On Alliance Canada's 2024 "White Paper on Theological Anthropology"

In February I hosted a Simpson Symposium for Ambrose Seminary (on youtube) about the Alliance Canada’s 2024 “white paper on theological anthropology”. For the symposium I interviewed one of the paper's co-authors, Rev Dr Arthur Wong of Edmonton Chinese Alliance Church, who has recently completed a PhD on Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theology of the Kingdom of God.

In the symposium I also raised some questions and talking points of my own which I thought might be worth sharing here. What follows are the bullet points of my own answers to our symposium questions, which are elaborated to varying degrees in the video linked above.

1.     What is your favourite part of this paper, and why? 

                                      a.     Besides the existence of a theological commission itself, which is a good development, what excited me most was what I'll call the paper's “charismatic view" of the Imago Dei and of creation (p. 66, 72-73, and 91), wherein Christ’s Body is viewed as diverse multitude giving their gifts to the whole, and this is extended to illumine our view of humanity (and of creation) as a diverse communion.

                                    b.     I also appreciated the call us to "attune" and "analyze" our ethical life (p. 96-98), including the kind of patient listening and communal discernment that doesn’t let our presumptions pre-empt the guide of the living Lord together. This could be a call to revival and reshaping of our General Assemblies.

2.     Could you walk us through the framework of the paper, and highlight one or two key themes?

a.     Arthur does this at length in the video, but I'd highlight how the paper importantly emphasizes both sides of the dialectic of individual and community in the goodness of humanity. In the paper the community does not absorb the individual but heightens the dignity and distinctiveness of each person, such that there also is no such thing as an individual who is in-and-for-themselves. (In fact, I'd say an untapped potential of the paper is its allusion to Bonhoeffer’s observation that these relations are meant to be mediated by the living Jesus Christ. One way to think of sin is when false mediators distort our relations to each other and to creation.)

3.     In retrospect, what is something you would build from or draw out more? Perhaps there is an inner tension in the paper that you would unpack or reconcile further?

a.     For my part, while I’d say it is a strength of the paper that it holds a bunch of things in tension and does not preemptively resolve them for the denomination, I noted a number of tensions within the paper that will need to be unpacked carefully:

                                      i.     functional vs. relational views of the Imago Dei (I would want to say more to correct for the colonial and ableist trajectories of the functional view)

                                    ii.     against-culture vs. with-culture (Early on the paper suggests that there is no one-size-fits-all posture toward culture, but late in the paper it threw some implied shade on “change” in itself, which for me implies an unhelpful default preference for status quo)

                                   iii.     autonomy vs. community (As good as it is to resist the lure of modern individualism, I would want to retain the value of proper self-care and self-assertion when there are repressive and oppressive systems to be resisted in Jesus name)

                                   iv.     anti-religious secularism vs. cooperative secularism (I would want to draw out the value of the Canadian-cooperative view of secularism in order to offset the negative view of secularism that tends to prevail in the American culture wars. See p. 59, 100)

                                     v.     Exodus as a metaphor for personal salvation vs. its original sense of social liberation (I would want to draw out the latter, which is crucial to the identity of Israel and ultimately its Messiah, but is very muted in the paper until p. 82 or so)

                                   vi.     imitation vs. participation; or principled ethics vs. attunement to Jesus (I would want to draw out the importance of the latter in each case, since we claim to be all for Jesus, claim belief in the authority of Scripture, and are inheritors of semper Reformanda. See p. 81 & 98)

                                  vii.     social trinitarianism vs. Body of Christ (I’d want to draw out the latter since it puts us on christological ground to resist tending toward abstraction. See p. 84-85)

                                viii.     analogia entis vs. analogia relationis (I would seriously question the paper's over reliance on Roman Catholicism on this point, and would draw out the value of footnote 40 on p. 79)

                                   ix.     John Paul II vs. Walter Brueggemann; or stable natural law vs. prophetic Christ (as with the prior point, thought I appreciate the twentieth century popes, on this point I would want to draw out the latter for us as a staple of ethics and a continuance of semper Reformanda)

                                     x.     the warning about “intractable conflict” vs. the call to attune patiently on p. 88 and 96 (I’d want to urge us not to settle for false peace and thus stall out the attunement)

                                   xi.     regency view vs. respect for variance of “ability” on p. 67f. (I’d want to point out that ability is not mentioned on p. 91, and express wariness of dropping that point, since the regency view so often leans into ableism and pragmatism. Missing this could cause us to diminish or miss the prophetic challenge to technocracy, euthanasia, etc. Furthermore, I’d also want to note that this page mentions ethnicity, background, and gender, but only mentions disability as a thing to be healed -- which implies a spiritualization of the medical model and misses out on the social model)

                                  xii.     body vs. soul (I’d note that the paper tends to over-separate body and soul, and then leans into the body in a way that assumes a patriarchal natural law and dilutes the place of the soul in the tradition, not to mention important texts like Matthew 19 and Galatians 3:28)

4.     How does this paper prepare us for one (or more) of the ethical challenges named on page 62?

a.     On gender and sexuality, I’d express a worry that the patriarchal natural law assumptions of John Paul II and the recently altered ordination readings could drown out those other threads which deserve to be heard out.

Reminder: these are my notes and do not represent the views of Dr Wong, let alone the other co-authors, his church, or even my own employer or colleagues.

One final note: this probably goes without saying to be clear this symposium and this post are for the sake of good faith conversation and discernment, so please let me know if you want to talk further. And obviously the above applies to a specific ecclesial context and may not apply in other churches the same way. For instance, if I was speaking in a Roman Catholic context I would address some of these concerns differently.