What does it mean to be human?

For most of us, subjectively, the everyday experience of being human probably hasn’t changed very much, but we may be aware of a storm of questions blowing furiously outside the house, rattling the windows and loosening tiles. What does it mean to be male and female? What is a “normal” state of mental health? Are ethnicity and nationality essential to our humanity? Are we anything more than compliant consumers of goods and services? Is AI making the human mind redundant? And as we enter the Anthropocene, are we—paradoxically—losing control of our destiny?

To be human is not just to be one thing. It is to be part of a story with a past, a present, and an imagined future.

Read more...
Plotting the kingdom: now and not yet and not like that
In order to keep my knee-jerk prejudices against certain aspects of traditional evangelical theology in good working order I have been reading [amazon:978-1433531620:inline], edited by Grudem, Collins and Schreiner. What I have been looking for is examples of how theologians really don’t get… ( | 9 comments)
Two narratives of the cross for Good Friday
There is a simple, universal or cosmic or existential narrative of the cross—the horizontal beam. Humanity has fallen, every individual person has sinned and must go by way of the cross to gain eternal life. But, for all its merits, this is a theological abstraction. It is not the biblical… ( | 3 comments)
Chris Tilling aims a relational christology at Bart Ehrman
I’ll make this my last post on Bird, et al.’s lively—bordering on manic—response to Bart Ehrman’s book [amazon:978-0061778186:inline]. Chris Tilling is a good friend, so I need to tread a little carefully here. His argument is based largely on his published PhD thesis [amazon:978-3161518652:inline… ( | 9 comments)
Simon Gathercole’s argument about pre-existence and divine identity in the Synoptics
Bart Ehrman thinks that Jesus became God—not in reality, of course, but in the minds of the early Christians. Against Ehrman, Simon Gathercole argues in [amazon:978-0310519591:inline], much as Michael Bird did earlier, that the Synoptic Gospels “see Jesus as having pre-existed and as… ( | 17 comments)
The meek shall inherit the world: an exercise in historical restraint
The sermon on the mount is addressed to first century Jews in Israel. The Beatitudes define that small community of first century Jews in Israel through which and for the sake of which YHWH would restore his people at a time of severe political-religious crisis. It is a community of the helpless,… ( | 6 comments)
Michael Bird on the question of whether Jesus thought of himself as God
I am very appreciative of Michael Bird’s work, partly because he understands the importance of developing a credible theological mindset on the basis of a New Perspective reading of the New Testament, partly because he quoted my sinking ship parable from [amazon:978-1620324592:inline] in his [… ( | 11 comments)
The Gospel of Matthew and the horizon of the early church
Mike Mercer—Chaplain Mike—wrote a nice piece a couple of years back on the Internet Monk site putting forward the view that Matthew’s Gospel is “a Torah, a catechism, an instruction manual for the church”. He wonders whether this perspective brings into question my contention that Jesus was a… ( | 2 comments)