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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

      Bibliography

      José Comblin, Retrieving the Human: A Christian Anthropology.

      Edward Farley, Good and Evil.

      Catherine Keller, From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and Self.

      James Nelson, Embodiment.

      Wolfhart Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective.

      Cross-Reference: Alienation, Black Theology, Christology, Creation, Embodiment, Eschatology, Feminist Theology, Freedom, Institutionalized Violence, Kingdom of God, Liberation Theology–Latin American, Sin, Society, Soteriology

      APOCALYPTIC THEOLOGY

      Eschatology treats Christian ideas about the future of humanity. Early Christians considered two types of eschatology. One, prophetic eschatology, emphasized the work of God through the faithful under the banners of peace and justice to transform societies and nations. A second, apocalyptic eschatology, focused on the action of God apart from human efforts to evoke a spiritual transformation beyond this world.

      Early Christianity was strongly apocalyptic; in particular, Paul emphasized the intervention of God in human history, especially at its end. As history moved forward, and the divine transformation of life did not occur, the church

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