Introduction
In 2021, a portion of the Champlain Towers South, in Surfside, Florida, collapsed, killing 98 people. It is thought that the building collapsed because of infrastructural inadequacies.[1] Alongside the great feats of human ingenuity may be listed the instances where human failure, due to lack of knowledge, wrong materials, or sometimes laziness, has resulted in deadly disasters. Other such incidents include the South Fork Dam near Johnston, PA, which, on May 31, 1889, after heavy rains, collapsed, sending some 3,600,000,000 gallons of water rushing towards Johnston, PA. This collapse, due to structural inadequacies, caused the deaths of 2,209 people.[2] Thomas Aquinas begins the Prologue of his De Ente et Essentia with a quote from Aristotle’s De Caelo et Mundo, suggesting that “A small error at the outset can lead to great errors in the final conclusions.”[3] This simple principle is discovered to be true in buildings and all human constructions, but is also true in our all too human attempts to articulate and defend a whole wide variety of truths across the academic disciplines. It is as true in the Natural Sciences as it is in Philosophy and Theology. What this simple saying suggests is that as pious as our intentions may be, if we introduce error in the fundamental elements of our speculative endeavours, we risk building a theoretical house of cards which will tumble at the slightest perturbation. This is, I would suggest, the fate of the approach to Theological Anthropology that Marc Cortez has been developing over the past ten years.
Cortez’s proposed goal for his approach to Theological Anthropology is that he wishes to develop what he calls a “Christological Anthropology.” Growing out of his interaction with Karl Barth’s theological anthropology, Cortez develops a method which he suggests will help us to come to a complete understanding of what it means to be human, by beginning and continuing with observations drawn from what the Scriptures tell us about Christ. In what follows, we will begin by providing a clear explanation of Cortez’s approach to Christological Anthropology. We will then note how and why he has determined that it is necessary to abandon a traditional Realist metaphysics and anthropology. In so doing, we will also explain what he has put in its place — how he seeks to explain what it means to be human — and point out some of the devastating consequences of this approach. We will conclude by showing why it is that his project not only fails to adequately explain what it means to be human, but why it also keeps him from being able to affirm the traditional Christian understanding of sexuality. Indeed, Cortez’s project, though he may not wish to go there himself, appears to force him into agreement with transgender theorists, and, ultimately, to the denial of the very existence of the human person — which would entail the denial of the person and humanity of Christ.
Christological Anthropology According to Cortez
A Barthian Prelude
Cortez finds, in Barth, what will become the primary principles of his approach to Christological anthropology. The most fundamental point which Cortez draws from Barth is that it is only from, in, and through Christ that we can know what it means to be human.[4] We find this idea developed in his earlier work, Embodied Souls, Ensouled Bodies, where he lays out Barth’s approach to a proper understanding of humanity. Cortez suggests that we find the grounds for the Christocentric approach to humanity in Barth’s understanding of the doctrine of creation, whereby Barth makes the following moves:
- There can be no knowledge of creation without prior knowledge of the Creator, for the notion of “creation” is co-dependent upon the notion of a “creator.”[5]
- The very existence of creation is grounded in God’s “decision to establish a covenantal relationship between himself and something other than himself,” but the “other” in whom this covenantal relationship is centered is humanity. Therefore, says Cortez, summarizing Barth’s argument, “if creation can only be understood on the basis of the covenant and if the covenant centers on God’s relationship with humanity, then creation can only be understood in terms of this theanthropic relationship.”[6]
- Finally, if creation can only be understood through the covenantal relationship between God and humankind, this seems to entail that it is only through and in Jesus Christ that we can have some understanding of humanity, and, for that matter, all of creation.[7] It follows that Jesus-Christ is the only proper starting point from which we may come to any true and meaningful understanding of what it means to be human.
This basic argument provides us with what Cortez describes as Barth’s central anthropological principle: though we may experience other human beings, or even humanity in general, we can learn nothing relevant from these phenomenal experiences about what it means to be a human; but, Jesus is, in every sense, the true man and the ontological determination of what it means to be human; therefore, if we wish to understand anything about what it means to be human, we must begin our study, not from the “phenomenon” of man, but from the archetype of man in Christ-Jesus.[8]
Cortez goes on to explain just what it means to say that Christ is the ontological determination of what it means to be human. He notes, first of all, that this entails that humanity is ontologically determined by divine election.[9] To be human, is to be elect in Christ who is, at once, both the elector and the elect in the truest and most originary sense.[10] Secondly, due to the fall and the corruption of humanity by sin, “human nature” has been inescapably corrupted by sin, such that it makes it impossible to know, from the phenomenal particular humans, what it means to be human. This is true on two accounts: (1) It is suggested that one cannot know what it means to be a human by looking at particular humans which cannot be considered as fully human because of the corruption of sin,[11] and (2) sin has so tainted the human intellect that it can no longer be trusted to arrive at any truth.[12] Therefore, it is only in Christ as incarnate and as faithful to the covenant — as the archetype of humanity — that we can have any trustworthy source for knowledge of what it means to be human.[13] Third, to be human is to be “summoned” by God into relationship through Christ-Jesus.[14] For Cortez, this means that the humanity of all humans is grounded in, and determined by, Christ’s election, covenant faithfulness, and divine summoning to a relationship with God. To the claim that Barth put forth the idea that Christ participates in the same human nature and existence as we have, Cortez suggests, “The important point is to realize that Barth understands human nature primarily in terms of a being’s concrete relationship to God (cf. W. Johnson 1997: 157). To become human, then, is to enter into the history of God’s covenantal relationship with that which is other to himself.”[15] These reflections all point back to, and support the central principle of Christocentric anthropology: Christ is the true archetype of human nature, in whom and through whom all particular phenomenal humans can both know what it means to be human, and, ultimately, become human. Ultimately, particular phenomenal humans are but tainted and corrupted imitations of the real, and give us no reliable knowledge of what it means to be human.[16] As such, to know ourselves, creation, and our creator, we must always and only begin with Christ.
Developing Christocentric Theological Anthropology
In the conclusion to his Embodied Souls, Ensouled Bodies, Cortez suggests that the purpose of a Christocentric theological anthropology is not so much to affirm or deny any one theory of what it means to be human, but, rather, to put limits on what can or cannot be said, by “identifying that which must be maintained and calling on proponents of the various theories to develop ways in which their theory can do just that.”[17] This minimal role for Christological anthropology, in relation to understanding “being human,” is the conclusion of his attempt to show how Christological Anthropology is able to help move discussions on human composition forward.
With this Barthian prelude completed, Cortez went on in the following years to develop his Christocentric theological anthropology. In a work published almost ten years later, Cortez distinguishes between what he calls a minimally Christological anthropology and a comprehensively Christological anthropology.[18] A minimally Christological anthropology “is one in which (a) Christology warrants important claims about what it means to be humans and (b) the scope of those claims goes beyond issues like the image of God and ethics.”[19] With such a minimalistic definition, it would not be surprising to discover that almost any Christian theologian who takes the Scriptures seriously engages in this form of Christological anthropology. He points the reader to John Calvin as an example of a theologian who engages in a minimally Christological anthropology: his understanding of what it means to be human is heavily influenced by, qualified by, and given direction by, his Christology.
Minimalistic Christology, however, does not accurately describe the type of project Cortez engages in. Rather, Cortez explicitly seeks to engage in what he calls a comprehensively Christological anthropology (CCA), in which, “(a) Christology warrants ultimate claims about true humanity such that (b) the scope of those claims applies to all anthropological data.”[20] In this way, Cortez sees himself as following Karl Barth’s lead, though not uncritically or blindly, in affirming that what it means to be human is ontologically determined by Christ.[21] In ReSourcing Theological Anthropology, Cortez sets out to accomplish two things: (1) to make explicit the theological principles of a true CCA, and (2) show that CCA is able to helpfully provide guidance on a number of important contemporary questions.
In relation to the first point, Cortez argues, first of all, based upon his reading of the Gospel of John (and, especially the statement in John 19:5 “here is the man”), that “Jesus is the true telos of humanity, the eschatological end that God had in mind from the beginning,” and, therefore, “that we must also maintain that this telos is intrinsic to the meaning of humanity. In other words, we cannot fully understand what it means to be human until we have seen true humanity revealed in Jesus.”[22] In other words, to the questions “what is man to be?,” or “what is the end of man?,” both of which are questions about human teleology, we must answer, “Christ.” Cortez will go on to argue that “Jesus did not come merely to restore a work of creation that was already complete in the beginning and only needs to be returned to its original state. Instead, John presents creation as something that somehow needs to be completed in and through Jesus Christ.”[23] In other words, it would appear that Cortez is suggesting that humanity (as seen in the particular instances of Adam and Eve) was not made complete or fully human in the beginning, then fell, and is restored in and by Christ. Rather, creation was made incomplete and is only made whole in and by Christ’s incarnation. This interpretation of Cortez seems to be confirmed by his later promotion of what he calls an “intrinsic view” of the creational teleology, suggesting that “the eschatological consummation of humanity that we see in Jesus Christ simply is the meaning of humanity. Humanity has no proper telos other than eschatological consummation. Consequently this finality is intrinsic to the definition of humanity.”[24] That is, man was not made as something that was complete in itself, but as something that can only be made complete in its eschatological (future) consummation in the incarnate and glorified Christ.[25]
Secondly, Cortez argues, based upon his interpretation of 1 Corinthians 15, that the incarnation of Christ was not simply to correct the fall, but “also as the one who advances creation toward its intended telos (15:35–49).”[26] He takes 1 Corinthians 15 to be arguing, not that Christ restores humanity to its pre-fall nature (is there such a thing?),[27] but, rather, that Christ directs man towards his eschatological consummation: a new humanity.[28] In the development of this claim, Cortez suggests that in order to understand the incarnation properly, “we could appeal to something inherent in the eternal Son. In other words, instead of affirming that the incarnate Jesus is the revelation of what it means to be truly human, maybe we should affirm that the archetype of humanity somehow resides in the essence of the eternal son.”[29] This entails, for Cortez, that the pre-incarnational second person of the Trinity is the eternal archetype of true humanity, rather than the incarnational Son being the “true fulfillment of the archetype.”[30]
Third, Cortez moves on to suggest that the traditional Christian understanding of the imago Dei fails because he thinks it cannot account for what he suggests is the Old Testament understanding of what an image of God is. This opens the door for him to suggest that “the imago Dei refers specifically to the humanity of the Son in the incarnation.”[31] He begins by suggesting that theologians have traditionally held that the imago Dei contains intelligible content which can teach us about man (material role),[32] and is able to help structure or organize what we say about man (formal role).[33] Relying on the work of James Barr and other Old Testament scholars, Cortez argues that the purpose of an image is to manifest the presence of God in the world — not so much to replace God, nor to be God — such that the presence of God is representationally present.[34] With this Old Testament understanding in place, Cortez argues, on the basis of the New Testament texts which use the language of “image” (2 Cor 3:18, Col 1:15, 3:10–11, Heb 1:3, etc.), that our understanding of the imago Dei must be reoriented to the conclusion that only Jesus Christ is the imago Dei, and that humans may be transformed into the imago Dei insomuch as they are united with Christ by the indwelling Spirit.[35] This means, for Cortez, that Christ “inaugurates true humanity” through the incarnation and the sending of the Holy Spirit to indwell all believers;[36] but, insomuch as Christ is the true human from eternity past, this entails that “being human fundamentally involves manifesting God’s own glorious presence through the indwelling power of the Spirit.”[37] To be human is to manifest the presence of God in the world and to the world by being made into the imago Dei through the working of the Holy Spirit by which we are united with Christ. In seeking to understand this solo Christos understanding of the imago Dei, Cortez first argues — based on Colossians 1:15–17 — that it must be referring to Christ in his physical and very real humanity.[38] He then notes that Hebrews 1:1–4 appears to connect the imago Dei with Christ in his divine nature, though pointing towards his incarnation.[39] This leads him to the conclusion that when we say that Christ is the imago Dei, what we mean is, “the imago Dei is true of the Son in virtue of the incarnation and that the imago Dei is eternally true in virtue of God’s eternal decree to become incarnate in Christ. To use Barth’s words, the ‘ontological determination of man is grounded in the fact that one man among all others is the man Jesus,’ and this is true specifically because ‘the man Jesus’ is the focus of God’s eternal decree of election. Before creation, the essence of what it means to be human has been eternally grounded in the humanity of Christ.”[40] Only the second person of the Trinity, in his eternally decreed incarnational reality, is the true human and the true imago Dei; and, therefore, to be human is to be united to the Son through the work of the Holy Spirit.
Finally, Cortez brings his theoretical arguments to a close by arguing, based primarily upon his reading of the book of Hebrews, that the eternal Son is true paradigm and “perfect representation of all that it means to be human,”[41] who, alone, really and truly “fulfills the creational design for humanity.[42] In what may be his most dizzying discussion in the theoretical section of this book, Cortez suggests that we need to understand whether or not Christ took upon himself a fallen or an unfallen “human nature,”[43] concluding that Christ must have had a fallen nature, but without sin.[44]
The four claims we have presented above become the foundation for the eleven theses which he proposes as fundamental for any attempt to engage in CCA. Cortez will then apply these principles to three important contemporary moral issues: sexual identity, racial identity, and death. Before considering whether or not CCA is able to speak truth into these issues, we must first note one major difficulty the entire project of CCA runs into, which not only accounts for the dizzying maneuvers Cortez engages in to support his position, but also explains why he has such a hard time providing reasons for his claims.
CCA and the Sidelining of Traditional Metaphysics
Who Needs “Natures” Anyways?
We find, in Cortez’s writings, as he grapples with what it means to be human, a progressive sidelining of traditional metaphysics. In his Embodies Souls, Ensouled Bodies, Cortez grounds his approach to anthropology in a distinctly Barthian understanding of humanity. What this means is that though the traditional language of “human,” “human nature,” or “human essence” is being used, Cortez does not want to commit to any specific understanding of these terms. This is made explicit in his ReSourcing Theological Anthropology, where he states that though he will be using “‘nature’ and ‘human nature’ to refer simply to whatever it is that an individual possesses or instantiates that is both necessary and sufficient to qualify that individual as a member of a particular class (e.g., ‘human’),” he goes on to note that his “intent is to avoid committing to any particular definition of ‘nature.’”[45] He states that he will use the terms “essence” and “essential” in the same basic way.[46]
This essentially means that he is using words with no referent — presumably with the goal of understanding what that term refers to. Later, in articulating what he oddly calls the “extrinsic view” of human teleology (associated loosely with Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, as interpreted by Edward T. Oakes, Kenneth Oakes, Neil Ormerod, Lawrence Feingold, and, later, Steven A. Long),[47] Cortez suggests what this perspective sees as determinative of “being human,”[48] and then calls upon Henri de Lubac in order to reject Feingold’s perspective.[49] Cortez then explains Long’s response to Lubac, in defense of a human nature which is common to all humans and the basis of what it means to be human,[50] but appears to reject Long’s claims because Cortez’s “intrinsic view” is able to account for what Long thinks it loses (i.e., the ability to understand the incarnation and to know what a human is apart from the incarnation).[51]
In the context of this discussion, Cortez suggests that, “no one denies that we can know at least some things about humanity independently of knowing humanity’s supernatural telos. That would be absurd since it would mean that non-Christians have no concept of what it means to be human.”[52] This claim, which appears very level headed, seems to be contradicted by other quite dogmatic claims, such as that found on the very next page, where Cortez says, “the supernatural telos we see in Jesus simply is the definition of what it means to be truly human.”[53] Perhaps I am simply being nit-picky about the use of words, but, when we say that x is the definition of what it means to truly (or as he says elsewhere, essentially) be y, this seems to entail that “to be y” just is “to be x.”[54] In other words, an essential definition of x provides us with the intelligibility of x — it tells us “what” x is according to its genus and specific difference — such that to know the definition of x just is to have a true essential concept of what x is. But, if Jesus simply is, as Cortez says, the definition of what it means to be truly human, then (1) it is, in fact, impossible to have a true concept or definition of what it means to be human outside of knowledge of Christ, and (2) to be human is to be Jesus. This seems to entail that, (1) whatever a non-Christian may think it means to be human, this is, in fact, not true — or, at very best, not essential to being human; and (2) either only Jesus is human, or, in some mystical way, only those who are united to Christ through the Holy Spirit are human — but not in themselves, only insomuch as they are a part of Christ who, alone, is human.
Cortez’s sidelining of all philosophical categories becomes even more apparent in his attempt to sidestep the entire Realism and Nominalism debate. When he arrives at his discussion of the effect of sin upon “human nature,” he brings up the question of the nature of, and the relationship between, particulars and universals, suggesting that the argument in favor of the idea that sin has somehow tainted a human nature which can be healed by the redemptive act of Christ “only works if you are willing to grant the idea that there is such a thing as a universal human nature that can be assumed and healed in the incarnation. If you think instead that a human nature is a concrete particular that exemplifies the properties necessary for qualifying as a specifically human particular, this argument loses much of its validity.”[55] The two views mentioned in this section are, presumably, simplistic articulations of some version of, first Realism, and, second, Nominalism. In what follows, Cortez appears to suggest that both Realism and Nominalism run into difficulties when trying to explain the effect of the incarnation upon humans.[56] Cortez later sidelines the broadly Realist approach with a handwave, saying, “But not only does this argument depend on the idea of a universal human nature, which many contemporary theologians would not affirm, but it also fails to address the matter at hand.”[57] The first comment can be hand-waved in precisely the same way that he handwaves the historical understanding of the Church: who cares that some, or even “many” contemporary theologians dislike the notion of a universal human nature, when it was arguably the position held (though in a much more nuanced way than any of Cortez’s writings suggest) by most Christian theologians for close to 1700 years of Church History. If someone is waving at you, it is only polite to return the gesture.
The second point which Cortez presents as a reason to reject the quasi-Realist perspective is that “it falls prey to the same argument as the previous paragraph, since before the fall Adam and Eve would also have participated flawlessly in this same universal human nature.”[58] The argument of the preceding paragraph suggests that we cannot establish the uniqueness of Christ’s humanity because, even if we say that he took upon himself a full, perfect, and unfallen human nature, this would not distinguish him from Adam and Eve.[59] But, according to Cortez, the Scriptures present Christ as “the unique revelation of true humanity.”[60] Therefore, as Cortez suggests, Jesus could not be fully, perfectly, and sinlessly human in the same way as Adam and Eve. However, if he took on a “universal” human nature, then presumably he would have been human in the same way as Adam and Eve. Thus, the Realist approach fails. The Realist, however, might respond to Cortez by arguing that what specifically makes Christ the “unique revelation of true humanity” is not that he had a “nature” that was notably or “essentially” different from Adam and Eve or the rest of humanity, as this would entail that either Christ was not human or that only Christ is human. Rather, what sets Christ apart from all humans, including Adam and Eve, is that (1) he modeled perfect humility (John 13:12–15, Phil 2:3–8), (2) he did all things so that through his actions and way of life that many “may be saved” (1 Cor 10:33-11:1), (3) he suffered voluntarily for the glory of God (1 Pet 2:21), (4) when tempted he did not sin (Heb 4:14–16), and (5) he obeyed the Father perfectly and without fail (Heb 5:8–10).[61] Many more examples could be given of Christ’s exemplary humanity, but none of them even remotely suggest that Christ is anything other than human — in the same way that Adam and Eve were human, or us for that matter — but human perfectly, fully, and without the corruption of sin. There is no hint in Scripture of a different or unique human nature. It is upon these wondrous grounds that we are promised justification through the incarnation and redemptive activities of the God-Man, sanctification by the indwelling Spirit (being made into the image of the Son), and final salvation through union with God in Christ by the Spirit.
Cortez, however, takes these two points as sufficient to abandon the quasi-Realist approach, and to look for a different way of understanding what it means to be human that is grounded in the humanity of Christ. Consider, then, what appears to be Cortez’s settled understanding of what it means to be human and see where it leads.
To be Human is to be Related to Christ
Ultimately, suggests Cortez, to be human is to be related to God in specific ways,[62] and, perhaps more specifically, “to be human simply is to be related to Jesus” by being ontologically and epistemologically grounded in him.[63] The ontological grounded-ness is the relationship of being called or summoned to union with Christ — specifically as elect because we are included in Christ’s election.[64] For Barth, Cortez states, “Humanity must, therefore, be defined as ‘the creaturely being which is addressed, called and summoned by God.”[65] We must add that the ontological and epistemological grounded-ness is described as (a) Christ’s sinlessness which guarantees the eschatological end towards which we are called (ontological ground),[66] and (b) through which we understand what it means to be human (epistemological ground).[67] This construction all comes back to a single important claim that to be human is to be the thing that is called to eschatological union with God through covenant relation in Christ Jesus by the Holy Spirit.[68] But wouldn’t it be more precise to say that to be human is to-be-in-relation, and, more specifically, to be in relationship to God through the covenant inaugurated in and through Christ — not simply called, but actually in relation as are the Elect?[69] This conundrum — the question of whether being human is defined by being called to or by actually being in relationship with Christ — presents a tension found throughout Cortez’ writings, which we will address shortly. Perhaps for the moment, however, we may settle on the idea that Cortez seems to be primarily suggesting that to be human is, by definition, to be in a covenant relationship with God through Christ’s election and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
This theological commitment, of course, raises some serious questions that need to be addressed: (1) there is the question of the humanity of those beings which would be considered human from the perspective of a traditional ontology (for they would be seen as particular instances of human nature),[70] but which could not in any way be seen as included in a covenant relationship with God in Christ: are they human? (2) There is also the question of how a “relation” can be that by which the nature or essence of substance (and not simply an accident) is defined (and, correspondingly, how this approach to human teleology could be even remotely considered “intrinsic”) when a relation is a way of being which is extrinsic to the relata, and accidental to them.
Is it All or only Some?
In relation to the first question — the status of the humanity of unregenerate “human persons” — Cortez thinks that the answer to this question must be “yes,” suggesting that “the ‘ontological connection’ between Jesus and humanity holds for all human persons and not simply those who are members of the Christian community.”[71] Presumably, this is because to be human is to be invited by Christ into relationship with God — whether or not one accepts this summons. This idea is made explicit in ReSourcing Theological Anthropology where Cortez seeks to avoid two possible interpretations of his claims about human nature: (1) soteriological Universalism (if to be human is to be related to God by divine election in Christ, does this not entail that all humans are elect. Therefore, Universalism), which he avoids by suggesting that “[i]t does mean that all humans have been designed for eschatological consummation as the outworking of God’s creational plan, but it says nothing about how many humans will actually arrive at this telos;”[72] and (2) Ontological Exclusivism (whereby only elect “persons” are human), which he seeks to avoid by suggesting that “all humans are human insofar as they have been patterned after the humanity of Christ and that all humans have been called to the eschatological telos we see revealed in Christ.”[73] On both accounts, Cortez is forced to shift his claims from (a) to be human is to be related to God in a covenant relationship established by inclusion in Christ’s status as the Elect, to (b) to be human is to be invited or summoned into that covenant relationship, whether the invitation is accepted or not; adding that (c) to be human is to be a thing which is “patterned after the humanity of Christ.”
There are a number of points of contention that may be raised in relation to Cortez’s fancy footwork, as he seeks to evade two unsavory positions. First, we cannot hold both (a) and (b) together, as the terms have significantly different extensions. In the first case (a), one is human whether or not they are in Christ — by the simple fact of being invited to union with Christ. In the second case (b), only those who are united to Christ can be said to be in the image of God and thus said to be human. Both cannot be true. Either all those who are not united to Christ through the indwelling Spirit are not human; or anything that is invited into covenant with God through Christ by the Spirit — by the very fact that it is able to be summoned to covenant union — is human (joining the covenant does not make it “more or less human”).
A second difficulty that one might raise, assuming we decide to take the second option (b), as Cortez appears to do whenever he seeks to defend his claim against this very objection, is that we may still be left with the question of the nature of those who have been condemned to Hell. Presumably their invitation to union with God in Christ has been withdrawn, it has been rejected — having once been summoned, they are no longer summoned. Do they retain human “nature” once they are no longer “being-summoned” to union with God in Christ? If “being summoned” is what makes one human, then once the summons is no longer present, do they cease to be human? Or, shall we say that it is one’s ability to be summoned which makes one human? Presumably those in Hell may no longer be summoned, and thus no longer have the ability to be summoned. Therefore, they are no longer human. Or, is it simply that at some point all were summoned, and this historic summoning is the eternal basis by which something is said to be human?
A related difficulty is raised when we attempt to relate the summons (for the sake of argument let’s assume it is a pre-temporal summons that all humans of all times were included in for all of eternity) to the eschatological telos. If it is the summons which makes one human, then it is not inclusion in the eschatological telos which makes one human; it is only the possibility that one might wind up obtaining the eschatological telos. In both cases, it is worth noting that the ontological ground of “being-human” is not intrinsic to the creature, nor is it within God or even the Son. Rather, it is in something that is extrinsic to all those concerned. It is not even found in a relation between God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, and the “summoned creatures”: the eschatological union. Ultimately, it is entirely found in the ability to be receptive of an invitation: to be able to receive a summons to union with God.
A final difficulty with Cortez’s attempt to escape both Soteriological Universalism and Ontological Exclusivism is that he adds in, almost as a fail-safe, that man is made after the pattern of the humanity of Christ. Now, we have already discussed a difficulty with this claim, based upon its uniqueness clause. A second difficulty, which we now raise, is that to avoid the claim that there is a pre-incarnational humanity of Christ, he will be forced to say that the paradigm or pattern of human nature either (a) is an idea of humanity in the mind of God, or (b) is the eternally known idea of what Christ would become through His incarnation in human history, or (c), adopting the A or B theory of time, that paradigm is the somehow “now” existing incarnate Christ of 0–33 AD. He rejects the first option (as we saw above) and does not consider either options (b) or (c), simply stating that somehow Christ’s incarnational humanity is the paradigm for all humanity. Though we could attempt to develop each of these options, it is more salient to the point we are making here to point out that using the language of Christ as “paradigm” or “pattern” upon which all humans find their humanity ontologically grounded is simply to return to the traditional understanding of what it means to be human: to be fashioned based upon the divine idea of human nature. As Aquinas pointed out, God creates from an archetypal form, a model, an eternal paradigm, or Idea.[74] The difference is that Cortez appears to be trying to materialize or incarnate the very idea itself. Here we may ask, assuming Christ’s incarnate humanity is somehow the paradigm or pattern upon which all humans are based, what is this “humanity” that Christ incarnates? It can’t simply be the divine nature, nor could it be the “person” of the Son, and Cortez will not allow it to be a divine Idea (too traditional). It follows, I would suggest, that Cortez either needs to bite the bullet and adopt the traditional metaphysics he has been so loath to accept, or, he needs to discard this additional means of grounding human nature, and return to man as “the being that can be summoned.”
On Relations and “being-related”
We turn, secondly, to the question of how a “relation” can be that by which the nature or essence of substance (and not simply an accident) is defined (and, correspondingly, how this approach to human teleology could be even remotely considered “intrinsic”). One looks in vain in Cortez’s work to find a clear definition of the term “relation” which is so fundamental to his understanding of human nature. So, one might presumably be forgiven for turning for help to the way in which some Christian theologians have adapted the Aristotelian understanding of “relation” for use in Christian doctrine. In his De Trinitate, Boethius considers how the various Aristotelian categories may, or may not, be predicated of God. Relation (“relativis” in Latin) is somewhat different from all of the other categories, for though an accident is said to be predicated of a substance as “inhering” in it, “relation” does not appear to inhere within substance — even when predicated of substance. Boethius notes that “[i]t cannot therefore be affirmed that predication of relationship by itself adds or takes away or changes anything in the thing of which it is said. It wholly consists not in that which is simply being, but in that which is being in some way in comparison, not always with another thing but sometimes with itself.”[75] Boethius goes on to illustrate the nature of relations by pointing out how we predicate relation in relation to location. Boethius illustrated the notion of relation by asking us to imagine that he goes and stands beside another person. He says, “[i]f I go up to him on the right and stand beside him, he will be left, in comparison with me, not because he is left in himself, but because I have come up to him on the right.”[76] The predication of relation is not something that is in the substance or subject of the predication, but is predication of the subject insomuch as the subject is related to another. As such, a relation is a way of being which is extrinsic to the relata, and accidental to it. One does not define a substance based upon something which is extrinsic to it. What, then, could Cortez possibly mean by saying that to be human is, by definition, to be in a covenantal relationship with God.
Even a cursory reading of Cortez demonstrates his dependence upon Barth’s approach to Christology, but a closer reading of Cortez reveals that he also appears to be approaching the “phenomena” of human nature from a broadly phenomenological and existential perspective.[77] Perhaps, then, he is using the notion of “relation” in a phenomenological sense? Phenomenology cannot reach beyond the perceptions of human experience to posit something outside of the subject,[78] however, this does not mean that it does not provide us with some understanding of what is meant by “relation,” as we do have some perception of being in relation to others. Others are perceived as not just objects in a world that is for me, but as subjects which are, themselves, perceiving and experiencing the appearances of their own world as for them.[79] As such, I experience the world as “intersubjective,” “actually there for everyone, accessible in respect of its Objects to everyone.”[80] Are there others to whom we are in fact related? Husserl is intent on maintaining both that we experience reality as intersubjective — as a reality which is shared by many subjects — and that, in fact, we “must hold fast to the insight that every sense that any existent whatever has or can have for me — in respect of its ‘what’ and its ‘it exists and actually is’ — is a sense in and arising from my intentional life.”[81] There is, then, no way of knowing that what we perceive as the other truly is other than my own subjective intentional life. As such, we need not worry about whether or not there is an other, and, rather, may concentrate on the nature of our relationships with the others so perceived. It is, perhaps, in this sense that we may see relation as no more than the intersubjectivity which forms our understanding of ourselves in our social contexts. This would fit well with Cortez’s apparent agreement with Barth that, “humans constitute themselves as persons in and through their actions in time. Humans are not metaphysical ‘substances’ in which their identity is grounded in some stable, underlying essence. Instead, Barth contends that I establish my identity in and through the history of my personal actions and relations.”[82] Of course, Cortez goes beyond agnosticism about the objective human nature to the denial that there is such a thing, coupled with the claim that to be human is to be historically situated and constructed through our actions and relations. If this is the direction that Cortez is going (denying the non-subjective grounds of ontology and epistemology and affirming a phenomenological ground of “human nature”), then he seems to be forced into affirming that Christianity itself is grounded in the subjects consciousness — Cortez being the subject in question.[83] With no ontological ground outside of the subject’s own consciousness, why does Cortez so perniciously adhere to Christian doctrine?
Perhaps Cortez would also like to reject the Husserlian notion of relations along with the traditional Christian understanding of relation. In that case, it would be helpful if he could tell us just what he means by “relation” so that we can understand what it means to be human.
Presupposing Humanity to talk about Humans
One final point needs to be raised before we conclude our analysis of Cortez’s approach to human nature. This entire discussion appears to presuppose a concept of humanity by which we are even able to say that “the ‘ontological connection’ between Jesus and humanity holds for all human persons…”[84] In fact, are we not working with an already determined understanding of what a human is when we say that Jesus, in the incarnation, became human? Throughout his entire body of work, Cortez continually points to Christ as the eternal paradigm of what it means to be human. The question we must ask is, if we do not know what it means to be human prior to reading in the Scriptures that in the incarnation Christ became a man, how do we know what Christ became? Why think that Christ was “born in the likeness of men (Phil 2:7)”[85] means that he became incarnate as a “human being” when we don’t know what it means to be a human being, or what a human being is? Some knowledge of what a human being is precedes our reading of Scriptures, not just in the incarnational claims of the New Testament, but even in the very first biblical references to humankind in Genesis 1 when we are told “Then God said, ‘let us make man in our image, after our likeness (Gen 1:26).” This is the very first time any mention of mankind is found in Scriptures, and the assumption of the author is, quite clearly, that the reader knows that the term “man” refers to “human beings” (which the author and the readers are). Assuming that the reader knows “what” a “human being” is, the attending claim (that man is made in the image and likeness of God) tells us something about human beings — at the very least, that they have a dignity which is superior to the rest of the things that Genesis 1 says were created by God.
From the creation narrative to the final book of canonical Scriptures, the assumption of the authors (both human and divine) is that the readers know what a human being is — what the referent for this term is. This natural knowledge of the nature of humanity is the presupposition for every single Scriptural claim about the creation, fall, and redemption of humankind in Christ. This seems to entail that, for Cortez’s project to even get off the ground, though he wants to sideline traditional metaphysics, he must also presuppose that the terms “humanity,” “human person,” “human,” and so on, have specific referents in the sensible cosmos, that the authors and readers of Scriptures — both pre-and post- incarnation — had access to. This very same meaning seems necessary for him to be able to say that Christ is the paradigmatic human being from eternity past through the divine elective decree. That is, without the presupposition of some content to which the term “human nature” refers, there can be no discussion of Christ as the “paradigmatic or archetypal human.”[86] This point can, in fact, be illustrated by considering what it means to be made in the image of God in relation to art, the artist, and the work of art, which we will consider in our conclusion. For example, whenever a work of art is produced, it begins in the mind of the artist — at the very least in intention. That is, the artistic process begins in the will to produce and the idea of the thing to be produced. Before there can be something that is rightly called a work of art, therefore, there is an idea of it, which it will be said to resemble, and against which its being will be measured.[87] In the same way, just as the work of art presupposes the idea in the mind of the artist, so the existence of particular humans made in the image of God presupposes the archetypal form of humanity in the mind of God.
As we come to our conclusion, consider how Cortez’s sidelining of traditional metaphysics actually creates the very problems that he sets out to solve in his ReSourcing Theological Anthropology: the problems related to what Christ’s incarnation as a Jewish man say about gender, race, and human bodies.
Conclusion: Deficient Ontology and Anthropological Conundrums
In this article, we have worked through the approach to theological anthropology developed over the past couple of decades by Marc Cortez. In so doing, we have pointed out not only that he has effectively rejected the metaphysical and epistemological grounding of traditional Christian theology, but that in so doing he has effectively made it impossible for himself to understand both human nature and Christ’s incarnation as man. He has effectively undermined his own project. In conclusion, however, it is worth noting that on top of undermining the very possibility of a theological anthropology and Christology, he has also created his own conundrums. The two primary conundrums that he mentions are how to understand human (1) sexuality, and (2) race. We will only consider the first.
The first question he runs into is what the maleness of the incarnate Christ might say about the imago Dei and what it means to be human.[88] Cortez points to a number of theologians who have suggested that Christ’s maleness implies that, in some way, men share more in the imago Dei, and have a greater share in Christ, than women.[89] Cortez points us towards 1 Corinthians 11, where Paul could be taken to limit the image of God to men.[90] He goes on to suggest that, insomuch as the imago Dei “refers to the whole person and not just the ‘spiritual’ aspects of the person,”[91] that embodiment is central to CCA,[92] and that because Christ came as a man, “we need a way of affirming the centrality of Jesus’s embodied existence without implying that maleness in itself is normative for humanity in general.”[93] Cortez notes that one solution would be a form of metaphysical realism — that is, that there is a universal nature in which all particular human-beings participate; and, to be a particular human being is to be either male or female; therefore, in the incarnation Christ necessarily had to be either a man or a woman.[94] As we expect by now, Cortez is not willing to take an approach that is both traditional and would solve the issue in question, because, for some theologians, the problem is that “it requires the existence of a universal human nature in which we all somehow participate.”[95] Granted, the way in which he portrays this approach is so seriously flawed that it would have been rejected by many historical theologians. The confused nature of his explanation of this approach is made evident when we consider how he refers to “universal human nature” as a “common substance” that is “what makes a person human.”[96] As such, one might argue that he is not so much rejecting the traditional approach as a straw man of the traditional approach. For Cortez, however, having already rejected such a thesis, he sets out to discover another solution.
Cortez’s attempt to discover another way of thinking about Christ’s masculinity leads him to affirm (1) that sexuality is an essential part of human experience;[97] (2) that thinking about Christ’s resurrection humanity does not help us understand human sexuality in any substantive way; and, perhaps more importantly for Cortez, (3) that we must understand “Jesus as one who challenges cultural notions of masculinity.”[98] The question is, of course, what does this mean?
Cortez begins by considering what Gender Essentialism would entail for Christ’s incarnational maleness. Gender Essentialism is described by Cortez as the claim that “masculinity and femininity describe gendered qualities and behaviors that correspond essentially with the biological realities of male and female.”[99] He considers a number of different ways in which one might approach the claim that certain gendered qualities follow upon, are related to, or are produced by, biological realities,[100] concluding that none of these approaches is sufficient.[101] This leads him to consider a second approach, whereby one might suggest that the incarnational Christ challenges the entire “masculinity/femininity paradigm itself,”[102] and, in fact, “subverts gender itself.”[103] Cortez seriously considers this position, suggesting that it shows that it is possible both to affirm that Jesus was a man, and that this says nothing about gender — which is nothing but a socio-cultural norm concerning how human males and females act and are characterized, both individually and in society.[104] How this claim is significantly different from either the second or third form of Gender Essentialism that he has discussed is unclear, as he seems to be suggesting that we can maintain the importance of the biological realities but affirm that there is no necessary connection between biology and gender characteristics or qualities.[105]
In light of his rejection of any form of realist metaphysics, Cortez’s conclusion is somewhat confusing. He says that, “we still saw how viewing human sexuality through the lens of Christology can challenge existing conceptions of masculinity and femininity and the extent to which men and women differ essentially from one another.”[106] This concluding statement, as balanced as it may appear, is made to appear absolutely ludicrous when held against the backdrop of everything we have just seen.
A quick summary might help to piece this all together. First of all, Cortez rejects any substantive version of what might be called metaphysical realism — there is no nature, essence, or “common substance” that is shared by all particular humans, making them to be “what” they are. To be human, on the contrary, is to be in a covenant relationship with God through Christ — it is, as we noted above, not to have a “stable, underlying essence,” but to become a person in socio-historically grounded actions and relations. We may then ask, secondly, what it means to have a biological sex — that is, to be male or female? Cortez may want to point towards certain genotypical and phenotypical features of the human individual, however, we must remind him that to be human is not to have a “stable, underlying essence,” which is precisely what he would be referring to if he sets out to define “male-ness” or “female-ness.” Indeed, if there are no natures, then there is no universal nature of being male or female either. As such, his claim that we can maintain the biological differences between male and females melts away into nothingness, like snow in Florida on a hot summer day, for there is no substance in which these accidents may inhere. Indeed, as Judith Butler and a number of twentieth century feminists have noted, if we reject a “substance metaphysics,” then we must also reject the accidents of biological sex and gender.[107] Consider how, on Cortez’s approach to theological anthropology, he is not only incapable of enlightening us about our human experience as sexed/gendered, but he is also incapable of avoiding Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity.
Though the rejection of realist or substance metaphysics in relation to the question of gender and sexuality (commonly known as Gender/Sex Essentialism) can readily be traced back to John Stuart Mill or Sigmund Freud, we will begin our story in 1984 with the publication of Gayle Rubin’s ground-breaking article, “Thinking Sex.” In this article, she notes, first of all, prefiguring Cortez’s claims, that in order to think about sex in such a way as to remove all injustice and oppression, certain axioms of Western culture must be eliminated.[108] She notes that “One such axiom is sexual essentialism — the idea that sex is a natural force that exists prior to social life and shapes institutions. Sexual essentialism is embedded in the folk wisdoms of Western societies, which consider sex to be eternally unchanging, asocial, and transhistorical.”[109] Sex is classified by the natural and human sciences as “a property of individuals.”[110] She goes on to provide a summary of philosophical and sociological research carried out in the mid-1900s, suggesting that, “the new scholarship on sexual behavior has given sex a history and created a constructivist alternative to sexual essentialism. Underlying this body of work is an assumption that sexuality is constituted in society and history, not biologically ordained. This does not mean the biological capacities are not prerequisites for human sexuality. It does mean that human sexuality is not comprehensible in purely biological terms.”[111] This appears to be very much what Cortez is affirming. Rubin recognizes that by denying realism and gender essentialism, she is affirming a form of Sex/Gender Constructivism.[112]
A similar theme can be found in the writings of Monique Wittig, who wrote her article “The Straight Mind” in 1980, and published it in a book of the same title in 1992. In “The Straight Mind,” Wittig argues that the terms “man,” “woman,” “sex,” “difference,” and so on, are all taken to be basic by the natural sciences, with a meaning that precedes discourse, and, as such, that they are never questioned.[113] However, she notes, “it has been accepted in recent years that there is no such thing as nature, that everything is culture…”[114] We see the same idea being elucidated, a little later, when she says that “for us there is no such thing as being-woman or being-man. ‘Man’ and ‘woman’ are political concepts of opposition, and the copula which dialectically unites them is, at the same time, the one which abolishes them.”[115] For Wittig, as for Rubin, sex and gender are culturally determined concepts. They are not “natures,” nor “accidents,” rather they are impermanent cultural constructs with a history.
In agreement with Rubin and Wittig, and critically building upon their ideas, Judith Butler first suggested that the sex/gender distinction was introduced to dispute the “biology-is-destiny” approach to sexuality (a form of Gender Essentialism).[116] She goes on to note that if gender and biological sex are indeed distinct, then “the sex/gender distinction suggests a radical discontinuity between sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders.”[117] That is, if gender qualities or traits are not tied to biological sex, then there is no reason to think a male will be masculine, or a female feminine. Indeed, suggests Butler, it follows that “man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one.”[118] Now, if we have been following Cortez closely enough, it should now be obvious that this is where he must find himself. He has very clearly argued that there is no direct link between biological sex and gendered qualities. As such, it seems he is incapable of escaping this conclusion. However, Butler has not finished with Cortez. For, she notes, “If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.”[119] We have already noted that if Cortez is rejecting the existence of stable and immutable natures or essences, then he does not have a right to lay claim to any stable and immutable “biological sex.” As such, Cortez is forced to acquiesce to Butler’s claim: both gender and sex are culturally constructed. As such, his theological anthropology creates the very problems that he wants so dearly to resolve. His approach to theological anthropology not only creates the problems, it keeps him from solving them, and makes matters even worse, for Butler is far from finished.
Indeed, Butler goes on to note, in agreement with Rubin and Wittig, that the very notions of “being” and “substance,” grounded in a “metaphysics of substance,” have been found to be culturally and historically situated.[120] Thus, it is necessary to reject a realist metaphysics and all notions of universal and immutable natures or essences. And as we have seen, Cortez finds himself in agreement. Butler, however, unlike Cortez, is willing to follow the consequences of this claim to their logical conclusions, noting that “the critique of the metaphysics of substance implies a critique of the very notion of the psychological person as a substantive thing.”[121] In other words, if there are no natures or essences, and therefore no substances, then there are also no “persons,” just performances according to cultural norms. Butler puts it this way,
In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed. The challenge for rethinking gender categories outside of the metaphysics of substance will have to consider the relevance of Nietzsche’s claim in On the Genealogy of Morals, that “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed — the deed is everything.”…we might state this corollary: There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.[122]
Of course, though it may seem revolutionary, it is unclear that Cortez can avoid this very conclusion: there is no human person, only a substantive relation relating to God through Christ. Though this seems to be the necessary conclusion of Cortez’s experiment in theological anthropology, it is certainly not the message of Christian Scriptures, nor of orthodox Christian doctrine. I would argue that the only way to avoid the Butlerization of Cortez’s theological anthropology is to return to that realist metaphysics he seems so opposed to.
In this paper, we have sought to understand Cortez’s approach to theological anthropology, articulating as clearly as possible his fundamental principles and doctrinal claims, and demonstrating that his system contains within it the source of its own failure. Most importantly, if we may sum up the conclusions of this article, by rejecting traditional metaphysics and epistemology, Cortez has effectively made it impossible to engage in anthropology and Christology, and he has ended up laying the foundations for a “Christian” affirmation of critical theories of sex, race, and so on. We have not sought to provide a positive contribution to the subjects in question, for the simple fact that there is no need. What is needed is nothing other than a return to, and defense of, historical Christian philosophical and theological doctrines — as found in the writings of Augustine, Boethius, Aquinas, and the Reformed theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
[1]“Disaster Assistance: Information on the 2021 Condominium Collapse in Surfside, Florida,” U.S. Government Accountability Agency, https://www.gao.gov/assets/d24106558.pdf (Published Feb. 26, 2024; Accessed May 16, 2026).
[2]“The South Fork Dam,” National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/jofl/learn/historyculture/the-south-fork-dam.htm (Updated March 10, 2026; Accessed May 16, 2026).
[3] Thomas Aquinas, On Being and Essence, in Thomas Aquinas, Opuscula I: Treatises, vol. 55 of Latin/English of the Works of St. Thomas Aquinas, ed. The Aquinas Institute, trans. Robert T. Miller (Green Bay, WI: The Aquinas Institute, 2018), 259.
[4]Marc Cortez, Embodied Souls, Ensouled Bodies: An Exercise in Christological Anthropology and its Significance for the Mind/Body Debate (London/New York: T & T Clark, 2008), 16–39, 60. This work will hereafter be referred to as ESEB.
[5]Cortez, ESEB, 18–19.
[6]Cortez, ESEB, 19–20.
[7]Cortez, ESEB, 20–21.
[8]Cortez, ESEB, 21–22. It would be worth exploring, in another paper, Barth’s use of the term “phenomenon” which has a distinctly Kantian and Post-Kantian German Idealist flavor. One wonders if Barth’s approach to Christocentric anthropology is grounded in the acceptance of the Kantian critique of knowledge, such that the phenomenal cannot be a source of knowledge, and what is in the noumenal, though fundamental for knowing and being, is, itself, beyond the human ability to know. If this is the case, then presumably what Barth is suggesting is that Christ must be the starting point of human understanding of the phenomenal because, entering the phenomenal from the noumenal, he alone is the ground of, and our only way to know what grounds, the phenomenal. An argument could be made that, if it is the case that Barth has taken the Kantian critique of knowledge for granted, and if it can be shown that Kant’s critique of knowledge is at best flawed (if not simply wrong), then Barth’s approach is both unnecessary and wrongheaded.
[9]Cortez, ESEB, 22.
[10]Cortez, ESEB, 22. Christ is both subject and object, thus overcoming the fundamental problem of Post-Kantian German Idealism (cf. ESEB, 30).
[11]Cortez, ESEB, 26–27.
[12]Cortez, ESEB, 27fn31.
[13]Cortez, ESEB, 27fn32, 28.
[14]Cortez, ESEB, 28–30.
[15]Cortez, ESEB, 31fn38.
[16]Cortez, ESEB, 32.
[17]Cortez, ESEB, 195.
[18]Marc Cortez, ReSourcing Theological Anthropology: A Constructive Account of Humanity in the Light of Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017), 21. This work is hereafter referred to as RTA.
[19]Cortez, RTA, 21.
[20]Cortez, RTA, 21.
[21]Cortez, RTA, 21.
[22]Cortez, RTA, 36.
[23]Cortez, RTA, 48.
[24]Cortez, RTA, 50–51. He contrasts the “intrinsic” view with what he calls the “extrinsic view,” which he describes as the claim that “distinguishes between what humanity is in creation (nature) and what humanity becomes through eschatological consummation (grace). The first tells us what humanity is essentially…while the latter reveals the elevation of humanity through grace (RTA, 51).”
[25]The way in which he labels these two views is indicative of a difficulty running throughout his entire corpus, which may be somewhat frustrating for readers steeped in classical or traditional Christian theology: Cortez uses words in unconventional ways. Here, for example, he describes as the “intrinsic view” a perspective which says the divine telos for mankind is not in the individual men themselves — it is not intrinsic to particular humans — but is found in the eschatological fulfillment of what it means to be human in the incarnate and glorified Christ. This idea seems to entail that the ontological determination of what it means to be human is extrinsic to humans, rather than intrinsic. The view he describes as the “extrinsic view” says, on the contrary, that the ontological determination of what it means to be human is intrinsic to all those things which can be said to be human, including the incarnate and glorified Christ insomuch as Christ is incarnate as a perfect human being. If we wish to affirm Cortez’s view, it seems that we are forced to say (1) that there is, in fact, nothing intrinsic to human beings which is the ground of their humanity — the ground of their humanity is fully extrinsic to each and every particular human, with the exception of Christ; (2) the only proper telos of particular human beings is not intrinsic to them as human beings, but is extrinsic as it is found in an eschatological state — it is to be something other than what they are, and is found only in an extrinsic telos towards which they are directed or called.
[26]Cortez, RTA, 83.
[27]Cortez, RTA, 78–81.
[28]Cortez, RTA, 83, 84.
[29]Cortez, RTA, 97.
[30]Cortez, RTA, 97.
[31]Cortez, RTA, 101.
[32]Cortez, RTA, 102.
[33]Cortez, RTA, 101.
[34]Cortez, RTA, 107–13. He thinks that this purpose can explain “functional” views of the image (i.e., man’s role in dominion or stewardship of creation, etc.) and leads to the rejection of “capacity” views of the image (i.e., man as rational, loving, etc.).
[35]Cortez, RTA, 114–115. He says, for example, “the New Testament views the image almost exclusively through the lens of Christology. Jesus alone is ‘the image of the invisible God’ (Col 1:15; cf. 2 Cor 4:4), the ‘exact representation’ of God’s nature (Heb 1:3). We thus find that the focus of the imago Dei has constricted to such an extent that only one person actually qualifies! …Jesus’s unique status as the image of God does not preclude others from participating in that reality. Thus, the good news is that we can be ‘transformed into his image’ (2 Cor 3:18) as we ‘put on the new self’ that is being ‘renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator (Col 3:10; cf. Eph 4:22–24) (RTA, 114).” Cf. Cortez, ESEB, 4.
[36]Cortez, RTA, 115.
[37]Cortez, RTA, 115.
[38]Cortez, RTA, 116–121.
[39]Cortez, RTA, 121–123.
[40]Cortez, RTA, 127–128.
[41]Cortez, RTA, 136.
[42]Cortez, RTA, 141.
[43]Cortez, RTA, 142–148.
[44]Cortez, RTA, 164–165. This chapter provides an example of the type of reasoning we find throughout this work, as well as in Cortez’s earlier work (Embodied Souls, Ensouled Bodies): he begins by laying down “Scriptural” Christological standards by which any theory must be judged adequate or inadequate; he then considers all the arguments in favor and against a particular position; he finds that they all meet the standards he has set for determining an adequate approach to the subject, such that one could affirm any of the positions without difficulty; so he then concludes that he prefers one position to the other; he then takes his preferred position as the ground for later claims (in this case, though he concludes that both positions — fallen and unfallen — are able to meet the standards he set for determining whether or not Christ had a fallen or unfallen human nature, he decides that the best position is the fallen view, because “some of the arguments [supporting the unfallen view] seem rather ad hoc [Cortez, RTA, 164]”). Ultimately, almost all of his conclusions appear to be preferred rather than argued for. For more examples of this type of reasoning see his Embodied Souls, Ensouled Bodies, pp. 153–54, 186–187. In each case, having spent an entire chapter considering arguments for and against specific philosophical theories concerning human constitution, Cortez concludes that most forms of the theory under consideration are able to answer the problems raised for them by a Christocentric approach to what it means to be human, and, therefore, cannot be eliminated on that basis.
[45]Cortez, RTA, 24–25.
[46]Cortez, RTA, 25, 51.
[47]Cortez, RTA, 51–55, 63–66.
[48]Cortez, RTA, 52. Here he quotes Edward Oakes for a definition of what a nature is, and then explains what he thinks this entails for the term “human nature.” Cortez says, “nature typically denotes ‘what is essential to something’s identity.’ To have a human nature is to have whatever it is that is essential for being human rather than some other kind of creature (RTA, 52).” He then lays out distinctions between Nature and Grace, and Nature and Supernature in his discussion of man’s natural and supernatural ends.
[49]Cortez, RTA, 51–55.
[50]Cortez, RTA, 63–64.
[51]Cortez, RTA, 65–66.
[52]Cortez, RTA, 66.
[53]Cortez, RTA, 67. Cortez frequently makes similar claims throughout his works: referring to Jesus, Cortez says, “he is both the one who inaugurates the new creation in fulfillment of all that God intended from the beginning and the new Adam who is the eschatological culmination of God’s plans for humanity, the telos that defines the essence of what it means to be human” (RTA, 50).
[54]Other than his summary discussion of the way he will use “nature” and “essence” and their cognates, early on in his ReSourcing Theological Anthropology (cf. Cortez, RTA, 24–25, 51–52), Cortez never returns to discuss the meaning of these terms, nor to redefine them. He also does not give us a clear understanding of his meaning of the word “define” and its cognates. As such, it may be that he has an entirely different understanding of the “definition” than we are here discussing. However, judging from the way he uses this term in conjunction with the terms “natural,” “essential,” and “necessary,” it seems that he is referring to what has traditionally been called an “essential definition,” that which refers to what x is by its very nature (cf. Peter Kreeft, Socratic Logic, ed. 3.1 [South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2010], 123–137.) In these pages, Kreeft outlines a number of ways in which one might use the word “definition,” and also explains that the proper sense of the term definition is usually taken to refer to what he calls a Real Essential Definition, providing the genus and specific difference of the thing being defined.
When Cortez says that Jesus is the definition of what it means to be human, it seems that he is using definition in the sense of a real essential definition. The difficulty is, of course, if he intends to say that Jesus is the definition of what it means to be human, in a real and essential sense, he needs to explain how this is so — when a thing cannot be properly called a definition. As Plato illustrates so vividly in his Socratic dialogues, when asked what something is, pointing at an instance of it does not provide us with a definition, only an example. The question that needs to be answered remains, what makes this an example of what we are seeking to define?
On the other hand, when Cortez explains how he intends to “use” the words “nature” and “essence” and their cognates, he appears to be providing only a “nominal” definition of these terms: how he will use them in his writing, regardless of whether or not they point to anything outside of the context of his writing.
[55]Cortez, RTA, 150. This discussion is alluded to earlier on in the same volume (RTA, 24–25).
[56]On the one hand, Cortez suggests that if there are only particular human beings, then one could not say that Christ’s incarnational redemptive actions healed “humanity,” for there are only particulars and nothing shared by them (Cortez, RTA, 151). There does not appear to be an explicit argument against Christ taking upon himself some form of “universal” nature, other than the statement, quoted from Crisp, that when Christ became human, he adopted some form of particular human nature rather than something universal (RTA, 151).
[57]Cortez, RTA, 172. The “matter at hand” is how to think about Christ’s incarnational human nature, as to whether it was fallen or unfallen, and, if unfallen, whether it was “ideal” or simply unfallen (as in Adam and Eve). His response to the dilemma he has created is to say that “the eternal Son just is the paradigm of humanity (RTA, 172).” To avoid saying that somehow the pre-incarnational Logos was, in himself, the paradigm of humanity (which would immediately introduce serious theological problems), Cortez tries to avoid these issues by suggesting that maybe “the paradigm of humanity somehow resides in the eternal Son, maybe as a divine idea (RTA, 172).” Even this is unsatisfactory for Cortez (though not for the obvious reasons — introducing difference into the Trinity, between the persons, as presumably only the Son would have the divine idea of humanity. Rather, his reason is that “the biblical authors never talk about some abstract, eternal idea of humanity as the paradigm of what it means to be human (RTA, 172).” Biblicism at its finest: the Bible doesn’t talk about it, so neither should we.), as such, he contents himself with simply suggesting that “we should view the humanity of Jesus itself as the eternal paradigm. Jesus just is God’s eternal determination of what it means to be human” (RTA, 172). We are left wondering what this can mean. Perhaps it is a mystery. If only we had some metaphysical means of avoiding the confusion, such as a more robust understanding of Realism — as we find in the church fathers and medieval theologians.
[58]Cortez, RTA, 172.
[59]Cortez, RTA, 171.
[60]Cortez, RTA, 170.
[61]I have, here, presented the reasons given for why we are called to take Jesus as our model, and imitate Him, in each of the verses which Cortez references when he claims that “each of these presents Jesus as the unique revelation of true humanity (Cortez, RTA, 170).” There is nothing, as far as I can tell, in these verses which even remotely suggests that Christ’s humanity was of a different “nature” from that of ours, or even that of Adam and Eve. On the contrary, in most of these texts, the explicit message is that we—as fallen but regenerate human beings, through the indwelling Spirit—can indeed imitate Christ. Paul, for example, in 1 Corinthians 11:1, explicitly says, “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.”
[62]Cortez, ESEB, 31–32.
[63]Cortez, RTA, 174.
[64]Cortez, ESEB, 22-26. Cf. ESEB, 31–32.
[65]Cortez, ESEB, 29.
[66]Cortez, ESEB, 27–28.
[67]Cortez, ESEB, 28.
[68]Cortez, ESEB, 29.
[69]Cortez, ESEB, 21–26. Here we are told that, to understand what it means to say that “‘the ontological determination of humanity is grounded’ in the man Jesus,” is that, first and foremost, “‘To be a man is thus to be with the One who is the true and primary Elect of God’”—that is, to be in Christ (ESEB, 22). Cf. ESEB, 24.
[70]We are not talking, necessarily, about a particular instance of a universal. A great deal of nuance is required, which we cannot get into in this paper.
[71]Cortez, ESEB, 30fn36.
[72]Cortez, RTA, 177.
[73]Cortez, RTA, 177.
[74]Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q.44, a. 3, resp. This is not the place to get into a discussion about how the notion of divine ideas and divine simplicity fit together. So we will simply note that Aquinas answers this concern.
[75]Boethius, De Trinitate, in Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. H. F. Stewart, E. K. Rand, and S. J. Tester (1918; repr., London, England/ Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1973), 27.
[76]Boethius, DT, 27.
[77]Though he does not explicitly claim reliance upon this approach to human cognition, it becomes apparent in (1) the language he uses, (2) his rejection of the metaphysical basis of a Realist approach to human nature, and (3) his dependence upon Barth. Take, for example, his statement to the effect that “One of Barth’s most fundamental reasons for arguing that limitation is good for human persons is that he thinks it is only by having a finite history that we have a meaningful identity. Barth contends that humans constitute themselves as persons in and through their actions in time. Humans are not metaphysical ‘substances’ in which their identity is grounded in some stable, underlying essence. Instead, Barth contends that I establish my identity in and through the history of my personal actions and relations” (Cortez, RTA, 249. Italics are mine). To be human is not to have a “stable, underlying essence” (the rejection of Realism), but to become a person in socio-historically grounded actions and relations (this is the language and the conceptual structure of phenomenological existentialism). Note, as W. Norris Clarke has perceptively suggested, phenomenology may have a great deal of serious insights about being human, and we may be able to take advantage of it, but only if we ground phenomenological insights upon the metaphysics of a robust Realism (cf. W. Norris Clarke, “Thomism and Contemporary Philosophical Pluralism,” in Deal W. Hudson and Dennis Wm. Moran, eds., The Future of Thomism (Mishawaka, IN: American Maritain Association, 1992), 98, 99–103).
[78]Indeed, this is one of the fundamental assumptions of Phenomenology, as developed in the writings of Edmund Husserl (Cf. the second and third meditations in Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns [Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999], 27–64). Hereafter referred to as CM.
[79]Husserl, CM, 91.
[80]Husserl, CM, 91.
[81]Husserl, CM, 91.
[82]Cortez, RTA, 249.
[83]Cf. Husserl, CM, 62.
[84]Cortez, ESEB, 30fn36.
[85]All Biblical quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2016).
[86]Though Cortez acknowledges that many theologians make this point, and are still able to engage in a Christocentric anthropology (the “minimally” Christological anthropology we mentioned above), he does not explain to us why this is wrong, but simply moves on to build his CCA (cf. Cortez, RTA, 19–21).
[87]Cf. Aquinas, ST I, q. 44, a. 3, resp.; q. 45, a. 6, resp.
[88]Cortez, RTA, 191.
[89]Cortez, RTA, 191–192.
[90]Cortez, RTA, 192–193.
[91]Cortez, RTA, 194.
[92]Cortez, RTA, 195.
[93]Cortez, RTA, 195.
[94]Cortez, RTA, 195–196.
[95]Cortez, RTA, 196.
[96]Cortez, RTA, 195.
[97]Cortez, RTA, 202.
[98]Cortez, RTA, 203.
[99]Cortez, RTA, 203.
[100]One might (1) maintain Gender Essentialism, but suggest that Jesus’ maleness was only limited by the “essential” differences proper to each sex, and not by the cultural constraints upon genders (Cortez, RTA, 204); one might (2) maintain Gender Essentialism, but argue that Jesus showed characteristics of both femininity and masculinity (RTA, 205). Here he appears to conflate gender and biological sex, suggesting that we “view Jesus as one who combined both sets of qualities [of men and women generally] in a single person [RTA, 205].” He is, however, unclear as to whether he means the “qualities” of male and female [which would presumably be referring to phenotypical and genotypical traits] or the qualities of masculinity or femininity [about which he is quite silent, mentioning only aggressivity vs. nursing and rough-housing vs. playing with dolls, RTA, 203]. This ambiguity becomes even more startling when he suggests that this approach entails that “in some way Jesus transcends the differences between male and female [RTA, 203].”); or, one might (3) maintain Gender Essentialism, but limit it to purely biological realities (RTA, 206).
[101]The first approach is problematic because he thinks that it entails that “(1) the male way of being human is more paradigmatic; and (2) Jesus cannot be the normative model for women (Cortez, RTA, 204).” The humanity of Jesus necessarily “excludes women (RTA, 205).” However, the Scriptures present Christ as the model for being truly Christian and human, which seems to suggest that Women can be neither. The second approach is said to be problematic because, suggests Cortez, it ruptures the very claim of Gender Essentialism, which would find a direct link between biological sex and gender qualities (RTA, 205). In this section we once again discover the confusion he introduces into this discussion through the apparent conflation of biological sex with gender qualities. He says, “if Jesus can be biologically male and possess the qualities typically associated with being female, then it follows that such qualities are not in fact essentially female (RTA, 205).” Are the “qualities typically associated with being female (RTA, 205, emphasis mine)” gender characteristics and behaviors or biological qualities? Assuming the former puts Cortez in an awkward situation, so, we assume the latter, but, the only examples that he provides of “gender characteristics and behaviors” are, as noted above (cf. fn. 100) so minimal as to be unhelpful. One worries that he has, voluntarily or not, straw-manned this version of Gender Essentialism (perhaps all of the versions here discussed) by providing us with the most unhelpful description of what this theory is actually claiming. It would be helpful for Cortez, perhaps, to consider some of the stronger articulations of Gender Essentialism, such as that given by Charlotte Witt, in her book The Metaphysics of Gender (Oxford University Press, 2011). The third approach is said to be problematic because, he suggests, it is so weak as to not be worthy of the title Gender Essentialism (Cortez, RTA, 206). This, of course, is no argument, and merits no response. It is telling that in the entire section in which he interacts with “theories” of Gender Essentialism, he never once quotes or references a proponent of gender essentialism, appearing to draw his descriptions of the forms he considers only from their critics (cf. Cortez, RTA, 203–210).
[102]Cortez, RTA, 206–207.
[103]Cortez, RTA, 206.
[104]Cortez, RTA, 208–211.
[105]Cortez, RTA, 208–209.
[106]Cortez, RTA, 211.
[107]Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990; repr., New York, NY: Routledge, 2006), 28–29, 33–34. Hereafter GT.
[108]Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Carol S. Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (1984; repr., Boston/London/Melbourne/Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), 275.
[109]Rubin, “Thinking Sex,” 275.
[110]Rubin, “Thinking Sex,” 276.
[111]Rubin, “Thinking Sex,” 276.
[112]Rubin, “Thinking Sex,” 306. She affirms as much in an earlier, equally influential, article titled “The Traffic of Women,” where she said “The realm of human sex, gender, and procreation has been subjected to, and changed by, relentless social activity for millennia. Sex as we know it — gender identity, sexual desire and fantasy, concepts of childhood — is itself a social product” Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic of Women,” in Rayna R. Reiter, ed., Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York/London: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 166. In both of her articles, she does allow for a distinction between sex and gender, but argues that they are both socio-culturally determined and have a history.
[113]Monique Wittig, “The Straight Mind,” in Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 27–28.
[114]Wittig, “The Straight Mind,” 27.
[115]Wittig, “The Straight Mind,” 29.
[116]Butler, GT, 8.
[117]Butler, GT, 9.
[118]Butler, GT, 9.
[119]Butler, GT, 9–10.
[120]Butler, GT, 28.
[121]Butler, GT, 28.
[122]Butler, GT, 34.
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