Anthropology is the name of the academic discipline that studies human nature, human institutions and the interpretive myths of human beings. It seeks to understand the operative definitions by which people live. Christian anthropology would, therefore, be an attempt to state the Christian understanding of human nature which inevitably would constitute the primary building block upon which Christian theology would be built. If this primal definition is ever challenged or if it ever proves to be either inadequate or false, the very foundation of Christian thought begins to totter. If that challenge is not addressed, or if one concludes that it cannot be addressed, then the whole traditional Christian enterprise will collapse before our eyes. This, in my opinion, is the reality faced by Christian believers at the dawn of the third millennium. To speak to this crisis was the purpose for which I wrote my most recent book, Why Christianity Must Change or Die. That is also why I have called for a new reformation. Christian anthropology assesses human nature as evil, broken, fallen, in some cases even depraved. The interpretive myth behind this definition is the ancient legend of the Garden of Eden. In that story God fashions a perfect creation. The world lacks for nothing. Rivers run through this paradise that are not polluted. Trees bear flowers and delicious fruit. Gold and onyx are abundant. A man called Adam, and later a woman called Eve, are placed into this Garden to tend it. They are the stewards of God's creation, the rulers over the world of nature. Everything in the Garden is for their use and benefit. God walks with them daily in perfect communion. This story concludes with these words: "God saw everything that God had made and indeed it was very good.......and on the seventh day God finished the work he had done.....so God rested." The man and the woman thus began their lives with an intimate and non-broken relationship with their creator. The only limit placed on this first family was that they were forbidden to eat the fruit of "a tree of the knowledge of good and evil." If the rule was broken, they were told, the penalty awaiting them was death. But into that paradise came the tempter in the form of a serpent extolling the virtues of the forbidden fruit until the woman first (for the ancient patriarchal wisdom was that the alluring woman was the source of the man's corruption) and then the man violated this prohibition, and fell into sin. Since death was universal, the assumption was made that the sin which brought death was also universal. The fall of the first family, it was said, corrupted the entire human race. Sin was thus original, inescapable, passed on from generation to generation, from parent to child, presumably through the act of procreation. The whole human race was fallen and no one was capable of restoring it. People were yearning for God to rescue them from the plight of their humanity. That anthropological understanding of human life was the assumption upon which the Christian story was based. This negativity toward human nature has long been a dominant part of our religious system. That is why our liturgy refers to human beings as "miserable sinners" who are "not worthy to gather up the crumbs under (God's) table." In the evangelical tradition we sing such passive dependent hymns as "Have Thine own way Lord, have Thine own way, Thou art the potter, I am the clay. Mold me and make me after thy will, while I am waiting, yielded and still." In our society the phrase "He had his way with her" has hostile sexual connotations. To be passive clay molded by a powerful deity, to have human life portrayed as "waiting, yielded and still," sounds like it is a human calling to be a pious victim. This mentality is present in the collect for Ash Wednesday where we define ourselves as those who worthily lament our sins and acknowledge our wretchedness. In our service of Holy Baptism we proclaim that this wondrous newborn human life is actually corrupted by "Satan and the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God," under the sway of "the evil powers of this world" and is filled "with the sinful desires of the flesh." In earlier days the Church taught that an unbaptized child who died would have no possibility of living in God's presence since the sinfulness of that child's nature was unwashed and thus unforgiven. One cannot escape the conclusion that Christian anthropology has defined human life negatively. "There is no health in us," we say. If this is the nature of human life, then clearly we need to be rescued by God. Jesus becomes the means of this amazing grace that "saves a wretch like me." Is this an adequate definition of human life or is this a form of Christian pathology that has been imposed on human beings by an inadequate theology of antiquity? Can such a theology escape its destructiveness? Would any human enterprise designed to provide training for effective parenting operate from this point of view? If modern parents told their children daily that they were miserable sinners, fallen creatures, lost, hopeless victims who could do nothing except await a parental rescue effort, would that rhetoric produce healthy children who would become healthy adults? Would we not see that parenting advice as destructive, sick and pathological? But has that not been the Church's primary definition of our humanity? Is it any less destructive or less pathological if it is done in the name of a God called Father? Immediately people retort, "But surely you do not mean to suggest that human beings are not evil, that sin is not real, or that we are not capable of depraved acts? Have you forgotten," they say, "about those teenage thugs who beat and murder elderly women while stealing purses on the streets of our urban centers? Do you not remember the holocaust? Or ethnic cleansing? Have you never viewed the instruments of torture on display in the Tower of London? Have you forgotten the abuse of children first and later of women in the sweatshops of the Industrial Revolution? Do you not recognize that human beings have persecuted, enslaved, discriminated against and even cannibalized one another throughout history? Have you so quickly adjusted to the death of James Byrd, dragged behind a pickup truck on a gravel road until he died, simply because he was black, or Matthew Shepard, beaten and tied to a fence post to die in a sub-freezing Wyoming winter simply because he was a homosexual man? Surely," they say, "you don't mean to minimize human evil or to suggest that sin is not real?" These are proper inquiries but be assured that I do not approach this subject of Christian anthropology as a naive advocate of an innate human goodness. I am never surprised at the human capacity for evil. I am, however, now convinced beyond reasonable doubt that the traditional explanations offered by Christian theology to interpret human life as fallen and thus predisposed to evil is not just an inadequate anthropology, but it is hopelessly flawed, pathologically distorted, wrong and it therefore must be abandoned. Let me put it boldly. Human Beings are not born in sin! The Church's understanding of the fall of human life from the perfection of creation to a state called original sin is pre-modern mythology and post-modern nonsense. This means that theological doctrines based on this view of sin which includes the image of Jesus as the rescuer, the sacrifice, the one who died for our sins are doomed. The old myth no longer works for us because it is not true. Nor can a Church that derives its power from trafficking in this institutionally imposed sense of depravity and guilt long endure. In 1859 Charles Darwin published The Origin of the Species in which a radically different understanding of human life was proposed. Darwin presented us with a view of life in which there was no perfect creation that God could pronounce good and thus no fall from this good creation into a state of sin. Instead, he suggested that the creation is not yet finished. It is still evolving and still expanding. So we are not fallen creatures, we are evolving creatures, a work still in progress. We have emerged out of billions of years of evolutionary history in which the struggle to survive was intense. Human beings are the winners in that struggle. The price of that victory has been to become radically self-centered, to be the bearers of what Richard Dawkins calls "the selfish gene." That is what has shaped our consciousness. It is our unfinished struggle to overcome this trauma of our past that we have mistakenly identified as a fall into sin, and for which we have yearned for deliverance. But deliverance will come only as our humanity is empowered to move beyond its fears, its tribal boundaries, its defining prejudices and its evolutionary past. Salvation thus can never be a rescue from a fall which never occurred, nor can it be a restoration to something we have never been. It is rather a call to move beyond our limits. It is discovering the power to enter a new spirituality, to taste a new transcendence, to possess, in the words of Paul Tillich, "a new being." This anthropology will inevitably require a new definition of God, a new understanding of the role of Christ as Savior, a newly restructured religious institution, new liturgical expressions, and a new understanding of priesthood. In a word, it will require a radical reformation that will create what will appear to be a new definition of human life. It will mean we can no longer talk about Jesus as the one who died for our sins. Can we still speak of him as Christ, or as the defining God presence? I think we can, but that will be my topic next month. --Return to Contents