Introduction To Christianity

by J.R. Foster

If before, perhaps through the conclusions implicit in the doctrine of the origin of species, he might have resignedly noted that so far as his past was concerned he was just earth, a mere chance development, if he was disillusioned by such knowledge and felt degraded, he does not need to be disturbed by this any longer, for now, wherever he comes from, he can look his future in the eye with the determination to make himself into whatever he wishes; he does not need to regard it as impossible to make himself into the God who now stands at the end as faciendum, as something makable, not at the beginning, as logos, meaning. This is already working itself out concretely today in the form of the anthropological approach. What already seems more important than the theory of evolution, which for practical purposes already lies behind us as something self-evident, is cybernetics, the “planability” of the newly to be created man, so that theologically, too, the manipulation of man by his own planning is beginning to represent a more important problem than the question of man’s past—although the two questions cannot be separated from each other and in their general tendency largely govern each other reciprocally: the reduction of man to a “fact” is the precondition for understanding him as a faciendum, which is to be led out of its own resources into a new future.

Brilliant