Path to Religious Conversion
Philosophy of Mind
Professor Rende
Path to Religious Conversion
Lonergan describes “Religious Conversion” as surrender, not as an action but as a motivation for falling wholly in love, giving everything up including one’s soul, to love God without reservations, qualifications, hesitations, and limitations. Since we are talking about how to love God recall back to Faith where Lonergan states how we come to love God.
” All other values are placed in the light and the shadow of transcendent value, which is supreme and incomparable and which links itself to all other values to transform, magnify, and glorify them. Thus the originating value is not human intelligence and responsibility but divine light and love, and the terminal value is not the human good we can bring about but the whole universe. Human development is not limited to skills and virtues but extends to holiness. The power of God’s love brings forth a new energy and efficacy in all goodness. The limit of human expectation ceases to be the grave. To conceive God as originating value and the world as terminal value implies that God too is self-transcending and that the world is the fruit of his self-transcendence, the expression and manifestation of his benevolence and beneficence, his glory. As the excellence of the son is the glory of his father, so too the excellence of mankind is the glory of God. To say that God created the world for his glory is to say that he created it not for his sake but for ours.16 He made us in his image, for our authenticity consists in being like him, in self-transcending, in being origins of value, in true love. Without faith, without the eye of love, the world is too evil for God to be good, for a good God to exist. But faith recognizes that God grants men their freedom that he wills them to be persons and not just his automata, that he calls them to the higher authenticity that overcomes evil with good. So faith is linked with human progress and it has to meet the
Professor Rende
Path to Religious Conversion
Lonergan describes “Religious Conversion” as surrender, not as an action but as a motivation for falling wholly in love, giving everything up including one’s soul, to love God without reservations, qualifications, hesitations, and limitations. Since we are talking about how to love God recall back to Faith where Lonergan states how we come to love God.
” All other values are placed in the light and the shadow of transcendent value, which is supreme and incomparable and which links itself to all other values to transform, magnify, and glorify them. Thus the originating value is not human intelligence and responsibility but divine light and love, and the terminal value is not the human good we can bring about but the whole universe. Human development is not limited to skills and virtues but extends to holiness. The power of God’s love brings forth a new energy and efficacy in all goodness. The limit of human expectation ceases to be the grave. To conceive God as originating value and the world as terminal value implies that God too is self-transcending and that the world is the fruit of his self-transcendence, the expression and manifestation of his benevolence and beneficence, his glory. As the excellence of the son is the glory of his father, so too the excellence of mankind is the glory of God. To say that God created the world for his glory is to say that he created it not for his sake but for ours.16 He made us in his image, for our authenticity consists in being like him, in self-transcending, in being origins of value, in true love. Without faith, without the eye of love, the world is too evil for God to be good, for a good God to exist. But faith recognizes that God grants men their freedom that he wills them to be persons and not just his automata, that he calls them to the higher authenticity that overcomes evil with good. So faith is linked with human progress and it has to meet the