74 Chapter 1 I do not intend to be complete in this section. There may be aspects that I will not mention, and there are other authors to quote on the same topics. Undoubtedly, more can be said on each of the topics I consider. The point is nothing more than to explore the theological side of the conceptual scheme. As the whole chapter includes criticism of modern Western culture, I opt for authors who represent an intercultural perspective. On the ground level of the person, this has led me to the Eastern-Orthodox metropolitan John Zizioulas (2021, 2023) and his radical personhood theology (3.1). Looking for an approach related to the paradox of citizenship, I engage with Gordon M. Zerbe (2012), professor emeritus at the Canadian Mennonite University, and his analysis of the overarching impact of heavenly citizenship within Pauline theology (3.2). Then, to deal with the lack of a joint framework or conception of the cosmic order, as Taylor (1989) employed the term, I focus on the contributions made by the missiologist and pedagogue Geoff Beech (2019, 2021, 2022) to the debate concerning Western dominance in the global debate on epistemology with his proposal for a relational epistemology (3.3). In so doing, I lightly touch upon each of the levels of fragmentation, adding the vertical dimension to the horizontal ones already included in the analysis and its conceptual framework. 1.3.1 Re-connecting the person: Zizioulas Modern Western thinking on and approaches to the person bear the hallmarks of individualism, sometimes even hyper-individualism or atomisation, and its immediate consequence of alienation. Protestantism, in its Lutheran, Calvinistic and Evangelic forms, is historically intertwined with this. In fact, the notion that not even medieval Catholicism was free of it represented a lifetime’s argument for Greek-Orthodox Bishop John Zizioulas, Metropolitan of Pergamon from 1986 until his death in 2023. Through appointments at New College in Edinburgh (1970), the University of Glasgow (1973) and King’s College London, he occupied an intermediate position between Eastern and Western theology, criticising the latter for its focus on the individual and the individuality of the person. In contrast, Zizioulas (2021, 2023) offered his radical personhood theology, which suggests a historical application of what it means to be a person that, in and of itself, needs to be clearly distinguished from the notion of individuality. Zizioulas (2021) criticised Western theological anthropology for its substantialist approach. Due to its connection with Greek (especially Aristotelian) philosophy, its definition of human nature and even of the person started to change. The idea of nature found in Western theology attached to ‘objectified substance’ (Zizioulas, 2021, p. 9), with its own qualities and
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