Questioning the Human: Toward a Theological Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century

QUESTIONING THE HUMAN

Questioning the Human

TOWARD A THEOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Edited by

LIEVEN BOEVE, YVES DE MAESENEER, AND ELLEN VAN STICHEL

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York 2014

Copyright © 2014 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014938148

Printed in the United States of America

16 15 14      5 4 3 2 1

First edition

CONTENTS

Exploring New Questions for Theological Anthropology

LIEVEN BOEVE, YVES DE MAESENEER, AND ELLEN VAN STICHEL

Part I. HUMAN NATURE AND SCIENCE

1. Theological Anthropology, Science, and Human Flourishing

STEPHEN J. POPE

2. The Concept of Natural Law in the Postmodern Context

HENRI-JÉRÔME GAGEY

3. Personalism and the Natural Roots of Morality

JOHAN DE TAVERNIER

4. In God’s Image and Likeness: From Reason to Revelation in Humans and Other Animals

CELIA DEANE-DRUMMOND

Part II. CHRIST AND THE DISPUTED SELF

5. Neuroscience, Self, and Jesus Christ

OLIVER DAVIES

6. Incarnation in the Age of the Buffered, Commodified Self

ANTHONY J. GODZIEBA

7. The Gifted Self: The Challenges of French Thought

ROBYN HORNER

Part III. RELATING IN A FALLEN WORLD

8. Difference, Body, and Race

MICHELLE A. GONZALEZ

9. Public Theology: A Feminist View of Political Subjectivity and Praxis

ROSEMARY P. CARBINE

10. Desire, Mimetic Theory, and Original Sin

WILHELM GUGGENBERGER

Turtles All the Way Down? Pressing Questions for Theological Anthropology in the Twenty-First Century

DAVID G. KIRCHHOFFER

Notes

List of Contributors

Index

QUESTIONING THE HUMAN

Exploring New Questions for Theological Anthropology

Lieven Boeve, Yves De Maeseneer, and Ellen Van Stichel

What does it mean to be human? In today’s context, this fundamental question lies at the heart of many debates in the Church and the world. Unseen cultural, political, and scientific developments provoke new challenges that can no longer be tackled from traditional perspectives on the human being.¹ The familiar concepts theologians use to make sense of Christian beliefs about the human being have lost much of their purchase. Humanity is said to be created in God’s image and likeness, marked by sin but, through God’s grace, saved to a new life in Christ. But what do we mean by human nature, personhood, freedom, soul, relation, and other concepts that this account traditionally draws on? There is an urgent need to explore the questions that theological anthropology faces in our contemporary context.²

This collection is distinctive in several ways. All the authors share a Roman Catholic background, which makes this volume a helpful complement to recent publications that represent views predominantly from other theological traditions.³ Moreover, nearly fifty years after Vatican II’s groundbreaking document Gaudium et Spes, it is a timely moment to assess the state and future of theological anthropology. The contributors share a fundamental methodological option for a critical-constructive dialogue with contemporary culture, science, and philosophy. Nevertheless, this commonality does not prevent this collection from integrating a wider range of approaches than is usually found in theological collections. This volume brings together experts in systematic theology and in theological ethics—two disciplines that often seem to think and write in parallel academic universes. Authors come from different American (including black and Latino) and European (including French and German) theological contexts. Moreover, the interdisciplinary insights on which the different contributors draw stem from both the natural sciences (neuroscience, evolutionary biology, ethology, etc.) and the humanities (cultural studies, philosophy, hermeneutics). This does not mean that we can pretend to cover all the important perspectives in one book, but it does indicate the kind of multidisciplinary cooperation that should be provoked by the complexity of the questions at stake.

Each of the essays explores recent literature in theology and other disciplines in order to address a burning question in theological anthropology. To organize the various essays, we clustered them around three anthropological key terms: nature, self, and relationality. Accordingly, the three parts of this book tackle, from a theological perspective, the challenges related to the classical natural-law tradition (Part I), the challenges to the modern conception of the subject (Part II), and the challenges to the postmodern awareness of diversity in a globalizing context (Part III).

In what follows, we briefly sketch the red thread that connects the different essays, bringing to the fore how the different parts present fundamental challenges to the theological heart of Christian anthropology (creation, sin and grace, and salvation).

In Part I, Human Nature and Science, the authors consider the challenge that scientific developments pose for the classical understanding of the human being as the image of God. Further, they address the ethical implications of this challenge, in particular with respect to the concept of natural law. The evolutionary account of Homo sapiens as a descendant of earlier primate species raises questions about our status as beings created in imago Dei, the image of God. It seems to undermine not only any claim about the human being’s unique position in relation to other species but also the idea of nature as a God-given teleological order that could serve as a normative standard for moral reflection. The foundational theory of theological ethics as it was developed by Thomas Aquinas presupposed that human creatures, as rational animals, could by their very nature know the natural law, which, as a participation in God’s eternal law, grounded universally valid moral insights. Contemporary advocates of natural law still invoke it as the basis of human dignity and of crosscultural moral principles or even norms, hoping to counter moral relativism (particularly when it comes to sexual ethics and human rights). But does it still make sense to appeal to human nature in ethical reflection? And if so, what does contemporary science tell us about an adequate understanding of this nature? To what extent can we still uphold notions such as the universality of morality or the distinctiveness of the human being among the animals?

In Chapter 1, Theological Anthropology, Science, and Human Flourishing, theological ethicist Stephen J. Pope investigates the possibility of retaining a core affirmation communicated in the old language of imago Dei and natural law—namely, the notion of a universal morality—while giving full credit to evolutionary theory’s insights into humanity. After introducing Thomas’s traditional interpretation and current Church teachings on evolution, Pope compares recent publications by two prominent moral theologians. Lisa S. Cahill, offering an account of the relationship between imago Dei and natural law, arrives at an inclusive, universal ethic that promotes an equal right to access the conditions necessary for human flourishing, while Jack Mahoney associates the concept of imago Dei with our capacity for altruism, which could be traced back to evolution theory itself. Pope shows how the authors connect an evolutionary perspective on human nature with a reinterpretation of theological anthropology—two distinct approaches to evolutionary theism. With this chapter, Pope lays the groundwork for the rest of this first part, questioning the notion of imago Dei as well as the roots of our human morality.

While Pope focuses on the question of how the natural sciences may alter our notion of human nature, systematic theologian Henri-Jérôme Gagey in "The Concept of Natural Law in the Postmodern Context situates the issue in a broader cultural setting. The postmodern awareness of cultural plurality and the radical historicity of our moral values render any appeal to nature suspicious. Gagey takes In Search of a Universal Ethic: A New Look at the Natural Law (2009), a document of the International Theological Commission, as his starting point for examining to what extent to which, and the conditions under which, this concept can prove relevant in the postmodern context. In the 2009 document this advisory panel to the Vatican distances itself from the modern rationalist approach" and its essentialist belief in human nature as immutable and ahistorical. It does not, however, go far enough. Gagey formulates a twofold challenge: the move away from a physicalist conception of natural law as identical with biological laws on the one hand calls for more explicit attention for the essentially social and historical character of human nature and, on the other hand, demands an approach which presents natural law thinking less as a scientific enterprise than as an initiation into wisdom. Natural law is a paradoxical concept, he concludes: it is in the first place a theological notion intended to express a fundamental anthropological conviction, and yet its aim is to function as a properly philosophical concept, directed to promote a reasonable ethical debate between different spiritual and religious traditions.

While Gagey voices a hermeneutical concern to safeguard the difference between theology/philosophy and the natural sciences, theological ethicist Johan De Tavernier by contrast seeks to cross these boundaries in his "Personalism and the Natural Roots of Morality." Personalist anthropology emerged as the attempt to overcome a putative physicalism in the natural-law tradition. It asserts that the human being is not reducible to nature but rather a person with spiritual and moral values. De Tavernier suggests that personalism itself tends toward a certain dualism between body and mind, nature and spirit—think, for instance, of its one-sided emphasis on culture over nature. Evolutionary biology challenges this view. In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin already focused on the evolutionary roots of human beings and their morality, claiming that the distinction between human and animal behavior is, in some cases, not so different. For example, animals have a capacity for sympathy, empathy, and group loyalty, to name just a few of their characteristically human traits. Morality does not start in culture; its roots are in dispositions that are programmed into our nature by evolution. As a result, good and evil are no longer exclusive theological and philosophical themes and could not be presented as the fruit of socialization (nurture) alone. De Tavernier proposes a renewed integration of natural scientific insights into the personalist tradition, an integration that parallels what Stephen Pope does for the natural-law tradition.

The contribution of systematic theologian (and biologist) Celia Deane-Drummond, "In God’s Image and Likeness: From Reason to Revelation in Humans and Other Animals, further elaborates on the issue of whether the human person can claim a unique status in creation. Against a recent theological approach that, by a process of extension, includes other creatures in the honor of bearing the divine image, Deane-Drummond defends the idea of retaining the distinctiveness of human beings in a nuanced way. From Thomas she borrows his interpretation of the terms image and likeness: He used the language of divine likeness to describe other animals, thereby expressing a sense of shared creaturely being; with the term image," Thomas referred to the distinctive character of human beings. Deane-Drummond adopts this distinction but, informed by recent ethological studies on animals, bases the image dimension not on the capacity for freedom that Thomas focused on but rather on the religious capacity. Moreover, she interprets this distinctiveness in terms of the performative, as presenting the particular task of humanity to recognize its divine vocation to serve God and to exist in respectful communion with other beings. Rather than argue that animals display the divine image, the author suggests that the close relationship between humans and other animals clarifies the distinctive features of what it means to be human. If human beings consider every species to have its own telos, they can better understand how to relate to other creatures and how to respect their particular human charism for the living community of both humans and other creatures.

Recent and often polemical debates on faith and science must not blind us to the fact that theological anthropology—a discipline that has developed primarily over the course of the past century—has been centered less on the classical concept of human nature than on the modern notion of the human subject. In recent decades, however, this modern view of the self, defined as an autonomous center of consciousness and agency, has increasingly come under attack. In the second part of this collection, "Christ and the Disputed Self, three systematic theologians explore how we can find alternative visions to what Charles Taylor has called the buffered self." Each of the three essays enters into dialogue with insights from other disciplines (neuroscience, cultural studies, and postmodern French philosophy) to formulate a diagnosis of the crisis of the modern human subject and to propose alternative theories that might offer a way out of the impasse in which the contemporary world finds itself. They all seek a more comprehensive view, oriented toward overcoming dualist accounts: How can we integrate self and world / other persons, mind and body, freedom and determinism? The three approaches converge remarkably in the retrieval of Christology for an adequate understanding of what it means to be human. All of the three authors explicitly state that renewal in theological anthropology is not a theoretical exercise in Christian doctrine but has ethical implications: It reframes the practical question of what it means to act in Christ.

In his chapter, "Neuroscience, Self, and Jesus Christ," Oliver Davies offers, first, a schematic overview of three major historical periods, with a view to illustrating how developments in science and technology influenced the development of the rationality of theology. For theological anthropology and Christology, a highly significant shift is located in the understanding of the relationships between mind and body and between self and world. More specifically, Davies focuses on the elements of the human (ethical/Christian) act, in dialogue with recent neuroscientific insights into how our cognition of other persons works. Cognition of the other—and the eventual act that is chosen in this encounter—is a matter of thoroughly embodied processes. Davies in his rich, multilayered analysis offers a new understanding of the human self as much more complex, interdependent, and vulnerable than modern philosophy and theology were able to acknowledge. At first glance, this may seem to weaken human freedom, once so strongly secured in the modern subject; however, Davies sees in this renewed, scientifically informed anthropology an opportunity to retrieve natural law (an embodied form of universality), the imago Dei, and the transforming power of Christ and the Spirit at work in Church and society.

In "Incarnation in the Age of the Buffered, Commodified Self, Anthony J. Godzieba, too, proposes a retrieval of personhood but reflects on it in light of cultural developments in which the human person is considered fragmented, secularized, and fully immersed in consumer culture. We have noted Charles Taylor’s buffered self, formed by a modern social imaginary to disavow transcendence. Godzieba introduces the claim of American cultural critic Chris Hedges that we not only are living our lives as consumers but find our lives measured over against a commodified celebrity culture that denigrates ordinary life and narrates authenticity in terms of material consumption and success. Viewed from a contemporary perspective, Christian theological anthropology has been at times insightful and at times clumsy in dealing with secularization. However, it has largely ignored the capitalist formatting of contemporary experience. Outside theology, the dominant narrative of person" has changed to the degree that Christian notions of grace and salvation have become literally unthinkable. Theological anthropology must tackle these philosophical, social, and cultural presuppositions directly if it is to speak with any sort of productive force in the twenty-first century. Godzieba argues that Catholicism’s incarnational and sacramental imagination, with its emphasis on embodiment and particularity, can be a resource for crafting an anthropology that resists the reductionism of the mainstream narrative and makes grace thinkable again.

In "The Gifted Self: The Challenges of French Thought," Robyn Horner makes explicit the fundamental philosophical question at stake in this second part of the book. Given the diagnosis that the theological anthropology of Gaudium et Spes is intrinsically modern in approach, she investigates the fate of the modern subject in the wake of poststructuralist critiques such as that of Jacques Derrida. According to Derrida, our relation to the world and to each other is not based in a subject identical to itself; rather, the subject is characterized by différance, splitting forever the self from itself. Horner then asks whether a (post-)phenomenological anthropology such as that of Jean-Luc Marion might be helpful in renewing theological anthropology. Marion’s work allows us to think the lost or dissipated self by means of the logic of the gift. Unable ever to be present to itself, the subject can be defined only as radical openness to the givenness of the world and of phenomena in general. In that very openness, Marion argues, the subject appears as radically given to itself, a givenness it realizes only in its responding to, and thus being given to, others. This new, christologically grounded approach to the subject and its relation to the world enables a new theological definition of the human being as given and created by God.

All three authors in the second part of this book agree that a major step beyond the modern subject in anthropology is the growing awareness of the constitutive role of embodied relationality for the human self, which as such cannot be reduced to individual self-consciousness. In the book’s third part, Relating in a Fallen World, three authors explore how the focus on relations among human beings in the world raises further questions: What world are we talking about, and which others? To whom do we feel related, and in what way? At stake is the tension between the theological retrieval of the imago Dei as the image of a triune, relational God and the harsh reality of power, exclusion, and violence. Written from the perspectives of traditionally marginalized groups, the essays sharpen our insight into the often implicit limitations of mainstream theological anthropology. Has the discourse on human nature not in fact promoted a particular culturally conditioned view of humanity? Similarly, is the modern subject not mirroring the illusion of Western men that they are self-contained autonomous individuals?

In her chapter, "Difference, Body, and Race," Latina theologian Michelle A. Gonzalez points out that a merely Western theological anthropology will not suffice in a world that is multicultural and globalized. There are various anthropologies, as each generation of Christians reinterprets the meaning of our humanity in the sociocultural, historical, and political context of the day. Non-Western, contextualized anthropologies, rooted in the insights of liberation and constructive theology, bring to the fore the traditionally marginalized concepts of difference, body, and race. The idea of mestizaje within Latino/a theologies shows, for example, how hybridity is not merely typical for Latino/a culture but can be seen as a fundamental characteristic of human existence in general and of Christ as the full image of humanity in particular. Black theology highlights the problematic connection between the image of God and embodiment and thematizes how racism relates to the construction of what is and is not human. Theology must critically investigate how its constructions of humanity privilege certain traits of human existence over others, which hinders us in genuinely considering all human beings as created in the image of God.

In "Public Theology: A Feminist Anthropological View of Political Subjectivity and Praxis," Rosemary P. Carbine takes up the challenge of non-Western voices for theology’s political relevance, more specifically for elaborating a constructive feminist public theology. She critically analyzes public theology’s prevailing anthropology, which often aligns itself with Euro-American modernity’s rationalist notion of humanity and its associated modes of political participation. This modern anthropology falsely naturalizes elite gendered, racial, nativist, and corporatist constructs of the human person. To offer a theo-political alternative view of public engagement and personhood, Carbine reconfigures public theology as the praxis of imagining, creating, and sustaining a community, and does so by revisiting Catholic social teaching on the Church’s public role in an eschatological and anthropological light. Feminist, womanist, and mujerista theological anthropologies propose a relational notion of the person, which Carbine weaves with Catholic social teaching into a religio-political reconceptualization of the imago Dei, beckoning us to live our full humanity in an ever more just community. She argues that effective public theology should subsist in rhetorical, symbolical, and prophetic practices that perform this community-creating work. The concrete implications of Carbine’s feminist public theology and theological anthropology are illustrated by examples of dominant and subaltern subjects involved in movements for social and economic justice as well as for the civil rights of immigrants.

Gonzalez and Carbine both consider the capacity to recognize difference and relationality to be the crucial criterion of an adequate theological anthropology. Theological ethicist Wilhelm Guggenberger reminds us in his chapter, "Desire, Mimetic Theory, and Original Sin," that relationality and culture are themselves highly ambiguous phenomena. Drawing on René Girard’s attempt to reveal the transcultural foundation of human community and its inherent violence, Guggenberger develops a fundamental dramatic-theological interpretation of original sin and grace. If human beings are mimetic beings by nature, even neurologically hardwired to be so, our desires are formed in our imitation of models. The theological-anthropological question is about the kind of relations we want to foster and about how to break the cultural mechanism whereby rivalry, exclusion, and resentment rule. Our globalizing consumer culture is an important point of reference here. The understanding of original sin as the dynamism of negative mimesis requires a profound process of conversion. In this context, grace must be understood as the occurrence that makes an escape from the vicious cycle of violence possible, opening our desire of becoming receptive to, and of finding fulfillment in, a truly human community.

It may be clear that the present collection does not presume to give a definite answer to the initial question of what it means to be human. It does, however, explore some of the most important challenges faced by theological anthropology today in depth and with a view toward formulating some key theological questions; we have only begun to grasp glimpses of a possible response—glimpses that we hope will invite further reflection and enliven the discussion. In this spirit David G. Kirchhoffer presents some concluding remarks in "Turtles All the Way Down? Pressing Questions for Theological Anthropology in the Twenty-First Century." His point of departure is the insight that human beings are the world (rather than merely live in the world). Relationality thus being the key-word for an up-to-date theological anthropology, Kirchhoffer discusses the main challenges that such an anthropology faces: first, anthropocentrism (as challenged by the ecological crises, the debate on who counts as a person, and technology); second, historicity (as introduced by social-constructivism and as taken more seriously in the Christian tradition in recent decades); third, vulnerability (as a morally neutral consequence of our interdependency); and, finally, language (as a means to engage with diverse discourses ranging from art through to philosophy, business, and cognitive neuropsychology). More than claiming to know the solutions for these different challenges, Kirchhoffer rather encourages theologians to further reflect on them and the way they are discussed in theological and other discourses with a necessary (self-)critical epistemological suspicion. For only in this way will we arrive at a relevant theological discourse on what human beings are, and be a legitimate dialogue partner for other discourses.

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