Participatory personhood: An evangelical essay on Christian anthropology

This project attempts to advance the thinking of evangelical anthropology via the concept of participatory personhood. Human personhood is constituted as participation in God as the basic necessary and sufficient condition of it and that this will point to two most basic forms of participation in God, the existential and the ethical. However, we can only arrive at this conclusion when we utilize the following evangelical approach. This approach must be also thought in two simultaneous directions; as both a comprehensive concept but also as articulated by three specific realms or locutions. These three locutions are nature, the Word of God, and the person of Jesus Christ, and they form the basis of participatory personhood as unpacked specifically in an evangelical manner. This engages in the contemporary dialogue of theological anthropology by the Christian community, east and west, primarily in answer to anthropological views of the Enlightenment and Postmodernity. This is an hermeneutical methodology, a grammar of participation which matches the selected anthropological subject of participatory personhood. Eastern theologian John Zizioulas provides the comprehensive aspect of being as communion , or divine-human communion as both the purpose and telos of all being Zizioulas' model is a Eucharistic one, a theology of communion through which he presents his ontological revolution of personhood. The specific areas are three evangelical aspects of theology as communication. They are presented as models of participation respectively from three western theologians: through Wojtyla's nuptial model which is congruent with the natural locution; Horton's covenantal model as congruent with the Word of God; and Davies' kenotic model as congruent with the person of Christ. Thus participatory personhood finds its origin as a human analogy of the communal personhood of the trinity. After the fall into original sin, humanity is called to reclaim its mediatorial status as the image of God on earth, and to serve Christ in the reestablishment of his Lordship over creation. And finally, we are called to the depths of divine-human communion as the basis of the eschatological rest as stated in II Peter 1:4, as "partakers in the divine nature."...