In this 1955 essay, [Vladimir] Lossky builds all of that around a very complex and very sophisticated analysis of how Christians, especially in the early centuries, talked about God as trinity and talked about the divine and the human in Jesus. If I had another three hours or so I would try to spell that out a bit further, but it might emerge a little later when we have some questions. The point I want to focus on here is that he is arguing for an essential mysteriousness about the notion of the person in the human world, an essential mysteriousness that one can’t simply deal with by listing it in a number of things that are true about us so that I am intelligent, loving, free and mysterious; which is something about the place I occupy in terms (as I said earlier) of being the point where the lines of relationship intersect. It’s because a person is that kind of reality, the point at which relationships intersect, where a difference may be made and new relations created. It’s in virtue of that that we are able as believers to look at any and every human individual and say that the same kind of mystery is true of all of them and therefore the same kind of reverence or attention is due to all of them. We can never say for example that such and such a person has the full set of required characteristics for being a human person and therefore deserves our respect, and that such and such another individual doesn’t have the full set and therefore doesn’t deserve our respect.
That of course is why – historically and at the present day – Christians worry about those kinds of human beings who may not tick all the boxes but whom we still believe to be worthy of respect, whether it’s those not yet born, those severely disabled, those dying, those in various ways marginal and forgotten. It’s why Christians conclude that attention is due to all of them. What that means, we may still argue a lot about. But the underlying point is quite simply that there is no way of, (as it were), presenting a human individual with an examination paper and according them the reward of our attention or respect only if they get above a certain percentage of marks. Any physical, tangible member of the human race deserves that respect, never mind how many boxes are ticked.
Read it all.
Rowan Williams–The person and the individual: human dignity, human relationships and human limits
In this 1955 essay, [Vladimir] Lossky builds all of that around a very complex and very sophisticated analysis of how Christians, especially in the early centuries, talked about God as trinity and talked about the divine and the human in Jesus. If I had another three hours or so I would try to spell that out a bit further, but it might emerge a little later when we have some questions. The point I want to focus on here is that he is arguing for an essential mysteriousness about the notion of the person in the human world, an essential mysteriousness that one can’t simply deal with by listing it in a number of things that are true about us so that I am intelligent, loving, free and mysterious; which is something about the place I occupy in terms (as I said earlier) of being the point where the lines of relationship intersect. It’s because a person is that kind of reality, the point at which relationships intersect, where a difference may be made and new relations created. It’s in virtue of that that we are able as believers to look at any and every human individual and say that the same kind of mystery is true of all of them and therefore the same kind of reverence or attention is due to all of them. We can never say for example that such and such a person has the full set of required characteristics for being a human person and therefore deserves our respect, and that such and such another individual doesn’t have the full set and therefore doesn’t deserve our respect.
That of course is why – historically and at the present day – Christians worry about those kinds of human beings who may not tick all the boxes but whom we still believe to be worthy of respect, whether it’s those not yet born, those severely disabled, those dying, those in various ways marginal and forgotten. It’s why Christians conclude that attention is due to all of them. What that means, we may still argue a lot about. But the underlying point is quite simply that there is no way of, (as it were), presenting a human individual with an examination paper and according them the reward of our attention or respect only if they get above a certain percentage of marks. Any physical, tangible member of the human race deserves that respect, never mind how many boxes are ticked.
Read it all.