Theology Today - Vol 41, No. 1 - April 1984 - BOOK REVIEW - In Search of Humanity: A Theological and Philosophical Approach

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In Search of Humanity: A Theological
and Philosophical Approach
By John Macquarrie
New York, Crossroad, 1983. 280 pp. $16.95.

The author has long believed that the proper study of humanity must be given high and commanding priority in and for theology; this is a matter of distinguished record running from An Existentialist Theology (1965) through The Principles of Christian Theology (1977). In this new essay, the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford gives a systematic account of his anthropological principles. In the following account of his proposals, I call attention to several themes of critical importance in post-liberal theology, for which general purview Macquarrie is an undeniably significant figure.

In the first place, he rejects any "substance" doctrine of human nature. Essential humanity is not a fixed reality antecedently determined by a transhuman reality. All the leading candidates for the position of external objective creator are dismissed: the God of supernaturalism, the genes and chromosomes of biological science, the socio-economic forces of Marxist pseudo-science. Becoming rather than Being is the decisive clue for grasping the reality of human existence. (In the book, "Becoming" is the first chapter, "Being" the last.) But not Becoming as a purportedly all-inclusive natural-cosmic process. Rather, we must look for a process of personal growth with freedom as its absolutely necessary condition. Thus, early and late, Macquarrie contends that freedom can be established as this foundational reality neither by philosophical proof nor by empirical investigation. As persistently be avers that an authentic understanding of God must not violate the integral reality of human freedom and creativity.

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Secondly, Macquarrie's rejection of the empirical must be carefully qualified. He is not unsympathetic to social science nor to other kinds of science, though he shares with Barth and idealist philosophers a confidence that no science is able to grasp essential humanity-the heart of the matter eludes all objectifying thought, whether it be scientific or philosophical. Moreover, he clearly believes that the defining characteristics of human being can be adequately made out and delineated in their properreality as interrelated universals. So to do is in fact the main business of the book. His elucidation of Transcendence, Embodiedness, Egoity (individuality), Conscience, Language, and Religion, for example, presupposes the validity and fertility of a descriptive-interpretational method generally identified nowadays as phenomenological. That is, the phenomena are not sense-data facts; the real phenomena (so to speak) are meanings comprising the intelligible structure of experience as such-not just my experience or yours but a generic human experience in which we all participate.

Thirdly, it is congruent with these methodological commitments (not necessarily entailed by them) to hold with Macquarrie that some of the cardinal doctrines of traditional Christianity are symbols rather than literal fact-claims. They are, that is, symbolically rather than literally true; resurrection, for example. He does not believe that this transformation entails a loss of richness for Christian faith. Freed from a factual-conceptual base no longer credible, the symbols can now function as

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creative concrete re-representations of universal realities, human, cosmic, and divine.

Fourthly, Macquarrie has a lively and persistent concern to register ontological claims. These outrank in the truth scale accounts of consciousness and behavior that either entail subjectivism or run off into scientistic reductionism. So he claims that as persons we have or may have authentic dealings with a real (trans-subjective) world and with a real God variously related to a real world. The moral dimension (treated under "Conscience") is one of these modalities. Here we have to reckon with "the given fact that there are ways forward and ways backward, a direction toward a fuller humanity and a direction toward a diminished humanity. It is this directedness that is known at the deepest level of conscience. We may call it the ontological or metaphysical basis of conscience."

I think it is fair to ask how concrete and lucid "fuller humanity" might prove as a principle of moral judgment. Be that as it may, Macquarrie looks for middle ground between moralistic absolutism and "complete relativism." He is committed to an ethics of disposition rather than to a rule-ethics.

Perhaps the weightiest of ontological claims is to be made for religion. Here Macquarrie is profoundly concerned to establish, or at least to show forth, the validity of religious experience, not just Christian experience, for he believes that religion is a primal modality of experience and Christianity one of its historical formations. I confess to experiencing an initial and persisting difficulty in comprehending how any experience, religious or otherwise, can be said to be valid. Common-sensically speaking, I should say that one has or does not have an experience. Philosophically, validity has to do with beliefs, propositions, assertions, etc.; more narrowly, with arguments and proofs, as in mathematics and logic, where valid arguments do not necessarily generate true conclusions. But I would not cavil over validity as a word. Macquarrie is after truth, not formal validity. He is concerned with what is true of reality, not what holds in and for an airless world of pure thought. So following Tillich, Macquarrie discovers certain characteristics of religious experience "which refer it to a reality outside the consciousness of the religious person."

Fifthly, it appears that for Macquarrie the primal religious modality is dispositional rather than cognitional in any standard sense. "On the whole, human beings tend to trust reality and to have a fundamental faith in being. This is not quite the same as faith in God, but it is a fundamental element in such a faith. It is something like a natural predisposition towards faith."

Some philosophers identify this religious factor as an essential core of intentionality in human existence. The philosophical language does not effectively conceal or diminish the fact that this predisposition as such does not put any trans-human being, be it God or nature, under any kind of leading-strings. Even if that "natural predisposition" should turn out

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to be a genuine universal in human existence, what in fact any person or any community actually trusts, substantially banks on and fervently adores, may turn out to have been an illusion, and a malefic one at that; just as the universal need for food hardly rules out my health being destroyed by a particular diet, no matter however august a religious endorsement it might carry.

Throughout his essay, Macquarrie grants that these formidable negative possibilities in the religious life can be blocked off neither by philosophical dialectics nor by empirical investigations. Anthropological prepossessions-the philosophical and theological priority of humanity-might, in other words, defeat the native hunger for Being and its Good. I suggest that Macquarrie's summing-up hardly overcomes that captivity. "The higher reaches of human life, what is in fact most distinctively human in us, seem to posit an origin in a level of being not less than personal and spiritual transcending both ourselves and the world."

Seem to posit? Seem to whom? Suppose, moreover, that the positing were a function of an eminently subjective need to share the burden of conscience and curse of evil with a not-self putatively divine. Freud and Marx, each of course in his own easily imitable way, believed that they had exhaustively accounted for the purely intra-human operation of that need. And each, of course, begs the prime question. Macquarrie may have begged it going in the opposite direction.

The book is a suggestive expression of the following post-liberal theological principles: (1) ontological claim and metaphysical intuition are split away from metaphysical systems with their commitments to formal coherence and dialectical argument. Example: Macquarrie rejects any mind-matter, body-soul dualism, and is equally confident that materialism is wholly discredited. What magisterial authority, philosophical and/or scientific, has disposed of these metaphysical options? The liberal personalists had an answer; but post-liberals find that the liberals leaned too heavily on idealist systems that had their day and ceasing to be dominant lost their theological virtue. Incidentally, Macquarrie has very little confidence in the promise of Process thought to reinstate a metaphysics as an indispensable (or even valid?) tool for Christian theological anthropology. Here be differs from persuasive post-liberal voices on the American scene, such as Schubert Ogden. (2) Human freedom and creativity are the core of existence; accordingly, they constitute the baseline, the primary givens, for theological reflection. This principle is a legacy of liberalism, whatever its transformations under existentialism; it is very like the primacy of the ethical in Kantian theology. (3) It cannot be the case that rationalism and empiricism exhaust the possibilities of human knowledge. There must be a mode of knowing endowed with the immediacy of sensation and the lucidity of reason; and our most meaningful traffic with reality must be routed over it; accordingly, it must be graced with our deepest feelings and our loftiest aspirations. Thus we are led beyond the deadly subject-

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object dualism of traditional-modern philosophy. (4) And also beyond every other dualism: God-world, self-society, soul-body, fact-interpretation. All such dichotomies are philosophically and theologically and religiously (Christianly?) unacceptable. A unitary (metaphysical theological) view that is anti-totalitarian in its socio-political implications, anti-authoritarian in its religious expression, benignly hierarchical in its dispositions of the lower reaches of being and knowing, appropriately mystical in its celebration of the prepotent presence of the one Life in all that is: such is the desideratum of Macquarrie's quest for a transcendently real humanity.

Julian N. Hartt
Charlottesville, Virginia