511 - What is a Human Being? Reflections on Psalm 8

What is a Human Being? Reflections on Psalm 8
By James L. Mays

"Implicit in every proposal about humankind is a diagnosis of the human predicament and a doctrine for its salvation. It is difficult to enter a serious discussion with anyone without heating the overtones of these proposals. The sciences concerned with human-kind have by and large preempted the place in general consciousness that was held in previous centuries by metaphysics, a portentous shift for theology and preaching whose effects are all about us."

A recent volume on Christian doctrine begins its chapter on "The Human Creature" by quoting Psalm 8.¹ Such use of the psalm is typical. Psalm 8 has an established place in our theological lectionary because it broaches the subject of anthropology. At its center stands the question, "What is the human being?"² In other eras, Psalm 8 was used in connection with the doctrine of creation because of its overall theme or with christology because of the way the psalm is cited in the New Testarnent³ But in our time, the phrase that commands attention is the question, "What is the human being?"

The affinity of our ears for that question reflects the mentality of the times. "We live," it has been said of our intellectual climate, "in an anthropological era." In 1863, T. H. Huxley wrote, "The question of all questions for humanity, the problem which lies beyond all others and is more interesting than any of them, is that of the determination of

James L. Mays is Cyrus McCormick Professor Emeritus of Hebrew and Old Testament Interpretation at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia. He is General Editor of the commentary series Interpretation, in which will appear his commentary on Psalms (1994). An earlier version of this essay appeared in From Faith To Faith. Essays in honor of Donald G. Miller, edited by Dikran Y. Hadidian, pp. 203-218.

¹ John H. Leith, Basic Christian Doctrine (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1993), P. 97. For other examples see the works of Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and others.
² Verse 5 reads, "what is 'enôšthat you remember him and ben-'adam that you see after him?" In contexts like Psalm 8, 'enôšis a collective term for humankind in its mortality, fallability, and limitedness. Ben-'adam designates the individual human being. Used as synonyms, the two refer to humankind collectively and individually. The NRSV is typical of current inclusive language translations; "what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?" Ben-'adam will be used occasionally in this article for human being.
³ Hebrews 2:6-8; 1 Corinthians 15:27. For an interpretation of Psalm 8 and its canonical context, see the pioneering article of Brevard S. Childs in Biblical Theology in Crisis (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1970), pp. 151-163.

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man's place in nature and his relation to the cosmos. Whence our race came, what sorts of limits are set to our power over nature and to nature's power over us, to what goal we are striving are the problems which present themselves afresh with undiminished interest to every human being on earth."⁴ Huxley's sense of emphasis was prophetic. The century since he wrote has seen a burgeoning of "the man sciences" and a growing readiness on the part of people to be told what it is they really are.

Though the various sciences that study humankind have by no means reached a synthesis and produced a unified science, interest and curiosity have stimulated numerous popular books written to provide a general answer to the question. The currents that run through these books usually flow from sources in the creative work of Darwin, Marx, and Freud, the three figures whose achievements have dominated the discussion in this century. We hear all about us voices that echo, modify, and distort their notions: Human beings are predators whose natural instinct is to kill with a weapon, an animal created by the union of an enlarged brain and a carnivorous way. The sudden combination of one with the other in the course of evolution created not only the human being but also the human predicament.⁵ Or, human beings are creatures lived by their unconscious. You know yourself only by getting to know your hidden self. You become yourself only by expressing your repressed self. Or again, human beings are creatures of the society they have created. Only by a revolutionary change of society can they recreate themselves in innocence and freedom.

Implicit in every proposal about humankind is a diagnosis of the human predicament and a doctrine for its salvation. It is difficult to enter a serious discussion with anyone without hearing the overtones of these proposals. The sciences concerned with humankind have by and large preempted the place in general consciousness that was held in previous centuries by metaphysics, a portentous shift for theology and preaching whose effects are all about us. In the culture of the psalmist's era, the dominant question of human consciousness was, Who is God? In our culture, the question, as it has been traditionally phrased, is, What is man?

In Psalm 8, the two questions are held together. Because the psalm has a confident answer of faith to the first, it deals with the second in a particular way. In the way the two questions are held together, the psalm offers a direction and structure of reflection about the question of the human being.

Psalm 8 speaks about the human, the species in general, and about God, a particular god. The way in which both subjects are held

⁴ As quoted in Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden (New York: Random House, 1978), p. 238.
⁵ For a recent example of reflection, in the Darwinian tradition, on the nature and prospects of the human species, see Edward O. Wilson's article, "Is Humanity Suicidal?" The New York Times Magazine, May 30, 1993, pp. 24-29.

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together furnishes a kind of paradigm that instructs our time as well as that of the psalmist.⁶

I

That Psalm 8 does, in fact, speak about the species in general and is not merely the esoteric language of sectarian experience cogent only for a group of initiates is a claim that has to be validated. Can human beings recognize themselves in this hymn? Is the psalm's question really an inquiry about the data of being human or merely a rhetorical embellishment of the poem? The answer lies in discovering what experience and phenomena are designated with and under the language of the reflection in verses 3-8. This centerpiece of the hymn is composed of three elements arranged about the question: the sight of the vast and marvelous sky at night, astonishment that God pays attention to mortals, and the assertion that God has set ben-'adam over other creatures. There is no mistaking the vocabulary of faith the psalm uses. It is creation theology in the classic mode and deals with every aspect of reality in terms of that rubric. The poem is informed by the same vision of creator and creation that is set forth more expansively in Genesis 1.

But when the three elements of the psalmist's reflection are considered carefully, it becomes apparent that the first and the third refer to aspects of general human experience; it is, then, also likely this is the case with the third element. Though the psalm in its meditative rumination speaks the language of a specific faith, with and through it the psalm speaks with and for humanity in general.

(1) "When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and stars you have made, what is ben-'adam ...?" The psalmist speaks of the staggering contrast between a human and the great bodies, processes, and powers in the world and the cosmos, the comparison between ourselves and all the rest of reality that, when noticed, brings with it an overwhelming sense of insignificance and displacement. And human beings do notice because, unlike other animals who live within a habitat, we are open to the world and cosmos. To know our finitude belongs to our nature. The reflections of humankind from earliest times display this awareness.

In the modern era, the experience is not diminished but heightened. Now we understand that the universe is not measured to the smallest degree by the reach of our sight, nor the march of time by the length of our lives. Astronomers and their planetariums show us the miniscule proportions of our solar system. Beyond our cosmos, the universe stretches from galaxy to galaxy through unlimited void until space curves back on itself. Beneath our sight falls away the partially plumbed depths of matter dissolving into molecules, atoms, and

⁶ For a full exposition of Psalm 8 that supports the following reflections, see the comment by the author in the volume on Psalms in Interpretation. A Biblical Commentary for Preaching and Teaching (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1994).

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electrons until a void is reached in the other direction. Geologists work out cosmic calendars, informing us that if the measurable course of earth's career were reduced to a year, the history of our civilization would occupy only the last minute of that year. Macrocosm and Microcosm, Space and Time. When we see..., what is ben-'adam?

To look is to experience finitude and transience. We exist in a universe that does not notice or care about us. To be human is to be afflicted with the capacity for this subliminal glimpse of the significance of our insignificance, to live constantly on the edge of consternation before the cosmos.

(2) "You gave the human being dominion over the works of your hands. All you put under its authority...." This broad claim about the place and power of humankind in the world stands in sharp contrast to the feeling of finitude and frailty. But in spite of the theological style in which the claim is put, it also refers to a component of being human. It belongs to the human identity to create its own world of culture out of the world that is there and constantly to seek to expand its control of the world by extending the limits of its culture.

When the psalm illustrates what has been set under human dominion, it lists other living creatures. In doing so, the psalm reflects the struggle of early humankind in wilderness and jungle-the arduous venture to master the skills of hunting and fishing, to secure a safe territory against claw and fang, to domesticate useful animals. The psalmist spoke out of the experience of ancient times. In the twentieth century, the list would have to be expanded to include the very elements of matter and the forces of nature. With science and technology, we have pushed the boundaries of culture out to the edges of the earth itself. The drive to control the world in which we live has gone so far that other living creatures, the animals of the psalm's list, are no longer a threat but are threatened.

Precisely because this is so, protests have arisen in our era against what is called the anthropocentric fallacy, the human presumption that it is the apex of the world of living creatures and may bend all things to its will and purpose. The protest takes two forms. The first is the argument that the anthropocentric presumption is an illusion compounded of prejudice and ignorance. Some who are impressed by the work of comparative biology and paleoanthropology in drawing lines of similarity in connection between animals and the human species have concluded that the latter is nothing but an animal and is to be explained by the phylogenetic heritage with which evolution equipped the species. If we are to survive, we must abandon the superstition that we are unique, come to terms with our animal identity, and make the best of it. Surely this argument has its rights against all the dogmatic and fearful resistance to new knowledge and rear-guard skirmishes against evolution. We are organisms, vertebrates, mammals, and primates, and from all these identities our nature is shaped. But the entire cultural history of humankind contradicts the logic of the

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"nothing-but-ers." We must be warned once again about the inadequacies of answering the question about humankind from the perspective provided by only one way of studying homo sapiens. Somewhere in the Pleistocene period, a creature emerged with imagination and the power to conceptualize, a creature who could to a degree assume responsibility for itself. It achieved a dominance that is quite unique. This record is an essential clue to its identity, an animal, but one that has the capacity to assume authority over its environment.

The other form of protest against anthropocentricism began with the fact of human dominance over nature and argues that we have gone so far in our exploitation and destruction of the ecosphere that the living creatures, dependent as they are on the processes of nature, cannot survive. Humankind itself is in danger. The answer, it is said, is to let nature be, to live in harmony and modesty within the sphere of life. Nature determines value by what it creates. Every living creature is as valuable as humankind. Elephants have their rights. Humankind must learn to live in the great egalitarian democracy of nature. This argument too has its urgent rights against arrogant, greedy despoilation of the environment and raises the inescapable question whether we really want the kind of world we are making. But the solutions proposed are often tinged with the romanticism of urbanites who have no real experience of nature left to itself and who, in their real desires, have no intention of being left to nature. Humankind, because of its identity, cannot find a way back into a harmonious ecological matrix and live simply in the rhythm and flow of biological process. Whatever the true story of our origins in natural history, the outcome we are transcends the animal world; plans and choices must deal with what we are becoming and not what we have been.

The world of nature is in control, but human history and its effects are out of control. The irony of such apocalyptic sounding statements is the way they point to the power of humankind in the world. All things for good or ill are set under its feet. "The heavens are Adonai's heavens, but the world he has given to ben-'adam, " says Psalm 115.

(3) "What are mortals that you care about them, human beings that you supervise them?" Here we have to raise the question whether the second element of the meditation also speaks of a feature that belongs to the structure of human identity. It is easy to assume that the psalm here speaks only of Israel's experience with the Lord. But the language of the text insistently points beyond the religion of Israel. "What are mortals, human beings," it asks "that you, God, turn to them and pay attention to them?" The assumption in the language is that the riddle of human identity is bound up somehow with its being remembered and visited by God. What is there in the phenomenon of the human that corresponds to this being remembered and visited by the divine?

Would it be an answer to say that mortals are incurably religious, that the pervasive presence of religion of some type in the race is the form of an awareness on humanity's part of dependence on and

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accountability to the divine? We know from their literature that, in other religions of the ancient Near East, people spoke of the remembering and visiting of the gods in whom they believed. Perhaps the answer will hold for primitive and early cultures and for the middle periods of cultural history.

In the modern period, however, broad sectors of humankind have turned away from the religions bequeathed by history and understood that move to be turning away from religion in general. It is widely held in our secular world that relation to God has no valid place in discerning the nature of the human being. But that conclusion depends on whether, with the denial of traditional religion, the questions and questing, the impulses and needs that were expressed in the religious experience, have vanished.

Because religion is generally considered to be a different realm of knowledge from science, it is usually left out of consideration by the sciences that study the human. But there are impressive claims that the question and quest inherent in religion are essential to the human phenomenon. The sociologist, Daniel Bell, argues that religion "is a constitutive aspect of human experience because it is a response to the existential predicaments which are the ricorsi of human culture."⁷ Loren Eiseley marshals the data of anthropology to characterize the human as distinctive in its capacity to transcend itself, a creature who cannot live by instinct but is compelled by a hunger for meanings, that come from outside as messages.⁸ The novelist, Walker Percy, (and why should a novelist like Percy know less about the human reality than a psychologist?) in novels and essays attacks the incoherence of attempts to define the human without considering the phenomena of self and soul.⁹

What is this being that longs so much to believe and belong that it gives itself over even to persons and powers who betray and destroy? This form of the question has not been invalidated. Every general book on anthropology that takes up the question in its broadest sense seems to pursue it and inevitably to slide into speculations and statements about faith and fealty that will save humankind from that betrayal and destruction.¹⁰

So the psalmist does speak of the human species in its frailty and finitude, in its power and purpose to control its world, and in its sense of dependence and destiny. The danger to vigorous theology does not arise from what is known about humankind in our era but rather from the failure to look hard and long and whole.

⁷ "The Return of the Sacred: The Argument About the Future of Religion," Zygon, 13/3 (Sept. 1978), p. 202.
⁸ See especially the essays in The Unexpected Universe (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969).
⁹ Among others, see the essay "Is a Theory of Man Possible?" in Signposts In a Strange Land, edited by Patrick Samway (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1991), pp. 111-129.
¹⁰ As illustrations, notice the conclusions of Robert Ardrey, African Genesis; Konrad Lorenz, on Aggression; Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden; Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death.

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II

And yet, though the psalm speaks of the species as a whole, it is the particular person of faith who speaks. The poet who celebrates the glory of God in creation is unmistakably a member of the congregation of Israel. God is addressed by the personal name "Yahweh," given to Israel as a sign and seal of their relation to God. The poet's experiences of God's remembering and visiting have come as the benefits of incorporation in a people chosen to live out a history whose subject and sovereign was Adonai. The antecedent of the pronoun in "the Lord our God" is the worshiping and believing community called forth by promise, shaped by covenant, and led by hope made known in the Word of the Lord. What the psalmist sees is humankind and world, but both are seen in the vision of faith in the Lord, maker of heaven and earth. The psalm's language contains and converts what is seen into the praise of God. The psalm is itself testimony to the possibility and promise that humankind can know itself and the universe with joy and trust through the knowledge of God.

(1) The psalm converts consternation before the chaos into the celebration of creation. Frailty and finitude in the vastness of space and time, yes, but not with an apprehensive sense of being displaced and lost. "The heavens are your heavens, moon and stars are your making." Infinitesimal mortal speaks dialogue into the infinite void of the universe, dialogue that is possible because of the faith that God transcends and grounds all that is.

At our modern distance from the ancient world of the psalm, we are inclined to think that it was easy for them to view the heavens with such confidence. It was written when things were simpler, when it was possible to personalize the cosmic environment, when the world was still understood mythologically. They did not know what we know. That is, of course, a brand of modern arrogance that is ignorant of the ethical, intellectual, and spiritual struggle behind the psalm. For millennia, humankind had regarded the celestial bodies as deities and their courses as the source of arbitrary powers that fated and fragmented human existence. To be able to think of sun and moon and stars as creation, as fascinating reasons to wonder but not to be afraid, and to conceive of the universe as centered in one God was an awesome achievement. Indeed, it is the foundation of the confidence on which our modern openness to the universe and the science that emerged from it are based. The problem of saying "your galaxies and your electrons" lies not in what we know, but in whom we trust. If we are to sing at all in the midst of the universe, it will take the form of a celebration of creation that breaks out as the gift of faith.

(2) The psalm converts humankind's realization that it has capacity to control and dominate other creatures into the recognition and acceptance of a vocation. It interprets the human drive to transform the world into its world as a role for human beings instituted by God and belonging to their identity.

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This intention on the part of the psalm will go unrecognized unless the significance of its royal metaphors are grasped. The place of ben-'adam in the world is portrayed by using the imagery of the coronation of a king. It is important to keep in view the fact that the psalm here speaks of the human species as a corporate whole, not some powerful sector of it, nor some privileged individual within it. Ben-'adam has been given a rank within the administrative system of God's sovereignty just below that of the divine court, crowned with glory and splendor, and set up as a king over the other creatures. All has been placed, as the royal idiom has it, under his feet. The picture is one familiar in the world of the psalmist, that of the installation of a vassal king by the ruler of an empire as regent over certain territory that belongs to the suzerain. The vassal's authority is delegated; his rule occurs within the reign of his Lord, whose policy guides his decision and whose purpose sets his goals. The dominion here portrayed as the role of human beings is not self-serving justification to use their power against other creatures and creation as though no desire or needs but their own matter. It is instead a critique and conversion of that view, a claim that human dominance is to be undertaken as a vocation whose source and significance lies in the reign of God, maker of heaven and earth who created all things and found them good.

The royal imagery has another dimension of importance to it. We are likely to think of the Oriental king as a symbol of tyrannical and arbitrary power. But, in fact, from all we know from the literature of the period, the ideal king was one who was expected to rule for the sake of his subjects.¹¹ Power was given to him to provide protection, administer justice, and plan for the prosperity of his people. This idea is implicit in the images of the psalm. Humankind is called by God to use the power given it in obedience to the reign of God and for the sake of all the other creatures whom its power affects.

From the beginning of the ecological movement, some have charged that the biblical view is the culprit whose arrogance authorized the technological spoilation of the natural world.¹² The fault, however, has not lain in the biblical imagery but in the failure of Christendom to understand and heed it. The royalty of humankind has become a tyranny. The summons in the psalm is to a vocation we have only begun to sense dimly, the mastery of the masters by the Sovereign of the universe.

(3) The psalm renders the human need to believe and belong into the words of those who know they have been met and claimed. Ben-'adam is the creature to whom God turns special attention in salvation and judgment, thereby creating a history that is more than the natural history of the other animals, a history that is open to the

¹¹ The ideal is the source of the description of the Davidic king in Psalms 45 and 72.
¹² The point of departure is Lynn White, "The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis," Science 155 (March 10, 1967), pp. 1203-1207.

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future, a history that is dialogue with the remembering and visiting God. Because the psalmist has learned to recognize the remembrance and visitation of God in the history of Israel, he perceives its hidden working in the life of all humankind. The special history of Adonai with Israel is a disclosure of the ways of God with all people.

Mortals seek the unity of everything real in order to be certain of the unity of their own existence. The psalmist announces to humankind, there is a center that holds. There is a healing center for mortals torn by the contradictions of frailty and power, of finitude and infinite obligation. The fragmentation of human existence, the incompleteness of our cognition, and our alienation from other beings are overcome and transcended in the poetry of radical monotheism.

For people in modern culture, who live as we live and who think as we think, the glimpse and possibility of such a center of reality is surprising. We live in bits and pieces, as bodies physicians treat, as psyches counselors console and psychiatrists pursue, as workers used by economic systems, as husbands and wives bound in nuclear families, as minds played upon by dazzling and unordered information and ideas. How can we feel ourselves one and at one with the All?

How can we understand ourselves as one and at one with the All? The impressive work of Ernest Becker, social anthropologist and Pulitzer Prize winner, in search for a unified science of homo sapiens is a symptom. All his career, until his death, Becker sought the wisdom that could come from the convergence of all the sciences concerned with humankind, anthropology, psychiatry, philosophy, and sociology. He believed the human situation to be precarious and threatened; his hope was that through a unified science of humankind we might come to know ourselves and take ourselves in hand while there is yet time. In a posthumous publication, Becker says "...the most utopian fantasy I know.. . would be one that pictures a world scientific body composed of leading minds, all fields, working under an agreed theory of human unhappiness. They would reveal to mankind the reasons for its self-created unhappiness and self-induced defeat. Then men might struggle even in anguish to come to terms with themselves and their world." But he concluded, "Yet I know that this is a fantasy...."¹³ The common ground that would give coherence to what the sciences have learned about humankind has not been gained; convergence has not taken place.

The psalmist would say that the riddle of ben-'adam is hidden in the mystery of God. Only faith can envision the point of convergence. Humankind recognizes itself fully only in the recognition of the Being from whom all reality arises.

The claim of the psalm is that we can say "human being" only after we have learned to say "God." It is the particular person of faith who learns to say the word in all its profundity and authenticity. The

¹³ E. Becker, Escape From Evil (New York: The Free Press, 1975), p. 168.

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universal is always implicit in the particular in biblical faith. In a literature where it is Israelites in their experience that are usually in view, that may seem somewhat surprising. But it is surprising only to those who have missed the hermeneutical significance of the canonical arrangement that sets Genesis 1-11 at the beginning of the Bible and the Revelation at its conclusion as a way of identifying the scope of the biblical drama. The psalm instructs and enables those who sing it to speak of themselves as human in no more specificity than the actuality of their own humanity and to speak of all others as no less. Only by speaking and thinking in this way is there any hope of answering the question, What is ben-'adam?

Philosophical anthropologists point out that, historically, human beings have sought their identity by comparing themselves to animals, to others, and to God. Only the second is absent from the psalm. Here the human is not known by comparison to other races, nations, cultures. The omission is not accidental, and its absence must be emphasized. The notion of universal humankind has been around for a long time, but the drift of history does not favor it. Tribalism, nationalism, racism, all the ways of being human in distinction from others and in hostility to others, govern the self-consciousness of the majority of the species. In every crisis of culture and at every transition in history, we have to learn again how to say "human being." By any other language, we do not discover but destroy ourselves. And in that fact alone, the left hand of the God of the universe shepherds us toward the realization of universal ben-'adam.

Can we also say, softly and modestly, that it is only this particular person of faith who can speak of and proleptically exist as universal ben-'adam? We are not much moved, we mortals, to imagination and change by generalities and definitions. They come rather with the inspiration that grasps us in quite individual and personal encounters, confrontations that take us out of ourselves and open us to possibilities we had not conceived or wanted. Beyond the unreserved openness with which "human being" is said in Psalm 8 lies the summons to a particular folk to be a peculiar people as a blessing to all the world, lies a vocation to be the Lord's own people as a signal that all the earth belongs to God-and for us there stands a man who in the individuality of his suffering and death stood for all. From such encounters, the idea of humankind becomes a promise and a vocation, a cause to celebrate and sing psalms.