The Human Person, God, and Symbols & Signs

HOMEWORK FOR WEDNESDAY/THURSDAY JAN 18 & 19:
*Read and take notes over "Spiritual But Not Religious? Not So Fast!"
By James Martin, S.J.
*There will be an open-note quiz over the Martin article.
*Read, "Pride of a Nation." We might not get to this article in class, but we will discuss it in a following class.

Class Notes from January 13 & 17:
THE HUMAN PERSON: Human experience is the starting point for all theology. When we reflect upon God, we are also reflecting upon how we "know" God and what it means to be human. To ask questions about God is simultaneously to ask questions about ourselves. Remember, we can only know God in a human way. We can begin asking questions about God by asking questions about ourselves; e.g., "What's the purpose of my life?" "Why do I exist?" "Who am I?" "What is happiness?" "What are my hopes/dreams?" "What is love?" "Why/how do I love?"

Human beings are self-transcending creatures; i.e., we can "go beyond ourselves" with our questioning. We are not driven by only instincts. We can ask "big" philosophical questions or meaning questions. We are finite creatures that exists in a specific time, place, culture, and history, but we can also transcend our own time, space, and circumstances through our questioning. Our questioning is not limited by finite circumstances. We are oriented to something infinite. We can move from the specific (the concrete world) to the abstract.

Theologically speaking, this "infinite reality" towards which we are oriented we can call a "Holy Mystery" or "God." Even before an experience of revelation, scripture, or prayer, we are already oriented towards this Mystery. Our entire existence--whether we acknowledge it or not--is grounded in this "Holy Mystery," or permeated by its presence. The "Infinite," "Holy Mystery," or "God" is silently present as the "background" or "horizon" in all or our experiences; e.g., relationships, communities, prayer, etc. God is incomprehensible in an absolute sense: we cannot know or classify God as we might classify various species of plants or animals. We can have an intuition of God, but we can never grab ahold or possess God.

Human beings are both matter and spirit, or "spirited matter." As matter, we are finite, rooted in human history, and we physically exist and will one day die. We come in and out of being. As spirit, we are capable of transcending the finiteness or limits of our bodies by asking big philosophical questions, etc.

If the "Holy Mystery" or "God" was going to communicate God's self to us it would be in a human way--through experience and human history. Human history is the process of God's self-communication. The climax of salvation history comes to its absolute pinnacle in the person of Jesus Christ--truly human and truly divine.

SIGNS & SYMBOLS: Symbols and signs are everywhere we turn--we could neither construct meaning, nor communicate without them. A sign is something that points to another reality and means what it signifies; the meaning is mostly fixed; e.g., a "stop" sign. Symbols are multi-dimensional signs that point to another reality and manifest the reality to which they point. Symbols are open to interpretation and they can manifest many different things to different people.