Autor: McCarthy, Michael

Buch: Workshop Rome 2001

Titel: Theological Reflection and Christian Renewal

Stichwort: Geschichtlicher Kontext für das Vatikanum II, Gaudium et Spes, Lumen Gentium; Merkmale dieser Zeit

Kurzinhalt: The Historical Context, Aggiornamento, Hauptinhalt von Gaudium et Spes, Aufzählung von Merkmalen unserer Zeit;

Textausschnitt: () The end of their colonial empires meant the decline of European political and cultural hegemony and the gradual emergence of the Third World.
()
By any standard of measurement, the post-war world was the scene of extraordinary change, international, political, socio-economic and cultural. Most importantly, the pace of change itself accelerated under the pressure of scientific research, technological innovation and mass communications.
()
The world as a whole was undergoing profound transformation; the Roman Church appeared content with a public posture that was essentially defensive and immobile.
()
Humani Generis of 1950, Pope Pius XII deliberately chose to emphasize the immutability of Catholic dogma, the authority of the papal magisterium, the inerrancy of scripture, the timeless validity of traditional scholasticism, and the constant need to protect Catholic orthodoxy.
()
The post-Tridentine separation between Catholicism and modern intellectual and political culture had unfortunate and unintended consequences. It led the Roman Church into a one-sided opposition to the modern age, and it led to an equally onesided secularism within important sectors of modern culture.
()
The modern age is marked by economic abundance and scandalous deprivation, by material progress and spiritual decline, by increasingly rapid communication and diminished public understanding, by deep religious aspirations and unprecedented atheism and secularism. Particularly disturbing are the terrible inequalities, economic, political and cultural, that divide the human race.
()
The first part of Gaudium et Spes articulates the biblical anthropology that underlies the Church's ethical and political vision. The Council affirms the dignity and worth of every human being created in the image and likeness of God. ... The true condition of the human race is that our personal and public lives reflect the created image of God in a sinful and distorted manner.
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In the second part of Gaudium et Spes, the Council applies these anthropological and ethical principles to five critical areas of contemporary life: marriage and the family; the Church and culture; socio-economic activity; the political community; international order and peace. The troubling contradictions of modernity are present in these interrelated domains where genuine achievement and serious disorder are inextricably knotted together.
()
Reliance on these principles enabled the Council to make critical evaluative judgments about the state of the modern world, to distinguish repeatedly between evidence of genuine progress and signs of unwelcome decline. By themselves, these normative principles were insufficient to generate practical and effective remedies for the institutional and cultural disorders they clearly identified.
()

Autor: McCarthy, Michael

Buch: Workshop Rome 2001

Titel: Theological Reflection and Christian Renewal

Stichwort: Antwort der Jesuiten auf Vatikanum II, Pedro Arrupe, theologische Reflexion

Kurzinhalt: 4 Dimensionen theologischer Reflexion, Notwendige Kombination der ethischen Forderungen der Bibel mit einer Analyse der modernen Welt

Textausschnitt: In his clarifying commentary, Father Arrupe distinguished four interconnected dimensions of 'theological reflection'.
1) It has its origin in spiritual and religious experience. Theological reflection begins with personal prayer and meditation, the illumination of the mind and heart by the Holy Spirit.
2) It gradually unfolds into theological inquiry that seeks to plumb the unexplored depths of divine revelation, ...
3) Sustained reflection on holy scripture and traditional Christian doctrine needs to be augmented by a rigorous institutional and cultural analysis of modern society. The continuing empirical discoveries of the human sciences and historical scholarship must be critically integrated with the fullness of Christian theology and spirituality if the urgent problems identified in Gaudium et Spes are to be effectively addressed ...
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4) Finally, theological reflection will require the exercise of Ignatian discernment by all who engage in it.

Autor: McCarthy, Michael

Buch: Workshop Rome 2001

Titel: Theological Reflection and Christian Renewal

Stichwort: Mission der Jesuiten im Lichte vo Vaticanum II, Lonergan, authentic renewal

Kurzinhalt: Liste: 8 Punkte; Hauptaufgabe: Überwindung der tragischen Kluft: Imperativ d. Gerechtigkeit u. Verteilung von Reichtum, christliche und vorherrschene Werte (Akademie, Massenmedien); decline

Textausschnitt: () What are the deepest practical implications of the Christian faith today?
()
There is no more urgent mission for The Society of Jesus than to repair two 'tragic splits' that have divided modern society. First, the scandalous gap between the gospel imperatives of love and justice and the national and global distribution of economic wealth and political power. Second, the regrettable separation between the vision and values of the Christian gospel and the governing priorities of modern secular culture, particularly those of the academy and the mass media.
()
In Lonergan's judgment, the modern age confronts the universal Church with a radically new cultural context, with new types of experience and unfamiliar questions, with new scientific and scholarly discoveries, with new practical responsibilities, and a new awareness of historicity and pluralism.
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These truly historic theoretical and practical advances were accompanied, however, by a distorted account of human knowledge, by a truncated analysis of human existence, and by a pervasive secularist bias incapable of responding effectively to the problem of human evil and sin. The major task of contemporary Christians, as Lonergan saw it, is to understand and transform modern society and culture after a long period of deliberate disengagement from its tangled blending of human greatness and wretchedness.
()
It is painful to shed ignorance; it is always difficult to achieve mastery and competence. It is hardest of all to accept the need for intellectual, moral and religious conversion, to surrender personal and cultural biases, to abandon sinful habits, to undergo a radical change in one's interests, concerns and values.
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If Christian aggiornamento is really to be fruitful and genuine, the Church must take its stand on human authenticity, both the personal authenticity of the individual Christian and the communal authenticity of the Christian tradition itself.

Autor: McCarthy, Michael

Buch: Workshop Rome 2001

Titel: Theological Reflection and Christian Renewal

Stichwort: Mangel an einem kritischen Zentrum, Vetera novis augere et perficere

Kurzinhalt: Lonergan (aggiornamento), Gründe für den Widerstand der Kirche, emergence of a solid right and a scattered left

Textausschnitt: The aggiornamento initiated by Pope John XXIII has had uneven results. Catholic Christianity has gradually opened itself to the important modern developments in empirical science, historical scholarship, and collective practicality. But it has lacked a vital and unified center within its own ranks able to mediate effectively between inherited tradition and modern innovation.
()
For Lonergan, aggiornamento meant elevating Catholic inquiry and practice to the level and demands of the modern world. He insisted that this effort at internal reform would require a tremendous stretch by Catholics, both as individual believers and as a global community of faith.
()
Lonergan correctly anticipated the divisive emergence of a solid right and a scattered left within the Christian community.
()
To what new theoretical and practical achievements did the twentieth century Church have to respond? Modern living has been permanently transformed by ...
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To a great extent, the Catholic Church, from the Council of Trent through the first half of the twentieth century, held itself aloof from these remarkable modern developments. Why did the Church adopt this posture of critical reserve and opposition? There were both internal and external reasons for its stance of withdrawal and resistance.
()
The modern theoretical and practical legacy taken in its full concreteness is a tangled knot of greatness and wretchedness, to use Pascal's famous idiom. Because the Church felt threatened by many of these developments, its collective response to them was predominantly defensive and critical. The most influential modern thinkers were perceived as hostile to Catholicism and to the cosmological and anthropological beliefs it held and taught.
()
The most powerful intellectual, political, and economic movements of modernity were also initially viewed as unwelcome. This was true of the Copernican revolution, ...
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Partly through deliberate exclusion but mostly through their own unpreparedness, Catholics found themselves segregated from creative intellectual leadership in the sciences, the arts, politics and economics.
()
In Lonergan's unsparing judgment, Catholic defensiveness towards modern culture compared unfavorably with the Church's mediating role in the high Middle Ages. ... The inspiring model of Aquinas (Lonergan spent over a decade reaching up to the level of his thought) provided Lonergan with a striking analogy for his own life's work. 'To follow Aquinas today is to do for the twentieth century what he did for the thirteenth.'

Autor: McCarthy, Michael

Buch: Workshop Rome 2001

Titel: Theological Reflection and Christian Renewal

Stichwort: Von der klassischen Kultur zum geschichtlichen Denken

Kurzinhalt: The New Cultural Context, Liste u. Gegenüberstellung: klassische Positionen, historisches Denken; 4 Bedeutungen von Geschichte, Grenzen des common sense

Textausschnitt: () Lonergan strongly believed that the renewal and reform of Catholicism confronted the Church with a truly momentous task. Catholic philosophy and theology had been heavily dependent on the presuppositions of classical culture.
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The heuristic emphasis of classicism is on permanent theoretical achievement, the fixity and certainty of truth, the universality of cultural norms and social institutions. By contrast, the genuinely historical mentality emphasizes the self-correcting process of inquiry, the development and revision of provisional hypotheses and theories, the concrete pluralism of cultural practices and commitments. Where the classicist anticipates finality of outcomes and judgments, his historically minded counterpart actively engages in the unrestricted quest for deeper theoretical and practical understanding.
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The primary sources of classical culture were poetry, politics, rhetoric, philosophy and religion. At the intellectual heart of modernity were the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century and the revolution in historical mindedness that emerged from the Romantic movement. Taken together, these two modern revolutions transformed our understanding of nature and history.
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Classicist science was the permanent achievement of syllogistically organized demonstrative knowledge. For the historically minded theorist of knowledge, science is the dynamic, self-correcting, normative process of empirical inquiry conducted within the specialized disciplines of the global scientific community.
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Classicist philosophy was based on logic and metaphysics. It sought its foundational principles in axiomatic truths or invariant intelligible forms. Historically minded philosophy, by contrast, has turned its attention to the human subject, to the subject's unrestricted desire for knowing the real and doing the good, to the unfolding of those desires on the four levels of intentional consciousness, ... Lonergan devised a new architectonic strategy for philosophy, basing epistemology, metaphysics and ethics, on the personal appropriation of cognitional and moral activity. His bold reconception of philosophy's internal structure, his insistence on the importance of intentional analysis, and his privileging of cognitional theory were deliberately designed to address the dynamic transformation of empirical science and the exigences of historical mindedness.
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The various methods of empirical inquiry, scientific, philosophical, practical, theological and scholarly are extensions and adaptations of a single, invariant, normative pattern. In discovering and articulating the generalized empirical method that underlies human cognition and action, Lonergan penetrated to the deepest sources of modern culture and achieved a critical standpoint from which to appraise and connect them.
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The shift from classicist to historical consciousness has also engendered a new philosophical anthropology.
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The new philosophical anthropology, by contrast, starts with individual human beings in the concrete circumstances of their actual lives.
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It is useful to distinguish four different senses of 'history' as Lonergan uses that clearly analogous term.
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The obligations entailed by this new awareness of historical responsibility reveal a significant limitation in common sense practicality. Despite its evident merits, common sense reasoning is unable to think and choose on the level of systematic and historical consciousness. It is characteristically subject to a general bias that tends to dismiss the insights of theoretical reflection and historical research as unnecessary, impractical and unrealistic.

Autor: McCarthy, Michael

Buch: Workshop Rome 2001

Titel: Theological Reflection and Christian Renewal

Stichwort: Notwendigkeit eines kritischen Zentrums zur Vermittlung von Kirche und Welt

Kurzinhalt: The Mediating Center, critical aggiornamento, creative minority within the Church, Liste: 7 Forderungen an ein kritisches Zentrum

Textausschnitt: 'Our disengagement from classicism and our involvement in modernity must be open-ended, critical, coherent, sure footed [...] we have to take the trouble, and it is enormous, to grasp the strength and the weakness, the power and the limitations, the good points and the shortcomings of both classicism and modernity.'
()
Lonergan called for the emergence of a creative minority within the Church, a vital, critical center, 'big enough to be at home in both the old and the new, painstaking enough to work out one by one the transitions to be made, strong enough to refuse half measures and insist on complete solutions even though it has to wait.'
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He saw the need to reform what was no longer adequate in the vetera, while avoiding the exaggeration and one-sidedness of the champions of the new. He was impatient with mediocrity, half-truths, superficial opinions, the undiscerning embrace of or resistance to change.
()
Aufgaben:
1) to understand and evaluate historical change, critically demarcating authentic development from unwelcome decline (30; Fs)
2) to assess impartially the merits and limitations of both classicism and modernity (30; Fs)
3) to mediate critically modern pluralism, practical, cultural, scholarly and theoretical; this would require thematizing the vast array of human differences, tracing them to their originating source in differentiated intentional consciousness, ...
4) to distinguish between authenticity and alienation in modern knowledge and praxis and to disentangle the enduring achievements of the new learning from the ideological counter positions to which they are often conjoined. ...
5) to check the recurrent human tendency to general bias, the source of short-sighted practicality and the underlying cause of the longer cycle of historical decline
6) to reaffirm the complementarity of faith and reason and in so doing, to reverse the succession of lower cognitive syntheses that began with the secular enlightenment and its rejection of revealed truth
7) to develop a methodical and critical philosophy that meets the continuing human need for intellectual integration while respecting the specialized character of modern science and scholarship. Grave problems, mountainous tasks and Herculean labors indeed!

Autor: McCarthy, Michael

Buch: Workshop Rome 2001

Titel: Theological Reflection and Christian Renewal

Stichwort: Kritisches Zentrum, Anforderungen an Christen für ein Wandel

Kurzinhalt: Liste: 3 Forderungen an die Kirche, struggle for authenticity, unrestricted fidelity to the transcendental precepts, Notwendigkeit eines Explikation der Konversion

Textausschnitt: The first requirement is sustained personal development, the continuous struggle for authenticity, unrestricted fidelity to the transcendental precepts, the constant withdrawal from alienation and sin, the humble recognition of our personal and collective limitations.
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The second requirement is religious, moral and intellectual conversion, metanoia, the fundamental transformation of mind and heart that enables us to meet the demands of Christian leadership and education. By religious conversion, Lonergan means
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The third requirement is to carry out the arduous and difficult process of personal appropriation. ... In self-appropriation, we thematize the ongoing process of spiritual conversion through which we became mature and responsible adults. Only on the basis of thematized conversion do we achieve the critical standpoint that enables us to distinguish between authenticity and alienation in human praxis, enduring achievement and aberrant ideology in the realm of theory, and between legitimate power and arbitrary rule in the governance of human affairs.

Autor: McCarthy, Michael

Buch: Workshop Rome 2001

Titel: Theological Reflection and Christian Renewal

Stichwort: ethics - foundational, von einer Metaphysik d. Seele zur intentionalen Analyse des Subjekts

Kurzinhalt: Existential Ethics and Historical Responsibility, Basis d. Ethik: unrestricted human desire to know u. dessen Entfaltung auf den 4 Ebenen; transcendental precepts: be attentive, intelligent, reasonable, responsible

Textausschnitt: The transition from classicism to historical mindedness has major implications for the practice of philosophy. The historic shift that Lonergan advocated from a metaphysics of the soul to the intentional analysis of the subject profoundly affects our understanding of knowing and being.
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The philosophical turn to the subject shifts the focus of ethics from the terminal goods attained through the soul's operations to the originating sources of moral activity in the incarnate subject and in the evolving historical communities to which situated subjects belong. (eg: das heißt, hin zu den transzendentalen Imperativen)
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Existential ethics discovers and articulates the basic principles, the structural invariants, of authentic human living. ...
a) the operation of these transcultural principles ...
b) their objective thematization ...
c) their active enrichment through the gift of God's grace
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The core of ethics is the unrestricted human desire to know and actualize the good, the truly worthwhile, in all of its aspects and enabling conditions. The source of ethics is the normative unfolding of that constitutive eros on the four levels of intentional consciousness culminating in the subject's free and responsible decisions and actions. ... It is these exigent norms that are explicitly thematized in the transcendental precepts: be attentive, intelligent, reasonable and responsible. And, it is the operative principles as concretely experienced in human consciousness that are actively sublated by the gift of God's grace and profoundly distorted by the multiple forms of bias and sin.

Autor: McCarthy, Michael

Buch: Workshop Rome 2001

Titel: Theological Reflection and Christian Renewal

Stichwort: ethics - constitutive, methodical; klassische - existentiale Ethik

Kurzinhalt: desire to know als konstitutives Prinzip d. Ethik, Entweder: satisfy the deepest demands of our spiritual nature, Oder: alienated; Werturteil intentionaler Analyse (nicht aufgrund metaphys. Spekualtion)

Textausschnitt: Constitutive
() he foundational principles of ethics are constitutive of human subjectivity. We are constituted as human knowers and doers by the unrestricted desires that orient us in a fundamental way towards the universe of being and value.
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we faithfully comply with the operative exigences within our own consciousness, we satisfy the deepest demands of our spiritual nature; we fulfill the requirements of sustained human development; we live at peace with God, our neighbors and the order of creation. By contrast, when bias and sin prevent the normative unfolding of our free subjectivity, or when we ignore or transgress the transcendental precepts, we become alienated from ourselves and ensnared in divisive conflict with God, our fellows and the created order ...
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It is important to recognize that an authentic ethics is not an externally imposed set of obligations and imperatives created to constrain our native human desires and aspirations. Rather, an existential ethics articulates the innermost aspirations and norms of the human spirit.
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The focus of existential ethics is not on terminal values, on the objects or ends at which human beings consciously aim, on the diversity of goods they deliberately seek and pursue. Existential ethics continues the reflexive turn to the intentional subject, to human inferiority. ...
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Classical ethics was based on carefully delineating the internal and external goods required for the perfection of human nature. Existential ethics, by contrast, concentrates on the normative unfolding of intentional subjectivity, on the sublation of objective knowing by authentic living, and on the further sublation of responsible agency through the charisms of the Holy Spirit.
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Lonergan's heuristically oriented ethics in no way excludes terminal values or denies the importance of the moral and intellectual virtues, but it grounds its evaluative judgments and decisions not in a metaphysics of the rational soul but in a normative intentional analysis of the incarnate, polymorphic developing subject.

Autor: McCarthy, Michael

Buch: Workshop Rome 2001

Titel: Theological Reflection and Christian Renewal

Stichwort: ethics: concrete, critical; echter Pluralismus und Ideologie mit Gegenpositionen

Kurzinhalt: Konkretheit: upper and lower blade, Unterscheidung between authenticity and alienation, The counter positions: ideological attempts to defend existential and historical alienation

Textausschnitt: Existential ethics begins with human beings as they actually are: embodied, polymorphic subjects, situated in a web of interpersonal relations, and manifestly dependent on the comprehensive orders of nature and history. Existential ethics is marked, therefore, by a threefold concreteness:
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The thematization of this threefold concreteness has a foundational and invariant upper blade and a highly differentiated and variable lower blade.
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At this level of concrete human praxis, of history as lived, the basic critical distinction is between authenticity and alienation, between the achievement and refusal of intentional self-transcendence. This intentional achievement has two aspects, the minor authenticity of the existential subject and the major authenticity of the underlying cultural traditions within which the subject is educated. Existential and cultural authenticity are the fruit of sustained fidelity to the foundational principles of ethics. Conversely, existential and cultural alienation are the result of personal and communal violations of the structural invariants constitutive of the free human person.
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The counter positions, by contrast , are ideological attempts to defend existential and historical alienation and to justify the numerous human refusals of self-transcendence.
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The fundamental insight underlying Lonergan's dialectical criticism is that genuineness in concrete living and objectivity in theoretical and scholarly judgments are equally the fruit of authentic intentional performance. There is only one way to achieve epistemic and moral objectivity: through the sustained exercise of authentic subjectivity, existential and historical.

Autor: McCarthy, Michael

Buch: Workshop Rome 2001

Titel: Theological Reflection and Christian Renewal

Stichwort: ethics: grace, geschichtlich; Notwendigkeit d. Gnade, Bedeutung der Tradition für die kollektive Identität

Kurzinhalt: Gnade und Aristoteles Komplemetarität, personal decisions -> moral identity, collective decisions -> collective identity as a nation, a church

Textausschnitt: () Lonergan's principle of intentional sublation is analogous to Aristotle's notion of functional complementarity. In both cases, a higher level of human development and achievement augments the operations of a lower level while preserving their integrity and validity. ... Thomas Aquinas appropriates Aristotle's notion of complementarity for his own analysis of the relationship between created nature and operative grace. For Aquinas, the virtue of faith perfects and completes the activity of human reason as charity and hope perfect and complete the exercise of the cardinal virtues.
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The interior pull towards authenticity and the sinful counter pull towards alienation constitute the central drama of human existence. The achievement of authenticity and the surrender to alienation clearly depend on the whole spectrum of intentional consciousness, but they rely most heavily on the subject's fourth-level operations of deliberating, evaluating, deciding and acting. ... We significantly determine who we are and will become by the concrete manner in which we choose and act.

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In the practice of intentionality analysis, Lonergan regularly emphasizes three connected forms of sublation. The sublation of empirical consciousness by the intellectual and rational operations of the subject; the sublation of objective knowing by responsible decisions and choices; the religious sublation of both intentional knowing and doing by God's sanctifying and redemptive grace.
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... the cultural traditions in which we are educated, are also constitutive of our identity.
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Just as our personal decisions and choices serve to shape our moral identity, just as they make us authentic or alienated subjects, so our collective decisions about the common good and the sustainable future of our world shape our collective identity as a nation, a church, a global society.

Autor: McCarthy, Michael

Buch: Workshop Rome 2001

Titel: Theological Reflection and Christian Renewal

Stichwort: ethics, conversion; Notwendigkeit von Unterscheidung (Entfremdung) u. Konversion

Kurzinhalt: Konversion, aggiornamento, kritisches Zentrum, kein Fortschritt ohne Verständnis des zu Integrierenden,

Textausschnitt: The foundational invariants of conscious intentionality are the explanatory causes of human development; interference with or opposition to their normative operation is the basis of human stagnation and decline.
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In Insight, Lonergan argues that personal appropriation of the universal and invariant upper blade would provide a much needed collaborative framework, a philosophical common ground, for human investigators across the entire spectrum of specialized inquiry.
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The successful execution of this ambitious integrative project, a project Lonergan directly connected with Christian aggiornamento, depends, however, on two inescapable conditions. First, we cannot credibly combine and integrate what we haven't already understood and made our own. The mediating functions of philosophy and theology clearly require sustained personal development on the part of those who would directly engage in them. Second, we cannot critically adjudicate the numerous conflicts and tensions that arise among the specialized forms of inquiry and practice unless we are able to distinguish effectively between self-transcendence and alienation in personal and communal conduct, and between truth and ideology in the thematization of human existence. ... we shall need an unprecedented level of intellectual and moral development and a sustained commitment to comprehensive conversion both as individual Christians and as an historical community of faith.
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The problems of the contemporary Church are indeed grave; the tasks it faces are mountainous and the required labors are Herculean. But, as believing Christians, we are not a people without hope, for as Jesus himself has promised, nothing is impossible when authentic human beings cooperate freely and generously with the power and wisdom of God.

Autor: McCarthy, Michael

Buch: Workshop Rome 2001

Titel: Theological Reflection and Christian Renewal

Stichwort: Schritte einer praktischen Theologie

Kurzinhalt: Liste: Praxis theologischer Reflexion, philosophische, theologische Ethik; notwenige Quellen d. Einsicht für verantwortungsvolles Handeln, upper, lower blade

Textausschnitt: 1. Deeply living the Christian faith in our daily existence. True religious conversion demands sustained prayerfulness, asceticism, ...
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2. Prayerfully reflecting on the central Christian mysteries: the creation of the universe, the fall of Adam and Eve, ...
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3. Developing a credible theological anthropology based on the Trinitarian understanding of God: basing human dignity on our original creation in God's image and likeness; basing ...
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4. Articulating a Christian ethics, both existential and social, in response to two fundamental questions: a) How should I act and live as a mature and responsible Christian? b) How should we live together as a free and self-governing community of interdependent persons? ... it is useful to distinguish, but not to isolate, a theological ethics based on Hebrew and Christian scripture and tradition from a philosophical ethics that proceeds from the data of moral experience, through practical inquiry and reflection, to the articulation of moral principles and the assertion of evaluative judgments.
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Both theological and philosophical ethics are profoundly affected by the cultural transition from classicist assumptions to contemporary historical mindedness. Classicism conceives of ethics as a permanent human achievement, as a finite set of invariant moral truths with universal and timeless applicability. Historically minded moral inquirers, by contrast, recognize invariant moral precepts ...
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5) By their different paths, theological and philosophical ethics converge on the following concerns: ...
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While these ethical questions are humanly unavoidable, the practical answers they receive are deeply contested, not only between Christians and those who do not believe in Christ, but also within the Christian community itself. There are several sources of this striking moral disagreement.
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Responsible policy making and planning invariably depend on multiple sources of insight: the norms and principles of ethics, the institutional analysis and cultural criticism of the human sciences, the depth dimension of historical research, disinterested dialogue and debate among citizens and their political leaders, and on the particular set of circumstances in which human action really occurs. Egoistic, group and general bias can distort human inquiry and decision making at each of these interconnected levels. Discerning the presence of bias and critiquing the ideologies with which bias disguises itself are essential to understanding and correcting practical conflict.
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6. ... As Lonergan constantly emphasized, the human good is always concrete. It is in the lived concreteness of the home, ...
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7. Theological reflection operates like a scissors with an upper and lower blade. The upper blade is

Autor: McCarthy, Michael

Buch: Workshop Rome 2001

Titel: Theological Reflection and Christian Renewal

Stichwort: Hauptkomponenten von upper u. lower blade; Tripolarität chr. Anthropologie (Trinität)

Kurzinhalt: Isolierter upper blade: keine Rezepte (Gaudium et Spes) - lower blade: status quo wird zur Norm, Mangel an Prinzipien; Dialektik: Schöpfung, Sünde - Erlösung, Gnade

Textausschnitt: There are three major components of theological reflection's upper blade: the Trinitarian theology of God; the intentional analysis of human subjectivity; a normative ethics of Christian principles and precepts (both transcendental and categorial). The key component of the lower blade is critical, factual analysis of the institutional, cultural and historical settings to which the principles and precepts of ethics apply.
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The weakness of the upper blade taken in isolation is its lack of effective specificity. It can tell us, as Gaudium et Spes did, what is unjust and unchristian in the way we live as individual persons and historically organized communities. However, it is characteristically unable to identify appropriate and effective remedies
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The weakness of the lower blade taken in isolation is its lack of principled normativity. Proponents of the lower blade tend to take the factual status quo for granted and, in the name of supposedly hard-headed realism, characteristically reduce normative measuring principles to the level of existing practice.
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The anthropology of Christian realism is also Trinitarian. All human beings are created in the image and likeness of God. God's created image within us is distorted and darkened through our crippling entanglement in sin. We nevertheless remain open to redemptive healing and creative renewal through the grace of God poured out for us in Christ. With its tri-polar dialectic of created nature, disruptive sin, and redemptive grace, theological reflection takes full account of both the greatness and wretchedness of human existence without losing the disciplined energy and tenacious convictions of Christian hope.

Autor: McCarthy, Michael

Buch: Workshop Rome 2001

Titel: Theological Reflection and Christian Renewal

Stichwort: Hindernisse für eine theologische Aneignung und Notwendigkeit von Konversion u. Unterscheidung

Kurzinhalt: Liste: Hindernisse, egoistic, group and general bias -> conversion; minor, major authenticity; Beeinflussung durch Kultur, Notwendigkeit d. Unterscheidung von Fortschritt und Niedergand (decline)

Textausschnitt: 1. The Christian churches, especially the Catholic Church, are still in the midst of a belated cultural transition. In the modern age, the major breakthroughs in science, historical scholarship and collective practicality were largely initiated by secular thinkers and social movements. ... It will surely take time to overcome the suspicion and hostility that came to divide Christians from their secular counterparts in the course of the European Enlightenment.
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2. Christians are faced with a continuing demand for intellectual and moral development.
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3. Christians are hardly immune from egoistic, group and general bias. ... The most serious human conflicts, both those within and between human beings, can only be overcome through comprehensive conversion, through the intellectual, moral and religious transformation of our thinking, living, deciding and feeling.
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4. There are inherent limits to the contribution. ... It is one thing to diagnose a malady, another to discover a cure; one thing to call for peace and justice, another to discover and enact their enabling and sustaining conditions. ... Moral idealism and prophetic criticism need to be combined with a deep knowledge of human existence and history,
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The real choices facing existential subjects are largely determined by the institutional and cultural communities in which they reside. Thus Lonergan distinguishes between the minor authenticity of the individual subject and the major authenticity of the historical community. Existential authenticity is a rare and difficult achievement for the individual person. It requires sustained self-transcendence over the course of a human being's lifelong development.
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... if the study of human society is to be critical as well as factual, to be both evaluative and explanatory, psychologists, sociologists and historians must learn to discriminate effectively between historical progress and decline, authenticity and alienation, the achievement and the refusal of self-transcendence.

Autor: McCarthy, Michael

Buch: Workshop Rome 2001

Titel: Theological Reflection and Christian Renewal

Stichwort: Theorie der Verantwortung

Kurzinhalt: Liste; What are: the cultural dispositions and skills, political institutions, what civic arts and virtues, What are the legitimate norms for judging the practice of an intentional community

Textausschnitt: a) How does the procession of intentional consciousness within the lives of individual human beings differ from its occurrence in the life of an intentional community?
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b) What are the cultural dispositions and skills, the shared ideas and beliefs, the moral commitments and convictions that are needed to sustain an authentic self-governing community?
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c) What political institutions, what civic arts and virtues, what critical allegiances, are required for the effective exercise of public liberty?
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d) What are the legitimate norms for judging the practice of an intentional community:
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e) How should we determine the scope and extension of the relevant moral community within which practical deliberation occurs,

Autor: McCarthy, Michael

Buch: Workshop Rome 2001

Titel: Theological Reflection and Christian Renewal

Stichwort: Vorherrschaft einer säkularen (kirchenfeindlichen) Mentalität; Massenmedien; 20. Jhdt: Verlust d. Unschuld

Kurzinhalt: Secularization of the Academy (George Marsden), abnehmender Einfluss d. Kirchen bei:, Zeitungen, Massenmedien; practical consequences of 'the death of God': absurdity, nihilism, divertissement, consumerism; decline d. säkularen Kräfte

Textausschnitt: However, a dramatic cultural change has occurred since the second half of the nineteenth century. ... The directive and critical influence of religion is greatly curtailed within the modern academy. ... If secular universities and research institutions have become the principal source of independent thinking and criticism in the West, and if religion and especially theology have become marginal forces within the academy and the scholarly world, then the Church's ability to exercise cultural and moral leadership through the practice of theological reflection is gravely in doubt.
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Universities and think tanks, of course, are not the only source of public leadership. Technological innovation and artistic creativity are an important source of original ideas. But technological inventions are rarely religiously inspired, and the creative communities in the contemporary West are often hostile to, if not aloof from, institutional Christianity. Cultural analysis and criticism also shape public opinion and taste. This process of informal education occurs through influential journals like the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, or in prominent public forums where the leading ideas of the specialized disciplines are exchanged and debated. But the spirit and substance of these journals and forums is also relentlessly secular, even when they deal with matters of genuinely religious concern.
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The mass media have probably the greatest direct influence on our attitudes and beliefs and on our affective and moral dispositions. Yet contemporary advertising, profit-driven journalism and popular entertainment ... genuinely foster a vision of human existence and the human good radically at variance with that of the gospel.
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The common theistic horizon that unified Western culture from the conversion of Constantine until the French Revolution has been replaced, especially among creative artists and in the most influential centers of cultural analysis and criticism, by a self-consciously secular mentality that is often hostile to the Church and incompatible with the Christian moral vision.
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The scientific community has legitimate doubts about the Catholic commitment to freedom of inquiry; artists fear its restraint on creative expression. The cultural left views Christianity as a conservative force supporting the conventional status quo; and post-modernists distrust the Christian reliance on authority and its commitment to universal ethical norms. In the face of these momentous historical challenges, is contemporary Christianity still able to provide significant public leadership for its own members?
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The forceful modern assertion of human freedom and dignity since the Renaissance contains a considerable measure of truth. We are collectively responsible for the world we bequeath to posterity. Yet that ethical truth has often received one-sided expression. Modern historical consciousness has, in fact, been tainted by a secularist bias that tends to treat human beings as the only source of insight and moral energy, and the good that humans achieve as the only basis for temporal hope. The practical consequences of 'the death of God' have not been innocent as the sad record of the twentieth century clearly shows.
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The distrust of religion and the rejection of theology have steadily narrowed the sources of knowledge and moral energy on which Western culture can draw. Since the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, several important elements in the Christian cultural synthesis articulated by Thomas Aquinas have been abandoned. First, the truth of divine revelation was rejected by rationalists like Spinoza; then the directive power of human reason was denied by skeptical critics like Hume.
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This mood of political and cultural pessimism coincides with a resurgence of classical liberalism that celebrates the economic efficiency of the commercial marketplace. But global capitalism only deepens existing inequalities within and among nations ...
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The profound lesson of the twentieth century, I believe, is that the age of innocence is over. The great secular ideologies, liberalism, Marxism, nationalism, have been forced to confront the intractable problem of evil and moral impotence. In creating and sustaining a just human society, there is no evading the demand for authenticity, personal, institutional and cultural. But authenticity is incompatible with egoistic, group and general bias, with the refusal of repentance and conversion, with the denial of God. It is also incompatible with the scapegoat 'solution' of locating the source of injustice and evil in the other, whether the other is a government official, an entrepreneurial capitalist or an ethnic, racial or religious adversary. Genuine conversion always starts with oneself, with one's own community,