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.

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No, it's not all about AD 70
I’ve just been listening to what strikes me as an excellent introductory podcast on eschatology by Martin Scott - a nice example of how a rethinking of eschatology along narrative-historical lines has the potential for generating good new theological syntheses. It caught my eye because Martin lists… ()
The death of Jesus for the nation
The Pharisees and chief priests warn the Sanhedrin that if the Jesus’ movement gets out of control, ‘the Romans will come and take away both our place (arousin hēmōn… ton topon) and our nation’ – in Caiaphas’ words, the nation will ‘perish’ (Jn. 11:48, 50). There is at least a hint… ()
The resurrection from the dead
The death and resurrection of Jesus, locked together in a brief three-day period, constitute the defining moment of Christian belief. It is here that the light of God’s love for humanity burns most brightly through the dingy fabric of history. But the light of the Easter event can be so… ( | 6 comments)
After Christendom, before meltdown
The documents of the New Testament provided a specific eschatological framework for the formation of the early communities of Christ followers. They taught them, first, how to see themselves as a people of God reconstituted beyond the geographical, historical and theological boundaries of… ()
Literal this that and the other
Mark Driscoll, who is beginning to inhabit the darker regions of my consciousness like some baleful theological bogeyman, recently announced by Tweet that Charles Haddon Spurgeon is his favourite mentor outside of scripture. ()
Review of Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch, ReJesus
ReJesus: A Wild Messiah for a Missional Church, by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch, is a call to a renewal of spirituality and discipleship centred on Jesus; it describes what that renewed spirituality and discipleship might look like; it tells some powerful stories about spirituality and… ()
Who are 'the least of these'?
One important point of biblical interpretation that came up during the course of a recent TREK gathering with the Christian Associates team in Gothenburg had to do with the meaning of Jesus’ story of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25:31-46. It is remarkable how this passage is widely and… ( | 1 comment)