Reviving Christian Humanism

The New Conversation On Spirituality, Theology, And Psychology

Don S. Browning

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780800696269
• eBook ISBN: 9781451406917
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

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Science, Religion, and a Revived Religious Humanism

For over 150 years there has been a vital, and often contentious, dialogue between science and religion. In recent years, new energy and fresh public interest have been injected into this conversation. This largely has come about due to the new insights into religion and ethics achieved by collaboration between evolutionary psychology and cognitive and social neuroscience.

What are the likely social consequences of this new interest in the relation of science and religion? There are at least three possible answers. One might be the new atheism exemplified by the writings of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens.¹ In this approach, the alleged defective thinking of the world religions is exposed, and a worldview and way of life based strictly on science are offered as replacement. A second option might be the return of a hegemonic dominance of religion over science. A third might be the emergence of a revitalized religious humanism of the kind that has happened on several occasions in the past in most of the great world religions. This last option is the one I will advocate.

What would this religious humanism be like? The major world religions would remain visible and viable as religious movements. But the contributions of science would help these religions refine their interests in improving the health, education, wealth, and overall well-being of their adherents and the general population. In addition, the sciences would help them refine their grasp of the empirical world, about which they, like humans in general, are constantly making judgments, predictions, and characterizations. In my vision, the attitude of scientists toward religion would be first of all phenomenological; they would first attempt to describe and understand (in the sense of verstehen) religious beliefs, ethics, and rituals in their full historical context. But their interest in explaining some of the conditions that give rise to religious phenomena would not be inhibited by either religion or the wider society. Yet the wiser scientists would understand the limits of explanation, would hesitate to skip lightly over the initial phenomenological moment, and would be reluctant to plunge headlong into speculations about the ultimate truth or falsity of religious ideas and practices in the way exhibited by the new scientific atheism.

On the other hand, the religions themselves can contribute to the sciences by offering hypotheses about how social and religious ideas, behaviors, and rituals can shape experience, even neural processes, often for the good but sometimes not. The religions can offer a more generous epistemology and ontology than science is inclined to find useful for the tight explanatory interests of the laboratory or scientific survey. This too might generate new hypotheses for scientific investigation. These would be some of the ground rules for how a dialogue between science and religion might stimulate a revived religious humanism.

Religious Humanisms of the Past

To speak of a revival of religious humanism acknowledges that there have been many expressions of religious humanism in the past. I will limit myself to speaking primarily about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The synthesis between Greek philosophical psychology and Christianity can be found in the use of Stoic theories of desire by the apostle Paul,² the presence of Aristotle’s family ethic in the household codes of Ephesians and 1 Colossians,³ and the Gospel of John’s identification of Jesus with the Platonic and Stoic idea of the preexistent “Word.”⁴ A more intentional religious humanism can be found in Augustine’s use of the neoplatonic Plotinus, especially in the philosophical psychology of remembrance in his Confessions (397 A.D.).⁵

But the most dramatic example of a religious humanism that spread simultaneously into Judaism, Christianity, and Islam can be found when the lost texts of Aristotle were discovered, translated, and appropriated by scholars from these three religions who worked at the same tables in Islamic libraries in Spain and Sicily during the ninth and tenth centuries. Richard Rubinstein, in his timely book titled Aristotle’s Children (2003), tells the story well.⁶ This study gave rise to forms of Aristotelian religious humanism in the works of Thomas Aquinas in Christianity, Maimonides in Judaism, and Averroës in Islam. On the American scene, one sees another form of Christian humanism in the synthesis of philosophical pragmatism, with all its influence from Darwin, and various expressions of liberal Christianity and the social gospel movement.⁷

Religious humanisms have not always flourished and are subject to attacks from both fundamentalists and scientific secularists. They need constant updating and vigorous intellectual development. But at their best, they make it possible for societies to maintain strong religious communities as well as integrating symbolic umbrellas that protect the productive interaction of the scientific and philosophical disciplines with the wider cultural and religious life.

Epistemological Frameworks for a Revived Religious Humanism

But on what epistemological and ontological grounds could such a dialogue between science and religion proceed today, especially if they were supportive of a revived religious humanism? In this book, I will address this question as a Christian theologian. Furthermore, most of my illustrations will come from the Christian tradition. Although I am interested in the possibility of a more widespread revival of religious humanism in Judaism, Islam, and the other great world religions, my illustrations and arguments will feature the tradition I know best. This will be useful for another reason. Of all the great world religions, for a variety of internal and external historical reasons, Christianity has doubtless had the most vigorous encounter to date with the challenges and stimulations of the rise of science in the modern world.

In my effort to demonstrate how the dialogue between science and religion can be productive, I will go two directions at once with varying degrees of evenness. To say it crassly, like the philosophical pragmatist that I am, I will try to show the payoff for both Christianity on the one hand and selected psychological disciplines on the other. I will attempt to show what Christianity can learn from some aspects of science that will refine, and in this sense improve, its grasp of its own religious beliefs, ethics, worship, healing, and spiritual practices. But I will also suggest ways in which these scientific disciplines can profit. By “profit,” however, I do not mean just getting more money in their research accounts, although that may happen as well. As I have already indicated, the modern psychologies, even in their properly naturalistic forms, can gain new hypotheses about how experience, including religious experience, shapes feelings, motivations, neural processes, and behaviors. With the advent of positive psychology in the work of Martin Seligman, Jonathan Haidt, Joshua Greene, and many others, an entire range of new research topics has emerged around love, forgiveness, wisdom, virtue, and spiritual transformation that was almost entirely absent from the psychological disciplines as recently as a decade ago.

We live in a period of wider and more fruitful epistemologies that open new possibilities of research between science and religion, even between psychology and Christian theology, that need not threaten either and could indeed strengthen them both. I have been retired from the Divinity School of the University of Chicago for over six years. Since the time of my official departure, several new collaborative research projects involving the natural sciences and the humanities—including theology and religious studies—have emerged around this university, which historically has been dedicated to graduate education and research. Today there are collaborative projects involving the natural sciences and the humanities that are proceeding on such diverse topics as spirituality and health, a science of virtue, wisdom, decision making, and anthropomorphism. They involve social neuroscientists, philosophers, political theorists, medical doctors, philosophers, social psychologists, sociologists, and theologians. Such collaboration at this university between science and the humanities would have been unthinkable during the peak of my active teaching years. It is interesting to note that the stimulators of much of this collaboration come from the burgeoning field of social neuroscience and such innovative and ecumenical scholars as John Cacioppo and Howard Nusbaum. Their knowledge of the neural plasticity of the human brain leads them to be as interested in how the external influences of social, cultural, and religious experience shape the physical base of our mental processes as they are in how these brain processes project themselves into our thoughts and behaviors.

I recall a prediction made to me by a distinguished New York University psychologist in the early 1990s. He believed that the rise of the neurosciences would relegate most of traditional psychology to the humanities and that departments of psychology would become branches of biology and medicine. I can remember leaving his office in a slight fog of depression over hearing this possibility. In many places, however, just the reverse has happened. A new conversation between psychology as a natural science and the humanities has risen that may have immense fruitfulness for both fields of study.

But what epistemological and ontological frameworks should guide such a conversation and possible collaboration? I will propose in these lectures the resources of what the late French philosopher Paul Ricoeur would call either critical hermeneutics or hermeneutic phenomenology. I can imagine that the very sound of these technical terms sends icy chills down the spines of some readers. I will try to explain them the best I can as I develop my arguments.

I can say this much now. There have been in recent years important and powerful proposals about the significance of phenomenology for the psychological disciplines, especially the clinical disciplines. These have been advanced by Frank Richardson, Blaine Fowers, and Charles Guignon in Re-envisioning Psychology (1999) and by Philip Cushman in Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History of Psychotherapy (1995).⁸ But, from my perspective, these proposals move too far in the direction of making psychology a thoroughly interpretive discipline, nearly losing the element of objectivity, or what I will call, following Ricoeur, the moments of distanciation and explanation that psychology as a science also must always include. But I say these things now only to chart the course I will travel. I will say more about these cryptic remarks in a moment.

I start first, however, with the term hermeneutic phenomenology. Hermeneutic phenomenology is an offshoot of the European hermeneutical and phenomenological movements. The hermeneutic side ran through the work of German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, the historian Wilhelm Dilthey, and the philosophers Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur. This movement was concerned with questions about the appropriate interpretation of texts. It held that the quests for meaning by the human spirit were objectified in the great texts of the past, and that to retain this fund of meaning and insight, these texts required interpretation and internalization.⁹ The hermeneutic movement arose from the disciplines of history, literary studies, philosophy, and theology as part of the Geisteswissenschaften (the cultural or moral sciences) in contrast to the Naturwissenschaften (the natural sciences).¹⁰ The hermeneutic movement was particularly concerned to resist the naturalization of mind, that is, the modeling of mind after the objectifying sciences of the neurobiology, physiology, and physics of that era. To say it bluntly, the hermeneutic movement was a strategy in the humanities to counter what my New York University psychologist friend thought was certain to happen when he made his prediction in the early 1990s.

The hermeneutic movement had an interest in phenomenological description but primarily in the description of meaning housed in the great literary classics that were formative in shaping Western civilization. Phenomenology in the more rigorous sense of that term began with late-nineteenth-century German philosopher Edmund Husserl. Husserl, however, advocated a kind of transcendental phenomenology that pursued a stringent description of the objects of consciousness when both the presuppositions of the existence of the personal ego and assumptions about the existence of objects in the external world were bracketed, suspended, or set aside.¹¹

Hermeneutic phenomenology is different from Husserl’s transcendental reduction of both the existence of the objects of description and the perceiving and describing personal ego. Hermeneutic phenomenology should even be distinguished from William James’s kind of phenomenological psychology, which allowed the personal ego and its unique experiences as legitimate subject matter for phenomenological description.¹² Husserl was too influenced by Descartes for my taste. He, like Descartes, founded epistemology on the pure ego that had been stripped of its linguistic and historical constitution. Early in his career, Ricoeur had published profound transcendental phenomenological studies of the essence of the will in Freedom and Nature (1966)¹³ and the fallibility of the will in Fallible Man (1965).¹⁴

But when Ricoeur decided he wanted to study the actual experience of human fault, in contrast to the mere possibility of fault, he turned to hermeneutic phenomenology and studied the epigenetic history of the Western symbols and myths of fault and evil in his monumental Symbolism of Evil (1967).¹⁵ The presupposition of this turn from pure phenomenology to hermeneutic phenomenology was the conviction that from the beginning the ego could not be the pure ego of Descartes and Husserl. It was, instead, both an embodied ego located in a desiring body and an ego constellated by language, tradition, and symbols from our inherited cultural past.¹⁶ We are feeling and desiring creatures who project our feelings through mediations of linguistic metaphors and symbols.

This is why Ricoeur, as do metaphor and cognitive theorists ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Science, Religion, and a Revived Religious Humanism
• 2. Broadening Psychology, Refining Theology
• 3. Change and Critique in Psychology, Therapy, and Spirituality
• 4. Religion, Science, and the New Spirituality
• 5. Mental Health and Spirituality: Their Institutional Embodiment
• 6. Institutional Ethics and Families: Therapy, Law, and Religion
• Epilogue on the Future of Science and Religion
• Notes
• Index