Living with Other People: An Introduction to Christian Ethics Based on Bernard Lonergan

Jay Newman is a professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph. He
is the author of Competition in Religious Life, Religion vs. Television:
Competitors in Cultural Context, and Inauthentic Culture and Its
Philosophical Critics.

The author, a theological ethicist at Saint Paul University in Ottawa,
awkwardly combines two projects here. He aims at providing readers
interested in a Christian understanding of ethics with basic tools for
moral self-understanding and deliberation, and he simultaneously seeks
to make accessible to the general public Bernard Lonergan’s basic
insights into the nature of “moral knowing.” Lonergan, a Canadian
Jesuit who died in 1984, was an eclectic, often abstruse, and sometimes
discerning theologian and epistemologist. Lonergan’s contributions to
Christian ethics tend to be rather abstract, and though Melchin may be
right in maintaining that Lonergan sheds considerable light on the
process of moral knowing, Melchin does not successfully establish that
Lonergan’s insights in moral epistemology lead directly to a superior
method for addressing the concretely practical issues normally
associated with Christian ethics. Melchin does try, if perhaps
half-heartedly; while the first half of his book deals in a highly
abstract manner with the themes of moral responsibility, moral and
cultural “horizons,” the social structure of moral knowledge, and
fundamental moral obligation, the second half endeavors to show how
Christian faith matters in moral deliberation, particularly with respect
to the themes of God’s justice, the dignity of persons, the common
good, and the preferential option for the poor.

Lonergan was often subtle to the point of being evasive, and the reader
may wonder whether Melchin’s grandiloquent expression and theological
narrowness and arbitrariness at key points in the discussion would have
elicited the master’s approval. The book’s bibliography and indeed
the book as a whole are apt to be far more useful to dedicated Lonergan
scholars than to readers seeking a genuine introduction to Christian
ethics. As an introductory text, the book has a study guide at the end
that poses such elementary questions as, “What are your values?” and
“Can you identify conversion experiences in your life?” Whatever its
appeal on this level, the volume may ultimately seem to be more
concerned with drawing undergraduates into the Lonergan camp than with
helping earnest inquirers to conceive as clearly as possible the
relationship between their Christian commitment and rational morality.