OTHERNESS AND SELF: AN ESSAY ON THE CHRISTIAN UNDERSTANDING OF SELF AND OTHER

Florin Toader TOMOIOAGĂ

lecturer, Faculty of Orthodox Theology, University of Oradea, Universitatii Str., Nr. 1, Jud. Bihor, Romania, tomoioagaf@yahoo.com

Abstract

Christianity contains a set of values which could help us to appreciate the other person when maybe our European education and culture of tolerance fail to do this. In this study I would like to underline a few basic concepts the Christian perception of the other is constructed on. Firstly, God is the wholly Other (Das Ganz Andere) in relation with His creature. On the other side, we became for Him at the moment of creation the whole Other. Secondly, Jesus Christ is the strangest person who ever existed on our earth, as the incarnate Logos of the Father who unites in Himself the most irreconcilable things. His earthly life was one of rejection and existential loneliness, but through His death He inaugurated the greatest revolution of all times: the acceptance of the other and, more than this, the treatment of the neighbour with the same love as one has for himself/herself. As a practical conclusion, we have to be aware that Otherness, as a quality of different beings, was not intended to put a distance between God and us or among us, but it is a “space” which affords us an infinite advance in the meeting of the other. The Christian theological perspective on otherness invites each one of us to share our love in universal brotherhood.

Keywords

Otherness, stranger, the other, Christ, neighbour, image, identity, suffering

(Language: english)

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