Theological Reflection: Woodstock's Way of Working
Theological Reflection: [Woodstock Report, December 1992, no. 32]
Copyright © 1992 Woodstock Theological Center
All rights reserved
In the following interview, Beth Kostelac, editor of the Woodstock Report, speaks with Father James L. Connor, S.J., director of the Woodstock Theological Center, about the Center's project on "theological reflection."
What is this "theological reflection" project the Woodstock team is working on?
It is an effort to become more competently what Woodstock was originally set up to be back in 1974.
And what's that?
I think the easiest way to describe it would be to cite the relevant paragraph of the Provincials' announcement of the establishment of Woodstock.
We have decided to inaugurate a center for theological reflection as a new ministry of the New York and Maryland Provinces. The details and most specifics of this decision must await the hard planning of the Center's director and board of advisors. Yet the purpose of this Center and its focus are already decided. By mandate, the Center will be aimed primarily at theological reflection in the Roman Catholic tradition, but with openness to dialogue with other traditions and other disciplines. We envision such a Center as responding to the need for a new development in theological method, which speaks clearly to the current situation. We hope the Center will respond to Father General's [the late Father Pedro Arrupe, S.J.] call for "theological reflection on the human problems of today," e.g., national and world justice, power, population, environment, consumerism, etc. (Statement of Eamon G. Taylor, S.J., and J. A. Panuska, S.J., Provincials of New York and Maryland Provinces, November 19, 1973.)
So Woodstock was instituted to develop and use a new theological method to address human problems of today?
That's right. As you can see, it is different from traditional theology in its subject matter, aims, and method. It doesn't focus on church doctrines and re-express them in modern terms for the faithful. It looks at urgent social issues as we experience them, seeing God present therein and asking of ourselves, in light of Scripture and tradition, what this situation demands of us, what God desires us to do.
Where did the concept and the terminology of "theological reflection" originate?
I am not sure who originated it, but it was our late Father General Pedro Arrupe who popularized the expression among Jesuits. He was deeply concerned with human suffering in our world and the injustices that cause it. This linkage between "theological reflection" and the current social situation was one of his many powerful insights. He explained it this way in an interview in America magazine in August 1971.
In the arena of intellectual concern, I consider theological reflection to be of prime importance. I think that the great issues of our time, the human problems of today's world, urgently require rethinking in terms of a truly evangelical theology. I am referring to such issues as humanism, freedom, mass culture, development, violence. In my view, theological reflection is incomplete without the insights of the human and exact sciences. This presupposes the work of a team, a multidisciplinary team. For my part, this is the service we must render man [sic]: to look for divine solutions that are very concrete, a contemporary incarnation of a God-view of our present world, arrived at by a search illumined by faith.
So, Father Arrupe wanted a "rethinking" of the urgent issues of our day in terms of truly evangelical theology, working in collaboration with the human and exact sciences, a search illumined by faith that will yield "divine" solutions to issues. And this is what you mean by "theological reflection?"
It is a good working description. It is a place to get started anyway.
Two years after that interview of Father Arrupe, Avery Dulles, S.J., used it as a basis for his own, fuller description of "theological reflection." His is still one of the best available descriptions of this method. It appeared in the English Jesuit journal The Way (Supplement 20, Autumn 1973, p. 114). A few of the many insights Father Dulles offered were these:
Is this how Woodstock has been doing its work since it began in 1974?
It certainly has been trying to do so with more or less success. It is interesting that in 1978, the then-director of the Center, Father Bob Mitchell, took Avery Dulles' article as a base-line for tracking Woodstock's actual use of this method in its projects since 1974. His report was encouraging, but also laid out some challenges, particularly about following the process, and not simply thinking about it. It takes commitment, time and energy, as well as personal confidence in its value for yielding good results. And finally, you have to have continuity in personnel. We have had a lot of turnover at Woodstock. We have an excellent team now, with good promise of continuity.
So, you think Woodstock is now ready to make a run at developing and incorporating "theological reflection" as its characteristic and habitual way of doing its work?
I really do. We have full team commitment right now. We are already working on it. We all meet together for three hours every three to four weeks to discuss and share reactions to readings we have done. We also meet for an intensive three-day period twice a year, fall and spring. We expect to maintain this rhythm for at least two years.
We are making good progress, and it is amazing how deeply everyone is getting into it. A major help is the diversity of training within the group: an economist (Gap Lo Biondo), a political scientist (Tom Reese), a chemist (Charlie Currie), a philosopher (John Langan), a Christian ethicist (Leon Hooper), a former inner-city pastor (Ray Kemp) and three theologians (Bob Mitchell, Joe Whelan, and myself). Temperamentally, we range from the down-to-earth practical to the speculatively cosmic!
Does this mean that other Woodstock projects are on hold?
By no means. They are all going forward on schedule. In fact, doing them while working out our methodology is a big advantage. The current projects provide lab experience for testing the use of the methodology as we learn it.
Walter Burghardt and Ray Kemp are getting priests and ministers to use the theological reflection process in their "Preaching the Just Word" retreats. John Langan, Bob Mitchell, and I are using it with the business executives in Woodstock's seminar in business ethics, right now on the business aspects of health care, and the "Business Vocation Conference." Tom Reese will use it to analyze and evaluate the way the Vatican works and does its business, which is his current study. Leon Hooper had this methodology in mind with the group he convened for "Retrieving and Renewing the Public Philosophy of John Courtney Murray." And Gap Lo Biondo is bringing this methodology to an analysis of the economy, as he networks with groups in Latin America on issues of development.
Joe Whelan spends full-time in assisting me with this theological reflection project, and also coordinates a group of lay professionals who meet monthly to probe the question, "What is it to be a Christian in the `marketplace'?"
What specifically are you reading and studying to help you develop yourselves as a Center of theological reflection?
Principally, we are studying and trying to incorporate into our group activity the discernment and decision making process of St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order. We are also studying and trying to incorporate the cognitional theory and method in theology of the late Bernard F. Lonergan, S.J. We believe that Lonergan's methodology is an excellent up-dating of St. Ignatius' spirituality and explicates the foundations of Ignatius' process.
What does Ignatian spirituality offer to a modern theological reflection process?
I would single out the following:
What is the need of going to Bernard Lonergan, if St. Ignatius provides so many of the major ingredients of a theological reflection process?
Modern as his spirituality is, Ignatius didn't live in the 20th century. A lot has changed since his day, and it has profoundly influenced the way we see, and think, and decide, and act. Ignatius never heard, for instance, of the Enlightenment, psychiatry, democratic capitalism, or nihilism. As a result of how we have changed, our culture demands that suppositions that Ignatius simply took for granted have to be justified and grounded. Moreover, what we've learned from fields like psychology, social science, and modern history enable us to give a much richer explanation of the dynamics of the discernment process than would have ever occurred to Ignatius. For respectability, as well as responsibility, Woodstock has to achieve such in-depth understanding of the discernment process. Bernard Lonergan is an enormous help in this effort.
How does he do that, concretely?
I will try to give a simple overview of some key points in Lonergan's method, just to illustrate how and why he is so helpful to us in this effort. For my superficiality I ask your forbearance, but especially Lonergan's (Lord rest him!).
Lonergan starts off by asking us to reflect on ourselves and see if it is not true that we invariably move in a pattern that can be described as four phases unfolding dynamically. In the first phase we are presented with data. Data comes to us most obviously through sensation (sight, taste, touch, hearing, smell). For instance, we smell something. Then, and this is the second phase, we ask ourselves, "What is that?" We seek to understand, we seek intelligibility. We try on different hypotheses for size. For instance, we ask, "Is it coming from outdoors or is it indoors? Is it cauliflower or is it mushrooms? Or is it something else?" We marshall evidence, weigh hypotheses against the known data, until we can say, "I've got it! It is mushrooms cooking in the kitchen!" That is an "insight," according to Lonergan. But no sooner have we said it to ourselves than we invariably ask, "Is that really so?" To be really sure and be peaceful about it, we feel the need to check it out. It is the requirement that we put our mind on the line by giving affirmation in a considered judgment. That is the third phase in this process, namely, judgment. But no sooner have we said, "Yes, it really is mushrooms," than we are moved to consider what, if anything, we should do about that fact. (Notice that the data has by reason of our judgment become a fact: it has been affirmed as reality having "objective" existence in its own right.) "What shall I do? Go eat some or not? Eat with others or alone?" And so on. A whole series of optional responses occurs to us, among which some choice must be made, if only the choice to do nothing at all. We are being drawn to choose this or that option according as we find this value (for instance, eating the mushrooms alone) more attractive than that value (for instance, continuing my study and waiting for dinner). As the various values inherent in the different options parade before me, I deliberate and then decide what to do. It is in the doing that this fourth and final stage (of discerning, deliberating, deciding, and doing) reaches culmination and completion. Until we actually do what we decided, we really haven't decided, and the values on which the decision was reached, are not yet real values for us.
If you change the example of the smell of mushrooms coming from the kitchen to the sight of street people on grates outside the State Department or a banner headline in the paper about starving thousands in Somalia, you can see how the four-fold train of successive operations readily becomes "theological reflection."
Lonergan has a marvelous treatment of the foundation on which we reach judgments of value. It is located in the peace or disquiet we experience as a result of our choices, actual or proposed. If the choice or deed does violence to the way we are designed to work, it brings restlessness, darkness, confusion. When we go on to rationalize, much less justify our bad choice, then we become confirmed in bad faith, and are unauthentic. We are on a course of self-destruction, which also severely injures those around us. This can happen to a group or society, as well as to individuals. If, on the other hand, our choices and deeds are consistent with who we are, we experience peace, joy, calm. We, whether an individual or a group, are on a trajectory of healthy growth. Anyone familiar with Ignatian discernment will immediately recognize the application.
Do we invariably go through this series of four steps?
We don't always go through them in a mechanical, lockstep way. It may happen, chronologically, that someone first forces us to make a decision (Your spouse says, "The roof's leaking; what are you going to do about it?"), so then we have to double back and get the data, organize it, reflect and understand, so that we can get an insight on which we can pass subsequent judgment, in order to make a decision, and do it. But you can see that these four steps are organically related to each other, and flow in an orderly way one from the others. They are the dynamic building blocks of the human process of knowing, deciding, and doing.
Why do we move along through these four steps?
What pushes us along through these steps is an innate, inner drive or desire that incessantly raises questions (for meaning or value). The youngest child will, without premeditation or plan, ask spontaneously, "Why? What? How? When?" and we adults experience this curiosity and desire through a lifetime. Lonergan, after much sophisticated analysis, shows that this inner drive is the heart of human being. We quest for understanding, goodness, and love, unconditional Love, finally. And the we in question is not just individuals in loose aggregate, but the human family. Lonergan has a profound sense of the social solidarity, the essentially social dimension, of human being.
Why is it useful to be familiar with these steps? If we invariably work this way, why not just go along and do it? Why reflect on it or talk about it?
The better we understand "how we work," then the better we are able to "work," the more intelligently and responsibly can we carry out our theological reflection. And thereby we can the better help others to participate in a process of theological reflection. Take the teaching pro at a golf course, for example. She not only has a good swing and therefore hits the ball well, but knows why her swing is good. The pro knows the anatomy of the human body and of the good swing. Therefore, she can make the desired corrections to the swing. She may never teach the Sunday afternoon golfer the anatomy of the swing, but she can help him play a very good game. Change the image from golfing to theologically reflecting, and it is clear why Woodstock has to know the anatomy of knowing, deciding, and doing.
Moreover, if you know the basic structure of the cognitive process, you can guide interdisciplinary conversation, because it underlies the methodology of all the different disciplines, like chemistry, law, history, sociology, economics. In fact, Lonergan discovered and uncovered this dynamic four-step cognitive process by analyzing the methodologies of mathematics, physics, and philosophy over 748 pages in his major work, Insight. He elaborated on the process, especially its fourth step, and showed how it is the underlying dynamic structure of theology in Method in Theology.
Has Lonergan got an ethics?
An ethics can be built out of Lonergan's method, he touches on it in Insight, and some people have developed a Lonergan based ethics. At the very heart of it is what Lonergan calls the "Transcendental Imperatives." After he has shown us, through inviting us to reflect on our own experience, that we do move through the four steps, and that we invariably move through the four steps, he shows that we must move through the steps if we are to be genuinely authentic human beings, responding to the call that we are. Since that is so, then the four steps become precepts or imperatives which he puts this way: Be attentive! Be intelligent! Be reasonable! Be responsible! So to live is to live well and be an authentic human being. You can readily see how an ethics can be built on this foundation.
Where do you see the project going from here?
The most important result of this project will be to have a team of people who have formed a genuine community of understanding of, commitment to, and skill in the doing of theological reflection. Thereby, they can guide their projects as instances of "theological reflection," train others in this art and skill, and facilitate groups (like business executives, clergy, government officials, educators, journalists) in using this methodology.
Lots of people know the theory. The challenge for us is to do it. What makes it challenging is the fact that it requires the committed involvement of the whole person: mind and heart, intelligence and feelings, faith and reason. Finally, you don't pull the process out sporadically or try to use it only in crisis situations. It is intended to become, through repetition, a continuing, habitual, quasi-instinctive modus operandi or "way of proceeding." Lonergan defines a method as "a normative pattern of recurrent and related operations yielding cumulative and progressive results." (Method in Theology, p. 4)
Society at large desperately needs this kind of search, illumined by faith, for solutions to our social ills. Today's problems are so deep that they won't yield to merely rational or technical remedies. They stem, finally, from disorders of the human spirit.
I am deeply humbled but highly enthusiastic about the mission Woodstock has been given. Pray for us.
