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Gil Baillie, working in a Girardian framework, suggests that the claim that man is made in the image of God means "this creature can only fulfill its destiny by becoming like someone else. So counterinstinctual and counterintuitive is such a thing, that the likelihood of this creature actually fulfilling such a destiny would be slim, indeed, unless the creature were somehow endowed with a desire to do so, a desire equally counterinstinctual and counterintuitive, a desire to be itself by becoming like someone else."
From this perspective, he argues, "the postmodern assumption that the self is an artificial social construct" - though "naive" and thought "it usually harbors hidden agendas" - still "might help awaken Christians to the fact that something at least as shocking lies at the heart of Christian personhood. In a very real sense, at the burning center of Christianity is a person who emphatically insists that he exists only to bear witness to another person, a person whose life is therefore iconic in the extreme, an icon of the invisible God, the God, moreover, in whose image and likeness Genesis tells us we are made." Postmodernity is thus "setting up questions to which Christianity has answers." Postmodernity might help Christians recover the insight of Tertullian: "the soul is naturally Christian."
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, April 29, 2006 at 02:06 PM
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