The Case for Christian Humanism

The Theos Think Tank has released a lucid essay on Christian humanism in an effort to reclaim the term “humanism” as a category of Christian thought. In answer to the Humanist movement (example), authors of the essay, Angus Ritchie and Nick Spencer, argue that

humanism comprises a positive (set of) creed(s) that are consonant with Christianity and worthy of Christian support.

Moreover, they argue that Christianity offers a more secure intellectual home for humanism than non-theistic philosophies:

commitment to rationality, human dignity and moral realism is better founded on Christian beliefs and commitments than on atheistic ones.

Their irenic approach emphasizes that the goal is not criticism of atheists per se, but rather to show that Christianity offers an intellectual tradition from which an authentic humanism can grow and thrive–and that Christians themselves must consciously appropriate.

To put forward this argument is not to claim that all Christians are necessarily humanists. Many, regrettably, are not. Nor is it to claim that only Christians can lay claim to the humanist label, let alone that non-Christian humanists are themselves in any way morally or rationally deficient. As the first chapter will make clear, humanism has the potential to be a broad ideological church in which people with different metaphysical commitments can share certain goals and ambitions for life and society.

Ritchie and Spencer begin their argument by outlining historical developments in humanist thought, paying attention to the recovery of classical thought (Cicero, for example) during the Renaissance. They show that the divide between Christianity and humanism was, as it were, ‘read back’ into that period by later scholars of the 19th century, especially students of Hegel, when in fact most Renaissance humanists were deeply Christian. (As an aside, in my own work on Ignatian spirituality one finds an abundant humanism in such places as the Ratio Studiorum of early Jesuit schools, who took as their motto Terence’s dictum Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto“, or “I am a human being, I consider nothing that is human alien to me.” See Ronald Modras’ fine work Ignatian Humanism.)

Their sketch of the philosophical origins of humanism and its growing rift with Christianity is helpful, seeking neither to criticize the originating impulses behind the humanist movement nor show why Christians were really right all along. Instead, they attend to the central focus of their argument, namely humanism’s philosophical underpinnings. They discern a certain disingenuousness in contemporary humanist critiques of Christianity, arguing that themes like being good without hope for supernatural reward; wonder at the universe; human agency and potential; and free intellectual inquiry are hardly at odds with orthodox Christian thought. They argue,

while it is presumably possible to find examples of Christians who have contravened all these points – who believe that the goodness demands God standing over you with a big stick; who are indifferent to the wonders, and the good, of creation; and who eschew genuine intellectual enquiry – they are hardly reflective of orthodox Christian thought and practice. On the basis of these descriptions, therefore, humanism is wholly consonant with Christianity.

They turn to the 2002 Amsterdam Declaration of the International Humanist and Ethical Union for an exegesis of contemporary Humanist thought. After responding to each of the points, they conclude that it is important to find some rapprochement between Christianity and humanism by looking at the foundations of humanist thinking.

the argument is simply that many of the ‘fundamentals’ of humanism find their origins in Christian thought and commitments and that these fundamentals can ultimately only be sustained by those faith commitments; or, more directly, atheism saws through the branch on which humanism sits.

It is a fascinating document– read the whole thing here.