In Defence of Lonergan's Critics

Extract

Our editor has learned much about torture in recent years. Had he not done so, I doubt whether he would have had the ingenuity to think of inviting me to reply to Bill Mathews’s defence of Bernard Lonergan in the light of Fergus Kerr’s review of thirteen other people’s reflections on Lonergan’s Method!

When we mounted that symposium at Maynooth from which Looking at Lonergan’s Method emerged we had a quite specific purpose in view. On the one hand, we believed that Method in Theology was far too important to be ignored. On the other hand, we knew that it would receive plenty of adulatory attention from those who have been so profoundly influenced by Lonergan’s work that they seem incapable of doing more than uncritically restating Lonergan’s position in Lonergan’s categories. We felt that there was room for a collection of essays which did Lonergan the honour of taking him sufficiently seriously to attempt critically to come to grips with some of the fundamental issues raised by Method (a similar attempt, by a group of Texan theologians, can be found in the Spring 1975 number of the Perkins Journal). It is, I think, a measure both of the importance of the issues, and of the perceived power of Lonergan’s contribution, that scholars as internationally distinguished, and from such varied cultural, philosophical and confessional backgrounds, as Hesse, Jossua, Pannen-berg and Torrance, should have agreed to take part in this enterprise. One shows respect neither for the issues, nor for Lonergan’s contribution to their clarification, if one simply leaps to his defence, as Bill Mathews tends to do, without—apparently—attempting first to understand the standpoints from which other scholars offer a critical response to his achievement.