Model of Personality
Critiquing inwardness – implications for therapy Having sketched a historical outline of a theological tradition, which emphasises inwardness when defining personhood, Gunton’s critique needs to be taken seriously as it has implications at both a personal and an ecological level. This helps keep in balance a view of personhood, for which this book is arguing – both substance and relationship are necessary constituents of personhood. Gunton states:
In particular, it encourages the belief that we are more minds than we are bodies, with all the consequences that has: for example, in creating a non-relational ontolog y, so that we are cut off from each other and the world by a tendency to see ourselves as imprisoned in matter.119 After reviewing several approaches to the issue of personhood McFarlane’s conclusion has a concrete and holistic tone. He states:
Whatever we say about the human person, it must dialogue with the present condition, individually and socially, politically and economically, not one abstracted to the historical past, teleological future or autonomous ego.120 McFarlane’s model focuses on Jesus, whose incarnation elevates bodiliness to primary importance, and thus helpfully guards against the historical temptation outlined above to relegate our bodily nature to secondary importance, as if it were a reluctant ‘add on’ or a secondary issue to relationship. Divine-human connection centred on Christ avoids an abstracted relationality argued from the immanent (God with Himself outside of relationship with the created order) Trinity, and instead portrays ‘the image’ from the human realm: ‘centred on the embodied obedience of Jesus Christ whose personhood is displayed within this set of relationships, this exercise of power, this political and economic agenda.’121 Christ becomes our integration point, the one who 83
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