A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross Quotes

“In Christ, the other is given as the neighbor. I encounter the other as one for whom Christ became human, was crucified, and resurrected, and this sets them free to be who they are.”
― Brian Gregor, A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross: The Cruciform Self

“This is also the problem with idolatry, which simply reinforces the incurvature of the self through the delusion that one is actually in contact with some transcendent point of unity.”
― Brian Gregor, A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross: The Cruciform Self

“Sin distorts the relationality that is ontologically constitutive of humanity: rather than being for God and the neighbor, the self tries to bring all exteriority within the domain of its power.”
― Brian Gregor, A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross: The Cruciform Self

“Faithful selfhood is not merely a matter of one’s personal religious journey or the egoistic concern of the individual self for its own private salvation. Rather, the self is a participant—both patient and agent—in the much larger narrative of God’s reconciliation of the world to himself through Christ.”
― Brian Gregor, A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross: The Cruciform Self

“This is the true via crucis: the cross destroys the self-justifying ego, putting it to death.”
― Brian Gregor, A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross: The Cruciform Self

“religious piety is all too often a manifestation of incurvature. Luther reminds us that the homo religiosus can also be a homo incurvatus in se.35”
― Brian Gregor, A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross: The Cruciform Self

“The self is curved inward, cut off from God and from the neighbor, and therefore ultimately cut off from true self-understanding as well.”
― Brian Gregor, A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross: The Cruciform Self

“Thus, “Christ is the word of God’s freedom. God is present, that is, not in eternal nonobjectivity but—to put it quite provisionally for now—‘haveable’, graspable in the Word within the church”
― Brian Gregor, A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross: The Cruciform Self

“The truth is a person. Consequently, the self participates in the truth not through strictly objective intellectual assent, but in a subjectively engaged relation of participating in and following after (Efterfølgelse, Nachfolge) this person.”
― Brian Gregor, A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross: The Cruciform Self

“The inward paths of self-reflection are labyrinthine—fraught with darkness and self-deception and inhabited by a conscience that ravages like a minotaur. The self needs to be broken out of the winding corridors of self-reflection, which so often lead into the despair of self-justification.”
― Brian Gregor, A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross: The Cruciform Self

“But he found a kindred spirit in Kierkegaard, who vehemently insisted on the infinite qualitative difference between God and humanity; when the finite tries to bear the infinite through itself, it will always end up with something less than truly transcendent.”
― Brian Gregor, A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross: The Cruciform Self

“Liberal Protestantism had exalted humanity at the expense of God,12 proclaiming an optimistic view of human religiosity and ethics. Yet despite its preoccupation with ethics, it was an ethical failure—something that became painfully evident to Barth in 1914 when all of his teachers and mentors endorsed the war policy of Kaiser Wilhelm II.”
― Brian Gregor, A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross: The Cruciform Self

“The error of religion is to assume that this moment depends on some prior or subsequent act—some behavior, feeling, or practice, but justification occurs entirely apart from the works of the law (Romans 3:28).”
― Brian Gregor, A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross: The Cruciform Self

“Christ draws us to himself, but he also offends our understanding of what the divine love and life must entail.”
― Brian Gregor, A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross: The Cruciform Self

“Christ is reality—the one Christ-reality (Christuswirklichkeit) inaugurated by the reconciliation of God and the world”
― Brian Gregor, A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross: The Cruciform Self

“Self-understanding is mediated Christologically.”
― Brian Gregor, A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross: The Cruciform Self

“What can limit the self-mediating I?”
― Brian Gregor, A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross: The Cruciform Self

“In short, the thinking (and understanding) self is curved in on itself and cannot break free. Thinking is incapable of transcending itself by and through itself. To paraphrase Luther, incurved reason is unable to want the transcendent to be transcendent.”
― Brian Gregor, A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross: The Cruciform Self

“The word of the cross is not reducible to the disclosure of new ethical or religious possibilities that the self must actualize.”
― Brian Gregor, A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross: The Cruciform Self

“God demonstrates his love toward humanity, in that Christ dies—not for the righteous, for those that are just and good, but for sinners curved inward in revolt against God (Rom. 5:7–8).”
― Brian Gregor, A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross: The Cruciform Self

“The word of the cross destroys the ontology of self-justification. This call is not based on God’s recognizing some achieved actuality, nor on some innate human possibility for good that might suggest this as a prudent investment. God gives life to the dead and calls into being that which does not exist (ta mē onta) (Rom. 4:17).”
― Brian Gregor, A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross: The Cruciform Self

“The incurvature of sin is not a happy fault (felix culpa), but the impossibility of communion with God.”
― Brian Gregor, A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross: The Cruciform Self

“yet sin is not only a matter of particular vices and misdeeds, but about the misrelation to God. As”
― Brian Gregor, A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross: The Cruciform Self

“This also entails an unconditional recognition of those others who cannot so easily pretend to justify their existence through their achievements—children, the elderly, the disabled, and those at the fringes of society. Human dignity consists in the irrevocable priority of person over works.”
― Brian Gregor, A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross: The Cruciform Self

“The self is bound because it is driven to justify itself, to prove that its existence is warranted and meaningful.”
― Brian Gregor, A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross: The Cruciform Self

“We see the problem of nihilism in the rise of senseless destruction, as well as in the banal political correctness in which the nice has supplanted the good as our horizon of evaluation.”
― Brian Gregor, A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross: The Cruciform Self

“But the biblical conception of freedom is not a quality or attribute that a human being possesses in isolation, in and of itself. Freedom is a relational phenomenon; it only appears in relation to others.”
― Brian Gregor, A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross: The Cruciform Self

“The desire for autonomous freedom results in a similar paradox: Adam has the semblance of freedom, but is in fact unfree. Prior to the fall, the human being existed in the image of God. In order that God might recognize the imago dei in creation, God created a free creature.”
― Brian Gregor, A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross: The Cruciform Self

“The fallen Adamic self cannot want God to be God. It wants to be God.”
― Brian Gregor, A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross: The Cruciform Self

“The biblical account of Adam’s sin does not speculate about the origin of sin and evil, but instead witnesses to its incomprehensible reality”
― Brian Gregor, A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross: The Cruciform Self