‘For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.’ At a theological level what does this imply as we think about the effects of the fall as that impacts, in particular, anthropology—or what it means to be human coram Deo (before God). We might be tempted to think along with the Great Tradition, when we think sin, in terms of a forensic relationship with God; God who is Lawgiver and Judge—emphasis on Law. But what if we go another direction, a direction that has been in the church’s tradition for just as long or longer than the Western Great Tradition; what if we think sin from within the [onto] relational or filial reality that co-inheres in the triune life of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? In other words, what if we think, in a God-world relation, that sin represents a disjunction or rupture, for the creature, from being participant in the triune life of eternal fellowship as God has desired from before the foundations of the world? If we think sin under this pressure, what we might end up with is the idea that what it means to be genuinely human, a fulsome creature before God, is that we must be in right relationship with this life; God’s triune Life. We get this sense, as we think what it means to be human from God’s imago Dei pro nobis; as we think humanity from God’s elected humanity to be for us in the image of God, who is the Christ (cf. Col. 1.15). Because God is gracious we find our esse as humans by way of being grounded and created in the image of Christ, who is the image of God for us. When the fall occurred this image was necessarily shattered insofar as God is Holy, thus our image bearing could no longer obtain; as such, it was no longer possible for those created in the image of Christ to be considered human in the sense of what that means in God’s economy and telos.

Philip Ziegler offers a nice script on this discussion as he continues to treat Wolf Krötke’ theology. In this instance it is with reference to theanthropology, and what it means to be human before and from God in Christ. You will note that Krötke’s perspective is both deeply Barthian and Athanasian; you’ll notice this when we see him using language like annihilation (not to be confused with soteriological annihilationism or with what some call ‘evangelical annihilationism’). So Ziegler and Krötke:

Further, the close association of reconciliation with the determination of humans as creatures reflects Krötke’s judgment that the denial of this status is close to the heart of sin. Concurring with Bonhoeffer’s remark that “God became human so that the human might become human,” Krötke admits that the situation into which God comes to save is one in which the human has ceased to be human. Sin is “an absurd destruction of creatureliness” which occurs “without meaning and which culminates in on other achievement than the nothingness of annihilation.” Human beings actively cease to be human, in Krötke’s view, by disregarding the limit God himself represents for the creature, i.e., in struggling variously to make good on the hollow promise of eristis sicut dei (Gn 3:5) and so to “accrue to itself unlimited value or limitless power.” Sin is the “tendency towards and idolatrization of human beings which destroys the humanity of the human in the most wicked way: for a human being is a ‘good god’ neither for himself, nor for others.” Krötke here takes up an important theme from Luther, who identified the root of human sin as the inhuman desire “that [one] should be God, and that God should not be God,” the fruit of which is the dissolution of true creatureliness and the transformation of human society into a collection of “unholy and arrogant gods.” Pursuit of self-deification results  in “the human destruction of the relation with God,” since a human being without limits is also thereby without relations. For Krötke the basic form of sin is the inhuman effort variously to lord it over others—including God himself—in absurd parody of divine lordship. As Jüngel has summarized this view, in active denial of our humanity, “we assume the role of lupus (man is a wolf to man).” This characterization of sin trenchantly affirms Luther’s own anthropological axiom, “we ought to be humans and not God—this is the summa.”[1]

If there was ever a time that being human needed to be fully lived into, it is our current moment. None of being human is shaped by cultural mores, or societal movements, it is shaped, sui generis, by what it means to be human in participation with God’s life, as we are participant in that life through the grace of God’s humanity for us in Jesus Christ. It is out of this vacuum—lack of participation in God’s life—that inhumanity flourishes in the broader world and society; indeed, in our own lives even as Christians (simul justus et peccator). Christians are called, at such a time as this, to bear witness to what it means to be human from the alien life of God, as that has been concretized in the flesh of Jesus Christ pro nobis. Humanity, in God’s economy, has never been an abstract sociological category; it has always already and only been a properly theological category insofar as what it means to be human, indeed, comes through an christological conditioning that has been actualized for us, from before the foundation of the world, in the elected humanity of Jesus Christ. This is the Evangel.

[1] Philip G. Ziegler, Doing Theology When God Is Forgotten: The Theological Achievement Of Wolf Krötke (New York: Peter Lang, 2007),