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Human Flourishing from a Biblical Perspective: Continuity, Discontinuity, and Their Implications for Contemporary Conceptualizations

July 19, 2013

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Human flourishing is a term that has been conscripted into service in the evangelical community in recent years as a semantic alternative to the Aristotelian notion of “the Good” or “Happiness,” both which have been corrupted in contemporary vernacular. The term has been offered as a framework for understanding and conceptualizing our approach to technological innovation in order to positively promote progress in the health and well-being of the human community. But what is flourishing? What does it mean to flourish? How does one flourish? And in particular, how are we, as Christians, to understand flourishing? As part of the process of framing and filling in the content of this concept, this paper proposes to explore the theological and scriptural foundations of a concept of flourishing that are found in Scripture from Genesis to Revelation. It will examine the semantic and metaphorical references to flourishing, noting the continuity and the discontinuity in the scriptural understanding of flourishing that exists between the Old and New Testaments. The resulting scriptural portraits of flourishing, including the implications of the changes that have occurred over time, will then be used to inform and to guide our understanding of human flourishing as it applies to bioethical issues today. The focus of this paper is scriptural insight, therefore the sources to be used will be primarily the Bible, in English, Hebrew, and Greek, lexicons, dictionaries, and various commentaries, as needed.

Keywords:
Biblical theology, human flourishing