Abstract
Bernard Lonergan developed his theological method as a response to the need to integrate historical studies into theological method. While his method is derived from his transcendental method, this paper argues that the last three centuries of the quest for the historical Jesus provide a test case against which to test Lonergan’s method. While critical historical method corresponds (more or less) to Lonergan’s first three functional specialties (research, interpretation, and history), the dynamics of the quest itself point to the need for dialectics and foundations while raising the question of doctrine. In this way the quest provides some empirical verification for Lonergan’s method.
During the 1960s, while working in the Gregorian University, Bernard Lonergan sought to develop his grasp of the issues raised by the introduction of critical historical approaches to Catholic theological method. Reflecting on his own performance of these years he commented that ‘all my work has been introducing history into Catholic theology.’ 1 The fruits of this investigation were his major work, Method in Theology. 2 As Lonergan repeatedly made clear, his primary task was not prescriptive but a nuanced analysis of theological performance, drawing on his own transcendental method. This is the same approach he deployed in his major philosophical work, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. 3 In both cases the normativity of his proposals, either as cognitional theory (Insight) or theological method (Method in Theology), derives from the invariant structures of consciousness uncovered through transcendental method. And so, his claim is not just that this is how theologians should do theology, but how the dynamics within human consciousness drive theologians to structure their inquiries. Attending to this inherent structure will then facilitate theology by providing an explicit method based on invariant structures which can lead to cumulative and genuine development within the discipline.
While Lonergan’s argument is drawn from his analysis of the structures of consciousness, if he is correct that this is how theology is done performatively, then there should also be corroborating evidence within the discipline itself. When we consider the output of the theological community, we should be able to detect in broad outline the approach Lonergan is seeking to promote. The argument of this article is that the last few centuries of the movement known as the ‘quest for the historical Jesus’ provides a solid test case against which to test Lonergan’s proposal. As has been noted above, Lonergan’s primary driving concern was the introduction of history into Catholic theology. Given the whole historical Jesus movement arose as a consequence of the emergence of historical consciousness in the 18th and 19th centuries, it is not unreasonable to suggest that the movement provides a significant test case, indeed a historical experiment, in the integration of history into Christology. 4 In this paper I will seek to demonstrate key features of Lonergan’s theological method as they arise in the context of the quest for the historical Jesus in order to provide an ‘empirical’ evidentiary base in support of that method.
I begin with a brief review of Lonergan’s proposal in relation to theological method. I then consider the history of the quest for the historical Jesus, from the first quest, to the renewed second quest, to what is now called the third or renewed quest. I then turn attention to three more modern practitioners of the quest, Dominic Crossan, John Meier, and Ben Meyer, focusing not on their results in relation to what can be said about Jesus, but about the problem of objectivity in historical researches that they themselves raise. 5 This focus advances questions on what Lonergan identifies as intellectual conversion in theology. The presence or absence of such a conversion is impacting on the approach and outcomes of the authors under consideration. Finally, I identify a further issue of conversion, that of religious conversion in relation to the person of Jesus himself, as something else that impacts upon the approach and outcomes of these authors, and its relationship to the question of objectivity in historical research. 6
Lonergan’s theological method
Lonergan takes as his starting point a transcendental analysis of the structure of intentional human consciousness. He identifies four ‘levels’ within consciousness, which he labels as empirical, intellectual, rational, and responsible. These levels are dynamically linked through a process of questioning which move the theologian from data, through insight and hypothesis (what is it?), through to the weighing of evidence and judgment (is it so?) to culminate in responsible action (is it good?). This upward movement through the levels of consciousness he will later call a creative vector. 7 These four levels give four ‘transcendental precepts’: Be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible. 8 However, this process culminates in a more serious existential question, who or what do I love, where do I fundamentally and ultimately stand? This is the question of conversion, of one’s basic horizon or orientation in the world. Lonergan then identifies a fifth precept: Be in love. 9 Conversion precipitates a different movement within consciousness, a healing movement from ‘above, downwards’ whereby the ‘being in love’ of the theologian transforms the responsible, rational, intellectual, and empirical levels of consciousness by opening them to greater levels of receptivity to the realities they encounter.
This transcendental structure gives rise to an eightfold differentiation of theological tasks, or functional specialties: research, interpretation, history, dialectics, foundations, doctrines, systematics, and communications, spelt out schematically in the following diagram. 10
The pivot between these two phases is conversion, of which Lonergan identifies three modalities: religious, moral, and intellectual. 11 Lonergan places conversion ‘outside’ of the method, as a personal event in the life of the theologian, though reflection on conversion is central to the specialty of foundations.
It is not my intention to spell out in detail what is involved in the implementation of these specialties. Rather I deploy them heuristically with explanations as needed for the purpose of the argument. However, with an eye to the direction of that argument, I note that the first three specialties—research, interpretation, and history—correspond in some sense to what has been called ‘critical historical method.’ They incorporate issues of textual criticism (research—attentive to the data), literary criticism (interpretation—intelligent grasping the meaning of texts) and historical criticism (history—basing historical reconstruction on reasonable evidence). Cumulatively these three specialties provide a good approximation of the activities that practitioners of critical historical method perform.
The quest for the historical Jesus
The first indicator of the impact of historical consciousness in theology relates to the writing of the French Oratorian priest, Richard Simon (1638–1712). His major work, Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, was the first significant attempt to write a critical history of the Old Testament using techniques of textual and redactional criticism. The focus of his work was on claims to Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, which he rejected on the basis of these critical techniques. He also undertook a follow-up work on the New Testament, Histoire critique du texte du Nouveau Testament. Simon’s intent was to challenge Protestant claims of sola scriptura by highlighting the human elements of the Bible. Nonetheless his work brought forth condemnation from the Church and he was expelled from his order. 12
It did not take long for others to use these same techniques with a focus on the Gospels. Hermann Reimarus (1694–1768) in his essay Von dem Zwecke Jesu und seiner Jünger: Noch ein Fragment des Wolfenbüttelschen Ungenannten (ET Reimarus: Fragments) launched a major attack on the historical credibility of the Gospels which he viewed as ‘a conspiracy hatched by the disciples of Jesus to assure themselves a livelihood after the death of their master and the defeat of his goals.’ 13 Whereas Simon was a priest seeking to advance a theological issue within the Church, Reimarus was a rationalist and a deist who rejected the notion of historical revelation and all that it entailed. His aim was to dismantle the historical claims of Christianity. In his wake was to grow a veritable publishing industry during the 19th century, a ‘quest for the historical Jesus,’ whose basic assumption was that historical Christianity is a mistake made by the early church, which the methods of historical criticism now allow us to correct. One of the more famous contributors to this industry was David Strauss (1801–1874) whose work Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet (The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined) dismissed all miraculous elements as mythical, introduced into the Gospels to support the early Church’s developing position on Jesus’ divine status. In his stinging criticism of the 19th-century liberal quest, George Tyrrell commented that they had looked into the well of history and seen their own reflection. 14 The 19th-century quest culminated with the introduction of the distinction between the ‘Jesus of history’ and the ‘Christ of faith’ by Martin Kähler (1835–1921) in his work Der sogenannte historische Jesus und der geschichtliche, biblische Christus (The so-called historical Jesus and the historic, biblical Christ). Kähler promoted a general scepticism about what could be known about the ‘Jesus of history’ while advancing the importance of the ‘Christ of faith.’
The erudition of Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus revealed the inadequacies of this first quest and largely brought it to an end. 15 From the perspective of Lonergan’s method we might note that the focus of these writings was largely in the specialty of history but built on an inadequate basis in research and interpretation. The basics of textual criticism were in place, but a literary criticism more sensitive to the literary nature of the sources had not yet emerged. The quest also revealed how other factors, such as religious commitments or lack thereof, were determining the approach of the various authors. Indirectly this raises the question of religious conversion and its place in relation to historical objectivity. For many in this first quest, faith was viewed as an impediment to historical objectivity, an objectivity needed to reveal the truth about Jesus.
The scepticism of the first quest was prolonged into the 20th century in the writings of Rudolf Bultmann whose work Jesus and the Word claims almost complete agnosticism about the history of Jesus, beyond the fact of his existence, and death at the hands of Roman and Jewish authorities. For Bultmann the name ‘Jesus’ simply signifies the earliest substratum of the biblical tradition. Whereas the first quest pitted the Jesus of history against the Christ of faith, Bultmann placed the Jesus of history behind a wall of historical agnosticism to promote the religious virtues of the Christ of faith. Nonetheless his students, notably Ernst Käsemann, reacted against this agnosticism to initiate the second or new quest for the historical Jesus. With greater sensitivity to the religious and literary nature of the works being considered, the second quest sought to reconnect what the first quest had largely sundered, to link the Jesus of history with the Christ of faith, reaffirming the early church’s witness to his life, death, and resurrection. Major contributions to the new quest came from James Robinson, Gunther Bornkamm, and Joachim Jeremias. Their efforts were more modest than the first quest, their gains more piecemeal, their grounding more scholarly. Whereas the first questers were people of minimal Christian commitment—deists and rationalists—the second quest was largely the product of theologians and Christian biblical scholars seeking to reaffirm the church’s faith in Jesus as the Christ.
Catholic scholars came relatively late to the second quest, as they struggled under the strictures of the anti-modernist oath (issued by Pius X, 1910 and in force until 1967). While in theory given some relief with the encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu (Pius XII, 1943), many scholars who embraced critical historical method remained under a cloud. It was only with Vatican II’s Dei Verbum that Catholic scholars made significant contributions to the quest for the historical Jesus. At this stage Catholic scholars remained heavily dependent on the work of Protestant scripture scholars. Key works emerging from this Catholic involvement were those of Hans Kung, On Being a Christian, Walter Kasper, Jesus the Christ, and Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus: An Experiment in Christology. 16 All these works adopted a critical historical methodology in their accounts of the person and life of Jesus. From a Catholic perspective these works marked the culmination of the ‘second quest.’
While the techniques of the critical historical method had become more sophisticated in the second quest, the pressing issue here remains one of religious conversion (expressed as faith in Jesus and mediated by him) and its relationship to the objectivity of historical scholarship. Could the historical research of Christian scholars be taken seriously as history, or does it amount to special pleading that seeks to reinforce what has already been adopted by their faith commitment? In Lonergan’s terms the differences between the outcomes of the first and second quests (in broad terms) emerges as a dialectic issue, one which goes beyond critical historical method in itself, but points to more fundamental questions about the horizon of the investigators.
The second quest has long been supplanted by what N.T. Wright has labelled the ‘third or renewed quest’ for the historical Jesus. This quest does not have the more unitary approaches of the first and second quest. What distinguishes it from the previous quests may be identified as follows: the prominence of new data, for example Dead Sea scrolls, gnostic gospels, and Jewish historical sources, significantly enlarging the range of historical background about the time of Jesus; new methods for analysing the data, such as sociological methods, and liberation and feminist critiques; and the emergence of new scholars, largely trained in a ‘studies of religion’ approach, who seek to bracket out questions of the faith commitment of the inquirer in the name of scientific objectivity. These factors—new data, methods, and scholars—tore apart the general consensus achieved by the second quest and heightened the dialectic tensions evident between the first and second quests.
Given this heightened tension it is perhaps not surprising that those involved in the third quest began to raise questions about the objectivity of their methods. The supposed strength of critical historical method was its claim to be in some sense ‘scientific,’ ‘objective,’ and ‘observer independent,’ but as the three centuries of the quest had demonstrated the results were far from uniform and displayed a plurality of outcomes. One solution is to insist on stricter criteria for objectivity. Some sought these explicitly in criteria such as those of embarrassment, of discontinuity, of multiple attestation, and so on. 17 While these provided some control of the material being considered, the subjectivity of the inquirer still appeared to play an inescapable role. Could this be eliminated and if so how? If not, what does it say about the objectivity of the method itself? More significantly in terms of the present essay, to raise these questions is to move beyond the mere awareness of a dialectic disagreement into the realm of foundations, where such foundational questions can be identified and addressed. We shall now consider how our three authors approach this issue.
John Dominic Crossan and The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant 18
In the preface of this major work, John Dominic Crossan immediately raises the issue of scholarly objectivity and its lack in the quest for the historical Jesus. He describes the then state of the subject as a ‘scholarly bad joke’ and an ‘academic embarrassment,’ concluding that it leaves ‘an impression of acute scholarly subjectivity,’ 19 a point he illustrates with multiple references to the work of preceding scholars in the area. Turning to the question of his own methodology he notes his use of various sociological and historical studies on the Mediterranean world (new data and methodologies) before turning his attention to the texts themselves. Here he identifies three key tactics: an inventory, the stratification of the inventory, and attestation within the inventory. The inventory includes much more than the canonical Gospels to encompass a range of other texts made available by archaeological discoveries; these are then stratified into historical periods, and multiple independent attestation within the inventory is then measured. This leads to a hierarchy of attestation based on their place in the stratification and the degree of independent attestation as a measure of historicity. This then leads to a complex score sheet for elements in the texts which he refers to as ‘complexes.’
Despite what might appear to be an almost purely empirical procedure Crossan does not present his method as claiming a ‘spurious objectivity.’ As he notes, ‘almost every step demands a scholarly judgment and informed decision. I am not concerned with an unattainable objectivity, but with an attainable honesty.’ He describes his method as ‘formal’ into which various material elements may be put with differing outcomes offering it as a ‘common methodology’ for historical Jesus research. 20 However, it has found little uptake within the discipline. N.T. Wright notes that for all the complexity of Crossan’s proposed stratification, few accept at face value the datings he proposes, suggesting that it is ‘possible, but is it likely?’ As this timeline of texts is central to Crossan’s argument, Wright concludes that he is trying to ‘build castles in the air.’ He describes the method as ‘almost positivist,’ which hides the fact that what Crossan offers as ‘starting points . . . are in fact conclusions’ drawn from prior basic theses about Jesus and the early Church. 21 He further suggests that the ‘appearance of great scientific and methodological rigour given by this [method] is just that, an appearance.’ 22
Wright correctly identifies the basic foundational issue as epistemological. Crossan recognizes the continued dependence of his project on ‘scholarly judgment and informed decision,’ a frank admission of the ineradicable contribution of the subjectivity of the scholar in the constitution of knowledge, while presenting his outcomes in an objectivist fashion which tends to occlude the basis for those judgments and decision in prior commitments. There is a tension here, between these two poles, which Wright suggests can only be resolved through the method of critical realism, or as Lonergan would note, through intellectual conversion. 23 Wright finds some parallels between Crossan’s goal of ‘attainable honesty’ and his own appeal to that critical realism, though in the end he finds Crossan’s position one of ‘complex and convoluted speculation.’ 24
My aim is not to engage with the details of Crossan’s work, but to highlight the foundational issue, that of objectivity, that he raises, and which have been subject to criticism as ‘positivist.’ 25 While few have found his proposed stratification convincing, it is also important to ask where such a method should sit and why it is of limited value. It seems at least to this reader that the approach Crossan has developed fits into the specialty of research, of gathering and collating the data, while prescinding from questions of meaning or interpretation. Crossan is, I would suggest, attempting to move from analysing the data of research to making historical judgments. Epistemologically this would be a form of empiricism or naïve realism.
John Meier and A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus 26
Perhaps no work on the historical Jesus can match the vast scope of the project envisaged by John Meier. With the first volume published in 1991, we now have a fifth volume in print as of 2016 and no end in sight. Meier’s ambition far exceeds the goals of many early questers, but he is nonetheless aware of the underlying methodological concerns with the objectivity of his procedure and the goal which he is seeking to recover. In the opening pages of the first volume Meier grapples with the questions of objectivity, noting that such objectivity can only be the ‘asymptotic goal’ of historical research. To address what is best viewed as a problem of bias or competing perspectives, Meier introduces his fantasy construct of an ‘unpapal’ conclave, an imaginative construct involving a Catholic, a Protestant, and a Jewish scholar weighing the evidence for each particular claim to historicity and voting on it. The three perspectives provide a ‘limited consensus, which does not claim to act as a substitute for the Christ of faith, [but constitutes] the modest goal of the present work.’ 27 All this is an effort on Meier’s part to ‘bracket what I hold by faith and examine only what can be shown to be certain or probable by historical research and logical argumentation.’ 28
Meier introduces a distinction between the object of historical research which he calls the ‘historical Jesus’ and the ‘real Jesus,’ noting that ‘The historical Jesus is not the real Jesus. The real Jesus is not the historical Jesus.’ 29 The real Jesus, identified with the totality of truth about Jesus, is not accessible to historical research (alone); knowledge of the real Jesus requires faith; the historical Jesus, on the other hand is a ‘fragmentary hypothetical reconstruction,’ accessible to all via historical methodology. 30 Central to that methodology is a set of criteria he deploys for assessing the historicity of Gospel events and sayings. 31 These are:
Criterion of Embarrassment: ‘the early Church would hardly have gone out of its way to create material that only embarrassed its creator or weakened its position.’ 32
Criterion of Discontinuity: ‘focuses on words or deeds of Jesus that cannot be derived either from Judaism at the time of Jesus or from the early Church after him.’ 33
Criterion of Multiple Attestation: ‘focuses on those sayings or deeds of Jesus that are attested in more than one independent literary source . . . and/or in more than one literary form or genre.’ 34
Criterion of Coherence: ‘sayings and deeds of Jesus that fit in well with the preliminary ‘data base’ established by using our first three criteria have a good chance of being historical.’ 35
Criterion of Rejection and Execution: ‘directs our attention to the historical fact that Jesus met a violent end at the hands of Jewish and Roman officials and then asks what . . . can explain his trial and execution.’ 36
Meier also lists secondary, less reliable criteria, for example detecting traces of Aramaic, references to the Palestinian environment, vividness of narration, and so on. These provide the overall framework for his historical reconstruction.
As with Crossan, Meier begins with an acknowledgement of the problem of ‘objectivity’ and how it is to be ensured. Whereas Crossan seeks some sense of objectivity in terms of his stratification of texts, Meier fully recognizes the irreducibly subjective nature of historical judgments and seeks to address this through two strategies, his construct of an ‘unpapal’ conclave, and the deployment of a set of criteria for historicity. The criteria provide some sense of methodological control, but the ultimate final judgment is then a matter of balancing the perspectives of his conclave participants. Here the differing faith perspectives of the conclave members are viewed as competing biases which need to be pitted against one another to arrive at some final consensus. What is obscured here is the subjectivity of the author who himself makes the final judgment as to what that consensus is.
Clearly Meier recognizes the problem of objectivity and subjectivity, but in viewing subjectivity in terms of competing biases his approach has elements in common with Kantian idealism. 37 There is no resolution here to the problem of objectivity since the subject remains locked into his/her subjectivity, balancing out biases. 38 The ‘real’ Jesus is hidden behind a veil, inaccessible to historical research. ‘We cannot know the ‘real’ Jesus through historical research, whether we mean his total reality or just a reasonably complete biographical portrait.’ All that is available to us is the ‘historical Jesus’ as a hypothetical fragmentary reconstruction. 39
In choosing the participants of his conclave as Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish, Meier could be said to be favouring a foundational principle based on religious conversion of some sort. To overcome this perception, in his second volume Meier slips in a fourth member of the conclave, an agnostic. While this might claim to be in the name of greater ‘objectivity,’ in fact it raises more forcefully the role of religious conversion in historical investigation. Is religious conversion simply another bias that needs to be overcome? Or is religious conversion a doorway to a clearer perception of what is really happening historically, particularly in dealing with literature of an inherently religious nature? An Enlightenment bias against religious tradition will always view religious conversion with suspicion and hence a block to uncovering what is true. This is basically the stance of many of those in the first quest. That Meier makes this concession indicates that he remains unclear about the foundational significance of religious conversion and falls back into a position of competing biases with the agnostic stance being just another bias to take into consideration.
Ben F. Meyer and The Aims of Jesus 40
While Ben Meyer stands at the origins of the third quest, his seminal work, The Aims of Jesus, has exerted considerable influence on a number of more recent authors—for example N.T. Wright and James D.G. Dunn 41 — who trace their methodological approach back to Meyer, who draws on his own familiarity with the work of Lonergan. 42 This is borne out in their self-identification as ‘critical realists,’ the term Lonergan (and Meyer) uses for his hermeneutic approach. 43 Indeed, this marks the significant difference between the approach of Meyer and both Crossan and Meier. The latter two both seek to deal with the problem of objectivity, an issue of profound philosophical difficulties, drawing on their own intellectual resources, while Meyer turns to thinkers of a more philosophical bent, Lonergan and the philosopher/historical R.G. Collingwood, to present an account of both critical history and the relationship between faith and historical reason. 44
Meyer begins by delineating the exegetical task of understanding the meaning of texts (what Lonergan speaks of as the specialization of interpretation) from the historical task of understanding the intention of historical actors (what he called historical interpretation) and the explanation of events which arise from the success and failures of those intentions (Lonergan’s specialization of history), seeking to find out ‘why this went forward and that did not.’ 45 He argues that ‘interpretation and explanation, then, designate distinct but inseparable aspects of the historical unknown to be known.’ 46 History then moves towards the goals of interpretation and explanation, of aims and outcomes, through ‘specifying unknowns (i.e. in asking questions) and in systematically converting them into knowns (constructing and cross-checking answers). The sequence, then, is: question, hypothesis, verification.’ 47 This sequence suggests two aspects to critical history, controlling the data and establishing the facts.
Under the heading of controlling the data Meyer draws attention to the ways in which various authors use ‘criteria of historicity’ as central to their historical methodology. For example, he argues that the commonly used criterion of discontinuity leads to a distorted account of Jesus which fails to attend to those areas of continuity between Jesus and both Judaism and the early church. Underlying the use of criteria he identifies the ‘skeptic’s style of deciding historicity questions . . . in a peremptory fashion by a single acid test and dealing with the data atomistically.’ 48 Rather than criteria, Meyer uses the term ‘indices’ of historicity, suggesting a more nuanced measure that allows for a yes, no, or undecided outcome. Concerning establishing the fact, he distinguishes between data and facts: facts emerge at the end of the inquiry as conclusions drawn from rational principles, with the object of determining the ‘why’ of historical events, not just the data of the events. ‘The role of data is initially to allow the specifying of unknowns and continuously thereafter to set limits within which the process of converting unknowns into knowns advances.’ 49 History is knowledge, not belief, is inferential in nature, and is built upon hypotheses which require verification grounded in data. A final historical judgment is ‘invulnerable when no further pertinent questions arise.’ 50 Prior to this term, judgments remain more or less probable.
As an account of critical historical method Meyer presents a far more philosophically sophisticated position than either Crossan or Meier. However, he pushes the position further by reference to the subjectivity of the historian. Both Crossan and Meier note the problem but fail to thematize it. Meyer notes that beyond critical method whereby we interrogate the text, texts also interrogate their interpreters. The study of history reveals ‘new possibilities of existence’ to which the interpreter may or may not be sensitive. History has a moral end: ‘The contact with the possibilities incarnated in Socrates or Caesar or Jesus is not simply “evaluation”. . . . I can learn nothing from [them] . . .without evaluating what they incarnate as on the side of life or death, as insight or blindness, as wisdom or folly or madness.’ 51 Hence the issue is raised of the historian’s own ‘intellectual and moral being, and in the end they account more fundamentally and adequately for the kind of history he produces.’ 52
What we find in Meyer’s account, which is hardly surprising given his education under Lonergan, is a presentation of the ways in which critical history (research, interpretation, and history) must face the problem of significant and dialectic divergences which arise from the particular intellectual, moral and, he will add, religious horizon of the historian. These divergences are in the end more determinative of the history produced than other factors. Indeed, Meyer moves onto this deeper religious issue in a chapter that focuses on the question of history in relation to faith, highlighting the question of a religious conversion and its role in the process of historical investigation. While Meyer has his own approach to the question with a focus on the miraculous, I frame the same issue in terms of the relationship between intellectual and religious conversion and their place in the historian. 53
Intellectual conversion and religious conversion in the historian
While the whole of Insight is directed towards the production of an intellectual conversion in the reader, the term itself does not appear in the work.
54
Rather, its most concise expression is to be found in his later work, Method in Theology. There we read that intellectual conversion is:
a radical clarification and, consequently, the elimination of an exceedingly stubborn and misleading myth concerning reality, objectivity, and human knowledge. The myth is that knowing is like looking, that objectivity is seeing what is there to be seen and not seeing what is not there, and that the real is what is out there now to be looked at.
55
What is of primary concern for this present account is the rejection of the notion that ‘objectivity is seeing what is there to be seen and not seeing what is not there.’ Rather, as Lonergan makes abundantly clear is, there is no notion of objectivity devoid of the human intelligence and judgment. Contrasting the different meaning of objectivity in the world of immediacy with that of the world mediated by meaning and motivated by value, he concludes that ‘objectivity is simply the consequence of authentic subjectivity, of genuine attention, genuine intelligence, genuine reasonableness, genuine responsibility’ 56 or more succinctly ‘Genuine objectivity is the fruit of authentic subjectivity.’ 57
Such a notion of objectivity grounded in intellectual conversion has consequences for any process of historical investigation. 58 Objectivity is not the result of some elimination of the subjectivity of the historian, but rather of the historian’s commitment to ‘genuine attention, genuine intelligence, genuine reasonableness, genuine responsibility.’ Objectivity demands a radical openness and commitment to the truth as a fruit of this authentic search. A problem arises when the historian misconstrues the nature of objectivity in empiricist or idealist terms, as this will feed back into their performance and blind them to a full response to the problem of historical objectivity.
To further complicate matters, when we are dealing with a religious reality such as the quest for the historical Jesus, the question of authenticity demanded by intellectual conversion cannot be separated from a further question of religious conversion, specifically a religious conversion grounded in the person of Jesus. Whatever else we might say about the New Testament, it gives witness to a massive and communal religious conversion whose focus is on the person of Jesus. 59 As Lonergan describes it, religious conversion is ‘being grasped by ultimate concern. It is otherworldly falling in love. It is total and permanent self-surrender without conditions, qualifications, reservations.’ 60 From the New Testament texts themselves, not just the Gospels, but just as forcefully in the epistles, we find evidence of a community where this ‘otherworldly falling in love’ finds its focus in the person of Jesus, crucified and risen. 61 We find this language of ‘excess’ for example in the hymn of Philippians 2:6–11—equality with God, a name that is above every name, every knee should bend, every tongue confess Jesus Christ is Lord—in Colossians 1:15–20—image of the invisible God, all things created through him and for him, he is before all things and holds all things together—and in the Letter to the Hebrews 1:1–14—the Son is inheritor of all the worlds, the exact imprint of God’s being, superior to the angels. 62 There are no superlatives great enough to encompass the reality of Jesus or express the love of his followers.
The question raised by the quest for the historical Jesus is whether a similar religious conversion in the life of the historian makes the historian more, or less, authentic in his/her historical investigations? Is a ‘total and permanent self-surrender without conditions, qualifications, reservations’ to the person of Jesus an act of human authenticity or is it inherently inauthentic? In a transposed context these are basically the questions addressed by the conciliar declarations of Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon. 63 These councils are best understood as the formulation of cognitive meanings which match the existential fact of overwhelming Christian devotion to the person of Jesus Christ. To reject those meanings is to cast the New Testament witness itself under the pall of inauthenticity, ‘a conspiracy hatched by the disciples of Jesus to assure themselves a livelihood after the death of their master and the defeat of his goals.’ 64 The foundational question of the authenticity of the religiously converted historian leads us with a certain inevitability to a consideration of the doctrinal judgments of these Church councils. From this perspective the strategies of Crossan to eliminate faith from history, and of Meier’s ‘unpapal conclave’ of a Catholic, a Protestant, and a Jewish scholar, represent a misconstrual of the question of objectivity.
The presumption of the first quest was that religious faith was simply a bias to be eliminated. 65 The second quest reappropriated the place of faith into the quest as Christian scholars pressed their investigations beyond the Enlightenment biases of the first quest. This established the material basis for a dialectic since both first and second questers were drawing on the same sources, using the same techniques, but arriving at different answers. The third or renewed quest has now thematized the foundational problem of objectivity and has led us to the doctrinal question of the status of Jesus Christ, as incarnate Word of God. If in fact the Christian doctrinal tradition is true, objective, and authentic, the faith of the historical investigator is not a bias to be eliminated or bracketed, but a doorway to be opened to the fulness of truth about Jesus. This is not to suggest that those without such a religious conversion focused on the person of Jesus should be excluded from undertaking the quest for the historical Jesus. What it suggests is that the dialectic disagreements that arise from the fruits of research, interpretation, and history (critical historical method) raise foundational questions about the presence or absence of religious and intellectual conversions within those historians, which in turn leads to questions about the status of fundamental doctrinal commitments. 66 The privileged position of the faith horizon only becomes evident in the normative phase of the theological method, not in its positive phase, though it is operative within that phase.
Conclusion
This article began with Lonergan’s claim that his method is not just a normative account of how theologians should undertake their responsibilities as theologians. It is also a nuanced articulation of how theologians actually do theology, inasmuch as they are attentive, intelligent, reasonable, and responsible. It further suggested that if this claim is true, we should expect to find evidence for this in the quest for the historical Jesus. The subsequent investigation found evidence of a movement beyond the activities of research, interpretation, and history (critical historical method) to a recognition of dialectic divergences within the quest, which questers have sought to address through attention to foundational questions on objectivity. This foundational issue also raised the relationship between the intellectual authenticity of the quester and religious conversion. Is a religious conversion focused on the person of Jesus a hindrance or an advantage for the quester? The answer to such a question was then found to be inseparable from a doctrinal stance on the status of Jesus himself. The movement from research, interpretation, history, dialectics, foundations, and doctrines have all arisen within the context of the quest, just as Lonergan expects. One may ask about the movement into systematics and communications. Questers have found little interest in exploring the implications of their program for systematic theology, given the way they have generally avoided the doctrinal issues, or simply denied their significance, and systematicians have generally not been that interested in integrating the outcomes of historical research into their systematics. 67 One the other hand, some questers have been very active in the area of communication, often delivering the outcomes of their historical investigations as yet another nail in the coffin of historical Christianity, while bypassing the need for dialectics, foundations, doctrine, and systematics. Fuller attention to all the phases of theological method might lead them to more modest conclusions. 68
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
1
Quoted in Frederick E. Crowe, Developing the Lonergan Legacy: Historical, Theoretical and Existential Themes, ed. Michael Vertin (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 78. The comment was made at a 1980 Boston College Workshop.
2
Bernard J.F. Lonergan, Method in Theology (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1972). While lecturing at the Gregorian University Lonergan ran a number of graduate seminars on theological method, which have subsequently been published as part of the Lonergan Collected Works: Early Works on Theological Method 2, ed. Robert M. Doran, Daniel Monsour, and Michael G. Shields (University of Toronto Press, 2013); Early Works on Theological Method 3, ed. Robert M. Doran, H. Daniel Monsour, and Michael G. Shields (University of Toronto Press, 2013).
3
Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, ed. Crowe Frederick E. and Robert M. Doran, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992).
4
On the notion of historical consciousness see ‘The Transition from a Classicist World-View to Historical Mindedness,’ in A Second Collection, ed. William F. Ryan and Bernard Tyrrell (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1974), 1–10.
5
For a more direct and prolonged comparison between Crossan and Meyer see Donald L. Denton, Historiography and Hermeneutics in Jesus Studies: An Examination of the Work of John Dominic Crossan and Ben F. Meyer (London/New York: Bloomsbury, 2004).
6
I should mention here the work of Jonathan Bernier, The Quest for the Historical Jesus after the Demise of Authenticity: Toward a Critical Realist Philosophy of History in Jesus Studies (London/New York: Bloomsbury, 2016). I only came across his work after I had completed the bulk of this project, the similarities between our approaches arising from our common sources in the work of Ben Meyer and Bernard Lonergan. I do however think there are key areas where I go beyond Bernier’s work, particularly in the concluding sections.
7
Bernard J.F. Lonergan, ‘Healing and Creating in History,’ in A Third Collection, ed. Frederick E. Crowe (Mahwah, NY: Paulist, 1985), 100–109.
8
Method, 217.
9
Ibid., 252.
10
Lonergan first made this structure public in his article, Bernard J.F. Lonergan, ‘Functional Specialties,’ Gregorianum 50 (1969): 485–505. It finds much fuller expression in Method. For a contemporary appropriation of this fuller expression see Neil Ormerod and Christiaan Jacobs-Vandegeer, Foundational Theology: A New Approach to Catholic Fundamental Theology (Minneapolis, MN:Fortress, 2015).
11
Robert Doran has added a fourth, psychic conversion, concerned more with the empirical level of consciousness as it participates in or impedes the operations of the higher levels. See Robert M. Doran, Theology and the Dialectics of History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990).
12
Auvray, P, ‘Simon, Richard.’ New Catholic Encyclopedia. 2nd ed. Vol. 13. (Detroit: Gale, 2003), 127.
13
Ben F. Meyer, The Aims of Jesus (London: SCM, 1979), 29. On this history of Reimarus’s text see ibid., 257, n.4.
14
James D.G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered (Grand Rapids, MI:Eerdmans, 2003), 48, n.108.
15
First published in 1906 it has recently been republished. See Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, ed. John Bowden (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2001).
16
Hans Küng, On Being a Christian (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976); Walter Kasper, Jesus the Christ (London/New York: Burns & Oates/Paulist, 1976); Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus: An Experiment in Christology, trans. Hubert Hoskins (New York: Seabury, 1979).
17
For an example of these see John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, 1st ed., 5 vols, vol. 1 (New York: Doubleday, 1991).
18
John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992).
19
Ibid., xxvii.
20
Ibid., xxxiv.
21
N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1996), 48. Wright is not alone in identifying a positivist strand in Crossan’s approach. James Dunn refers to Crossan’s approach as resulting in a ‘surprisingly “objective” stratification,’ while citing H. Childs to the effect that Crossan displays ‘a subtle and unwitting positivism.’ Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 109, n.39.
22
Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 50–51.
23
Wright draws indirectly on Lonergan through his inspiration from the work of Ben Meyer. See below.
24
Ibid., 62.
25
I should note that Crossan makes a vigorous defence of his approach in a sequel work, John Dominic Crossan, Birth of Christianity (Bloomsbury Academic, 1999), not only from criticisms from Wright but from Timothy Luke Johnson, John Meier, and others.
26
Meier, A Marginal Jew, 1.
27
Ibid., 1–2. Meier himself describes the construct as a ‘fantasy.’ I also note that in Vol.2, 4 Meier adds an ‘agnostic’ and a Muslim in Vol.4, 12, to his unpapal conclave.
28
Ibid., 6.
29
Ibid., 21–31. For a critique of Meier’s account based on a Lonerganian perspective see Anthony Kelly, ‘The Historical Jesus and Human Subjectivity: A Response to John Meier,’ Pacifica 2/4 (1991): 202–29.
30
Meier, A Marginal Jew, 1, 31.
31
Meier is hardly unique in the development of such criteria, merely a further iteration thereof. Other authors have given similar lists.
32
Ibid., 1, 168.
33
Ibid., 171.
34
Ibid., 174.
35
Ibid., 176.
36
Ibid., 177.
37
Ben Meyer comes to the same conclusion, that Meier’s position is an example of neo-Kantian idealism. Ben F. Meyer, ‘The Relevance of “Horizon,”’ The Downside Review 112 (1994): 1–14. Christopher McMahon suggest that Meier’s position is more one of naïve realism, but the unpapal conclave construct seems to be not a denial of subjectivity, but of subjectivity as an ineliminable bias that must then be balanced out. On the other hand, McMahon helpfully distinguishes between Meier’s epistemological foundations and his actual performance. See Christopher McMahon, ‘Christology, History, and Frankenstein’s Monster: The Evolution of the Historical Jesus in John P. Meier,’ New Blackfriars 83 (2002): 504–13.
38
As Jonathan Bernier notes, ‘Meier understands the religious commitment of these scholars as barriers to objectivity.’ Bernier, The Quest for the Historical Jesus after the Demise of Authenticity, 159.
39
Meier, A Marginal Jew, 1, 24.
40
Meyer, The Aims of Jesus. For a thorough study of Meyer’s contribution to historical Jesus studies see Bernier, The Quest for the Historical Jesus.
41
See for example Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, which has numerous mentions of Meyer’s work, notably in the introduction, xix; Dunn, Jesus Remembered. 110–11; Wright in fact wrote an introduction to a re-release of Meyer’s work, Ben F. Meyer, The Aims of Jesus, Introduction by N.T. Wright ed. (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2002). For a further identification of biblical scholars influenced by Meyer see Denton, Historiography and Hermeneutics, 13.
42
Meyer undertook doctoral studies at the Gregorian University, at the time Lonergan was working out his ideas for theological method.
43
Meyer extends his position in his later work, Ben F. Meyer, Reality and Illusion in New Testament Scholarship: A Primer in Critical Realist Hermeneutics (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 1994).
44
For an account of Collingwood’s significance for historical Jesus research see Jordan J. Ryan, ‘Jesus at the Crossroads of Inference and Imagination,’ Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 13 (2015): 66–89.
45
Meyer, The Aims of Jesus, 78.
46
Ibid., 79.
47
Ibid., 80.
48
Ibid., 81. This should not be viewed as a direct criticism of Meier, whose work appears after that of Meyer. Whether this criticism applies to Meier would require a more detailed investigation than can be undertaken here. The more likely target of Meyer’s criticism is Bultmann.
49
Ibid., 88.
50
Ibid., 92. The criterion of ‘no further pertinent questions’ clearly follows the position of Lonergan in Insight where Lonergan repeatedly refers to ‘no further relevant question’ as the criterion for judgment, most notably in the discussion of universal doubt, Insight, 433–36.
51
Ibid., 92–93.
52
Ibid., 94.
53
Denton articulates a certain uneasiness with Meyer’s focus on the miraculous, lest it makes Meyer’s work seem like an apologetic defence of miracles. He notes that it would be a mistake to read Meyer in this way, while acknowledging the problem. See Denton, Historiography and Hermeneutics, 105–6.
54
The essence of intellectual conversion is captured in what Lonergan identifies as three positions and their counterpositions. See Lonergan, Insight, 413: ‘It will be a basic position (1) if the real is the concrete universe of being and not a subdivision of the “already out there now”; (2) if the subject becomes known when it affirms itself intelligently and reasonably and so is not known yet in any prior “existential” state; and (3) if objectivity is conceived as a consequence of intelligent inquiry and critical reflection, and not as a property of vital anticipation, extroversion, and satisfaction. On the other hand, it will be a basic counterposition if it contradicts one or more of the basic positions.’
55
Method, 223.
56
Ibid., 248.
57
Ibid., 273.
58
Note it is the notion that is grounded in intellectual conversion, not the objectivity itself which is grounded in genuine attention, genuine intelligence, genuine reasonableness, and genuine responsibility.
59
As Meyer notes of the New Testament: ‘the gospel literature was not only stamped by the confessional concerns of the church but was created by the church to express those concerns.’ Meyer, The Aims of Jesus, 81–82. Those concerns were religious, and to fail to resonate with such concerns is like a ‘blind man [who] is bound to find a lecture on colour obscure.’ Ibid., 96.
60
Lonergan, Method, 226.
61
See for example Larry W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003).
62
It is interesting to note how little attention Crossan gives to the Epistles in the New Testament, even though they bear powerful witness to the historical impact of Jesus.
63
As Meyer argues: ‘the dogmas of historical Christianity had simply objectified the New Testament “thing” and, in particular, Jesus as the New Testament church understood him, viz, as redeemer and Son of God. Simultaneously to repudiate the dogmas and appropriate the meaning of the historical Jesus proved to be an ambitious but self-defeating project.’ Meyer, The Aims of Jesus, 103.
64
Ibid., 29. Similarly we find repeated calls in the first quest to free the historical Jesus from the Christ of faith.
65
Meyer notes for example of Strauss: ‘Through hundreds of pages of analysis he showed himself stoutly impervious to the leading themes and motifs of gospel literature.’ Ibid., 98.
66
One could also raise questions about the place of moral conversion in the quest for the historical Jesus. This is more difficult to document, but a case could be made that the type of perspectives raised by liberation and feminist theological discussions on the historical Jesus may be indicative of the presence or absence of modes of moral conversion.
67
As an example of an attempt at this, see Peter Laughlin, Jesus and the Cross: Necessity, Meaning, and Atonement (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2015).
68
The author would like to thank Jonathan Bernier, Director of the Lonergan Research Institute, Toronto, for helpful comments on the first draft of this paper.