Why Anglican: What is a human person?

The answer I give when asked what drew me in to the Anglican tradition has grown over the years, as I find more words to describe what I sensed but could not explain at the time. (I spend most of my week wearing a collar in contexts where collars are not often seen, so these questions are frequent.)

Last November I wrote more about some of those developments in an essay for Covenant.

But here is a more recent realization I have had about the link between my own work in the classical school tradition that began sixteen years ago, and my Confirmation into the Anglican Communion that happened 13 years ago:

My work in a classical school gave me—for the first time that I can recall—a more wholistic understanding of what a human person is. My first encounters were certainly with people like Lewis, Sayers, and Chesterton, who turned out to be medieval thinkers who happened to find themselves living in the thick of modernity. But then the many ways that the Christian Scriptures teach what it means to be a human person came to light through readings of pagan classics, patristic texts, and medieval works.

The human person is an embodied soul. We are made up of concentric circles of imagination, and intellect, and a will. We are a mind, a heart, and a gut. We are created, moral beings living in a created, moral universe. So we are to grow as moral beings always, so that increasingly strengthened grace-infused virtues can allow our mind to master and direct our desires. And we are all of these things, together. The ancient and medieval church developed at a time and in a place in which this fuller understanding of the human person was held, which directly impacted the worship and theology of that Church.

Modernity changed how we think about the human person, and the churches in which I was a member before moving into the Anglican Communion all had their beginnings in modernity, or at least considered their beginnings as being in modernity. So they were in this sense born with a modern understanding of the human person. This shaped their worship and theology.

When modernity suggested that we are just our minds, or we are just our wills, or we are just our desires, or we are just our bodies, the churches born in modernity could not help but be shaped by these fractured understandings of what makes a whole human person.

At its worst—not everywhere always, but at its worst—the telos of the Christian life changed. What started as journey of becoming increasingly united as a whole person to Christ that “He may dwell in us and we in him” became “affirm the right idea about God” or “feel the right things about God.” What started as “gather together with fellow Christians who live nearby” became “gather together with those who look and think and act like you.”

There is an important caveat. It would be important even if the Anglican Communion was currently a beacon of ecumenical light in a fractured world. But it is all the more important given the reality that this is sadly not the case.

Here is the caveat: all Churches lived through modernity and are now living in whatever you want to call this time we are living in. So all Churches have succumbed to these things in some ways, whether they were born in modernity or not. I remain drawn to a tradition that is at least aware of and trying to connect itself to a more whole—a more catholic—picture of the human person, but I am ever aware of the ways in which modernity has infected all of us.

In short: As I began to understand the human person more, I was drawn to those traditions whose worship and theology fed and equipped whole human persons by connecting them—body and soul—to their Maker. So that in Christ, they may one day stand before the Triune God, survive that encounter, and enjoy Him forever.