The Ashgate Research Companion to Theological Anthropology

Joshua R. Farris, Charles Taliaferro, Joshua R. Farris, Charles Taliaferro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317041313
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In recent scholarship there is an emerging interest in the integration of philosophy and theology. Philosophers and theologians address the relationship between body and soul and its implications for theological anthropology. In so doing, philosopher-theologians interact with cognitive science, biological evolution, psychology, and sociology. Reflecting these exciting new developments, The Ashgate Research Companion to Theological Anthropology is a resource for philosophers and theologians, students and scholars, interested in the constructive, critical exploration of a theology of human persons. Throughout this collection of newly authored contributions, key themes are addressed: human agency and grace, the soul, sin and salvation, Christology, glory, feminism, the theology of human nature, and other major themes in theological anthropology in historic as well as contemporary contexts.

PART I
Methodology in Theological Anthropology

1

The Madness in Our Method: Christology as the Necessary Starting Point for Theological Anthropology

Marc Cortez

Many theological anthropologies claim that Jesus Christ is in some way the revelation of true humanity. He is “the mystery of man,”¹ “true humanity,”² the “archetype” of humanity,³ and the revelation of “what human nature is intended to be.”⁴ Thus, Ray Anderson argues that only “the humanity of Christ … discloses the radical form of true humanity,”⁵ exemplifying what may be described as a widespread consensus among theologians that Jesus Christ lies at the heart of theological anthropology.⁶

At first glance, such claims seem intuitively obvious. Given the long-standing conviction that Jesus Christ is both fully and truly human—fully human as the complete union of deity and humanity in the incarnation and truly human as the sole postlapsarian example of a human life lived without sin—the theological intuition that a proper understanding of the human person must begin with Christology seems almost self-evident.

However, such claims do not go unchallenged. Indeed, for some contemporary thinkers such a Christologically-centred anthropology is necessarily doomed, offering a sadly limited and isolating perspective for understanding something as beautiful and complex as the human person. While they often recognize Christology as a significant point of departure for theological anthropology, they typically stop short of claiming that he alone provides the proper vantage point for understanding humanity.

Nonetheless, I argue in this chapter that we can still maintain the long-standing intuition that Christology alone provides the proper ground for theological anthropology, provided that we offer a more robust methodological account of how Christology and anthropology should be related. To that end, we will need to consider first some of the more significant objections. Having identified the primary challenges facing a Christological anthropology, we will then consider Karl Barth’s anthropology as one of the more robustly Christological anthropologies available. There we will see that Barth’s approach offers resources for responding to the major concerns about Christological anthropology. Nonetheless, in the final section, we argue that although Barth may serve as a useful dialogue partner, pointing the way toward a more adequate Christological anthropology, more work needs to be done in addressing the theological and methodological issues involved.

Confronting the Madness: Key Criticisms for Christological Anthropology

We can summarize most of the concerns about Christological anthropology by asking three key questions, each challenging the extent to which a Christological starting point is really adequate for understand the human person.

First, why exactly does Jesus deserve this prominent location in theological anthropology? Few things could be more startling than claiming that a single human individual has revelatory significance for the entirety of human life. And this is particularly the case given the limited biblical justification for such a claim. While the Bible certainly describes Jesus as a true human and offers his life as an example for the rest of us to follow,⁷ suggesting that Jesus may play a central role in understanding human moral and/or religious action, it never explicitly states that Jesus in any way functions as the ground for understanding the human person in general. Thus, any theologian making such a robust anthropological claim owes some explanation of the biblical justification for this move.

Some also balk at any attempt to ground an understanding of universal humanity in the particular humanity of a single individual. Consider yourself, for example. Unless you are an extraordinary person who has somehow managed to live in virtually every human culture, experienced life from the standpoint of multiple ethnicities, genders, economic circumstances and all the states of ability and disability, your identity has been shaped by certain particularities—like the rest of us—that will not allow us simply to move from your case to the human experience of people in general.

This becomes problematic for many modern Christologies precisely because they tend to emphasize Christ’s particular humanity.⁸ He was a Jewish male raised in first-century Galilee, among other things. Like me, his humanity is marked and limited by these distinguishing characteristics, making it difficult to see how his humanity could reveal universal humanity any more than mine could.

Probably the most significant concerns developed along these lines have come from feminist theologians who point out the difficulty of developing a general anthropology from a single, male individual.⁹ In what sense can we say that he reveals what it means to be human? In taking this approach, do we not run the risk of associating the human with being male? Or, at the very least, do we not marginalize what it means to be female if we say that all of humanity can be adequately revealed through the male form of humanity?¹ After all, as a junior high student once pointed out, “Jesus was never a teenage girl.”

Although feminist theologians have expressed these concerns most clearly, similar questions could be raised about every aspect of Christ’s particularized human experience (e.g. class, race, geographical location).¹⁰ How do we privilege Christ’s humanity without, at the same time, privileging these particular expressions, and, consequently, marginalizing other particular expressions of being human?

Second, how exactly do you draw anthropological conclusions from a Christological starting point? In other words, what are the methodological principles by which we derive anthropological insights from our Christological starting point? Do you simply read the gospels, look at your situation, and ask, “What would Jesus do?” Surely it is more complicated than that, but in what ways? Unfortunately, few theologians have given explicit attention to this question, affirming the Christological starting point without discussing the precise how involved. Although we do not want to become so burdened by methodological issues that we never get around to dealing with substantive anthropological questions, we must give some attention to the appropriate steps that must be considered when relating Christology and anthropology in this way.

This question becomes even more significant when we turn to unique aspects of the life of Jesus like his sinlessness and deity. Regardless of how you answer the question of whether Jesus was born with a “sin nature,”¹¹ most orthodox¹² Christologies affirm that Jesus lived a truly sinless life. Since that is true of no other human, it becomes difficult to see how the humanity that Jesus reveals could be related to the humanity that we experience in our everyday lives. Many have argued that it is precisely in virtue of his sinlessness that Jesus can reveal what it means to be truly human—i.e. humanity untainted by sin. So Jesus reveals humanity as God intended it and toward which he is redeeming it. While that may be true, however, such an approach raises significant questions for the applicability of such a Christologically grounded theological anthropology. At the very least, it runs the risk of only revealing a “true” humanity so removed from our everyday existence as to be a useless abstraction.

Questions also stem from the uniqueness of the incarnation. Orthodox Christologies affirm that Jesus was truly human but not merely human. As the unique and inseparable union of deity and humanity in a single individual, how do we discern which aspects of Jesus’ life that are applicable to other humans and which might be unique to the incarnate God-man? And if we make such distinctions, on what basis? The concern here is that we might end up using a pre-established understanding of what it means to be human—i.e. one developed independently of Christology—to determine that which is truly human about Jesus in the incarnation.¹³ Such an approach, however, would mean that we are actually developing an anthropocentric Christology rather than a Christocentric anthropology. Surely there will always be a dynamic relationship between those two fields of inquiry, but for a Christological anthropology to succeed, there must be a way to identify what is truly human about Jesus without appealing to a definition of “human” developed independently of Christology.

Third, how should a Christological anthropology relate to other anthropological disciplines? Even a theological anthropology thoroughly shaped by Christology must acknowledge the wealth of information about the human person produced by disciplines like biology, sociology, psychology, and the neurosciences, among many others. What does it mean to say that Jesus reveals true humanity with respect to the humanity revealed by these non-Christological approaches?

Even if a Christological anthropology acknowledges that other disciplines might be able to generate meaningful insight into humanity, it still claims a privileged perspective on humanity, one that stands outside the reach of any other discipline. For many, the inevitable result of prioritizing Christology in this way is to instantiate a theological ghetto, isolating theology from the other anthropological disciplines by its totalizing claims.¹⁴ It would seem that any adequate approach to anthropology must account for the data produced by such disciplines. But can a Christological anthropology do so with integrity? Or does the claim that only Jesus reveals true humanity create a situation in which Christological anthropology can only accept as true data that agrees with its predetermined starting point? If so, can there be any meaningful dialogue?

We could certainly identify other significant questions, but these seem the most pressing for developing a Christological anthropology today. And it is questions like these that might leave some wondering about the apparent madness of trying to develop a comprehensive understanding of humanity from the limited perspective of a single human individual.

The Only Proper Vantage Point: Karl Barth as a Case Study for Christological Anthropology¹⁵

Few would question that Karl Barth offered one of the most thoroughly Christological approaches to theological anthropology. Indeed, T.F. Torrance considered it “in some ways the most arresting aspect of Barth’s theology.”¹⁶ And Barth himself thought it was more revolutionary than his famous Christological reorientation of the doctrine of election.¹⁷ Essentially it involves the conviction that “The nature of the man Jesus alone is the key to the problem of human nature.”¹⁸ Thus, according to Ray Anderson, “Karl Barth, more than any other theologian of the church, including the Reformers, has developed a comprehensive theological anthropology by beginning with the humanity of Jesus Christ as both crucified and resurrected.”¹⁹

Clearly, then, Barth falls in the ranks of those who follow the theological intuition that Jesus Christ reveals humanity in some significant way. So the question becomes whether Barth has managed to do so in a way that addresses the concerns raised above.

The Why of Christological Anthropology

For Barth, Christological anthropology finds its theological ground in the doctrine of election. As Barth famously declared, the doctrine of election is “the whole of the Gospel, the Gospel in nuce.”²⁰ This is because it is in the doctrine of election that we find God’s eternal self-determination to be God-for-us in the person of Jesus Christ, his free and gracious decision that “the goal and meaning of all His dealings with the as-yet non-existent universe should be the fact that in His Son He would be gracious towards man, uniting Himself with them.”²¹ This means that ultimately and eternally, Jesus is the human. All others are human insofar as they are included within the scope of God’s eternal decision to be God-for-us-in-Christ, which fortunately includes all of us.²²

Jesus’ unique status as the revealer of true humanity, then, ultimately has an eternal ground in the doctrine of election. But he does not stop here. In a second move, Barth argues that Jesus also grounds our humanity through his covenantal (sinless) faithfulness. Although all humans have fallen into sin and thus stand in contradiction to their own Christologically-determined nature, God’s gracious love ensures that humans are and always will remain human. And this is specifically because Jesus remains the one human who has not fallen into the self-contradiction of sin and thus continues to be rightly related to God as his covenantal partner (i.e., human).²³ This means that Jesus’ humanity is ontologically decisive for our humanity because it is his faithful humanity that maintains and redeems our own.²⁴ But it is also epistemologically decisive because Jesus is the one in whom we see true humanity unspoiled by sin.²⁵

In a third move, Barth argues that we also need to take into account the “divine summons” that we all receive in Christ, one that calls us into our own true humanity. Because the Son has entered creation through the incarnation, “To be a man is to be in the particular sphere of the created world in which the Word of God is spoken and sounded.”²⁶ Jesus’ very existence summons all humans as the sphere within which they are encountered by the divine Other. For Barth, then, being truly human is not a static concept. Instead, we find true humanity insofar as we respond to the summons we all receive in Christ, a summons that we may not even be consciously aware of, but one that grasps all humans as creatures who live in the sphere in which God became one of us.

Almost uniquely among theologians, then, Barth offers a robust theological explanation for the Christological determination of theological anthropology. Jesus alone determines what it means to be human because (1) His humanity grounds ours eternally through God’s eternal decision to be God-for-us-in-Jesus (election); (2) His humanity grounds ours redemptively through the covenantal faithfulness that both maintains our humanity and revea...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Methodology in Theological Anthropology
• Part II Theological Anthropology, the Brain, the Body, and the Sciences
• Part III Models for Theological Anthropology
• Part IV Theological Models of the Imago Dei
• Part V Human Nature, Freedom, and Salvation
• Part VI Human Beings in Sin and Salvation
• Part VII Christological Theological Anthropology
• Index
• Index of Scripture References