Theological Anthropology: Revised and Expanded Edition

By Fortress Press

Theological Anthropology gathers and translates seminal texts from early Christianity that explore the diversity of theological approaches to the nature and ends of humanity. Readers will gain a sense of how early Christians conceived of and reflected upon humanity and human nature in different theological movements, including Platonism, Gnosticism, asceticism, Pelagianism, Augustinianism, and their legacies in late antiquity and the dawn of the Middle Ages.

Theological Anthropology is part of Ad Fontes: Early Christian Sources, a series designed to present ancient Christian texts essential to an understanding of Christian theology, ecclesiology, and practice. The books in the series will make the wealth of early Christian thought available to new generations of students of theology and provide a valuable resource for the Church. Developed in light of recent Patristic scholarship, the volumes will provide a representative sampling of theological contributions from both East and West.

The series aims to provide volumes that are relevant for a variety of courses: from introduction to theology to classes on doctrine and the development of Christian thought. The goal of each volume is not to be exhaustive, but rather representative enough to denote for a non-specialist audience the multivalent character of early Christian thought, allowing readers to see how and why early Christian doctrine and practice developed the way it did.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Jun 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781506449418

Book preview

Cover Page for Theological Anthropology

Praise for Theological Anthropology

"I have long used the prior edition of Theological Anthropology with theology students, as the best accessible single volume for those interested in original sources bearing on the Pelagian controversies. The inclusion of Origen, Ephrem the Syrian, and Evagrius of Pontus in this revised edition retains all the virtues of the original, but provides a theologically richer and historically fuller picture. This book is an essential, basic tool for students in theology and history, a welcome reference for all who teach in this area."

—S. Mark Heim, visiting professor of theology, Yale Divinity School, and Samuel Abbot Professor of Theology, Andover Newton Seminary at Yale

At its core, theological anthropology seeks to answer the psalmist’s question, ‘What is man that thou art mindful of him?’ As a subfield of historical theology, theological anthropology has greatly expanded since 1981 when Patout Burns published the first edition of this book. This new edition, composed with added contributions of Joseph Trigg, Robin Young, and Jeffrey T. Wickes, includes not only the voices that have traditionally dominated the conversation—Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa, Pelagius, Augustine—but also voices of the Alexandrian and Syriac traditions: Clement, Origen, and Ephrem. Together they provide rich and accessible material for students to reflect on essential questions of identity within the context of God’s creative and redemptive purposes for the human family.

—J. Warren Smith, professor of historical theology, Duke Divinity School

Burns and Trigg present fresh, readable translations of patristic texts on what it means to be human. The selection spans a number of traditions in the early church, making this volume a valuable resource for anyone who wants to understand what the broad Christian tradition has to say about issues such as the body, the passions, free will, grace, and knowing God.

—David R. Maxwell, Louis A. Fincke and Anna B. Shine Professor of Systematic Theology, Concordia Seminary, St. Louis

"Many of us who have long used the first edition of Theological Anthropology as an anchor text for courses in theological anthropology and the theology of grace will welcome this expanded edition. Particularly welcome are additions from the Eastern Christian tradition, especially Ephrem the Syrian. The addition of select homilies of Augustine adds nuance and pastoral depth, and the revised introduction continues to provide an invaluable orientation to these materials. We owe a debt of gratitude to Burns and Trigg."

—J. Matthew Ashley, associate professor of systematic theology and director of graduate studies, University of Notre Dame, and book review editor, Theological Studies

"Enthusiasts of patristic theology, rejoice! The revised and expanded edition of Theological Anthropology collects an array of primary texts from the Latin, Greek, and Syriac traditions, with splendid introductions, that show how theological discourse on Christ produced imaginative expressions about the dignity of the human person. This book entices readers to engage in ancient Christian answers to the perennial question, ‘What is a human being?’ An asset for students, teachers, and scholars alike."

—Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Laurent, associate professor of historical theology, Marquette University

"I am delighted at the publication of this new and expanded edition of Theological Anthropology. The book is a treasure trove for all those interested in learning firsthand the diverse ways in which a variety of theologians in Christian antiquity teased out the implications of what it means to believe that we as human beings are made in the image of God, and that God in Christ became one of us. The selection of texts is helpful, and the translation into English is excellent. The footnotes aid our understanding without being overly invasive. It is a slim yet mighty volume!"

—Nancy Elizabeth Bedford, Georgia Harkness Professor of Theology, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary

This refreshed and expanded volume brings together a rich collection of early Christian writings about humanity. The assembly of these selections is a great service to many who would find them inaccessible otherwise. These ancient authors are always challenging and insightful, and sometimes strikingly contemporary. Their ideas about who people are, relative to God and the world, are important both to understand the history of Christian thought and to pursue the task of exploring the meaning of human life and history today.

—Andrew McGowan, Dean and President of Berkeley Divinity School, and McFaddin Professor of Anglican Studies and Pastoral Theology, Yale Divinity School

Theological Anthropology

Theological Anthropology

Revised and Expanded Edition

J. Patout Burns & Joseph W. Trigg

Volume Editors

with

Robin Darling Young & Jeffrey T. Wickes

Fortress Press

Minneapolis

THEOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Revised and Expanded Edition

Copyright © 2023 Fortress Press, an imprint of 1517 Media. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Email [e-mail] or write Permissions, Fortress Press, PO Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440-1209.

Cover image: Apsis mosaic of Santa Pudenziana, Rome

Cover design: Kristin Miller

Print ISBN: 978-1-5064-4940-1

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5064-4941-8

While the author and 1517 Media have confirmed that all references to website addresses (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing, URLs may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Contents

Series Foreword

Introduction

1. Irenaeus of Lyons

Against Heresies

2. Clement of Alexandria

Stromateis 7.3.16–21

3. Origen

Peri Archon 3.1.18–19

Dialogue with Heraclides

Homilies on the Psalms

4. Ephrem the Syrian

Hymn on the Church 9

Hymn against Heresies 42

Hymn against Heresies 28

Hymn against Heresies 29

5. Gregory of Nyssa

Homily on the Sixth Beatitude

6. Evagrius of Pontus

Praktikos

Scholia on Ecclesiastes

On Calculating Reasonings

On Prayer

7. Pelagius

Letter to Demetrias

8. Augustine of Hippo

To Simplician on Various Questions

Sermon 294

Canons of the Council of Carthage, May 1, 418

On the Grace of Christ

Sermons on Romans 7

On Rebuke and Grace

Selected Bibliography

Name and Subject Index

Scripture Index

Series Foreword

In his book The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, Robert Louis Wilken reminds us that Christianity is more than a set of devotional practices and a moral code: it is also a way of thinking about God, about human beings, about the world and history.¹ From its earliest times, Wilken notes, Christianity has been inescapably ritualistic, uncompromisingly moral, and unapologetically intellectual.

Christianity is deeply rooted in history and continues to be been nourished by the past. The ground of its being and the basis of its existence is the life of a historic person, Jesus of Nazareth, whom Christians identify as God’s unique, historical act of self-communication. Jesus presented himself within the context of the history of the people of Israel, and the earliest disciples understood him to be the culmination of that history, ushering in a new chapter in God’s ongoing engagement with the world.

The crucial period of the first few centuries of Christianity is known as the patristic era or the time of the church fathers. Beginning after the books of the New Testament were written and continuing until the dawn of the Middle Ages (ca. 100–700 CE), this period encompasses a large and diverse company of thinkers and personalities. Some came from Greece and Asia Minor, others from Palestine and Egypt, and still others from Spain, Italy, North Africa, Syria, and present-day Iraq. Some wrote in Greek, others in Latin, and others in Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, and other languages.

This is the period during which options of belief and practice were accepted or rejected. Christian teachers and thinkers forged the language to express Christian belief clearly and precisely, they oversaw the life of the Christian people in worship and communal structure, and they clarified and applied the worshipping community’s moral norms.

Every generation of Christians has reconsidered the adequacy of the religion’s practice and witness and has reflected seriously on what Christians confess and teach. Each has come to recognize the church fathers and their works as a precious inheritance and source for instruction and illumination. After the New Testament, no body of Christian literature has laid greater claim on Christians as a whole.

The purpose of this series is to invite readers to return to the sources, to discover firsthand the riches of the common Christian tradition, and to gain a deeper understanding of the faith and practices of early Christianity. When we recognize how Christian faith and practices developed through time, we also appreciate how Christianity still reflects the events, thoughts, and social conditions of this earlier history.

Ad Fontes: Sources of Early Christian Thought makes foundational texts accessible through modern, readable English translations and brief introductions that lay out the context of these documents. Each volume brings together the best recent scholarship on the topic and gives voice to varying points of view to illustrate the diversity of early Christian thought. Entire writings or sections of writings are provided to allow the reader to see the context and flow of the argument.

Together, these texts not only chronicle how Christian faith and practice came to adopt their basic shape but also summon contemporary readers to consider how the events, insights, and social conditions of the early church continue to inform Christianity in the twenty-first century.

George Kalantzis

Series editor

1 Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), xiii.

Introduction

In this volume, thoughtful and influential Christian thinkers from the second through the fifth centuries reflect on what it means to be human. Anthropology is a modern term formed by combining the Greek words for human being (anthrōpos) and reason or rational discourse (logos). It designates as a scientific enterprise the discipline that investigates how human beings developed into a distinct species and how human societies organize themselves and function. Theological anthropology is that subdivision of theology dealing with the nature and destiny of human beings in relationship to God. The authors here, along with their Jewish and pagan contemporaries, considered such reflection—whether on the part of Moses, Plato, or Jesus—as philosophy, love of wisdom, a way of life that required the training of the whole person. Like their contemporaries, they believed that human beings have what James Kugel calls semipermeable minds.¹ For them, humans are not autonomous, self-contained individuals but share aspects of the self with family and community, with other rational beings (angels and demons), and potentially at least, with a transcendent God, the God whom Christians experienced in distinct ways as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Thus, Christians saw no contradiction in affirming that they would be most fully themselves when they could say with Paul, It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me (Gal 2:20). Modern readers not accustomed to such perspectives can find, in the writings selected here, that they are compatible with penetrating perceptions about the human condition.

The Biblical Intertext

All the authors here would have approved what Ephrem said of the Bible: Its verses and lines spread out their arms to welcome me. The first rushed out and kissed me.² Their works translated below are peppered with biblical citations in parentheses. These are not from the original documents but have been noted by the editors of the editions the translators used or by the translators themselves. Such citations show that these authors considered the Christian Bible authoritative and continually grounded their arguments in it. Unless they were preaching on a particular text, in which case they likely had it before them, they were citing the Bible from memory. They knew the inspired text well and understood that their readers or hearers would know it too, having heard it regularly read and interpreted in worship. Where they cite a biblical passage word for word, expecting it to be recognized, the translators have put that passage in italics. Such passages are not from any modern English translation of the Bible but reflect how each author read and used the passage in question. Their Bible was for the most part the same as the Bible Christians have today: an Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures as received and augmented by Greek-speaking Jews before the advent of Christianity (LXX), and a New Testament, at the heart of which were the four Gospels and the Epistles of Paul. The naming and numbering of the books, chapters, and verses of the Bible in the identifying references inserted by the translators are those of the Revised Standard Version.

These Christian authors not only knew this entire Bible well but read it as a coherent whole in which every statement is relevant to every other statement. This was because they believed that the Bible as a whole was the embodiment of the living divine logos. (As Evagrius’s Calculations 8 in chapter 6 makes clear, the entire cosmos is, for them, also an embodiment of the divine logos by which it came to be.)³ If they found any given passage obscure, they ranged all over the Bible to clarify it, as Gregory of Nyssa did in order to make sense of just one verse, Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God (Matt 5:8).⁴ The way these authors used the Bible thus has more in common with contemporary approaches to the Bible from a literary perspective than to historical-critical approaches.

This entire Bible was a legacy of the Judaism of the Second Temple period—the roughly six hundred years between the building of a new Jerusalem Temple by Jews who had returned from exile in Babylon and the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by the Romans in 70 CE. Paul lived his entire life at the close of this period; he and the Gospel writers were all Second Temple Jews. As such, they understood human encounters with God in terms of temple worship, rituals prescribed in Exodus and Leviticus by Moses for the tent (tabernacle) that preceded the temple. This does not mean that they necessarily participated in worship there, although Jesus, his disciples, and Paul all did so. Many Second Temple Jews, including but not limited to followers of Jesus Christ, saw the temple in Jerusalem as the earthly manifestation or copy of a heavenly temple. This heavenly temple was where, in the words of the Epistle to the Hebrews, Christ as high priest offered himself as a sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins (Heb 9–10). After the destruction of the temple, Christians, including the authors in this volume, believed that Jesus’s body had replaced the temple as the place of God’s earthly presence even while it still stood. When the divine Logos became flesh in Jesus, he tabernacled (eskēnōsan) with them (John 1:14) and spoke of the temple of his body (John 2:21). Christians as a whole are Christ’s body (1 Cor 12:27), living stones constituting a spiritual temple (1 Pet 2:5). By virtue of Christ’s presence within them, the individual bodies of baptized Christians, their earthly tents (2 Cor 5:4), were temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor 6:19). Temple language is always implicit and often explicit among the writers in this volume. Thus, they spoke of prayer as ascent (in Hebrew, aliyah, climbing the Temple Mount) to the place where the human mind encounters God. Christians of the first five centuries nourished regularly such an understanding of encounter with God as they prayed the Psalms, the hymns of the Second Temple, and celebrated the divine liturgy.

Also on the basis of this Christian Bible, all the authors in this volume affirmed the creation, formation, governance, and eventual perfection of the earthly world by one transcendent God, the benevolent and just Father of Jesus Christ, God’s Son and also God’s Logos (John 1:1) and Wisdom (1 Cor 1:24). They affirmed as foundational the teaching about what it means to be a human being in the Hebrew Scriptures. In the seventeenth century, Blaise Pascal summarized that teaching as the simultaneous affirmation of the grandeur and dignity of humanity as originally created by God and the misery of humanity’s present condition.⁵ Christian theologians found both grandeur and misery in the opening chapters of Genesis. That grandeur and dignity came from the testimony that all human beings were intended to be in the image and likeness of God (Gen 1:27–28) and had been transformed from inert clay into living souls by having been infused with God’s breath (Gen 2:7). In other passages from Hebrew Scripture, the dignity of human beings, a unique relationship to the transcendent God, was likened to or identified as a kinship in which God is the parent (e.g., Ps 103:3 and Isa 63:16). This is the understanding of God’s relation to humans that pervades the New Testament. The misery comes from the inescapability in human life of what the Bible calls sin. Although that sin is now trivialized in popular usage to refer to pleasurable indulgences like a taste for chocolate, for biblical and early Christian authors, sin was the seemingly universal tendency of human beings to behave in ways that injure themselves, hurt others, and ravage the created order.

The authors in this volume found a definitive account of human misery in the third chapter of Genesis, the story of the Garden of Eden. (They did not, though, necessarily consider that story an account of actual events that happened exactly as described.)⁶ There Adam and Eve, the two first human beings, succumb to temptation by the snake (whom they identified as Satan), disobey God’s command, and eat fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They experience shame and seek to hide from God, who holds them responsible for their action and expels them from the garden. Having lost their original home, they and their descendants as well would experience the woes that are now the common lot of all human beings: women have pain in childbirth and are bullied by men, men must suffer hard and unpleasant work in order to eat, and all humans must die. In this account, humans created by God—not God—were responsible for this loss. Even though, as a result of this catastrophe, humans lost the likeness to God that was God’s original plan for and gift to humanity, they nonetheless retained the image of God constituted by human participation in logos (Gen 1:26). The authors here found the fullest account of a process for rectifying the misery of the human condition in Paul’s Epistles, which explained how Jesus Christ frees those believing in him from the power of sin and death. They sketched out a process that begins by incorporating believers through baptism into the Christian community understood as the Body of Christ, transforming them into the image of Christ by the renewal of their minds, and eventually bringing them as whole persons—body, soul, and spirit—to full unity with God. By such means, God was working—through Christ—to restore the divine likeness that had been lost so as to establish (at least some) humans and their world in a stable, perfected state of likeness to the divine, a process that can be referred to as divinization.

Philosophical Resources

Their education gave the Christian thinkers represented here, particularly those who wrote in Greek, a familiarity with philosophical views in the prior works of philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Plotinus about the meaning of human existence, the resources and practices that make life good, and the possibility of transcending the limitations of its earthly condition. These thinkers, like Jews and Christians, believed in one transcendent God. They did not believe that God had made decisive interventions in human events like calling Abraham to be the ancestor of a chosen people or giving definitive instruction on how to live through Moses, much less sending the divine to take human flesh as Jesus Christ. Nonetheless, philosophers had views compatible with those found in the Bible about the cause of human sufferings in earthly life and their alleviation in a promised future life. Christians recognized that this was particularly true of those in the Platonic tradition that dominated the early Christian period. Beginning with Socrates, these philosophers saw know yourself, a maxim attributed to the god Apollo speaking through his oracle at Delphi, as their first task.⁷ By implication, in the ordinary course of life, human beings are not aware of their own character and motivations. Plato’s Socrates states that his goal is to find out enough about himself to know whether or not he is actually a beast.⁸ Human beings who do not know themselves cannot have full rational control of their own behavior; they act out of the irrational impulses that the Greeks referred to as pathē—emotional disturbances like sexual lust, terror, and rage—often in ways destructive to themselves and to human society. The Iliad, the epic poem foundational to Greek education as well as to Western literature, for example, tracks the most dangerous and intractable of the pathē, rage. Thus, philosophers were concerned not only with self-awareness but with freeing themselves from the pathē, so as to live a good and happy life during their time on earth and, possibly, to continue that existence after death.

The good and happy godlike life philosophers envisaged would be a life according to logos (plural, logoi).⁹ Logos is meaningful human speech along with the human capacity for intellectual understanding and responsible free choice. Logos distinguishes humans from other animals with which they share an awareness based on sense perception, instinctual appetites, and perhaps emotions. Logos is also the immanent rational order and consequent intelligibility of the cosmos. Natural philosophy, what is now called science, was the investigation of the logos in the natural world by the exercise of human logos. Most philosophers believed that because humans were rational beings (logikoi, "possessing logos"), they could, in part, perceive and discuss the all-encompassing logos that orders the cosmos.

Because they believed that obtaining freedom from the pathē and living according to logos were genuinely within the power of human beings, philosophers rejected the view that all events and outcomes in human lives are determined by external factors rather than by responsible choices. In the ancient world, such determinism was often associated with the view that the stars control human lives and that astrologers could discern their future lot by deciphering the movements and positions of these heavenly powers. Philosophers taught, rather, that a good and happy life depended, in whole or in part, on attention to oneself and specifically on the training (askēsis) of habits of conduct—the virtues—that constitute the character of a good person. Asceticism, restraining the pathē through the practice of askēsis, was not a practice initiated by Christians, much less exclusive to them. Platonists taught that human beings risked occupying a limitless place of unlikeness, but the practice of philosophy enabled them to become like God as much as possible.¹⁰ Augustine noted that the opening words of the Gospel of John put forward the same understanding as Platonic philosophers in identifying the divine Logos as the genuine light that enlightens every human being (John 1:9), even if Platonists parted company from Christians at the words and the Logos became flesh (John 1:14) in Jesus Christ.¹¹

Thus, the Christian authors largely shared with the philosophers and with one another an understanding of humanity that they presupposed as a basis for their own attempts to understand what the gospel of Christ teaches about human nature and human destiny. Christians whose