Creatureliness: What It Means to Belong to God’s Creation

When I was young, middle school maybe, my best friend and I had a simple exchange about a surprisingly deep topic: whether humans are animals.

It occurred in the place where many of our conversations happened: 40 feet up a giant white pine which grew in his backyard.

We basically lived in that tree over those summers—so much so that we kept a bucket of “sap soap” under the sink to scrub our hands after our climbs. When it comes to my wonder at creation, that tree—its smell, the feel of its bark, the way I scrambled up its branches until they became too thin to stand on—played a formative role.

As we were swinging among the branches one day, I made a comment implying that we—like the monkeys we were imitating—were animals.

My friend paused his climbing. “We’re not animals,” he said. “We’re humans.”

I responded in the gentle, self-assured fashion of a middle schooler who knows it all. I calmly explained what I had learned in school: that we are primates, that primates are mammals, and that mammals are part of the animal kingdom. Therefore, we are animals.

I’m not sure where the conversation ended. Maybe I convinced him with my simple logic, or perhaps he simply trusted his older friend’s confident response. Or, maybe most likely, we both got bored of the conversation and became more interested in imagining the wild world we looked over from atop the pine tree.

We didn’t know it then, but we’d touched on a question I would keep asking for a long time: What kind of creatures are we? What is humanity’s place in creation?

We Are Animals—But That’s Not the Whole Story

Looking back, our middle school selves couldn’t have known how interesting and nuanced a conversation we had started.

Yes, we are animals, biologically speaking. But we can’t leave it at that. This definition is imperfect on its own—simultaneously too broad and too narrow.

In one sense, it’s too broad because we are a very specific species of animal. We have opposable thumbs, a large neo-cortex, and innumerable other qualities that help to define our species. To get even more granular, we are each individuals that hold distinct memories, feel emotion, sense the world around us, and act in our own way.

On the other hand, “animal” is too small a category. We are alive, which means we also share our history and our being with plants, bacteria and viruses. And we are even shaped by the non-living, yet completely dynamic natural world of rock and water and air.

To be human is to be an animal, but also to be individual (unique!) and to be alive (amongst all life!). To be human is to belong to the created world in all its complexity and in relationship to everything else. This is the essence of creatureliness.

Learning Creatureliness by Observing Creation

When we want to more deeply understand our creatureliness, it makes sense to look around us.

Often, the first things we notice are differences. Nothing else uses tools quite like us. Nothing else leverages language just like we do.

Every species has its own set of distinct characteristics. It’s what makes a species a species. It’s important to spot these points of contrast. They are real, and recognizing our particular strengths can make us better humans.

But when we look a little longer, we begin to see more than just the differences.

We catch similarities that weren’t apparent before. As I learned while on assignment for the Language of God podcast, an octopus—a creature so different from us in so many ways—can identify individual humans, and reach out a tentacle in curiosity that reflects our own. We are not alone in our awareness of the world around us.

We also begin to see things in other creatures that we cannot do and cannot possibly be, like plants turning sunlight into energy and bats creating complex maps of their world through sound.

Bringing these similarities and differences together place us within the context of creation. We see the ways in which we cannot be human without other creatures, and we realize that the development of our species happened in response to everything around us—from the plants which sustain us to the viruses that both harm and help us.

Creatureliness and the Image of God

We are not only defined biologically, but also theologically. We were created, among all our creaturely relatives, in the image of God (Genesis 1:26-27).

And so what is God like?