I think, perhaps, the question is more are a “personal being” and a “person” the same thing? Can one be a personal (as opposed to impersonal, presumably) being without being a “person,” which I would understand to mean without being a human?
Ontological Precision of Person. Boethius, an Italian philosopher-statesman of the 6th century, defined person as an individual substance of a rational nature. This definition, explained by later theologians, especially St. Thomas, has become classic in theology. All recognize the term "rational" to mean any intellectual nature, not merely human, and the term "substance" to designate first substance, the subsistent subject or hypostasis. The precise clarification in this third stage is that the notion of subsistence, existence in itself, and therefore incommunicability, belongs to the notion of person. Person is the subsistent, incommunicable subject of an intellectual nature—theology now has a notion of person that accounts for the distinct roles of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the biblical description of the economy of Redemption. This ontological notion of person, while far from adequate, offers a secure basis for theological consideration of the Trinitarian and Christological mysteries.
Just because humans are the only persons we know to exist, (aside from corporations in the US) it doesn't follow that person means human. Angel's if they exist are persons. The peoples of Tolkien's Middle Earth include hobbits, dwarves, elves, orcs, ents (sort of sentient animate trees), and various unfallen and fallen angels.
If dolphins turn out to be of human level intelligence and capable of moral deliberation we would presumably count them as persons.
Just because humans are the only persons we know to exist, (aside from corporations in the US) it doesn't follow that person means human. Angel's if they exist are persons.
But why are angels persons? What definition of “person” do angels meet? When I look at my dictionary, I don’t see a definition that would encompass angels. I see
a human;
an entity, as a corporation, treated by the law as having the rights and duties of a person;
a member of the Trinity;
the unitary human-divine nature of Christ;
a character in a play, a guise;
the appearance, or the body and clothing of a human; or
grammatical person (first person, second person, third person).
I don’t see a definition that says something like “a being of human intelligence capable of moral deliberation.” Were we to discover such beings, that might lead us to expand the definition of “person,” but it doesn’t seem to be what “person” is generally understood to mean now.
Humans think they smarter than dolphins because we build cars and buildings and start wars etc., and all that dolphins do is swim in the water, eat fish and play around. Dolphins believe that they are smarter for exactly the same reasons.
The OED gives in addition: in general philosophical sense, a conscious or rational being. Example, from John Locke: a thinking intelligent being that has reason and reflection and can consider itself as itself.
The OED gives in addition: in general philosophical sense, a conscious or rational being. Example, from John Locke: a thinking intelligent being that has reason and reflection and can consider itself as itself.
Thanks for that additional definition. That helps me better understand much of what has been said.
But fwiw, my experience leads me to think that most people where I live wouldn’t know or recognize that definition of “person.” Saying that an angel is a person would likely be met with confused or at best blank looks. That’s just not how the word is used by the average person where I am.
If we're going to go all credal, "For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven, was made incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and was made man."
Why not just go with something like the eternally-begotten of the Father, or the Word?
Thank you all for your thoughts. My thinking has always been along the lines that while He had the ability to become incarnate, He did not do so until Mary conceived. To put it another way, incarnation was His taking on flesh. At the moment, I'm reading what ATMF and MT are saying as very different to that.
The Tanakh frequently describes the Hebrew experience of God in relational phraseology, and often has God changing God's mind, or repenting of having done something. I think it is useful to bear this approach in mind when we try to understand God or try to be like God/Christ.
There is no "before" with God. God is eternal, and not inside time. For God, Jesus was always incarnate. For us, who are bound by time, it happened at a certain point along the line that we call time.
ISTM that as @Bishops Finger and @BroJames said at the beginning it depends what you mean by person.
@Nick Tamen pointed out, the OED includes the following as part of its definition of a person
CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY
each of the three modes of being of God, namely the Father, the Son, or the Holy Ghost, who together constitute the Trinity.
On top of that, I found the entry in the Catholic Encyclopedia which stated that
When we say that God is a personal being we mean that He is intelligent and free and distinct from the created universe.
Finally, we have Boethius in the c6th and Aquinas after him defining a person in theological terms as
Boethius, an Italian philosopher-statesman of the 6th century, defined person as an individual substance of a rational nature. This definition, explained by later theologians, especially St. Thomas, has become classic in theology.
ISTM therefore that in both classical theism and theistic personalism God is considered a person.
So apparently it is I who has failed to grasp the difference at first attempt.
The classical theist tends to start from the idea that whatever else God is, he is essentially that reality which is absolutely ultimate or fundamental, and the source of all other reality. He not only does not depend in any way on anything outside him, but could not even in principle have depended on anything outside him.
and by contrast....
Theistic personalists, by contrast, tend to begin with the idea that God is “a person” just as we are persons, only without our corporeal and other limitations. Like us, he has attributes like power, knowledge, and moral goodness; unlike us, he has these features to the maximum possible degree. The theistic personalist thus arrives at an essentially anthropomorphic conception of God.
and then....
Nor do classical theists deny that God is personal in the sense of having the key personal attributes of intellect and will. However, classical theists would deny that God stands alongside us in the genus “person.” He is not “a person” alongside other persons any more than he is “a being” alongside other beings. He is not an instance of any kind, the way we are instances of a kind. He does not “have” intellect and will, as we do, but rather just is infinite intellect and will. He is not “a person,” not because he is less than a person but because he is more than merely a person.
Apologies for the lengthy quotes from the WWW but it has helped me to see the difference more clearly.
There is no "before" with God. God is eternal, and not inside time. For God, Jesus was always incarnate. For us, who are bound by time, it happened at a certain point along the line that we call time.
Are the second person of the Trinity and the person of Jesus precisely identical? If so it means he always had a human nature as well as a divine one and always had a human body too. To my mind the divine nature of the Son remained unchanged before during and after the Incarnation.
But I am probably wrong <reaches for his 50 year old theology text books.>
Okay, there seems to be a pond difference (or something regional) where for some people "person" simply equals "human," and for others not. That's fine. We can see that difficulty and work around it when we're trying to discuss (say) the personhood of the Father.
But when it comes to other ways the word "person" may or may not stretch, I'd like to ask this and see where it leads us. If they are not "persons/people," then how do you refer to the class of beings that are intelligent, possess free will, interact with others in a kind of society, have a moral sense, have feelings, and so on?
If you are absolutely certain that no such beings exist who are not also human, problem solved. But you will still need a term for this class of beings if you ever want to discuss fairytales, science fiction, or the possibility of us discovering/being discovered by aliens some day. You'll also need a term for earthly creatures who are under debate in these areas. Otherwise you can't discuss them without huge honking work-around terms.
At present headline writers use "intelligent" as a sort of stand-in for the whole kit and caboodle. But that's awfully loose, especially if the subject of the conversation you're having has to do with social/emotional stuff and NOT intelligence per se. For example, those hominid burials where they've found traces of flowers, and scientists go on to ask questions about hominid society and whether/how such people (oops) cared for their dead, had a belief in an afterlife, performed rituals, found aesthetic pleasure in flowers, etc. etc. etc. If you're going to discuss this topic, you can say "hominid, hominid, hominid" again and again, sure. You can say "Are they truly intelligent like us?" But that's not the question, is it? "Are they people like us?" covers the ground a bit better.
tl/dr: So what do we call this class of non-human intelligent social emotional moral beings, if not people?
Some of this stems from that verse "I, the Lord, do not change. So you, O Israel, are not destroyed." Which is more a statement of God's faithfulness than a proposition about his esse.
Of course there are other verses which are more about his being ("You are still the same, and your years never end"). But AFAIK these all have in view God's reliability--always there, always the same attitudes and personality, utterly predictable when it comes to his reactions to human sin, faith, etc.--that sort of thing. And maybe a bit on his infinite-ness--we don't have to worry that God will have a sudden insight into some area he needed to grow in, and suddenly reverse his earlier position on (say) the morality of kicking dogs. He does not change in that way.
Now the incarnation is a different matter to all of these. God takes on human nature, sure, that's a huge change (and yes, it takes place in time--I couldn't begin to understand how this looks in eternity). But it's not a change in God's personality--it is in fact driven by his personality. It does not affect his reliability, it gives him no new insights that may lead to new behavior on his part (shudder), he is still the same God we have been loved and carried by all the years of our creation. To use a crappy analogy, it's as if I dove into a swimming pool and got wet. Did I change? Well, yes and no. You'd have to ask "Change in what sense--for what purposes are you asking?"
tl/dr: So what do we call this class of non-human intelligent social emotional moral beings, if not people?
To be honest, I can’t think of a single word I’d use for the category of human and non-human intelligent social emotional moral beings, or that I would commonly hear where I live. I can, and regularly do, discuss beings that belong to this class—humans, angels, fairies, elves, spirits, demons, dwarves, hobbits, orcs, ents, lwa, Martians, djinn, whatever—without having or finding a need for a single word that applies to the entire group. In fact, before this thread, it never really occurred to me that anyone would think such a term is needed. I’d just use “beings” and adjectives relevant to the specific conversation being had.
The OED gives in addition: in general philosophical sense, a conscious or rational being. Example, from John Locke: a thinking intelligent being that has reason and reflection and can consider itself as itself.
Thanks for that additional definition. That helps me better understand much of what has been said.
But fwiw, my experience leads me to think that most people where I live wouldn’t know or recognize that definition of “person.” Saying that an angel is a person would likely be met with confused or at best blank looks. That’s just not how the word is used by the average person where I am.
Really? My experience is that the popular conception of angels could quite easily fit Dafyd's definition, just going from portrayal of angels in films/tv series/books etc.
The OED gives in addition: in general philosophical sense, a conscious or rational being. Example, from John Locke: a thinking intelligent being that has reason and reflection and can consider itself as itself.
Thanks for that additional definition. That helps me better understand much of what has been said.
But fwiw, my experience leads me to think that most people where I live wouldn’t know or recognize that definition of “person.” Saying that an angel is a person would likely be met with confused or at best blank looks. That’s just not how the word is used by the average person where I am.
Really? My experience is that the popular conception of angels could quite easily fit Dafyd's definition, just going from portrayal of angels in films/tv series/books etc.
Oh, I agree that angels easily fit the definition Dafyd supplied. What I meant was that in my experience, the average person around here wouldn’t use or hear “person” with Dafyd’s definition in mind.
tl/dr: So what do we call this class of non-human intelligent social emotional moral beings, if not people?
To be honest, I can’t think of a single word I’d use for the category of human and non-human intelligent social emotional moral beings, or that I would commonly hear where I live. I can, and regularly do, discuss beings that belong to this class—humans, angels, fairies, elves, spirits, demons, dwarves, hobbits, orcs, ents, lwa, Martians, djinn, whatever—without having or finding a need for a single word that applies to the entire group. In fact, before this thread, it never really occurred to me that anyone would think such a term is needed. I’d just use “beings” and adjectives relevant to the specific conversation being had.
Let's say that word is gurgurs. One might want to say, "Although I am not a vegetarian, it's a sin to kill let alone eat a gurgur." Or "We're having a meeting this Thursday and all gurgurs of whatever race or species are welcome to come." Or "In Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet, the planet Mars has three native gurgur species." (Lewis's own word was hnau.)
Surely we can agree that if we believe in the Trinity then at least 33.33% of God is a person?
(However a percentage approach does seem bonkers to me!)
I’m sorry, we seem to be digressing somewhat. My original question was ‘Is God a person?
Presumably it is a necessary precursor to determine what is meant by "person" as the thread has established that there isn't consensus on that. After all, if "person" is coterminous with "human" the question becomes rather different from if "person" has a broader meaning.
FWIW I've seen (sci-fi again) the term "sapients" to group humans with other beings with similar mental characteristics.
tl/dr: So what do we call this class of non-human intelligent social emotional moral beings, if not people?
To be honest, I can’t think of a single word I’d use for the category of human and non-human intelligent social emotional moral beings, or that I would commonly hear where I live. I can, and regularly do, discuss beings that belong to this class—humans, angels, fairies, elves, spirits, demons, dwarves, hobbits, orcs, ents, lwa, Martians, djinn, whatever—without having or finding a need for a single word that applies to the entire group. In fact, before this thread, it never really occurred to me that anyone would think such a term is needed. I’d just use “beings” and adjectives relevant to the specific conversation being had.
Let's say that word is gurgurs. One might want to say, "Although I am not a vegetarian, it's a sin to kill let alone eat a gurgur." Or "We're having a meeting this Thursday and all gurgurs of whatever race or species are welcome to come." Or "In Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet, the planet Mars has three native gurgur species." (Lewis's own word was hnau.)
Yes, I understand how the word would be used. I’m just saying that before this thread, I’ve never encountered the need for such a word—at least not that I can recall and perhaps outside an occasional book. (It’s been a long time since I read Lewis’s Space Trilogy, and I’ve admittedly forgotten much of it.)
Interestingly one of the state sponsored protestant umbrella groups in China is called the Three Self Patriotic Movement.
That seems to acknowledge the Trinity without getting into notions of personhood.
God is in one way a person (cataphatic theology) and in another way is not a person (apophatic theology). God is a person in so far as consciousness and love and desire are creaturely participation in the being of God, and is not a person in so far as God transcends finite individual personhood. Or God is not a person, but still less is God like any created thing that is not a person.
God is in one way a person (cataphatic theology) ... in so far as consciousness and love and desire are creaturely participation in the being of God, ...
How does the latter make God a person? It was you you divested me of the idea of God as a person of Persons, a gestalt. How do you square that obtuse triangle?
Interestingly one of the state sponsored protestant umbrella groups in China is called the Three Self Patriotic Movement.
That seems to acknowledge the Trinity without getting into notions of personhood.
The "self" in those cases refers to "self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating." From the Christian side of things (as opposed to the state side, because of course there are, um, issues), this is a healthy reaction against ongoing dependency on foreign churches. You know, the kind of unhealthy dependency that involves paternalism/colonialism on one side and prolonged infancy on the other side?
So nothing really to do with the Trinity, I'm afraid.
Coming from a Quaker background (whether I would still call myself one or not), I have no dog in the Trinitarian fight, and I really don't care about creeds and such. But the question of God as a person, or "personal" has been on my mind for the past few years. Science fiction has been mentioned, but not the fact that the major preoccupation of SF with personhood lately has not revolved around aliens or animals as persons, but around artificial intelligence and when a software program must be regarded as a person. This seems much more relevant to the question of God's personhood. The ancients pretty clearly assumed God had a body of some sort (Moses asked to see it). For the past couple of millennia at least we've given up on that and imagining God as a person has meant imagining a disembodied mind, kind of like our minds, but bigger and smarter and more powerful. Someone who has thoughts we would recognize as thoughts, plans, intentions, judgments, opinions, etc. Kind of like software, in that these things are not bound to any specific hardware (i.e., a body).
My answer to the question "When does AI become a person?" is "Never." As for whether God is a person, I am inclined (striving not be dogmatic) to say that God is a person when embodied in Jesus (which I regard as a bounded historical event--the idea of incarnation as something happening outside of spacetime seems nonsensical to me). Without that human body, God is the Logos (Tao, Dharma), not anything we would recognize as a person--someone we could have a reciprocal relationship with. The whole point of the incarnation is to enable God to take a personal form that makes a reciprocal, personal relationship possible.
If you found out that, differently from what you thought before, God is or is not a person, how would your life change?
For me to find out that orthodoxy had a diametrically opposite new dialectical synthesis would be intellectually eyebrow raising. And too little too late.
Comments
I’m not so sure. Does intelligence and freedom equal a person?
If dolphins turn out to be of human level intelligence and capable of moral deliberation we would presumably count them as persons.
- a human;
- an entity, as a corporation, treated by the law as having the rights and duties of a person;
- a member of the Trinity;
- the unitary human-divine nature of Christ;
- a character in a play, a guise;
- the appearance, or the body and clothing of a human; or
- grammatical person (first person, second person, third person).
I don’t see a definition that says something like “a being of human intelligence capable of moral deliberation.” Were we to discover such beings, that might lead us to expand the definition of “person,” but it doesn’t seem to be what “person” is generally understood to mean now.-Douglas Adams
But fwiw, my experience leads me to think that most people where I live wouldn’t know or recognize that definition of “person.” Saying that an angel is a person would likely be met with confused or at best blank looks. That’s just not how the word is used by the average person where I am.
How would you put it before the Incarnation? The Son then was the one who was to become incarnate?
Your phrase is spot-on, and expresses the Nicene Creed. How would you react to Mousethief's post?
Is "before" a meaningful idea? It seems to me that, once incarnate, the Word had always been incarnate.
This is my understanding as well. Incarnateness is part of his eternal nature.
This is not true of the Father or the Spirit.
Thank you all for your thoughts. My thinking has always been along the lines that while He had the ability to become incarnate, He did not do so until Mary conceived. To put it another way, incarnation was His taking on flesh. At the moment, I'm reading what ATMF and MT are saying as very different to that.
@Nick Tamen pointed out, the OED includes the following as part of its definition of a person
On top of that, I found the entry in the Catholic Encyclopedia which stated that
Finally, we have Boethius in the c6th and Aquinas after him defining a person in theological terms as
ISTM therefore that in both classical theism and theistic personalism God is considered a person.
So apparently it is I who has failed to grasp the difference at first attempt.
Any ideas anyone?
and by contrast....
and then....
Apologies for the lengthy quotes from the WWW but it has helped me to see the difference more clearly.
If you can relate to a concept, it's almost certainly not true of God.
Are the second person of the Trinity and the person of Jesus precisely identical? If so it means he always had a human nature as well as a divine one and always had a human body too. To my mind the divine nature of the Son remained unchanged before during and after the Incarnation.
But I am probably wrong <reaches for his 50 year old theology text books.>
Thats what the textbooks say.
However "does not compute."
But when it comes to other ways the word "person" may or may not stretch, I'd like to ask this and see where it leads us. If they are not "persons/people," then how do you refer to the class of beings that are intelligent, possess free will, interact with others in a kind of society, have a moral sense, have feelings, and so on?
If you are absolutely certain that no such beings exist who are not also human, problem solved. But you will still need a term for this class of beings if you ever want to discuss fairytales, science fiction, or the possibility of us discovering/being discovered by aliens some day. You'll also need a term for earthly creatures who are under debate in these areas. Otherwise you can't discuss them without huge honking work-around terms.
At present headline writers use "intelligent" as a sort of stand-in for the whole kit and caboodle. But that's awfully loose, especially if the subject of the conversation you're having has to do with social/emotional stuff and NOT intelligence per se. For example, those hominid burials where they've found traces of flowers, and scientists go on to ask questions about hominid society and whether/how such people (oops) cared for their dead, had a belief in an afterlife, performed rituals, found aesthetic pleasure in flowers, etc. etc. etc. If you're going to discuss this topic, you can say "hominid, hominid, hominid" again and again, sure. You can say "Are they truly intelligent like us?" But that's not the question, is it? "Are they people like us?" covers the ground a bit better.
tl/dr: So what do we call this class of non-human intelligent social emotional moral beings, if not people?
Some of this stems from that verse "I, the Lord, do not change. So you, O Israel, are not destroyed." Which is more a statement of God's faithfulness than a proposition about his esse.
Of course there are other verses which are more about his being ("You are still the same, and your years never end"). But AFAIK these all have in view God's reliability--always there, always the same attitudes and personality, utterly predictable when it comes to his reactions to human sin, faith, etc.--that sort of thing. And maybe a bit on his infinite-ness--we don't have to worry that God will have a sudden insight into some area he needed to grow in, and suddenly reverse his earlier position on (say) the morality of kicking dogs. He does not change in that way.
Now the incarnation is a different matter to all of these. God takes on human nature, sure, that's a huge change (and yes, it takes place in time--I couldn't begin to understand how this looks in eternity). But it's not a change in God's personality--it is in fact driven by his personality. It does not affect his reliability, it gives him no new insights that may lead to new behavior on his part (shudder), he is still the same God we have been loved and carried by all the years of our creation. To use a crappy analogy, it's as if I dove into a swimming pool and got wet. Did I change? Well, yes and no. You'd have to ask "Change in what sense--for what purposes are you asking?"
Really? My experience is that the popular conception of angels could quite easily fit Dafyd's definition, just going from portrayal of angels in films/tv series/books etc.
And the Trinity does?
Let's say that word is gurgurs. One might want to say, "Although I am not a vegetarian, it's a sin to kill let alone eat a gurgur." Or "We're having a meeting this Thursday and all gurgurs of whatever race or species are welcome to come." Or "In Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet, the planet Mars has three native gurgur species." (Lewis's own word was hnau.)
(However a percentage approach does seem bonkers to me!)
Is trying to determine what "a person" means really a digression?
Presumably it is a necessary precursor to determine what is meant by "person" as the thread has established that there isn't consensus on that. After all, if "person" is coterminous with "human" the question becomes rather different from if "person" has a broader meaning.
FWIW I've seen (sci-fi again) the term "sapients" to group humans with other beings with similar mental characteristics.
Not remotely. My brain packs its bags and goes on holiday.
As I originally answered, no.
That seems to acknowledge the Trinity without getting into notions of personhood.
How does the latter make God a person? It was you you divested me of the idea of God as a person of Persons, a gestalt. How do you square that obtuse triangle?
The "self" in those cases refers to "self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating." From the Christian side of things (as opposed to the state side, because of course there are, um, issues), this is a healthy reaction against ongoing dependency on foreign churches. You know, the kind of unhealthy dependency that involves paternalism/colonialism on one side and prolonged infancy on the other side?
So nothing really to do with the Trinity, I'm afraid.
My answer to the question "When does AI become a person?" is "Never." As for whether God is a person, I am inclined (striving not be dogmatic) to say that God is a person when embodied in Jesus (which I regard as a bounded historical event--the idea of incarnation as something happening outside of spacetime seems nonsensical to me). Without that human body, God is the Logos (Tao, Dharma), not anything we would recognize as a person--someone we could have a reciprocal relationship with. The whole point of the incarnation is to enable God to take a personal form that makes a reciprocal, personal relationship possible.
For me to find out that orthodoxy had a diametrically opposite new dialectical synthesis would be intellectually eyebrow raising. And too little too late.