The Homebrewed Christianity Guide to Being Human: Becoming the Best Bag of Bones You Can Be

By Donna Bowman and Tripp Fuller

This Homebrewed Christianity Guide explores how Christian theology can address our rapidly changing paradigms of human existence. Donna Bowman argues that theology can contribute to our knowledge of the human self as gained through the sciences, that a theological perspective on humanity is useful in contemporary pluralistic and global settings, and that there's theological significance to work and play. She also tackles issues of gender, sexuality, creativity, and human expression--with jokes!

It's no longer possible to assign definitive meaning to categories like man and woman, self and society, freedom and determinism, reason and feeling, soul and body by reference to systems of narrative (including biblical narrative) and interpretation in which those ideas are taken for granted. The theology of human personhood begins with irreducible experiences both universal and particular and searches for functional understandings from the whole range of Christian and non-Christian ways of knowing. Plus, jokes!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: May 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781506405667

Book preview

Matter?

Series Introduction

You are about to read a guidebook. Not only is the book the sweet guidebook size, shaped perfectly to take a ride in your back pocket, but the book itself was crafted with care by a real-deal theology nerd. Here’s the thing. The Homebrewed Christianity Guide series has one real goal: we want to think with you, not for you.

The whole homebrew metaphor grows from my passion for helping anyone who wants to geek out about theology to do so with the best ingredients around. That’s why I started the Homebrewed Christianity podcast in 2008, and that’s why I am thrilled to partner with Fortress Press’s Theology for the People team to produce this series. I am confident that the church has plenty of intelligent and passionate people who want a more robust conversation about their faith.

A podcast, in case you’re wondering, is like talk radio on demand without the commercials. You download a file and listen when, if, where, and how long you want. I love the podcast medium. Short of talking one-on-one, there’s hardly a more intimate presence than speaking to someone in their earbuds as they’re stuck in traffic, on the treadmill, or washing dishes. When I started the podcast, I wanted to give anyone the option of listening to some of the best thinkers from the church and the academy.

Originally, the podcast was for friends, family, and my local pub theology group. I figured people in the group were more likely to listen to a podcast than read a giant book. So as the resident theology nerd, I read the books and then interviewed the authors. Soon, thousands of people were listening. Since then the audience has grown to over fifty thousand unique listeners each month and over a million downloads. A community of listeners, whom we call Deacons, grew, and we’ve got a cast of cohosts and regular guests.

Over the better part of a decade, I have talked to scores of theologians and engaged with the Deacons about these conversations. It has been a real joy. Every time I hear from a listener, I do the happy dance in my soul.

And here’s the deal: I love theology, but I love the church more. I am convinced that the church can really make a difference in the world. But in order to do that, it needs to face reality rather than run from it. The church must use its brain, live its faith, and join God in working for the salvation of the world. And that’s what these books are all about.

We often open and close the podcast by reminding listeners that we are providing the ingredients so that they can brew their own faith. That’s the same with these books. Each author is an expert theological brewer, and they’ve been asked to write from their own point of view. These guidebooks are not boringly neutral; instead, they are zestily provocative, meant to get you thinking and brewing.

I look forward to hearing from you on the Speakpipe at HomebrewedChristianity.com and meeting you at an HBC 3D event. We can drink a pint and talk about this book, how you agree and disagree with it. Because if we’re talking about theology, the world is a better place.

And remember: Share the Brew!

Tripp Fuller

The Homebrewed Posse

Whether it’s the podcast, the blog, or live events, Homebrewed Christianity has always been a conversation, and these books are no different. So inside of this and every volume in the HBC book series, you’ll be hearing from four members of the Homebrewed community. They are:

The Bishop: Kindly, pastoral, encouraging. She’s been around the block a few times, and nothing ruffles her feathers. She wants everyone to succeed, and she’s an optimist, so she knows they will.

The Elder: Scolding, arrogant, know-it-all. He’s old and disgruntled, the father figure you can never please. He loves quoting doctrine; he’s the kind of guy who controls every church meeting because he knows Roberts Rules of Order better than anyone else.

The Deacon: Earnest, excited, energetic. He’s a guy who has just discovered HBC, and he can’t get enough of it. He’s a cheerleader, a shouter, an encourager. He’s still in his first naïveté.

The Acolyte: Smart, inquisitive, skeptical. She’s the smartest student in your confirmation class. She’s bound to be a biologist or a physicist, and she’s skeptical of all the hocus pocus of Christianity. But she hasn’t given up on it yet, so her questions come from the heart. She really wants to know if all this stuff works.

We look forward to continuing the conversation with you, online and in person!

1

Humanity: Achievement Unlocked

Do we really need a guidebook to tell us how to be human? I’m glad someone thinks we do, because they’ve just given me the easiest writing assignment ever. I can tell you how to be human, and what’s more, I can tell you that you’re already doing it.

Step one of one: Be a member of the genus Homo, the species sapiens, and the subspecies sapiens.

If you’re wondering what that looks like in practice, most of it is bound up with doing stuff other mammals do. Be born alive rather than hatching out of an egg. Get nutrition out of your mom’s body (or a technological facsimile) for the first months of life. Have hair! But not too much hair. Mostly have some follicles where your distant ancestors’ hair used to be. Regulate your temperature—and this is important—internally. Engage in sexual reproduction. Gestate your offspring in your uterus and then feed them from your mammary glands.

But apparently that’s not all there is to this mystery of being human, or you wouldn’t have bought a whole book about it. It turns out you’re right, and my dreams of making a mint writing the shortest how-to book in history are all in vain. The problem is that humans can’t just be. We have to exist and become. We are life thinking about itself, as my daughter told me once. We reflect, we regard ourselves, we ponder and construct what it means that we are.

So my initial prescription for being human, which is mostly about biology and associated instincts and drives, misses the point for a simple reason: humanity isn’t about being; it’s about doing. A guide to being human would more properly be titled, A Guide for Doing Human. Because what we want to know is how to choose, when it comes to the aspects of humanity where we have a choice (things mostly other than that list above). We want to know how to think about ourselves, what to make of ourselves, how to deal with ourselves. And the same goes for all the other selves around us.

That’s what we’re really interested in: how to understand ourselves so that we understand the choices we have made, are making, and will make. But while we’re doing the first part, we can’t wade gingerly into the biological pool and try to keep our eyes from stinging and our hair from getting wet. We’re going to have to dive headfirst into the matter of our Homo sapiens sapienity if we’re to have any hope of making sense of the choices that arise for creatures like ourselves. Animals like ourselves.

Evolution

I know it’s a scary word. Trust me, I was carefully taught to fight or flee at the sound of it. I grew up fundamentalist in the Bible Belt; sat through innumerable anti-science films in elementary school chapel; and once owned and treasured a poster detailing all the reasons evolutionary biologists were full of crap, from discredited missing links (Java Man turned out to be a pig’s knuckle!) to the second law of thermodynamics. If you share a similar upbringing, you can fill in the rest of the spectrum. I have never lived north of the Mason-Dixon line or in a major metropolitan area. My whole life has been spent broiling under the heat lamp of creationism, being basted liberally at regular intervals with the ridicule of sputtering scientists and the fear of godless, amoral secular humanists.

But if we’re going to come to terms with the nature part of our human nature, we have to acknowledge one central fact: we are kin to the animals. That recitation of mammalian characteristics on the first page? Not just the whim of a creator God disinclined to invent everything from scratch. We share those characteristics with the bat, the cat, dolphin and dog, koala bear and hog, because we are in their family. They are our cousins. Many steps back on the family tree—more or less depending on which particular current species you’re talking about—we have a common ancestor. And that’s why my fifteen-year-old son, whom I once fed exclusively with milk my own body produced, now has hair starting to grow on his face. Anyone who observes or undergoes these changes should find it pretty hard to deny a connection to the fox, the ox, giraffe and shrew, echidna, caribou.

Some Christians have now spent more than a century denying or waving away this kinship. If we can nail down what it is about evolution that causes so much anxiety for Christians, we can figure out what those Christians mean by human, and what theological values might (they think) be altered or lost if that meaning had to change. I don’t think it’s really about biblical literalism; an interpretation of the creation stories in Genesis as scientific history is a weapon they use against evolution, not the reason for the war.

In my lifetime among these Christians, here’s what I’ve observed:

Human dominion over nature, granted by God in Genesis 1:26, is harder to maintain if humans are a part of the animal kingdom rather than a separate and special creation. (And dominion over nature is the justification for exploitation of its resources, from meat-eating to fossil fuel extraction.)

Animals serve the purpose of decorating and equipping the world for the benefit of humans. That’s why God made them—and therefore, God made us for a distinctly different reason. If we are animals, too, that clarity about their purpose and our own goes out the window.

In that same verse, God says, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness (NRSV). We’re different because God makes us like God’s self in some way. If we’re merely the latest in a line of primates, the tip of a branch on evolution’s bush, then how can we be qualitatively different from the species that gave rise to us? Offspring have only what their parents give them—no more.

God desires a relationship with us, and made us specially to have that potential. God doesn’t desire a relationship with