The Shape of Theological Humanism
40
fails to make a normative claim on human life. It is a short step from the principle of undecidability to overt nihilism. The world is seen and experi-enced as enclosed and constantly reshaped by the shifting power alignments of human will, in which the highest values devalue themselves.
that reduces it neither to undecidability nor to “my” community. Most importantly, we need a way to understand the positive, substantive, and nor-mative meaning of transcendence as it makes a claim on human lives within We need a way to articulate the claim of transcendence on human beings
historical existence. Can we combine the insights of a religious community with the felt demand for universal justice and individual autonomy? “The integrity of life” provides the norm and ideal for so doing. That is the case we want to make.
Western Christian tradition in order to show both how the present dilemma arose and how theological humanism responds to it. This requires that we isolate metaphorical clusters of images used to speak and think about the We turn now to understand the dynamics of theological thinking in the
divine, to practice theology.Religion, Critique, and Beyond
Paul Ricoeur notes that it is “not regret for the sunken Atlantides that animates us, but hope for a re-creation of language. Beyond the desert of criticism, we wish to be called again.”beings are aware of an original – that is, a structurally basic – religious con- (^5) Modern, critically minded human
sciousness (“the sunken Atlantides”) as something that is meaningful and yet lost to them. People are aware of religious consciousness through myths, rituals, and traditions, through their memories of childhood wonder, and through fleeting moments of being caught up in the magical mentality of
religion. People want the security of answers; religion seems to give them answers from a place far ism and much current churchly theology seems motivated by this longing for the sunken Atlantides.away from this one. Oddly, religious fundamental-
To become a child again would mean to abandon the capacity to think and to make one’s own judgments on the basis of critical principles. That is why many contemporary people are disgusted at the upsurge of fundamentalist The aim of theology is not to recover this lost mode of being in the world.
religion. Theological thinking wishes to feel and experience the “call” of sacred powers “beyond the desert of criticism,” but by interpreting, and thereby re-creating, the meaning and power of religious language in a post-critical