At the Origin of the Christian Claim

by Giussani, Luigi; Hewitt, Viviane

• ISBN13: 9780773517141
• ISBN10: 0773517146
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1997-11-01
• Publisher: McGill Queens Univ

Summary

Giussani argues that if we accept the hypothesis that the mystery entered the realm of human existence and spoke in human terms, the relationship between the individual and God is no longer based on a moral, imaginative, or aesthetic human effort but instead on coming upon an event in one's life. Thus the religious method is overturned by Christ: in Christianity it is no longer the person who seeks to know the mystery but the mystery that makes himself known by entering history. At the Origin of the Christian Claim presents an intriguing argument supported with ample documentation from the gospels and other theological writings.

Author Biography

Monsignor Luigi Giussani is the author of more than twenty books. In 1995 he was awarded Italy's prestigious National Catholic Culture Prize.

Table of Contents

Foreword	vii
David Schindler
Preface	ix
Introduction	3	(1)
Life and the Religious Factor	3	(3)
The Dizzying Human Condition	6	(3)
Reason in Search of a Solution	9	(2)
The Religious Creativity of Man	11	(10)
Some Attitudes of Religious Constructiveness	13	(5)
A Spectrum of Hypotheses	18	(3)
The Need for Revelation	21	(8)
Some Examples	22	(5)
Facing an Unimaginable Claim	27	(2)
The Enigma as a Fact Within the Human Trajectory	29	(7)
A Radical Overturning of the Religious Method	30	(1)
No Longer Just an Hypothesis	31	(2)
A Problem That Must Be Solved	33	(1)
A Problem of Fact	34	(2)
How the Problem Arose in History	36	(13)
The Fact as Criterion	36	(4)
Concerning the Method	40	(3)
The Starting Point	43	(6)
A Profound Certainty with Time	49	(10)
The Itinerary of Conviction	49	(6)
A Question Arises, A Certainty Breaks Forth	55	(3)
A Case of Moral Certainty	58	(1)
The Pedagogy of Christ's Self-Revelation	59	(11)
The Essentials of the Pedagogy of Christ's Self-Revelation	62	(1)
For His Sake: The Core of Freedom	63	(3)
The Moment of Identification	66	(4)
The Explicit Declaration	70	(10)
The First Dawning of Explicitness	72	(1)
A Challenge	73	(3)
The Conclusive Declaration	76	(2)
The Discretion of Freedom	78	(2)
Christ's Conception of Life	80	(19)
A Premise: Education in the Morality Necessary for Understanding	80	(3)
Human Stature	83	(4)
Human Existence	87	(1)
An Awareness Expressed as Asking	88	(4)
The Law of Life	92	(5)
Conclusion	97	(2)
The Mystery of the Incarnation	99	(10)
An Extraordinary Historical Reality	100	(3)
The Terms of this New Reality	103	(1)
Instinctive Resistance	104	(5)
Notes	109	(8)
Subject Index	117	(10)
Author Index	127