The Logic of Christian Humanism
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humanity rooted in human knowing or freedom or love. God is free to encounter or to abandon human beings. The human relation to the divine, accordingly, is marked by a range of emotions from fear to love, and, addi-tionally, the demand for obedience to God’s law. The norm for right think-
ing about God must be nothing else than God’s free encounter with human beings. Valid theological reflection begins with God’s revelation and moves humanward: it follows the story of God’s self-disclosure and the human encounters with this divine Other.
is found or lost in God (as mystics might say). God is the light of the world; God is the One in whom all are found. In this way “man discovers when he discovers God; he discovers something that is identical with himself A different way to God is through a journey of discovery in which the self himself
although it transcends him infinitely, something from which he is estranged, but from which he never has been and never can be separated.”gious struggle is to examine and penetrate the self in order to discover that “we live, move, and have our being in God,” as St. Paul says at Mars Hill. (^10) The reli-
claims to the Greeks in Athens in front of the Areopagus about the God whom they worship but do not know. Paul continues:Paul’s speech is in some respects paradigmatic of this outlook. He pro-
From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him – though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being,’ as even some of our own poets have
In this respect, God is the presupposition of any valid knowledge of God precisely because God is the presupposition of the self, not far from said. (Acts 17:26–28)
each one of us. One does not try to reason towards a God who is a stranger and must be encountered to be known, as in biblical personalism. Theology articulates the insight that God is the first and foremost truth of all reality, including the depth of the self. How the self is conceived to exist in God
differs among theologians who hold this outlook, ranging from mystical darkness where the soul is lost in God to highly rational and metaphysical systems in which reality is conceived as modes of God’s being. Still, the jour-ney is towards the insight or thought that God is in all things and all things
are in God. The test or norm for properly theological claims is accordingly that God is only validly conceived when grasped as the presupposition and condition of every truth, including true self-knowledge.