Why We Need an Ecumenical Council on Anthropology

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The ancient ecumenical councils often met to discuss difficult and divisive issues related to things like:

• Gentile inclusion in the church without becoming proselytes (Jerusalem Council)

• The divinity of Jesus (Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople)

• Jesus’s humanity and divinity (Councils of Ephesus, Chalcedon, and Constantinople II and II)

• Iconoclasm (Council of Nicaea II)

These days, every now and then, the Catholic church will issue some encyclical from the Pope, the Lausanne Covenant association will write a position paper, and Anglicans will produce a statement that X is a difficult matter and requires much prayer, and we need to keep talking to each other.

However, none of those publications or declarations are sufficient in the twenty-first century as we are now facing a new crisis as to what it means to be a human being with adjacent debates related to human identity, gender, sexuality, artificial intelligence, transgenderism, and even transhumanism.

I suggest that we need a new ecumenical council meeting over several weeks if not years to discuss the following issues:

• What is a human being?

• What is the responsibility of humanity towards creation and the animal world?

• What are human rights and what makes such rights universal and unassailable?

• What is a woman and what is a man?

• What is the church’s pastoral response to persons who are intersex, non-binary, or with gender dysphoria?

• What is the church’s pastoral response to same-sex attracted persons and same-sex marriages?

• What is the church’s theological response to artificial intelligence and trans-humanism?

Such topics need to be addressed with respect to the Church’s scriptures and traditions, modern theology, as well as taking into account anthropology, sociology, and biology. It should not merely attempt to restate old doctrines, but genuinely consider too the development of doctrine. It should include not only biblical scholars and theologians, but anthropologists, sociologists, sexologists, pediatricians, psychologists, neurobiologists, and computer scientists.

We live in a world where “identity” is now a secular version of the soul, cyborgs are perhaps two generations away, scientists who affirm that human beings are a sexually dimorphic species can be sacked, artificial intelligence will make many jobs redundant, polyamorous marriage is a decade away in western cities, the effects of climate change will continue to adversely impact the earth, and St. Paul’s Cathedral in London will host its first same-sex marriage before this decade ends.

Irrespective of what you think of those topics, those are the presenting issues, and the churches of the world - whether Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox - need to be able to address them in a way that is faithful, meaningful, reasonable, and persuasive.

If not an ecumenical council, then maybe a multi-disciplinary project that brings Christians of various expertise together to discuss such things.

Listen to the words of Psalm 8:

⁴ What is mankind that you are mindful of them,
    human beings that you care for them?
⁵ You have made them a little lower than the angels
    and crowned them with glory and honor.
⁶ You made them rulers over the works of your hands;
    you put everything under their feet:
⁷ all flocks and herds,
    and the animals of the wild,
⁸ the birds in the sky,
    and the fish in the sea,
    all that swim the paths of the seas.
⁹ Lord, our Lord,
    how majestic is your name in all the earth!

How do we recite Psalm 8 today and what do we mean by it in the twenty-first century given the debates and challenges that we are facing?

Let the brightest minds in the global church consider such things!