There is something describable by the term `human nature’ and something else describable by the term `human personhood’. We’ve confused the two greatly in our modern world, so intellectually challenged in nearly all fields of thought but science and technology and so morally challenged in all fields including science and technology.
To orthodox Trinitarian Christians, Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox and Lutherans and others, it is the most fundamental truth of all truths that God is three Persons, Father and Son and Holy Spirit, in One God. God is three Persons in One divine Being, one divine Nature.
`Human personhood’ as I understand it is a set of proper relationships, first of all with God or at least with God’s Creation, second of all with other individual creatures in that Creation; these relationships are the sort which can make a human being a friend of God, capable of sharing His life. `Human nature’ as I understand it is our basic, thing-like human animal beings, in themselves noble enough that they are capable of conceiving of moral truths and other sorts of truth, divine being and maybe divine Person-hood. To avoid confusion, remember that human nature can refer to the characteristics of those bipedal, beer-brewing animals which belong to a certain branch of the family of Homindae—see the side-bar at Homo sapiens, or it can refer to a specific particular member of homo sapiens.
So this much we Christians know:
- The Father is a Person.
- The Son is a Person.
- The Holy Spirit is a Person.
- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one God, one divine Nature.
and,
- Each individual human being is a human person only as an image of God, by way of God’s offer of friendship and that individual’s acceptance of that offer.
- Each individual human being is inherently, by birth, a human animal.
We should be careful in assuming we mortal human beings are persons and generous in speaking of efforts by our own selves and by others to accept God’s offer of friendship. We should look for signs of the development of that relationship between God and all those we care about, especially those for whom we have some responsibility.
This is the way in which person was defined in the 1913 edition of Webster’s dictionary, along with an example of (mi-)use by John Locke—a man who, in my opinion, gifted us with a lot of bad understandings of man as an individual and as a community:
3. A living, self-conscious being, as distinct from an animal or a thing; a moral agent; a human being; a man, woman, or child. [1913 Webster]
Consider what person stands for; which, I think, is a thinking, intelligent being, that has reason and reflection. –Locke. [1913 Webster]
[Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48, {Based upon Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, 1913, C. & G. Merriam Co., Springfield, Mass and upon WordNet(R), a semantic network created by the Cognitive Science Department of Princeton University}]
Good try, I would think, but meaningless more than wrong. Or “not even wrong” as some would say. Or even, “It doesn’t fly in the modern atmosphere.” But one criticism: our self-consciousness is more often than not distorted rather than true, leading us—for example—to justify what our body was already doing as being the result of an act-of-will. This is why I’ve downgraded will in my anthropological thinking and completely thrown out `free-will’. We have the inclinations of a human animal, including the inclination to explore the world and think about it and to project our own selves into possible futures. We can consciously form habits of good behavior. Our wills are constrained by our human animal nature and our minds work best when working toward the future. In person-hood, however defective and incomplete during our mortal life, we at least see and feel hints of a greater unity, a perfection and completeness possible only to those more fully in communion with God than is possible in our mortal lives.
Too many Christians talk and act as if this sort of situation, where traditional understandings don’t work, indicates problems only on the side of the modern world and its thinkers. Too many other Christians and far too many non-Christians talk and act as if this sort of situation, where traditional understandings don’t work, indicates those traditions have no validity whatsoever and need to be jettisoned in favor of a non-Christian or anti-Christian worldview.
Words, their meanings and their usages, seem to develop into customs—something which meets some combination of need and desires and other desideratum. The word `person’ was taken over by various sorts of well-meaning human thinkers and actors and feelers, such as pro-life activists who needed some way of expressing their moral intuitions about the value of human life. The problem is: rattlesnakes and human beings are both mortal creatures which arose from the dust of the earth, so to speak.
There is much about human animals to make us unique in the animal kingdom—whether it be the case that the differences are qualitative in new attributes or merely quantitative in attributes shared with other animal species. There is also the Christian revelation that human beings belong to God in a special way, by way of an offered adoption, an adoption made possible when the Son of God took on a human nature. He was one of us, yet He brought His divine Person-hood into union with a particular human being—Jesus of Nazareth. Since He was one of us and yet not a human person, we have another line of argument that we are not inherently persons—at least if we wish to protect the meaning of Person-hood when we think of Father and Son and Holy Spirit.
Still, as I wrote, if not inherently persons—we are unique in our totality and in, for example, the level of our abstract reasoning powers even if chimpanzees possess some of those powers.
To summarize:
We become Person-like by responding properly to God or, at least, God’s Creation. We become human persons by forming good, loving relationships with the Triune God. We become friends with Him. We learn how to share His Life, though He Is and we will be mortal creatures sharing divinity and sustained by the Almighty for time without end.
Our person-hood and our life after death doesn’t come because we possess some immaterial soul which is inherently part of each of `us’. Rather is it the case that we’re born as human animals and ascend to a higher spiritual state by way of accepting God’s offer of friendship.