Abstract
I am grateful to the Editor for affording me the opportunity of this note, and to Professor Barter Moulaison both for highlighting some of our substantive differences and for drawing my attention to some points at which I failed to make my meaning clear.
Professor Barter Moulaison’s friendly admonition to honor the balance of theory and praxis is well taken. The intellectual apostolate is not without its spiritual perils, and it is good to keep them in mind as I begin a new work as Director of the Lonergan Research Institute. Indeed, her mention of church kitchens conjured up a fond memory: I fell in love with my wonderful bride in a church kitchen, where we volunteered together serving Toronto’s homeless!
I had not perceived, but was glad to be advised, how some of my remarks might be misunderstood. When I played off Barter Moulaison’s metaphor of “therapy” to invoke the critique of therapeutic culture in Habits of the Heart, I certainly did not mean to imply that Barter Moulaison is, as she concludes, “primarily concerned with feelings.” I intended an analogy: “Lindbeckian therapy” gives an insufficient account of Christian truth in favor of successfully managing Christian language. The context in my article is a critique of the limitations of a “grammatical” (not an “experiential-expressivist”) conception of doctrine, and an insistence on the necessity of proceeding to judgment. In a similar way, when I mentioned Freudian therapy, I did not mean to suggest that Barter Moulaison’s “therapy” is Freudian. It was simply a rhetorical device to introduce Freud’s interpretation of Christianity, in order to highlight what is at stake in the affirmation of Christian doctrine as true. Many thanks to my interlocutor for helping me rein in a runaway metaphor!
Patricia Churchland uses Betty Crocker’s account of microwaves to illustrate the difference between common sense and scientific explanation, and I borrowed her illustration to the same end. Cooking and chemistry are both intelligent activities, but cooking is a specialization of common sense intelligence. It frankly never occurred to me that anyone would find this example “intriguingly gendered,” because I did not foresee a readership that thinks of cooking as the peculiar domain of women. Of course, Betty Crocker is a woman’s name; Thomas à Kempis and Cephalus, two of my other illustrations of common sense, are men. In any case, I was comparing common sense with theory; I had no intention of comparing Barter Moulaison to a cook, a monk, a pious elder, or, when I mentioned GPS, a tourist. In retrospect, I can see how I might have been clearer, and appreciate the chance to explain.
Fairly enough, Barter Moulaison points out that I have not read her book. She wishes to differentiate her views from Lindbeck’s, and I confess that I too readily imputed the shortcomings of his position to hers. For her part, she admits, with admirable honesty, not having read all of Lonergan’s Triune God. One appreciates that the volumes were rare, and in Latin. Still, both her original critique and my subsequent explication and defense were essentially about the merits of Lonergan’s project, and only incidentally about hers.
Finally, her comparison of theologian-as-scientist and theologian-as-grammarian goes, I think, to the heart of our substantive differences. She is right to suppose that Lonergan holds for a scientific (i.e., explanatory) theology with a differentiated set of methods, including a dialectical method for discerning the continuities and assessing the differences in a developing tradition. That said, I cannot understand why she persists in describing his account as “a theory of a deep rupture”—which no Catholic could hold—between ante-Nicene and Nicene doctrine. Barter Moulaison bids us follow “the logic of the ontological claims that are disclosed within scripture and the Nicene tradition,” which could easily pass for a description of his first thesis in Doctrines. According to Lonergan, one and the same mystery is presented in the New Testament, confessed by all the ante-Nicene Catholic writers, and declared at Nicea. The Nicene difference is not in the reality meant but in the way it is meant, to wit, in incipiently systematic terms. Barter Moulaison says Nicea clarified “appropriate ways” and excluded “incoherent ways” of speaking about God. But why are some ways “appropriate” and others “incoherent”? The coherence in question is not logical, for Arianism is logically coherent while Trinitarianism is notoriously problematic. It is, rather, correspondence to the revealed mystery, known through true judgments and formulated in statements which, at Nicea, began to employ systematic meaning.