“For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God” (Eph. 2:8). What is grace? How does it save me? Why does God give it? Is grace an interference in my life, an add-on I need? And so the questions go.

It should be obvious that having some understanding of grace is important in order to value what God gives us. It goes to the heart of our relation to God as humans, and our relationships with God in Jesus through the Holy Spirit. The problem is that grace is divine, but it is also created. It is “supernatural” but also in some way “natural” as well.

Jonathan Heaps has written an important and ambitious book, outlining what is in essence a new program for theology today — and not just for Roman Catholics. He is the director of the Bernard J. Lonergan Institute at Seton Hall University, one of 11 study centers around the world working to extend Lonergan’s extremely rich legacy.

Right away, I need to say that this is not just another “Lonerganian” book that regurgitates the Canadian’s transcendental method for connoisseurs. Lonergan would have hated that his opus founded a school, which is antithetical to his life’s work, but it did inevitably happen.[1] Heaps incorporates and then goes beyond Lonergan to develop a creative approach to the vexed question of the supernatural in Christian theology. From there he develops his fresh approach to theology in general.

Today the word supernatural in daily parlance means the paranormal: phantoms, fairies, “ghoulies and ghosties, and long-legged beasties, and things that go bump in the night.” It is opposed to the “natural,” meaning a rational grasp of reality which brooks no mystery that science cannot elucidate, including the dogmas of religion, of course.

But this is modern. “Nature” in ancient and medieval thought, up to the 18th century in fact, meant first the creation, and second, in philosophical speculation, the quiddity (or whatness) of creatures. For Plato and Aristotle, individual animals of a species had a common nature: doggishness of dogs, cattishness of cats, humanness of humans.[2] In Christian theology, the question arose about the nature or natures of Jesus Christ: human and divine? And that led to the further question of the relation between humans and God, the author of our nature: between the natural and what is above natural.

What links our nature and God’s supernature? God created all that is, giving every relative being with the absolute divine Being. Paramecia, parrots, and Parisians all exist because of God’s Being. In a famous statement, Thomas Aquinas postulated that “God is being through essence, and all others by participation” (Summa Theologiæ 1.4.3.). In other words, we live and move and have our being because God sustains us. Because sin seriously damaged our nature, in particular our awareness of our relation to God, there is a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17), grace, to accomplish God’s original intent that we “become partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4.) Grace enables participation in that nature. In other words, through it our human nature can “bathe” in the supernatural divine.

After Aquinas came a host of commentators who tried to elucidate this grace. It is created, yet divine. But God and creation are separate. If they are not, then we are not talking about the God of the Scriptures. As Heaps notes, “God and only God exists by nature, which is why God is the only necessary being” (p. 97). One possible solution is to ask what human nature is by itself, a “pure nature” before humankind sinned. This is part of vociferous arguments that Katherine Sonderegger notes raged among 17th-century Roman Catholic theologians concerning

the very nature of God, the scopus and perfection of His knowledge, the workings of His victorious grace, and the freedom of His creatures … At this level of doctrinal seriousness, no final verdict was reached. The painful calumnies, the calls for inquisition and condemnation, the relentless polemics, personal and ecclesial: these had to stop. But this explosive argument … between two ways of receiving the heritage of the sainted Doctor, must now be regarded as a “difference of the schools.”

With the revival of Aquinas studies in the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches, this difference of the schools returned to the fore, concentrating on the notion of a “pure nature” and whether there is a “natural” desire to see God — to enjoy “the beatific vision.” The French Jesuit Henri de Lubac, in a series of articles in the 1940s, attacked it, pointing out that this was an impossible abstraction that separates the natural from the supernatural action of God in grace. The reaction was severe: Pius XII condemned it in a 1950 encyclical and de Lubac was forbidden to teach or write. Yet his view won out, and he was named as a theological adviser to the Second Vatican Council.

The problem of the supernatural remains, however.

Here Heaps follows Lonergan’s analysis closely, especially his earlier works on Aquinas. He distinguishes between the medieval problem of grace and the “irreducible modern problem of the supernatural.” The medieval problem has a specific side, which is how God’s grace makes a difference in creation and in human life. The generic side is how God’s action makes a difference in these (p. 43). The modern problem of grace asks specifically what God is doing in free human action, and generically what God is doing in the cultural realms of human meanings in which those actions are conceived and take place (p. 209). The lasting value of Thomas Aquinas’s opus tempts many to make an essentially medieval answer to the modern challenge, but Heaps shows that this is not possible. However, he argues, it is also not possible to develop any satisfactory answer to the modern challenge without taking into account the medieval solution.

There is a “prephilosophical commitment,” Heaps says, that people face, which is the decision whether to believe in a divine being. Until René Descartes in the 17th century, theology was the “queen of the sciences,” and philosophy her handmaid. Since then the two have become separate disciplines. Heaps contrasts Maurice Blondel, a believer who analyzed human action using what he called a “method of immanence,” with Jean-Paul Sartre, the atheist existentialist. From this clash of positions, he distills an underlying ambiguity. Blondel the believer says that free action should be taken as if there is ultimate meaning. Sartre says that freedom is nothing in itself. Neither can justify his position by philosophical reasoning — both are ambiguous.

Heaps then shows that the modern question of what God is doing in free human action cannot find a satisfactory metaphysical answer. It is intrinsically hermeneutical, seeking to interpret rather than explain definitively. As a theological hermeneutic, it will inquire into “common funds of meanings and values,” meaning cultures. This work would not seek some overarching interpretive key, say, like Martin Luther’s reading Scripture through the lens of the Epistle to the Romans. Rather this enterprise would examine doctrines in their cultural context, with the hope that these disclose possible divine meanings, “to investigate what human action has concretely meant in its cooperation with God” (pp. 211; 206-7, and 207.n21)

Finally, he proposes a heuristic along three interrelated “axes” of inquiry to do critical methodological theology. The first is theories of transcendence (from atheism to process theologies), the second is a study of cultural, horizonal, and contextual differences among these theories, and the third plots transformations of development, decline, and redemption (pp. 218-24). Theologians will need to allow for divergences, resulting in what Heaps calls a “speculative pluralism.” The openness of communications is “essential to theology’s self-realization and also rather extravagantly beyond its present means” (p. 225).

Heaps is a good writer, and he navigates his very dense material with a sure hand and a ready sense of humor. His proposal for a new approach to the doing of theology is backed by vast research, and, I believe, a certain frustration with some of the limitations of current theology (which I share). Repeatedly he states that we need no “great man” now. Although his analysis and proposal are clearly based on the opus of Bernard Lonergan, he does what a good Lonergan student should do: develop. Transcend the master who never wanted to found a school.

I must make a few remarks about his use of Lonergan. He tends to stick with the early studies of Aquinas, and rarely mentions the two most familiar books, Insight and especially Method in Theology. Lonergan’s work on Aquinas is itself creative, and he moves far beyond the school approach he had to endure as a student. Heaps does not get into the controversies among Thomists and others concerning Lonergan’s positions. Although much of the basic thrust of Method in Theology is present, its presence is mainly felt through its influence on the author of this book. I think this is wise. Method is brilliant, filled with concepts that continue to inspire to this day. But Lonergan began writing it sub specie æternitatis in 1965, after he was diagnosed with lung cancer. As a result it hurries to say what needs saying. In order to experience the breath of his thought, people who read it should also complement that with (at least) the three collections of essays, his treatise on the Trinity, and of course, Insight.

And along the way, read Jonathan Heaps, The Ambiguity of Being: Lonergan and the Problems of the Supernatural.

[1] When my coauthor John Raymaker and I chose a title for our book on Lonergan’s economics as an exemplar of his transcendental method, we decided not to put his name in it. It should not be off-putting, but it can be, because of certain claims by members of the “school.” See “Attentive, Intelligent, Rational, and Responsible”: Transforming Economics to Save the Planet (Marquette University Press, 2023).

[2] Summing up the change from fixed nature, Lonergan wrote, “If one abstracts from all respects in which one man can differ from another, there is left a residue named human nature and the truism that human nature is always the same.” It is true that, in this way, “one can apprehend man abstractly through a definition that applies … through properties verifiable in every man”; and indeed, one can know human being as such, but “man as such, precisely because he is an abstraction, also is unchanging.” If we leave human being at that, “one is never going to arrive at any exigence for changing forms, structures, methods, for all change occurs in the concrete, and on this view the concrete is always omitted.” In “The Transition from a Classicist Worldview to Historical-Mindedness,” Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan 13: A Second Collection: Papers by Bernard J.F. Lonergan, S.J. Edited by Robert M. Doran and John D. Dadosky (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016); 1-10; 3.

Title IV is the disciplinary process for members of the clergy, including bishops. Its failings have been much in church news recently, especially concerning bishops. At the House of Bishops meeting on September 20, 2023, we discussed at length what these cases meant for bishops in general. There is in some quarters the impression that compared to priests and deacons, bishops get off lightly. We bishops issued a statement that acknowledged “disappointment, pain, and grief” across the church that these cases have caused.

The most publicized of these recent cases is that of former Bishop of Oklahoma Ed Konieczny. The President of the House of Deputies, Julia Ayala Harris, filed a complaint against him alleging that he made “unwanted and non-consensual physical contact and statements” on the day she was elected President by the House of Deputies at last year’s General Convention. After a year, the disciplinary process concluded that a “pastoral response,” not disciplinary action, was required. President Harris made the matter public in a letter to the deputies, asking, “If there is no discipline for well-documented violations, then under what circumstances would discipline be imposed?”

The Living Church, to its credit, has given extensive coverage to the issue. In one article, it presented a chronology of Bishop Konieczny’s process, which shows the lengthy and convoluted steps it takes from the reception of a complaint to its adjudication, not to mention this one’s specific oddities. Kirk Petersen concludes, “The church would be better served by a clearer understanding of the facts.”

One can perhaps better understand my retired colleague’s statement.

My own experience of Title IV began in 2001 when I became the first elected Bishop in charge of the Convocation of Episcopal (then American) Churches in Europe. I was immediately confronted with a disciplinary case, which I was able to resolve by turning the priest over to his bishop, as the accused was not part of Europe’s clergy. However, I realized then that the convocation had no way to administer discipline to clergy that was fair and open, because the canon we operate under (I.15) had no provision then for a process. After long and difficult negotiations, we finally got the canon revised by General Convention, and the convocation now has its own disciplinary board.

I am not trained as a lawyer, but the responsibility as bishop and my experience of getting a system set up does give me enough insight to claim that we need to revise Title IV completely. I voted against the proposed revision at the conventions of 2003 and 2006, and finally decided not to vote against it in 2009 because the process of revision had already been so long.

It has to be said that Episcopalians do not much like discipline. A seminary professor told me about a senior seminarian who, after a lesson on canon law, angrily exclaimed that he would never have sought ordination if he’d known that the rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer were canonically enforceable. For the longest time, diocesan conventions created their own courts, and attempts to create canons for the whole church were stoutly resisted in the name of local rights. To (over)simplify a complex history, a number of lawsuits starting in 1991 led to the Church Insurance Company demanding a better system. A new Title IV was created following the model of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and it became effective in 1996. Almost immediately, people wanted something less bluntly adversarial, and so the model of discipline for lawyers and doctors was selected for what was finally adopted in 2009.

Today’s Title IV has two underlying concerns. The first and second appear in IV.1: “The Church and each Diocese shall support their members in their life in Christ and seek to resolve conflicts by promoting healing, repentance, forgiveness, restitution, justice, amendment of life and reconciliation among all involved or affected.” Essentially, justice and reconciliation.

The quandary is how to create a system of discipline for bishops, priests, and deacons that gives justice to those who have been harmed, restrains clergy from violating our oaths of ordination “to conform to the doctrine, discipline, and worship” of the church, and that also effects reconciliation. To do this, following the American Bar Association model (as I understand it), an inquisitorial system was created.

American courts are adversarial. The prosecution accuses, the defense defends, and the judge (and jury) decide who has won. In an inquisitorial system, such as France’s, there is first an official who takes in a complaint, investigates, and decides whether it has merit, building a dossier along the way, which may or may not be presented to a prosecutor. In Title IV this is the Intake Officer. This officer can accept or dismiss the complaint. There are several steps and “panels” to go through before a court (“hearing panel”) adjudicates the complaint, should it get that far. It must be said that Americans’ lack of familiarity with inquisitorial legal systems is an immediate barrier to understanding the process and therefore the outcome of a Title IV complaint.

I do not think this process encourages reconciliation, despite everyone’s best efforts. Disciplinary processes of any kind, if they are effective, discipline. Where we are now with the presenting case is that both the President of the House of Deputies and the Presiding Bishop have referred the issue to the Standing Commission on Structure, Governance, Constitution, and Canons to examine ways to improve Title IV.

The focus is on the discipline of bishops, because of the perception that bishops get off more lightly than priests or deacons — a perception I firmly believe is false (though it certainly used to be true). But the whole system is at fault. While the canons remain the same, penalties vary for identical offenses. What constitutes “conduct unbecoming a member of the clergy,” unless specified, is vague. In one diocese, a priest may be deposed for an affair with a parishioner; in another, the priest might be suspended or fired and given a severance package.

A much simpler system of clergy discipline is necessary, restoring the bishop’s role with appropriate guardrails for transparency and fairness. At the same time, a “pastoral response team” should become a fixture in every diocese, created by canon, whose task would be to work separately toward reconciliation and healing of all concerned. In light of today’s financial crisis, moreover, many dioceses are hard-pressed to follow through with the myriad steps of Title IV.

Finally, the whole term of “ecclesiastical authority” needs rethinking. It is vague. When there is a diocesan bishop, or coadjutor or suffragan in charge (if there is no diocesan), that person is “the ecclesiastical authority.” When there is no bishop, the canons prescribe the diocese’s standing committee to fulfill that function “for all purposes declared by the General Convention.”[1] But at least once, a General Convention appointed a committee to arrive at a definition of those purposes, without result.[2]

I am absolutely in favor of the tradition of diocesan standing committees as a check upon the bishop’s powers, as opposed to practices in other provinces of the Anglican Communion. However, standing committees are inherently unable to function in place of a bishop, though the very title “ecclesiastical authority” would seem to grant those powers, apart from a sacramental role.

The total lack of any canonical accountability for the work of standing committees when there is no bishop exercising authority has led to serious situations, the current case of the standing committee of the Diocese of Haiti being the most egregious. There are other examples of overstepping boundaries besides that one.

At General Convention 2003, a proposed revision of Title IV suggested that lay officers be held accountable along with clergy. If I recall correctly, the potential for lawsuits led the House of Bishops to delete that section. However, standing committees should be accountable for their conduct, not only as a potential “ecclesiastical authority,” but also for the authority that they routinely exercise. In Canon III.12.13, “Dissolution of the Pastoral Relation between a Bishop and a Diocese,” while there is the possibility of terminating a Bishop’s ministry, no provision addresses the standing committee’s possible responsibility for the failure of the relationship.

The canon is the result of the unwillingness of a former diocesan bishop of the Diocese of Pennsylvania to resign, despite a unanimous vote in 2010 of the House of Bishops that he do so. A provision in the House of Bishops Rules of Order for such action could replace Canon III.12.13, if for some reason holding standing committees to account be deemed unfeasible. But that issue would still be very much in need of a remedy.

I submit that the present moment is propitious for revising Title IV completely, and competently holding accountable all those called to exercise “ecclesiastical authority.”

The Rt. Rev. Pierre W. Whalon served as Bishop in charge of the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe from 2001 to 2019.

[1] Article IV, Constitution & Canons of the General Convention 2022.

[2] See Journal of the General Convention of 1841, page 13. According to White & Dykman, nothing came of it.

We will have to learn the lessons of the moment we are going through, to question the development model to which our world has been committed for decades and which is revealing its flaws in broad daylight, to question the weaknesses of our democracies. (My translation)

President Donald Trump of the United States, in a press conference on March 29, 2020, addressed what he thinks needs to happen:

We have to get our businesses open, we have to get the planes flying, we have to get everything going, we have to get even the cruise ships, I mean we have to get those cruise ships moving along.

The question arises, what should life look like after the COVID-19 pandemic dies down? Like some three billion other fellow humans, I find myself at this time of writing under government order to self-confine in order to stop the spread of the virus. Confinement’s “silver lining” gives us each an opportunity to do some soul-searching about who we are really, and what we hope will happen when we can finally get out and about.

Reading The Way of Saint Benedict by Rowan Williams has made me realize that there is something similar to this time in my life and the time that a monk or nun spends in a cell. As the former Archbishop of Canterbury points out, monastic life holds together two basic aspects of Christian life that seem contradictory: solitude in which to see through one’s fantasies and focus on God’s call on one’s life; and communion with others in service.

President Trump stated in that press conference that the resulting job losses will significantly increase rates of suicide and drug use. As isolation, job loss, increased insecurity of necessities and financial means drag on over weeks and months, and school closings force parents and caregivers to mind children indoors without let-up, it is easy to see that Trump’s prediction is being borne out, alas.

There have been huge expressions of solidarity across the world. This great swell of good will has been extremely gratifying to witness. I am extremely impressed with the many ways that congregations and clergy have very rapidly developed to still be church when communal worship is not possible.

The return to “normalcy” that the President so ardently wants, however, will not happen. Economic disruptions will be far-ranging. Social trauma such as that experienced when being prevented from properly burying one’s dead will leave real psychological scars, as will the collateral damage of family members and friends committing suicide or succumbing to drug addiction, not to mention domestic violence.

Macron’s call to “learn the lessons of the moment we are going through, to question the development model to which our world has been committed for decades and which is revealing its flaws in broad daylight, to question the weaknesses of our democracies,” is what needs to be done in general, not just in the aftermath of the pandemic. Growing economic inequality and divisive political rhetoric were all very present before COVID-19 emerged to torment humanity.

Every economy in human history has had in fact two different but interlocking economies, the basic consumer economy of buying and selling goods and services, and the productive economy that provides those goods and service. Since the invention of money, a third basic facet of any economy emerged: the redistributive or financial function. What needs to be changed now is how globalization has disastrously re-jiggered the relations among the three. Finance itself has become an industry, “producing” money that has fabulously enriched a narrow class of people.

If humanity is entering a new cycle of decline — and it would seem so — then reversing that movement requires a full-throated diagnosis of the nature of decline.

The Canadian theologian Bernard Lonergan’s theory of history includes such an understanding of the difficulty of reversing decline:

A civilization in decline digs its own grave with a relentless consistency. It cannot be argued out of its self-destructive ways, for argument has a theoretical major premise, theoretical premises are asked to conform to matters of fact, and the facts in the situation produced by decline more and more are the absurdities that proceed from inattention, oversight, unreasonableness and irresponsibility.

One does not have to look far today for absurd “facts.” The comedian Steven Colbert invented the word “truthiness” for the impulse to take for fact that which one wishes to be true based on some intuition or emotion, and not to allow real facts to change one’s opinion.

In this time of plague, people are rediscovering Albert Camus, especially his book La Peste (The Plague). Camus’ atheism was an indictment of the absurdity of human life, but with a glimmer that humanity could do better.

That “glimmer” was not based on trust that technology and science will rescue us. It is rather that the human heart desires better, wants to know, feels we can improve, senses that there is more to life than eating, drinking, and making merry. What frustrates the basic desire of the heart today, among other things, is what Pope Francis calls the “technocratic paradigm” in his major encyclical Laudato Sì’. The technocratic paradigm rests upon our illusion that God uses the creation willy-nilly for divine purposes and therefore, like God, so can we. The Cain and Abel story points to the murderous consequences of acting on that delusion. In terms of the encyclical, however, the sinful interpretation of 1:28: “subdue the earth and rule over [all the animals]” is responsible. Humans created in the image of God (1:27) are to be the stewards of creation on behalf of the Creator, not its despotic masters.

Given the huge drops in crime and pollution during our internment, it might occur to an alien race to confine us permanently to our homes! But the present danger also offers a way forward. Lonergan’s analysis of decline points to another reality as well, which is that the love of God creates all that is, and that love cannot be thwarted in the long run. If we attempt to determine what should come after the pandemic without it, we must be pessimistic. “Inattention, oversight, unreasonableness and irresponsibility” are in the long term just too overwhelming for humans on our own.

Creating a better reality than before can only come from people whose hearts and minds are firmly fixed on reality: God loves us all and offers each of a sacrificial way forward through the cross of Jesus Christ. The cross is God’s Word on evil — not “natural evil” that is the result of universal processes, like infectious viruses or hurricanes, but human evil and its seemingly infinite repercussions. And his resurrection is God’s ultimate “yes” to us in all of our inattention, oversight, unreasonableness and irresponsibility.

Anything that we Christians do that does not grow out of our conviction that God loves the whole creation, including us humans in our subordinate role as wayward stewards, falls under judgment. This does not mean that we shall magically overcome inattention, stupidity, false judgments, and wrong actions. However, it does mean that at every level, individual, communal, national, global, we do indeed have the grace to change: to become and act as Christ.

Every one of us is involved in improving the lot of all. Surely this has come home to us in novel ways, as we navigate food shopping and getting medical care during confinement. How to move forward once I, once we, can move again?

People around the world should be asking what kind of capitalism is necessary? In the abstract, capitalism remains the most efficient way to distribute goods and services, but in practice this twisted, superbly wasteful capitalism is responsible not only for unacceptable inequalities but also the inexorable rise of more and more calamitous climate change. Finance should not rule the world: it should serve. While production of goods will require fewer workers, due to automation, concentrating means of production in a few regions has led to all kinds of other imbalances. There is no need to be fatalistic: we can change. We can strive to ensure that all economic actors are as free as possible to add to it and benefit from it, because only in this way can there be real flourishing for all.

Now we should spend time daily praying and meditating on Scripture. For if decline is the fruit of “inattention, oversight, unreasonableness and irresponsibility,” then flourishing must require that we pay attention, gather and weigh information, ask questions, entertain insights, imagine concepts, marshal our evidence, and figure out how to tell fact from fancy. And once we are on to a truth, we are responsible for communicating it to others. For what is true, what is good, is always concrete, not an abstraction.

The churches as institutions are currently facing challenges not unlike those faced in times past under enemy occupation: we are unable to meet physically, and our finances are in a very precarious position. In other words, we have been here before, and we survived. I believe the after-COVID period will in fact see a new growth in the churches, as those who found ways to reach out beyond themselves as well as maintain contact with their flocks will attract new people seeking fresh and authentic communities of followers of Jesus.

From the local to the global, each of us is being enlisted and empowered by the love of God in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit into freshly transformed, transformational communities of faith — for the life of the world.

Whether we Christians act on that reality will determine what is actually going to happen after COVID-19.

The Rt. Rev. Pierre Whalon was bishop in charge of the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe from 2001 to 2019.