Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: A Second Collection

Titel: A Second Collection

Stichwort: Religion - Kirche; Lonergan über Rahner: theologische Anthropologie; Zusammenfassung: Theologie - Wissenschaften

Kurzinhalt:

Textausschnitt: 147a I have been speaking to you of religion at its best. But an organized religion, a church, is not a conventicle of saints. It is like a net cast into the sea that catches all sorts of fish. If the same ultimate goal and ideal is proposed to all, there also must be proposed the successive stages in a development towards reaching the goal. So it is that, as generation follows generation, there is always a gap between the ideal and the real, between religion as it strives to be and religion as it is in fact. But apart from cases of self-deception or insincerity, this gap or contrast does not imply that religion is phony, that religious people say one thing and do another. The very being of man is not static but dynamic; it never is a state of achieved perfection; it always is at best a striving. The striving of the religious man is to give himself to God in something nearer the way in which God has given himself to us. Such a goal is always distant, but it is not inhuman, for it corresponds to the dynamic structure of man's being, to the restlessness that is ours till we rest in God. (Fs) (notabene)

147b I have been arguing that, because religion pertains to an authentic humanism, theology has a contribution to make to the humanities. But one can go further and argue with Karl Rahner that the dogmatic theology of the past has to become a theological anthropology.1 By this is meant that all theological questions and answers have to be matched by the transcendental questions and answers that reveal in the human subject the conditions of the possibility of the theological answers. Explicitly Father Rahner excludes a modernist interpretation of his view, namely, that theological doctrines are to be taken as statements about merely human reality. His position is that man is for God, that religion is intrinsic to an authentic humanism, that in theology theocentrism and anthropocentrism coincide. On this basis he desires all theological statements to be matched by statements of their meaning in human terms. His purpose is not to water down theological truth but to bring it to life, not to impose an alien method but to exclude the risk of mythology and to introduce into theological thinking the challenge of rigorous controls. (Fs) (notabene)

148a I must not give the impression, however, that such a theological anthropology already exists. Father Rahner has not, to my knowledge, done more than sketch how one might go about constructing it. But the mere fact that the proposal has been made reveals how closely a future theology may be related to the human sciences and to the humanities. (Fs)

148b Let me conclude with a brief summary. I pointed to five areas in which theology has been learning or has to learn from other disciplines: history, philosophy, religious studies, methodology, and communications. Then I recalled Newman's theorem that the omission of a significant discipline from the university curriculum left a blind spot, the mutilation of an organic whole, and a distortion of the disciplines that remained and endeavored to meet real human needs. While I was not in a position to discern whether this theorem is borne out by facts, I did suggest that a theology with a properly developed method would be of some use to human scientists who, on the one hand, wished to avoid all reductionism without, on the other hand, becoming captives of some philosophic fad. Further, I added that religion was part of an authentic humanism, and so that theological reflection on religion was pertinent to the human sciences and the humanities. Finally, I referred to a paper of Father Karl Rahner's with which I am in substantial agreement, to indicate just how closely related to human studies a future theology may prove to be. (Fs)