Human Ontology: What It Means To Be Human

Kymberli Cook: 

Welcome to The Table Podcast, where we discuss issues of God and culture. My name is Kymberli Cook and I am the Assistant Director of the Hendrick Center here at DTS. And today, we are going to be talking about how we understand our own makeup as human beings, how that comes into play, into societal conversations, and the big fancy word for at least how we understand ourselves to be made up as human beings is ontology. That is a rough and dirty definition. Our wonderful guest, Daniel Hill, the Assistant Professor of Christian Theology at George W. Truett Theological Seminary, whose specialty is theological anthropology, is going to help us have a much better definition. Thank you so much for joining us today, Daniel. 

Daniel Hill: 

Thank you for having me. It's a real treat to be with y'all. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Yeah. Daniel actually used to be on staff, on faculty here at DTS, so it's exciting for us to be able to get to see you again and to get to hear your voice and your wonderful insights again. 

Daniel Hill: 

And before that, I was a student. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Oh, that's right. I forgot you were a student here too. 

Daniel Hill: 

Yeah, back in the day. 

Kymberli Cook: 

ThM, right? 

Daniel Hill: 

Yeah. Almost 100 years ago, but yeah. 

Kymberli Cook: 

I know. Doesn't it feel that way? 

Daniel Hill: 

Yeah. 

Kymberli Cook: 

All right. So Daniel, how did you come from DTS to... I know you went to Wheaton and working on your PhD, and you have to specialize, and so how did you end up specializing in anthropology? And for people who are listening and may not even really know what Christian or theological anthropology is, unpack that as well as how you came to be interested in it. 

Daniel Hill: 

Yeah. The path was a little circuitous for me, it was a little winding. I was writing my master's thesis on a church in South Africa when I was getting my ThM at Dallas. And I would go to this coffee shop to write all the time. And I would sit there after work and I would watch all these people get off work and they'd come to this coffee shop and they would just hang out around the bar, the espresso bar. So there's no alcoholic beverages involved, it's just coffee. And they would just stand there and then they'd leave. They wouldn't come in groups, they would come as individuals and just hang out. And it was the strangest thing to me because it didn't really map on to any of my experiences. 

But I couldn't figure out why are people doing this? Why would you come to a coffee bar and hope to chat with the barista you don't really know after work for an hour and just stand there, not interacting with other people? And I started to wonder, what is it about us that is longing for human connection? That stuff was one strand and then the other strand, I was memorizing 1st Peter with some friends, and in 1st Peter at one point it says, "Husbands, don't be harsh with your wives because of your prayers." And that stood out to me, he says it later on in 1st Peter to elders, it's like, why is my prayer life affected by how I treat other people in the church? What is that presupposing about who I am as a creature and how I'm connected to them? 

And it didn't really mesh with my me and Jesus, I'm just an individual way of seeing the world. And so that led me to Wheaton to study with Marc Cortez who's an expert in theological anthropology. And that's the fancy way of asking the question, what does scripture and revelation and what God has done in Jesus tell us about what it means to be a human being? What are we supposed to be desiring? Where are we headed? What are we made up of? All those are bound up in the question of theological anthropology. 

Kymberli Cook: 

And so you were driven to it by just the longing for human connection that you saw in a variety of different places? 

Daniel Hill: 

Yeah, and the text of scripture that we're saying, hey, we're connected in some kinds of place. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Interesting. Okay, so you said what we're made up of, as you were talking about a part of what anthropology is. Is that what you would say is ontology? 

Daniel Hill: 

Yes. Ontology is the study of being. When we talk about human ontology, what does it mean to be a human being? What are the parts that make us up? Not head, shoulder, knees and toes parts, but do we have a mind? Do we have a soul? Do we have a spirit? Do we have bodies? Are we bodies? All those questions, or it's variations of the same question is, what kind of being are we? Are we rational? Are we volitional? Do we have freedom? Are we gendered? All those stuffs is captured in human ontology. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Yeah, I think on ontological is probably many seminarians favorite word. I don't know very many people who aren't seminarians who use the word a lot. But it's like once you learn it, it's a term that, really, you almost can't fully unpack. It's a great word in that because it encapsulates this concept, like you said, of being, and something actually existing. Just again, it's really difficult, but I love that word. 

Daniel Hill: 

Yeah. I was playing Scrabble- 

Kymberli Cook: 

Sorry, what were you saying? 

Daniel Hill: 

I was playing Scrabble with my parents maybe a year ago, and I played the word ontic, which is a variation of ontology. And they were all, that's not a real word. And my parents are educated and no- no one talks about that. 

Kymberli Cook: 

And you're like, can you just trust that I know - 

Daniel Hill: 

Yeah. 

Kymberli Cook: 

That's awesome. All right, so again, that's a really big, scary word, and we're even talking about pretty abstract topics to a degree. So, how would you even just to orient people as to the practicality of some of people's ontology, whether they know they have it or not, how does it impact people's daily lives? Yeah, just how does ontology and presumptions about it impact our daily lives in a way that we might not expect or appreciate? 

Daniel Hill: 

Yeah, I think there are probably a couple easy strands to the map out there. The most obvious is probably bioethics or medical ethics. So, let's say you have a loved one who is rendered brain-dead or is put in a medically induced coma. Are they still alive and do they have certain rights? And how should we interact with them? What differentiates that state from someone who's a corpse or from a corpse? So that's one of the more concrete points of emphasis. 

You also get into questions like human rights, and let's say you have a pathogen or a vaccine or what not, anything that you want to test his efficacy, what delimits who... You can test it on mice, we generally accept that in society. Why can you do that with a mouse if you can't do that with a human person or with someone who's deteriorating or something like that? And why would that be out of bounds? Well, you have to say, this person, even someone whose mental capacities are diminished, they are still a member of this category human being and is distinct somehow from being a mouse or a houseplant or something like that. And so ethics is one of the key ways that you can see some of these questions just playing out. 

Kymberli Cook: 

And maybe, like you were even talking about with the hospital decisions that have to be made and that kind of thing, that might be a key place somebody actually encounters the topic in a way that they have never had to encounter it before. And that might be one of the reasons it is such a... There's a variety of layers to why it's such a complex and horrible situation to find yourself in. But that is part of it is that you're having to grapple with a very real life example of an abstract concept, where life and death touch. That is part of the domain we're talking about here. 

Daniel Hill: 

Yeah, and even the journey towards death. So, there's a philosopher of the 17th century who says, we are our memories. Well, my son didn't have object permanence first couple months of his life, and towards the end of most of our lives, our mental capacities diminish and our memories fade. So, what makes you, you, if you don't have your memories? And you might say, oh, it's the relationships we have with one another. Well, that's an ontological claim. And if you can't remember those people, do you still have those significant relationships? So yeah, I think there are beginning of life, conception, end of life, a lot of these issues are really brought to bear. 

Kymberli Cook: 

So, I can't imagine, at least having been in the theological world this long, that people don't have different opinions on this. Everybody likes to have a different opinion on things. 

Daniel Hill: 

Yes 

Kymberli Cook: 

So, let's talk first about some of the different opinions or thoughts about ontology, specifically that would lie outside of the Christian faith. Yeah, so let's lay down Christian orthodoxy, those lines, and say, we're not going to play on that field right now. Let's play on this other field. What are some of the positions and thoughts that are being put out there in society as a whole? 

Daniel Hill: 

Yeah, I think probably the historically predominant one is that we are not embodied. We are just souls. And maybe something happened to us... Well, something certainly happened to us because for all intents and purposes, I can look at you and see that you're embodied, but who I essentially am is something and I strive to be just a soul. And so you might associate that with Platonism or neo Platonism, but you see strands of that in Buddhism, in Hinduism, that materiality is fundamentally something to flee, to avoid, or it's a state of privation. It's not as good as being immaterial. That's one side. The other side would be, and there are Christians who affirm versions of this would be that I'm merely material. So you might call that reductive physicalism or materialism. Materialism saying there's only physical things in the world. And so human creatures are no different from mice. Well, different, but not different on a ontological level to use that word, maybe degree- 

Kymberli Cook: 

It's an important one. 

Daniel Hill: 

Yeah, it's degrees. It's not a difference of kind. So, you might be stronger than a mouse, you might have better intellectual capacities than a mouse, but you're not a fundamentally different thing. And so that would be materialism on one side and then we're just souls being Platonism or neo Platonism on the other. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Okay. So, you said that there are some Christians who hold that. Is there any position that would be distinctly unchristian with that, or is it the same and there are some Christians who just hold it? Like you mentioned reductive physicalism. Is there something that, if a Christian were thinking through positions and they say, hey, I really like how that sounds because I come from a science background or something like that, I can really appreciate that. Is there something that would be out of bounds as they were embracing that ontology? 

Daniel Hill: 

Yeah, so there are theological issues and then there's an idiom I'm trying to think of that I can't think of. So, there are issues to keep in mind, but the big concern you should have is a Christian, just in general, doesn't submit to the proposition or accept the proposition that materiality is all there is. So, even if you're inclined towards it, as a Christian, you believe in God, the Father, maker of all things visible and invisible. So, in that statement you're saying there is this God who is spirit who's not reducible to a materiality. He's qualitatively different or as one theologian, she says, He differs differently. So, you wouldn't be able to say all that exists is material. You'd have to have a big caveat with the name Yahweh. 

Kymberli Cook: 

But you could say everything else in the universe is material. Is that fair? 

Daniel Hill: 

Again, I'd be like, well what about angels and- 

Kymberli Cook: 

I know, right? And that's why I was asking that- 

Daniel Hill: 

... then you could ask me if- 

 Yeah, well there are some theologians who think angels have a body. It's a spiritual body. Augustine calls it an airy body. I don't know why I put scare quotes around airy. So you could quibble about that, and there's a little bit of disagreement onto how to parse out the angelic realm because you don't want to say on the one hand that they're material like we are, but you also don't want to say that they're spirit like God is because when we say God is spirit, we're making a claim about omnipresence and you don't want to say an angel is omnipresent. 

So, I think the angelic question, I would put that in the category of a theological issue and also put the hypostatic union being a theological issue in that, as Dr. Wong has written at Dallas, that the incarnation is a one-time thing. The hypostatic union is a one-time thing, so Jesus assumes the human nature and in his death he's still united to that human nature. And if you think a corpse is all that is, what bridges the gap between his death and resurrection? But you'd have to read his book to see the rest of that argument mapped out. He did not pay me for that plug, by the way. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Well, you just got to have each other's backs. 

Daniel Hill: 

Yeah, yeah. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Okay. So, you gave us two different sides of the spectrum of those who have thoughts on ontology outside of the general Christian tradition that would be out of bounds. And what does that look like to somebody in society? I referenced maybe people from a really scientific perspective would oftentimes argue for a reductive materialism, reductive physicalism, one, would you agree with that? And two, what would the spirit based one look like? 

Daniel Hill: 

Yeah, I don't know if I would say that all people who are scientifically inclined, and I might have- 

Kymberli Cook: 

Did I say all? 

Daniel Hill: 

No, you - 

I wouldn't even say that most Christians who are scientists would be inclined in that direction. I think there are certain advantages and disadvantages. So, there are folks like Trenton Merricks or Nancy Murphy who are Christian philosophers who would say, well, most of human history has said the soul does certain things and now we know the brain does a lot of those things. So, what is the soul doing and why do we need it? We can explain much, not all, but much of human mental life and much of human desire and et cetera, and action all that stuff in terms of neurological cause and effect. So, why don't we just use- The soul should go the way of Occam's razor, or the way of all flesh, we don't need, it doesn't do anything anymore. 

Yeah. So, there are certain advantages to that. You have greater dialogue with the hard sciences. You can have greater dialogue with neuroscience in particular. What that might look like mapping out, you would be saying, though, that... Let's say someone is feeling anxious or someone is feeling depressed or scared or doubting, all of that is a neurological causal chain is what you'd be saying, that there's nothing, and you just need to change something in the chain to get a different effect. Whereas someone like Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, you pick your person in church history, they would say, now there are certain spiritual practices we have to engage in order to train this immaterial part of us to desire God rightly. It's not just this causal, you put this in, this comes out, but you can restrain things, you can fast, and you can long for this intervention of God on your behalf. 

And it's not all explicable through cause and effect. On the pure spirit side of things, there is a tendency to just denigrate the importance of the body. You want to get away from if materiality is something we've fallen into, it's not a part of our ultimate destiny, then you see that branching out in two directions. Either I can do whatever I want with my body because that's not really me, it's just this thing I have or I want to become ultimately just numb to the body. So, there's some accounts of stoics standing outside in the ancient world, in the middle of blizzards and rainstorms because they're trying to achieve this state of complete numbness to the needs and the desires of the body, starving themselves, viewing materiality as any kind of good thing. And both of those have some theological issues too. So, one on the spiritual discipline side of things, the other one on the, you might say Genesis one through three side of things. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Yeah. And when you're talking about those who are trying to numb themselves to their bodies and that kind of thing, like you referenced earlier, there's definitely ties to several world religions there. So, we can see that very clearly playing out. But what do you think is the relationship between maybe not necessarily a denigration of the body, but an importance, an agnosticism with regard to the body. Do you see any relationship between that and technology? 

Daniel Hill: 

I think there can be. If I were to make a baseless speculation, I think contemporary society, typically we associate materialism with atheism or with secularism. I think contemporary society is more inclined to the ancient way of viewing the body as of complete unimportance. I think that's actually more in light of where we are. And so the body is just something to modify. It's like a machine you're trying to fine tune. And so any of the aches and pains and ills of the body are things to be triumphed over and overcome. And there's value in medicine and physical therapy and all these hosts of ways that we try to navigate life in the world. But when we view the body as something that is just like a computer we're trying to upgrade in different ways, I think we've gone far a field of where Christianity has called us, to be very blunt. 

Kymberli Cook: 

That's okay. And it also makes me think of, we just recorded a podcast, I guess, on the Metaverse. And so this idea that there would also be this whole other world that doesn't fully... It sort of necessitates a body, but at the same time it nothings the body to a degree because you may or may not actually be physically involved with whatever's going on in that internet type Metaverse. Do you have any thoughts on that with regard to ontology or is it the same? 

Daniel Hill: 

Yeah, I think I would agree. I was giving a lecture in Dallas at a church on the Metaverse last summer, and there's so much goodness about our being located in a particular area. And there are so many things about being located and stuck somewhere that we need to accept as good. It limits my agency. I can't change and be involved helping someone in Alberta, Canada in the way that I can be here and to my neighbors here. And that's okay because God made me as someone who's stuck in Waco right now, and I can move obviously, but the people around me, my neighbors, the people in my church, the people across the street from me, He's put me here for them, to serve them, and to share the good news of salvation with them. 

Yeah, so I think that's something I think the Metaverse is fleeing away from, our locatedness, the fact that we're stuck places, that we're limited, and the body is one of those things that limits us. If you've ever tried to run an ultra marathon, your body is the thing that keeps you from going forward that says this far no farther at a certain point. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Or a marathon, not necessarily- 

Daniel Hill: 

Yeah, or a marathon. I haven't even done an ultra. Yeah. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Have you run an ultra marathon? 

Daniel Hill: 

No way. I haven't run a full marathon because my body quits at mile nine. It says, why are we doing this? Why are we paying to do this? 

Kymberli Cook: 

Sorry to put you on the spot there. Maybe you could have just thrown that out there and everybody be like, wow, yeah,- 

Daniel Hill: 

Yeah. No, I appreciate that. 

Kymberli Cook: 

All right, so we've covered the spectrum for those outside the faith and what out of bounds ontology or at least some key markers of out of bounds ontology might look like. So, you've already started talking us through a little bit of what some of the positions are within the Christian faith, the fact that there's not something... We'll get in a second too, or maybe you can start with what all Christians should believe. So, I think you already alluded to that with regard to there is something immaterial in that it has to at least encompass God. Would you agree that that's what all Christians need to hold to? Is there anything else? 

Daniel Hill: 

Yeah, I think that would be the first thing. I'm very hesitant to say all Christians have to, unless it's like Nicea or Chalcedon, something like that. I think Christians should, I would say, affirm the goodness of the body because we say that God, who eternally existed, his Father, son and Holy Spirit, comes to us through a body and in a body, and both of those prepositions are important. So that's an affirmation of embodiedness, of being bodies. And so Christians should affirm that God didn't make us as spheres, that he formed us out of the dust of the earth as Genesis two says. And that that's a good thing, that he declares that stuffiness of us good and he embraces it in the incarnation. And with that comes claims of being able to relate to others, that's something we do as bodies. It's not something we do as minds. 

So, we should affirm the goodness of bodies. We should affirm the goodness of limits because bodies are limited, to be embodied is to be here and not over there. Of boundaries, my body has an end and if I enter into another body, I have to do harm to them. And so that's a good thing to have this boundary marker, to steal an Old Testament image and use it inappropriately. So, we should affirm the goodness of limits, the goodness of boundaries, you might call those rights, and the goodness of bodies. And there are some other things you could go on from, from there. 

Christians also tend to believe that there's this immaterial portion of us, you might call it the mind, you might call it the self, you might call it the soul. You might say this emerges from materiality. That would be a non-reductive physicalist. You could say it's this immaterial principle that is joined with the body. That would be a dualist. A holistic dualist would say that they are inseparably linked. There's hylomorphic dualism, which is saying a soul takes a particular form as a body. And there's questions about how to parse out hylomorphic dualism into one of those two sides of the spectrum. And then there are some Christians who say, we have three parts. We have a body, a soul, and a spirit. And that's called a tripartite anthropology or a trichotomy. And you see that in Tertullian, but in contemporary times you see it in Will- and others as well. And it's taken from first Thessalonians four, I believe. 

Kymberli Cook: 

And so what passages, and you can choose whichever position you'd like to start with, but what are some of the key passages giving us some concept of ontology and what scripture says about how the human being is made up and that kind of thing. Obviously with this many different interpretations, it's fair, hopefully, and if we're being charitable to one another to say it's probably broad enough that it's not an open shut case as far as what scripture does say, but what are some of the key passages that are out there that all of these interpretations are revolving around and trying to make sense of? 

Daniel Hill: 

Yeah, so that's a difficult question because it depends on who's reading and who's interpreting. So, for a while you have all these passages up until maybe, I think it's 1980, but all these passages in the Old Testament are it's like, and God put breath, and God put breath. And you would read that and people would say breath is immaterial. You have body and spirit right there. A couple Old Testament scholars read through the Old Testament and more than a couple now and say, well, breath is not soul. It's like the life principle. And you can see this development of how nephesh, which is the word for breath in Hebrew, is used. 

It's used sometimes for where food goes, food keeps you alive. It's used for exhaling and inhaling, exhaling and inhaling maintain the life force of the human creature to a certain extent. So that would be the place many people used to go. And then you have passages in the New Testament like the rich man and Lazarus, which is a parable, so that gets into some genre questions. And I think the bigger argument I would make personally for there being some immaterial element to human life is the resurrection of the body. In first Corinthians 15 in Revelation, there's this promise that you will be bodily resurrected and that the immaterial self soul, whatever you want to call it, is that which preserves the identity from your life before resurrection, and your life after resurrection, that there has to be something about you that endures in order for it to still be you. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Does that same concept connect to those who would hold to an intermediary state? I know that some don't, some traditions don't, and that's fine, but for those who do, is that something that they would be pointing to as well? 

Daniel Hill: 

Yeah, so they would say, well, if there's some part of you that endures, it has to be somewhere. And you read Paul talking about, I wish to be with the Lord. Well, he doesn't seem to be saying, I wish one day in the resurrection with all of you to be with the Lord, because he says it's better for me to stay here now than to be with the Lord in Philippians. And so someone might read that and say, well, in the intermediate state, you go and you are with the Lord. You're incomplete in a sense because the hope is the resurrection of the body, but that the soul continues to exist in the presence of the Lord after death. 

Kymberli Cook: 

So, I feel like what you were talking about with regard to ruach and nephesh, that the Old Testament terms for breath and spirit, am I right in saying that that was maybe something that the Christian physicalist, the ones who would be emphasizing the materiality of the human being, that they would bring up against those who are trying to assert some level of dualism? But that seems to me more of a critique. Are there any passages that they would specifically point to, that the more material would point to, or is it- 

Daniel Hill: 

I don't- 

Kymberli Cook: 

Yeah, sorry, go ahead. 

Daniel Hill: 

Yeah, no, I think the biggest argument would be scripture doesn't say this. So, it's like you're using these passages, but these passages don't mean... I don't know if that's copyrighted. They don't mean the things that you are thinking that they are meaning. And so where would you then argue that this is from? And if you've taken all the biblical foundation away, the Protestant would say, for the most part, well maybe this isn't something we confess if there's no scriptural evidence in favor of it once you're always reforming. 

I think the difficulty is you'd still have some passages that seem to indicate that you continue, that you are promised to be raised. Not that a copy of you will be raised, but you yourself. If I were to put on my non-reductive physicalist hat, I might say passages in the Psalmist and in Isaiah where it says, I can't praise you in sheoul, that maybe that's an indication that I don't continue to act and I can't continue to exercise any agency after death. And then from there it's like, well, those who say that are importing Greek philosophy into Christianity. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Interesting. So, one last question/direction of conversation. So, are there any cultural conversations playing out where we see essentially non-Christian ontology at odds with Christian ontology? So, I think you talked a little bit about that with ethics, but we can maybe dig in a little bit more there because now we've surfaced all of the different positions. And we can talk there and then obviously add anything else, any other areas you see it playing out in a way that people might not realize ontology is actually a lot of what's going on in this conversation. 

Daniel Hill: 

Yeah, there's a famous case with a philosopher, I think he was in Australia, and he might be an Australian philosopher who was saying, if someone is disabled, mentally disabled, if they have a mental impairment of some kind, and so they don't have the cognitive abilities of... I'm using scare quotes, "normal human beings", he would say that, so I'm speaking from his vantage point, that we should eliminate them from society because they're no different from say, an orangutan, or say a dolphin might have more rational powers than someone who's severely mentally impaired. 

And that is the, we're just material things raising its ugly head. So that would be one way in the ethical conversations. You see that in questions on when does life start? When does life end? How should we treat people towards the end of life? Should we usher someone into death? Should we end someone's life? All those are questions about what makes us who we are, what makes us valuable, where our value comes from, which are are ontological claims. So, in contemporary times, we tend to value things based on their use. So, I have a computer that doesn't work very well, it sits under my bookcase. It has no value to me, but we can treat people like that as well. So, if someone is elderly, what is their usefulness? If someone is young, what is their usefulness? 

And if someone is born with down syndrome, what is their use? And a Christian theological anthropology should say, well, the arc of redemption is that we are not valuable because of what we can do for God, but because God sets his affection on us, and so that person with down syndrome is valuable to God, and they have all the rights and privileges pertaining to someone who is beloved and loved by God. I think there are also interesting questions that come up with issues of how we should respond to the decay of our bodies. And is it something we're just always trying to flee and stave off and put off for as long as possible? So, you see this in contemporary times with how many supplements can you cobble together to keep your testosterone or your estrogen levels up to a certain degree so that you can be immortal. 

But we're creatures of time, and that's a good thing. And it's not something to run away from, that God has something for us in each of those stages of life, something good for us. It doesn't mean that I should try to burn out my knees as fast as possible so that I can be arthritic in my twenties, but when arthritis comes, I'm not valued based on how well my joints perform. That's not where my rights and my dignity comes from. It comes from the fact that God sent forth his son, born of a woman, and embraced humanity in the incarnation. And I could keep going. I don't want to rant for too long, but you see it in questions of gender, you see it in questions of sexuality. All those fundamentally come down to a lot of the time to questions of ontology. What are we? 

Kymberli Cook: 

And it's almost like because of a Christian ontology, you could end up making a really unique stand on something such as, let's go for supplements because that's easier than some of the other topics. But where you say no, I will do my best to respect, like you said, that I am inhabiting time and that is how God made me. And different people will take different stances here. And so that means for me, I only go this far, as far as it goes to, like you said, trying to perfect the machine, that kind of thing, and recognize like, no, I am embracing my situatedness in time and in the body and that thing. 

And that's a really distinctive position in society these days, or it has the potential to be distinct, particularly when it's coupled with the gospel and with, really, an ability to unpack one's ontology and say, no, I believe this because of scripture. This isn't just me taking some new age or old age or whatever position. This is really because of what I believe. And that is an interesting point of conversation that people might not have ever considered. 

Daniel Hill: 

Yeah, my wife and I have some really good friends, and one of them has MS, multiple sclerosis, and her doctor told her, essentially, you have 16 years before you lose your eyesight, and the function of your arms. And first off, it is an interesting claim to make to someone with that certainty, but that's a different conversation. That's a different podcast. So I can take all the supplements I want, and let's say that there's some combination of supplements that will keep my testosterone levels and keep me at peak performance. I have 16 years with my friend, roughly, give or take. I need to learn to be with them. And it would be sad and pathetic to spend all my time trying to flee from death when there are so many around me who don't have that option. 

I'm to be there, as Psalm 19 says, companion, I'm to be a companion of those who walk in the fear of the Lord. Our calling it Christians is not... And this is, I think, an ontological claim. So, I said beforehand that vocation flows out of ontology. Our vocation as Christians is not to try to live forever. Our vocation as Christians is to try and be faithful in the time that we've been given, and to bear witness rightly to God in Christ in the time that we've been given. And that doesn't mean you go out and eat bacon seven times a day, but we- we're not those whose lives are governed by the fear of death because we have this promise of resurrection that the person I am today is the person who will be raised to life, which again, is an ontological claim. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Yeah. I find it such an interesting area of conversation, like I said, because it seems so abstract when you first are talking about it, and even introducing the word and trying to explain what the word ontological even means and all of that. But then when you get down to it, like you said, it gets down to our vocation. It gets down to decisions that we make about the pills that we swallow. It gets down to the nitty-gritty so quickly. 

And it's just something that I would hope a lot of Christians would take the time to think through so that they're not just absorbing one of these narratives that we've been talking about, and narratives, they're not necessarily being a bad thing, but there are a variety of narratives with regard to what humans are and are made up of and who they are ontologically. And I would hope that a lot of believers would take the time to work out for themselves where they stand on that, because there are such practical ramifications. 

Daniel Hill: 

Yeah, indeed. 

Kymberli Cook: 

So Daniel, I just want to thank you so much for your time. It's been a wonderful chatting with you, and I am hoping that this impacts people's lives, and that they go open up a dictionary and start working this stuff out. And heaven forbid searching something on the internet and who knows what you'll find. But we really appreciate you being with us and just unpacking so much that you have spent so much time studying. I don't know that people sometimes recognize how many hours of reading there is and the ability to just be like, oh, yeah, here's what the stoics used to do and here's what- 

Daniel Hill: 

Yeah, yeah. 

Kymberli Cook: 

... this current or semi-current philosopher in Australia is saying. So, we just really thank you for your time and for your dedication to your craft and to your scholarship. We really appreciate it. 

Daniel Hill: 

Thank you so much. And if someone's interested in learning more about this stuff, there's a wonderful technical book by Mark Cortez called Theological Anthropology: A Guide for the Perplexed, and then there's a book by Kelly Kapic called You're Only Human, which is a little bit more accessible in talking specifically about finitude. And John Swinton has a book called Becoming Friends of Time, which is about disability and time. So, if you're interested in reading or hearing more, parsing some of this out, those are three great resources. 

Kymberli Cook: 

No, thank you for mentioning that. Yes, the Kelly Kapic book is huge for the executive directors currently. They're big fans of it. 

Daniel Hill: 

Oh, yeah. Yeah. And he's a wonderful human being. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Well, good. That's even better. 

Daniel Hill: 

Yeah. 

Kymberli Cook: 

All right. We also just want to be sure and thank you who are listening, we want to thank you for your time and recognizing that you have lots of podcasts out there that you could listen to. And we just want to thank you for joining us for this little bit amount of time that you have in your life, and we would ask you if you would be so willing to join us next time when we discuss issues of God and culture.