For a World Coming of Age: Reformed Theology’s PATH to Publicly Accessible Inquiry into Human Flourishing

Theology claims to know something about human flourishing. When those claims address persons who do not share the theologian's confessional commitments, they carry empirical entailments that invite evaluation by publicly accessible standards. This article develops PATH (Publicly Accessible Theology for Human Flourishing), a methodological framework specifying what such evaluation requires. Drawing on Edward Farley's postauthority criteriology and Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Christological mandate for theology in a world come of age, PATH establishes that public account-ability for flourishing claims is not secular capitulation but theological faithfulness. The article situates PATH within Habermas's public sphere framework, advances beyond it by specifying empirical accountability standards, and introduces the Four-fold Inquiry spanning analytic-philosophical, historical-cultural, human-person, and human-origins domains. The Construct and Evidence Engagement (CEE) Method provides tools for evaluating how theological thick constructs relate to the ways in which psychological science approaches wellbeing, flourishing, and thriving. PATH and the CEE Method are demonstrated through critical engagement with the World Health Organization's wellbeing framework, the World Happiness Report, Vander-Weele's Human Flourishing Program and Global Flourishing Study, and Ryff's eudai-monic framework. The analysis identifies structural problems in the field's leading measurement instruments, including validation failures visible in VanderWeele's own 40-item Wellbeing Assessment, while finding in Ryff's program several examples of the corrigibility PATH's provisional trustworthiness requires. The article concludes that theology contributes to interdisciplinary inquiry on flourishing not by subordi-nating psychological science to theological direction or by treating scientific findings as settled confirmations, but by bringing centuries of sustained reflection on what genuine flourishing involves into disciplined engagement with scientific approaches to related inquiries.