The Shape of Theological Humanism
52
non-being, nothingness. In those events, Tillich was even willing to speak of “ecstatic humanism,” a humanism in which the self is grasped by a power beyond itself and enabled to endure in life.Other thinkers have sought to think beyond the opposition between reli-
gion and critique. Feminist and womanist theologians, black and Latin American liberation theologians, as well as particularized theologies from Africa and Asia, have used various and different critical methods to combat the sexism, classism, and racism of traditional theistic belief and theology. (^42)
The name “God” is connected with some mediated experience that is liter-ally not God – that “not God” is the metaphorical predication of God. So, the God who liberates the poor or empowers women is not poverty or “womanhood” itself but is manifest in the experience of liberation from
oppression. Similarly, the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas has under-taken a similar project within his tradition. The God of ontology, the God of traditional theism, is not God. God is only disclosed as a “trace” within the encounter with the face of another human being. But God is also not
the face. God is a trace. This conception of lateral transcendence, as we called it before, theological humanism. The finality of the other, the demand to care for the other, opens a trace of the divine. In all these cases, the reality of God requires, pushes Levinas’s “humanism of the other” in the direction of
paradoxically, that one negate traditional theism in light of what respects, enhances, and liberates human life.
Theological humanism is mindful of the past. Yet the present situation is dif-ferent from previous generations. The pressing concerns are different ones. God and the Integrity of Life
Overriding other concerns is the fact that human and non-human life stand under extreme endangerment in myriad forms. People are too often reacting to the seriousness of the threat in dangerous ways, which we have called hypertheism and overhumanization. Theological humanism resists both of
these tendencies, while understanding the force of their appeal. Our inten-tion is to incorporate some of the deepest positive meanings and intentions from both theology and humanism into a new dynamic vision. We are changing the terms of the debate.
expression of human freedom, yet, when pursued to its end, critique destroys the order of highest values (enshrined in the idea and images of God) that give meaning and substance to freedom. Critique thus deprives Theology must now begin with a paradoxical recognition: critique is an