This paper brings George Lindbeck's cultural-linguistic model of religion into constructive dialogue with Donna Haraway's theory of situated knowledge to explore a theologically grounded epistemology that is both contextually aware and inductively shaped. While Haraway destabilizes the claim to objective, disembodied knowledge by emphasizing the perspectival and embodied nature of all knowing, Lindbeck's model highlights how religious meaning arises from participation in the shared language and practices of a tradition. Taken together, these perspectives open a path for theological reflection that honors both the internal grammar of religious communities and the social, political, and corporeal embeddedness of theological discourse.
At the same time, Lindbeck's approach offers a critical challenge to forms of theological critique that risk positioning themselves above or outside the life of the faithful. Theology, understood culturally and linguistically, must emerge with the community and not over it. Religious knowledge, then, is not abstract speculation but a form of embodied competence cultivated through liturgical, ethical, and narrative participation.
What emerges from this interplay is a reframing of situated knowledge not merely as a marker of epistemic limitation, but as a source of theological insight. Religious traditions become sites of knowledge that are not universal despite their context, but meaningful because of it. The cultural-linguistic framework thus reveals how truth can be apprehended in and through the concrete, lived patterns of faith communities. In this way, the decentralization of universalist truth claims is held together with a renewed appreciation for the epistemic depth of contextual, inherited, and practiced forms of knowing—opening up a theological methodology that is both critical and committed, plural yet tradition-sensitive.