Theology of Personhood

Right at the outset, let me assure you that I am certainly not going to try to tell any of you what a person is. I don't know what a person is. But the great thing is, it really doesn't matter that I don't know. Definitions, after all, in matters such as this are tedious, and not terribly useful. So I won't try to define a theological view of the person, a Christian sense of personhood. But I will try to describe it. I have settled on a list of qualities, dimensions of such a sense that I think merit some reflection. It is worth saying, too, that because all of this is a description, and not a definition, it is necessarily open-ended. What I am going to say could be said equally validly a dozen different ways. And to the qualities which I will list, there could be added a dozen more, equally validly.

The value of making such a list, open-ended though it may be, is that if we can honestly say that in our dealings with ourselves, with one another, and with our people, these qualities are brought into play, these dimensions are recognized, and honored, then we are effectively carrying out our mission to be the agents of no less a healer than Christ. Our presence to our people will be more than simply our own, it will be Christ's.

So on to the list. Christian tradition can be said to present a sense of the person as "Mysterious", "Related", "Unique", "Complex", and "Incomplete". And now, as you may have guessed, I'm going to talk a little bit about each of those words.

First, "Mysterious". An authentic Christian sense of personhood is really based on this idea, and must flow from it. The person is a mystery. Now, those who remember their early catechetical training were probably taught, as was I, to use that word, mystery, to mean something hidden, unknown, even unknowable... a reality to which one cannot relate in any very wide range of ways, but which must be simply taken on faith. And that is a useful approach to the notion of mystery, but I think there is a better one. And that is to use mystery as St. Paul uses the word. For Paul a mystery is a reality that can indeed be known, and known with certitude. For Paul, faith is never less than knowledge. If anything, it is rather more. The point of distinction then is not whether or not a mysterious reality can be known, but rather how it is known, and what is the source of that certainty.

For Paul, a mystery is a reality that transcends, goes beyond human ability to experience directly, a reality that can be known only to the extent that is revealed. A reality to which a person must be lead, rather than one which he discovers on his own initiative. So for Paul, mystery is a reality that can be known only to the extent that one is in relationship with another. It can never be known in a vacuum, discovered in a laboratory, concluded to on paper.

But once that relationship with another is established, and the revelation is made, the reality is knowable indeed, and with certitude. But again, there is a difference, and an important one. When I am dealing with realities which are not mysterious, which can be known through direct experience, the source of my certitude is something quite independent of any quality that may or may not reside in the thing known. Rather that certitude is based on my own ability to experience accurately, and to interpret that experience properly. Or better, it is based on my confidence in my own ability to do that. So to the extent that I deal with reality that is non-mysterious, I am left in the pretty uncertain position of having to generate my own certitude.

Well, I go through all of this to emphasize the nature of a mystery. Because all of what I have said is considerably less the case when what I know is a revealed reality. Then my certitude is based on my confidence not just in myself, but in the other as well, in his authority, his honesty. When what is known is a mystery, the generation of certitude becomes a two-person job, equally the function of the revealer, and the listener.

Well, in Christian tradition, the person is precisely such a reality. A mystery, a reality that transcends our ability to know directly, to experience directly, accurately.

I can set myself the task of getting to know so and so. I can kidnap him, weigh him, measure him, cut off lots of little pieces and analyze them, run him through a roomful of the most sophisticated diagnostic machinery imaginable, a battery of psychological and emotional tests. I could go on like that for years, until not a molecule of the man had been left unscrutinized. And I still would not know him. Oh, I'd know a fair bit about him. But even that would be pretty much limited to a list of measurements, not qualitatively all that much other than what can be gotten with a tape measure and a scale. Now certainly, those measurements will more than likely give me a springboard to use in making some pretty good guesses about probable behavior, about opinions, attitudes, values, and so on. But guesses are all that they would be.

So to say the same thing over again, the nature of a person, what this person, what any person is, cannot be known in direct experience. If it is to be known at all, it must be revealed.

And luckily enough, it is revealed. By two revealers, each in their respective arenas ultimately authoritative. And if we in our approach to a person are not disciples of both authorities, then we will not move ourselves into the presence of the person, as he is.

And the first revealer, of course, is God. People are what God says they are. And He says exactly the same thing about every person. Any person, any place, any time is a creature whose existence flows from a direct act of God's own will, who exists because God chooses that he exist. A person, then, in revelation, is a creature of infinite dignity, infinite value, who comes from God, and is constantly called back to union with Him.

Now all of that means a very great deal. It means that if I am to live in the real world, if I am to move in the presence of people as they really are, take part in a healing process that is truly person-oriented, I must hold to be creatures of infinite dignity and value a whole lot of people who just don't seem to be very valuable, who don't seem to be invested with much dignity at all.

Sometimes, when we look at some of our people, some of those whom we propose to accompany through the healing process, there just doesn't seem to be a whole lot of dignity, very much of value there. There doesn't seem to be much of a spark of divine will in that creature. When that happens, that is when we go back and dig through all of that jargon I went through a bit ago. In a Christian sense of person, what "seems to be" really isn't very important. What "seems to be" probably isn't right anyway, and even if it is, it is only something about that person. It is never that person.

So God is the first revealer. And He reveals personhood. What people are.

But the second revealer in all of this is the individual himself. And his role in that process is as essential as is God's own. That is so by God's design, and must be recognized and honored as such by those who would move in the company of real people. God will tell us what people are. But the individual must tell us who he is. And he is the only one who can. Again, all the tests and measurements in the world will never tell me who so and so is, if he doesn't want it known.

I used a word a bit ago that I think is truly critical. The word "disciple". Discipleship, the stance of a listener, a learner, must be the heart of the approach we make to our people, if we are to have any hope of meeting them truly as God's people. Perhaps there is a sense in which the only diagnostic procedure, or investigative technique that really works is the simple question, "Where does it hurt?" If we can ask that without giving the impression that the answer is being evaluated, tested, measured by us against some standard, some prejudice we may have as to where it is supposed to hurt, then we are disciples, and we are truly in the presence of mystery.

The next two qualities of Christian personhood that I will try to describe are really two facets of one reality. But I couldn't think of a way to say it in just one word, so I'll use two. In the light of Christian tradition, a person, properly understood must be seen as "Related", and "Unique". And we can really use pretty much a common sense understanding of those words. To say that a person is related is to say that that personhood is neither realized nor experienced, properly, in a vacuum. This is really one of the original insights into personhood, human nature as God intended that it should be. It was expressed thousands of years ago really, in the Book of Genesis. God looked at what he had created and said, "It is not good for this person to be alone." In fact, it was not only not good, it was not possible, and still be the creature that God intended. So in the Creation story itself, people are constituted in relation to one another. And I think we have to underline the word "constituted". To be in relationships, to live them out, is not something simply added on to one's humanity, one's personhood, to fill it out, make it more pleasant from time to time, rather to do so is constitutive of one's humanity, personhood.

This original Scriptural insight gets developed in the Scriptures pretty thoroughly. Developed really to the point at which, even fairly early on in the Old Testament, it is almost as though the individual person really cannot be approached philosophically, but must be so in terms of his membership in the people. There were lots of intertwining reasons for that, some sociological, some theological. In any case, that clan spirit, that sense of peoplehood, created in patriarchal times a uniquely strong sense of solidarity among the Hebrews. The tribe was held responsible for what the individual did, and the individual was expected to accept the consequences, both positive and negative, of his tribal membership. There are any number of examples of that in the early books of the Old Testament. But certainly the clearest example, the one with the widest range of implications, is the story of the Fall. It is a profound revelation, really... the notion that the human condition, the way in which each person thereafter would experience their personhood, being affected, radically, by the actions of two individuals. So the notion, clearly revealed in Christian tradition, that we are each of us constitutive elements of one another's well-being, that on a level that goes far beyond politics, or economics, or sociology, no one is absolutely an individual. We have been created otherwise, by God. And so on and on, through the covenants with Noah, and Abraham, and Moses, the point is more and more clearly made. Salvation itself, the fullest development of personhood, radically depends on relatedness, membership in, adherence to, the people.

But on the other hand. When we are talking about human beings, it seems there is always an "on the other hand", there is very little in Scripture that is chiseled in granite. We misunderstand Scripture if we fail to see it as a process of revelation, a picture of a gradually developing understanding of God, and of humanity, and of the world. And so there begins to temper this notion of collective personhood, an increasingly clear revelation of individual personhood.

And interestingly enough, the form which that stream of revelation takes is an increasingly clear notion of individual moral responsibility. The idea that the consequences of my acts are borne by me, not the tribe, nor the nation, nor all of mankind. That notion begins to surface most clearly after the settlement of the Hebrews in the Promised Land, with the rise of cities, and the beginning of the dissolution of the strong patriarchal organization that had marked the people up till then. Personal religion, personal salvation through an individual relationship with God begins to gain prominence. The notion is sharpened and refined, really after the social catastrophe of the Babylonian exile. The idea of collective salvation and collective responsibility remains, certainly, but its fullest realization is put off till Messianic times.

And those two parallel notions continue to be developed on through the New Testament, and remain side by side, sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory, through 2000 years of Christian thought. Sometimes one, sometimes the other gains dominance. It wouldn't be too difficult, I shouldn't think, to chart that against the background of secular history.

And all of that already speaks to the next quality of Christian personhood. That relatedness is expressed and experienced by unique individuals. This dimension of personhood is simply put, rather more complicated in practice. The way in which a person fits in, belongs, relates to, benefits from, contributes to those around him will, and should, differ with each individual. Literally, each.

I think to really appreciate that, we have to fall back on the notion of the person as a mystery. A creature marked by a uniqueness that stems from, reflects, really, a clear, explicit, distinct act of Divine Will. This person is because God wills him to be. Two equally strong emphases there. This person is because GOD wills HIM to be. That invests him with a dignity that cannot, need not, be explained, but which must be respected. And in the face of that, nothing that I may accomplish, nothing that I may presume about myself in terms of skills, insights, power, ability, gives me the right to assume an ultimate control over that individual. For a fair bit of time now, the philosophical base of our sense of the dignity, the inviolability of the individual person has been the Kantian notion of the autonomy of the individual. Well, a lot of people, from Freud to Skinner have gone a long way toward undoing that notion. It seems fairly clear that people are not inviolable at all. Autonomy is far from an absolute. I believe it to be our role as healing believers to re-affirm that dignity, that autonomy, not as a quality that cannot be violated, but rather as one that must not be violated. Ours is a moral, not a technological imperative. We must do that by drawing on an insight that is much older and far less conventional than that of Kant. That of the book of Genesis. By His choice and on His terms, God has invested each of His people with a dignity that is a reflection of His own, and it simply doesn't matter whether or not that is evident in any measureable way.

The next dimension of personhood I would like to address is a complicated one, but I think, immensely important. The word I've used to express it is "Complex". I use that word to mean that a person, approached in his wholeness, as God has made him to be, acts and reacts with a variety of faculties, in a variety of arenas, all at the same time. We in the western world, heirs as we are to a Greek caste of thought have grown very accustomed to giving those various faculties and arenas various names. We call them intellect, will, emotions, spirit, body, and so on. We have even virtually canonized one such distinction, that between body and soul. Well, I can, in all Christian orthodoxy, and with perfect fidelity to revelation, to what God tells us people are, stand up here and assure you that no one of us here has a soul, and neither do any of the people with whom we deal. But in precisely the same sense, no one of us here has a body either, and neither do any of the people with whom we deal. And I think the implications of that are wide ranging, in terms of mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical well-being. One of the clearest earmarks of western philosophy over the centuries has been the fact that it is essentially an analytical approach to reality. The way to understand a thing is to take it apart, set the parts next to each other, see how they fit together, and then put it all back together again. That is true of things and true of ideas as well. That analytical tradition, mind you, has made for great scientific advances. It lends itself remarkably readily to the development of technique. It works very well indeed when you are dealing with things. It works considerably less well when you are dealing with people. And it doesn't work at all when we try to approach people out of the Scriptural or Judeo-Christian tradition. The notion of a person being made up of body and soul, as though they were two separate, distinct realities, is a notion foreign to Scripture. Rather, a human person is presented as a creature that is both physical and non-physical at the same time, or put even more in terms of the Scriptural language, a creature who acts physically and non-physically, does physical and non-physical things, at the same time. So the Scriptural image of the person is that of an integral creature. Integrity, wholeness is the most basic, most human virtue. Sin is really dis-integration. Holiness and wholeness are the same notions.

And the final dimension of a Christian approach to personhood that I would like to emphasize, I have labeled as "Incompleteness". It simply means that in order to rightly understand and realistically approach any person, any time, we have to see them as being at a point on a line. Being in process, in every dimension of their personhood. So for any of us to define the individual, to limit our response to him, and our expectations of him to what we see in front of us right here, right now, is to do violence to his personhood. I am sure that each of us has heard, any number of times in our relationships, both personal and professional, "You just have to accept me as I am. Take it or leave it." Perhaps we have said that ourselves. Well, that is simply never true. We need never accept anyone just as they are, since "just as they are" is never all they are called, and empowered, to be. We certainly have to accept them, approach them where they are. That is just being realistic. But we who hold that the human person springs from a divine source, and is set to an infinite future, we can never say about anyone, not even ourselves, "Well, this is all you can be, all you can do."

We must never try to blueprint a person's movement in process, physically, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually. That is a terribly violent thing to do. But we must always invite it, never block it, and as much as possible be a companion in that movement. If we do that well, we will live comfortably and creatively in the presence of mystery. Because we will live comfortably and creatively in the presence of other human beings, as God has made them to be.