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."

Liberal Arts 7: Psychology and Sociology

The seventh post in my series on the importance of the liberal arts for civilization, finishing up the usual general education curriculum at a non-Christian school. Previous posts include:

1. A Vision for the Liberal Arts
2. The Value of Philosophy
3. The Value of History
4. The Value of Music and Art
5. The Value of Literature, Writing, and Speech
6. The Value of Science and Math

1. We've covered literature, philosophy, art, music, history, writing and (indirectly) speech, science and math. With those we have covered the classical liberal arts. Two more courses often fill out a general education curriculum: psychology and sociology.

Psychology has to do with our human minds, how we think, our personalities, why we behave the way we do. Sociology has to do with how people behave as groups, how different groups interact, and the various layers of a society. These are incredibly significant concepts that potentially help us understand ourselves and others more clearly.

I would argue that these are areas of a vast lack of self-awareness in American culture. We do not understand ourselves and why we behave the way we do. We do not understand what it's like to grow up in a different place in a different social setting. So we evaluate others on the basis of our norms and possibilities rather than having a realistic sense of what the lives of others are truly like.

These courses are thus of potentially immense value for individuals, groups, and nations. If we understand ourselves and others, we can potentially get along better with each other. We can potentially build a better society. So these courses are of immense value to the advancement of civilization.

2. In psychology, we get to know ourselves and how we are different from others. How did the events of my childhood help make me what I am today? What is my personality type and how is it different from people with other personality types? Ideally, I stop considering other people weird, abnormal, or inferior because they do not think the way I do or act the way I do. I realize they're just different.

From a Christian standpoint, I become less judgmental of others. I realize that I have weaknesses others do not have, and others have strengths I don't have. Young individuals can catch a glimpse of what it is like to be older. Hopefully, students develop some empathy for others.

In psychology, we hopefully can see our own bad habits and move toward healthier ones. Do I make excuses for my bad behavior? Do I vent my frustrations in a healthy way? Do I have any unhealthy ways of relating to other people? Do I have any bad habits or addictions? How can I change?

How do emotions work? How does memory work? These are all incredibly useful things to know. They give you an advantage in almost any field because they help you understand and relate to others more effectively.

3. Sociology tends to be more controversial, because it gets at some of the most unreflective assumptions of our herd. These are assumptions that give us a sense of meaning and belonging in the world, so we can become incredibly defensive, angry, even violent when they are exposed.

What if a very male-oriented society comes to find out that women are just as smart as men? What if it turns out that black people are just as smart as white people? Sociology exposes prejudices and privileges we either don't think we have or we mistakenly think are true.

So sociology can be very controversial to the group it is analyzing. A white person may not like being shown that a black person faces more traffic stops, more scrutiny and suspicion, more obstacles in day to day living than he or she does. A religious person may not like his or her prized religious experience being described as a predictable experience typical in certain cultures or subcultures.

But these insights, hard though they are, can help diverse groups get along together. They can help us check ourselves and correct our course. Why is it that one person sees only good in President Obama but someone else sees only bad? Why would someone associate being against abortion with being against gun control? Group behavior is very predictable and is the stuff of sociology.

4. If taught right, you can see that sociology is especially an important course for a healthy society. You could argue that homo sapiens is at root a herd animal. We survived in the past by forming clans that made alliances and fought together against others.

But civilization moves beyond the level of the clan, just as Christianity does. Christianity calls us to love our enemy and not just our herd. As such, an understanding of sociology is an incredible tool for the advancement of civilization.

Biblical words for soul and spirit

1. The typical process of reading the Bible goes like this:

• I see the same English word used throughout the Bible. For example, "soul" or "spirit."
• I assume that word has the same meaning throughout the Bible, since it is the same English word.
• I assume that the meaning of that word is whatever that word means to me in English, which could involve things I've heard from the pulpit or things I've read somewhere.
• Perhaps there is a key verse or passage that drives my understanding of that word, the Archimedian point from which I interpret all other verses or the focal lens through which view all the other verses.

So on a topic like "soul" or "spirit," I may have had someone say that the "biblical" view of a person is that we are made up of a body, a soul, and a spirit, variously defined. 1 Thessalonians 5:23 might be a focal verse: "May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ."

2. This of course is a pre-modern way of reading the Bible. It is unreflective and completely unaware of how to read the words in historical context. So,

• These were not the same words in Greek and Hebrew.
• The meanings were not the same because the books in which these words were used spanned 1000 years and words change meaning over time in any language.
• The proper dictionary for defining these words is not an English one, but a function of the "dictionary" in use at the time and place where each book was written.
• You cannot use the meaning of a word in one part of Scripture to define a word in another part of Scripture because the meaning of a word is a matter of how it is used at a specific time and place.

3. So if we look at the biblical words for spirit and soul, here's something like how they map out over time.

a. nephesh - a living being of some sort. Genesis 1 calls the living creatures that God creates in the sea, nephesh chayah. So, in Hebrew, these sea creatures were "living souls." C. S. Lewis knew enough to put it this way: "You don't have a soul. You are a soul." Of course that is only the Old Testament way of using the word.

Adam as a living soul is the whole Adam, body and breath (Gen. 2:7). The NIV well translates the phrase here as "living being." There is thus not a single instance in the Old Testament where the word "soul" means a detachable part of a human being.

b. ruach - breath. In Hebrew, "spirit" comes much closer to what we think of when we speak of the soul. But it would be anachronistic to think of spirit in the OT as what we mean by the soul. I personally think it is misleading to translate this word as "spirit" anywhere in the OT. We would be much more accurate to translate the word as "breath."

c. psyche - The Greek word for "soul" both retains the OT sense of nephesh but also occasionally adds the use of the word in some Greek circles. So in 1 Peter 3:20, eight "souls" are saved on the ark. Notice how the NIV, realizing how confusing the word soul would be for an English speaker here, has prudently left the word untranslated. "Soul" here simply means a living being, as in Hebrew.

Psyche can also mean "life," as in Matthew 10:39. Here it is obviously not a part of us that continues to live after death, for it would then make no sense to say that "whoever loses his soul will find it."

So there are really very few places like 1 Thessalonians 5:23 where something like the Greek picture of a bipartite or tripartite person is invoked. In such cases, we are only looking at a picture, a metaphor of human existence. It would be foolhardy in the extreme to treat this as the ultimate secret to understanding human psychology.

In such instances, the soul seems to be something like the meeting point and intersection of body and spirit. It is like the animal part of us. Philo, for example, calls the spirit the "soul's soul." I do not think at any place, however, the NT considers the soul in Platonic fashion to be a detachable part of us that survives death.

d. pneuma - "Spirit" retains its connection to the idea of breath (cf. English derivative pneumonia). However, the NT does seem to draw more consistently on the Greek image of the spirit as a part of the human being that holds the essence of who we are and that can leave our bodies. This is ultimately, I believe, still a metaphor of sorts, not a scientific picture. Although there are significant scholarly voices against me, I still think that Hebrews 12:23 most likely pictures the disembodied spirits of the righteous around the throne in heaven.

Who are you?

Did some thinking last week about this question.  Who are you?

1. A lot of who you are is who others think you are.
Whether we like it or not, a good deal of who we are is a matter of who others think we are.  It is real because it has real consequences.

• What others think of me (perception is a reality)
• What I think of myself (whether my self-perception is "accurate" or not)
• What God thinks of me - P.S. This is who I truly am and it no doubt includes all the complexity of this post and more. At root, he considers me to be created in his image, which makes me immensely valuable. 

2. A lot of who we are is determined, outside our control.

• We are more than animals, but we are animals. We have drives and urges. Much of what we call our sinful nature relates to our animal drives gone amok.  
• groups I didn't choose - A person does not generally choose to be Irish or female, yet these group memberships are part of our default identity.
• default self-concept - By default, we start with a sense of ourselves that intrinsically relates to our genetics and environment

3. In Western culture, we especially consider identity a matter of what we are by choice.

• self-concept by choice (who we decide to be, despite our default self-concept)
• decision for/against God (and what God does to me in response) - From a Christian perspective, this aspect of my choice is most determinative of who I am, not least because God changes us in response to our choice for him.
• my choices, actions, patterns of behavior - These relate to the previous one.  Probably more than any other factor, our choices in the face of all the forces around us indicate who we are. They are embodiments of the attitudes we choose to embrace.

10 Personality Disorders

I was surprised to find out yesterday that there are, officially, only 10 different personality disorders.  Which one do you come closest to?  I'm paranoid that I may have all of them.

Cluster 1
1. Paranoid
Thinks everyone's out to get them (not be confused with what I am, "perceptive").

2. Schizoid
Detached, aloof, prone to introspection and fantasy, may appear cold and callous

3. Schizotypal
odd beliefs, appearance, magical thinking (superstitious), suspiciousness, has unreasonable "ideas of reference" to him or her by others

Cluster 2
4. Antisocial
Callous unconcern for the feelings of others, lacks guilt, aggressive, no conscience (more common in men)

5. Borderline
Lacks a sense of self, feelings of emptiness and abandonment (more common in women)

6. Histrionic
Need for attention and approval of others, seem to be playing a role, as if in a drama

7. Narcissistic
Grandiose sense of self-importance, need to be admired, self-absorbed, selfish

Cluster 3
8. Avoidant
Sense of social ineptness, avoids people, doesn't want to be embarrassed, rejected

9. Dependent
Lack of self-confidence, need to be taken care of, ingratiating, self-effacing (can hook up with the narcissistic)

10. Obsessive-compulsive (different from OCD)
preoccupation with details, perfectionism, rules, black and white thinking

Descartes Summary

René Descartes (1596-1650; pronounced “day-CART”) is rightly considered the “father” of modern philosophy. But he also had a massive impact on mathematics, inventing the Cartesian coordinate system of x’s and y’s that every high school student learns. He was a devout Roman Catholic, although the church of his day condemned his physics and philosophy. He was French but did most of his work in the Netherlands, most importantly a work called, Discourse on Method. At the time of his death he was a tutor to Queen Christina of Sweden.

Every philosopher to some extent gives expression to the struggles and spirit (Zeitgeist) of their time. The most famous thinkers are those whose expressions and solutions most resonate with their age or some later one. That to which Descartes gave expression was a sense of uncertainty and a thirst for something solid and true. The Protestant Reformation and the Renaissance had generally eroded the assumptions of a thousand years; in particular, that the things Christians had heard and believed through the Church were correct. Those who were convinced that charismatic leaders like Martin Luther, John Calvin, or Huldrych Zwingli had correctly interpreted the Bible might simply switch the source of their certainty. But what had been an unquestioned assumption (Christian belief is self-evident and universally agreed) now had to be argued for.

The beginnings of the scientific revolution would become yet another source of questioning assumptions. We discussed Francis Bacon (1561-1626) in chapter 8 and his attempts to place the quest for knowledge on an experimental basis. One gathers evidence and tabulates the data, eventually drawing the conclusion that best fits the evidence. Again, he represents a move from assumption of truth to the need to justify it.

In this context, Descartes begins to look for a place of absolute certainty from which to establish a firm basis for truth. Unlike Bacon, he is a rationalist (see chapter 4). He searches for truth first in reason. He questions everything he can question and finds he can doubt everything except for the fact that he is doubting. His conclusion is, cogito ergo sum, “I think; therefore, I am.” From this point of certainty, he then proceeds to try to reconstruct certainty on all the things people of his day took for granted, including the existence of God.

Despite how certain Descartes himself might be of his conclusions, he has sowed a doubt that had not been there before, much as the Reformation did. All the ordinary truths about the world—that I am really sitting somewhere reading this book—now have a question mark over them that was not there before. He creates a new sort of human identity. “I” am the most certain thing I can know, and the rest of the world is the object of my knowledge. I may still believe in God, but it is I who is doing the deciding and believing. The order of the world, all the truths that I had once assumed without question, are now truth claims that I am forced to make decisions about. Even faith becomes an inevitable choice I have to make as an individual, instead of an assumption. The shift seems inevitable. I can still believe everything I believed before about God, faith, and the world, and I can believe them ferociously. But I am now keenly aware that I am the one doing the believing.

The impact of this shift, this turn of focus of truth from something “out there” inherent in the world to something I have to make judgments on inside my head, has been far beyond massive. This sense of a human individual as a rational being that makes decisions about what is true has empowered everything from the scientific revolution to the birth of capitalism to the notion of social contracts between individuals, the basis for the United States system of government. Descartes inadvertently gives birth to the “autonomous individual,” a sense of a human person as someone who can make objective decisions about the quite distinct world outside of herself.

Descartes’ sense of nature and of the soul fit hand in glove with his other ideas. He makes a sharp distinction between the natural world and now the super-natural world. Nature is no longer everything that God created, but only now the physical, material part of it. Descartes does not include things of God, angels, or spirits, or things having to do with the mind in what he calls "nature." These now "immaterial" things are far more certain to him than what would become the world of science. He thus inadvertently prepared the way for Deism, which saw the world as a machine God created but with which He need no longer be involved.

Descartes also shifts the soul from being the life principle of a person to become the immaterial container in which the human self resides. It is where the “I” can think about the world in a detached and objective fashion. It is where the human will is located. It is the part of the person that survives death, like an escape pod.

The current climate is rather negative toward Descartes, and clearly we can point out any number of extremes in his thinking. Martin Heidegger (1886-1976), more than anyone, has shown that we cannot detach ourselves from the world around us. Almost everyone today would recognize the impossibility of complete objectivity. Nevertheless, we should not forget that most of the greatest cultural developments in the Western world these last few centuries can be traced back to Descartes more than to any other single individual.

Image of God

Finally getting back to some philosophy. The last post was on the soul.
__________
Thus far in the chapter we have looked at the human person from four different angles. We started with those who have viewed us as biological machines. From a Christian standpoint, this much is true, but it is not nearly the whole picture. Then we looked at the extent to which human identity is "socially constructed," that is, the degree to which we draw our identity from the social groups and contexts in which we grow up and live. Again, Christianity would historically see more to human existence than the mere constructs of particular societies. Further, Christianity's understanding of salvation has set us on a trajectory that tends to transcend visible social groupings and group-embedded identity. Since being a Jew or a Greek, a male or a female, a slave or a free person--or any visible indicator--cannot tell that a person is part of the people of God (Gal. 3:28), the usual external indicators of identity become quite inadequate. [1]

The third angle was that of personal choice, existentialism. Existentialism focuses on the potential for each of us to create our own identity for ourselves, to make ourselves into anything we want to be. Again, while Christianity can certainly accommodate a view that sees individual choice as essential to becoming a Christian, we would not believe that truly authentic existence is something anyone can create from any direction in life they choose. We believe that there are right and wrong choices, no matter how much you might invest yourself in the choices you make.

Finally, we looked at the traditionally Christian view that we have souls or spirits within us that survive death. Although the idea that the soul might be the primary container of our identities largely dates to Descartes, Christians have long associated the soul or spirit as the part of us that survives death until the time of the resurrection when we are reunited with a transformed body. In the last section, however, we saw that much of the work the soul is made to do in modern Christian thinking is itself largely a modern innovation that at least can be questioned from a number of different angles, including that of the Bible itself.

In this final section of the chapter, we want to consider if thinking about how humans as the image of God might stand at the heart of a Christian view of human beings. Yes, we are biological machines whose self-understanding derives significantly from our social context. Yes, a privilege of Western society in particular is the freedom to determine who we are in many more respects than people at other times and places. Yes, whatever the mechanism, we believe all humans continue to exist at death and that they will eventually be re-embodied. But more than anything else, a human is a reflection of God. A human person is an image of God.

Just like the soul, the idea of the image of God has also shifted somewhat over the centuries. As Western culture after Descartes became more individualistic, so the image of God more and more became something inside of me as an individual. [2] This was a crucial shift. Prior to Descartes, the image of God was something about me that reflected the divine order of things. What humans are reflected in part what God is. God is ruler of the universe. So God created humanity as His image to rule the created order. [3] Other aspects of us as humans that were often thought to reflect characteristics of God and the order of the world were our rationality and our potential for moral righteousness.

[textbox quote: The image of God in Wesley: natural, political, moral]

The Reformers from the time of Martin Luther increasingly looked at the image of God as something almost completely destroyed by Adam's sin in the Garden of Eden. [4] It became something we largely do not have in the present but that Adam had in the past. They focused primarily on the "moral" image as something completely lost in the Fall of humanity. Yet another current view focuses on the image of God as something greater than anything Adam had in the past but that we are destined to have in the future, at the time when God restores all things.

All of these views go well beyond anything in the Bible. Genesis is not very specific as to what the image of God in humanity might be, although in 1:27 it seems to relate to men and women governing the world. Paul and others in the New Testament seemed to relate this position of honor in the creation to Psalm 8, which the NRSV translates,

"what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor. You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas" (8:4-8).

As His image, God has granted humans a position of honor in the world that is a reflection of His own honor. Here is no sense of human rationality or even morality. We simply reflect God. The place He holds over all is the place He has assigned humanity in the world. A man should not cover his head when he prays because his head reflects God (1 Cor. 11:7)--to see the honor of a man is to see the honor of God. Similarly, one should not harm an innocent human because you are harming the image of God (Jas. 3:9). These are all pictures, but we can easily synthesize them into a Christian way of thinking about what we are as human beings created in the image of God.

First, even if one only looked at humanity as biological machines, we are clearly the dominant beings on the planet, at least as far as we can see. [5] The idea that humans "rule" in the animal kingdom--even if we are poor rulers at times--seems beyond question. We hold a position of honor in the created order that does reflect the role God has in relation to the entire creation. Part of that high position does include a higher rational and moral capacity than the rest of the creation, which reflects our sense of God as the perfect thinker and absolute standard of goodness. In this sense, Christian thinkers throughout the ages have fastened on legitimate aspects of what we are as humans, even if they read much more into the image of God than any biblical author was thinking.

However, what is perhaps more important for us today is to recognize that humanity in the image of God is intrinsically valuable and meaningful. Prior to Descartes and the Reformation, the value of humanity in general was a reflection of the very order of things, of the world. Meanwhile, the value of an individual human might be a matter of the social class to which they were born. There was no sense of development. It was assumed that a person who turned out to be great must have always been great.

After Descartes, thinkers no longer simply assumed an intrinsic order to things. A person's choices might show them to be great, and a person might start from nowhere and rise to greatness. The late 1800s saw Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and the birth of psychoanalysis, where events in a person's childhood were seen as formative influences that combined to make a person what they became. The nature/nurture controversy began, which would eventually become the question of whether what we are is more a function of our genetics or the environment in which we grew up.

Nevertheless, we can to a great extent return to the thinking of the Christians of the ages by thinking of how God thinks of humanity. If humanity--if indeed all the creation--is important to God, then it becomes a moral offence to mess with any of God's "stuff" and especially with humanity, which Scripture has declared to be the image of God in a way that the rest of the creation is not. This fact of God's perspective toward us makes us intrinsically valuable, despite the fact that we might also be biological machines that think and make moral choices.

[1] Although to be sure, visible Christiantity soon developed its own set of visible indicators so that group-embedded identity has continued to dominate the history of Christianity as well, another indication that homo sapiens is a herd animal.

[2] I am highly dependent in what follows on Charles Taylor's The Sources of the Self.

[3] This would seem to be the primary sense of the image of God in Genesis 1:27.

[4] The late Stanley Grenz spoke of a shift to a "relational" view of the image of God in the Reformation, followed by a more "dynamic" view as something God wants to restore in us at the time of Christ's return. See Theology for the Community of God, **, 168-73.

[5] Leaving out of consideration the spiritual realm for the moment.
_____________
As a side note on Steve Deneff's sermon this past Sunday:
Pastor Deneff made an interesting contrast between contemporary Westerners who are more "performance" based and the Bible world that was more "identity" based. This laborious chapter I've been hammering out in bits and pieces for months says similar things but in different terms.

First, what he is talking about is part and parcel of the ancient world, indeed I consider it the default of the human animal everywhere. His "identity" is really a function of a collectivist and honor-shame culture, as discussed previously.

Second, it is a pre-Descartes view of a person that sees who we are as a function of orders outside ourselves, an order to the world that is out there, as discussed previously and above. I think it can be recovered (as above) by seeing our truest identity as what God thinks of us. But the "performance" view--I am what I do--is one possible perspective as a result of the Cartesian slide, IMHO.

Wesley's "End of Christ's Coming"

Chris Bounds put me on to John Wesley's sermon, "The End (or purpose) of Christ's Coming" as a good place to see his breakdown of the image of God. I was looking for his sense of what the image of God in humanity consists of.

The sermon is quite interesting. Wesley's knowledge of Latin literature is impressive, which he quotes in Latin. He has the right understanding of Romans 7 as far as he goes ("Personating a man convinced of sin, but not conquering it").

He seems to demonstrate the "modern" sense of human will as found aptly in, for example, the philosophy of John Locke (Adam "was endued with a will, with various affections [which are only the will exerting itself in various ways]"). Augustine also of course talked about two wills, but not in terms of human understanding making choices, at least as I understand it. For Augustine these wills are a matter of God's choosing rather than ours.

His reading of the Genesis text is fully pre-modern a mirror reading of the text from within his own worldview, while at the same time incorporating the questions of old ("whence the origin of sin"). Important to realize that we often reinterpret the words of the ancients without realizing it, putting our thoughts into their words. So the comment that Satan "sinneth from the beginning" means that Satan was the first one to sin.

Wesley mentions two elements of the image of God in this sermon--the natural image and the moral image. I didn't find the political image in this sermon. Wesley includes within the natural image 1) understanding, 2) will, and 3) liberty. This framework seems decidedly impacted by the post-Cartesian paradigm shift.

The moral image has to do with the original "righteousness and true holiness" that Adam had and we have lost entirely apart from Christ. The political image is humanity's commission to rule the earth, impacted decidedly by the Fall.

In Genesis, I find only the third sense of the image of God, that humanity was intended to rule the creation as God rules His creation. In the NT, the image seems understandably to have a sense of reflecting the honor of God or the glory of God. I can't think of any places where it has anything to do with understanding, free will, or volition. I can't think off hand of any places where it has to do with an original moral righteousness either--this is all post-biblical expansion of Paul expanding on Genesis, for all I can tell.

These things are of interest to me, but I am more interested in how we today might conceptualize human beings as being in the image of God. The two key biblical senses of the phrase still seem most pertinent:

1) God has appointed us stewards of His creation. We are the most empowered of his creatures--which of course includes our greater understanding, our greater liberty, our greater sense of choices to make. We thus have the greatest responsibility among God's creatures.

2) Every human individual reflects the greatness of God. To harm any individual (here I am not speaking to issues of justice) is to mess with God's stuff.

I am the greatest of novices when it comes to image discussion after the New Testament. I welcome enlightenment of fundamental discussions I do not know.

Relationships in the Bible

The "original meaning scholar" inside of me always cringes a little when I read about Moses' relationship with God... or David's or Peter's or Paul's. Frankly, I have the same reaction when people talk about the relationships between the persons of the Trinity. The reason? These sorts of comments strike me as vastly anachronistic.

Six months ago I would have tried to explain this "feeling" I get in terms of ancient personalities being "dyadic" or group embedded. I might have suggested that the modern, introspective self traces back to the Romantics and in some ways back to Augustine, who individualized our understanding of Paul's writings.

Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self has been filling in some of the details. I wish I had the time to encapsulate his massive tome in detail. One of the main shifts that I blogged on a few weeks back is a shift from seeing truth as something out there that is part of the order of the world to seeing truth as something that my mind has to sort out by sifting through all the particular evidence of my reason and senses.

Inadvertantly, "I" become the center of the universe. I can still affirm that God is the center, but I am keenly aware that I am concluding that God is the center. Before I simply assumed God was the center unthinkingly. (I sense that Taylor will go Heideggerian on me at the end, but I'm no fan of Heidegger, meaning that I find this Cartesian situation unavoidable to some extent).

Eventually, individual identity becomes more and more particular to me. "I" become more and more self-defined, determined, and differentiated. It thus entails the eventual birth of modern intimacy, where my vastly increased in size self connects with your vastly increased in size self.

What I'm getting at is that pre-moderns did not have nearly as developed senses of themselves as individuals as so many of us do. And as a result, their relationships were not nearly as deep or complex as ours can be. It is not simply that "abba" did not mean "Daddy" in Aramaic (it didn't). I am saying that there really weren't any "Daddys" of the modern sort. Love between individuals did not have the kind of differentiated complexity--or post-Romantic age feeling--that we often have in the Western world. Go look at relationships in Africa or Asia if you want to know what biblical relationships were like.

Now of course the Trinity is a realm of absolutes beyond cultural contexts. The Trinity did not change their interrelationships after Descartes, as far as I know. But I'm not sure any of us mortals could really fathom what their absolute relationships would be like. Nevertheless, I predict that most of the trendy trinitarian stuff right now will be completely abandoned within twenty or thirty years. I suspect that an aweful lot of it is yet more of the post-Cartesian, post-Romantic projection of the modern self on God.

Continuity of Identity

I have a couple of writing tasks soaking up my time. I might write a little on one here tomorrow. But I wanted to put a pulse through the blog. First, this week's Lenten post is up on my Dean's blog (http://wesleyanseminary.wordpress.com).

I notice that they have a session at the Wesleyan Theological Society on Friday at Azusa Pacific University over Joel Green's book, Body, Soul, and Human Life. I'll be there and may Twitter the conference. In general, Twitter hasn't worked much for me because I don't do much that is worth tweeting hour by hour, but I might use it on Friday.

In any case, one of the benefits of the idea of a soul is that it can provide for continuity of existence between now and resurrection. Indeed, it can provide for continuity of existence even in life, since I may lose memory or like Phineas Gage can have a personality-changing rod blow through my frontal lobe.

Time has fascinated me since high school. I remember chilly mornings in Florida of 60 degrees (oh, those were the days! oh me, oh Indiana!) walking across a breezeway to a classroom building wondering how it happened to be "now" and knowing there would be another "now" the next day but wondering how I got from one now to the next.

I have felt that strange feeling often. I have some writing assignments due. How strange that it is "now," here in bed early in the morning. How do I get to submission late afternoon today or to California on Friday?

The thought struck me last week that my strange feeling of "now-ness" was part of the continuity of identity question. Continuity of identity is not simply a question of now and resurrection in the future. It is a question of now and tomorrow. Sleeping is truly like a death. I cease to exist and then resurrect in the morning. Is it "me" that wakes up? What makes it me?

I count it as me. Tomorrow's me has memories of me. Tomorrow me's body has occupied continuous space in the intervening time (whatever that means). But isn't there a sense that if you don't do something for me now, you are doing it for someone else tomorrow?

These are mysteries to me. If my question before was, "How do I get from this moment to later?" My question this morning is, "Is it even really me in that later moment?"

P.S. I promise that I have not been doing drugs this morning :-)

Joel Green quote (Body, Soul, and Human Life)

"Libet found that conscious awareness occurred temporally after the onset of brain activity setting in motion the voluntary movement though before the movement itself. This led Libet to argue against "free will" in favor of "free won't" -- that is, that even though we do not consciously cause an action like a voluntary finger movement, we are capable of stopping it before it happens."

Interesting...

9.4 A Soul in a Body, Part 1

The earlier parts of this chapter were:

9.1 Biological Machines
9.2 Socially-Constructed Identity
9.3 Existentialism and Identity

A Soul in a Body, Part 1:
When we who are Christians affirm the “Apostle’s Creed,” we confess our belief in the “forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.” Popular Christianity often misses the meaning of Christian faith in “the resurrection of the body.” It is an affirmation that, one day in the future, God will transform our dead corpses (or whatever is left of them) into new bodies, and we will come back from the dead, possibly on an equally transformed earth. The “resurrection of the body” is thus something distinct from the “immortality of the soul,” even if the two ideas do not necessarily contradict each other. The idea that “you die and go to heaven or hell” is thus slightly different from what most Christians in the past have believed. It would be more accurate to say that most Christians in history have traditionally believed that you die and go to a place of reward or torment to wait for the final resurrection and judgment, after which you will go either to eternal life or condemnation.

So where does the idea of the soul come in? As we will see, we do find some language in the New Testament that seems to relate to “disembodied” existence between our deaths and our resurrections—whether for eternal life or death. But we ironically find very little language in the Bible that speaks of “souls” in this way. The idea that we have a detachable soul, which comes into existence at least at our conception and continues to exist forever, arguably came into Christian tradition more from the influence of Greek philosophy than from the Bible itself.[i]

Nevertheless, it became the consensus of Christendom, not only that at some point in the future we will receive resurrection bodies, but that we have immortal souls. When the vast majority of Christians have believed something for so long, we must surely be very cautious about drawing a different conclusion. Those of us who are Protestants have room for “reformation,” particularly when the majority seems to have deviated from the founding principles and practices of earliest Christianity. But some developments from New Testament times seem like appropriate extensions or refinements of first principles and practices, even clarifications of tensions or ambiguities within the earliest church. So it would seem we can neither dismiss common elements of historic Christianity easily nor completely affirm them without the possibility of reformation or development.

At the same time, no human being can remove their thinking completely from the categories of their times and places. You could argue that it is not so much the existence of the soul that is the important consensus but rather what language of the soul was really about. We could argue that belief in the soul has primarily been about our continued existence after death. The soul also provides potential mechanisms to explain our individual identity or even free will. For others, the existence of a soul at conception might provide an argument against abortion when as yet an embryo not only has no blood or breath—the biblical images of life—but has no nerves to feel pain, let alone has thought. You could at least argue that what is important is that we can affirm these things—continued existence, continued identity—rather than a particular version of human psychology...

[i] The church father Origen (AD185-254) believed that God created all the souls of humankind when He made the world. He thus believed that our souls pre-existed our conception. He also believed that, since all souls were good, all humans would be good after they were freed of their bodies. He is thus the earliest known Christian “universalist,” someone who believes everyone will be saved in the end. For this reason he was posthumously excommunicated several centuries after his death.

9.3 Existentialism and Identity

Previous posts in this chapter have been:
9.1 Biological Machines
9.2 Socially-Constructed Identity

9.3 Existentialism and Identity
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), one of the best known atheists and skeptics of the 1800s, is often quoted for his famous line, “God is dead.”[i] However, Nietzsche’s point in saying it was not so much to argue for the non-existence of God as to show what he thought the implications were.[ii] The twentieth century saw a proliferation of atheism, and we may very well be witnessing a further decline in Christianity in North America already this century as well.[iii] Many of those who adopt an atheist position do so with the same ignorance that Nietzsche himself talked about well over a hundred years ago. In that respect, Nietzsche is sometimes called a prophet of the twentieth century. Popular atheism failed to recognize the potentially disastrous consequences of what a world without God might look like, potentially justifying things like holocausts and world annihilation.

In his 1882 book, The Gay Science, Nietzsche depicts a madman coming to a marketplace where a group of people are more celebratory than anything at the fact that God is dead (125). The madman tries to make them realize what they have done in killing God, but they are uninterested. He finally goes away, concluding that they do not know what the consequences will be. In particular, the madman claims that we will have to become like gods to be worthy of having killed God. What Nietzsche meant is fairly clear from his other writings, not least his novel, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

If God is dead, Nietzsche argued, then we are entirely responsible for who we are and what we do.[iv] Echoing Fyodor Dostoevsky, who did believe in God, Nietzsche would write that if God does not exist, “Nothing is true; everything is permissible.”[v] Nietzsche thus developed his understanding of the “superman,” the person who has a strong enough will to create him or herself. Ordinary people, “men” needed God to tell them who they are and what they can and cannot do. If God is dead, then “men” must either become “supermen” and create their own identities, or they must follow and obey those who do have such a “will to power.”[vi]

Nietzsche’s philosophy thus both stood at the end of a long deterioration of theism while also trying to find meaning in a meaningless world.[vii] In chapter 7, we looked at some of the changes in Western culture that led from a world in which almost everyone believed that God existed and was actively involved in the world (theism) to the Enlightenment where many believed God had created the world but was no longer involved (deism) to a worldview in which everything could be explained on a purely natural and scientific basis (naturalism). What Nietzsche effectively predicted was that a world in which God does not exist to give meaning to the world is a nihilistic world, a world that lacks any intrinsic meaning or purpose. If God does not exist as a Guarantor of meaning and right and wrong, then everything is ultimately meaningless.

At the same time, Nietzsche anticipated a twentieth century movement called existentialism. It is a “glass is half empty” view to say that everything is meaningless. The “glass is half full” view that corresponds to it is to consider everything as equally meaningful. If there is no real or intrinsic meaning to the world, then any meaning I adopt and make my own is just as meaningful as anything else. The existentialists of the mid-twentieth century thus taught that we create our own identities. We make ourselves what we are. Therefore, an existentialist would say we are whatever we will ourselves to be. A human person is a creator of identity, and identity is self-constructed.

Probably the best known existentialists of the twentieth century were Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80) and Albert Camus (1913-60). Sartre captures existentialism well, particularly atheistic existentialism, in his motto, “Existence precedes essence.” Existence is whether or not we exist, that we are. By contrast, our essence is what we are. Our essential characteristics are the things that, if you changed them, we would be someone different. Sartre himself put it in this way:

"What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man [sic] first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards… Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing – as he wills to be after that leap towards existence. Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism" (“Existence is a Humanism,” 1946).

Sartre is basically saying the same thing as Nietzsche did. Humanity has no objective identity, no “what it really is” and no “what it should be.” We are born; we come into existence. But we are the ones who have to decide what we are, what our essence will be. “Man [sic] is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment that he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does.”[viii] For Sartre, therefore, none of us have a destiny. We have to determine who we are.

Quotes
“A man [sic] can live with any how, if he has a why.” Victor Frankl

“One is not born a woman, but becomes one.” Simone de Beauvoir

“Every man [sic] is born as many men and dies as a single one.” Martin Heidegger

At the same time, it does not matter to the atheistic existentialist what we choose to be. One identity is as legitimate as any other. Albert Camus (pronounced Al-BEAR Ca-MOO) is known for saying that, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”[ix] Behind this comment was the idea that life itself has no objective meaning. It does not matter whether we live or die. Camus wrote a number of novels in the genre of the theater of the absurd. In novels like The Stranger, he portrayed matters of life and death taking place by pure chance and happenstance, with matters we experience as incredibly serious treated casually and as insignificant. Things we might consider absurd are really no different from things we consider significant.

The positive is that any reason we find to live, to go on, becomes valid. Why have you not committed suicide? Any reason you have to live is as legitimate as it is absurd. Go with it.
Do you love to help the needy and liberate the oppressed? Wonderful! You have found a reason to live. Do you love collecting rocks or stamps or repeatedly seeing how many times you can hop on one leg? Great! Go for it. You have found a reason to live.

While we might most associate existentialism with atheism, we can also speak of a certain Christian existentialism. Indeed, Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55), whom we have met before, has as much claim to be the founder of existentialism as anyone else. As we saw in chapter 2, Kierkegaard is the one that promoted ideas like a “leap of faith” or “blind faith.” For him, we cannot find any compelling rational basis for our faith. Therefore, our faith is a matter of our choice. We take a leap of faith into Christian faith. The problem with Kierkegaard’s approach, of course, is that it gives us no compelling reason not to jump just as well into Islam or atheism.

Nevertheless, some of the imagery of existentialism can fit with certain forms of Christianity. Existentialism emphasizes the importance of identity as a matter of individual choice. While Christians do not believe the nature of this identity is a free-for-all or a matter of individual determination, many Christians do believe that a person can be “born again” as a new person, a new creation by a choice for Christ. The New Testament itself uses the imagery of moving from death to life (e.g., 1 John 3:14). Many Christians might say, thus, that we take on our true identity when we make a choice to have faith.[x]

[i] Nietzsche makes this statement both in The Gay Science (1882) and Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85).
[ii] That is to say, Nietzsche concluded early in his life that God did not exist. His writings were not arguments to advance the idea that God did not exist but rather his sense of what the implications of God’s non-existence were for morality and human identity.
[iii] A book to consult here is The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christendom (Oxford: Oxford University, 2007).
[iv] Another key work of Nietzsche here is Beyond Good and Evil (1886).
[v] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, part 4, “The Shadow.” Nietzsche and Dostoevsky apparently reached similar conclusions independently about what is true if God does not exist. However, Dostoevsky did so with faith that God actually did exist. His novel Crime and Punishment (1866) is an apt expression of his understanding.
[vi] It is generally argued that Nietzsche would not have thought of Hitler as such a “Superman,” even though Hilter himself did,
[vii] An interesting book that aims at tracing the philosophical deterioration of faith in God over the last few centuries is James Sire’s, The Universe Next Door, 5th ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2009).
[viii] “Existence is Humanism.”
[ix] The Myth of Sisyphus.
[x] The Zeitgeist or spirit of the age has in fact often taken Christians too far. Historically, Christianity has not believed that I can decide to have faith in my own power. Orthodox Christianity believes that it is only by God’s gracious empowerment that anyone can make a choice for God.

9.2 Socially-Contructed Identity

The first post of this chapter, "What is a Human Being?" was Biological Machines. Now for the second:

9.2 Socially Constructed Identity
We are often unaware of the degree to which we are different from others until we meet someone different from us. This dynamic is true of our personalities. We might assume that someone who does not plan out their future in detail is irresponsible or, visa versa, that someone who plans things out in detail is boring and inflexible. The truth is rather that both personalities have their strengths and weaknesses, and neither should look down on the other.

What is true of individuals is also true of culture. Cultures as a whole can take on personalities, although we must always be careful not to stereotype or “pre-judge” an individual’s identity or probable behavior simply because of where he or she is from. However, cultures usually do have different norms, ideas, and practices. And you often cannot see the idiosyncrasies of your own culture until you live a while in another and can see your own looking in from the outside.

One of the benefits of intercultural experience is to realize that most of these differences are not a matter of right or wrong—cultures are just different from each other. This realization is especially important when it comes to reading the Bible. Do Christian women today need to veil their heads when they pray or prophesy in worship (1 Cor. 11:5)? Do Christians need to abstain from pork (Lev. 11:7)? Must the husband be the head of the household in the twenty-first century United States (1 Cor. 11:3)? These are all issues raised by instructions various books of the Bible gave that were very relevant to the cultural situations of their day. At the same time, they all seem far removed from contemporary Western culture. So do they still apply?

Our identity, thinking, and behavior as human beings are far more “socially-constructed” than we might at first imagine. One of the ground breaking books of this dimension of human existence was Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman’s The Social Construction of Reality.[i] They write, “to be given an identity involves being assigned a specific place in the world.”[ii] One grows up with experiences of how your parents and those around you treat you and eventually makes general assumptions about how “everyone” should act and be treated. This becomes a part of our sense of who we are—the “internalization of society as such and of the objective reality established therein, and, at the same time, the subjective establishment of a coherent and continuous identity.”[iii]

We thus largely absorb our default understanding of what a human being is from our environment growing up. These understandings are some of the most basic ways we think about ourselves and others around us—and some of the elements of our thinking about which we tend to be most unreflective. In the West, for example, children are often raised to be individualists who can sharply distinguish themselves from their families and starting point in life. We often think of ourselves as free to determine who we are, whom we marry, and what we want to be.

However, this understanding does not seem to be the default way in which most human beings think about themselves. The majority of cultures both in the past and present have not tended to think of themselves in this way. The West cherishes the freedom of individuals to determine their own identity and to have individual influence on society at large. But most cultures in history have valued remaining true to your inherited identity and societal structure, with certain select individuals destined to lead the vast majority of “lessers.” The contrast between these two perspectives—both largely un-reflected upon—has been particularly evident when the West has tried to “help” other cultures in the area of freedom and democracy without clearly taking the distinctions into full account.

[textbox: collectivist culture, individualist culture]

The distinction also comes into play for Western Christians when we read the books of the Bible, which were written in what are sometimes called collectivist cultures, cultures
in which a person’s identity is primarily embedded in the groups to which you belong, particularly your race, family, and gender.[iv] Westerners will tend to read simple words like “I” and “you” with all the assumptions they make when they use these words in reference to themselves and others as individuals. But many of these assumptions will not hold true for what biblical authors and audiences were thinking.

In collectivist or group cultures, individuals have more what is called dyadic personality. A person defines themselves primarily in terms of their external relationships and the way others perceive them rather than by personal self-identification. Men are a certain way and women are another. Jews are one way and Greeks are another. Wealthy people are this way and poor people another.

In reality, of course, people and people groups are much more complex than simple stereotypes. But most human brains can only differentiate things by way of a relatively small number of distinctions. We inevitably learn things and process the world by categorizing things, by putting things into “boxes.”[v] In group cultures, these boxes are relatively large and are sanctioned by culture and “tribe.” We tend to ignore the things that don’t fit in our boxes—or label such people as deviant—while highlighting those things that fit with our preconceived categories. Such boxes thus have an inherent tendency to skew reality, despite the fact that we cannot think without them.[vi]

The biblical texts are filled with reflections of the group orientation of its authors and audiences. While Christians affirm Israel as God’s chosen people in the Old Testament, the relationship God has with Israel has a number of characteristics that fit with the way other ancient peoples understood their relationship with their chief god. For example, the most likely original wording of Deuteronomy 32:8 pictures Israel’s God as “God Most High” assigning the lesser gods to the other nations of the world.[vii] Different peoples had different gods as their special patrons. Their gods were part of their identity, went to war with them, and so forth.

The fact that the Egyptians detested shepherds who herded sheep (Gen. 46:34) suggests that the Old Testament prohibition against pork was as much a matter of ethnic identity as anything else, despite the common claim that it had to do with health issues. The surrounding Philistines, Moabites, and Ammonites ate pork, Israelites and Canaanites of the central plain did not. And since gods were part of this identity, to eat pork was thus indirectly to associate with the gods of the surrounding peoples as well. When the Prodigal Son of Luke 15 finds himself feeding pigs, a Jewish audience would have immediately recognized that he had left Israel and, by implication, Israel’s God.

The New Testament also reflects group embedded identity, although much of it also undermines traditional groupings. Titus reinforces the stereotype that “Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons” (Tit. 1:12). Today we would want to emphasize that every individual from a place like Crete should be allowed to determine by their own actions whether they are a liar or not. We would call such a statement prejudicial. But it is typical of collectivist, “us-them,” thinking.

The household codes of Ephesians 5-6, Colossians 3-4, and 1 Peter 2-3 largely embody stereotypically ancient roles for men and women, slaves and free, parents and children. Passages like Galatians 3:28 are far more distinctive and unique in the ancient world: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female.” Of course the ancient world also allowed for “deviants.” Aristotle, for example, can speak of certain women who are a “departure from nature” in their fitness to lead others (Politics 1.1259b). Again, today in the Western world we would recognize that such boxes are as much a matter of culture as of nature and would argue that an individual should be defined by his or her actions and intentions rather than presupposing how someone will act or think because of the groups to which they belong.

A group culture is more oriented around external honor and shame rather than internal guilt for violating your own values.[viii] Westerners tend not to notice statements in the Bible like, “I am not ashamed of the gospel” (Rom. 1:16), Jesus scorning the shame of the cross (Heb. 12:2), God crowning humanity with glory and honor (Ps. 8:5), or sex with an aunt uncovering the “nakedness” of an uncle (Lev. 18:14). Even the “blesseds” of the Beatitudes in Matthew 5 are about receiving honor from God despite the shame or apparent foolishness of earthly peacemaking or poverty. We have changed the meaning when we read them in terms of individual happiness.

So what is a human person, as far as most of the world in most times and most places throughout history is concerned? The predominant answer has been that there are different types of persons depending on their groups—their social location. Ancient Jews divided the world into Jews and non-Jews (Rom. 1:16). Greeks divided the world into Greeks and barbarians (Rom. 1:14). There are slaves and free individuals. There are men and women. There are the rich and everyone else. We would argue that the default understanding of the human person, in so far as how people understand people, has historically been to define them externally in terms of the key groups to which they belong.

That is not to say, however, that we do not find expressions of common or universal personhood, especially in what we might call wisdom or proverbial type literature. “All people are like grass, and all human faithfulness is like the flowers of the field. The grass withers and the flowers fail, because the breath of the LORD blows on them” (Isa. 40:6-7). “Man is born for uprightness. If a man lose his uprightness and yet live, his escape from death is mere good fortune.”[ix] Yet even in the proverbial wisdom of the ancients, we generally find people divided up into types like “righteous” and “wicked,” with little sense of the possibility for someone to change from one to another or little allowance for mixture.

[i] The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Anchor, 1966).
[ii] Social Construction, 132.
[iii] Social Construction, 133.
[iv] See, for example, Bruce J. Malina, The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology ***.
[v] Cf. Jean Piaget’s theory of learning.
[vi] See chap. 16 and postmodernism.
[vii] The Dead Sea Scrolls have confirmed that the ancient Greek translation of Deuteronomy 32:8 was actually more original than the Hebrew texts we had prior to 1947. They read, “When [the Most High] ... separated [humankind, he set the bounds of the peoples according to the number of] the children of God” (The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible ***).
[viii] Malina, The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology...
[ix] Confucius

You are Adam

No, not the Adam of Garden of Eden fame, although you are him too. I just couldn't think of a better title.

My wife and I watched a move called Adam this morning. I enjoyed it but my wife hated the ending. I'm not necessarily recommending you see it.

In the movie, Adam is a 29 year old man with Asperger's syndrome, although he is highly functioning, can hold down a job, etc. But there are things he doesn't see. He doesn't get humor very well. He has difficulty knowing when his banter about astrophysics is absolutely boring. He doesn't get the concept of holding your tongue very well--or of white lies. He is completely honest--which gets him into trouble socially.

The movie is a drama, not a comedy, but it's not too dramatic. It won't win any awards. But it occurred to me that one of the problems we all have is that we all are like Adam but we don't realize it.

There are things we are good at, things we "get." But almost all of us have blind spots, areas where we don't realize we don't get it. And, ironically, these are often the areas where we think everyone else is stupid!

It is a simple observation--this is an area where someone else can do X just as easy as a fish swims in water. You probably have some of these areas too--where you're the fish in water. Your blind spot might be the weakness that goes with your Fish-Strength.

So in what area of life do you have "Blind Spot Syndrome"?

Humans: Biological Machines

The number one task at the beginning of the new year is finishing off seminary curriculum for the Spring. A secondary goal is to finish the philosophy book in January. I had written two sections of Chapter 9: "What is a Human Being?" but it wasn't working. So here's to starting the chapter over:
__________
9.1 Biological Machines
Christians obviously believe that a human being is much more than a biological machine. But we are nevertheless biological machines. We have bodies that work when they have the appropriate fuels in the appropriate environments. They break down, they need repairs, they cease to function altogether.

Ecclesiastes expresses somewhat pessimistically that humans "can see for themselves that they are no better than animals. For humans and animals both breathe the same air, and both die. So people have no real advantage over the animals. How meaningless! Both go to the same place—the dust from which they came and to which they must return" (3:18-20, NLT). In a different context, Paul contrasts the truly spiritual person from the "natural" person (1 Cor. 2:14), a word notoriously difficult to translate. [1] A really literal translation would be a "soulish" person. A strong argument can be made that Paul here is alluding to the part of the human soul we share with the animal realm, while our spirits are different. [2] So you might say that some people are merely animal, not spiritual--even some Christians!

We need to be very careful not to take this language as God's literal view of the human make-up. The Bible expresses truths about human beings using more than one picture of how we mortals are put together, revealing truth in the categories of those to whom God was speaking at the time. As we will see in this chapter, the Old Testament does not use the word soul the same way that we do. The New Testament comes closer occasionally, but still with slightly different assumptions than we have. Those who try to break down the parts of the human psyche using biblical language inevitably end up with a very strange mixture indeed, made up of ancient language and contemporary psychology, filtered through some seventeenth century philosophy they may never even have heard of! [3]

Nevertheless, as long as we do not take the distinction between our animal part and our spiritual part too literally, the distinction is potentially very helpful. [4] By the end of the chapter, you may conclude that we share a great deal more with the animal world than many of us previously imagined. Certainly we all recognize that we need to eat, sleep, keep warm, and do many other things animals do. Abraham Maslow (1908-70) famously categorized human drives in terms of a "hierarchy of needs" in the form of a pyramid. [5] At the base of the pyramid were basic needs like breathing, food, water, sex, sleep, and excretion. If these things do not take place, you will die.

[insert Maslow's pyramid]

But we share much more with the animal world than these basics. Maslow suggested that when our physiological needs are met, we will focus on higher "needs." On the next level up in his pyramid of needs, he suggested we will strive for safety and security over and above food and basic bodily functions. [6] Then he placed our social needs on the next level up, things like our drive for love, belonging, family, and so forth. Above that level he placed our longing for self-esteem and respect. Finally, on the highest level, he placed something he called "self-actualization," by which he meant reaching your highest potential as an individual, to be all you can be. Maslow thought of self-actualization as something different for each person, something very relative to who you were as an individual.

Subsequent psychology has picked the particulars of Maslow's theory apart, questioning whether we can really speak of such a fixed hierarchy in relation to some of these "needs." His idea of self-actualization also seems dubious, and Christians believe that regardless of what personal peace or fulfillment you might feel, God is the one who has determined the appropriate goals for human life. But what Maslow does for us is get us thinking about some of the basic longings and drives we as humans share with other animals. Certainly we share very similar physiological needs with other animals. Humans regularly show themselves little different from animals in their inability to control their sex drives, often having sex with anyone they can, like a dog or orangutan.

The best known vices and human sins show us to be slaves just as much to our desires as any other animal. For example, it would be hard to find an animal in the wild as prone to obesity as the American homo sapiens. How many humans are able to rise above the herd mentality of so many species to treat groups other than their own fairly or view their own objectively? How many examples of genocide attempts has history left us? How many humans show mercy when they sense weakened prey on which to pounce? We are, in so many instances, little different from other predatory animals.

We share other longings and drives with other animals as well. We have a drive for security, as other animals, and we can become vicious when cornered. On the other hand, anyone who has had a pet recognizes that dogs and cats can have a sense of belonging to a family and usually long for affection, just like humans. Some animals can even demonstrate a kind of selflessness and self-sacrifice that many humans would not offer under the same circumstances.

Most of us humans are easily manipulated and can be trained. We obviously try to train up our children in the way they should go (cf. Prov. 22:6). We "reinforce" positive behavior and often use a "punishment" model to discourage behavior we do not want. When we become adults, we often think we are free and no longer being trained, but most of us continue to be herded and "conditioned" by the media, politicians, and countless cultural forces and trends throughout our lives.

Some of the language of the previous paragraph comes from the work of the atheist B. F. Skinner (1904-90), perhaps the most significant psychologist of the twentieth century. He is best known as the originator of a system of training or "conditioning" others--especially children--called behavior modification. While we strongly disagree with his assumption that humans are only highly evolved animals, it would be difficult to deny that he correctly showed that you can steer the behavior of humans in very similar ways to how we might steer the behavior of other animals like rats and pigeons.

[textbox--behavior modification (use operant conditioning in the definition), positive and negative reinforcement]

Skinner's terminology has made its way into popular language. When we talk about positive reinforcement, we are talking about rewarding a person or animal for an action or choice that we want them to do. Negative reinforcement is thus when one withholds or withdraws reward or something desired to discourage a particular choice or action. [7] Skinner notoriously used this method with success in relation to lower animals, and it usually works with human animals as well, unless one of the more unique features of humanity kicks in, namely, our ability to reflect on ourselves. If one realizes he or she is being manipulated, one will normally stop cooperating with the manipulator. [8]

We will discuss the relationship of the brain to the soul later in the chapter. But it is clear that we share many parts of our brain with the brains of other animals. For example, the brains of lower animals are basically like our brainstem, which keeps us alive by controlling things like our breathing or body temperature without us even thinking about it. The more complex the animal, the more similarity between their brains and ours. Thus reptiles not only have a brainstem, but a cerebellum like ours that helps regulate movement and balance.

[insert diagram of human brain]

Then mammals like ourselves have a neocortex like we do in our cerebrum, the outer part of our brains. Theirs are not as developed as ours are, but they share certain features. At the core of our cerebrum is the limbic system, where basic emotions like fear and aggression seem to originate. We share these basic structures with other mammals--and we would seem to share many of the same basic drives associated with them. Where our brains are unique is in the outer most parts of our brain, the parts that seem to be able to control and moderate our aggression and emotion--in other words, our reasoning parts.

Certainly as Christians we believe that human persons are much more than biological machines. But we clearly are biological machines as well, perhaps far more than most people realize. There are locations in our brain involved in everything from our memory to our personality to our spiritual experiences. Change the structure of our brain and we become different people--fundamentally different! Nevertheless, as Christians we believe that a "spiritual" realm exists in addition to the merely "physical," although we cannot say exactly what these words are literally referring to. Nevertheless, we believe they refer to real things that truly exist and that make us much more than animal, as we will discuss later in the chapter.

[1] KJV: "natural"; NRSV: "unspiritual"; NIV: "man without the Spirit"; NLT: "people who aren't Christians."

[2] Thinking here of the Jewish interpreter/philosopher Philo who thought that the spirit was the "soul's soul" but that the rest of the soul was that which humanity had in common with the animals (Allegorical Laws 1.11; Heir 55).

[3] Namely, Rene Descartes' understanding of the soul.

[4] Many scholars believe that Paul's language in 1 Corinthians 2 is using the language of his opponents at this point. For a brief exploration of this passage in the light of Philo's writings, see my A Brief Guide to Philo (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 76-79.

[5] "A Theory of Human Motivation," Psychological Review 50.4 (1943): 370-96.

[6] Including things like security, employment, health, resources, morality, etc.

[7] Not to be confused with punishment. Skinner believed that punishment only trains a person to avoid punishment rather than to avoid a particular choice and he is well known for his opposition to corporal punishment. While it is possible he was more correct than wrong on many of these ideas in theory, many parents will likely conclude there is still a legitimate role for punishment to play as a deterrant to certain behaviors. We will discuss the question of punishment versus formation in chapter 13, "Living Together in Society."

[8] Unless, of course, the manipulator is using reverse psychology, and the goal is actually to get you to do the opposite of what they seem to be trying to get you to do.