Abstract
What does Christianity teach about human being? More specifically, what does it say about the individuality-relationality question: are humans basically separate and independent entities, or are we essentially relational and interconnected beings?1
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Notes
Amos Yong, Beyond the Impasse: Toward a Pneumatological Theology of Religions(Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2003), 35–36.
Quoted in Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 57.
Susan Pace Hamill, “An Evaluation of Federal Tax Policy Based on Judeo-Christian Ethics,” Virginia Tax Review 25, no. 3 (Winter 2006): 747.
Carter Heyward, Saving Jesus: From Those Who Are Right (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999), 124.
Frank Stagg, Polarities of Man’s Existence in Biblical Perspective (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1973).
Indeed, Joel S. Kaminsky argues that, contrary to scholarly arguments that collectivism is rare in the Hebrew Bible, “a corporate understanding of punishment pervades the major theological systems found in the Hebrew Bible.” Joel S. Kaminsky, Corporate Responsibility in the Hebrew Bible (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), 12.
Cf. Paul E. Davies, “Trends toward Individualism in the Teaching of Jesus,” Journal of Bible and Religion 24, no. 1 (January 1956): 16, 17.
Max Turner, “Approaching ‘Personhood’ in the New Testament, with Special Reference to Ephesians,” Evangelical Quarterly 77, no. 3 (2005): 223.
Ibid., 211. Jaime Clark-Soles’s comment is also pertinent: “As feminist, gender, and post-colonial studies have taught us, not everyone signifies the same thing when using the language of personhood.” Jaime Clark-Soles, Death and the Afterlife in the New Testament (New York, NY: T & T Clark, 2006), 112.
Nonetheless, it should be noted that Kaminsky contends that Ezekiel’s seemingly individualistic language does not mark a departure from essentially corporate concerns. See Kaminsky, Corprorate Responsibility, 177–78. For a fuller discussion of these issues in Ezekiel, see Jurrien Mol, Collective and Individual Responsibility: A Description of Corporate Personality in Ezekiel 18 and 20 (Boston, MA: Brill, 2009).
C. F. D. Moule, “Individualism in the Fourth Gospel,” Novum Testamentum 5, nos. 2–3 (July 1962): 172.
Cf. David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991), 74.
David R. Brockman, “Adam Smith and the Gospel,” The Progressive Christian 183, no. 5 (Summer Two 2009): 10–13, 27.
While some might interpret this as referring only to Christians, I suggest that his statement, “You did not choose me but I chose you” (v. 16), indicates that involvement in the vine is not a matter of one’s faith stance. We are all branches of the (Di)vine. This example is drawn from David R. Brockman, “Adam Smith and the Gospel,” The Progressive Christian 183, no. 5 (Summer Two 2009): 12.
For example, Augustine writes in The City of God, “For we were all in that one man, since we all were that one man who fell into sin through the woman who was made from him before they sinned.” Augustine, Hanh, The City of God against the Pagans, ed. and trans. R. W. Dyson (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 555–56.
Quoted in Philip Hefner, “Going as Far as We Can Go: The Jesus Proposal for Stretching Genes and Culture,” Zygon 34, no. 3 (September 1999): 498.
Elsa Tamez, “Greed and Structural Sin,” Trinity Seminary Review 31, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 2010): 9.
R. Lansing Hicks and Walter Brueggemann, introduction to Amos, Hanh The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books, ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1991), 1170.
I would hope that this episode is remembered by those Americans who called unpatriotic their fellow citizens who opposed the invasion of Iraq. Choan-Seng Song puts the matter of prophecy in terms of the revolutionary nature of God’s redemptive acts. Israel “attempted to institutionalize God’s revolution within the framework and structures of their political and religious institutions. But they had to pay dearly for all their attempts. Prophets issued the warning that God’s redemption could not be contained in a human institution.” Choan-Seng Song, quoted in Robert A. Hunt, The Gospel among the Nations: A Documentary History of Inculturation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2010), 148.
Responding to my presentation of this notion at the 2013 Midwest Political Science Association conference, political scientist Robert Adcock raised the quite valid concern that I do not specify whether the source of the prophet’s recognition is revelation or reason, a distinction he understood (as a nontheologian) to be quite significant. Certainly some Christians (such as Tertullian) have asserted a strong distinction, or even opposition, between revelation and reason. As an Anglican, I take my lead from Richard Hooker in refusing to regard reason, including human reason, as opposed to divine revelation; I also do not wish to make a sharp distinction between reason and revelation. Hooker holds that God leads people to truth through revelation (i.e., Scripture) and reason. As W. David Neelands notes, for Hooker, revelation and reason are not in conflict, since “both have their source in God” (Neelands, “Hooker on Scripture, Reason, and ‘Tradition,’” in Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. Arthur Stephen McGrade [Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1997], 76).
Reason is reflected in the order of the cosmos, and human reason is designed to discover that order and make sense of it. Right reason is God’s instrument for guiding the world (Richard Hooker, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, bk. 5, in The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, vol. 2, ed. W. Speed Hill [Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977], 45). Since even human reason can be the instrumentality for divine revelation, it makes no material difference whether the prophet’s critical stance is the result of reason (e.g., “this situation makes no sense, given what we believe”) or of direct divine revelation (e.g., “God tells me”).
Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (New York, NY: Continuum, 2009), 170.
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© 2013 David R. Brockman
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Brockman, D.R. (2013). Tensions in Christian Scripture. In: Dialectical Democracy through Christian Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137342539_2
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