For the Sake of Others

"A hero in the Talmud is someone who works on his own spiritual development for the sake of others." Bob's post rightly emphasizes the communal dimension in religion -- that our relationship with God, in which we experience His love, properly involves our relationships with and love of others. Why is this so? I think the key is love. We cannot really experience God's love unless we love and are loved by others. And love is always "for the sake of" another.

The need for involvement of others in our spiritual growth is reminiscent of the problem of modern science, which, in its scientistic form, eliminates the human from the world of knowledge. Scientism claims to have the "final say" on what is real, but the result is to leave out the human being whose mystery cannot be captured by science.

According to E.L. Fortin, the corrective is "a new 'Socratic turn' that, like the original Socratic turn, would both preserve science and return it to its native human context." Fortin quotes Walker Percy's The Moviegoer where the narrator said that he focused on science (his so-called "vertical search") and when he finished this search, the "difficulty was that though the universe had been disposed of, I myself was left over." The narrator finally realizes that his search really needed to be "horizontal," to be conducted by "wander[ing] in the neighborhood." Fortin concludes, "This is as good a recapitulation of the Socratic turn as one is likely to come across anywhere today. Socrates' turn toward human things did not necessitate abandonment of his quest for the knowledge of nature. The two must somehow go hand in hand. Our task is to find a way of bringing them together again." He calls this "[o]ur most urgent need." Fortin, "The Bible Made Me Do It," in Human Rights, Virtue, and the Common Good, at pp. 128-129.

So, to heal our theology and our science requires that we act "for the sake of others." Someone who could show us the way would be a true hero! As Christians, we know who that hero is.