The Shape of Theological Humanism
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effaces and distorts the life of others and the right intentionality of one’s own life. Human sin consists in a closure of the self on itself in which to God and others are denied and the intentionality of life to its highest good thwarted. relations
what is the good served and sought in this vision of life? The highest good for Christian humanists, we submit, is the union of happiness and holiness. What does that mean? Here too we find Christian humanism to be a kind If the double love-command is to guide right human relations and choices,
of third-way thinking. Much ancient Greek and Roman thought conceived of the human highest good in terms of Thinkers debated what defines well-being. Is it (for instance) the lack of pain and the increase of pleasure, as Epicureans thought? Is happiness the con-eudaimonia, happiness or well-being.
templation of the good, as Plato and Aristotle in different ways taught? Stoics sought self-sufficiency and tranquility in the face of forces and suffering beyond human control. Conversely, Jewish and Christian thinkers shaped by the biblical traditions thought about the highest good in terms of righteous-
ness, holiness, and obedience to God. The human good is a delight in the law or lived under the law of love, as St. Paul says. Even today, there are thinkers who insist that “morality” is mainly about fulfilling duties of justice, whereas others remain focused on flourishing or well-being, happiness.
human existence must be the harmony of duty and well-being, holiness and happiness. Often, this truth is grasped in its denial, much like the denial of God by the fool revealed to Anselm a way to think rightly about God. The The intuition of Christian third-way thinking is that the highest good of
idea that the wicked should flourish or that the virtuous should suffer unjustly strikes one as wrong, hardly the highest good. The death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gunned down in Memphis while struggling for racial justice, violates moral sensibilities. The image of Job, to use a biblical
example, who suffers even though he is the most righteous of men, gives rise to his own protest before God.together even if in this life they usually do not. The innocent wrongly suffer in this world. (^18) Somehow happiness and virtue ought to go
the “Anselmic principle” to practical existence. Can I conceive a good greater than my sheer happiness? Yes, I can conceive of a condition in which genuine well-being is characterized by justice and virtue and holiness in me In a sense, this norm of right choices and actions is just the application of
and in all people. Can I conceive of a good greater than a universal rule of jus-tice and vira state of happiness, well-being or flourishing. What is more, one could work the logic the other way around. Can any idea of God be truly unsurpassable tue and holiness? Yes, I can think the idea of that reality also being