They are accessible only to those who are well grounded in academic theology. For such readers, one hopes they will help shape the discussion of what it means to be a human being, one whose existence is “eccentric,” that is, not belonging to oneself.
The work patiently lays out the various questions of Christian theological anthropology. Kelsey takes pains to show what those questions are and how they are related, highlighting their complex interactions.
He divides the work into four sections. The first, a set of introductions, describes the contemporary method that seeks to locate theological discussions within the practices of the religious community. Kelsey is keen to avoid imposing the foreign logic of how one comes to belief from non-belief onto this theological discussion. That is not at all the same thing as the logic of how one moves within the Christian framework. The latter, Kelsey insists, is always trinitarian; as such, it sees human being under three different aspects – as created, as being destined for consummation and as reconciled.
Assuming this trinitarian structure, each of the next three sections seeks to locate one aspect of human being within a specific set of practices. The first treats the human being as created. Kelsey does not start with Genesis, which he sees as being written under the rubrics of salvation history, but with Proverbs. The result is to see the physical world as a given, a “proximate context.” This world is something one does not escape, but is always to be lived in with faith in the one who creates.
The second section deals with our consummation and is the provenance of the Spirit, whose theological virtue is hope. The last section deals with how God relates to us in seeking reconciliation, and wherein our existence is seen as being due to the death of another. Kelsey focuses this discussion on the Sermon on the Mount, seeing the in-breaking of the kingdom and God’s reconciliation in the practices of love to God and neighbor that the Sermon enjoins, that is, prayer and moral treatment of our neighbor.
Each section thus seeks to determine the structure of one way that God relates to us, and each has its own set of questions, asking, “Who am I?” “What are we?” and “What ought we to do?”
Kelsey has a hawk’s eye for anything that smacks of private spirituality, that would remove theological thought from a community’s practices. On this score, he is surely right. But he seems suspicious of the inner, warning of its distortions. Perhaps Kelsey does not think that talk of the inner is meaningless. But something more than a formal balance and leaving a structural place for the inner may be needed in a culture where the inner really has become a void, and where the hollow men have triumphed.
ERIC O. SPRINGSTED is a Presbyterian pastor and the author of several books, including “Simone Weil and the Suffering of Love.”
