The Shape of Theological Humanism
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and beyond the opposition of the prophetic encounter with divine other-ness and the mystical discovery of self in God. It provides both critical and constructive tools for thinking rightly about the divine; it relates religion and critique.
greater can be conceived” in later chapters of this essay. At this juncture it is enough to show how it functions as an element in the bundle of ideas that characterize We will unfold in greater detail this test of “that than which nothing Christian humanism. For the Christian humanist, there is no
opposition between God and humanity – hypertheism and overhumaniza-tion are equally false – but this also means adherence to a norm for proper thinking about God. The God that is “not far from each one of us” is the one than whom none greater can be conceived, but is also announced in
the scripture as totally Other and yet discovered as the source of wisdom.The Highest Good
According to this account of Christian humanism, the connection between self-knowledge and love of God is a way to conceptualize the core of the Christian witness. Christian faith is a trust in the living God manifest in Jesus Christ that ignites and emboldens loving service of all creatures in relation
to God. Christian humanists have therefore insisted that the double love-command, to love God and one’s neighbor as oneself, expresses this connec-tion between God and self-knowledge as a maxim for the conduct of life. That maxim finds testimony in each and every human heart. In some way,
every person has a grasp, no matter how tenuous or distorted, that other people are owed respect and esteem as well as having a deep longing for the divine. The task of the Christian community is to form and order personal and social existence so that people’s actions and relations enact the ground
and destiny of life in God. A life aimed at enacting that truth is in turn noth-ing other than the union of holiness and happiness, that is, the highest human good.bundle of core ideas in Christian humanism. (^14) This conception of the highest good is then the third element in the
relation to the divine as the very life of one’s life, is specified in terms of the double love-command, to love God and to love the neighbor as oneself.This means that the self is not some solitary “I” in relation to itself. There is For the Christian humanist, what defines the dignity of human life, a free (^15)
no private community between self and God lodged in the deep interiority of the “I.” The self is profoundly marked by otherness; God and neighbor inhere in the love that defines existence. As Martin Luther put it in words