Ben F. Meyer: Critical Realism and the Aims of Jesus
Ben F. Meyer’s historical work on the life of Jesus came together in his book The Aims of Jesus. In addition much reflection concerning critical realism and New Testament studies (based mainly on Lonergan’s philosophy) has gone in to Meyer’s Critical Realism & the New Testament and Reality and Illusion in New Testament Scholarship. For Meyer, Lonergan’s work (following on Collingwood) established history as an autonomous field of knowledge free from intrusion by foreign ideologies (the perennial problem of historical Jesus research). Firm in this conviction, Meyer was free to reject “the Enlightenment conception of history as a closed continuum” as well as methodical skepticism. (Critical Realism and the New Testament 150). The gospel traditions were for him potential sources of rich historical data.
Lonergan’s work (as noted above) showed the myth underlying the conflicting epistemologies of naVve realism, empiricism and idealism. Namely, that they share the fallacy “that knowing is like seeing, that knowing the real is, or would be, akin to seeing it” (150). This allows for a critically real investigation into historical acts of meaning.
Lonergan understood world-process as “emergent probability” over and against the cosmologies of both the classical and modern era. Tracing classical cosmologies to Aristotle and modern ones to Galileo, Meyer notes that Lonergan’s emergent probability accounts for the functioning of scientific laws, changing their status from necessity to verifiable probability. Meyer concludes that “Emergent probability thus spelled an end to the cult of necessity characteristic of modern as well as Greek cosmology” and sees the “closed universe” thesis as its last gasp (150). Thus Meyer was freed from the presupposition of naturalism so common in historical Jesus scholarship.
Finally Lonergan’s Insight provided an account of common sense knowledge of which historical knowledge is a specialization. Meyer refers to Insight as the basis and Method in Theology’s treatment of the functional specialty history as the fully developed account of history-as-knowledge. All of this together affirmed the autonomy of history as a distinct field, free from ideological a priori declarations of what may or may not be historical. Thus, for Meyer, the question of the historicity of Jesus’ miracles for instance are open, a controversial assertion to be sure.
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