In graduate school, I took my theology and religion classes from a professor named John Hick. The reason I did was that I had run across some of his books in college.

One of his books that I think is something of a minor classic is Faith and Knowledge. I reread parts of it recently because some of the issues he discusses keep coming up in the adult class.

The section I’ve reread begins with him talking about meaning. He argues first that the word "meaning" has become so inflated as to be meaningless; and this was in the 1960’s, that he was writing. So, he substitutes the word, "significance."

He bothers with this clarification because his whole point revolves around the importance of significance, A.K.A, meaning. The world is not just a "blooming, buzzing, confusion;" as William James put it; it’s not mere chaos out there—at least, not usually—rather things and events have meaning for us, they have significance; some more than others, of course.

This is true for animals as well as us humans. Except in animals significance is less cognitive than in us, more instinctive. For example, as I was taking notes for this, I looked out the window and watched a blackbird pecking around in the dirt, looking for worms and bugs, I imagine. Why? Worms and bugs signify food for blackbirds. This significance of worms and bugs for blackbirds is instinctive, programmed. They don’t decide anything; they don’t first ponder the significance of worms and bugs, and then decide to eat them. They just do it.

While humans also have instinctual programs, hard-wired into our systems like the other animals, we also have considerable space left over in our brains that allow us to program ourselves. We have freedom and opportunities to signify things in one way rather than another; we can give our own meaning to events and situations. This accounts in part for the interesting and exciting variety of individual life-styles and cultures. We have the freedom to signify differently. This is the source of some of the joys of being human and some of our headaches and heartaches. For example, it somewhat accounts for the rich variety of art and music in the world, and it accounts to some extent for why we fight each other: we see things; we signify them differently.

Hick goes on to subdivide our signifying, our meaning-making, into categories: natural, ethical, and religious. He reasonably concludes that a single event or situation may have a natural, an ethical and a religious significance. To take a ridiculous example, say I see someone slip on a banana peel and land on his back. As far as this goes it is a natural phenomenon that includes gravity, anatomy and so on.

Now, without anything being added to this scene on the natural level, we might also see it as an ethical situation; as one having ethical significance. I may feel morally obligated to assist this person. Now interestingly, I have more freedom here than did the poor guy who slipped on the banana peel. Once the natural sequence started with stepping on the banana peel, there was little he could do about it. Once the moral imperative to help begins to work its way into my consciousness, however, I have much more freedom to stop or redirect it. "Oh he'll be ok," I say, as I hurry past; or "It serves him right for not watching where he's going," I say as, again, I hurry past.

Then finally, this ethical dimension of the situation may itself be imbedded in a larger horizon of significance, namely the religious. I may see my moral obligation to be variously grounded in the religious belief that loving your neighbor as yourself is God's will. But again, this dimension doesn't force itself on me like the natural law of gravity does. I can ignore it without the kind of immediate natural consequences that slipping on a banana peel may have on the human body.

Let’s take another example: Jesus. Starting from the natural level, Jesus is a human being. In spite of the various misunderstandings of him throughout the ages as not really human, the catholic creeds unequivocally affirm his full humanity. The definitive confession here, from the Council of Chalcedon in C.E. 451, says that Jesus "is of one substance with us [humans] as regards his manhood [his humanity], like us in all respects, except for sin." Indeed, if we had been alive at the time and known Jesus in the flesh, I'm sure that we'd have no doubts about this, his humanity.

We may have wondered, however, what moral value to assign to his behavior. According to the gospels, a lot of people wondered about that. "He casts out demons by the prince of demons," was perhaps the lowest rung on the ladder of moral value anyone assigned to him. Some people thought he was in league with the devil.

But others assigned a more positive value to Jesus. They thought of him as a prophet, or a teacher who as they put it, teaches the law of God in truth. In every age, I suppose, there have been people who recognize the veracity of Jesus' moral teaching. Some of them go on to recognize a further dimension to Jesus—namely his unity with God.

After having argued about it for several centuries, the church came to the belief that in this totally human Jesus, in this teacher of moral truths, one encounters the reality of God as in no other, indeed, as could be in no other. Jesus is unique in this unity with God.

To see Jesus in this light is, of course, to see a religious significance to him.

Now, let’s say that we are one of those who perceive this unique significance in Jesus, a significance that we can only express with sentiments that we normally reserve for God. Does this significance nullify the natural dimension of Jesus’ person? Does this holy and divine significance that he has acquired for us compel us to assume that he is no longer human like us? "No, it doesn’t," the church has said. On the contrary, the catholic confessions urge us to see these dimensions united in the one person: Jesus is truly human and truly God. Indeed, to fully appreciate who Jesus is, we need to hold together: the natural—Jesus’ humanity; the ethical—the inherent morality of his life and teaching; and the religious—his unique presentation of God. He is all this, the church has said, all this in one person.

Well, how might anyone know this about Jesus, or about anyone else for that matter? Here, I will be brief. We can know it because, along with physical, natural sensibilities, we also have moral and religious sensibilities. I know this begs a lot of questions, but since I just promised to be brief, I’ll ignore most of them. Just as we have physical senses that register physical realities, so we have moral and religious—spiritual, if you prefer—sensibilities to register moral and spiritual realities.

Of course, these latter sensibilities are not given like instincts. They emerge and grow through our interactions with the world, by us responding to the natural world in certain range of ways and evaluating the consequences accordingly. Just as the ethical and spiritual dimensions of the world are grounded for us in the natural dimension of it, but reach beyond it, so our ethical and spiritual sensibilities are grounded for us in our physical senses, while reaching beyond them.

Finally, we need to remember that the consequences of moral actions are to be evaluated according to moral criteria, and spiritual according to spiritual criteria. We need to remember this because we commonly, but mistakenly, evaluate moral and spiritual actions by natural criteria. We shouldn’t expect moral or spiritual actions to always have immediate natural consequences—we shouldn’t, for example, assume that the guy slipped on the banana peel because he was morally or spiritually corrupt. For when we draw these conclusions, we may find ourselves in an intellectual corner wondering why "bad natural things can happen to morally or spiritually good people."

Moral actions effect moral consequences, like a clear conscience, for example. Spiritual actions effect spiritual consequences like an inner life of purpose and joy, for example. This is not to say that we are not whole persons and that a clear conscience or authentic spirituality can have no effects on our bodies or otherwise influence our natural lives. It is only to say each dimension is what it is, and we should be careful about confusing them.

As I said, because moral and spiritual perceptions are not instinctual, we have more freedom with regard to acknowledging these dimensions of life and what counts for truth in them. Indeed, we are more able to ignore them as they may tug on our consciences or inspire us to see the world in a theologically holistic way.

God seems to have given us the freedom to minimize the way the world affects us morally and spiritually to such an extent that the world can become for us nothing but a phenomenon of mass and energy. But that is a sad, because unnecessarily constricted, way to live.

The fact is: life can be complicated It’s complicated because it’s rich and multifaceted. Apparently God likes it that way. One of the joys of life is discovering why. I think it’s got something to do with harmony.