John Paul II & the Nature of Human Dignity

Over the next few weeks, I plan to post passages from some of John Paul II's encyclicals as they help unpack his understanding of personalism. The first few passages are from Redemptor hominis (1979):

Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it. This, as has already been said, is why Christ the Redeemer "fully reveals man to himself". If we may use the expression, this is the human dimension of the mystery of the Redemption. In this dimension man finds again the greatness, dignity and value that belong to his humanity. In the mystery of the Redemption man becomes newly "expressed" and, in a way, is newly created. He is newly created! "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus." The man who wishes to understand himself thoroughly-and not just in accordance with immediate, partial, often superficial, and even illusory standards and measures of his being-he must with his unrest, uncertainty and even his weakness and sinfulness, with his life and death, draw near to Christ. He must, so to speak, enter into him with all his own self, he must "appropriate" and assimilate the whole of the reality of the Incarnation and Redemption in order to find himself. If this profound process takes place within him, he then bears fruit not only of adoration of God but also of deep wonder at himself.

. . . . This amazement, which is also a conviction and a certitude-at its deepest root it is the certainty of faith, but in a hidden and mysterious way it vivifies every aspect of authentic humanism-is closely connected with Christ. It also fixes Christ's place-so to speak, his particular right of citizenship-in the history of man and mankind. Unceasingly contemplating the whole of Christ's mystery, the Church knows with all the certainty of faith that the Redemption that took place through the Cross has definitively restored his dignity to man and given back meaning to his life in the world, a meaning that was lost to a considerable extent because of sin. And for that reason, the Redemption was accomplished in the paschal mystery, leading through the Cross and death to Resurrection. (sec. 10)

This material is profound because it understands that our human dignity is recovered and rediscovered in the Incarnation and redemptive work of Jesus. Human meaning is returned to all of us because God became a human being and because of what he has accomplished through his suffering, death, and resurrection. And at the heart of all this is the human need for love, which is essential to our very personhood.

Can There be a Christian Culture?--Part 4

In light of the threat to stable meaning and ethics that historicism brought, one of the urgent needs was for Christian thinkers to account for human choice in a meaningful way. Are human beings really free? Can they make decisions and choices that are meaningful in any way that the average person could point to? Thinkers, again, took different directions. Some looked to raise human beings above the material and social world, offering two levels of existence. They were faced with trying to bridge the Kantian divide between the material and moral worlds.

Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, for example, condemned the modern attempt to master the historical process as sin and hubris; nonetheless, he looked to a kind of self-transcendence of history in which the repentant person’s heart is given "agape power" from on high, rising with the promise of Christ from the edge of history. For Niebuhr, who seems to finally deny the reality of a resurrection of the body or an afterlife, this transcendent freedom is somewhat limited: "Man, in both his individual life and in his total enterprise, moves from a limited to a more extensive expression of freedom over nature. If he assumes that such an extension of freedom insures and increases emancipation from the bondage of self, he increases the bondage by that illusion." Niebuhr by reducing the claims of Christianity to existential "heart" truths rather than real claims about the actual universe actual created a kind of ghostly neather-world. Niebuhr was no gnostic, but neither was he finally looking to a real eschaton.

Russian philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev went even further, seeing history not as a material but as a metaphysical work. Memory, being essentially non-material, points to the spiritual quality of human culture and its final eternal destiny. As such, a philosophy of history is to teach that the historical process is not “something that is alien to us, that is imposed upon us, that crushes and enslaves us.” As I've observed in another post, Berdyaev's personalism gave way to a real gnosticism.

Others, rather than posit a kind of two-tier world, embedded human responsibility within historical patterning itself. According to Herman Dooyeweerd, societies have religious ground motives that propel them along. What others identified as laws or forces of history are really God-given norms which can be obeyed or rebelled against with consequences: "Historicism . . . is the fatal illness of our 'dynamic' times. There is no cure for this unwholesome view of reality as long as the scriptural creation motive does not regain its complete claim on our life and thought." Dooyeweerd held that as long as historicism acted as a relativizing poison, anything like God-given norms could not be easily seen, but that did not mean they were not there,

For Brunner, too, human freedom is only true freedom when it acknowledges its dependence upon God. Human attempts to be autonomous from their Creator end in slavery. A “false liberalism,” which believes itself the ego-driven creator of reality, and “false determinism,” which robs human beings of any real creativity or action, both ultimately deny God’s existence. Yet this freedom was always to be bounded by the action of God in history.

For many Christian thinkers, the Incarnation of Christ was central to resolving the tension between destiny and freedom, for Christ made present what God promised for the future. For Eliot, as Dawson noted, religion is what gives spiritual freedom because “it alone brings man into relation with a higher order of reality than the world of politics or even culture.” While Eliot also believed in a more vertical world where eternity penetrates the world of time, he would not reduce that world to anything less than an incarnational one.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, too, recognized in Christ the concrete universal. Human freedom is a gift of God’s freedom, a locale for human action, yet “this space belongs to Christ,” and Christ’s incarnation as a human being and by extension in his people, “generates an inexhaustible abundance of Christian situations” in which his meaning may be imparted.

For each of these thinkers and writers, then, Christ in some manner freed people from the material relativism and determinism of history, but they differed significantly on how to conceptualize that salvation. What they did agree on was that Christians must navigate between the twin dangers of complete egotism and pure determinism.

"Good is the Flesh" by Brian Wren

What an amazing new hymn! Well worth pondering in it's Christ-centered and sacramental understanding of our bodily existence.

Good is the Flesh by Brian Wren

Good is the flesh that the Word has become,
good is the birthing, the milk in the breast,
good is the feeding, caressing and rest,
good is the body for knowing the world,
Good is the flesh that the Word has become.

Good is the body for knowing the world,
sensing the sunlight, the tug of the ground,
feeling, perceiving, within and around,
good is the body, from cradle to grave,
Good is the flesh that the Word has become.

Good is the body, from cradle to grave,
growing and aging, arousing, impaired,
happy in clothing, or lovingly bared,
good is the pleasure of God in our flesh,
Good is the flesh that the Word has become.

Good is the pleasure of God in our flesh,
longing in all, as in Jesus, to dwell,
glad of embracing, and tasting, and smell,
good is the body, for good and for God,
Good is the flesh that the Word has become.

from Bringing Many Names. Carol Stream: Hope, 1989.

Reason and the Mind of Christ

Obedience to Christ is based in the atonement. I would hold that the expatiation and moral models of the cross, both important emphases in their own right, are subsumed under the Patristic emphasis on Christ as victorious conqueror. He literally rules from the cross over the powers of the cosmos. The Epistle to the Colossians puts it this way:

And when you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it. (2:13-15)

It should be clear by now that Christian pedagogy is never just cognitive, even if that element is at the forefront for most of us (musical performance, dance, visual art, and kinesiology excepted, of course.) We are engaging the already conquered principalities, "the cosmic powers of this present darkness" with weapons that are not flesh and blood (Eph 6:12). Having the mind of Christ means recognizing the wisdom and foolishness of the cross, an epistemic and responsive set of actions that stand as judgment on our own divided communities (and institutions) of faith. Christ has come and "proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near" (Eph 2:17). His mind is life and peace to us when we dwell on his established victory and when we then act upon it accordingly. This truth founds the necessary larger place for Christian teaching and doctrine in our university curriculum.

Unfortunately, this locale has also been too often a source of great divisions among us. Paul's appeal to the Corinthians, "that all of you be in agreement and that there be no divisions among you," called for unity "in the same mind and the same purpose" (1 Cor 1:10). Indeed, Paul's appeal to the foolishness of the cross was meant to counter this miserable failure of proud claims to special wisdom among the church there: "Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age?" (1:20) Of course, too easily such teaching can play back into the anti-intellectualism that Mark Noll has called "the scandal of the evangelical mind." But at the same time, it should call us to humbled and weaned hearts upon our mother's breast (Ps 131) when we focus our cognitive, embodied selves in community on the work of the reigning Christ. The mystic Richard Rolle offers this observation:

I counsel you this: never forget the name of Jesus, but keep it in your heart day and night, as our most special and precious treasure. Love it more than your own life, and root it in your mind. Love Jesus, for He it is who made you, and who bought you back again at so expensive a price. Give your heart to Him, for it belongs to Him. And set your affection on his name, Jesus, which means "health."

No evil thing can hold sway in the heart of one who keeps Jesus faithfully in mind. For his name chases away devils and destroys temptations, puts away wicked fears and vices, and cleanses the thought-life. Whoever loves this name truly is full of God's grace and spiritual virtues, enjoying spiritual comfort in this life, and when such persons die they are taken up into the orders of angels, there to look upon Him whom they have loved in joy that has no end.

The mind of Christ conquers us when we make him the center of our contemplation, a contemplation which radiates out into the whole academy of our investigations, teaching, and learning. This holy radiant center is the energy that fuels a politics and ecclesiology of forgiveness, which we need so desperately in the academy.

A politics and economics of forgiveness affirms us each individually precisely as you or I sacrifice our pride for the other: "If compassion is knowingly to put oneself at risk for the sake of the other, then self-disposessive virtue is predicated upon a prior state of self-possession" (Oliver Davies). The cross's kenosis in us affirms our own true identities, ones which we need not hold on to in academic battles, battles fought so hard because they are over so little, as the saying goes. Instead, recognizing even the justice of our hatreds at times, we transcend them in the hospitality and demand of the gospel.

In this sense, the biblical vision is inclusive. Miroslav Volf has written on the particular "Catholic" (or universal) personality that Christianity affords its followers. The Church, as the biblical revelation teaches, will be made up of every ethnoi, every identity group. In this sense, Christianity practices what Volf calls "exclusion and embrace." It has its own particular identity, yet it also is inclusive of all -- "whosoever will, may come."

Christmas and Kenosis in Pedagogy

I want to suggest that two aspects of the Son's entry into our world, his incarnation and self-emptying, are expressed in his people, as well, though on a much more rudimentary and limited level. Christ calls us to incarnate his truth in every cultural expression out of which we are born, as well as to grasp the essential paradox that when we lose ourselves, we are found; when we deny ourselves, we receive; and when we make ourselves last, God exalts us in due season. I believe this is true even in our learning.

The Church’s education, and therefore, its learning is always an extension of the incarnation, though not at the compromise of the Son's deity. (To put it more technical terms, theosis is never a violation of aseity, our continual growth in Christ will never cross the essential difference between God and his creation.) Jesus does not call us to a learning without context, without history, or without community. Instead, we are called to live and learn his truth in particular times and seasons, places and peoples.

Consider the kenosis of Christ. The Son made himself "nothing" for our sakes. We area called to do the same in imitation of him, though never at the deep metaphysical level that he did so. However, kenotic learning for us is also self-giving, self-emptying even. At times, learning which calls on us to experience great loss seeks to hold together mystery and mysterion, the unanswerable and the lately revealed. It embraces a willingness to suffer for learning, as well as a trust that our vulnerability in learning will be answered and prized. It may experience absence and longing--a dark night of the soul, as John of the Cross calls it.

Theology has traditionally advanced in two directions:

1. Via positiva, postive assertions about God's self-revelation in creation, with divine history culminating in Christ, and in scripture, as well as to a lesser extent in church history and tradition.
2. Via negativa, negative assertions about the limits of our creaturely assertions about God. We cannot claim to know God exhaustively. Our search for him often ends in our simply acknowledging that we can go no further using this or that image or vocabulary. What we have received is sufficient, but then neither are we God.

As Reinhard Hütter has argued, our positive assertions always need a hint of negative correction. We cannot speak of God exhaustively. We have to learn what our limits are. This is true about God's world, as well. Our studies end in mystery. I am not promoting a "god of the gaps" in which whatever we can not explain at the time must be attributed to God. On the contrary, everything known and unknown is God's. Rather, we need to acknowledge that the limits to our understanding are signs of our dependence on God.

In the Orthodox tradition, icons always attempt to be both--what can be known of God and of the final uncontainable mystery of God. What is beyond our knowing is always part and parcel with what we do know (95-110). Kenotic learning, likewise, recognizes that the transcendentals of the true, the good, and the beautiful, as ultimately grounded in God, can only be attended to in an iconic manner. Learning mystery is true learning. Everything that is possessed of what is glorious, righteous, or true will not speak to us exhaustively, as if we could control it. When we say what can be said and acknowledge what cannot, we are affirming our creatureliness, as well as our role as God's covenant people.

Incarnational learning is similar--an emptying, a taking on of the context, a missional trajectory that grows mature and complete in the process of undergoing the given task. Kenotic and incarnational learning share the notion that since being is communion, authentic learning is both individual and communal; indeed, the individual is a community, as the communal has at times an individual quality. Learning requires sacrifice and submission, a giving of one's self, a risking of one's identity and nature. At times, it means not understanding with any comprehensiveness the change that is taking place in yourself as the learner or in the learning community that you help form. It is only discovered in retrospect, having been the work of the Spirit all along.

By affirming that the incarnation and the self-emptying of Christ were eternal possibilities in the Son, and by suggesting that our own finite forms of these are part of the imitation of Christ we are called to, we recognize that these forms of learning with their vulnerability, dependency, and sacrifice are not post-lapsarian instruments that we must begrudge, but part of the nature of being human persons. We learn this way by God's design.