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The Pyramid or the Raft: Francis Schüssler Fiorenza and Bernard Lonergan in Dialogue about Foundational Theology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2014

Peter J. Drilling
Peter J. Drilling*
Affiliation:
Christ the King Seminary
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Abstract

How different from each other are transcendental method and reconstructive hermeneutics as approaches to foundational theology? Not so different that there is no room for dialogue between Bernard Lonergan and Francis Schüssler Fiorenza. Some parallel areas of concern which Lonergan and Schüssler Fiorenza develop idiosyncratically include the self-correcting process of learning, the role of faith in foundational theology, the relationship between experience and interpretation, and the specific connection within Christian foundational theology of inferiority with the data on Christianity. Imagining how the authors could be open to each other's theory yields points of complementarity.

Type
Articles
Information
Horizons , Volume 13 , Issue 2 , Fall 1986 , pp. 275 - 290
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 1986

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References

1 Fiorenza, Francis Schüssler, Foundational Theology: Jesus and the Church (New York: Crossroad, 1984).Google Scholar References to Lonergan occur on pp. 201, 267, 275, 282, 316 nn. 90, 91.

2 Ibid., pp. 286-87. “There does not exist a fulcrum independent of a society's cultural tradition and experience that can provide a firm foundation…” (ibid., p. 309).

3 Lonergan, Bernard, Method in Theology (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), p. 270.Google Scholar

4 Schüssler Fiorenza, p. 288.

5 Ibid., pp. 300-01.

6 Ibid., p. 304.

7 Lonergan, p. 270.

8 Lonergan frequently employs “the self-correcting process of learning” as a foundational category in his theological method, and in differing contexts relating to different types of questioning. See Method in Theology, pp. 81 (within the context of a discussion of the realms of meaning), 159-60 (in the chapter on “Interpretation”), 208-09 (in the chapter on “History and Historians”), 302-05 (on the differentiations of consciousness), and 313-14 (where the term itself is not employed but the meaning is clear in the discussion of ongoing contexts). Moreover, Lonergan had already developed the central significance of the insight that meaning is not derived by deduction from self-evident truths by a logically straightforward process, but is rather a self-correcting process of learning, in Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (London: Longmans, Green, 1957), esp. pp. 174–75 and 713–18.Google Scholar

9 Schüssler Fiorenza, p. 275; see also p. 282.

10 Ibid., pp. 281-82.

11 Ibid., p. 282.

12 Lonergan, , Method in Theology, p. xi.Google Scholar

13 Ibid., pp. 139-40.

14 Ibid., pp. 133-36.

15 Schüssler Fiorenza, p. 281.

16 Ibid., p. 287.

17 Ibid., p. 293.

18 Ibid., p. 296.

19 Lonergan, , Method in Theology, p. 9.Google Scholar

20 See Lonergan, Bernard, Understanding and Being: An Introduction to INSIGHT, ed. Elizabeth, A. and Morelli, Mark D. (New York: Edwin Mellen, 1980), pp. 202–10.Google Scholar There Lonergan studies the natural desire of inquiry that rises spontaneously within the human spirit, and the experience that gives human spirit something about which to inquire. Without experience inquiry has nowhere to go.

21 Schüssler Fiorenza, p. 296.

22 Lonergan, , Insight, p. 182.Google Scholar

23 Schüssler Fiorenza, p. 299; see also the relevant discussion in Part II, on the foundation of the church, pp. 97-98.

24 Lonergan, , Method in Theology, p. 289.Google Scholar

25 Schüssler Fiorenza, p. 300.

26 Lonergan, , Method in Theology, p. 355.Google Scholar

27 Ibid., p. 268.

28 Ibid., p. 269. For statements that similarly discuss the outer determinants in religious traditions, especially, in the present case, in the Christian tradition, of a process of conversion and development, see Method in Theology, pp. 291 (recurrently), 293 (lines 1-5), 327 (lines 10-16), 343 (lines 11-12), 363 (lines 24-27).

29 Fiorenza, Schüssler, Foundational Theology, p. 30.Google Scholar In this section of his argument Schüssler Fiorenza discusses the manner in which his foundational theology deals with the resurrection of Jesus as a historical event and as a faith event.

30 Ibid., pp. 33, 39. “A correspondence exists between the form of literary discourse and its content” (39). See how Schüssler Fiorenza deals with the issue of the church's foundation by means of the questions a hermeneutical reconstruction would ask (123-54).

31 Ibid., pp. 280-82.

32 Ibid., p. 238.

33 Lonergan, , Method in Theology, pp. 290–91Google Scholar, and Insight, chs. 18-20.

34 Lonergan, , Method in Theology, pp. 118–19.Google Scholar

35 Fiorenza, Schüssler, Foundational Theology, pp. 304–05.Google Scholar

36 Schüssler Fiorenza demonstrates the function of retroductive warrants by raising questions about his hermeneutical reconstruction of the religious identity of the church as it stands behind her mission in ibid., pp. 223ff.

37 Ibid., pp. 304-11.