Wednesday, May 24, 2023

Complete in oneself?

Man is not to trespass on God’s preserve; he is to be wholly dependent upon God; thus he is wholly unlike God, since his freedom consists in dependence, not in independence. The eating of the tree of knowledge and of life, the infringement of the divine preserve, is the effort to achieve autonomy, to be entirely self-centred; it means exchanging the a Deo esse for an impossible a se esse. If man had not yielded to this temptation, he would have lived in communion with God; he would have received life as a gift; daily he would have received it as a gift at the hands of God.—Emil Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of Creation and Redemption, 119–20

No comments: