Henry Nelson Wieman and Empirical Theology (Radical Empiricism)

A dear friend and mentor, Dr. Kenyth Freeman, mentioned to me a few years ago that I should check out the work of American philosopher of theology, Henry Nelson Wieman.  I didn't want to take on another thinker, as I felt I had too many too-read books on my list already.  It wasn't until last year that I found out he had written his master's thesis on Wieman (in 1956).  So I borrowed and read his thesis, and since then I've really been on a Wieman kick, which has also lead me to some other like-minded thinkers, categorized variously as religious naturalism, radical empiricism (William James' term), empirical theology, the "Chicago School," or empirical realism (Bernard Meland).

For my birthday last Saturday, my wife got me three more books that I've added to the pile in the photo above. Working from the bottom up...

Religious Experience and Scientific Method - Wieman's first book, originally published in 1926, my copy is a reprint of the 1971 edition. This is Wieman's equivalent to Wilber's Marriage of Sense and Soul, but written about 70 years earlier, and remained a constant theme for Wieman throughout his career.

American Philosophies of Religion - one of my birthday gifts.  My copy is an original 1936 edition. Looks fascinating as Wieman teams up with former student Meland to survey American philosophers, classifying various schools as supernaturalism, neo-supernaturalism (Tillich, Niebuhr), idealism (absolutists Royce, Hocking, or modern mystics - Rufus Jones, or Personalists - Brightman), various streams of romanticism (such as aesthetic naturalists - Santayana), various streams of Naturalism (such as evolutionary theists, cosmic theists such as Whitehead, religious humanists such as Otto, and empirical theists (the University of Chicago folks, such as Edward Scribner Ames, John Dewey, Shailer Mathews, Gerald Birney Smith, and the two authors).

The Source of Human Good, published in 1949 - this is often considered Wieman's magnum opus where the source of human good being "the creative event" (which I think has some strong parallels to Balder's concept of (en)closure).  I asked my friend why he liked Wieman so much, rather than, say Hartshorne, who was one of his teachers. He said it was the humanity of the man, a real concern about people, and the application of religion in very practical ways. This book is great all the way through, but would even be worth getting just for the technical postscript.  When reading this book, it seemed to me Wieman was paving the way for for a reconstructive post-modernism. He was a proto reco pomo!

Man's Ultimate Commitment, published in 1958 - Wieman had what some called a Calvinist streak, in that he felt strongly about making a personal commitment to something that saves.  But very different from a fundamentalist conception.  Wieman was calling for a commitment to what he called "creative interchange." Again, very forward looking - Wieman even shares concerns about limits to growth and peak oil, though not using those terms.

Creative Freedom: Vocation of Liberal Religion - essays written in the '50s, published in posthumously in 1982. I found this book interesting enough to read, but not memorable.

The Empirical Theology of Henry Nelson Wieman (1963) is a series of essays by others reflecting on Wieman's work, and with Wieman's replies to each of them, which is quite fascinating.  This is volume 4 of the Library of Living Theology, edited by Robert Bretall, who said about Wieman "It is quite possible that he may be what his students have almost unanimously aclaimed him - the most comprehensive and most distrinctively American theologian of our century."

Seeking Faith for a New Age: Essays on the Interdependence of Religion, Science and Philosophy - published in 1975, the year of Wieman's death.  Various essays previously published, but brought together in an organized fashion, and includes some of his interesting later writings.  This is another birthday gift, and I've been reading his essays on "Science and a New Religious Reformation" from 1966, "Co-operative Functions of Science and Religion" from 1968, and "Knowledge, Religious and Otherwise" from 1958. I must say, he had a very integral approach; he probably would have appreciated Edgar Morin. Editor Cedric Hepler writes "As Wieman has indicated in personal correspondence to the editor, the reason religion, science, and philosophy need each other is because only through their interdependence can mankind go about "seeking a faith for a new age." "

Interestingly, Wieman outlines some integral-like levels of cultural development in the 1966 essay. The first three roughly parallel red, blue, and orange.  The fourth level has "the religious problem...interpreted to be an unfathomable mystery which the human intellect cannot penetrate. these are the religious existentialists and the neo-orthodox."  He calls the fifth level "the new cultural threshold," and says "To be sure, this further step cannot be taken so long as impenetrable mystery is held to be the ultimate concern of religion. At this fifth level, one seeks knowledge to guide religious commitment and so cannot stop with mystery. At this fifth level, mystery is recognized as the frontier of knowledge but not as the barrier beyond which intellectual inquiry cannot pass...Let us accept everything which this ultimate concern with mystery may have to offer. But let us be on our guard against using this appeal to mystery as a device for holding fast to cherished beliefs which we know can never be sustained by evidence."

"Against this background of analysis and survey of conditions, may we summarize the basic religious problem of our time as we see it. It can be put in the form of a question, thus: How can religion and science be united to make human existence at all levels more fit for the effective operation of that creativity which expands indefinitely the valuing consciousness of each individual in community with others when this community must itself expand indefinitely to include all the diverse goal-seeking activities of human existence insofar as they can be brought into relations of mutual support at deeper levels of mutual understanding across wider ranges of diversity?" [reminds one of Balder's "(en)closure", right?]

Fallible Forms & Symbols - Discourses of Method in a Theology of Culture - Bernard Meland's 1976 publication. As mentioned above, Meland was one of Wieman's early students at Univ. of Chicago, and they worked together on the American Philosophies of Religion back in 1936 (above).  Meland continued to be an admirer of Wieman, but also respectfully emphasized a difference.  Wieman tended to focus on manageable realms of experience, whereas Meland liked to bring emphasis to the unmanageable dimension - "we are more than we can think" he liked to say.  This book as some dry sections, but overall is fascinating in the discussion of symbols, language, mythos, and cultus, and their various insights and limitations.

Creative Interchange is another book of essays about Wieman. This project was begun in 1974, a year before Wieman passed away, but not published until 1982.  Largely written by former Wieman students I think, and very interesting to see how the next generation was carrying his ideas forward.  Also very important essays from Meland and Charles Hartshorne.  And a brief excerpt of a letter by John Cobb, Jr. to Wieman, who wrote that "In spite of metaphysical differences between your thought and that of Alfred North Whitehead, I have come to feel that the concrete meaning of his doctrine that God is immanent in all things as a lure to their optimum self-creation is religiously better brought out in your analysis of what it means to serve the event of creative interchange than in the work of most Whiteheadian theologians."

Finally, Religion and Radical Empiricism by Nancy Frankenberry - a 1987 overview of this stream, covering mostly William James, John Dewey, Wieman, Meland, Bernard Loomer, and Alfred North Whitehead, and Abhidharma Buddhism.  This is a great book, clearly laying out the important issues and distinctions, and a suggested way forward. I started a thread about this book here.

Views: 344

Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

One distinctive feature of religious inquiry is that it must be passionate. By "passionate inquiry" I mean a concern to find the truth when the concern is so strong that we cast our whole self into the inquiry in such wise that we are in a state of readiness to recognize our own distorting prejudices and pride and the conditioning which falsifies our intuitions and perceptions. In passionate inquiry as I here use the term I mean a zeal for valid knowledge which drives us to search out our own desperate clinging to certain beliefs for the sake of personal security, thereby blinding ourselves to contrary evidence. In passionate inquiry we search our souls to uncover those corrupting biases which creep in to mislead the mind when the inquiry is about matters which profoundly shape the course of life.

- Henry Nelson Wieman, "Knowledge, Religious and Otherwise," The Journal of Religion, Jan. 1958
(p. 279 in Seeking Faith for a New Age)

Amen brother Wieman.

PS: But according to this study, and other such studies increasingly being published, this is much more likely with liberals than with conservatives.

The problem as I see it is that liberals tend to be more open to new information (one of the primary distinctions between liberal and conservative), but the conservatives tend to have stronger faith commitments. To combine both of these traits is a challenge, but a needed one, I think (see more Wieman below).

Even liberals, however, still struggle with what J.H. Kunstler called "the psychology of previous investment" - if your life has been invested certain belief structures (myths of the given), it takes a lot of conscious effort ("passionate inquiry") to fairly evaluate the evidence.

Wieman continues...

There is a second sense in which inquiry must be passionate if it is to achieve religious knowledge. After we have achieved knowledge in the sense of fair treatment of all the evidence, including logical coherence or propositions, we must cast our whole self in religious commitment of faith under the guidance of this knowledge, not because this knowledge is necessarily the truth, but because inquiry is not religious unless it includes commitment of faith in the form of action and decision shaping the course of life. In this way error may be discovered if error is sought; but error will not be discovered if we hold our belief tenaciously for the sake of security.

Since religious inquiry must be passionate in this second sense, namely, in the sense of casting our lives in devotion under guidance of the best knowledge we can discover, religious knowledge must be intensely practical. It must be knowledge which points out the direction of all our striving. Therefore, knowledge about ultimate reality and the Being of being and the cosmic process and First Cause is not properly religious knowledge unless, and insofar as, such knowledge marks out a distinctive and transforming course of action in dealing with family and friends, our jobs, our sicknesses and health and immediate conditions of human existence. I am not saying that all metaphysical knowledge is outside the bounds of religious knowledge. I am saying that it is outside those bounds when and if it fails to indicate rather clearly a distinctive way of life for man to which he can give himself quite completely in conducting his daily affairs.

Interestingly, later in this same 1958 essay as quoted from above, Wieman makes a statement that lumps capitalism in with some other regressive ideas.

"Our personalities from infancy may have been organized about the religious convictions of communism, or about the conviction that the white race is ordained of God to rule over the Negro, or that capitalism is identical with the will of God and any deviation therefrom is sin, or that the Japanese race from its origin has been in process of preparation for the high mission of ruling the earth.

You and I, of course, are very sure that the religious convictions reaching down to the roots of selfhood in us do not require the sort of correction demanded of these other faiths. It is conceivable, however, that our complacency is ill-founded...We may not cease to be Christian, but we should cease to be complacent Christians."

Wieman, btw, was raised a Presbyterian, and ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1911; in 1931 he switched his affiliation to Congregational; he shared his naturalistic approach to Christianity with people of many denominations during his years as a professor of philosophy of religion (at Univ. of Chicago and elsewhere). He joined a Unitarian fellowship in 1949, and in 1950 was granted ministerial fellowship with the American Unitarian Association. [A bio of Wieman can be found here.]

Hi David - he sounds like a vital, honest, clear thinking man to have fairly transcended his early christian heritage.

I have a couple of brief reaction-responses.

I have perhaps been making room in myself and trying to make room for myself for years around some super strong Christian conditioned ambivalences and even antipathies. It wouldn't be fruitful or truth-conveying for me to try to say how that project is going - in some ways and moments, well, and in some ways and moments, not so well. I really don't know.

Wieman became a Congregationalist and then a Unitarian. Those are the two childhood churches I attended in a smallish New England town in the late 40's and early to mid 50's. I am not saying that my truly dreadful feelings, if I enter a gut-level memory of church, is due to the churches themselves - I was going through a difficult childhood and New England I suspect was a dreadfully repressive place. So the dread is probably mine as much as the local church particulars and socio-cultural religious surround. I'll leave this inserted thought here by saying that I may have had a better feeling for this young child's Unitarian church experience.

This current memory of my life and my consciousness at that time was and is too muddled to be able clearly identify causes. Yet strange for me to read that those were his babies, and that my Scottish family roots arose to some extent from Presbyterian stock, "protestant ethic" and all. Please excuse me for any personal ill-vibes I may have tossed into this thread and site.

The other thing I want to say is that in the quote below, from his bio, I really liked reading what I have emboldened. That is a fine insight to me and quite a large challenge, as I read it.

'While living at Carbondale, Wieman continued to move away from traditional Christianity. In 1963 he wrote, "It is impossible to gain knowledge of the total cosmos or to have any understanding of the infinity transcending the cosmos. Consequently, beliefs about these matters are illusions, cherished for their utility in producing desired states of mind. . . . Nothing can transform man unless it operates in human life. Therefore, in human life, in the actual processes of human existence, must be found the saving and transforming power which religious inquiry seeks and which faith must apprehend."'

Thanks, D

ambo

DavidM58 said:

Wieman, btw, was raised a Presbyterian, and ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1911; in 1931 he switched his affiliation to Congregational; he shared his naturalistic approach to Christianity with people of many denominations during his years as a professor of philosophy of religion (at Univ. of Chicago and elsewhere). He joined a Unitarian fellowship in 1949, and in 1950 was granted ministerial fellowship with the American Unitarian Association. [A bio of Wieman can be found here.]

Ambo,

Thanks for sharing your reactions and your background. How Wieman talked about God and religion shifted a bit over the years, I suppose partly due to changes in his own thinking, and partly due to who he felt his audience was at the time. Yet the general thrust remained the same from first till last. His first book was "Religious Experience and the Scientific Method," written in 1926, and re-issued in 1971 with a new preface by Wieman, in which he writes:

"During the last 45 years I have revised my interpretation o what meets the three requirements:

1) What truly and observably operates to create the human form of experience beginning with union of male and female cells. 2) What can expand indefinitely the valuing consciousness of the individual in community with others when our ruling commitment is given to it and other required conditions are present; and 3) What does this in such a way that scientific research and technology can be applied to provide these required conditions?

This book, Religious Experience and Scientific Method, represents my first attempt to solve this problem but not my last and most mature attempt. In this book I still retained features of the idea of God beyond the reach of empirical inquiry and hence obstructive to the full cooperation of science and religion."

- H.N.W., Feb. 22, 1971

In Jan. 1972, he wrote the following (published in the book Creative Interchange):

"But what makes for the greatest good when required conditions are present? Is it God? That is a word I shrink from using because it carries so many different meanings for different people."

Wieman clarified this statement to the book's editor in a personal letter in June, 1972: "I reject the word 'God' in this statement not because I reject a reality that can be given that name but because the word has become the source of confusion and deception."

Wieman's last book, published in 1987,  more than a decade after his death, was on the same topic as the first: Science Serving Faith.

"He joined a Unitarian fellowship in 1949, and in 1950 was granted ministerial fellowship with the American Unitarian Association."

A good fit. It seems many who bring rationality to their religion end up in UU. It's the only church I attend. A number of progressive groups also choose to have their meetings at UUs, which also attracts my attendance.

Reply to Discussion

RSS

What paths lie ahead for religion and spirituality in the 21st Century? How might the insights of modernity and post-modernity impact and inform humanity's ancient wisdom traditions? How are we to enact, together, new spiritual visions – independently, or within our respective traditions – that can respond adequately to the challenges of our times?

This group is for anyone interested in exploring these questions and tracing out the horizons of an integral post-metaphysical spirituality.

Notice to Visitors

At the moment, this site is at full membership capacity and we are not admitting new members.  We are still getting new membership applications, however, so I am considering upgrading to the next level, which will allow for more members to join.  In the meantime, all discussions are open for viewing and we hope you will read and enjoy the content here.

© 2024   Created by Balder.   Powered by

Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service