Walter Wink: Collected Readings

16. The Human Being

16 The Human Being Walter Wink completes his study of The Human Being by highlighting Nicolas Berdyaev’s notion of the “anthropological revelation”—the revelation of humanity’s “christological consciousness.” The implications of humanity’s christological nature are that we must not look for guidance from “above,” nor can we be overly dependent upon Scripture and tradition for guidance. Rather, we must look within and become conscious of that numinous reality that human beings incarnate—God. Jesus reveals both God’s desire to “incarnate in humanity” and humanity’s call to become human, “as God is human.” Wink concludes that what Christianity has to give to the world is not institutionalized religious structures—they are all too often co-opted by the Powers That Be and provide religious sanction for the Domination System. Rather, what Christianity has to give to the world is the “myth of the human Jesus . . . the revealer and catalyst of our true humanity.” Source: Wink 2002: Part 6, 257–260 Lo, I tell you a mystery: God is human, And we are to become Like God. Our spiraling itinerary brings us back to Nicolas Berdyaev, one of the true prophets of the twentieth century and the herald of the anthropological revelation. He believed that the future coming of the Human Being “with great power and glory” (Mark 13:26) will reveal humanity’s christological nature. “The Coming Christ will come only to a humanity which courageously accomplishes a christological self-revelation, that is, reveals in its own nature, divine power and glory.” Berdyaev bemoaned the false humility and passivity 301 of much Christianity, which withers the people’s creative capacities and renders them merely obedient. Christ, he said, will never come in power and glory to people who are not active creatively; for it is the creative act that reveals human nature.1 But Christianity has often crushed the creative spirit. Believers are made to feel guilty of hubris for reaching too high or risking too much. Authorities punish people for failure, so they learn to defend themselves against possibilities too lofty. Against this tendency, Berdyaev announces the anthropic revelation, which John’s Gospel had already declared: “The one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father” (14:12). The same sentiment is expressed in an apocryphal saying about the Human Being: “When you make the two one, you will become Truly Human Beings [“sons of men”], and when you say, ‘Mountain, move away,’ it will move away” (Gos. Thom. 106). The task of humanity’s religious consciousness, Berdyaev thought, is to reveal its christological consciousness. Only the mystics, transcending all times and seasons, have glimpsed the Christology of humanity. Only the Christology of humanity, the reverse side of the anthropology of Christ, will reveal in the humanity of Christians the genuine image and likeness of God.2 The great insight of Joachim de Fiore (d. 1202), an insight trivialized if treated literally, was that the era of the Father and the era of the Son were soon to inaugurate the era of the Holy Spirit. For us today that means that, for some situations, there is no explicit guidance from Scripture or tradition. In cases dealing with modern science, politics, technology, genetics, abortion, sexual orientation, and even situations in which the injunctions of Scripture are unambiguous, we must still, according to a saying ascribed to Jesus, “judge for yourselves what is right” (Luke 12:57). (And we must even decide whether that saying is right. Apparently most Christians have decided that it is not, since they do not live that way.) Our attempts to find guidance by prooftexting are born of religious anxiety bordering on despair. Our purpose can no longer be revealed from above. We are left without external authority, forced to find it within ourselves, like Jesus’ disciples in the story of plucking on the Sabbath. The God who commands, withdraws. That absence of aid from on high shows the great wisdom of God. The attempt to limit our purpose to keeping the commandments turns creativity into submission, which is to say that there is no creativity. Only human beings in touch with the Human Being can reveal the truth about the daring now required of us. There can be no divine revelation of this secret, Berdyaev insists. God does not wish to know what the anthropological revelation will be, since to do...