Kelsey's Life

Having formally sketched the ultimate and proximate settings in which human life is organized in 4A and 5A, in chapter 6, “To Be and Have a Living Body: Meditation on Job 10,” David Kelsey begins to address what human beings are. Kelsey argues that Job’s story of his own “having been born” (Job 10) narrates an account of his birth in two entwined, but distinct ways. These two ways of telling the story of his birth “also tell the story of the birth of every human person” (242). Job’s particular and subtle double-telling of his birth provides resources for a general articulation of two lines of human creatureliness.

The source of Kelsey’s constructive claims are situated in Job’s “contest about wisdom” (241-245). Job’s lament offers two related tracks for Kelsey’s proposal (245). In one story Job tells of his birth from a human mother, while the other tells of being given a living body by God. The difference in the telling is not that God is present in one and absent in another, but rather “the difference lies in the way God is involved in each” (246). The remainder …show more content…
The range of themes demonstrates not only exegetical creativity but also the expansive concerns that can be enfolded in theological anthropology. There is a lot we can talk about here. The second theme (251-255) clarifies the stakes in the language of actual in Kelsey’s collective term “actual living human bodies.” Actual denotes “more than” in distinction from the possibility or potentiality of living human bodies. The third theme (255-257) on God’s equal immediacy and intimacy to human bodies and nonhuman bodies brings us back to questions about the prospects and execution of a non-anthropocentric anthropology. The trick here is to affirm that God relates to different kinds of creatures each according to their own kind and to avoid contrastive statements about God in relation to