The Task of Theological Humanism
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are “things in between,” for a theological humanist. We exist between those realities that bespeak the dictate of conscience within the depths of our lives and the awareness that this claim, permission, and mandate to respect and enhance the integrity of life transcends its messengers and means. It is as if a
heavenly deity speaks a word of command and freedom. To violate con-science, to pit oneself against the integrity of life, is thereby to fall as a human being; to respond to the dictate of conscience is to rise to the height of human existence. Between the falling and the rising is the space and task
of human existence, beings made good but changeable. Anyone who has been grasped by this experience thereby has reason to adopt theological humanism as a way to understand and orient life.There is one more reason to note for being a theological humanist. If
anything characterizes the present situation it is a terrible loss in our spiritual lexicon, that is, the symbols, stories, metaphors, practices, and images needed to make sense of and orient human life meaningfully and richly. One of the evils of overhumanization is the wholesale rejection of religious resources to
make sense of life and thereby a kind of flattening of human existence. One of the evils of hypertheism is to reduce the symbolic treasures of a religious tradition to wooden dogmas and so nothing more than tests for obedience. On all sides, people are increasingly trying to live with impoverished sym-
bolic and imaginary forms. Little wonder that there is so much despair and emptiness at the very moment when the global media system endlessly gen-erates ever new pictures and images of our endangered age. Many are open but uncommitted to any orienting ideals and values. Some thinkers see the
global era as “flat.”global dynamics might indeed be flat, but human existence transpires within a sense of the complexity of goods that permeate life and also the dictate of conscience. How then to speak about the depth and scope of being human?^2 Theological humanism thinks otherwise. The world of
What words ought we to use?using some of the images, metaphors, forms of thought and expressions developed within the long, long legacies of Western humanism and also In our essay we have tried to answer those questions by excavating and
the ChrRicoeur’s term), we have unabashedly sought critically to reclaim resources of the imagination in order to articulate the depth of conscience and the scope of human transcendence. This is why a theological humanist lives istian tradition. As “third men,” as believing Gentiles (to recall Paul
through a religious tradition. Religious communities enable people to culti-vate their sensibilities for the divine or ultimate reality and other forms of life through participation in foundational myths, intellectual traditions, rituals, particular experiences, artistic forms and styles, and institutional structures.