Striving for Human Excellence
While accepting that you are still a fallen sinner
What Christians need in a time of increasing artificiality (AI) is to lean into their humanity, into their distinctly human excellence. Human excellence, what I call magnanimity To Live Well, doesn’t mean perfectibility, but rather our innate capacity for greatness as God designed us, which shall be different based on each individual. But the remarkable thing is that every human being is created for their own kind of excellence, endowed by their Creator with gifts, skills, and talents to exercise for his glory and the good of their neighbor. We should strive to grow in these areas as well as in universal excellences like in kindness to others, in generosity, in grace, in peace, in the virtues, in the Fruits of the Spirit, all so that we can honor God and love our neighbor more. The goal is not to earn God’s favor or build an identity or become “good enough” for anything in particular, but to be faithful to God by living into what we were created to be: “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10). That’s all we are doing, walking in the good works which God created for us beforehand.
But this raises a number of challenges: How is this different from optimizing or hustle culture or lifehacking? How do we avoid works righteousness? And how does this account for our sin nature? In other words, can you have a distinctly Protestant Christian Humanism that acknowledges the role of sin and still calls us to pursue our human potential in Christ?
I believe the answer is yes. Here’s how.
