The Logic of Christian Humanism
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that any Christian humanist can affirm, “a Christian lives not in himself, but in Christ and in his neighbor.”faith in Christ and also poured out to the neighbor in love. Christian exist-ence, in other words, does not rest or resolve itself in itself. The Christian (^16) The Christian is caught up in God through
self exists in, with,demand of love as the distinctly Christ-like path to the highest good. Who I am, what I can become, is defined by a project of increasing love for God What is more, the right intention for life appears under the form of the and for the other: God and the neighbor.
and for others. The Christian self, again, is not a brute given. It is a project or task whose end is the God of life and the life of the neighbor. That is why Christian humanists speak of cultivation, education, and even perfection in Christian love. Genuine formation is to bear Christ in one’s life through
love of God and others.A human self is a concrete, specific person in community with others, seek-ing to live out a life of love within the complexities and realities of existence. In this vision of life, the self is not an abstract principle of identity.
The self is also not lost in God or the neighbor. There is no “mystical” absorption of self into the divine, nor is there a moral effacement of the worth and dignity of the individual person in praise of the priority of the “other,” an idea various Christian feminists have rightly challenged. (^17)
A person in her or his own dignity exists within a complex set of relations with the ability to orient life responsibly.sonal freedom and dignity. The same thing must be said about the neighbor. That is, again, why Christian humanism insists on the importance of per-
Since the love of God and true self-knowledge arise together, the command to love neighbor as self cannot mean, despite what some neohumanist detractors like Todorov think, that a Christian loves others in the abstract a means to the divine. Insofar as the self is in God through faith and in the as
neighbor in loving acts, the same is true in principle of other people. Any actual person exists in a complex web of interrelations with others and with the living God; they must be loved concretely, not abstractly. Of course, how people live within the web of experience can take almost infinite expression.
Some live in hope and courage; others live in despair and anger; still other people struggle to be faithful parents and good citizens. The ways of life that people adopt are many and part of the richness and travail of human reality.The Christian humanist finds this variety of ways of life ambiguous. It is
part of the comic but also tragic tapestry of human existence. The ambiguity of the human project does not entail an easy acceptance of the notion that somehow all ways of life are equally good and true. No way, style, or path of life ought to be adopted that violates the double love-command and thus