Coram Deo

Human Life in the Vision of God

Riswold

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781630878313
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In order to adequately address the issues of atonement and christology, we must understand how it is that we think about the relationship between God and the human being. The way in which we understand and interpret the life and death of Jesus and his role within that relationship then impacts our theology of the sacraments, particularly the eucharist. Further, the questions continue to confront and be confronted by my inescapable identity as a Lutheran Christian. I use the term 'inescapable' because I find myself working from and with theologies and theologians that are unabashedly critical of patriarchal religious doctrine and paternal theological construction, yet I cannot be convinced that the tradition which formed me is irretrievable or irrelevant.... I am seeking to use Luther as one of my sources, but I am working to reinterpret him and offer a more adequate constructive alternative that embodies what is useable in his tradition. I find the potential for a liberating message within Christian theology, and I find a critical theological resource in Luther.--from the Introduction

1

Solitary Subjectivity to Relational Agency Philosophical Roots of Theological Anthropology

Theological Anthropology: Introductory Comments

“Theological anthropology may be able to deal with persons in their genuine concreteness only by a second ‘turn,’ from the person as patient or subject of consciousness to the person as agent.”1 This challenge is the impetus for this chapter. The rest of this study builds upon this suggestion of agency as a second “turn” in speaking about humanity. This suggestion, however, presupposes what is called the first philosophical “turn”: the turn toward the subject.

This is why the first steps in this project move us back to the realm of Enlightenment philosophy. A central concern of this book is to illumine the relationship between God and the human being as a means to answer some theological questions raised by atonement theory. In order to get into the conversation about the relationship between God and the human being, we must understand the philosophical origins for speaking about the human being per se, and then move toward speaking about the relationship of the human with the divine. This chapter first moves back to explore the roots of language about the human being in terms of its vocabulary found in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. The point of this is not to provide an exhaustive search into Kant’s philosophy, but to establish the root of theological conversation about the human being in the philosophical shift toward speaking about the human as subject. From this basis we will move on to develop an understanding of the human as agent in relationship to God and the world.

The term ‘anthropology’ first entered into common use in the sixteenth century as the name for a subordinate discipline within metaphysical psychology. . . . Then, ‘anthropology’ came to refer specifically to human psychology. This made it possible for the doctrine on the nature of the human being to be removed from its earlier metaphysical setting and made independent.2

The independence of anthropology as a discipline characterizes the modern philosophical and theological era. The suggestion that we can and ought to speak of human beings as subjects, as beings with experience worth examining and understanding at a deep level, critically shifts the direction of philosophy and theology. In this study, I follow Pannenberg’s view that it becomes essential for human beings to speak of “themselves in relation to the world only if they presupposed God as the common author of both themselves and the world.”3 Consequently, after I establish the independence of the human being as subject with the philosophical resources of Kant’s Enlightenment thought, I move on to examine the relationship of the independent being with God, and the implications of that for her relationship to the world. The concept of “relationship” is a crucial for this project, and will be developed in a number of ways. The fundamental nature of the relationship of the human being to God makes it the focus of theological anthropology as it is used in this project. This relationship founds the existence of the human being, and it establishes her relationship to the world.

“With the modern era’s attention to the human subject, theological anthropology has come into its own as a distinct theological topic.”4 From this statement, the Dictionary of Feminist Theologies goes on to suggest that attention to the human subject finds a distinct articulation in feminist theology. Theological anthropology is a prominent concern of two leading schools of contemporary thought: feminist theology and process thought.5 These schools of thought inform this book as both critical tools and constructive resources, and their questioning what it means to be human, in relationship to the world and to God, provides an impetus for the study at hand.

We will return to a consideration of these schools of thought after briefly introducing the origin of some issues in speaking about the human being. The origin lies in part within particular vocabulary, terms, and concepts arising from the philosophical Enlightenment of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, found here in Kant’s writing. The point of this exploration is to tease out some of the key issues regarding the conversation about being human in order to see the shift through which they have moved from philosophical origination to contemporary theological manifestation. In eliciting some origins in philosophical anthropology, we can discover some fundamental concerns for the human being that are picked up as they are expressed and enhanced in feminist and process theologies.

Why begin the conversation with reference to the Enlightenment? We will see in the following sections how particular concepts and terms from Kant’s philosophy prove indispensable for any conversation about the human being as subject. As these are the roots for our modern conversation about human subjectivity, it is important to understand the ways they originated and continue to function. These terms and concepts are then used to set an agenda for theological conversation about the human being in relationship to God. We will move from Kant to some contemporary thinkers and their proposals for understanding human beings, their subjectivity and their agency. We will see how each draws conceptually from terminology found in Kant, enhancing and questioning its traditional philosophical meaning.

Origins/Definitions: Kant and the Enlightenment

While this project seeks to articulate and work with a theological anthropology, we gain from Kantian philosophical principles, several specific terms and concepts that inform the conversation: they include autonomy, reason, the human will, the categorical imperative, and freedom of decision. On the one hand, these concepts are often presupposed in contemporary conversations about theological anthropology, and come to be used in new ways, while on the other hand, they inform the proposal of this chapter explicitly. Consequently, I will explore Kant’s thinking as an entrée to what follows.

Autonomy

Autonomy characterizes the human as she is able to make her own laws, literally—auto nomos—to be governed by her own law. Kant states what becomes a motto of the Enlightenment, Sapere aude! (dare to know! know boldly!), in decrying the faults of the human condition in the modern era. “Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a portion of mankind, after nature has long since discharged them from external direction, nevertheless remain under lifelong tutelage.”6 Tutelage is the condition under which the human being remains bound to the direction of and an obligation to others. Autonomy is its corrective. This call for daring knowledge illumines Kant’s call to courage: “ ‘Have courage to use your own reason!’—that is the motto of enlightenment.”7 Decisions made and actions taken on the basis of external necessities or influences like the reason of others are characteristic of an individual under tutelage.

This illuminates in part the distinction between heteronomy and autonomy on which Kant relies. In this distinction, the autonomous will is determined by nothing other than itself, and the heteronomous will is determined by external forces, such as force, coercion, and satisfaction. “The point is that in obeying the moral law for the sake of the law alone, the will is autonomous because it is obeying a law which it imposes on itself: heteronomy occurs whenever the will obeys laws, rules, or injunctions from any other source.”8 Self-determination of the will is crucial to Kant’s philosophy, and it involves other aspects of his thought. Governance on the basis of one’s own volition is the point to emphasize here. The principle of autonomy “implies that the determining ground of the moral will must be, not any empirical rule or concept, but the formal concept of lawfulness in general, which is a concept of pure reason.”9 That is, it is not a particular rule that one must obey; it is a general notion of moral law itself, and the entire concept of lawfulness, that beg obedience. If one acts out of fear of retribution, or of obedience to the particular letter of a specific law imposed externally, then one acts heteronomously.

Autonomy as freedom of reason is a particular characteristic of the human being in the public realm. Kant distinguishes between freedom in the public and the private realms: Enlightenment is “the freedom to make public use of one’s reason at every point.”10 Public freedom is here understood as the ability of each person as thinker or scholar to devise arguments and hold opinions according to her own reason. This includes the ability of the individual to express her thoughts on the justice or injustice of certain laws or practices. However, Kant also speaks of the private use of reason which binds the individual to obey the statutes of the office she is to carry out. “Here argument is certainly not allowed—one must obey.”11 This dichotomy is explained in part by an understanding of the world which holds firmly to the importance of individual freedoms of expression while maintaining the need for structure and order.12

Kant’s best example of this is the clergyperson who is bound by virtue of office to preach and teach according to the principles of the church body. However, as a scholar and as an individual, the person is allowed and even encouraged to write and speak about personal assessment of the merit and failing of such t...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Solitary Subjectivity to Relational Agency Philosophical Roots of Theological Anthropology
• Chapter 2: Human Agency and Divine Mutuality:Feminist Theologies and Process Thought
• Chapter 3: Finitum Capax Infiniti in Luther’s Writings on the Sacraments
• Chapter 4: The Mission of Jesus and the Vision of God:Implications for Christology and Atonement
• Chapter 5: Hoc est / Hoc facite:
Theology of the Eucharist as Indicative and Imperative
• Chapter 6: Conclusion
• Bibliography