Autor: Byrne, Patrick H.

Buch: Beitrag zur Konferenz: World Views: Environment, Culture, Religion 7: 1-2 (March 2003)

Titel: Ecology, Economy and Redemption as Dynamic: The Contributions of Jane Jacobs and Bernard Lonergan

Stichwort: Emergente Wahrscheinlichkeit (emergent probability) - Gnade

Kurzinhalt: What is distinctive in Lonergan's own treatment of grace and redemption is his way of situating them in relation to emergent probability

Textausschnitt: 6a In using the term "bias" Lonergan characterizes the accumulating devastation in terms of its relation of opposition to the self-correcting potential of intelligence, inquiry, and insight. But as a Christian theologian, Lonergan was clear that the same pattern of decline is a pattern of sin in its relation of opposition to God. Lonergan is in fundamental agreement with St. Augustine's characterization: "evil is nothing but the removal of good until finally no good remains." And as a Christian theologian, he affirmed that the reversal of sin and its devastating social consequences is by God's grace. In fact his earliest research was on the development of Aquinas's theory of grace (2000). (Fs) (notabene)

6b What is distinctive in Lonergan's own treatment of grace and redemption is his way of situating them in relation to emergent probability. In Insight, he raises the question of God's solution to the problem of sin, evil, and social decline, and argues that the solution is the emergence of the theological virtues of "faith, hope and love" (1992, 718-25, 741). There he reflects upon redemption as occurring within this universe of emergent probability - "When in the fullness of time" the Redeemer came, as Christian theology has put it. (Fs)
6c Soon after Insight, however, Lonergan began to speak about the relationship between emergent world process and redemption more broadly as involving "three dynamics" of creativity and progress (intelligent self-correction), decline and degradation (bias and sin), and redemption and recovery through the healing that takes place in all religious love (1993, 1999a). The religious love, according to Lonergan's later view, is a constant of human affairs. Love heals hatred and bias, and off-sets the corrosive effects of stupidity and wickedness. There is a strain of hatred of nature to be found embedded in the seminal works of some founders of modernity like Machiavelli and Bacon. There is also misanthropic hatred to be found in certain strains of environmental activism. Religious love is love of God, and to love God unconditionally is to love everything God loves-all natural and human creation. Grace, religious love, sets about undoing hatred and making possible healing and discerning, intelligent responses to situations. (Fs)

6d As a Christian theologian Lonergan identifies the unconditional love found in all religions with the mission of the Holy Spirit, "God's love flooding our hearts through the Holy Spirit given to us (Rom 5, 5)" (1972, 105). This dynamic of redemption, Lonergan claims, suffuses all human history and is present through all human affairs, just as is intelligent creativity and biased degradation. The mission of the Holy Spirit reaches full efficacy through the mission of the Son, who inaugurates in emergent probability God-authored schemes testifying to God's undying redemptive love. (Fs)
6f Reductionistic forms of Darwinism tend not only to refute role of God as Creator, [eg: but]to eliminate as superfluous theological considerations of grace. Lonergan to the contrary integrates God's grace with the evolving character of the natural and human worlds. (Fs)