Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

e. 'Critical Realism'
FAITH AND THE HISTORICAL JESUS §6.3
'Critical Realism' is a term brought to NT study by Ben Meyer 40 from his long
engagement with the works of Bernard Lonergan. It sums up Lonergan's theory
of knowledge: 'knowing' is not just seeing; rather, it is a conjunction of experience,
understanding, and judging. 41 'Critical realism' expresses the synthesis
that he wants to maintain over against the antitheses of naive realism on the one
hand and idealism on the other, against the former's overemphasis on the objectivity
of that which is known and the latter's overemphasis on the subjectivity of
the knowing. 42 In applying this epistemology to history, Lonergan shows just
how complex is the process between data and fact. 43 'Critical realism' is formulated
particularly against the 'naive realism' of the old historical positivism,
against what Lonergan calls 'the principle of the empty head', 44 that is, the idea
'that objectivity is arrived at through the subtraction of subjectivity', 'objectivity
in the world of immediacy simple-mindedly applied to the world mediated by
meaning'. 45 Meyer formulates Lonergan's argument thus: 'The hallmark of critical
realism is its insistence on the empirical (data), the intelligent (questioning
and answering), the rational (the grasp of evidence as sufficient or insufficient,
the personal act of commitment) as — all of them together — entering into true
judgment'. 46 Wright has taken up Meyer's concerns in turn and proposes his own
form of 'critical realism':
This is a way of describing the process of 'knowing' that acknowledges the
reality of the thing known, as something other than the knower (hence 'real-
40. B. F. Meyer, Critical Realism and the New Testament (Princeton Theological Monographs
17; Allison Park: Pickwick, 1989); also Reality and Illusion in New Testament Scholarship:
A Primer in Critical Realist Hermeneutics (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1994). Meyer's
debt to Lonergan was already evident in his Aims 16-18.
41. Most compactly expressed in B. Lonergan, 'Cognitional Structure', Collection: Papers
by Bernard Lonergan (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2 1988) 205-21. 'The criteria of objectivity
are not just the criteria of ocular vision; they are the compounded criteria of experiencing,
of understanding, of judging, and of believing. The reality known is not just looked at; it is
given in experience, organized and extrapolated by understanding, posited by judgment and belief
(Method in Theology [London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1972] 238).
42. For the wider use of the term in philosophy see C. F. Delaney, 'Critical Realism', in
R. Audi, ed., The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
1995) 169-70; A. Collier, 'Critical Realism', Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1998)
2.720-22 ('Critical realism holds there is more to "what is" than "what is known" ...').
43. Method chs. 8-9.
44. As in Method 157, 204, 233.
45. Meyer, Reality and Illusion 109, 135.
46. Meyer, Reality and Illusion 142, and see earlier 68-70.
110