New Creation

John W. Dixon makes an intriguing argument in a 1998 Anglican Theological Review essay on “Trinitarian anthropology.”

He offers a fundamental anthropology rooted in physics and evolutionary biology, and suggests “The human mind and its products are a part of the web of relations. The relational structures of humanculture are added to the order of nature as a part of it as well as supplementary to it, not over against it assomething wholly other.” In the human mind, “The rich and complex array ofneuronal patterns and linkages in humans generates a depth of memory that is not only greater in extent butin productive power than anything available to animals. Such memory in conjunction with present situationsrequires a transformed sense of the future in which deliberate planning is necessary. With planning therecomes purpose and with purpose, hope.” There are “emergent properties” constitute “the realm of the spirit.”

Drawing on Mark Johnson’s The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason , he suggests that our bodily interaction with the world shapes imaginative meanings, such that “metaphor is at the center of these symbolic constructs that organize our neuronal processes.” Further,

“These metaphors cohere into models—myths, rituals, art works, philosophies—of order and of meaning, ouranthropology. Two fundamental dimensions of the human enterprise are the crafts, the means for contendingwith, of using, the facticity of the world, and those models that determine meaning, value, and purpose.Models are not quite what some interpretations of the word suggest: things we make outside ourselves. Theyare dimensions of our selves, means of organizing our neuronal structures and processes.”

On this basis, he suggests an interpretation of Paul’s claim that he had died and that Christ lived in him: “Thehuman personality, a part of nature, is shaped by neuronal organizations that are in turn shaped by physicalnecessities (evolutionary adaptation) and by those images that are, necessarily, the means for shaping thoseemergent properties that arise from but go beyond what we are in nature. These images (myths, paradigms,metaphors, models) are not dispensable instruments but aspects of our selves, processes, structures,determining who we are.”

In the most literal sense, then, Paul really does become a new creation by His encounter with Christ, because in that encounter all the memories, myths, paradigms, and metaphors that had made him what he was changed.