What is a Christian? 1

What is a Human Being?
We human beings have multiple dimensions. I am not certain how these categories all play out inside me. I am not sure whether they are in the world itself or whether they are just helpful for us to process the world. But they are useful categories. They help us discuss matters that are true about us in the world.

1. There is our thinking, reasoning capacity. This is the part of us that has to do with ideas. We draw conclusions from premises. We make hypotheses about the world by gathering data. We reflect using certain rules like 1) if a is completely true and 2) b is fully entailed within a, then 3) b is also completely true. No one has ever shown an instance where such rules of logic are not true.

2. We have emotions and feelings. These are typically reactions to the world mediated by our personalities and brain chemistry. We are angered by something or saddened by something. We are motivated to "fight for freedom" or demotivated from doing anything. They can also churn within us without clear external cause. We can have moods and chemical imbalances.

Our emotions often connect our perception of the world to action. Emotions are neither about truth nor morality, but they can move us toward or away from them. Temptations often come in the form of emotions, but it is our choices that most fully reveal who we are.

3. We make choices. We have volition or "will." Sin properly so called is a matter of our choices. We cannot fully control what goes through our head. Indeed, there are situations of addiction where we cannot control our choices. However, under normal circumstances, it is our choices that most indicate who we are, who we choose to be.

Many aspects of who we are fall outside our control, at least initially in life. We cannot control who our parents are. We cannot control whether we are born with a male or female body. We cannot control the socio-economic status with which we come into life. From a Christian standpoint, these are relatively trivial characteristics.

It is our choices that reveal who we truly are. We start out in life a slave to fallen impulses. We do not have control over what we choose. The draw of temptation is with us our whole life. But a Christian has a power source beyond the world that we see. The Holy Spirit can empower our volition to be able to choose the good.

For heuristic purposes, let us call these three aspects of a person the main constituents of the mind--reason, emotion, and volition. Let us call the general tendencies of our mind--our ways of thinking, feeling, and acting--our personalities.

4. We also have bodies. Our brains are part of our bodies and thus there is clearly a physical component to our reason, emotions, and will, to our minds. We experience our minds as more than our bodies, whatever the underlying reality might be. As Christians we often speak also of a spiritual dimension of a human being. This is human identity as it relates to God and matters of virtue.

To distinguish spirit here is to say nothing of the metaphysics. These categories are heuristic. They allow us to talk about the world without committing to a particular configuration of the world in itself, das Ding an sich in Kantian terms. [1]

We will resist calling the spiritual realm, "supernatural." To call that realm "supernatural" may be to smuggle in a distinction from Descartes and the seventeenth century. [2] We are not committing to any ontology here, to any actual configuration of existence. We are not committing to dualism and certainly not to any Gnosticism. It is simply the case that we can talk about spiritual things as a category that reflects an aspect of humanity.

5. One might think of the human mind as an intersection between our brains and our "spirit," from one perspective what we might call our souls. From another perspective, we might call our "living souls" the essence of us that continues into eternity in whatever form our glorified bodies might take (cf. 1 Corinthians 15). [3] The part of our mind that relates most directly to the spiritual is our volition. The choices we make reflect most directly our connection to God.

The pattern of our choices over time is our character. Some of us are as consistent inside and out as an arrow flies. Some of us have a churning of conflicting impulses within us but still shoot like an arrow in the choices we make. In one sense, the latter person shows greater strength of character, greater virtue, because their choices are made with greater intentionality.

While there is an external virtue to the person who does the right thing every time without turmoil or conflict, there is perhaps a greater virtue for the person who does the right thing every time despite conflicting impulses. Morality is most meaningful as a function of intentionality.

In the end we are not simple beings. Despite Descartes' belief that my "I," my "soul," was a unitary, simple entity, I am a swirling mixture of factors. I do not always know who I will be in a particular moment until that moment comes and a choice is made. I am not one desire. I am many conflicting desires.

5. Thus far we have focused on who we are as individuals. Thus far we have potentially followed a course of Western individualism and Cartesian subjectivism. By contrast, part of human identity is social and relational. Further, more important than me looking out at the world is God looking in at it.

Being a Christian certainly relates to my internal world. But who I am is not primarily a matter of my choices toward myself. Scripture formulates who I am more in terms of my choices in relation to God and others, my external world. The fundamental Christian ethic is to love God and love neighbor.

So as an individual I may be body, mind, and spirit. However, God is focused especially on how I interact with "him" and others. [4] Indeed, our spiritual dimension is more a matter of our relationship with God and others--movement beyond ourselves--than an internal matter, although we may experience the spiritual as an internal matter.

6. Our identity is thus bigger than being the mere "thinking things" that Descartes thought we were in the early 1600s. We are creatures who live in community, in culture. We are communities of practice. We have cultural rituals that also define us. We share common symbols that embody our collective identity (e.g., a Bible, a flag, a Steeler's sweatshirt). We have community stories that tell us who we are. [5]

The biblical cultures were "collectivist" cultures where identity was much more a matter of the groups to which one belonged than a matter of how an individual might have defined him or herself. Bruce Malina has helpfully summarized human identity in such cultures as a matter of gender, genealogy, and geography. [6] However, we should neither endorse group or individualist culture as the proper one. Both have strengths and weaknesses.

Who we are is both a matter of the subjective (internal, tending toward the individualistic) and the objective (external).

7. God's perspective is of course the truly "objective" perspective. God sees das Ding an sich. God knows all the facts of the universe in all their proper relationships to all other facts. This is what absolute truth is, the God's eye view.

We have only fractional access to God's view. Even Scripture was revealed within the categories of those to whom God was speaking initially. The Bible is thus incarnated truth, truth revealed "in the flesh" of those to whom God wanted to communicate. Otherwise, no one would understand.

There is a subtle narcissism when we think our understanding of the Bible is absolute truth. Those who think such things are unaware that they have a particular worldview and particular paradigms, which are functions of their culture. [7] They are like fish who do not realize they are swimming in water. If they would say, "the Bible is absolute not incarnated truth," what they really mean is, "My understanding of the Bible is absolute truth." They thus imply that their worldview and their culture has finally arrived, not knowing how to read the Bible in its own original cultural contexts.

However, a real understanding of the Bible reveals that the Bible made sense to all those to whom it was first revealed. The words of the Bible made sense to them. They had paradigms. They had worldviews. The vast majority of the words of the Bible, perhaps even every word, made sense within the cultural frameworks of their original audiences. Since my/our paradigms and worldviews are different from theirs in many respects, reading the Bible in context is like an intercultural experience, reading someone else's mail from another time and place. The Bible is for us as Scripture, but its books were not written directly to us.

We can thus take the stance of critical realism. Truth about the world exists. It is what God "thinks." But our apprehension of that truth is overwhelmingly colored and skewed by our finitude and fallenness. We do not see the world as it but through a glass darkly. A former professor at Indiana Wesleyan University also used to say rightly, "but we do see." [8]

8. From God's perspective, humanity is created "in the image of God" (Gen. 1:26-27). The people of God both within Scripture and history have long reflected on what this image might be. In Genesis, it is first the position of humanity within the creation (the "political" image). However, it has been extended to refer to other aspects of a human such as our ability to reason and the eternality of our souls (natural image). Wesley also refer to our moral image as that part of us that could become righteous and holy. [9]

The above musings on the image of God all reflect to one degree or another the culture of the thinker, and they all point to truth. Genesis comes from a collective culture and so is focused on humanity's identity as a group within the groups of the creation. Wesley was a child of the Enlightenment and focused on individualistic features like personal morality and will.

Perhaps most helpful is to think of humanity in the image of God as a reflection of human value. Human life is sacred because we are reflections of God. No human life can be treated casually or trivially, even when we are speaking of morally reprehensible individuals. It is not that we have inherent rights, as if I am intrinsically valuable apart from God--more on this subject to come. It is rather the fact that we are loved by God that makes us valuable. We are valuable because we are reflections of God.

9. What is a human being? We are the image of God in some state of relation to God. We are "spirits in bodies." We are social, relational beings that live in communities of storied identity and practice. We are thinking, feeling, choosing things.

[1] Kant argued in The Critique of Pure Reason that we cannot know the world as it is in itself, the "thing in itself" (das Ding an sich). We can only know the world as it appears to us, the "phenomenological" world.

[2] Descartes sharply distinguished the natural world of our bodies from the spiritual world of our souls. This created a sharper dichotomy than had existed before. Prior to Descartes, existence was more of a continuum of being, and the ancient Greeks could think of the soul or life-force as thin material.

Descartes thus creates a distinction between the natural and the "supernatural" realm. Both become entirely separate modes of existence with completely different rules. Modern science can now treat the world as a machine that follows laws. Deism can emerge as a perspective that sees God as creator but not as involved in the world. The spiritual becomes something entirely different than the natural. See especially Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1992).

[3] The Bible has more than one picture of the soul, all of which give truths about human identity. These reflected the "psychological" paradigms of the various cultures within the Bible. Treating the eschatological whole of an individual as a person's soul leans toward the Hebrew construct that talked of the human nephesh as the whole living being. Treating it as a part of a person leans toward the Platonic detachable soul. Both images can be useful.

[4] God has no sexual organs. God is thus not literally male. This is a metaphor, an anthropomorphism, a portrayal of God in human terms to help us capture a glimpse of God in one aspect.

[5] While the term worldview is often limited to ideological systems, N. T. Wright helpfully expands it also to include core practices and rituals, key symbols, and common narratives. See N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992).

[6] Cf. especially, Portraits of Paul: An Archaeology of Ancient Personality (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1992).

[7] Paradigms are particular patterns and systems of understanding by which people at a particular time and place process the data of the world. These change over time and are an element of culture. See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 4th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2012). A worldview is a collection of paradigms that show coherent patterns. As mentioned in n.5, a more holistic understanding of worldview moves beyond the ideological to the cultural.

[8] Dr. Glenn Martin. I generally disagreed with Dr. Martin's overall perspective, which I considered unreflective in its foundations. However, I agreed with him on this point.

[9] E.g., in his sermon "On the New Birth."