Justified ex nihilo: Retrieving Creation for Theological Anthropology with Luther and Bonhoeffer

This article seeks to articulate a framework for theological anthropology that takes seriously the doctrine of creation, while also remaining christologically grounded and soteriologically informed. Toward this end, I will look briefly at how Martin Luther understands the relationship between justification, anthropology and creation, before turning to the way in which Dietrich Bonhoeffer picks up on Luther’s tripartite, justification‐based definition of the human being. In doing so, Bonhoeffer will help to clarify the essential role that creation plays in grounding and orienting a theological anthropology which seeks to take seriously the soteriological realities of sin and reconciliation.     

The Challenge of Autism for Relational Approaches to Theological Anthropology

In this paper, I argue that autism places an important restraint upon the use of relationality in theological anthropology. This argument proceeds by outlining how the appropriation of dialectic personalism, which initiated ‘the relational turn’ in twentieth century theological anthropology, has struggled to escape the capacity or property‐based focus on individual subjects. As such, this relational account remains discriminatory against those who do not or cannot enact a particular kind of relationality, as some models of autism suggest. Moreover, attention to interpersonal relationships as a key human capacity within twentieth century theological anthropology closely parallels and may even have informed the development of autism within psychology as, in part, a social impairment. The devastating collision of these two intellectual trajectories is made apparent in explicit references by contemporary theologians to autism as a condition that prevents some humans from bearing the image of God, developing fully into persons, or receiving God’s grace by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.     

Reconsidering Relational Anthropology: A Critical Assessment of John Zizioulas's Theological Anthropology

Abstract:  There has been an increasing emphasis in theological anthropology on the constitution of the person through their relation to God, others, self and the world. In focusing on the relational dimensions of personhood other important facets have not received sufficient attention: the doctrine of sin, the discontinuity between divine and human persons and human embodiment in the world. This article offers a critical assessment of John Zizioulas's anthropology which can be considered a paradigmatic example of a relational anthropology. Although the concerns raised are in relation to Zizioulas's work, many of them are instructive for relational anthropologies more generally.     

Spiritual Machines,Personal Bodies,and God: Theological Education and Theological Anthropology

Programs of theological education in Christian traditions are exploring “distanced learning” as one way to address certain challenges to their educational excellence. A major strand in a twenty‐year old discussion of the nature and purpose of theological education has urged that analysis of theological schooling's failures and assessment of proposed remedies ought to be framed explicitly in theological terms as part of an ongoing inquiry into what makes theological education properly theological. This essay tries to show how following that advice can make a practical difference in assessing the merits of distanced learning. It does so by raising questions about the theological‐anthropological assumptions, respectively, of theological education and of distanced learning.     

The Theological Anthropology of Young Adult Catholics in Postmodern America

The metaphors and images that the individual holds for God have been neglected in theological anthropology, even though they offer important insights into how the individual builds a foundation of faith, engages in the world spiritually, and participates in religious institutions. The author interviewed young adult Roman Catholics for this study, guided by the following question: What metaphors and images do individuals hold for God, and how do these metaphors and images contribute to an understanding of theological anthropology?     

Who is My Neighbor?: The Good Samaritan as a Source for Theological Anthropology

As the title of this essay suggests, the author's aim is to offer a reading of Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan in the context of contemporary debates over the nature of personhood. The essay argues that our identity as persons is bound up with our relationship with Jesus in whose life is disclosed both the identity of the three divine persons of the Trinity and the form of human personhood they make possible. To know what it means to be a person, one needs to look to Jesus who provides, through the parable of the Good Samaritan, both the model and the source of our own personhood. [Editors]     

Sex, Aggression, and Pain: Sociobiological Implicatios for Theological Anthropology

Theological anthropology can be enriched by paying attention to insights into human behavior taken from sociobiology. The capacity for reflective self-consciousness enables the human animal to respond to basic instincts and drives in unprecedented ways. Humans follow gender-specific sexual strategies, display aggressive behavior, and respond to physical pain as do other animals. Yet human beings have the intellectual ability to express these tendencies uniquely in either destructive or constructive ways. The human being, unlike any other animal, must reckon with sexual ethics, the problem of violence, and the meaning of suffering. In developing the basic concepts of theological anthropology—good creation, natural evil, fall, sin, and image of God—sociobiological research can lead to more adequate understanding of the human.     

‘But Do Not Use The Rotted Names’: Theological Adequacy and Homosexuality

The Christian evaluation of homosexuality is based primarily on a model which can view homosexuality only as aberrational. From a Christian theological point of view this model articulates an inadequate vision of the dignity of human being. In its deliberations on the process of church, Vatican Council II implicitly developed a relational-progressive model for understanding the salvific engagement of the complete gift of Godlife and creation. This model, in turn, provides a new basis for understanding human dignity and evaluating homosexuality. Viewed from this perspective homosexuality is able to be considered a sacramental embodiment of Godlife.     

Coram Mundo: A Lutheran Feminist Theological Anthropology of Hope1

Abstract : Human life coram mundo, in relationship to the world, is complex and challenging. Third wave feminist resources provide a lens for reading Martin Luther's ontology of the human person because the two share a commitment to seeing human life at the intersections. A Lutheran feminist theological anthropology of hope responds to unique anxieties produced by a more subversive patriarchy, bound to racism, classism, homophobia and multinational corporate structures in the twenty‐first century.     

Toward Theological Anthropology: Tracing the Anthropological Principles of John Webster

John Webster rooted his doctrine of the human creature in a thick portrait of the living God in and of himself as well as in his works wherein he creates, sustains, redeems and perfects them unto life in him. This essay will seek to unfold, introduce and assess his methodological principles for pursuing a distinctly theological anthropology by attending to his engagement of external threats in postmodern anthropology and internal challenges from christocentric anthropologies. We will suggest ways in which his anthropological project suggests a way forward for those doing systematic work today in as much as it not only offers a confident approach on distinctly Christian terms but slowly ponders the fundamental facets of such a schema, tending to theology and creation prior to a focus upon incarnational Christology as a necessary means of engaging in ‘biblical reasoning’.     

‘God,the Father Almighty’: A Theological Excursus

The confession of ‘God, the Father almighty’ in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds can be interpreted as offering a progressively more focused characterization of the First Person of the Trinity, such that ‘Father’ clarifies the meaning of ‘God’, and the force of ‘almighty’ is controlled by the meaning of ‘Father’. The results of such an exegesis accentuate divine transcendence in a way that raises questions about theological claims to natural knowledge of God. More specifically, they suggest that the very comprehensiveness of God's relationship to the world implied by divine almightiness blocks any direct line of inference from creation to Creator.     

Jeanine Thweatt-Bates. Cyborg Selves: A Theological Anthropology of the Posthuman

Abstract

Of all the research programs investigating radical life extension, cybernetic immortality is, by definition, the most ambitious. Several models fall within this category. While some include the possibility of “re-corporealizing” either as machine, biological entity, or hybrid, all models have several essentials in common. They require the ability to construct a non-biological (e.g., electronic) substrate that can model the functioning human brain, including the ability for consciousness (self-awareness) and a means for uploading into this artificial mind the contents of one's mortal life experiences. The individuals who have speculated most comprehensively on this include Ted Chu, Raymond Kurzweil, and Martine Rothblatt.¹1 Relevant books include: Ted Chu, Human Purpose and Transhuman Potential: A Cosmic Vision for Our Future Evolution (San Rafael, CA: Origin Press, 2014); Michio Kaku, The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind (New York: Doubleday, 2014); Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (London: Penguin, 2013); Martine Rothblatt, Virtually Human: The Promise and the Peril of Digital Immortality (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2014).     

Work and Its Discontents: On Contemporary Theology’s Response to the Question of Work

I begin this essay by articulating capitalism’s problematic work ethic, to which a host of contemporary theologians are rightfully responding. I then establish a pattern that structures a host of those contemporary theological responses. Theologians working out of the “God as Worker” model aim to address work‐related problems by calling for workers to imitate God’s work. Making use of Augustine’s doctrine of transcendence, I problematize that mode of response on two fronts: (1) those proposals are based on too quick an appeal to theories of divine action, which the authors problematically assume provides a model for ideal forms of human action; (2) those proposals lack clarity regarding the precise nature of “work” and thus fail to develop a proper analysis of the cursed mode of agency. Thinking with Augustine and a classical theological schema wherein God is the transcendent cause (and final end) of all creatures thus prohibits the attempt to address questions of work by identifying just modes of work in God’s productive agency. In contrast to this model, I argue that an Augustinian response must treat work as both a distinctly creaturely and a cursed activity.