverished to contain it, and the usual historiocritical questions about the relative probability of different explanations are rendered useless. At the same time, Frei acknowledged, the gospel story clearly makes claims that are not less than historical. "If I am asked to use the language of factuality, then I would say, yes, m those terms, I have to speak of an empty tomb. In those terms I have to speak of the literal resurrection."

Near the end of his life Frei reflected that his personal stake in Lindbeck’s argument was very deep, and he exhorted Lindbeck not to back down from his truth claims about the truth status of Christian language. Frei lived long enough to see the emergence of a postliberal school, to which he bequeathed some vexing questions. Is the postliberal conception of Christian truth merely descriptive and evocative? Is it enough for theologians to say that biblical truth is the capacity of the text to draw readers into a new framework of meaning that makes sense of one’s life and world?

In the next issue I will look more closely at those questions and at the possible future of postliberalism.

Postliberal theology has affirmed the decisive significance and the integrity of the biblical narrative. But in what way do postliberals affirm the truth of Christianity? Are they merely saying that the Bible is true in the way that a work of fiction is true? Is it sufficient for the church to claim that biblical truth lies in the capacity of the scriptural text to draw readers into a new framework of meaning that makes sense of one’s life and world.

Much of the literature generated by and about postliberal theology has debated these questions. Meanwhile, the postliberal school founded in the 1970s by Hans Frei and George Lindbeck has entered its second generation and is showing signs of producing a variety of offshoots. As a school the postliberal project has been shorter on movement-consciousness than many previous schools of its kind, such as Boston personalism or the biblical theology movement. More important, the family resemblances among the different kinds of postliberal theology are getting thinner as the protegés of Frei and Lindbeck rethink what it means to say that Christianity is true.

One option for postliberal thinkers is to adhere to the idioms, or at least the general approach, of Frei and Lindbeck. This option describes a range of thinkers, including Garrett Green (Connecticut College), Stanley Hauerwas (Duke Divinity School) and William Placher (Wabash College). In this approach, the postliberal answer to the truth question is that scripture is true in the manner of its distinctively mixed genre and that, yes, it is enough to say that biblical truth is the capacity of the text to draw readers into a Christian framework of meaning. Philosophically, this stream of postliberal thinking draws chiefly on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose writing on "language games" emphasizes that meaning arises as a function of learning the internal coherence of a language.

A second strand of postliberal theologians seek to recover a premodern understanding of truth in order to secure the claims of Christian faith. One of the chief proponents of this view is Bruce D. Marshall (St. Olaf College), who in several essays and in his recent book Trinity and Truth maintains that theology must return to the rich trinitarian theism of Thomas Aquinas to get its bearings. However, informed by contemporary nonessentialist analytical philosophy, Marshall argues that even Aquinas was wrong in trying to Christianize epistemological realism.

A third trend in the postliberal school takes a very different tack, arguing that postliberal theology as a whole is overly preoccupied with epistemological debates and is too much focused on conserving tradition. Those who press these concerns, such as Kathryn Tanner (University of Chicago Divinity School) and Serene Jones (Yale Divinity School), work with a post-modern understanding of culture and a strong commitment to feminism. They are, in effect, rethinking the relation of postliberal theology to liberal theology in what way does it go beyond or counter classic liberalism?

These distinctions are not rigid; the movement remains very’ fluid. In recent discussions with Green, Hauerwas, Placher, Tanner and Marshall, I focused on these questions: Is postliberal theology distinguished fundamentally by its position on the nature of religious truth? Is postliberalism indeed a distinct alternative to theological liberalism and conservatism?

The truth question looms large in postliberal theology, and especially among the critics, who maintain that postliberal theology is deficient as a way of rendering Christian truth claims. Theologians pressing this criticism include Ian Barbour, Donald Bloesch, Brevard C. Childs, Gary Comstock, Alister McGrath, C. John Sommerville and Mark Wallace.

The attention to this issue bothers some in the postliberal school. "I think the epistemological realism-antirealism debate is overblown in its theological importance, and I try not to engage it," Tanner remarks. Hauerwas also dissents from the idea that "we need an epistemological theory’ about realism and antirealism." On the strength of Wittgenstein’s analysis of language and Alasdair MacIntyre’s analysis of language and social science, Hauerwas is predisposed "to leave behind epistemology." But if he had to choose between philosophical realism -- the belief that the objects of our thinking correspond to real entities -- and antirealism, then "I’m clearly a realist," Hauerwas says.

Green says epistemological questions can’t be avoided, but he has his own particular way of addressing them. Instead of investing theological significance in a theory about how the mind intuits objects of sense data, or about the reality of the world external to consciousness, or about the extent to which the mind is creative in producing experience, Green focuses on the role of imagination, a term which refers in ordinary conversation to fantasy and illusion, but which also refers to discovery, illumination and reality. Green argues that the truth question is unavoidable for theology precisely because God encounters us in the imagination.

Green’s version of postliberal theorizing on knowledge is compatible with the "cautious realism" that Placher also upholds. Placher cites Frei’s Barthian-like emphasis on the factual historicity that the gospel narrative contains, and, with Lindbeck, Placher argues that the relativity of our understanding does not negate or preclude the reality of that which we seek to understand. In The Nature of Doctrine, Lindbeck accepts Aquinas’s assertion that while we cannot begin to imagine what it means to say it, we must affirm that God is really good. Placher explains: "The significatum of our claims about God [in this case, that God is indeed good] corresponds to what is the case about God, but the modus significandi [any understanding we may have about what this claim means] doesn’t."

Placher’s book The Domestication of Transcendence elaborates this argument with the implicit purpose of showing that postliberal theology is not antirealist. "The reading of postliberal theology as antirealist can admittedly appeal to occasional unfortunate passages, but it seems to me a clear misreading of the texts taken as a whole," he contends.

Marshall would go a step further. In his influential essay "Aquinas as Postliberal Theologian," he argues that the realism of Aquinas complements Lindbeck. Marshall’s major work Trinity and Truth offers a rich blend of arguments drawn mainly from Aquinas, Lindbeck and analytic philosopher Donald Davidson. With Aquinas, whom he lands as the church’s best theologian of the divine triune ground of truth, Marshall argues that Christian theology must be "robustly trinitarian." With Lindbeck he argues that experience is belief-dependent and that experience therefore cannot provide the ground of meaning or the justification for beliefs (as Schleiermacher-style liberalism assumed). With Davidson he affirms a strong version of philosophical antifoundationalism, claiming that beliefs can be justified only by other beliefs. Put differently, beliefs are justified by their coherence with other beliefs that are not seriously questioned at a given time.

Says Marshall: "We cannot even figure out what sentences mean, and therefore what the contents of belief are, without relying on the concept of truth and the processes by which we decide whether sentences are true." The antirealist position is thus unpersuasive, he contends. At the same time, the notion that truth means "correspondence with reality" is vacuous, for truth does not submit to intentional definition or informative equivalents. This is the crucial point at which Marshall parts company with Aquinas. Aquinas believed that a Christianized epistemological realism is viable as a theory of truth. Marshall counters that no epistemological theory provides a conceptual equivalent to truth. Truth is conceptually basic. At the recent American Academy of Religion convention, Marshall clarified that his thinking is "realist" if realism merely refers to the belief that there is a world created by God that is neither God nor us. But in most philosophical discussion, he observes, realism usually means a commitment to the correspondence theory of truth, the law of the excluded middle and a nonepistemic view of truth.

Trinity and Truth argues that this package of philosophical presuppositions is not the basis on which the credibility of Christian beliefs should be judged. Instead of subordinating Christian claims to realist (or other) canons of truth that stand outside Christianity, Marshall proposes, Christian thinkers should argue from an explicitly Christian standpoint. The justifying ground of Christian belief is the trinitarian and incarnational logic of biblical narrative as expressed in Christian liturgical practices. God grants us true beliefs in order to give us a share in God’s life. "I am bending the antiessentialist philosophical tradition to Christian purposes," Marshall explains. His rethinking of the postliberal project amounts to a Christian reconceptualization of the correspondence theory of truth. In the movement of God’s Word in preaching and sacrament, God brings about a correspondence of our whole self to God’s self. The outwardly moving, self-relating divine ground of truth serves God’s purpose of making us bearers of Christ’s image by bringing us to true beliefs about God’s Triune self.

This argument brings postliberal theology closer to the idioms of Thomist metaphysics than anything that Hans Frei could have imagined. Marshall’s debt to Aquinas is deep and longstanding. With tongue slightly in cheek he remarks, "I used to believe that everything I believe, Aquinas also believed, but now I realize that Aquinas was wrong about a few things."

Marshall reports that the argument of his book first occurred to him when he read Lindbeck’s Nature of Doctrine. "Lindbeck brought home to me, as did Hans Frei in a different way, the idea that Christians can and should have their own ways of thinking about truth and about deciding what to believe," Marshall explains. "They need not take their truth claims on loan from some other intellectual or cultural quarter, or regard the only alternative to epistemic servitude as isolation from the broader human conversation about what is true."

The first part of this sentence is the Barthian key to postliberal theology; the second part underscores the determination to avoid the charge often leveled at postliberals -- of wanting to take up residence in a ghetto of "intratextuality" and rely on "revelational positivism."

Though Marshall’s argument is laden with the kind of category-splitting epistemological theorizing that Hauerwas usually resists, Hauerwas’s forthcoming Gifford Lectures will commend Marshall for advancing Barth’s project. Barth is the hero of Hauerwas’s lectures, and the closing chapter gives a prominent role to Marshall’s case for conceiving the Christian God as the truth, though it also suggests that Marshall underestimates the problem of cultural accommodation in modern theology.

Hauerwas remains ambivalent about the use of the term postliberalism ("I’ve never really thought of myself as being positioned beyond liberalism," he says), and he says he puts little stock in Lindbeck’s theory of religion. Yet his writings are filled with attacks on theological liberalism, and he shares with Marshall the postliberal insistence that Christian speech is supposed to reflect the practices of Christian communities. "What was important to me in Lindbeck’s book was his understanding of the church as the naming of Christian practices that put it at once in service to and over against the world."

For Hauerwas, accommodation to non-Christian assumptions is the fundamental failure of liberal theology. He sees such accommodation in the thought of theologian James Gustafson when he assumes the role of an "onlooker," posing questions to the Christian tradition.

In a 1998 exchange with Placher in the Christian Century, Gustafson charged that postliberals never give straight answers to questions about the historical credibility of biblical narrative or about the relation of Christian truth to the truth of other religions. In Gustafson’s rendering, postliberal theology is essentially a strategy to avoid such questions "by limiting the intellectual and social context within which theologians and pastors can think about what they are saying and doing." To Gustafson, the whole project smacks of a tribalist theology which exalts faithfulness to community identity "rather than openness to participation in the intersections of religious and theological outlooks with other outlooks on the same realities that religion and theology address."

Hauerwas challenges what he takes to be Gustafson’s effort to assume the position of a naturalistic historian and thereby seize the high ground. Like Ernst Troeltsch, Hauerwas remarks, Gustafson is trying "to find a place to name history outside history . . . and it won’t work." For his part, Hauerwas says, "I’m a historicist all the way down." Hauerwas adds that he admires Gustafson for being at least a consistent Troeltschian. "He’s willing to give up the christological claims in order to be a Troeltschian." Hauerwas adds: "That Gustafson never enters into argument with Barth seems to me quite indicative."

This point often arises in conversations with postliberals. Though it is not quite true that Gustafson and other liberals "never enter into argument against Barth," there is a pronounced tendency in liberal theology to dismiss Barth’s idea of truth as the self-authenticating word of God. Postliberals rightly complain that liberal critics repeatedly inveigh against a hoary insulated "neo-orthodoxy" that has little to do with Barth’s rich and profound thinking.

As a rule postliberal thinkers are not categorical in defining their relationship to liberal theology. Many postliberals acknowledge that their positions on the historicity of biblical narrative and the religious truth contained in non-Christian religions are compatible with liberalism. In emphasizing the priority of the biblical narrative, they do not aim to set up Christianity as a totalizing ideology that provides what Gustafson calls "epistemic privileges." To say that Christians should allow the biblical world to absorb their own world, Placher explains, is to affirm that Christians should resist viewpoints and ideologies that are incompatible with the central claims of scriptural teaching and that Christians should consider whether scriptural narrative "might be unexpectedly helpful" in understanding their own lives.

To Green, postliberal theology is most valuable as a critique of theological liberalism. Its greatest challenge is to make Barthian claims about theology make sense to people who are not disposed to like them. "The part of The Nature of Doctrine that remains most compelling to me is its persuasive diagnosis of the fatal weakness of theological liberalism -- its ‘experiential expressivism’ -- and the corresponding reminder that religion, like language and culture, shapes our most inward experiences rather than ‘expresses’ them," Green remarks. He judges that the biggest problem for Lindbeck-style theology is its failure to explain how the passive, receptive aspects of religion relate to religion’s active, reconstructive aspects. Green’s theorizing on imagination aims to tackle this problem, though he concedes that his thinking about imagination thus far has been fixated on its reproductive character at the expense of its active capacity. A more dialectical understanding of imagination could aid the cause, he allows, of making orthodoxy more generous and compelling.

"One of the hardest things about trying to follow Karl Barth is his apparent lack of interest in the liberal question of how theology can meet the challenges of modernity: historical criticism, the collapse of the ‘house of authority,’ the apparent disjunction between scientific and theological thinking, etc.," Green reflects. "I believe that valid Christian responses to these ‘liberal’ questions are implicit in Barth’s theology, but they are couched in terms that most moderns simply cannot or will not hear."

Green views himself as taking a different approach from those -- he would include Hauerwas in this camp -- "who want simply to oppose Christian to secular-humanist approaches and sensibilities." Postliberal thinkers have to find new ways to connect with the secular people who surround them, Green urges. They have to speak the gospel in ways that secularized modern people can hear: "That’s what led me to imagination in the first place, and I still believe that one can be true to the task of theology without compromising the essentials as did theological liberalism."

Lindbeck’s Nature of Doctrine grew out of his personal involvement in the ecumenical movement. He was seeking to account for the modern phenomenon of theological consensus in various interdenominational discussions. This ecumenical concern is reflected in the postliberal commitment to developing Frei’s "generous orthodoxy." In different ways, Green, Placher, Hauerwas and Marshall are all committed to renewing an orthodox Christian center. While disclaiming any nostalgia for neo-orthodoxy, the postliberal theologians are advancing the old neo-orthodox project of rethinking Christian orthodoxy in a modern spirit.

Some postliberals, such as Lindbeck, are especially interested in pursuing theological dialogues with evangelicals. Others are more interested in conversation with the Catholic tradition. Hauerwas observes that while Placher remains "determinedly Reformed" in his approach to theology, "some of us are definitely becoming more Catholic in our thinking." He does not believe that postliberal theology is likely to speak increasingly in an evangelical voice "unless you think that the most determinative evangelical voice among us today is that of John Paul II."

A significant trend within the postliberal movement agrees with Hauerwas and Marshall that the best way to a generous orthodoxy heads in a Catholic direction. Theologically, philosophically, historically and liturgically, this group believes, evangelical Protestantism is too thin to be the best interlocutor for a vital Protestant theology of the new century. Hauerwas explains: "The problem with the evangelical voice is too often all it voices is the New Testament and now. That simply gives Christians an inadequate resource to confront the kind of world in which we are living."

For Hauerwas and Marshall, the postliberal turn to Aquinas and the spiritual practices of the liturgical churches is linked to the original postliberal project of rethinking Christian orthodoxy in a postliberal spirit. Frei was an Episcopal priest; Lindbeck is a Lutheran ecumenist. Hauerwas remarks, "For me and my people, we will speak for the Catholic voice." He expects that this is the future of evangelicalism too: "My own hunch is that evangelicals will increasingly move in a more churchly traditional manner for a recovery of the Catholic tradition."

For years Gustafson, Max Stackhouse and others have charged that postliberal theology risks ghettoizing the church with its fixation on liturgical practices and on the ecclesial context of Christian speech. Meanwhile, liberation theologians have protested that postliberal theology is more concerned with Christian catechesis, formation and liturgy than with the struggle for social justice.

A mostly younger group of postliberals has taken up these criticisms. Kathryn Tanner, for example, criticizes postliberal theology for its tendency to insulate the church and theology from cultural pluralism, external criticism and issues of social justice. Serene Jones, David Kamitsuka (Oberlin College), Ian McFarland (Aberdeen), Gene Rogers (University of Virginia) and British theologians Rowan Williams and David Ford share affinities with this "progressive" form of postliberalism.

Tanner’s work reveals how different strands of thought are pushing postliberalism in new directions. She is significantly shaped by her sense of the postmodern intellectual climate and specifically by her understanding of postmodern culture. In Tanner’s telling, the modern view of culture conceives of culture as a self-contained unit with clear boundaries that separate one culture from another. Modern social theory and anthropology emphasize the way cultures provide norms that sustain social stability. Postmodern theory, on the other hand, plays up the lack of secure boundaries. It attends to hybrid cultures and to interactive boundaries. Unlike the idea of culture as a consensus-forming social phenomenon that resists change, the postmodern spirit is more impressed by the lack of consensus in cultures and by the dynamics for social change that already exist in cultures.

Tanner believes that modern theology has relied too much on a view of culture as a self-contained entity, and she argues that postliberal theology shares this deficiency. While postliberals have rightly perceived the importance of culture for Christian identity, they misuse Wittgenstein to serve their orthodox ends, says Tanner. Whereas Lindbeck and his followers invoke Wittgenstein to provide a rule-oriented "grammar" of Christian identity, Wittgenstein himself wanted to show how problematic is the idea of following a rule. "Wittgenstein maintains there is no way to single out the rule that is being followed by observing purported instances of its application," Tanner says. "While the postliberals are right about what leads to uniformity in the process of rule following, the Wittgensteinian point is that nothing fixes these communal norms in place."

Christian identity based on shared beliefs is a mirage, asserts Tanner. She presumably means that the identity is a mirage except as it is the product of a decidedly ungenerous orthodoxy. She contends that Christian identity exists in shared questions and discussion topics, not in shared beliefs. Under the authority of God’s free Word, she contends -- her work retains some Barthian glosses -- Christian identity is constituted "by a community of argument concerning the meaning of true discipleship." She views her work as "a revised postliberalism" that addresses many of the worries about its conservative methodological tendencies -- for example, tendencies to insulate a Christian perspective from external criticism, and to ignore serious diversity, contest and change within Christianity." To her the term postliberal implies, or at least should imply, that one has moved through and beyond liberalism, not necessarily against it.

"The new and improved postliberalism I’m talking about incorporates the best of a Troeltschian liberalism within a theological method focusing on Christian particulars," she remarks. "I start where postliberalism usually starts but burst the usual boundaries of discussion by attention to the way the wider culture and other religions are contested ingredients from the first in a Christian viewpoint." In agreement with Troeltsch, Tanner opposes all claims for the absoluteness or superior truth of Christianity. Christians must not claim that Christian revelation makes Christianity superior to other religions, she believes: "What Christianity has going for it is its substantive proposal of a way of life -- a way of life over which Christians argue in the effort to witness to and be disciples of Christ, and with which they enter into argument with others."

Tanner’s brand of postliberalism places her closer to the classic liberal theologian Albrecht Ritschl than the neo-orthodox Barth on the fundamental question of the rules for making Christian claims. For Tanner, Christianity is true to the extent that it inspires attractive communities of faith. Metaphysical claims are out, as are Barth’s claims for theology as the explication of revelation.

Though she disclaims a substantive continuity with much of the liberal tradition, Tanner acknowledges that methodologically her work proceeds along liberal lines. To her, the boundaries of Lindbeck’s theory of religion provide no protection from the issues liberal theology has engaged. For this reason she refigures the ideal of a third way. She is interested is not so much in a third way between liberalism and conservatism, she explains, as in a third way between Yale postliberalism and the Chicago school of liberalism.

Today the advocates of Yale postliberalism and Chicago liberalism are probably outnumbered by those who, like Tanner, are trying to build bridges between these approaches. In many instances, the development of postliberal theology is following Barth’s own theological trajectory. Whereas in the 1920s and ‘30s Barth claimed that the liberal theology in which he was trained was a terrible distortion, a wrong turn and a betrayal of Christ, in later life he took a more constructive and occasionally irenic approach to liberal theology. He wrote appreciative statements about Schleiermacher, he allowed that Schleiermacher might be interpreted as a theologian of the Holy Spirit, he emphasized the humanity of God in contrast to the Wholly Other, he called human beings "covenant-partners of God," and he looked for "parables" of grace and truth in non-Christian religions and ideologies. Though Barth grieved in his later life that most theologians rejected his approach to theology in favor of current cultural and hermeneutical fads, he looked for Word-oriented allies wherever he could find them, and for the most part he did not persist in claiming that liberalism was the fatal problem in modern theology.

A significant sector of the postliberal school has similarly reconsidered its characterization of liberal theology as alien or fundamentally mistaken. Whether theologians like Tanner can move in this direction without giving up the Barthian heart of the postliberal experiment remains to be seen.

Part of the complexity in charting the theological world comes from the fact that Lindbeck’s influential account of liberal theology as "experiential-expressivist" describes only a small part of actually existing theological liberalism. Lindbeck’s "experiential-expressivist" model does a reasonably good job of accounting for the romantic and mystical streams of liberal theology, but it does not account for variants of liberal theology that make gospel-centered claims (such as the tradition of evangelical’ liberalism), that base their affirmations on metaphysical arguments (such as the Whiteheadian process school) or that appeal to gospel norms and metaphysical arguments (such as the Boston personalist school). These are the most important schools of American liberal theology ot the past century. Moreover, Lindbeck’s account of theological liberalism fares no better as a description of the theologies of such contemporary liberals as Brian Gerrish, Landon Gilkey, James Gustafson, Peter Hodgson, Marjorie Suchocki or David Tracy. His critique misses at least this much of the target. In that regard, Tanner is right not to follow those postliberals who invest great significance in Lindbeck’s critique of theological liberalism. And she is right that theology must come to terms with a more pluralistic understanding of culture. The emergence of a multiculturalist, strongly feminist "Barthian" trend in theology is a most welcome development in a field that has known more than its share of stodgy antifeminists.

But in moving away from Barth’s Word-oriented approach to theology, the postmodern revisers may be relinquishing the Barthian impulse that gave postliberal theology its dynamism and coherence. They could be lapsing into the kind of postliberalism that has no "post" at all.

There is an equal danger that Thomist-leaning philosophical theology could have a similar effect in a different direction, trying to save theology by modernizing Aquinas. The Thomist postliberals and the postmodernist postliberals will relinquish too much if they disparage the credibility of doing theology in Barth’s style as exegesis of God’s free, self-authenticating, Spirit-illuminated Word. Barth’s warnings against embedding Christian truth claims in any prior theory of knowledge apply in the present case: if Christianity has no eschatological Word to explicate, then we are left only with liberal naturalism and historicism.

Barth insisted that to hear scriptural narrative as God’s Word has nothing necessarily to do with defending its historical character or some particular historical element within it. His point was not that scriptural narrative contains no historical elements, but rather that the Bible’s historical elements are always mixed with myth, saga and related forms of expression as vehicles of the Word. The Word is apprehended as event. It is never an object of perception or cognition. It does not seek to be mastered in order to be understood; rather it seeks to lay hold of us.

Postliberal theology at its best has held fast to these Barthian themes. It has embraced Barth’s nonfoundationalist spirit and his methodological pluralism while correcting his dogmatic lapses, his lack of interest in interreligious dialogue and his antifeminism. If truth is grace, it can be known only through grace. Postliberal theologians would do well not to give up this Barthian principle.