Christian Anthropology Quotes

It is theologically and anthropologically important for woman to be at the center of Christianity. Through Mary, and the other holy women, the feminine element stands at the heart of the Christian religion.

Spontaneously, without any theological training, I, a child, grasped the incompatibility of God and shit and thus came to question the basic thesis of Christian anthropology, namely that man was created in God's image. Either/or: either man was created in God's image - and has intestines! - or God lacks intestines and man is not like him. The ancient Gnostics felt as I did at the age of five. In the second century, the Great Gnostic master Valentinus resolved the damnable dilemma by claiming that Jesus "ate and drank, but did not defecate." Shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil. Since God gave man freedom, we can, if need be, accept the idea that He is not responsible for man's crimes. The responsibility for shit, however, rests entirely with Him, the creator of man.

When man banishes God and his neighbour from his heart, he loses his sovereignty over God’s creation, bestowed on him by virtue of his likeness to God. In other words, he fails in what he has been designed for – to oversee the world with justice and, being enlarged by the spirit of prophecy, to bring all creation to God.

The popular idea that Christianity says “human nature” is inherently bad is actually the opposite of what the earliest Christian theologians believed.

For Paul the cross is the place where our new identity is formed; it is the great intersection between anthropology and theology.

Cod became almost a religious icon - a mythological crusader for Christian observance.

All arguments between the traditional scientific view of man as organism, a locus of needs and drives, and a Christian view of man as a spiritual being not only unresolvable at the present level of discourse but are also profoundly boring...From the scientific view at least, a new model of man is needed, something other than man conceived as a locus of bio-psycho-sociological needs and drives. Such an anthropological model might be provided by semiotics, that is, the study of man as the sign-using creature and, specifically, the study of the self and consciousness as derivatives of the sign-function.

It would be well if all who call themselves Christians, should learn that it is not their business to believe and teach what they may think true or right, but what God in his Holy Word has seen fit to reveal.

All the three monotheist religions (Jewish, Christianity and Islam)claim that their God (Yahweh, God and Allah) created humans in a similar way: this indicates that creationist have not yet established the creator.

It appears now to be universally admitted that, before the exile, the Israelites had no belief in rewards and punishments after death, nor in anything similar to the Christian heaven and hell; but our story proves that it would be an error to suppose that they did not believe in the continuance of individual existence after death by a ghostly simulacrum of life. Nay, I think it would be very hard to produce conclusive evidence that they disbelieved in immortality; for I am not aware that there is anything to show that they thought the existence of the souls of the dead in Sheol ever came to an end. But they do not seem to have conceived that the condition of the souls in Sheol was in any way affected by their conduct in life. If there was immortality, there was no state of retribution in their theology. Samuel expects Saul and his sons to come to him in Sheol.

The impact of philosophical pluralism on Western culture is incalculable. It touches virtually every discipline—history, art, literature, anthropology, education, philosophy, psychology, the social sciences, even, increasingly, the “hard” sciences—but it has already achieved popularity in the public square, even when its existence is not recognized. It achieves its greatest victory in redefining religious pluralism so as to render heretical the idea that heresy is possible.

Man’s mortality is therefore a phenomenon that runs counter to his nature in that it opposes that for which he has been designed. This is precisely why the human soul is restless: if life leads only to death, then nothing can ever be meaningful.

Economic relationships do not operate on value-neutral laws, but are rather carriers of specific convictions about the nature of the human person - the person's origins and destiny. There is an implicit anthropology and an implicit theology in every economics.

We have been taught, both inside the classroom and outside of it, that there exists an entity called the West, and that one can think of this West as a society and civilization independent of and in opposition to other societies and civilizations. Many of us even grew up believing that this West has a genealogy, according to which ancient Greece begat Rome, Rome begat Christian Europe, Christian Europe begat the Renaissance, the Renaissance the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment political democracy and the industrial revolution. Industry, crossed with democracy, in turn yielded the United States, embodying the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

When we suffer tribulation, pain or illness in our life, we must remember to pour out our heart out to God rather than seek human consolation by going from one person to another and talking about it. This might give us some psychological consolation, but we lose all the tension of life, that energy of pain which is so precious when we direct it towards God.

The individual to whom one ascribes “a strong personality” merely presents a particular mixture of natural elements, with certain prominent traits. Despite these salient traits, such a person ultimately creates only the impression of déjà vu. A saint is striking because of a countenance unique in the world, because of a light that is always ultimately personal. He or she has never been seen before.

the Platonized eschatology so popular over many centuries (how will my soul get to heaven?) has played host to a moralized anthropology (what’s to be done about my sin?), generating a quasi-pagan soteriology (God killed Jesus instead of punishing me).11 This has been assumed to be what Paul was saying in these letters. More specifically, when people express “faith” in this line of thought, they are assured that they are therefore forgiven and heaven-bound. This, it has been assumed, is what Paul meant by “justification.” One can see a low-grade version of this when young persons, moved by a sermon or perhaps by an apologetic argument, say a prayer of Christian commitment and are thereupon informed that they are now “justified by faith,” that they are therefore going to heaven, and that they must not try to supplement this pure, justifying “faith” either with moral effort or with religious ritual.

Because of this Christian materialism, a catholic postmodernism (or postmodern catholicity) affirms sacramentality on two levels. On the one hand, it affirms a general sacramentality: the whole world has potential to function as a window to God and a means of grace from God because God himself affirms materiality as a good thing. We see this not only in creation itself but also in the reaffirmation of it in the incarnation, in which God is happy to inhabit the goodness of flesh. Furthermore, materiality receives an eschatological affirmation in our hope for the resurrection of the body. Even the future kingdom will be a material environment of sacramentality. On the other hand, when an incarnational ontology and anthropology are linked with our earlier affirmation of time and tradition, a catholic postmodernism also affirms a special sacramentality - a special presence and means of grace in the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist.

Real humility has nothing to do with creating in myself a low self-image or making myself feel guilty. It means recognizing that all my talents and virtues are gifts from God, gifts for which I am profoundly thankful. These gifts are entrusted to me so I can share them with people around me. I also share in their gifts, for which I am thankful to those people and to God. Real humility is also a recognition in practice that God loves each of my neighbors just as he loves me, so each one is invaluable.

To me, who first approached Christianity from a delighted interest in, and reverence for, the best pagan imagination, who loved Balder before Christ and Plato before St. Augustine, the anthropological argument against Christianity has never been formidable. On the contrary, I could not believe Christianity if I were forced to say that there were a thousand religions in the world of which 999 were pure nonsense and the thousandth (fortunately) true. My conversion, very largely, depended on recognizing Christianity as the completion, the actualization, the entelechy, of something that had never been wholly absent from the mind of man.

Political economist and sociologist Max Weber famously spoke of the “disenchantment of the world,” as rationalization and science led Europe and America into modern industrial society, pushing back religion and all “magical” theories about reality. Now we are witnessing the disenchantment of the self. One of the many dangers in this process is that if we remove the magic from our image of ourselves, we may also remove it from our image of others. We could become disenchanted with one another. Our image of Homo sapiens underlies our everyday practice and culture; it shapes the way we treat one another as well as how we subjectively experience ourselves. In Western societies, the Judeo-Christian image of humankind—whether you are a believer or not—has secured a minimal moral consensus in everyday life. It has been a major factor in social cohesion. Now that the neurosciences have irrevocably dissolved the Judeo-Christian image of a human being as containing an immortal spark of the divine, we are beginning to realize that they have not substituted anything that could hold society together and provide a common ground for shared moral intuitions and values. An anthropological and ethical vacuum may well follow on the heels of neuroscientific findings. This is a dangerous situation. One potential scenario is that long before neuroscientists and philosophers have settled any of the perennial issues—for example, the nature of the self, the freedom of the will, the relationship between mind and brain, or what makes a person a person—a vulgar materialism might take hold. More and more people will start telling themselves: “I don’t understand what all these neuroexperts and consciousness philosophers are talking about, but the upshot seems pretty clear to me. The cat is out of the bag: We are gene-copying bio- robots, living out here on a lonely planet in a cold and empty physical universe. We have brains but no immortal souls, and after seventy years or so the curtain drops. There will never be an afterlife, or any kind of reward or punishment for anyone, and ultimately everyone is alone. I get the message, and you had better believe I will adjust my behavior to it. It would probably be smart not to let anybody know I’ve seen through the game.

Among the most virulent of all such cultural parasite-equivalents is the religion-based denial of organic evolution. About one-half of Americans (46 percent in 2013, up from 44 percent in 1980), most of whom are evangelical Christians, together with a comparable fraction of Muslims worldwide, believe that no such process has ever occurred. As Creationists, they insist that God created humankind and the rest of life in one to several magical mega-strokes. Their minds are closed to the overwhelming mass of factual demonstrations of evolution, which is increasingly interlocked across every level of biological organization from molecules to ecosystem and the geography of biodiversity. They ignore, or more precisely they call it virtue to remain ignorant of, ongoing evolution observed in the field and even traced to the genes involved. Also looked past are new species created in the laboratory. To Creationists, evolution is at best just an unproven theory. To a few, it is an idea invented by Satan and transmitted through Darwin and later scientists in order to mislead humanity. When I was a small boy attending an evangelical church in Florida, I was taught that the secular agents of Satan are extremely bright and determined, but liars all, man and woman, and so no matter what I heard I must stick my fingers in my ears and hold fast to the true faith. We are all free in a democracy to believe whatever we wish, so why call any opinion such as Creationism a virulent cultural parasite-equivalent? Because it represents a triumph of blind religious faith over carefully tested fact. It is not a conception of reality forged by evidence and logical judgment. Instead, it is part of the price of admission to a religious tribe. Faith is the evidence given of a person’s submission to a particular god, and even then not to the deity directly but to other humans who claim to represent the god. The cost to society as a whole of the bowed head has been enormous. Evolution is a fundamental process of the Universe, not just in living organisms but everywhere, at every level. Its analysis is vital to biology, including medicine, microbiology, and agronomy. Furthermore psychology, anthropology, and even the history of religion itself make no sense without evolution as the key component followed through the passage of time. The explicit denial of evolution presented as a part of a “creation science” is an outright falsehood, the adult equivalent of plugging one’s ears, and a deficit to any society that chooses to acquiesce in this manner to a fundamentalist faith.

The so-called 'condemnation of Origen' by 'the Church' in the sixth century probably never occurred proper, and even if it occurred it did so only as a result of a long series of misunderstandings, when the anthropological, eschatological, and psychological questions were no longer felt as open to investigation – as Origen and still Nazaianzen considered them – but dogmatically established. The aforementioned condemnation was in fact a condemnation, not at all of Origen, but rather of a late and exasperated form of Origenism; moreover, it was mainly wanted by emperor Justinian – or better his counselors, given that he was not a theologian – and only partially, or even not at all, ratified by ecclesiastical representatives. This 'condemnation' was triggered by the development of a radical kind of Origenism in the first half of the sixth century, especially in Palestine, in the monasteries of St. Saba, the 'Great Laura' and 'New Laura' […]. (pp. 724-725)

My hypothesis is mimetic: because humans imitate one another more than animals, they have had to find a means of dealing with contagious similarity, which could lead to the pure and simple disappearance of their society. The mechanism that reintroduces difference into a situation in which everyone has come to resemble everyone else is sacrifice. Humanity results from sacrifice; we are thus the children of religion. What I call after Freud the founding murder, in other words, the immolation of a sacrificial victim that is both guilty of disorder and able to restore order, is constantly re-enacted in the rituals at the origin of our institutions. Since the dawn of humanity, millions of innocent victims have been killed in this way in order to enable their fellow humans to live together, or at least not to destroy one another. This is the implacable logic of the sacred, which myths dissimulate less and less as humans become increasingly self-aware. The decisive point in this evolution is Christian revelation, a kind of divine expiation in which God through his Son could be seen as asking for forgiveness from humans for having revealed the mechanisms of their violence so late. Rituals had slowly educated them; from then on, humans had to do without. Christianity demystifies religion. Demystification, which is good in the absolute, has proven bad in the relative, for we were not prepared to shoulder its consequences. We are not Christian enough. The paradox can be put a different way. Christianity is the only religion that has foreseen its own failure. This prescience is known as the apocalypse. Indeed, it is in the apocalyptic texts that the word of God is most forceful, repudiating mistakes that are entirely the fault of humans, who are less and less inclined to acknowledge the mechanisms of their violence. The longer we persist in our error, the stronger God’s voice will emerge from the devastation. […] The Passion unveiled the sacrificial origin of humanity once and for all. It dismantled the sacred and revealed its violence. […] By accepting crucifixion, Christ brought to light what had been ‘hidden since the foundation of the world,’ in other words, the foundation itself, the unanimous murder that appeared in broad daylight for the first time on the cross. In order to function, archaic religions need to hide their founding murder, which was being repeated continually in ritual sacrifices, thereby protecting human societies from their own violence. By revealing the founding murder, Christianity destroyed the ignorance and superstition that are indispensable to such religions. It thus made possible an advance in knowledge that was until then unimaginable. […] A scapegoat remains effective as long as we believe in its guilt. Having a scapegoat means not knowing that we have one. Learning that we have a scapegoat is to lose it forever and to expose ourselves to mimetic conflicts with no possible resolution. This is the implacable law of the escalation to extremes. The protective system of scapegoats is finally destroyed by the Crucifixion narratives as they reveal Jesus’ innocence, and, little by little, that of all analogous victims. The process of education away from violent sacrifice is thus underway, but it is going very slowly, making advances that are almost always unconscious. […] Mimetic theory does not seek to demonstrate that myth is null, but to shed light on the fundamental discontinuity and continuity between the passion and archaic religion. Christ’s divinity which precedes the Crucifixion introduces a radical rupture with the archaic, but Christ’s resurrection is in complete continuity with all forms of religion that preceded it. The way out of archaic religion comes at this price. A good theory about humanity must be based on a good theory about God. […] We can all participate in the divinity of Christ so long as we renounce our own violence.

In marked contrast to the relaxed, typically Latin attitude of the Dominicans the Protestant missionaries were still proceeding at full blast with the fight for souls. These North American evangelists of strictly fundamentalist inclination combined in a curious fashion strict adhesion to the literal meaning of the Old Testament With mastery of the most modern technology. Most of them came from small towns in the Bible Belt, armed with unshakably clear consciences and a rudimentary smattering of theology, convinced that they alone were the repositories of Christian values now abolished elsewhere. Totally ignorant of the vast world, despite their transplantation, and taking the few articles of morality accepted in the rural Amenca of their childhoods to be a universal credo, they strove bravely to spread these principles of salvation all around them. Their rustic faith was well served by a flotilla of light aircraft, a powerful radio, an ultra-modern hospital and four-wheel-drive vehicles -- in short, all the equipment that a battalion of crusaders dropped behind enemy lines needed.

It is in the ‘other world’ of the Divine Liturgy that we are supremely enabled to see Christ. In the Holy Eucharist we are captivated by the vision of Him Who, being rich, for our sakes became poor that through His poverty we might become rich (cf. 2 Cor. 8:9), through Him Who laid down His life that we might live for ever (cf. John 10:15; 4:9). All those things that are uttered, prayed for, and performed in the Divine Liturgy dispose our souls to hatred of our sinfulness, our fallen state, and we feel the need to humble ourselves before the supreme Image of meekness and love Who is depicted for us in the Eucharist. The Divine Liturgy should unfailingly stir up in us the desire for repentance, the desire to amend our lives. We also encounter Christ when our hearts receive His word. When we read the Holy Scriptures, a little phrase often comes to life within us, generating in us the desire for repentance. We know from the lives of the saints that a single word can be enough to make one flee into the desert, strengthened for the work of repentance, and finally to become great in the sight of God. Such was the case of St. Anthony, who heard the Gospel read during the Divine Liturgy: ‘Go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me’ (Matt. 19:21), and promptly left for the desert so as to apply it, and then became like a god among the Desert Fathers.

MSB: The triumph of Christ marks the culmination of your work from a thematic point of view. But in the world itself, it also marks the culmination of the long journey of human violence. RG: I think that Saint Paul's letters, particularly Romans and Corinthians, have the form of a mimetic spiral. Everything we've been talking about constitutes a sort of exegesis of what Paul had to say about the centrality of the Cross. The Cross is not only knowledge of God, but first and foremost an understanding of mankind. Paul was perfectly aware of this. It seems to me essential that the notion of the crucified Christ as “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:23) be examined more closely. I had thought that Jacob Taubes, in his book on Paul's political theology, would develop this idea, but he never really gets around to it.6 MSB: Your acquaintance with Paul seems to have deepened over the years. RG: I hope it has. In a way it is rather recent. I have come to better understand Paul through reading and talking with Protestants. Most Catholics speak mainly of the Gospels. Protestants, on the other hand, speak mainly of Saint Paul; they consider Saint Paul's letters to be the primary Christian documents. I would find nothing more interesting than to write on the relationship between Protestantism and Catholicism. True ecumenicism would be exactly this, understanding what the Gospels and Saint Paul fundamentally have in common. The anthropological interpretation of Satan offers an opportunity for going further in this direction, it seems to me. MSB

Palo Mayombe is perhaps best known for its display of human skulls in iron cauldrons and accompanied by necromantic practices that contribute to its eerie reputation of being a cult of antinomian and hateful sorcerers. This murky reputation is from time to time reinforced by uninformed journalists and moviemakers who present Palo Mayombe in similar ways as Vodou has been presented through the glamour and horror of Hollywood. It is the age old fear of the unknown and of powers that threaten the established order that are spawned from the umbra of Palo Mayombe. The cult is marked by ambivalence replicating an intense spectre of tension between all possible contrasts, both spiritual and social. This is evident both in the history of Kongo inspired sorcery and practices as well as the tension between present day practitioners and the spiritual conclaves of the cult. Palo Mayombe can be seen either as a religion in its own right or a Kongo inspired cult. This distinction perhaps depends on the nature of ones munanso (temple) and rama (lineage). Personally, I see Palo Mayombe as a religious cult of Creole Sorcery developed in Cuba. The Kongolese heritage derives from several different and distinct regions in West Africa that over time saw a metamorphosis of land, cultures and religions giving Palo Mayombe a unique expression in its variety, but without losing its distinct nucleus. In the history of Palo Mayombe we find elite families of Kongolese aristocracy that contributed to shaping African history and myth, conflicts between the Kongolese and explorers, with the Trans-Atlantic slave trade being the blood red thread in its development. The name Palo Mayombe is a reference to the forest and nature of the Mayombe district in the upper parts of the deltas of the Kongo River, what used to be the Kingdom of Loango. For the European merchants, whether sent by the Church to convert the people or by a king greedy for land and natural resources, everything south of present day Nigeria to the beginning of the Kalahari was simply Kongo. This un-nuanced perception was caused by the linguistic similarities and of course the prejudice towards these ‘savages’ and their ‘primitive’ cultures. To write a book about Palo Mayombe is a delicate endeavor as such a presentation must be sensitive both to the social as well as the emotional memory inherited by the religion. I also consider it important to be true to the fundamental metaphysical principles of the faith if a truthful presentation of the nature of Palo Mayombe is to be given. The few attempts at presenting Palo Mayombe outside ethnographic and anthropological dissertations have not been very successful. They have been rather fragmented attempts demonstrating a lack of sensitivity not only towards the cult itself, but also its roots. Consequently a poor understanding of Palo Mayombe has been offered, often borrowing ideas and concepts from Santeria and Lucumi to explain what is a quite different spirituality. I am of the opinion that Palo Mayombe should not be explained on the basis of the theological principles of Santeria. Santeria is Yoruba inspired and not Kongo inspired and thus one will often risk imposing concepts on Palo Mayombe that distort a truthful understanding of the cult. To get down to the marrow; Santeria is a Christianized form of a Yoruba inspired faith – something that should make the great differences between Santeria and Palo Mayombe plain. Instead, Santeria is read into Palo Mayombe and the cult ends up being presented at best in a distorted form. I will accordingly refrain from this form of syncretism and rather present Palo Mayombe as a Kongo inspired cult of Creole Sorcery that is quite capable

the Cook expedition had another, far less benign result. Cook was not only an experienced seaman and geographer, but also a naval officer. The Royal Society financed a large part of the expedition’s expenses, but the ship itself was provided by the Royal Navy. The navy also seconded eighty-five well-armed sailors and marines, and equipped the ship with artillery, muskets, gunpowder and other weaponry. Much of the information collected by the expedition – particularly the astronomical, geographical, meteorological and anthropological data – was of obvious political and military value. The discovery of an effective treatment for scurvy greatly contributed to British control of the world’s oceans and its ability to send armies to the other side of the world. Cook claimed for Britain many of the islands and lands he ‘discovered’, most notably Australia. The Cook expedition laid the foundation for the British occupation of the south-western Pacific Ocean; for the conquest of Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand; for the settlement of millions of Europeans in the new colonies; and for the extermination of their native cultures and most of their native populations.2 In the century following the Cook expedition, the most fertile lands of Australia and New Zealand were taken from their previous inhabitants by European settlers. The native population dropped by up to 90 per cent and the survivors were subjected to a harsh regime of racial oppression. For the Aborigines of Australia and the Maoris of New Zealand, the Cook expedition was the beginning of a catastrophe from which they have never recovered. An even worse fate befell the natives of Tasmania. Having survived for 10,000 years in splendid isolation, they were completely wiped out, to the last man, woman and child, within a century of Cook’s arrival. European settlers first drove them off the richest parts of the island, and then, coveting even the remaining wilderness, hunted them down and killed them systematically. The few survivors were hounded into an evangelical concentration camp, where well-meaning but not particularly open-minded missionaries tried to indoctrinate them in the ways of the modern world. The Tasmanians were instructed in reading and writing, Christianity and various ‘productive skills’ such as sewing clothes and farming. But they refused to learn. They became ever more melancholic, stopped having children, lost all interest in life, and finally chose the only escape route from the modern world of science and progress – death. Alas,

Having fallen prey to the intellectualism of modernity, both Christian worship and Christian pedagogy have underestimated the importance of this body/story nexus—this inextricable link between imagination, narrative, and embodiment—thereby forgetting the ancient Christian sacramental wisdom carried in the historic practices of Christian worship and the embodied legacies of spiritual and monastic disciplines. Failing to appreciate this, we have neglected formational resources that are indigenous to the Christian tradition, as it were; as a result, we have too often pursued flawed models of discipleship and Christian formation that have focused on convincing the intellect rather than recruiting the imagination. Moreover, because of this neglect and our stunted anthropology, we have failed to recognize the degree and extent to which secular liturgies do implicitly capitalize on our embodied penchant for storied formation. This becomes a way to account for Christian assimilation to consumerism, nationalism, and various stripes of egoisms. These isms have had all the best embodied stories. The devil has had all the best liturgies.

The biblical God could not have dispersed men except in view of a positive good (for them) …What good? …traditionally for all cultures, evil mean separation—dia-bolos –while unity always declared itself as a good. …There is an anthropology detectable in the biblical text, an anthropology that through the centuries remained that of Christian civilization. An answer to the question can be drawn from it. In this anthropology man is viewed as a being who becomes, who is never fully completed but is always coming to be. In other words, he is a being with a beginning and a finality. …His true dream is not directed toward that which is here below. In this earthly realm, therefore, a “perfect” unity could only be a false unity.

Of all the great and minor faiths as religions that have evolved over the ages with humanity. Many had their birth at the death or near death of another religious faith. One day the anthropological phenomena of our predominant faiths may become naturally forgotten, demonized, if not morph into another religious tradition altogether. What we historically call as mythology is for Ancient Greece, Persia, or Mayan cultures were the Almighty religions of their age. So it will be again with our Epoch from today our renowned and accomplished heirs of thousands of years into our combined futures. That will have regarded our present day Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as mythologies of their own future anthropological understanding.

When a person converts to Christianity, he or she not only enters a relationship with Christ and inherits eternal life, but also adopts a worldview—a set of lenses through which to view the world. Other critical worldview questions include What is real? (metaphysics); How do we know that which we know? (epistemology); What happens to a person after death? Where is history going? and What kind of a thing is a person? (anthropology). For more discussion on the subject of one’s worldview, see James W. Sire, The Universe Next Door, 4th ed. (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2004); J. P. Moreland, Love Your God with All Your Mind (Colorado Springs: Nav-Press, 1998); and Nancy Pearcey and Phillip E. Johnson, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity (Wheaton: Crossway, 2001).

Vattimo is very different from Heidegger, and he clearly understands the importance and the centrality of Christian belief in defining the destiny of Western culture and civilization, and in fact at the end he dwells on the notion of agape as the result of the anti-metaphysical revolution of Christianity.40 However, it seems to me that there is a problem in his religious perspective because he does not place enough emphasis on the Cross. As I recently wrote, he sees only interpretations in human history and no facts.41 He aligns himself with the post-Nietzschean tradition in claiming the nonviability of any historical ‘truth’ and confining the novelty of Christianity to a purely discursive level. For him Christianity is mainly a textual experience, which we only believe in because somebody whom we trust and love told us to do so.42 Although this is a concept which is quite close to the idea of ‘positive internal mediation’, as proposed by Fornari, there is no grounding, no point of departure in this long chain of good imitation; or at least it is a loose one: the book, that, according to a strict hermeneutical approach, can be subject to any possible interpretation. Paul says that the only things he knows are Jesus Christ and him crucified (1 Corinthians 2.2), and this seems to me to be an indirect answer to Vattimo: one can deconstruct any form of mythical or ideological ‘truth’, but not the Cross, the actual death of the Son of God. That is the centre around which our culture rotates and from which it has evolved. Why should the world have changed if that event did not convey a radical and fundamental anthropological truth to the human being? God provided the text, but also the hermeneutical key with which to read it: the Cross. The two cannot be separated.

Is the mimetic mechanism the original sin? Yes, of course. The original sin is the bad use of mimesis, and the mimetic mechanism is the actual consequence of this use at the collective level. Usually, people don’t see the mimetic mechanism, even when they can identify all sorts of rivalries which are at the base of the development of this very mechanism. The mimetic mechanism produces a complex form of transcendence, which plays a very important role in the dynamic stability of archaic society and therefore one cannot condemn it from an anthropological and sociological standpoint, because it is necessary for the survival and development of humanity. It can be defined as the ‘social transcendence’ in Durkheim’s terms, or the idolatrous transcendence from the point of view of the Judaeo-Christian perspective. It is an illusory and idolatrous form of sacred that, nonetheless, can protect the archaic human community from greater and more disruptive forms of violence. It is what Paul says also regarding powers and principalities,6 meaning the secular powers of this world: they are doomed, and they are going to disappear very quickly, but he doesn’t condemn them in a self-righteous way, he does not demand that they are destroyed with violence, and one has simply to submit to their authority.7 The archaic sacred is ‘Satanic’ when there is nothing to channel it and to keep it at bay, and social institutions are there to do precisely this job, until the Kingdom of God will finally triumph.

Ultimately, archaic religion and Christianity are structurally similar because man, even at the most archaic level, has always worshipped his own innocent victims, without being aware of it. This is, the unity of religion lies: it centres on the worshipping of the victim. The God of Christianity isn’t the violent God of archaic religion, but the non-violent God who willingly becomes a victim in order to free us from our violence. The evidence is all there under our eyes and we don’t have to resort to theology to understand it, for it is purely anthropological. The discovery of his innocence is unwelcome because it coincides inevitably with the discovery of our guilt. The continuous teaching of Christ’s message through the diffusion of the Gospels is as important as this revelation. It is exactly what transforms the world, not in a sudden and abrupt way, but gradually, through a progressive assimilation of his message, which is often readdressed to be used against Christianity itself with

However, in Jainism there is a system of extensive worshipping of all sorts of deities, which present residual sacrificial elements.23 In Christianity worshipping has been defined in terms of the imitation of Christ, with positive external mediation, which is fundamental to the idea of Christians’ involvement in worldly matters. As a matter of fact, there are historical sources that speak of connections between Jainism and Judaism, which remain underexplored and which are simply fascinating. The most striking evidence is given by Frazer, who reports the presence of versions of the judgement of Solomon, which is so central to Judaeo-Christian tradition, in Jainist texts.24 Although non-violent in nature, Jainism has eventually relapsed into a patriarchal caste system of Hindu Brahmanical heritage which is so widespread in India and which still represents a form of exclusion, of symbolic and actual outcasting.25 This is ‘structural violence’, i.e. radical injustice. Moreover, as was suggested at a recent COV&R meeting, the history of religions and societies in Asia testifies, from a descriptive standpoint, that Hindu and Buddhist cultures and states have not been without violence, as is commonly believed, pretty much in the same way as has happened with historical Christianity.26 What I gathered in that conference is that all these religions are fully aware, from a normative standpoint, of the injustice of violence and I fully acknowledge that the Easter traditions have contributed in making those societies less violent. They know that the human being should withdraw from anger, resentment, envy, violence, but they are not fully aware of the scapegoat mechanism. They know what sacrifice is, and they progressively tried to forbid it. The difference that I see between them and Christianity is that the latter was able to formulate in the Gospels and unmask in a full light the anthropological mechanism of mimetic scapegoating and sacrifice.

Indeed, the two actions are juxtaposed in the same story. This is the crucial point. A similarity is also at stake here. If one must use the term ‘sacrifice’ for the good prostitute, it doesn’t mean that it cannot be used for the other woman as well. Things Hidden was still written from the perspective of anthropology and, therefore, Christianity seems like a kind of ‘supplement’, rather than converting everything to its perspective. Today I would write from the point of view of the Gospels, showing that the Gospels read the bad woman and the bad sacrifice as a metaphor of the old humanity, unable to escape violence without sacrificing others. Christ, through his own sacrifice, frees us from this necessity. We have then to use the word ‘sacrifice’ as self-sacrifice, in the sense of Christ. Then it becomes viable to say that the primitive, the archaic, is prophetic of Christ in its own imperfect way. No greater difference can be found: on the one hand, sacrifice as murder; on the other hand, sacrifice as the readiness to die in order not to participate in sacrifice as murder. These two forms are radically opposed to one another, and yet they are inseparable. There is no non-sacrificial space in between, from which everything could be described from a neutral viewpoint. The moral history of humanity is the shifting from the first to the second meaning, accomplished by Christ but not by humanity, who did everything to escape this dilemma, and above all not to see it.

MT: These texts are at one and the same time very beautiful and obscure; they need to be explicated, clarified. “What is hidden will be revealed.” Why must Revelation be hidden? RG: It's not that it must be hidden, actually it's not hidden at all. It's mankind that is blind. We're inside the closure of representation, everyone is in the fishbowl of his or her culture. In other words, mankind doesn't see what I was saying earlier, the principle of illusion that governs our viewpoint. Even after the Revelation, we still don't understand. MT: Does that mean that things are going to emerge gradually, but that at first they're incomprehensible? RG: They seem incomprehensible because mankind lives under the sign of Satan, lives a lie and lives in fear of the lie, in fear of liars. The reversal performed by the Passion has yet to occur. MT: Insofar as the Church itself has been mistaken for two thousand years and has been practicing a sacrificial reading of the Passion of the Christ, that reading is a way of hiding Revelation. RG: I'm not saying that the Church is mistaken. The reading that I'm proposing is in line with all the great dogmas, but it endows them with an anthropological underpinning that had gone unnoticed. MT: Why not just clean up our bad habits by sweeping them away once and for all in the year zero, making way for an era of love and infinite peace? RG: Because the world wouldn't have been able to take it! Since the sacrificial principle is the fundamental principle of the human order—up to a certain point human beings need to pour out their violence and tensions onto scapegoats—destroying it all at once is impossible. That's why Christianity is made in such a way as to allow for transitions. This is no doubt one of the reasons why it is at once so far from and so close to myth, and always susceptible to being interpreted a bit mythically. When Nietzsche says that Christianity is impossible, that it can only lead to absurdities, to outrageous, insane things, it can be said that he's superficially right, even if ultimately he's wrong. You can't get rid of the sacrificial principle by just flicking it away as if it were a piece of dust. History isn't finished. Every day very interesting things, changes in outlook, are happening right before our eyes. In the United States and everywhere, a lot of current cultural phenomena can be unified by describing them as the discovery of new victims, or rather as their concrete rehabilitation, for in truth we've known about them for a long time: women, children, the elderly, the insane, the physically and mentally handicapped, and so forth. For example, the question of abortion, which has great importance in American debates, is no longer formulated except in the following terms: “Who is the real victim? Is it the child or is it the mother?” You can no longer defend a given position, or indeed any of them, except by making it into a contribution to the anti-victimary crusade. MT

Although Christian thinking on the body is formed by the account in Genesis, of equal if not greater importance is belief in the resurrection of the body. In the form of the "Nicene" creed adopted at the Council of Constantinople, the final clauses read, "We look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come." Christian thinking about human beings oscillates between the beginning and the end, origin and goal. The hope of resurrection led inevitably to the question of whether the body was part of the definition of the self. The bodily resurrection of Jesus was, of course, a matter of biblical history, but it took time for Christian thinkers to draw out the full implications of the Resurrection for Christian anthropology.

However, there are two other sources that can provide evidence for an original monotheism: early scriptures of religions with roots in the ancient world and the anthropological method, the very means by which scholars had attempted to demonstrate an evolution of religion. Virtually every religious culture carries a vestige of monotheism that can be identified as a variation of the nine-point description. And the tribes that are least developed in terms of their overall material culture provide some of the strongest support for original monotheism.

According to the Catholic convert Scheler, people today fled from God because they fled from themselves. So being concerned with religion was not about self-sacrifice or any other loss. Quite the opposite: ‘You gain yourself as a person by losing yourself in God.’ Scheler was convinced that only Christian Socialism was capable of finding a way between the capitalist West and the communist East. In his philosophical anthropology, he stressed the special nature of humankind as ‘co-operator with God’.

The most widely held theory was not actually that religion began with mana but that it started with animism. This theory was defended forcefully by E. B. Tylor and his disciples, such as Andrew Lang. But as Lang was surveying the many anthropological reports about local cultures, specifically those coming out of Australia, he realized that while many tribes lived on an animistic level, there were some who held a belief in a single god, which could not have evolved out of animism.[18] Thus he stipulated that there could be two ways that religion could originate, either with animism, in line with Tylor’s theory, or, as he had just discovered, directly with monotheism. Lang conceded that he could not judge which of these two possibilities might have occurred earlier in time. He was able to show that the monotheism of these cultures was not the result of influence from, say, Christian or Muslim missionaries, and that it was intrinsic to the cultures, but he could not demonstrate that it was the starting point for all of religion, though he was strongly inclined that way. It was at this point that Wilhelm Schmidt put the theory of original monotheism on sound footing. He refined a method called culture-history, which had already been used by other scholars, such as Fritz Graebner (who also did not share Lang’s conclusion). The purpose of culture-history was to identify a chronological sequence among prehistorical cultures, truly an ambitious undertaking, but not an impossible one.

In the Bible, “heart” does not simply describe a human organ that is important for life; it describes, anthropologically, the core of the human person, the

Every philosophy of life will have an anthropology—a stance on what a human is. Do we interpret the human being through the grid of economics and class struggle (Marxism), biology and the struggle to survive (naturalistic Darwinism), or suffering produced by attachment to transitory things (Buddhism)? Are we bundles of experiences, streams of consciousness?

Here are the basic commitments that run behind and through wokeness (or UJP more descriptively): Anthropology: Neo-paganism (no Creator, no creation order, we are our own rulers) Sexual ethics: Compulsive libertinism (we express our desires, and all should approve) Political theology: Marxist Statism (we trust the state to rule us and make things right) Metaphysics: Postmodern Darwinism (evolution explains life with no absolute truth) Theology Proper: Mystic Selfism (we should follow our hearts, not any authority) Soteriology: Therapeuticism/Ritualism (we become our best self by doing the work) Eschatology: Utopian Earth-Centrism (we’ll make the earth right through social justice)

...Seasonality is still with us -- even if it is a pale, contracted shadow of its former self. In the Christian world, for instance, there is still the midwinter ´holiday season´ in which values and forms of organization so, to a limited degree, reverse themselves: the same media and advertisers who for most of the year peddle rabid consumerist individualism suddenly start announcing that social relations are what´s really important, and that to give is better than to receive...

But wokeness overturns these truths. Its fundamental anthropological categories are not the biblical ones of believer or unbeliever, but oppressor or oppressed (“anthropology” means doctrine of humanity, or what makes us human). As we have seen, wokeness renders “white” people as oppressors and people of color as the oppressed. This is true racially, but as we saw in handling intersectionality, these categories apply much more broadly today to “underprivileged” peoples of all kinds. The Marxists first used this pairing of the rich and the poor, reading the former as evil and the latter as innocent. Today, these same identifiers apply along the lines of skin color, weight, the sexes, disability, the police, and more.

Why should evangelicalism embrace anything that carries a theological warning label? Is it wise for evangelical leaders to endorse any type of system that is based on an antithetical theology and anthropology-which Richard Rohr and the authors he influenced have demonstrated in their Enneagram works?

In all its variations, universalistic ethics is therefore characterised by an effacement of the difference between Is and Ought (polemics against this difference between Is and Ought in recent years has not by chance become all the more fierce) as well as by the detachment from empirical anthropology and history. Compared with the classical ethical tradition - from the pre-Socratics up to the Enlightenment via Plato, Aristotle and Christianity - a loss in the content of reality and the sense of reality is to be noted in so far as that tradition started from the fact and from the necessity of the unremitting struggle of Reason against the escalating yearning of ineradicable drives and passions, and directly or indirectly placed this struggle at the center of its considerations.

Once the run was over, however, something funny would happen. No matter how fast or far any of us had gone, everyone was exhausted. Spent. Keeled over. That’s when the backslaps and high fives would happen. We were bonded in our fatigue, whereas a moment before we were separated by our giftings. Physically drained but emotionally fortified, we laughed and kidded around, talked about how hard it had been. The feeling was always positive. Our shared limitation brought us closer together. A theologian might say that God has given everyone different gifts and abilities, yet similar weaknesses. This is one of the great insights of the Christian faith. The world runs after success and strength and perfection and finds that the track only gets longer, the runners more spread out. The Christian considers weakness the location of grace and unity, not evidence of their absence. You might say, then, We are separated by our virtues but united in our distance from virtue. We are divided by the specifics of our political or aesthetic ideals but united in the fact that we fall short of those ideals. We are separated by how and whom we love but united by our failure to love perfectly. We are separated by the career paths we’ve taken but united by the ubiquity of regret, both professional and otherwise. We are separated by how much we’ve gained or accrued but united in the experience—somewhere along the line—of loss (and the fear of loss). We are stratified according to how we live but re-democratized by the fact of death. If you want to find common ground with someone, then don’t start with what they put on their résumé. Start with what they leave off.

The difference seems to be conveyed best by saying that the Reformed Christian thinks theologically, the Lutheran anthropologically.

This generation grew up constantly reminded that they lived in the greatest country in the world, the land of the free, with liberty and justice for all its citizens. Yet, as they matured, members of this generation found a disturbing disparity between this popular American self-image and actual reality. They found that many people in this land—women and certain racial minorities—were, by law and custom, definitely not free. By the sixties the new generation was inspecting closely, and many were finding other disturbing aspects of the United States’ self-image—for instance, a blind patriotism that expected young people to go into a foreign land to fight a political war that had no clearly expressed purpose and no prospect of victory. Just as disturbing was the culture’s spiritual practice. The materialism of the previous four hundred years had pushed the mystery of life, and death, far into the background. Many found the churches and synagogues full of pompous and meaningless ritual. Attendance seemed more social than spiritual, and the members too restricted by a sense of how they might be perceived and judged by their onlooking peers. As the vision progressed, I could tell that the new generation’s tendency to analyze and judge arose from a deep-seated intuition that there was more to life than the old material reality took into account. The new generation sensed new spiritual meaning just beyond the horizon, and they began to explore other, lesser known religions and spiritual points of view. For the first time the Eastern religions were understood in great numbers, serving to validate the mass intuition that spiritual perception was an inner experience, a shift in awareness that changed forever one’s sense of identity and purpose. Similarly the Jewish Cabalist writings and the Western Christian mystics, such as Meister Eckehart and Teilhard de Chardin, provided other intriguing descriptions of a deeper spirituality. At the same time, information was surfacing from the human sciences—sociology, psychiatry, psychology, and anthropology—as well as from modern physics, that cast new light on the nature of human consciousness and creativity. This cumulation of thought, together with the perspective provided by the East, gradually began to crystallize into what was later called the Human Potential Movement, the emerging belief that human beings were presently actualizing only a small portion of their vast physical, psychological, and spiritual potential I watched as, over the course of several decades, this information and the spiritual experience it spawned grew into a critical mass of awareness, a leap in consciousness from which we began to formulate a new view of what living a human life was all about,

Given that I write about a time that's so archaeologically elusive, with so slight a body of written texts, I can't argue that some refer to my novels as fantasy. But I would ask readers to consider this: If a Christian character in a historical novel believes in the power of prayer and imagines they see a result, the work is still deemed historical fiction. If a pre-Christian character does the same, the work is deemed historical fantasy.

You could say then that desire creates a ‘lining’ around the surface, or just under the surface, of an object so that it works dynamically as a sign. The lining is put there by people and says in effect, ‘Here is the object to possess and the fact that both you and I desire it makes it powerfully significant.’ We are very close here of course to Girard’s mimetic desire; the only difference is that it is played out in a systemic collective form, in the world of economics, the marketplace of buying and selling. Here is another aspect then of our world of signs. They are not just about information. Many of them—perhaps today almost all of them—enlist our mimetic and possessive desire to achieve and communicate their meaning. However, the moment I say this a reaction surely sets in. People have a sense that the contemporary phenomenon covered by the word ‘desire’ is richer and more many-sided than sheer possessiveness, and immediately I will also agree. I said ‘almost all’ signs, not all. I believe in fact that before the motif of possessive desire at work in Western society there is an earlier, underlying and more wonderful level which it presupposes. In this case Girardian desire, although enormously cogent, is only a partial description of the historical and anthropological facts. Before people in the West learned to desire things as consumers they learned to do so as contemplatives! I

We have to do a better job at the work of anthropology if we hope to maintain our role in the public discourse.

By the very cogent anthropology of Judeo-Christianity, whether or not one agreed with it, human existence was by no means to be understood as the transaction of a higher organism satisfying this or that need from its environment, by being “creative” or enjoying “meaningful relationships,” but as the journey of a wayfarer along life’s way. The

THE attention of the writer having been called to the fact that all Indo-Germanic nations have worshipped crucified Saviours, an investigation of the subject was made. Overwhelming proof was obtained that the sun-myths of the ancient Aryans were the origin of the religions in all of the countries which were peopled by the Aryans. The Saviours worshipped in these lands are personifications of the Sun, the chief god of the Aryans. That Pagan nations worshipped a crucified man, was admitted by the Fathers of the early Christian Church.

I am not going to attempt a physical or medical analysis of death and its aftermath or a psychological or anthropological description of beliefs and practices having to do with death. There are plenty of books about such things. Rather, I approach the question as a biblical theologian, drawing on other disciplines but hoping to supply what they usually lack and what I believe the church needs to recapture: the classic Christian answer to the question of death and beyond, which these days is not so much disbelieved (in world and church alike) as simply not known.

The object is evident in the name of the discipline. Similarly, theology (theologia) is the study of God. The object of theology is not the church’s teaching or the experience of pious souls. It is not a subset of ethics, religious studies, cultural anthropology, or psychology. God is the object of this discipline.

Reducing the individual to her economic status or her racial, sexual, or gender identity is an anthropological error.

the Platonized eschatology so popular over many centuries (how will my soul get to heaven?) has played host to a moralized anthropology (what’s to be done about my sin?), generating a quasi-pagan soteriology (God killed Jesus instead of punishing me).

For the only path leading out of the torments of hell to the everlasting joy of the Kingdom is that of the divine commandments: with our whole being we are to love God and our neighbour with a heart that is free of all sin. The return journey from this remote and inhospitable land is not an easy one, and there is no hunger more fearful than that of a heart laid waste by sin. Those in whom the heart is full of the consolation of incorruptible grace can endure all external deprivations and afflictions, transforming them into a feast of spiritual joy; but the famine in a hardened heart lacking divine consolation is a comfortless torment. There is no greater misfortune than that of an insensible and petrified heart that is unable to distinguish between the luminous Way of God’s Providence and the gloomy confusion of the ways of this world.

Mindfulness of death is therefore a gift of God which assists man in finding his heart, which is the beginning of the healing of his person, the purpose of which is to labour for the restoration of true communion within the whole race of Adam. The paradox is this: that mindfulness of death liberates man from the fear of death, and leads him to see all things from the perspective of the love of God. Where death had been a consequence of sin, it is now the Gospel of Life, for it causes eternity to take its rightful place above all earthly things in such an absolute and definite way, that even if the enemy were to offer centuries of earthly bliss and success, the believer now prefers the marks of the Cross through which true joy and eternal salvation are come to the world.

Towards the end of the Seventh Step of The Ladder of Divine Ascent, St. John of Sinai says that we shall not be condemned for not having performed miracles, nor for not having been great theologians or contemplatives. We shall, however, need to give an account for not having mourned sufficiently over our sins, our state of corruption, and our imperfections. For we know very well (and the prayers of our Church confirm it) that no man can live a single day upon earth without sin. This being the case, we must do our utmost to keep ourselves from sin by cultivating the new tree of the spiritual paradise which has taken root inside our bosom, and by watering it with the streams of our tears. And the One Who would be enthroned within our hearts will show Himself to be stronger than the one that rules over this world (cf. 1 John 4:4). In other words, the presence of God must become active within us that the enemy, the possessor of this world and tormentor of our souls, be overcome.

The soul has need of a divine lamp, even of the Holy Ghost, who sets in order the darkened house. It needs the bright Sun of righteousness, which enlightens and rises upon the heart, as an instrument to win the battle. That woman who lost the piece of silver, first lighted the lamp, and then set the house in order, and thus, the house being set in order and the lamp lit, the piece of silver was found, buried in dirt and filth and earth. So now the soul cannot of itself find its own thoughts and disengage them; but when the divine lamp is lit, it lights up the darkened house, and then the soul beholds its thoughts how they lie buried in the filth and mire of sin.

Adam, where art thou? Eve where art thou? What have ye done?’ But neither of them answered, ‘Here I am, Lord. I am hiding because I have sinned against Thee, of my own fault, and I repent. Do Thou forgive me.’ Neither of them said anything of the kind; instead, Adam cast responsibility onto Eve, and Eve onto the serpent. Adam even went as far as blaming God. ‘The woman whom Thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat’, said Adam (Gen. 3:12), meaning, ‘It is Thy fault.’ And the Lord, Who never constrains anybody and never imposes Himself on anyone, departed. He left them to suffer the consequences of their disobedience, to toil on earth until they should ‘come to themselves’, as did the Prodigal Son.

it may be worth while to note again how often finely developed skulls are discovered in the graveyards of old monasteries, and how likely seems Galtons conjecture, that progress was arrested in the Middle Ages, because the celibacy of the clergy brought about the extinction of the best strains of blood.

What early Christianity meant by 'faith' (pistis) was initially nothing other than running ahead and clinging to a model or idea whose attainability was still uncertain. Faith is purely anticipatory, in the sense that it already has an effect when it mobilizes the existence of the anticipatory towards the goal through anticipation. In analogy for the placebo effect, one would have to call this the movebo effect.

When Jesus says to Simon, "Follow me," the response is a single act of faith and obedience; there is no gap between a mental action of believing and a bodily action of following. The human person is not a mind attached to a body but a single psychosomatic being.

Christian education has absorbed a philosophical anthropology that sees human persons as primarily thinking things. The result has been an understanding of education largely in terms of information; more specifically, the end of Christian education has been seen to be the dissemination and communication of Christian ideas rather than the formation of a peculiar people. This can be seen most acutely, I think, in how visions of Christian education have been articulated in terms of “a Christian worldview.

But all the while the ritual practices of the mall are grabbing hold of hearts and capturing imaginations, shaping our love and desire, and actually forming us in powerful, fundamental ways. If our cultural critique remains captivated by a cognitivist anthropology, then we’ll fail to even see the role of practices. This constitutes a massive blind spot in much of the Christian cultural critique that takes place under the banner of worldview-thinking.

The reference to “the whole human” highlights the connection of the apokatastasis and the divinization of humanity through the incarnation with another feature of Gregory’s thought—his distinctive theological anthropology. The passage from Catechetical Oration 32 cited above continues: For since the God-bearing human was from no other source than our common mass, which through the resurrection was raised by union with the divinity, just as in the case of our body the working of one of the organs of sense extends to the whole consciousness—the unity in the member—so also the resurrection of the member goes completely through the whole, as if the whole nature were a single living being, being imparted alike from the member to the whole in accordance with both the continuity and the unity of the nature. 26 For Gregory, the image of God in human beings is located not in individual human beings but rather in humanity as a whole. 27 Human nature is then essentially corporate rather than individual, although Gregory’s anthropology does not negate individuality. Through the corporate solidarity of humanity all share in the death introduced into it by the choice of evil of one of its members. Through the union of the Word with this corporate human nature, all of humanity shares in the life of the resurrection when one of its members is raised from the dead.

Gregory makes a sustained case for the same interpretation of Christ’s subjection to the Father in 1 Corinthians 15: 28 in a homily on that text. 30 His argument may be summarized in the following manner: Christ’s body is humanity as a whole; humanity as a whole will eventually become subject to God; therefore it is not the divine Word but rather the whole of human nature joined to the divine Word in the incarnation that is said to be subject to God. 31 The relation of the apokatastasis to the linking of the Eastern trajectory of incarnational soteriology with Gregory’s own distinctive corporate anthropology is clear in this sentence from the homily: “And on the basis of the whole human nature with which the divinity was mixed, which is a certain sort of first-fruits of the common dough, humanity exists according to Christ, through whom all humanity is joined to the divinity.

On the most basic question of all, “who is a Jew?” Elisabeth could find no solid answers. Many of her interviewees simply shrugged: “Ask three Jews, get five opinions.” In a later Christianity Today article, Elisabeth summarized her search for answers. “It is not, Israel officially proclaims, a racial question. There are Jews in every anthropologically-defined “race”—from the black Ethiopian to the Chinese orthodox Jew. “It is not a religious question. Probably fewer than ten percent of Israelis are orthodox Jews, and many are not only not religious, but are militantly anti-God. “To be Jewish is not a linguistic question. Over seventy languages are spoken in Israel, even though Hebrew is the official language and strong efforts are made to encourage everybody to learn it. “It is not a cultural question. Some Jews, desperately casting about for a definition that would satisfy me, said that Jewishness is a “cultural consciousness.” But what culture? Elisabeth had seen keening eastern Jewish women in Arab dress, Jews from New York’s East Side, Russian Jews, and Israeli natives born on kibbitzes. There were clearly no common denominators in terms of rituals, speech, dress, or outlook. “Is Jewishness then a political category?” Elisabeth continued. “Israel is a political state, but there are millions of Jews who are not Israelis. There are thousands of “Israelis” who are not Jews—every Arab now “assimilated” into the nation of Israel by conquest is officially an Israeli . . .” At the time the Israeli government defined Jews genetically, which to Elisabeth seemed a strange contradiction when they so vehemently deny that Jewishness has anything to do with race. But the determining question is, “‘Who is your mother?’ Anyone born of a Jewish mother is Jewish. The question as to what makes her Jewish has no answer. If your father is Jewish, if he is even a rabbi, it will not help you at all.”⁠3 “I have come to the conclusion that it remains for Israel; alone to execute justice for those who are its responsibility. If its highways must cut through the Arabs’ desert, if it claims ‘eminent domain,’ it must justly compensate those who have been displaced, those whose empty houses and lands Israel is now determined to fill with its own immigrants.

Spontaneously, without any theological training, I, a child, grasped the incompatibility of God and shit and thus came to question the basic thesis of Christian anthropology, namely that man was created in God's image. Either/or: either man was created in God's image - and has intestines! - or God lacks intestines and man is not like him.