The
following comes from an Evangelical Protestant philosopher (at the time, he was
assistant professor of philosophy at Wheaton College). This is important as
many Trinitarian apologists tend to dodge the definition of "person"
vis-a-vis Trinitarian theology:
What is a
person?
What is a person? That question cannot be
adequately answered in a few pages. Nevertheless in ordinary life the term is
used with at least some measure of understanding, and it is possible to single
out some of the concepts that are crucial to the notion of personhood.
Persons are first of all agents. They are beings who make choices and then act on those decisions. Persons are also conscious. Though they sometimes act
blindly or unconsciously, they possess a degree of intellectual awareness, including
that special type of reflective awareness usually referred to as self-conciousness.
Persons are hardly to be thought of as mere
(purely rational) thinking machines, however, for they are not always rational
in their behavior. In fact their acts seem to stem more from what they value than from what they know. Persons
desire, love, want, wish, dislike, abhor and generally adopt a multitude of
caring attitudes towards a complex variety of things.
Persons, moreover, act for certain purposes and goals, and they often
defend their acts by citing reasons
of various sorts. Persons think of at least some of their decisions and act as free, and they are held to be responsible for those acts. As
responsible agents, persons are usually regarded as unique individuals with a
measure of autonomy. But this individuality hardly precludes their involvement
in larger groups. In fact, to understand a person’s individuality, we usually
think of him in terms of the communities of
which he is a part, and which certainly are in some sense part of him.
Despite all this complexity, persons are
nonetheless thought of a possessing an essential unity and continunity.
Not only is a person considered to be unified at any one moment; a person is usually
even thought to be in some sense essentially the same person that he was in the
past and will be in the future. These key concepts—action, choice, consciousness,
values, freedom, reasons, purpose, responsibility, sociality, unity—define for
us a conceptual framework or word-picture of man that we shall call the image
of the personal.
This personalistic framework permeates our
everyday understanding of ourselves and our social relationship. Its importance
can hardly be overestimated. Many of our institutions, especially the older,
more tradition-bound ones such as marriage and courtship, are tied very closely
to the image of the personal and would no doubt change radically or perhaps
even perish were that image to cease to be regarded as true. Others, such as
education, are even now in ferment as older views of the person come into
question, undermining traditional assumptions about how people learn and the
nature of learning itself. The concept of a person is also central to our moral
traditions; to seriously abandon the personalistic framework would necessitate
fundamental changes in the way we treat each other, or at the very least a
change in the way we talk about and justify that behavior. (C. Stephen Evans, Preserving the Person: A Look at the Human Sciences
[Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1977], 10-11, italics in original)
