Christianity as Transcendent Humanism: Humanity's Infinite Reach

Micah Redding

Okay, well, sometimes I think that when we set out to rethink our religion or our spiritual tradition, That we have an inclination to try to streamline things, to get rid of ideas that don’t seem to work anymore, that seem unreasonable or kind of old-fashioned or antiquated. And I think that can be a really healthy and productive thing to do.

Micah Redding

But one of the things that sometimes happens in that process is that we start dealing With something old and weird that nevertheless has a lot of connective tissue in it, that is maybe a clue to some kind of profound vision that our forebears were trying to convey to us. And I think that one of those things is this kind of bizarre doctrine of the idea that Christ ascended in human bodily form into the heavens to sit down at the right hand of God.

Micah Redding

And this is a problem for a lot of people. It’s pretty much a problem in any kind of modern cosmic understanding. But it’s not just a problem for theological liberals, it’s also a problem for mainstream Christians and conservatives.

Micah Redding

Because for a lot of Christians, heaven is the place where your soul goes when you die. And so heaven isn’t really a place for bodies, so what is Jesus doing with a body there? And I’ve heard multiple times over the years people suggest to me that Jesus must have discarded his body on the way up to heaven, that somewhere outside of the scene he got rid of it because he didn’t really need it anymore.

Micah Redding

But the first Christians were insistent on the idea that no, there is a human being seated at the right hand of God. And it wasn’t any more reasonable for them to insist on this then than it is now. So we might ask why was that so important?

Micah Redding

And I think we could start to get a little bit of an idea if we look at some of the scriptures that form the bedrock of the New Testament. And so one I want to look at is Psalm 8. And Psalm 8 says, What is mankind that you are mindful of them? Human beings that you care for them. You have made them a little lower than the angels, and crowned them with glory and honor. You made them rulers over the works of your hands. You put everything. under their feet.

Micah Redding

And he’s ruminating here on the Genesis I idea that God had in the beginning created humans in his image And commissioned them to do his work in the world of creating and cultivating life, and as part of that, by necessity, had given them the capability to rule over all creation.

Micah Redding

And he’s saying, Why? We are not cosmic beings flitting among the stars. We’re weak and we’re mortal. Why have you given that to us?

Micah Redding

So, this shows up in some interesting places in the New Testament. One of those places is in the book of Hebrews, which in the book of Hebrews, the author is trying to show why Christ is more significant than other. Religious figures, and he goes through and shows that Christ is more significant than Moses or Elijah. And then he comes to the idea of angels. And there were people at the time who were worshiping angels or considered maybe Jesus was actually an angel, something like that. And so the author sets out to show why Christ is more powerful, more significant than the angels. And this is his argument.

Micah Redding

It is not to angels that he has subjected the world to come about which we are speaking. But there is a place where someone has testified: What is mankind that you are mindful of them? A son of man, that you care for them, you made them a little lower than the angels, you crowned them with glory and honor, and put everything under their feet. Now, in putting everything under them, God left nothing that is not subject to them. Yet at present we do not see everything subject to them, but we see Jesus, who for a little while was made lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honor.

Micah Redding

And the argument here is that Christ has a more significant role than that of angels because Christ is a human being, and humans have a more significant role than that of angels.

Micah Redding

The idea behind this is that in the beginning, when God set out that this is what humans were to do and to become and to be, that when they fell short of that calling, God doesn’t change his mind. Instead, God sends Christ as a human to be the fulfillment of what humanity was always intended to become.

Micah Redding

And to be a signifier, as this says, everything, both visible and invisible, both things present and things to come. Are to be under humanity, and yet we don’t see that because we’ve fallen short, but we do see Jesus who embodies and signifies this for us.

Micah Redding

And so the Theologian Paul Tilleck calls the New Testament vision a profound doctrine of a transcendent humanism, a humanism which says that Christ is the fulfillment of essential man, of the Adamic nature. And this was the vision of the early church. It was a hu humanism that saw the value of humanity not as defined by the limits that they saw around them, but by the unlimited reaches of Christ’s own potential.

Micah Redding

This is why it was essential that they insisted Christ had crossed the full span of human experience from his birth In poverty to his crucifixion as a criminal, his death, resurrection, ascension, and then seating at the right hand of God, ruling over all things, because this was the full span. of what humanity was supposed to be.

Micah Redding

And you can see why they mu they insisted that Christ was in heaven in human bodily form, because if Christ had to throw away his body somewhere along the way, then that meant that that meant that humanity Could not live up to God’s purposes and potential for it.

Micah Redding

So, this idea That Christ had stepped in and embodied what humanity was ultimately to be. It’s important to understand that this was not Christ removing our birthright as human beings. So, Paul will say over and over again that we are heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ because Christ is the one who enables us. To fulfill that role. And he talks about us following the trajectory of Christ through suffering and glorification because every step of the process, Christ is inviting us into participation.

Micah Redding

And so Paul will talk about us. Doing every single part of that, including reigning with Christ. And he can even just casually drop into statements like this: Do you not know that we will judge angels?

Micah Redding

And when I was growing up, if we encountered this passage, we would have said, No, we actually didn’t know that. That wasn’t the story we were told in Sunday school. But for Paul, this was absolutely. The story. This was so essential to the story that he can just kind of casually mention this and expect that everyone will understand what he means.

Micah Redding

And so this logic shows up in one of the paths, even in passages that some people would look at as the center point of Christianity. 1 Corinthians 15. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.

Micah Redding

The logic here is that God refuses to do his redemptive work. without partnership and participation of humanity. And so if humanity fails and fails to live up to its side of the process, God will enter into humanity itself and make sure that humanity is capable of participating. And so he goes on and describes the resurrection as a process that spreads outward from Christ into his followers and then into all creation.

Micah Redding

And then he goes on to say, for he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death, for he has put everything under his feet. And this once again is a quotation of Psalm 8. This is the idea that because God had commissioned humanity to reign over all things, that Christ was coming in to make sure that that would happen. And everything that stood in the way, up to and including death itself, would have to be removed through the reign of humanity in the person of Christ Jesus.

Micah Redding

So this is a profound and transcendent vision of what humanity really is that’s that’s Caught up in the whole vision of Christ and his potential.

Micah Redding

And I want to point out that Paul can, in the same breath, Turn around and say something like this: There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, scithian, slave or free, but Christ. is all and is in all. And so Paul holds on to this transcendent potential of humanity along with this transformative process in the universe, in creation, and to the full equality of every human being.

Micah Redding

And I think that’s an incredibly rare thing in history. Because we’ve all seen philosophies that have held to one of those ideas. And let go of the others, held to the idea that we were all equal and let go of the idea that we had transformative potential, or held on to the idea that we had transformative potential and tragically let go of the idea that we were all equal. or even affirmed that humanity was transcendent and rejected the idea that we could or should do anything about that. And the early Christians held on to all three of those in their fullest intensity.

Micah Redding

So I think it would be reasonable for someone to say, okay, That sounds great, but is that in any way a realistic idea? Is that coherent with reality? In any way, or is this kind of just an idealistic romantic notion? And we’ve seen skepticism about all those things.

Micah Redding

Are humans really equal in any meaningful sense? Do humans have the ability to kind of go beyond where we currently are in history and achieve more and more things as history unfolds? So I find it interesting that the physicist David Deutsch, who is a pioneer of quantum computing, In his book, The Beginning of Infinity, he kind of sets out to look at the physical and computational properties of the human brain.

Micah Redding

And he identifies one particular thing that he thinks is incredibly unique among human beings. And as he calls it, that is, the fact that we are creators of explanatory knowledge. What that means is that the human brain is at least a universal Turing machine, that we can at least run any algorithm that can be defined. That we can at least model any physical process in the universe, that we can enter into any physical system and modify and come up with new outputs, that we can create new things.

Micah Redding

And this As he puts it, gives us a special relationship with the laws of physics. Because the things that nature can do without us are infinitesimal in comparison to the things it can do with us, because the human mind can model every physical process that happens in nature and a whole lot more. And so he says, if a physicist wants to know about the future evolution of a supernova, the most important scientific question that they have to ask Is are there any intelligent beings in the vicinity?

Micah Redding

What’s remarkable about that is that it is precisely that ability. that establishes a basis for human equality. Because if the human mind can model any kind of process, any kind of system in the universe, then it can certainly model other minds. And that means that by our very nature, what one mind can do, another mind can learn, that what one mind can think, another mind can be communicated. That we have this equivalence where we are qualitatively equal to every mind we might encounter, and not just every human mind, we are qualitatively Equal to every mind we might reach in the future, whether alien or super intelligent AI. The only difference might be access to processing power or storage capacity. but by the nature of a mind defined in the physical way that he does, that doesn’t represent a difference in ability.

Micah Redding

And so, as David Deutsch sees it, from a physical basis, the human mind and the human brain has unlimited reach, has infinite reach. to where it can understand anything that happens in the universe ultimately. That it can create anything that can be created, understand anything that can be understood. Communicate with any mind past, present, or future. This is what he means by infinite reach.

Micah Redding

And it’s interesting to me that these properties that he derives from this kind of physical structure Are precisely the properties that resonate so much with this ancient Christian notion that human nature was such that it was appropriate. To be reigning over all things, seated at the right hand of God.

Speaker 2

Thank you.