Critical Realism... coming back soon

Hello to all the scattered critical realists of the earth:

  I am hoping to resurrect this blog, which really served in the past as a way of working through the issues that CR (in the stream following Lonergan) raised for my own approach to the New Testament.  I am a PhD student at the London School of Theology (though living in Minneapolis, MN, USA) working in Mark's gospel with speech act theory in a CR framework.

  My PhD thesis is entitled "Liberating Ecclesiology in Mark's Gospel" and will focus on Mark 11:1-13:2 and draws alot from the work of John R. Searle and Quentin Skinner and their work in speech act theory and adaptation of it for doing interpretation across historically distant contexts.  

  I plan on beginning to reflect on the issues related to CR that I come upon in my studies on this blog.  In the meantime, there are several posts (a couple years old admittedly) that describe my own understanding on Critical Realism in the Lonergan, Meyer, Wright line of thought and its relation to biblical studies.   You may or may not find them interesting (and even convincing?).... I'll leave that judgment up to you.

  Peace. 

Tom A.

Why I'm a Critically Real Christian Part II: the Salvation of the Individual

Speaking about my own experience with my tradition in conflict with Scripture means looking both at how I have been formed and the world in which the Bible, (especially for Christians the New Testament), was written.

My Tradition: Salvation by Faith and the Individual

The Protestant tradition looks to the reformation, Luther etc. as a climactic moment in returning the the truth of Scripture as obscured by the Catholic tradition. The debate with the Catholic church over authority and certain practices (such as selling indulgences) formed Luther and Calvin's thought in a certain way. Salvation by faith was a key element of their teaching over and against the earning of salvation by purchasing indulgences and doing penance. This was a positive development, but what happened was that certain insights were hardened into dogmas that when removed from the original debate over specific practices and teachings lead to the opposite exremes. Salvation by faith becomes a rule or law which is hardened in the tradition and it obscures other important elements of what Jesus taught. I'll come back to that after another element of my own tradition.

For westerners (generally people living in Europe and U.S. and Canada) the individual has a heightened importance. The individual person is more important (in the way we think and act) than the family or community. There are lots of reasons for this from philosophy to industrialization, the point is, because of this, when we read the Bible we are naturally disposed to favor individualistic readings over ones concerning the community.

The New Testament

The New Testament, when read within my tradition, is often interpreted primarily with regards to the salvation (by faith) of the individual. The strength of the tradition, and the power that it has over interpretation ensures that other readings seem strange and are usually discarded without being given a chance. Readings that answer the question "how is the individual saved?" are given priority. The definition of "being saved" is usually, the guarantee that the spirit of the individual (as opposed to the body) will join God in heaven after death.

Although the subject matter of the New Testament does deal with the salvation of individuals, this happens within the context of the salvation and restoration of Israel. Often times, we ask questions of Scripture that the texts are not answering. Reading texts in light of salvation by faith make it difficult to understand New Testament texts calling for God's people to obediently work out their salvation. The book of James, for instance, with its demand that the people of God be obedient to the "perfect law that gives freedom", was useless to Luther in his polemic against Catholic practices, and has not been as important in my tradition as texts that speak of salvation as the free gift of God. When taken out of the context of polemical debate, the book of James as well as the letters of Paul can be seen as complementary, although different expressions of Christian faith seeking to answer different questions. That is why when interpreting we need to be disciplined about seeking which questions a text is asking.

Another example of our tradition harming interpretation is when texts are read only in light of the salvation of the individual. The prophetic tradition (Isaiah, Ezekiel and so forth) looked forward not just to a day when the individuals of the world would be saved. Rather, they thought in terms of the promises of the covenant God to Israel. They thought in terms of the fate of the nation, and God's purpose for Israel. Jesus and the New Testament stand firmly within that tradition, although through them the tradition is radically transformed. The point is that highly individual readings obscure the communal element of what the New Testament teaches.

An example of this is that texts such as Romans 9 which deals with the questions concerning Israel's fate in light of what happened in Jesus' life, death and resurrection. Paul claims that God's promises to Israel have not failed and that his purpose in electing Israel will continue through the redefined people of God in Christ. It is those very passages that are often used to discuss the election of specific individuals, some for heaven, others for hell. The problem, to me, is that the tradition obscures the meaning of the text by asking the question, "how is the individual saved?"

How do we, in response, improve interpretation? First of all we need to acknowledge that our tradition has had much to do in forming the way we read the Bible. There is nothing wrong with this fact, unless we allow premade theological answers to replace interpretation. If we do that, then we take away the ability of Scripture itself, hardening our hearts to ways that the Spirit may be seeking to transform us through it.

Secondly, we need to let the New Testament determine the questions it is answering. To do this we need to understand something of the historical context within which it was written, compare it to other writings of the time period, pay attention to matters of genre and be aware of how our own tradition might obscure the intention of the authors in question.

Why I'm a Critically Real Christian Part I

If being a Christian meant to simply inherit the Christian faith of the people before me and to uncritically hold to it, then it is nothing more than just a cultural element passed on like language, food, customs etc. I think that most of the time, in American church, because of the way things are set up, the masses of people have no way of knowing why they believe the things they are being taught.

The very hope of Christian faith, to me, is that God's Word can address us- break in to the present and transform us. Our relationship to our tradition is so important because the tendency in any tradition is for beliefs to solidify and harden into repeatable phrases, dogmas that lose their power to transform when separated from the real presence of the Spirit and the hope and expectation that God himself might be addressing us.

The problem when the Bible's meaning is presented by one person in a pastor/congregation model, is that the people become disempowered in terms of coming to the Bible's texts and actually coming to a better understanding of its meaning.

We have a big problem because we are inheriting a tradition and we are not even aware that there is a whole history behind us that affects how we think, our way of living and how we perceive ourselves in the world. My own tradition as a Western Protestant Christian is one that goes back from Scripture to the Church fathers, has been profoundly influenced by philosophy (from Plato to Descartes and beyond), the reformation, Luther and Calvin, the Enlightenment etc. As a white American I've been formed by the history of America, from Deism to slavery, from racial inequality and white flight to American individualism and consumerism.

Being critically real means first of all to acknowledge the fact that we have a history and a tradition. All of these things have formed us and our thinking in ways we might not even be aware of.

Beyond all of that, as an American evangelical, the way I was taught to read Scripture was formed by a tradition and handed on to me. The problem I have had, though is that the way I was taught to read the Bible and the actual subject matter of what I was reading came into a sharp tension. The tension has been formulated into a question which drives forward for an answer- and that is why I'm a critical realist. If I wanted to hold on to the way I was given Scripture, I would have to dismiss the question; however, if I follow the question, I need a method to guide me.

The general shape of critical realism as a method for understanding ourselves and our world is as follows: things are never what they seem. Appearances are always related to reality but never fully reveal it. Because of that, we need to be critical in the way we seek to know the world as it is presented to us. When it comes down to it, on a certain level we are all critical realists- for example, when watching a movie we interact with it on two levels- 1. As a story- we put on our blinders so to speak and enjoy it through a kind of chosen naivete. 2. We recognize that the reality of the movie is not the pictures flashing across the screen or the story told, but the whole system and industry surrounding it, from production (actors, stunt men, special effects) to advertising, and consumption.

If we are not critical, the reality behind the appearances will stay hidden.

When it comes to Christian faith and Scripture, it is necessary on a certain level to come to God as children- with a simple faith. At the same time we need to be critical in the way we appropriate what the tradition has given us. Otherwise we might get stuck in ways of living, acting and thinking which obscure true Christian faith and have now way of moving beyond what we have been given, and being transformed.

Often, when a question arises, we default to pregiven answers handed down to us by the tradition. A critical realist can not do that because he or she is compelled to seek an answer, which is relevant to the question being formed. If you do not follow the drive to know to the point where the question you want answered, even the question itself will come out of the tradition instead of from the process of seeking knowledge. It is not bad that the tradition gives us questions and answer, It becomes a problem when you get stuck in a circle of questions and answers which never change, and the faith that has been passed on to us is unable to be challenged and transformed even by the Scriptures themselves.

None of this makes sense unless we move on to understand it through concrete examples.

to be continued...

Lonergan's Breakthrough and Ben Meyer's Aims of Jesus

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.

Lonergan's Cognitional Theory and Historical Method

Lonergan’s theory of history depends on an important distinction between the world of immediacy (the available sense world) and the world of meaning. The world of meaning is made up of the cultural matrix, the common held meanings of a group of people, and within that the meaning of individual speech and action. Lonergan says,

“Meaning, then, is a constitutive element in the conscious flow that is the normally controlling side of human action. It is this constitutive role of meaning in the controlling side of human action that grounds the peculiarity of the historical field of investigation” (178).

Lonergan shows that naive realism, empiricism and idealism share a basic supposition about knowledge: that knowing is like seeing. This myth of knowledge as seeing overlooks the distinction between the world of immediacy and that of meaning. The naive realist believes he knows the world of meaning in a way analogous to seeing (reading the meaning of a text straight off the page), while the empiricist limits knowledge to that which can be experienced by the senses. The idealist understands that knowledge is meaningful, but denies that it refers to reality (it is only ideal). Lonergan, over and against all, reveals the source of their disagreement: their shared myth of knowledge as seeing, and posits critical realism. The critical realist understands that the real world is that which is mediated by meaning. He says, “the reality known is not just looked at; it is given in experience, organized and extrapolated by understanding, posited by judgment and belief” [Please note the four levels of consciousness at work. Method 238.]

It is from this point that historical inquiry can begin, concerned with understanding human acts of meaning through a process in line with the operations of human knowing and proceeding through a process of hypothesis verification. Lonergan refers to British philosopher R.G. Collingwood’s well known work, The Idea of History. According to Collingwood the goal of historical inquiry was to come to understand the “inside of the event” in terms of the human intentionality of the actors involved. This accords with Lonergan’s epistemological breakthrough.

Lonergan's Cognitional Theory: The Structure of Human Inquiry

Everything Bernard Lonergan does is based on and refers back to his cognitional theory. He argues that by attentiveness to the knowing subject (one's self), the structure of inquiry can be perceived, understood and then judged.

The drive to know and the structure it follows are common to all. All human knowing operates on four levels, all of which are conscious (aware) and intentional (having an outward object). They are the empirical, intellectual, rational and responsible levels of consciousness [The following discussion of the levels of consciousness can be found in Method in Theology, 9]. At the empirical level of consciousness the knowing subject is sensing, perceiving, imagining, feeling, speaking and moving. At the intellectual level it is inquiring, coming to understand, expressing the understanding and working out the presuppositions and implications of the expression formulated. At the rational level the knower is passing judgment on the truth or falsity of a statement after weighing the evidence and deciding if the conditions of its truth have been fulfilled. The final level is the responsible level in which the subject makes decisions concerning possible actions, evaluating and deciding the meaning of those actions in light of greater goals and aims.

The four levels of consciousness consist of relative operations each building on the previous, (1) experiencing leads to (2) inquiry and understanding by which intelligible answers are formed to questions arising from the first level. (3) Judging the veracity of the answers follows and finally (4) deciding a course of action in accord with what has been judged true is the final level of consciousness. The levels of consciousness are a dynamic unity, given as a whole.

Lonergan notes that “one and the same operation not only intends an object but also reveals an intending subject” (15). By attentiveness and awareness to one’s knowing, the knower can, in accordance with the very structure she is aware of, decide to “operate in accord with the norms immanent in the spontaneous relatedness of one’s experienced, understood, affirmed experiencing, understanding, judging, and deciding” (15).

This coming to acknowledge the structure of knowing, and then deciding to act in accordance with it is what Lonergan calls self-appropriation.