The theomorphic anthropology of Aidan Nichols: The witness of a historical theologian.

摘要

The faith that Christianity developed in Western Europe is in jeopardy as the West witnesses the rise of all kinds of anthropological and philosophical ideologies about the human person. This philosophical and anthropological crisis, because of its negative effects on the Christian dynamism of salvation and doctrine, threatens the relevance of the Christian assumptions about the supernatural end of the human person and the importance of transcendent and religious values. In response to this crisis, theologians and philosophers of the East and West have worked out treatises and presented arguments that have never been singled out as systematically as it is in Aidan Nichols's anthropology. On account of this achievement, we find it beneficial to investigate the intellectual achievements of the Dominican theologian, one of the most prolific theological writers in the English language. It is his conviction that, to overcome this modern anthropological crisis, modernity and postmodernity are in need of a Christian humanism that draws its inspiration from the biblical and intellectual heritage of both the Western and Eastern churches. So, he proposes a theomorphic anthropology; a version of anthropology that conveys the idea that God can appear in the form of a human and can be made known through His natural creation by both conceptual and practical reasoning. His anthropology also warns against a version of Christianity too influenced by subjective epistemologies of self-esteem. In contrast, he advocates an anthropology that is based on an effective witness of the forms, within which Jesus Christ is the perfect form. Though the main purpose of this dissertation is to present the contributions of the historical theologian Aidan Nichols to Christian anthropology, it seeks to outline the long history of God's search for man and the difficulty man experiences in keeping himself aware of the divine image in which he was created. Finally, it seeks to construct a modern Christian humanism that exhibits a way for men and women of faith today to meet the challenges of secular humanism and of ideologies such as liberalism, existentialism and relativism.