Serving the New Humanity

How do we experience our own humanity in contemporary cultural contexts? The answers are contextual and therefore they are varied, but there are themes that emerge.

It is no longer comprehensible for rising generations to imagine being human apart from our interconnectedness with all of creation; from entangled life of fungi and plants to the ecosystems that we depend on for food and nurture, to the rapidly changing climate that threats the entirety of earthly life. What was once a perspective associated with primal cultures is now both available to, and demanded of all cultures. 

A theological anthropology that privileges humans in its understanding of soteriology, that cannot comprehend in a new way that all creation groans for the revealing of the children of God, has become worthless. It has nothing meaningful to say to contemporary humans whose lives are intimately entangled with all living creatures and immediately threatened by global warming. 

It is no longer comprehensible for rising generations to imagine being human solely in relation to physical embodiment and physical proximity to other humans. We have always been conscious that there are other humans beyond our sight and voice. Now the global communications revolution taking place for over 100 years is accelerating into the creation of virtual worlds where people meet avatar to avatar regardless of physical distance. This is changing our understanding of embodiment. 

A similar change is taking place as bio-technology has begun to make it possible to replace increasingly complex parts of our body. Whether such parts are purely mechanical, or bio-mechanical (I have such a part keeping me alive) or purely biological (borrowed or grown) we live between the possibilities of the VR avatar and Robocop. At the leading edge of our technology we imagine new possibilities for embodiment, eternal life, and the ends for which humans should live. 

A theological anthropology parroting naive language about the sins of the flesh and the resurrection of the body cannot possibly convey in our time the meaning of God's self-revelation in Jesus Christ; either of his death on the cross or his resurrection from the dead. 

It is no longer comprehensible for rising generations to imagine being human apart from the processes of humanization and dehumanization not merely mediated by, but arising within society. One of many byproducts of centuries of modern genocide is the realization that humans in relationship to one another are the bearers and keepers of their own humanity. Facile references to humanity, or human rights, as a gift from God simply do not reflect contemporary human experience. 

From the enslavement of peoples in the 17th century to the present, to the genocide of indigenous peoples in the Americas, to the Holocaust, to the shocking levels of gun violence and murder in the United States our human experience is that God declines to act directly to protect humans or their humanity. We can fantasize that God's action is somehow hidden within the witness of the Church or some particularly pious individuals. But for contemporary persons such fantasies lack credibility in light of a history of Christian complicity in inhumanity. It isn't credible to say that humans were "endowed by their creator" with human rights when the religions and religious leaders who supposedly know that creator never recognized those rights.

More credible is to recognize outright that in God's providence it is humans as humans who must recognize and offer one another humanity or there will be no humanity. God endowed us with each other. We find our humanity between us as humans in our human societies or we do not find it all. But perhaps this is what Jesus is trying to tell us in Matthew 25:31-46.

It is no longer comprehensible for rising generations to imagine being human apart from a context of multiple cultures, religions, and languages. One would be hard pressed to find a human alive today that isn't involved in regular interactions with persons of a different cultural backgrounds and languages; interactions that shape both subtly and profoundly their self-understanding. It is that diversity that shapes our experience of being human and thus becomes a critical element of our contemporary self-understanding. Diversity shapes us even when we find it uncomfortable and threatening. 

A credible theological anthropology must not only account for cultural diversity, but place it squarely within God's providence as a positive contribution to our humanity. Otherwise we destroy ourselves in the pursuit of a cultural purity God never intended.

Moreover our interconnections make us profoundly aware that humanity is inescapably global, and that any conversation about what it means to be human that isn’t global in nature is inevitably deficient. There are no geographical monopolies on wisdom, insight, and truth.

And finally it is no longer comprehensible to imagine being human apart from the diversity of understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality characteristic of the human experience of being human in relation to other humans. Even if one identifies oneself as a cis-gendered male, as I do, this very identification acknowledges the reality of others who are not. That persons regard themselves as lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, trans-sexual, queer, and other inculturated articulations of difference is a fact in our self-knowledge that cannot be un-known by denial, any more than we can un-know that people speak different languages than our own and live out different cultural ways of being human. For the contemporary person the denial of a diversity of sexes, genders, sexualities, and cultural ways of understanding the same is to deny one's own experience of being human within that diversity. 

Moreover, the rise of an historical consciousness coupled with rapid social change creates in us an awareness that the ways in which we inhabit our sex, gender, and sexuality have changed over time. I am not, and cannot be, a cis-gendered male in the say way as my grandfather or great grandfather. And this recognition of change extends to culture, language, social structures, and religion. 

A theological anthropology that cannot account for diversity in the present and over time cannot and should not be taken seriously. 

What this requires of theological education, the preparation of Christian leaders, is a shift  away from an emphasis on hermeneutics as the science of interpreting texts and traditions from one culture into another. We need an emphasis on dialogue and dialogical approaches that engage the ongoing process of contextualization of the gospel toward a fulfillment that is always eschatological rather than historical. 

In contemporary theological education hermeneutics should be preparatory to the learning the processes of intercultural dialogue. The student as student should be drawn into those processes in preparation for becoming a leader who leads a congregation into that process as it continues to be realized in their life with the world. 

It is no accident that Jesus' promise to be with his disciples until the end of the age follows directly on his sending them into mission among the nations of the earth. It is no accident that the Spirit of Christ is manifest most cogently and powerfully when the disciples are gathered among the nations of the earth, and when they then go out to continue the mission of Jesus to serve humanity. 

To return to the beginning of these three posts, the proper study of humans is humans. And the proper study of God begins with the study of humans and their self-understanding. Because God is Emmanuel, and we find God where God has made God's self known.