R. Sutherland, Faith and Ambiguity.
David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity.
Cross-Reference: Being/Becoming, Diversity, Experience–Religious, Language–Religious, Postmodernism, Process Theology, Truth.
ANALOGY (See LANGUAGE–RELIGIOUS.)
ANTHROPOLOGY
Formulated by Christian traditions and reflections, Christian anthropology is a set of beliefs about human being in the world. These beliefs provide a particular orienting vision of human being and are crafted from the mythologies, narratives, creeds, and doctrines distinctive of Christianity. At the same time, however, these beliefs variously engage the cultural matrices within which the beliefs are developed.
As beliefs embedded in cultural matrices, Christian anthropology is thus a region of theology where interchange between theological and extra-theological disciplines is especially intense. Christian beliefs about human being in the world require collaboration not only with philosophy but also increasingly with the natural sciences, social sciences (political science, economics, anthropology, sociology, psychology), history, and literature. Christian anthropology is also a rapidly changing dimension of theology, because of the ever-changing interaction between beliefs theologians forge from their distinctive traditions, on the one hand, and these beliefs as they are shaped by or in tension with other cultural and disciplinary viewpoints on humankind, on the other.
Three recurring themes usually pervade the belief structure of Christian anthropologies. These can be presented as constituting the orienting vision of human being in the world usually affirmed by Christian traditions, while also enabling analysis of how that vision is related to diverse cultural issues. These three themes are humankind’s origins in God, “the Fall,” and a new humanity and earth.
Origins in God. Christian anthropologies initially emphasize the origin of human being, the world, and the cosmos in the creating activity of God. Some Christian thinkers read the creation accounts of the Hebrew scriptures as descriptions of how humans came to be, thus rivaling or (as some say) supporting, evolutionary viewpoints. Most theologians, however, have eschewed viewing the Genesis creation accounts as descriptive of how the natural mechanisms of creation came to be, and instead they stress the connection of human creaturely presence with the originating activity of God. Whatever be the first dynamics of creation, what matters in Christian anthropology is the belief that those dynamics have their source in, and continuing relation to, God.
This view of the origins of the human is reflected in the crucial notion of humans as created “in the image of God.” Humans are understood to be image-bearers of God, thus distinguishing them from the rest of creation. In this there is an original relatedness to God. For some theologians, humans’ physical uprightness was the mark of the good human who bore God’s image. For most theologians, however, the Genesis accounts suggest that humans are image-bearers by reason of more complex traits.
Among members of the latter category, one group has taken the view that humans are distinguished by their rationality. Aristotle, providing a philosophical foundation, argued that “the animals other than [hu]man, live by appearances and memories . . . but the human race lives by art and reasonings.” Patristic and medieval theologians, including Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, stressed that the human soul as rational and intellectual was the seat of the image of God.
For a second group, humans display the image of God in their being given responsibility for the earth. As God creates and sustains, so humans exercise their creativity on earth and care for it, and in this they are image-bearers of God.
A third group has stressed the human conscience, a moral awareness of good and evil, as the mark of the image of God in humankind. As God is a God of justice, humans reflect that God in their consciences’ sense of the just and the good. Even a disturbance of conscience, the “uneasy conscience,” could be seen as testimony to humans’ Godlikeness.
For a fourth group, the image is sometimes founded in the human capacity for self-transcendence. Again, humans’ ability to reason can be emphasized here, not as the mark of God’s image but as a means to transcending self and apprehending God. The experience of self-transcendence becomes the seat of the image of God. As God is transcendent, somehow greater than, more than, or beyond creation, so humans have potential to transcend themselves in various ways. This view is evident in the works of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and some Protestant thinkers. For Paul Tillich, for example, humans possess the image of God in having a structure of freedom that “implies potential infinity.” Humans themselves are never infinite, but there is “a drive toward the infinite” that enables them to experience self-transcendence in their finitude. Similarly, Wolfhart Pannenberg proposes self-transcendence—for him, openness to the future and anticipation of God—as establishing a “broad consensus for a contemporary anthropology seeking the uniqueness of humankind.”
Pannenberg, however, as well as others, also utilizes a fifth understanding of the image of God. This fifth view stresses that humans are bearers of God’s image in their relationality, their being with and for others. The others to whom humans relate are other humans, with whom a “co-humanity” (Karl Barth), nature, and the world more generally (Pannenberg) is shared. As Jürgen Moltmann put it forcefully, we must not think of humans as made in the imago dei without also knowing humans as made in the imago mundi. Still other theologians (e.g., R. R. Ruether) working with this fifth perspective also stress that this relationality should be “authentic,” liberating, egalitarian—avoiding, for example, tendencies to construct itself in a dominative mode that favors male, Caucasian, or other aspects of privilege.
The Fall. A second pervasive theme of Christian anthropologies in the West is evident in the fact that theologians have traditionally interpreted humans as “fallen,” “deformed,” or variously failing to manifest and realize the good that they are created in God’s image to be.
Whether theologians presume a first “fall” in history (a first sin of some sort that historically inaugurates the more widespread departure of later peoples from their created goodness) or whether they take the scriptural and doctrinal notions of “the fall” more symbolically (as representing the recalcitrant and pervasive reality of human evil), the perduring theme in Christian anthropology is that humans exist in a condition that is against that which is good in and for them. This condition is described in different terms: as “condemnation,” “lostness,” “depravity,” “radical deformity,” “estrangement,” “alienation,” or “oppression.” A Christian thinker’s view of human “fallenness” is distinctively shaped by which of these terms are selected. In whatever way the condition of fallenness is characterized and in whatever terms, several related key controversies rage around this theme.
A first set of controversies concerns the extent of the distortion. How radical is human evil? To what degree is the goodness of humans as created in the imago Dei destroyed? Conceivably, a spectrum of responses to these questions could range from one side asserting that the fallenness is complete, such that there are no vestiges of goodness in humans, to another side taking the fallenness as a disruption that, however extensive and painful, still leaves human goodness as capable of redressing the evil. Traditionally, however, even the widest extremes among positions in classical Western theologies resist easy correspondence with the two ends of this conceivable spectrum.
Neither Augustine nor Calvin—both of whom stress the radical deformity of humans through the fall—denies the persistence in human creation of the good gifts of God. The radicality of the fall, for both thinkers, signifies not that human creaturely life has lost every vestige of goodness, but that humans are so hampered they cannot themselves redress what
