We are born as members of the human species. Whether we are born fully human is another matter. Children are born unfinished. Not only is it powerless, it is becoming a self through language, memory, love, responsibility, and so on.
We were not born by choice, and we could die at any time. Biology gives us life. It doesn’t determine what life is for.
The latest answer comes from Silicon Valley. Artificial intelligence will expand the mind, genetic engineering will modify the body, and longevity science will likely conquer death. Transhumanism says it loud and clear: humans are just drafts. When nature succumbs to engineering, humanity will arrive.
But this question comes back every time I think about what kind of people we should be, what we owe each other, and why it’s better to live longer. If we ignore it, which means we’re too busy to care, human meaning is left to our appetites, circumstances, or those with the power to define it.
The old answer may be closer. We were born as humans, but we were born to become humans. “Be who you are,” says the old command, but who is that? Is the self something we discover within ourselves, create for ourselves, receive as a gift, or become so through our relationships with others?
Hannah Arendt started with what she called “natality.” she wrote:
“It is faith and hope in this world that perhaps finds its brightest and most succinct expression in the few words of the Gospels announcing ‘glad tidings’: ‘A child has been born to us.'”
All children enter as new people into a world that has already begun. To be born means to bring about the possibility of a beginning.
Humanity is by no means a done deal. Technology cannot manufacture it, nor can a lone person achieve it. Humans are still coming. Not just in front of us, but among us, and in someone whose life reveals what we will become in the future.
The advent of artificial intelligence has made it harder to avoid another old question. It’s about what, or who, is truly original. Machines can speak fluently without experience, generate confessions without memory, and generate arguments without conviction. But we inherit language before we choose words. We become ourselves through others.
If human dignity depends on more than our abilities, then even an amazing simulation of human expression need not threaten it. Our values run deeper than the capabilities that technology has already replicated.
Reality is more textured and mysterious than the horrors of technology allow, and more open to meaning than any measure of performance can explain. Science can explain much about what we are without exhausting the meaning of who we are or ending the question of transcendence.
Authenticity is not self-creation if none of us create ourselves. Being human may depend on responding to what is given rather than independence.
Religion enters here not because reason has failed, but because religious language precedes our choices and names something that is beyond our making. “Grace” is one such word. The deepest things are given before they are earned, such as life, love, language, and belonging.
What is given must be received, cherished, and shared. Grace does not abolish human agency. It gives you the independence to start something.
Christianity further asserts that the meaning of humanity is ultimately not about ideas or better versions of ourselves. It appears in people. The claim is unique, but the questions it answers are common. What kind of life reveals humanity’s purpose?
But Christians often understand Jesus too narrowly as someone who will restore humanity and restore what Adam lost. Orthodox theologian John Behr takes a different view. He argues that humanity was not perfected from the beginning. Adam was one of the earliest humans.
Christ doesn’t just repair what’s wrong. He reveals what humanity should become. Humanity does not lie in lost purity. It’s beyond that.
For Christians, Behr sees fully human life in the crucified and risen Christ. But the human implications of that claim are not limited to believers. Humanity reaches fulfillment not through mastery, invincibility, or escape from death, but through a life freely given in love.
Here Christianity breaks with Silicon Valley’s dreams of transcendence. Both imagine change. But man turns to a greater force over nature. The other is toward a love that is no longer ruled by self-preservation.
The medicine will cure you. Technology expands possibilities. A longer lifespan may mean more time for attachment and repair. But immortality cannot answer what infinite life is for. It may just add more time to the unfinished work.
Grace is not a compulsion from God, nor is it an escape from the work of becoming. It is the life we have already been given that draws us towards the freedom for which we were born.
Where, when and to whom?
Not beyond human limits. It’s not an ideal realm away from everyday life. Not when biology finally submits to engineering. It is not an isolated self responsible only to itself.
Humans come wherever life is received as a gift and returned as love. Christians make the more specific claim that this life has already appeared, that is, that one’s humanity is revealed not by clinging to life, but by giving it.
This argument does not require closing the circle of believers. Jesus did ask people to believe in him. The Gospel says so. But belief is more than agreement. It is his revealed trust in God and participation in the life he lives.
Christians, Jews, Muslims, skeptics, and non-religious people may have different answers, but the question remains.
What kind of life is worthy of our trust?
“I have come that they may have life and have it abundantly,” Jesus said.
he said: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” It is not a formula to be learned, but a method to be followed. It is not an answer to end all questions, but an embodiment of truth. Rather than escaping mortality, life is given to us and shared.
Matthew’s Gospel ends not with an explanation but with a promise:
“And remember, I am always with you, even to the end of the world.”
notes and reading
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hannah arendt human condition (1958). Arendt believes that the words “a child has been born to us” are found in the Gospels. Of course, the Gospels present the birth of Jesus as good news, but the word itself comes directly from Isaiah 9:6. “For unto us a child is born, and unto us a son is given.” Her inaccuracy may be revealed. Arendt brings together the promises of the Hebrew Bible and the announcement of the gospel into a single image of natality. Every birth brings someone new into the world and with that person the possibility of a new beginning.
Harold Bloom The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. First published in 1973. Bloom argued that originality does not mean freedom from influence. Writers become themselves through inheritance, resistance, and modification. Artificial intelligence gives new visibility to that old anxiety. Machines cannot be produced without language, but the human voice cannot begin on its own.
Lionel Trilling Honesty and sincerity. 1972. Trilling distinguished integrity, or the truthfulness of what one presents to others, from authenticity, or faithfulness to one’s perceived deeper self. AI complicates both by imitating beliefs without experience and by reminding us how human expression relies on inherited languages and borrowed forms.
john bear According to the Bible: A form of Christian theology. 2025. Behr argues that humanity was not perfected from the beginning, but was merely restored after the Fall. Christ reveals the mature human being toward whom creation has always moved. The fully human life is not found in mastery or escape from mortality, but in the crucified and risen Christ, a life freely given in love.
Romans 12:6–8. Paul speaks of grace not as a private possession, but as a gift that bears fruit in service, such as teaching, encouragement, generosity, leadership, and mercy. What is given becomes completely ours when it is given to others.
Bible references. “I came that they might have life and have it abundantly,” John 10:10. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life,” John 14:6. And “I am with you always, even to the end of the age,” Matthew 28:20. Citations are based on the new revised standard version, updated version.
“No one comes to the Father except through me.” John 14:6 is often read as Christianity’s final word of exclusion. But these words immediately follow Jesus’ declaration, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” The argument is not that religious labels or correct formulas will save us, but that the path to God is revealed in the life embodied by Jesus: truth lived, love given, and mercy practiced. “Through me” does not necessarily have to mean explicit membership in the appropriate religious organization.
Nor is this an invitation to “Jesus oratory,” that is, praise to Jesus that is separate from the God he reveals and the life he teaches. Jesus himself said, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father” (Matthew 7:21).
Christianity’s claim remains special: “Christ reveals the way to God.” but Particularity need not be exclusive.. The question is not simply who names Jesus correctly, but who learns to live the life Jesus calls “the way.”
against the arrangement
stubborn others
Approximately 2+2=5
Source: 2 + 2 = 5 – williamgreen.substack.com
