Becoming human: Christology and deep time

Abstract

The Chalcedon formula rests on “fully God and fully human”. We creatures have no capacity to understand what “fully God” encompasses, and the question of who and what we are as created human beings remains. Returning to the Nicene Creed today, and here in Africa, possibly more than anywhere else in the world, because of its place as the “cradle of humanity”, that question arises above and beyond all the Patristic debates and ecclesial wrangles. The theologians at that time assumed they knew what a human being was. I want to raise this question of what it is to be human and how that impacts the way we might understand the work of salvation today. Christ came in one form of humanity: Homo sapiens. So, with the advent of evolution, advances in palaeontology and palaeoanthropology, archaeological finds throughout Africa and DNA testing, then what is human becomes a profound question. This essay examines some of the parameters of that question.