My friend Ciara Reyes-Ton asked me to say a few words for the release of her new single, To Become Human. She asked me to address what it means to be human, both from a biology perspective and from a faith perspective. Here’s what I said:
What does it mean to be human?
It’s an interesting question,
one that biology and theology can both weigh in on,
but, I think, one that neither can answer by itself.
And this is fitting, because, as the song says,
To be human is to “be part of a larger species, part of a larger world.”
To be human is to be in relationship.
As a biologist, I would say that there is something special about life,
that comes from participating in a larger system.
Evolution and metabolism are both relational processes,
evolution because it involves interaction with others –
cooperation and competition, inheritance, and variation –
metabolism because it involves using chemical resources
and reordering your surroundings.
As a theologian, I would also say that there is something special about life.
In Christianity, it means participating in the life of God.
Human life, in the image and likeness of God,
involves reason and will, participating in divine order,
the Logos of the Cosmos, participating in Christ.
More viscerally, respiration,
our continual process of breathing out and breathing in,
means that we are always sharing life and breath with our neighbors.
It is not an accident that God’s very presence dwelling among us, the Holy Spirit,
Is named as breath –
the breath over the waters in the beginning,
and the breath over the disciples at Pentecost,
the beginning of the church.
We are a God-breathed people
in more ways than one.
Again and again, the Bible calls us back to images
that are biological as well as spiritual,
Tree and fruit, vine and branches, living water and bread of life.
We say that God “came down” from heaven
ascended back up again, to the right hand of the Father,
but few of us today – if ever –
think that involved a spaceship.
It is, instead, a way of saying that heaven came near to us.
Something extraordinary, perfect, holy,
Became accessible.
Jesus normalized the transcendent,
made it ordinary, bodily, tangible –
the kingdom of God is with us.
It is not an “out of this world heaven,”
but a visceral process,
as close as a heartbeat, as tangible as breath,
and unmistakably biological.
And, curiously enough, all of this normalizing the transcendent
allowed us to transcend our normality.
God lifted up the bread,
making it into the Body of Christ.
And God raised us up,
Making us into the Body of Christ.
We are not, to borrow from Aristotle,
just a body equivocally – a lump of matter, a lump of flesh, or a corpse.
We are part of God’s body – dynamic, relational, transcendent.
God’s breath breathes in us.
God’s will moves us.
Dare I say, we are part of the metabolism of God.
Theologians have preferred financial metaphors like “ransom” and “the economy of salvation,”
but the Bible is often less anthropocentric and more zoological.
We are members of the same body, moved by the same breath,
offspring and heirs through Christ’s body.
“Life,” and “human life” in particular,
capture this duality of metabolism raised up and heaven brought near.
Scripture begins with a duality, not because the world is dualistic,
but because we continually push God and neighbor away from us.
We have a foolish intuition that the things before us
are different from the things we seek,
the things we need and want and love.
Scripture begins with duality to bring the opposites together,
in the language of theology
the incarnation of God and the divinization of humanity,
the at-one-ment.
Science speaks differently, but perhaps says the same thing.
It begins by asserting the truth of our unity,
With the world and with one another.
It punctures that illusion that we are separate and apart.
It shows us the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.
We are flesh and blood – though not flesh and blood alone.
We are made of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur.
We are, even at the most fundamental level, bodies.
And we live, embedded in and entwined with the Earth
physically, chemically, and biologically.
Minds can exist ideal and alone,
but bodies are messy and relational.
They can never be fully abstracted from their physical surroundings,
the air, food, and water they need to be alive.
A human body can be taken away from these things,
but it ceases to be human
and becomes just a body, floating in space.
So, I want to say: we are inherently relational
made for one another, for God, and for creation.
It is not good that the man should be alone.
We are relational,
not just in an abstract psychological sense –
though we are relational in that way as well.
We are relational in a deeply physical and physiological sense.
We are bodies, interacting with a physical world
and interacting with one another in a physical world.
We live in a scientific renaissance,
a period of new ideas and new technology,
where we are rapidly learning new things
about ourselves and our place in the cosmos.
My own corner of that research has been “astrobiology,”
which explores the origin, extent, and future of life in the universe.
In the long term, we are looking for alien life,
but a big part of that involves understanding Earth life.
What is so interesting about life here
that we want to find it elsewhere?
What makes life so interesting, so valuable, so “life-like”?
Countless books have been written about this topic,
from across the scientific disciplines,
and from across the humanities.
(I’ve written a few myself.)
And the most common definitions of life,
the ones we come back to again and again through the centuries
are metabolism and reproduction.
Metabolism is the process whereby living beings organize the elements.
They take that which is not them and turn it into them.
They inform matter and apply their information,
coded in genes and proteins,
to stuff around them.
They take lumps of chemicals and turn them into bodies.
They enliven the elements
Reproduction is the process whereby living things make more of themselves.
They go from one to many.
They cease being alone and start being together.
They create other from self,
because reproduction is not just copying.
It is imperfect copying, so that the offspring are just slightly different.
And something wonderful happens,
because once you start making these imperfect copies,
they adapt, they evolve, they become something new.
Over time evolution fits populations to their environment,
makes them better at being where they are and what they are.
There’s more to that, including some tricky bits,
mathematically, philosophically, theologically.
Too much to go into here, but let me say briefly:
Evolution fits things to their environment.
It doesn’t mold them into something better in an absolute sense;
It doesn’t fit them into the logos of the cosmos,
mold them into one body,
or direct them toward transcendence.
That would be to mistake evolution for God,
and to get the theory all wrong.
Like gravity and entropy,
evolution reveals a world that is,
and reveals that the world is becoming something new.
It does not reveal what the world will become
or what the world should become.
I said before that biology and theology would both be needed.
I believe something miraculous is happening.
I believe the world is being made new,
and that life is part of that process.
I believe that you and I and humanity have a role to play in that transformation.
We are related to each other for a reason
and we have a purpose.
As a Christian, I think God revealed that purpose in Jesus Christ.
Christ became human that we might become divine
“part of a larger species, part of a larger world”
In the language of the bible: adoption into the household of God
Incorporation into the Body of Christ, Grafted onto that tree, branches off that vine.
There is a spiritual metabolism, by which God orders the world,
including humans, but not humans alone,
through humans, but not through humans alone.
We take the ordinary and lift it up.
We take the profane and make it sacred.
Of course, it’s not really a duality –
there is no place where God isn’t,
where God hasn’t been,
and which God does not have a plan for.
Our theology begins with a duality because we have a foolish intuition
that the things before us
are different from the things we seek,
the things we need and want and love.
We are constantly lifting things up,
because they and we already have that purpose, that end.
Our holiness is dynamic, like life.
It happens in the doing.
We are stardust.
We are living water.
That is the mystery that Ciara’s song reminded me of.
It is not enough to say that Christ became human so that we might become divine.
Christ became human that we might become fully human.
That is our fullness, our fulfillment, our role in the metabolism of the universe.
We relate.
We sanctify.
With human minds and human hands.
There is something grand and planetary about that.
We reveal the order of the universe as we study it.
Science can be sacred when it uncovers the holiness
present from the creation of the world.
Technology can be sacred when it participates
in the transcendence of the ordinary,
in love, harmony, and art.
You have the power to wrap up
the very rocks and stones around you
into the life of Christ
Human will and human wisdom can do this,
Human science and human ethics
It is an awesome and wondrous thing we do – to bind and loose.
There is also something powerfully concrete about our full humanity.
The kingdom of God is built from stardust,
from carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur.
We look for it in the heavens because we have found it here,
in flesh and blood, bread and wine and water.
There is more. Good heavens, there is always more,
but there is never less.
The kingdom of God is built from embodied souls,
you and me and messy humanity.
I do not seek to escape my biology, my planet, or my humanity;
but I look beyond them,
so that what seems separate may be revealed as one,
so that what seems profane may be revealed as holy,
so that the invisible God may become visible.
A life alone – abstracted from bodies and abstracted from neighbors –
is not life. It is dust and ashes.
It ceases to be human and becomes just a body, floating in space.
But, in community with others, enlivened by the breath of God,
we transform the world.
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