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3 Faith, Substance, and the Cross In the previous chapter we discussed Charles Taylor’s claim that human beings are self-interpreting animals. As we saw, self-interpretation is a matter of strong evaluation, a second-order evaluation of oneself. Are my desires, goals, and commitments good? Am I living the way I should? Is it good that I “am”? We evaluate ourselves, in this strong sense, within a horizon of significance— i.e., a set of background assumptions regarding what is good, meaningful, and valuable. Moreover, this strong evaluation takes place before some authority. The category of “existence before” is therefore essential to becoming a self. I experience myself as responsible, answerable, accountable to some authority for who I am and what I do. This authority might be another self, a community, an institution; it might be a code or principle; it might be my own conscience. In this chapter, and for much of this book, our concern will be the category of existence before God (coram Deo). To begin, then, I offer a few remarks on why this category is the ultimate horizon of strong evaluation, and thus for becoming a self. * * * The self exists before others and needs the recognition of those others who are authoritative. This is essential to the self and its sense of identity. As AntiClimacus puts it in The Sickness Unto Death, this authority provides the criterion of the self; it gives the self its goal and the standard by which it is measured. Consequently, those before whom one exists define oneself, and establish one as who one is. Anti-Climacus shows that there is a phenomenological difference between the degrees of self-consciousness, depending on whom one exists before: “A cattleman who (if this were possible) is a self directly before his cattle is a very low self, and, similarly, a master who is a self directly before his slaves is actually no-self—for in both cases a criterion is lacking.” There is a criterion for the child who becomes a self before his parents, and as an adult the self gains the community, the polis, as a criterion. In these cases the criterion is human, but there is a qualitative difference between the self whose criterion is the other human and the self who exists directly before God. With God as the criterion, “an infinite accent falls on the self,” such that the self becomes aware of itself in a different way. With God as its criterion, self-consciousness is intensified not merely finitely but infinitely (SUD 79–80). When the self recognizes that its existence is a concern to God, the self is individuated in a new way. This is a disorienting realization—that God is not concerned about oneself through the mediation of an abstract idea like humanity, 40 A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross state, or world, but about the sin and faith of the individual self. This is offensive to human reason because it is so counterintuitive.1 But the offense is not limited to the theistic idea that the individual exists before God. The offense deepens when it becomes Christological. Not only does the self exist before God; this intimacy is intensified by the claim that God has come to the world for this individual self and has allowed himself “to be born, to suffer, to die, and this suffering God—he almost implores and beseeches this person to accept the help that is offered to him! Truly, if there is anything to lose one’s mind over, this is it!” (SUD 85). There is therefore a phenomenological difference between the self before a human criterion, the self before the God of a general theism, and the self before the crucified Christ. It is this last category that will occupy us with our anthropologia crucis: How is the self recognized and justified before this suffering God, who became human and died on a cross? What sort of selfhood is constituted before the criterion of the God on the cross? As we have seen, the need for recognition is a need for justification—for one’s actions or a certain practice or behavior, but most fundamentally for one’s existence . The question of justification penetrates to the heart of my being. Does my existence matter, or is it a matter of indifference? Does my existence have meaning? Moreover, is it a good thing that I exist? By what right do I exist here and now, and...

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