I'm Warren Smith, and today you'll be listening in on my conversation with Alan Noble.

He's the author of a new book called You Are Not Your Own, belonging to God in an inhuman world.

Interacting with my students and with friends and family members and recognizing that there's

a great deal of angst, anxiety, frustration.

For some people, you know, it might be mothers feeling like they keep saying to themselves,

I just need to get through the day.

There's so much that they have to do.

There are so many people telling them how they should be better parents and better wives and better Christians or better whatever.

And it's overwhelming. They don't know how to take care of the environment, better, whatever it is.

My students, the same kind of anxiety. How can I be a better student? How could I be a better member of my church, a better

girlfriend or boyfriend or whatever? And it's overwhelming. Theology, the study of God,

has, of course, been a preoccupation of Christians and, well, theologians. Most of the best known theologians in history from Thomas Aquinas to the present have taken

a shot at writing a systematic theology, which is a grand statement of all the major theological

issues.

For that reason, we have a lot of great books that unpack biblical theology.

For the record on my bookshelf, in fact, I'm looking at them right now, I have systematic

theologies by Wayne Grudom, John Frame, and Norman Geisler, in addition to Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica.

What we have lacked, however, until recently, is a systematic and biblical anthropology, the study of man and who he is.

Lately, though, we have been embroiled in battles over what it means to be human.

Issues such as abortion, sexual behavior and identity, stem cell research, euthanasia,

transgenderism, transhumanism.

These are all issues whose arguments rise and fall on the question, what does it mean to be human?

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