wfn.org | Trinity Institute 2001 tackles basic question: Who are we?

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2001-132

Trinity Institute 2001 tackles basic question: Who are we?

by Susan Erdey

     (ENS) At Trinity Institute's 32nd national conference, held at Trinity 
Church in New York City, May 3-4 and simulcast to viewers at 127 satellite 
downlink sites and via Internet, speakers explored the question, "Who are we?" 
They approached the question from the perspectives of theology, cognitive 
neuropsychology, artificial intelligence, biology and ethics, and social 
construction, and offered their observations on what this means for individual 
spiritual journeys.

     Trinity Institute's director, the Rev. Frederic B. Burnham, himself a 
scientist, brought his own passion for the intersection of science and religion 
to this year's topic. "Last year I sent a letter to 50 former speakers asking 
them to give me three horizon issues that they thought the Institute should 
pursue." 'Human nature' tied for top response, and a reply from Princeton 
sociologist Robert Wuthnow indicated that six or seven scientists at Princeton in 
a variety of disciplines were interested in the topic. 

     "I began to read across those sciences," Burnham said, and "I discovered two 
things. First, the fundamental question running through these disciplines was: 
what does it mean to be human? Second, the most interesting feature that 
persisted across those disciplinary boundaries was the understanding of human 
being as a creature who is profoundly relational and embodied."

Not just souls, but persons

     The conference began with Colin Gunton, professor of systematic theology at 
King's College in London, distinguishing between "relational being" and "being 
relative" and describing an ontology of relation which involves a "vertical" 
relationship with God and a "horizontal" relationship with each other. 

     He cautioned that if you get the God relationship wrong, you'll get the 
human relationship wrong: "The mistake we have tended to make is the 
understanding that our relation to God is a purely spiritual one...We need a view 
of our relations to God that doesn't simply see us as souls but as personal 
beings. Our theology shapes our self-understanding and therefore our being."

     Citing ancient Christian authorities such as Irenaeus of Lyons and the 
Cappadocian Fathers, Gunton pointed out that Christian tradition contrasts 
sharply with the modern view of the church as "the place where individuals go to 
get their dose of religion. The church is somewhere you go; it isn't something 
you are...The loss of Israel as a model for the church is serious in this 
respect." 

     The Cappadocians especially elaborated the idea of the Trinity as 
perichoresis: literally, "Father, Son and Spirit are bound up in each other's 
being. They take who they are entirely from one another." Yet through their 
relation, Gunton said, also comes their genuine otherness to one another--they 
"give to and receive from one another that which they uniquely are." And that, 
said Gunton, is communion, eternal love, which can go out of itself and create 
that which is not God.

     It's that relational capability, Gunton maintained, which is the key to 
understanding the imago Dei, the image of God--not the ability to think or 
reason.

Fighting 'conceptual apartheid'

     Warren Brown, director of the Research Institute for Cognitive 
Neuropsychology at Fuller Seminary in California and adjunct professor at UCLA's 
Brain Research Institute, discussed his own efforts at breaking down the 
"conceptual apartheid" between the two "thought-worlds" he inhabits--neuroscience 
and religion. 

     Brown studies brain disorders in humans, but he is also a Christian and a 
professor at an evangelical seminary--a thought-world that gives him "a more 
spiritual view of humans" but which "tends to lose its grounding in the realities 
of our physicalness." Brown said he instead looks for "acceptable positions 
within each domain that allows for the greatest resonance with the other domain." 

     He cited several examples from cognitive neuropsychology, including the 
problem of physiological links between temporal lobe seizures and peak spiritual 
experiences. "If intense religious experiences can be linked to certain forms of 
abnormal brain electrical activity, how do we understand normal spiritual 
experiences?" he asked. 

     He argued for a "non-reductive physicalism" that does not reduce humans to a 
"bag of interacting molecules." He described "personal relatedness" as the aspect 
of human nature that "best captures the Christian and Biblical view of persons, 
and the essential aspects of our personhood for which the term 'soul' is used." 
The brain's cognitive capacities "taken together and working interactively…allow 
for the emergence of personal relatedness that we call soulishness." 

'Without body there is no being'

     Following a lunch break and concert by the London Symphony Chorus, 
participants experienced a multimedia presentation by Anne Foerst, research 
scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Artificial 
Intelligence Lab and theological advisor to Kismet and Cog, MIT's robot projects. 
Her presentation, "Humans, Robots, and the Community of Persons," challenged 
views about technology and what constitutes thought, and what, if any, is the 
boundary between "human" and "person." 

     In dealing with artificial intelligence, she said, "one of the most 
fundamental constraints we have is that our own personal self-understanding of 
what it means to think, of what it means to be intelligent, will fundamentally 
influence the choices we make and the construction of our machines." The most 
crucial assumption of all is that "without body there is no being, without body 
there is no mind, no thought, nothing." 

     Yet emotional intuition, sharpened by relationship, plays as large a part in 
shaping thought as raw intelligence. "What we think we see is actually a 
construction between ourselves and the outside world...Human beings do not 
develop as rational, individual beings but are entirely relational," she said. 

     To prove her point, Foerst played video clips of human interactions with a 
"social robot" named Kismet--endowed with long lashes, big blue eyes, movable 
eyebrows, a "kissy" mouth--all elements of what Foerst calls "the baby scheme," 
the kinds of facial features to which human beings are hard-wired to react as 
they would to a human baby. In the videos, researchers talked to Kismet--and saw 
her respond--as a toddler might. But has Kismet actually learned anything? Can 
she really understand what she's doing?

     Any baby starts life with only the most basic of human emotions; as Foerst 
put it, "the parts are there, but they are not connected." Yet parents treat 
their infants as though they are connected--and that's what enables the 
connections to happen. "It is absolutely crucial that babies are in relation, 
because without relation, they don't learn anything," said Foerst. "People can 
actually give you good and bad images of yourself, which is enormously powerful." 

     "Personhood is not dependent on anything we can do or we look like or the 
functions we have. Personality is only defined by the way others treat us," 
Foerst said. "And we know that humans are damned good to deny other humans 
personhood"--as part of racism, sexism, or some other form of prejudice which 
says "sorry, you're not a person." "We can construct who belongs to us and who 
doesn't." But the imago Dei given by God supercedes human-constructed personhood.

Mind rooted in the flesh

     Friday morning's session began with William Hurlbut, a physician and 
lecturer in the program in human biology at Stanford University, addressing 
"Evolution, Empathy, and the Image of God." 

     "As evolved, embodied beings, shaped in both body and mind through the long 
history of life, we share an ancient heritage, a common 'language,' of mental 
categories, emotional responses, and physical needs," Hurlbut explained. "Mind is 
rooted in the very flesh and flow of biology's structures and life's dynamic 
processes…not merely embodied, but embodied in such a way that our conceptual 
systems draw largely upon the commonalities of our bodies and the environment we 
live in. The result is that much of a person's conceptual system is either 
universal or widespread across languages and culture."

     "Just as our body and mind have been formed and fashioned by the cosmos from 
which we have emerged, could it be that the manifestation of love further 
complements and completes that which is, revealing and reflecting both the 
fundamental nature of the universe and the full significance of human life."

Meaning found in relationship

     The Institute's several strands were drawn together in a presentation by 
Kenneth Gergen, professor of psychology at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. 
His career has focused on how human practices and institutional traditions that 
have been expressed in individualistic terms can be reconceptualized as forms of 
relatedness.

     He grew up in what he described as a "deeply agnostic" family, but began 
attending a Southern Baptist church with his friends from public school. Though 
he became a "true believer," attending church several times each week, still he 
had questions. 

     His questions continued into his teen years and followed him to Yale, where 
he was drawn to the sciences, and particularly to psychology, where the 
resurrection and virgin birth were looked upon as medieval folktales. In place of 
those traditions were the certitude and methodology of science. Yet he found that 
even psychology was made up of "bounded principalities." Where is the chief 
truth? he wondered. What building is that located in? 

     "I've been very much a part of a set of dialogues that have moved through 
the academy, the culture, across globe--in many guises--postmodernism, 
poststructuralism, postenlightenment, postfoundationalism, social 
constructionism," Gergen said. "Somehow it's the matrix of relationship out of 
which meaning comes. Out of relationship derives the very concept of meaning 
which we use in these various domains."

     Gergen ended his presentation by playing a recording of 15th-century polyphonic 
choral music. The singers coordinate their voices without direction, he said. They have 
no printed music. They must stand close together, listening to each other, building on 
each other's vocal movements. In this way, he said, the singers are the embodiment of 
"the relational realization of the sacred."

--Susan Erdey is a writer and editor at Brown University. This story was condensed 
from an article published in Trinity News.