A personal redemption. Unamuno, Life 4.6
Unamuno
believes that Christianity requires God to relate personally, without
any other mediator, to each individual. God did not die and return to
life to save us all, but to save each one of us, alone. And it was
not an error that made him do this, a mistake or sin originating with
our ancestors, but a love for each individual, which drove him to
create conditions under which that individual might live forever.
Y
en torno al dogma, de experiencia íntima pauliniana, de la
resurreción e inmortalidad del Cristo, garantía de la resurrección
e inmortalidad de cada creyente, se formó la cristología toda. El
Dios hombre, el Verbo encarnado, fué para que el hombre, a su modo,
se hiciese Dios, esto es, inmortal. Y el Dios cristiano, el Padre del
Cristo, un Dios necesariamente antropomórfico, es el que, como dice
el Catecismo de la doctrina cristiana que en la escuela nos hicieron
aprender de memoria, ha creado el mundo para el hombre, para cada
hombre. Y el fin de la redención fué, a pesar de las apariencias
por desviación ética del dogma propiamente religioso, salvarnos de
la muerte más bien que del pecado, o de éste en cuanto implica
muerte. Y Cristo murió, o más bien resucitó, por
mí,
por cada uno de nosotros. Y establecióse una cierta solidaridad
entre Dios y su criatura. Decía Mallebranche que el primer hombre
cayó para
que Cristo nos
redimiera, más bien que nos redimió
porque
aquél había
caído.
Round
this dogma—the
intimate experience
preached by
Paul, the resurrection and immortality of Christ, the guarantee of
resurrection and immortality that these provide to every believer—all
Christology took shape. God became man, the Word made flesh, so that
man, in turn, might become God—that
is, that we
might become immortal. And the Christian God, the Father of Christ,
necessarily an anthropomorphic god, is the one who created the world
for mankind—for
each individual person, as the catechism of Christian doctrine that
they made us learn in school says. Furthermore,
the true religious purpose
of redemption is to save us from death, rather than from sin,
in spite of every effort to pretend otherwise: sin is only defeated
insofar as it implies death. Finally, Christ died, or rather was
resurrected, for me—for
each one of us, individually. This established a certain solidarity
between God and his creation. Malebranche (†)
said that the first man fell so
that Christ might save
us, rejecting the doctrine that Christ redeemed us because
the first man fell.
---
(†)
Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715 CE) was a Catholic priest and
philosopher. He studied
theology and scholastic
philosophy at the
Sorbonne, which he left to join the Oratory of Jesus and Mary
Immaculate (also known as the French Oratory). There he spent the
remainder of his life, publishing
works that attempted to
reconcile the Christianity of St. Augustine with the rational
philosophy of Descartes,
since he rejected the scholastics.