“So close!” I think when I read posthumanist literature. “So close and yet so far.”
Posthumanism tells us that human beings are becoming something other than human which, when compared with the humans of today are so other that to call that future thing “human” is to speak falsely —just as calling the hominoidea “human” would be anachronistic.
They are “so close” because, really and truly, resurrected humanity shall be clothed in glory (2 Cor. 5.1-5; cf. Rom 8.18-25) and move from glory to glory (2 Cor. 3.18); we shall be clothed in immortality (1 Cor. 15.50-55), shall draw food from the Tree of Life (Rev. 2.7), and rule over angels (1 Cor. 6.3).
Neither are they wrong in the idea that humans have developed and changed over the course of history. We have changed. Substantially have we been altered. Along God’s redemptive history catastrophic things have happened that altered both humankind and the world. Christians who reject out-of-hand the idea of human development over time have not reckoned with their Bibles, a few examples may be helpful:
We are no longer naked youths in a safe Garden full of literally low-hanging fruit —we are not merely fallen, we are more glorious. We wear skins, and make sacrifices by fire (Gen. 3.21, Gen 4.3-5). We have simultaneously fallen from original glory and yet, also, by God’s grace have grown and matured liturgically and bodily.
God changes the fundamental structure of the world during the flood. The flood is a (re)terraforming of the earth. It rains now. God gives Noah lordship over blood and meat. We are now meat-eaters, and judges, law-makers and sword-carriers. We have been glorified.
Humans undergo a massive biopolitcal shift —with all of the attendant ecological impacts of it— when the Tower of Babel project collapses. Abraham is a different kind of human than Nimrod —I don’t think it is wild to imagine that this change carried some genetic features as well.
Humans undergo a massive alteration at the foot of Sinai. A new kind of human emerges from under the pillar of fire, one who speaks with God and draws near to Him.
A new kind of humaning-forth occurs in the Incarnation. We cannot go backwards. We cannot undo that event and its implications for all humans born after the Annunciation.
The crucifixion is likewise a change and a development the impacts of which change the surface of the world —both the human and non-human world. The Resurrection is a bigger end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it change than the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum is supposed to have been. For planetary-scale mass-extinction is just a continuation of the dominion of death (old-hat really), but the de-dying of Jesus changes the whole system.
At the Ascension something even more glorious shifts in humanity: the scarred human body of Jesus of Nazareth is taken-up into Heaven. Now and forever a human shape rests in the counsels of the Trinity (complete with eyes, elbows, toenails, colon, etc.).
And then, a new humanity, like and yet also unlike anything before it, is inaugurated at Pentecost. The Spirit falls and fills baptized bodies. We are, post-pentecost, different humans in a different world.
And so, posthumanism lands “so close” because God has grown, matured, glorified, changed, developed, evolved his humanity over the course of time. And he has done so in creative catastrophic events that mark His Story towards its glorious fulfilment. And Christians shouldn’t balk at this in our rejection of whatever else posthumanism has on offer.
And yet, posthumanism remains simultaneously “so far” because its narrative story and its account of the world fail to account for God’s Story and God’s World —which is to say the story and the world. Precsiely in rejecting the Eternity of God, they must of necessity speculate an ersatz eternity-past composed of billions-of-billions of years and anticipate an ersatz future-glory of bodies that never die in the place of bodies that rise again.
Posthumanism remains “so far” also because we disagree about what constitutes a significant change. the advent of sacrifice by fire, the flood, the gift of the eating of meat, the collapse of Babel, the giving of the Law, the Resurrection of the body of Jesus of Nazareth, etc. mark greater changes in the human story than either “rapid encephalization” on the one hand or digital implantation on the other.
“Fr. Mark, are you seriously suggesting that human development writ large across history is far more dependent on the unfolding of our relation to God, than terralogical or morphological features?”
Yes. You got me. Guilty as charged.