as more amenable to the post-liberal climate in which we now live. The problem he finds with Lonergan’s approach to religion, and by extension to Christian theology, is his insistence on an a priori human consciousness in which is found an awareness of the transcendent.7 Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic approach compares religious thought to the way we learn language.8 Religious awareness is not prior to experience, he argues, but develops out of human encounters in culture: it is shaped by ritual,