Theological Education and Emerging Anthropologies

The central message of the gospel is that God incarnate in Jesus Christ makes possible the restoration of our humanity.

How that message is received, understood, and articulated within each culture will depend upon that culture’s understanding of what it means to be human. While the understanding of what it means to be human may be placed in religious context, understanding a culture’s anthropology as more important that understandings its theology for communicating the gospel message. 

As importantly, it is in the anthropology of a culture that we will find God revealing God’s self within the culture. In the order of creation narrated in scripture God reveals to the first humans the natural order that includes themselves, their relation to that order, and their relationship to one another before God reveals God's own nature. Natural revelation, both in relation to the non-human and social orders precedes the special revelation by which God reveals specifically what it means to be human in relation to God.

This is ratified by the Incarnation, through which we learn that we cannot know God as God until we are restored to our true human selves by God incarnate as a human. Jesus' teaching and works, which focus entirely on restoring humanity, are one with his self-hood: making it possible to grasp that God is love. The disciples that would worship Jesus as the Christ would first know him as a human, and will naturally articulate the meaning of his divinity in terms of their how culture's understanding of humanity.

Because of its long history within the family of cultures called “The West,” and its formative role in shaping those cultures, the Christian theological interest in anthropology has primarily been in articulating the anthropology presumed to be found in scripture and continued in Western culture. Understanding how cultures outside the West construct the human person has primarily been a problem for missiology. And typically missiologists have been concerned with how the gospel addresses and reforms the presumed-to-be-inadequate anthropologies of those cultures.

The distinction between a supposedly normative Christian theological anthropology arising from what is sometimes called a “Christian” worldview and those anthropologies found in the diversity of non-Western cultures engaged by the gospel has always been problematic.

The central truth of Incarnation cannot help but be articulated within a particular culture’s anthropology, including those of 1st century Palestinian Judaism and later Greece and Rome. There is no identifiable Christian anthropology apart from that of the cultural environment into which Jesus was born and the first cultural environment into which it spread. Unless we take the fact of his birth as validating that worldview as normative and universal, which itself has little support in scripture, theological anthropology is inevitably a form of contextual theology.

Unfortunately the bitter fight with modernity waged by Christian evangelicals has led them to normalize this contextual theology and thus defend what they call a "Christian worldview." The superficial resemblance of this worldview with those of other non-modern cultures has then bolstered their claims that the so-called "Christian worldview" is actually universal, with modernity representing a dolorous deviation that must be corrected.  It is an approach as misguided as that of theologians in the liberal tradition that assume the ultimate universalization of the modern.

We now find that the anthropological consensus in Western culture is dissolving under the impacts of: 1. Growing cultural diversity in Europe and North America, 2. Rapid advances in the scientific understanding of the human person and, 3. Technological advances that introduce new possibilities for engagement among humans and between humans and machines. Moreover the process of globalization of Christianity, recognized as having taken place from the beginning, and which is now accelerating, challenges all claims from the West to possess or ever have possessed a normative anthropology. Global Christianity has multiple anthropologies, and from within each the gospel of God incarnate is necessarily understood in different ways.

This means that for theological education the missiological challenge to identify and relate the gospel to a diversity of cultures has become a central feature of the ministry of the church, and thus the pastoral leaders of the church. Standard curricula that place missiology or mission studies as a peripheral concern while continuing to privilege Western forms of theological anthropology are becoming increasingly ineffective in preparing men and women for ministry. Instead students need to be taught to analyze both their own culture and other emerging cultures (not least that of the emergent 2nd Machine age) in order to understand the fundamental meaning of Incarnation and how it is leads to the restoration of the fullness of human life.

Indeed, to go further, we must realize that a concern with philosophical theology, metaphysics, and systematic theology are  a product of a particular western and now modern cultural context, and indeed more specifically the culture of the intellectual elites who early on took control of the Christian church and imposed their particular interests on its theological endeavors. Which isn't to say they are irrelevant. They coincide with the cultural values of the rising educated middle class within which Methodism made its home in the 20th century and were thus a legitimate form of inculturation.

But even that culture is changing, and theological education must reckon with those changes or grow irrelevant.

In short, today and in the foreseeable future missiology as the basic inquiry into cultural context and how it influences the gospel need to take precedence over other forms of inquiry in seeking to articulate the meaning of the gospel in any and every particular place and time. They are the foundation of a theological education, for they alone provide a basis for comprehending how God's self-revelation in nature and society prepares for  God's special revelation in the contemporary world of ministry.