if there remains the occasional good affect, good thought, or good action.
Similarly, theologians who see the extent of the distortion as less drastic rarely claim that the remaining goodness of humanity is in itself capable of redressing the fallenness. Friedrich Schleiermacher, for example, who wrote that human consciousness involves not just original sinfulness but also an “original righteousness,” still taught that some further transformation was necessary if that perduring “righteousness” was to redress the pain and suffering in human life.
A second set of controversies concerns the locus of the distortion. Where in human life is the distortion seen primarily at work? One approach identifies certain “faculties” of the human soul (affections, body sensations, mind, and will). A given theologian may privilege one of these as the primary locus of human fault, but usually when this is done, the other “faculties” play contributing or correlative roles. So Augustine, for example, may focus primarily on the will as problematic—its bondage and its refusal or inability to will the good. But the will is stimulated by its bondage; it steers the whole being wrongly because of the appetites of the body and related affections, and in consequence turns the mind wrongly away from contemplating the things of God, toward contemplating things of earth and body.
The controversy here reached new levels of intensity in late-twentieth-century discussions, especially when Christian feminist theologians challenged the dominant anthropology, as exemplified by Augustine, which would accuse the body and its appetites and affections for humanity’s evil will. Feminists do not simply reverse the Augustinian stance, thereby praising body and faulting mind; rather, they see the locus of the distortion in precisely the dichotomizing, fragmenting opposition of body and mind. Further, they point out that this dualism’s devaluation of the body also devalues woman and nature, both of which are perceived as dangerous bodily domains that are distorting and in need of control. The locus of the distortion is, then, according to these critiques, to be found in what Rosemary Radford Ruether has termed a dualist “distorted relationality” rather than in some single faculty of human being.
The question of the locus of the fall, again, however it is conceived of (e.g., as estrangement or lostness), can also be focused individually or continually. In the classical theologies, especially in Western societies, the focus has largely been on what individuals do and have—their guilty consciences, their wills, their bodily desires, their false thoughts, and their idolatries. It is true that Augustine could speak of “original sin” as a great “train of evil”—a legacy, if you will, by which individuals were conditioned; this does tend to shift the locus toward domains and circumstances larger than any individual. But the sin or fallenness showed its real force in the way it entered the individual’s bodily life, especially his or her sexuality, and affected the individual being.
In contrast, especially by the nineteenth century, theologians began articulating human fault and distortion as a communal or social problem, in part because of interaction with emerging cultural and social theory. Paradigmatic here is Schleiermacher, for whom sin is elaborated as “corporate sin.” For him sin pertains not severally to each individual, but “in each the work of all, and in all the work of each; and only in this corporate character, indeed, can it be properly and fully understood.” More recently this issue has arisen again, especially in Latin American liberation theology, wherein, without denying the personal or individual locus of sin, the liberation theologians stress regions of “institutionalized violence” as the locus of the distortion that needs primary theological address.
A third set of controversies concerns human responsibility for the fall. Debate has been intense and occurs frequently between those who take a “moral” view of human evil and those who emphasize a “tragic” view. Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich focused this debate keenly at mid–twentieth century. Niebuhr stressed the moral responsibility for human evil, primarily human sin as pride that is continually enacted in history. Tillich, while also attending to humans’ moral responsibility for evil, tended to place this moral view within a tragic view—one that stresses the universality and unavoidability of the fall, hence suggesting that it is too much to make humans alone responsible for the distortion. How theologians navigate the tensions between the moral and tragic view of human fallenness and evil has in many ways intensified in difficulty as twenty-first-century humanity wrestles not only with the persistent issues of guilt, suffering, and death, but also with the particular forms these take in struggle with addictions, the loss of ecological habitat, the threat of nuclear holocaust, gender injustice, and the growing gap between rich and poor.
In whatever way Christian anthropologists settle the relationship between the tragic and the moral, other debates also occur concerning the nature of human moral responsibility. What is the nature of sin? Classical traditions have fused the notions of being “curved in on oneself” and of “pride.” The predominant failure, then, is one of a self’s turning in upon itself and then exercising the will to power and self-aggrandizement. This notion of sin has worked strongly to identify and name the “sin” of powerful leaders and groups who exploit others for their own purposes. Human failing then is “sinful” in the human’s defense of self-interest and desire for power.
On the other hand, for exploited groups—whose lives are routines of self-doubt and reluctance to exercise power—sin as pride has not sufficed to articulate their human failing. Both African American and feminist theologians have stressed, in contrast, that self-abnegation or the refusal to seek empowerment of oneself and one’s people is just as serious a failure to exercise moral responsibility, just as viable a notion of “sin.” In other words, the self can be alienated from itself through both pride and sloth, through will to power, and failure to exercise power.
A New Humanity and a New Earth. A third theme of Christian anthropologies has been emphasis on the promise and potential for a new humanity and a new earth. Because humans and their world are suspended and held in the originating and sustaining nexus—the creative and providential activity of God—humans are believed to be transformable, restorable, healable creatures. Christian doctrines of human being, in this respect, are not exhausted by their discourse about “origins” or “fallenness” but include narratives and symbols of release into wholeness. Here, then, anthropology opens out into soteriology—into discussion of humans’ need for salvation (from salvus, healed), for “healing.”
The focus on a new, healed humanity also opens anthropology into Christology because the healing and healed humanum has traditionally been represented by Jesus Christ. In Pauline language, Christ is “the second Adam” (Rom. 5:12-21). Christ is humanity as humanity originally is created to be. In Christ, thus, is the completion of humanity in the imago dei. Of course, as the meaning of the imago dei differs, so also will the meanings of Christ as one in whom this imago is fulfilled. There is remarkable consonance, however, among Christian anthropologies as various as those of Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Rosemary Radford Ruether that the divine act of creation is not complete until the redemptive (or restorative or healing) work is experienced by humanity. The notion of Christ as “second Adam” presents the Christian redeemer figure as the one in whom the creation of humankind finds fulfillment.
The notion of an individual Christ as “second Adam,” however, is not a sufficient symbol for representing the newness needed by a “fallen” humanity. More collective or communal symbols have therefore been employed to symbolize the needed transformation and to facilitate doctrinal reflection: kingdom of God, city of God, corporate grace, new earth. These symbols have often been restricted by theologians to ecclesiology, eschatology, and pneumatology, but they also function as symbols of a new, healed humanity and hence are not separable from Christian anthropologies.
These communal symbols of human wholeness and completion of creation place at the heart of Christian anthropology two tensions that are still being debated. These tensions can be expressed in two questions.
First, is the new, reconstituted
