Ideas and Challenges
19
God.” The purpose of Christian humanism, as we explore in chapter 4, is to show how beliefs about God’s incarnation as a human being in Jesus Christ provide the backing and the aim of an authentically humanistic out-look. Because God became human in Jesus Christ, Christian faith, the
believer holds, is then the truest expression of a humanistic view of the world. As Thomas Merton once wrote, “True Christian humanism is the full flowering of the theology of the Incarnation.”of this outlook, and every similar kind of religious humanism, remain (^18) The grounds
within the humanismspiritual qualities (or supposedly universal structures of human existence), The second form of religious humanism can be called. 20 confines of a specific religion. In this form, the humanistic impulse focuses on common^19 spiritual or speculative
abstracted from the particularities of religious traditions. This form of reli-gious humanism comprises a family or spectrum of approaches with a shared conviction that whereas religions are many (as are languages or other dimensions of culture), the human spirit is one and universal. They
all seek the common spiritual unity that underlies the diversity of human religions and cultures. Spiritual or speculative humanists tend to believe people can become too attached to their inherited religions and fail to see what is common in the human spiritual quest. The future of humanity,
they would say, depends on plumbing the depths of the human spirit and articulating its shared principles, practices, and common longings. In contrast to the humanists of organized religions, the spiritual-speculative humanists find the necessary and sufficient conditions for being truly
humanistic in analyzing and interpreting human being as such and never solely in the convictions of one specific religion.bent. The spiritualist takes the religions of the world as repositories of Humanists of this kind may have either a spiritualistic or speculative
profound insights and experiences. In spite of differences, each religion in its core comprehends the heart of human being in relation to the divine.Their aim is to identify the common structures and universal forms under-lying every religion. The spiritualist sees that the modern person is privi- (^21)
leged to behold the big picture of religious diversity within a globalized world and is no longer confined within the boundaries of one religion. They define the spiritual task of modernity as the effort to distill into sys-tematic form the human wisdom that abides in different degrees within all
religions.human being in relation to what is of ultimate importance and reality in the great philosophical systems, and not so much among the historical Speculative-leaning religious humanists look for universal truths about^22