The notion of revelation, or a direct communication from God to a specific person or group of persons, is largely currently met with widespread scepticism. First one must deal with the competing claims these revelations make about the nature of human existence, about God, and so on, from different religious traditions. Secondly, the notion has been debased by various small sects making similar claims to revelation, often with disastrous consequences for their followers.
In response, Louis Roy OP has written a spirited defence of the notion of revelation, one which seeks to respond to the scepticism and indifferentism of the current generation, including some theologians. Roy draws from the work of Bernard Lonergan, from which he utilises judicious insights to find a path forward. Perhaps the central theme drawn from Lonergan is the critique of conceptualism which he viewed as the root cause of our modern intellectual malaise. Conceptualism gives primacy to concepts while neglecting the dynamics of question and insight from which concepts arise. It detaches concepts from their intellectual roots, claiming for them some sort of universal validity. As Lonergan puts it, ‘concepts have dates’, they arise in relation to specific questions. One consequence of conceptualism is classicism which presents an a-historical notion of culture as universal and normative, with little or no account of cultural pluralism. These concerns are recurrent in this work.
The book is divided into four parts. Part 1 consists of a single chapter which moves quickly from biblical accounts of revelation to Aquinas’s account of revelation and biblical inspiration. He presents the reader with three heuristics, ‘revelation as anthropological’, ‘revelation as evolutionary’ and ‘revelation as Christological’, to help understand different accounts that will emerge. This chapter provides a basic foundation for the study.
Part 2 moves from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Chapter 2 focuses on key authors Spinoza, Locke, Lessing, Hume, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Schleiermacher – plus the Council of Trent and Pascal, as we move into the Enlightenment period. Following the conceptualism of Scotus, there is a growing separation (rather than a distinction) between the natural and the supernatural. This separation proves pivotal, leading to an understanding of revelation as purely supernatural and not subject to reason (fideism), or purely natural and with the reach of reason (rationalism). Kant also plays a significant role because of his split between knowing and reality, which then emphasises religious experience (viewed as ‘real’) at the expense of meaning which is ‘subjective’.
Chapter 3 considers the Catholic response to the Enlightenment thought the writings of Drey, Möhler, Kuhn, Newman, the modernists, Vatican I and II and Hans Urs von Balthasar. Newman rightly looms large in the discussion with his groundbreaking work on the development of doctrine raising the question of historicity. Balthasar is criticised for his ‘sharp contrast’ between ‘non-Christian experience and revelation in Christ’ (p.101), a theme Roy returns to later in the work. Overall, Roy notes, ‘With the exception of most scholastics, virtually all the Catholic thinkers since the French revolution endeavoured to overcome the limitations of conceptualism’ (p.102), not all successfully.
Chapter 4 returns to focus on Protestant authors, Troeltsch, Barth and Pannenberg, who begin to take more serious the question of historicity and the dangers of historicism. We are now in the era of the quest for the historical Jesus, and the ‘ditch’ between ourselves and the events that constitute an historical revelation. How can we trust the faithful transmission of revelation through a history of human mediation? Are we dependent on the findings of historians to validate our faith? Is it a leap of faith (Kierkegaard) or the adamant rejection of the relevance of historical scholarship for faith (Barth)? How do we resolve the tension between the particularity of historical revelation and claims to its universal validity? In particular, Pannenberg’s claims in relation to historical validation of the resurrection is critiqued: ‘What he does not elucidate satisfactorily, in my estimation, is the transition between historiography’s probable conclusions and faith’s certainty’ (p.135). Nonetheless, due to their efforts ‘the issue of historical consciousness – an issue of moment for those who nod to the incarnation of the Son of God in human history – has been most worthy of investigation’ (p.141).
This brings us to Part 3, entitled ‘Contemporary Discussions’ consisting of two chapters, one on the hermeneutic philosophy of Paul Ricœur, the other a response to the challenges of post-modernism, pluralism and the claims to normativity of a religious tradition.
Chapter 5 on Ricœur is the most difficult chapter. Ricœur’s thought is dense, and his key categories are quite different from the preceding chapters. Ricœur’s work emerges from a concern for the interpretation of text, and the relationship between that interpretation (the sense) and the reality to which the text refers (the reference). He introduces the notion of suspicion (the masters of suspicion – Marx, Freud and Nietzsche) and the important category of testimony. Indeed, Christianity is founded on the testimony of those who knew Jesus. Is such testimony trustworthy or subject to suspicion? Roy raises four questions of Ricœur’s position: a question concerning practical truth and the need to distinguish between fruitful and harmful texts; a question concerning theoretical truth and the possibility of religious language having a real referent; a question concerning the relationship between the author’s intention and the interpretation of the text; and a final question concerning Ricœur’s account of the role of imagination. Our author repeatedly chastises Ricœur for falling into a Kantian construction of the relationship between the sense and the referent. What is missing, he claims, is a robust notion of judgment as found in the work of Lonergan.
In Chapter 6, Roy deploys his Lonergan background most extensively to address post-modernism and the problem of clashing viewpoints. The consistent thread is the question of judgement, so decisive to Lonergan’s cognitional theory. We are not locked in endless cycles of experience and interpretation; judgement breaks through into the realm of truth: ‘I can judge intelligently whether an interpretation must be modified or thoroughly discarded’ (p.181). Judgement prevents historicity from becoming historicism, while allowing for a perspectivism that is ‘congruent with the search for factuality’ (p.184). In an interreligious setting Roy offers a ‘moderate pluralism’, a position which focuses on meaning and interpretation while prescinding from the question of truth. This he contrasts with a radical pluralism he finds evident in the later work of Edward Schillebeeckx, which falls into a doctrinal relativism. With the notion of judgement Roy is able to uphold the normative authority of the Church’s doctrinal tradition while allowing for a variety of theological interpretations.
In Part 4, Roy has three chapters which deal with interreligious dialogue, a distinction to be draw between revelation and God-speech, and finally on the claims made by Christian faith in relation to Jesus. Each of these chapters makes insightful contributions to ongoing discussions in the interreligious realm.
Overall, this is an insightful and clearly written work that will be of value to students and professors of theology at the graduate level. His breadth of scholarship and depth of insight are evident in every chapter of the book. Still, I would raise two issues. The first concerns his use of Lonergan. There is a substantial chapter in Method in Theology on the nature of meaning. It seems to me that the topic of revelation would be strengthened by making greater use of this material, particularly the notions of carriers and functions of meaning. The second is the question often raised by the doyen of Lonergan studies, Fred Crowe: what functional speciality are you working in? This is a criticism not just of Roy but of the field of theology of revelation more generally. There are foundational questions (the condition of the possibility of revelation and the categories needed to talk about it); doctrinal questions (both ecclesial and theological judgements about revelation); and systematic questions (how do we understand the process of revelation, and its relationship to other doctrines). The discussion of the topic would be clarified by attending to these distinctions. Still, this should not deter a potential reader but might act as a spur to further research.
