In The Ambiguity of Being: Lonergan and the Problems of the Supernatural, Jonathan R. Heaps offers a truly visionary retrieval and extension of Bernard Lonergan’s theological contributions. Rather than excavating the import of a bite-sized intimation in Lonergan’s vast corpus, Heaps applies Lonergan’s theological and philosophical virtuosity to tackle the fundamental Christian conundrum at the intersection of God’s grace and human freedom. The volume could function as a primer in Christian philosophical theology for graduate students or, for a Lonergan aficionado and lifelong learner like myself, as a demonstration of what Lonergan accomplished in his early Thomistic studies and his later masterpieces to advance the impact of theology upon questions of the modern era. In any case, the book is not for the faint of heart, but absolutely worth the effort to follow the pathways of Heaps’s arguments and, ultimately, his sketch of a theological hermeneutics of culture(s).

Borrowing Heaps’s own words: “This book aims to retrieve (and, in later chapters, extend) Lonergan’s identification, explication, and application of the theorem [of the supernatural] to the relatively recent controversy around the natural and the supernatural” (1). The controversy around nature and supernature is, of course, the problem of grace and freedom, which presents itself in the lives of Christians as one of human agency versus—or in view of—God’s effective will. This controversy has become particularly vexing with the emergence of a scientific worldview and, as Heaps shows, is no longer solved by medieval metaphysical positions. His parsimonious description of the Western shift to modernity hints at his fuller explanation of the fundamental shift in worldview that rendered the medieval solution to the supernatural foundational yet obsolete: “The challenge posed to sixteenth-century physics by Thomas’s thirteenth-century metaphysics presaged a wider fissure to form between the medieval speculative mentality and modern ideals of scientific knowledge” (4). Thus, his objective in this text is to show how the Thomistic problem of the supernatural must be recognized and addressed for our time as a pair of intertwined questions.

Heaps approaches the problematic by transposing the medieval problem of the supernatural (How does God’s grace/action make a difference?) into the modern questions of: “What difference is God making in human freedom?” and “What difference is God making in the products of human freedom?” Along the way, he parses the philosophical-theological developments in twentieth-century Catholic anglophone and francophone domains so carefully and minutely that these chapters could in themselves be a graduate course on the development of Catholic thought in modernity. Likewise, throughout the latter half of the text, Heaps masterfully describes and applies Lonergan’s position on meaning as constitutive of human actions, particularly the human-engendered enterprises of communities and cultures. These sections advance his thesis while modeling for contemporary scholars the power of Lonergan’s methodological contributions, here the threefold theological movement of progress-decline-redemption in human history.

Heaps’s invitation to other scholars in the final chapter—to help develop a theological hermeneutics of culture(s) “that would investigate what human action has concretely meant in its cooperation with God” (211)—is both compelling and inspiring. His argument here persuades readers of the real significance of the supernatural (God’s grace) making a difference in our human actions and in the world we cocreate. The seminal insight concerns human meaning as constitutive of human action, which means that our actions matter to form and reveal who we are, and matter to others in how we live out the compassion of God in our time and place. Heaps has not left us to grapple alone with this challenge. Rather, as a final contribution, The Ambiguity of Being guides our exploration of human meaning by recapitulating Lonergan’s methodology and systematically applying it for our times, so that we can authentically live our Christian faith today.