Theological Anthropology 101
Anthropology is the study of human beings. The term comes from the Greek words anthropos, “man” (in the generic sense), and logos, “word” or “study.” You can break this –ology down further into biological and forensic anthropology, cultural/social/sociocultural anthropology, paleoanthropology, linguistic and applied (to real-life problems) anthropology. Today we will dip into what is known as theological anthropology.
In a Christian approach to the subject, theological anthropology is defined as the study of humanity in relation to God, based on the Judeo-Christian Scriptures and doctrinal principles. Thus, it explores human nature and culture through a divine lens.
“Theology is anthropology,” said German artist Anselm Feuerbach. This statement suggests that understanding God is the key to understanding humankind. And vice versa. Knowing God better helps us to know ourselves better.
Of course, not all anthropologists would be on board with that idea. In fact, most perhaps wouldn’t—in our human-focused world.
“I started out in anthropology so, to me, how society works, how people put themselves together and make things work, has always been a big interest.” –George Lucas
I certainly can’t boast any degree in anthropology, secular, theological, or otherwise. But like anything else that interests you, you can always learn more. As a Christian missionary myself, I’ve probably studied more of the subject than the average person. (Besides watching hundreds of forensic detective shows! 😊)
Light on Learning
During my senior year in high school I took the nerds’ course in behavioral science (anthropology/sociology). There I first encountered the remarkable Margaret Mead (1901-1978). A formidable woman, whether you agree with her in everything or not.
Like Mead as an anthropologist, my job as a writer is to ferry people to fascinating places, times, and topics. Do I know everything? Not at all. But that’s part of why we read. And it’s why I write: to make learning entertaining and storytelling educational.
“I never got any training in how to write novels as an English major at Oberlin, but I got some great training for writing novels from anthropology and from Margaret Mead.” –Alan Furst
In my next-up book Legacy of the Linnenbrink Light, the main character Cristina is the daughter of a cultural anthropologist who comes into contact with a missionary. Is there a clash of worldviews? You bet.
Because Melissa Travis holds a Christ-centered perspective of the world. She’s convinced of who she is, where she came from, what she’s doing, and where she’s going. But she has also learned to value highly the culture of the Chiloé Islands where she lives and works.
For Cristina, things remain more relative. Until…she’s drawn out of her comfortable universe and her focus shifts.
Core Concepts
Theological anthropology, as Melissa understands it, has its foundation in the Latin term Imago Dei (Image of God). We believe that all human beings, from Nunavut to Tierra del Fuego, are created in the image of God. This crowns each member of the human race with inherent worth, dignity, and responsibility before our Maker. From the beginning, our principal purpose has been to fellowship with God and partner with Him in ruling over Creation.
A Trinitarian perspective of the human personality emphasizes that we are social beings who live in personal relationship with God and others. Like the Triune God, our body, soul, and spirit integrate in a complete nature. We are free individuals but not independent or self-sufficient.
Although Christian belief views humanity as fallen through sin, Jesus Christ embodied true humanity in His Incarnation as a human man and redeemed us through His death and resurrection. He is the key to grasping our ultimate destiny to reflect and glorify God in His presence.
“The desire to ascend to a sort of godhood runs deep in fallen human nature, but it is a perversion of the good and right desire to be like God in a way appropriate to our finitude. The theological work we need to be doing is not a sort of turning-away-from-God-toward-mere-anthropocentrism. Rather, it is turning to the inspired, image-making acts of Creation and Incarnation and asking how those answer the questions of our age, with the confidence that the answers we need are there in God’s making us in his image, and then taking on our image and imaging himself to us in our very midst.” –Chris Krycho on “Theological Anthropology”
How does that brief summary of Christian theological anthropology connect—or sometimes conflict—with say, cultural anthropology?
First of all, Christians depend on a biblical framework or authority to accurately know ourselves as human beings.
Next, we see our culture—and ALL cultures—as a blend of God-designed creativity and the impact of sin. The entire history of the world shows both our beauty and our brokenness.
Finally, we believe in God’s redemptive plan for humankind. Through Jesus Christ, the Creator offers a larger purpose and hope to every culture and society on earth. His work in every historical event aims to transform and restore the Imago Dei.
Engaging Issues and Implications
We need more interaction between the advocates of secular and theological anthropology. Despite significant differences in worldview, surely we share many perspectives on human life. For example, a Christian perspective on human value has many implications for contemporary ethical and environmental issues.
“I love seeing what people are eating. It’s a great way of looking at what is similar and what is different about people. It’s sociology and anthropology and history rolled into one.” –Mark Kurlansky
The study of world cultures is among the most absorbing and intriguing of subjects. Far from a dry and dull academic discipline, field research involves living with and learning about a fascinating variety of people and things: food and fashion and folklore, architecture, music, language, and history.
And religion, including beliefs and values. Anthropologists around the world assume that each people group “already” has a religion that meets their needs. Hence, some of the existing controversy with missionaries.
Melissa, a new missionary but no newbie to the Islands of Chiloé, appreciates the local Chilote culture. Cristina also falls in love with the islands, to the dismay of her upwardly aspiring fiancé.
“Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess.” –Margaret Mead
But the earlier experience of René Linnenbrink, Cristina’s amiable father, in Chile’s Rapa Nui (AKA Easter Island) has led him to consider missionary influence as not exactly positive. Although 19th-century Catholic missionaries recorded the first anthropological data there, they suppressed most indigenous traditions—and brought Western politics and commerce in their wake. Peruvian slave raiders, forced labor, and epidemics arrived. However, Dr. Linnenbrink admits that the Rapu Nui people did much to destroy their own culture, environment, and population through internecine warfare and cannibalism before the advent of outsiders.
More recent fieldwork in the Araucanian Andes of southern Chile has cracked the good man open to discuss religion and theological anthropology a little with his daughter’s new friend. I’m as yet undecided about whether to include the following hypothetical dialogue in the book.
But hey, take a peek…
Melissa: I love a lot of elements of the culture here. Fish and potatoes, piping hot milcao.* “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…” (*a deep-fried patty made of shredded and mashed potatoes and pork cracklings)
Dr. René: But what is your approach here? Change their religion, which is certainly an integral part of culture and identity. Look, señorita, I’m a religious man myself—brought up Lutheran, to be precise—but anthropologically, Christianity is just one religion among many. All are equally valid.
Melissa: Do you think so? I hope I’m respectful, but I’d definitely reject the syncretistic religious practices that combine medieval Christianity, indigenous rituals, and the occult, in the name of culture. And I don’t think God wants us to just abandon the people of the world to their own myths, or fate. Not every change in a culture has to be a tragedy, does it, Don René?
Dr. René: (Smiles) Perhaps not. And not that these Desertores islands are utterly untouched by other extra-cultural influences. In a manner of speaking, you would not be the first to “convert” them.
Melissa: Our goal—my goal, at least—isn’t necessarily to “convert” them from their culture to mine, though. Honestly, I don’t have such a high view of my own culture that I’d have a right to feel superior about it.
Dr. René: But oftentimes, in the past, missionaries bring their Western culture along with their Christian religion. They open schools with ulterior motives. Then, as soon as they’ve “educated and civilized” people, enter the even bigger culture destroyers.
“I’ve often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.” –Clifford Geertz
Cristina: (Lifts hands in surprise) Surely, Papá, you’re not against schools and education!
Dr. René: Not your school, obviously. (Chuckles) Not in this specific place and time. Modern civilization has already penetrated this island to a large extent. The best we can do for Chilotes is to document and facilitate some preservation of their distinctive culture.
Cristina: And prepare the young people for the life they’re going to face, whether anthropologists like it or not, Papá.
Dr. René: Perhaps, sí. But my point is, many times the missionaries’ influence made simpler cultures vulnerable…to commercial and political takeover, foreign land claims, culture modification. Loss of native languages, even kidnapping and slavery. They were completely engulfed. What happened in Rapa Nui—Easter Island, where I worked some years ago—is a case in point. Even the incident of Darwin and the Beagle crew’s abduction of the Yahgán teenager Orundellico, AKA Jemmy Button.
Melissa: (Horrified) Those were not missionaries!
Cristina: Don’t you have to put those events into some sort of historical context, though, Papá? A lot of those people didn’t mean to be cruel. They just didn’t understand. We know better now.
Dr. René: Or should. And Darwin, admittedly, wasn’t involved in the purchase/abduction scheme. It’s unclear whether he believed in a “superior” white race. But he had such a very low opinion of the indigenous peoples that he started to support missionaries to evangelize in Tierra del Fuego. He considered non-Europeans, non-Christians, as lesser entities, their culture backward.
Cristina: Is that…is that how you think, Melissa?
Melissa: Definitely not that they’re lesser people, some sort of subhuman species! Their culture—maybe we’d call it backward, or rustic. So would you. But…that’s not why they need Jesus. All of us, from every religion or non-religion, need to hear the gospel of Jesus, His love, His plan to rescue.
“It is universal to give gifts as an expression of love. My academic background is anthropology, the study of cultures. We have never discovered a culture where gift-giving is not an expression of love.” –Gary Chapman
Dr. René: They need Jesus? See, that’s it, señorita. Christianity has always wanted to fix the native cultures, rescue people from themselves.
Melissa: It’s not the culture per se that needs fixing. But people’s hearts do. And I’m sure some aspects of the culture will change along with the hearts. People within a culture can’t change without affecting the culture. As soon as Jesus enters into the equation, yeah, Don René, I think there’s going to be change.
Dr. René: Here we have landed on the theme of change again. And why? As if something was wrong with the people before? My dear señorita, you aren’t like that, yet the opinion smacks of arrogance.
Melissa: (Bites her lip) “Something” is broken in all of us. In me, too. Tell me you don’t see anything wrong with the culture, the life, here.
Cristina: I sure do! But I try to do good, even be a good person, if you want to put it that way.
Melissa: Trying to be good without God, and live a good life—the good life—without a life with God doesn’t work. It’s futile.
Cristina: Well, it’s slow going, I’ll say that. I can’t see much impact I’ve had so far.
Melissa: (Wry smile) Or me either, sometimes, to tell the truth.
Dr. René: You’re only one person, señorita. It takes a whole army of newcomers. How much a culture may be marked also depends on how influential the person is who brings about change–good or bad. Or “converts,” as you might put it. And how serious his or her conversion is.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” –Margaret Mead
Melissa: Yes. Don René, I don’t believe any culture on earth is all right or all wrong. Far from it. But I do believe that Scripture and God are always right. I—we—are only trying to be honest in pointing out where they differ.
Dr. René: Naturally they’re going to differ. They’re different religious systems.
Melissa: And aren’t religious and moral beliefs one of the main areas where culture is lived out and reinforced and passed on? Yet sometimes—most of the time, maybe—people hide behind religious traditions in order not to break with unhealthy vices…or even downright evil.
Dr. René: So, the sins of the lost and needy souls. That’s a judgment call, señorita, and not so subtle, at that.
Melissa: Well, they do have needs. I’m sorry if it sounds judgmental, but don’t we all, for that matter? And not just spiritual needs…
Cristina: Right. The culture here in Chiloé isn’t that isolated, but still they lack education and medical care and basic necessities. Has anybody ever asked these people what they want?
Dr. René: You have a point there, mein Schatz.
Cristina: And what happens if you—we, really—withhold medicine, technology, knowledge, just to keep people’s culture “untouched”? We’re assuming that nothing will ever touch them, that they don’t need anything.
Dr. René: Ja, ja. I do question the posture toward the Amazonian tribes with endemic malaria. The appalling infant mortality rate… Here, admittedly, government, industry, and television have done far more to separate the Chilotes from their cultural heritage than missionaries ever did. (Grins) Preach away, Señorita Melissa.
Melissa: I value them enough to think they deserve better. To hear the gospel of Jesus, and to know Him.
“Jesus Christ is the captive of no culture and the master of all culture.” –Leighton Ford, “Hour of Decision”
Anthropology for Writers
This conversation on theological anthropology continues periodically over the next year. Melissa opens up to learn from René Linnenbrink how to surrender some of the baggage of her own culture. He gradually warms to the possibility of a vital experience with the God who not only mandated culture-making but redeemed and transformed it. She comes to see that she can be a cultural relativist as well as an advocate of biblical authority.
As time goes on in this series world [Desert Island Diaries and First Mate’s Log], Melissa and Cristina team up to preserve and promote many aspects of Chilote culture. A (completely fictional) civil uprising turns them into defenders and guardians of the island legacies. They encourage music and folklore, traditional arts and crafts, organic agriculture and artisanal fishing—before these things become mere memories of the old-timers.
“When a culture isn’t represented…(when there is) silence where heritage should be…heritage and history disappear. Not by force, but by absence…it fades. (Sometimes) cultural erasure is not just neglect but intentional.” –Deleyna Marr, Reflections from the Mirror
When we don’t cherish our history and heritage, it soon vanishes. When we forget, when we ignore, when we deliberately toss on the trash heap of time, our past is lost. Our present is diminished, and our future fogs in.
We should honor people’s innate desire to grow, to feel safe and secure, not to suffer needlessly. But we recognize that often comes with a price: Devaluing, at least in a measure, their culture of origin. That’s why I and other writers record their legends and traditions, stories and songs. And revel in them too.
“I honestly think anthropology is one of the most useful fields a fantasy writer can study, more so even than history.” –Marie Brennan
Oh, I perceive their faults and weaknesses, even as I recognize (I hope) my own prejudices and failures and those of my country and ethnicity. So, with respect and responsibility, I set about the task of, first of all, understanding, and then attempting to make our world—at least, some aspect(s) of it—a better place than I found it.
One of a writer’s jobs is to stir and inspire. Another is to give a voice to the voiceless. And especially when the writer finds herself in a place and position to hear the groans and whispers and wishes, as well as the laughter and longing.
An Approach to Mission
Which brings me to the additional job of a writer who is also a missionary: the joyful planting and strengthening of a dynamic local church of maturing believers. Are they Christian Chilotes? Or Chilote Christians? However we label them, they remain unique human beings.
I believe in Jesus as the way, the truth, and the life. According to the apostles, we know of no other path that leads to God. And I believe that no matter what our proud human nature might prefer to postulate, someday every last one of us will bow the knee to Jesus. While I don’t see everything as black or white, this IS.
Back in 1989, when I still lived in Chiloé, Steve Green (the son of missionaries himself) sang: “To love the Lord our God is the heartbeat of our mission, the stream from which our service overflows. Across the street or around the world, the mission’s still the same: Proclaim and live the truth in Jesus’ name.” –Jon Mohr & Randall Dennis
That describes my approach to Theological Anthropology 101. Loving God and people, making friends, giving gifts, sharing truth. And, uh, living as if I believed it, no matter what.
May we put sky-high value on a robust Christ-oriented worldview. All of us need to fully comprehend who we are, where we came from, what we’re doing here, and where we are going. God give us a vision of human nature that transcends culture, undergirded by the hope of glory for all the “ransomed people (of) God from every tribe and language and people and nation” (Rev. 5:9, NLT).