I began this book by arguing that theology is both an unavoidable and an impossible task. We are driven to it by a compulsive need to make sense of the world. To make our way through life we need a coherent map of reality. At the same time, this task is utterly beyond our capacity to carry through, given the dynamics of the process of knowing, the nature of that which we seek to know, the ambiguous stance of the knower and the enormous and bewildering range of that which is to be known.

I then contended that, in order to discover how best to do our theology, we need to understand how we know what we know. Epistemological insights, in their turn, should be derived from a comprehensive anthropology.

I sought to deal with the question of anthropology by questioning three assumptions--that thinking is our most important faculty, that we always act for the reasons we think we do and that we exist separate from each other. In contradistinction to these assumptions, I contended that reason is but one of a number of human faculties, that unconscious motives are major determinants of human behaviour and that we are intimately connected with others and with the entire ecosystem, not merely agentially, but organically, even psychically.

In the following chapter I argued that the human mind is not the only, or even the prime organ of knowledge. It was also argued that it is dysfunctional to attempt to separate one means of knowing from another. We are body/minds and comprehensive and healthy knowing involves a range of epistemological modalities, a total embodied apperception. I further suggested that theology was deficient if it overlooked any of these ways of knowing.

In the succeeding chapter, when I returned to a theme introduced earlier, I argued that there is evidence, both within ourselves and within the broader cosmos, of an immanent grace that is unobtrusive but persistent. This grace is expressed in a loving that is both affective and passionately committed to our individual healthfulness and to the moulding of the entire eco-system into a community of justice and peace.

I next suggested that this utopia could not be created by divine fiat. It needed to evolve. Maturation presupposes development. I further argued that this developmental journey involves two reciprocal phases, self-enhancement and self-denial. [90]

I further argued that no-one begins in a state of innocence. We are born into a world laden with the guilt of others, into an environment burdened with individual, cultural and institutional pathologies, a world whose challenges provide the necessary environment for soul-making.

Placing us in just such a world, God gifts us with freedom, a freedom to say yes or no to him, a constitutive freedom. We will make mistakes. This is part of our learning. The development of shadow personalities, the obverse images of our personas and the flip side of our strengths, is inevitable and necessary to this development.

The content of the unconscious, psychic effluent from the past, and those aspects of ourselves that have been unconsciously repressed, are the prime source of our hurtful behaviours, our perverse compulsions. It is from within that our sin arises. However, it is in acknowledging this sin, and confronting the shadow matrix from which it arises, that we progressively appropriate and integrate the total self.

The source and means of this appropriation is God's loving of us. This loving enables us to mentally, feelingly and actively appropriate God's acceptance of us and her forgiveness. The mystery of her grace, alluded to in the first chapter of the Letter to the Ephesians, is cosmic in scope and involves, as its originating, effective energy, the incarnation of the divine love in the life, death, resurrection and exaltation of Christ.

I can anticipate at least one criticism of the perspective I have outlined.

There are those who will argue that it concentrates too exclusively on the individual and too little on social influences and challenges.

There have been two major approaches to the issue of social transformation. There are those who have argued that society will only be changed by transforming individuals. Others contend that it is by restructuring society that individuals are changed. We have dichotomised these options. The reality is that both perspectives are valid. Influence flows in both directions, though in neither case are results inevitable. Transformed individuals, despite the fact that their immediate circle of friends, acquaintances and neighbours will be influenced by their changed attitudes and behaviours, do not, by virtue of the fact that they have been transformed, necessarily feel any obligation to participate in the re-creation of society. Nor do changed social circumstances automatically transform those whose lives are circumscribed by them. [91]

However, while I would strongly argue that individual and social transformation are inter-related, in a limited rather than absolute sense, I would also want to contend that the transformation of the individual is where the healing must begin. In arguing thus, I am not intending to discount the fact that the sheer facticity of institutional injustice severely inhibits the possibility of individual transformation, and that it should be challenged wherever and whenever it manifests. What I am wanting to suggest, however, is that, unless the dysfunctional material in the unconscious of the individual is addressed, neither the individual or the wider society will experience healing. The individual will remain at odds with themselves, with others and with the environing eco-system and this conflictual effluent will continue to foul our shared atmosphere, creating fresh injustices. Furthermore, if we attempt to address institutional violence, without first recognizing our inner violence, our well-intentioned, and often passionate involvement in social justice runs the risk of increasing the violence against which we are fulminating. On the other hand, if we are careful to address, and not overlook, our inner violence, barriers to true, vigorous community will be successively removed and we will see the emergence of a new heaven and a new earth, characterized, not by selfish individuality, but by social righteousness and peace.¹ [92]

[FOB 90-92]