Those People

Sometimes I will exclaim, when dealing with irritating and difficult people on the phone, “What’s wrong with these people?” Actually I do this a lot, not just on the other end of the phone, but in the face of this or that author, car driver, or person standing ahead of me in the cashier’s line. My wife admonishes me: Nobody is one of “those people.” You’re slipping into the realm of the collective slur. It’s morally sloppy and morally corrupting. What do you really know about that person?

She’s right: My irritation often slides into a widening pool of anger that pushes others into a “kind.” “Those people” who work at insurance companies; “those people” who work for the airlines, traffic police, online retail, university administrations, ecclesial bureaucrats, Congress, and on and on. My little world becomes populated by a series of amorphous enemies, literally “peopled” by those I meet and speak with every day whom I have transformed into antagonists to my well-being. I’m exaggerating. But only a little.

For years I have resisted the use of “they” as a singular pronoun by my students. “When someone trips on the sidewalk in front of you, help them up.” “When God heals someone, they are moved to thanks.” When I read this use of “they,” my always-on cerebral grammar check sets off a beeping alarm. The main reason for this pronominal pluralizing of a singular referent has been the push, over the past few decades, for non-gender-specific language. The contortions or clunky oddities adopted to avoid gender-specific language annoy me. But I’ve given in to the practice. I was finally convinced by the grammar-as-use argument—what is “correct” speech is constituted by how people actually talk. I’ve also had to bow before historical arguments that show that the use of “they” as a singular pronoun is in fact venerable in English. These days the Chicago Manual of Style and many other arbiters of common speech agree on the permitted use of the singular “they.” One of Wikipedia’s more scintillating articles is on the topic. I submit!

But leave usage aside. I remain worried about the interchange of singulars and plurals on a more metaphysical plane. Collectives and individuals are not the same. And make no mistake, we do live in a world where the two have been blurred. The created particularities of human persons (along with other creatures) have become malleable features for manipulation or dismissal. The queer and transgender movements have decreed that there are no longer to be “he’s” or “she’s.” This imperative is not simply a matter of respecting personal self-identity; rather, self-identity has been swallowed by the realm of collective descriptions. We become “kinds” qualified by whimsical accidents, defined according to the variables of human desire or hopelessness. 

It’s mostly hopelessness today. We no longer trust in the particular goodness of the specificities of the creaturely world, of this or that person, of this or that hill, or this or that bird. Each element of God’s world gets shoveled into new categories of being in which individuals melt away into properties: hominids, ecosystems, or, worse, threadbare political categories of workers, capitalists, the poor, the rich, the marginalized, and the powerful. Every “singular” is nothing but a shifting “they.” 

This is why the scriptural account of Adam and Eve is so important. There is a modern tendency to see these names as, at root, designating a class of being: the Human Being (Adam), or the abstracted process of generation (Eve, mother of the “living” [Gen. 3:20]). By this reading, the creation stories of Genesis are seen as “symbols” of some vaguely human characteristics, placeholders for a general ordering of biological form.

We should resist this modern perspective. Yes, St. Paul himself might seem guilty of translating individuals into kinds in his discussions of “two Adams” (see 1 Cor. 15), one from the earth (mortal), one from heaven (immortal). But did Paul in fact understand the First Adam as the human “kind” and thus the Second Adam as another, more divine “kind” (the New Human Being)? Many Christians have acted as if this were the case. That assumption has led to a peculiarly Christian form of hopelessness, stoking expectations for a “history of the human race” that heads to redemption. But the world’s pain contradicts such an expectation. Things are not getting better and better. The resulting disappointment has directed Christian hope away from life here to a life somewhere else. Individuals bound to the Collective Adam in “this life” are miserable; our only hope is in the plural collective of another world, a “glorified humanity.” We hear this language a lot from theologians.

Paul and other traditional Christian thinkers, such as Augustine, do not support thinking of “kinds,” mortal or immortal, created or glorified. They treated the category “human” as a decidedly historical, singular, and genealogical given. The Adam of Genesis 1–4 is an individual person with choices, feelings, sorrows, labor, hopes, and his own mortality. It is this set of singular realities and experiences that is then taken up—in time, in specific moments—by individuals after Adam, by his and Eve’s actual children. An individual woman in childbirth and this or that man in the field cry out in travail and sink under the weight of toil, not “humanity.” It is not “these people,” but rather actual people, singular individuals, who join together in matrimony on this or that day. Each lives, yes, “his” or “her” life. Hence, the burgeoning “begats” of the Bible: Adam begat Seth; and Seth begat Enos and other sons and daughters, each in turn begetting this one and that.

When Paul speaks of the “First Adam,” he does so “typically” (Rom. 5:14). A scriptural “type” is not a collective. A type has existence in a singular fashion, which then God somehow applies to another singular: David lives in a particular way, and God applies the contours and events of his life to Jesus. Adam is a “type” only insofar as she or he, you or I, live under the governance of the particularity of the first man. He fell; we fall. He begets; we beget. And, we might add, there is no Second Adam, no “Christ,” without the singular individuals whom he has created and decisively encountered, conforming each to himself. The Second Adam has a name, Jesus, and a city, Nazareth. He, the Singular Him who is Lord—not “the divine,” or some other abstraction—meets each of us in our singularity. That encounter, and not any account of Homo sapiens, discloses the fullness of what it means to be “human.”

Particular people and “those people”: This kind of discussion can (unhelpfully) stray into philosophical debates over realism and nominalism, and the latter’s role in the collapse of the West (a cottage industry in intellectual history). There is no need to go down that road. Scriptural “types” or “figures”—Adam, Eve, Ruth, David—bridge the divide between universals and named individuals by locating both in God’s Word, in whom and by whom all real individuals are conformed to God’s specific purposes. Again, we are most who we truly are—both as human beings and discrete individuals—in Christ. God has not made vague groups. He and she, you and I, are God’s singular objects of creation “according to His Word.” Only thus are we the objects of God’s care, love, calling, demand, judgment, and final reordering in the specifically scriptural way that turns us each to the other and to God, just here, just now. Such is the beautiful and wondrous world, crystalline in its unique details, yet comprehended in the single ordering embrace of the singular God upon whose name we call (Gen. 4:26).

My wife’s admonition presses in a positive direction. It turns out that I am “those people” (Adam); but those people are God’s (Ps. 144:3); and God is the God of each. Yes, there are “kinds,” groups, and categories that have a collective character—a “they.” Israel is a “they” beloved by God, but a “they” because (as Christians understand) created in the singular Jesus. And God knows each of its members from before his or her appearance, and like each star in the sky, knows each by name (Ps. 139:16; 147:4). Being called out by name is what marks “humanity.” The singular God, whose name is holy, precedes each of us in every respect. And we are formed in his image: “Behold, the man” (John 19:5); “I am he” (John 18:5).

What is wrong with these people? Nothing that God has not already stamped with his own particular self. Oh, the ill-considered utterances on my vicious tongue! “Therewith bless we God, even the Father; and therewith curse we men, which are made after the similitude of God” (James 3:9).

Ephraim Radner is professor of historical theology at Wycliffe College.

Image by James Cridland, licensed via Creative Commons. Filter added, image cropped.