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Wiki MarkupConcerning the point I've made about the different understandings of what a human being is in the case of "the Enlightenment," on the one hand, and of "the Christian religion," on the other (cf. n.d.; 3 October 2001), I now note: _\[Radical Monotheism and Western Culture: 46\]);_ * _that lying behind my distinction and providing a much ampler context in the history of ideas for understanding it are the different attempts, especially by Reinhold Niebuhr and Rudolf Bultmann, to distinguish systematically between Christian self-understanding, on the one hand, and that of the humanist-idealist tradition, on the other; and_

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Wiki Markup
1. that H. Richard Niebuhr makes much the same distinction that I make  between "a rational mind" and "an existing self." (This he does in the  context of arguing that "truth and untruth are present also as relations  between selves," and thus distinguishing between "impersonal and  personal truth," or "the truth that is the opposite of error or  ignorance and the truth that is antithesis to lie or deception." "\[T\]he  first sort of truth which is a relation of thought to things is  inseparable from the second which is a relation of a self to selves. We  often abstract the one from the other, but in any situation in which  objective truth is considered interpersonal truth is also involved. No  scientific inquiry or treatise, no logical analysis, as well as no poem  or political address, but what brings before us a self who in addition  to being a thought-ful being dealing with objects is a faith-ful being  to be trusted or distrusted as truthful or untruthful toward other  selves. Liable to error as a subject dealing with objects, he is also  liable to deception as self in dealing with selves; able to know the  truth about things\[,\] he is at the same time able to keep truth with  companions or deceive them" _\[Radical Monotheism and Western Culture: 46\]);_

2. that lying behind my distinction and providing a much ampler context in the history of ideas for understanding it are the different attempts, especially by Reinhold Niebuhr and Rudolf Bultmann, to distinguish systematically between Christian self-understanding, on the one hand, and that of the humanist-idealist tradition, on the other; and

3. that hardly less important for understanding the distinction is Whitehead's profound statement about "the defect of the Greek analysis of generation" (Adventures of Ideas: 242).

22 March 2004