Christian Philosophical Anthropology . a Reformation Perspective

No question seems more intensely bound up with the search for the ultimate meaning and significance of existence than the question of man. In the rush of daily life people are inclined to by-pass the question — until illness or accident befalls them or the suffering of others becomes inescapable fact. It is not without reason that the question of man, of who he is, arises in situations where, in one way or another, evil is manifest. That’s how it was when history began, when the first human couple hid, revealing awareness of themselves — naked and vulnerable for each other and towards the Creator. That’s how it still is today, when people find that ‘ordinary folk’ are capable of hating and killing one another. Philosophical questioning after man can never be a purely academic affair; the relation between self-reflection and evil prohibits that. The Jewish thinker Abraham Joshua Heschel (1966, 13-14) is very frank about this: