Dr. Gutierrez,
A few observations relating to anthropocentrism.
-Jesus warned His followers not to fall into idolatry. Yet He never mentioned another religion of His day - the Greek or Roman pantheon of gods, Caesar worship, Zoroastrianism, or even Buddhism. Rather, He repeatedly cautioned about the lure of mammon or money, or greed (which is really a manifestation of selfishness, our problem from the beginning). Is that not the simple answer? We have stomped on the rights of the conquered and degraded our planet in the quest for riches. Now there are so many of us demanding so much we are marching toward ecological disaster.
It has always been about money and what money connotes. It is useful as a servant but, as Christ said, not as a master. The supposed needs of our flesh are seen as paramount. Materialism is now our religion. We are manipulated to believe we can find true happiness there.
Our aim has become to satisfy what Paul calls the ‘outer man’, ‘the flesh’ or ‘the carnal man’. One commentator I read calls him ‘the egoic self’. He is the false self. The self-centred self. The anthropocentric self. He parades himself in pride, boasting that he can wound his enemy. He responds by announcing his own ‘fire and fury’ and he is ‘locked and loaded’.
The good news or gospel is that he died on the cross in Christ. In God’s eyes he is legally dead. To teach us he is a ‘dead end’ and can lead only to tragedy, God has not yet seen fit to finally put him out of his misery. So he soldiers on in his useless attempt at self glory. He is not the true self, the new creation, the one begotten from above by the Holy Spirit. The one conceived through faith in the living word and founded on the promises of God, not the will of man. The one destined for adoption as a child of God.
-Concerning creation week, you spoke of the ultimate act being the Sabbath as opposed to the creation of man (as is our custom, our focus is anthropocentric, so we assume that the main point of the account must be one or the other as each relates directly to us). I’m sure you are familiar with the chiastic nature of Hebrew poetry. Its structure is that the essential point is related in the centre of the narrative with steps on either side of it reflecting each other. So, I think we are to view the fourth day as the apex or crown of the creation week account. The heavenly luminaries should be our focus. The sun, moon and stars. They are all there for ‘signs and seasons’ (or appointed times).
Christ is the light of the world, the sun of righteousness:
We, as the moon, can but reflect His glory as we attempt, with varying success, to bring light into darkness.
The stars, the constellations in the zodiac, were placed by God to write the plan of salvation across the heavens for all to see as it is revealed progressively each night through the course of a year (see Ps 19:1-6, or, for example, the book ‘The Witness of the Stars’ by E. W. Bullinger). Over 100 Hebrew star names have survived to us.
Rather than resting in God and accepting His plan for our lives each day as it unfolds, we have corrupted this beautiful message into a form of fortune-telling called astrology.
-Finally, isn’t theology itself (especially Arminianism) by definition anthropocentric?
We need to create a belief system to help explain God. Something that makes some kind of sense at our level because God’s doings are often incomprehensible to us now and we crave a dualistic structure of good/evil, right/wrong that we can make judgments about and try to follow to show our worthiness.