What Is A Human Being?
Searching for a Christian anthropology
It’s been said that while previous eras of church history have seen necessary debates and clarifications around issues like Christology and soteriology, the need for our day is around anthropology.
What is a human being?
It’s not obvious anymore. As we head into a technological world that offers transhumanism as another option on the identity menu to pick from, it’s important for all of us to clarify our view on this basic question of what it means to be a human.
So that’s what I’ve been thinking about lately.
Is it possible to summarize what it means to be a human in a single sentence? As it turns out, being able to do this is simpler than you would imagine if you assume Jesus’s teachings are authoritative, and it’s immensely clarifying in almost innumerable ways.
Defining “Human”
Two writers in particular have helped me—Dallas Willard and Andy Crouch—and it shouldn’t be surprising that they simply point to Jesus’s own words. In fact, a Christian anthropology can be summed up just by looking at the first and second greatest commandments.
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”
Mark 12:29-30
The idea is simple: to obey these commands, you have to be these things.
In Andy Crouch’s book, The Life We’re Looking For, he says that to be a human being is to be a “heart-soul-mind-strength complex designed for love.” At the risk of hubris, I’ve slightly expanded on this to include the prelude of the commandments, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one,” which acknowledges that God is our Lord, our Creator, making us his creation, and that we are his people created with a purpose.
So I’ve slightly altered Crouch’s helpful definition. It’s deceivingly simple.
Humans are heart-soul-mind-body creatures designed in the image of God for loving God and each other.
This is what it means to be human in a single sentence.
Picturing a Human
Dallas Willard has this diagramed in his book, Renovation of the Heart. It looks like this.
Our Spirit and will, which is our heart, is at the center of our being. Above that is our mind and intellect, which is just below our body, which is situated in a social context, and it is all held together by our soul, which organizes all of these aspects into a coherent person, what we might call our personality or our character.
Once you view the human person through this lens, lots of things click into place.
Integrating Our Self
Spirit
Receiving the Holy Spirit in salvation means replacing our old, dead Spirit with the Spirit of God in our innermost being. We enter into the new covenant where the law is no longer an external standard to be upheld by sheer willpower but is instead written on our hearts, and our will is bent toward God and his good.
Mind
Our will can be influenced and shaped by our mind. The life of the mind takes on a new purpose. We don’t use our intellect simply for the purposes of knowing more or becoming smarter but for shaping our will, walking in step with the Spirit of God in us, and reshaping our imaginations to desire more of the good, true, and beautiful. We are “Transformed by the renewing of our mind” (Romans 12:2).
Body
The habits of our bodies shape what we dwell on in our minds. Our actions matter. What we do with our bodies affects more than our bodies themselves but our minds and wills. So we purge bad habits (sin) and cultivate virtuous habits (righteousness) with more than “doing the right thing” in mind but with our innermost Spirit and the desire of our will in mind. We’re habituating our deepest desires with the habits of our bodies by engaging in and abstaining from particular practices and habits. This is why liturgy, both corporate and private, is important. They habituate our bodies and shape our minds and imaginations. So Paul says in the same breath as the mind, “Offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship” (Romans 12:1)
Relationships
But all of this is in the context of our social location. None of this terminates on ourselves, but “Out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks” (Matthew 12:34). What is in our hearts, our deepest will, will overflow and affect our relationships. Without the law of love written on our hearts and cultivated in our minds and bodies, we can’t love those around us the way we should. We can’t love our neighbors as ourselves when our self is disordered.
Soul
And our souls organize all of these different components into a coherent whole. When we say someone has “sold their soul,” we mean that they have given up control of these other parts of themselves to someone who doesn’t will their good or the good of others. When someone’s soul is at rest, they have surrendered their whole selves to God and allow him to work in them through the means he has established at every level. They are integrated and ordered toward God. “Truly my soul finds rest in God; my salvation comes from him” (Psalm 62:1).
Denials that Disintegrate Our Self
We also see how different philosophies and ideologies affirm some parts of being human while denying others. Here are some examples.
Materialism affirms the body and mind but denies the soul, spirit, and our status as divine image bearers.
Gnosticism and its modern forms affirm the soul and spirit but deny the goodness of the body.
Fundamentalism affirms the soul, body, and mind but denies the will because it demands obedience without transformation.
Individualism affirms the soul, body, mind, and spirit but denies the social context we live in.
Pantheism and Panentheism affirm all of this but deny that we are creatures made by a creator.
You could go on and on to make more connections. They’re endless. By denying one or more aspects of our humanity, they leave us disintegrated, restless, and living less than our full humanity.
A Vision for Our Whole Self
What Christianity offers is a vision of being truly human. Christianity not only accounts for all of these different aspects of being human, but it integrates them, transforms them through God’s own Spirit, and orders them toward the love of God and others.
Nothing else does that. Nothing else comes close.
Jesus was not only the perfect example of a fully human person, but he was God himself who was able to forgive us of the ways our natural spirits are disordered away from love and send us his Spirit to write the law of love on our hearts, the same Spirit who empowers us to be transformed into people of love over a lifetime.
This means that the Christian life looks a lot less like the try-harder regulations imposed by fundamentalists of any stripe and more like, as Henry Scougle wrote and Fred Sanders depicted, a progressive surrender to the heart of God in the soul of man.
This is a distinctly Christian anthropology.
Every other conception of the human person is a performative treadmill of trying harder. But in Christ, we have hope in life and death.
As the Heidelberg Catechism opens with its first question:
Q. What is your only comfort in life and in death?
A. That I am not my own, but belong— body and soul, in life and in death— to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.
He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood, and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil. He also watches over me in such a way that not a hair can fall from my head without the will of my Father in heaven; in fact, all things must work together for my salvation. Because I belong to him, Christ, by his Holy Spirit, assures me of eternal life and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.
Only with this view of the human person does the Prayer of Self-Dedication in the Book of Common Prayer make sense for us to pray.
Almighty and eternal God, so draw our hearts to you, so guide our minds, so fill our imaginations, so control our wills, that we may be wholly yours, utterly dedicated unto you; and then use us, we pray you, as you will, and always to your glory and the welfare of your people; through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.