"I've Loved You Since the Beginning of Time": The Problem of the Person in Boehme,
Schelling, Dostoevsky, Errol Flynn, and Jan Olof Bengtsson

JAMES MCLACHLAN, Western Carolina University

Most of us who are interested in personalism have at one time or another either read about or been told of its demise in the late '60s or that like a beloved old relative it may have lingered into the '70s but was really dead and forgotten except by loving family by the '80s. What had been a major force in American philosophy and American liberal theology was eclipsed by analytic philosophy as too metaphysical and theological and various trends of neo-orthodoxy and process theology as either too metaphysical or too anthropocentric. But in philosophy and theology as in George Romero movies, the dead don't stay dead very long, and if you sit through enough sequels they become even more interesting than the living. In recent years there has been a small renaissance of interest among philosophers and theologians in the Anglo-American philosophical world in personalism and its history. The Biennial Conference on Persons, The Pluralist, and several recent publications are evidence of this. Rufus Burrow's fine Personalism: A Critical Introduction, and the prominent place given to personalism in Gary Dorrian's history of American Liberal theology, and Randy Auxier's upcoming book examining Royce's personalism are examples of the resurgence of interest in personalism. One could say that the history of European personalism has been slightly different, alive and well in Catholic circles but also living on in the works of individual personalistic thinkers. It has never gone away. Maverick personalists such as John MacMurray, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzwieg, Nicholas Berdyaev, Gabriel Marcel, and Emmanuel Levinas always seem to appear as if from nowhere on the continent.