I have uploaded A Modern Understanding of Human Being, a book about human being from a viewpoint of a Christian accepting and making some sense of modern empirical knowledge.
In this book, I lay a foundation by advocating respect for empirical reality, the reality into which we are born and in which we develop. Moreover, I argue from both tradition and modern empirical science that the human mind is an entity which is shaped in response to our environments, to the world at a higher level, or even to Creation as a whole. In this way of thought, a human mind is an encapsulation of reality so far as we actively perceive it and actively respond to it. When we realize this is the nature of our minds, we can better develop them and we can begin to see those relationships, such as those which largely make up our minds, is primary over stuff. Relationships make stuff and shape stuff. God’s love creates contingent being and His love continues to shape being right to the concrete realm of things. We can play our role in shaping that concrete realm of things with our active love and our other forms of relationships, some of which shape entities of God’s Creation into evil forms.
In this book, I extend this understanding of thinking to human feelings and acts. A more complete understanding of reality comes from considering human nature in light of those three aspects: mind, heart, and hands. We need thought both practical and abstract, feelings which are properly disciplined for the moral ordering of our lives, and actions toward an ordered life and an ordered relationship with the physical realms of Creation. Mind, heart, and hands.
The final part of the book is a presentation of my understanding of salvation as an enfolding into the Body of Christ by which we remain our individual selves, perfected and completed as much as possible for such creatures as we are, but we’ll also be fully the Body of Christ in the small and that Body will be each of us in the large, though mostly the Body will be Jesus Christ. We are saved as individual and communal human beings, as our own selves and as members of our families and as members of our nations and as members of our occupational groups and so forth, members, that is, of the Body of Christ. This can be readily compared to the Trinitarian doctrine where Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three divine Persons but are one God. The saved will be a multitude of human persons but we’ll be one Body of Christ.