VALOR: El buen humor.

The previous chapter introduced the specific contribution of N. T. Wright to the methodological and epistemological questions regarding the relationship between theology and historiography. Wright’s work, as I have presented it, is a case study in the contemporary allocation of theological questions oriented within an historiographical framework, and purposed toward a constructive contribution to a historically grounded theology. In other words, Wright is useful to look at because of his attempt to bring

together a commitment to historical knowledge and a concern for theological questions. Further, Wright’s questions are the church’s questions, and his method is governed by his theological commitment to history. Yet his historical method overtakes his theological commitment by submitting both history and theology to the epistemological frame of CRw. Fundamental to both history and theology is his account of human knowing. Theology is ordered

according to human questions regarding ultimate meaning and revelation is present in the world as an object of knowledge in the same way as other objects of knowledge are present in the world. One way of clarifying this would be to say that Wright’s formal account of epistemology relies upon the material content of human questions regarding ultimate meaning; it starts with the questioning subject. In this way, his epistemology has a

transcendental structure, one that gains knowledge according to the rational answers to human questioning, even if that questioning is regarding

revelation.164 _{As we will see, the theological approach I will describe in this}

164 _{That Wright’s epistemology has a transcendental structure is further}

suggested by his close reliance on the work of Ben F. Meyer and Meyer’s account of critical realism. In The Aims of Jesus, Meyer, discussing the relationship between theology and history, endorses in his approach the

chapter begins with the material content of revelation and orders an epistemology around that content, especially the divine object of knowledge.165 _{What this looks like is the task of this chapter.}

This chapter and the next aim to reverse the direction of Wright’s epistemology in order to see theology from the perspective of the theologian. Following these chapters we will then look at history from this newly

articulated theological perspective. What does theology, with its methodological assumptions and commitments, have to say about the

historian’s work? By letting Wright have the first word in the present chapter, the following discussion intends to be shaped by his critically realist concerns, and so begins by asking the following very specific question: What is the epistemological significance of the object of knowledge if the object of knowledge is God?

“’transcendental method’” of Bernard Lonergan (Ben F. Meyer, The Aims of Jesus, vol. 48, Princeton Theological Monograph Series (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2002), 280 n. 30.). Meyer articulates this according to a “morality of knowledge” at work in a “pre-critical” way: “it is the confident supposition that human intelligence intends the real and attains it….By this route [i.e. questioning] it brings to light the realized conditions of the possibility of attaining the real by intelligence, thereby disclosing the further possibility that men should be ‘hearers of the word’….” (Ibid., 108-09). The purpose of Meyer’s comments in this section of Aims is to move from the skeptical

hermeneutics of Cartesian criticism to the positive and engaged hermeneutics of a pre-critical approach in full faithfulness with the creedal tradition of the church. This positive assessment of history (and a quick dismissal and mischaracterization of Barth; p. 107) is theoretically bound to a deeper

epistemological commitment to the transcendental Thomism of Lonergan. In nuce, as Robert Sokolowski writes, “Lonergan infers from the complete

intelligibility of being to the affirmation that God exists” (Robert Sokolowski,

The God of Faith and Reason: Foundations of Christian Theology (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995), 109. The account of theological epistemology that I will provide in this chapter overcomes Meyer’s dichotomy between critical and pre-critical, rejecting any hint of a transcendental methodology, by moving deeper into the space opened up by Karl Barth’s theology, here represented by T. F. Torrance.

165 _{Wright is suspect of words like “divine” to the extent that they force into}

the abstract an ideal concept of the very historical and particular God

revealed in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. Here and elsewhere where I use such language I am mindful of the problem, but have been unable to find a less awkward alternative.

A brief look again to Wright will be followed by a clarification of the subject-object distinction in modern theology and philosophy, and then our attention will be turned toward two theologians, T. F. Torrance and Søren Kierkegaard, both of whom deal in depth with the concepts of objectivity and subjectivity, respectively. Torrance, perhaps more than any other theologian, has emphasised the objectivity of God in the theological enterprise; and Kierkegaard, through his pseudonymous works by Johannes Climacus, powerfully turns objectivity into a radical subjectivity. The goal of this chapter, then, is to begin to articulate the relationship between the object of knowledge and the human subject’s relationship to that object if that object is the God revealed in the Bible.