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After demonstrating the tensions and contradictions that surround the problem of human animality in fourth-century theological anthropology, this chapter demonstrates that although twentieth century theological anthropology utilizes a different vocabulary, it is nevertheless structured around the same basic conceptual problem—and is no less conflicted than its ancient counterpart. A survey of eleven theologians demonstrates a rough consensus around the idea that a fundamental “openness to God” distinguishes human beings from other animals categorically. Subsequently, the chapter analyzes the work of Karl Rahner and Wolfhart Pannenberg to demonstrate the particular tensions and contradictions that human animality generates in contemporary theological anthropology.

Chapter 1 examines the theological anthropology embedded in two of Gregory of Nazianzus’ renowned sermons—Oration 28 and Oration 39. Oration 39 takes up the language of the prologue to John’s gospel, but subtly shifts the vocabulary so that the “life” common to all creatures is replaced by a “knowledge” that belongs to humanity alone. Oration 28 narrates two different contemplative ascents to God; one in which animality must be sacrificed and one in which animality is humanity’s point of connection to the divine. Both orations demonstrate that human animality is fundamentally unstable in Gregory’s theological anthropology—both the scapegoat for human separation from God and, although it goes unacknowledged, the model for contemplative union with God.

Chapter 5 works constructively on the narrative of sin and redemption at the heart of the Christian account of human life. It reverses the conventional paradigm in which humanity falls into sin through proximity to beastly impulses and, through redemption, is raised again above the state of other animals. Drawing on Althusser and Butler to establish an account of “humanity” as an ideological apparatus, the chapter argues that the idea of anthropological exceptionalism itself is at the heart of human sinfulness, a false pretension to transcendence that negates the relations in which God has set human beings. The chapter argues that the incarnation of God as a human being, while it accomplishes redemption, does not endorse an exceptional status for humanity in creation, but reattaches human beings, through their own animality, to creation as a whole.

This chapter takes up the work of Ankara theologian and kalam scholar Şaban Ali Düzgün, treating his Muslim understanding of fitra, or primal human nature and how he uses this Islamic concept to redefine what it means to be primitive. From his understanding of primal human nature, the chapterreconstructs his theological anthropology—one defined by both Enlightenment values and classical Islamic understandings of the God-world relation. Through a holistic reconstruction of Düzgün’s theological anthropology, the analysis shows that his dialectical use of both Islamic and “Western” concepts not only allows him to cast authentic Islam as compatible with Western values of individual freedom. Further, Düzgün’s theological anthropology also allows him to actively defend individual agency and worth in the face of double-standards, be they religious or secular, or in the face of Western individualism gone to the extreme.

This chapter works to refigure humanity’s place in creation, shifting from accounts centered in the imago dei that inculcate a sovereign anthropological exceptionalism and toward an account in which human beings find themselves personally and spiritually constituted by relations with nonhuman creatures. To that end, the chapter balances conventional emphasis on Genesis 1 with a reading of Nebuchadnezzar’s character arc in the book of Daniel, which configures sovereignty and human uniqueness in a very different way. Moving to the New Testament Gospels, the chapter suggests that one’s identity in the Realm of God is always determined from the perspective of the oppressed. Following this insight through, the chapter imagines who human beings might be in the eyes of various nonhuman neighbors, from pets to animals confined in factory farms.

In Origen of Alexandria, there is a consistent emphasis on the slow transformation of material bodies into spiritual beings—that is, of the passage from a corporeal to a noetic existence. And certain types of food play a crucial role within this ongoing process of transformation insofar as eating becomes a mechanism for integrating body and soul and elevating them into a nature of spirit. Origen uses the Pauline food categories found in 1 Corinthians 3 as a hermeneutical key to unlock the whole of scripture and its significance for the structure and formation of the Christian life. This chapter demonstrates how Origen employs the symbol of breast milk as one of several “diets” for those embodied souls undergoing the slow transformation into a spiritual body. Crucially, Origen is the first to develop at length the relationship between the milk and solid food of 1 Corinthians and the “vegetables for the weak” found in Romans 14. The inclusion of vegetables enables Origen to harmonize Paul’s threefold anthropology of fleshy, soulish, and spiritual. As a result, he creates an elaborate taxonomy of souls—a dietary system for classifying the different statuses of souls among Christians.

The Bible, taken in its ancient historical context, says little explicitly about the nature of the human being, certainly not in any kind of scientific or philosophical way. It provides no explicit “theological anthropology.” Yet the New Testament, if read with care and creativity, may be seen to teach that the human person is a product of social and cultural construction; that the body, though a unity in some sense, is also made of various parts; that the self is social. The New Testament may help Christians accept the necessary finitude of human beings as a good, not as a flaw of human existence. It may come as a surprise to many people to see what may be learned from an innovative reading of the Bible about human sexuality and desire. Moreover, the value of some very traditional doctrines not popular with most modern people, such as the doctrines of original sin and predestination, may also be rediscovered for our time. And certainly the New Testament is rich for imagining the meaning of salvation and the resurrection of the body—even the “deification” of human beings—for Christians in the 21st century.

The introduction outlines the structure of the “problem of human animality” in Christian theological anthropology and explains how it leads to ineradicable tensions and contradictions in Christian accounts of human life that rely on anthropological exceptionalism. Prior to a summary of the book, the introduction also offers an explanation of its method with particular attention to the rationale behind the choice to focus on fourth-century Christian authors in conjunction with contemporary critical and constructive theology.

Chapter 6 takes up the end of the human story with God, the eschatological transformation of the human being through the resurrection of the body end entry into perfect communion with God. Conventionally, theologians have imagined resurrected of human body as being whole and intact, but with several basic vital functions negated—namely digestion and sexual expression. Arguing that such a maneuver safeguards the materiality of the human body precisely by negating its animality, this chapter seeks to construct a vision of transformed human life with God in which digestion and sexual expression are at the center of human communion with God and fellow creatures. The chapter’s efforts are aided by the wealth of the tradition itself: biblical and liturgical imagery such as the wedding feast of the Lamb, eucharistic theology, and Christian nuptial mysticism.

Chapter 2 takes up Gregory of Nyssa’s homiletic Commentary on the Song of Songs with special attention to Gregory’s exegetical strategies for dealing with extensive animal imagery in the context of erotic poetry. Gregory’s interpretation utilizes the strangeness of the animal imagery to cover the naked indiscretion of the Song’s sexual content for his listeners; attention to animal metaphors allows Gregory to produce contemplative wisdom from an erotic text. Simultaneously, however, Gregory disparages a straightforwardly sexual reading of the Song as a capitulation to base and beastly desires. In the end, Gregory’s reading is structured around a dynamic tension as it is desire rather than rationality that ultimately draws a human being into endless pursuit of union with God. Although this holy desire is a function of the animal portion of human life, Gregory can never acknowledge it as such without undermining his fundamental commitment to anthropological exceptionalism.

The conclusion makes a case for the foregoing chapters’ theological work on human animality as a novel approach to ecological theology. The human relationship to the animality internal to human life shapes human relationships to nonhuman animals and the natural world in a determinative way. Where humanity is defined over against animality and performed in each human life through efforts to transcend one’s own animality—as the bulk of the Christian tradition would have it—then humanity is ill equipped to life in ecological relationships of mutuality and responsibility with fellow creatures. A theology whose account of human life is centered on human animality is one necessary piece of an adequate response to ecological degradation.