School of Theology and Seminary Graduate Papers/Theses

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Theology (Th.M)

Department

School of Theology and Seminary

First Advisor

Dale Launderville, OSB

Second Advisor

Michael Patella, OSB

Subject Categories

Biblical Studies | Christianity | Religion | Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion

Abstract

Ezekiel has often been criticized as a dehumanizing book. Still it is alternative humanisms that have done so much to dehumanize mankind with the totalitarianism of self-deifying individualism or the totalitarianism of collectively-imposed manmade metanarratives. Far from being a dehumanizing book, the objective of the son of man/Adam is certainly to purge his hearers of all anthropologies of autonomy and license, but this Adamic priestly prophet does this to eschatologically resurrect in them an anthropology of dependence and true freedom. Reasserting the creation theology and anthropology of Genesis, Ezekiel insists that authentic humanism, Edenic humanism (i.e., the original humanism), is grounded in the Creator God who eschatologically recreates mankind in the divine likeness and a faith-relationship with him which is maintained by the Lord GOD’s life-sustaining temple presence and exercised in a royal priesthood with sacrificial love toward fellow human beings. Freedom is freedom from rebellious sin and death as well as freedom from the imposition of all manmade anthropologies as necessary ways of salvation. At the same time, it is a sacrificial choice between manifold divine goods (i.e., possible good choices) that is made within the framework of God’s will as well as within a framework of complementary and different vocational duties to each other. Only at the recapitulation of all things will recreation and Edenic humanism become fully actualized.

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