The Shape of Theological Humanism
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there are many ways to define religion. Religion is belief in a god. Religion is the “cult of the invisible.” Religion has also been defined as a illusion. And so on. There are also endless disputes about what actually counts as a religion. For the purposes of this essay, we say that what makes a myth, psychological
ritual, practice, community, or set of beliefs “religious” is that it provides ways for human beings to orient existence in relation to what is deemed to have unsurpassable importance On this account, theism is a specific kind of rand reality amid intractable problems of life.eligion found in many societies
that conceives of the sacred, or ultimate, or what is unsurpassably important and real as a “God” (world and is unsurpassably important – most perfect, most holy. There are types of theism. Traditional monotheism conceives of God as the one uncon-theos). A god, a deity, is a being who acts in and on the
ditioned agent upon whom all reality is dependent. In polytheism there are many gods, often ordered in some pantheon, like the Greek gods. Pantheism conceives of the world itself as divine, as a deity.The rise of the modern Western world, we are told, was in many ways
the death of a theistic conception of reality and purpose for human life. For many modern thinkers, truth or goodness or beauty were no longer found in the The meaning of truth, goodness, and beauty shifted humanward. With this conformity of mind or action or art to what was “real” or “divine.” (^2)
shift religion and “theism” seemed to wane. As popularly understood, Italian Renaissance “humanists” of various stripes proclaimed that human beings, and humans alone, are ends-in-themselves, possessing intrinsic worth or supreme importance. (^3) All other forms of life (natural or divine)
are appraised in relation to human well-being. Further, while the natural world might function by its own “laws,” human beings, not God, are agents, the makers of history. As Tzvetan Todorov notes, humanism “refers to the doctrines according to which man is the point of departure and the
point of reference for human action. These doctrines are ‘anthropocentric’ doctrines, just as others are theocentric, and still others put nature or tradi-tion in this central place.”humanism is the free, productive, and creative exercise of human capacities (^4) The end or good of human life for traditional
for the sake of human f lourishing. “The distinctive feature of modernity,” Todorov continues, “is constitutive of humanism: man nature or God) decides his fate. In addition, it implies that the ultimate end of these acts is a human being, not suprahuman entities (God, goodness, alone (and not only
justice) or infrahuman ones (pleasures, money, power).”point. Theism holds that the right orientation of human life is to to the will of God(s). The divine, whether one or many, is conceived as an There are basic contrasts between a theistic and a humanistic stand-^5 conform