Proving one is human is becoming increasingly difficult these days. Take Boston Dynamics. It’s humanoid robot can do a complete gymnastics floor routine, including flipping, rolling, and jumping with a full 360 degree twist. Computers beat humans at all kinds of games now. They’re even being used to compose news articles. And we have hardly begun to see what quantum computers will be able to do.
Then there’s reCAPTCHA, where we try to prove to a computer that we’re humans and not just another computer. We’ve all seen it when we log into websites. Sometimes it’s a box to check next to “I’m not a robot.” Other times it’s a weird set of almost undecipherable letters and numbers. It can even be an elaborate puzzle, like trying to pick out obscure storefronts or crosswalks in small, fuzzy pictures.
The problem with saying, “I’m not a robot,” though, is that modern humans no longer have the intellectual framework to truly believe it. If our only reality is a materialistic one (which seems to increasingly be the prevailing view these days), then we are in fact robots. We may be fantastically advanced robots due to evolution, but we are robots nonetheless.
The idea that humans are somehow different from the rest of the physical world is uniquely Christian. Western civilization has received its highly developed concept of personhood primarily from two key Christian teachings: creation and the Trinity.
The Bible tells us that humans have been created in the image of God. That means we share certain traits with creation (we are, after all, physical animals). But we also share some traits with God (we bear his likeness in the sense that we are persons the way God is).
But what exactly is a person? Enter the doctrine of the Trinity. In debating the question during the first centuries of the early church of exactly who God the Father, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit are, the church was asking a simple but profound question: what makes a person a person? The answer the church gave was that a person is someone with intellect, emotion and will. And since we see in the Bible that God the Father, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit all demonstrate intellect, emotion, and will, they therefore are unique persons. God, therefore, is three unique persons in one.
I don’t understand the depths of the doctrine of the Trinity, just as I don’t understand how I can be both an animal and a person at the same time. I just know that I am a person and not a robot.
And so does everyone else in this world.
This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.
For the past sixteen years New Commandment Men’s Ministries has helped hundreds of churches throughout North American and around the world recruit teams of men who permanently adopt their widowed and single parents in their congregations for the purpose of donating two hours of service to them one Saturday morning each month. We accomplish this with a free training site called New Commandment Men’s Ministry
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