Henry Nelson Wieman was an American philosopher and theologian who developed an "empirical theology" which opposed both orthodoxy and humanism and claimed that through the scientific method one could discover "God" – that is, "that creative good which transforms us in ways in which we cannot transform ourselves. "
Background
Henry Nelson Wieman was born on August 19, 1884 in Rich Hill, Missouri, the first of eight children of Alma Morgan and William Henry Wieman. Both parents were graduates of the Presbyterian school, Park College, in Parksville, Missouri. Before they were married Alma taught at Park College while William studied for the ministry at Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati. While Henry was young his father was minister in Rich Hill and then in Irving, Corning, and Vermillion, Kansas. In 1892 the family moved to Miramonte, California where Henry's maternal grandparents and three uncles were already established as farmers. The Wiemans later moved on to Orosi, California in the Sierra Nevada mountains. William worked for the Presbyterian mission board there and served as a circuit preacher in four small towns.
Education
Henry finished two years of high school in Dinuba, California followed by two years of preparatory study at an academy attached to Occidental College, a Presbyterian school in Los Angeles. Because his freshman year studies at Occidental College were less successful than his captaining of the football team and work with student government, his parents encouraged him to transfer to Park College, hoping he would benefit from its rural location and emphasis on manual labor. In addition to attending classes and church, Park students grew food, cooked, cleaned, cleared land, planted orchards, and constructed buildings.
As a student at Park College, Wieman had dreamed of following his uncle into a career in journalism – until a fateful experience one April evening in 1907. As he sat alone looking over the Missouri River in the faint light of dusk, a sudden conviction came over Wieman – a conviction that he should devote his life to religious inquiry and its central problem. Graduating from Park College and San Francisco Theological Seminary, he later earned a Ph. D. in philosophy at Harvard.
Career
Wieman’s attempts to construct a philosophy of religion which paid virtually no heed to supernatural revelation or to biblical authority or to historic Christianity soon brought him to public attention, and he was invited to join the faculty of the University of Chicago Divinity School, an institution known in the 1920s as a hotbed of Modernism in religious thought. There the question of the reality of God was at the center of controversy. Some professors were opting for humanism, while others were attempting to develop a form of "conceptual theism. " For example, some believed that "God" was the concept people have for the forces or activities in the cosmos that give rise to personality. It was suggested by many in Chicago that in the study of religion we could examine the history and development of people's concepts and ideas about God; we could study cultural ideals and human values, but we could not know anything about the existence or nature of divine reality itself.
Into this setting Wieman came in the 1920s proclaiming that "God is an object of sensuous experience, " that God is "as real as a toothache, " and therefore that religious inquiry should not be focused on socio-historical issues or on human ideals. Thus, he sought to clarify the nature and workings of "God, " which Wieman defined as "that Something upon which human life is most dependent for its security, welfare, and increasing abundance. " This approach caused Wieman to develop and support definite ideas about how religious inquiry should be reformed. It should not concentrate upon biblical studies, church history, or ecclesiastical doctrine. Neither should it utilize some trans-experiential method which gives authority to "revelation" or ecclesiastical dogma. Rather, religious inquiry must give centrality to sense experience, guided by reason, as the inquiry seeks to discover how we can put ourselves in the keeping of that good not our own, that power which is the integrative activity at the heart of the cosmos. While a number of scholars felt that Wieman's empirical method truncated religious inquiry, and while many criticized his disregard for history, Wieman gained a tremendous following.
His major books included Religious Experience and Scientific Method (1926), The Wrestle of Religion with Truth (1927), The Source of Human Good (1946), Man's Ultimate Commitment (1958), and Creative Freedom: Vocation of Liberal Religion (1982). In these works Wieman developed his defense of naturalism and empiricism in religion, his opposition to humanism, his assurances concerning the reality of God, and his focus on creativity and creative interchange. Through charting a course which at once affirmed the scientific method instead of reliance on revelation and which advocated theism instead of the new humanism, Wieman offered a unique alternative in theology between orthodoxy and liberalism. He died on June 19, 1975, at the age of 90.
Religion
According to Wieman, in religion, just as in science, there are not two realms of reality, namely, natural and supernatural. There is but one dimension of reality, and it must be studied through the observations of the senses. This does not mean there is no god. But God is a natural creative process or structure – superhuman, but not supernatural. Our supreme devotion, then, must be to the creative good that is the activity of God, not to the created relative goods of human construction or the social ideals of the human mind. For Wieman, this was an ultimate commitment to what in his later years he increasingly came to label "creative interchange. " In early life Wieman was a Presbyterian. In his middle years, as a professor, he shared his naturalistic approach to Christianity with people of many denominations. In retirement he was a Unitarian Universalist.