ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that whilst the combined effects of the now widespread move beyond philosophical foundationalism to more historically, socially and linguistically situated accounts of human rationality. Writing in The Legitimation of Modernity, Hans Blumenberg helpfully distinguished between modernity defined in terms of the now widely questioned Cartesian search for an 'absolute beginning founded only on itself '. Lindbeck's emphasis upon the need for the faithful observance of underlying grammatical rules, whilst helpful, could be held to do inadequate justice to the creative forwards-looking dimension of Christian living which goes some way beyond merely thinking the same underlying thoughts and doing the same basic things in a variety of changing contexts. The combination of continuity and creativity is better captured with the musical image of dynamic improvisation within accepted forms than it is by Lindbeck's linguistic and grammatical comparisons.
