CRCNA Inside Baseball #1: Religion as Language or Culture

You're making me talk about George Lindbeck

Note: I have a growing list of posts in my head that address things within my Church denomination right now (the CRCNA). I’m going to write a series that I will post on Mondays. “Inside baseball” is a term that means “matters of interest only to insiders.” These posts are going to be very niche. You may find some interesting ideas in them, but they are mostly written with my people in mind. Wednesdays and Fridays will have the more usual posts (lest you think I’m only writing about this stuff now).

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Among the many debates happening within the Christian Reformed Church in North America right now, there is some changes in the understanding of what our denomination is. As I watch this happening, I think a lot about a book recommended to me by another CRC pastor called “The Nature of Doctrine” by George Lindbeck. Lindbeck was not CRC. He was a Lutheran who participated in lots of ecumenical discussion and worked at Yale Divinity School. However he has an idea in this book (which is really about ecumenicism and not what I’m going to talk about) that is very helpful for understanding some things about our denomination.

If we think about a denomination like ours, we can think of it in a few different ways. It will hopefully be clear by the end of this thought that people do. The first way is what Lindbeck calls the cognitive-propositional approach. In this approach, being a part of the denomination means that you learn about a series of statements about God, and other related topics, you find them true, and then you state your agreement with them. If you agree with the beliefs of the denomination, then you are part of the denomination. Your feelings and your practices are more or less irrelevant in the purest form of this attitude.

This is probably the most common way I see people think about denominations in general and our denomination in particular. The emphasis on confessionalism that has shown up in the last few Synods really brings this home. When you are focused on ensuring complete agreement and adherence to a set of statements that help form doctrines, it’s a sign that you think of what you’re doing primarily as sharing information and knowledge with people.

The second way is what Lindbeck calls “experiential-expressivist.” In this model people focus more on the subjective feelings of religion than on any kind of doctrinal statement. If something “feels right” then it fits within the religion. This type of attitude is more common in what people would call “liberal Christianity.” Unitarian universalists would be an example of a formal structure for this way of thinking. There can be levels of this kind of thinking as well, people who think of Church as a certain kind of feeling that is identified and described by themselves.

This kind of approach to religion isn’t as popular in institutions, but it is very popular within the broader culture. When people say things like “do whatever feels good for you” or “we all really serve the same God” they’re probably thinking of religion in this fashion.

The third way is what Lindbeck suggests is a better model and he calls it the “cultural-linguistic” approach. In this way, a denomination is not strictly about a set of beliefs, nor is it governed by purely subjective feelings. It is instead more like a language or a culture. It’s easiest to explain this way with an example that is suggested by the name “cultural-linguistic.”

I live in Canada. There is currently a conversation among the people within my nation about what it means to be Canada, what kind of distinctive culture we have. It’s very hard to write down what it means to be Canadian in a book. If you wanted to learn what Canadians were like and what it meant to be Canadian, the best way to do that would be to come and live here for a while. Get a job, go to the grocery store, watch some Canadian television, observe how people drive and discover what makes them honk at you. By immersing yourself within the culture, you would begin to understand what’s “normal.”

At the end of your experience, if I asked you would probably explain what you had learned by telling some stories about particularly “Canadian” things that you experienced or observed. It would be difficult to make a list of things that make a Canadian. At the same time, if we invited some other Canadians to listen to your story, they would probably tell you either that you’ve understood Canada or that some of your stories don’t seem to reflect our culture. Even though no one can provide you with a list about what Canada is, they can certainly tell you if you’re on the right track or not. It’s not purely subjective, and it isn’t up to everyone to decide what Canada is.

In a similar way, if I wanted to teach you what the CRC was then the best way to do this would be to expose you to a number of congregations within the denomination. Pastors have this experience most commonly, but members who have moved between different churches have also gotten the chance to do this. By spending time immersed in the life of a church in different places, you begin to experience what it is that makes a congregation part of the denomination. There will be some connection between the confessional and creedal documents that we use and also decisions of Synod, but there will also be some things that are not addressed in those documents but nevertheless are identifiably part of the denomination. One of the most helpful quotes from Lindbeck on this idea is below.

“…interiorized skill, the skill of the saint, mainfests itself in an ability to discriminate “intuitively” (nondiscursively) between authentic and inauthentic, and between effective and ineffective, objectifications of the religion.”

George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine (Westminster John Knox Press, 1984) p. 36

There are people you will meet within the Christian Reformed Church who could not articulate to you the points of disputation within the Canons of Dort or recite the Heidelberg Catechism to you, and yet they have an instinct which tells them that what they are hearing does not feel like the CRC. It’s not a subjective feeling, it’s based on being immersed within a culture that embodies its beliefs deeply within its practices.

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There are two reasons why I wanted to attempt to explain Lindbeck’s categories of religion that connect with the current state of things in the CRCNA.

First, the “culture” of the CRC is thinner than it used to be. Pastors used to move a lot more regularly because churches were more similar to one another. They used very similar orders of worship, they held two services, they were strictly sabbatarian, they used the same hymn books. There were other smaller practices that went along with this. The culture of coffee time after the Church service was over, inviting people over for soup between the two services, and having family devotions after dinner are all practices that are not part of the doctrines of our church, and yet were widely practiced becuase they were a part of the culture of being CRCNA.

Kent Hendricks has written about something called the “CRC circulatory system” (Edit: Kent says the idea originated with Paul VanderKlay and you can watch him use the idea in this video) which described the way in which people moved from the CRC’s “heart” in Grand Rapids out to its outlying communities and back through Grand Rapids. This circulatory system helped to maintain a consistent culture within the CRCNA. People moving meant that the experince people had was similar across churches. At this point in our history the Grand-Rapids-centric nature of this system has broken down and churches are becoming more differentiated in their isolation. There is no longer a rich set of practices that you can point to as uniquely CRC. There are still some holdovers, but even here there is greater and greater diversity.

If we think of a denomination as just a series of doctrines and propositions, then this wouldn’t be troubling. “The Confessions will keep us together and if we’re not together, it’s because we are not following the confessions closely enough.” But I think some of the weirdness we are seeing right now is because we never were held together solely by our confessions. Instead we were held together by a broader culture of what it meant to be CRC that included many practices which have been dropped and not replace.

As Eric Dirksen and Aleah Marsden have written about here, there is a need to have a broader vision of what it means to be beyond the confessions because being a denomination means a great deal more than this. If we accept that we have a thinner culture, then the work we need to do to strengthen the denomination is the work of building up our culture once again. Confessions play a part in that, but there is much more that needs to go into that for it to be effective (I will write about practices next time).

The second reason why I wanted to explain all of this has to do with some people who join the CRCNA. One of the reasons I see for people joining the CRCNA has to do with our beliefs. The confessions are often named as the main attraction, but some people look pretty carefully at the beliefs of a denomination before choosing to join it. This makes sense. You want to know what is behind a denomination before you join one. But the problem is that each individual congregation may not precisely reflect those beliefs becuase of the thinning culture around our denomination. When there are fewer and fewer people who have internalized what it means to be CRC, and more and more people who have internalized what it means to be a part of their congregation, the disconnect between what the denomination says it is and what a congregation actually is can be wide. The culture they observe can be different from the statements that they have read online. This can be viewed as the church being dishonest or unfaithful in some way, but I think it is just a symptom of our thin culture as a denomination right now.

This difference grows as we welcome people from other denominations without recognizing that we had a culture OR that they are bringing culture with them. When Pastors transfer into the CRC, our primary concern is that they agree doctrinally with what our denomination teaches. We want them to adhere to the confessions. But we pay less attention to the culture that they bring with them from their “home tradition". In the old circulatory system, this would work itself out eventually as the new-to-CRC pastor would gradually begin to be shaped into a “CRC pastor” through the observation and practice of ministry, but with a thin culture and pastors who tend to stay closer to one area, it’s possible that their cultural expectations of the denominations are never challenged.

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That was a lot. Let me summarize what I wanted to say in brief.

1. A denomination isn’t defined purely by a series of doctrinal statements or the subjective experience of its members. Denominations are cultures which contain a mixture of belief, experience, and practice.

2. The CRC has a much thinner culture because of the end of a number of common practices and because of the breakdown of the circulatory system through Grand Rapids.

3. As newcomers join the CRC, and as churches become more islolated from one another, the culture of those newcomers or local congregations can become separated from the culture that helps keep the denomination working together well.

I think this matters because the way we think about a denomination affects the scale of the solutions we propose to help it. A renewed emphasis on our doctrine is helpful, but it’s not going to bring us all back together without a thickening of the culture of the CRC. Next time I write, I’ll talk about practices and why they’re possibly as important as our doctrines, and yet why they seem to have been neglected.