The Enduring Value of Lonergan’s Realms of Meaning for Understanding Scripture and the Development of Christology

Introduction

Few issues have become more neuralgic to exegetes and theologians alike than discussions of method, but the landscape of biblical scholarship has undergone a sea change in the last three decades with the emergence of a robust repudiation of a previous generation’s fixation with historical methodologies. The inadequacy of these methods is well documented, and recent years have witnessed the emergence of new readings more robustly anchored in established doctrines of Christian orthodoxy, especially Nicaea, along with the recovery and proliferation of traditional approaches such as the monastic practice of lectio divina. These developments movements reverberate beyond the sacred page as part of a movement that has delivered a significant renewal in the field of theology at both the academic and pastoral levels. Yet, at the same time, this movement unwittingly threaten to attenuate a full appreciation for the contribution of Nicaea to something more than just the mere ‘clarification’ of biblical material. Amidst this threat, the work of Bernard Lonergan, who was neither an exegete nor a historical theologian, serves as an essential and seminal, even if sometimes undervalued or overlooked, corrective. ¹ Lonergan’s account of the journey from the christology of the NT to Nicaea supplies an enduring hermeneutic for understanding Scripture and appreciating the achievement of this first ecumenical council for at least two reasons. ² First, Lonergan’s account of the realms of meaning illuminates the precise character of the biblical witness by rooting it in the experience of religious conversion. Second, Lonergan’s work views the journey to Nicaea as the driving force behind the development of Christian realism, anchored in the experience of religious conversion, as evident in the roles played by worship and soteriology at Nicaea. By pointing to the power of religious conversion as a catalyst for the emergence of new realms of meaning in Christian theology, this realism moderates both (a) the attempt among some exegetes to ground christology in the historical reconstruction of Jesus’ self-understanding and (b) postliberal theology’s denigration of the “foundationalism” of traditional dogmatics.

Realms of Meaning, Scripture, and Nicaea

The Canadian Jesuit Bernard Lonergan (1904–1984) dedicated his life to examining human subjectivity and its role in history. Placing theology within these two concerns has resulted in a body of work that still awaits full engagement by the network of institutes and scholars, which have committed significant effort to this task. One obstacle to understanding Lonergan’s work is the technical jargon that often confuses outsiders. However, the importance of Lonergan’s work, especially regarding the development of christological doctrine, becomes clearer and offers a strong appreciation of his achievements.

Central to Lonergan’s work is his account of human subjectivity, which he outlines in contrast to reductionist views of human interiority that focus on isolated operations or faculties, unrelated to or indistinguishable from any other operation. Lonergan argues that, in doing so, these reductionist views fail to consider all the operations that make up the fully conscious subject or how these operations interrelate. Such conscious subjectivity is not fully realized through any single act or operation; rather, human consciousness constitutes a dynamic web of operations where each act complements and builds upon the others. It is within this context that Lonergan presents his account of the realms of meaning and the exigencies that provoke their emergence.

Lonergan’s Method in Theology identifies four realms within a fully differentiated consciousness: common sense, theory, interiority, and transcendence. ³ The emergence of distinct realms of meaning unfolds as developmental stages in response to the drive to meet various needs or exigencies that arise. ⁴ These exigencies reflect the tension in human consciousness between different modes of knowing that can lead to progress or a “flight from understanding.” ⁵ In the realm of common sense, the most basic realm of meaning, the human subject finds expression in the concrete language of everyday life, including evocative language and symbolism. What Lonergan identifies as “systematic exigence” represents the drive to transition from common sense, narrative, and myth to the second stage of meaning, theory. The systematic exigence separates the world of common sense from the world of theory, allowing for scientific and philosophical specialization as a fuller understanding of the nature of knowledge comes to the fore. In this realm, language becomes technical and precise. A useful example of this exigency is operative in Plato’s dialogues and begins to find some resolution in Aristotle. The move from the second stage of meaning to interiority, the third stage, is animated by the need to meet the critical exigence, a turn toward the subject and conscious interiority to examine how we know (What am I doing when I am knowing? Why is doing that knowing? What do I know when do it?) and to address the limitations of pure theory by addressing and appropriating the structures and operations of our interiority. Lastly, when the human subject is caught up in the presence of the divine, the realm of transcendence, it is prayer, contemplation, and even silence that delineate the ‘language’ of this realm. ⁶

Lonergan’s account of the realms of meaning provides an enduring hermeneutic for appreciating the significance of Nicaea. It does so, in part, because it emerges from and holds together the ontological, soteriological, and anthropological dimensions of the religious experience that inform the Christian claim to locate the definitive revelation of God in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. For Lonergan, the historical development of christological and trinitarian doctrine is bound up with the realms of meaning, and the “higher viewpoint” supplied in the functional specialty of dialectics. ⁷ Lonergan applies this higher viewpoint to doctrinal development, not simply as one possible tool among others. Rather, the functional specialty dialectics supply the essential and universal tools for an authentic historical vision—a viewpoint from which a way forward can be discerned, and signs of decline or regression identified. Lonergan applies this higher viewpoint to the data of theological developments leading from the NT to Nicaea as part of his treatise on the Trinity.

The fundamental question of the relationship between Jesus and the God of Israel, whom Jesus identified as his Father, propelled the Christian community toward Nicaea and catalyzed what Lonergan calls “Christian realism.” The writers of the NT wrestled with this question, moving between the monotheism of the Shema (Dt 6:4–5) and the Christian experience of God’s presence identified with Christ, especially in the experience of the Resurrection and the outpouring of grace into the heart of those who came to believe (Romans 5:5). The questions the earliest disciples posed about Jesus, his identity, and his religious meaning emerged within a framework, or a horizon, defined by a primitive undifferentiated consciousness, where the realms of theory and interiority had not yet emerged as distinct. But experience and transcendence become perichoretic in the religiously converted subject, reflected in the pages of the NT. ⁸ The biblical text employs symbols, evokes feelings, and affirms values. The pages of the NT are filled with descriptive accounts of Jesus’ identity framed within this limited but pregnant narrative horizon of meaning operating on the level of common sense. The NT is not a systematic treatise on christology; rather, its purpose has always been to tell the story, make a proclamation, and do it so that the world might come to believe.

Lonergan’s dialectical account of the development of doctrine from its origins in the “grab bag” ⁹ christology of the NT to the theoretical clarity of Nicaea is also the story of the emergence of a new realm of meaning, a new horizon within which the Christian tradition began to operate. The Christian conversation with ancient philosophy precipitated a shift in the kinds of questions asked and answers given. The naïve empiricism of Tertullian gave way to the idealism of Platonic thought, mediated in the Christian tradition by Origen, among others. In the christological plurality of the early centuries of the Christian church, the aggressive clarity of Arius’s teaching inadvertently exposed the inadequacies of Tertullian and Origen’s radical subordination of the Son (θέος) to the Father (ὁ θέος). Since the early Christian community had no philosophical system of its own, the utilization of Platonism tended to drive the theological issues at hand, even though that system had some glaring shortcomings, including an inability to address the Christological question par excellence—the relationship between the God of the Shema and Jesus. After all, the answer to the question was not a simple conclusion to be inferred from the pages of Scripture. But it was clear to Lonergan that the ὁμοούσιος of Nicaea, as Athanasius understood and defended it, said something new through the introduction of a new realm of meaning and the transposition of the meaning of the ancient texts to express a precise theoretical judgment regarding the truth of the Son’s divinity and co-equality with the Father born out of a religious affirmation of Christ’s resurrection and ascension. ¹⁰ Through this experience, the journey to Nicaea produced something that was not available to the minds of the NT authors.

Christology and Recent Biblical Scholarship

As noted above, the landscape of NT scholarship has undergone a complex shift in the last two decades, with the repudiation of a previous generation’s myopic fixation on historical scholarship and its preoccupation with hypothetical reconstructions of the historical development of the gospel material. The rise of more doctrinally and narratively focused methodologies has provided much-needed balance to contemporary exegesis. ¹¹ These methodologies speak to a yearning for theological coherence and a reading anchored in the life of the Church, an approach called for in important Roman Catholic magisterial documents. Although laudatory in many ways, within this recalibrated exegetical approach, extremes have emerged that often exhibit a tendency (sometimes implicit, other times explicit) to telescope the historical development of theological and christological doctrine that threatens to collapse an appreciation for the achievement of Nicaea, as set forth by Lonergan, making it a fait accompli. ¹²

One prominent example of this widespread issue comes from the provocative work of Brant Pitre, whose most recent book on biblical christology seems to circumvent important aspects of the historical development of doctrine highlighted in Lonergan’s account of the road to Nicaea. ¹³ Pitre, a critically trained exegete, robustly reaffirms the “indispensable” character of historical-critical exegesis but asserts that critical scholarship is to be circumscribed by the Church’s tradition and the analogy of faith. ¹⁴ The issue is not sidestepping or neglecting historical development but rather reorienting history to demonstrate fundamental continuity with Christian doctrine. To his credit, Pitre admits that his argument for rooting a Nicene-like christology in the historical reconstruction of Jesus’ ministry and his self-consciousness stands against much twentieth-century NT scholarship, and he is careful to acknowledge this fact. Yet the drive of his approach to “divine christology” telescopes the development of christology by minimizing the place of the resurrection and the role of ongoing conversion played in the formation of the NT, as well as the historical development of christological doctrine on the way to Nicaea. ¹⁵

Pitre’s methodology is essentially postliberal and narrative, resting as it does on a triple coherence with early Judaism, Jesus’ ministry (understood in total), and the life and thought of the early Christian church. This triple coherence is derived from E.P. Sanders, but Pitre’s presentation mimics that of John Meier (to whom the book is dedicated) in its detail and thoroughgoing documentation. ¹⁶ For Pitre, the divine christology of Jesus is explicitly revealed in some passages whose authenticity is widely contested, including the so-called christological “thunderbolt” (Matt 11:25–27//Luke 10:21–22) where Jesus makes robust christological claims, which Pitre qualifies as authentic. ¹⁷ In addition to this “thunderbolt,” Pitre adjudicates the so-called epiphany miracles of “Walking on Water” (Matt14:22–33//Mark 6:45–52; John 6:16–21) and “Calming of the Storm” (Matt 8:23–27//Mark 4:35–41//Luke 8:22–25) as “plausibly” authentic, given the triple context methodology he adopts. ¹⁸ Instead of interpreting these narratives in light of post-resurrection christologies, what Raymond Brown described as “christological moments,” ¹⁹ Pitre interprets these stories as part of his historical sketch of Jesus’ self-understanding. Pitre leans heavily on many contested or secondary positions in the reconstruction of the history of Jesus’ ministry, such as the historical value of the Fourth Gospel and the historical authenticity of the ἐγώ εἰμι statements in the Synoptics. His reconstruction of Jesus’ ministry often appeals to a rather expansive application of criteria of historicity. For instance, Pitre defends the historical plausibility of passages by utilizing the criterion of coherence with the triple context noted above, and he similarly professes to examine passages to identify a generalized sense of the “substance of the words” of Jesus (substantia verborum rather than the ipsissima verba/vox). ²⁰ Although Pitre provides a substantial bibliography and maintains a substantive engagement with the best of current scholarship, his arguments, taken as a whole, belie a persistent drive to ground Nicaea in the consciousness of the historical Jesus while at the same time evincing little interest in the role played by the resurrection, particularly its subjective impact of the first generation of believers, in the development of christology. ²¹

While Pitre and other proponents of an early high christology are certainly correct in challenging the Bultmanian “black hole” of Jesus’ life and ministry (ex nihilo nihil fit), ²² which characterized the resurrection of Jesus as the sole grounding of Christian faith and Christological doctrine, Pitre goes too far by downplaying the resurrection experience as merely the “necessary but not sufficient” ²³ cause of early high christology. ²⁴ He succumbs to a form of historicism, or archaism, as his criterion of theological legitimacy: ‘contemporary thought is validated by Jesus’ thought’. ²⁵ The narratives constructed by the evangelists clearly embrace the divinity of Christ, which Pitre has, in fact, demonstrated. But the extent to which this reflects the self-consciousness of Jesus of Nazareth remains to be seen. The role of Jesus’ resurrection as decisive for Christological faith remains unassailed, and rightly so. Pitre’s apparent reservations concerning Jesus’ resurrection and its place in the religious conversion of his followers as both the subjective and objective anchor of christological faith lead him to an overly zealous attempt to ground the identity of Jesus in a historical reconstruction that fails to do justice to the Church’s proclamation of the gospel. ²⁶

Joseph Gordon has done a great service for the exegetical and theological guilds with his recent integration of Lonergan’s thought and the demands of contemporary biblical criticism, and this service ought to guide some of the aggressive exegetical moves made by Pitre and others concerned to collapse the development of doctrine into a historical-critical reading of Scripture. ²⁷ Gordon sets forth in a far more nuanced and comprehensive fashion what Pitre seeks to argue without a foundational or systematic framework. ²⁸ For Gordon, the account of human intentionality and the role conversion(s) play in the realization of human authenticity grounds the value of historical-critical methodology as well as the mundane material dimensions of the ‘production’ of Scripture. ²⁹ But all of this historical development does not detract from the power of Scripture; rather, it contributes to the discernment of God’s presence in Scripture. Gordon rightly emphasizes that the power and presence of the Spirit active within the community of believers provides the continuity Pitre strains at. ³⁰ As part of his “systematic theology of the Christian Bible,” Gordon emphasizes the importance of the human subject and the believing community’s rule of faith—a rule that, for Gordon, is far from static in history but reflects development in language, meaning, and concepts. ³¹ With this dynamic “rule of faith” in mind, Gordon frees the Christian tradition to embrace the historical development of Christian doctrine, such as the ὁμοούσιος of Nicaea. For Gordon, this embrace of development emerges directly from his robust account of the character of the reader of Christian Scripture: the converted subject who moves to the realization of a fully differentiated consciousness. In other words, religious, intellectual, and moral conversion ground the authentic and fulsome reading of Scripture. At the same time, Gordon recognizes the limitations and feebleness of the biblical authors, but this fact does not diminish the power of Scripture; rather, it serves to highlight the work of the Spirit. So that believers always remain anchored in Scripture but move beyond it at the same time.

Turning back to the historical christology offered by Pitre, one ought to recognize that there is more theological (and christological) energy to be gained through an exploration of the material Pitre deems historically authentic by treating it as evidence of the rapid and creative outgrowth of the transformative encounter with the risen Christ, and encounter mediated in and through the corporate and personal experiences of those who were indeed closest to him in the course of his ministry. In addition to being attentive to Gordon’s systematic approach to Scripture and the role of religious conversion in reading it, those who, like Pitre, would anchor christology in a historical reconstruction of Christ’s self-understanding would do well to remember William Loewe’s admonition:

Historical research on the development of the gospel tradition sets forth a genetic and dialectical account of the entire christological tradition in the service of a constructive statement of its contemporary significance. But “the historical Jesus” is neither the foundation of christology nor its primary norm. ³²

This observation from Loewe points to a fundamental feature of historical consciousness, which, in its most fully operational form, can distinguish among the kinds of meaning and can do so dynamically. ³³ Moreover, historical consciousness promotes an authentic doctrinal theology rooted in the subject’s experience, which can discern between the religious and theological apprehensions of doctrine and recognize the centrality of the subject (and her subjectivity) in these apprehensions. With the centrality of the subject in mind, one might rightly wonder, with Frederick Crowe, whether and to what extent we have been able to move from the objective to the subjective to better account for the origin and development of doctrine. ³⁴ Crowe’s question, thus, brings forward the issue of religious conversion as presented by Lonergan.

Religious Conversion and the Development of Doctrine

The move to a more subjective account of the development of the doctrine of Nicaea is rooted in the centrality of the resurrection and exultation of Jesus as the decisive event for initiating christological faith. ³⁵ As noted above, the NT mediates religious conversion in the Christian context so that the criteria for grasping the truth of the Christian gospel (and the conversion it provokes) do not rest on positivistic history but in faith understood as the cognitive aspect of the transformation effected by God’s gift of love poured forth in one’s heart by the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:5). ³⁶ Religious conversion serves as an important catalyst for the emergence of distinctive realms of meaning that begin within the foundational experience of the believer. ³⁷ For the Christian, the experience of conversion rests upon the singular event of an encounter with the Risen Christ.

Although the development of trinitarian ontology remains at the center of Nicaea, the grounding of trinitarian claims in the exploration and reflection on the saving work of God in Christ remains intimately bound up with this achievement. ³⁸ The enduring value of Nicaea emerges in its attention to the soteriological foundations of claims made about Christ (and concomitantly with claims about what it means to be human). The soteriological dimensions of Nicaea, evident in the debates of Alexander of Alexandria (among others), often center on the content of Christian salvation manifested in the worship of Christ as a primary driver of Nicene orthodoxy. ³⁹ It is this experience of being drawn into the worship of Christ that grounds the ὁμοούσιος of Nicaea. ⁴⁰ From the apprehension of value (“Jesus is worthy of worship”) to the mystery of fact (“Jesus must share what is uniquely worthy of worship in the Father”). ⁴¹

The orientation toward worship takes account of religious conversion: “Religious conversion is transferring oneself into the world of worship,” ⁴² which describes an ecstatic state where the worshipper is immersed in a continuous act of self-surrender, relinquishing the narrowness of immediate existence and embracing a decentring of the self. In this ongoing act, one lovingly offers oneself to the ultimate source of meaning, truth, and value. ⁴³ The quiet undercurrent, the “inner word” of God’s love, calls the religiously converted individual to live a life of praise and fellowship. Similarly, what Lonergan calls the “outer word” of God’s Word in Christ, rooted in a foundational orientation towards worship, urges believers to transcend themselves through concrete acts in the world, acts rooted in love for God and neighbor, leading to a transformation into the image of Christ. Religious conversion, as specified within the Christian tradition, involves a transformation of one’s subjectivity, such that, in the spirit of Jesus, one opens oneself through love and obedience to God’s will, even to the point of death. As Lonergan states, confronted with the reign of sin, death accepted out of love becomes an act of selfless worship and a participation in the Son’s loving worship of the Father. ⁴⁴

Like Pascal, Lonergan contends, “there is a realm in which love precedes knowledge,” ⁴⁵ and this is the realm of religious knowledge and transcendence.

Though religious conversion sublates moral, and moral conversion sublates intellectual, one is not to infer that intellectual comes first and then moral and finally religious. On the contrary, from a causal viewpoint, one would say that first there is God’s gift of his love. Next, the eye of this love reveals values in their splendour, while the strength of this love brings about realization, and that is moral conversion. Finally, among the values discerned by the eye of love is the value of believing the truths taught by the religious tradition, and in such tradition and belief are the seeds of religious conversion. For the word, spoken and heard, proceeds from and penetrates all four levels of intentional consciousness. ⁴⁶

As noted above, Lonergan sees religious expression as progressing through the several realms of meaning in distinct stages. Within a fully differentiated consciousness, one can operate and move through each of these realms, engaging the rich diversity of meaning evoked and communicated in religious expression. At its source, the mystery of love grounds the near-apophatic realm of transcendence. Within the realm of interiority, one locates the ground of a methodological framework; the realm of theory gives religious expression its technical unfolding, while preaching, exhortation, and catechesis abide in the realm of common sense. The shift to the second and third realms of meaning, that is, theory and interiority, is closely tied to the believers’ experience of religious conversion and a theology of grace. The reflection and introspection that accompany the direct experience of sanctifying grace push the theologian to consider what is true, and it is precisely this dynamic that Lonergan’s dialectical account of the road to Nicaea reminds readers continually to “pay attention to the word as true.”

Within some strands of contemporary theology, postliberal suspicions are often directed at any attempt to ground theological method in universalized invariant operations of the human mind. For her part, Jane Barte Moulaison recently amplified these suspicions in the direction of Lonergan’s account of the “way to Nicaea.” Her proposal for what she termed a “non-foundationalist” position on the Nicene Creed and its development appeals to the work of George Lindbeck and his characterization of Christian doctrine as merely “regulative” and “therapeutic.” ⁴⁷ In her comparison of the two approaches, she writes:

[T]he differences in their construals of the discriminen for right teaching could not be more different: for Lonergan, such discrimination is settled through advertence, as in any scientific procedure, to the ground of epistemic certainty, his own transcendental method. For Lindbeck, on the other hand, the dialectical process is governed by the ‘deep grammar’ of the faith—its communally authoritative rules.” ⁴⁸

As Charles Hefling and Jeremy Wilkins (among others) have both noted in their respective defences of Lonergan’s work on the development of doctrine against postliberal attacks, although there may be a regulative or therapeutic function to doctrines, they are solemn judgments of truth that have grown out of and constantly point back to the experience of a transformative encounter with the love of God, what Lonergan terms, religious conversion. ⁴⁹ As such, when authentic, doctrines make concrete the invariant operation of judgment: it is so; it is true. That these judgments occur within specific historical communities, which possess a common grammar that emerges within history, that history does not obviate the essential character of doctrines as regulative precisely because they express true judgments concerning what God has wrought in history. These judgments, as this essay has shown, stand amid the transformative and worshipful encounter with God’s love revealed in Christ. Lonergan’s account of interiority and the transformative experience of religious conversion brings both balance and integration to the history of christological doctrines, and it does so in a manner that highlights the transformative encounter with the risen Christ mediated through the sacred page mediated in the Church by the Spirit.

Conclusion

Lonergan’s account of the journey to Nicaea (as nuanced, defended, and expanded by so many of the authors mentioned above) supplies an enduring hermeneutic for understanding and appreciating the achievement of Nicaea in a manner that speaks powerfully to the present concerns regarding fruitful biblical interpretation. The delineation of the realms of meaning illuminates the precise character of the biblical witness as a symbolic narrative that accounts for the “grab bag of christologies” one finds in the NT, while at the same time accounting for Scripture’s function and limitations relative to history and the believing community. Rooted in the experience of religious conversion, the NT drives the development of Christian realism and points the tradition to the apprehension and affirmation of the truth of the Christian claim, a truth that is affirmed within the horizon of authentic subjects whose very being has been flooded by God’s love. Attempts to attenuate the development of doctrine, especially the development of christological doctrine, through appeals to a doctrinally centered interpretation rob the sacred page of some of its power within our contemporary world, as it has come to be defined by historical consciousness. Being attentive to these realms of meaning in conjunction with a historical approach to the text has the power to place one within the nexus of religious conversion and the genesis of christological affirmation. Locating the reader within this nexus is, at least in part, the ultimate goal of lectio, the monastic approach to biblical interpretation that unleashes the power of the Word in the lives of those willing to submit to it in all of its wonder, frustrations, beauty, and complexity.