Method,Meaning,and the Theologies of Religions

Religion and Religious Experience

Lonergan’s view of religion distinguishes, on the one hand, the diversity of institutionalized religious forms, including beliefs, codes of conduct, rituals, and customs, and, on the other hand, a transformative experience that marks the common core of all religion. His view has two poles: an inner, experiential pole and an outer, interpretive and communicative pole. The former aspect accounts for the universalism of his view. Crowe remarks that Lonergan had doctrinal reasons for holding a universalist position, namely, that Roman Catholic doctrine had by the 20th century fully affirmed the universality of God’s salvific will, citing the first epistle to Timothy (1 Tim 2:4). ⁷ But Lonergan also referred to empirical studies of the world religions, quoting Friedrich Heiler in Method in Theology for example, as to highlight evidence supporting the universality of religious experience. In short, Lonergan’s Catholic commitments and view of religion led him to two affirmations, namely, that genuine religious experience, the ground of personal holiness, flourishes outside of Christianity, and that other religious ways are of God.

The two basic poles to Lonergan’s view of religion have theological correlates in his treatment of the divine missions. He spoke of the inner gift of the Spirit and the outer word of the Son in God’s declaration of redeeming love for all people. Again, his analyses often transition between phenomenology and theology, and at times the two modes of inquiry combine in a single statement. ⁸ For example, he often spoke of religious experience using the biblical and theological language of ‘the gift of God’s love’ (Rom 5:5), while his phenomenological analysis frames his understanding of the inner factor in the diverse, historical forms of religious living. But Lonergan’s universalist view neither turns all religions into iterations of crypto-Christianity nor reduces the gospel to a transcendental structure or metanarrative. His view of the transcultural heart of religion unfolds in a series of heuristic categories oriented to understanding the particularities of religious living and to discerning the patterns of grace and redemption in history. He integrated his work as a Catholic theologian into this universalist perspective while remaining fully committed in his explanatory approach to the uniqueness of Christianity (as we will discuss below). Speaking of religious experience, the gift of God’s love, Lonergan wrote:

Being in love with God, as experienced, is being in love in an unrestricted fashion. All love is self-surrender, but being in love with God is being in love without limits or qualifications or conditions or reservations. Just as unrestricted questioning is our capacity for self-transcendence, so being in love in an unrestricted fashion is the proper fulfilment of that capacity. ⁹

Lonergan used the language of his tradition to describe religious experience, but his explanation exploits the heuristic value of his philosophical and theological anthropology. Of course, the phenomenologist invariably uses tradition-specific language in explaining the normative structure of consciousness; the categories of interiority yet require careful hermeneutical attention in cross-cultural contexts. Even the language of ‘being in love unrestrictedly,’ reflects a particular sociocultural factor in naming what Lonergan designated as a transcultural phenomenon. ¹⁰ On strictly phenomenological grounds, religious experience corresponds to the conscious fulfilment of the transcendental orientation of intentionality to intelligibility, truth, and goodness. The experience marks a limit in Lonergan’s analysis of religious interiority. His phenomenological explanation does not say anything about how the subject apprehends or interprets the experience, only what the experience does (at least minimally or structurally) in consciousness.

The chapter on ‘Religion’ in Method begins by establishing the terms and relations on which this explanation depends. Lonergan began the chapter by considering the question of God in the context of his intentionality analysis. He argued that this question arises on the horizon of intentionality for any person who searches for meaning, truth, and value, because wondering about the meaning, truth, and value of any particular part of the universe implies a question about the whole. Does the intelligible universe have an intelligent ground? Does the world of truth and value participate in a necessary, transcendent reality and Supreme Goodness, or do our reflective and moral judgments vanish into the arbitrariness of accidents and shadows? The question of God arises in the lived quest for meaning.

Answers are of a different order. Lonergan focused neither on logical demonstrations nor on theological defences of particular answers to the question of God. In fact, he pointed out that the question too arises in many different forms and at different stages of historical development. But he emphasized the link between the question of God and the unrestricted reach of human intending. He drew attention to the echoes of the question in the subject’s cognitional performance and pursuit of authenticity, inviting his readers to reflect on their own desire to grasp how each and every answer to the question of God presupposes an orientation to the divine. ¹¹

Lonergan’s analysis ties the question of God intimately to the norms of conscious intentionality and the capacity for self-transcendence. He explained how the subject’s unrestricted desire for meaning, truth, and goodness motivates the subject towards growth in knowledge and responsible self-possession, towards overcoming bias, apprehending new insights, adjudicating truth and falsity, and discriminating between the genuinely good and the merely satisfying or apparently good. Self-transcendence marks growth in knowledge and virtue. It occurs by an inner faithfulness to the exigencies of a native openness to being in the human endeavour to know, choose, and love. ¹² The question of God arises neither as merely a cultural construction nor as innately given. Rather, the lived pursuit of both personal authenticity and human flourishing in discreet socio-historical contexts discloses the question of God on the horizon of human consciousness.

Let us sum up a few points of Lonergan’s anthropology: the unrestricted orientation of our quest for meaning and creative possibilities in this life leads us naturally to the question of God, norms our cognitional and intentional endeavours, constitutes our capacity for self-transcendence, and guides our cultivation of personal authenticity. Let us not forget the existential value of this analysis, too. The primary data on these proposals remain within us, and the significance of these proposals extends beyond their explanatory incisiveness to their methodical worth. By self-appropriation, a person grows not only in self-knowledge but also in responsible self-possession in his or her living and doing. ¹³ Such a person deliberately pursues knowing and choosing with an increasingly heightened awareness and commitment to the norms of mind and heart.

Despite better efforts, the lived achievement of personal authenticity no doubt remains partial and precarious. One laments repeated failures and suffering in this or that aspect of one’s life and confesses with St Paul: ‘I can will what is right, but I cannot do it’ (Rom 7:18). ¹⁴ Liberation from the manifold forms of bias and harmful patterns of decision-making requires an intentional, affective, and psychic reorientation to lived wounds, mistakes, and the relevant situations. Lonergan suggests that sustained growth in authenticity happens when a person falls in love, for being in love fulfils and ‘takes over the peak of the soul, the apex animae.’ ¹⁵ The gift of love actuates the capacity for self-transcendence, initiating the ‘gradual movement towards a full and complete transformation of the whole of one’s living and feeling….’ ¹⁶ The primary (existential) answer to patterns of pain and decline in personal living as well as to the question of God in the quest for meaning resounds in the experienced satisfaction of transcendental intending.

As the question of God is implicit in all our questioning, so being in love with God is the basic fulfilment of our conscious intentionality. That fulfilment brings a deep-set joy that can remain despite humiliation, failure, privation, pain, betrayal, desertion. That fulfilment brings a radical peace, the peace that the world cannot give. That fulfilment bears fruit in a love of one’s neighbour that strives mightily to bring about the kingdom of God on this earth. ¹⁷

Returning to the distinction between theology and phenomenology, the passage above raises several significant points for clarifying Lonergan’s discussion of religious experience. (1) This passage sounds remarkably reminiscent of Augustine’s famous opening to his Confessions: ‘Our hearts are restless until they rest in you, O Lord.’ Lonergan’s descriptions of religious experience often reflect the profound influence of his theological tradition. But where Augustine perceptively described his heart’s longing for God and eventual conversion in the common-sense language of his cultural milieu, Lonergan made a methodical turn to interiority that allowed him to reflectively transition among various realms of meaning (e.g., common-sense, theory, interiority, transcendence) and attain an explanatory perspective on diverse religious utterances. (2) Lonergan’s theistic claims concerning the question of God require inferences that begin with the available data of consciousness. But the primary phenomenological contentions in Lonergan’s view of religion do not contain theistic assertions. Lonergan first and foremost invited his readers to reflect on their interior lives in view of appropriating primarily two phenomena, namely, their unrestricted openness to the universe of being and their experienced fulfilment of that openness. ¹⁸ (3) That experienced fulfilment produces particular patterns of affect and action. Neither contradicting nor supplanting the native openness of the human spirit, those patterns of affect and action express its inchoate fulfilment. Consider the following passage:

As it is defined, [being in love in an unrestricted manner] is the habitual actuation of man’s capacity for self-transcendence; it is the religious conversion that grounds both moral and intellectual conversion; it provides the real criterion by which all else is judged; and consequently one has only to experience it in oneself or witness it in others, to find in it its own justification. ¹⁹

On religious experience, Lonergan’s basic phenomenological contentions pertain to the conscious intentional dynamics of unrestricted desire and (total) fulfilment. Though these contentions alone neither affirm nor deny a particular view of God, they place a sphere for the religious at the heart of Lonergan’s anthropology and possess normative and heuristic value. He suggested that in each and every person of any culture there resides a transcendental orientation animating his or her lived pursuit of intelligibility, truth, and goodness, and that in the same persons there may flourish a transformation of living and doing consonant with and surpassing (by the richness of unrestricted loving) what he or she unrestrictedly desires. ²⁰

These basic contentions outline a structure of consciousness and help to explain why the concrete performance of knowing and choosing entails existential processes of conversion. ²¹ Will I assent to the gift of unrestricted loving, to the mystery of love and awe pulling me from within (religious conversion)? Will I choose the genuine good despite foreseeable pain and privation or will I take the easy road, the merely satisfying (moral conversion)? Will I match my criteria for ‘reality’ to the exigencies I experience as normative in my cognitional performance (intellectual conversion)? The inner norms of the lived performance of conscious intentionality issue calls to conversion. And the dynamic state of being in love unrestrictedly enables a person to respond faithfully to those conscious norms—to be attentive, intelligent, reasonable, and responsible. Once religious experience ‘takes over,’ it governs our knowing and choosing in all we do. ²²

Lonergan did not hesitate to acknowledge witnessing religious experience in others. In fact, Crowe says that Lonergan repeatedly referred to the statue of the Buddha: ‘So you can have an experience of God’s gift of his love …. It’s an experience you can see on the face of the Buddha.’ ²³ Religious experience manifests itself in patterns that Lonergan recognized outside of Christianity and yet associated with St Paul’s description in Galatians—acts of kindness, goodness, faithfulness, self-control, and gentleness revealing a deep love, peace, joy. ²⁴

Of itself, then, religious experience neither supposes that we know God nor proceeds from our knowledge of God. ²⁵ But distinguishing religious experience and knowledge of God anticipates their integration within Lonergan’s method. He described the gift as ‘an orientation to transcendent mystery,’ which elicits a response of adoration, and recognized this orientation as providing ‘the primary and fundamental meaning of the name, God.’ ²⁶ This point illustrates how method constructively brings together phenomenology and theology: the phenomenological allows us to consider religious experience as transcultural, not the product of a particular cultural linguistic worldview or horizon, and its integration with theology places the history and intellectual achievements of a particular faith community upon an empirical, transcultural base. ²⁷ The integration gives theologians a measure of methodical control in doing theology, that is, it allows them to construct theological positions consonant with religious, moral, and intellectual conversion. ²⁸

In sum, Lonergan attributed to religious experience a transcultural aspect because he contended that it occurs in consciousness as methodically prior to discursive achievements and culturally specific meanings. ²⁹ It marks the positive moment and inner core of all religion. But he also insisted that the category of religious experience has use only in interaction with data. ³⁰ Only by attending to the historical forms of religious living in their unique cultural expressions and particularities does the transcultural category of religious experience help to deepen our understanding of the religious in human history. ³¹

The importance of history in this analysis underscores a key point for our purpose here: the question of religious experience in a theology of religions partly reproduces a larger question about theology in general and the role of history in doing theology. Lonergan emphasized the need for an empirical concept of culture in theology because he wanted to explain how theology could do what he believed it ought to do, namely, to mediate ‘between a cultural matrix and the significance and role of a religion in that matrix.’ ³² The importance of history for this task led him to rethink theology as an ongoing process rather than a permanent achievement. He described method in theology as a ‘framework for collaborative creativity,’ not a ‘set of rules to be meticulously followed by a dolt.’ ³³ Meaning becomes primary, and when theology makes meaning rather than causality its basic category, historicity moves out of the shadows of logic and metaphysics. History provides the data in interaction with which theological reflection unfolds, and its significance disallows the classicist tendency to decide (a-historically) about the complex realities of diverse religions and cultures on the pretence to an abstract universality and necessity.

If theology should mediate between a religion and its cultural matrix within a religiously pluralistic world, then it must match a sufficiently verifiable and heuristic notion of the religious with an empirical concept of culture. It must attend to religion in history. It cannot allow the abstract and universal to eclipse the contingent, concrete, particular, and dynamically unfolding historicity of religious persons in community. The standard point of departure in the theology of religions does not work in a methodical theology. On the latter, the religions are not self-contained systems or reified sets of competing (or incommensurable) truth claims; they are alive and as incomplete as the human history in which they exist.

Development and Expression

The section above emphasizes that Lonergan defined religious experience heuristically. He prescinded from the many and diverse manifestations of religious experience to offer an explanatory account of its function among the dynamics of human consciousness. The task of understanding the expression requires consideration of other variables that impact on how the normative structure of consciousness unfolds in a particular time and place as the history of consciousness. This point in the analysis brings us to the place where the transcultural intersects with the socio-historical, where the inner core of religion mates with its outer manifestation. Though I give only cursory examples of interpreting particular religious phenomena in this section, I wish to discuss two of the variables that would factor into any in-depth study of religious experience in the concrete, namely: (1) the ongoing development of religious conversion and (2) the modes of conscious intentional apprehension in religious expression. In short, I argue in this section that Lonergan’s analysis of religious development and expression helps us to appreciate how a theology in which meaning becomes basic enables theologians to attend to religious and cultural particularities in relation both to their principles and to the larger, unfolding patterns of history within which they occur.

Let us begin then with a distinction, for ‘a distinction has to be drawn between being in love in an unrestricted manner (1) as it is defined and (2) as it is achieved. As it is defined, it is the habitual actuation of man’s capacity for self-transcendence. … On the other hand, as it actually is achieved in any human being, the achievement is dialectical. It is authenticity as a withdrawal from unauthenticity, and the withdrawal is never complete and always precarious.’ ³⁴ Lonergan’s definition not only constrains the meaning of religious experience to what happens in human consciousness but also functions as a heuristic limit; that is, it helps us to understand unique instances of religious experience by relating them to a particular or fixed point (which he implicitly defines in the terms and relations of interiority). ³⁵ Different instances differ in the degree to which they approximate the limit, and yet their approximation of the limit constitutes their similarity.

More concretely, the saints and mystics describe a profound union with God, but even ‘the greatest of saints have not only their oddities but also their defects ….’ ³⁶ Likewise, many people live their whole lives ‘in Christ Jesus’ with ‘the being of substance’; they may not advert to their religious experience or intentionally appropriate it, but they continue to live and act out of it because it strikes to the heart of who they are. ³⁷ Nor do they constitute the exception, for ‘ordinarily the experience of the mystery of love and awe is not objectified. It remains within subjectivity as a vector, an undertow, a fateful call to a dreaded holiness.’ ³⁸ Again, Lonergan’s definition does not portend a particular interpretation or style of appropriating religious experience. His notion signifies a transformation of the whole person in his or her living and doing and anticipates the variations in attainment that occur among different people and within a single lifetime.

On Lonergan’s view, then, religious experience embraces more than a self-contained experiential datum or even peak experience. In fact, his method of understanding religious experience begins with a stream of data that includes the narrative of the whole person in his or her pursuit of authenticity, in his or her struggle against sinfulness and growth in virtue. ‘The data, then, on the dynamic state of other-worldly love are the data on a process of conversion and development.’ ³⁹ Jeremy Wilkins explains:

Being in love is a dynamic state. It is dynamically conscious, in that there is an ongoing flow of consciously linked operations and feelings. Love knits together the flow of operations and feelings into a stable, functional whole whose unity is given in consciousness though it is not thoroughly coherent, both because of its inherent incompleteness and, more radically, because of sin. But being in love is also dynamic in the further sense that the functional whole itself is developing. Love is not content merely to consolidate and maintain present achievement; it is relentlessly on the move toward more coherent and consistent self-transcendence. Hence to be in love is to be involved in an ongoing process of personal growth. ⁴⁰

Now that ongoing process of personal growth entails the mating of inner and outer factors in religion. Recall the distinct poles of Lonergan’s view: the experiential pole pertains to a world of immediacy ‘in which image and symbol, thought and word, lose their relevance and even disappear,’ and the outer, interpretive and communicative pole pertains to the world mediated by meaning in which people may reflect on their experience, wonder about its meaning and implications, investigate and objectify it in the language, images, and symbols of a particular religion and cultural milieu. ⁴¹ If the achievement of religious experience (the inner factor) remains partial and precarious, then its expression (the outer factor) may reflect in this or that aspect the incompleteness or absence of conversion within the person. Human history also includes a range of religious aberrations. ⁴² On the other hand, a religious expression may represent a genuine achievement of the human spirit, and by those varied expressions the world receives its deepest meanings and highest values. ⁴³

Nor did Lonergan suggest that religious expression merely transports to the outside whatever exists or fails to exist on the inside of a person. He recognized that religious expression has a constitutive role in the process of appropriating and deepening the inner experience of the mystery of love and awe. His analysis also suggests that history decides about the content of each religious word and that consequently the effects are not univocal in each instance of religious development. In other words, the accumulated meanings and values of the religious tradition and its communal practice have a constitutive role in the appropriation of religious experience, but the effects may vary in different persons, communities, places, and times.

Human authenticity massively influences the concrete expression of religion in history. Of itself, the inner core of religion marks the utmost in self-transcendence, but the data on that core encompass the ongoing process of personal growth. It includes not only the inner determinants of ‘God’s gift of his love and man’s consent,’ but also the ‘outer determinants in the store of experience and in the accumulated wisdom of the religious tradition.’ ⁴⁴ Religious expressions originate within the tension between the self-as-transcending and the self-as-transcended and occur (always already) within socio-historical contexts. ⁴⁵ Such expressions may acquire a widespread and powerfully influential currency within a culture. But social currency does not guarantee a positive relation to the origin of genuine expression in self-transcendence; for example, the believers may dutifully utter and pass on the words of the religion, though their actions no longer embody (and perhaps betray) the meaning and significance of their confession.

So human authenticity provides the principle of religious expression, but ‘human authenticity is never some pure and serene and secure possession.’ ⁴⁶ The dialectical pattern of religious development implies that people who strive to live out their religious experience remain ever vulnerable to the manifold forms of bias resulting in oversights, mistakes, and repeated moral failure. ‘Accordingly,’ wrote Lonergan, ‘while there is no need to justify critically the charity described by St. Paul in the thirteenth chapter of his first epistle to the Corinthians, there is always a great need to eye very critically any religious individual or group and to discern beyond the real charity they may well have been granted the various types of bias that may distort or block their exercise of it.’ ⁴⁷

Lonergan also extended this point about religious individuals and groups to account for larger patterns in history. He explained how collectivities of people acting in faithfulness to the transcendental notions produce outcomes that over time amass into patterns of progress (whether in social relations, culture, or religion), how violating those notions produce opposite outcomes eventually resulting in cycles of decline (social, cultural, or religious), and how a religion that promotes self-sacrificing love can have redemptive effects, undoing patterns of decline and reinforcing progress within society, culture, and religion. In short, he explained how the dialectic of history originates in the tensions of adult consciousness and the ongoing process of personal growth. Religious living occurs concretely within these larger patterns in history and thus undermines attempts to reduce the religions to systems or worldviews independent of their social existence. ⁴⁸

But not all religious expressions differ strictly on the basis of conversion and authenticity. Lonergan also explained how expressions of religious meaning and value might result from different modes of conscious intentional apprehension and belong to different realms and stages of meaning. Understanding how these variations circumscribe religious expression may foster mutual appreciation among people who speak in otherwise disparate religious languages. Different modes of apprehension produce differences in meaningful expression that may complement rather than oppose each other at the level of human authenticity. ⁴⁹ So within the Christian tradition the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob need not oppose the God of the philosophers. What undifferentiated consciousness apprehends in the realm of common-sense may also spark the inquiry that eventuates in what a theoretically differentiated consciousness grasps with its technical language and systematic approach in the realm of theory. For example, parishioners may reliably draw on the religious wisdom of a common-sense culture for considering questions of faith; but that same culture in itself may not possess the resources for meeting the exigencies of each and every question that arises in its realm, and then an Athanasius or perhaps an Aquinas may play a pivotal role in the history of the community. ⁵⁰

The pluralism in religious language oftentimes reflects a pluralism of communications. Many of the differences among religious utterances result from different manners of apprehending meaning and value rather than the presence or absence of conversion. ⁵¹ Lonergan began with the available data of consciousness—the unrestricted desire of the human spirit and the pattern of conscious intentional operations and relations—and then identified multiple differentiations of consciousness in which religious expression can occur. ⁵² Though he explained the resulting pluralism in the context of doing Christian theology, his method precludes linguistic provincialism and attributes to the analysis of variations in meaning a dimension of transcultural validity. ⁵³

Let us now sum up a few key points of this section: the inner core of religion pertains to an unrestricted being in love, an orientation to transcendent mystery and a response of wordless adoration, and the expression of religious experience may deepen or stifle its appropriation; the expression may symbolize, objectify, and name the experience as well as infer numerous conclusions on the basis of it in relation to various modes and differentiations of consciousness. But religious experience remains partial and precarious in its development and shares its instability with its expressions. Despite the complementary and genetic differences that belong to variations in realms and stages of meaning, the deepest division among religious utterances originates with the presence or absence of religious, moral, intellectual conversion. Finally, these deep divisions produce effects that amass in society, culture, and religion as the patterns of progress and decline.

Lonergan thus provided theologians with tools to interpret particular religious phenomena in relation to their principles of expression and to evaluate them according to the normative exigencies of the human spirit. So, for example, a theologian who differentiates common-sense and theory may understand the process of demythologization that occurs when the achievements of a technical minority become widespread in a religious culture; in such a post-systematic context, a majority of people may surrender varieties of biblical anthropomorphism without fully understanding the reasons behind the shift in the religious worldview of their horizon. But that culture’s achievement remains precarious: the historical sensibilities of a community may lead to an empiricism or reductionist tendency that pronounces all religious truth as metaphor with ethical profit at best. Such a community yet needs the further intellectual conversion that grasps ‘the real’ not as the ‘already, out, there, now, real’ but as the compound achievement of their conscious intentional operations (i.e., their experiencing, understanding, judging, deciding). ⁵⁴

Lonergan’s approach to theology aims at understanding (and deepening) the religious in history, not at declaring the definitive content of theology for each and every time and place. His approach precludes the tendency to treat the religions as somehow independent of the interior and religious lives of their adherents and the socio-historical contexts within which they live. ⁵⁵ His orientation to history originates with his move to make meaning basic in theology, and this move, in turn, places the criterion for theology in the authenticity of the interpreter. In other words, the theologian who interprets and evaluates religious phenomena has no recourse to ‘some ‘objective’ criterion or test or control. For that meaning of the objective is mere delusion.’ ⁵⁶ Rather, the criterion resides within the theologian herself, for ‘objectivity is authentic subjectivity.’ ⁵⁷ She can only heighten her own consciousness and attain the self-appropriation that will allow her to discern the religious meanings and values of others who, like her, stand within patterns of progress and decline.

Questions about how to interpret religious phenomena outside Christianity reproduce an important question for methodical theology in general. Have I overcome my own conflicts in cognitional and moral self-transcendence sufficiently to discern the measure in which others have resolved theirs? If the question pertains to personal authenticity, the method unfolds in the theologian’s discernment:

Only through such discernment can he hope to appreciate all that has been intelligent, true, and good in the past even in the lives and the thoughts of his opponents. Only through such discernment can he come to acknowledge all that was misinformed, misunderstood, mistaken, evil even in those with whom he is allied. Further, however, this action is reciprocal. Just as it is one’s own self-transcendence that enables one to know others accurately and to judge them fairly, so inversely it is through knowledge and appreciation of others that we come to know ourselves and to fill out and refine our apprehension of values. ⁵⁸

For Lonergan, theological method in our pluralistic context has an internal relation to the other. It begins with the self-appropriation of the theologian because it consists in the principles of discerning patterns of meaning in various and often interrelated contexts, but this performance of discernment involves reciprocity with the other. He proposed a threefold relation: dialectic, dialogue, and encounter. Dialectic describes the concrete process in which growth and failure in self-transcendence commingle and conflict, but dialogue moves theologians from a ‘conflict of statements to an encounter of persons.’ ⁵⁹ Each person in an encounter promotes self-transcendence in the other, for ‘every person can reveal to any other his natural propensity to seek understanding, to judge reasonably, to evaluate fairly, to be open to friendship.’ ⁶⁰ For Lonergan, theology anticipates dialogue and encounter within a reciprocal performance of discernment—a discernment that promotes self-transcendence in the theologian even as she strives to critically understand the complex reality of the religious other in history.

Dialogue, Encounter, and Emergence

Lonergan’s explanation of religious development and expression suggests that not only are religious communities in an ongoing process of growth, but also that theology may anticipate the emergence of novelties in understanding and action as the religions continue to write their histories. His analysis also does not specify or restrict itself to the Christian tradition. On the contrary, he situated theology on transcultural bases that may in principle enable people of different religious traditions to build mutually transformative relationships. In other words, his approach to theology does not aim strictly at facilitating interpretation and evaluation. His proposals make intelligible various (possible) ends or results of the dialectic, dialogue, and encounter that theology incorporates—for example, social and cultural change, religious renewal, friendship, and community. In short, this section argues that interreligious dialogue for Lonergan may lead to cooperative engagement in increasingly shared histories of progress, decline, and redemption.

The common models in the theologies of religions project different trajectories or ranges of possible outcomes for dialogue on the basis of their different conceptions of the final relationship among the religions. Lonergan’s method begins not with a doctrinal or metaphysical supposition, but with a heuristic notion of religious development as dialectical and ongoing in this life. Consequently, his method projects a range of possible outcomes or expectations for interreligious dialogue that neither predetermine content nor ignore the importance of history in interreligious relationships.

In his ‘Prolegomenon to the Emerging Religious Consciousness of Our Time,’ he outlined several variables that may condition the occurrence of novelty in religious consciousness. He began with his basic perspective on religion, naming the core aspect as infrastructure and the outer aspect as suprastructure. But then he explained the emergence of something new in religious consciousness by turning to religion as lived in society and culture. He titled his second section ‘Social Alienation,’ and explained how large establishments and bureaucracies exhibit an organizational complexity that nullifies simplistic solutions to problems and exacerbates alienating effects. He also considered the further complicating factor that social institutions rely for needed changes on human intelligence and responsibility, making them candidates for scrutiny in a milieu of alienation and injustice. He named the third section ‘The Second Enlightenment,’ and outlined the shape of a current movement for cultural achievement and social change, a movement ‘offering hope and providing leadership to the masses alienated by large establishments under bureaucratic management.’ ⁶¹ These sections on society and culture illustrate how a component of novelty in religious consciousness may arise ‘in response to social change’ or ‘be released by cultural difference.’ ⁶² They illustrate Lonergan’s effort to discern problems and opportunities for innovation in his own sociocultural milieu.

These analyses also lead to a fourth section that discusses religious consciousness specifically in its dynamic, changing, historical aspect. Here Lonergan explained how a component of novelty ‘may remodel any of the previously existing forms of religious belief and practice, or scatter into idiosyncratic particularisms, or move (enthusiastically or reluctantly) towards ecumenism or universalism.’ ⁶³ Now all these forms of innovation are socio-historically contextual, but they each underscore how the dialectic of development in the mating of inner and outer factors in religion keeps the religions of history open to something new. Of course, the criterion for evaluating novelty here remains self-transcendence. For Lonergan, particular instances of religious renewal, ecumenism, or universalism demarcate distinct possibilities of genuineness in history. When meaning becomes basic in theology, logic (in its secondary role) no longer dictates the possibility or impossibility of religious living for individuals and groups on the basis of doctrinal or metaphysical axioms. Rather, theology attends to religious living as it unfolds historically in relation to the genuineness of persons in community.

Notably, Lonergan spoke of ‘universalism’ in emerging religious consciousness without violating the norms of intellectual conversion or falling into facile essentialism. He recognized the possibility for different religious traditions to enter into relationship, friendship, and community on the basis of religious experience, the utmost in self-transcendence. He cited Raimundo Panikkar and William Johnston as theologians whose works support or affirm this trajectory for religious living and development. But he specifically cited aspects of their works that emphasize religious experience as a heuristic limit rather than an essentialist common ground or formula. He rejected the latter. He also cited Robley Edward Whitson who discerned an attraction to life-giving community emerging in contemporary consciousness—an attraction that intensifies in the historical struggle to overcome various forms of social alienation and political coercion and brings to surface a deep (existential) desire for human unity. Whitson also recognized a unique move towards convergence for the world religions and called theologians to promote it. He wrote:

The peculiarity of this convergence process is that we must not think we are leaving or abandoning traditions for someone else’s or for a new construction, but we are bringing traditions into contact with the expectation that when they are no longer isolated we will be able to discover how each in its own authenticity has even greater significance in interaction with the others. … We are also assuming that the historic traditions are being called into unity and hence that this is integral to their authenticity. The theological task is to discern this calling in the historic development of the tradition to this point and creatively to project at least something of what a fulfilment of this calling could mean for the tradition in question and the others converging with it. ⁶⁴

Though Lonergan neither quoted Whitson in the key of a manifesto nor elaborated on the grounds for the assumptions to which he refers, the passage does seem to represent the thrust of what Lonergan envisioned as possible for the religions in their ongoing development. Notice, for example, a few implications of this convergence at the phenomenological level: religions are neither isolated by incommensurable linguistic horizons nor are they reduced to phenomenal manifestations of an ultimate noumenon. Nor again are they hierarchically ordered on the basis of a single tradition’s assumed superiority. Rather, the traditions are called at once to realize authenticity in their own terms and to pursue this task in cooperation with one another. On Lonergan’s view, the religious traditions carry the effects of both accumulated insights and the manifolds of bias, and they realize authenticity within the patterns of progress and decline that define their unique social and cultural histories. But to secure creativity and progress in their socio-historical contexts, the religions need the healing that penetrates scotoma and reverses cycles of disintegration and waywardness. Dialogue, dialectic, and encounter among the religions may play a pivotal role in the mediation of healing and in the ongoing process of their growth.

In sum, Lonergan’s universalist view of religion promotes rather than diminishes attentiveness to the complexities of religious development and anticipates a broad range of possible outcomes for interreligious dialogue on history’s unfinished stage. His notion of religious experience functions heuristically as a limit term. It at once anticipates experiences of conscious intentional fulfilment occurring across religious and cultural boundaries while expecting to discern the patterns of religious development only in socio-historical forms and in varying degrees of authenticity. On his universalist view, the experiential core of religion grounds the authenticity of concrete religious living within a particular tradition that evolves and changes in history. The same experiential factor makes it possible for members of diverse religious traditions to enter into truly open dialogue, a dialogue oriented to mutual understanding and exchange, critique, and transformation. Lastly, this inner factor may become the principle for interreligious cooperation in the context of an emerging religious consciousness that seeks healing for an alienated social milieu, promotes personal flourishing, guides cultural achievement, builds life-giving communities, and gives hope for people who otherwise see darkly in this world. ⁶⁵

The Uniqueness of Christianity in a Theology of Religions

Let us return to the divine missions in salvation history. Lonergan cited 1 Timothy 2:4 as expressing an aspiration to universalism within Christianity. Though his phenomenological treatment of religious experience does not specify or privilege the Christian tradition, it provides the explanatory hermeneutic for the Christian discernment of the Holy Spirit in the world. In other words, the Christian tradition possesses reasons internal to it for a universalism of the divine missions and thus anticipates the fruits of the Spirit in diversified contexts, languages, and traditions, but theology needs the phenomenological skills or categories that will enable it both to discern the Spirit in disparate cultural-linguistic contexts and to communicate its own doctrine in the varied languages of those diverse cultures. ⁶⁶ Lonergan thus correlated a phenomenological account of religious experience to the gift of the Holy Spirit in salvation history.

He also correlated the mission of the Son to the structure of his phenomenology of religious expression. He spoke about the significance of divine revelation by using the same analogy he used to explain the constitutive role of a religious tradition in deepening religious experience, namely, the analogy of two people falling in love and then avowing their love to each other. While the silence lingers prior to their confession, while the two love each other in secret, their love remains nascent. The fullness of their love awaits their avowal, for ‘it is the love that each freely and fully reveals to the other that brings about the radically new situation of being in love and that begins the unfolding of its life-long implications.’ ⁶⁷ For Lonergan, the analogy here elucidates Jewish and Christian claims about divine revelation. It helps us understand why God enters the world, introducing divine meaning and value into human history, ‘taking part in man’s making of man,’ ⁶⁸ and thus disclosing ‘to a particular people or to all mankind the completeness of his love for them.’ ⁶⁹

Lonergan’s inclusion of Judaism here disallows a strict correlation of the analogy with the mission of the Son (and thus Christianity). ⁷⁰ In fact, Crowe suggests that the analogy remains sufficiently generalized to include potentially each of the religions of the world. He says ‘we might conclude either to one word of God spoken for everyone, or to various words of God spoken, one for Judaism, another for Islam, another for Hinduism, and so on.’ ⁷¹ Note how Crowe suggests that the analogy may in principle extend to other religions, not that it does. He does not seek to pronounce new doctrines or emend familiar ones. Rather, he recognizes the possibility of ‘various words of God spoken’ because of his orientation to understanding the final relationship between Christianity and the religions as unfinished in human history and in ongoing need of our discernment in relation to the divine purpose for the human family.

The temptation to speak more decisively about the relationship of Christianity to the religions threatens to reduce the religions to abstractions. If new doctrines on the religions should emerge, they will emerge through collaborative reflection on (increasingly shared) histories of religious experience. ⁷² Crowe’s position on religious pluralism—what I call a ‘theology of discernment’—largely reflects the methodical suppositions that he brings to the task of theology. By contrast, others make more definitive statements. Jacques Dupuis, for example, recognized the presence of God in other religions and named them ‘substitutionary mediations,’ affirming their salvific efficacy, whereas Gavin D’Costa’s theology of religions arrives at an opposite conclusion, insisting that Catholic doctrine does not allow for salvation outside the church. ⁷³ Both theologians make judgements on the salvific value and content of other religions. Crowe’s theological foundations lead him to suspend judgement, however, and this decision in no way undermines the truth of Christian doctrine. His appropriation of doctrine relies on different foundations.

Crowe’s recognition of the possibility of many words of God spoken in the history of religions may raise questions about Christian uniqueness. But these questions signal the need for a methodological transition from theological foundations, the domain of his use of the analogy above, and into doctrines. Questions about Christian uniqueness in a religiously pluralistic world require consideration of the variables that condition the development and apprehension of Christian doctrine. As Crowe says, Lonergan’s commitments in Christology and trinitarian theology require no proof texts; ⁷⁴ but his shift to a methodical theology, a theology that makes meaning basic and logic secondary, significantly reshapes traditional thinking about the appropriation of Christian doctrine and its implications. Consequently, the affirmations that factor into discussions of Christian uniqueness—such as the completeness and finality of revelation in Christ, the universality of the redemptive meaning of the cross and resurrection, the necessity of the Church—need not produce an aporia or impasse in the context of religious pluralism and interreligious dialogue. Rather, these affirmations become integral to the reciprocal discernment and openness to novelty that a shift to meaning brings about in theology.

Let us briefly consider Christian doctrine, which originates primarily and most profoundly with the Paschal Mystery, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Communities of faith have drawn on scripture and tradition over millennia to interpret the meaning of the gospel as the liberation of the human family ‘from everything that oppresses,’ proclaiming, as did Paul VI, that ‘in Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, who died and rose from the dead, salvation is offered to all men as a gift of God’s grace and mercy (cf. Eph. 2.8; Rom. 1.16).’ ⁷⁵ The Church’s growing understanding of the Paschal Mystery has led it to pronounce many truths about Jesus and his identity—as the Divine Word, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, Redeemer and Liberator, Alpha and Omega—and a number of Scriptural passages leave little room to hesitate about the Christian understanding of Christ Jesus as the absolute centre of salvation history. ⁷⁶ Most significantly, the completeness of the revelation of God in Christ precludes the possibility for any other comparable word of God spoken in the world of religious expression: ‘In Christ and through Christ God has revealed Himself fully to mankind and has definitively drawn close to it…’ ⁷⁷

Do these affirmations necessarily produce exclusivist or inclusivist understandings of the religious other? Of course, affirming the completeness of revelation in Christ does not imply superiority or at all justify arrogance, if these entitlements are associated (however mistakenly) with such theological positions. Most importantly, the doctrine about the finality of Christ does not originate with an exclusivist or inclusivist intention. It flows from the heart of the religious experience that recognizes: ‘God is love’ (1 John 4:8). If Christ fully reveals the God who is Love, then revelation is complete because Love’s Self-Gift is full and total. The kenotic gift in the avowal of divine love sets up a new situation, for love fully surrenders itself in the Word. ⁷⁸

Christian doctrine affirms the completeness of revelation truly and permanently, but doctrine does not exhaust the potential for deeper understanding of the meaning of revelation in Jesus. Dogmatic pronouncements occur in specific contexts, with a specific meaning and judgement, usually in response to a conflict or dispute within the community; they remain permanently true strictly in relation to their original meaning and judgement. Of course, contexts change, horizons expand, modes of apprehension develop and vary—‘and so, if the doctrines are to retain their meaning within the new contexts, they have to be recast.’ ⁷⁹ The development and apprehension of Christian doctrine largely depends on variations in culture, context, and differentiations in consciousness.

Lonergan treated dogma not as premises in a theological calculus, but as particular expressions of revealed mysteries into which we may grow ever more deeply. ⁸⁰ When meaning becomes basic in theology, dogma no longer stands as the logically given starting point for resolving problems. On the other hand, when deductive approaches dominate, theologians may argue over which doctrines to emphasize; they may even suggest emendations of doctrine; they may counterbalance seemingly harsh doctrines with seemingly compassionate doctrines. ⁸¹ Insofar as they apply dogma to contemporary questions independently of both faith’s humility in accepting revealed mystery and the research and exegesis required for understanding what a particular church document means, their logic loses sight of the plenitude of the Christian Mysteries and the ongoing contexts of the pronouncement and appropriation of church doctrine. Not that dogma lacks value outside the original context of its promulgation. Quite the contrary. Christian doctrine simply requires careful interpretation, and understanding the revealed mysteries expressed in dogma moves us deeper (and without limit) into the ongoing process of our personal and communal growth.

Deepening our understanding of the Christian Mysteries relies on the dynamism of faith. For Lonergan, faith grows out of religious experience. It signals the cognitive aspect of the dynamic state of unrestricted being in love. In fact, he defined faith as ‘knowledge born of religious love,’ and his way of speaking about this knowledge implies that it does not conform to linguistic or propositional structures. It does not constitute a belief; the two are distinct. Rather, Lonergan identified faith with an apprehension of transcendent value, an apprehension that ‘consists in the experienced fulfilment of our unrestricted thrust to self-transcendence, in our actuated orientation towards the mystery of love and awe.’ ⁸² Such an apprehension of value both stands above all other values (as itself supreme and incomparable) and links itself to other values (as ‘to transform, magnify, glorify them’). ⁸³

The knowledge born of religious love enriches human knowing in the ongoing process of religious conversion. Its root and ground in religious experience makes faith phenomenologically ostensible, and its effect on conscious intentionality enables a person to apprehend truth and value more deeply and consistently. Faith does not itself reduce to the judgments of a religious tradition, but it functions as the principle for discerning the value of accepting such judgments. It becomes the ‘the eye of religious love, an eye that can discern God’s self-disclosures.’ ⁸⁴ This understanding of faith places interreligious dialogue on new ground because it allows for a view of the religious other as the already graced other in the dialectic of religious development. The need to preach the gospel to all nations continues as vibrantly today as ever before, but no human person brings about faith in another if only God speaks the inner word that gives life to faith. ⁸⁵ The power of the inner word positively relates each and every authentic outer word to the gospel. Evangelization unfolds through dialectic and dialogue with a keen awareness of our secondary role in the divine economy and a hope for continual (and universal) advance in genuineness. Interreligious encounters among religiously converted people are special opportunities for growth in understanding, friendship, and community—a growth that involves sharing beliefs and discerning God’s self-disclosures.

Lonergan’s and Crowe’s perspectives on doctrine, faith, and religious development emphasize the limitless potential for understanding the Christian Mysteries more deeply and in relation to the wide compass of the divine intention. The depths of divine revelation envelop the whole of human history and inspire eschatological expectation, keeping us waiting in prayer and labouring for the fullness of God’s Reign. ⁸⁶ But what we will become and whom the heavenly church will include or not include yet remains veiled in faith, for though ‘we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed’ (1 John 3:2). Divine revelation has not put to rest the question of Christianity’s relationship to the religions. Rather, it puts that question in the context of eschatology (i.e., more in God’s hands than in our own) and compels us by charity to cooperate in living towards an answer. On Christianity’s relationship to the religions, Crowe suggests that a theological response depends on how a theologian understands the nature and limit of our secondary responsibility in the divine plan for human history. He writes:

If God’s ‘plan’ is already in place for us, that is, in the ‘already’ of our ‘now,’ then to that extent we are no longer free. And if God has a determinate ‘plan’ in place for Christianity and the world religions, then we will let be what must be. But suppose God has no such plan, suppose that God loves a slow-learning people enough to allow them long ages to learn what they have to learn, suppose that the destiny of the world religions is contingent on what we all learn and do—say, on Christians being authentically Christian, Hindus being authentically Hindu, and so on. Then responsibility returns to us with a vengeance, and the answer to the question of the final relationship of Christianity and the world religions is that there is no answer—yet. ⁸⁷

The Christian dispensation yet implies the ongoing nature of our religious development in the global and diversified apprehension of what God gives in Word and Spirit to the whole human family. Our apprehension always already includes the diversity of our cultures and contexts; it includes our lived relationships with the religious other (and all the others). Exclusivism and inclusivism are partly correct in their affirmations of the necessity of the church for salvation and the universality of God’s gracious love towards us, but each of these camps fails to fully appreciate the potential significance of reciprocal discernment with the religious other for the ongoing growth and development of the Christian community. ⁸⁸ Each camp fails to fully incorporate a pneumatology that matches an empirical concept of culture as to anticipate the development of Christian doctrine in relation to the historicity and social existence of people in distinct cultural and interreligious (i.e., religious as unrestrictedly in love and religious as historically distinct) contexts. ⁸⁹ If communicating the meaning of dogma takes account of the lived experience of diverse communities, then it may become clearer with patient discernment how Christian faith and life converge and diverge with various ways of religious living. ⁹⁰

By their authenticity, religious persons may build relationships that give birth to something new—perhaps social and cultural change, perhaps religious renewal, and perhaps life-giving community. Lonergan’s phenomenology explains the possibility for this reciprocal discernment and emergence. His analysis of religious experience empirically anticipates in people of diverse convictions and cultures an inner orientation to the mystery of love and awe that may flourish in their religious, moral, and intellectual lives. Christians may recognize this (analogically) shared experience as a communio of the Holy Spirit, a communion that traverses disparate cultural-linguistic horizons. If through the mission of the Son God has spoken an outer word of redeeming love for the human family at a particular time and place in the history of human affairs, still God draws by the power of the Spirit all people in each and every time and place into the Body of Christ in infinite variation and diversity.

Conclusion

Only by living out Christian faith more whole-heartedly, authentically, lovingly will the question of Christianity’s final relationship to the religions meet in fullness with its answer. By prejudging that relationship, the common models in the theologies of religions may at best anticipate in interreligious dialogue a creative tension between fidelity and risk. But that creative tension bespeaks a basic opposition. On presupposing a final relationship, an attitude of risk and openness to the religious other may tend towards a misapprehension or miscommunication of Christian faith. Likewise, an intention of faithfulness may diminish the potential for reciprocity in interreligious encounters; it may even block or distort the real charity given to the person or community. But faith does not require such an opposition. When theology links the shock and excess of revelation in Word and Spirit to the incompleteness of Christianity’s relationship to the religions, when it makes meaning its basic category and places the criterion for its hermeneutics in conversion, then faithfulness and risk are integral to each other; there is no opposition because a reference to the axiomatic does not define the relation. Rather, the relation pivots on self-transcendence: faithfully adhering in Christian living to all that promotes self-transcendence implies risk in anticipation of the self as transcended.

Many debates in the theologies of religions are resolved methodologically rather than doctrinally. Christianity in its religiously pluralistic context need neither retreat into a doctrinal, linguistic enclave nor pursue a revisionist agenda for central beliefs. It need only clarify for itself the limits of its secondary responsibility in the divine plan and turn to the history of human affairs with eyes of genuineness and discernment. When meaning becomes basic in theology, then theology can start to think about encountering persons of other faiths in hopes of understanding their religious utterances, not just by learning their languages, but also by connecting their languages with the ground of religious interiority and by correlating the expressions to the realms and stages of meaning in which they occur. Lonergan acknowledged that currently the world religions do not share a common language. But he also acknowledged the possibility for the religions to grow in mutual understanding and community, because he recognized a foundational element in all genuine religiosity that occurs only as grace and gift:

That grace could be the finding that grounds our seeking God through natural reason and through positive religion. It could be the touchstone by which we judge whether it is really God that natural reason reaches or positive religion preaches. It could be the grace that God offers all men, that underpins what is good in the religions of mankind, that explains how those that never heard the gospel can be saved. It could be what enables the simple faithful to pray to their heavenly Father in secret even though their religious apprehensions are faulty. Finally, it is in such grace that can be found the theological justification of Catholic dialogue with all Christians, with non-Christians, and even with atheists who may love God in their hearts while not knowing him with their heads.^91,92