A suggestion for properly locating impasses in theological stances, e.g. trinitological disputes:
It makes sense to me to associate Lonergan’s secular conversions –
- 1) intellectual,
- 2) social,
- 3) affective &
- 4) moral –
w/his imperatives & functional specialties, respectively,
- 1) experiential awareness & research,
- 2) intelligent understanding & interpretation,
- 3) reasonable judging – deciding & history and
- 4) responsible acting & dialectics.
This anthropological account thus cycles thru
- 1) descriptive
- 2) interpretive
- 3) evaluative &
- 4) normative
value-pursuits to realize human authenticity.
Religious conversion would then proceed in a reverse succession thru the normative, evaluative, interpretive & descriptive functional specialties to realize a sustained authenticity via self-transcendence (being in love):
- 1) normative – foundations (exegetical, liturgical, historical & philosophical)
- 2) evaluative – doctrines (creedal)
- 3) interpretive – systematics (theopoetic & metaphysical idioms)
- 4) descriptive -communications (pastoral, homiletics, missiology).
I set this forth to suggest that, for example, scholarly trinitological impasses can thus be variously located in differences regarding:
- 1) anthropology
- 2) foundations
- 3) doctrines
- 4) systematics and/or
- 5) communications.
This is to suggest that if two theologians disagree regarding a more fundamental level, e.g. anthropological or exegetical, then, it will derivatively produce doctrinal disputes.
And it makes little sense to engage in systematic polemics, e.g. trinitarian syllogistics, with those whose who disagree with us at a more fundamental level, e.g. doctrinally or foundationally, much less anthropologically.
Some impasses between classical & analytical approaches, in fact, result from conclusions embedded – not only in one’s axioms, premises or logic, but – in the very definitions of one’s terms (e.g. philosophically: what is God? or anthropologically, what’s a person?).
