Self-Generation; Dependence and Independence Cont.

Rereading Oswald Bayer's Living By Faith: Justification and Sanctification, I was caught by this quote from Ernst Bloch's Principle of Hope.

I thought it captured well many of the points I made previously in my post Dependence and Independence.

Bloch was a Marxist philosopher who had a lot of influence on Jurgen Moltmann's Liberation Theology, and a lot of other anthropocentric theology. Concluding his massive three volume work, Principle of Hope, Bloch writes:

"Man everywhere is still living in prehistory, indeed all and everything still stands before the creation of the world, of a right world. True genesis is not at the beginning but at the end, and it starts to begin only when society and existence become radical, i.e. grasp their roots. But the root of history is the working, creating human being who reshapes and overhauls the given facts. Once he has grasped himself and established what is his, without expropriation and alienation, in real democracy, there arises in the world something which shines into the childhood of all and in which no one has yet been: homeland."

-Principle of Hope, vol. 3 (trans. Neville Plaice et al. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 1375-76.


Bayer mockingly critiques: "We homeless ones are moving out of our state of misery, out of a foreign land, and coming back home, coming back to paradise. This will be the result of our work, of our perfected cultural achievement" (17).
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This quote from Bloch really exemplifies the character of man's claimed "independence." Lets walk through this quote step by step...
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"Man everywhere is still living in prehistory, indeed all and everything still stands before the creation of the world, of a right world. True genesis is not at the beginning but at the end, and it starts to begin only when society and existence become radical, i.e. grasp their roots."
- Can you say "gnostic"!? Notice the role of creator that man takes on when he claims independence from God, creation, history, society, and human nature.
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"But the root of history is the working, creating human being who reshapes and overhauls the given facts."
- Creating by reshaping and overhauling the given facts? Does this make any sense? This is what I had to say in my previous post: "They cannot claim that they achieved these [personal achievements] independent of any factors. Quite literally, to be independent means to be able to create ex nihilo, you need to be able to create something out of nothing, we would need to be God!" I made the point that the more one tries to exert supremacy over, in the attempt to be "independent of," the more he shows himself to be dependent on, what Bloch calls, "the given facts." You can rearrange, reshape, or overhaul the "given facts" all you want, but in the end they're still the "given facts." Or to adopt the recently controversial political phrase: "You can put lipstick on a pig, but it is still a pig." (I had to!)
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"Once he has grasped himself and established what is his, without expropriation and alienation, in real democracy, there arises in the world something which shines into the childhood of all and in which no one has yet been: homeland."
- While my previous post was focused on "personal independence," notice the very characteristic Marxist "communal independence" that Bloch proposes. The concept I want to focus on is the grasping, the establishing what is mine. In my previous post, I give an analogy of a power-playing King who tries to express his independence from, by exerting over. I state that the very attempt at independence is what makes him a slave: "The reason that he is a slave is because he took, he grasped (ala the fruit). And the harder he squeezes to continue to hold on to this dream of independence, the more the things that he is dependent on weigh in on him."
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I will leave you with my previous conclusion:
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"The answer to the contradiction is not to take (as in the fruit, or in the case of the king), but to receive, that is, entering God back into the equation, to recognize what God has given us, to thankfully receive this, and to joyfully go out and care for those things God have given us dominion over...We are dependent, it is true, but we are dependent on a God who promises to clothe, feed and sustain us, and finally bring us home."