Theology and Reason

Abstract

I had anticipated learning from the contributions of others to the debate initiated last autumn in New Blackfriars by Professor Nicholas Lash and me (the debate on what has been called ‘the liberal consensus’) without reentering that debate soon, if ever. The scrupulous courtesy of Fr. Timothy Radcliffe’s article in the March issue, in which he discusses whether there is such a ‘consensus’ among Catholic biblical scholars, makes it easy to do that. However, I have found it impossible to let the remarks of Mr. Joseph Fitzpatrick in his March article, based on the views of Bernard Lonergan, pass without protest.Mr. Fitzpatrick’s article appears to me to encourage hostility to reason itself. He does not openly declare himself an enemy to reason, and I have no doubt would sincerely repudiate such a charge: but, all the same, what he wrote will surely reinforce hostility to it on the part of others. A large part of his contention is that, in theology, and, by implication, in other disciplines as well, deductive reasoning should be demoted. Anyone who puts forward such a thesis needs to spell out with great care exactly what he means by it if he is not to be taken, or mistaken, for an enemy of reason; and Mr. Fitzpatrick exercises very little care. He objects to ‘the habit among Catholic theologians of arriving at conclusions by often dubious deductive reasoning’ (p. 134). We have here, at the outset of his attack on the use of deductive reasoning in theology, a vital ambiguity.