Bidding ends 11/9/2018: Mobile Ed: TH222 Theological Anthropology

 The Human as a Christological Being
 For Zizioulas, then, only the divine persons are the kinds of eternally unique and absolutely free beings who constitute true personhood. If there is to be any kind of creaturely personhood that corresponds to this divine reality, it will only be as creaturely realities come to participate in the reality of divine personhood.74 As Robert Turner concludes, “There is no true human personhood which is not constituted by a union with the divine persons.”75
 Establishing the union between the divine and the human that makes real personhood possible in the created world is where Christology comes into play. And since Zizioulas presents the challenge of human personhood as a creational reality and not simply a consequence of the fall, he concludes that Christology is not purely soteriological. Christology extends beyond redemption to include the theological completion of God’s creative purposes for humanity, which was “to effect the ultimate koinonetic union of creation with itself and with God in love” so that all creation comes to participate in the personal reality of God and become hypostasized.76 This is the ecstatic movement of divine personhood directed toward creation. In creation, we see this initially when Adam received the “divine call” in which he was constituted as an Other and called into personhood.77 By creating Adam in his image and summoning him into personal relationship, God invited Adam into a hypostatic state that would not have been available to him as a purely biological being, thus making human personhood possible.
 Adam’s role, however, was not limited to his own personhood alone. Consistent with the rejection of substantial causation, Zizioulas contends that human beings do not have their cause in some underlying substance. Instead, what causes all other human beings to exist is Adam as “a particular being.”78 As the Father is the personal cause of the Trinity, so Adam is the personal cause of humanity. Thus, the hypostasization of Adam was to have been “the constitutive event of humanity” in which all human beings become human persons.79
 The story of creaturely personhood, though, extends even further. According to Zizioulas, human persons were to play a mediatorial role in extending this personhood to the rest of creation. “All creatures possess a hypostasis, a mode of being. Yet not all creatures are gifted with the freedom to relate this hypostasis to the divine ‘mode of being’ which is not subject to death.”80 Thus, although other creatures are particular beings that humans can engage as significant others, only humans are made in the image of God and have been “endowed with the freedom to reflect divine personhood in creation.”81 Thus, having received the gift of becoming persons through the divine summons into relationship, human persons were to extend the gift of personhood by bringing all of creation into communion with God. This is the “priestly character of humanity.”82
 However, the “ ‘chain’ of hypostatic existence” is still not complete.83 Given the creaturely limitations of Adam’s biological hypostasis, Zizioulas contends that Adam alone could not have provided the bridge between the uncreated divine being and the particular being of all created entities. “If Adam as a particular being and not as a human nature is the primary cause of human being, he must be in a constant relationship with all the rest of human beings, not via human nature — for this would make nature acquire again the decisive priority — but directly, that is, as a particular being carrying in himself the totality of human nature, and not part of it.”84 Yet as a finite creature, this is precisely what Adam cannot do. Without some further explanation, then, it would seem that “Humanity . . . per se cannot be a candidate for a personal ontology.”85
 It is only in the incarnation that we see the true ground of human personhood. Christ is the one who bridges the “gulf of otherness” by joining created and uncreated in a single person,86 thus allowing created realities to participate in the very same relation (schesis) in which he is constituted as Son in relation to the Father and the Spirit.87 “One must see in Christ a person in whom the division of ‘natures’ is changed into an otherness through communion.”88 Even more, though, Christ is a “catholic” or “corporate” person who establishes the personhood of all human persons by allowing them to participate in his own eternal sonship.89 Thus, Christ is both one and many: “Christ is ‘one’ in his own hypostasis, that is, as he relates eternally to the Father, but he is also at the same time ‘many’ in that the same schesis becomes now the constitutive elements — the hypostases — of all those whose particularity and uniqueness and therefore ultimate being are constituted throughout the same filial relationship which constitutes Christ’s being.”90 In this sense, Christ is “the ontological ground of every man.”91 He comes as Savior not simply because he reveals true personhood, but because he is the one who “realizes in history the very reality of the person and makes it the basis and ‘hypostasis’ of the person for every man.”92
 In the incarnation, then, we see the truth of creation itself: “The incarnate Christ is so identical to the ultimate will of God’s love, that the meaning of created being and the purpose of history are simply the incarnate Christ.”93 Thus, God always intended for the incarnation to occur, without which creation could never achieve God’s creational purposes. Even if humanity had not fallen, human beings would still have needed to be “transformed incrementally into Christ, that is, man-with-God.”94 In other words, the incarnation is not just about restoring humanity back to its created state, as though creation was a state of perfection beyond which humanity could grow no further. Instead, Christology reveals that the telos of creation lies beyond itself.
 In its purely biological hypostasis, then, human nature cannot attain true personhood. Personhood must always be received as a gift in relation with other persons, and that is what God made possible by joining divine and human in the person of the Son and summoning all humans to participate in the personal life of the Son. Hypostasized in the Son, human persons were then to extend that personal life by entering into meaningful life with the rest of creation. Tragically, of course, Adam refused the summons, which leads us into Zizioulas’s understanding of sin, redemption, and the church: the ecclesial hypostasis of the human being.

Cortez, M. (2016). Christological anthropology in historical perspective: ancient and contemporary approaches to theological anthropology. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.