This new series will look at what a human is from a Biblical perspective. The Bible is an ancient book, written by ancient cultures and therefore it will not have a modern understanding of what constitutes a human.
This causes problems when we come to read the Bible, as without knowing the ancient biological and spiritual background, we can misread what the text is saying. Which leads to bad theology.
The series will look at the differences between the Spirit and the Soul. Unpack what the Mind is from an ancient perspective. And define how the terms Body and Flesh have separate meanings.
But first we need to define the modern view of a human.
The Modern View
Primarily, the modern worldview says humans are self-contained individuals, who are made up of a physical body and a consciousness (mind). Consciousness is often described as an accidental by-product of the Evolutionary process. It gets further deconstructed by academic researchers into simply being ‘electric impulses’.
However, it quickly gets complicated when we move away from this concept and look at how modern people describe the experience of being human. It’s as though the above definition aid incomplete.
We hear people sometimes say, ‘I was born in the wrong body’. How does this work with the above description?
We also hear people say ‘When I die, my body decays but my mind lives on in Heaven’. If the body is the only part of a human which is ‘real’, then this hope seems illusionary.
And then if you ask a hundred people ‘What is consciousness?’, then you’ll get many mixed-up answers.
In our modern scientific age, we struggle to actually define what we mean. It is sometimes called the ‘Sticky Problem of Consciousness’. I think this is probably due to the fact we use scientific methods to understand reality. This means we can’t find scientific evidence to prove non-physical elements of the Universe. We can only prove the physical things. And this ultimately means we fail to properly define immaterial, intellectual or spiritual realities and entities.
Identity is Now Everything
It seems to me that as we move into the Postmodern Age, we are starting to become aware of the importance of the immaterial part of the human experience. And we’ve come to the conclusion that ‘identities’ appear to be a good way of defining the individual.
In Western cultures, we are encouraged to find ourselves and discover our true selves. This is the Great Commission of our age. In a Christian sense, we would say that Christ calls us to bring the truth of the Gospel to the World, while the current cultural paradigm calls us to navel gaze until we find the truth within us.
The UK Government has legislated a list of eight protected characteristics or identities:
Age
Disability
Gender Reassignment
Pregnancy and Maternity
Race
Religion or Belief
Sex
Sexual Orientation
It is illegal for an individual to be discriminated against on the basis of the above list. It seems to me that these are the official identities we are to use to safely engage with the World around us and ‘find ourselves’.
Pre-Modern Identities
The Pre-Modern people had key identities too, which helped to define who they were. These included location, lineage, marital status and job roles.
We see this in the names of famous people from history. Thomas Aquinas means Thomas who came from Aquino. More examples include Robin of Loxley, also known as Robin Hood, and Eleanor of Aquitaine.
Many surnames, which have been handed down to us over centuries, relate to job roles. These include Goldsmith, Carpenter and Brazier.
If someone was born within marriage, it meant they had certain privileges compared to bastard children, especially when it came to any inheritance.
I find the difference between the pre-modern identities and the modern list above compelling. A pre-modern person wouldn’t consider any of the Equalities 2010 list as important. But equally, our Modern culture places low priority to where someone comes from, whether they are married or born ‘out of wedlock’.
I have placed a paywall here as I will further lay out my thesis on the conflict between self-generated and dependent identities. If you want to read further, you will need to become a paid subscriber.
If you want to learn more about these relational or dependent identities, you can read it at my other SubStack newsletter, Agloria. Click this link
Thank you for reading this far and I hope you enjoyed this post. Next time, we will start to look at the difference between the Spirit and the Soul.
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