David Kelsey's Anthropological Proposals Concerning The Whats Of Human Creatureliness

Chapter 7 and 8 continue David Kelsey’s constructive anthropological proposals concerning the “what” of human creatureliness. Towards the end of chapter 8, Kelsey offers an abbreviated thesis of his eccentric anthropology (which also gestures to the meaning of the title):

The ground of meaning in human life is eccentric to that life. (327)

In elaboration of that thesis, chapter 7 (281-308) re-entangles Job’s twin-telling his birth story in order to guide an engagement with Genesis that centers on the concept of person, while chapter 8 (309-332) develops an account of human flourishing as the faithful response of creatures to God as creator.

Persons and Bodies

Kelsey proposes a distinctive theological concept of what a person is for Christian

Morals and ethics are not measured by the distance from paradise lost or absent. Rather than looking back at Eden, human creatures look out for the well-being of the quotidian. That is to say, for Kelsey, human creatures flourish insofar as they are accountable to God—who like a Lender has given human creatures their bodies on loan—by appropriately and faithfully living “a set of practices” in their proximate contexts and for their context’s well-being (310). Flourishing has to do with being and acting on the “powers and capacities” of a given living body and the “networks of relationships” it is set in over time

On page 321 Kelsey brings up the threat of violence that occurs when our practices are out of step with a vision of fellow creatures and ourselves precisely as creatures. Along these lines, I wonder about the possibility of a critique of violence. Violence takes on cool quotidian and everyday shapes in addition to apocalyptic and spectacular forms. Is Kelsey able to account for everyday violence, violence that emerges and is sustained within the quotidian? Is there a sense that violence is in harmony with, or simply a side-effect of, the fragility and complexity of creation? Is theological immunity granted to the quotidian insofar as it must, from the outset, be deemed good as the proximate context created by