Religion and the Human Future An Essay on Theological Humanism

The Humanist Imagination^2

One common feature between much Western humanistic and theological thought has been the belief that what is morally good and right is bound to the flourishing of human persons and human communities. As Immanuel Kant put it, humanity is an end in itself; this insight is the foundation for a

universal categorical imperative to orient freedom. Similarly, the Shorter Catechismchief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” God is the highest good; God is the end of human flourishing. In the Middle Ages Thomas (1647), hardly a humanistic manifesto, insisted “man’s Westminster

Aquinas argued that the highest human good is to know God in and through God’s own being, a perfection of love that is also the perfection of human being. Today, thinkers like the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas have championed a “humanism of the other man.” (^1) Most Western
thought, religious and otherwise, has had a decidedly anthropocentric and so humanistic flavor, even if conceptions of the human and of the human good have differed. After all, what Kant or Protestant divines or Aquinas or Levinas meant by the human good differs in substance and grounding.
Yet human well-being and cultivation seems intrinsic to what is morally good and right.as obvious. The pitch of violence by human beings against human beings is The affirmation of human dignity and worth has not always been taken 2
as old as civilization itself. The twentieth century was distinctly horrific and a weary chronicle of wars, gas chambers, killing fields, and rape camps. The horror continues in the twenty-first century.gives rise to kinds of anti-humanism. In the nineteenth century Friedrich (^3) The brutality of human beings
Nietzsche had bluntly stated, “the world is beautiful, but has a disease called Man.” Twentieth-century thinkers were more ambiguous in their criticism
9781405155267_4_002.indd 239781405155267_4_002.indd 23© Religion and the Human Future: An Essay on Theological Humanism2008 David E. Klemm and William Schweiker^. ISBN: 978-1-405^ -15526-7David E. Klemm and William Schweiker 5/2/2008 8:01:22 PM5/2/2008 8:01:22 PM