Response to Donald Keefe on Lonergan

Abstract

RESPONSE TO DONALD KEEFE ON LONERGAN DONALD KEEFE'S "A Methodological Critique of Lonergan's Theological Method " in a previous issue of The Thomist is one of the most challenging and thought-provoking articles I have seen recently.1 He appears to mount a sophisticated and devastating critique of Lonergan 's theological method. I would like to suggest lines along which a Lonerganian might respond. Many points call for challenge, but I read Keefe to be making two central affirmations: (I) I,onergan holds to a distorted understanding of the nature-grace distinction, by which nature is the prior and determining reality, and grace an accidental and extrinsic a.fter-thought: (~) Lonergan continues to hold to the out-moded natural-supernatural distinction. I believe Keefe is half-right in both cases. The two theses I attribute to Keefe are distinguished by the words "distorted" and "out-moded." The first assumes (at least for the sake of the argument) there is such a thing as the nature-grace distinction, and claims that Lonergan misconstrues it. The second, more radical thesis is that this distinction was current in the Middle Ages as the natural-supernatural distinction, but is now to be abandoned. In other words, it is possible to misunderstand a tradition, and it is possible to belong to a mistaken tradition. I take Keefe to be accusing Lonergan on both counts: Lonergan misunderstands the nature -grace distinction; but further, that distinction is itself erroneous and so Lonergan, holding to it (with whatever misconceptions ), stands doubly condemned. I believe Keefe is half-right in both cases. In the first instance , he is right on the substance, but incorrect in his read1 Full reference: The Thomist 50 :28-65 (1986) . All internal references to Keefe will be to this article. 88 RESPONSE TO DONALD KEEFE ON LONERGAN 89 ing of Lonergan. That is, there is indeed a valid distinction between grace and nature; but Lonergan understands it correctly, not incorrectly. In the second case, he reads Lonergan correctly , but is mistaken on the issue. That is, Lonergan does indeed espouse the nature-grace or natural-supernatural distinction; but that distinction is not out-moded, but perenially valid. Point I. Thesis: "Lonergan holds to a distorted version of the nature-grace distinction, by which nature is the determining reality, and grace an extrinsic after-thought." This is my wording, but I am attributing the thought to Keefe. The following quotations from his article are intended to justify and expand this thesis. "Lonergan's thought on the nature-grace relation is finally moored to the supposition that created grace (being in love with God) is a contingent modification of a preexisting natural entity ..." (Keefe, 33). Translated into epistemological terms, this means that reason is the controlling reality, faith an adventitious late-comer. A theology based on such a notion is inescapably rationalistic. "To refuse such accountability ... is to suppose interiority to be self-validating and autonomous: this is Lonergan's supposition, and it reveals a rationalism little at peace with a gratuitous intellectual horizon , the horizon of faith " (Keefe, 34) . Further, this transcendental method, as self-validating, is inescapable , and therefore deterministic. " Such a consequence is the very hallmark of determinism" (Keefe, 36n). As such it has no openness to history; the method thus in advance excludes the proper content of theology. "It carries an emphasis upon fallenness and the need for redemption which, as has been said above, is curiously absent from Lonergan's anthropology" (Keefe, 41) . In sum, Keefe outlines here the kind of extrinsic, twolayered theology of a self-enclosed natural world into which grace penetrates adventitiously as a strange and foreign intruder , an awkward after-thought-the very understanding that Rahner was attacking in his early writings on grace.2 2 Karl Rahner, "Concerning the Relationship Between Nature and Grace." Theological Investigations !:297-317. Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1961. 90 TERRY J. TEKIPPE My response: Keefe is quite right to reject such a conception of the nature-grace relationship. Unfortunately for his case, Lonergan never held any such thing. Though Keefe is obviously familiar with a great range of Lonergan's writings, he has missed the point of a whole number of...