In a Babel-like age in which man increasingly seeks to decrease the gap between man and God, there is a need for evangelical theologians to defend and define a biblical understanding of man’s existence and limitations. In theology proper, many theologians have used the way of eminence and the way of negation as a way of describing and defining divine attributes. By reversing this process, we can define an anthropology in the shadow of theology proper. Human limitations can be defined by the antithesis of the negated attributes of God while human attributes can be defined as a limited participation in God’s communicable attributes. Developing an anthropology in light of theology proper can help us guard a proper creator-creature distinction and also gives us unique insights into the nature of human limitations.
In this paper, I will argue that the ways of eminence and negation provide a unique method to defining a human anthropology of participation. I will do this by (1) defining man’s ontological participation in God as consisting of esse and existence, (2) describing how the incommunicable attributes of God (infinite, independent, simple, immutable, atemporal) define human limitations, and (3) developing how God’s communicable attributes (life, intellect, love) by analogy provide positive definition of the human being. I will primarily use Thomas Aquinas and Andrew Davidson for my development of participation and Petrus Van Mastricht for my discussion of divine attributes.