Houston Centre Blog Post Series Introduction
Dr. Jens Zimmermann, Houston Centre Director · July 15, 2022
This blog series by our Centre fellows showcases how their varied yet unified research interests support the Centre’s twin mission: to explore, clarify, and articulate human identity in the contemporary world, and to contribute to the common good. In pursuing this mission, we are seeking contributors from all knowledge disciplines, and, ideally, also from different religious or explicitly non-religious traditions. This interdisciplinary, interfaith stance is motivated by the Christian inspiration of the Centre’s work, namely that Jesus Christ, the incarnate eternal Word (Logos) of God, through whom, for whom, and toward whom all things were created, is the unifying heart of all that is true, good, and beautiful. Hence, true insights about humanity and the common good can come from any source, and truth also emanates from non-Christian and non-religious quarters alike, both of which are capable of correcting erroneous, calcified cultural Christian assumptions about human identity and the world we share.
According to the Christian tradition, human identity is an ideal rooted in the Incarnation. God’s becoming human summed up the human species in substitutionary fashion, not merely re-presenting but re-presencing or repeating humanity in a regenerative way, and thus perfecting it to its intended completion. God-humanity is perfected humanity, and the divine offer to every human being is to become fully human by sharing in this new humanity through union with Christ in faith. It is thus in the God-man Jesus that the full meaning of the Biblical phrase “created in God’s image and likeness” is revealed. As the church father Irenaeus (c. 130–c. 202) puts it,
For in times past it was said that man was made in the image of God, but not shown, because the Word, in whose image man was made, was still invisible. That is why man lost the likeness so easily. But when the Word of God was made flesh, He confirmed both things: He showed the true image, when He himself became what His image was; and He restored and made fast the likeness, making man like the invisible Father through the visible word.[1]
Irenaeus here reveals two of Christian anthropology’s constitutive elements. The first is that human beings are created in the image of Christ in order to become like Him, both in character and in His glorified, transformed physical being manifest after He rose from the dead. Christian anthropology is therefore centred in the Incarnation (i.e., in Christology), in the person of Jesus the God-human. Christ reveals that human identity is defined by being made in God’s image, and that means, first and foremost, that to be human is to be a person.
This mystery of human personhood derives from the greatest mystery of all—the reality of the Trinitarian Godhead. Christians believe that Jesus was God incarnate, and in his Incarnation He revealed God to exist, uncreated, in three personal hypostases, that is, as three interrelated personal ways of being God. Father, Son, and Spirit are fully God, as one God, and yet irreducibly differentiated as “persons.”
Analogously, the mystery of human identity is a particular hypostasis of human nature. A person, one who says “I,” speaks as someone who indwells human nature without being reducible to any of the capacities we usually associate with either a human body or a human mind. For this reason, neither physical nor mental capacities ultimately determine one’s personhood—nor, therefore, do they determine a person’s irreducible dignity and irreplaceable worth. Contrary to those who make self-consciousness or rationality the basis of personhood, even the most severely physically or mentally disabled human remains a person of infinite worth.
The second element is that human identity is a vocation. Being human is a process of becoming human, and we become truly human by becoming more and more like Christ. Every human being is created a person, and therefore every human being’s vocation is to grow into the fulness of the Saviour’s image. Some church fathers, like Irenaeus, distinguished within this vocation between God’s image and God’s likeness. According to this distinction, every human being is born with the dignity (and normally with the additional requisite mental and physical capacities) of being in the image, but humanity’s fall into sin has eradicated the likeness of Christ. This likeness consists in the moral virtues associated with the One Lord: love of God, love of neighbour, and the subordination of one’s own bodily life to exemplify God’s love for humanity and creation.
In his letter to the Galatian church, the Apostle Paul enumerates these Christlike virtues, , all of which, with the aid of Christ’s very Spirit, should result from living according to the likeness of Christ: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such there is no law. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.”[2] For Paul, these virtues exemplify the new humanity that Christ inaugurated; they are the markers of our development into complete or “mature manhood,” that is, into the adulthood of being human that comes by striving for the measure of humanity we see in Christ (Ephesians 4:12–13). Surely, if Paul believes these virtues foster “the common good” of the church, itself the new humanity in embryo, then we may assume that this affirmation and development of our humanity is also conducive to the common good of secular society.
Irenaeus thought that nourishing one’s basic humanity by striving after these Christian virtues was the way to prepare fully to partake in the glorified human nature of Christ upon His return: “You must hold the rank of a human being before you partake of the Glory of God. […] preserve the form in which the craftsman fashioned you.”[3] Irenaeus’s point is that Christians must live their human lives, including their joys, pains, and sufferings, by living them in light of the Incarnation, and this is done by demonstrating the virtues outlined above. Christian anthropology, therefore, knows nothing of a trans- or post-humanist call to escape the human condition altogether.
What Christian anthropology does know, indeed insists on, are both the givenness and the malleability of human nature. Being human is an ontological fact, but it is also a vocation to be accomplished. Human identity lies in the gift of personhood, irrefutably granted to every human being by virtue of being made in God’s image, yet this human ideal and its fullest realization is found only in Christ, the true image of God and the perfect human being. As finite creatures, answering the question of what it means to be human requires rigorously looking to Christ and returning our gaze to Him when it wavers, captivated as our eyes are by so many idols. Therefore, being human is an interpretive effort to discover and re-discover what true humanity looks like. Natural science can certainly help to describe those biological features of our nature that we do and do not share with other organic life forms. Ultimately, though, only theology, philosophy, and the interpretations offered by the arts (literature, poetry, painting, sculpture, and the performing arts) enable us to grasp the metaphysical contours of our human identity. It is here, not in the biology of otherwise inert matter, that true life is to be had.
For Christians, our guide in these explorations is always God’s humanity as revealed in Christ, to which the Scriptures attest. Yet here, too, we are dealing ultimately with the mystery of a personal “who” rather than a quantitative “what,” and we must take caution to remember this. In a sense, Christian anthropology is ultimately “negative” or “apophatic,” insofar as the only utterly certain ground for knowing human identity remains the infinitely unfolding mystery of the person of Christ. We should not forget, however, that God has revealed the affirmative or kataphatic factum (something that has been made) that we are made in His image, and His image is Jesus Christ.
Christian anthropology thus operates firmly within an incarnational, Christ-centered framework of interpretation; yet precisely this framework opens the Christian vision of what it is to be human to all those disciplines, in the human and natural sciences, which are seriously interested in human identity. As mentioned earlier, a Christ-centered approach to human identity most naturally aligns with those inquiries into human nature that emphasize and defend personhood. My hunch is that most of the posts in this series will either implicitly or explicitly move in this personalist direction. Yet none of the contributors is restricted in this way: participants will write about human identity from their particular interest in issues relating to humanity and the common good.
We hope that the reader will benefit from this variety, and will become inspired, likewise, to think about who we are and how our identity might be nurtured in our present cultural climate, one over which hangs, as Rowan Williams puts it, “the pervasive sense that we are in danger of losing our sense of the human.”[4]
[1] Irenaeus of Lyons, The Scandal of the Incarnation: Irenaeus Against the Heresies, ed. Hans Urs von Balthasar and trans. John Saward (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), p. 56 (Irenaeus, Against Heresies V.16.2).
[2] Galatians 5:22–24.
[3] Irenaeus, The Scandal of the Incarnation, p. 72 (Against Heresies IV.39.2).
[4] Rowan Williams, Being Human: Bodies, Minds, Persons (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2018) p. 25.