Theologically my interests concern the nature and workings of sin. This is perhaps an odd thing for a Unitarian Universalist to say. But I am not interested in sin in the manner of a Christian, who is like a doctor trying to cure an individual’s disease. Instead, my interest resembles a public health official who tries to prevent and manage disease vectors more than managing invidividual cases. Where I am concerned with individual cases, it is because of the broader dynamics they represent.
For the study of these disease vectors, I turn first to Foucault. Drawing on Foucault’s three axes of study–power relations, power-knowledge, and the formation of the self–we can then go on to analyze sin as occuring in three intersecting patterns: oppression, ignorance, and the unwhole self. We do not need to stay with Foucauldian understandings of these patterns, although they will be helpful. Analysis of each pattern individually will be fruitful, but we stand to gain the most from looking at how the three intersect and work together.
As far as salvation, I am not concerned with why it happens so much as how. That is, I am only peripherally concerned with why “God” chooses to save us from the dynamics of sin. In short, I am not a Christian nor a monotheist, so their many theories on this matter are not useful to me. Yet salvation still happens, and outside the bounds of Christianity and monotheism. How best to describe it? If we know how to describe sin, how do we say that we are saved from it in this lifetime?
So far the best description I’ve encountered comes from Henry Nelson Wieman. Wieman asserts that salvation happens as a “creative interchange” between people, an event that renders them more fully human. Where or who this interchange comes from–that is, whether from “God” or not–is largely irrelevant. What matters, says Wieman, is that creative interchange happens and that it seems to be caused by something greater than ourselves (although we are also causes along with it). For Wieman this creative source–or just “creativity” for short–is as good a description of god as we will ever get–and as good as we will ever need. Creativity happens, and we can either align ourselves with it or choose less fulfilling paths. Echoing Tillich, Wieman sees this as our ultimate choice.
You would probably also find good stuff in Robert S. Corrington‘s books. He teaches at Duke Divinity School, is a Unitarian Universalist, and just might be the only Porsche Club of America member who is a philosophical theologian!
Oops. Make that Drew, not Duke. Four letters, starts with D …
Might I also suggest James’ Varieties of Religious Experience and Alcoholics Anonymous, 4th Ed. for further reading on the dynamics of the “creative interchange”? I enjoyed your Tear in the Soul post from earlier; any suggested links to Wieman’s writings?
James is good, but I haven’t read Bill’s book yet. I hadn’t thought of it in that way, but it makes sense that it would be about creative interchange.
No Wieman links that I know of. You might ask Philocrites.
I’d say that for Wieman, God is what integrates..both our individual self and communities…so that salvation is social and individual. The integration of the self is the unification of competing ends, impulses, directions and socially it’s created through seeking inclusive ends which are informed by creative interchange with other people.
Both Wieman and Dewey think that we cannot become more moral than what we can imagine. Problem is, we are limited, finite, partial. We don’t have an adequate moral imagination. We need to be transformed, our vision enlarged, taking into account a much wider world and this can only happen to the degree that I’m open to taking in the other into who I am.
So even on the social level there’s an individual component…that is, I need to cultivate in myself the skills, attitudes, habits which will lead to an open stance to the world and other people.
But my question is: why would this not be monotheism? The sort of radical committment to this process which Wieman calls for in “Man’s Ultimate Committment” (I was curious what you thought about the book), strikes me as monotheistic.
As for links….I’m not sure of any texts online. One can find some articles. One in particular is Wieman’s intellectual autiobiography at
http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/unitarians/wiemanapp.html
There’s a lot of nice pieces on Unitarian theologians, philosophers, etc. which are covered at this site.
But Wieman books are reasonably priced because in the 60s and 70s, Southern Illinois U (my school) republished a number of his works. So if one goes to ABE.COM it’s easy to spend little on his books.
Religious Inquiry is his last book and through Beacon Press actually and it’s about the clearest and most cogently argued book. But he’s also the most narrowly focused on human beings and less metaphysical. Something like Source of Human Good, which is his most read book is the closest to process thought, Whitehead and the like then anything else and much more cosmic in scale.
It’s good to see you back and posting. I always appreciate the stuff you write.
It’s not monotheism because no personal or the-one-god is being posited. Wieman explicitly rejects this. Still, I suppose you could call him a theist–his “creativity” is a deity. But for me personally, I tend toward the panentheism of Toaism. Perhaps Wieman’s more process-oriented stuff could be described as panentheistic as well.
I’m still working my way through Ultimate Commitment. I had a copy from the church library while I was waiting for a used bookstore to mail me my own copy. Then I took a break for the move. Once I get some fiction out of the way, I’ll go back to it. So far, though, it’s been excellent.