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I missed it when it started, but was happy to catch up this morning on Richard Beck’s ongoing blog series on “Salvation and the Unity of Human Nature”. There are five posts so far in which Beck is reviewing the early church fathers’ thought that human nature is a single, unified nature.

In Part 1 he explores Gregory of Nazianzus’ statement that “…what is not assumed is not healed, but what is united to God is saved.” Gregory’s use of “assumed” here is a different meaning than we usually have for it today. Here’s how Beck summarizes:

Thus, human nature is a single, shared ontological whole. While there are many human persons, those persons share one human nature. When Christ became incarnate as an individual person, he made ontological contact, through that individual point, with the whole of humanity. And when Christ’s individual humanity was resurrected, the whole of humanity, as a single united nature, was resurrected with him.

In Part 2, Beck ties this reasoning to Romans 5 where Paul says that all humans died in Adam and all will be made alive in Christ. Rather than this being some sort of symbolic thing, Beck suggests, if humanity is “a single reality that comes to be expressed as many different persons”, then there is a tangible way in which the fall and redemption affect us all. Fascinating.

Part 3 brings us to Gregory of Nyssa whom Beck summarizes thus:

The image of God is not located simply in Adam, nor in each individual person separately. Rather, the whole of human nature, stretching from the first human person to the last, is together the one image of God.

Part 4 he goes to the question of salvation and free will:

Christ, in the Incarnation, healing and restoring a capacity for receptivity in human nature, a healed nature in which everyone participates.

Today in Part 5 he pulls in Meister Eckhart and reminds us of Jesus’ teaching that what you have done unto the least of these, you’ve done to Jesus. If humanity is a unified whole, Beck suggests,

Loving self = Loving every single person = Loving any single person = Loving Christ.

And, correspondingly, a failure to love at any point in this equation is a failure to love the whole.

It feels like he’s nearing some of Teillhard’s territory here, which is fascinating to me since they seem to be coming at it from different directions. But there’s much good to consider across Beck’s posts. This unified essence of humanity is a theme across many other belief systems, and that’s no reason to reject it. To me, it suggests more that eacy of these religious expressions are getting at a universal truth about our connectedness.

ChrisHubbs.com

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Richard Beck on a single, unified human nature

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