Christ and the Many
"Only Christianity satisfactorily solves the problem of the One and the many, because Christ is the 'concrete universal.' Only in the Incarnation can an individual be universal and the universal be individual. 'Christ is neither one individual among others, since he is God and so not susceptible of comparison, nor is he the norm in the sense of a universal, since he is this individual.'[1] However, though Christ is not just one individual among others...he is also not the mere removal of an individual from the sphere of his fellow individuals. Christ is a human being; to raise him above human beings is to make Arius' mistake and thus to eliminate the possibility of our participation in Christ. Christ remains immersed in history; yet, because he is God, all historical norms are subordinated to Christ. Christ cannot be interpreted in terms of the universal norms of history, since he is unique, so there is no place for abstracting from particular cases or inessential accidents. There are no accidents in God, so Christianity can only display the normative content of history manifest in the irreducible particular fact of Jesus Christ. Christ is the concrete norm for all abstract norms The norm for history comes not from above it, from the absolute laws of universal reason, but from within it. Christ thus bridges Lessing's ditch between the absolute and the particularities of history."
--William Cavanaugh Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire (Grand Rapids: Eerdman's Publishing Company, 2008) pp.76-77
[1] Cavanaugh is quoting from Hans Urs von Balthasar "Characteristics of Christianity," in Explorations in Theology vol. I (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989) p.170.
--William Cavanaugh Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire (Grand Rapids: Eerdman's Publishing Company, 2008) pp.76-77
[1] Cavanaugh is quoting from Hans Urs von Balthasar "Characteristics of Christianity," in Explorations in Theology vol. I (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989) p.170.
Comments
Which is what this statement is.
We live in a time and place when all of the Sacred Texts of the entire Great tradition of humankind are freely available to anyone with an internet connection.
Have you and the said author ever made a thorough-going examination of this multi-faceted Great Tradition---and on the terms of each of the Sacred Texts, and NOT through your own provincial pre-judgements--that is unexamined prejudices!
Plus as a fallen sinner, what do you really know about anything at all?
Are you on conscious knowing terms to the great power and primal energy that enlivens everything---that creates and destroys super-novas for breakfast?
Have you submitted and surrendered your presumed "self" to that Primal Energy and infinite Consciousness?
And thus found out for real what IT is really all about.
Until you have done so you are not in a position to make an intelligent statement about any thing whatsoever.
Where do you begin and end?
Where are you?
Who and what are you?
What is an apple?
How far and where is up?
How big is LIGHT?
You cant even account for your own existence or appearance here---you dont even know what you are in Truth and Reality.
And yet you presume to make such grand statements which effectively damn most of human kind as living in cultural darkness.
Until of course, courtesy of you and your fellow "true believers", the only ones that "know" and possess the "truth", they are brought to the "truth"---at the point of a gun if necessary, just like it was done in the old days.
Such a project is inherently TOTALITARIAN in its nature and INTENTION, and inevitably leads to mountains of corpses and rivers of blood.