Knowing Creation by unknow

Knowing Creation by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2018-02-28T16:00:00+00:00


Concurrence as Perichoresis

Concurrence takes a special form with material persons because personhood is essentially perichoretic. It is impossible to be personal alone. The Godhead is not an isolated ego but three persons, each of whom indwells the others by reaching out in love and appreciation, by knowing even as they are known. Trinitarian friendship, their reciprocal identity-conferring relationships of self-giving love, proceeds in such harmony of outlook and valuation that the Trinity express themselves in one action, one will ad extra.

Because human beings are material persons, the human psyche is tied to an animal life cycle. Developmental psychologists agree that personhood is essentially perichoretic. They explain that human beings are born full of personal potential but that such capacities have to be evoked and developed in a personal surrounding. Many take a page from Kantian ethics to suggest that autonomy is the goal of human development, something we grow into if all goes well.8 Various scales are offered to map and norm the individual’s progress. According to psychoanalytic versions, the human infant begins as a booming, buzzing confusion of inputs and impulses, but by the age of three months or earlier has the cognitive capacity to differentiate and center its psychic field on a human face. A few months later, its cognitive skills progress enough to recognize that the face goes away, and this realization launches the long process of ego development over the course of which the ego deploys a variety of self-management strategies that organize, structure, and restructure the personality. Therapy assists the ego in consciously identifying, sorting, and discarding dysfunctional defenses and—when successful—brings the individual to the goal of rational self-government.9

Once again, theology recontextualizes. From the beginning, whether recognized or unnoticed, the omnipresent Godhead is really present to all levels of human personality, interacting constantly in many and various ways to enable normal human development, working to foster creativity, nudging the human psyche with “aha” insights, and precipitating seismic shifts towards “out of the box” thinking (say, to invent Riemannian geometry or to put two and two together to get sixteen)! Material persons are no more made for solo action than the divine persons essentially are. Autonomous ego management is not the ultimate goal of human development. A further stage builds on its achievements and capacities but moves beyond them into conscious recognition and intentional cooperation with indwelling Godhead, into a restructuring of personality that puts friendship with God at its functional center so that more and more everything that the human person says and does flows from that lived partnership.10 John’s Gospel speaks of this as being “born again” “from above.” John’s Jesus declares that all that he says and does comes out of his relationship with the Father. John’s Gospel presents Jesus in his human nature as the paradigm of mature perichoretic human personality.



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.