Abstract
This article accepts that theology is always in danger of becoming abstract and losing its distinctive sense of reality. Part of the problem is the way a critical theology can become removed from experience. A constructive response to this problem—of special relevance to theological education and pastoral communication—is fostering an interplay in Christian experience between the empirical ‘fact’ of Christianity, the ‘classic’ form of Christian revelation, and ‘the phenomenon’ of God’s self-revelation experienced in the corporate consciousness of the Church.
The exploration of faith is an ongoing activity, ideally refreshing itself in every age, and communicating the authentic meaning of faith as a gift and a responsibility to the culture in which it moves. Theology’s grounding in the realities of experience is wide and deep, but most of this is subterranean, tacit, and never fully objectifiable. The interpersonal community of faith, its corporate consciousness, institutional structures, charismatic persons, saints, martyrs, wisdom figures, and so forth, together with the symbols and sacraments, the inspired writings and key doctrines, its art and overall ‘philosophy’ constitute an immense, historic and largely undifferentiated current of experience in which theology lives.
But there are difficulties—a loss of reality from within, and the resistance of the culture from without. With the success of the methods of empirical science and the cultural dominance of a scientific mentality, theology began to suffer a long-term crisis. Traditional and originally philosophical notions such as ‘being,’ ‘presence,’ ‘essence,’ and ‘nature,’ so basic to Catholic doctrines, lost their metaphysical assurance in the world of modern science, and then were further dislocated in the shifting sands of the postmodern world. Consequently, the capacity of theology to attend to the data of experience, either in the realm of faith or contemporary culture, was diminished. A renewed receptivity to the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of Christian revelation as it is registered in human consciousness is called for.
Whatever the explanation of how theology lost its experiential grounding, a critically aware meta-physical or meta-phenomenological exploration of reality is not the problem. That lay, rather, in the often unnoticed limitations of exploring the data of faith with a consciousness already shaped, explicitly or not, by an ossified metaphysical structure. When a venerable array of concepts and definitions are already in possession, there is an ideological obstacle to the theological creativity that would be sensitive to the experience of the Church, to the diverse expressions of culture, and to the history of the world in which Christian communities exist.
Bernard Lonergan’s Method in Theology was an outstanding contribution to the reintegration of theological activities, which had grown apart in the face of the complex data with which theology had to deal.
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Appearing some 40 years ago, its vital ingredient was the regulatory role of conscious experience in regard to the theological development and employment of metaphysical terms. He writes: The point to making metaphysical terms and relations not basic but derived is that a critical metaphysics results. For every term and relation there will exist a corresponding element in intentional consciousness. Accordingly, empty or misleading terms and relationships can be eliminated, while valid ones can be elucidated by the conscious intention from which they are derived. The importance of such a critical control will be evident to anyone familiar with the vast arid wastes of theological controversy.
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Lonergan’s familiarity with ‘vast arid wastes of theological controversy’ is shared by numerous others who had grown weary of abstractly rational procedures. His phenomenology of the love of the Holy Spirit flooding Christian consciousness in its self-transcending dynamism was welcomed in a theology developing in an ecumenical and interfaith context. However, the phenomenon of self-transcending love still needed to be correlated to the phenomenon of the Christ-event if the interests of a distinctive Christian theology were to be served. 3
In what follows, I sketch a way in which three perceptions of the Christ-event—termed here ‘the Fact,’ ‘the Classic,’ and ‘the Phenomenon’—arise out of the one experience of faith, and figure in a theological and Christian communication. The aim throughout is to promote a distinctive realism in theology based firmly in a ‘thick’ sense of experience. Such efforts must begin with the recognition that reality reveals itself in different ways to different minds at different times and in different levels and registers. A book, for example, can lie on a desk as an empirical object, perhaps to be weighed and sent by mail; or it may be taken up and read, and so become a source of, say, aesthetic, intellectual, or moral enrichment. Conversely, there are many modes of receptivity corresponding to the manifold richness of reality, as different as looking at a book, admiring its dustcover, throwing it to the floor—or, reading it, underlining particular passages, re-reading some of its more striking sections, and engaging others in discussion of its content, style, usefulness, and potential impact, or assessing its suitability as a gift to a colleague. 4 Such manifold potential experience is pre-eminently the case when thinking focuses on the figure of Christ and the larger notion of the Christ-event. But first, let us begin with the most general and diffuse of the three perceptions, the empirical Fact of Christian reality.
The Christian Fact
Clearly, the Christ-event is an historic fact in the narrative of civilization—originally in the Mediterranean world, then in the West, but now in an increasingly global manner. Christianity may wax or wane, but Christ remains a commanding personal symbol, immeasurably enriching the moral and religious imagination of human beings. The story of his birth, life, moral teaching, death, and resurrection is woven into the history of individuals, peoples and nations in ways that are impossible to deny—even if it can be questioned whether all such instances, in all their occasions and degrees, are authentic manifestations of who he was, what he stood for, and what is entailed in following him.
From one perspective, the Christ-event can be accurately identified as ‘the Christian Fact.’ 5 But it is so elemental, and yet so empirically observable and pervasive that, when subjected to analysis or reflection, it appears oddly complex and not easily objectified. The Fact includes in its range endless particular topics, which, like Russian dolls, contain a number of successively smaller shapes: moral inspiration, liturgical celebrations, festive occasions, multiple aesthetic forms—music, literature, painting, architecture, and even film in which ‘Christ figures’ are an established category. Apart from religious and moral considerations, the Christian Fact has been a prodigious aesthetic and literary event. In this variety of embodiments and influences, the Fact of Jesus Christ has permeated the world of human meanings and values in a unique manner. For the two billion Christians of the world, he is the focus and exemplar of religious and moral life. In a penumbra of other relationships to other religious traditions, he is, sometimes unsettlingly but, nonetheless, inescapably, a factor. For non-Christians, it is impossible to escape the multiple associations of his presence in images, writings, institutions, works of art, holidays and feasts, and so much else, all inspired by what and who he was. The dating of the calendar, the structure of the week and the year, the biblical references that are part of the language itself, the holdings of art galleries, the repertoire of classical music, and Christian witness in all ages and cultures, create a complex of content and influence so as to constitute an immense Fact. At the very least, theology is called on to explain the intrinsic meaning, value and implications of this factual phenomenon, even in the less propitious times of contemporary secularism.
The Christian Fact is massively present, whether encountered from without or lived from within. In its regard, theology is not first of all defending an idea or a expounding a theory, but referring to a huge, empirical, historical, social, cultural and religious reality. Critics may well reject the idea of ‘Christianity’ or the authority of Christian teachers, or the moral tone of Christian practice. They cannot do so, however, by denying that this Christian Fact, whether admired or detested, has massively shaped world-history. It is public, multivalent, ever emerging, not as an idea to be justified, but as a reality to be recognized. It is a continuing and unfinished event—as an institution, a community witnessing to what is ‘otherwise,’ however familiar and sedimented its expression may have become.
Without running too far ahead, we note that to register this Fact in any positive sense is to be drawn toward the classic expressions that are associated with it, and toward the phenomenon of the originating experience in which it occurred. The Fact, of itself, is publicly accessible in the empirical world. Christian classics—pre-eminently the writings of the New Testament—are intrinsic to this Fact, even though expressing an excess of meaning that eludes objectification. We pass, then, to a consideration of what ‘the Classic’ entails.
The Christian Classic
Before the writings of notable French phenomenologists such as Jean-Luc Marion, Michel Henry, and Jean-Yves Lacoste were well known in the English-speaking world, David Tracy’s The Analogical Imagination, with his extended treatment of ‘the Classic,’ was covering much of the same ground, and for much the same reasons—that is, to recover the distinctive sense of Christian reality and the experience of self-disclosure or ‘revelation’ intrinsic to it. 6
Though an adequate summary of Tracy’s prodigiously documented chapters treating of the classic is beyond our scope, we may usefully draw attention first of all to the capacity of the classic to refresh and revitalize any area of tradition of thought—and especially in regard to theology. 7
The Classic in General
Particular instances of classics are found in every domain of human culture. They are commandingly there in an elemental, incontrovertible way—in art, science, philosophy, religion, history. In his preliminary general description of the classic, Tracy contends that the ‘naming certain texts, events, symbols, rituals, images, persons’ as classic suggests that the culture is recognizing ‘nothing less than the disclosure of a reality we cannot but name truth.’
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The classic expresses an excess of meaning, and so discloses a fresh, and even a transformative, sense of reality. Through it, we glimpse what is ‘the essential’ in life, just as we are summoned to ever further learning and appreciation.
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To that degree, familiarity with the classic inspires a wholesome humility and a more refined receptivity in regard to all reality. It gives intelligence a quality of tact, for there are realities that can only be received, contemplated, beheld—but never mastered or fully analysed.
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Lonergan, anticipating a theological application of this notion, writes that, ‘the classics … not only are beyond the initial horizon of their interpreters but also may demand an intellectual, moral, religious conversion of the interpreter over and above the broadening of his horizon.’
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Consequently, the special impact of the classic lies in its ability to reshape horizons, and to provoke a conversion to something higher or deeper or broader than the projections and routines of previous outlooks.
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The classic’s special provocative power, in both its artistic and other forms, is strikingly expressed by George Steiner as follows: In a wholly fundamental, pragmatic sense, the poem, the statue, the sonata are not so much read, viewed or heard as they are lived. The encounter with the aesthetic is, together with certain modes of religious and metaphysical experience, the most ‘ingressive,’ transformative summons available to human experiencing … the shorthand image is that of an Annunciation, of ‘a terrible beauty’ or gravity breaking into the small house of our cautionary being. If we have heard rightly the wing-beat and the provocation of that visit, the house is no longer habitable in quite the same way as before. A mastering intrusion has shifted the light.
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The classic provocatively intimates dimensions of human existence in the face of dehumanizing pressures. 14 It is an ‘annunciation’ of a larger mystery, despite the postmodern reduction of sensibility to the banal. 15
The Religious Classic
Nonetheless, the communication of an excess of meaning is characteristic of the religious classic—even if making hard and fast distinctions, say, between an artistic or religious classic, is problematic, given the elusive, provocative and overbrimming significance of a classic in any area. Nonetheless, we can follow Tracy when he points to some quasi-specific features of the religious classic. It can be appreciated as a revelatory event in that it meets the limits of human existence with the disclosure of a fullness, a wholeness, and a healing that comes from beyond—‘a radical and finally gracious mystery.’ 16 This disclosure comes with its own originality, but it also presupposes an antecedent willingness that is receptive to what is offered. Keeping in mind some instance of the persons, texts, or events that have attained classic status in a religious tradition helps clarify certain features of the religious classic.
First, such classics express surprising possibilities at the limits of human existence. There are, indeed, the dark limits of guilt, death, suffering, and powerlessness. But these are met with the positive experiences of forgiveness, being loved, and being able to love in return, along with the gifts of enlightenment, wonder, joy, hope, and gratitude. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not conquer. The routine world is typically ‘at a loss for words’ when its familiar boundaries are breached.
Second, while the religious classic never simply offers the whole meaning of life, it does radiate a certain sense of wholeness, of ‘what it is all about.’ Mind and imagination are drawn into a radical unknowing. In contrast to the familiar, the calculable, the manageable, the intimations of the religious classic conceal even as they reveal. Conventional categories and routine perceptions are no longer enough. Language is silenced before an ineffable gift. There is a luminous excess inviting the spirit to expand, and to leave unsaid what cannot be spoken. The presence of ‘No-Thing’ within one’s world subverts all limited categories. It makes space for the ‘Nowhere,’ which appears as a true homeland, the patria, the place where the promise of life is kept.
Third, the revelatory impact of a religious classic presupposes a willingness to reflect on the ultimate bearing of existence. If searching and questioning are suppressed, the disclosive intimations of the religious classic will be felt as excessive, threatening, fatiguing, too obvious, or, otherwise, too alien. There is a disturbance in that too much of the self is revealed—and provoked. Anyone searching into the origin, the direction, and the goal of this universe, cannot afford to reject out of hand what the inspired classic brings to expression. It offers an arresting glimpse of the ultimate in the world. To reject that would be to deny what is most ecstatic and inspiring in human history, and to be cut off from what human beings most treasure in their humanity.
The Christian Classic
What then of the story of the life, teaching, and death and resurrection of Christ? He is unavoidably a presence in a world of classics figures, but he also affects human culture more specifically as a unique religious classic. Through him, the Word is incarnate, summoning consciousness to a specific sense of God’s relationship to the world and to human destiny. Christians may well feel in the interpersonal intimacy of faith that Christ is more than a religious classic, but he is certainly not less than such.
Tracy would describe the peculiar character of the religious classic as evoking something of the ultimate mystery communicating itself at the frontiers of life. Even though it is given through human witness—word, sacrament, and deed—it is not primarily a human production, however inspired. Such inspiration is not information ‘about’ another, but is a word or intimation of the ‘Other’ in a quite original sense. It bears the character of a free and personal self-revelation: the wholeness of the ‘Other’ is experienced as a ‘Who’—as is manifestly the case in the Abrahamitic religions. In the Christian experience and its interpretative tradition, the ‘Who’ is the culmination of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ, the Yes to all God’s promises and the Amen to all our prayers (cf. 2 Cor 1:20). The Christ-event is mediated through an immense complex of symbols, images, institutional forms, doctrines, writings, events, communities, and persons (apostles, confessors, martyrs, and pastors) as God’s own self-manifestation.
The Christian classic has a number of irreplaceable features, which, for instance, structure the New Testament narrative and various versions of the Creed: the originating love of the Father; God’s self-giving in the Son; the unconditional love revealed on the Cross, and its triumph in the resurrection; the Spirit as the inexhaustible communication of the gift of God, in eternity and time; the Church as the sacrament and witness of God’s saving will in history—and then, the eschatological consummation in ‘the life of the world to come.’ 17
With the coming of Christ, one’s sense of self, of the universe, of God, are all alike called into question, provoked, revised, and drawn beyond any provisional interpretation. His past words, deeds, life, and death are a continuing presence as the Risen Lord breathes his Spirit into the Church and the world in each moment. He is a question resonating on all levels of reflective culture. In the above-cited words of Steiner, he embodies something ‘grave and constant’ in the human condition, to incarnate a ‘terrible and disturbing beauty.’ His parables, his crucified corpse, his return to his disciples in a life beyond death, penetrate into the meaning of our humanity and its ultimate hopes. The classic force of the New Testament make its radical claims by confessing that Jesus is ‘the Christ,’ ‘the Lord,’ ‘the Alpha and Omega,’ ‘the resurrection and the life,’ and so on. Yet there is a startling dynamic of negation in such confessions, extending to the ‘invisibility’ of God (John 1:18), to Christ also (1 Pet 1:8), to the selfhood of the believer (1 John 3:2), and to the times of fulfilment (Acts 1:7). 18 To that degree, the original Christian classic engenders an experience of a holy darkness in which any canonical expression of revealed truth draws the believer into ever deeper and broader dimensions of wonder, searching, and self-surrender.
In terms of Christian realism, the Classic inheres in the communicability of the Fact. It attracts the beholder into an inside knowledge of what has empirically taken shape in historical experience. But now we move from Fact and beyond the Classic to the Christian Phenomenon, and the manner in which it is experienced.
The Christian Phenomenon
Compared to the Christian Classic, there is a deeper level in the phenomenon of Christian revelation out of which arise the various classic expressions. Appreciation of this Phenomenon requires a disciplined receptivity to what has been given, and continues to be given, in the consciousness of Christian faith. What is routinely ‘taken for granted’ in theological discourse must find a deeper receptivity, so as to be ‘taken as granted.’ 19 We pause, then, to reflect on the nature of this receptivity and the specific character of the Christian Phenomenon.
Receptivity to the Given
Max Scheler, one of the earliest and most formative of philosophers in the field of phenomenology, wrote on the need for an appropriately open, unbiased, and refined phenomenological receptivity: There is nothing more disastrous for all epistemology than to establish at the beginning of one’s methodological procedure a too narrow, restrictive concept of ‘experience,’ to equate the whole of experience with one particular kind of experience and with that mental attitude that is conducive ‘only’ to it, and then to refuse to recognize as ‘primordially given’ anything that cannot be reduced to this one kind of experience.
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A phenomenological approach calls into question the naïveté of the narrow band of everyday experiences and holds in suspension the habitual convictions about the ‘real world’ that are interwoven into such routine and partial perspectives. The aim is to throw light on the question of how meaning arises and of what elemental experiences are basic to it—without collapsing them into a monodimensional horizontalism or getting snagged on predetermined notions of subjectivity or objectivity. Such an intense and disciplined act of recollection allows consciousness to be freshly ‘struck,’ as it were, by what is given from beyond the self and its self-interest —hence, the phenomenological vocabulary of ‘active openness,’ ‘conversion to the given,’ epoché or ‘reduction.’ In this respect, phenomenology is never purely descriptive, for it intends to illumine experience so as ‘to point us further to the radical bases of our lives.’ 21 As a result, a phenomenological attentiveness can enrich experience with new awareness of the self, and of the depth and breadth of what is given and registered in human consciousness.
Theology remains indebted to Husserl’s seminal influence in phenomenology. Steinbock quotes with approval an observation from the Husserl Archives which, in some sense at least, presumes collaboration between philosophical phenomenology and theology: I want what the churches want: to lead humanity to Aeternitas. My task is to try to do this through philosophy. Everything I have written up to now is only preparatory; it is only a development [Aufstellen] of methods. In the course of one’s life, one unfortunately does not arrive at the core, at what is essential. It is important for philosophy to be led out of liberalism and rationalism, and to be led once more to what is essential, to truth. The question concerning ultimate reality, truth, must be the object of every true philosophy. This is my life’s work.
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The founding-father of phenomenology sought thus to call into question the abstractions of conceptually inflated systems, along with their accompanying rationalistic, ego-centred mentality. Accordingly, he proposed a renewed concentration on ‘the things themselves’ (zu den Sachen selbst). He, thus, reacted to an Enlightenment intellectuality, which presumed a situation in which an already-constituted rational self anticipated and treated the data to be understood only within the horizon of reductively pre-established possibilities. But when attention is focused on the phenomenon—consciously experienced, appreciated in its own right and in the conditions of its disclosure—reality begins to be experienced in its arresting and particular otherness. A surplus and an excess of significance disrupt abstract ideas, systems, and methods, and require attentiveness to what is given, and to the mode of its appearance. In a theological perspective, the data derive from the donum (gift), while that gift comes from a giving and a giver beyond any worldly horizon.
The Christian Phenomenon Revisited
Recent writers, such as Marion, Henry, Lacoste, and Steinbock, have insisted on extending the range of phenomenology to religious experience. The religious dimension had ceased to be of intrinsic significance for a philosophy which tended to confine itself to horizontal analysis at the expense of the vertical dimensions of the height and depth of experience. 23 But this ‘other dimension’ cannot be reduced to the level of purely empirical or intellectual presentation. There occurs an irruption, a mode of given-ness—traditionally termed ‘revelation’ and ‘epiphany’—in contrast to the horizontal. 24 The verticality of experience moves within a vector of surprise and grace. For its part, the horizontal is largely what is within one’s reach and under one’s control—at least within the ambit of a given culture. 25
The varied types of experience and the diversity of data that is manifest in each situation require different levels and types of receptivity, as the Scholastic adage has it, quidquid reciptur recipitur per modum recipientis (whatever is received is received according to the capacity of the recipient). That is to say that the degree of receptivity is affected by different mentalities, capacities, attitudes, moods, preoccupations, and perspectives of the recipient. A plurality of possibilities affects not only an endless variety of individuals and communities, but also cultures, societies, historical epochs, and successive ages in the Church itself.
Consequently, a refined, properly buoyant and receptive theological attitude will work against any conception of the revealed donum as an uncarved block of reality, already-out-there-now, complete, immediately accessible to intuition and contained in conceptual formulation. Thus possessed and comprehended in some fashion, it is communicated in a stock array of signs, ideas, and definitions. In contrast, revelation is an ever-original event of self-communication on God’s part, given into history as it unfolds ‘for us and our salvation.’
The receptivity of faith to the self-revelation of God is not (usually) the property of a subversive individual. Rather, the dynamics of receptivity presuppose the interpersonal experience of a community of faith formed by an animating tradition with its sacred texts, doctrines, symbols, sacraments, and examples of holiness. 26 The Christ-event introduces a new horizon in which the transformative act of God’s love affects every dimension of consciousness, to transvalue values and engender new dimensions of meaning in the understanding of God, our selves, and our world. What took place in this originating event was not contained within the previous horizon of expectation, but rather disrupted it with the excess, attractive and demanding, of what is given in Christ.
Jean-Luc Marion’s fertile reflections in this area assist the appreciation of the overbrimming or ‘saturated’ character of the Christian phenomenon. 27 It permeates the receptive consciousness of faith, thus to make the believer a witness to what is given rather than an agent of its production. 28 Though the grace of Christ is freely offered, it is not simply ‘there’ to be inspected, possessed, and taken for granted. In the words of St Thomas, one is conscious of the radical gift of grace only coniecturaliter per aliqua signa (by way of conjecture/discernment through a various signs), amongst which are the peace of a good conscience and surrender to God. 29 Whether subtly or dramatically, consciousness as affected by the Christ-event expands in a new horizon, or, as St Paul would say, ‘for those who are in Christ, there is a new creation’ (2 Cor 5:17). In this regard, a phenomenological theology is less thinking about some object of Christian belief, and more a form of thinking from within the experience of what is given, by allowing it to appear in its arresting ‘otherness’ and provocative power. There is, therefore, a ‘eucharistic’ moment at the heart of theological thinking, such that, to use a Heideggerian wordplay, ‘thanking’ and ‘thinking’ interweave. Inscribed into theological activity traditionally described as fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding), there is the moment of fides recipiens donum Dei appropriandum (faith open to receive and to appropriate the Gift of God as it is offered).
A phenomenological attitude does not presume that the Christ-event and the grace of God are phenomena in the same way as, say, a human face, a work of art, or an historic event can be. Collapsing everything into a fideistic subjectivism might appear to be the danger. That would be at one extreme, whereas, at the other, we may be rightly wary of a revelational ‘objectivism’ that overwhelms the role of the believing and thinking subject. Admittedly, a theology of disclosure that we have been here suggesting, inverts those habitual patterns of thinking which routinely presume that the subject is already self-constituted and given, already ‘self-possessed,’ before anything else is given or appears to it. In contrast, a phenomenological attitude puts the emphasis on the uncanny given-ness of the what and who of ‘the other.’ As a result, any activity on the part of the subject, as well as its mode of self-awareness, is radically affected by a fundamental receptivity to what is given, in its transcendent otherness. In the receptivity of faith, therefore, the rational, all-critical ego no longer occupies centre-stage. It does not act as a self-contained monad projecting itself onto what is other and external to it, thus, ‘subjecting’ everything to its powers of reason. 30 In the phenomenological and theological case, the subject is one who is ‘subjected’ to what is so graciously and provocatively disclosed to it. As a result, it is forearmed against all pretensions to exhaust or constitute the gift. 31 In its receptivity, the subject witnesses to what is originally given. 32
Marion refers to five instances of what he terms ‘saturated phenomena’: an event, a work of art, the flesh/body, the face, and, in a way that tends to combine all four, revelation. 33 In theological terms, the event that makes all the difference, which calls on the believer to participate in its unfolding, is Christ’s death and resurrection. In the light of faith, the community of believers is beholden to a light and a beauty not of this world. In its celebration of the Eucharist, the Church lives out a new sense of incarnate existence as the Body of Christ. 34 Through the conversion of faith, believers encounter the face of One who sees them, and indeed, ‘sees through them.’ 35 The lived communal sense of the gift of God-given truth grounds the appreciation of what God’s self-revelation might mean. All five such instances share a sense of a primordial self-giving. 36 None of them is constituted by the subject, but each appears in its original and self-imposing impact. Thus, the believing subject comes to itself in a new consciousness only through self-giving otherness of the phenomenon concerned.
Theology can be only enriched by a more phenomenological attentiveness. 37 And, in its turn, theology is able to extend the range of phenomenology to the singularity of positive revelation. 38 Still, the general phenomenological principle stands. The saturated phenomenon shows itself by giving itself; and this takes place in a more intense and overwhelming manner in the case of the faith seeking to understand what it has received as gift and revelation. 39 At no point is it implied that the phenomenon of revelation is so overwhelming as to incapacitate the intelligence, responsibility, and imagination of the believer. Rather, what is so given in revelation inspires its own tradition of rationality in which faith, phenomenology, and critical realism play their respective parts. 40 On the one hand, the multi-faceted creativity of Christian intelligence can never be reduced to its experiential base. Nor, on the other hand, must human reason be allowed to remain undisturbed in ideological isolation from the reasons of the heart that reason cannot know, cut off from the love that recognizes no limits as it ‘bears all things, hopes all things, endures all things’ (1 Cor 13:7–8).
Interconnections
The three topics presented in this sketch—the Fact, the Classic, and the Phenomenon—at least point in the right direction, whether as converging considerations, as complementary viewpoints, or as different levels of perception.
Within the Christian Fact are found both the refreshing power of the Classic and the revelatory power of the Phenomenon. From some angles, it is true, the empirical Fact, the ‘classic’ (Tracy et al.) and the overbrimming or ‘saturated phenomenon’ (Marion et al.) are not easily distinguishable. There are phenomenological dimensions of the classics and their place in cultural history. Likewise, a particular classic is in its own right a phenomenon within any specific cultural development. For its part, the Fact is simply ‘there’ with a certain diffuse, unavoidable obviousness. It is accessible to empirical observation and investigation from any number of perspectives—demographic, economic, political, and so forth. In contrast, an appreciation of the classic is inherently more demanding. An exposure to it may require a personal development that amounts to some level of intellectual, moral, religious conversion, as Lonergan noted. 41 Further, even though the Fact has a wide cultural and even global impact, its recognition requires no particular phenomenological or hermeneutical attitude or methodological reception, beyond registering empirical data—that is, ‘the facts.’ None the less, this Christian Fact may invite an appreciation of the classic articulations of the Christ-event, and a deeper searching into the phenomenon of Christian experience.
The Classic, on the other hand, is recognized as a commanding instance of making sense of the Christian Fact. Each Gospel, for instance, is an expression of the whole revealed truth; it works, as Tracy suggests, with the power of the whole. It emerges from a community of faith and for the Church in every age. There is a sense of excess and originality surpassing the obvious human and historical origins of the writings concerned. For such texts are received as ‘sacred,’ as witnessing to the culmination of revelation in Christ and as participating in the lived witness of the apostles and evangelists. The community of faith reverences them, not only as the Word of God in terms of content and reference, but also as ‘inspired,’ that is, as given in the power of a self-giving, self-revealing agent, the Holy Spirit. These ‘sacred’ and ‘inspired’ writings exceed all mundane categories and agencies in their capacity to carry forward in the world the meaning of what has been given from beyond it.
This sense of transcendent given-ness—from beyond, through, but exceeding, the capacities of human agency—will carry over to affect the approach of a Christian phenomenology (in terms of content and of the way such content is disclosed and communicated).
Conclusion
To refer to the distinctive sense of Christian reality in terms of Fact, Classic, and Phenomenon doubtless runs the risk of creating a collage of Christian images or scattered impressions functioning in an idolic manner at best. Such figurations might be only projections, reflecting back to society, at a particular stage of its history, a range of self-serving expressions of, say, power, national or cultural superiority, aesthetic enjoyment, or even ethical righteousness. Reality is limited to the parameters of consumption, self-assertion, and control. But there is another possibility within the ‘thick’ description of aspects of Christian experience that we have been offering. Expressions can function in a more iconic fashion. They are not our mirror-image, but windows allowing the light of another world to enter. If that is the case, the phenomenon of Christian revelation can be appreciated as a vertical, horizon-changing irruption. It can summon to conversion, of mind, heart, and imagination, and thus be a creative source of new understanding and greater freedom in the light of what is ‘other’ (cf. 2 Cor 3:18).
In the interests of enriching theological intentionality with a sense of greater realism, we have exploited the three notions of Fact, Classic, and Phenomenon in a blend of empirical, critical, and contemplative awareness. Admittedly, there is a certain circularity involved, despite the order of exposition followed here. After all, what, in the broadest sense of the word, is more a ‘phenomenon’ and a continuing ‘event’ than the Christian Fact? And yet the Fact would dissolve into a cloud of contradictory impressions if there were no Classic to hold it together with a sense of the whole and capable of expressing its intrinsic meaning. However, the Classic would come from nowhere and find no reception in the corporate mind of the Church if there were no fertile depth of experience, the Christian Phenomenon, from which the Classic form arises, and which is the focus of the appreciative consciousness of the Christ-event, in its content, origin, and end.
The ways in which the mystery of Jesus Christ—the Christ-event—is in its totality registered in human consciousness are manifold and diffuse. The ambition to develop a theological method that is entirely adequate to Christian revelation and its relevance to all times and cultural contexts will inevitably encounter problems, such as the lack of cultural, spiritual, academic resources, etc. Communicating a creative and critical sense of the Christian reality, aware of the promise and the distortions inherent in the contemporary culture, is not so much doomed to failure, but remains an ongoing task requiring the best energies of Christian believers in every age.
If the Fact imposes itself on empirical consciousness, if the Classic inspires a critical attention to what has been uncannily revealed, the Phenomenon requires a form of focused recollection within the consciousness of the Christian community. At a time when Church leaders call for a ‘New Evangelisation,’ it is appropriate for theology to make a contribution by refreshing the sense of the Christian experience from which it arises; and to which it returns for refreshment, reshaping, and endless inspiration.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.