Kerby Anderson

What does it mean to be a human being? This is a question raised in Psalm 8, “What is man?” This question is at the heart of so many of our social issues, such as human rights, gender, sexuality, and artificial intelligence.

Dr. Carl Trueman discusses the issue of biblical anthropology in his article in World magazine. He was on my radio program to discuss the topic by pointing to books that helped him more accurately define a human being.

Augustine’s Confessions is the first book he mentioned. “Augustine successfully integrates theology, experience, and doxology into his autobiography in a way unmatched by any before or since.” His work contradicts the modern idea “that to be truly human is to be autonomous, unencumbered self-creators.”

A second book Trueman mentions is Blaise Pascal’s Pensées. While Pascal draws from Augustine’s anthropology, he brings a modern perspective. His commentary “on the materialist culture of the 17th-century French court has many parallels with our entertainment-obsessed world. Why does the king have a jester? Because he fears death and, having nothing else to worry about due to his material wealth and power, needs to be distracted from his mortality.”

The book, What It Means to Be Human, by Carter Snead is a book of bioethics. It also reminds us that human beings are not defined by autonomy but obligation and dependency. We should see the body and human embodiment as morally significant.

Christians must reject the modern, secular worldview that does not see humans as created in the image of God. These books (and others he mentions in the article) are helpful in bringing us back to a biblical perspective of what it means to be a human being.