The Shape of Theological Humanism
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community is a “cruelly hazardous” thing. All too easily, human lives are formed around distorted ideals and values that mutilate one’s life and the lives of others. Overhumanization and hypertheism are the main distortions in our age. The endless inflation and extension of human power to dominate
other forms of life and even control the future threatens us in many ways. The fanatical demand that human beings submit to the “God” of one com-munity as the only true active reality in the world feeds violence and stupid-ity around the globe. The hazard of life is that it might be fashioned on false
ideas and ideals; the hazard is cruel because human beings cannot escape the labor of bringing wholeness to life but are always fallible in their perception of what is true and good.This hazard and its cruelty were captured in Christian thought in rather
stark terms by St. Augustine in his of human judgments, he writes:Ignorance is unavoidable – and yet the exigencies of human society make City of God. Reflecting on the complexity
judgment also unavoidable. Here we have what I call the wretchedness of man’s situation ... How much more mature reflection it shows, how much more worthy of a human being it is when a man acknowledges this necessity as a mark of human wretchedness, when he hates that necessity in his own action and when, if he has the wisdom of devotion, he cries out to God,
Human wretchedness – to use an out-of-fashion term – is that human lives are always marked by ignorance and yet also the need to make judg-“Deliver me from my necessities.”^3
ments. The necessity is “wretched” when it becomes clear that human beings long to escape the ignorance and limitations that mark finitude and yet can never do so. We face the cruel hazard of having to make judgments about forming our souls. The idea of the integrity of life is meant to pro-
vide some response to the cruel hazard and the nagging wretchedness of human life.task of each and every human being. It is the labor of human freedom. Part of Buber’s point was to insist that the struggle to become whole is the
As mortal beings we are bound to the dust of the earth even if we are also free. The challenge of human life is to rise to one’s capacities rather than to fall into brutishness. The power of rising or falling is human, mortal free-dom. It is what makes us changeable human beings “things in-between.”
The idea of the integrity of freedom and also the kind of self-labor, the formation of self in relation to others, which has always been the adventure of human existence.life must then tell us something about human