Josh Farris on the Creation of the Self

Theological Anthropology and the Question of the Self

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast, I'm your host John Harris once again for a discussion that I think will be interesting for all of you. It touches on some of the things that I've been talking about regarding social justice and race as a social construct, gender as a social construct, all these things we're hearing from more postmodern types in our society.

But it also affects those who would, or I guess answers those who would say that all those things are not just social constructs, no, they're biologically rooted and that's all they are. And we know that neither of those options are really true.

And as Christians, we need to understand who we are as humans, what are we as corporate bodies, as groups, but what are we more importantly also as individuals, as selves. And to discuss this with me is Joshua Ferris.

He has agreed to join the podcast to talk about his new book, The Creation of the Self. Joshua is a Humboldt Research Fellow. He is a visiting lecturer at a number of universities. He went to Southern Seminary where he got his MDiv and the University of Bristol where he has a PhD in theology.

And you can get his book on Amazon. And you can also purchase it if you go to the publisher directly at johnhuntpublishing .com and use the promo code Ferris23. That's a capital F, Ferris23. And you can get a 20 discount on the ebook there if you want to purchase his book there.

So Joshua, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for joining me. Hey, John. Good to be with you. Yeah. I appreciate it. We have a few mutual friends. And I actually, I don't think I mentioned it to you before, but I think Daryl actually told me, I don't know, a year ago or so, it was months ago, about your work.

And then I know you mentioned Stephen Wolfe, you had a conversation with him and he suggested this would be a great place for you to talk about your book. When is it coming out?

It's not out yet, right? It's officially out July 1st in the US. Okay. Yeah.

June 30th in Europe. Okay. So I won't ask why the difference. So it's coming out in a few weeks. And what are you, well, just tell me a little bit about yourself, I guess, and what even drove your curiosity to write a book like this?

Why I Wrote The Creation of the Self

Yeah. So long story short, theological anthropology became an interest to me in seminary. And I was at the Southern Baptist Seminary in systematic theology two, the course, and we were discussing a variety of different issues from anthropology, the constitution question of what it means or what it is that makes us who we are as human beings.

Are we bodies or brains or soul body compounds? And then, of course, other questions that I later saw as related, especially given my interests in philosophy that overlap with my theological interests in other issues of gender, sexuality, sexual identity, of course, marriage, ethnic identity, and other group or communal identities that we often discuss or at least touch on in theological anthropology.

And so I realized then as I was studying theology there and simultaneously investing myself quite a bit in philosophy that I really wanted to spend quite a bit of time in my doctoral work on the question of constitution and relatedly the question of the origin of the soul or the self as soul and which is an old conversation in church history, as you know, that has kind of fallen in recent history.

It's become less important. And I'm trying to revive the interest again in that discussion as it intersects or overlaps with other questions in science and religion, particularly questions about agency and personhood and how those views have been influenced by or shaped by naturalism, secularism, anti-theistic views of God and persons.

And so anyway, so that became a real focus in my dissertation, my doctoral work of which I published that dissertation. And then years later, I was thinking more and more about the theological side of the question, which I published an introduction to theological anthropology with Baker Academic and then this most recent book, which is really, I guess, written for two different audiences.

One is for a broader sort of mainstream intellectual audience of unbelievers, agnostics about God and older theistic views of persons. And then the other one is for just the kind of the broad mainstream Christian intellectual who's interested in developing a sort of more rich, robust conception of the person and its sort of worldview implications.

So the big point of the book is it's a defense of an older view of personhood as a soul or the self as a soul, which overlaps with the claim that there is a God and that God is an explanation for the self as soul.

And the two are intimately overlapping, as we see in the tradition within the Augustinian tradition, especially John Calvin picks up on this in his Institutes, particularly when he's talking about knowledge claims, about the intimate or personal overlap between knowledge of self is also knowledge of God and vice versa, which, as you know, gets picked up later on in recent history and in various apologetic discussions related to presuppositionalism, reformed epistemology and these sorts of questions.

But the big claim is that we ourselves as souls, and that entails that we are created entities, that we are not solely products of biological evolution or that we are emergent products, which is becoming all the more popular these days in science and religion discussions about persons.

Or the idea that we are wholly physical beings, which is becoming popular in those circles as well, especially as it's rooted more and more in naturalism and secular assumptions about persons. And then, so this question, of course, has other implications that we can talk about, but that's the big picture of the book.

Yeah, very nice. So what is the self? Where did it come from? Those are the questions that are on the table. Where do you see the blatant errors on this question in our day-to-day lives? I mentioned, of course, the social construct idea, but where do you see that your ideas, the biblical understanding, the theologically conservative understanding of this is challenged?

The Denial of the Soul and the Stable Self

Yeah. So I think there's been a wide reception of a different, a number of views that take this, that almost explicitly or wholly exclude any notion of a self as soul, that we are souls. That's becoming altogether unpopular, not just in a wider secular academic context, but also in Christian context as the soul has come under fire for especially the last 10, 20 years.

And there's been a recent flurry of literature on this subject from biblical scholars to theological scholars, as well as philosophers who are rejecting any notion of the soul and the soul's intimate connection to God or to some sort of theism, which was prominent in the ancient world and prominent through the likes of Augustine and Aquinas.

So we're seeing that rejection simultaneous with that. In the wider culture, we're seeing an outright rejection of not only the soul, but a self in general. And we're seeing re-envisionings of selves as wholly autonomous beings that are wholly physical.

But we're also seeing other views that suggest that we are unstable beings through and through, that there is no stability to the self, and that there is no persistence of the self. So the self that you are today isn't the self that you are tomorrow.

That is wholly changeable. And Brian Lowry has recently been promoting this sort of position. He's a psychologist. And this sort of view is becoming somewhat prominent in psychology at Stanford University.

And so he's been pushing this sort of view, the self, the social creation of you, which he says that you are wholly a social construction or social creation through and through, and that there is no stable you.

You are basically just hats that you put on or positions that you fill or occupations that you assume in your life. There is no stable self, in other words, that endures through time or persists. So you can see very quickly what this might do to the question of dignity and how we understand the dignified person or how we might understand responsibility.

And if there is a stable self that undergirds any sort of responsibility that we can attribute or predicate responsibility of action to a person, but rather we are the construction of our community around us.

And you might say that there's some plausibility in that view at some level, but I think the whole denial or rejection of the self, certainly the soul, but a selfless soul that is a stable entity that is responsible, that has dignity given to it by God as an Imago Dei bearer, those sorts of ideas are becoming altogether antiquated like the notion of the soul itself, which has become largely an antiquated idea, which I think is problematic and.

We need to retrieve those ideas. Yeah. What are some of the pitfalls then that you see coming? The dangers of rejecting the true view of the self as this Imago Dei with dignity from God and then embracing, for instance, the idea that we're.

Just a product of our community? Yeah. Well, I think if we're talking in the Christian realm, I think some of the dangers include not only a stable notion of identity that we can predicate identity to, that we can predicate responsibility and action to, but also other stable identities like gender, sexuality, and ethnicity and community.

These are all important factors. In my intro book, I don't talk about this really in the creation of self. In my introduction to theological anthropology, I make a distinction between strict personal identity that we can identify the person, that there is a person, and this is fundamental to how we make sense of morality in the world, but it's also fundamental to how we make sense of action, responsibility, and identity over time, but then relatedly and importantly, narrative identity, which I think of as contingent identities, but nonetheless, altogether important, and there are different levels of importance of our own contingent identities, contingent identities being like the communities that we are connected to at a deeper level, the communities that we are connected to by way of our origins, namely our family, contingent identities that we're connected to at a deeper level, namely the church, if we've been baptized in the church and we've had faith and we're partaking of the Lord's Supper and those sorts of things, but then other identities as well that would be included, that would have a deep sort of impression on who we are, that are not something that is so feeble or that fluctuates so much, as if we could take our hat on and off, but that is like gender, and gender is rooted in biological sex, if we take biology to be somehow determinative of our identity, that's obviously a question right now in the wider culture, but it's a question even in the Christian culture right now, as we're thinking about these things afresh, and as we're arguably drifting on these sorts of issues, what role does biology play in determining our social arrangements and orderings.

Gender, Biological Sex, and the Soul

In the world? Let me get specific here, because you're mentioning something that I think is fairly interesting. One of the right-wing critiques of the gender ideology that we see around us is that, hey, you're a man or you're a woman based upon the fact that you have certain chromosomes or certain parts of your body, and the retort, of course, from the transgender lobby, I guess, but that whole LGBT spectrum is that the people who advocate for these deviancies want to say that, no, actually, if you experience life in a certain way, that determines who you are, and so that becomes this interface, it seems like, between your experience and the experience of others is what makes you who you are.

So, if you experience life as a woman, then that makes you a woman, whether or not your biology says you are or not. And I think for especially older conservatives who are just watching things change so fast, they think this is silly, this is dumb, this is, obviously, you know who you are because you have certain biological characteristics.

It sounds to me like what you would say is that neither of those are completely true. Obviously, I know we would side with those who say that there's a biological component here, which at least tells us who we are, but we're not reduced to that biology.

So, are souls male and female? I mean, maybe explain that.

Yeah, that's a good question. So, this is a common question that comes up to me, and sort of the view that I hold. I am open to the idea that souls are engendered, but that would have to be based in some way upon biological sex, or it would have to be rooted or related in some way to biological sex.

If we as persons or selves are souls, these sort of stable things that have these properties of, well, consciousness, I think, and I have experiences, and I am who I am in virtue of, well, the soul that I have, the soul that God has given me, the soul that God has created, then there's a sense in which gender only makes sense subjectively in the context of our biological relation, rooted in biological sex.

And I think that is somehow determinative of the gender identity that we do have, that we have been given, that is a created reality itself. It is something that is stable and determinative of who we are, even if there is still a distinction between the soul as determinative of personal identity, I am who I am, and my body that makes me either gendered as male or gendered as female.

But the complex arrangement or the compound arrangement of my soul to my body is an important arrangement that is not something that can be slipped on and off like a hat or like a face mask, as Brian Lowry would talk about our identities.

He would say all our identities, even though he doesn't want to go this far, when he's honest. The other day he was talking to Sean Carroll on his podcast. Sean Carroll is a famous physicist who's been largely has challenged any sort of theism or theistic idea of God and persons.

He says, he says straight when in his honest moment, he's like, I'd like to believe there's a deeper part of me, but really I am just the masks that I put on in society and the meanings that are created from the social constructs of the society around me and the various communities that I walk in.

That's just what I am. He says something to that effect. And biology is certainly not something like that. Biology is something that is given to us from our origins and from the very beginning of our lives.

That is, even if biology isn't permanent in all respects, it doesn't give us, it's insufficient for identifying persons, as I argue in the creation of self, that there is something transcendent about the self that points us to God and necessarily requires that God's action in bringing us about or bringing about these sort of contingent persons or consciousnesses that we are.

There is something about our being created from the very beginning in our bodies in a way that our bodies contribute a determinative identity or a fixed biological identity that cannot be cut off. So the important idea is that when we're thinking about gender, I think there's been this complex ramification from the separation of gender as a social construct from sex as a biological or biologically determinative reality.

And I think from that distinction or even separation of those two ideas, there has been this sort of complex severing of gender from biological sex such that there have been recent attempts to make sense of these as gender as solely a social construct, in which case, if it's severed from its biological context altogether, then it becomes an idea firmly planted in the air, in midair.

There is no objective way to make determinant about your own gender apart from some sort of biological context in which gender originates, it seems to me. So either you have to rely on something like what Brian Leary says is that gender is wholly a social construct that the communities create and give meaning to, or you have to say something like this, which is what many in the transgender community are arguing, that ourselves are wholly separate from our bodies.

And in virtue of that, given that there is no... No, they wouldn't say this, but given that there are no objective ways in which to make determinant gender, gender becomes a wholly autonomous matter that I choose or that I make determinant myself, whatever I choose or want to be.

So, okay, I want to fine tune this to make it crystal clear for everyone in the audience. So biological sex then or gender, would you say, you use the term confer or determinative of, would you say that it accompanies the gender that God gave you or would you say it's determinative of the gender that God gave you?

In other words, is your biology something that... I'm thinking of specifically Jesus after he received a new body and we're going to receive a new body and those bodies, it appears that they are gendered in some way, though they are much different than the ones we have now.

Are these things... Do we look at our biology and say that this determines who I am as far as gender goes or do we look at it and say this reflects.

Who God made me to be? Yeah, well, I think both. I mean, I think the underlying assumption is that this is what God made me to be and it's a gift and we need to take it as a gift because it's a... Well, it's a creational gift and so that's the wider theological context in which we should understand our biology, the world we came into, the family we came into, the society and nation we came into.

That's the wider context that should be treated as a creational gift, I think. So there's a lot of theological sense, I think, that needs... that that makes of our world. What we came into, despite its imperfections, despite the imperfections of our own families, it is a gift given to us by God.

But I think at a philosophical level, I think biology is determinative of gender and apart from that connection, there is no objective way to make sense of or make determinative of gender itself. It becomes a relative idea, relative either to the individual autonomy of the person, wholly divorced from any sort of objective constraints or objective generalities that are given to us in biology or society, or it's wholly determined for us by the social constructs that our society gives to them, to these genders.

So I would say that even if you believe in something like the idea that we are souls, that can persist, that exist in an intermediate state in the way that Jesus seems to when he dies on the cross, his corpse is in the grave and he exists in some form or fashion.

Well, there's different theological positions, but that's irrelevant at this point. And then he's later physically resurrected. There is some sort of connection to his body still, even during the disembodied state, his body left an impression on his soul and gave his soul a structure that is something that cannot be cut off or excised in any obvious way.

And in fact, he is raised again, and it seems that there's a teleological connection between his soul and his body that lends itself to the fact that, yeah, when he's raised again, he's in a similar body.

And in that similar body, it appears he is gendered still.

Biology, Tradition, and the Limits of Gender Theory

So would you agree with Carl Truman then? You mentioned that, well, you didn't say Carl Truman, but you mentioned that you think that there's a sense in which we can create our own identities or the source in the minds of, I guess, the transgender activist types that we can determine in contrast to our biology.

We can say who we are. I know we're talking about gender so much here, but it's kind of the hot topic now. And Carl Truman says basically, like, look, we just got to get back to rooted biology. And I'm sure you probably haven't seen my videos on this, but I've critiqued Truman a little bit on this, at least.

I mean, I agree with his conclusion, but I've said what you said at the beginning, which is that it seems like the people today, at least, who are advocating this thinking are saying it's all a social construct.

It's their experience with other experiences. It doesn't seem like it's an autonomous self thing where they just flip a switch and then that's what they desire. And he uses the example of like free market capitalism where you can just buy whatever car you want.

And that's like gender. You can just buy, you can just take whatever one you want off the lot. And I've said, well, if you listen to these guys, it doesn't seem like that's what they're saying. They're not saying you have the power in yourself to just determine exactly who you are.

It sounds like there has to be some kind of a social interaction here. And maybe that explains why there's such a push for social recognition, because that's part of why they, in order to overcome the rootedness, the fixed idea of there being a gender to make it malleable, they seem to want to make sure society reinforces this malleability.

And that will, I guess, bolster their faith or their idea that everyone agrees with this, therefore it must be the case. So I'm just curious, I'm sure you've read his book. I mean, do you agree with his notion of the problem and solution here?

The problem being it's the autonomous self, the solution being rooted biology, or do you think.

Differently about that? I am. Honestly, I don't know. I haven't read his book, so I don't know the details of his position. I would say, and I do listen to your show quite often. I haven't listened to that particular show, but maybe I should.

I would say that there is a, we got to get back, I think we need to step back here a little bit. I think in terms of biology, I don't understand biology itself in a reductive materialistic way. I don't take it in that way.

I don't take the biology that we have in a mechanistic way that you might take someone like Descartes to affirm, and later appropriations of Rene Descartes as a sort of biological mechanism that's merely mapped onto sort of geometry and quantified, or can be understood in terms of quantities solely.

I think the biology that we do have has a teleology of some sort, a perpissiveness, in other words, that the ancients and most of the reform scholastics seem to have held, and that biology is somehow functionally fitted for the soul.

While there is a distinction to be made between social gender orderings and social gender behaviors, certainly there's a distinction to be made. I still think that the social gender orderings is rooted in some way in the biology, but that biology is not physically reductionistic.

That biology is somehow transcendent and has meaning. There's a whole meaningful structure that's created and given to us by God in which we interact in the world in marriage and with the opposite sex as well as the same sex.

There's certain governing principles that are related to our biology. There is a way in which you can conceivably make a distinction between social behaviors and biology. When you start introducing that in a philosophical or an ideological way, it's easy to take one and and make that primary over the other.

I think that can be dangerous. I would say that there are traditional norms that we've been comfortable with throughout history of how gender socially interacts. In some form or fashion, it is related to or rooted in the biological context, which has a wider and expansive transcendent context that provides a teleology for social interaction.

Those cannot be divorced. I think it's helpful. Maybe you can shed light briefly on me or help me place Truman's view. I think it is helpful to point back to the biological sex as somehow the rooted context in which we understand social dynamics and how we as gendered beings interact.

With one another. I'm sorry. I wouldn't have brought up Truman if I knew you hadn't read.

His book, so it's not fair for me. I probably should have read it. I've been told to read it.

Several times. Yeah, I did too. There's actually a shorter one now you can get if you want to read it. I think I had four or five people tell me, you have to read this, you have to read this. Then I read it and I was like, I mean, okay.

It's one of those books, like Stephen's book came out and everyone gave it a negative review, it seemed like. Not everyone, but most people. All the major evangelical outlets didn't like it. They felt the need to tell everyone that.

With Truman's book, the same group said, we feel the need to tell everyone that this is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I read it and I thought there was some good nuggets in it, but overall, I just thought his argument was a little, I guess, weak on that.

I'm trying to pinpoint the difference. I don't want to spend all the time here because I know there's a lot more to your book than this idea of the self as it pertains to gender, but because it is the big debate, it sounds to me like what you're saying is the reform scholastics and I guess the reformers would have, when they looked at this idea of gender, whenever they did in Augustine, they would have said that there is something biologically rooted about it, but it's not the biological rootedness of the evolutionary biologist who says that everything is determined by genetics.

You're saying, no, it's not that. There is a deeper spiritual meaning to your biology, essentially. I think that's a very important point to make that you can't find really common cause, at least not much common cause with the evolutionists.

There are some, like Sam Harris wants to critique the transgender stuff by saying, well, this is ridiculous. Of course, we evolved to the point of, for the sake of survival, having these two genders, which create children and nurture them.

If you deny that, you're just denying science. I think a conservative can hear that critique and think, oh, that sounds good. I want to oppose the transgender stuff, but they don't realize, okay, what you're buying into this notion that's against what we believe as Christians about the self.

That's where I'm trying to explore here. I guess right now is that distinction of what you're trying to say, no, biology is important, which I agree with you, but it's not everything. It's not determinative of everything.

I don't know.

If you have any comment on that, but that's where I'm getting at. Yeah, I think that's right. So I would say that there are social behaviors, there are social orderings that are important, and in some way, they are connected and rooted in a biological context, but that is not physically reductionistic.

There is a certain teleological relation between the body that we have and the character or behaviors that we have as human beings as well and how we interact with one another. And I think no matter what you think about the natural law views or natural law tradition, I think the natural law tradition can help us kind of gain a grasp of this and how we can get our feet planted a little bit more.

There is a sense in which morality and social behavior is related to our biological context and how we interact in our bodies, and I think that in some ways, like so many natural law theorists would argue, there is something about our sociality that is teleological to our bodies and that we can only have access to by way of revelation as well as practiced revelation in terms of the liturgies and the practices that are given to us in scripture.

And I think in order to get our feet established even more firmly, as we move away from a sort of biblical worldview or even the natural law tradition or what have you, and we start overemphasizing maybe biology.

Biology is helpful in terms of saying determinatively, yeah, I think this is kind of what you're getting at, and I think this is an itch that needs to be scratched more and made sense of if we're going to get back to biblical morality, even traditional morality and gender roles and more controversial ideas about how genders should interact with one another, how marriages should be.

We need to think more about how these are related. You have egalitarians who will firmly argue something like we're arguing here, that gender is rooted biologically, if we're going to make any sense out of gender at all.

We need to do that. That's important. That's good. I agree with them. But then when it comes to everything else, everything else is in terms of our interactions and our social behaviors is up for grabs, and there isn't any sort of way to motivate how it is that we think about the richer context in which our biologies play a role in gender and gender performance or gender social performances and how we interact with one another.

I didn't know we were going to go down this line, but it's an interesting line. No, no, that's fine. It's important. I think it's really interesting and important. I just want to say that I don't have anything prepared here.

It is something that I've thought about, but as I interact with my egalitarian friends, there's almost this sharp separation and divorce between social behaviors and social interactions and biology at one level, and at another level, they're willing to use biology to make sense of or at least to argue against the transgender activist and the LGBT community, and complementarians, on the other hand, are willing to say something a little bit more, like, oh, well, there's implications, more implications from our biology that we need to thicken up a bit to make sense of these sorts of things, and we don't need to just throw all of tradition out and all traditional gender roles out, because there's probably something within the wisdom of that of the wider tradition that we need to retrieve in order to make sense of how it is that we behave together as gendered beings and these sorts of things, and so we can't sharply separate those things and just say everything in terms of social behavior is up for grabs.

So it's okay, even if I accept that my daughter is both biologically female, but also gendered female, it wouldn't be up for grabs that she could start dressing in ways that look like a man, or that if I had a boy, that he could start wearing dresses, right?

Those things are not up for grabs.

Race, Ethnicity, and Social Construction

So let me back off the gender thing, and let's talk about maybe a wider conception. We could use any number of examples, perhaps race is another, ethnicity is another category in this. There does seem to be some truth to the idea that your community does confer certain responsibilities or obligations you're born into, right?

And you pick up these patterns, and then we call these patterns, at least in part, culture, that you have traditions and in different ways of living with one another that, let's say, are distinct. Right now, if I were to go an hour and 45 minutes south, and I were to walk into Harlem, New York or something, I would probably stick out, right?

Because of the way I look, but there's other things that one of the reasons, I guess, that people will look at me and think, okay, he's different, is because I'm also going to act differently. Presented with similar circumstances, I will perhaps be more cautious or be less cautious or be more forgiving or be less forgiving or be more polite or be less polite, depending on what's presented before me.

And that is based on what I'm used to, based on my experience in this world. This has become, I think, for BLM and CRT advocates, this has become something I think they really want to drive home, is that race is a social construct.

You are on this power dynamic chart, and you can even map it out, and that this power level, I guess, is what determines a large part of who you are. And of course, I think with intersectionality, actually, it's comprehensive, because you can take all the different factors of who you are and chart them.

And so, it's actually, I mean, although it's supposed to be postmodern, it seems like, actually, it is this attempt to kind of bring it into this scientific grid, almost, that we can look at these things in almost an experimental way, and we can determine who someone is based upon a number of these different factors and reduce someone to those things.

And they all have to do with social experience, right? Well, the truth in that seems to be that, well, yeah, I mean, I am born into a community with certain obligations. There is a culture, it seems to parallel or correspond in some way to ethnicity.

And I think that's just because different families are different. But obviously, that's wrong. It's wrong to say that that's all you are, is these experiences that you have, especially experiences of being oppressed or oppressing.

So, yeah, I would just be curious if you could address that, because I see that as the second wing today. You have the gender issues, but then they're using the same kind of logic when it comes to ethnicity or race.

And your experiences determine who you are. You must have this certain experience, even if you have the biology, let's say, but you don't have the experience and you're a Clarence Thomas or something, you don't qualify.

So, experience.

Is the most important thing. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, I think there are a lot of parodies between the logic used in the LGBT community and the race community, as you mentioned. Of course, I mean, this has been a common sort of tactic of the LGBT community to sort of capitalize on race, right, as we know, and the racial discussions, as well as the wins in the debates on racism and these sorts of things.

So, that's been a common tactic. Although, I mean, obviously, in terms of the racial wins and those sorts of things, conservatives, conservative black people, as well, would say that their LGBT community is using that illicitly.

Yeah, but this whole idea of experience, I think this is interesting. I think you're picking up on something here. Yeah, I think, so, I recently wrote this article, and of all the articles I've written, it's been one of the hardest ones to publish, and it's on race.

I haven't written anything publicly on race, but I think there's a complex set of issues here and how we think about racial identity or ethnic identity, if you make a distinction there. There's lots of distinctions.

Obviously, Steve Wolf, in his book, he makes a distinction between ethnicity and race, and although he was hammered as basically being a racist, but if you read him, it's quite clear he's saying that, at least in our ethnic context, it's multiracial.

But anyway, the, yeah, there are these complex sort of facets of the discussion, and so, in my article, I'm actually trying to be very neutral. Now, I have very, you know, stronger commitments, but I'm trying to be very neutral in just laying out sort of what do we mean by race, racial identity, or ethnic identity, and then also what are the theological implications that follow from that or the questions that follow from that.

Nobody's asking that. All the racial experts, and I cite some of the literature, do conflate these various views. Of course, we might say that race is totally irrelevant and just being radical individualists, as some have argued, in which case this discussion is not all that important, but there is a complex sort of interrelation between what we mean by racial identity as a biological reality, as a social reality, or as a social construction in some ways, and where it is that we derive our objectivity on these issues.

There's a complex interrelationship between most of the views that are out there, if they're even articulated very clearly, which most racial discussions are not very clear, at least doesn't seem to be very clear to me, especially the pop-level discussions.

If we take race to be a real entity or property of persons, a real feature of their identity, then there's kind of two broad camps of views, and that is that it is some sort of biological reality, whether you take that in the genetic direction or the genealogical direction, and then there's the kind of more social constructivist view, which you might say, well, social constructions still have a sort of, there's still a realism to them in some ways.

They're not like something, and to varying degrees, like I said before, in terms of our narrative identity, some narrative identities have a deeper impression on us and have shaped us in deeper ways that we can't sort of like, we can't just kind of take on and off a hat.

It's not like that. It's something that's more deeply aggressive in our psyche and in our social behaviors. But I think what you're getting at now is that experience has become my individual experience in my interacting with others, the other has become also almost kind of the primary adjudication between who I am and how I determine who I am.