What Paul Sensed About Being Human
I'm reading for my Bible and poetry class on Versed. It's Sunday morning, and I have my composition book out, Sharpie S-Gel at the quick.
I'm somewhere in Rome. It's sometime in the middle of the 1st century.
The letter is in Greek. David Bentley Hart is translating Paul, who writes:
"Therefore I implore you, brothers, by God's mercies, to present your bodies as a living, holy, acceptable sacrifice to God, your rational worship; And do not be configured to this age, but be transformed by renewal of the intellect, so you may test the will of God, which is good and acceptable and perfect." (Romans 12:1-2)
I'd been studying classical rhetorical anthropology, how the ancient Greeks and Romans understood human personhood via four dimensions:
Language, Time, Bodies, and Relation.
Paul, naturally and seemingly without premeditation, is hitting all four.
He is identifying himself as one teacher in an emerging culture of people who had been influenced by another teacher who was no longer here, writing from somewhere around Corinth to somewhere in Rome to people he may or may not have ever met or even known second-hand through anyone else, who also somehow were following “the Way” of this now-absent teacher, before any of the Gospel accounts had been written, trying to meet them where they were and attempting to work with them to organize their growing movement, a movement which for some couple centuries would be persecuted to varying degrees.
And I am reading him two thousand years later, in North America, a couple of centuries after a Republic had been founded on the assets of stolen land, in which what had become the State Religion in Rome (which now no longer exists) has become a fragmented kind of de facto religion almost everywhere around me, although no two people will ever really sound like they’re agreeing on what it means to be what is now called “Christian,” without basically citing a line of poetry and never giving a coherent explication.
I cannot be transformed without understanding these dimensions. Obviously, there’s language (and so much of it! and so many kinds!), without which there’d be no speaking or writing. And how long or short my expression and, perhaps most importantly, when it hits, when the speech or piece is being heard or read, and how its themes relate to the past and the future—this defines the context for you, you in your body, who’s reading this right now. And my body, how I treat it and how you treat yours, what my habit patterns tend to be, how I grow visibly emphatic here and nervous here (and, again, how all these things relate to you), is my instrument. And in that understanding of you, in the types of phrases or examples I choose, in my suspicions about your assumptions (which may or may not be challenged), and in whether I’m trustworthy, etc. etc. define our relation.
Language — We're creatures of logos. We think in words, organize reality through speech, make meaning through articulation. This isn't optional or cultural—it's constitutive. You can't be human without language.
Time — We exist in temporal succession. We remember, we anticipate, we're always caught between past and future. We age. We change. We're shaped by history and oriented toward what's coming.
Bodies — Whatever else we are, we're material. We occupy space. We get tired. We need food, rest, care. Any account of human existence that ignores embodiment isn't describing humans—it's describing abstractions.
Relation — We don't exist in isolation. We're formed by relationships, embedded in communities, constituted by our connections. The solitary individual is a philosophical fiction. Actual humans are always already relational.
These aren’t rhetorical devices. They’re observations about reality. The Greek and Roman thinkers got something right: you can’t give a complete account of human existence without addressing all four dimensions.
Paul is not writing a treatise on rhetorical anthropology. He's making an urgent theological argument about transformation. He's telling the Christians in Rome: offer yourselves to God, don't conform to this age, be transformed by renewal of your mind.
And notice what happens. In two verses, Paul naturally touches all four dimensions:
Time: “This age” (tō aiōni toutō) versus the age to come. You exist in temporal succession, caught between two ages. Paul commands you not to let this particular era—with its patterns, assumptions, and configurations—shape your form. The transformation happens now, continuously (the present imperative “be transformed” implies ongoing action). You’re not waiting for some future eschatological rescue. The renewal is happening in ordinary time, day by day.
Bodies: “Present your bodies” (parastēsai ta sōmata hymōn)—not your souls, not your good intentions, your actual flesh. The site where sacrifice happens is material, physical, vulnerable. Paul knows what he’s asking. A living sacrifice means your embodied presence in the world, the hands that type comments, the knees that kneel at Mass, the eyes that read Scripture with a Sharpie in hand.
This is why Hart’s translation hits so hard: you can’t spiritualize your way out of the body. The transformation Paul describes requires your whole embodied self showing up in space and time.
The “renewal of the intellect” Paul describes leads to testing “the will of God”—I’m in ongoing dialogue with divine intention, discerning together what’s “good and acceptable and perfect.” My transformation happens in relation to God, in relation to the community, embedded in the actual relationships that constitute my life.
The Greek and Roman rhetors were right about what humans are. Paul agrees—but he redirects it. You don't transcend these dimensions through transformation. You reorient them toward God.
Transformation and Renewal
This matters because it means transformation isn't some mystical extraction from ordinary existence. It's the reorientation of what you already are.
When I was drinking heavily, all four dimensions were oriented one way—toward destruction, resentment, self-medication. That's not because I was following some dark rhetorical framework. It's because humans are linguistic, temporal, embodied, and relational creatures, and mine were all aimed at the wrong things.
That was one configuration. One orientation of the four dimensions that constitute human existence.
Now—slowly, imperfectly, one day at a time—those same four dimensions are being reoriented.
None of this is mystical or abstract. It's what transformation actually looks like when it happens to a creature who is linguistic, temporal, embodied, and relational. Paul knew what he was talking about. The Greek and Roman rhetors knew what humans are. And transformation, when it's real, touches all four dimensions—because there's no other way to transform a human being.
Paul reinforces this knowledge, and gives it a conceptual aim: Present my body. Renew my intellect. Test the will of God.
It happens in my words and deeds, over time, in my flesh, in relation to others. Not because that's a clever rhetorical structure, but because that's what it means to be human—and transformation, when it's real, transforms the whole person.
And here I am, as are you. And, as ever, I am grateful for this experience, this opportunity.
Thanks be to God.
Appreciatively,
Aaron