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| The Battle of Alexander at Issus by Albrecht Altdorfer (1480–1538) |
Humanity has an eternal destination
by Herman Dooyeweerd
(New Critique of Theoretical Thought, Vol 3, pp 783-784)
In the radical community of the human race according to the divine order of creation, the human is not qualified as [ie not "framed" or "defined" as] a "rational-moral being", but only by the kingly position as personal religious creaturely centre of the whole earthly cosmos. In humanity the rational-moral functions also find their concentration and through humanity the entire temporal world is included both in apostasy and in salvation. All things, beings, and factual relations qualified by a temporal modal function are transitory, the temporal bonds of love included. But the human has an eternal destination, not as an abstract "rational soul" or spiritual "mind", but in the fulness of one's concrete, individual personality. This puts it beyond any doubt that the various conceptions of "body" and "soul", or of "body", "soul" and "spirit" devised from the immanence stand-point are in principle unserviceable in a Christian anthropology which starts from the radical basic motive of the Word-Revelation. The all-sided temporal existence of a human, i.e. one's "body", in the full Scriptural sense of the word, can only be understood from the supratemporal religious centre, i.e. the "soul", or the "heart", in its Scriptural meaning. Every conception of the so-called "immortal soul", whose supratemporal centre of being must be sought in rational-moral functions, remains rooted in the starting-point of immanence-philosophy [ie "time-enclosed" philosophy].
But all this merely relates to the only possible starting-point of a Christian anthropology. Anyone who imagines that from our standpoint human existence is no more than a complex of temporal functions centering in the "heart", has an all too simple and erroneous idea of what we understand by "anthropology". What has appeared in the course of our investigations in this third volume [of A New Critique of Theoretical Thought] is that in temporal human existence we can point to an extremely intricate system of enkaptic structural interlacements, and that these interlacements presuppose a comprehensive series of individuality structures, bound within an enkaptic structural whole. This insight implies new anthropological problems which cannot in any way be considered as solved. But they do not concern the central sphere of human existence, which transcends the temporal horizon.
No existentialistic self-interpretation, no "act-psychology", no phenomenology or "metaphysics of the mind" can tell us what the human ego is, but — we repeat it — only the divine Word-Revelation in Christ Jesus. The question: "What is a human?" is unanswerable from the immanence-standpoint. But at the same time it is a problem which will again and again urge itself on apostate thought with relentless insistence, as a symptom of the internal unrest of an uprooted existence which no longer understands itself.
(Herman Dooyeweerd, New Critique of Theoretical Thought, Vol 3, pp 783-784)
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