Bernard Lonergan on faith

by Shane Clifton
I have heard a number of people criticize Bernard Lonergan for, supposedly, being dry and methodological.  Here is an extract from his Method in Theology that is, perhaps, devotional:

"Without faith, without the eye of love, the world is too evil for God to be good, for a good God to exist.  But faith recognizes that God grants men their freedom, that he will them to be persons and not just his automata, that he calls them to the higher authenticity that overcomes evil with good.  So faith is linked with human progress and it has to meet the challenge of human decline. For faith and progress have a common root in man's cognitional and moral self-transcendence.  To promote either is to promote the other indirectly.  Faith places human efforts in a friendly universe; it reveals an ultimate significance in human achievement; it strengthens new undertakings with confidence.  Inversely, progress realizes the potentialities of man and of nature; it reveals  that man exists to bring about an ever fuller achievement in this world; and that achievement because it is man's good also is God's glory.  Most of all, faith has the power of undoing decline.  Decline disrupts a culture with conflicting ideologies.  It inflicts on individuals the social, economic and psychological pressures that for human frailty amount to determinism.  It multiplies and heaps up the abuses and absurdities that breed resentment, hatred, anger, violence.  It is not propaganda and it is not argument but religious faith that will liberate human reasonableness from its ideological prisons.  It is not the promises of men but religious hope that can enable men to resist the vast pressures of social decay.  If passions are to quiet down, if wrongs are to be not exacerbated, not ignored, not merely palliated, but acknowledge and removed, then human possessiveness and human pride have to replaced by religious charity, by the charity of the suffering servant, by self-sacrificing love.  Men are sinners.  If human progress is not to be ever distorted and destroyed by the inattention, oversights, irrationality, irresponsibility of decline, men have to be reminded of their sinfulness.  They have to acknowledge their real guilt and amend their ways.  They have to learn with humility that religious development is dialectical, that the task of repentance and conversion is life-long. (MIT, 117)"

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[Brian LePort]

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