On Human Beings and Dirt

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uring my college years, I became fascinated by the history of Western thought. I know it may be super nerdy, but I am captivated by tracing ideas from their genesis in history to their termination in the modern world. It’s kind of like playing a gigantic game of telephone!

Recently, I’ve been spending a lot of time researching theological anthropology (i.e. what theology has to say about human beings) through the centuries and I have come across some really challenging and intriguing ideas; one of which I would like to share with you.

For the longest time, theologians have squabbled about what it means to be human – that elusive imago Dei, right? What does it mean to be made in the image of God? Well, somewhere along the way, it seems that many of these bright and best theologians lost sight of a pretty self-evident feature of being human: embodiment. Thankfully, this idea of human physicality has resurfaced in the history of thought. Now, while I’ll leave most of these ideas about embodiment to my friend Collin to hash out (here: kaleidobible.blogspot.com), I do think there is something extremely important about physicality that we would do well to remember.

Think back to the creation account of Genesis. The narrative of Genesis 2:7 reminds us that human beings were formed from the ‘dust’ of the ground. To put it bluntly, we were fashioned from ‘lumps of dirt.’ What does this mean? Well, it means that you and I – as human beings – have a particularly intimate association with the physical world. We are made from it.

Now you might ask, so what? To which I would respond, when was the last time you thought about your relation and responsibility to the physical world? What might it look like to care for that from which you were made? I’m not talking about some whacked-out, tree-hugging fanaticism here. Rather, I’m asking what a careful honest assessment of your responsibility to the physical world might look like given the fact that you are so related to it.

Furthermore, how might you worship God with your physicality? Given that He has created us from dust, how might we use our dust to glorify him? Do you think caring for the body that you have might be considered worship? Does it seem strange to think that interacting with ‘other dust’ by rock-climbing or going on a walk or swimming might actually be worship?

I wonder if you might join me in discovering how to enjoy and use our embodiment to augment the Kingdom of God as we continue to discover what it means to be human.