The Logic of Christian Humanism
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yourself, but return within yourself, for truth resides in the inner part of man.” God is the inner illumination of the mind, which propels the self beyond itself into the divine. God is the light of the world reflected in the human soul.
theologians when it is taken to mean that there is an easy link between “me and my God.” God is not a projection of the self and its wants. Many criti-cisms of humanism have rightly attacked this point, claiming that humanism This idea can be easily misunderstood. It has rightly been criticized by
reduces the divine good to the human good, as Feuerbach advocated. Humanism, even Christian humanism, thereby becomes a form of anthro-pocentrism because everything, including God, is valued in relation to human flourishing. (^3) This makes God into an image of the self or at least a
servant of human desires for happiness. That was not Augustine’s point. His idea was that by “an ascetic discipline, one ascends in the scale of reason, receiving illumination not from that Platonic anticipation, the Form of the Good, but from God. The illuminated mind is enabled to choose rightly
between the various objects of desire which confront it.”sical Christian thinkers as well. Erasmus, for instance, claims in his Militis ChristianiThis idea of a human capacity for relation to God was made by other clas- (1503), that God simply is the life of the human soul. Calvin^4 Enchiridion
opens hensive statement of Protestant faith in the Reformation era, with the claim that true and sound wisdom consists of knowledge of God and knowledge of self. He went on to claim that these two are bound together so closely The Institutes of the Christian Religion (1535), easily the most compre-
that it is difficult to saGod lead to right self-understanding? Is the inverse the case? God is always nearer to us than we are to ourselves. Calvin insisted that “it is beyond dispute that the human spirit possesses through natural instinct a sense of the y which brings forth the other. Does knowledge of
Deity.”as “fleeting and vain.” The human imagination is a factory of idols, driven by fear, guilt, and anxiety into fabricating and worshipping idolatrous images However, Calvin was aware that this sense of the divine was vague as well^5 He called this the sensus divinitatis and related it to conscience.
rather than the true God. The sense of the divine can be the engine of idolatry just as much as it testifies to a bond between the human spirit and the divine spirit. The doubleness or ambiguity of the “sense of the divine,” that it testifies to the human capacity for a relation to God and yet is also
fleeting, vain, and even distorted, is important in Christian humanism.Western world among theologians who would not call themselves Christian humanists in a precise sense. John Wesley, who insisted on vital, living faith, This claim about the relation of God and self continued into the modern