„The Addressee of Divine Sustenance, Rescue, Salvation and Elevation: Toward a Non-Reductive Understanding of Human Personhood“, in: M. Jeeves (Hg.), From Cells to Souls –and Beyond: Changing Portraits of Human Nature, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004, 223-232.
One of the most pressing problems in any interdisciplinary discourse about the human person is the awareness that reductionistic forms of thought are extremely hard to avoid. A theological contribution to this discourse shares this difficulty. It is confronted by the “mentalist” reduction and the “physicalist” reduction which divide the humanities and the sciences. Beyond this, the disciplines on both sides offer further reductions in dealing with the human being. The self-consciousness or the soul in the humanities, the brain or the genes in the sciences – these are but a few of the many candidates proposed and promoted by different disciplines in order to offer a reliable or even final point of reference, a reliable reality and a framework to host and to structure the whole anthropological discourse. How can anthropological studies which emerge from different academic areas of attaining knowledge open themselves in such a way that key symbols, concepts and rationalities used in one field can be successfully and illuminatingly applied in other areas?