On the Integrity of Life
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picture, image, or metaphor for our whole being as moral and mortal crea-tures, conscience is both the longing for integrity, a desired crystallization of the soul, and a claim, a demand, to respect and enhance the integration of goods in other forms of life. Insofar as “God” is the integrity of life – that is,
the power of life towards its ever-renewed integration of power and life sensed and held as ultimately important and real – then conscience is a sense of the divine, a capacity for what we can call or name God. Of course, this sense, this capacity, can be vague, fleeting, and distorted; human life is riddled
with fallibility and fault. As Christian thinkers have always known, the fact of conscience is insufficient to ground valid reflection on God. The claim of conscience does not ing of conscience, that is, the longing for and sense of the claim of the integ-cause a relation to the divine. Yet the sense and long-
rity of life, arises through the dimensions of life conjointly with the sense and longing for the divine. It must then be constantly tested to ensure that this is a rcan now ight sense, a true longing, a valid idea of the divine. That test, we see, is provided by the whole constellation of ideas found in the
notion of the integrity of life. Insofar as that is correct, then we formulate the imperative of responsibility rightly to reflect the human capacity for God in and through the sense and claim of conscience: in all actions and relations, respect and enhance the integrity of life before God. That
imperative, we submit, clarifies what is ultimately important and real and also the way in which theological humanism.the human capacity for God can be conceived within
In this chapter we have completed the first step of this book by outlining theological humanism aimed at the integrity of life. Next, we will show The Next Step
what light theological humanism sheds on various domains of existence in response to the twin challenges of overhumanization and hypertheism.