First, the TL;DR version...
If you don’t already own this book, go grab it now. If you enjoy my work, you’ll get to read the lucid perspective of one of my dearest mentors and friends since I re-became a Christian a number of years ago. I trust this man and hold him in the highest regard. Low Anthropology is the most important book that has come out all year (actually, in the last few years). Yes, this book is tied to the Christian faith. But its implications run far deeper than that. This book dives into the heart of the human situation itself (aka ‘anthropology’) and clears the channels for something bigger to shine through. It is an absolute primer on self-awareness and provides a reset of what we hold true about ourselves.
Okay, now for the longer version...
For those of us who were either away from the church for a long time or just didn’t grow up with Christianity in the home at all, the problem with a lot of books about the Christian faith is they come from the wrong place. A dear teacher of mine once told me that in order to make our way into the divine or the universal, we must first start with the human. This is what a lot of faith-based books get wrong. They give us this obtuse language that we either recoil from or that is totally foreign to us. They talk above our heads and portray God as this abstract thing that we don’t know what to do with. This approach fails to meet us where we are.
In this book, Dave scraps the abstract and jumps right into the human predicament. Godly talk is a mere base note of the book. It lays the undertones but does not interfere with his clear depiction of showcasing what humans actually experience in our day-to-day life.
When you hear ‘high’ and ‘low’ anthropology, it’s easy to deduce that a high anthropology means having a high regard for human life while having a low anthropology means holding a negative view of human life. This is not it!
The statement, “We’re only human,” alludes to the notion of a low anthropology.
It helps to see that ‘high’ and ‘low’ refer to how high (or low) one holds the bar for justifying their existence.
(I know, typical Lutheran move to make everything about justification.)
If you have a high anthropology, you have a very high bar for justifying your existence. You have to totally crush it in life to love and accept yourself (and everyone else in your sphere has to jump over that impossibly high bar too). But with a low anthropology, you have a very keen awareness that humans are (as Dave so lucidly outlines in the book) limited, doubled, and self-centered. When you live in honesty with these human realities, you can lower the bar for yourself and those around you in this messy world. Let’s dive briefly into each:
Limited
A high anthropology will make you believe that you are limitless. Sky’s the limit, baby! This is the essence of the modern cultural message, at least in the US. It sounds like such an empowering sentiment, and it can be, to a degree. But not kept in check, ‘leveling up’ becomes an addiction that will kill us. To live with an ideal of limitlessness is to live in a constantly unworthy state. We are bound by time, biology, history, and all kinds of factors that are way beyond our personal volition. It behooves us to get real with this.
Doubled
A high anthropology makes it sound so easy: Just do the right thing! You know what to do! We, the living, are among the first generation to have the internet at our behest. We should be able to just figure out what to do and... do it. This way of seeing the world is only partially right. Humans aren’t great at knowing right from wrong (Hitler thought he was right, for godsakes). But most of us who aren’t psychopaths have well-tuned consciences. We feel bad when we steal, kill, covet, and dominate for our own gain. We cringe when we’re unkind to ourselves and when we betray others. We don’t like to destroy our environment. But we still do it! Just doing the right thing is far easier said than done. This book dives way deeper into this self-divided human reality (Romans 7:14-20).
Self-centered
A high anthropology places self-centeredness ‘out there.’ It projects it away from ourselves and places the blame on people, systems, and demographics. But a low anthropologist is honest about the ways we’re blind to our own self-centeredness. For what makes up systems and structures of oppression but self-centered individuals like you and me? Our biases are rooted so deep within the human psyche that I don’t know if it’s even possible to root them out entirely. We can, however, gain clarity and honesty about our own self-centeredness. This is what might make way for compassion, and it’s what this book inspires us to do.
With these limitations, we humans are only capable of so much awesomeness. Raising the bar only makes us resent ourselves and each other all the more.
I know what you’re thinking... But what would happen if we did that?! If we lowered the bar, wouldn’t everyone just… stop trying? Wouldn’t we all quit our jobs, stream Netflix way too much, and waste the day away on social media?
Oh, wait… Kinda sounds like life today, doesn’t it? There seems to be a collective giving up in our culture right now. But not a healthy or liberating giving up. Rather, it’s like we’re all turning in on ourselves and against each other in the worst nihilistic way.
See, giving up doesn’t come from having the bar too low. It comes from having the bar at an impossible and superfluously high level.
Don’t you feel it? We’ve made life so difficult for ourselves. In our recent cultural moment, if you don’t have straight-A’s and go to a famous college, something is off with you. If you’re even the least bit down or out of your element in social settings, you must be pathologically askew. If your life doesn’t resemble that of your peers and heroes on social media, what are you even doing? If you’re not manifesting your ideal life and overcoming all of that trauma you’ve taken on, you’re not “doing the work.” If you’re not as socially astute as the activist influencers (right or left) that you follow, you might get ousted from the tribal circle. If you’re not establishing value or meriting your worth, you’re a freeloading burden. Better get on that hustle.
Do you see what’s going on? We’re fried. Done. Blamo. Kaput. The bar we’ve set for ourselves and each other has been impossibly high. In our modern world since the enlightenment, endless progression has become the unquestioned ideal and we’ve become our own gods. As high and as fast as we have jumped towards that bar, we’ve only worn ourselves out.
We don’t give up from lowering the bar. We give up from it being waaaaay too high. We humans are not designed to endlessly improve the way our collective ego wants us to.
Our true power is coming to grips with the fact that we are not that powerful. Nor do we need to be. The Twelve Step Program has had this figured out for a long time. Just look at what they made the first step: We have to experience our powerlessness before we can experience our power.
This is the gift this book gives us. It is the upside-down (actually, right-side up) perspective of the authentic Christian gospel. Our worth is not something we can live and strive FOR. That carrot will always be out in front of us no matter how fast we run toward it. Rather, our worth is an already-established birthright that we live FROM. In the Christian tradition, our egoic body is not the source of our worth. The source of our worth is safely outside of ourselves in Christ and is bestowed to us from God. We cannot gain our worth, nor can we lose it.
It is not in our job description to be our own gods or to justify our existence, and it’s killing us to try. We are in such need of God’s help to love and accept our humanity and that of our neighbor. This book is one way, I believe, that God has helped us in that area. Lowering our anthropology truly is the unlikely key to a gracious way of life towards others and ourselves.
Daily Pastoral #29