기독교사회윤리로서 책임윤리에 대한 성찰

Abstract

What is responsibility in an ethical sense? What does it mean that Christian should be responsible? This article aims at evaluating ethic of responsibility as Christian social ethics in the Korean context. For this task, I explore the concept of responsibility by bridging Emmanuel Levinas’s ethic of the Other. According to Levinas, responsibility is the very nature of subjectivity. He asserts that “I” am responsible for the other because “my” being as an individualized subject is perfectly bonded with my relation to the other. Levinas describes this relationship as obsession, since it totally controls the I. This is what is meant by Levinas’s famous phrase, “I am a hostage” of the other. The subject is persecuted because it cannot avoid the Other’s sovereignty over the I. It is an abandonment of subjectivity in a radical way. Ethic of the other and responsibility can be equally translated into the doctrine of Kenosis. Jesus’ self-gift to the other and for the other is his ethical representation of Levinas’s famous slogan, “Here am I.” This total responsibility for the other as employed in the cross, makes the cross the central component of Jesus’ story. Jesus is the representative being for the other until death, a death that takes the sin and the punishment of the other and expiates it. The cross is then a revelation of the glory of the Infinite in Jesus. In this manner, Levinas has given us another language to express the expiatory death of Jesus in a manner which can also honor other substitutional selves who were obsessed for and by the other. As Jesus has shown to us what responsibility is for the other, Levinas awakens us that we have an infinite responsibility for the other. Notwithstanding, it is not an easy task to do this ethic. However, when we humbly confess that we are so weak to execute ethic of the other, grace of God pours his strength. This is why R. Niebhur defines Christian ethic as “impossible possibility.”