I
The word "biohistorical" holds together in one both the biological grounding of our human existence and the historico-cultural dimensions of human life, thus highlighting what is most distinctive in our humanness? It immediately suggests that We are qualitatively different from any other form of life in important respects. We humans emerged-out of less complex or (as some would say) "lower" forms of life-in the course of evolutionary developments on planet Earth over many millennia; and We cannot exist apart from this living web that continues to nourish and sustain us. It is important to note that this biological point by itself tells us nothing about the unique role, within this evolutionary setting, played by the emerging historical features (that is, the sociocultural features) of human existence. The order of nature is, of course, the wider context within which human history has appeared, but it has been especially through our historical sociocultural development over many millennia-not our biological evolution alone-that we humans have acquired many of our most distinctive characteristics. Our increasingly comprehensive knowledge, for example, about the natural world in which we live and about our human constitution and possibilities has provided us with significant powers over our immediate environment and over the physical and biological, as well as sociocultural and psychological, conditions of our existence-powers that go far beyond those of any other animal. We humans, thus, have gained, in and through our various knowledges, a measure of transcendence over the nature of which we are part; and with our developing practices and skills-growing in modernity into enormously powerful technologies-we have utterly transformed the face of the earth and are beginning to push on into outer space. Clearly we human beings, and the further course of human history, are no longer completely at the disposal of the natural order and natural powers that brought us into being, in the way we were, say ten millennia ago.
How should we understand--in connection with the evolutionary account--these features of our humanity that have emerged largely in human history? Anthropologist Clifford Geertz has pointed out that our present biological organisms, if left simply to themselves, would be so seriously deficient that they could not function. "We are .. . incomplete or unfinished animals who complete or finish ourselves through culture-and not through culture in general but through highly particular forms of it: Dobuan and Javanese, Hopi and Italian, upper-class, academic and commercial" (Geertz 1973:49). The organism that has finally appeared as human is, thus, "both a cultural and a biological product”; and the various sorts of human culture that have appeared around the world must each be understood as an indispensable dimension-in its particular location-of the niche on planet Earth within which human-kind is sustained. Our niche, without which we humans could never have come into being or continued in being, has increasingly acquired important historicol-cultural features: that is, the human niche is itself a developing biohistorical reality This cultural dimension of human existence, including especially the growth and increasing complexity of human symbolic behaviors, has affected significantly the actual biological development of the predecessors of today's Homo sapiens. It has had particularly strong effects on the evolution of the human brain, as brain-scientist Terrence Deacon has shown, Deacon argues that the emergence of symbolic behaviors-such as language, a central feature in the historical unfolding of human cultural life-helped bring about the evolution of our unusually large brains (Deacon 1997:44-46, 251f, 339-59, 407-10). Thus, all the way down to the deepest roots of our distinctly human existence, we are not simply biological beings, animals; we are biohistorical beings. And in significant respects, our growing historicalness-our Historicity--is the most distinctive mark of our humanness.
Because of our historicity--because we are beings shaped decisively by histories char have in turn given us the power to shape future history in significant ways--we humans have great creative and destructive powers in the natural order on planet Earth. And in the last century we have become aware that unless we live and act within the constraints that life's ecological order on Earth places on us--unless we arrange our activities in ways appropriate to the environmental context that supports and sustains us--we will not survive much longer. No other form of life-trees, dogs, other primates-needs this kind of information or would be able to make any use of it. We humans alone have knowledges and technologies that give us the power to destroy ourselves as well as many other complex forms of life; and, in fact, we are already engaged in such highly destructive activity. We humans alone are able to envision the enormity of these matters--to understand what all of this means (not only for ourselves but for other species as well); and we alone are able deliberately to amend our ways in respects that may bring us into better harmony with the overall ecology of planet Earth. For us humans, thus, these concerns have become a matter of life and death-not only for ourselves but for much other life as well. Humans are historical beings-beings with historicity, agents with powers to shape their own future: if we are to survive in this world, not to mention flourish, we need to develop an understanding of ourselves and the World in which we live that makes clear how we must comport ourselves in life, how we must live and act; our understanding of ourselves, that is, must include moral and ethical features.
In every age and every society and culture about which we have some knowledge, we find what we today call "religious" and "moral" dimensions. Women and men everywhere have created (have imagined) pictures and conceptions of the world in which they were living-conceptions of what human beings are; of rules and standards, values and norms, governing how life should be lived; and of institutions assuring that these important matters would be passed on to future generations, In acquiring language and culture every normal infant begins to order its behavior in terms of what, in due course, will become exceedingly detailed and complex socially created and socially imposed rules and norms-behavioral patterns within which it will live and act and think throughout the rest of its life. Language, many other behavioral practices and normative standards, and world-pictures-not this or that specific linguistic or moral rule, or cultural value, or conception of the context of human life, but the necessity to have such values and rules and conceptions-belong to our humanity as such, to our self-consciousness and our capacity to take responsibility for ourselves in some measure. These are central features of the historical dimensions of our human existence. I want now to sketch briefly some of the characteristics of this normativity that is apparently inherent in our humanness. I shall make five points in this connection.
1. That which most sharply differentiates human beings from other forms of life (as we have just been noting) is our historicity: on the one hand, we humans have been shaped by our histories; but on the other hand, increasingly we have-especially during recent millennia-gained significant control over some of the processes of historical change and development through which we are moving, and in that respect some degree of control over our own historicity Our growing human powers and creativity however, have obviously become quite dangerous, and we must strive to manage them better or we may destroy ourselves. We need, therefore, to think through carefully how we humans-as a species-should proceed at this point.
2. Human beings; human institutions, cultures, and societies; and human historical processes-all of these marked by historicity--could not have come into existence or remained in existence without delicate balances between creativity and continuity freedom and order, in the cultures within which they were emerging. The maintenance of such balances in communal institutions and practices, and in individual agents and their actions, is what can be called "responsible" ordering and acting. An optimal realization of human historicity in any particular concrete situation can occur only to the extent that the pertinent communities and selves are able and willing to take significant responsibility for their institutions, practices, and actions; this responsibility of course, is understood in quite different ways in the many diverse sociocultural and historical contexts in which it emerges. (The concepts of "responsible" and "responsibility" will be examined in some detail later in this chapter. Here I use these words in their conventional meanings.)
3. As we look back over the history of the past century--with its horrible paroxysms of violence and war, but also its enormous growth in human knowledges and powers--we can see how important it is that we exercise our historicity in much more responsible ordering and action than we have achieved in the past, We must shape and reshape our human communities and selves in ways that-as we hope-will facilitate the development of better-ordered freedom and creativity in both the individuals and the societies of future humankind. The enormous growth of our technological power in recent centuries, culminating in the power to destroy humanity along with many other species of life, means that only as we humans learn to take greater responsibility for the effects of our actions-on both the environment and the ongoing movement and direction of history and culture-can there be much likelihood that we will survive.
4. Our capacity to take responsibility for ourselves and for the direction history is going depends on a relatively high degree of self-consciousness and knowledge of what we are actually doing and its effects, and a proper orienting of that consciousness and knowledge in action. The effectiveness of our historicity will depend significantly on our awareness of ourselves and our powers and of what our real possibilities in life may be, as well as on the existence of practices and institutions that facilitate the historical dimensions of our lives. If humanity is to survive and flourish, we will have to work toward patterns of societal organization, practices, and institutions that will expand and deepen awareness of our historicity and its significance; these must include social and cultural patterns that will sustain and perhaps enhance our historicity. Obviously the many forms these issues and concerns take in various sociocultural contexts and for different persons cannot be specified in this bare outline: those matters will depend on the specific, very diverse situations involved.
5. In all these matters, of course, we must keep in mind that our historicity cannot function optimally unless it is working harmoniously with its biological base--our bodies and the ecological networks that sustain and support them--and only if that biological base is itself functioning well. Taking responsibility for ourselves and our societies as biohistorical beings must always include, therefore, taking significant responsibility for the organic and physical networks of which we are part.
These normative considerations, grounded in and emergent from the historicity of our humanness, are quite abstract and formal as here sketched; and in that respect they violate the very concern for historicity that I am trying to express. To hold, for example (in point 1, above), that the overarching consideration that we must take into account is the imperative "to think through carefully how we humans--as a species--should proceed at this point" leaves this central concern in much too abstract a form. The whole point of calling attention to our "historicity" is to emphasize that our understanding of what is required of us in any particular situation is always shaped largely by the historico-natural situation itself not by some abstract universal norm. What is required by one sociohistorical situation or natural setting will likely be significantly different from what is required in other contexts. In this book, for example, we are concerned with the question of what significance Jesus may have in today's world. But obviously there cannot be any single answer to such a vague and general question as that. What that question may signify for Chinese peasants would likely be of little interest to modern European university students, and vice versa; what may be important in that question for some African politicians would hardly be of pertinence to American soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan, and vice versa. The conception of us humans as fundamentally historical beings has itself developed in a particular historical context--largely among intellectuals in the modern West. Like all other conceptions, it has its meaning, significance, and truth principally within that context, and the extent to which it will be taken seriously into account in other situations will depend very much on those situations themselves. It should not be surprising, therefore, if some of the abstract concepts found in this discussion may at first make little sense to some readers. It is my hope that reading this chapter will clarify these matters.
The fourth point above, that taking "responsibility for ourselves and for the direction history is going" presupposes knowledge that we are historical beings, and this requires a "relatively high degree of self-consciousness," is also extremely abstract and thus potentially misleading. The level of our self-consciousness, as well as the kind of self-consciousness that we have, depends largely on the particular historico-cultural situation within which we live and think. It is not the case that everyone in the World at this moment can understand, or needs to understand, himself or herself as a "historical being", modes and degrees of consciousness of this fact differ greatly in the countless varied local situations around the world-a point directly implied in the claim that we are shaped by and relative to our basic historical contexts. This consideration, moreover, will be pertinent rather differently for those with the power to affect and take responsibility for large populations than for those, for instance, with a newly emerging consciousness of their own oppression-a point often emphasized by liberation theologians. Observations similar to these could easily be made about the other points being considered here.
As historical, self-conscious, culture-creating, and in some respects self-determining beings, women and men inevitably must decide what they are to do and be--given the life-situations in which they find themselves: How should they shape and order and orient their lives? Toward what sort of future should they work? It is not the case, of course, that all men and women have thought of themselves as free and creative, as able to shape and determine their own futures and their children's futures. In some cultures ideas of this sort have not appeared, or have been downplayed; and in most cultures they have been deemphasized for women. Thus, the forms in which experience has come to many individuals and groups have often inhibited these notes from coming into View However, the modern intellectual standpoints that enable us to observe the great variety of cultures, societies, and religions-all of which have been produced by the human spirit-put us into a position from which we can hardly avoid thinking of that spirit as possessing great freedom and creative power. It is important that both societies and individuals learn to take significant responsibility for themselves and their worlds: what men and women decide today especially and most frighteningly in the realms of international politics, economics, and ecological concerns, will significantly affect the life of future generations-indeed, it may determine whether there will be many more generations in the future.
Our international political arrangements have put the gradually cumulating growth of human power during our long history into the hands of nations competing with each other (though economic developments in the last century have somewhat qualified this point); and our moral and religious commitments and values and suspicions-especially in the fundamentalistic versions now appearing many places around the globe--focus the energies and interests of each of us on the political, economic, cultural, and religious fragment of humanity to which We belong, rather than on the wellbeing of humanity as a whole and the welfare of the rest of life on Earth. So our moralities and our religions and our other value-loyalties, instead of enlarging and protecting our well-being, actually increase the possibilities of disastrous wars. Instead of acceding to the demands of our present social, political, and religious commitments and arrangements, we men and Women today must take up our full responsibilities and act in behalf of humanity as a Whole-and in behalf of our environment, which makes all life on Earth possible.
II
Humans are socioculturally shaped and socioculturally creative beings, as we have been noting; and as a result of our creativity we have gradually acquired the power to shape significantly--that is, to participate in the creation of--our human future, As far as we know creativity of this self-conscious sort is found only in the human world, and it did not come about in any simple Way Human deliberative creativity could hardly have begun before the development of fully articulate speech, possibly one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand years ago (Deacon l997:364). Let us imagine, for a moment, how our creativity may have come into being (been created). The initial stages must have been largely social developments, possibly brought about by the growing intensity of the more or less primitive linguistic interchanges, a serendipitous outcome of the wider creativity in the universe (God); these beginnings certainly could not have been the result of any deliberate human intentions and actions (for no one could have had any idea of creativity at that point), However, as humans increasingly gained facility with language, they discovered a deeper solidarity with each other, new possibilities of collective action and enjoyment, and new kinds of experience. The more they interacted linguistically the more complex became their interconnectedness, This in turn encouraged still more linguistic interaction, which led to increasingly intricate linguistic patterns, and so on: language as an enormously complex symbolic system was beginning to come on the scene. So what began simply as ordinary natural interactions between different members of the species Homo sapiens evolved serendipitously (over many generations) into modes of sociocultural interaction that were more complex and experientially rewarding, and thus preferred over other modes. In this way the possibility of choice--deliberate decision--was beginning to appear (be created), and with it came the possibility of creating this rather than that. In all of this the human brain was itself being constrained to grow and develop.
It is worth noting that the serendipitous creativity (God) to which I have been calling attention here is similarly involved in the development of every new human infant: over many months an infant gradually pulls together and organizes the vast swarm of feelings and images and noises; muscular throbbing and bodily struggling; the regularity of appearances and actions of caretakers together with the special comfort and relief felt when fed, when diapers have been changed, when being warmly held and gently rocked and otherwise responded to; and so on and so on. As the infant gradually brings all this "blooming buzzing confusion" (William James) into increasingly familiar patterns--largely shaped by the language it is beginning to acquire--a sense of its own self and a sense of being in relatively organized surroundings slowly develop. None of the earliest steps into this emerging linguistic facility growing self-consciousness, and incipient ability to make choices can be directly intended or chosen by the infant, for each of these capacities is only in the process of being created--serendipitously created--in connection with the infant's continuous interaction with its caregivers. Similarly with the historical emergence of our species into self-consciousness and the abilities to speak and act: the early stages were largely a serendipitous product of complex processes of interaction over many generations. Along with the gradual emergence of language, self-consciousness, and deliberate choice-in the early history of the human race, as well as in the development of each human infant-a wide range of skills and capacities began to emerge and come into play In both cases creative processes that originally begin serendipitously (God) gradually become a complex intermix of this serendipitous creativity with some degree of deliberate human choice and action.
This mix of human self-conscious creativity with the serendipitous creativity roundabout has continued all the way down to the present, with the proportion of deliberate human creative action steadily growing. As the creation of increasingly complex languages and cultures continued, and human self-consciousness emerged more fully and began to direct human activities more effectively women and men gradually learned how to make plans and develop long-term projects. Thus, the creation--in part humanly intended, in part serendipitous (God)--of increasingly intricate cultures continued to move onward; and in connection with that movement, more complex modes of action as well as new ways of thinking emerged. We still experience, in the projects with which we humans are engaged today this intricate mix of deliberate human intention and action with the serendipitous contextual creativity that brings about quite unexpected developments-some desirable (from a human point of view) and some exceedingly undesirable. This occurrence of "unexpected consequences" of our human actions is often remarked upon. Another well-known example of this contextual creativity is sometimes experienced in ordinary conversation:
A conversation . . . is not simply an interchange of discrete "acts," in which each agent is attempting to realize a particular goal. Though in each remark the speaker is attempting to say something that is fitting at that moment, what happens in a conversation cannot be understood simply as the summing up of all these individual actions. Often the interchange comes to have "a life of its own" (as we say), and it may well go in directions no one had anticipated and lead to new insights and ideas which none of the participants had thought of before .... Thus . . . the conversation proceeds down pathways not expected by the original speaker or any of the others. An intervention by speaker B moves the conversation in a way that A had not intended; and a succeeding intervention by C moves down a slightly different path, not anticipated by either A or B, so that when A responds again, it will be with a comment not directly continuous with his or her earlier remark, one which takes into account what B and C have unexpectedly said. And thus the path of the conversation as a whole, though definitely continuous, is not a direct working out of the original intention which A (or anyone else) was attempting to express .... Sometimes, in an exciting conversation of this sort where new ideas seem continuously to be bursting forth, the participants are 'tarried away" by the flow of the conversation itself which has come to have a seeming intention of its own ....This social experience does not mean that the individuals cease to act as free agents in their own right: they each contribute to the conversation out of their own freedom, not under some external compulsion . . . ; it is a moment of [serendipitous] creativity which the group process itself makes possible. (Kaufman l993:275f.)
Our human ability to act, I am suggesting, is bound up closely with our creativity-as well as with the wider serendipitous creativity (God) char seemingly appears almost everywhere. Conversely our human creativity is bound up closely with our ability to act-our ability to make decisions about what we want to do, to plan the course of action that will enable us to accomplish what we have decided upon, and then to work on char program until our intentions have been realized (or changed). All human actions and procedures can quite properly be regarded as instances of creativity-a low grade of creativity perhaps, but creativity nonetheless-for they are intended to bring into being something that did not exist before, something new.
These sorts of daily activities are all quite familiar and frequent and are usually not thought of as particularly important or creative. We generally reserve the words 'creative' and "creativity" for quite unusual events in which something extraordinary very important, and previously non-existent has been brought into being; the thought of creating something truly new has a ring of special significance, rarity novelty I have no desire to change this note of special significance than is suggested when the notion of creativity is invoked. But it is important--especially as we consider our human historicity in connection with the theological position being developed here--that we understand the close link of human creativity with ordinary human agency and that we do not assume that only geniuses or gods can engage in this supposedly miraculous activity. None of these three--human historicity agency creativity--can be conceived apart from the others; these features of our humanness must have gradually evolved and developed, over many millennia, in interconnection with each other. Though our creativity could not exist apart from our historicity and agency in some respects it may be regarded as the most important of the three. Without this creativity-in part the emerging creativity of humans themselves, in part the surrounding serendipitous creativity (God)-humans would never have been able to transform the context of their activities and lives from the strictly natural order within which they originally emerged into a gradually evolving system of dynamic transgenerational bioloistorical momentums. This new slowly emerging biohistorical order began to provide a context within which (at least in some settings) further human creativity would be encouraged and could become effective. As humans faced the problems that arose in their ordinary everyday living, human creativity was occurring with increasing potency and frequency Obviously we cannot take up here the many examples of creativity in everyday life, but we need to note that none of this human creativity would have emerged had human' life not been gradually acquiring a biohistorical form: humans were animals that, for many thousands of years, lived out their lives in the context of increasingly complex sociocultural worlds. These sociocultural worlds-slowly and quite unintentionally created by our many generations of forebears as they addressed the problems they had to face-provide the basic settings of our lives today contexts handed down to each of us as we were socialized and enculturated from infancy.
We have been examining here the structural features that had to emerge if human agency was going to appear and develop. An agent is a semiconscious subject, an "I," a being not only aware of the various features and dimensions of the world in which it is acting but also implicitly aware of itself and its feelings, desires, wishes, moods, attitudes, abilities and skills, hopes and dreams, loves and hates, successes and failures. Of course, some persons, perhaps because of unusual circumstances of class or role or education, may be much more conscious of their agency than others. Agency and responsibility-and our sense of agency and responsibility-vary greatly in strength and significance from moment to moment, person to person, group to group, culture to culture; and no individual person or social group, no culture or class or gender or race or historical period, is entirely devoid of all possibilities for responsible action (barring, of course, a manor disastrous breakdown).
Our brief examination here of the complex interconnectedness of human historicity agency and creativity-each of them dependent upon the emerging human linguistic capabilities-should give us some sense of the complicated and lengthy biohistorical development apart from which this triad central to our humanness could not have emerged (been created). As we have noted, this development is reenacted in Jesus and Creativity its own distinctive way as each new human being moves from birth through infancy childhood, and adolescence into full maturity.
III
With this developmental picture of our humanness in mind, we are in a position to turn to the question of responsible agency and creativity; and that will bring us closer to an understanding of what such comprehensive symbols as God and Jesus are all about. We rarely if ever, talk about animals (or computers) "taking responsibility" for a given situation or action, though we are well aware char animals are able to "care for" their young, can be taught to behave in ways required by humans (as a result of housebreaking of pets, for example), and can learn to "obey" many different sorts of human commands. Though we may say that we hold our dog "responsible" for having made a mess in the kitchen, it would seem a little odd to say the dog ought to "take responsibility" for this sort of problem. Taking responsibility is an extraordinarily complicated sort of action that perhaps only the human brain can manage. One must have acquired a number of complex skills and abilities (with their respective feedback mechanisms) and have learned how to manage all of these in concert when contemplating a future course of action for which one is Willing to hold oneself responsible. Many animals have the capacity to seek necessary or desirable goals (for example, to search for food, engage in mating, make nests, travel great distances without getting lost), and that suggests their possession of something like rudimentary forms of what in humans develop into self-conscious attention and intention. But to "take responsibility" for what we are doing or are attempting to do, we need a good deal more than the capacity to seek desirable goals.
We must, for example, be able to imagine the future-that is, imagine what is not now the case and thus not present in our experience. Indeed, we must be able to imagine more or less simultaneously a number of diverse possible futures among which we might choose as we contemplate alternative actions that could be undertaken. For such imagining to be possible, we must have acquired a complex but manageable symbol/ image system in terms of which we can represent to ourselves these diverse alternatives. This is ordinarily made available to humans as we acquire a complex language in the early years of life, a language that, above all, has first-person words such as "I," "me," "mine," "we," "us" First-person terms all have self-reflexiveness built into them. In saying "I" or "me" a speaker is paying attention and calling attention to himself or herself (along with whatever else it is that he or she is saying). In learning to say "I" (at about the age of two years) we were beginning to distinguish ourselves clearly from things other than ourselves-from all those things with which the "I" enables us to contrast ourselves. Thus, we began to bring about (create) what is called "self-consciousness" (Similarly with "we" and "us" and “our”--words which enable us to be aware of ourselves as participating members of specific groups.) The language that we learn in early childhood, together with the facility that this enormously complex symbol--system provides us, makes possible our acquisition of a number of important skills and capacities: our ability to symbolize, intend, attend, decide, and so on; our self-awareness and self-consciousness; an enormous extension of our capacity to imagine; and much else. Without these instrumentalities, human agency (acting deliberately) and human taking responsibility for our actions, our selves, and our human creativity would not be possible.
When we hold ourselves responsible for something we have done, or understand that we must take responsibility for what we are about to do, we are making reflexive moves in our minds that go an important step further than first-person language alone could carry us. To take responsibility is to make a move that binds agent/ decision/ intention/ attention/ act/ creativity all together in a larger unity a newly created unity in which the act and creativity performed are directly attributed to the agent. The agent is now regarded, and regards herself or himself as the dynamic origin or source of the act, as well as of the creativity that comes about through the act. Neither of these would have occurred without this agency and for this reason the agent is held accountable for both of them. Here the peculiar character of human self-consciousness-that it relates itself to itself that it is self-reflexive in unique and important ways-again appears, but in a more complex mode than simply saying "I," And the act is itself a novel creation, a creation that brings about the further creation of something that did not exist before.
We are now in a better position to see how and why being responsible, taking responsibility for our selves and our actions, is so important. Complex forms of human existence are constituted by biohistorical structures and processes of the sort just mentioned, and the complexity of these forms could neither come into being nor continue without them. The triad of human historicity/action/creativity is a fragile living structure. I say "living" because, as a biohistorical process, its continuing existence depends on the ongoing activities of living human beings. If and when all humans engaged in a specific instance of this process die, the process itself-and the many diverse living strands of which it is constituted-will die with them, They may leave behind Wonderful artifacts-think of Easter Island, for instance--but many of those artifacts will no longer have use or meaning. Unless we humans in all our diverse cultural settings--Africans and Chinese, Indonesians and Americans, farmers and CEOs, teachers and politicians, mothers and fathers, and so on--continue to take responsibility for the particular strands of our common biohistorical heritages, those strands will die away (though some of their features may survive in other cultures they have influenced). Recently we humans have learned that in our ongoing activities-creative and destructive-we are undermining the very conditions that make human biohistorical life, and much other life as well, possible. The time has thus come for us humans as a whole to take responsibility for the human project as a whole; that is, to take more direct responsibility than we have in the past for the ongoing living triad of human historicity/ action/ creativity. If we do not, the human Project itself may not survive much longer. In chapter 4 we will consider whether and in what respects the central Christian symbols with which we are working, jesus" and "God" (creativity), bear significantly on this urgent matter.
To take responsibility for some act or project or person or community is, in the first place, to respond to it, to become concerned about it; and in the second place, to make ourselves accountable for it-to keep ourselves informed about its well-being, and if there are problems to seek ways to address them effectively.” Something like taking responsibility is to be found in all human cultures. All activities directed toward keeping the complex living interactive networks of human affairs properly oiled and Working, so that the day»by-day exigencies of life can be effectively addressed, come under this heading. A good physician is someone Who takes responsibility for patients who need special care because of illness or accident. A good teacher is one who takes responsibility to educate students--that is, to introduce them to various features of the culture in which they are growing up and within which they expect to live so they come to enjoy and to participate effectively happily and creatively in those aspects of their ongoing lives. Good parents are those who take responsibility for their children so that they remain healthy become enabled to Ht well in the sociocultural context in which they will likely be living, get a good education, and-above all-are able to grow into, and will seek to become, responsible adults, Many of our specifically moral terms ("trustworthy" "good," "loyal," "liar," "honest," "cheat," "courageous," and so on) direct our attention to various distinct features of responsible (and irresponsible) acting and living (Kaufman 1993x189-9l); and we ordinarily employ these and other similar terms when we want to encourage ourselves and others to act responsibly in particular situations. The words "responsible" and "responsibility" (and, of course, "irresponsible") are important flags with which we call attention to potential major breakdowns of the complex historicity/ action/ creativity triad, breakdowns that threaten the human biohistorical project.
Taking responsibility is a capacity of a higher, more complex order than the skills and activities earlier mentioned (that is, speaking, imagining, symbolizing, deciding, intending, attending), and it presupposes them all,” To be an agent, as we can now see, is not merely to be one who can do something: it is to be one who is held accountable for what he or she does and who holds herself or himself accountable. The agent knows that it is not enough to think of oneself as simply choosing between envisaged alternatives; one must also recognize that one is accountable for the choice that is made and accountable for the Way in which the act is carried out. This accountability is in due course factored back into the process of decision»making; and choices then begin to be made, intentions advanced, and actions performed with the issue of accountability also considered. Accountability thus constitutes another feedback loop in the self-reflexiveness of the agent, and this sense of responsibility or accountability becomes a feature of the self»awareness of the agent as further acts are envisaged. So a new and more complex level of symbolization and self-consciousness begins to pervade the whole process of acting, a level that deepens significantly the sense of one's agency and all that is involved in one's decisions and actions. What is emerging (being created) here is moral agency. With it comes the necessity to find ways of assessing the sorts of acts for which one is willing to be held accountable, distinguishing them from those for which one does not wish to take responsibility And this gives rise to an entirely new consideration: the question about standards and norms that define responsible conduct and can thus provide guidance in our deciding and acting-what we call moral standards and values, moral rules and norms. The possibility--and the necessity--of making distinctions between moral and immoral, good and bad, right and wrong action has thus emerged (been created).
The emergence of moral standards and rules-of some form of moral language and with it morality-is no accident: it has been essential for survival in every society. Without some distinctions of this sort, and without their importance being emphasized by penalties for violations, the complex networks that make increasingly complicated action and creativity possible would probably never have developed or been sustained. These sorts of activity become possible and effective only when, on the one hand, there are in the society quite complex social networks of differentiated roles and statuses, clear behavioral patterns, well»developed linguistic and ideological traditions, and the like. In individuals, on the other hand, there must be complex feedback networks of body control, significant behavioral patterns and skills, good linguistic facility mental training, and discipline.” Every new act performed will have its effect upon and will make its contribution to this complex interconnected web that is indispensable for ongoing deliberate action and creativity Agents-whether individuals or communities-are, of course, just as responsible for these wider consequences of their acts as_ for their more immediate objectives. It has been through the growth of complicated networks over many generations that these sorts of complex action have become possible, and it is only through the responsible exercise of human agency that they can be sustained and further developed. When we ask the distinctively moral questions--Is it right to do that? Is it good to do that? Is it wrong or evil to do that?--we are asking whether this particular act is a piece of responsible doing. That is, we are asking whether this act fits effectively and appropriately into the surrounding action»network into which it is being introduced, asking thus about its quality as a responsible act--in the full, rich sense of the word "act."
This is something significantly different from asking whether the act is, say ‘expedient" or whether it "fits" well within its immediate context.” In our moral questioning we ask about such things as these: Is the intention expressed in the act a responsible one? That is, does it take into account all that should be taken into account in connection with this act? l-las the act been carried through in a responsible way? Is the agent (whether a person, a community a church, a corporation, a nation) acting responsibly in performing this act? However important may be concerns about expediency or aesthetic matters, questions like these that involve moral reflection and criticism raise the most fundamental and far»reaching issues, for here we are inquiring about and assessing action in its distinctive character as free and responsible doing by selves and communities. Every action is a new link in the complex sociocultural web apart from which no acts would be possible: will this act strengthen that web or weaken it? Of course, in many of the trivial decisions we make, these wider effects and more general characteristics of our actions remain largely unnoticed and are relatively unimportant. But with our weightier choices we feel impelled to take into account this more far»reaching significance of what we are about to do. This question about the ramifications of our actions on the action-networks in both our society and ourselves is the deep root of what we call morality.
One more consideration bearing on human responsibility must be mentioned here. We cannot act responsibly unless we have awareness of and fairly accurate knowledge about, the context within which we are about to act: Are there bears in the woods into which we propose to go? poisonous plants to be avoided? possible resources of food and shelter if needed? safe places to spend the night? and so on. It is of course possible, and sometimes necessary to move into a situation about which one knows very little, but such moves may be quite dangerous and foolhardy So when risky moves are about to be undertaken, an agent-whether group or individual-concerned about acting responsibly will attempt to acquire as much valid information as possible. We could not act at all if we had no awareness of at least the basic outlines of the situation into which we were moving; without that we would have no way of deciding what to do, what act would be appropriate.
In every society of course, an important Part of the enculturation with which children are provided is awareness and knowledge of the surroundings in which they are living. Such knowledge is ordinarily not taught in explicit verbal lessons in which we would say for example, "This is walking, and that is sitting, and this is a chair, and that is a table, and this is how we walk to the chair and sit at the table." Rather, the child is simply helped to engage in the activities of walking and sitting and eating at the table; and the pertinent language is picked up as he or she acquires these important skills and practices. The child gradually becomes aware of being in the house, and aware of the yard outside the house, and aware of the dangers on the street. Quite unconsciously the child builds up (creates) a picture of his or her immediate environment; and in the subsequent years of growth the picture becomes augmented by the child's accumulating experience, on the one hand, and augmented very substantially on the other hand, by the child's growing awareness of the larger picture of the wider surrounding world. By adolescence and later maturity the child will have acquired major features of the world-picture dominant in the society within which he or she is growing up." That is, the child will have become aware of the many features of the basic context within which his or her activities are carried out-a world-picture that will be largely taken for granted in all future acting, thinking, planning, exploring, meditating, and ongoing living. Most children will live out their lives, of course, in the context supplied by the dominant world»picture(s) of the culture(s) in which they have been socialized; and Women and men, who in their maturity seek to act responsibly ordinarily envision, understand, and work out their actions in the terms supplied by these cultural world-pictures that, in their local and cosmic dimensions, order and orient their lives. Without these "pictures" of the wider contexts in which we take ourselves to be living-pictures of which we may barely be consciously aware-there could not be any responsible action; and without responsible action to sustain them, complex societies and cultures such as ours could never have come into being (been created).
Many quite different world-pictures have been created in the diverse social settings of humanity's long history. At first these pictures must have been quite simple, confined largely to the local environment. But as more complex civilizations emerged, more comprehensive pictures appeared, with speculative images and thoughts about the heavens above, the earth underfoot, and the powers that rule the world-those destructive powers that must be avoided as well as those creative and healing powers that can bring peace and health and joy. In most societies such world-pictures have been quite comprehensive: they not only displayed how things are in the world; they also set out the deep values and meanings that enable humans to orient themselves in life-enable them to find their way through moments of failure and despair as well as times of fulfillment and joy These important features bearing on the meaning of life-what we might call the "religious dimensions" of traditional world»pictures-have, however, become desiccated and weakened in today's highly secularized pluralistic societies. This is partly because the inherited religious institutions, which have always put their emphasis on the importance of tradition, have found it difficult to adjust themselves to the increasingly rapid pace of change in today's world.
Recently what can be called a"scientific world-picture"-beginning with the Big Bang and including a universe fourteen billion light-years across-has been imaginatively created and widely accepted (in educated circles in the West and elsewhere) as the overall context within which human life has come into being. It was in connection with this new world»picture-largely based on findings and speculations of modern astrophysics, cosmology biology and evolutionary theory and increasingly becoming transcultural-that I worked out the theological position elaborated in my recent book on God as creativity (Kaufman 2004). This world»picture is often presented in the popular press as offering little explicit guidance on how humans should order their lives; and it may be touted as a picture that thoroughly refutes and undermines traditional religious views about life and the world-the alleged "warfare of science with theology" (White 1993). In my book on God as creativity and in this book on Jesus and Creativity I am trying to move beyond that dead end by showing that, with some significant revisions, the two central symbols of Christian faith--God (creativity) and Jesus--can be brought into significant relation to this modern world-picture."
IV
We can sum up this exploration of human agency-in its interconnectedness with our creativity and historicity and its dependence on a Jesus and Creativity picture of the context within which life is to be lived responsibly-by brief consideration of a value deeply cherished in many cultures today: human freedom.” As we have seen, human action becomes possible only within contexts of extraordinary complexity including feedback interconnections in self and society and the necessary physiological and physical supports for these; learned patterns of behavior and symbolic facility together with correlated social customs, roles, and institutions; and subjective feelings and moods, attitudes and beliefs, pictures and knowledges of the world within which life is to be lived. Given this complex interconnected conditioning of our every action, what does it mean to speak of human groups and individuals as free, as in a significant sense self»determining?
It would be a mistake to regard free acts (that is, acts thought of as freely chosen) as simply spontaneous in origin, that is, as just beginning on their own, so to speak, as coming from nowhere. Free action emerges within a context of ongoing processes of activity and striving in an organism that is itself interconnected with ongoing sociocultural processes. To consciously and deliberately guide and order (to some extent) certain of these processes, to turn them in directions they otherwise would not go, is an emergent capacity gradually acquired, ordinarily in childhood. Dynamisms are already present and working in these various processes, as the child's freedom begins to appear; and these provide the materials and the power to which the child learns to give form and direction. As language is acquired, the child is enabled to employ more complex forms of symbolization, and this in turn makes possible envisaging diverse sorts of potential actions with increasing accuracy and sharpness. The possibility of comparing and choosing among alternatives also arises. None of this could happen, of course, until humanity itself had progressed through the long linguistic»cultural»historical development we have been examining; free action and its scope and range are products of this historico-cultural process. ln some cultural contexts these possibilities remain small. In others that provide the necessary patterns of social differentiation and organization together with adequate resources for symbolization, they may become highly developed. As appropriate behavioral habits and symbolization networks, together with the requisite motor skills, are formed in the child, possibilities for acting with some measure of freedom begin to appear. The child disciplines its fingers and learns to read music, for example, and gradually becomes able to play the piano--and thus the possibility of choosing to play Chopin emerges (is created). Psychological studies suggest that the childhood environments that are most conducive to the development of free and responsible agent»selves are those in which caring and love, acceptance and approval, trust and loyalty-these and other moral qualities!-are frequently experienced. In contrast, contexts of neglect, rejection, hatred, and violence frequently bring forth warped and stunted selves, often incapable of effective and responsible action. Thus, even in its most intensely subjective and personal dimensions, freedom is not something belonging simply to individuals. It is interpersonal and social in its origins, and it requires an appropriate social and interpersonal context for its continuing exercise and nurturance.
Freedom should not be thought of as a kind of "metaphysical" quality a controversial matter about something humans may or may not possess. The term "freedom" refers to that which distinguishes human action from mere behavior; it points to those situations and those respects in which we are in a significant degree agents, not just organisms; it indicates that we men and women have control (in certain respects) over what we do, and that we can therefore take responsibility for it and be held accountable for it. Human agency-freedom-emerged over many generations as a gradual modification of what had originally been simply organic patterns of behavior into patterns largely humanly created and thus susceptible (to some extent) to being deliberately chosen. Our actions always remain a modification of previously existing appetites, habits, and customs over which some degree of deliberate control has been gained. They are an expression of their organic base (at least in part), the habitual and customary patterns characteristic of our socio-cultural environment, and the modes of symbolization made possible by the linguistic resources available; hence, they never are "absolutely free" (whatever that might mean). My freedom thus belongs as much to the context of my action-the relationships in which I stand-as it does to me. Although freedom is a distinctive mark of our humanity there are great disparities in the degrees to which different humans, or groups of humans, are enabled to exercise their freedom; and it is this, of course, that has informed and motivated the many recent liberation movements. This valuing of freedom goes back many centuries, and the early Christian movement made it a central theme: "For freedom Christ has set us free," declared Paul; "stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery" (Gal. 5:1).
Up to this point I have been using the idea of deliberate choice among alternative possibilities as the principal metaphor for understanding freedom; but however illuminating that may be, it does not yet show clearly the full reach of human freedom. Our freedom is not only a matter of our ability to choose moment by moment what we will do: it is also the power to act upon and to transform our very selves. All types of self-discipline, of training the self to do something or be something--developing a skill, practicing various sorts of exercises, reading, studying, meditating--are actions of the self on itself (Note once again the circle of self-reflexiveness that is involved here.) Such activities are usually intended to transform the self into an agent with possibilities of action different from those that now obtain-thus creating a somewhat new and different self Agency is not a static condition that simply is what it is: agency is, rather, a living process, a creative process continuously engaged as much in transformation of itself-of opening one's self to new and different possibilities of action--as in transformation of external realities. By virtue of this power of acting upon ourselves, we are able to take responsibility not only for our particular choices and actions but-in certain respects-for our very selfhood, for what we have become and what we shall become. It was this modality of freedom of which Paul was speaking in the above quotation: the freedom to become a"new creation" (2 Cor. 5:l7), the new fulfilling freedom that a re-creation "in Christ" could bring. Elsewhere he makes clear that we ourselves must take major responsibility for this transformation; "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling," he says; "for it is God [creativity!] who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure" (Phil. 2:12b-13).
Our consideration here of human action and responsibility of human freedom and creativity has brought us to some of our most profound moral-indeed religious-concerns: questions about who or what we humans are, questions about our self-acceptance and self-discipline, questions about how we should act and what goals we should pursue, questions about our failures and guilt, questions about the meaning of life, questions about the world within which we take ourselves to be living, questions about the ultimate reality with which we must come to terms. Morality and religion, it is now clear, are not peripheral or optional matters superimposed on our basic human existence, matters that we can take or leave as we like. They are matters that emerge unavoidably out of our still-developing humanity out of our historicity agency and creativity-matters that emerge because we are in a significant measure free and responsible and creative. In emphasizing the appropriateness of the term "freedom" to characterize the distinctiveness of our humanity I am not making a primarily psychological point-that we humans feel free in our action. Our freedom is a feature of our human self-reflexiveness; that is, of our having learned to relate ourselves not only to those others with whom we are interacting but to ourselves as well. If our freedom ever reaches its potential and we are enabled to act with a full ecological consciousness, we should find ourselves able to fit more smoothly and effectively into the natural environment that is the setting for our lives and our activities. Perhaps-in some distant future-it may even become possible for humans to feel truly at home in the world in which we find ourselves. We are, of course, far from realizing this eschatological dream. But we have tasted enough of human agency and freedom, and we know enough about what constitutes human responsibility to have some sense of what it might mean to live as members of communities of truly free persons-at home in the world. It was an early version of this sort of vision that was expressed in the ancient metaphor of the coming "kingdom of God": Jesus--and many others during the last two thousand years--have prayed that this kingdom might come "on earth as it is in heaven." For most versions of Christian faith, jesus has been regarded as key to the coming on planet Earth of this New Age. Chapter 4 will explore this claim that the creativity of Jesus will (or can) help bring humanity into a New Age.
As I have been arguing throughout this book, today we live in a much different world than the earliest Christians did, indeed different from that of the generations up to and including the nineteenth century. Many today of course, do not accept the overall scientific picture of the origins of the world and of life. In my opinion, however, that picture provides us with the best information available on these matters today though it is in many respects incomplete and will, no doubt, be modified and probably significantly transformed in future years. But its principal outlines will likely remain with us for a long time, and we can expect human life to be increasingly understood in terms of these scientific knowledges. In consequence, our understanding of many of the problems of life-as well as the overall meaning of human existence-will have to take these knowledges into account. Think of the enormous impact modern medicine and biology are already having on the way many today understand human existence and the issues with which humans now must come to terms.
It is very important that we overcome the so-called warfare of science and religion and bring our thinking about religious and moral issues into connection with our scientific knowledges. The biohistorical understanding of the human sketched in this chapter enables us, on the one hand, to maintain significant connections with modern scientific conceptions of the World around us and the web of life of which we are a part, while, on the other hand, also giving us-in the concept of human historicity-a way to connect these scientific ideas with the religious and moral themes of human freedom, creativity and responsibility themes of central importance to ongoing human life and its meaning. With this understanding of the complexity and the uniqueness of our humanness in place, we are in a position to sum up and assess the significance of the Jesus-trajectory2 christology that began to emerge in the first two chapters of this book.
