Saturday, July 20, 2019

C. Stephen Evans on the Definition of a "Person"


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)