As an academic psychologist I think it is important to see what our understanding of spirituality might inherit from our understanding of our psychology. From the viewpoint of psychology, one can no more see spirit as separate from nature than one can see mind as anything but deeply dependent upon the evolution of nervous systems of a particular form and complexity. Even if not sufficient to it, mental life, the life of emotion, cognition, and consciousness of self, is necessary for spirituality. Moreover, mental life itself only emerges through a long period of individual development, requiring lengthy dependency on other human beings, and extensive social support. This dependency and support not only meets, but shapes our biological and emotional needs, and brings our cognitive capacities and our personhood into being, building within each of us an identity and an interior life. Given the role of interdependence in the emergence of individual minds, any integrity we have as spiritual beings is likely also to be an achievement contingent upon the character of our relationships with other persons, and our memberships in larger communities. If so, understanding our spirituality requires sustained attention to its social nature. If our emotional lives, our inner subjectivity, and the boundaries of our individual identities are historically developed constructions (even if equipped and required by our biological inyheritance), then it is possible, as a social and spiritual project, to reconstruct and transform our lives in alternative ways, recognizing the interdependencies that are our real source of strength and power, and becoming more attentive to our moral fellowship with others.

In a recent article, I argued that neuropsychology is necessary but insufficient to account for the human spirit (Teske 1996), and that its emergence is evolutionarily and developmentally rooted in social interdependence (Teske 1998), the present paper specifically addresses the processes which may be involved in the social construction of the human spirit. The human spirit is taken to be that aspect of human mental life by which we can apprehend meanings and purposes extending beyond our individual lives. It is possible that the transcendence of the spirit over individual neurocognition is neither a fiction, nor an illusion, but a product of social life which cannot be accounted for in terms of individual psychology alone. The specific thesis of the present paper is that the human spirit can be understood as a social and historical construction, dependent upon but not determined by human neuropsychology, in turn embedded within the evolutionary emergence of higher mental processes.

The present argument will presuppose (1) that individual neuropsychology is necessary but insufficient to account for the integrity of self and spirit and (2) that this is a fragile achievement which is contingent, for both evolutionary and ontogenetic reasons, on the construction of the person, of emotional life, of internal subjective experience, and of the boundaries of individuality. In a recent article (Teske 1996), I argued that spirituality, defined as the apprehension of meanings and purposes extending beyond the individual, required a neuropsychology sufficient to represent both self and world. While accounting for some of the requisites of spiritual life, like sentience, conscious mental life, and self-knowledge, our neuropsychology also helps us understand their limitations. The "modularity" of our neuropsychology in particular (the tendency of our brains to function as a set of semi-autonomous subsystems), while necessary for the stabilization of a complex neural system, raises a "problem of integrity," evidenced by research on hemispheric differences, brain dysfunction, and even the dissociations present in normal memory. What I suggest is that the integrity of self or spirit needs to be understood as an achievement and, while systems of belief, as well as subdoxastic emotional integrations may contribute to this achievement, it is largely produced via our position within larger systems or communities. Spiritual integrity therefore depends upon the psychological interiorization of purposes which themselves transcend individual mentality. Surrender and sacrifice can then be understood to require a de-sacralization of boundaries of self. That is, that we no longer take the boundaries of self as given or obvious, as natural kinds or as ordained by God, but in fact sociohistorically constructed human products, however sedimented and buried in time they may be, and that we are also capable of more deeply understanding or even transforming them, both within and beyond our own lives.

I recently argued in these pages (Teske 1998) that the human neuropsychology necessary for spirituality has an evolutionary history requiring extensive social interdependency for its development. The immaturity of human nervous systems at birth, and their plasticity, results in a need for experiential shaping, which continues through the course of an individual’s life. The evolutionary hypertrophy of the prefrontal cortex in particular (i.e. its growth well beyond the previous hominid proportions), which colonizes the neural regulation of arousal, and affects the very structure of emotional life, results in a need for extensive social scaffolding for normal human functioning (the size and location of the enlarged parts of the brain results in their appropriation or influence upon a wide range of other functions). This makes possible the emergence of a socially constructed virtual reality (the use of a metaphor of "virtual reality" should, I hope, be evocative for anyone who has ever fully engaged in an interactive computer game), a supervenient symbolic world transcending immediate experience. Our engagement with such a world is rooted in familial and communal attachments which generate the emotional and spiritual patterns of adulthood. Our cognitive capacities involve a symbolic independence from immediate environments, and make possible the emergence of symbioses with external memory systems. Such systems make possible novel and interiorized forms of socially constituted experience, including the spiritual.

Given the deep evolutionary and ontogenetic role of social interdependence in human mental life, the integrity of self and spirit is an achievement likely to be contingent upon our membership in relational and communal wholes of which our minds, selves, and spirits are but parts, and upon which their larger meanings depend. The specific character of human emotional life, our inner subjectivities, and even the boundaries of our individuality are socially constructed and maintained. It is likely that even "internal states" are constituted within a semantic rather than a physical space, itself a social and intellectual product.

The argument for the social construction of the human spirit builds on the "constitutive rules" of John Searle, and will suggest how the specific character of human emotional life (as understood by psychologists, psychoanalysts, and anthropologists), our inner subjectivities (understood via classic and contemporary work on the social origins of individual cognition), the boundaries of our individuality (as understood psychologically, anthropologically, and even historically), may be socially constructed and maintained. Evidence for the social construction of biologically rooted emotional life, both across development and across cultures, will be presented, suggesting an analogous construction of spiritual sentiments. I will argue (drawing on work in both psychology and philosophy) that even "internal states" are constituted within a semantic rather than a physical space, itself a social and intellectual product which, while dependent on individual neuropsychology, is not necessarily coterminous with it. Indeed, the boundaries between this semantic space and the world "outside" is the central issue in therapeutic discourse. Argument will be made for the social construction and cultural limitations of our particular form of individuality, to show how individuality might be capable of transformation, by considering alternative constructions. I will also look more deeply at the role of narrative, culturally and historically rooted, unified by tradition and community, as a sine qua non of both identity and a moral or spiritual life. Finally, I will conclude with a review of the theologically relevant elements of the present account of spirituality, and suggest some resources for explicating a theology more attentive to the social nature of our selves and spirits.

Searle's (1969, 1995) concept of a "constitutive rule" provides a paradigm case of how social construction works. Regulative rules, like the driving code, regulate antecedently existing activity (driving) which is logically independent of the rules. Constitutive rules, like the rules of American Football, create new forms of behavior (touchdown, offsides) whose existence is logically dependent on the rules. These rules constitute activities, events, or objects, called "institutional facts" (vs "brute facts") by Searle, which would not exist without the rules. Mating would exist without such rules, but not marriage, nor divorce. Physical possession of objects would exist, but what of ownership, property? Constitutive rules ramify even into our personal lives. Relationships like "friend" vary across cultures, subcultures, and historical eras. There are things one "cannot do" and still be a friend.

Institutional facts, like the existence of restaurants, waiters, or even dollars (Searle 1995), while they cannot exist without physical tokens (whether relatively localized, as in the case of a dollar, or distributed over space and time, as in the case of a marriage), cannot be defined in terms of any particular physico-chemical description. A dollar can be metal, paper, wampum, or even magnetic traces on a computer disk. Still, institutional facts, like the fact that the metal objects in my pocket are money, are only epistemically objective, in that they are true independently of any individual’s representations; they are ontologically subjective in that they are facts only relative to the intentionality of agents. They are also language dependent, both epistemically, and because of their communicability, complexity, and independence of the attitudes of specific participants (e.g. I may still be married, even if I have forgotten that I am), ontologically. Money, like marriage, only is what it is because some particular human beings are prepared to treat its tokens in certain ways (although they can change historically). So, unlike brute facts, institutional facts do not exist independently of all representations, but are observer-relative functions rather than intrinsic properties, even if the observer-relativity is collective and social.

Institutional facts can be iterated. Having the functional and moral status of husband and wife requires the institutional fact of marriage, which requires a marriage ceremony, which requires a certain kind of social contract, which requires making a promise, which, in turn, requires a certain form of linguistic utterance. The logical structure of complex societies is provided by such iteration, interlocked into systems, maintained and varied through time, accumulated and sedimented historically. These iterated structures are what grant symbolic powers for the creation of meaning, deontic powers for the creation of rights and obligations, and make possible the logical structure of social power and even honor. The iteration and interlocking of institutional facts means that they cannot exist in isolation, that they are fundamentally systemic (Searle 1995). By virtue of their historical sedimentation, they may appear to be more obdurate facts, and it may require some effort to uncover their sources. Nevertheless, as Searle points out, what enables observers to create or impose such institutional functions is intrinsic to observers. Given the demonstrable developmental, cultural, and historical variation in the attribution of personhood, or in the life of the human spirit, it seems uncontroversial to assert their institutional character. Nevertheless, one can take issue with Searle vis-a-vis whether mental states are themselves intrinsic to observers, or observer-relative functions only made possible by neurological processes which are intrinsic to observers.

There are a number of events, conventionally viewed by psychologists to be, by virtue of their locatability within individual subjective experience, intrinsic or "natural" properties of individuals. These include characteristics of both our cognitive and our emotional lives which research suggests may be locatable, as much in structure and operation as in content, socially rather than individually, between rather than inside persons. If central and essential components of our understanding and experience of the world are socially constructed, then it follows that the subset of our understanding and experience which constitutes our spirituality (including our ability to apprehend, emotionally engage with, internalize, identify with, and direct our lives toward meanings or purposes transcending the self), is likely to be similarly embedded. We turn now to three such components: emotional life, psychological internality, and individuality itself.

The social construction of emotion is particularly relevant to spirituality. While emotions, like much of the rest of our embodied lives, may derive from evolutionarily constrained biological givens, they are understood, experienced, and enacted according to a particular set of historical and cultural rules. The basic structure of our emotional life is built in childhood out of foundational scenes which engage our biological systems. These foundational scenes are rooted in the character of family interactions scripted by the culture (Nathanson 1992, Tomkins 1979). Emotions are "intentional" states, they have objects, they are "about" something (Averill 1980). It is the experience of the relationship to this object that constitutes the meaning of the emotion, or, more accurately, is constituted by it, since it is the experience that is going to be generated by the supervenience of meaning upon biology, not vice versa. This is because it is the sharing in a common stock of knowledge about that kind of relation which enables a person to act in an intelligent and appropriate manner (Shotter 1984).

Averill defines emotion as "... a transitory social role (a socially constituted syndrome) that includes an individuals appraisal of the situation and that is interpreted as a passion rather than as an action" (1980, 312). Passivity is experienced as something that has happened to me, is beyond my control, rather than as something I have self-initiated, done for myself. The classification of any self-involving event as active or passive requires interpretation, an evaluation not inherent to the response itself, as in Schafer's (1976) psychanalytic account of emotions as "disclaimed actions."

We see here how an important ego-boundary, the intra-individual boundary between action and passion, is maintained. Nevertheless, such a definition of emotion makes clear that what is constituted by the social construction of our emotional lives is not just a set of internal states, but a complex set of relationships both with the objects of emotion, and with a cultural system which determines the overall drama. This overall drama includes not only our roles, but the parts played by others, including the generalized other, around which we build a more unified sense of self.

Such an account of emotion can easily be extended to the whole universe of "spiritual" passions. If all emotions are so constructed, it makes no sense to suggest that any emotion is less real by virtue of such a process of construction, only that different social and historical contingencies may produce quite different but just as "real" emotions. Consider an emotion of the Ilongot male, called "liget," which irritates and distracts him until it reaches its peak, moving him to slice off the head of an enemy, thereby filling him with energy, passion and a deeper sense of knowledge (Rosaldo 1980). This is a cultural construction as much as our feelings of romantic love, or the passions of faith.

The classic work on the social construction of thought is that of Vygotsky (1978) and Luria (1976), who present evidence about how inescapably social our "inner" thoughts are. Vygotsky (1978) provides an example of a cognitive function that originates in a relation between mother and child in the way a child's reaching gets interpreted as pointing. It is in the child's relations with others that the meaning of situations is built, and only subsequently internalized, and Vygotsky's work suggests that this may be true for all the higher cognitive functions, including attention, memory, and the formation of concepts. Recent examples of the social construction of memory gone awry are provided by the problems associated with "recovered" memories in the case of sexual abuse, e.g. Wright (1983). Luria's work (1978), particularly with Uzbekistan peasants, suggests that even the capacity for abstract reasoning is contingent on historical changes in social life and organization.

Rom Harre (1984) states as a principle that everything in the mind first existed in some conversation between experienced and novice members of the culture. The key to the process, which can be linked explicitly to the notion of a constitutive rule, is the "psychological symbiosis" in which the mature person provides the immature with internal states by interacting with them as though they possessed them (Ochs & Schieffelin 1984). We "internalize" these motives, intentions, and understandings by habituating the behavior scaffolded by others, acting as if we have those states, and, by the same process, being enjoined in the same constitutive discourse. If I successfully act "as if" I were assertive, I am legitimately taken to be assertive. "Internal states", are constituted within a semantic space which is itself a social product and which, while they certainly depend on the neurobiological operations by which each individuals' piece of the process depends, are not necessarily coterminous with an individual's biological boundaries.

The origin of putatively individual cognitive activity in social context is amply documented in the psychological literature. Cognitive complexity, for example, is likely to be as much a property of social situation as of individuals. The research of Tetlock and Boettger (1989) suggests that social circumstances like crisis, personal threat, and even political campaigning are as likely to produce lower cognitive complexity as to be produced by it. Even the frequently replicated finding of an error in over-attributing internal causes of behavior (Nisbett & Borgida 1974, Ross, Amabile, & Steinmetz 1977), may be attributed to internal processes by committing a meta-version of the same error (Jellison & Green 1981). Evidence both that this kind of error is made far less frequently in Mysore than in Chicago (Miller 1984), and that American subjects judged to be "more socially adjusted" are more prone to this error (Block & Funder 1986), suggests that it is a cultural rule rather than a pan-human "cognitive bias."

In the Western culture of which the Judaeo-Christian tradition is a part, we take the existence of separate, autonomous individuals, with capacities for self-direction and responsibility to be self-evident (cf Gergen 1991). We grant rights to individuals, we hold them responsible for their actions, and we hold single individuals to be the only appropriate containers of a whole range of emotions, from romantic love to the peace that passeth all understanding. To say that the particular form that our individuality takes is a social construction is, again, not to say that it is illusory, but that its reality is of an abstract, and socially negotiated kind, just as any other socially instituted entity.

The evidence from other cultures suggests that our conception of an individual self is constituted by a set of cultural roles and practices. This evidence suggests that the kind of bounded and autonomous individuality which we presume to be universal is instead culturally peculiar (Geertz 1973). As Heelas and Lock (1981) indicate, all cultures make some distinction between self and not-self, but differ radically both on their boundaries, and on the existence of and the proper relations between various parts. For the Balinese there is only a minimal role for the unique, individual self in everyday life and it would border on the nonsensical to consider the state of individuals’ minds in relating to them. For the Ilongot, there is no recognition of an autonomous self apart from outward behavior (Rosaldo 1984), and the collectivist Ifaluk find any reference to unique, autonomous individuality as excessively egocentric. Traditional Hindu culture defines the self fluidly in and through others rather than by sharp differentiation from them (Miller 1984, Shweder & Bourne 1982, Shweder & Miller 1985).

The Western conception of self is also historically recent. John Lyons (1978) argues that it was not until the late eighteenth century that people began to view their individual selves as central, previously viewing themselves in terms of group membership categories. Even the soul was not an individual possession, but created by God and made incarnate only transiently. In the Medieval world, privacy did not mean separation from members of one's household but its separation from the wider public (Duby 1988). Roy Baumeister (1986, 1987) traces the contributing historical trends, including the religious choice introduced by the Reformation, the distinction between public and private self made possible by capitalism, and the cultivation of an inner self during the Romantic era. He sees identity as the spiritual problem of our time, as cultural change has produced a decline in the guidance produced by traditional religion, urbanization has increased the confusion of choice and distraction, life has been demystified by science, and psychology has undercut confidence in our self-knowledge. The contemporary Western "self" is constituted by being socialized according to a particular theory (Harre 1985). We are taught to believe in a "self" which has a rich interior, is clearly bounded from not-self, is construed to be the possession of a particular biological individual, and is assumed to be unique. It may be that the "crisis and commitment" aspects thought to result in the achievement of identity (Erikson 1956, 1959, 1968) are themselves constructions produced by a certain sort of justificatory account rather than by intrapsychic processes. Following Winch (1958) and Wittgenstein (1953), Slugoski and Ginsburg (1989) argue that the requirements of identity achievement are isomorphic with the criteria for intelligibility of human action, that is, that being able to make ones actions intelligible is the same as having an identity. The criteria for intelligibility involve being able to give a reason for an action (whether or not the action was previously intended), and to be committed by that action to consistent future behavior. One claims an identity the same way one claims agency, by "[representing] one's actions as issuing from the workings of a complex cognitive machinery" (Harre 1979, 256). Not only is "internality" itself a social construction, but it is the process of accounting for actions as intentional which maintains one's identity.

A case can be made that spiritual connections, connections via trans-individual meanings and purposes, between people and their intimates, their families, and their communities, have been socially deconstructed, rendered suspect, meaningless, or unintelligible. Historical and cultural forces have served to construct a self increasingly alienated from community, from tradition, and from shared meaning, as these social wholes are increasingly eroded and fragmented by the emergence of postmodern culture. What Sampson (1988) calls "self-contained individualism" may be the historical product of the development of Western civilization, but it could hardly have produced such accomplishments as the building of cathedrals, the emergence of the scientific community, or the political unification of continents. The truly great achievements of any culture are not as likely to come from separate actors attempting to mesh, but from "interdependent actors whose very design for being includes working on behalf of larger interests" (21). An alternative "ensembled individualism" includes more fluid boundaries between self and other, locates control in a field of forces inclusive of the individual, and conceives of a self which includes relationships with others. Sampson presents evidence that the latter form of individualism is actually more common worldwide, providing illustrations from Maori, Hindu, Japanese, Confucian, and Islamic indigenous psychologies, as well as from Greek tragedy and pre-Homeric narrative. Sampson argues that defining internal control as freedom and external control as the lack thereof tends to conceal the overdetermining field of forces controlling any course of action, much of which is well outside of individual desire and will.

The point is that transcending the dominant view of self, and constructing spiritual connection, is not to be obtained by surrendering to the deconstructive forces of postmodernism (those forces which would erode or fragment meaning), but by recognizing, rather than denying, the hidden interdependencies that are the sources of strength and power for individuals. Ultimately it is only through this sort of reconstructive (in the sense of building greater and more coherent, more healing, structures of meaning), social project that spirit is constituted in any historical period, as it can be, anew, in ours.

Julian Jaynes (1976) and others (cf. Hermans, Kempen, & van Loon 1992) argue that our very consciousness of self is constituted and organized metaphorically as a space. Moreover, if the social constitution of a kind of logical or moral space is a prerequisite of selfhood, the life of that self entails movement in that space, and it is in narrative that coherence and continuity, that particular connections between events, that the integration or the disintegration of ones' life through time, are constituted. Charles Taylor (1989) argues that it is only by virtue of having a location in a moral space that we can be said to have selves.

Taylor (1989) provides a detailed account of the historical emergence of our contemporary understanding of the self, in which he argues that, whether or not we are aware of it, some kind of moral framework is inescapable for selfhood. He argues that discussions of morality have focused too heavily on issues of respect and obligation for others, and not on two other axes, that of what makes for a full life, and our dignity, or that which we believe commands the respect of others. If our very presence and movement in the world is shaped early on by an awareness of others, an awareness of a public space, then even if we come to question our moral framework, living in a space of communal and consequential values is constitutive of human agency. The moral space constitutes, and is incorporated into one’s self-identity, such that one cannot step outside that space without damaging one’s personhood. We can see this in the disorientation produced by identity crises, in the emptiness and vertigo of wider horizons being swept away in modern crises of meaninglessness, and even in pathological levels of ego loss which can affect one’s grip on one’s very stance in physical space. Taylor also makes clear that, unlike independent objects of scientific discourse, a self only exists among others, in "webs of interlocution," in a geography of social space, "and also crucially in the space of moral and spiritual orientation within which my most important defining relations are lived out" (47).

Despite his attention to the public nature of the moral space within which our self-identity is constituted, much of Taylor’s (1989) book is at pains to explore the emergence of our peculiarly modern notion of inwardness, a version of which we have already rehearsed here. In my view, what much of contemporary selfhood, and hence personhood, is about is a kind of incorporation or "interiorization" of a moral space. With Taylor, I agree that understanding my location in moral space, what moves me, and what is the direction of my life requires narration. To build a life worth living is to build some greater reality or story into our lives. To the extent that this includes aspirations for transcending one’s finite, human desires and beliefs, this is the story of our spirituality, whether theistically based or not. "In order to have a sense of who we are, we have to have a notion of how we have become, and of where we are going…" (47), so "…because we cannot but orient ourselves to the good, and this determines our place relative to it and hence determining the direction of our lives, we must inescapably understand our lives in narrative form, as a ‘quest’" (51). Taylor finds our placement and orientation within, and the narrative of our movement within a moral space to be "inescapable structural requirements of human agency" (51).

There is no doubt but that the ability to construct a narrative of one's life is supported by brain structures, though not necessarily one's own, but that one's own psychological "interior," including the moral space constituting one’s agency, is not necessarily isomorphic with one's biological interior. The sense of meaning in our lives may only be possible through a kind of "narrative truth," as indicated by Donald Spence (1982) and Donald Polkinghorne (1988). Moreover, the narratives themselves, or at least the traditions from which they are derived, are sociohistorical products by definition. It is these narrative traditions that thinkers like Taylor (1989) and Alasdair McIntyre (1981) would have us become aware of in seeing how we construct integrated lives. Traditions like the Biblical and Republican strands pointed to by Robert Bellah and his colleagues (1985) as well as the Romanticist and Modern languages described by Gergen (1991), are certainly important parts of the heritage of self in complex Western society. The roots of our very spirituality are also sociohistorical products, and that spirituality itself is always rooted in a narrative tradition, realized by a process of historically sedimented metaphorization. One need only reflect for a moment on the metaphors of God as father, realms of kingdoms and lords, and spirit as breath, to realize how much of a tradition is constructed out of the available languages of time and history.

The goal here has not been to deconstruct the self, or by implication, the possibility of an individually-centered spiritual integrity, but only to illustrate the contingency of selfhood, and to suggest that there is an open-endedness to that contingency which leaves room for us, as a human community, to reconstruct in ways that enable the living of more meaningful, more spiritually integrated lives. It points away from a view of persons as having essences, or of having "souls" in any way that escapes the sociohistorical and evolutionarily embodied contingencies by which they are constituted. Spirituality includes the other in our construals of ourselves, and it is the solidarity with them that alone allows the story, our story, to outlive our individual biologies. The goal is never merely to preserve, to entomb, to repeat endlessly, to be reborn unchanged, but for growth, for procreation, to create anew, to be transformed.

In the context of the current science/theology discussion, it may be valuable to review the theologically relevant elements of the present account of spirituality. The first is that on this account, our spirituality is deeply embodied. It is necessarily rooted in and dependent on (but not determined by or reducible to) our neuropsychology, tied to a certain level of cortical complexity. Nevertheless this tie to neuropsychology makes integrity a contingent achievement, heavily dependent on individual development, in which social and intellectual processes engage and shape deeper biological mechanisms. It is also evolutionarily rooted in capacities for neuroregulatory and emotional function, shaped by a social interdependence which helps account for the sociocultural symbioses so important for communal life.

The second theologically relevant element of spirituality is that it is historically contingent. Historical and social processes generate and constitute much of what we think of as our spirituality. There is a role for the historical emergence of rule-structures which bring new entities and events into being, events which, while they may be constructed are not, on that account, necessarily fictional. These historical processes are themselves evolutionarily embedded, but provide an additional route to the renewal and transformation of human life.

A third theologically relevant element is the social interdependence of our spiritual lives, linked to basic emotional attachments and their development. Our very cognitive abilities are likely to be socially originated, the interiorization of which may constitute central features of our spiritual experience. Nevertheless, attention to the interdependent character of our interior lives may make alternatives possible to the individual separation and alienation so endemic to the contemporary world. Ultimately this attention may require fuller explication in a theology which is explicitly makes reference to religious communities.

Although I am by no means a theologian by training, it may be useful to suggest some resources for the theological task. Unfortunately, most of the work within the science/theology tradition, and in theology more generally, seems to take the existence of the individual person for granted as a natural kind. This appears, for example, in the focus on a tension between the biological adaptation of individuals and of groups (cf. Hefner 1993), which tends not to include an understanding that individuality itself may be a product of group adaptation, and the "tension" may contribute to the historical flexibility of group adaptation.

From the Anglo-American science/theology tradition, the work of Barbour and Hefner are important resources. Barbour’s (1990) attention to reorientation and the healing of brokenness as central theological components is significant. Along with Peacocke’s attention (1993) to the emergence of distinct actions at higher levels of biological complexity, Barbour’s multi-leveled emergentist view also takes evolution seriously. Barbour also draws attention to our evolution as social beings, and the impossibility of language or symbolic thought without it, and the dependence of our very sense of self on our treatment by others. Barbour’s Biblical view of human nature, acknowledging the social nature of individuals in community, also recovers the meaning of "covenant," with a people "not a succession of individuals," and including a participative responsibility for the world, and the possibility of cultural transformation. Like Tillich (1957), Barbour sees sin in the violation of relatedness and interdependence, in egocentricity and inordinate self-love. Nevertheless, I think this understanding also needs to be balanced with Reinhold Niebuhr’s (1964) observation that Western culture is indebted to religion for "the sense of individuality and the sense of a meaningful history." In the wake of this century’s totalitarian politics, and the continued horrors produced by racial and ethnic hatred, we best heed his warning that the denial of individual limits (in which I would include our very individuality) also ramifies into (or perhaps, is a reflection of) an even greater tendency of groups, over individuals, to absolutize and to be blind to the rationalization of their self-interest.

Philip Hefner’s (1993) theological theory of created co-creators is another important resource. While an appreciation for Hefner’s work may belie my Lutheran heritage, I am not sanguine about his dualism of biology and culture. Hefner perceives our personhood as the "weaver" or the "gatekeeper" (Hefner 1998, 539 and 543). However, both these metaphors imply a separation between biology and culture which requires some form of reconnection. Hefner sees the natural order as a "fit vehicle for divine grace" (1993, 232), and the core of the imago dei as a free creator of meanings, emerging from a long evolutionary process, including a symbiotic co-evolution of biology and culture. Nevertheless, despite his sensitivity to the constitutive over referential functions of religious language and ritual, he does not carry this into an understanding that the individual per se may be a linguistically and culturally constituted entity. While it is still possible, with Hefner, to view our evolutionary heritage as an obstacle to moral life (although it may not be, in many cases, e.g. reciprocal or kin-based altruism, capacities for empathy, the emotional bases for attachment and love), it may be that population genetics, group selection, and cultural symbioses might help us see how individual morality, and individuality itself, as constituted by modernity, can be transformed. Group life might be enhanced by individuation as well as by sacrifice. I agree with Hefner, nevertheless, about the importance of sacrifice, of giving oneself, even in death (ultimately necessary for evolutionary change), to units beyond the self. If the meaning of something just is its function in a larger system, then self-transcendence is involved in the very apprehension of meaning, something which thinkers like Tillich and Rahner might readily affirm. As I argue elsewhere (Teske 1999, forthcoming), giving oneself to something greater, the only meaning one’s life can finally have, may require an end, a bounding of self. Hefner is also very sensitive to the need to construct narratives and symbols, a capacity "intrinsic to the evolutionary process at the level of homo sapiens", to justify, explain, and assess action. I would again want to argue that actions, and even agency itself, is not merely "contextualized" or "marked linguistically" by such constructions, but constituted by them. Narration and symbolization is not created de novo by individuals, since individual identity is itself constituted, generated, and brought into being as a sociohistorical and developmental product via such narration and symbolization.

There are a whole range of ways in which the present account of spirituality may be theologically relevant in terms of meaning, morality, and even in our contemplation of mortality. It may be useful to understand the meaning of our lives in the movement in semantic and moral space that is narrative. We may better learn to understand how meaning and purpose can supervene on the development of more relational selves and spirits, especially as we understand just how transcendence is not bound to individual biology, and how self-transcendence requires not only separation from but openness to others, and to what is Other.

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