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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The art of being church
It is characteristic of postmodern art that the relationship between the artist and the work of art produced is not as straightforward as we are accustomed to expect. Conventionally an art object such as a painting or sculpture is understood to be the work of an individual artist, and its public… ( | 1 comment)
The Coming of the Son of Man
My book has now been republished by Wipf & Stock.From the back cover:Tracing the powerful motif of the ‘coming of the Son of man’ from Daniel through to Revelation, Andrew Perriman provides thought-provoking ideas about eschatological narrative. What was it like to hear the biblical… ( | 5 comments)
The widow’s prayer
Jesus’ story about a poor widow who seeks vindication against her adversary is usually read as a model of Christian prayer in a quite general sense (see, for example, these commentaries collected at textweek). This approach certainly yields some important insights, but it also illustrates a… ( | 4 comments)
A brief and friendly critique of the Evangelical Alliance statement of faith
In response to Peter’s post about the Evangelical Alliance statement of faith, I would suggest that this sort of statement is designed for a particular purpose and does it admirably. An organization like the EA needs to define a doctrinal position that is acceptable across the spectrum of… ()
Critical-realism and postmodernism
The ‘emerging church’ project is an experiment in new forms of church. The question of what ‘church’ is, however, cannot be resolved sociologically or experimentally. Ultimately, a theological answer is required. This page was written to provide some preliminary reflection for the Future of the… ()
Transmillennialism™
Paul Seburn referred in another post to the ‘transmillennial’ view on New Testament eschatology. I thought it might be worth examining this separately. There’s a lot of material on the two sites I looked at (www.presence.tv and www.transmillennial.com), but I have limited my superficial… ()
Postmodernism and the Jesus of history
There is both a diachronic (historical) and a synchronic (a-historical, existential) dimension to the development of a theology for the emerging church. The argument has for the most part been developed synchronically in response to cultural and philosophical changes taking place both inside and… ()