The Shape of Theological Humanism
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age to counter forces of disintegration in forms of life amid their complex relations. Yet the same longing testifies to the ever-present sense of life’s struggle to bring itself to wholeness, to integration, in spite of the pull and drag of disintegration. Most people in advanced, late-modern global socie-
ties do not seem to seek would mean in actual human life. There is no obvious reason why we should think that necessity is more important than what is not necessary. The oddity of actual life, in its particularity, vulnerability, and contingency, can surprise necessary being. It is not at all clear what that idea
us with as much wonder and love as what is permanent and necessary. People tend to have a sense for vibrancy, changeability, the aliveness of reality. What is desired, then, is more aliveness. William James, the American philosopher, wrote in his book on religious experience that “life, more life, a larger, richer,
more satisfying life, is, in the last analysis, the end of religion. The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.”simply life, even more life. If that were true then life itself could pass the James is only partly right. What seems of unsurpassable importance is not 20
Anselmic test of perfection; life would be a kind of God. Theological human-ism would thus require pantheism and vitalism, the belief that the world is alive and is divine. That does not seem right, and for the same reason that traditional Christian humanism did not just seek only being or mere necessity,
but some state of perfection that unified those other goods.the goods of life around a commitment to respect and enhance this integrity in others and oneself. What seems to be of unsurpassable importance is the What a theological humanist seeks, we submit, is the right integration of
right and responsible unity of power and life as the integrity of life. There is little wonder why that should be so in an age in which the radical extension of human power through technology threatens all forms of life. It is also an age in which forces of disintegration show that any one form of life cannot
claim ultimate importance unless gathered up and linked to a commitment to respect and enhance the integration of those goods needed for life to be sustained and to flourish. The integrity of life connotes for our time the deepest longing and the most profound claim on human life. That is the
contention of theological humanism.existence and as a capacity for the divine? What images or metaphors and symbols would a theological humanism drawn from Christian sources use to How might one speak of that longing and claim as a felt sense in human
name this “God?” That is to admit that a form of theological humanism aris-ing within other religious resources might be developed through different metaphors and images and might even reject the idea of God itself. The answer to the question was intimated in our discussion of conscience. As a