Bogoslovska smotra, Vol. 90 No. 2, 2020.
Original scientific paper
The Human Being and the Created World (Gen 1 – 2). Biblical-TheologicalCchallenges to Contemporary Christian Anthropology and Ecology
Đurica Pardon
orcid.org/0000-0002-6400-3740
; Parish of St. Ladislaus the King, Punitovci, Croatia
Abstract
Contemporary anthropology emphasises that there are three spheres in which the human being builds the world of relations: in living with nature, in living with other beings, and in living with spiritual beings. While using insights of multidisciplinary research of general anthropology, theological anthropology reads Biblical texts and adopts from them a system of ideas and practices for religious life that characterise Christianity. Religious Jewish and Christian theological anthropology always held that the human similarity with God is the fundamental starting point of the Biblical understanding of the human being and its unavoidable part. This article analyses creation accounts and their anthropological ideas within the context of the whole Biblical narrative on relations between God and the human being and within the cultural ideological context in which they emerged. The fundamental claim that the article makes and elaborates on is that the Biblical-theological anthropological teaching is dependent on the territorial and cultural situatedness of Israel, i.e., that territorial and cultural difference of place and environment in which the two creation accounts emerged plays a decisive role for understanding the ideological background of Biblical anthropology.Biblical theological anthropology understands the human being as a localised and grounded being, who lives, at a specific place, freely and in peace, and worships God in political and economic independence together with his/her own people. Although they emerged in different historical and cultural contexts, both creation accounts offer a clear message that the human being is existentially tied to earth on personal, national, and global level of existence. This is, at the same time, the ideological background of the Biblical anthropological teaching and a constituent part of human identity. Such an approach reveals that Biblical theological anthropology, as opposed to the previous understanding of religious life through the lenses of the relation between God – human being and human being – human being, contains an additional element of the relation human being – earth as an unavoidable part of religious anthropological-theological system. This offers a new and Biblically grounded anthropological-theological image that can provide clearer answers to the question of the human being in the context ofthe contemporary world and its ecological crisis. In this manner, a possibility of a new form of authentic Christian theological-anthropological and ecological teaching presents itself and offers an opportunity of salvation and saving of the common home of all creation – Earth – in the current state of alienation and uprootedness from it.
Keywords
anthropology; theological anthropology; Biblical anthropology; theology of earth; Book of Genesis 1 – 2.
Hrčak ID:
243117
URI
Publication date:
31.8.2020.
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