Historical Crucifixion: A Liberationist Response to Deep Incarnation

Suffering and the Evolutionary Process

The notion of deep incarnation serves to support the growing movement away from an anthropocentrism that justifies either unmitigated exploitation of the earth’s natural living systems or benevolent care in a utilitarian manner directed exclusively to human benefit. At the same time, deep incarnation does not dictate the adoption of what Gregersen calls a “purely system-oriented” view that does not distinguish different levels of nature or allow for interest in individual organisms. ¹⁸ In particular, it must be noted that there are biological forms – of which the human species is one but not the only – that have developed “complex repertoires of awareness and even self-awareness” that differentiate them from other forms. Though the ethical implications of the discussion regarding “higher” and “lower” forms of life goes beyond our discussion here, we can note that the acknowledgment of these complex repertoires of awareness allows for a discussion of evolutionary suffering and how it might be considered by Christian soteriology.

One of the most significant contributions of deep incarnation theologians is that they reconsider the character and cause of suffering in the created order. Any student of evolutionary biology realizes that the sensory neural network to feel pain represents an important development in creatures. It is precisely in the stimuli responses to pain and pleasure that one sees the magnificent adaptations and diversity that constitute evolutionary development. Ironically, the ability to experience pain is far from negative; it positively reflects a higher stage of biological complexity. It is, as Gregersen pithily calls it, part of the “package deal” of God’s creation “in which joys and sorrows are consistently correlated without ever being harmonizable.” ¹⁹

Theologically, when suffering is seen through an evolutionary lens, the notion that it came into the world because of human sin can no longer be maintained. Suffering, as we have seen, is part of the evolutionary process. Moreover, the fossil record tells us that things such as pain, predation, and extinctions predate the human species. Therefore, deep incarnation operates from the assumption that evolutionary pain, suffering, and death, as Elizabeth Johnson asserts, “are neither divine punishment for sin nor providential happenings intended to lead to soul-making or growth in virtue. Insofar as they are the result of the natural working out of life’s creative processes, they are morally neutral.” ²⁰ Because organic life’s regeneration relies on elements such as predation and death, deep incarnation strikes a blow against a literalist reading of Genesis that would attribute worldly or creaturely pain and suffering exclusively to the effects of human sin.

While the facts of evolutionary biology frame suffering differently, they still require a theological accounting. The sheer extent of suffering in the natural world leads theologians of deep incarnation to ask the question posed by Holmes Rolston decades ago, “Does nature need to be redeemed?” ²¹ His response was twofold. At a basic level, the answer is negative. If redemption means strictly being saved from the guilt of sin, then it cannot apply to non-human creatures. However, in correlating the language of biologists and theologians, Rolston finds in “regeneration” a promising concept. Taking account of organic life’s frailty, the biologist can assert that the survival and development of species resides in the possibility of regeneration. Though they take various paths, theologians of deep incarnation agree with the Pauline insight that “the whole creation has been groaning” (Rom 8:22 RSV) and through deep incarnation seek to expand the Christian vocabulary of the cross and redemption to include non-human creation.

God’s Presence to Cruciform Creation

A central characteristic of deep incarnation theologies is the effort to correlate evolutionary suffering with Jesus’s suffering on the cross. We have seen that even after one dismisses human sin as the exclusive cause of suffering, there are plenty of what Rolston identifies as “natural evils” in the world to warrant the language of redemption. Indeed, like Gregersen, Rolston acknowledges how suffering, such as predation or even bad luck, serves as a prelude to creation or regeneration in the evolutionary process. Though no consolation to the prey, it does provide nutrition to the predator. Though no solace to that which is burned, the wildfire revitalizes its forest ecosystem. For Rolston, “Life arises in passionate endurance. Struggle is the dark side of creation.” ²² In light of this struggle, the Christian language of the cross and redemption becomes central. Indeed, it leads Rolston to describe all of creation as “cruciform,” an insight that many of the theologians of deep incarnation share. ²³ By describing creation as cruciform, deep incarnation theologians appeal to the intrinsic connection between the Christian mysteries of incarnation and crucifixion and, it would seem, redemption.

In contrast to much of Western Christianity’s post-Anselmian emphasis on the cross and the atonement-redemption dynamic, deep incarnation makes a closer connection between the cross and incarnation. Observing that creaturely existence consists in vulnerability and frailty, Gregersen emphasizes the intrinsic connection between incarnation and crucifixion, so much so that they should not be thought of separately. “The incarnation of the Son of God is not only an event associated with the birth of Jesus, but also a process that extends through the life story of Jesus and ends in his death.” ²⁴ This process reverses the emphasis found in many atonement theories. That is, the incarnation is not subordinate to crucifixion (Jesus came to die), but that the crucifixion expresses the fullest sense of the incarnation (Jesus died because he came). Precisely because creaturely life is characterized by frailty and ultimately ends in death, the incarnation would not be complete without the death of Jesus.

Taken together, incarnation and crucifixion constitute a powerful statement about God’s presence with all of creation. In deep incarnation theologies, the death of Jesus is the culmination of the incarnation process and its most profound expression. As Elizabeth Johnson elucidates, “Having tasted the dregs of rejection and physical agony, the crucified Christ knows what it means to suffer. In his own body, he knows. Since he is Wisdom incarnate, this knowing is embedded in the very heart of the living God . . . What is new in view of the cross is divine participation in pain and death from within the world of the flesh.” ²⁵

The consoling word of deep incarnation regards a God who knows suffering intimately. For Denis Edwards, deep incarnation provides a way to think about God as co-suffering with creatures in a manner that expands, but does not reject, the notion of divine impassibility. ²⁶ He employs two dimensions of Karl Rahner’s sacramental theology to speak about God’s co-suffering with creation. ²⁷ By affirming Rahner’s description of the saving event of Christ as the “primordial sacrament of redemption,” Edwards, like Gregersen, affirms the intimate connection between incarnation and cross as part of a unified process. ²⁸ The sacramental connection between cross and salvation links the Christological mysteries so that one cannot separate out incarnation, ministry, crucifixion, and resurrection. “The cross, of course, involves the whole event of the Word made flesh, the self-giving love of his life and ministry, which culminates in his death and is intrinsically connected in his resurrection.” ²⁹ To a created world that is cruciform with suffering, the message of Christianity is about a God who became flesh. In the ministry of Jesus Christ, we see more about the presence of God among us, and in his death on the cross we have the ultimate fulfillment of the logic of incarnation.

An important byproduct of deep incarnation theologies is how they encourage other theologians to consider the existence and implications of evolutionary suffering and death. Pope Francis’s great ecological encyclical, Laudato Si’, provides a case in point. While Denis Edwards has correctly pointed out that deep incarnation provides a theological grounding for the positions taken in the letter, he suggests that it is that the theme of evolutionary death is missing from Pope Francis’s writing. ³⁰ In this, he is correct. Nowhere in Laudato Si’ do we find an account of pain or suffering in the natural world that is not attributed to human causes. Nowhere in the encyclical does Francis deal with violence, predation, or other factors inherent in the evolutionary process. It is revealing that when he quotes Saint Francis’s canticle, Francis does not invoke the lines, “Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Death, from whom no one living can escape.” ³¹ To that end, the theologians of deep incarnation make an important contribution in light of the insights of evolutionary biology.

However, Laudato Si’ emphasizes a point that is either undervalued or missing from much of the work on deep incarnation. In naming the current crisis that Earth faces today a “social-environmental” one, Francis indicates that environmental destruction is a product of sin. It must be connected to the exploitation of the poor and both must be addressed by an integral ecology and spirituality. ³² The throwaway culture is one that not only damages the natural environment, it destroys culture itself. Francis emphasizes this link between ecological and social compassion, “when we fail to acknowledge as part of reality the worth of a poor person . . . it becomes difficult to hear the cry of nature itself.” ³³ If deep incarnation is to contribute to this sort of integral theology, then it must find a way to link its insights regarding evolutionary suffering to the reality of ongoing human suffering.

A return to the context of Puerto Rico helps to summarize the contributions of deep incarnation and to raise an important question. In the wake of massive environmental destruction, one that is part and parcel of the terrible costs in the ongoing development of life on the planet, the message of deep incarnation concerns a God who suffers with all creation. Though the insurance industry and governmental organizations might refer to hurricanes as “acts of God,” the reality is that these powerful storms are part of naturally occurring weather patterns in the Caribbean basin. They are not the product of God’s wrath. To the contrary, in the wake of a devastating storm and with the knowledge that more are to come, deep incarnation speaks of a God who accompanies all creatures through their travails with the promise of hope and resurrection. This promise extends from the human population to animals and plants, and to the waters and skies. To a situation of anguish, misery, and loss, deep incarnation speaks of a God who is present, a God accompanying all who are suffering.

While recognizing that hurricanes of themselves are natural acts, they are not completely free from human influence. The human factors hastening climate change, which warm the seas and generate more frequent and powerful storms are an important part of the story today. The aftermath of Hurricane Maria, like many other weather events, exposed deep political and economic problems connected to unjust human behavior and social structuring. How suffering was portrayed and to whom the relief efforts were prioritized revealed much. Though eloquent in its position on evolutionary suffering, it is unclear what deep incarnation might contribute when reflecting on injustice like that which Puerto Rico endures. How can the insights regarding evolutionary suffering be brought to bear on the suffering of a people who have been and continue to be ruled without being given a meaningful voice in how they are governed?

The challenge to deep incarnation becomes clear in its discussion of Christ’s crucifixion. To speak of Christ’s suffering as inevitable or possessing a natural necessity risks legitimizing certain forms of human suffering. If Jesus’s suffering, torture, and death were inevitable consequences of incarnation, then those very conditions can be rationalized for others. The imitation of Jesus could be portrayed as docile submission to oppressive powers instead of prophetic rejection of the ongoing crucifixions that take place today. In light of this concern, the essay now turns to theologians who have explored the cross in relation to the suffering endured by marginalized peoples. In their work, we can see the ways that the cross has been misused to further oppression, and we might glimpse at the manner that deep incarnation can avoid this temptation and serve to be a message addressing evolutionary and unjust suffering.

Cross as Defilement

Feminist theologies have long recognized distortions latent in Christian soteriologies, particularly in how the notions of sin, the cross, and redemption have been employed in the discursive oppression of women. The nineteenth-century suffragists critiqued the anti-woman discourse of Eve bringing sin into the world and its connection to redemption by a male savior. ³⁷ In the mid twentieth century, feminists such as Valerie Saving and Judith Plaskow noted how sin is imagined within the structures of male socialization (e.g., pride, alienation, etc.) and, therefore, the contrasting virtues (humility, suffering for others) serve patriarchal systems that further oppress women. ³⁸ The reflection on how theological categories affect the experience of women also led to the correlational reexamination of the Christological categories themselves. Many resonated with the bottom-line soteriological question raised by Rosemary Radford Ruether: “Can a Male Savior Save Women?” ³⁹

The oppressive discourses coming out of patriarchal Christologies function both at a societal and private level. Drawing upon their own experiences, Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker unveil the ways that these tropes are connected to racism, domestic violence, and sexual abuse. ⁴⁰ When speaking to other victims of abuse, Brock notes the connection between their faith and remaining in abusive relationships. Though she recognized the motif of suffering silence in her Japanese upbringing’s “fatalistic philosophy of shi-katta-ga-nai,” Brock sees it at the heart of what these women received from the Christian tradition. ⁴¹ When Jesus is lifted up as the example of one who willingly suffers and does not raise his voice in protest, women are burdened not just with a parent or domestic partner who inflicts violence, but with a command to endure that violence as a divine calling. “Believing in the benevolent protection of a powerful God, they interpreted violence as divine intent, pain for their own good. And the Christian tradition reinforced this impulse by upholding Jesus as a son who was willing to undergo horrible violence out of love for his father, in obedience to his father’s will.” ⁴²

Drawing from the experience of African-American women, Womanist theologians have also raised important questions regarding the manner that human suffering is ideologized by employment of cross language. ⁴³ In her now-classic essay on black women’s surrogacy, Delores Williams uncovers how the notion of redemption, and particularly the idea of Jesus as a surrogate suffering in place of humanity, has furthered the oppression of black women in the United States. ⁴⁴ Based upon her study of the antebellum and postbellum contexts, Williams concludes that surrogacy is the principal structure of domination that black women in the United States have experienced. The surrogacy roles—in the areas of nurturance, field labor, or sexuality—where black women served as surrogates for white women as mothers, sexual objects or for black male labor, might have developed out of coercion before the civil war, but they continued in a “voluntary” manner in terms of social constructions. ⁴⁵ Racial stereotypes still employed today (e.g., mammy or Jezebel) have their roots in this surrogacy structure. ⁴⁶

As important as Williams’s analysis is for naming a mode of oppression, her most important contribution resides in the indictment of the Christian tradition as regards to the use of surrogacy language in Christological reflection. For inasmuch as Jesus is portrayed as a surrogate for humanity by taking punishment on himself, he sacralizes that very structure of surrogacy. Too often, Jesus’s vicarious suffering seen in this view is placed upon black women as a burden that they must follow. Even though surrogacy roles are the very substance of their oppression, they are told that their salvation lies in reiterating them. In her mind, the most helpful way to talk about sin and redemption revolves around the concept of “defilement.”

Moving away from the mid-twentieth-century tendency to view sin in terms of alienation or estrangement, Williams utilizes the term defilement, which she defines as “human attacks upon creation so as to ravish, violate, and destroy creation.” ⁴⁷ The move frees up an interpretive space away from individualist and socially privileged connotations of sin and constructs a key correlation between the historical treatment of black women’s bodies and the destruction of the natural environment. By defining sin with the language of defilement, the harm done to humans is brought together with that done to the environment. Whether it be in the strip-mining of land, or the exploitation of breeder women, the disrespect for nature’s placements, or the body snatchers from Africa, Williams diagnoses a disrespect for nature and women as characteristic of Western thought, and sadly, one that has found legitimacy in biblical monotheism. One of its most insidious characteristics is the way that defilement is structured to be invisible. Whether in the discourse of human dominion over nature, the myth of Africans as the descendants of Ham, or the nineteenth-century “anthropology” attempting to prove the racial inferiority of those descendants of African soil, defilement works precisely in the manner that it sanctions, legitimizes, and normalizes violence and exploitation.

If liberationist theologies share the sense that Jesus’s death can be understood only by his life and ministry, Williams goes further by concluding that the response to defilement cannot reside in the crucifixion. In Williams’s vision, the cross is the exemplar of human defilement and degradation, “human sin in its most desecrated form.” ⁴⁸ For that very reason, of itself it offers no hope. She puts it bluntly, “There is nothing of God in the blood of the cross.” ⁴⁹ It is the ministry of Jesus, his proclamation of God’s reign, and his resurrection that are the source of hope.

To be sure, the critiques of feminist and womanist scholars pose serious questions for the manner that the cross is treated in deep incarnation theologies. They demonstrate how even the well-intentioned invocation of virtues such as obedience and self-sacrifice can function to legitimate violence and oppressive social constructions. Removed from the context and complexity of the gospel portraits of Jesus, discourse about the cross can devolve into dangerous territory. When the death of Jesus becomes a model of suffering, it is liable to the kinds of ideological and discursive distortions that make the gospel message oppressive rather than liberating. Even behaviors or qualities that might be judged as positive or desirable can be twisted. As Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza states, “For women, a theology of the cross as self-giving love is even more detrimental than that of obedience because it colludes with the cultural ‘feminine’ calling to self-sacrificing love for the sake of their families.” ⁵⁰

For all of the intended positive claims that it opens up, the manner that Jesus’s death is treated in deep incarnation theologies can leave it vulnerable to this kind of manipulation. When Gregersen asserts, “On the cross Jesus loses his heavenly Father and thus the certainty of his own sonship,” there is no way to determine why that loss takes place or who inflicts this loss. ⁵¹ When crucifixion is treated as simply the culmination of the incarnational dynamic, then Jesus’s suffering takes on the character of inevitability, and as we have seen, this inevitability means that suffering by those who are oppressed can then be ideologized as necessary or inevitable as well. Rolston’s summation is telling:

The secret of life is that it is a passion play. . . . Things perish with a passing over in which the sacrificed individual also flows in the river of life. Each of the suffering creatures is delivered over as an innocent sacrificed to preserve a line, a blood sacrifice perishing that others may live. We have a kind of ‘slaughter of the innocents,’ a nonmoral, naturalistic harbinger of the slaughter of the innocents at the birth of the Christ, all perhaps vignettes hinting of the innocent lamb slain from the foundation of the world. ⁵²

Here we see the tragic endgame of deep incarnation’s logic. Evolutionary suffering is tied to Christ’s death, one that is removed from history. Though qualified as nonmoral and naturalistic, evolutionary suffering still serves as the harbinger of the slaughter of innocents, and as the former appears biologically inevitable so the latter can take on this very inevitability. Surrogacy, obedience, and self-sacrifice are too easily co-opted by the interests of hegemonic powers, whether social, familial, or interpersonal, to victimize in the name of faith.

This study’s main claim is that deep incarnation theologies possess a problematic account of the crucifixion. These theologies point to Jesus’s death as the culmination of the incarnation, a climax that reveals God’s accompanying presence to all suffering creatures. Though a theologically rich claim, its logic is problematic because it is only the fact of Jesus’s death that matters, not the form. As incarnation’s fulfillment, Jesus’s death appears as though could have occurred any number of ways: by accident, disease, or being eaten by a lion. What matters is that God became flesh and in the person of Jesus died. Yet, Jesus’ death was not just any death. It was a political execution, and that form matters.

Liberation theologies have been invoked to demonstrate how unjust suffering can be legitimated by ignoring the character of Jesus’ death. They reveal how the inevitability of Jesus’s death can be used ideologically to justify the oppression of others as equally inevitable. Beyond their corrective function, it would seem that liberation theologies’ emphasis on oppressive sin as the cross’s cause dooms them to an anthropocentrism that deep incarnation theologies seek to avoid. On the other hand, it remains unclear how deep incarnation theologies can invoke the cross in a way that accounts for the exploitative and hegemonic structures within which it functions.

History – Evolutionary and Historical

Though deep incarnation theologies are vastly different from those at work in the dualistic neo-scholastic paradigm, they share a similar proclivity to ignore the historical causes of the crucifixion. In the case of the manual tradition, the reification of the divine and human orders resulted in escapist and spiritualist theological formulations that ignored history and created dangerous binaries of soul-body, church-world, spirit-matter, etc. Deep incarnation theologies generally do not trade in these harmful dualisms because they do not reject history. Rather, they consider a wider frame that predates human history. In the effort to avoid either an anthropocentrism that excludes nonhuman creation or the attribution of evolutionary suffering to sin, deep incarnation theologies take the cross out of historical context, or at least out of a human historical context, to consider it in a wider planetary or even cosmic lens.

On the other hand, liberationist theologies connect Jesus’s life and ministry to his death to establish the form-content link between the doctrines of incarnation and crucifixion, an insight that eludes theologies that cannot or refuse to see it because of their dominant social location. The Word did not become abstract flesh. Rather, God becomes human in the person of Jesus who lives in all of the formal and structural complexity that constitutes human life. Thus, in the pioneering work of James Cone, the identification of Jesus as black overturns the ignorance of Jesus’s context by liberal and neo-orthodox predecessors. ⁵⁶ In the feminist reading of Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza, Jesus is understood as part of an ekklesia of wo/men, an emancipatory basileia movement that rejects patriarchal understandings of Jesus. ⁵⁷ For their part, Latinx theologians have brilliantly elucidated the socio-cultural dynamics of marginalization critiqued by the notion of Jesus as a Galilean. ⁵⁸ Though different in many aspects, these theologies connect the form of Jesus’s death to its historical fact, so that the suffering victims of historical injustice provide a crucial hermeneutic safeguard to the crucifixion against interpreters who would elide the political and oppressive character of Jesus’s death.

Thus, it would seem that a key difference between deep incarnation and liberationist theologians lies in their approach to history. Deep incarnation theologies dealing with a pre-historical evolutionary process appear unable to connect the meaning of the cross to historical forces. Similarly, liberationist theologies that emphasize the historical causes of Jesus’s crucifixion seem incapable of accounting for a connection to evolutionary suffering. It would appear that one must either view the crucifixion of Jesus as an inevitable outcome of the incarnation independent of human historical forces or as the outcome of human historical sin such that it can only tangentially have meaning for nonhuman creation. Yet, because the divide between these two theological visions concerns history, then perhaps the search for a rapprochement involves an understanding of history in a way that connects them and opens each one to the respective claims of the other.

Deep incarnation theologians dispel the anthropocentrism dominant in much Western thought that separates the human species from the rest of creation. At the same time, they recognize the danger of a deep ecology that would equate all creatures without distinction. Against the Platonic and gnostic temptations to separate God and matter, Niels Gregersen reads the Johannine gospel and Pauline texts with an eye for Stoic physics and anthropology that “was basically materialist but also recognized the informational or ‘logical’ aspects of the material world.” ⁵⁹ Reading early Christian texts with this Stoic lens, Gregersen understands the account of the Logos in the prologue of John’s gospel as the structuring principle of the universe, not just the rational capacity of human beings. Thus, the view of the divine Logos signals a unity to the cosmos while at the same time allowing for differentiation and structure.

Though writing decades earlier and from an entirely different context, Ignacio Ellacuría also sought a way to philosophize and theologize in a way that overcame dualisms while allowing for differentiation and structure. ⁶⁰ Philosophically, Ellacuría engaged critically and constructively with Marxism, especially the dialectical materialism of Engels, to reject idealisms that were escapist from the challenges of history while also rejecting forms of materialism that devolved into historical determinism. ⁶¹ Drawing upon Xavier Zubiri’s “open, materialist realism,” Ellacuría developed a philosophy of “historical reality” that offers a promising bridge between deep incarnation and liberationist theologies because it grounds history in a basic materiality while recognizing the transcendental possibilities of human praxis. ⁶²

The beginning principle of Ellacuría’s understanding of history is its materiality in which four notes demonstrate its dynamic structural character: matter, space, time, and life. ⁶³ Regarding matter, Ellacuría highlights that we can speak of a fundamental unity to all matter, but this unity does not imply a uniformity. Matter allows for a wide diversity of things. Indeed, the temptation is to look at the multiplicity of material things as separate entities without understanding their basic unity as matter. Moreover, matter is dynamic. As contemporary physics has shown us, matter is both mass and energy. There is no need to look for something outside of matter to animate it; it possesses an intrinsic dynamism.

Concerning space, Ellacuría acknowledges that contemporary physics has revealed how an atomistic view of material things does not take into account their interrelated character or their dynamism. ⁶⁴ Our growing understanding of light, gravity, and time-space demonstrates how we now conceive of the cosmos in terms of dynamic interaction rather than static realities. Within the complex structure of the cosmos, material things have a “position” relative to other things so that space should be thought of not as another “thing” but as a structural principle. Similarly, time is not an object nor absolute, but refers to an exteriority of realities that is successive. Not claiming a kind of universal static notion of time, Ellacuría’s notion of temporality, like materiality and spatiality, indicates a unity of dynamic interrelation. ⁶⁵

Accounting for the discoveries of evolutionary biology, Ellacuría once again invokes a unity-in-diversity as he describes the behavior of living things. This three-fold process includes: provocation (suscitación), in which action on part of living thing is elicited; affection (afección), in which the vital tone of living things is disturbed; and the response (respuesta), in which the living thing responds to provocation and affection with adaptations and development. These adaptations constitute the evolutionary process we see in all living creatures and, it must be noted, involve the very evolutionary suffering that deep incarnation seeks to address.

Thus, Ellacuría’s discussion of the human species springs from and always presupposes the basic dynamism of creatures that live among spatial, temporal matter. There is no room for an anthropocentric idealism that separates the human species from the rest of creation, nor can one view history as somehow separate from nature. Even the death of Jesus belongs to this dynamic process. In a vision remarkably harmonious with the assumptions of deep incarnation, divine consolation, solidarity, and hope for victory that liberationists see in Jesus’s ministry and the cross reaches back through creation. To miss that point is to truncate the full promise of Jesus as liberator. At the same time, the cross does not emerge in this picture as inevitable. It is the result of historical sin and it is in the account of history that the distinctive nature of humanity and history get articulated without creating separations or dualisms.

The Reality Animal and Historical Sin

Ellacuría’s complex understanding of history involves the special evolutionary capacity found in the human species, what Zubiri calls the “sentient intelligence.” ⁶⁶ Though much can be said about this pillar of Zubirian epistemology, for the purposes of this study, we can emphasize the difference between humans and other animal species lies in how they respond to the things around them. ⁶⁷ For while animals apprehend otherness as stimuli, Zubiri and Ellacuría claim that human beings apprehend it as reality. Here, reality is understood not as an “area of things” but as a formality, a notion that real things are “in their own right” (de suyo). So, in order to demonstrate the human connection to creation while acknowledging the human capacity to respond to reality, and indeed create new reality, the Zubiri-Ellacurían moniker for the human species is the “reality animal.” ⁶⁸

As reality animals, human beings live in history, not as the simple march of time but as a dynamic process – a dynamism of creating possibilities and capacities. ⁶⁹ Evolutionary science has shown us how creatures transmit biological and genetic structures to successive generations, and the human species participates with all other species in this same process. However, in Ellacuría’s view, history is a “traditioning transmission” (transmisión tradente) in which the human phylum transmits tradition itself as well. That is, it hands on ways of life or being in reality; possibilities for choosing and creating new forms of reality.

As human agents (and the structures they create) engage reality, they create new reality and history. Capacities are developed and possibilities open up, but other capacities and possibilities are closed off and, in the latter, we see sin in structural and historical forms. Taking into account this dynamism of historical reality, we can remember Ellacuría’s famous description of the “crucified people” as,

that collective body that, being the majority of humanity, owes its situation of crucifixion to a social order organized and maintained by a minority that exercises its dominion through a set of factors, which, taken together and given their concrete impact within history, must be regarded as sin. ⁷⁰

It is here that one can properly speak of suffering as crucifixion, the state-sponsored execution meant to instill terror and subjugation in colonized peoples. Jesus’s crucifixion was not simply the inevitable culmination of the incarnation process. It was the product of historical sin, and therefore must be framed by that context so that the reality of crucified people today may also be recognized as historical sin. Ironically, Ellacuría would heartily agree with the description of the world by deep incarnation theologians as “cruciform,” but not for the same reason. In his view, the world is cruciform not because all living creatures face the inevitable fate of death, it is cruciform because the majority of the world’s creatures suffer unjust deaths due to the reign of historical sin. In the age of the Anthropocene, in which human praxis has meant a logarithmic leap in extinctions and threatens the planet’s very survival, crucifixion becomes an apt description. Accounting for this historical suffering can bolster the insight of deep incarnation and indeed fortify efforts against human destruction of the natural world while bolstering projects for greater social justice.