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The Problem of Human Self-Transcendence in the Dialectical Theology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 August 2011

Harold B. Kuhn
Affiliation:
Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore, Kentucky

Extract

Man poses for himself his most tantalizing problems. He seeks to discover what he is, to foresee whither he goes, and to find what limits are imposed on his progress. He ponders his connections with the realm of matter, and seeks to locate himself within a larger sphere of an all-inclusive Reality. As a citizen of the world of space and time, man feels an essential homelessness, and reaches out toward a possible realm in which those aspirations which are unfulfilled in his present experience may find fulfilment. He persists in looking beyond himself as an individual, and beyond the social group of which he is a part. In so doing he is confronted with a tension between the world of possibility which he intuits and his own present situation.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1947

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References

1 Brunner, H. Emil, Man in Revolt: A Christian Anthropology (London: Lutterworth Press, 1939), p. 20.Google Scholar

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8 Ibid., p. 74.

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26 See in his articles in Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, 1909, pp. 405ff; and 475ff.

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28 Barth, Epistle to the Romans, pp. 346ff; see also p. 120.

29 Barth, Kirkliche Dogmatik, p. 287.

30 Niebuhr, op. cit., p. 55.

31 Ibid., p. 92.