A Theology for the Earth: The Contributions of Thomas Berry and Bernard Lonergan

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION i^ cholars of religion are no strangers to challenges from the modern and post-modern world. In this latter half of the twentieth century, the ecological crisis is perhaps among the more difficult of these challenges. When the very foundations of life itself are threatened, how does one engage in reflection on one's religious faith? Thomas Berry was one of the first and most creative North American religionists to seriously consider the issue of the role of religion in restructuring human-earth relations. Thomas Berry was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, November 9, 1914. From his own reports, he had an early interest in nature and wilderness. As a young adult, he joined the Roman Catholic Order of Passionists and was ordained to the priesthood May 30, 1942. Berry had a passion for learning and teaching. Despite his Order's first commitment to preaching, rather than to university careers, Berry did gain permission to prepare for an academic career. He completed a Ph.D. in history at The Catholic University of America and went on to China, where he began a study of Chinese languages. Berry's teaching career in the United States of America was in the area of world religions, most of it spent at Fordham University, New York, from which he retired in 1979. Berry's interest in the ecological crisis came to the fore in the 1960's. For him, however, it was not a passing fad of that memorable decade. It remained a serious and dedicated commitment that Z A THEOLOGY FOR THE EARTH consumed his attention and expressed itself in almost all his teaching , writing and speaking from that time until the present. During that time, there was considerable development, refinement and synthesis to his thought, but also an overwhelming consistency in the cultural solution he proposed to the ecological crisis. Berry's proposal was simple but radical; a new story of the universe to inform and reinvent modern culture in all its expressions. At the basis of his contention was the notion that divine-human-earth relationships must be recast. It is both his creativity and his dogged persistence, as it is evidenced in his writings, that compelled this study of his work and its potential contribution to a Christian theology ofecology. Perhaps the greatest difficulty one faces in constructing a theology of anything in modern times is the fact that Christian theology itself has been flaying about for an identity and a methodological basis since the demise of scholasticism and the encroachment of empirical science on theology's claim to universal knowledge. Where does one find a convincing foundation for a contemporary theology capable of conversing with modern science, the most obvious player to date in the attempt to confront the ecological crisis? This is a problem, given the extremely tenuous nature of the science-religion relationship in modernity. The construction of a Christian theology of ecology calls for a revision of the very way in which we think about what theology is, how one does theology and on what bases it can claim to present any kind of truth or functionality in word or action. No one in our time has met these questions with a more careful and convincing response than the Canadianphilosopher-theologian Bernard Lonergan (1905-1984). Bernard Lonergan took serious account of the philosophical and ideological assumptions underlying the modern rift between science and Christianity, confronted them and rebuilt the foundations of Christian theology. Hence, my decision to use Lonergan's heuristic account of world process and the role of theology within it as the theoretic tool toward a construction of a Christian theology of ecology. Post-modernism has raised legitimate questions that challenge such thinkers as Thomas Berry and Bernard Lonergan.On what basis can one take seriously the work of a popularizing scholar who proposes the dreaded "grand narrative" as a global solution to the ecological crisis, as Berry does, or the foundationalism of Lonergan?1 Have we not convincingly deconstructed narratives and uncovered their inherent colonizing and imperialist ideologies? Haven't foundations been shown to rest on still other perceptions and assumptions as equally precarious as the edifices they attempt to ground? A full INTRODUCTION O account of the legitimacy of such questions as well as their own fallacies is beyond the scope of this work. Briefly, however, an apologetic for Berry and Lonergan might proceed along the following lines. We...