IDENTITY IN BEING BECOMING, BECOMING BEING

After posting Genesis Revisited, I woke on the morning of Christmas Eve 2020 with thoughts on Being Becoming, Becoming Being. To my surprise, I felt that I could suddenly string and express into words my personal take on the being becoming of Triune God and being becoming of a human being.
 
For the past forty-five years or so, I have long been grappling as to whether there is authenticity in the personality or identity of a human being or God for that matter, whether the ‘I’ and ‘me’ is authentic and real. If so, who am I? What is Identity? What is my being?
 
By and large, humans go through life embracing, accepting or even presuming that there is an authentic ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘you’. This is fundamentally essential to live life as we experience it and relate one to another in this plane and dimension.
 
We do not live life in complete isolation from everything. In each and every moment we are in continual relationship to every other existence that is apart from ourselves, in time and space, in this reality.
 
WE ARE NOT ALONE.
 
As such, for me, who and what I am, my identity, may be understood and defined as a ‘being’ of the sum of all my relationships.
 
An analogy of this, on a more minute and personal scale, can be better understood through a brief examination of the human body.
 
From an elemental perspective, “Almost 99% of the mass of the human body is made up of six elements: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. Only about 0.85% is composed of another five elements: potassium, sulphur, sodium, chlorine, and magnesium. All 11 are necessary for life. The remaining elements are trace elements, of which more than a dozen are thought on the basis of good evidence to be necessary for life. All of the mass of the trace elements put together (less than 10 grams for a human body) do not add up to the body mass of magnesium, the least common of the 11 non-trace elements.”[1]
 
In terms of molecules, the human body is made up of:
 

• Water
• Proteins – including those of hair, connective tissue, etc.
• Fats (or lipids)
• Hydroxyapatite in bones
• Carbohydrates such as glycogen and glucose
• DNA
• Dissolved inorganic ions such as sodium, potassium, chloride, bicarbonate, phosphate
• Gases such as oxygen, carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide, hydrogen, carbon monoxide, acetaldehyde, formaldehyde, methanethiol. These may be dissolved or present in the gases in the lungs or intestines. Ethane and pentane are produced by oxygen free radicals.
• Many other small molecules, such as amino acids, fatty acids, nucleobases, nucleosides, nucleotides, vitamins, 

cofactors.

• Free radicals such as superoxide, hydroxyl, and hydroperoxyl.[2]

 
Our bodies also contain trillions of bacteria defining who we are and our wellbeing.
 
Any fluctuation in elemental, molecular or bacteria composition in our body will have a consequential, however minute, effect on us. As the elemental, chemical and bacterial components of the body changes moment by moment, the complete ‘who’ and ‘what’ we are undergo similar changes. These changes are essential and fundamental for the process of growth and decay in our lives.
 
The newborn babe at childbirth will grow into a young person, who will eventually grow old and die. Such is the nature of life and being that is ours.
 
Yet through all this, as humans, we continue to identify who we are and our being primarily through the human body of our birth till our death. Who and what we are seem to be intrinsically jointly and severally linked to, with, in, into and through these changes, in that the growth and decay of the moments, though separate and specific events, are but expressions of the dynamic continuum of identity. For we are not static, beings frozen in time, space and dimension, without the ability of growth, decay or self-renewal.
 
Rather we are dynamic beings in our becoming and becoming in our beings, in and as the sum of all our relationships
 
It is written in Genesis 1:26,27  “Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness,[3]….. So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.[4]”
 
Humans were created in the image of God. As such, reflections and hazy glimpses as to Who and What Divinity is, can inherently be found, within us as human beings. If so, could this being in becoming and becoming in being, this identity, also be within the Nature and Being of Triune Divine?
 
As humans, we tend to absolutise perfection. In so doing we are inclined to view absolute perfection as something that cannot change. For change seems to suggest that the thing that is absolutely perfect is no longer that which is absolutely perfect. Change implies a motion that makes that which is absolutely perfect, less or better than what it was before the change. In so doing, this, our notion of absolute perfection, carries within it an inherent element of unchanging nature and being.
 
Humans, by and large, ascribe absolute perfection to the nature and being of God. As such, the nature and being of God must necessarily, also, be unchanging. For if God can change, then God would not be absolutely perfect. For change would mean that, that which was, is now lesser or better than what it had been, thereby negating, this, our notion of absolute perfection. Therefore, one of the essential attributes of God is that God must be, and is completely unchanging, in nature and being.
 
But this cannot possibly be.


[1] Wikipedia: Composition of human body under Elements.

[2] Wikipedia: Composition of human body under Molecules

[3] Genesis 1:26(a) New International Version

[4] Genesis 1:27 New International Version

non-For God to be unchanging means that God is a State of Staticity. Staticity means a state of inactive equilibrium, of stagnation, inactivity, motionlessness.
 
Triune God creates. Creation testifies to this. In creating, Triune God did something new that was not there before. There was no creation before. In creating, Triune God became a Creator. Not only that, in creating, dare I say, Triune God had a new experience, that of being a Creator to creation.
 
Creation suggests, if not reveals, that Triune God can have new experiences that were not within Triune Divinity before creation. It also suggests that in becoming Creator, Triune Divinity has grown and added to Eternal Triune experience and relationships.
 
However, having new experiences and relationships do not, in any way, take away or add to the nature of Divinity in the Triune. Rather it expresses the nature and being of Triune Divinity, as that of the ever-changing and unchanging Triune, as the becoming and non-becoming Triune Divine. This dynamism is intrinsically within the Nature and Being of Triune Divinity precisely because God is Triune and not ‘mono’ or singularly one. For, if Triune is Eternal and Divine, then within Triune, Father, Son and Spirit, Divinity, new experiences and relationships would have existed eternally.
 
As stated above, Creation can only suggest a revelation of this.
 
The man Christ Jesus, God become human, the Incarnate Son, is the complete revelation to creation and humanity as to the Identity of Triune Divinity and authentic identity of a human being. More than that, Jesus the Christ is also the Way, Truth and Life, of the Where and How the Divine Nature and Being of Triune God is joined to, interacts in and authentically relate with us, humans in nature and being, creatures made in the image and likeness of Triune Divinity.
 
This is also what Christ in you, the hope of glory[1] reveals and encompasses.
 
God becoming human, not only authenticates human identity in being becoming-becoming being in the sum of all our relationships, but also allows the potential[2] of eternity[3] (eternal life) set in the human heart[4], to come to fruition and realised, with, through and in the man, Christ Jesus.
 
For, “Anyone who is joined to Christ is a new being; the old is gone, the new has come.”[5] In Christ, Triune Divinity is also a new Being, the old is gone, Triune New Identity has been realised.
 
Being Becoming-becoming being in Christ, both God and humanity are now joined in this new dynamic identity of Christ, with Triune Divine and humanity both jointly and severally enabled to participate in each other’s nature, being and the sum of all of each other’s relationship.
 
Identity, I believe, is also inclusive of non-being and non-becoming, as alluded earlier as "the becoming and non-becoming Triune Divine. I believe that these are inherent within Triune Divinity, created humanity and the person of Christ. I will address this in a later post.


[1]Romans 8:20-21:  “For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it in hope, that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.” NIV see footnote[h]
Colossians 1:26-27: “the mystery that has been kept hidden for ages and generations, but is now disclosed to the Lord’s people. To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” NIV

[2] Hope of Romans 8:20 and Colossians 1:27

[3] John 17:3 ‘life eternal’

[4] Ecclesiastes 3:11 “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” NIV

[5] Colossians 2:17 Good News Translation. ESV “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.”