The Wonders of Life: What Are Human Beings…

Psalm 8:1-9 

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honour. Psalm 8:3-5

“What are human beings?” A deceptively powerful question from Psalm 8.

The answer, of course, depends upon who you ask. 

Ask a biologist: 

Humans are classified under the genus Homo, within the family Hominidae (the great apes), order Primates, class Mammalia, phylum Chordata, and kingdom Animalia.

Ask a chemist:

We are a unique molecular arrangement containing the most fascinating molecule in the universe: deoxyribonucleic acid. Somehow, this amalgamation of atoms stumbled upon a way to replicate itself. And over four billion years, that molecule has come to dominate the earth through elaborate self-sustaining chemical interactions.

But Psalm 8 has a decidedly different answer:

Humans are a little lower than angels—or God, depending on the translation—crowned with glory, and given authority over the world.

Modernity, however, has stripped away this perspective and replaced it with an operating definition that drains our true nature, making us blind to our noble state. Our culture tells us that we are our careers, our accomplishments, our families, our country, or our academic pedigrees.

And we take these things very seriously—often to our detriment.

Psalm 8 tells us we have been fed a lie. We are lofty beings, yet we have been brought low by a theory of knowledge that is purely empirical: that meaning can be measured.

The French language gives us a helpful distinction here. (And I apologize in advance to the French for this oversimplification of their beautifully complex language.) It has two primary words for knowledge: connaissance and savoir.

I know that China is part of Asia. That is connaissance. But I have never been to Asia. I know this fact, but I don’t know in my being what this implies.

But I also know that golf is inhumanly difficult. And I know this because of my endless lost balls, shanks, and three putts. That is savoir. I know the agony and ecstasy of golf.

Our society has elevated connaissance—the accumulation of information—over savoir, knowing something in its depth, in its heart. And because of that, we do not know who we are. More tragically, we have forgotten whose we are.

Even religion can fall into this trap. We can accumulate information about the Bible without allowing ourselves to be shaped by it. I saw this clearly when I wrote my doctoral dissertation on how people read the Bible.

I interviewed one man—an engineer, a faithful servant of the church in Buffalo. He had retired and spent countless hours maintaining the church building, never charging us a cent. He knew more about the Bible than anyone else in the congregation, and he served more than almost anyone else. A good friend. But fascinatingly, though he knew, he did not believe a word of it and it meant nothing to him. He “connaissance”-d Scripture, but he was not known by it.

Others, though not well schooled in Scripture, were clearly shaped by it. “The Lord is my shepherd” truly gave them the comfort of a pastoral God. They had savoir of the Lord.

In order to know, savoir, ourselves, we must first savoir the Lord.

Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopal priest and author, names this distinction powerfully. She writes:

The last thing any of us needs is more information about God. We need the practice of incarnation, by which God saves the lives of those whose belief has turned as dry as dust… Not more about God. More God.

Though institutional religion may be waning in our society, a strong majority of people still believe there is more to reality than the empirical. According to Gallup, roughly 70 percent of people believe there is something spiritual beyond the natural world, even if it cannot be seen.

We can come to know God more by knowing more about God’s creation. This is exactly what the author of Psalm 8 experienced. One can imagine him standing outside on a clear, cool night, gazing upward, overwhelmed by awe: When I consider the moon and the stars… what are human beings that you are mindful of them?

He gazed in slack-jawed awe at creation, but the awe that you and I have should be multiplied many times over.

He had no idea just how astonishing the universe truly is. Those tiny points of light are massive balls of gas ignited by gravity. Stars are formed by microscopic dust drifting through endless space, colliding slowly until—suddenly—light bursts forth. He did not know that all physical matter is composed mostly of empty space. Atoms are infinitesimally small, yet only about one trillionth of their volume is actual solid!

Imagine placing a marble at the center of a football field. That represents the nucleus of an atom. The electrons swirl around the outer edges of the stadium.

And here is the truly astonishing thing: you can levitate. I can levitate. Every time we walk, we are floating one angstrom—one ten-billionth of a meter—above the ground, held up by repulsive forces much like two positive poles of magnets pushing against each other.

When the psalmist looks at creation—and when we do—and then realizes that God has made us greater than all of it, simply astounding.

So the challenge before us is to live as beings of lofty light.

Brian McLaren, a leader in the Generous Orthodoxy movement, puts it this way:

Spiritual practices are about life—training ourselves to become the kinds of people who have eyes and actually see… so that we experience—with increasing consistency and resiliency, even in economy class—not just survival, but Life—abundant, examined, conscious, worth living, and good.

He wrote those words twenty years ago, before economy class became what it is today. Imagine being stuck in the middle seat on an eleven-hour economy airline flight with no legroom and a screaming baby. McLaren’s point is not merely that we survive such a flight—but that even there, life can be abundant.

You might rightly say, “Tom, this sounds wonderful—but it’s not possible. Not in this world.”

I sympathize. My instincts tell me the same.

But note the context of Psalm 8; it follows a series of psalms filled with anguish and despair, typified in Psalm 6: 

“I am weary with my moaning;

every night I flood my bed with tears;

I drench my couch with my weeping.

My eyes waste away because of grief;

they grow weak because of all my foes.” (Psalm 6:6–7)

These psalms (including Psalm 8) were written in a time of war and threat, when Israel was surrounded by enemies. Yet Psalm 8 lifts our eyes beyond the immediate moment to deeper truths.

Psalm 8 was revolutionary in the midst of war, hunger, and inequality. In ancient cultures, only kings were believed to bear God’s image and thus they held all the power. But Psalm 8 declares that all people are crowned with glory and given authority.

We acknowledge suffering—but as people of faith, we also acknowledge greater realities that center us and give us strength.

The Lord knows every hair on your head. And God has entrusted you with authority over this extraordinary world; that is what Psalm 8 tells us.

What greater compliment could God offer?

We understand the power of nurturing. That is why classrooms keep pets—to teach children responsibility and care. And this nurturing mirrors the work of Christ himself. Jesus comes down, loves us, and gives his life for creatures who are, in all honesty, far beneath him—yet he chooses to remain with us.

The psalmist knows our flaws. God knows them too. We are greedy. We blame others. We push people aside. And yet—we are crowned with glory.

There is a hunger, Harvey Cox, a Harvard professor and author of God in the Secular City, saw a resurgence of spiritual curiosity at Harvard—students wearing crosses and yarmulkes, flocking to a course on Jesus not taught since 1912. But the enrollment was only bested by Econ 101.

And I suspect this hunger for more God is in part a hunger to know, to savoir, ourselves.

What are human beings? I leave you with this quote, the attribution of which I could not find:

“A human is dust lit by the breath of God—a fragile frame carrying immortal longings.”

May we all truly know God, and in so doing even come to know ourselves. Amen.