A Comparison of Demythologization and Method

The thrust of demythologization dwells on the exigency of being responsible to the challenge of God's word here and now by freeing oneself from attachment to the achieved yet illusive security in certain established worldviews, in the light of the eschatological judgment of God. This kind of operation seems to fit into the fourth level of consciousness in Lonergan's framework, where the subject experiences the love of God flooding his heart by the Holy Spirit and then taking this love as the originating value to decide and be responsible towards one's life. It is a dynamic from religious conversion heading towards moral conversion for higher values and the truly good. Lonergan would agree that this operation does not rely on the attained knowledge in one's worldview. Though the dictum goes that there is no love without prior knowing, Lonergan argues that in religious matters love precedes knowledge and the very beginning of faith is due to God's grace. This love is the cause that leads human beings to seek knowledge of God.(23) Bultmann has a similar understanding: "Man has a knowledge of God in advance, though not of the revelation of God, that is, of His action in Christ. He has a relation to God in his search for God, conscious or unconscious ... The question of God and the question of myself are identical."(24) In line with Pascal's famous insight, the heart has its reasons that reason itself does not understand, Lonergan sees that the heart's reasons are the discernment of, and intentional responses to, values as knowledge attained by faith, distinctive from the factual knowledge achieved by experiencing, understanding, and judging.

If this is granted, Bultmann is certainly right that whatever the outdated mythological knowledge or the prevailing scientific knowledge may be, it has little or even nothing to do with one's encounter with God in faith. Concerning the conditions of the possibility of one's conversion towards higher values or responsible action for God, Lonergan emphasizes the prior love of God, while Bultmann focuses on the power of God's word, its eschatological vision and its inherent judgment. Lonergan seems not to confine the flooding of God's love in our heart to reading the Scriptures or listening to the kergyma only, though they are certainly its privileged mediation. The Holy Spirit, however, is free to grant a similar consolation without previous cause. "Of itself, then, in as much as it is conscious without being known, the gift of God's love is an experience of the holy, of Rudolf Otto's myterium fascinans et tremendum. It is what Paul Tillich named a being grasped by ultimate concern. It corresponds to St. Ignatius Loyola's consolation that has no cause, as expounded by Karl Rahner."(25)

About the problem of myth, Lonergan distinguishes the different functions of meaning, namely, cognitive, efficient, constitutive, and communicative.(26) Lacking distinctions, primitive consciousness blends cognitive meaning insensibly with the constitutive, and the result is myth. The distinction between mere words, the meaning of the words, and the realities meant by the words is a later achievement of the mind. Demythologization seems to represent an effort to recover the cognitive meaning by discarding the constitutive one. The constitutive vision of the end of the world at hand must give way to the eschatological exigency of the present. But the question is: is the eschatological exigency the only cognitive meaning in the Scriptures? Lonergan seems to prefer the polymorphism of human consciousness that can raise different sets of questions towards various actual cognitive meanings. Let us take an example: God is vengeful. In a not-yet differentiated consciousness towards some deep religious experience, a primitive mind stuck in naive realism would definitely perceive God as somebody-already-out-there who does not tolerate injustice and evil deeds. Bultmann would definitely see this proposition as myth and would likely discard the constitutive meaning of an angry God and emphasize the myth's cognitive meaning of a call to abandon sinfulness here and now as our responsibility before God. However, a psychiatrist seems to see something more:

In fact, clinical evidence suggests that atrophy of the religious sense in man results in a distortion of his religious concepts. Or, to put it in a less clinical vein, once the angel in us is repressed, he turns into a demon... for time and again we watch and witness how repressed religion degenerates into superstition. In our century, a deified reason and a megalomanic technology are the repressive structures to which the religious feeling is sacrificed...Soon the only thing that would be left of all his science would be the atom bombs he possessed.

.... In concluding this chapter we might venture to say that God is a 'vengeful God' indeed, for neurotic existence in some cases seem to be the toll that a crippled relation to transcendence takes on man.(27)

From this passage, we can almost see the ontological import of 'God is vengeful' that reacts to the suppressed transcendent dimension that the human being is supposed to be.

As a whole, Bultmann's horizon does not allow the legitimacy of making propositional statements about God or belief. This has much to do with the problem of objectifying conceptuality. Rooted in Neo-Kantianism, Bultmann understands the word 'objectify' as designating the object-making activity of reason. When he uses it, it does not refer to thinking that is oriented towards what is genuinely objective, but to a mental construct that provides a model for external reality. In this sense, Bultmann's thinking is in line with the Kantian distinction of phenomenon and noumenon. What we can know is only the phenomenon, constituted or structured by human reason and categories. The reality remains unknown. In light of this, theology should not pretend to know God or use the objectifying mode of thought. God is not our mental construct, but the 'wholly other' than us. "To speak of God in concepts appropriate to a mere construct of Reason is to make God into an idol."(28)

Therefore, it is Bultmann's epistemology that prevents him from making any general statements about God or belief. This paper cannot make a detailed study, discussion, and critique of the Kantian problematic, but a few points can be made to shed light to the contrast between Bultmann and Lonergan. First, Lonergan does not see knowledge as simply immanent to the subject or as the construct of reason by the subject, though it is attained through the subject's reason. In fact, genuine knowing is a self-transcendent process. In experiencing, the sense data is given to the self that is different from illusion. The subject needs to be attentive. In understanding, the mind raises questions that might be different from the established answers and then forms certain ideas or insights. The subject is to be intelligent. In judging, evidence needs to be marshalled so that the conditions can be fulfilled. The subject is to be reasonable. In this sense, objectivity is reached by authentic subjectivity that goes through the transcendental precepts. Second, there might be a certain confusion about what judgment is. It seems that we need to know all the conditions about the world or God, before we can make a judgment about either. Since it is impossible to know all the inter-related conditions, we cannot then make a judgment. But Lonergan distinguishes two kinds of questions. There are questions for intelligence which ask what, why and how. There are questions for reflection, which ask whether the former answers are correct. The limited commitment of judgment to answer 'is it so?' is different from the ongoing understanding of comprehensive coherence. The latter is the ideal of human intelligence. Judgment is to the effect that no matter what the later understanding of the universe might be, at least this is so. Is God vengeful? If the meaning is about an angry God already out there to punish our wrongdoings, the conditions are not fulfilled. If it means that the violation of our transcendent constitution finally makes us suffer, the judgment is right.

Third, the distinctive fourth level of consciousness in terms of decision and value is not isolated from or in conflict with the other three levels in terms of knowledge. In fact, as Aristotle says, "everyone desires to know." Part of the intentionality of feeling towards values is exactly knowledge itself. Lonergan understands their relationship as sublation. The higher levels of consciousness sublate the lower. In this sense, knowing God has no inherent or a priori conflict with commitment to and responsibility to God. Lonergan surely acknowledges Bultmann's concern about the danger of knowledge as becoming one's attachment to security. The problem is also similar to what the hermeneutic of suspicion uncovers, the so-called orthodoxy as the mask of ideology for self- interest. Lonergan describes it in vivid metaphors:

Such devaluation, distortion, corruption may occur only in scattered individuals. But it may occur on a more massive scale, and then the words are repeated, but the meaning is gone. The chair was still the chair of Moses, but it was occupied by the scribes and Pharisees. The theology was still scholastic, but the scholasticism was decadent. The religious order still read out the rules, but one wonders whether the home fires were still burning...(29)

Lonergan sees the problem as the loss of common meaning due to personal and collective inattention, or failure to understand, or undetected rationalization. The attachment to security or self-interest is as great as the problem of inauthentic knowing. In this sense, conversion is to be threefold, not simply religious, moral, or intellectual, but all three are necessary.

Finally, an existential exigency in terms of decision and responsibility alone is incomplete and often neglects the objective hierarchy of values and the place where the truth lies. Existential commitment can be without a moral face. The incident of Heidegger's life-long and controversial connection with Nazism shows the limitation of his existential philosophy. Certainly, this limitation was already there in his description of Dasein. But the right description does not justify his wrongly actualized philosophical commitment. Applying the existential categories to theology, we still need to be attentive, intelligent, and reasonable to do moral and intellectual discernment for understanding God's will here and now for me as well as for others.

23. Cf. Ibid, 123, 283.

24. Jesus Christ and Mythology, 52-53.

25. Method, 106.

26. Cf. Ibid, 76-81 see their elaboration.

27. Victor E. Frankl, Man's Search For Ultimate Meaning (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Perseus Publishing, 1975), 75-76.

28. R.A. Johnson, Rudolf Bultmann, 25.

29. Method, 80.