Autor: Marsden, Georg M.

Buch: The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship

Titel: The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship

Stichwort: Literatur, Kritik, Verabsolutierung des Selbst, Kritiker als Erlöser

Kurzinhalt: Literatur im Horizont der Verabsolutierung des Selbst, Reinhold Niebuhr: Tugenden -> Laster (to turn our virtues into vices);

Textausschnitt: Roger Lundin in The Culture of Interpretation: Christian Faith and the Postmodern World provides some excellent examples of how contemporary debates in literary theory look different when Christian theological perspectives are allowed into the picture. In Lundin's view most of the discussion of art and literature during the past two centuries has been controlled by the absolutization of the human self. ... So throughout the twentieth century the manifestation of one's own creative vision has been used to justify almost any artistic expression. With the postmodern denial that we can have any access to a transcendent or to any metanarrative except its own (that humans are the only creators) some of the modern aura of the artist as redeemer was transferred to the critic as redeemer. The critic with the power to historicize and relativize every text (and all of life could be seen as a 'text') became a person freed from convention because he recognized that everything was convention.
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In the modern West, however, the elite champions of high culture have urged throwing off any authority external to human beings themselves.
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As we have already seen, with God out of the picture, humans loom as the ultimate creators of reality. The self, or perhaps the community or the nation, is inflated and absolutized. With consideration of the divine ruled out as unacademic or unprofessional, it has been widely assumed that humans can solve their own problems - as in the cult of psychotherapy, the cult of technological progress, ... In Reinhold Niebuhr's terms, this built-in flaw has a deeply ironic quality, in that we tend to turn our virtues into vices. We use our technological gifts to build horrible weapons of destruction.
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These human vices are impossible for us to eradicate because they are built on our best qualities: our abilities to create, to choose, to build, to bring order and justice. Even our ability to love turns into inordinate love for our own family, community, interest group, or nation. At the heart of all our vices is the original sin, described in Genesis - the belief that we can be 'as the gods,' the unlimited creators and rulers of our own destiny.