Questioning the Human

Toward a Theological Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century

Lieven Boeve, Yves De Maeseneer, Ellen Van Stichel, Lieven Boeve

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780823257539, 9780823257522
• eBook ISBN: 9780823257553
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Theological anthropology is being put to the test: in the face of contemporary developments in the spheres of culture, politics, and science, traditional perspectives on the human person are no longer adequate. Yet can theological anthropology move beyond its previously established categories and renew itself in relation to contemporary insights? The present collection of essays sets out to answer this question. Uniting Roman Catholic theologians from across the globe, it tackles from a theological perspective challenges related to the classical natural law tradition (part 1), to the modern conception of the subject (part 2), and to the postmodern awareness of diversity in a globalizing context (part 3). Its contributors share a fundamental methodological choice of a critical-constructive dialogue with contemporary culture, science, and philosophy.This collection integrates a wider range of approaches than one usually finds in theological volumes, bringing together experts in systematic theology and in theological ethics. Authors come from different American contexts, including Black and Latino, and from a European context that include both French and German. Moreover, the interdisciplinary insights upon which the different contributions draw stem from both the natural sciences (such as neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and ethology) and the humanities (such as cultural studies, philosophy, and hermeneutics).This volume will be essential reading for anyone seeking a state-of-the-art account of theological anthropology, of the uncertainties it is facing, and of the responses it is in the process of formulating. The shared Roman Catholic background of the authors of this collection makes this volume a helpful complement to recent publications that predominantly represent views from other theological traditions.

PART I

Human Nature and Science

CHAPTER 1

Theological Anthropology, Science, and Human Flourishing

Stephen J. Pope

There is no doubt that the human race, Homo sapiens, evolved from predecessor hominids around 200,000 to 150,000 years ago. We constitute one class among the great apes and have more genetic similarity to chimpanzees than chimpanzees have with orangutans. We are intelligent, group-living animals. Like other primates, we have a sense of fairness, tend to prefer our own offspring and members of our own groups to outsiders, and generally pursue a policy of punishing cheats and cooperating with those who are trustworthy.

What does an evolutionary view of humanity imply for theology? If we were not created on the “sixth day,” does that also mean that we can no longer be considered, as Genesis proclaims, created in the “image and likeness of God” (1:26)? Does an evolutionary view of human origins also suggest that God is not the author of the moral law? What does an honest recognition of the evolutionary roots of morality imply about the long-established Christian claim that God teaches in two “books”—the divine law revealed in scripture and the natural law discovered by reason? What, in short, is the status of the central Christian affirmation that humans are created in the “image of God?” Can we retain an account of the natural moral law while taking seriously that our species is the product of a long process of biological evolution?

This chapter will argue that an account of biological evolution provides a framework within which to think about the meaning of both the imago Dei and natural law. First, it traces the traditional interpretation of these themes in the writings of Thomas Aquinas and briefly summarizes current Church teachings on evolution, imago Dei, and natural law. Then it focuses on the recent theological treatments of imago Dei and natural law in the writings of two prominent contemporary moral theologians, Jack Mahoney and Lisa Sowle Cahill. We argue that reflection on the imago Dei and the natural law would do well to incorporate evolutionary theory. Doing so enables us to develop a viable alternative to two unacceptable extremes: a traditionalist dualism that simply ignores contemporary evolutionary anthropology and piously affirms the truth of the imago Dei and the natural law, and a reductionistic naturalism that takes science seriously but dismisses the imago Dei and natural law as anachronistic holdovers from a prescientific age that can no longer command our respect. Our distinctively human capacities have grown through the evolutionary process in a way that both continues to bear its imprint and that allows us to transcend it in acts of responsible love.

Thomas Aquinas on the Imago Dei and Natural Law

The Christian concept of natural law, notably as developed by Thomas Aquinas, was based on the conviction that the Creator purposefully designed the entire created order with a vast array of particular species whose essences are unchanging. All creatures are created in the “likeness” of God in that they manifest, in remote and analogical ways, something of God’s existence, or life, or intelligence, yet human beings alone are said to be created in God’s image because we are created with the capacity for the “spiritual operations” of knowing and willing. Nonhuman animals are thus “traces” or “vestiges” of God, but we are the “image” of God. Thomas interpreted the biblical description of our creation in the “image and likeness of God” (Gen. 1:26) as pointing to our rational capacities. Our rational capacities enable us to take responsibility for ourselves and other creatures. It enables us to be both “masters of our own acts” and to exercise “dominion” over other creatures (Gen. 1:26; also Gen. 5:1 and 9:6).¹

Thomas held that the mind of the Creator governs all of the creation through the eternal law. All creatures are governed by the God-given order of nature, which proceeds through all creatures behaving according to the internal dynamics of their own natures. God acts as primary cause in and through creatures acting on one another as secondary causes. The human person has a special dignity because he or she has a rational soul. According to Thomas, the soul is the “subsistent form” of the human body. As the form of the body, it exists both to animate the body and to order the body and all of its parts in the relation to one another. As “subsistent,” the soul can exist independently of the body after death in a separated state prior to the resurrection of the body. The spiritual character of intellectual and volitional acts indicates that the soul is not dependent on the body for its acts. Acts of understanding and willing, that is, are not the activities of any bodily organ, including the brain or the central nervous system. Thomas is not, however, advocating dualism, because he did not understand the soul to be a substance in itself. He regarded the human person as the substance, and the human soul as its subsistent formal principle.

Human beings are unique because we alone are held to the natural law, which Thomas defines as the rational creature’s “participation” in the eternal law.² Other animals are intelligent, but we alone are rational, capable of deliberation, planning, and offering logical arguments for our judgments. Natural law constitutes the framework of ethical norms to which the virtuous person conforms and by which he or she attains some degree of flourishing in this life. As rational creatures we are obligated to conform to the divinely created “order of nature.”³ The precepts of the second table of the Decalogue offer a formulation of the basic norms governing the goods of life, sex, marriage and family, property, and speech. These norms are revealed in divine law for the sake of clarity, Thomas thought, but their importance is evident to any rational person who reflects on the most basic normative requirements of any relatively well-ordered community. The natural law is a way of talking about what counts as appropriate conduct for “rational animals.” “Reasonable” in this context refers not to instrumental rationality, the most efficient way to get what one happens to want, but rather to the intelligent pursuit of the human good—i.e., the best way to get what one ought to want given our rational nature.

Thomas’s account of both the imago Dei and natural law were obviously rooted in a view of human nature that was formed by biblical, Aristotelian, patristic, and other ancient sources. It assumed a hierarchically structured cosmos with human beings located in a “middle position” between purely spiritual and rational creatures, angels, and purely material and irrational creatures, plants and animals. In this teleological scheme, the lower always exists for the sake of the higher. Plants exist for the sake of animals, and irrational animals were thought to exist the sake of rational animals. Thomas had no reason to doubt that there was a real Adam and a real Eve who were created by God and placed in paradise to dwell in harmony with God and one another, or that they then sinfully and irrationally disobeyed God, were cast out of the garden, and left the rest of us with the legacy of original sin and concupiscence. This view was consistently maintained by modern Catholicism, with few individual exceptions, up through and beyond the age of Darwin.

Darwinism, Evolution, and the Magisterium

The Darwinian account of Homo sapiens as descended from previous primate species raises a host of profound questions for this classic Catholic anthropology. An overwhelmingly strong convergence of evidence from a variety of disciplines uncovered that the earth is much older than the biblical chronology allows. It issued a frontal attack on the Thomistic view of nature as designed by God and populated by unchanging species functioning within a fixed and permanent “order” of nature. It provided an unassailable body of evidence showing that instead of created in a paradise we evolved out of predecessor hominids.

This paradigm shift raises major questions about human dignity. The vision of human beings as descended from predecessor species (but not monkeys) challenged the widespread Christian anthropocentric assumption that we are the primary purpose for the existence of all other animals. Awareness of our continuity with other species called into question the assumption that the world is divided neatly into rational and irrational creatures. Scientific research shows that we are not as rational as once assumed, and that animals are more intelligent than we used to think. Evolutionists regard the differences between species as more a matter of degree than of kind. Rather than created in the image of God, we seem to be just another species of primate (albeit one with special cognitive abilities). As Stephen Jay Gould put it, we are a “tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree.”⁴

This view of nature as a scene of constant struggle that is “red in tooth and claw” also called into doubt the assumption that we ought to “conform to” the natural order of nature. In the first place, nature is not so orderly. In the second, only the social Darwinians advise us to conform to it. If anything, ethics struggles against nature. Evolutionary thinking, then, would seem to have left both the imago Dei and the natural law in tatters.

The Catholic Church has had a complex and ambivalent relation to evolutionary theory.⁵ In the first half of the twentieth century, the evolutionary explorations of Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin were greeted with enthusiasm in some quarters but hostility in others. His works were censored by his Jesuit superiors and banned by the Holy Office. He was required to leave his teaching post and to sign a statement renouncing any suggestion that he rejected the doctrine of original sin.

Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Humani Generis (1950) offered tentative recognition of the value of evolutionary theorizing. The pope taught that the hypothesis of the evolution of the human body could be entertained by Catholics as long as they acknowledged that, even if the body is understood as emerging from “pre-existent matter,” the soul of each person is specially created and “infused” into matter directly by God.⁶ The encyclical also insisted that a legitimate interpretation of evolution could not deny the doctrine of “monogenism,” the belief that all human beings originated from a single primal couple. Pius assumed that monogenism is entailed in the doctrine of original sin: Universal redemption in Christ (Rom. 5:12–21; 1 Cor. 15:20–23) presumes a prior universal fall in Adam (Gen. 3). Recent authoritative treatments of evolution continue to hold the natural unity of the human race (perhaps in a way that is consistent with a single common ancestor) but have quietly stopped referring to monogenism.⁷

Pope John Paul II’s treatment of evolution was shaped in part by his desire to avoid repetition of the Galileo fiasco and the Church’s condemnation of Copernicanism. He went further than Pius XII in conceding that evolution is “more than a hypothesis,” but he too felt it absolutely necessary to invoke the special divine creation of each soul to provide ontological support for human dignity.⁸ One might wonder why the pope did not think that God could have worked equally well to give divine support to human dignity through secondary causality rather than by means of special divine intervention. In Thomas’s understanding of causality, after all, God is the primary cause of everything that exists and works through particular secondary causes. God’s love creates and gives value to everything that exists, including the human person and his or her dignity. In any case, the pope insisted that human dignity rests on God’s having specially created each soul and inserted it into the human body at some point very early in the embryological process.

John Paul II made an important distinction between scientific findings about evolution (what some people call “facts”), scientific theories about evolution (including either weakly, moderately, or strongly supported hypotheses), and philosophical and theological speculation based on either of these other aspects of evolutionary thinking. The pope made a distinction between the indisputable fact that we have evolved and ontological naturalism, which argues that anyone who accepts the fact of evolution cannot also continue to believe in God.

Another key issue concerns the relation between mind and brain. The pope maintains that the naturalist claim that mind emerges from matter without divine influence contains three interrelated mistakes: It confuses a philosophical speculation with an empirically verifiable scientific claim; it fails to support the dignity of the person; and it contradicts the theological claim that we are made in God’s image. He insists that we not confuse the different kinds of epistemological claims that come, respectively, from science, philosophy, and theology. Yet it is hard to see why, in itself, the simple claim that mind emerges from matter contradicts the affirmation that we are made in God’s image or have a special dignity. After all, the second creation story depicts God as a potter who forms us out of the clay of the earth. It is not the material “out of which” we have come that establishes our dignity but rather the distinctive intellectual, moral, and religious abilities that it produces in us. It is not how we begin that is decisive but where we can end up. It is thus not the material of the brain that has dignity but the human mental and affective capacities that the brain makes possible. The soul is the form of the body, and the mind’s activity is what the form does. The pope is best interpreted here as warning us about the dangerous consequences that come from wrongly construing the emergence of mind from matter. Instead of evolutionary theory reducing the mind to matter, Christian theology sees an ascending movement from matter to mind.

The imprint of John Paul II’s teaching is also registered in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It explains that “Scripture presents the work of the Creator symbolically as a succession of six days of divine ‘work,’ concluded by the ‘rest’ of the seventh day,⁹ but ‘nothing exists that does not owe its existence to God the Creator.’ The world began when God’s word drew it out of nothingness; all existent beings, all of nature, and all human history is rooted in this primordial event, the very genesis by which the world was constituted and time begun.”¹⁰ Yet for some reason it treats Adam and Eve as historical figures whose sin in paradise constituted the “fall” of the entire human race.¹¹ While the account of the fall in Genesis 3 uses figurative language, the Catechism concedes, it “affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man. Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents.”¹²

The Catechism continues to invoke both the imago Dei and the natural law as if evolution makes no difference to how we interpret them. Critics might read this as incoherent eclecticism, but proponents might distinguish the job of the magisterium, to teach what is true, from the task of theologians—to provide, as best they can, the reasons why what is taught is in fact the case. The difficulty faced by theology, however, is considerable: how to reinterpret the imago Dei in a way that makes sense in light of an evolutionary view of human origins, and how to make sense of natural law in a contemporary context that thinks of nature in a way that is radically at odds with old Aristotelian-Thomistic conception. The Catechism does not help matters when it repea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Exploring New Questions for Theological Anthropology
• Part I. Human Nature and Science
• Part II. Christ and the Disputed Self
• Part III. Relating in a Fallen World
• Turtles All The Way Down?: Pressing Questions for Theological Anthropology in the Twenty-First Century
• Notes
• List of Contributors
• Index