A Theological Anthropology for Human Flourishing Postcolonial and Feminist Reflections for These Troubled Times

This article offers a Christian theological anthropology that is both thoroughly theological and responsive to critical postcolonial and feminist perspectives, in their insistence that human power relations are considered. The tradition of theological anthropology is summarized in three moments, focussing respectively: on the rational soul in imago Dei, assuming a unitary human nature; on the self realising subject in relation combined with strong assertion of a fixed gender binary; on the imago Dei in the plurality and heterogeneity within humanity, alert to issues of power and justice. While postcolonial and feminist perspectives enrich the third moment, they tend to valorise the immanence of God within human relations at the expense of the radical alterity of the transcendent God The article draws on enriched anthropological notions of plurality while remaining fully theological in terms of God's immanence and transcendence.