Daniel J. Treier, a Protestant theologian noted for his contributions to Christology and theological interpretation of Scripture, died unexpectedly late last year. His former teacher and friend Kevin Vanhoozer wrote a moving tribute to him, writing:
An evangelical theologian to the core, he knew that the goal of life is communion with God. Dan enjoyed spiritual well-being, a healthy relationship—a friendship—with God… even as his bodily health failed, Dan continued to flourish in fellowship with his family, his friends, and his God. He was, in short, one of the healthiest people I’ve ever known, even on the eve of his physical death. It is well with Dan’s soul. He is alive in Christ.
One of my favorite sentences on theological anthropology came from Treier, who wrote in his Introducing Evangelical Theology that “in God’s drama of redemption, humans take center stage: these are the creatures whose nature the Son of God assumed in the incarnation. These are the creatures who can know themselves truly in relation to God” (italics mine).
March 21st, World Down Syndrome Day, is an especially fitting day to contemplate what it means to be a human being. Notably, it is a day to remember something we should already know but almost constantly forget.
Human dignity is not determined by the attainment of physical or intellectual prowess, nor the lack thereof. Human dignity is also not a generalized abstraction. Rather, human beings have a dignity that derives from something — or, better, someone — particular: the eternal Son of God, who took to himself a truly human nature at Christmas. The Athanasian creed concisely explains what this entails, echoing the language and ideas of the council of Chalcedon:
For the right Faith is, that we believe and confess, that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and Man; God, of the Substance of the Father, begotten before the worlds; and Man, of the Substance of his Mother, born in the world; Perfect God and perfect Man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting; Equal to the Father, as touching his Godhead; and inferior to the Father, as touching his Manhood. Who, although he be God and Man, yet he is not two, but one Christ; One, not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of the Manhood into God; One altogether; not by confusion of Substance, but by unity of Person.
Crucially, when “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn 1:14), it was not self-evident to the world that he was, indeed, the Incarnate Word. In the gospels, those who know themselves to be sinners or are otherwise in dire straits recognize who Jesus is. They depart with joy and peace. But those who appear comfortable or otherwise have little sense of their desperate need for a Savior depart from their encounter with Jesus disappointed, angry, or in turmoil.
Similarly, in the epistles of Paul, the saving power and wisdom of God revealed in the cross of Jesus Christ — that we preach “a crucified Messiah” — seems like folly and weakness to the world (1 Cor 1:17–31). It is like the stench of death to those who are perishing, but it is the fragrance of life to those who are being saved (2 Cor 2:14–17). The God-Man did not come in the pomp and comforts of the world. To the contrary, he was expressly tempted by Satan with such a course, but he refused it for the way of the cross (Matt 4:1–11).
Hence, when we contemplate what it means to be a human being, and we follow Treier’s lead that we are the creatures whose nature the Son of God assumed in the incarnation, then we must devote rapt attention to who the Incarnate Son of God is. We must in particular fix our gaze on the quintessential unveiling of the Son: his humiliation and exaltation during Holy Week. Whatever else it means to be a human being, we are those whose nature the eternal Son of God took to himself, whereby he hung upon the cross. Bloodied, mocked, beaten, mistreated, gasping for breath, screaming out a cry of godforsakenness while also pronouncing a cosmic absolution and that all is finished; this one, this crucified man, and not humanity at the peak of our physical and intellectual power, is the archetype after which humanity is patterned, the true “image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15) of which each human person, however great and famous or small and hated, are all a copy and shadow. Vindicated by his resurrection from the dead (cf. Rom 1:2 and 1 Tim 3:16), he vindicates those who are united with him by faith, such that we become participants in his resurrection (Rom 4:25; 6:5).
In countries such as Iceland and Scotland, the overwhelming majority — nearly all — pregnancies are ended when prenatal tests indicate the child has Down Syndrome. In England the rate is as high as 90%, and several mothers of children with Down Syndrome related to the BBC in 2020 just how often they were pressured to terminate their pregnancies. In the United States of America, a 2023 NLM/NIH study of data from the prior decade concluded “systematic review on published literature in the US has estimated that termination rates range from 67% to 85% among the overall population of individuals with a positive prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome.”
This reality should shape the way that pro-natalists argue for the goodness of life. We may, after all, be on the cusp of a new pro-natalist moment: Pro-natalism has long been a concern of conservatives such as Ross Douthat, or Matthew Lee Anderson in his Oxford dissertation. Today, however, the economic implications of an aging global population with significantly declining birth rates worldwide have surprisingly led to pro-natalism becoming a concern for progressives also.
In many ways, the church should welcome and applaud this development. But a unique counter-testimony that the church is able to offer in this moment is that putatively ‘un-productive’ human life is of irreducible worth. Both in the ancient Greco-Roman world of the early Christian centuries, to the sanitized eugenics of modernity, the church’s vocation has been and will continue to be hospitality, even when it proves costly, towards those whom our broader pagan context regards as Lebensunwertes Leben, “life undeserving of life.”
Sometimes, of course, people with significant physical or intellectual disabilities go on to accomplish remarkable things. Everyone should applaud their success. But there are also not a few people with such severe disabilities that they will scarcely live ‘productive’ lives in the crass materialism and totalizing economics of the globalized, neo-liberal order.
Perhaps, even for these most severely disabled human beings, their distinctive vocation and gift, if we can receive it, is an embodied testimony that to be human is not to have the whole of our lives instrumentalized by post-industrial, robot-like productivity. These lives, with all the unique blessings and challenges they entail, precisely by being unproductive in the tyrannical gaze of today’s technocrats, echo our Lord’s dictum that “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mk 2:27).
But as those who worship a crucified and risen Messiah, we should be a vanguard of hospitality for human beings whose irreducible dignity, value, worth, and purpose is determined neither by accomplishment, nor the lack thereof, but by having the very same nature the eternal Son of God took to himself.