The French philosopher René Descartes, to whom much of Western thinking is indebted, spent substantial time trying to figure out what exactly he was. In his Meditations on First Philosophy, published in 1641, he pondered this question and came up with an intriguing answer. “What therefore am I?” he wondered. “I am nothing other than a thinking thing.”1
One doesn’t have to be a philosopher to recognize the significance of Descartes’ move. He essentially reduced humanity to its reasoning capacities, prioritizing the intellect over all other aspects of personhood. Human beings, he concluded, are primarily “thinking things” (the Latin term is res cogitans), able to exist apart from the body. As such, he introduced a dramatic dualism between the body and mind (or soul), maintaining that the latter was superior to the former.
Seventh-day Adventists are typically on “high alert” when it comes to anything that smells of “dualism.” Because we believe we exist as a unified whole, where the body and the mind (or soul) can’t exist apart from one another, we often have an allergic reaction to anything that hints at a distinction between the two. Indeed, we often insist that we don’t have a soul, but that we are a soul.
There are many teachings that exist downstream from this idea—from our belief about what happens at death, to the nature and duration of hell, to how we treat our bodies. All of these things are good, important, and valuable.
Yet, on a practical level, it seems like we’re often a lot more Cartesian than we may recognize—which makes sense, since we, like most people who’ve been shaped by Western culture during the past 400 years, are the offspring of Descartes and the Enlightenment he helped nurture.
What does it mean to be human in all our varied dimensions?
Simply put, while Adventism does place significant emphasis on the body and our “health message,” we’re also, at our core, mostly a “thinking person’s” religion. So much of our evangelism and shared worship experiences focus almost exclusively on informing the intellect and engaging the mind. We pride ourselves on being the most biblically informed, the most theologically astute.
To be clear: these things are good and important. We shouldn’t downplay them. I’m simply inviting us to more fully put into practice what our theology says about the nature of human beings: to recognize that we’re so much more than “thinking things.” We’re also “feeling things,” “relational things,” “physical things.”
Indeed, we’re not simply a “brain on legs,” as John Mark Comer says, but people who have emotions, in all their multidimensional splendor, and who are being shaped and formed by many different factors apart from our pure intellect.2 This is, after all, why we celebrate the Incarnation during this season—when the Word became flesh for our redemption.
So what’s the invitation? Let’s explore more fully what it means to be human in all of our varied dimensions—seeking to grow not only intellectually but also emotionally, relationally, physically, and whatever other dimensions we have as humans.3
Then we can truly be people who more fully reflect Christ’s image.
1 René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Michael Moriarty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 20, 32.
2 John Mark Comer, Practicing the Way (Colorado Springs, Colo.: Waterbrook, 2024), p. 86.
3 For more on this, see my book The Table I Long For (Warburton, Victoria, Australia: Signs Publishing, 2021).
