The Created Person and the Mystery of God

Let us begin by outlining the hypothesis we wish to examine in these pages. What we propose is that man’s experience of the things of the world as created, and of himself as creature, is the great sign that opens him up in the fullness of his humanity to the Mystery of God. This openness is the proper realization of human nature, and constitutes man’s vital receptivity to the design and intention of God regarding his existence. In Christianity, we affirm that what has happened, in fact, is that God has fashioned an extraordinary destiny for man, and He enables man to accomplish this destiny by communicating to him a participation in Divine life through Jesus Christ.

This means, however, that God’s intervention in history brings about something more than a mere confirmation and clarification of man’s experience of himself. Rather, Divine historical revelation announces that man is called to a purpose that he never could have imagined or conceived within the scope of his own created nature even considered in its openness to God. Nevertheless, This super-natural destiny is in fact God’s design for man’s life (and it is a design that–even thought it transcends utterly any possibility contained within man’s religious openness–supereminently fulfills the whole scope of human desire and human hope). Man lives ultimately in order to fulfill God’s intention for his existence (whatever it might be) and man’s religiosity causes him to look to God with all the force of his intelligence and freedom. For these reasons we can say that revelation (even while its specific content transcends man’s nature and is therefore radically "un"-expected) also constitutes the answer to the wonder-filled, awesome, and intrinsically open question that constitutes the depths of human experience. In this essay we will examine the contours of this question, and the various ways that it emerges--clearly or obscurely--in the course of human life.