Hermeneutics
Frederick G. Lawrence has made the claim that Lonergan's work may be seen as the culmination of the postmodern hermeneutic revolution begun by Heidegger. Heidegger replaced Husserl's phenomenology of pure perception with his own linguistic phenomenology. Gadamer worked out this seminal insight into his philosophical hermeneutics. According to Lawrence, however, Heidegger, and in a lesser way Gadamer, remained under the influence of Kant when they refused to take seriously the possibility of grace and redemption. Lawrence makes the observation that Heidegger - influenced also by Augustine's inability to work out a theoretical distinction between grace and freedom - conflated finitude and fallenness in his account of the human being. 'Sin' is therefore absorbed into 'fallenness,' and fallenness is simply part of the human condition. Lonergan, building on the 'theorem of the supernatural' achieved in medieval times, as well as the distinction between grace and freedom worked out by Thomas Aquinas, is able to remove all the brackets and return to the truly concrete, with his unique synthesis of 'Jerusalem and Athens.'
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