La conception chrétienne de l’homme

Résumé 0

According to the author, “The Christian conception of humanity” is a profoundly optimistic one. Certainly it recognises the presence of evil in the world and its negative effects on the human condition. However, through hope, Christian faith is certain that evil will be vanquished once and for all. Christian optimism is founded neither on a scientific vision nor on a philosophical conception, but rather upon a religious experience centred on the encounter with the person of Jesus Christ, son of God and saviour. The author stresses the historicity of the process of salvation, which is expressed in the threefold dimension of time: the age of the Jewish faith, the age of Jesus Christ and the age of the fulfilment of the eschatological expectation in which we presently find ourselves.However, this history of salvation does not take the place of the history of the world, whether that of the cosmos or that of humanity, both of which retain their own specificity. Our salvation history is, instead, an event-based reality that happens to the autonomous human reality in the manner of an encounter, since the human being is essentially a relational being. It is the theme of encounter that constitutes the guiding theme of this article. Thus, Creation “is not a production, but a relationship” in which God comes to meet humanity and enters into a covenant with God’s people. And the “people of God”, in the Christian tradition, becomes universal : each person is called upon to fulfil his or her destiny, which is not really destiny at all but a vocation, a call to which one responds freely. The people of God is on a journey towards the fullness of that encounter, that is, towards the fulfilment of the Kingdom and the complete restoration of the Body of Christ in an eschatological perspective.Finally, the author emphatically notes that “at the heart of Christian faith is the affirmation that God is love…. It is the driving force of love that gives faith its most authentic meaning.”