Can There Be a Religious Humanist Theology?

What would a religious humanist theology look like? If we assert that the divine is incomprehensible and ineffable, then how can we speak of any sort of encounter or relationship with the divine? Since we offer a humanist approach to religion, we might want to begin with human consciousness. Let’s, therefore, start with a premise that the search for the divine in the cosmos is, in effect, a desire to “ensoul” the cosmos, to discover a universal, cosmic human consciousness.  In his book, The Essence of Christianity, written in 1855, the German theologian Ludwig Feuerbach declares that God is nothing more or less than our own self-consciousness projected onto the cosmos. This projection, however, separates, alienates humanity from its true divine essence. Feuerbach understood Christianity, the incarnation of the divine in Christ, as the reintegration of an alienated divine/human consciousness.

Some 70 years later, in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, the renowned sociologist Emile Durkheim insists that religion emerged as a projection of the social organization of the primitive tribal, totemic society. “The god of the clan was the clan itself” is the oft-quoted  Durkheimian tagline. The human encounter with the divine is a projection, in the one case of the individual human mind—a psychological process—in the other of the social group—a psycho-social process.

In a corollary to this notion of divinity as the projection of human consciousness, the great 20^th century German-Jewish philosopher Martin Buber notes the ubiquitous human desire for relationship. We seek relationship because we find our own selves in our relationship with other selves. This is what Buber had in mind in his seminal work I and Thou. Buber led us to understand that there is, indeed, no “I” without a “You.” I discover my own self in my encounter with other selves.

The notion that we might seek the source of divinity within our own lives, our own souls, our own self-consciousness is not necessarily a discovery of modern theologians and social scientists. Within the Hindu tradition beginning with the Upanishads compiled during the 8^th to the 5^th centuries BCE, there is recognition of an identity between the life-force of the individual human and the life force of the cosmos. Atman is Brahman is the key observation of this tradition. Atman, the soul of the individual is identical with Brahman, the universal soul, universal Being.

“In the beginning all was Brahman, one and infinite… He is seen in the radiance of the sun in the sky, in the brightness of fire on earth, and in the fire of life that burns the food of life. Therefore it has been said: He who is in the sun, and in the fire and in the heart of man is one. He who knows this is one with the one.” [From the Maitri Upanishads in The Upanishads, translations from the Sanskrit with an Introduction by Juan Mascaró, Penguin Books, 1965, p. 101]

This observation is not unique to Hinduism within the ancient tradition. The theology of ancient Israel as reflected in the Hebrew Bible also acknowledges the identification of the human soul with the divine. In the first chapter of Genesis, humanity is created in the divine image. In chapter 2, a clump of earth is animated by the divine breath to become a living human being. The Book of Proverbs declares, “God’s lamp is the soul of the human” (Prov. 20:27). The human soul, the human life force is equated with the divine breath, the divine soul, the divine light.

In fact, the way we name the monotheistic God of the three Abrahamic faiths—Judaism, Christianity and Islam—is a misnomer leading to a tragic misunderstanding. In the Hebrew Bible, God has a name. God’s name is YHWH, usually pronounced Yahweh. In the Septuagint, a translation of the Hebrew Bible undertaken in Alexandria, Egypt, in the 3rd century BCE, the name of God is translated kurios, meaning “lord.” Jewish tradition translates this name as adonai, also meaning “lord,” and this is how the name is translated into English.

However, the significance of this name is actually made rather clear in Exodus 3:13-15. The name seems to express a 3^rd person form of the verb “to be,” perhaps to be translated, “He is.” I would suggest that we translate Yahweh as “Being” itself. This is a far cry from the notion of God as Lord. It actually would bring us closer to an understanding of divinity expressed in the Upanishads.

The ultimate goal of the religious life is to realize this connection between human self-consciousness and the consciousness of what the religious person sees as an animate cosmos. God is the soul of the cosmos, its animating energy, its consciousness. I might reverse Feuerbach’s observation and say that God is not so much a projection of human consciousness as it is, in Buber’s formulation, the “You” of the cosmos, a reflection of the human need to identify consciousness of self with a conscious, animate, “ensouled” cosmos.