The Shape of Theological Humanism
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and believes that there is something there to understand. Understanding also has an inner tendency to grow toward believing, as we come to trust to what we understand. Likewise, believing begins with someone or some-thing announcing itself to me. Believing similarly has an inner tendency
to increase in understanding, as we grow in understanding of the one to whom we respond.notPrecisely because of this interconnectedness, theological humanism does want to abstract the ultimate objects of understanding and believing
(“Being” and “God”), nor does it want to get caught up in the debate about how the symbol “God” relates to the concept “Being.” The focus is on the human dimension of these interconnected activities of understanding and believing. The metaphoric clusters explored above have it wrong either
because they presuppose this distinction of God and being or try to sur-mount it and thereby unwittingly endorse it. The debates concerning God and being lead us away from the pressing issue that defines our time: the endangerment to life, both human and non-human. Focus and concern
should be on the integral relation of understanding and believing, as denot-ing both the elemental capacities of a living, experiencing creature, and the forms of the human organism’s relations to the social and natural environ-ments around it. For theological humanism, to think theologically is to relate
both the form of thinking and the object we are thinking about to the integrity of life. This insight unites in a new way religious consciousness and critical consciousness into “third-way thinking.” We seek to reclaim the claim, the presence and reality of the divine found in the various metaphorical clus-
ters, but now through the idea and norm of the integrity of life. How so?ing and doing in the context of endangerment to life. It gathers together the metaphorical clusters, again recognizing them The integrity of life is an idea and norm that guides and measures think-as metaphors. First, the integ-
rity of life has the status of a doing itself, that guides them, and that imposes a freely accepted them. In this regard, the integrity of life participates in the metaphorical cluster of God as light of the world. We see the ideal as the critical ideal that is an ingredient in thinking and light that makes claim on
judgments of value and worth possible and that directs our thinking toward a truth that can never be possessed. The integrity of life gathers together the sense that the form of the good (Plato), divine truth (Augustine), or uncaused cause (Thomas) assumes for us when submitted to critique. For us, the ideal
is an indispensable standard, regulative in use and not, as Kant saw, an object of knowledge, even as, we insist against Kant, it points to reality and how we can and ought to inhabit the world.