I concurr with the suspicions which Pete
Steen voiced in his thesis on Dooyeweerd about the human heart as a
supra-temporal entity. This has both unfortunate Platonistic and
Kantian overtones.
To me, the key contribution of Dooyeweerd, is his notion of enkapsis,
which most broadly understood encompasses the inter-modal coherence
of all things in Christ through the plastic continuity of our naive
experience. The “heart” is thus the sum total of who we are under
God, in relation to the Father who calls us, the Son who makes
relationships possible, and the Spirit who opens up all things. The
notion of a supra-temporal human entity is thus rendered redundant.
To me the most important thing is to develop a Reformational approach
along Trinitarian lines, and I am fascinated that Glenn Friesen is
finding Trinitarian structures implicit in Dooyeweerd’s thinking. I
would agree that they are there, but for reasons of the time (perhaps
because of the inter-necine warfare which seems then to have existed
between Dooyeweerd and the theologians), this was obscured and
distorted. As a recourse, it may be (I stand to be corrected by
others who know much better than I do), that Dooyeweerd had then to
depend too heavily on his Neo-Kantian philosophical background rather
than on fully developed Trinitarian basis.
jgaive
Apr 02 2003
01:25 am
I concurr with the suspicions which Pete
Steen voiced in his thesis on Dooyeweerd about the human heart as a
supra-temporal entity. This has both unfortunate Platonistic and
Kantian overtones.
To me, the key contribution of Dooyeweerd, is his notion of enkapsis,
which most broadly understood encompasses the inter-modal coherence
of all things in Christ through the plastic continuity of our naive
experience. The “heart” is thus the sum total of who we are under
God, in relation to the Father who calls us, the Son who makes
relationships possible, and the Spirit who opens up all things. The
notion of a supra-temporal human entity is thus rendered redundant.
To me the most important thing is to develop a Reformational approach
along Trinitarian lines, and I am fascinated that Glenn Friesen is
finding Trinitarian structures implicit in Dooyeweerd’s thinking. I
would agree that they are there, but for reasons of the time (perhaps
because of the inter-necine warfare which seems then to have existed
between Dooyeweerd and the theologians), this was obscured and
distorted. As a recourse, it may be (I stand to be corrected by
others who know much better than I do), that Dooyeweerd had then to
depend too heavily on his Neo-Kantian philosophical background rather
than on fully developed Trinitarian basis.