Fujimoto, Mitsuru. Translated by Cynthia Dufty. "The Black Curtain of Fundamentalism -- An Idea from Theological Anthropology" (排他主義という黒幕 -- 神学的人間論からの考察). Japan Evangelical Association Theological Commission Pamphlet 6 (May 2006): 37-48.
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I. THE PRINCIPLE OF EXCLUSION
I.A. Establishment of Identity
Cornelius Plantinga, a theologian of the Reformed Church in America, in looking at God's works of creation recorded in Genesis 1, has found a very interesting pattern of “separating” and “binding together”. Everything in the cosmos is without shape when, out of this formless void, God begins to make the world by separating. That is, through separating light and darkness, day and night, water and land, he does his creative work. But also at the same time God binds things together. That is, he binds humans to the rest of creation as its caretakers, and through breathing into humans the “breath of life” he binds them to himself.6
At the time of creation, out of a formless void and from a world of chaos through creative separation, God brought forth a variety of entities. This is not only a matter of separating; also through being bound together with things that are different, these entities have their own existence established. In other words, whatever exists individually in this world, through being differentiated from other things, and also at the same time through being bound with other things, is created as an individual having its own distinctiveness. What is brought forth in this way, separated from the other and becoming an individual with their own distinctiveness, is a human being with an individual personality. To exist as a person with an individual identity, it is necessary that that person is clearly differentiated from other people (as well as things in their environment), but that is not enough; they also must exist in relationship with others. What this means is in order to establish individuality, a person must go through a process of excluding some relationships, and being distinguished from some things while at the same time accepting some relationships and becoming bound to some things.7
I.B. The Principle of Exclusion
When humans committed sin, it is not the case that the created world returned to the previous formless condition. Rather, through committing sin, the process of establishing distinctiveness through “separating and binding together” became extremely distorted. In this way, the exclusion principle was born. Humans, through two methods come to exclude the other. First, distorting “separating,” we declare our sovereign independence, making ourselves central. With ourselves the center of everything, it's as if the world revolves around us as the center and we thrust away the other. At the same time, distorting the “binding together” with the other, we take the other into ourselves, making them subordinate. Originally we were meant to live in reciprocal relationship with others but people have come to feel satisfaction in making the other dependent and putting them under their own rule.
For humans who have sinned and are separated from God, “separation” has come to mean not being distinct from others but denying others and binding together has come to mean not relating with the other but dominating the other. Let's think about the mechanism of this formation of individual distinctiveness in a little more detail.
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6 Cornelius Plantinga, Breviary of Sin: Not the Way It's Supposed to Be (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995) 29. Plantinga is currently the president of Calvin Theological Seminary.
7 For references on how self-identity is defined through relation with the other, see first of all, late 19th century German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach's work, The Essence of Christianity, then Jewish philosopher Martin Buber's I and Thou and French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas' Totality and Infinity. These works are taken into consideration in analysis of the problem in the theological world as well and have been translated into Japanese. For a more accessible analysis see, Ian A. McFarland, Difference and Identity: A Theological Anthropology (Cleveland, Ohio: The Pilgrim Press, 2002).
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