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not only militancy but also certainty in their propositional beliefs. They both seek and find hard-and-fast answers to life’s most profound Theological humanism, by contrast, changes the terms of the debate. The extreme tendencies of hypertheism and overhumanization share questions.
It offers a stance and orientation of passionate and open questioning toward the integrity of life. The mystery of life’s integrity eludes com-plete human grasp. Humility must replace certainty in the religions. True religion is the willingness to live in the open, in freedom, guided by one’s
own religious symbols and rites, without the need to reduce ambiguity to certainty.measure themselves by the idea of the integrity of life, we are calling for a By calling on the religions, including the secular opponents of religion, to
revolution in thinking. We advocate freedom is long overdue. within religion. The revolution
As we know, for centuries, theologians have worked out concepts for thinking about human experiences of the divine. It is time for the reli-A Revolution in Thought
gions to catch up with theology. Theological humanism poses the integ-rity of life as the source of a sense of ultimacy that is both theological and humanistic. The integrity of life is definable by specifying its basic within dynamically related wholes. Obviously, people will disagree and structure
have disputes not only about the content of this ideal, but also about how to apply it to real situations. We need this debate, and we need from all sides, both theological and humanistic. This debate will have scientific, political, aesthetic, economic, educational, and religious compo-participation
nents to it, as people reflect on what the integrity of life means in any particular real situation. In fact, we have been engaged in this many-sided debate throughout part two of this book.Our view of religion and the human future does not draw its warrants for
humanistic claims exclusively from specific religious resources. That would be religious humanism, as we called it before. Religion is also not just a natural phenomenon explainable by theories of evolutionary biology. Those positions, we have seen above, often value religion in promoting social
coherence and personal wholeness, but judge theistic modes of religious thinking false, scientifically speaking. These positions are forms of reli-gious theology or, as we called it, “speculative” religious humanism. Theological naturalism and continue in current terms the enterprise of natural