What does it mean to be human? This seems to be a pervasive question that underlies much of what obtains in the cultural shape. In other words, people in the West have ostensibly adopted the idea that individualism is the primary way people operate as humans. Douglas Campbell describes it this way: “Liberals are also unhappy about any undue influence on the person from causality, which is generally construed as automatic if not mechanical, and therefore exclusive of human freedom. They therefore insist on a “space” or “zone” of freedom around the individual that is free from any influence. The uncaused and free space of individuals is anchored by their minds and their rationality. It includes their property which is private.”[1] Campbell is involved in a discussion on human conceptions of freedom, but for our purposes what he notes illustrates for us nicely what Western individualism entails; and how that impacts an anthropological understanding. Clearly, what Campbell is referring to is the blossoming of Enlightenment rationalism, romanticism, and subjectivism; or even turn-to-the-subject Cartesianism. I would suggest that this insight from Campbell is unremarkable, in the sense that this way of thinking, about what it means to be human, is so self-evident in the Western hemisphere, that it is simply ubiquitous and the lived reality for the mass of humanity.

What stands out is just how incurved (homo incurvatus in se) this conception of humanity is. We have this conception of humanity riddled throughout the Protestant history of ideas just the same. We can look as far back as Aristotle and his tripartite faculty psychology—composed of affections, intellect, and will—and see how that gets redressed over and over again through the centuries. Thomas Aquinas, and those who follow him one way or the other, reiterate this way of thinking humanity; as if we can categorize the internal parts of what makes a human a human. We see this on display in the starkest of ways in Puritan theologies. This is manifested most in someone like William Perkins, at least most destructively, insofar as he so subjectivizes anthropology, and as corolloary, soteriology, that he forces people to look within themselves, and to their fruits, to attempt to assure themselves that they indeed are one of the elect (cf. experimental predestinarianism; practical syllogism). As we move into the modern period, among the theologians, Friedrich Schleiermacher stands out as the theologian who develops a theology built upon a turn-to-the-subject; a turn to the self, and the self’s ‘feeling of dependence’ as the ground for knowing and thinking God (oversimplified, but for our purposes: apropos). The point being: that most of theological anthropology, up into the present, has been focused on some aspect where the subject is overly focused on the self, as the way it thinks humanity, and thus the frame within which it sees itself relating to God.

In my view, much of theological anthropology, while its intent was not this, has been anti-Christ; anti-God. Each period of theological development can only do the best it can with the ideational categories it has available; so we ought to read the past with charity, and resource the riches, even if under antiquated categories, that it was able to produce for the Church catholic. That said, I think it is better to think humanity not in abstraction, but from the concretization of the humanity of Jesus Christ. Martin Luther did this very early on, and Karl Barth pressed into it with acumen and the sort of radicalization he is known for. Barth, and Luther to the degree he was able, think humanity as an extra nos (outside of us) reality; a reality we become gifted with as God in Christ elected our fallen humanity for His freely chosen exalted humanity that always already was before the foundations of the world. So, for Barth, what it means to be human is to become participant in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ; to do so by participating in and from the faith of Christ by the Spirit, and in so doing, come into union with the exalted and recreated humanity of Christ that is genuinely human. This is a humanity that is re-conciled with the triune God who, by definitional reality, is in a subject-in-being relationship for and in the other. In other words, genuine humanity, according to the archetype of Christ’s humanity (pro nobis), is the sort that is enclosed within the inner and eternal life of the Father’s, Son’s, and Holy Spirit’s koinoinal relationship. In short, to be human, in the Barthian (and I’d suggest, Pauline) schema, is to be involved in the relationship we were originally created for; that is, to be fully enflamed by worship of our Father who birthed us through His eternal Word through the breath of the Spirit, so that we might be participant in His eternal life and purpose in the other.

Cornelius van deer Kooi and Gijsbert van den Brink instructively describe Barth’s anthropological understanding this way:

The christological approach is especially found in Karl Barth (CD III/2) and his followers. As we alluded to previously, Barth fears that attempts (such as that of Rahner) to ground theology in the human subject cannot ultimately do justice either to God or humanity. For that reason, we must not so much try to understand God on the basis of our ability for self-transcendence but, on the contrary, understand ourselves on the basis of God’s ultimate act of self-communication—God’s revelation in Jesus Christ. All around us we see only people who have fallen into sin and are marked by its effects. We therefore need a new revelation of God if we want to grasp what true humanness entails. That revelation has been given to us in the true man, Jesus Christ. With good reason the New Testament presents him as the image of God par excellence (2 Cor 3:18; Col 1:15). In him it becomes manifest that the true human being (der wirkliche Mensch) is the human being who lives in a relationship with others. For Jesus did not primarily live for his own sake but, out of his love for the Father, for and with others. He was sent for their salvation. The individual person per se, without these relationships with God and others, is not fully human. The Grundform (basic form) of being human is being together with other human beings (CD III/2, §45.2).[2]

Van der Kooi and Brink, continue by putting an even finer point on this as they refer to Eberhard Jüngel’s ressourcement of Luther and Barth; with particular focus on the eschatological orientation of what it means to be human, both towards and from Christ’s humanity which is coming to us and for us, in the present, and in the eschatological time to come (i.e. second Advent):

Human identity is defined by the Word that tells us about the cross and resurrection of Christ. This approach makes human identity something external; it consists not at all in what we ourselves can produce but is found in Christ. In Christ’s incarnation God identified with our death-doomed existence. This action defines us as beings who are allowed to live out of that Word, which comes to us and addresses us. Whatever else might be said about us, God does not freeze us in our past or in our biological limits; instead, he has destined us to be receivers of his love. This approach also clarifies what sin is—an attempt to escape from this role of recipient and to strive for self-realization. But by doing so, we thereby miss our destiny and ignore God as the precious secret of our existence. The most crucial thing that might be said about us from an ontological angle is that Christ has come to “bother” us, that he sat down beside the sinner and identified himself with the sinner. This action defines true humanness, for being truly human means refusing to be independent. It means welcoming the way that God addresses us with his Yes and living in harmony with this Yes.[3]

Ultimately, to be human, according to the tradition under consideration, and the one I affirm, is to be in Christ. Humanity is defined first by divinity, and what it means for God to be the triune God in Himself (think an/enhypostasis). This reality serves as the ground that God creates from; this is the reality imaged forth first by the Son’s election to be us, so that we might be Him (paraphrasing Irenaeus). It is a reality that contradicts independence and individualism (isolated solipist subjects) at its very root. To be human in God’s Kingdom is to live in right relationship with God; to be elevated to what the Son has chosen to be for us in His assumed humanity as the image of God (cf. Col 1.15). This means that part of proclaiming the Gospel, in its discipleship form, is to declare that we are most human when we are in fellowship with God through the mediatorial humanity of Jesus Christ; and as a consequence, in fellowship with others. To continue to attempt to find satisfaction in the way of the world, and the way they define and think humanity, will only lead to loss and chaos; something we are not in short order of as we pan the global landscape. maranatha

[1] Douglas A. Campbell, Pauline Dogmatics: The Triumph of God’s Love (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2020), 217.

[2] Cornelius van deer Kooi and Gijsbert van den Brink, Christian Dogmatics: An Introduction (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2017), 257.

[3] Ibid., 258.