Low Anthropology

From Pastor Jay Cashmer's sermon on 11.2.2025

This past weekend, we had family in town. 

It was my wife’s side of the family. My mother-in-law, Janice, is turning 90 this month, and to celebrate, the relatives came into town and stayed with us. One family member, my mother-in-law’s sister’s son, Ivan, was there.

Do you know how it is when you’re sitting around with family? You start reminiscing, and you start talking about people. This was the case with us, and as we talked, this statement about Ivan’s mother was thrown out:

“Ivan, your mother was a saint.”

My guess is that you have someone in your family that this sentence applies to. Everyone has a ‘saint’ in the family, don’t they? Just like everyone has a 'black sheep’, everyone has a ‘piece of work', and everyone has that person who doesn’t even get words, they just get an expression. We all have that. This conversation about Ivan’s mother Carol made me think about this term ‘saint’ and how it really has three different meanings:

You have the cultural meaning, which we see here; because we all were in agreement: Carol Lawson was a ‘saint’. That’s how we use the word in our culture. Then we have the church meaning, and lastly, we’ve got the Biblical meaning. The church meaning and the Biblical meaning are very different. 

The church meaning of ‘saint’ refers to those people who we acknowledge throughout history as worthy of praise. This started out simply meaning the people who died because of their confession of Jesus as their Savior, beginning with Stephen in Acts 6, then James the Apostle in Acts 12. Next, we have Peter and Paul (church history holds that they were martyred). We also have our Church fathers, like Ignatius. 

Eventually, though, things began to change. 

Here’s a quote from the ‘Lutheran Cyclopedia’, a concise, in-home reference for the Christian family. How many of you have this reference in your home? (That’s what I thought). It was given to me when I went to the Seminary to make sure I came out really, really Lutheran. It was given to me by the AAL (who remembers the Aid Association for Lutherans?) I figured that I needed to factcheck myself if I was going to talk about the history of saints today, so I dove into the Lutheran Cyclopedia and came across this quote: 

“After the 5th Century, the number of festivals in the church increased rapidly.” 

Yeah, they did. Do you know why? 

The church figured out a way to monetize saints (If you think that sounds cynical, just wait until you hear my Bible Study on this). It’s that simple. If you had a saint, you could encourage a pilgrimage, and if you had a pilgrimage, it meant people would come to your town. It’s the same reason cities today want to host Super Bowls. Pilgrimage = Tourism. And so, from the last 2000 years, there are now 10,000 different saints because the church figured this out. That’s the church definition of saints. And I’ve got news for you: That’s not Biblical. 

The Biblical definition of ‘saint' is twofold. First, let’s look to the New Testament. In the New Testament, Paul uses a word to describe believers. The Greek word is ἅγιος (hagios) and it means ‘holy’. When that word is applied to us, it makes us back up. ‘Holy’ means without sin, though, so how can this word be applied to us? 

To understand, we need to go to the Old Testament which has two words for the saints in Hebrew. One means holy: קָדֵשׁ (Qadesh). A new concept, however, comes to us with a different word: חֲסִידִים (Chasidim). And Chasidim gives the idea of a word applied both to us and to God. We see it in 1 Samuel 2:9: 

“He will guard the feet of his faithful ones.” (That’s the word Chasidim). “But the wicked shall be cut off in darkness.” 

Explaining this text (and this is why a good study Bible is an even better reference than the Lutheran Cyclopedia), we find that the Hebrew is used for God and his people to characterize the nature of their relationship. The the Biblical concept of the word ‘saint’ then isn’t how good a person is; it is not comparing one person’s actions to another and saying, ‘Wow, your mother was a saint!’ The Biblical definition of ‘saint’ defines our relationship with God in terms of being holy. 

Here’s the question: How can sinful people like us have a relationship with a Holy God? 

There has to be forgiveness, mercy, grace, and above all, a sacrifice for sin. The biblical concept of ‘saint’ elevates God, puts Him first, and understands our relationship with him through grace and mercy. This is a challenge in today’s world, though, because we simply don’t see that understanding. 

You might remember the author David Zahl, who wrote a book in 2019 called ‘Seculosity’ which we did a sermon series on. Just a quick review: David has become my favorite contemporary Christian author because he has an incredible way of taking a 500-year idea and putting it in terms of the 21st century. I read his first book, and the premise is ‘everybody has a god’. In other words, even if you say you don’t believe in ‘God’, everyone has a god. Your god is the thing you look to for comfort or consolation. It’s the reason or source of your joy. Everyone has one. His point was this: In a world that’s taken God out of society, a vacuum has been created, and something is going to fill it. Zahl talks about religion being your ‘god’, or politics being your ‘god’, or money. In his second book ‘Low Anthropology” (anthropology is the study of man), we see another 500 year idea: It’s about the law; it’s about what happens when you take the law out of our society, and this ‘law’ means ‘God’s law’. 

Do you remember your catechism days: You learned the three uses of the law: 

#1. The curb
#2. The mirror
#3. The rule

The curb basically keeps us in line. The rule describes the actions that we know we shouldn’t do (God calls this sin). The mirror (that’s the big one) applies to ourselves. When you take that out of our society, you create a really unfortunate circumstance where man ascends to the top of the pyramid, and Zahl calls that ‘high anthropology’. When man is at the top of the pyramid, there’s nothing that really stops us. And although we know we can’t be perfect, we think that we ‘should at least try’ and that there are ‘some people closer to perfection than others’. We start comparing ourselves to others, and that’s where the high anthropology kicks in. He shows a demonstration of it with an interesting statistic: A report from a journal Pharmacotherapy shows a study run from 2007-2019, which says that ‘the proportion of college students with prescriptions for antidepressants or anti-anxiety medication doubled over this time.” 

This study was completed in 2021. Zahl continues, “In the conversations that I’ve had with students, they tend to describe school and life in one of two ways: Either as a series of audiences to impress or as an adversarial environment full of potential enemies and allies, where failure must be avoided at all costs”. Low anthropology, p 18. 

This is the pressure to be perfect, and it is devastating, and it is real. Look at the date that the study began: 2007. That means that you had kids 20 years ago who were 25 years old, and they were told they had to be a perfect student, and that pressure weighed on them. It’s 20 years later, they’re now 45 years old, and what are they being told? You have to now be a perfect parent, you have to a perfect ‘this’, or a perfect ‘that’, and if you’re not, then what’s wrong with you?

That’s high anthropology, and it’s devastating. 

Social media doesn’t help. Now, I’m not the old man yelling at clouds here. I know that social media is here to stay, so lets just get used to it. I also know that social media doesn’t help, though, because it feeds into the monster of high anthropology. “High anthropology defines you by your best day and your greatest achievements” - Zahl. High anthropology is when you take that profile picture and think, “I don’t like it,” so you take another one. High anthropology is when you think to yourself, “I should probably hit ‘like' on this post because if I don’t, what are they going to think of me?” High anthropology is the pressure you have to be the perfect parent and to throw the perfect birthday party for your perfect child. That’s high anthropology, and it’s real, and it's devastating to us. Because there’s a domino effect: If you couple that concept with comparing ourselves to others, all of a sudden we have "confusion and disappointment when we sit in judgment of other peoples behavior. Judgement leads to anger, anger leads to antagonism, and before you know it, the world is quietly divided into two groups: the honest, sensible people like me, and the ignorant foolish ones over there. As a mentor of mine once quipped ‘There are two types of people in the world: those who think there are two types of people and the rest of us.” Low Anthropology, p.17, 32. 

The rest of us are those who recognize this fact: ‘I am a poor miserable sinner’. 

Last week was Reformation Sunday. On that day, we made it very clear: We’re not celebrating being Lutheran. We’re celebrating being Christian. ‘Lutheran’ is the vehicle that brings us Christ. This week, for All Saints Day, we also have to ask what we’re celebrating: It’s not ‘being saints’, but we celebrate being made into saints when we begin with this statement: “I, a poor, miserable sinner.” We don’t come to church to show off and say “look how good we are!” We come to church because, as Zahl says, ‘we’re all screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared. Even the people who seem to have it more or less together’ and ‘don’t compare your insides to other people’s outsides, because their outsides are probably not true.’

Low anthropology elevates God first and it puts us into a relationship with Him. “I, a poor, miserable sinner” can only work because of the statement, “Oh, almighty and merciful God”: This is the God who loves you, the God who cares for you. If we compare ourselves with each other, it just creates division and anger. Look around in our world today? What’s it like? Where do the issues come from? 

We’ve lost the law. So, as saints, not because of what we’ve done but because of what’s been done for us in our savior Jesus Christ, it is God’s will that you recognize your savior Jesus, fall to your knees, confess your sins, and receive grace, mercy, and forgiveness. Because do you know what happens in a group of people that kind of revolve around “I, a poor, miserable sinner” and understands this concept that we’re all in this together? They experience mercy, they experience forgiveness, they experience grace, and they experience a true and genuine Christian love for one another because the thing that unites us is that we’re not perfect and we’re never going to be perfect, but we are made holy when we’re connected to Jesus Christ. 

I pray that that is your foundation today; that you are connected to Jesus Christ. You know what He did for you, and you know what He’s going to do for you, and in that way, we rejoice in the eternity that He brings.