Alienation
Some thoughts & roots
Alienation is the experience of being a stranger, ‘away from home,’ estranged from others and from oneself. In the New Testament, the verb apallotrioó (to estrange or alienate) is found only in Eph. 2:12, 4:18 and Col. 1:21, and always in the passive (see Stott, p.90). Paul refers to mankind’s alienation from God and from his fellow man. In Christian thought, these fundamental alienations are believed to be overcome in the cross of Christ.
Cain the Fugitive
Alienation is also a theme of the Scriptures as a whole: Adam’s eviction from Eden, Cain’s wandering as a fugitive, Israel’s servitude in Egypt and later exile in Babylon. All of these symbolize an alienation that seems to be the lot of mankind, and a feature of literature from the earliest times. In Luke 15, Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son gives “a microcosmic anatomy of estrangement” (Jones, p. 176).
The word alienation appears in English from 1388 onward and for centuries meant either transfer of ownership or insanity (OED). Then, from the 1940s, the word was used increasingly to describe social and cultural estrangement. Influences would include the vast disorientation caused by World War II, and the writings of Weber, Kierkegaard, and Tillich. A major source was the newly discovered Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, written by Karl Marx in 1844 but not published until 1932.
Hegel and Feuerbach had seen alienation as part of man’s developing self-consciousness, whereas Marx saw it as an urgent social and economic problem. For him, man was alienated in religion, under the state, but supremely in his labor. “For Marx and Kierkegaard, the world in which Hegel felt ‘at home’ had become alien” (Löwith, p.173). It would seem that we are inheritors of that world. Alienation, an important concept in social psychology and other fields, has its roots — Christians belive — in as basic theological reality: that mankind is alienated from God, his fellows, and himself. If we once felt at home (the Eden memory?), it now seems harder and harder to find such a home. The world has become alien.
Raymond M. Vince
© 1988, 2014
Bibliography
Encyclopedia Britannica (1974 ed.), vol. 1, pp.574-576.
G. V. Jones. The Art and Truth of the Parables (London, 1964).
K. Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought (London 1965).
B. Ollman, Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (Cambridge, 1976).
J. R. W. Stott, The Message of Ephesians: God’s New Society (Leicester, 1979).
R. M. Vince, Alienated Man: The Theme of Alienation in the Writings of Karl Marx and Søren Kierkegaard (unpublished MTh dissertation: King’s College, London, 1980).
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First Published:
Vince, Raymond M. “Alienation.” New Dictionary of Theology. Sinclair B. Ferguson, David F. Wright, and J. I. Packer (eds). Downers Grove, IL, Inter-Varsity Press, 1988. p.15.
