BEYOND SECULARISM? TOWARDS A POST‐SECULAR POLITICAL THEOLOGY

In this article I analyse some of the reasons for a recent, resurgent interest in religion and theology by political philosophers and relate this interest to an inherent instability in modernity itself. In the first part I describe the landscape of current political philosophy with a particular emphasis on radical philosophers. In the second part I describe how the liberal distinction between religion and politics generates a theological instability due to the effective disappearance of the social embodiment of religion within modernity. In the third part I draw some conclusions regarding the challenges the new post‐secular condition presents to theology.     

QUINTUPLE EXTENSION: MIND, BODY, HUMANISM, RELIGION, SECULARISM

Extension of the system that includes the key substrates for sensation, perception, emotion, volition, and cognition, and all representational sources for cognition, supports the view that there is an extended mind and an extended body. These intellectual views can be made practical in a humanist system based on extensions and in religious systems based on extensions. Independently, there is also an institutional extension of secularism. Hence, I maintain, there are five principal forms of extension.     

A CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY OF EVOLUTION AND PARTICIPATION

Recent controversies surrounding the discernment of design in the natural world are an indication of a pervasive disquiet among believers. Can God as creator/sustainer of creation be reconcilable with the belief that God's work is indiscernible behind secondary evolutionary causes? Christian piety requires that the order experienced in the natural world be evidence of God's love and existence. Theistic evolutionary models rarely examine this matter, assuming that God is indiscernible in the processes and order of the world because only secondary causes can be examined. This leaves antievolutionary perspectives to interpret and address the problem of seeing God in the world. I examine these issues in order to gain more credibility for the religious longing to discern God in nature while at the same time affirming the indubitable truth of an evolutionary history. I argue that God's trinitarian nature, hiddenness, and incarnation give us reason to believe that God's presence in the natural world will be discernible, but only within the natural processes, and thereby only in an obscured fashion. I also argue that newer understandings of evolutionary mechanisms are more consistent with theological appropriation than are strictly Darwinian ones.     

CONSTRUCTING A THEOLOGY OF EVOLUTION: BUILDING ON JOHN HAUGHT

The construction of a distinctively Christian “theology of evolution” or “theistic evolution” requires the incorporation of the science of evolutionary biology while building a more comprehensive worldview within which all things are understood in relation to our creating and redeeming God. In the form of theses, this article brings four support pillars to the constructive work: (1) orienting evolutionary history to the God of grace; (2) affirming purpose for nature even if we cannot see purpose in nature; (3) employing the theology of the cross to discern divine compassion in the natural world; and (4) relying on the divine promise of new creation. Among other things, John Haught's blueprint has located the pedestals on which these pillars will stand. For this groundwork, Haught deserves thanks.     

THE RETURN OF THE NATURALISTIC FALLACY: A DIALOGUE ON HUMAN FLOURISHING

In response to the proposal justifying the morality of homosexual acts offered by Todd A. Salzman and Michael G. Lawler, this paper seeks to make intelligible the reasoning used by the New Natural Law Theory and others that arrives at the opposite conclusion. This article proposes to explore the weaknesses in the arguments offered in justification. By proposing an expanded notion of human nature so as to include sexual orientation as one of the factors from which to draw moral norms, the authors have adopted the central proposition of the Old Natural Law Theory defended by Francisco Suarez and others, viz., that human nature as such was a fit source from which to draw moral norms. Thus the New Natural Law Theory, formulated by Germain Grisez to answer the charge of the naturalistic fallacy, has curiously found itself being refuted by a reformulation of the Old Natural Law Theory. This article seeks to show how the proportionalistic reasoning used by Salzman and Lawler leads inevitably to a revival of the naturalistic fallacy.     

COGNITIVE THEISM: SOURCES OF ACCOMMODATION BETWEEN SECULARISM AND RELIGION

Abstract. Religion persists, even within enlightened secular society, because it has adaptive functions. In particular, Ralph Wendell Burhoe's theory holds that religion is the repository of cultural wisdom that most encourages mutual altruism among nonkin, long-term social survival, and human progress. This article suggests a variant of Burhoe's rationalized naturalistic view. Cognitive theism is a proposal that secularists sometimes take religion on its own terms by suspending disbelief about God. If we consider particular human capacities and limitations in memory, perception, personality, and motivation, the regulated “mind expansion” of cognitive theism may help us to evaluate, coordinate, and invigorate things in a modern environment. In this environment, communicative and travel technologies have led to a high loading of consciousness with a historically unusual diverse range of experiences and responsibilities, a high rate of cultural change relative to biological evolution, and a tendency to factionalize. Burhoe's extension of the concept of symbiosis to the coevolution of culture and genes is modified here in recognition of individual differences and of individuals' potential for choosing strategies, recombining in groups, and learning. In human biocultural symbiont pools, cultural phenomena can evolve while changing partners in a dance with genetic substrates, a dance that broadly supports these substrates. In the context of diversity and incessant change in a large predominantly secular community, Judeo-Christian monotheism can have a valuable advisory unifying function.     

RENAISSANCE HUMANISM AND PHILOSOPHY AS A WAY OF LIFE

A long-established view has deprecated Renaissance humanists as primarily literary figures with little serious interest in philosophy. More recently it has been proposed that the idea of philosophy as a way of life offers a useful framework with which to reassess their philosophical standing. This proposal has faced some criticism, however. By looking again at the work of three important figures from the period, this essay defends the claim that at least some thinkers during the Renaissance did see philosophy as a way of life, while also acknowledging the force of reservations made by recent critics.     

NATURALISTIC OBSERVATIONS OF INSTITUTIONALIZED RETARDED PERSONS: A COMPARISON OF LICENSURE DECISIONS AND BEHAVIORAL OBSERVATIONS

In the last several years, various organizations have produced strikingly similar documents by which institutions for retarded persons are judged for licensure. The purpose of the present study was to determine whether residential units that were licensed differed from residential units that were not licensed in terms of the active programming behaviors of their staff and residents. Data were collected through a time-sampling procedure that yielded about 160,000 observations on eight staff and six resident behaviors. Results showed that the licensed units were just as derelict as unlicensed units in providing habilitative programming for their retarded residents. Maladaptive responding by residents occurred at least as much as task-related behaviors: residents spent as much time self-stimulating as they did in programming; they also engaged in self-abusive behavior about as much time as they engaged in on-task responding. Results were discussed in terms of the failure of governmental regulations that are not based on observation to adequately assess habilitative programming.     

HUMANISM AND THE MEANING OF LIFE

This paper addresses two related questions: 1. Does human life have a purpose? and 2. Is human life intrinsically valuable? Clearly human beings have personal, communal and common purposes, but we cannot know whether there is an external transcendent purpose in addition to these. However the argument that mundane purposes are meaningless without transcendent purposes, though valid, rests on false premises. There are four ways of explaining the intrinsic value of life. The first (pantheism) is the idea that human life is sacred because everything is sacred. A second is that life is intrinsically valuable because something else is valuable and indeed sacred – the idea, for instance, that mankind is made in the image of God. The third is that human life lacks value because of its contrast with the sanctity of the gods. The humanistic explanation is that human life as such has intrinsic value. There are (at least) six reasons for holding that human life is intrinsically valuable; these reasons are given.     

BETWEEN BARTH AND WITTGENSTEIN: ON THE AVAILABILITY OF HANS FREI'S LATER THEOLOGY

This paper explores the “cultural‐linguistic” dimensions of Hans Frei's theology. I make the case that several of the pragmatic and sociological concerns usually identified as distinctive marks of Frei's later theology of the 1980s are, in fact, central to his work as far back as the early 1960s. Moreover, I demonstrate that such “cultural‐linguistic” insights present important continuous threads in the development of his theology from early to late. Attending to this dimension illuminates the trajectory of Frei's thinking as consistently Wittgensteinian in sensibility, and deeply indebted to his career‐long conversation with Karl Barth's theology. If successful, this reading should clarify the ways in which Frei's early work is more innovative, and his later work less derivative, than is often recognized.     

ELECTION AND THE TRINITY: TWENTY-FIVE THESES ON THE THEOLOGY OF KARL BARTH

A new and “revisionist” reading would argue that the later Karl Barth saw the existence of the eternal Trinity not as the ground and presupposition, but as the consequence of God's pre‐temporal decision of election. A more “traditionalist” reading, on the other hand, as defended by this essay, denies that proposition. The texts adduced by the revisionists, it is argued, fail to make their case. More plausible, alternative readings are offered, counter‐evidence is marshaled, and the deleterious theological consequences of the revisionist alternative are spelled out. Barth could not have adopted it without contradicting his most basic convictions.     

JOHN POLKINGHORNE AND BERNARD LONERGAN ON THE SCIENTIFIC STATUS OF THEOLOGY

On the basis of his acquaintance with theoretical elementary particle physics, and following the lead of Thomas Torrance, John Polkinghorne maintains that the data upon which a science is based, and the method by which it treats those data, must respect the idiosyncratic nature of the object with which the science is concerned. Polkinghorne calls this the “accommodation” (or “conformity”) of a discipline to its object. The question then arises: What should we expect religious experience and theological method to be like if they are accommodated to the idiosyncratic nature of God? Polkinghorne's methodological program is typical of postcritical positions in the theology‐science dialogue in holding that the fiduciary element in theological method is simply a species of the fiduciary element that is a de facto part of all knowing—in other words, theological method does not differ in fundamental kind from the methods of the natural sciences. But this program may contain the seeds of an alienation of theological method from the transcendence of God similar to the double self‐alienation of theology described by Michael Buckley in At the Origins of Modern Atheism. I contend that something like Bernard Lonergan's position on how the method of faith seeking understanding is related to the methods of the natural sciences is exactly the sort of thing that one should expect on the supposition of Polkinghorne's principle of accommodation, at least if the God who is the object of theological science is transcendent. The way in which the divine differs from all other objects ought to be disclosed or reflected in religious experience and theological method. Polkinghorne charts the course for an accommodated theology, but it seems to be Lonergan who is more intent on following it.