Major Reviews 337 Theology and the End of Doctrine by Christine Helmer Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2014. 196 pp. $26.70. ISBN 978-0-664-23929-9. CHRISTINE HELMER HAS WRITTEN a timely and important book that deserves to be widely read and discussed by anyone concerned with the state of theology in our time. She takes issue here with the so-called “postlib- eral” or “cultural-linguistic” theory of doctrine for- mulated by George Lindbeck that has held so many American theologians spellbound for the past three decades. She argues that in their effort to insulate the- ology from the critical challenges arising from other academic disciplines in the university, Lindbeck and his followers have precipitated a new crisis for doc- trine, since it has now lost its historic referential char- acter of making truth-claims about human experience and divine reality: “doctrine has moved away from reality into language” and thus lost “its inner power” (p. 19). Doctrine, as traditionally understood, has now come to an end, or at least has found itself at a dead-end. Moreover, theology’s status as an academic discipline in conversation with other disciplines has been seriously jeopardized by this definition of doctrine. Once the relation of doctrine to experience and reality has been severed, theology is emptied of its material content and consequently has nothing of its own to contribute to the university. The great irony, for Helmer, is that a theory widely lauded for defending doctrine against its modern critics has actually had the effect of undermining the very integrity of doctrine it seeks to preserve: “This is a crisis made by doctrine’s defenders, not by its revilers” (p. 7). If doctrine is to be recovered, then its proper “end” in the sense of “goal” or “purpose” has to be reexamined, which is her book’s constructive aim after its critical aim has been accomplished. Helmer criticizes the work of Bruce Marshall, a former student of Lindbeck, because in Marshall’s hands, “doctrine is enlisted as the grammar of a worldview” that furnishes “timeless norms for Christianity” and polices what Christians can or cannot say, believe, and do: “Marshall lifts theological assertions out of history . . . . Instead of describing God as norm, theology and its doctrinal formulations become the norms of belief and practice” (p. 61). Marshall’s handling of the Bible is particularly troubling for Helmer, since he “identifies Scripture so closely with a particular set of doctrines,” which are then determined “to be the sole biblical hermeneutic for the church” (p. 95). She is referring to the so-called “rule of faith” (regula fidei) to which Marshall and other postliberals appeal in order to close the gap between Scripture and the creeds formulated in the patristic period. The Bible, for Marshall, is to be interpreted through “shared creedal rules”