Beyond Lonergan's Method: A Response to William Mathews

As I wrote in my review of the book (New Blackfriars, July 1975), all but one or two of the thirteen symposiasts in Looking at Lonergan’s Method initiate what seem like quite damaging lines of criticism, and in the space of an article Bill Mathews could no more refute them all (New Blackfriars, January 1976) than I could fairly present them all —and, like me, he has incorporated theological reflections of his own, which makes the debate so multilateral that it threatens to exasperate readers without access to the symposium or perhaps even to Lonergan’s own books. It seems to me, then, that extended argument about the soundness or otherwise of this phalanx of objections to Lonergan, and about the wisdom of my general endorsement of these objections, with all the grit of detailed claim and contradiction and the paraphernalia of criss-crossing page references and citations, would weary all but a tiny minority of our readers. These I am content to leave to judge for themselves between my reception of the symposium’s objections to Lonergan and the totally different assessment proposed by Bill Mathews (and by Hugo Meynell, forthcoming in The Month). For the rest, as regards readers without access to Lonergan’s books, I must of course emphasise—and after Bill Mathews’s article they will surely realise—that it would be unfair for them to take either the symposium itself or my review of it as the last word on Lonergan, enabling them in good conscience to defer for good the labour of reading Lonergan’s Method and allied works.What I want to attempt now—because it forced itself on me as I read what Bill Mathews had to say—is to bring out the difference in expectations and presuppositions which (I suspect) leads him and me to read Lonergan so differently. Since it is a difference in perspective that (I believe) divides theologians today, and not only theologians, the issue has the wider implications with which the majority of our readers may be assumed to have some acquaintance and concern. It is the question of the preconditions of any future theology.