On the Affective Salience of Doctrines

Simeon Zahl

OAI: oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/295164 • DOI: 10.17863/CAM.42228

In his classic study, The Nature of Doctrine, George Lindbeck articulates an account of Christian doctrinal statements as fundamentally ‘regulative’ in nature. In his view, the best way to understand ‘church doctrines’ is in terms of ‘their use, not as expressive symbols or truth claims, but as communally authoritative rules of discourse, attitude, and action.’1 A religion, Lindbeck tells us, is first and foremost ‘a kind of cultural and/or linguistic framework or medium that shapes the entirety of life and thought,’ and church doctrines make up a significant part of that cultural‐linguistic framework. As Mike Higton explains, this means that ‘to understand any [doctrinal] proposition one must attend to the weave of practice within which it is made’, and ‘attend[ ] to the way [religious truth claims] are involved in the whole shaping of communal and individual life.’