Being Persons
OK, I know I promised I would have a break from Trinitarianism, but I have been reading the dissertation of a colleague from the States about the Egalitarian nature of God. In it, the writer makes the important point that being a fully human ‘person’ is greater than being an ‘individual’. In our culture at the moment, the stress is on being individual consumers rather than being individual human persons. So our culture has increasingly dumbed down on the depth of being a person.
Personhood is therefore explicit in the Christian faith, when it draws on a Trinitarian ecclesiology, that has something to say about a God who is three persons of one substance, (Please note that this is not three substances and one person which is the mistake that many of us Westerners make). So we can take inspiration from the Trinitarian God, to seek our personhood, or what it means to be a human person – or more accurately – how we are becoming persons.
In contemporary business, we used to have personnel departments with personnel managers. I find it interesting in this light, that these departments have become human resources departments and human resource managers. The difference is sublte, but points to an increasing depersonalisation of roles in every area of life, that seeks to make us individuals and not persons.
Christianity then has a lot to say about what it means to be a person. Indeed, a person in connection with other persons, which then takes inspiration from a God of three persons that find their identity in being one holy community. If anything, Christianity is about putting back this ‘egalitarian-ness’ back into culture which is increasingly becoming little more than a market. If we draw on the Trinity, we have much to say on being persons and justice…
