Address: “The Naturalistic Theism of
Henry Nelson Wieman”©
The Rev. Sarah Lammert, USR,
February 11, 2007
In 1926, Henry Nelson Wieman, who
had been serving as a visiting professor at the Divinity School of the
University of Chicago, was asked to give a talk at the Theology Club to explain
Alfred North Whitehead’s new book “Religion in the Making.” Those of you who attended last week’s service
on the process metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead will especially appreciate
this story. Although Whitehead’s book
was creating a sensation in academic circles, to the dismay of the very
well-read faculty at the Chicago Divinity School, they found the book “wholly
unintelligible.” A packed audience
waited with baited breath for the “miracle” of interpreting this book. As Wieman’s biographer Bernard Meland
reports:
The miracle was performed. With deftness and patience, and with
occasional sallies in poetic imagination, Wieman took the key phrases and their
basic concepts and translated them into the more familiar imagery of the
pragmatic Chicago School. It was as if
the shuttered windows in one’s own household had been swung open, revealing
vistas of which one had hitherto been unmindful.[1]
Needless to say, Wieman was
immediately offered a permanent position with the Div School, where he would
stay on for the next twenty years, and become a part of the inner circle of the
Process Theologians who built their ideas upon the intellectual framework set
out by Whitehead.
Wieman was 42 when he gave that
incisive speech in Chicago, the same age I am now! Just to fill you in briefly on his life until
that point, Wieman was born in 1874 in Rich Hill, Missouri, a small town south
of Kansas City. Wieman originally
thought to pursue a career in journalism until he had a mystical experience one
evening during his senior year at Park College:
I came to my room after the evening meal and sat
alone looking at the sunset over the Missouri River. Suddenly it came over me that I should devote
my life to the problems of religious inquiry.
I never had a more ecstatic experience.
I could not sleep all night and walked in that ecstasy for days.
Wieman carried this sense of
intensity and urgency about the religious quest throughout his days, although
he never fully trusted the mystical, rigorously applying the scientific method
to his search for the truth. Raised in
the Presbyterian Church (although he would become a Unitarian Universalist
later in his life), he pursued a Masters of Divinity at the San Francisco
Seminary, and served as a campus minister in Davis, CA for four years before
taking a more academic approach to the problem.
He earned his doctorate in philosophy at Harvard, and taught philosophy
of religion and theology at Occidental College for a decade before he became
acquainted during a “blistering and stupefying summer in Southern California”
with Whitehead’s ideas of God as a living changing force; the interplay between
that which is static, and that which is fluent; the lure towards harmony and
wholeness. And, within this view, the
idea that humans are co-creators with God – co-agents in the process of moving
that which is merely potential into actuality.
Whitehead’s ideas ignited Wieman,
whose intellectual cup was already filled nearly to the brim with the
pragmatism of John Dewey and William James, and also the naturalistic
scientific worldview of religious humanism.
Even before reading Whitehead, Wieman had begun to shape his own
approach to religion that could be termed naturalistic (as opposed to
supernaturalistic), empirical (or subject to being studied and described), and
value-centered (focused on what could add to human good).
Now that was a lot of what we used
to call 25 cent words when I was a child (I guess now they’d be $2 words), so
let me just explain a little about the intellectual context out of which
Wieman, and the Chicago Div School were operating at the time. Pragmatism was a response to the post-Civil
War era, and marked the intellectual culture of early 20th Century
America. The Civil War had been
devastating on many levels – not only was it a brutal and traumatic war, but in
the larger sense it seemed to many to be a failure of the ideals underpinning
democracy itself. What men like Dewey
and James brought to the table was a skeptical approach to ideas – a belief
that ideas should never become ideology.
Instead they saw ideas “as tools – like forks and knives and microchips
– that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves.” [2] According to the pragmatists, ideas are a
social phenomenon, created by groups of people in response to their
environment. The survival of ideas,
therefore, depends on their adaptability, rather than their immutability.
No wonder Wieman, along with his
peers at the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, was (at least
initially) so enthusiastic about Whitehead’s intellectualized approach to
theology, which of God as adaptable rather than immutable – God as the energy
of the unfolding universe. While Wieman
would later distance himself from the speculative metaphysics of Whitehead,
saying that it is an error to try to conceptualize God beyond what can be
empirically studied and described, he also refused to embrace the completely
secular approach of Dewey and others, insisting that human life is fulfilled
not through intelligence and willpower alone, but through the power of creative
transformation, which is beyond human power, and is yet contained within
nature.
The question that was at the heart
of Wieman’s religious journey, was articulated by him in this way: "What
operates in human life with such character and power that it will transform man
[sic] as he cannot transform himself, saving him from evil and leading him to
the best that human life can ever reach?"
For Wieman, God was synonymous with Creativity. Theology, he felt, needed to be rescued from
its failure to come to grips with practical reality and to provide a clear path
of devotion to a “saving Creativity” that enables humans to act responsibly and
thus not only survive, but to live into what is possible.
Wieman was convinced that humanity
had reached a crossroads with three possible futures (futures which still seem
relevant today): First, we could destroy
ourselves, or at least our most developed civilizations. Second, we could fall under the domination of
a ruling elite that will be ruthless in protecting its own benefits through
subjugating other peoples. Third,
national leaders and other powerful individuals might commit themselves to the
process of “creative interchange,” which for Wieman constitutes God, whereby we
learn to cooperate with one another for our mutual benefit.[3]
For Wieman, the fullest development
of human life is achieved through a process in which we become increasingly
responsive to a wider and wider range of our environment. You could say for Wieman, the human quest is
to become more completely attuned to the interdependence of life. He warned that at every stage of individual
and societal development, there is a great “waste of experience” – that we are
limited in our capacity to relate to each other and to our greater world
because of the limits of our own perception.
Like Whitehead, who warned that “it is not ignorance, but the ignorance
of ignorance itself that is the death of knowledge,” Wieman felt that for
humankind to survive and thrive, we would need to continuously develop and
expand our capacity for opening our hearts and minds to one another and to the
world.
Last week, I shared my colleague
Yielbonzie Johnson’s idea that we engage in worship any time we measure the gap
between what is, and our highest ideals.
For Wieman, worship is something a bit different: it is that moment of
transformation when we suspend the normal limitations and habits of the mind,
and open ourselves to an expanded awareness of nature in its fullness. The source of human goodness, he said, is not
achieved through human effort alone, which at best sets the stage for
transformation. For Wieman, there is a
force greater than reason or will alone:
not a supernatural force, but the power of Creativity, which moves us
beyond what we thought possible, allowing us to step out into the unknown.
Lest Wieman begin to sound like
Captain Picard of the Star Trek Enterprise, exploring
strange new worlds, seeking out new life and new civilizations, and boldly
going where no man has gone before, let me say
that as he grew older he turned away from his cosmic explorations, and become
more and more focused on human interactions in the realm of social
psychology. He felt that the power of
creative interchange, or transformation, could be experienced through a certain
kind of communication which is actually not unlike the way we communicate in
our Connections groups. It begins with a
candid expression of one’s unique personal perspective, offered without the
need to defend oneself or impress another.
The listener must work not to project interpretations or feeling upon
what is said, but simply be present, without judgement, and to hear the
other. If the listener is not clinging
to his or her own perspectives, but is open to the ideas of the other, this
kind of communication then enlarges the mind and increases what the listener is
able to think or know. Since the
listener and speaker are now in a sharing mode, further creative interchange is
now possible.[4]
In different ways, throughout his
lifetime, Wieman’s message was this: the path of human salvation is not through
a God in a heaven, nor through the scientific method alone, but through opening
ourselves to the power of creative transformation:
To
do what lies beyond the reach of [our] imagination, a greater imagination must
be created in [us]. To see a good beyond
what [we] can appreciate, a greater appreciation must be developed in
[us]. The creative event, not [humanity
itself], creates this great imagination and this more profound and discriminating
appreciation.
In other words, we must go beyond
our greatest available ideal visions, and through the power of Creativity,
commit to the process by which all values are continually expanded and renewed,
and by which the individual is ever seen more clearly as a part of the
community of all. For Wieman, evil might
be defined as that which hinders creativity from being expressed.
Towards the end of Wieman’s career,
he found himself under increasing personal and professional stresses. His wife accused him publically of
infidelity, ending his career at the Divinity School. He moved to Houston, where he was attacked
for his liberal-pacifist ideas, and although he supported Civil Rights, an
article about him in The Humanist magazine led many to believe he
supported segregation. Martin Luther
King Jr. critiqued Wieman’s theology in his doctoral dissertation, although
ironically it was that same dissertation that later was found to have been
partially plagiarized, casting doubt on King’s legacy. He was attacked by Christian theologians for
being an “ultimate skeptic” who wanted to “anihilate truth,” and he was also
attacked by humanists for being too theistic.
Upon retirement, Wieman became a
Unitarian Universalist, commenting in a 1967 sermon to the Grinnell Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, “I
don't think I've found any other association of people who gather regularly to
consider the important problems of human existence which I've found is more
congenial or as congenial as this."
In one of his last public addresses, entitled “My Failures” Wieman
wondered aloud if his greatest achievement, the concept of creative
interchange, might prove to be a colossal failure. As one of his biographers suggested, he might
have read his own earlier words in answer to his own question:
The culmination of man's quest through the ages,
if ever there is a culmination, will not be to build the house of his
dreams. It will be to climb above the
fog of his dreams and see that the greatest values are shining summits very
different from his dreams.
For me, the greatest lesson I walk
away with from Wieman, given this tragic week for both Ridgewood and Glen Rock,
a week in which the creative force of two young lives were cut short, is that
what saves us as humans is not what we know, but how much we can surrender
ourselves to an ever-expanding awareness of our interconnection with one
another, and with our world. In an
attempt to keep them safe, we pressure our children too much to conform to
ideals and standards that we, through fear of change, have set out in
stone. Instead, could we risk
encouraging them to take us to new worlds which we ourselves can scarcely
envision? Could we allow them the space
to experience Creativity, and devote ourselves to the path of creative
interchange?
Look –
This is our world for another day.
Reach out
to it, it is your own life.
Know,
too, that this day is dear
even to
strangers you will never know
Stretch
out your arms to embrace it.
Do not go
back to sleep.
[1] As quoted in Southworth, Bruce, At Home in Creativity, Skinner House Books, Boston, 1995, pp. 17-18.
[2] Menand,
Louis, The Metaphysics Club, Farrar, Staur and
[3] Southworth, p. 27.
[4] Shaw, Marvin C. “The Moral Stance of Theism Without the Transcendent God,” Process Studies, Vol 18, No. 3, Fall 1989, pp. 173-180.