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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
What is remarkable about David Tracy's Blessed Rage for Order is the absence of what Bernard Lonergan has designated as the specifically theological principle: conversion. The present writer regards this absence as a flaw, despite the ambiguity of “conversion” in general and of Lonergan's use of the term in particular. An attempt at clarification is made, showing how “conversion” can operate as Lonergan intends. In contrast, the methodologically self-conscious style of the proposed revisionist theology appears to be self-defeating.
1 Cf., Tracy, David, Blessed Rage for Order (New York: The Seabury Press, 1975), p. 43Google Scholar: “In its briefest expression, the revisionist model holds that a contemporary fundamental Christian theology can best be described as philosophical reflection upon the meanings present in common human experience and language, and upon the meanings present in the Christian fact.”
2 Cf., Lonergan, Bernard, Method in Theology (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), p. 131Google Scholar: Foundational theology presents “not doctrines, but the horizon within which the meaning of doctrines can be apprehended. Just as in religious living ‘a man who is unspiritual refuses what belongs to the Spirit of God; it is folly to him; he cannot grasp it’ (1 Corinthians 2, 14), so in theological reflection on religious living there have to be distinguished the horizons within which religious doctrines can or cannot be apprehended; and this distinction is foundational.”
3 Tracy, David, “Lonergan's Foundational Theology: An Interpretation and a Critique” in McShane, Philip (ed.), Foundations of Theology (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1972), pp. 197–222.Google Scholar
4 Gilkey, Langdon, Naming the Whirlwind (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1969), p. 110.Google Scholar
5 Cf., “Bernard Lonergan Responds” in Foundations of Theology, p. 231: “On the counterpositions the object is out there now, the subject is in here now, the two are irreducible, objectivity is a matter of taking a good look, and value-judgments are always merely subjective. On the positions, objects are what are intended in questions and known by answers, subjects do the questioning and the answering, objectivity is the fruit of authentic subjectivity, and subjectivity is authentic when it is self-transcending.” Also, cf., Lonergan, Bernard, Verbum, ed. Burrell, David (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967), p. 7;Google Scholar and Lonergan, Bernard, “Cognitional Structure” in Crowe, Frederick (ed.) Collection (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967), pp. 221–239.Google Scholar
6 Lest the metaphor be misconstrued, the point is simply that Lonergan's intention in Method in Theology is to bring discipline, as distinct from self-consciousness, to the practice of theology. Tracy, in carrying discipline to an extreme, runs the risk of a self-consciousness which takes the form of a fixation on method that is theologically paralyzing.
7 Curran, Charles, “Christian Conversion in the Writings of Bernard Lonergan” in Foundations of Theology, pp. 41–60.Google Scholar
8 Lonergan, Bernard, “Theology in its New Context” in Ryan, William and Tyrrell, Bernard (eds.), A Second Collection (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1974), pp. 65–66.Google Scholar
9 Method in Theology, p. 237.
10 Ibid., p. 238.
11 Ibid., p. 240.
12 Ibid., pp. 240-241.
13 Ibid., p. 253. I am grateful to my colleague Stanley Hauerwas for reminding me of Lonergan's oft-quoted remark that insights are a dime a dozen, suggesting the need for a conscientious examination of any insight before affirming its truth and living it out. Hauerwas' point is well taken that religious “conversions” are also a dime a dozen, and that it is a life-consuming task to learn how to affirm the truth of a religious conversion and to act it out.
14 Ibid., p. 243.
15 For a brilliant amplification of the same metaphor, cf., Dunne, John, Time and Myth (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1973), pp. 5–7.Google Scholar
16 Lonergan's insistence upon maintaining both aspects of conversion is not without historical precedent. It fits remarkably well Augustine's account of his own conversion. The climactic event in the garden seems to Augustine in retrospect as a moment that brought to fulfillment a process that had its beginnings much earlier. Lonergan no less than Augustine affirms the priority of grace.
17 The question could also be raised as John Dunne raises it in the opening lines of Time and Myth: “What kind of story are we in?”
18 Method in Theology, p. 342.
19 Blessed Rage for Order, p. 43.
20 The oddness of Tracy's approach to the question provoked his colleague Langdon Gilkey, to remark in a lengthy footnote on p. 378 of Reaping the Whirlwind (New York: The Seabury Press, 1977)Google Scholar: “In accepting that ontological or metaphysical requirement as an aspect not only of the meaning of a theological symbol but also as an aspect of its adequacy to experience, we agree with Tracy's criteria. Perhaps on this issue, the difference lies in the interrelation of ontological explication and argument and “existential verification.” For him, as for Ogden, the ontological inquiry can establish on its own the truth of the religious symbol God. For us that inquiry only helps in that establishment as one of its moments. It is, as we noted, a necessary moment but not, we believe, a sufficient one. Because ontological significance can at best establish an “abstract” understanding of existence (i.e., of its essential structures), an understanding also threatened by the contrary implications of estrangement; and because religious symbols are “true” as religious symbols, finally by our participation as well as (i.e., not only by) our reflective process—therefore the final validation, even of theology's cognitive claims, must be an existential or participating verification of its primary symbols. Those who can establish by metaphysical analysis the truth of faith are almost universally those whose existence is qualified by participation in and through that faith.” From this text it would appear that Gilkey regards (misreads?) Tracy's revisionist theology as another version of the kind of “natural theology” that no thinking Protestant can abide. Ironically, Gilkey was undoubtedly among those theologians who provoked Tracy to attempt the move missing from Lonergan's Insight and not made sufficiently critically (at least in Tracy's judgment) in Method in Theology: namely, the attempt to mediate critically rather than dogmatically the affirmation of God upon which the rest of the theological enterprise is founded.
21 John Dunne, for example, who receives low marks from Tracy for explicit methodological reflection, has for more than a decade produced some of the most vital “foundational” theology one can point to. When most contemporary theologians were lamenting the “death of God,” Dunne was moving far beyond the frontiers of that movement in his City of the Gods. His forthcoming Reasons of the Heart (Macmillan) is, in this writer's judgment, one of the most profound essays into a truly foundational theology one could wish to find.