In the late summer of 1977, I made my way to New Haven, Connecticut, not yet twenty-two years old and afire to study theology at Yale Divinity School. At that innocent dawn of my theological life, I was surprised to discover that not everybody at YDS shared my passion for theology. People had other reasons for going to seminary besides wanting to read more Augustine and Luther, to say nothing of more Kant and Hegel. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, I was advised, take Lindbeck. I did.
The course George Lindbeck offered that term was “Comparative Doctrine,” which focused on the historic doctrinal disagreements among Christians. The Second Vatican Council featured heavily in the course. Lindbeck, I learned, had been an official Protestant observer at Vatican II, which had concluded only a dozen years before. As I found out a good deal later, he had been much involved in the complex goings-on at the council through all four of its “periods,” from its surprising opening sessions in the fall of 1962 through to its conclusion in 1965. His main interest in “Comparative Doctrine,” as it turned out, was not simply the differences of doctrine among Christians, but their possible resolution, especially those between Lutherans and Roman Catholics. This was not my first taste of Vatican II—that had come in an undergraduate church history course—but it was my first exposure to the difference the recently concluded ecumenical council might make to the thought of theologians and in the lives of Christians, not least those outside the Roman Catholic Church. At the time I was one of the interested outsiders, and I listened.
