The 2024 Truman G. Madsen Lecture on Eternal Man was given by Reverend Andrew Teal, a chaplain specializing in Christian church history and a full member of the Faculty of Theology and Religion at Oxford University.

To ponder the vagaries and difficulties of what it means to be human is an adventure undergirding the philosophies, stories, art, music, and perhaps above all, the faith traditions of our race. To explore our freedoms and obligations, our destiny, personality, our embodied-ness, education and social life, language, emotion and loneliness, our ideals and choices, our faith, love and hope, our suffering and mortality is a tall order for any life to make sense of, but that is our unavoidable destiny.

In this address, Reverend Teal proposed that the question of who we are is answered only Christologically - searching to respond fully to the question of Jesus Christ: ‘Who do you say that I am?’ (Matthew 16:15). He evaluated the thesis that humans discover the mystery of their being only in seeking and following him. We find ourselves when we glimpse that He has found us.

Deseret News: The Rev. Andrew Teal at BYU: ‘The wonderful reality’ of who we are becoming

Listen to Reverend Andrew Teal's interview on the podcast Inside Sources