The Shape of Theological Humanism
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proclaimed that “true religion, or a heart right towards God and man, implies happiness as well as holiness ... [T]he Spirit of God bearing witness with the spirit of a Christian, that he is ‘a child of God.’ ”reformed theologian and the great translator of Plato, claimed that the imme- (^6) Friedrich Schleiermacher,
diate sthe dangers of “subjectivism,” later theologians made virtually the same point. The American theologian H. Richard Niebuhr argued that “God” is the center of value around which the self in its relation to others comes to elf-consciousness is a testimony to one’s relation to the divine. Despite
be as a self.not without witness in the rough and tumble of personal and social life. At the core of human existence is some testimony, some desire, for what can only be the divine. To love God is to know one’s self truly, and, conversely, to^7 Granting the fault and fallibility that riddles human life, God is
have a true apprehension of one’s self is to grasp the ultimate object of one’s desiring. This relation to the divine in the depth of the self defines the distiHowever, these and other theologians were not always clear about the nctiveness of human existence.
causal to be a self, an actual living individual, cannot mean that somehow one comes to self-awareness and then in a subsequent act decides to love God! Knowledge of self does not relation between the human heart and the living God. What it means cause the knowledge of God. The knowledge of
self and love of God arise simultaneously or they do not arise at all. One does not peer inside of oneself somehow to find God. If one does, the sense of the divine remains vague, fleeting, and too often vain. While a good deal of contemporary “spirituality,” especially in late-modern Western societies, is a
longing for something sacred, Christian humanism rightly understood is not a version of religious narcissism or bland natural theology. A distorted rela-tion to God means that the self, despite its illusion of existence, is not really alive. Outside of a right love of God we do not and cannot truthfully know
ourselves. That is the condition of sin, a denial of God. There is living death in which the self, while biologically alive, is spiritually dead.states that manifest the right or distorted relations between self, God, and On this construal of the human self, one can diagnose various moods or
others: moods like anxiety, holy sadness, human folly, the terrified and free conscience, or real joy in a life of love. Christian humanists examine these “moods” that disclose the condition of human existence within the defining relation to the living God. However, the state of the “soul” and its signifying
moods (guilt, joy, sadness, hope) does not human plight from this perspective is that people are not rightly aware of themselves precisely because they do not properly love God. Human beings exist in a haze, a profound sleep or spiritual death, unmindful of their cause a relation to the divine. The