The End of God-Talk -- Final Report -- Updated May 5, 2020

Rice University's Dr. Anthony Pinn, a professor of religious studies and persistent scholar of African American religiosity in particular, offers a compelling presentation via The End of God-Talk: An African American Humanist Theology (2012).



This comes to me as no surprise. I've found Pinn to be both a rich resource and a challenging conversation partner--as for the latter, early phone talks with him were often frustrated by how much I didn't know, but also fruitful because they promised knowledge about religious alternatives. Moreover, when it's still common today for folks--black people included--to see an almost necessary association between being African American and being religious, I don't think I can overstate how much more impactful it was to hear an expression of atheism from Pinn.

Here's a snippet of Pinn that represents his relevance, I think, for secular communities.

Because it's so good, I was tempted to summarize God-Talk. I won't do that here, however. Instead, my final report is driven by the observation that several connections exist between Pinn's work and some key points we've covered in our course: the sources of secular thinking and the meaningfulness of human life.

First, though, I need to return to something I brought up in an earlier post. I mentioned there that Pinn's affinity for theological discourse--why he chose to do humanist theology rather than philosophy--had something to do with an identifiable traditional structure. By this, I'm referring to how theological discourse, especially the systematic variety, is usually preoccupied with addressing fundamental subjects in a way that is integrative, coherent, and comprehensive. For example, a typical Christian systematic theology might look like this when outlined:

I. God (theology proper)
II. Jesus (christology)
III. Humanity (theological anthropology)
IV. Sin/Salvation (soteriology)
V. Church (ecclesiology)

Or, if we let Joel Beeke break it down as an insider of Christianity:

(Note the video's emphasis on the sources or disciplines--biblical, historical, philosophical, experiential, etc.--used to do systematic theology. The subject of sources is something I'll come back to later.)

Pinn's presentation is not far off from the above structure. But there are some significant differences:

I. Community
II. Humanity
III. Wholeness
IV. Ethics
V. Celebration

Do you feel like you have a systematic secular worldview? What would you have to think about to get there? What do you notice about the order or arrangement of Pinn's system? What's first? Or how about what's absent?  What do you think about the major inclusion of celebration, what Pinn also calls ritual? How does that fit into your understanding of nontheistic humanism?

(There's a lot to say about about the need for celebration in secular communities. For now, I'll settle on Fry's apt description of humanist ceremonies as a "contemporary way of satisfying a timeless need to bring significance to life's big changes" [1:45-1:55]. Humanists disregard this "timeless need" because of an undue fear of anything that resembles religion at our own peril.)

Humanism -- Science or Religion?

Beyond seeking a structural resemblance between humanist theology and systematic theology, by choosing theology over philosophy Pinn might also be expressing his position on humanism as both moral and religious. He is leery of what he suggests is a tendency to think of humanism as a purely scientific orientation, because science, while having great descriptive power, stops short of evaluating implications based on what ought or ought not to be. Science describes, but it doesn't prescribe. "[T]o interrogate the cultural implications and cultural pitfalls of . . . scientifically reasonable statement[s]" is among the "special abilities of theology," says Pinn (4). As for the religious-ness of humanism, Pinn has elsewhere explored African American religion as fundamentally a "quest for complex subjectivity" (2011). Rather than saddle you with the details, I'll emphasize that defining religion in this way reaches out to include non-theistic orientations such as humanism. So, if non-theistic humanism is a religion and theology is religion's articulation, then non-theistic humanism can--should?--have a theology. It's fascinating how, via an apparently slight vocabulary choice, Pinn makes such an important statement about the status of humanism! You might remember that Baggini talks a little about the religious-ness of humanism in the conclusion of Atheism: A Short Introduction (225-27).

What say you? Is secular humanism purely scientific? If science is our preferred mode of expression, how might this be a limitation? What do you think about seeing secular humanism as a religion? If it is, should its discourse be theology, then? Or would you prefer not to call humanism a religion and choose instead to follow Hagglund's use of "secular faith"? Remember that he distinguishes secular faith from "religious faith," because the former is "dedicated to persons or projects that are worldly and temporal," and "that [are] vulnerable to loss" (6). How about the portmanteau of "seculalogy" to name our secular theology ? Ha, ha!

(Note--with skepticism, I might add--the video's presumption of secular humanism's dominance in spaces of public education.)

Secular Sources

At the start of our course, we dug into what it means to talk positively about life, meaning, and morality without a theistic belief. Wrestling with this was all the more necessary because it's taken for granted that, without theism, there are no durable sources for talking about these things. Baggini, however, talks about life having "its own answer to the question of why we should live" (152). Accordingly, we can look to the the details of our everyday, earthbound life to provide satisfactory answers to existential questions.

Pinn echoes this with a section in which he identifies the source material of his humanist theology and further distinguishes his work from traditional theology. In a word, Pinn's source material is "ordinary," primarily because Pinn's humanism "pays no allegiance to the idea of revealed materials that link the transcendent and human history" (9). There's no deference to supernaturally revelatory material that expresses the voice of God for all time and all people. To be fair, the Bible still has "some metaphorical or symbolic value," but it, and presumably other religious texts, "are no more significant and hold no greater meaning" than secular texts (ibid). The Hebrew Torah and Thoreau's Walden are essentially equivalent: both are human constructions that ruminate with earnestness on the existence of human beings, and we can learn from them. It should be said that privileged among Pinn's secular sources are African American literature, as well as other forms of what he calls "material culture," such as photographs and architecture (10-16).

Do you have a secular canon or a collection of source material that you privilege in your own life? If limited to three or five items, what would you include in that canon?

Meaningfulness of Human Life

A final connection I'd like to make between Pinn's work and our course has to do with something many people find in the Bible: human meaningfulness. In Genesis, the first book of the Bible, there's a story of creation that describes human beings as made in the image of God (Gen. 1:27). Theologians for ages have interpreted this to mean, among many things, that humans are supernaturally special, that we have a soul, a God-given freedom, a divine spark, etc. Michael Ruse talks about this when he says, "We humans get our meaning and value from the fact that we are created by this God, out of love, for Him to cherish and for us to adore and obey Him."

For Pinn, however, and I'd gather for any atheist, exploring what it means to be human involves a move away from the ontological guarantees of the imago dei or "image of god" idea. The catch, as Ruse also points out, is that while giving this up means there's no idea of original sin, no fundamentally wicked deficiency in human nature to weigh us down; there's also no human approximation of divinity, no supernatural exception, and no eternal soul to elevate us. This can be a real downer, but it doesn't have to be. We can still find positive meaning in an understanding of human nature and worthiness that is not based on supernatural origins. Pinn's understanding of the self sees it as a "cultural construct" and a "materially embodied 'something' (that lives and dies)" (47). Pinn later describes how this focus on time and space "has more depth, more layers, more possibilities than formulations of salvation" (88). Pinn continues, in language not dissimilar from Hagglund's talk of finitude, "Lived life as embodied selves, in light of this and within the framework offered by nontheistic humanist theology, becomes recognized for its dynamic nature. And there is something elegant about this arrangement" (88). I couldn't agree more. There is something elegant, something gracious about how our finite lives provide opportunities for us to care about and be cared about. I've learned from Hagglund that this caring just wouldn't be the same--or wouldn't be caring at all--if we could count on some form of ourselves and our world lasting forever. That's cause to celebrate, right?

And, although we don't have the imago dei as an anthropological boost, we do have Carl Sagan's "star stuff," which never fails to blow me away!

"The cosmos is also within us. The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood. Everything we are made of was forged in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself. Star stuff, contemplating the stars. Think of the possibilities." (6:26-7:10).

Well, there you have it, friends! It's been a wild ride this semester. I've learned a lot from each of you. Feel free to share any thoughts about this report.

Final Run Total Since COVID-19: 10
I estimate my overall run total to be between 20-30, but I am unsure because I failed to note my run count on the scorecard before we left for Spring Break. My apologies!