FEBRUARY 2006 - ISSUE 6 - ISSN 1448 - 6326

Systematics, Sensibility, and Smart Bombs: Looking for Lonergan’s Legacy   Michael Warren

Abstract

The illegal and internationally condemned attack by the United  States on Iraq raises theological questions about the Eucharist, about systematic theology, and especially about pastoral theology and preaching.   It could happen that pew dwellers and pulpit dwellers can both be deaf to the words of the Eucharist but, more importantly, to the sensibility called for by the gospels and by the words and actions of the Eucharistic ritual. How can this situation be corrected?  The writer calls on Bernard Lonergan’s theology to help shed light on what pastoral agents might have been doing in a crisis like the internationally condemned attack on Iraq.  He writes from his position in the pew but also from the angle of pastoral theology.

The writing of this paper has allowed me to explore aspects of theology that have long troubled me.  Chief is the lack of unity I find in systematic theology, despite all the efforts at renewal, many of them successful, that have gone into systematic theology in the last forty years.  And so, my first and main concern in this paper are the consequences of this lack of theological unity for the local church.  My second theological concern is theology’s inadequate attention to what Jurgen Habermas calls the “lifeworld,” the concrete circumstances of everyday life. As I hope to show that lack of attention is disastrous for the local church.   My third concern is the need for more attention to the Eucharist as the necessary focal point of unity in theology’s attention to lifeworld.  To get at this aspect, I must speak out of my own lifeworld in a suburb of New York City during an international crisis.  I start with the Eucharist.

The Eucharist is meant to be a center point of the Christian life, the balancing point of the ecclesial gyroscope spinning with the impetus of the gospel. The ritual itself is concrete and specific, with actions and words involving leader and assembled.  It makes specific claims about the meaning of life, and involves the assembled in group actions signifying their connectedness to one another and to the whole world: sharing bread and drinking from a common cup.  In a broken world, many of the statements made in the assembly are by themselves outrageous from a non-faith perspective.  Every aspect of the ritual drips with theological meaning.  And yet this very specific, very ancient ritual is always accompanied by another reality too often ignored by theology itself: the life world and life meanings lived by the assembled.  The life meanings embedded in one’s life world can be hostile to the gospel.  Specific and ingrained, “life meanings: are unspoken assumption about reality that may effectively counter the words and actions of the ritual itself.  The reason for this paper is to study the epistemological disconnect between the words and actions of the ritual and the sensibilities of many in the worshiping assembly, including the presiders.[1]  

Despite Lonergan’s resolute reconstruction of theological unity in his systematics treatise: Method,  systematic theology remains part of the problem.  In this writer’s view too many theologians have gotten caught up in the abstract architectonics of systematics while ignoring more mundane specifics, namely, the lifestructure and sensibility of ordinary people under the sway of consumer capitalism.[2]  The Eucharist is the ritual where Jesus’s proposal about the meaning of life is publicly affirmed and celebrated by the Body of  believers. As set forth in the words and actions of the ritual in a celebrative mode, Jesus’s proposal is to be enfleshed in the community as a corporate body.  When they are so enfleshed as an ongoing process, that body becomes a living embodiment of the Spirit that Jesus poured out in the world through his death and resurrection.   Perhaps the simplest and most direct way of putting this is Schillebeeckx’s: Jesus is the sacrament of the human encounter with God, and the church is the sacrament of the encounter with the Spirit of Jesus.  Though Jesus will always be the human encounter with God, the church can be something quite other than the embodiment of the Spirit of Jesus. It can be a set of verbalized commitments and claims about the purposes of life, but claims and commitments not verified by the group life of the assembly.  The local assembly could be a counter-sign of its own claims. 

For the assembly to be otherwise, pastoral agents would have to work consciously toward a group life marked by gospel fidelity.. The verbal claims about our relationships with God and with our world are to be actualized in deeds.  Lacking that enfleshment, the assembly is marked by an absence or epoche -- a missing piece, yes, but also an overlooked piece not considered significant..  With this absence of vital gospel-centered action in place, a community’s group life becomes vague, unfocused, unable to shed light on actual situations.  In some cases that group life becomes as jolly as a social club full of self-regard..  However, in crisis situations, when conflicts around claims and conflicts around commitments surface conflicting visions of life, one can see more clearly how eviscerated of power the Eucharist can become. 

The recent unjust and illegal attack by the United States and Britain on the people of Iraq provided for some in the U.S. just such a crisis situation and a startling example of how the Eucharist can become a museum artifact, whose power, like that of a museum piece is entirely in the past.  At the point of its production, the museum artifact was crafted for specific purposes.  Here in the museum it has only aesthetic or historic interest.  It has become a kind of prop.  In a church building, displaying the U.S. flag on one side of the altar (so worshipers won’t forget what they actually worship) and the papal flag on the other (implicit icon of institutional power claims) — in such a context what chance is there that the disturbing rhetorical claim of the Gloria will be honored?  “Glory to God in the highest and peace to God’s people on earth.”   

That claim, repeated Sunday after Sunday may not get inside the sensibilities of those assembled.  Perhaps, the claim cannot be allowed into either consciousness or sensibility because it is too disturbing.  To be actualized in any person(s), a religious like this one demands that those saying it have (in Lonergan’s words),  “a new concept of self, new principles to guide that self in thinking, judging. evaluating, new principles guiding everything that concerns that self.”[3] 

The rhetorically evident claim of this hymn of praise, the Gloria, is that peace among people on earth is what gives glory to God,   The grammatical structure says, then, Glory is to be given to God.  But there is an “and,” adding a second aspect of Glory to God, and that is: “Peace to God’s people on earth.”  If I am correct then, the Gloria asks us this: You want to see how God is glorified on earth, then look at the lives of these persons, what they stand for, how they process ordinary events in their lives, what they are willing to do and what they cannot do and will not do — about fostering peace. Meanings intoned may mean nothing.  To have significance words need to be worked at, considered, re-considered, struggled with, and, as Lonergan so clearly claims, allowed to create their own appropriate anxiety.[4]  Otherwise they have the significance of a flake of paint that twirled down from the ceiling of the church and fell on one’s shoulder unnoticed. 

In my New York City suburban parish, the single allusion, week after week over a period of more than eight months, to the fact that our country was pursuing a war to kill people in another nation, was this: a formula prayer for “our” parishioners who were “serving our country in the military,” that they be kept safe.  An upper-middle class lifestyle and the mindset it fosters allowed that petition to be announced and that it be the sole allusion to a horror that was brewing.  Further the context itself assured that nobody would protest.  Anyone who might have dared stand to shout out an addition to that prayer  “And that they will have the courage to refuse to kill anyone,” would have been ejected from the assembly.  In a Lonergarian vein, I point to these aspects: a specific place of worship, a specific group who assembled, a specific set of presbyters “serving” the congregation, and a very specific ignoring of a planned human abomination sure to kill thousands of innocent civilians. And all this specificity backgrounding the Eucharist, a specific ritual.  Something specific and central in our tradition had been pushed aside, and other specifics, other convictions, other “realities” had taken its place.  I began to ask myself whether the Eucharist could in fact be for some an unacknowledged way of hiding out each week from God and from the call of the gospel.

I realize my claims here are not statistically provable, a fact that does not make them any the less meaningful.  The very manner in which the Eucharist is celebrated, the kind of speech engaged in, the way the assembled come together, the way the ritual unfolds, the issues raised (and those withheld) in response to the scriptures — all these factors make for the particularities of this event — and for better or for worse. Of course, and crucially, one must add one more particularity: the particular understanding of what theology is, and how one is to speak theologically, and then, of the result,---also for better or worse--the actual engagement in discourse about God and in the actions and practices that flow from engaged discourse.

The problem — let’s call it “pastoral inertia” — is at root a theological problem rooted in vague theological notions and inept theological discourse, inept in the sense that it does not lead to focus on concrete situations. Bernard Lonergan’s writings shed light on this problem of vagueness, not once or even often, but continuously. I think of him as the Apostle of the Specific. A stitch running through all of his writings is the question of reality and of insight into reality. For my purposes, here I recall for readers a few passages, which because of their similarity to one another, disclose Lonergan’s insistence on this one feature of any thought adequate to reality but especially needed for theological reflection: getting to the real or the actual, via the concrete and specific.

 Lonergan and the Sacrament of the Specific           

Lonergan’s writings keep circling back to the problem of reality, of attention to reality, and of the kind of healing action that can result from that attention — or of the mess inattention brings in its wake. .  He repeats these themes over and over again.  These must be the ones he judged most seminal.  In his published writings he evidently wanted — and may even have insisted--that these repetitions to be included for rhetorical effect.  Such repetition suggests he may have been afraid his readers might miss the central points of his life work.   One of these is his conviction that reality is found in concrete situations, not in vague verbal claims that help us ignore the specifics of the particulars in which we are enmeshed.    For example, in “Insight: Preface to a Discussion,” one of his essays compiled as Collection, published in 1967, he writes,

To know the concrete in its concreteness is to know all there is to be known about each thing. To know all there is to be known about each thing is, precisely, to know being.  For me, then, being and the concrete are identical terms. [emphasis added because Lonergan here makes a rare use of the “first person,” for a kind of personal underscoring of an idea that recurs throughout the corpus of his writings]  However, this view of the concrete has a presupposition.  It presupposes concepts express insights and that insights grasp forms immanent in sensible presentations.  To put the matter the other way about, it presupposes that the sensible has been intellectualized through schemes, sequences, processes, developments.  On that supposition, human knowledge forms a single whole, and the totality of true judgments is necessarily knowledge of the concrete.[5]

Among the many places Lonergan repeats this theme is in his appreciation of the “later Husserl.” 

[I]t remains for Husserl that the fundamental truth, the really basic world, is not the scientific or philosophic but the popular.  He argues that one has only to take any scientific procedure or conclusion, and with a little probing one will find that the ultimate evidence lies in the popular world , in the [lived world] , with its [deep sense of what is self-evident]. Science claims to rest on experience, but what is experienced is not the scientist’s real world but the popular world.[6]

But of course his lengthy, in-depth study of Husserl’s writings on paying attention to what is there before us is all about Lonergan’s own concern for the particular: “For me being and the concrete are identical terms.” One of Lonergan’s own favorite analyses of the process of paying attention is found repeated in several places in Insight but also in two famous essays in his A Second Collection[7] but again in an essay on the genesis of Methods.[8]  These were the passages that initially attracted me to Lonergan’s work. They are from Second Collection, but can also be found word-for-word in Insight.    

I have been asked for "a theological perspective on how a community of love adapts and directs itself for effective mission and witness."  Presumably the reason for the request lies in points I have made elsewhere.  There is in my book Insight a general analysis of the dynamic structure of human history, and in my mimeographed text De Verbo Incarnato a thesis on the lex crucis that provides its strictly unintelligent policies and inept courses of action.  The situation deteriorates to demand still further insights and, as they are blocked, policies become more unintelligent and actions more inept.  What is worse, the deteriorating situation seems to provide the uncritical, biased mind with factual evidence in which the bias is claimed to be verified.  So in ever increasing measure, intelligence comes to be regarded as irrelevant to practical living.  Human activity settles down to a decadent routine, and initiative becomes the privilege of violence."  (Insight, p. xiv)

If human historical process is such a compound of progress and decline, then its redemption would be effected by faith, hope, and charity.  For the evils of the situation and the enmities they engender would only be perpetuated by an even-handed justice: charity alone can wipe the slate clean. [emphasis added]  The determinism and pressures of every kind, resulting from the cumulative surd [a “surd” is a deafness and comes from the Latin word for deafness] of unintelligent policies and actions, can be withstood only through a hope that is transcendent and so does not depend on any human prop. Finally, only within the context of higher truths accepted on faith can human intelligence and reasonableness be liberated from the charge of irrelevance to the realities produced by human waywardness (Insight, Ch. XX).[9] 

In my agitated state before the altar week after week leading up to the horrific bombing of Baghdad,  I kept remembering these words of Lonergan.  

In the original version of this sequence, in Insight, Lonergan gives the following similar account of what he names above as “decline” but there calls “oversight.”  It is important enough for my purposes to cite it also.  Oversight to some might connote a sense of responsibility for a situation, but not in the way Lonergan uses it here.  It has an opposite meaning: a deliberate willingness to overlook elements that that can be brushed aside only to the peril of many in the situation and of course to the peril of the situation itself.  Pastoral agents do well to keep in mind this meaning of oversight, as oversight itself is too easy to find among those habituated to pastoral laziness.  The following passage couid be applied as a critique of Catholic leadership, especially in the United States.

Besides insights there are oversights. Besides the dynamic context of detached and disinterested inquiry in which insights emerge with a notable frequency, there are the contrary dynamic contexts of the flight from understanding in which oversights occur regularly and one might almost say systematically.  Hence, if insight into insight is not to be an oversight of oversights, it must include an insight into the principal devices of the flight from understanding.

…The flight from understanding will be seen to be anything but a peculiar aberration that afflicts only the unfortunate or the perverse.  /6 In its philosophic form, which is not to be confused with its psychiatric, moral, social and cultural manifestations, it appears to result simply from an incomplete development in the intelligent and reasonable use of one’s own  intelligence and reasonableness. But though its origin is a mere absence of full development, its consequences are positive [i.e., evident] enough. For the flight from understanding blocks the occurrence of the insights that would upset its comfortable equilibrium.  Nor is it content with a merely passive resistance. Though covert and devious, it is resourceful and inventive, effective and extraordinarily plausible.  It admits a vast variety of forms, and when it finds some untenable, it can resort to others. If it never refuses to supply superficial minds with superficial positions, it is quite competent to work out a philosophy so acute and profound that the elect strive in vain and for centuries to lay bare its real inadequacies….

[I]nsight into the various modes  of the flight from understanding will explain 1) the range of really confused yet apparently clear and distinct ideas, 2) aberrant views on the meaning of meaning, 3) distortions in the a priori synthetic components  in our knowledge, 4) the existence of a multiplicity of philosophies, and 5) the series of mistaken metaphysical  and antimetaphysical positions. p. 6

 “The evils of a situation and the enmities they engender would only…[be corrected by] “charity” which “alone can wipe the slate clean.”  What too easily can happen is that in a particular assembly — or in a whole group of assemblies--the group’s self-understanding and claims, but also its deeds as a body of persons, become vague, unfocused, unable to shed light on actual situations.  In crisis situations, like the one in the U.S. cited above, one can see more clearly how eviscerated of power the Eucharist can become a visible, even public, gutting of the gospel, colluded in by bishops.

The Problem of  Systematics Today and Its Connection  to the Eucharist

At this point I wish to return my initial questions.   Why is it that so many theologates and university theology programs pay so little attention to the pastoral conditions that either enhance the living of the gospel or diminish it.  From my reading of Lonergan, I find he puts these actualities as an ever-present horizon in gospelling.  Why is it, then,  that catechesis and pastoral theology in general are given such little regard and attention in universities and seminaries?  As the revised (1997) General Directory for Catechesis insists, catechesis is all about the maintenance of conversion, a particularly unstable human reality, having to do with more than one’s thoughts but with one’s entire sensibility and way of living.  Conversion is not a big deal; the big deal is the maintenance of conversion.  How then does it come about that in one U.S. university the department of theology has no courses in pastoral theology or pastoral ministry.   Even worse, across campus there is an entirely separate enterprise for spirituality and ministry.  To put the situation in an alarming but droll way: they do not commune.

Theology needs to push harder to get beyond thoughts about thoughts, and to reject the old theorem, namely, “Because I can think it, then I know reality.”  However, the renewal of theology will not progress very far unless we can restore its unity, and especially its ability to recognize the import for theological reflection of what people actually live in their day-to-day lives, and how “actual livings” affect their religious sensibilities, for better or for worse.  Lonergan worked hard to forge a unified understanding of theology and how it should proceed, a wonderful example of which is displayed in his great treatise on “systematics,” Method in Theology.  There he describes systematic theology (“systematics”) this way:

The functional specialty, systematics, attempts… to work out appropriate systems of conceptualization, to remove apparent inconsistencies, to move towards some grasp of spiritual matters both from their own inner coherence and from the analogies offered by more familiar human experience. (p.132)

One need not be an astute reader to see that in his logical sequence of the eight functional specialties, each one enhances the specialty that follows, and that the enhancing progresses as the specialties accumulate.  The penultimate specialty is systematics, but in Method in Theology the entire sequence exists to serve communications, which is the most specifically pastoral of the sequence.  Each specialty is pastoral as far as its overall end purpose goes.   Here Lonergan says:

“[Communications]  is a major concern, for it is in this final stage that theological reflection bears fruit. Without the first seven stages, of course, there is no fruit to be borne. But without the last the first seven are in vain, for they fail to mature.” p. 355.  At this point, he recommends to readers F.X.Arnold’s five volume edited work, The Handbook for Pastoral Theology, for pastoral theology is all about the fruits of the gospel. 

Lonergan’s hopes for systematics--aiding the grasp of spiritual matters in their inner coherence and in ordinary human living--will be closer to realization when theology connects its overall  programme more closely to what happens at the Eucharist.  The Eucharist is meant to be a center point of the Christian life. It is the communal event where the Jesus’s proposal about the meaning of life is ritually affirmed and celebrated by the Body of  believers. Those meanings are to be enfleshed in the community as a corporate body.  Body is the leitmotif word that flows through this ritual.   When these meanings are so enfleshed, that body becomes a living medium for the communication of the Spirit that Jesus poured out in the world through his death and resurrection.   Perhaps the simplest and most direct way of putting this is Schillebeeckx’s:  Jesus is the sacrament of the human encounter with God, and the local church is the sacrament of the encounter with the Spirit of Jesus.

 The church is meant to be that, but for many it is not that.  A stumbling block to the human encounter with the Spirit of Jesus in a communal body seems to be this:  theology’s lack of integration and unity.  And what, as it is lived,  theology stands for can be something quite other than that encounter with the Spirit of Jesus.  So too the Eucharist   Instead of being an event where we encounter the Body of the Christ, that is, the embodiment of the Spirit poured out in Jesus’s resurrection, now discernible in this assembly, it is often something quite different. It can be a set of verbalized commitments and claims about the purposes of life, claims and commitments not verified by the group life of the assembly.  The verbal claims about our relationships with God and with our world are not enfleshed in deeds.  As noted above, such a situation represents a gospel absence or epoche, a missing piece.  Lacking gospel deeds, a community’s group life becomes vague, unfocused, unable to shed light on actual situations.  It permits “worshippers” to leave the place of worship and pledge allegiance to Der Fuhrer, no matter what the current surname of that person might be.  In crises, one can see more clearly how eviscerated of power to touch people’s lives the Eucharist can become. As already pointed out, one such crisis occurred recently in the United States.

Michel De Certeau has pointed out how people tend to make symbols mean what they want them to mean, thus giving themselves permission to overlook what they might have been intended to mean.[10]  Thus it is possible for the Eucharist to mean something almost opposite to its  intended meaning. What was the Eucharist’s meaning for those guarding the condemned in the concentration camps of World War II, when the chaplain came and celebrated Sunday Mass for those guards?   What did it mean in the 1970s during the annual Military Mass in Buenos Aires, where bishops, cardinals and papal nuncios gathered with the military leaders who in process of murdering almost ten thousand young people for being suspected leftists?[11]

The Eucharist can be the event that allows the assembled to put God “on hold” for another week.  It can be part of a consumerist bargain with God: I’ve done my part, now it is up to you, God, to fulfill your part.  Stay off my back for the rest of the week and make sure nothing bad happens to me or those I love.”  The Eucharist can be a place people go to hide out from God, without being aware that this is what they are actually doing.  I realize my claims here are not statistically provable, a fact that does not make them any the less meaningful.  I will offer examples to anchor these claims.

 The Problem of Sensibility

The underlying issue is one of sensibility.   Sensibility is a word that names how things “hit us,” how they strike us, what they mean to us at a feeling level. It names matters, not just of concept but also of affect.  Sensibility remains an issue of importance for systematic theology, even if  writing about systematic theology awards it little attention.[12]    Theology in general and local congregations in particular might consider the distinction between the primary and secondary doctrines of religious communities,[13] for the distinction clarifies issues around religious sensibility.   The primary doctrines of a church deal are about how to be a person in the world, based on a religious imagination of life's purposes.  These doctrines are about life's specific circumstances and how to deal with them in religiously wise and coherent ways.  These are not so much the doctrines we have memorized or can recite. An example of such primary doctrines might be my mother’s conviction that we should not eat without remembering the anguish of those who have no food, or her often repeated Irish wisdom about thanks: “Tis only the dumb animals that can’t say thanks.”  The primary doctrines comprise the deeper core message of the church that gets inside us and causes us to react the way we do to events in our life.  They are the well from which our religious reactions and attitudes bubble forth.  They form our sense of what is "truly right and proper" in life, how we think about life and death, what we name as good and what we say is evil.  

The primary doctrines are what cause certain things to "hit" us in a certain way.  For example, the expression, "good life" for us may not name — at least according to our sacred writings--a life filled with purchased goodies but one that takes seriously the human dignity of all persons.  The primary doctrines are an indispensable pair of religious lenses that help us see with greater clarity and thus walk a more careful path.  Primary doctrines shape a basic stance toward the world and a basic way of living and behaving. All religions have their primary doctrines and all hold them sacred.    It is possible for someone to have a solid grasp of the secondary doctrines (the doctrinal rules about doctrines) but little grasp of the habits of the heart and basic gestures and behaviors fostered by the primary doctrines.[14] 

Primary doctrines only become truly primary, not so much when we grasp them as when they grasp us and determine which of the secondary doctrines we see as most important.  Secondary doctrines govern the development of the community's larger body of doctrines.  Such rules are one step removed from practice, a fact that does not make secondary doctrines unimportant, but does make then “unprimary.”  When a community's espousal of its secondary doctrines loses touch with its primary doctrines, the community's inner life and its outer coherence are endangered and compromised.  The philosopher William Christian says that if we had to choose between doctrines about doctrines [secondary doctrines] and proposals about courses of action, he would opt for the second.  He implies that the real danger lies in the secondary doctrines displacing the primary practical doctrines.  Should the catechism displace the beatitudes, the primary religious "path" has been lost.  Should systematic theology forget its need to keep touch with the primary doctrines of gospel faith and the sensibility fostered by them, it has lost its way.  Careful reading of Lonergan’s essay on systematics in Method will show the highest achievement of method to be a gospel sensibility in individuals and Eucharistic assemblies.[15]

My own fear is that current systematic theology, in its clear conceptual organization, tends to become a  reality unto itself, and a reality cut off from the actuality of the local church.  I see this tendency in the way theology is taught, in the way the various specializations are prized in seminaries and universities, and in an unspoken hierarchy of specializations among recent graduates.  Pastoral theology — the theological areas focusing on the actual practice of the gospel--and catechesis (“the systematic, lifelong, and careful coaching of disciples  in the practice of the Jesus Way’) are not highly regarded by the recently ordained in the United States, despite the work of Lonergan to unite theology and despite Michael J. Buckley’s scholarly but implicit expose of this error.[16]

I am claiming that behind Lonergan’s theology is one insistent reality: the role of a living, sensible embodiment of the teachings of Jesus in actual persons and the way they live. All theology serves the move from a systemic deafness to God to shocked recognition that God’s call in Jesus cannot be answered in a general way but only in very specific sacramentalizations.  As Marianne Sawicki puts it, you can’t see the Lord unless you feed the hungry; when you put your fingers into the wounds of the world you will come to recognize the body of the Lord.  Or to quote, Thomas, “Unless I put my hands into the holes of the nails, I will not believe.”  I have often thought the evangelist might have meant this as Thomas’s deeper meaning: “Unless…., I will not be able to believe, because I cannot encounter the Christ until I touch the pain of that Christic body.”  In other words, they are the conditions needed for Jesus-faith.   Monique Pincon-Charlot and Michel Pinchon provide a compelling example of the refusal of church people to rub elbows with people considered “less,” in their description of “life-style enclaves,” in France, where Sunday routines in ever-more-popular “gated communities” are pleasantly structured, with  “two masses, one following the other, each one filling the church.[17]”  Of course, the “gated community” phenomenon is following ostentatious wealth everywhere.  In such a world,  Jesus’s example of Dives and Lazarus is no fairy tale

FOOTNOTES:

[1]  Especially helpful on this issue is Lonergan’s “Subject and Horizon,” chapter 13 of  Phenomenology and Logic: the Boston College Lectures on Mathematical Logic and Existentialism, Philip J. McShane, ed., Vol. 18 of the Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan (Toronto Buffalo London: University of Toronto Press , 2001.

[2] See “Interpreting Situations,” in Edward Farley, Practicing Gospel (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), pp. 29-43.                   

[3] See Note 1,”Subject and Horizon,” p.281.

[4]  Ibid,  pp. 284-288,  the  section entitled  “Horizon and Dread,” esp. 287.

[5] “Insight: Preface to a Discussion.”  Chapter 19 of  Bernard Lonergan, The Collected Words of Bernard Lonergan, edited by Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: Lonergan Research Institute of Regis College, 1993), p. 148.                                           

[6]  “The Later Husserl,” p. 255, in Phenomenology and Logic: The Boston College Lectures on Mathematical Logic and Existentialism, Vol. 18 of  Collected Works of  Bernard Lonergan.   Philip J. McShane, ed.  Here in brackets I provide English translations for words Lonergan gives in German.

[7] Bernard J.F. Lonergan, “The Transition from a Classicist World-View to Historical-Mindedness,” pp. 1-9  and “The Response of the Jesuit as Priest and Apostle in the Modern World,” pp. 165-187,  of William F.J. Ryan and Bernard J. Tyrrell, eds.,  A Second Collection (Phila: Westminster Press, 1974).

[8]  Bernard Lonergan, “The Ongoing Genesis of Methods,” in Frederick E. Crowe, SJ, A Third Collection: Papers by Bernard J.F. Lonergan,  pp. 146-165. This account is especially detailed and expansive.                          

[9] Bernard Lonergan, "The Transition from a Classicist World-View to Historical Mindedness," in Wm. Ryan and Bernard Tyrrell, eds., A Second Collection, pp. 7-8. This passage appears in more than once place is L’s writings, which shows how important this line of thought was to him.  See for example, the Preface to Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, Vol. 3 Frederick E Crowe and Robert M. Doran, eds., The Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.

[10] This idea recurs in various places in Graham Ward, ed. The Certeau Reader (Malden,MA: Blackwell,2000 and also in Tom Conley, ed. and trans.,  Michel de Certeau: Culture in the Plural (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2001).  I am interested in the fact that deCerteau brings together religious and secular scholars.

[11]  I raise these issues in more detail in “ The Worshiping Assembly: Zone of Cultural Contestation, Chapter 1 of At This Time In This Place: The Spirit Embodied in the Local Assembly (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1999), pp. 7-24.                                              

[12]  An example of a systematic lack of attention in Systematic Theology to sensibility is found in the two volume Systematic Theology, published in 1991 by Francis Fiorenza and John Galvin.  In the 720 pages of these two volumes, there is no mention of “lifeworld,” the important concept detailed for us by Jurgen Habermas, in Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functional Reason.  Trans. Thomas McCarthy. (Boston Beacon Press, 1989), pp. 170-172.   One might argue that lifeworld is indirectly alluded in two brief sections on spirituality or in the “nod” given  liberation theology; if so, these “nods” prove my claim. I say: systematics without lifeworld is a set of ideas about ideas, not about reality.   See, Francis Schussler-Fiorenza and John P. Galvin, eds., Systematic Theology: Roman Catholic Perspectives  Vols. 1 and  2 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991).  It is important to note that in general Fiorenza’s writings about the local church and practical theology are impressive, important, and excellent for attention to the issue of context and lifeworld. See, for example, Francis Schussler Fiorenza, “The Church as a Community of Interpretation: Political Theology between Discourse Ethics and Hermeneutical Reconstruction,”  Chapter 3, pp. 66-91 of, Don S. Browning and Francis S. Fiorenza, eds., Habermas, Modernity, and Public Theology  (NY: Crossroad, 1992).  Perhaps, the omission of context and lifeworld from a treatise on “systematic theology” is an example of the crisis of systematic theology.

[13]  Here I am following some of the ideas of William A. Christian, Sr., The Doctrines of Religious Communities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), Chapter 1.  His work is not about Christian communities but is a philosophical analysis of all religious communities.

[14] For a critique of this error in a theological treatise, see Michael Warren, “Review of Avery Dulles, The Assurance of Things Hoped For” (NY: Oxford University Press, 1994), in The Irish Theological Quarterly 64 (1999): 199-201.

[15] See, Method in Theology, pp. 336-337.                     

[16] Michael J. Buckley,  At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven and London:Yale University Press, 1987) and “The Rise of  Modern Atheism and the Religious Epoche,”  CTSA Proceedings 47 (1992): 69-83.  For a critique of how Avery Dulles can succeed in ignoring particulars, see, Michael Warren, “Review of Avery Dulles, The Assurance of Things Hoped For” in The Irish Theological Quarterly 64 (1999): 199-201.

[17]   “La Derniere Classe Sociale: Sur la poste des nantis [Hunting for Security], Le Monde Diplomatique  September 2001: pp. 1, 24-25.

Michael Warren is Professor for Pastoral Theology and Catechesis in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, at St. John’s University, New York City.  His most recent books are  At This Time In This Place: The Spirit Embodied on the Local Assembly  (1999) and  Seeing Thru the Media: A Religious View of Communications and Cultural Analysis (1997).  He is currently finishing a new book on ministry with youth.  Its title will probably be Youth Ministry in an Inconvenient Church.

 

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