Agape and Personhood. David L. Goicoechea

child sacrifice at least for his chosen family of Abraham.

      However, what Paul witnessed is that God sacrificed his

      only Son in an absurdity that was without visible miracles.

      The mystery of love was such that Paul actually witnessed

      in Stephen no visibly resurrected Christ, but instead

      a look of love on Stephen’s face that made more sense to him

      than any logical meaning and it could fulfill The Davidic Promise.

      Besides the look of love there was a voice so loving that it

      called Paul to go forth and be a blessing to all the peoples.

      In Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, chapter five, he

      put it all very simply: “For anyone who is in Christ, there is

      a new creation; the old creation has gone, and now the new

      one is here. It is all God’s work. It was God who

      reconciled us to himself through Christ, and gave us the work

      of handing on this reconciliation.” It was now Paul’s work

      by suffering in love with Stephen and Jesus to reconcile all.

      St. Paul’s four noble truths

      I All sentient beings suffer including God in the God-man.

      II So the problem of evil becomes the mystery of suffering

      which should be embraced.

      III For loving suffering not only builds character

      but also in a reconciliation process saves others

      with self denying sacrifice that loves them as more important

      IV as St. Paul found along the nine-fold path

      of his journey of reconciling love

      (1) which began when he was touched by the loving face

      of Stephen revealing the loving face of Jesus’ Mystical Body

      (2) and along which he progressed for his beloved Thessalonians

      by teaching them how agape is increasing love for the whole

      human race

      (3) and for his beloved Corinthians by teaching them that

      agape is the love feast and the Lord’s Supper

      (4) and again for his Corinthians by showing them how

      agape is the suffering which consoles others

      (5) and for his beloved Galatians by showing them how

      agape is the freedom to serve one another

      (6) and for the Romans by teaching them how

       agape is the love of God made visible in Jesus Christ

      (7) and for Philemon by teaching him how

      agape loves the slave as a brother

      (8) and for the Philippians whom he taught how

      agape is the love that prepares us for greater glory

      (9) and all the while pondering more deeply with the Romans

      that what proves that God loves us is that Christ

      died for us while we were still sinners. Having died

      to make us righteous, is it likely that he would now

      fail to save us from God’s anger? Now that we have

      been reconciled, surely we may count on being saved.

      The history of personhood

      Shamanism can be defined as a group of techniques

      by which the practitioners enter the ‘spirit world’,

      purportedly attaining information that is used to help

      and to heal members of their social group.

      The shamans’ way of knowing depended on deliberately

      altering their conscious state and/or heightening

      their perception to contact spiritual entities

      in ‘upper worlds’, ‘lower worlds’, and ‘middle earth’.

      For the shaman the totality of inner and outer reality

      was fundamentally an immense signal system,

      and shamanic states of consciousness were the first steps

      towards deciphering this signal system.

      Homo Sapiens Sapiens was probably unique

      among early humans in the ability to symbolize,

      mythologize, and, eventually, to shamanize.

      Although the term ‘shaman’ is of uncertain derivation,

      it is often traced to the language of the Tungus

      reindeer herders of Siberia where the word ‘shaman’

      translates into “one who is excited, moved or raised”.

      An alternative translation for the Tungus word is

      “inner heat,” and an alternative etymology

      is the Sanskrit word ‘saman’ or ‘song.’

      Stanley Krippner1

      For the first fifteen hundred years of Christian history the paradigm

      of persons in relation was worked out in progressive stages.

      But 500 years ago when modernity began with Luther, Calvin

      and Henry VIII and then with Descartes, Hobbes and up to Hegel

      the new paradigm of rugged individualism went through its stages.

      Now with the postmodernists there is a return to persons

      in relation with a communal emphasis as with the shamans.

      The history of personhood in the West might be thought of

      in its simplest form in the following three stages of three:

      I Praeparatio Evangelica

      1) with hunter-gatherer and agricultural shamans

      2) with Greek vegetative, animal and rational souls

      3) with Mosaic and Davidic tribal spirit

      II Guiding definitions

      1) with three persons in one God

      2) with two natures in one person

      3) with an individual substance of a rational nature

      III Three traditions of agape and personhood

      1) with the tradition from Augustine to Aquinas

      2) with the tradition from Francis to Luther

      3) with the tradition from Descartes to Kierkegaard

      Agape is the gift and the task of a love for all persons

      who as the brothers and sisters of Jesus, the Son of God,

      are believed to have unique singularity and equal worth.

      Agape is a universal love that is not based on equality

      at the level the lowest common denominator, for even though

      particularity does imply an exclusivity that destroys universalism,

      the singularity of the incarnation is able to have a logic that

      unlike particularity