Abstract

The author presents a Christian theological approach to the issue of autonomy and self determination. God has the greatest autonomy and it is He who determines himself and all creatures. Furthermore, God is Trinity, a unity of three persons, totally lacking in any self-centeredness or individualism. God creates man in His image, so also in man, as a "person", we can recognize the characteristics of autonomy and self-determination, in the appropriate degree. Being in relationship with God is absolutely necessary to man, but the latter, as a person, is able to assume and freely welcome this relationship and to collaborate with God in bringing it to perfection. This perfect relationship is a gift from God, thanks to God’s emerging from Himself to meet man. Practical atheism in the western world understands the freedom of man as full autonomy from God. Christianity instead reveals the God who gives life and freedom, and therefore, autonomy, which is the characteristic of living beings. Human freedom is realized in communion with God, who gives life out of love, and only in this way it is realized in communion with others. In the divine life itself we humans participate directly in grace and still more in the gift of glory. Death, which seems a limit to human freedom, has been transformed by Jesus Christ into the time of the definitive encounter with God, and then in the transition to life in its fullness in the sight of God