“What is man that thou are mindful of him . . . ?” King David, as he stood before the grandeur of God, as He reflected upon God’s handiwork in creation, asked an age-old 
question, with reference to the who of humanity. In this instance, he wasn’t necessarily attempting to peer into the entailments of a theological anthropology, but instead simply standing in awe at the bigness of God relative to God’s compassion for us small little human beings here on the flatland. For the rest of this piece, I want to think about what it means to be human before God. Not from a philosophical or speculative vantage point, but from God’s concrete Self-revelation for us in Jesus Christ.
Philosophers of old, like Francisco Petrarch, impressed the idea that humanity is at its most virtuous, and thus most human, when it is turned into itself; when we live private lives wherein a cultivation of the virtues can obtain; with the result that humanity’s telos can be most realized in and through the developing virtues, the ultimate good. Petrarch, we might say, was a proto-Enlightened modern, in regard to his way of thinking humanity with reference to his turn to the subject attitude. But this isn’t the way Jesus thought of humanity, and its entailments coram Deo (before God). Jesus, as the second person of the Trinity, within the Divine Monarxia, within the processions of God’s eternal life, within the origins of relation within God’s triune life, ecstatically receives His life as the Son in relation to the Father. Likewise, the Father, in return, receives His life as the Father from the Son, as the Son is the Son of the Father; and this implicates the warp and woof of the Holy Spirit’s life, just the same, within the koinonia of the Father/Son. So, in this frame, life is understood, under perichoretic pressures, in the sense that primordial and eternal life, that of the triune God, is a life of interpenetrating subject-in-being givenness; wherein what it means to be truly alive is to be in reception of the other, and vice versa. This is an ec-static existence, even within the immanent life of God. As such, Arthur McGill offers the following insight as he reflects on these matters from within the Gospel of John:
Now, the Gospel of John is totally preoccupied with the themes of glory, of fulfilled life, and of realized worship. John identifies these themes with the death of Jesus. However, the death of Jesus can only be understood when we know who Jesus is. The first part of John’s Gospel concentrates on showing us who Jesus is; the second part focuses on the significance of Jesus’ dying. John sums up everything that can be said about the identity of Jesus in the phrase, he is “from the Father.” He not only comes from the Father in a sequential sense. All that he has and is comes from the Father. The Father gives the Son of Man his knowledge, his purposes in will, his authority in judgment, and above all, his life. The Son has life in himself, not from himself, but from the Father. Yet, from the Father, the Son has life, life within himself. In all of this, John presents Jesus as living by what I have called an ecstatic identity—a being not by virtue of anything that is his own, but a being by virtue of what the Father continually communicates to him.[1]
McGill, I think, brings out the proper focus when thinking about the implications of this ecstatic identity. This is a fellowshipping mode of being; an intimate reality of how life has eternally been within the environs of God’s dynamic life of co-inhering love. But it is this life that stands as the antecedent basis out of which God elected to create us, humans. It is in the image that He freely chose for Himself in the face (prosopon) of the Son, wherein we as creatures come to have life as participants in and from His life. This is God’s grace; it is an act in His becoming for us. Not a pure act, but a gracious act based upon His type of life that indeed determines the shape of all created life; particularly the life created in His image, as images of the image of God in the Son (cf. Col. 1.15).
And so, life is really a matter of being Grace formed from within the womb of the Father; indeed, as the Son has always already and eternally been in the womb of the Father as the Son for us. These are deep matters, doxological matters, but matters that we must concentrate on if we might come to understand what in fact it means to really be human before God. The Apostle Paul pens the following: “Therefore as you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him, having been firmly rooted and now being built up in Him and established in your faith, just as you were instructed, and overflowing with gratitude” (Col. 2.6,7). Notice how the themes of this passage correlate well with the themes we have been considering in this short development. The theme of “received Christ Jesus the Lord” (so the ec-static identity, as McGill identifies that for us), and the theme of grace or “gratitude” as the expression of understanding that this is in fact the ground of our lives in and from the ec-static life of the Son in Christ for us. Indeed, if the Son’s life, in eternal relation to the Father, is one of ecstatic identity, one that is in constant relational reception of the Father’s life for Him, then how much more is it not the case that our lives, as participants with Christ’s life (participatio Christi), aren’t indeed lives that ought to be constantly consumed by God’s possession of us, as He primordially pours forth His life for us; indeed as He does so in constant relation with the Son for us, within the eternal life of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?
Barth helps us think about these themes with greater focus:
But at this point we can and must attempt a more precise and material definition. If the Word of God is which man is, and is therefore historical, is a Word of divine grace, if he is thus summoned to hear and obey this Word, i.e., to be, and to continue to be, in the hearing of this Word, then the being of man can and must be more precisely defined as a being in gratitude. That casting of his faith on God which we have described as the true history and being of man is not so audacious and strange and fantastic as may appear at first sight. Rightly understood, it is in the strictest sense a natural human action. In it the creature remains in full self-possession, and exercises as directly as possible the true being beside which it has no other. It is, as it is told by God that He is gracious to it. In daring to cast itself upon God, it corresponds to the Word without which it would not be this human creature. When we understand the being of man as a correspondence to this Word, we understand it as a being in gratitude. Gratitude is the precise creaturely counterpart to the grace of God. What is by the Word of the grace of God, must be in gratitude; and man’s casting of his trust upon God is nothing other or less, but also nothing more, than the being of man as his act in gratitude.
The term εὐχαριστεῖν or εὐχαριστία, like the objective term χάρις which it reflects, is one of the terms which is only used soteriologically in the New Testament. But in the New Testament the existence of the man Jesus is a soteriological, the soteriological reality, and therefore in Jn. 1, Col. 1 and Heb. 1 we can also see its ontological significance. If man as such is not to be understood apart from the existence of the man Jesus, we cannot avoid the term grace and its complement gratitude even in the description of the being of man as such. As the One who in Jesus meets him as his Saviour, and says that me is gracious to him, God is already the Creator of man. The creaturely being of man must as such be understood as a being claimed by this Word, and therefore as a correspondence to the grace of God, and therefore as a being in gratitude.[2]
Selah.
[1] Arthur McGill, Death and Life: An American Theology, 70.
[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/2 §44 The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 160.