The Judeo-Christian Tradition deeply values and honors human life in its many dimensions and at the same time has always carried with it a strong notion of “a life to come.” Even though the spiritual resources of the tradition were not always fully uncovered, the Christian notion of life is dynamic and multilayered. To find “true life” always meant to enhance the life given by spiritual means and the discovery and realization of spiritual laws. Life is always a life interwoven in some way into a “counter-world” that helps to find the true life for the faithful and the world, even as it provides permanent and creative “spiritual aspirations.” However, what appears to be crucial in the Christian way of dealing with the creative tension between world and “counter-world” is that it was always – albeit in varying degrees – embedded in the triad of love, faith, and hope. In the New Testament, hope based on faith and framed by love marks the “Gestalt” of the Christian life driven and motivated by God’s spirit. There are, however, traditions present in the broad stream of Christian faith, which sacrifice the care for the flourishing of life for the sake of securing life “in the world to come.” Even though there is this ongoing debate about the relation between the care for enhancing this life and the care for the ‘true life’ at the expense of this life, research has shown that even during the turmoil of the first centuries, Christians built not only churches but also hospitals, demonstrating an early consciousness within Christian communities of the profound connections between spiritual and physical well-being.
The following considerations will outline the research project Enhancing Life Given and Hoped For: A Theological Exploration of the Spiritual Laws Embedded in the Transformative Unity of Love, Faith, and Hope and sketch out the central questions, important hypotheses, and methodological and conceptual tools. Knowing that the pursuit of this research will certainly be influenced by new insights and as yet unknown trajectories of inquiry, I will nonetheless lay out the central ideas. This project will theologically address the Big Questions, which stand at the outset of the Enhancing Life Project: 1)“What does it mean to enhance life, including spiritual life?” and 2) “what are the spiritual laws for the strategies, social mechanisms, and technologies that enable us to enhance life in its many dimensions and in measurable ways?” This project will place special (even though not exclusive) emphasis on the first question, examined through the lens of Christian traditions (in accordance with my own expertise) but with clear implications for other world religions that share consideration of this question, and which other researchers will address in their respective projects. (The second question will be at the center of William Schweiker’s project.)
The core question of the project is: “How does the hope for God’s current and future creative presence stimulate human creative striving for the enhancing of life?” This core question is shaped by Sir John’s observation that “we know that humans flourish best in a system of life that stimulates novelty, innovativeness and individuality, and that rewards new approaches, new concepts, new inventions, and new and better ways of thinking about life and its ultimate ends and concerns” (POSS, 36). The project hypothesizes that the spiritual nourishing of a perspective on the world in which there is a current and future transformative spiritual presence of the Divine encourages the exploration of new possibilities in many fields of human inquiry. In other words: “How does the Christian hope for God’s transforming presence in this life and “the life to come” contribute to the faithful enhancement of human shared life in the third millennium? What spiritual laws feed, stimulate, and shape faithfulness to human flourishing?” Even though the project has a special emphasis on hope and “counter-worlds,” it will explore the spiritual laws embedded in and found in the unity of love, faith, and hope, with Christianity serving as the starting point. Our working hypothesis is that the tension between what is religiously considered the world and the “counter-world” can be utilized in a creative way for the drive to transform this world. If this impulse for transformation is rooted in faith and framed by love, the counter-worldly orientation can stimulate transformative energies and release visions for the enhancing of life.
In the Christian tradition, faith, love, and hope represent the central specific Christian virtues. For St. Paul they represent the central forces which shape the Christian life and which are brought forth and nourished through God’s spirit. For this reason, my project assumes that this unity of faith, love, and hope is a quite fertile context for the discovery of spiritual laws to guide the enhancing of life.
I hypothesize that the spiritual laws found in the unity of love, faith, and hope (in which I concentrate on hope) influence and creatively shape the religious life – but not only the religious life – along eight axes. Against the background of my training both in theology and sociology, these axes emerged as conceptual tools in previous work and provide a first orientation for the reconstructive and constructive conversation with influential traditions of Christian thought and practice. These eight axes consist of:
1) the dynamic relation between giving and receiving in enhancing life, traditionally understood as losing and winning life;
2) the dynamic relation between work and effort on the one side and gift and grace on the other side;
3) the dynamic relation between what can and needs to be enhanced at the moment in urgent interaction and what can be transformed only in larger timeframes reaching out to future generations;
4) the dynamic relation between the person as the place of spiritually enhancing life and the social sphere and community;
5) the dynamic relation between creative unrest and providing fundamental ontological security;
6) the dynamic relation between continuously transcending boundaries and preserving and maintaining boundaries;
7) the dynamic relation between individual agents (the believer in his profession) and social agents (faith communities, political agents) bringing about the enhancing of life;
8) the dynamic relation between particular spiritual means and trajectories for enhancing life and non-spiritual (yet still spiritually motivated and initiated) ways of enhancing life (see William Schweiker’s project).
In addition, I need to be open to the possibility that the spiritual laws that creatively shape these aspects of life eventually describe - at least at first sight - paradoxes, transcend simple alternatives, and eventually refer to nonlinear processes. The specific way in which religious traditions adopt and embody the spiritual laws along these axes creates what could be called the “spiritual texture for enhancing life.” With respect to the variety of Christian traditions and the multiplicity of faith traditions, I expect significant variations of this spiritual texture and sufficient similarity in order to have mutually enriching conversations. (On this, see also William Schweiker’s project.)
With first guidance provided by these hypotheses, the study will then ask: What are the most influential religious symbols, narratives, and scripts that carry and support these spiritual laws? Do the religious texts point to specific practices in which these spiritual laws are embodied? Based on the assumption that hope is grounded in faith and framed by love, how does this openness to key practices appear evident? Furthermore, one needs to ask in what specific networks of religious symbols these spiritual laws are communicated. As an example, I will have to examine whether and for what reasons the symbols communicating spiritual laws are primarily found in religious insights regarding creation, or in symbols related to Jesus Christ, or eventually God’s spirit.
To look at the distinct networks of symbols informed by so-called Trinitarian theology is of great importance for this project for a specific reason: it is the experience of and the reflection upon God’s spirit in which God’s ongoing transformation of the life in this world is related to the goal of a final eschatological transformation. In other words, the spirit of God is the place where the enhancing of this life and the enhancing of life in the “counter-world” are interlaced in a dynamic manner. The combination of both these dimensions lies at the root of the Christian perception of the transforming presence of the Divine. Hence I hypothesize that the spiritual laws play a crucial role in the dynamic spiritual interrelation of world and counter-world, of this life and “the life to come.” My preliminary assumption is that it is the present power of the divine spirit anticipating the “life to come” which is the driving force in the permanent process of enhancing life. The title of this project, “Enhancing the life given and hoped for,” captures this nested notion of life.
Even though the analytical and constructive emphasis of the project is informed by the shape and impact of hope, the relations to faith and love also need to be considered. We assume that love does play a sensitizing and a perception-enabling role. Since any insight into the needs and the chances of enhancing life implies some perception and analysis of a given process or state of affairs, the sensitizing for both the problems and the hidden chances for enhancement become crucial for the whole process. Hence the transformative power of hope always needs to be related to the sensitizing function of love and the subsequent perception of a given situation. Faith, for its part, mobilizes the resources of hope and change in situations where the enhancing of life is endangered and is seemingly blocked.
Recognizing the long development and the internal complexity of religious traditions, I will further ask a question which lies is at the core of the Enhancing Life Project: “Given the dynamic aspect of life in the Judeo-Christian faith tradition, what are the religious measures and standards to assess enhancing life?” If religious traditions are a spiritual laboratory for visions and practices for enhancing life and at the same time the memory of more or less successful ways of enhancing life, we are thereby enticed to ask for specific religious and spiritual criteria to measure and evaluate the transformation brought about by the striving to enhance life.
The study will primarily focus on materials coming out of the Christian tradition, as represented in theological classics and discussed in the 20th century, in order to uncover the spiritual laws buried in and reflected in the Christian tradition. Although the evidential focus is Christian, the implications for discovering how the hope for God’s creative presence stimulates human creative striving for the enhancing of life will resonate across religious and disciplinary divides.
In terms of method, the project will combine rigorous reconstructive analyses with courageous constructive theological work. The project “Enhancing the life given and hoped for” will engage – where it is necessary – in a fruitful reshaping and reforming of our understanding of the Christian tradition.
This constructive theological work entails entering into conversation with three distinct types of theological traditions, because they represent – as a first working hypothesis – different primary foci or trajectories for enhancing life. One conversation partner will be the tradition of religious naturalism, a tradition that is well grounded in American religious thought. What makes this tradition a fruitful conversation partner is its openness to the beauty and complexity of nature as well as their (past, current and future) prominent role in the conversation between religion and science. The second conversation partner will be the pietist and evangelical faith tradition (broadly conceived, including its Pentecostal branches), which is currently the most vital and community-based tradition of Christianity. What we find illuminating for the exploration of spiritual laws is the intense debate about and the practice of care, social work, and “diaconic engagement” in these traditions. The third promising conversation partner will be the more Trinitarian-structured tradition of continental theology. Among its characteristics is a commitment to civic engagement and responsible work in the public realm. Without any doubt, this threefold typology will require further refinement, but nonetheless will provide some initial orientation to my research.
In looking at these three traditions, of particular interest are two types of contrarian lines of thought. A cursory view on religious traditions discloses, first, that some traditions are engaged in enhancing life – contrary to their dominant theology and their strong orientation towards a “counter-world” beyond this world. Second, the religious impulse to enhance life can also work against the grain of the dominant culture surrounding the religious community.
The general larger aim of the study is a constructive proposal for how the spiritual laws embedded in the unity of love, faith, and hope nourish, orient, and push for / propel the process of enhancing life with regard to many spheres and dimensions of life.
Given that the spiritual laws embedded in the unity of love, faith, and hope are valid and working not only within the community of believers, this particular inquiry is methodologically challenged to explore these laws in such a way that they can be translated into the wider discourse of the overall Enhancing Life Project and made accessible as well as plausible for other fields of inquiry. This translation process is a specific goal of the Project. In order to establish Enhancing Life Studies, we need to communicate the spiritual laws to other fields of inquiry, which are co-responsible for the enhancement of life in the third millennium. Therefore, what my project on “Enhancing the life given and hoped for” strives to be is a laboratory in which – based on the spiritual laws embedded in the unity of love, faith, and hope – human imagination and an adventurous spirit of inquiry can connect across multiple fields of academic inquiry and beyond to the curious lay public.
This translation process of spiritual laws will help to answer a question which is of importance of the collaborative endeavor of the overall project: “What dimensions of life are brought to the forefront and what cultural, social, and technological sensitivities are encouraged when the enhancement of life is stimulated by hope, grounded in forms of faith, and framed by love?”
In order to intensify the conversation with religious naturalism focused on Enhancing Life Studies, I plan to visit the University of Copenhagen, which hosts a Centre for Naturalism and Christian Semantics. Over the last years, I have been very active in the field of Media and Religion. I plan to bring the concern for enhancing life into this debate and to organize focused faculty workshops in cooperation with partners in London (London School of Economics) and Jerusalem (Hebrew University). When the project has sufficiently progressed, I will travel to Hong Kong (Baptist University and Alliance Bible Seminary) and Taipei (Presbyterian Seminary and Chung Yuan University) for further research exchange. Since the Asian Churches are caught in intense debates about spiritually adequate engagement with their lived environment, an intense exchange about Enhancing Life Studies will be mutually useful and promising. As there is a good chance to raise other funds for traveling, I designated only a moderate amount for this travel in the budget. (As I am an external member and research associate of the Theological Faculty in Stellenbosch / SA I would be able to mobilize external funding for a visit there.)
I will start working on the analytical tools (the axes described above) and on the analysis of the three traditions in year one of the project. In order to work and write uninterrupted on the constructive reshaping of the tradition, I see the need to buy out additional research time in the second year, and this has been explicated in the current budget and budget narrative.
Facing the challenge of the third millennium with an increasingly global technological culture and economy, many institutions and individuals have called for a renewed vision of human flourishing based on the processes of enhancing life. I do see a growing quest for a renewed vision of human life oriented by spiritual laws, a quest that Sir John identified and pursued with passion. My project seeks to make a substantive contribution for advancing such a vision for enhancing life.
How will the theological answer produced by my project address the central question of The Enhancing Life Project: “What does it mean to enhance life, including spiritual life?” This answer cannot yet be given, but the intellectual interest which is at the basis of this project is grounded in a tentative anticipation: The spiritual laws embedded in the unity of faith, love, and hope will enable the tension between this life and “the life to come” (or the “counter-world”) to become a transformative and productive force for enhancing this life spiritually and at the same time on all levels of life. The visions of life that emerge out of this creative tension will lead to new visions of the flourishing of life – which will have a stimulating impact on non-religious attempts to enhance life. True spiritual enhancing of life by means of spiritual laws will “spill over” so to speak and invigorate other means of enhancing life – by providing visions, imaginative energies, and passion as well as patience. The grounding of this hope in faith (or its analogies in other spiritual traditions) will make a creative contrarian posture in enhancing life possible. In order to enhance life where it is needed, but also envision where it is possible, the dynamics pushing towards enhancing life must be guided by the sensitivities provided by love. Only in connection with faith and love can the transformative power of hope be grounded in a deep solidarity of life and a bold vision of a future for enhancing life.