The Source of Human Good by Henry Nelson Wieman

First published: 1946

Edition(s) used:The Source of Human Good. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Critical analysis; theology

Core issue(s): Freedom and free will; God; good vs. evil; knowledge; nature; reason

Overview

The Source of Human Good is one of Henry Nelson Wieman’s most important works, in which he offers a conception of God as creative value within the context of human interactions and purposeful living. In developing his argument, Wieman introduces a key phrase, “the creative event,” which connotes creativity as operating in human life and giving it qualitative meaning. For Wieman, creativity is not merely identified with the common usages often associated with it, such as solely innovative behavior on the part of individuals or achievements produced by artistic persons (although these would be included as instances of it). Rather, God is creativity, in the sense that God is the character, structure, or form that enables the events of human life to be creative. “The creative event” is a complex term describing a process of how the many discordant parts of our lives are reorganized into a more inclusive whole.

Wieman explains that the creative event, which results in creative good, is a concrete reality embracing four unified but distinct subevents. Briefly stated, they are

(1) the emerging awareness of qualitative meaning through communication

(2) the integration of these new meanings with those previously acquired

(3) the expanding of quality in the appreciable world and

(4) the widening and deepening of community.

The first event is the primary context from which the other three emerge. For Wieman, a stream of experience first comes to us as qualitative immediacy and then becomes cognized into knowledge relations. Qualitative meaning occurs when every organism reacts so as to break the passage of existence into units or intervals called “events” and to relate these to one another. When a single organism is able to acquire the qualitative meanings developed by other organisms and add them to its own, the human mind and its appreciable world are transformed. Wieman states that events include within their structures possibilities for developing in process. Since qualities, or values, are the things of which events are made, they are the ontological reality of an event; every event accessible to human experience is a quality or complex of qualities. Also, every event is an instance of energy. Furthermore, Wieman asserts that a conjunction is a new or more complex event made up of a strand of events. When a conjunction occurs in such a way that the qualities of the event included in the conjunction fulfill their possibilities to a greater degree, there is an increase of meaning, or qualitative meaning.

The fundamental religious significance of Wieman’s philosophy of creativity emerges at this point. Since events cannot foresee the developments possible to them and the universe cannot determine whether there will be an increase or decrease of value, there must be some determining factor responsible for integrating the values of the individual events. This one process is God, or the process of progressive integration of value within the universe. Accordingly, God reveals Godself to humans in these events in such a way that we can understand and learn how to bring forth conditions that allow for an increase of value. As the creative event, God is the highest value. Creativity in humans is something produced in us as a consequence of the prior workings of the creative event. For Wieman, God is part of the cosmic whole but is not totally identified with the universe. Also, in this naturalistic framework, limitations are placed upon God by the present realities at hand. Although God can work only with what is present, Wieman insists that creative good may never be destroyed.

Christian Themes

Wieman’s empirical orientation and naturalistic metaphysics compel him to refute the transcendental conceptions of the divine celebrated within the dominant Jewish and Christian theological traditions. Dismissing a supernatural God that is immaterial and residing beyond history, Wieman conceives the creative event as materially based, where matter is meant as a form of energy that determines the very structure of time and space, together with all else that exists or is possible. As a natural process, God is the continuous creator of ideals, aspiration, and value, the supreme manifestation of freedom, and the source and sustainer of human freedom. As creativity, the creative event underlies all others in the sense of being a changeless structure of felt quality and knowable order, and it is necessarily prior to every other form of experience.

According to Wieman, the creative event is always and absolutely good in the sense of creating value and must necessarily destroy values that have become too ossified in order to achieve the best possibility for new values under prevailing conditions. Wieman further suggests that sin is any resistance to creativity for which humans are responsible, or the domination of created good over creative power. As long as humans are preoccupied with seeking only the material goods of life, then creative good cannot accumulate and enrich human lives. Although his view of God as creativity does not totally rid itself of the residue of philosophic idealism, Wieman’s pragmatism and scientific emphasis tend to avoid much of the subtle rationalism that characterizes much Christian process cosmology. As such, his empirical theology also confounds both traditional Western metaphysical systems and the nihilistic trends regarding the ethics of much aesthetic postmodernism that have recently come under attack.

Wieman’s empirical leanings lead him away from traditional notions of Christian revelation. For him, the creative event is unknowable aside from the way it functions in relation to other events. Although human need forms the basis from which this function is delineated, the stress is on the remarkable creativity that is both discernible and elusive to reasoning individuals. With the use of such faculties as observation, rational analysis, and intuition, individuals can gain knowledge of this divine reality. Wieman also offers a unique conception of Christian faith, which he describes as a creative and liberating commitment to the creative event (or quality apprehended by way of feeling). This deeper commitment is, again, to the actuality, not merely to ideas about it. This faith commitment entails conformity of lifestyle and behavior to the overall purpose of the creative event: the increase of human freedom individually and collectively accompanied by growth of creative community.

Moreover, Wieman expresses soteriological concerns in this work. Emphasizing a primordial interrelatedness among all organisms, he suggests that transformation of individuals occurs in interactions with others. At the level most important for human living, the creative event always operates between persons. Hence, the isolated person can never experience God, or so it appears. Arguing that a healthy encounter with the other helps to promote the possibility of creative community, Wieman believes that humans are responsible for opening themselves to creative interchange as the source of good. When we do so, we may be “saved” from illusions of isolation and separation from others.

This vision of interrelatedness, organic growth, and mutual support and meaning for all who participate in the processes of creativity introduces an ethical component to Wieman’s thought. Creative interchange helps provide the necessary structures for authentic communities of solidarity, care, and justice. With his emphasis on the structure of the creative event, Wieman’s empirical theology foreshadows important poststructuralist insights regarding the open-endedness of our practices and struggles and the fact that we live in worlds of paradox and uncertainty. His religious naturalism rejects both traditional Christianity’s triumphalism and modernism’s love affair with guaranteed progress.

Sources for Further Study

Bretall, Robert W., ed. The Empirical Theology of Henry Nelson Wieman. New York: Macmillan, 1963. This collection of essays clarifies some of the basic themes in Wieman’s unique process theology. Most of the contributors assess whether or not Wieman’s empirical framework can provide an adequate conceptual base for explicating the understanding of existence implicit in Christian faith. Included is an autobiographical essay by Wieman, outlining the single problem on which his intellectual life was focused and describing significant influences that shaped his thought.

Shaw, Marvin C. Nature’s Grace: Essays on H. N. Wieman’s Finite Theism. New York: P. Lang, 1995. These essays considers Wieman as the leading member of the group of religious naturalists associated with the University of Chicago who founded the school of “naturalistic theism,” the idea that the divine is an immanent and finite creativity at work in an evoloving universe.

Southworth, Bruce. At Home in Creativity: The Naturalistic Theology of Henry Nelson Wieman. Boston: Skinner House, 1995. An introduction to Wieman for a new generation, covering Wieman’s philosophical and theological ideas and placing them in the context of feminist and liberation theologies. Bibliography, index.

Wieman, Henry Nelson. The Intellectual Foundations of Faith. New York: Philosophical Library, 1961. Wieman reasserts his argument for a rational foundation of faith based on an empirical view of the nature of God, which alone can guide humans toward purposeful, fulfilling living. He provides a critique of various contemporary answers to the question, What can save humanity from its self-destructive propensities?

Wieman, Henry Nelson. Man’s Ultimate Commitment. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1958. Believing that individuals can be transformed into great good or great evil, Wieman emphasizes that there must be something that underlies such transformation, requiring human cooperation.