This abbreviated course attempts to demonstrate that the search for transcendence is a search undertaken by theorists from various disciplines. The search for transcendence actually takes place within non-theological circles and communities. Culture analysts, political theorists, and scientists of the psyche who probe the content of human consciousness and the dimensions of human society have worked out approaches to transcendence. They construct a concept akin to the Jewish and Christian notion of transcendence.

The nature of the search for transcendence, when undertaken from a non-theological starting point, is that the intelligibility and authenticity of the discipline, whether it be a social, political, or psychological theorist, are never in vain. The search for transcendence is a valid intellectual pursuit and is not one about which Jewish and Christian theologians ought to be apologetic. The implications for theologizing are obvious:

(1) This-worldly transcendence, which affirms that all of the conditions for the total fulfillment of life are present within the human situation, is affirmed by the theologian and non-theologian alike. The social, political, and psychoanalytic theorists, in league with Jewish and Christian theologians, acknowledge that human life is not all that it can be. They rather attempt to devise ways to bring about total human fulfillment, using the categories appropriate to their respective scientific disciplines. To do so is to acknowledge from many different points of view that the desire for wholeness is a basic human characteristic.

The various definitions of transcendence share a common theme: a total life fulfillment, or redemption and reconciliation. Transcendence means, therefore, the complete resolution of social, economic, and political

problems as well as spiritual and psychic wholeness. Transcendence becomes, in fact, a general category, utilized by many diverse disciplines to mean essentially the same thing, i.e., total fulfillment of human life. Thus, the theologian, when he speaks of transcendence in a this-worldly manner, shares the same moral objectives as the humanistic and social scientists. He is not describing a world foreign to the ordinary experiences of the common man, a world "up there" inhabited by divine and supernatural beings. He is rather pointing to a fundamental human drive, that urge within man for the enhancement and completion of human personality, the amelioration of those tensions and differences within his world that inhibit the perfect fulfillment of the human condition.

What has been demonstrated is the convergence of the theological and non-theological disciplines on one essential point: that of the human need for wholeness. Whatever may be the definition of transcendence given by the different social, political, and psychoanalytic theorists, the objective is always the same. It is to bring into being that which the human condition demands, that is, the perfection of being. This is the same objective that the Jews and Christians have intended with their affirmations about the being of God and the nature of his activity in human history.

One cannot claim that theology has a more valid concept of transcendence than the other disciplines. The claims of theology must also be

empirically verified. It is rather evident that theology is not an irrelevant and anti-humanistic discipline. So it appears that theology has reentered the quest for transcendence with great vitality and forcefulness; and it does so claiming to be a interpreter of the human condition. But even more so, theology asserts that it can provide for wholeness and perfection.

(2) The search for transcendence demonstrates that the concern of the theologian is not to describe the nature and being of God. Instead, he attempts at an exposition of the consequences of God's activity in human history. When the Jew and Christian affirm faith in transcendence and when they specifically mean faith in the transcendent God of the Old and New Testaments, they are affirming faith in the God who has acted in human history to redeem man from his sins. That affirmation, when translated into categories congruent with the humanistic objectives of the social sciences, refers specifically to the effect that the revelation of God has had upon human life. When that translation has been made, transcendence becomes a historical, and not a metaphysical category. Transcendence refers to the transformation God has effected upon the concrete human situation in terms of reconciliation, redemption, the restoration of health, the amelioration of social and political divisions, and so on.

Transcendence must be grasped, not referring to the God up there beyond the affairs of human life, but specifically in terms of what God has effected historically on behalf of man. Transcendence is not the description of the inner metaphysical being of God; it rather refers to an event, that historical event reported in the Old and New Testaments, which brings about the reconciliation of man and society.

The history of human thought demonstrates the debilitating effect that the previous understanding of transcendence has had upon the development of a vital and appealing humanism. To use spatial metaphors which shift the location of transcendence from "out there" to "the depth of being" continues to subject the notion of transcendence to the criticism that God, the

ultimate reality, is distinct from and uncaring for the welfare of concrete historical man.

That transcendent dimension of which the theologian speaks can be described by reference to concrete indices of what it means to be human. The theologian cannot content himself by speaking in abstract generalities about the nature of human life. When the theologian argues that human life has been enhanced by the revelation of God in history, he means something quite specific about the quality of that human life. And the quality of human life refers specifically to empirical indices of the content of that life. The redemption of man from sin, which event has been effected by God's revelation of himself in history, means concretely that human life has been given a quality of existence that it did not previously have. When the translation has been made from theological categories to humanistic ones, that quality of existence describes human life in social, political, economic, and psychoanalytic terms.

The theological description of the redeemed life affirms "a joyful, willing and free mind," the willful service to the neighbor, the rejection of such criteria for action as "gratitude or ingratitude, . . . praise or blame, . . . gain or loss." The man of faith does not put another man "under obligation," nor does he "distinguish between friends and enemies" when he serves man. He spends himself and is not discouraged by the lack of return for his services; nor is he prompted to serve because he anticipates a reward.

Human life is radically altered, in empirically measured ways, by the revelation of the transcendent God in human history.

(3) Transcendence is defined by the non-theological interpreters with emphasis on two essential components: first, transcendence defined in psychic or spiritual terms as wholeness; second, transcendence defined in political or social terms as historical purpose or direction.

The theologian can profit from the discoveries of the psychological and political implications of the meaning of transcendence. The theologian neither introduces non-relevant concepts to the meaning he gives to transcendence, nor does he discover factors that do not exist there. He ought to be conscious that the concept of transcendence has a psychological and political dimension.

"God's in his heaven, all's right with the world" is an old saying. When this is viewed from the perspective of the theologian seeking for wisdom from the social scientist, it becomes the occasion for asking the question, What are the psychological and political indications that the world is "all right"? The theological search for those kinds of analytic allegiances will enhance his own conceptual task and will enable him to flesh out and give meaning to his own categories. He will then become aware of the deepest spiritual meaning of transcendence and of its broadest political implications.

We may call these two dimensions of transcendence as self-transcendence and historical transcendence At this point we may begin to speak of interrelatedness of individual wholeness and social responsibility. The relationship of the individual to transcendence is always more profound when it includes the social-political dimension and introduces the individual to the struggle to transform community than when it defines that relationship solely in spiritual and individualistic ways. Any dichotomy between self-transcendence and historical transcendence is false in theory and perverse in practice. Moreover, it is foreign to the Jewish and Christian witnesses to the redemptive action of God in history. Ultimately, what transcendence means is the absolute transformation of every part of human experience, individual and social, by the redemptive activity of the sovereign and transcendent God who becomes identified with man in order to effect wholeness.

The theologian Edward LeRoy Long, Jr. has captured succinctly the essence of what it means to live within the dimension of transcendence and to affirm on the one hand the over-riding availability of grace and the corresponding response of responsible stewardship of that grace: