Bonhoeffer: New Humanity

“Only in Christ do human beings know themselves as God’s creatures; in Adam they were creator and creature all at once.  In order to know itself as a creature of God, the old human being has to have died and the new one arisen, whose essence it is to live in disregard of self and wholly in contemplation of Christ.  As those living in Christ, the new human beings know themselves in identity with the old human beings that have passed through death—as God’s creatures” (151).

-Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Act and Being: Transcendental Philosophy and Ontology In Systematic Theology, ed. Wayne W. Floyd, trans. Martin Rumscheidt (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 151.