Are We Too Human?

Philosophers in the tradition of Nietzsche will echo his lament that “we are human, all too human” (made in his 1878 work Human, All Too Human: A book for Free Spirits), which is often used at one level to lament the brokenness of the human race, or at another level to reject the authority of those that might make truth claims from the standpoint of divine revelation (this is indicated by Nietzsche’s attack in that book on Christianity as something that, as a human product, “wants to destroy, shatter, stun, intoxicate”.

A counter to Nietzsche can be found in a statement by Steven Guthrie of Belmont University, made in an interview in volume 109 of the Mars Hill Audio Journal about his book Creator Spirit: The Holy Spirit and the Art of Becoming Human. The counter, says Guthrie, comes in the form of a tension within the Bible. On the one hand, the Biblical texts repeat the all too familiar notion of the fallenness of humanity. On the other hand, Guthrie reminds us that this fallenness is not the original state of things, and that the incarnate God in Jesus Christ can lead us back to that pre-lapsarian state of things through his becoming the New Adam, that is, the new standard of what it means to be human.

Thus, for Guthrie, the problems we see in the world is not  due to the fact that we are all too human. Contra Nietzsche, and from the standpoint of Christ, the problem is due to the fact that we are not human enough.