Читать книгу New & Enlarged Handbook of Christian Theology - Donald W. Musser - Страница 16

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 ails them; the radicality of the fall also means that every domain of human life—affections, thoughts, actions—is distorted even 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 humanity to be found primarily in the renewal of dynamics of individual faith and practice or primarily in the emergence of new collectivities—new ways of relating human to human, human to nature, and human to cosmos? Currently one finds numerous and strong Christian communities throughout countries of the North Atlantic that give primacy to the proclamation of human renewal through individual spiritual experience and growth. On the other hand, within these same countries and throughout third-world regions of the Southern Hemisphere, experiences of ethnic strife, political repression and oppression, and loss of the environmental world have granted to many a new sense of urgency in proclaiming a telos (goal or end) for humans in the world that is communal, celebrating the differences between particular groups but seeking new connections and alliances that are restorative for all.

Second, the more communal symbols prompt renewed inquiry in Christian anthropology on another tension, one long intrinsic to the Christian tradition. Will the reconstitution of humans in the world, hence the fulfillment of their createdness, be articulated theologically as renewal of this earth and this cosmos or as emergence of some new “transcendent” order articulated as replacement for this earth and cosmos? Amid twenty-first century despair and resignation—in the face of threats to ecostructure, from nuclear holocaust, and from intransigent economic and political structures—the tendency is strong among many Christian thinkers to turn away from this order of things and to articulate a kind of hope that does not restore creation, but looks for a complete rupture (dramatized for some by a “rapture” of Christians from this troubled world) and toward completely new order.

In tension with this vision are other Christian thinkers who recall that biblical visions of a “new heaven” are regularly related to, or are affirmed alongside, the vision of a “new earth.” On this view, there cannot be and must not be any resignation to the loss of created earth, but there must be instead an experience of renewal that sets humans laboring with all of creation for the construction of the new earth which is the new heaven. From the vantage point of such a Christian anthropology, not only is the survival of humans in the world at stake, but also the fulfillment and thriving of humankind and all of creation.

MARK LEWIS TAYLOR