What is that Christian historicity that we call Christian tradition? What, as John Henry Newman might ask, does it mean for Christ’s church to be subject to history?1 Answering such questions means understanding the relationship between Christian truth and Christian history. But it also means understanding the ways that Christians are agents in history, in their grandeur et misère. And because Christians exercise agency in time, answering these questions means wrestling with the lethal racialization of human beings by Christians and by history, by Christians in their history. It is not only the moral urgency of the problem that pulls us to attention; it is also the conviction, available to faith, that the history that is ours is also the history that is God’s. To remain blind to history’s grandeur et misère is to fail in the fullness of a sight that understands God to be at work in the struggle against human iniquity.2 That failure is nescience, and nescience is a sin. But underneath all these questions and convictions, holding them together while distinguishing them, is the question of the present chapter: What is human history?
What Bernard Lonergan writes of history is not, perhaps, what we might expect. What Lonergan writes and rewrites is a theory of history. The decision is unusual. Lonergan’s theorizing might even strike us as far too abstract for the urgent problems of his day, let alone for our own. Why not rise to meet the age on its own level?3 Why not, if the body bleeds, bandage the wound where it is?
This rising is what Lonergan is struggling to do. He is working to understand what human history is, and therefore what history can become. He writes not just to grasp bandages for the wound but also to grasp anatomical knowledge of the body. He writes to take measure of what is happening in his world. And Lonergan’s theory of history is what the present chapter strives to understand, explain, and expand. It is important to my argument because it provides a way to discuss history, and therefore a way to discuss the historicity of Christian tradition. Lonergan also provides the tools by which to understand what it means to build a “metaphysic” of tradition—that is, what it means to operate in the realm of theory, which is one of the fundamental efforts of this book. But to understand this operation, to learn with Lonergan how to take measure of history and what it means to discuss metaphysics within it, we must first understand what theory is.
A Definition of Theory
Lonergan distinguishes between common sense and theory. While both have to do with human intelligence, their standpoints differ.4 Common sense is that shared practical intelligence that guides people in their daily lives, the communal knowledge that deals with “the concrete and the immediately practical.”5 Lonergan says, “The practical common sense of a group, like all common sense, is an incomplete set of insights that is ever to be completed differently in each concrete situation.”6 So common sense is a specific kind of shared understanding. It is the kind that deals with the practical, the concrete. But common sense often cannot understand this about itself, and it mistakes itself for all the understanding that there is.7
Theory, by contrast, is at once more general and more specific than common sense. Its specialized language applies human intelligence to systematic inquiry about the world, whether in philosophy or in science.8 This systematic inquiry is demanded by the questions that common sense cannot answer and by the dynamic structure of human consciousness, which desires such answers and asks such questions. Such a demand is what Lonergan calls “systematic exigence.” So theory emerges in its own right as its own realm of meaning, apart from common sense: “The systematic exigence not merely raises questions that common sense cannot answer but also demands a context for its answers, a context that common sense cannot supply or comprehend. This context is theory, and the objects to which it refers are in the realm of theory. To these objects one can ascend from commonsense starting points, but they are properly known, not by this ascent, but by their internal relations, their congruences and differences, the functions they fulfill in their interactions.”9 Theory, then, differs from common sense by seeking the meaning of terms and their relations to one another rather than their relation to the questioner. Per Lonergan’s preferred example, the questions that Socrates asks—such as, “What is justice?”—cannot be answered by common sense, because common sense focuses on concrete applications and not on what a thing is in itself.10 Each of Socrates’s dialogue partners can say whether or not a set of circumstances is or isn’t just, but none of them can define justice in a way that applies to each just or unjust situation. Socrates wants a universal definition, but common sense cannot provide one. His questions seek answers only to be found in the world of theory, a world in which “things are conceived and known not in their relations to our sensory apparatus or to our needs and desires, but in their relations constituted by their uniform interactions with one another.”11
Lonergan distinguishes between history and a philosophy of history—that is, between the events of history and the kind of theorizing of history that would ask not “What happened?” but “What is history?” This latter question demands not a historian but a philosopher. “A philosopher cannot be content to ask of history, Who holds the power?” argues Lonergan. “He must ask whether this incidence of power is for human progress or for human extinction.”12 Theory, in other words, leads not just to different kinds of understanding but also to its own kinds of judgments about what is the case.
It is worth pausing at this point to consider what, exactly, Lonergan is trying to achieve with theory, and therefore what this book is trying to achieve as a theory of Christian tradition. “While practical people wait for concrete situations to arise before attempting to work out their consequences,” he says, “theoretical minds are given to anticipating ideal or typical cases and to determining how a deduction could be carried out in each case.”13 Practical intelligence infers from the given situation; theory tends to be “anticipatory,” to be “creative and constructive.”14 Because theory deals in the ideal and typical, it is not useful in every case for every question, just as common sense is not. Indeed, for Lonergan, there is a danger inherent in approaching history through the lens of ideal types.15
So this book has a danger latent in its effort, which is the danger of mistaking its theoretical, creative, heuristic understanding of history and tradition for history and tradition. The mistake would be a kind of overextension of one form of knowledge beyond the boundaries of its competence. Instead, it is important not only to maintain a “humility” about the argument of this book but also, and more concretely, to maintain that it is a theory and so can only bear the weight of what any other theory can bear: it is heuristic, anticipatory, creative.
But the move to theory is fundamental because the goal of the book is to understand Christian tradition, which requires understanding history and revelation in history, a task to which common sense is not equal. To view history in a commonsense way—of which historians perform a sophisticated version—constrains history to the perspective of one’s own context.16 Though that kind of history is important, it is not the history that the present work is interested in, because it is distorted and narrowed by group interest, and there is a basic moral imperative to be invested in history beyond our own groups.17
A further imperative orients human beings toward the world and beyond groups—that is, toward theory, and beyond common sense. Since the present work is a work of theology, its theory of history must also include an understanding of God not only generally but also specifically as revealed in Christ. The kinds of judgments that such a theory must make will include the “too intelligible,” as Lonergan puts it in reference to the supernatural meanings that are above human reason yet known in the light of faith.18 Theology would be, on this analysis, a theory: it will (and does) have terms and relations, generalizations, principles, and thus a viewpoint that one can properly call theoretical.
Theory’s anticipatory measure is what allows for new questions to be asked of history, questions that reach beyond the causal chains of what happened, beyond one’s own group, and even beyond what was moving forward in a time or place.19 Theory can ask what history is. More than that, a theory of history allows for an approach to the whole of history, which otherwise remains beyond our grasp. Lonergan calls such a theory o...
