Person, Grace, and God

Philip A. Rolnick, 2007, Person, Grace, and God, Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans

This is a book that need to be slowly chewed, meditate upon and digested. Philip Rolnick is professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota. This is not an easy book to read but a great book to understand. Rolnick takes on the tremendous task of investigating the concept of personhood.

Rolnick started his investigation from the etymological and historical development of the concept of personhood. Then he takes on the challenges to the concept of personhood from neo-darwinism, polemical deconstruction and from the critical stance.

He concludes "(u)ltimately, to be a human person means that the totality of who we are is open-textured to the presence and power of God."

This is a remarkable work of scholarship of a theologian and philosopher whose methodical use of exegesis and analysis gives us a good idea of the concept of what it means to be a person.