Dust that Breathes E-Book

William Schweiker

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 530

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

In this insightful and look at the practical challenges and possibilities for Christian life in the global age, Schweiker investigates Christianity's current relevance and discusses how the life of faith can be oriented. * Explores the big religious themes of modern life, including religious identity in global times, the role of conscience, integrity, and versions of religious humanism * Written by an author who is internationally recognized as one of the world's leading theologians * Draws on the work of some prominent contemporary philosophers and theologians to clarify the nature of faith * Unique in its appreciation of the ambiguity of religion - in its representations of the highest human achievements as well as the very worst of human actions - using a balanced and engaged approach to discusses contentious theological and intellectual issues

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Table of Contents

Half title page

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Preface

Introduction

Part I: Topics

Chapter 1 The Specter of Religious Identity

1

2

3

4

5

6

Chapter 2 Humanizing Religion

1

2

3

4

5

Chapter 3 Conscience and Spiritual Conviction

1

2

3

4

5

6

Chapter 4 Metaphors of the Soul

1

2

3

4

Chapter 5 Voices of Neohumanism

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Chapter 6 The Christ of Christian Humanism

1

2

3

4

5

Part II: Thinkers

Chapter 7 Human Only Human?

1

2

3

4

5

6

Chapter 8 Goodness and Fictive Persons

1

2

3

4

5

Chapter 9 Reverence for Life – The Spirit of Life

1

2

3

4

5

6

Chapter 10 Sovereign Expressions of Life

1

2

3

4

5

Chapter 11 Ecstatic Humanism

1

2

3

4

5

6

Chapter 12 On Christian and Theological Humanism

1

2

3

4

5

6

Index

Dust that Breathes

This edition first published 2010

© 2010 William Schweiker

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

Registered Office

John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom

Editorial Offices

350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA

9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK

The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell.

The right of William Schweiker to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schweiker, William.

 Dust that breathes : Christian faith and the new humanisms William Schweiker.

p. cm.

 Includes bibliographical references and index.

 ISBN 978-1-4443-3535-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)

 eISBN 978-1-4443-9280-7 (ebk)

 1. Christianity and religious humanism. I. Title.

 BR128.H8.S39 2001

 261.2–dc22

2010011932

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

To friends and colleagues who labor in the world of thought for the sake of the humane expression of religious convictions

Preface

Like every book, this one is the result of much thought and a lot of labor. And like other books, the pages that follow have etched into them the life of their author, even when the etching is seemingly concealed. How could it be otherwise? Only human beings write “books” and in the writing convey a temperament, sensibility, a bent of mind. I make no excuses about this fact. But what does it mean? A few words by way of a preface might be helpful to convey a bent of mind reflected in the chapters that follow.

This book charts engagements with various thinkers and topics that have in the course of time helped to solidify a specific theological and ethical outlook. I have always been deeply interested in and concerned about the range of human cultural activities. I came to theology from English literature rather than the study of religion or philosophy, and while I grew up in the church I have never been especially focused on the Church somehow removed from other human realities. Some of my most profound memories are of the destructive use of religious beliefs by those who, in the name of Christ, shamed and harmed people my family loved and deeply admired. Some believers obviously insist that purity of dogma is what matters most. As a youth I could never figure out how doctrine should trump love or justice. On that point, I was and I remain a Methodist. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, ardently believed that a life without love is loss, but to be subject to error in our opinions, our doctrines, is the price of being mortal, finite. We cannot escape fallibility; we can responsibly labor for justice and for love.

During my ministerial training I was fortunate enough to spend a year as a World Methodist Intern at Wesley’s Chapel, the mother church of Methodism. Interns were selected to help renew the ministry and re-open the Chapel which had been closed for an extensive renovation. Along with the other interns and the pastoral staff, I engaged in mission work, did the daily offices, and tried to carry on something like what the Wesley brothers called the Holiness Club. I also found myself heading to the University of London, working with the poor in the East End, making friends with folks in the city’s library system who had little interest in the Church. By temperament and piety, I have always been inside and outside the religious community.

In the writing of the essays and articles that resulted in this book I have tried to name the temperament and piety of the insider/outsider. During my graduate studies at the University of Chicago, where I now teach, my professors introduced me, in very different ways, to the idea of “hermeneutics,” a form of thought interested in human understanding through the arts of interpretation. A “hermeneut,” to use the odd term, is someone who moves between the known and the obscure, present and past texts, the ambiguous and the relatively clear for the sake of understanding the wide and wild range of religious, cultural, and social activities. The term is taken from the Greek “Hermes,” the messenger between the gods and human beings. I liked the term and the form of thinking it designates. It fit me well. It is how I specify the demands of theological and ethical work in a complex and dynamic global world, especially given my experience working in London. I adopted the name. I have tried to practice hermeneutical reflection ever since, including in this book. Hermeneuts cross boundaries and inhabit many “worlds.”1 Thinking is an adventure; it is a journey of discovery aimed at understanding. I hope the reader of the book gets this sense of adventure.

Over the last decade or so I have come to realize that while “hermeneutics” is an apt description of a way of thinking, it does not capture completely the temperament and piety that I struggle to live. Another term was needed in order to capture that kind of life. Much to my surprise, I came to realize that historically the best term for this outlook was Christian humanism, a legacy steeped in a love of learning, the examination of life, a practical take on Christian faith, and open to truth wherever it can be found. The Christian humanist is a hermeneutical thinker, to be sure. But her or his focus is wider since it is not only about understanding but also about the complex and joyous challenge of rightly orienting human existence. As the reader will also come to see, I have decided that a decisive revision is needed within Christian humanism in order to speak to our global age. What we have to interpret and the lives we have to orient are more complex, more diverse, and more global than previously imagined by the legacy of Christian humanism.

In light of the needed revision, I now designate the temperament and kind of piety that I try to inhabit as Christian theological humanism or, in a more cumbersome way, as theological humanism drawn from Christian sources. This is meant to get at a temperament and piety steeped in my specific religious tradition but lived on the global scene. Like it or not, we have to move between social, cultural, and even religious communities. More precisely, we inhabit many “worlds” and our identities are complex. In this light, one could be a theological humanist drawn from Jewish or Hindu or Islamic or Buddhist sources. In an age when too many religious and secular people remain ardently dedicated to drawing sharp distinctions between the insider and the outsider – building walls around their precious identities in order to protect themselves from global flows and global interactions – some of us live in-between, some of us relish the movement between social spaces, some of us work for complex identities. We do so in the service of the integrity of life, as I call it. This book is written from the stance of the believing insider/outsider – the Christian theological humanist – in the hope of helping others with a similar temperament and piety to claim the outlook for themselves and to live it freely and hopefully in our global times.

Most of the chapters that follow originated as lectures, essays, or requests for chapters. I am thankful to be able to collect them in this volume and so I want to express my deep gratitude for the invitations to speak and to write. This book is also the result of untold hours of conversation with colleagues, friends, and students. I cannot name them all, but a few are important to note. I especially thank Svend Andersen, Maria Antonaccio, Harlan Beckley, Don S. Browning, Aimee Chor, Kelton Cobb, Kristine Culp, John de Gruchy, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Michael Fishbane, Franklin I. Gamwell, Carl-Henric Grenholm, W. David Hall, Philip Jackson, David Jaspers, David E. Klemm, Paul Mendes-Flohr, Lewis Mudge, Thomas Ogletree, Wendy Olmstead, Richard Rosengarten, Andreas Schüle, Max Stackhouse, Per Sundman, Klaus Tanner, Günter Thomas, Dale Wright, Michael Welker, and Glenn Whitehouse. Over the last several years, the topics, problems, and thinkers engaged in this book have appeared in classes and seminars. I have learned deeply from students. I thank them for their insight and labor. I also want to thank my assistants for their considerable help with the production of the volume: Elizabeth Sweeny Block and Bruce Rittenhouse. Finally, I thank my son, Paul, and Maria for care of life and mind.

WS

Chicago, Illinois

Note

1 Interestingly enough, Thomas Aquinas, in Summa Theologiae 1a q.91 art. 1, notes that human beings are “little worlds” because other parts of “reality” are found in human existence.

Introduction

1

In one creation story of the Bible, God is pictured as stooping down, sweeping together a pile of dust, and breathing life into it. A human being is created. It is a quaint story, perhaps. Consider its meaning within the texture of Christian thought.1

Adam: the name means “earth” or “dust” creature. Symbolically, human beings are dust that breathes. Made of the earth, “humus,” human beings are also enlivened by “spirit,” the breath of life. Christians are taught to remember these realities of human existence. On Ash Wednesday, the traditional beginning of the season of Lent, ashes are imposed on one’s forehead in the sign of the Cross with these words: “Remember that thou art dust and to dust thou shall return.” And yet, Christians also believe in the resurrection of the body. While human beings are embodied, finite, creatures – beings of dust – we are dust that breathes. To be human is to participate in the life-giving power of God’s spirit. The glory and the fragility of life – breath and yet also dust – are permanent features of existence within which persons and communities must navigate their lives. The hope of Christian faith is for new life, a renewal of spirit that enlivens our dust. Can these ancient symbolic and conceptual resources speak anew in the global age? Can they provide insight into our lives and how we can and ought to orient the life of faith? This book aims to reclaim resources for current thought and life.

Dust that Breathes: the title signals several things about the book. Some of its meaning indicates forces that shape human life around the world. The title is also about specific challenges and possibilities open for Christian thought and life. The chapters that follow try to get at these forces, challenges, and possibilities from the perspective of a Christianly shaped vision of human existence.

I live in Chicago and have the joy – and agony – of jogging along the city’s beautiful lake front. Away from my home, through the tree-lined neighborhood streets of Hyde Park and towards the lake, eventually I reach the Point and then trudge along the path northward to the city until my legs and lungs fail and I turn to make the trip back home. Chicago is called the windy city. Runners and joggers know this well. We have to brace ourselves against the fierce wind coming off Lake Michigan that at times stops one from running. Along the lake to turn into the wind is to experience a deep and profound sense of the limits on our lives from forces beyond us – the natural environment, structures of the urban world, and other forces that can bring life to a standstill. In the chapters that follow I try to confront, analyze, and respond to the forces, the winds, which rush upon people of faith and limit our lives. These forces remind us that while we breathe, while human beings are enlivened spirit, we are also dust. There are forces that resist our striving. Realism is demanded in our religious and moral lives and just as much in theological and ethical thinking about our lives.2

The title of this book has other meanings as well. One of my deepest joys as a young man was to learn to sail. My family never owned a sailboat, but thanks to friends I was able to learn to sail. There is a rush of power that sweeps up from within the sails when skimming across the water and hiking-out to keep the boat pitched just right. One comes about, and so turns into the wind. There is resistance. The boat trembles and rockets forward in a fold of air. The tell-tails laced to the sails whip back against the canvas and flicker like flames. Their darting signals the direction of the wind. To sail is to feel power within strain; it is to know that sometimes we are sustained by forces that we cannot master but which we are nevertheless challenged to navigate. These challenges embolden resolve. This experience is also part of the chapters that follow. Each of them tries to discern the spiritual and moral challenges at work in our world and how we might navigate them responsibly in ways that invigorate and embolden human existence. We need to learn to navigate the age in which we live. That is one moral and religious task facing people of faith around the world.

There is a third and most obvious meaning of the title of this book, at least for Christian readers. The image of “breath” is deep within the Christian imagination. In the creation story, God’s spirit moves over the face of the deep. The rhythm of human breathing is a sign of spirit. Christ teaches that the spirit blows where it will, just as the wind. At Pentecost, the birth of the Church, the Spirit enters the place where the apostles had gathered like the rushing of the wind. The image of wind symbolically presents the vitality and movement of the divine spirit in creation, in teaching, in the gathering of the church and thus in new and transformed life. To think about human existence as “dust that breathes” is, accordingly, to think in terms of how the divine spirit is alive, bringing forth renewed life and even new forms of life. The chapters that follow explore the possibilities now open for human existence, and, accordingly, how we can and should live responsibly within those possibilities.

These meanings of the title of this book – forces, challenges to navigate, divine spirit and the possibilities for new life gathered together in an image of human beings as “dust that breathes” – run through the chapters that follow. These meanings denote the structures, the dynamics, that give form to current human life, or so I claim. Yet these forces, challenges, and possibilities gather within a specific dynamic afoot in our time. It is a surprising one, actually. This global dynamic resists Christian faith and yet is also a challenge that can invigorate faith, if rightly navigated. This dynamic is a possibility for the divine and human spirits in our age. And what is that dynamic? It is new and diverse expressions of human­ism. How can Christian thinking about human beings as “dust that breathes” engage the new humanisms? That is the founding question of this book.

My suggestion about “humanism” as a global dynamic that is a force, challenge, and also a possibility will seem odd to some readers. Many Christians think in terms of an absolute opposition between Christian faith and humanism. Strident secular humanists agree. They cannot imagine any connection between religious faith and humanistic convictions. A lot of people, religious and secular, have been taught that humanism is a relic of the past. They believe that humanism is basically at odds with current sensibilities, especially ecological ones. The idea is that belief in a distinctive human dignity is somehow demeaning to non-human life. That is not the case from a Christian perspective. Whatever else Christian faith means, it is a way of life rooted in the conviction that God was in Christ, a full human being, reconciling the world to God’s self. The divine does not despise the human lot. Given this truth, Christians can and must always and everywhere think about what it means to be and to live as a human being. Of course, many forms of humanism have rightly passed into obscurity, especially ones that celebrate unbridled human power and the absolute worth of human beings and no other form of life. Nevertheless, around the world and in many cultures and traditions there are stirrings for a kind of humanism that conceives of human responsibility within and not against other forms of life. Faithful people have to decide how to interpret, understand, and live their religious conviction in an exceedingly com­plex global age.3 New humanisms pose the possibility and challenge of freedom within religion. The purpose of this book is to outline a vision of Christian faith and freedom that can navigate forces and possibilities for new life.

2

Christian Faith and the New Humanisms: by the subtitle of the book I mean to show that the chapters that follow try to map some of the current discussion about humanism and to engage a variety of positions from a specific account of Christian life. The book builds on some of my earlier work, and especially a volume recently co-authored with my friend and colleague, David E. Klemm.4 The chapters of the present book were originally written in response to requests for a lecture or an essay. The origin of the chapters clarifies why I have engaged specific thinkers and topics linked together through a concern to survey and engage the relation between Christian faith and new humanisms. I have made revisions in the essays for the sake of coherence in the book. Hopefully there is some wisdom in collecting them within one volume. Perhaps it is a vice to believe that one’s thoughts bear repeating. Sometimes one must sin boldly (as Martin Luther would put it). The theologian’s responsibility is to speak as clearly as possible about the religious and moral questions of the age.

Throughout the book the reader will encounter a vision of Christian faith and life that runs decidedly against the winds of contemporary theology and ethics. It does so in several ways. A good deal of current Christian thought, especially among North American Protestants, is markedly particularistic, that is, it is concerned with the particular character of Christian thought and practice and the supposedly unique reality of the Church in the world. These thinkers draw on many ideas to develop their account of the Christian life. They focus on the formation of Christian virtues in light of the narrative character of human understanding and the story of God’s action in Christ. Often, they are stridently against modernity and “The Enlightenment.” They insist on obedience to Christian authorities. Finally, Christian particularists are suspicious of any demand that Christians show the truth of their convictions within the rough and tumble of public discourse. These positions have thankfully taught us a lot about the distinctive shape of the Christian life and also the problem with overly general, even universalistic, claims on behalf of a Christian vision of the moral life. That being said, this book presents a decidedly different account of Christian existence. This account is focused on responsibility and the cosmopolitan conscience, insistent about the interpretive character of human understanding in its many forms, appreciative of modern advances in thought and life while mindful of their problems and ambiguities, ardent in its defense of religious and political freedom, and one that insists on the public task of Christian thinking in the global age. In this light, one could see theological humanism as a new form of liberal theology or a version of Christian realism, although I do not think those labels capture in detail the outlook of theological humanism.5 Besides, I fear that “liberal theology” is so grossly misunderstood and misrepresented that it is best to drop the term. And while I develop a type of moral realism in this book and others, its resources are not limited just to Christian sources.

Labels do not matter as much as outlook. What theological humanism shares with those pastors, theologians, and believers who stand in the lineage of “liberal” theology is the conviction that the truth of faith must be stated in terms that people can understand and actually live, and, further, that there is a proper liberty, freedom, within the religious life in terms of how one understands and lives out Christian commitments. But this freedom is not the fancy of the isolated individual driven by his or her own desires and greed; this freedom is also not a mindless relativism where there is no truth but simple preferences. Despite the many and proper criticisms of those faulty ideas of freedom – ideas too obvious in current social life – there is another and true conception of freedom rooted in the Christian message. Here “freedom” designates a way of living faithfully amid the actual realities that sustain and also limit contemporary existence. Nowadays we cannot honestly live or think as if the Enlightenment did not happen; Christians cannot sincerely act as if the massive advances of the sciences are simply not true; we cannot pretend that the teachings of the Church remain unchanged from the dawn of time. Christians cannot really claim that it is possible to inscribe social reality – the reality of other peoples, other faiths, other civilizations – within the flow of the biblical story. If they claim to do so, it is not obvious what that would mean for actual life. We can only live in the age we are given to live and that is why the task of navigating forces, challenges, and possibilities is the permanent res­ponsibility of Christians. That is the freedom of responsibility. And that responsibility has been the mighty cause of liberal theology. Seen in this way, St Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, as well as many others, were, in fact, “liberals.” They sought to speak truthfully to their age for the sake of life within the Spirit. That remains the task today.

Admittedly the voices of Christian particularism have a certain attraction in an uncertain and complex age. A good deal of the attraction, it seems, is that they paint a clear picture of Christian thought and life that relieves believers of the burden of current reality. Social life is neatly boxed into the “Church,” where Christians are to live in peace, and the “World,” which is violence and war. The task of the Church is to be the Church. The background of this picture is a rather grim account of modern thought and life and also a deep longing somehow to dwell in a pre- or post- or anti-modern world. This kind of clarity can bring consolation to believers and certainly it gives them confidence about the virtues of their faith. That is the strength of this kind of theology. In other words, these theologians speak powerfully to the anxiety of Christians in wealthy and increasingly secularized nations about the meaning and relevance of faith. By the same token, they risk playing into the need among people in complex cultures to have some unique “identity.” Theology becomes a kind of sociology or politics and faith is understood in terms of identity formation. But Christian faith is not really about Christian identity. It is about God’s action in Christ and the power of new life. In my judgment, the real task of theology is to grasp and be grasped by the daring insights of Christian faith into human beings as “dust that breathes.”

That is not all. The major weakness of church-centered theology in a particularist mode is that it is unrealistic either about goodness found outside of the Church or about the forms of distortion within the Church. And in this respect, as noted above, theological humanism is a version of what used to be called “Christian realism,” and in a number of ways. First, it is a bit silly to contend that everything outside of the “church” is a realm of sin and death and war and so to deny the obvious good will, insight, intelligence, creativity, and peace of other cultures and religions, many of whom – if we are honest – are more peaceful than Christian communities. Christians cannot live in the Church sealed off from the world. “Church” and “World” are complex, interrelated, and ambiguous realities of forces, challenges, and possibilities. Yet believers are supposed to denounce the world and retreat into the church while their daily lives rely on developments in modern science, technology, medicine, social existence, communication, and education (to name a few) that characterize our global age. Theological and ethical thinking should not force faithful people into hypocrisy. What is more, the dismissal of the “world” is a dismissal and scorn for the very reality Christ came to reconcile unto God. In this light, the advance of knowledge, freedom, and equality around the world is something Christians should celebrate and seek to further. Christians are called to live into the reign of God and not to long to return to a pre-modern social order on the assumption that it can be re-adopted as though time has not marched on. We are to walk in the ways that lead to life, as scripture puts it. For Christians, the future is about being fully alive with God and with others. No period of history, no philosophical outlook, and no figure of thought can claim to signify without remainder the reality of the living God.

The argument of this book is cast against prevailing winds in Christian theology in yet another important way that carries forward insights of Christian realism. If anything characterizes the various stripes of current theology and Christian ethics it is that human problems are primarily social ones and, what is more, theology itself must be seen as a form of sociology. Christian morals are conventional; they are a reflection of custom and inherited Church authority. Redemption is liberation from oppressive structures or a transformation of character through one’s resocialization into the life of the Church. The human “fall” is not turning from God or from our “true” nature; it is not about a struggle within human life between the “flesh” and the “spirit,” as St Paul calls it. Rather, the “fall” and the struggle take place between human beings and their institutions. Everywhere we look, the claim is that life would be better if we had better institutions; oppression would vanish from the earth if only we joined the right community (e.g. the Church). The idea, as Irving Babbitt noted, has its roots in the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and “has tended not only to sub­stitute sociology for theology, but to discredit the older dualism [i.e., spirit/flesh] in any form whatsoever.”6

I do not agree with most of Babbitt’s ethical and religious position. I do believe he is right on this point. Any Christian realist would as well, like Reinhold Niebuhr and others. In the rush to avoid invidious dualisms of “body and spirit” or “mind and body,” dualisms that are said to be non-biblical and somehow the result of Greek thought and Western patriarchy, there has been a wholesale embrace of Rousseau’s main idea that the human problem is between persons and institutions, whether those institutions are various “isms” (sexism, racism, colonialism, etc.) or whether the conflict is between Church and world. Now, I too want to champion in every way possible the liberation of human beings from forces of oppression. And I have no desire to deny the depth of human sociality. We are social and relational creatures through and through, as the various chapters constantly attest. Yet in the pages that follow one will find the dogged insistence that we confront with honesty and humility the problem of our inmost being, the struggle for integrity in our lives and communities. This is not only a social problem. I seek to articulate and to examine the complexities of human existence from a theological perspective for the sake of orienting social and personal life realistically and responsibly. The human problem is deeper and more intractable than current forms of Christian theology and ethics admit. It is inside of each of us as well as in the institutions that shape, sustain, but also corrupt human existence. This conviction has drawn me to engage certain themes and thinkers in the chapters of the book. It is what renders the outlook humanistic and realistic and not just a new version of theological liberalism.

We can only think in the age in which we actually live even if we strive and long for new life. I have tried to think honestly and responsibly in the pages that follow. It has meant exploring Christian faith from an angle of vision called theological humanism. I understand that this way of thinking runs headlong against many of the winds of current theology in terms of the kinds of claims one can make, how to show the truth of Christian convictions, an understanding of the relation of person and community, and also in matters of moral theory. The aim of the book is to make a case for this outlook in the hope of convincing others to inhabit Christian convictions freely as theological humanists and therefore dedicated to what respects and enhances the integrity of life.

3

The main theme of this book is the relation between Christian convictions about human existence and the widespread debate about humanism. I enter this debate because of a shared concern held by humanists: for the sake of orienting life rightly, we must explore and assess the fault, tragedy, folly but also hope and aspiration inscribed in human existence. I want to clarify the idea of theological humanism by setting it in context. This means two things that are important to have in mind when reading this book. First, various themes important for my account of theological humanism will arise in the course of the chapters, ideas about conscience, responsibility, the integrity of life, faith, transcendence, and so on. These themes are not treated at just one point in the book. The same is true of humanism. I do not devote a chapter to its meaning and history; that would be better done in a single volume on its own. What this book does is to allow a distinctive Christian moral and religious sensibility to come to expression in and through engaging themes and thinkers.

Of course, this strategy of thought is important in itself. Come what may, human thought about practical matters arises within the ongoing conversation and debate with others for the sake of understanding and orienting existence. While some philosophers and theologians write their books by presenting clean and direct lines of argument, my thought is circuitous, engaged, and multidimensional. I try to think along with and yet beyond other thinkers, religious and not, based on a belief about the entanglement of thought and life. I am aware that this makes my arguments “difficult,” as it is put by my friends and critics. The theologian Bernard Meland supposedly said that “we live deeper than we think.” I agree. Theological and ethical thinking is always trying to get as deep as we actually live; it aims to bring to expression and to understand the structures and dynamics of lived reality for the sake of orienting faithful and responsible existence. That is the kind of thinking practiced in this book. I invite the reader to join in this adventure.

The second thing to bear in mind when reading this book is that there will be, by the nature of the case, some repetition. This is partly because the various chapters were originally developed in response to specific requests for an essay or lecture that circled around the topic of Christian conviction and humanism. It is also the case because, as the product of one man’s mind, every chapter is going to reflect my concerns. But there is a deeper reason for repetition. Just as thinking is bound to the dynamics of human living, so also theological and ethical reflection can never grasp reality in toto. Mortals that we are, the human mind can never get everything in focus at once, to have a God’s eye perspective on any topic, let alone reality itself. We only see in part and then darkly. We inhabit various and limited perspectives, and thus are forced to use our imaginations to fill out what we cannot completely grasp. One should never confuse one’s perspective with the whole of things, as if we somehow got it all. We should never confuse our best and most faithful attempts to speak of the living God with the living God. Whatever we can say about human existence will be limited, partial. Yet this fact about the inherent limits on human thought also means, on my account, that we can attain a more complete understanding, a better grasp of any topic or question, when we see it from multiple perspectives and dimensions. By engaging various thinkers and topics, I am, accordingly, trying my best to assess perspectives on the question of Christian convictions about human existence and the new humanisms in order to understand forces, challenges, and possibilities and thereby to present a more adequate response to them. This fact about my style of argument demands patience on the reader’s part. Given the limitations of the human mind, I cannot imagine another way to carry out the complex task of theological and ethical reflection.

Theological humanism is then a stance and orientation in religious thinking and life. The term is meant to designate an approach often neglected in strident times when the advocates of kinds of orthodoxy vie for power both inside the academy and within religious communities. Precisely because spiritual truths are held by human beings, they are vulnerable to human fallibilities and therefore must be interpreted in terms of their bearing on human and non-human life. Theological humanism denotes a deep religiosity, but one that gains critical distance from one’s home tradition, which in my case is Christian faith. A theological humanist finds within the insight of others, even those who deny one’s own faith, a human connection that ought not to be wantonly violated but rather treasured. Yet because theological humanists insist that one’s beliefs and practices must be tested by their impact on life, there is normative weight to the task. Not everything that appears under the guise of religion counts as spiritual insight. Not all claims or actions or practices of a religious community, one’s own or that of others, can be or must be endorsed. There are judgments to be made. Over the last years thinkers in various religious traditions have been pursuing something like theological humanism. There is not much at stake in a name, in any case. What matters is the stance and orientation, the bent of heart and mind, which characterizes an approach to religious and moral thinking.

There are differences among those who are thinking about theological humanism.7 For my part, I have tried to plumb and compare decidedly religious symbols, texts, and practices in order to grasp the ways they display a lived structure to reality and intimate how responsibly to orient life. I do this in the chapters that follow. Others have pursued different ways into theological humanism and expressed different concerns and sensibilities. Whether or not a theological humanist takes an ethical focus, a more speculative one, works with non-religious thinkers and texts to grasp their religious significance, examines resources in non-Western and even non-theistic traditions, or seeks to understand the import of the arts, is a matter of temperament and expertise. I hope my reader recognizes herself or himself in the range of work that falls within theological humanism and joins this venture.

Theological humanism is, further, a hermeneutical enterprise insofar as religious disclosures traverse realms of culture and thus human meanings. These disclosures of meaning demand to be interpreted – the work of hermeneutics – because they are not self-evident revelations of God nor are they so odd and strange that they fail to make any connection to the everyday job of human living. For a theological humanist of my stripe, the demand for interpretation arises partly because one understands the religions as cultural realities, but also because there is no reason to limit disclosers of truth to the explicit texts, symbols, and practices of historic religions. Almost everyone has some religious longings, and so one can be less concerned with structures of authority and the need for obedience to those in the know. Religious meanings can even appear in the self-overturning of explicit authoritative religious forms. As an orientation in thought and life, theological humanism insists on interpreting human spiritual longings. This is why, again, I have engaged the various thinkers: because each of them seeks to probe and understand our condition, morally and religiously.

One needs to grasp the force of these moves. My strategy of interpretation is, in part, to use religious resources diagnostically, that is, to deploy religious ideas, concepts, symbols, texts, and the like to decode meanings in what are supposedly non-religious realms of life. This is to suggest that a purely non-religious hermeneutics is finally unable to grasp the full texture of human experience or cultural practices. Yet the tactic is also, dialectically, to apprehend distinctively religious orientations anticipated or announced in cultural realms that can thereby fund creative religious and theological thinking and revision.8 Where this differs from previous kinds of theological reflection on culture is at least twofold: one makes no assumption that this venture is necessarily undertaken within the context of Christian theology, and, further, its criterion of validity is linked to a concern for the integrity of human and even non-human life. Theological humanism is a decidedly religious orientation and not a secular one; it likewise wrestles with human foibles and flourishing, rather than trying just to bolster the authorities of some tradition.

4

With some sense of the aim of the book and its distinctive outlook, what about its organization? I have structured the chapters under two headings: topics and thinkers. This order gives structure to the book even though it does not have the strict coherence that characterizes the usual single volume. A reader can dip into this chapter or that chapter without fear of missing the larger point. And like a piece of music, themes and variations appear and reappear throughout the volume in order to provide the fullness and complexity of the whole. In this respect, the organization under the headings “Topics” and “Thinkers” too easily gives the impression of a neat distinction between the book’s parts. So, beware: the organization of the chapters is not what matters so much as the themes and their variations that appear in the context of engaging different topics and thinkers.

Part I, “Topics,” explores various forces that sweep around the world. The chapters of Part I move from the general to the more specific: they show how a Christian theological humanist, as I call myself, draws on religious resources in order to address shared human challenges and concerns. More specifically, three big topics are treated in Part I: religious identity in our global times (Chapters 1–2), the idea of conscience as a means to articulate the most basic mode of moral existence (Chapters 3–4), and current versions of humanism, including Christian humanism (Chapters 5–6).

Part II, “Thinkers,” engages some prominent contemporary philosophers and theologians on the relation between faith and humanism. However, these chapters are not simply studies of the specific thinker. They are written in order to clarify theological humanism by developing and contrasting it with other types of humanism on some shared point of reflection. The movement of this part of the book is also from the general question of humanism to specifically Christian works. Part II also has some rough and ready divisions of labor, much like Part I of the book does. Chapters 7–8 engage two current philosophers important in recasting the question of humanism, specifically Paul Ricoeur and Iris Murdoch. This is followed, in Chapters 9–10, with reflections on the theme of the integrity of life important for theological humanism. Conscience is crucial for thinking about the human mode of moral being (Chapters 3–4). The integrity of life is the norm and measure of conscience and so for theological humanism as well. Recent work by Jürgen Moltmann and also the Danish philosopher and theologian Kund Løgstrup is helpful in clarifying the topic of “life,” theologically and ethically. Finally, Part II, in a way parallel to Part I, returns to the theme of “Christian humanism” with discussion of Paul Tillich’s idea of ecstatic humanism (Chapter 11) and John W. de Gruchy’s recent work on Christian humanism (Chapter 12). There are then connections between the parts of the book – themes and their variations that weave through the book – even if I have not been slavish in trying to fit everything into a neat and tidy box. The topics and thinkers, themes and variations, hang together within a capacious outlook.

This book seeks to make a simple point, really. Despite what some might think, it is possible to articulate the meaning, significance, and truth of a Christian outlook on life that does not involve special pleading – saying that Christian faith cannot be tested by other ways of knowing and living – or triumphalism, the grisly idea that only Christians know the truth and the whole truth. On the contrary, this book outlines an approach to Christian existence fully engaged with shared human concerns and yet meant to show the force and truth of convictions for meeting the practical challenges and possibilities of our age. In ways often not seen, God’s Spirit is at work in the world empowering persons and communities to respect and enhance the integrity of life. The divine breath enlivens dust.

Notes

1 Christians are not the only ones to make these kinds of claims. Similar ideas can be found in other cultures and traditions. For instance, Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic philosopher and Roman Emperor, notes in his Mediations: “A little flesh, a little breath, and Reason to rule all – that is myself.” So the point is not the uniqueness of the Christian vision so much as a distinctively Christian interpretation of finite human being. I aim to clarify that distinctive vision throughout this book, but especially in Chapters 6 and 12, below. See Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. M. Staniforth (New York: Penguin, 1964), Bk II, p. 2.

2 In other works I have explored these matters in terms of kinds of realism important for theological ethics, especially moral realism, as a claim about the nature of norms and the good, and also hermeneutical realism, a theory about the character of human moral understanding. On this point see William Schweiker, Responsibility and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). For a related account see Robin W. Lovin, Christian Realism and the New Realities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Lovin helpfully distinguishes, and relates, political, moral, and theological realism. The point being, for realists, that human beings do not dwell only within a “world” of their making (their “cultures”), but are always interacting with, responding to, forces, challenges, and possibilities beyond their powers that limit, sustain, and further human activity. It is popular nowadays to deny these claims of realism. But the denial does not finally succeed. While we cannot know completely or with certainty all of the reality which limits, sustains, and furthers our existence, we practically confirm it in everything we do – unless, of course, one is lost in delusion.

3 For examples among religious thinkers see Humanity Before God: Contemporary Faces of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Ethics, ed. William Schweiker, Michael A. Johnson, and Kevin Jung (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006). For a non-religious argument see Luc Ferry, Man Made God: The Meaning of Life, trans. D. Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

4 See David E. Klemm and William Schweiker, Religion and the Human Future: An Essay on Theological Humanism (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008).

5 I realize, of course, that Christian Realism is often seen as opposed to the legacy of liberal theology because, as Reinhold Niebuhr would put it, the “liberal” outlook seems too positive in its evaluation of human capacities for genuine moral action and is often inattentive to the forces that resist every attempt to refashion the social order around the ideals of justice and Christian love. While that difference is certainly true, Christian Realists and Liberal theologians seek to make the Christian faith intelligible and meaningful within the conditions of contemporary life and thus seek to respond to shifts in personal and social life rather than adhere to traditional formulations alone. The disagreement arose in terms of how to understand contemporary conditions of life and also the dynamics of personal and social life. In any case, my concern is not with the similarities and differences among these theological movements, but, rather, with what can be learned from them and their critics for the sake of advancing a vision of Christian existence today.

6 Irving Babbitt, “What I Believe” in Irving Babbitt: Representative Writings, ed. George Panichas (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981), p. 5.

7 For a nice summary of the options, see the volume dedicated to theological humanism in the journal Literature and Theology: An International Journal of Religion, Theory and Culture 18:3 (2004).

8 See William Schweiker, Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics: In the Time of Many Worlds (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).

Part I: Topics

Chapter 1

The Specter of Religious Identity

1

In the first two chapters of this book I want to explore the idea of “humanizing religion.” This chapter looks at actual conflicts found in religious life on the global scene, what can be called “the specter of religious identity.” I isolate three responses to it, namely, religious terrorism, moral particularism, and theological humanism. The next chapter steps back in order to take a more general approach to the topic, one that also explores how we ought to think ethically about the life of faith and the relation of theological ethics to other forms of thought. Both chapters introduce the idea of theological humanism, but through different forms of inquiry. The chapters ask: how ought we to inhabit and to think about our religious convictions?

What I mean by the specter of identity is quite simple. People in our global times live with multiple identities. For example, I am male, white, a citizen of the USA, a Protestant Christian, a father, a fan of the Chicago Fire soccer team, a political progressive, and so on. My “identity” is a bundle of more specific ways of identifying who I am, and it is hard to imagine how just one of these attributes (father, Fire fan, Christian) could subsume the rest, so that I would be, for instance, only a Fire fan. Our lives are multidimensional and complex. Is the complexity of actual life a good thing or is it a problem? Maybe my identity should be unified under just one, absolute identity, say, that I am a Christian. Since religious convictions claim to be about what is most real and important, as we explore in the next chapter, it is not surprising that they are usually believed to trump other ways of identifying a community or a person. That is the argument of moral particularists, as we will see. Their contention is that one’s identity should be formed by the beliefs and practices of one particular community, say the Church. Oddly enough, that is also an idea driving a good deal of religious conflict, including religious terrorism.

Theological humanism, conversely, thinks that the complexity of identity is a good thing, morally and religiously. It is a good thing partly because it is crucial for individuals and communities to have the freedom to fashion different kinds of lives, but it is good also because this complexity enables kinds of self-criticism that are important in our age. The freedom for self-criticism is at the root of the human problem inside of every human life. People tend to want to justify themselves, that is, to show that they are right and righteous. Of course, more will be said later about these options in current religious life, but again, the basic question is whether or not the complexity of identity is a problem or a possibility, religiously and morally. Theological humanism thinks it is a possibility; others see it as a problem.

The very idea of “theological humanism” might sound odd, or at least confusing. Tzvetan Todorov has noted that humanists believe that “freedom exists and that it is precious, but at the same time they appreciate the benefit of shared values, life with others, and a self that is held responsible for its action.”1 The point of “theological humanism” is to understand religious identity in relation to commonalities of human existence and the responsibility we have to respect and enhance the integrity of life with and for others. It denotes a third way beyond the usual divide between secular humanistic outlooks and those forms of belief and practice that seek to enfold life into one particular religious community.2 The great Renaissance humanist Petrarch wrote that “theology is a poem, with God for [its] subject.”3 The task of Christian thinking is to understand and orient human existence within a divine poem. When we think about the moral life within a theological perspective, we interpret the divine poem in terms of human needs and meanings. So, I will use religious texts and stories not just to know those stories or somehow to try to live within them alone. These texts are a prism, the spectacles, in and through which one can grasp the actual structures of lived reality.4 By the end of this chapter I hope to have shown the importance of theological humanism as a way of inhabiting religious identities in our age.5

2

It is important to realize that one decisive feature of our global age is that human identities are internally complex. After all, there are German Muslims in Berlin, south Chinese Christians as well as women Hindus who cheer for (say) Italy in the World Cup. The reasons for this complexity are many: migration of people due to war or economic plight, worldwide communication processes and the flow of cultural symbols and commodities that enable people to envision new identities, the global spread of the religions, and so on. Of course, this fact is not new in world history. People have always moved around for various reasons, especially due to the forces of empire, colonization, and war. Nevertheless, a feature of global dynamics is the re-fashioning of traditional identities on a scale not previously seen.6 This fact poses a problem to the religions.

Any religion includes many things: rituals, stories and myths, communal organizations, and ideas for how to live rightly. Religions also claim to be about what is unsurpassably important and real that connects human beings to “sacred” or “divine” powers.7 For Christians the living God revealed by Christ is what is most real, most important. Yet if a religion is about what is of unsurpassable importance and reality, then the complexity of identity would seem to be a problem. It would mean that people’s lives are wrongly formed if they are shaped by what is not unsurpassably important and real, say, around political beliefs, ethnic connections, or sexual identities. On this reasoning, in order to be religious one ought to fashion lives that unify existence under one dominant identity. One should just be a Christian or only a Jew or be prepared to stand before Allah on judgment day as a devout Muslim. In other words, it appears that the religions require that one’s identity be unified under one category that designates what is unsurpassably important and real. My Christian identity must trump my cultural or political or ethnic identity, if I am to be faithful to the living God.

If this is true of religious convictions, then how can one live in a society where the authority that backs one’s identity is not recognized as absolute? How can the religions avoid conflict since my Christian identity must be at odds with, say, your Buddhist identity? The Nobel Prize winner in economics Amartya Sen has wisely written that “many of the conflicts and barbarities in the world are sustained through the illusion of a unique and choiceless identity.” The problem is “the presumption that people can be uniquely categorized based on religion or culture.”8 After 11 September 2001, the rhetoric was extreme, at least in the USA. We heard about “the Islamic Nation” or “international infidels,” the “Christian” West, or the “axis of evil,” terms which classify people under one description. Sen has put his finger on what I am calling the “specter of identity.” Is it a good thing that people’s identities are complex, and, further, how ought we to live with that complexity?

The specter of identity is a clue to the inner-meaning of terrorism used in the name of religion. In the attempt to protect an identity from criticism by others or from being polluted by other ideas and values within the flow of global reflexivity, some religious communities seek to enfold existence within one description and thus one way of reading their community’s divine poem, as it were. They want their identity to become their destiny, a reality about which they have no choice. More precisely, they want to force an either/or choice: either one is a real Christian or a true Buddhist or a genuine Muslim, or one is unfaithful, untrue. This can lead to conflict, even terrorism. And that is because terrorism is a way to form people’s identities through violent means.

In order to get this point about terrorism and identity formation one needs to be clearer about terrorism and, more specifically, “religious terrorism.” As it happens, the Bible is a great text to study in order to understand terrorism. (Texts of the other great religions could also be used, but that is another matter.) Recall two biblical stories as we proceed through the rest of this chapter. They are the lenses, the spectacles, the “divine poem,” in and through which we are trying to get at the lived structure of contemporary reality. They are what the biblical scholar Phyllis Trible once called “texts of terror.”9

The first text is the various plagues God sends upon Egypt in order to free the Israelites from slavery to Pharaoh. God tells Moses that the people need to leave Egypt and go into the desert and worship. Pharaoh sees this request as a threat to his political power and also a religious challenge because he is the head of Egyptian state religion. After locusts, frogs, a bloody Nile and other horrors, God finally slaughters the first-born of Egypt, human and non-human. Then we read (Exod. 12:30–1):

Pharaoh rose in the night, he and all his officials and all the Egyptians; and there was a loud cry in Egypt, for there was not a house without someone dead. Then he summoned Moses and Aaron in the night, and said, “Rise up, go away from my people, both you and the Israelites!”10

Later, in Deuteronomy 26:5–11, the Israelites are told to repeat this story, to see themselves within this divine poem, and so God’s salvation of Israel. This is part of Passover celebration.

The second text is the slaughter of the innocents in Matthew’s Gospel. Remember that King Herod gets wind of the birth of a king of the Jews, and in order to stop this “messiah” he sends his soldiers to slaughter all male children aged 2 years and younger. The prophet Jeremiah is quoted in Matthew’s Gospel about the terror of the people:

A Voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.

But, in fact, Jesus escapes. His father Joseph is warned in a dream and he takes Mary and Jesus down to Egypt. To this day, Christians celebrate this flight of Jesus as part of the Christmas season. What about the slaughtered children?

These texts of terror portray horrific, even genocidal, violence and the death of innocent children that destroys the future of people. They shape the way the people in the stories see reality in and through a clash between political powers, a king or a pharaoh, and divine power. They form identities: the people of Israel versus the Egyptians; those who worship the messiah against Roman might. But, of course, religious terror is not a thing of the past. The reality of terrorism is hard to miss in our current world. It fills the daily newspapers. While usually associated with fanatical Islam, terrorism is found among most of the world’s religions. It is not just the monotheistic religions that are involved in terror, although it is very popular nowadays to think that somehow monotheism is uniquely linked to terror. For instance, Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka who are part of the National Heritage Party have been fighting a war against Hindu and Christian separatists. Buddhist monks, usually thought of as peaceful, have in fact stood by kings and fought wars for centuries.11