Substack: https://mediatedbymeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Can you know arguments for God and still remain untouched by God?

In this episode, we turn to chapter four of Bernard Lonergan’s Method in Theology: Religion.

After method, the human good, and meaning, Lonergan now asks the decisive question: what happens when human consciousness opens onto transcendence?

For Lonergan, religion is not simply an optional department of human life. It is not reducible to private feeling, moralism, apologetic proof, or ritual performance. Religion concerns the deepest fulfillment—or refusal—of the human subject as such.

We begin with the question of God. Lonergan argues that this question is not imposed on the mind from outside. It is implicit in the unrestricted dynamism of human questioning itself. We ask not only about this or that finite thing, but about intelligibility, truth, value, and being without limit.

From there, we move to self-transcendence. Human consciousness is structured to go beyond itself: beyond mere sensation, beyond immediate appetite, beyond private satisfaction, toward truth, value, responsibility, and love.

Then Lonergan makes the central turn: this capacity for self-transcendence becomes actual when one falls in love. And in its highest form, this is being in love with God—not as sentiment, but as a transformed horizon of existence.

Religious experience, for Lonergan, is the experience of being in love in an unrestricted fashion. It is conscious, but not immediately known. It is mystery: fascinating, awe-filled, and transformative. It does not simply add a doctrine to the mind. It reorders the subject.

The episode then examines how religious experience becomes expressed through tradition, word, community, doctrine, preaching, and history. Lonergan shows why religion speaks across multiple realms of meaning: common sense, theory, interiority, and transcendence. Liturgy, mystical writing, dogma, preaching, and theology do not all operate in the same mode, but they can belong to one living religious tradition.

Finally, we turn to Lonergan’s account of faith: not as irrational belief, but as “the knowledge born of religious love.” Faith is rooted in the heart, in the subject transformed by God’s love, and from that love arise religious beliefs, communal judgments, and the historical transmission of religious meaning.

In this episode:

• Why arguments for God are not the same as religious transformation
• The question of God within human consciousness
• How unrestricted questioning opens onto transcendence
• Self-transcendence as the dynamism of the human subject
• Being-in-love as existential transformation
• Religious experience as unrestricted love
• Why religious experience is conscious but not yet fully known
• Mystery, awe, and the holy
• Why religious utterance moves across different realms of meaning
• The tension between the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the God of philosophers and theologians
• Religious development as dialectical
• Faith, progress, decline, repentance, and conversion
• The Word as the mediation of religious experience
• Cor ad cor loquitur: heart speaks to heart
• Faith as knowledge born of religious love
• The distinction between faith and religious belief
• Why theology must think from within conversion, not merely about it

Chapters:
00:00 — Arguments for God and distance from God
01:28 — Religion within consciousness
02:48 — The question of God
04:28 — Unrestricted questioning and transcendence
06:04 — Self-transcendence
07:38 — Being-in-love as transformation
09:20 — Being in love with God
11:02 — Religious experience as mystery
12:44 — Conscious but not yet known
14:00 — Religious expression and realms of meaning
15:40 — The God of faith and the God of theory
17:08 — Religious development and conversion
18:40 — The Word and religious mediation
20:04 — Faith as knowledge born of love
21:34 — Religious belief and community
22:32 — Why this chapter matters

Religion, for Lonergan, is not first a theory about God. It is the fulfillment of the human subject’s unrestricted orientation toward truth, value, love, and transcendence.

In the next episode, we move to the eight functional specialties: Lonergan’s practical organization of theology so that research, interpretation, history, dialectic, foundations, doctrines, systematics, and communications can become cumulative and collaborative.

How do we recover meaning in a fragmented world?
Short reflections on consciousness, conversion, and responsibility.

Read the full essays at Mediated by Meaning: https://mediatedbymeaning.substack.com

#meaning #philosophy #faith #psychology #jordanpeterson #catholic #lonergan #selfunderstanding