The Human Still Coming
Where, when, in whom?
We are born members of the human species. Whether we are born fully human is another matter. A child arrives unfinished—not only helpless, but still becoming a self through language, memory, love, responsibility, and others.
We did not choose birth, and we could die at any moment. Biology gives us life. It does not settle what life is for.
The latest answer comes from Silicon Valley. Artificial intelligence will enlarge the mind, genetic engineering correct the body, longevity science perhaps conquer death. Transhumanism says it plainly: the human being is only a draft. Humanity will arrive when nature yields to engineering.
Yet the question returns whenever we ask what kind of person to become, what we owe one another, or why a longer life would be better. Ignoring it—“I’m too busy to be bothered”—leaves human meaning to appetite, circumstance, or whoever has the power to define it.
An older answer may come closer. We are born human, but also born to become human. “Become who you are,” the old command says—but who is that? Is the self something we discover within, create for ourselves, receive as a gift, or become through our relationships with others?
Hannah Arendt began with what she called natality. She wrote:
“It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their ‘glad tidings’: ‘A child has been born unto us.’” *
Every child enters a world already underway as someone new. To be born is to bring the possibility of beginning.
Humanity is never a done deal. Technology cannot manufacture it, nor can the solitary will achieve it. The human is still coming—not only ahead of us, but among us and in someone whose life reveals what ours may become.
Artificial intelligence makes another old question harder to avoid: What—or who—is truly original? A machine can produce fluency without experience, confession without memory, argument without conviction. Yet we inherit language before choosing our words; we become ourselves through others.
If human dignity rests on more than our abilities, even astonishing simulations of human expression need not threaten it. Our worth lies deeper than capacities technology already reproduces.
Reality is more textured and mysterious than technological fear allows, and more open to meaning than any measure of performance can explain. Science can describe much of what we are without exhausting the meaning of who we are—or closing the question of transcendence.
If none of us creates ourselves, authenticity is not self-creation. Becoming human may depend less upon independence than upon answering for what has been given.
Religion enters here—not because reason has failed, but because religious language names what precedes our choosing and exceeds our making. “Grace” is one such word: life, love, language, belonging—the deepest things are given before they are earned.
What is given must be received, cared for, and shared. Grace does not abolish human agency. It gives agency somewhere to begin.
Christianity makes a further claim: humanity’s meaning is not finally an idea or a better version of ourselves. It appears in a person. That claim is particular, but the question it answers belongs to everyone: What kind of life reveals what humanity is for?
Yet Christians have often understood Jesus too narrowly: as repairing humanity and restoring what Adam lost. The Orthodox theologian John Behr tells the story differently. Humanity, he argues, was not completed at the beginning. Adam was humanity in its infancy.
Christ does more than repair what went wrong. He reveals what humanity was meant to become. Humanity does not lie behind us in lost innocence. It lies ahead.
For Christians, Behr locates fully human life in the crucified and risen Christ. Yet the human meaning of that claim is not confined to believers: humanity reaches fulfillment not through mastery, invulnerability, or escape from death, but through a life freely given in love.
Here Christianity parts company with Silicon Valley’s dream of transcendence. Both imagine transformation. But one looks toward greater power over nature; the other toward love no longer governed by self-preservation.
Medicine heals. Technology enlarges possibility. Longer lives may mean more time to love and repair. Yet immortality would not answer what a limitless life is for. It might only give us more time to remain unfinished.
Grace is neither divine coercion nor escape from the work of becoming. It is the life already given drawing us toward the freedom for which we were made.
Where, when, in whom?
Not beyond the human condition. Not in an ideal realm removed from daily life. Not when biology finally submits to engineering. Not in the isolated self answerable only to itself.
The human is still coming wherever life is received as gift and returned as love. Christians make the more particular claim that this life has already appeared—in one whose humanity was revealed not by holding on to life, but by giving it away.
That claim need not close the circle around believers. Jesus did ask people to believe in him; the Gospels say so. But belief is more than agreement. It is trust in the God he reveals and participation in the life he lives.
Christians, Jews, Muslims, doubters, and those with no religion may answer differently, but the question remains:
What kind of life is worthy of our trust?
“I came,” Jesus said, “that they may have life and have it abundantly.”
He said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” Not a formula to master, but a way to follow; not an answer that ends every question, but truth embodied; not escape from mortality, but life given and shared.
Matthew’s Gospel ends not with an explanation but a promise:
“And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
Notes and reading
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958). Arendt attributes the words “A child has been born unto us” to the Gospels. The Gospels do, of course, announce the birth of Jesus as good news, but the phrase itself comes more directly from Isaiah 9:6: “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given.” Her imprecision may be revealing. Arendt gathers the promise of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Gospel announcement into a single image of natality: every birth introduces someone new into the world and, with that person, the possibility of a new beginning.
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. First published in 1973; 2nd ed., 1997. Bloom argued that originality does not mean freedom from influence. Writers become themselves through inheritance, resistance, and revision. Artificial intelligence makes that old anxiety newly visible: no machine generates without prior language, but neither does any human voice begin alone.
Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity. 1972. Trilling distinguished sincerity—truthfulness in what we present to others—from authenticity, fidelity to a supposedly deeper self. AI complicates both by imitating conviction without experience and reminding us how much human expression depends upon inherited language and borrowed forms.
John Behr, In Accordance with the Scriptures: The Shape of Christian Theology. 2025. Behr argues that humanity was not completed at the beginning and merely restored after the Fall. Christ reveals the mature human being toward whom creation has always been moving. The fully human life appears not in mastery or escape from mortality, but in the crucified and risen Christ—a life freely given in love.
Romans 12:6–8. Paul describes grace not as private possession but as gifts made fruitful in service: teaching, encouragement, generosity, leadership, mercy. What is given becomes fully ours in being offered to others.
Biblical references. “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” is John 10:10; “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” is John 14:6; and “I am with you always, to the end of the age” is Matthew 28:20. Quotations follow the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition.
“No one comes to the Father except through me.” John 14:6 is often read as Christianity’s final word of exclusion. Yet it immediately follows Jesus’ declaration, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” The claim is not that a religious label or correct formula saves us, but that the way to God is revealed in the life Jesus embodies: truth lived, love given, mercy practiced. “Through me” need not mean explicit membership in the right religious group.
Nor is this an invitation to “Jesus-olatry”—admiration of Jesus detached from the God he reveals and the life he teaches. Jesus himself says, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father” (Matthew 7:21).
The Christian claim remains particular: Christ reveals the way to God. But particularity need not become exclusion. The question is not merely who names Jesus correctly, but who is learning to live the life he calls the Way.
"The human is still coming—not only ahead of us, but among us and in someone whose life reveals what ours may become." Yes! When ChatGPT was first released, it challenged me and most other writing instructors to ask what communicating and writing really amount to--questions that can't be adequately explored without considering who we really are and can become. Something comes before our words come, and our choice to use or not use AI to speak in our name reflects our level of responsibility to that something. As you say, "we inherit language before choosing our words; we become ourselves through others."
"Science can describe much of what we are without exhausting the meaning of who we are—or closing the question of transcendence." AI can imitate much of what we are, too, without a commensurable exhaustion or closure.
"Becoming human may depend less upon independence than upon answering for what has been given." In recent years, I've understood Paul's self-identification as a "co-laborer with Christ" as an approach not just to apostolic work but to personal formation. We don't become alone. Excellent post.