Terminology Tuesday: Personalism

Personalism is a worldview, which posits the person as ultimate in *ontology (being) and axiology (value). Mostly personalism has been *theistic, but occasionally atheistic (e.g. J. M. E. McTaggart). Christian personalism argues that God as personal is ultimate in ontology and axiology, and that human persons, created as they are in the divine image, are penultimate in ontology and axiology.

Defining ‘person’ is philosophically very difficult and controversial. Minimally, one can say that a sufficient condition for personhood is the capacity to say ‘I’ as a self-conscious speech agent. In the canonical presentation, Father, Son and Holy Spirit are such speech agents (the Father in Matt. 3:17, the Son in John 17:1 and the Holy Spirit in Acts 13:2). Persons are ‘thous’, not ‘its’. On this view, Christian personalism maintains that the one *God is personal in three self-consciously distinct but inseparable ways as the eternal *Trinity: one God in three Persons.

Christian personalism, when consciously informed by a trinitarian understanding of God, prizes relationships, since ultimate reality consists of Personsin-relation: the eternal dance of love, which is Trinity. Christian personalism is not individualistic. Because of the high value placed on persons, Christian personalism ought to express itself in a concern and advocacy for the well-being of persons and their relations: a culture of life rather than a culture of death. Historically speaking, distinct forms of personalism have arisen in more than one place (e.g. Europe, Britain and the US). Personalism of whatever precise stamp resists any reductionist understanding of humankind, whether secular (e.g. humans are merely the highest kind of primate) or religious (e.g. *pantheism). Indeed, there is an argument that without the emergence of Christianity and its ideas of the triune God and Christ as the God-man, together with the shared view with Judaism of human beings as images of God, that personalism could not have arisen. The Roman Catholic tradition produced major modern personalists in John Paul II (Poland) and Emmanuel Mounier (France). In Britain, philosopher John Macmurray was an important personalist, and Borden Parker Bowne, Edgar Sheffield Brightman and Martin Luther King Jr were similarly important in the US.

Bibliography

R. Burrows, Jr, Personalism: A Critical Introduction (St Louis, 1999); J. Macmurray, The Form of the Personal, 2 vols. (London, 1995); P. A. Sayre, ‘Personalism’, in P. L. Quinn and C. Taliaferro (eds.), A Companion to Philosophy of Religion (Maldin and Oxford, 2000).


Cole, G. A. (2016). Personalism. In M. Davie, T. Grass, S. R. Holmes, J. McDowell, & T. A. Noble (Eds.), New Dictionary of Theology: Historical and Systematic (Second Edition, p. 667). London; Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press; InterVarsity Press.

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Mark A. Lester has been a dedicated movie reviewer since the age of 13, from the classics of the golden age to the blockbusters of the 21st century. He currently lives in the western suburbs of Chicago.

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