The age-old question—What is man? —has become urgent today. No doubt, people in every era have asked it, but currently, especially in the West, this question now consumes us. In fact, Daniel Strange suggests that if the main theological question to be answered in the first millennium of the church was “Who is Jesus Christ?”, and in the second millennium, “How are we saved?”, now in the third millennium it is “What is a human being?”[1]
1. Daniel Strange, “Going Deeper,” Themelios 48.1 (2023): 26. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1947) also recognized this truth in the mid-twentieth century.
One of the reasons for this is due to the loss of the influence of the Christian worldview in the West. Prior to the seventeenth century, Christian theology largely influenced and shaped our society, but due to the Enlightenment, modernism, and now postmodernism, this is no longer the case, and our culture is now “suffering from a collective identity crisis.”[2]
2. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, “Human Being, Individual and Social,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine, ed. Colin E. Gunton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 158.
What has also made our culture’s identity crisis more acute is the development of various technologies alongside these worldview changes. What we once viewed as “natural” and “fixed” has now changed with our ability to “remake” humans. In a day of test-tube babies, transgender operations, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and cloning, our society questions whether there is anything “natural” about us. No longer are humans viewed as created, designed, and ordered; instead, we are viewed as malleable beings who determine our “identities” solely by our own subjectivity. In such a context, pressing metaphysical and ethical questions have now arisen. Do we have a fixed nature? Do we have inherent dignity because we are created in God’s image or are we merely artificially made? Are we bare animals, by-products of an evolutionary process, commodities that can be technologically manipulated and re-fashioned for whatever ends we deem best? It is therefore no wonder that the question “What is man?” resounds with urgency today, and no wonder that our culture finds itself amid an identity crisis of monumental significance.
This is an important time for Christians for several reasons. First, we have an extraordinary opportunity to speak the truth of God’s word to our world with precision and force. Asking the question—What is man? —is one of the best ways to capture the attention of non-Christians regarding the truth of Scripture, to get them to think of worldview differences, and by God’s grace, to show them the futility of their view alongside the truth and power of the gospel.
Second, evaluating competing views of humans also has significant practical consequences since it affects every area of thought and life. For example, how one analyzes the nature of humans, what our problem is, and what we think the remedy is to our problem, directly impacts political, economic, and education theories, and much more. In fact, central to building a “culture” is a view of what humans are. Depending on whether you think people have intrinsic dignity, are naturally good or greedy, need more education, and so on, will determine what we think and how we act in other areas of life that are foundational to building a human society.
Third, what we think humans are directly affects how we treat one another, order a society, educate people, and create societal goals and aims. Much of the disagreement today we see among political parties and in the media on a host of moral issues as abortion and human sexuality stem from competing views of humans. Christians must address this.
So given the pressing need for Christians to bring the truth of God’s word to bear on these issues, this article will proceed in three steps. First, I will underscore the truth that our present-day identity crisis is directly due both to our rejection of a Christian view of humans and our embrace of various non-Christian views. Second, I will highlight the “tragic irony” of our society’s rejection of a Christian view of humans, which has resulted in serious consequences that threaten both the value of humans and our free existence as we presently enjoy it—precisely because of the rejection of a Christian worldview. Third, I will challenge the church to recover and live out a Christian view of humans as the only hope for the lostness of our society and ultimately for the glory of our triune God who has created us to know, love, and serve him, both now and forevermore.
What is Man? Beauty or Beast?
As noted, the question—“What is man?”—is an urgent one today. Central to it is the question—to borrow from the old Disney classic—Are humans beauty or beast? One’s answer to this question is directly tied to one’s worldview. For example, when David asks, “What is man?” in Psalm 8:4a, his answer is quite different than the answers given today. David answers the question in terms of humanity’s creaturely and image-bearing status before the greatness of God (Ps. 8:1–3, 5–9). In Scripture, unlike our society, humans are unquestionably creatures of significance precisely because we are created in God’s image. Scripture does not wrestle with the question of whether humans have intrinsic value since that is a given due to our creation by God. Instead, Scripture speaks of our fallenness that requires God’s gracious provision of a Redeemer. But for our society, the question of whether humans are intrinsically valuable is not a given, nor is the emphasis on our fallenness. Thus, our society is fixated on the questions of human “estrangement” and “meaninglessness” rather than knowing the answer that we are significant creatures who are now moral rebels against God.
Why are the questions and answers so different? This disconnect was not always so. In the West, given the influence of Christianity, humans were historically viewed in more biblical categories. But this all changed with the rise of the Enlightenment that witnessed a worldview shift away from Christian theology in at least two significant areas. First, the Enlightenment rejected a revelational epistemology for human rational autonomy. Humans were no longer viewed “from above” (i.e., from what God revealed about us in Scripture) but “from below” (i.e., from the standpoint of finite, fallen, human perspectives independent of Scripture). Second, there was a corresponding rejection of trinitarian theism. This was first replaced by deism and then evolutionary naturalism, and both hollow substitutes greatly affected how we think about human origins, design, purpose, and significance.
What resulted from these two major shifts of ideas? The West witnessed a rise of competing views against Christianity e.g., secular humanism, Marxism, existentialism, nihilism, behaviorism, deconstructionism, largely indebted to evolutionary naturalism now combined with a secular-postmodern-pluralistic perspective. Our culture then necessarily embraced competing ideas of what humans are, which for the most part resulted in confusion, a devaluation of humans, despair, meaninglessness, and growing dystopian visions of reality.
Sadly, ideas always have consequences, a point we will return to momentarily. The West’s “collective identity crisis” is largely due to our society’s rejection of a Christian view of reality, including its view of human value. As the West has turned away from Christian theology and its understanding of humans and embraced various secular-postmodern views, it has sought to explain who and what humans are solely “from below”—in terms of biology, chemistry, physics, and the social sciences—all framed within the confines and limits of evolutionary and methodological naturalism.
Not surprisingly, the enlightenment poet Alexander Pope’s method for the study of man is now the norm: “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of Mankind is Man.”[3] Yet in seeking to “liberate” ourselves from God and his divine revelation, disaster has occurred. In truth, our attempt to understand ourselves “from below” is analogous to what happened to the prodigal son.[4] The prodigal son could only live “free” of his father until his money ran out. But once his money ran out, he had to return to his father because he could not function apart from him. In a similar way, humans can only follow the advice of Alexander Pope if they continue to live off the borrowed capital of Christianity, but once we jettison Christian theology, we soon discover that we have just undercut the warrant for our own dignity, value, and significance. In other words, we go morally bankrupt.
3. Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Man,” in Poetical Works, ed. H. F. Cary (London: Routledge, 1870), 225.
4. I am indebted to Cornelius Van Til for this illustration.
This is precisely what happened in the West. Instead of viewing ourselves as created by God, we sought to understand ourselves in terms of an impersonal, blind evolutionary process. But in so doing, if we remained consistent with this naturalistic worldview, we could no longer view ourselves as beauty; we are only beast. Over time, we gradually began to admit that humans are not creatures of value created by the triune-personal God, but rather products of impersonal causes. For a while, people continued to affirm human dignity, along with human rights—but failing to acknowledge that all these truths were borrowed capital from a Christian view of humans and not warranted by their worldview. As people sought to remain consistent with their secular-postmodern view, they ran out of money. In its place, humans were viewed solely as beasts, the product of the impersonal plus time plus chance. As Paul reminds us in Romans 1, in refusing to acknowledge our Creator, we explained ourselves solely in terms of created things. But the disastrous consequence of such a move is that the metaphysical and epistemological grounding for human value, purpose, meaning, design, reason, love, freedom, justice, etc. now has no basis. Sadly, such truths not only vanish from our thinking, but we also live out their loss in our lives.
The Tragic Irony of Secular-Naturalistic Anthropologies
From a Christian view, our present-day collective identity crisis is directly tied to our rejection of the Christian worldview and our refusal to acknowledge that we are creatures of God and responsible to him. The result is “tragically ironic.”
Let us focus on the word “ironic.” Beginning with the Enlightenment to our present-day, it has been fashionable to argue that “we have come of age,” that we have “freed” ourselves from the “burden” of viewing ourselves in light of Christian theology. Indeed, even the moniker “the Enlightenment” is evidence of the unbelievable pride and rebelliousness of this era’s intellectual thought. The term assumed that the previous era was “dark,” but now with either our rejection or our reinterpretation of Christianity, the “lights” have been turned on. Before us is a new era of “freedom,” “liberation,” and “discovery” of the unlimited potential of man—a potential that will ultimately result in a utopian future: the French Revolution, the subjective thought of Jean Jacques Rousseau, and the utopian dream of Karl Marx, and many others. Such thinking believed Pope’s dictum that the proper study of man is man, and that humans could finally liberate themselves from dependence on God and his Word. Instead, they thought, we could understand who we are solely “from below.”
Yet the “irony” of the situation is that this era up to our own day has not resulted in “liberation,” “freedom,” and a utopian future, but one disaster after another. In the twentieth century alone, we have witnessed multiple wars and the destruction of nearly one hundred million people at the hand of such “utopian” ideologies. The irony is that this way of thinking failed to realize that if one rejects the triune God of Scripture, one must also reject the human dignity of Scripture. In other words, one cannot simultaneously warrant the human rights that a biblical view of humans alone provides without also embracing the entire biblical worldview that views humans as God’s dependent image-bearers.
This is exactly what occurred in the West and its embrace of the Enlightenment mentality as worked out in both modernity and postmodernity. The West sought to liberate itself from the “restrictions” of Christian theology while simultaneously borrowing from it, at least for a time. The novelist Walker Percy notes this irony by observing that the conventional wisdom of twentieth-century thought about humans consists of two components, the first owing to modern science and the other owing to Christianity. On the one hand, secular thought sought to understand man “as an organism in an environment, a sociological unit, an encultured creature, a psychological dynamism endowed genetically like other organisms with needs and drives, who through evolution has developed strategies for learning and surviving.”[5] On the other hand, secular thought viewed man as “somehow endowed with certain other unique properties which he does not share with other organisms—with certain inalienable rights, reason, freedom, and an intrinsic dignity—and as a consequence the highest value to which a democratic society can be committed is the respect of the sacredness and worth of the individual.”[6]
5. Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle (New York: Picador, 1975), 20.
6. Percy, Message in the Bottle, 20.
But, as Percy notes, the problem with believing these two propositions simultaneously is that they are “radically incoherent and cannot be seriously professed without even more serious consequences.”[7] This is why as the Enlightenment morphed into modernity and postmodernity, it maintained the beastly first proposition but discarded the beautiful second. In so doing, it jettisoned the concept of human dignity, value, and significance. In many ways, postmodern thinkers have walked the path of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), who not only proclaimed the “death of God” but also the “death of man”—because even he knew that both stand and fall together. This is why people such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, given their embrace of the “death of God,” insist that human nature is not “designed” or “ordered” but completely malleable, even questioning whether humans have any value or dignity at all, other than what we subjectively construct.
7. Percy, Message in the Bottle, 20.
But from a Christian view, the irony of humans rejecting God and thus losing our beauty and dignity is not merely ironic, it’s also horribly “tragic.” In our rebellion against God and seeking to understand humans solely “from below,” the Enlightenment project has not resulted in its promised liberation and utopia. Instead, it has resulted in futility, despair, and meaninglessness, which has also opened the door to totalitarianism. Why? Because ideas have consequences. Our attempt to understand humans apart from God ultimately results in our own self-destruction.
Mark it well: anthropology that attempts to study humans apart from the glorious triune God who has created us for himself inevitably strips from humans their dignity and reduces us to the product of blind, impersonal forces. But if this is so, then humans have no intrinsic meaning and purpose, and such things as rationality, love, freedom, and justice are reduced to mere subjective human constructions (which is another way of saying that they are not objectively true). Even more: these wrong ideas regarding humans never remain theoretical. Inevitably, people act on what they believe, and this is where the tragedy is even more pronounced. Let us focus on three examples of the disaster that non-Christian thought has produced.
The Tragic Loss of Human Dignity
Apart from a Christian view of humans, there is no objective basis for human dignity, value, and significance, which is sadly not only acknowledged but acted on. For example, Robert Haynes, the president of the 16th International Congress of Genetics says this:
For three thousand years at least, a majority of people have considered that human beings were special, were magic. It’s the Judeo-Christian view of man. What the ability to manipulate genes should indicate to people is the very deep extent to which we are biological machines. The traditional view is built on the foundation that life is sacred . . . Well, not anymore. It’s no longer possible to live by the idea that there is something special, unique, even sacred about living organism.[8]
8. Andrew Kimbrell, The Human Body Shop (San Francisco: Harper, 1993), 233–34.
But where does this lead? Tragically, it has led to the slaughter of human beings in multiple wars, countless abortions, infanticide, euthanasia, suicide, and more. In the twentieth century, millions of people were slaughtered on the altar of secular-naturalistic views of humans. Regarding abortion, in the US since 1973, an estimated 64 million babies have been murdered. In addition, in 2017, a Gallup poll found 73% of Americans supportive of euthanasia (assisted suicide) and 57% supportive of doctor-assisted euthanasia. Or think of Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at the Massachusetts Institute of Psychology, writing in defense of infanticide in the New York Times.[9] To be clear, infanticide is the deliberate killing of babies after they have been born. Consistent with his worldview, Pinker suggests that some cases of infanticide could be carried out even when there is no mental illness in the child, because “it has been practiced and accepted in most cultures throughout the world.” Pinker asserts that a capacity for neonaticide is hard-wired into the maternal genes by our evolutionary history. Mothers in primitive conditions had to make difficult choices between caring for their existing infants and nurturing a newborn, and so, “if a newborn is sickly, or if its survival is not promising, they may cut their losses and favor the healthiest in the litter or try again later on.” Pinker then argues that the same genetic disposition may trigger neonaticide in cases where pregnancies may threaten the mother’s health. He then suggests that various psychological conditions and cultural practices protect the mother from too great an attachment to an infant who may have to be let die. “A new mother will first coolly assess the infant and her current situation and only in the next few days begin to see it as a unique and wonderful individual.” He then suggests that in those first few days, killing an unwanted child is not only natural but also culturally acceptable on a wide scale.[10]
9. Steven Pinker, “Why They Kill Their Newborns” (Nov 2, 1997).
10. See Steven Pinker, “Why They Kill Their Newborns” (Nov 2, 1997) as cited in Phillip E. Johnson, The Wedge of Truth (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 111–12.
These are only a few examples of the tragic loss of human dignity in our society. We see this breakdown when a sleeping homeless woman is lit on fire in a New York subway. We see it when an unpopular student shoots up his classmates like a shooter in a video game. We see it when a woman sleeps with over 100 men in a day for monetized publicity. We see it when fertilized embryos are doomed to a frozen stasis because their parents didn’t want their undesirable genetic qualities. We see it when there are almost no down syndrome children in Iceland—because they have all been snuffed out before they drew their first breath.
We see it in the breakdown of the family, gender confusion, and our society’s determination to destroy marriage and the family as the basic building block of human society.[11] It’s also evident in our increased suicide rates. Suicide is one of the leading causes of death in the US, and it is on the rise, specifically among young people. Over 49,000 people died by suicide in 2022. In 2022, it was estimated that there were 1.6 million suicide attempts. Suicide reflects a general despair about the meaning and the purpose of human life, and it is one of the tragic consequences of a rejection of a Christian view of humans.
11. See Joy Pullmann, False Flag: Why Queer Politics Mean the End of America (New York: Regnery, 2024).
The Tragic Loss of Moral Categories
In addition to the loss of human dignity is also the loss of moral categories. David Wells argues that the twentieth century has seen three massive cultural changes tied to our rejection of a Christian view of humans that have affected how we understand ourselves. These shifts went from (1) character/virtue (moral categories) to personality (self category); (2) from nature (something fixed) to self-consciousness (individual, private); (3) from a shared sense of collective humanity to a vision of the self—“the I”—at the person’s center, which results in the inward look inside ourselves to find the answers to life.[12]
12. David F. Wells, Losing Our Virtue: Why the Church Must Recover Its Moral Vision (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998); idem, “Losing Our Religion: The Impact of Secularization on the Understanding of Sin,” in Ruined Sinners to Reclaim, ed. David Gibson and Jonathan Gibson (Wheaton: Crossway, 2024), 803–20.
Wells unpacks the consequences of these shifts:
Because of the first, we have slowly sloughed off the moral framework of life. Because of the second, a rampant relativism has been loosed on society, since no one’s self-consciousness is exactly like anyone else’s. A person’s understanding about life, about his or her place in the cosmos, therefore becomes private and individualized.[13]
13. Wells, Losing Our Virtue, 120.
In regards to the third,
this sets us apart from many other cultures, in which it would be inconceivable for people to imagine that they could look inside themselves for the answers to life. Even more remarkable is the thought that buried within are the balms for our wounds and moral failures. There is a touching innocence to this trust. It is almost as if no one has told us that we now live east of Eden, that these internal streams are also polluted waters.[14]
14. Wells, Losing Our Virtue, 122.
What implications follow from these movements away from the Christian view of humanity? Wells gives two important implications.
First, in our secular-postmodern view, we have rejected God as our transcendent reference, and thus have no objective basis for moral norms. As Wells reminds us, “sin is no longer defined in relation to God but, rather, it is thought of only in terms of the self.”[15] But with such a loss, the warrant for an objective standard of morality, justice, and law vanishes, replaced by the subjective construction of finite, fallen humans. In the end, what this leads to is the State taking the place of God and arbitrarily determining moral law, which should terrify all of us.
15. Wells, “Losing Our Religion,” 809.
Second, and building on the first point, “sin” has become a conceptual impossibility. The “death” of God also brings about the death of “moral categories.” In a postmodern era, sin is no longer defined in relation to God. In the place of “sin,” we have “evil.” But the convenient thing about the term “evil” is that it expresses moral repugnance without needing to make clear the standards by which the action is seen to be repugnant. The difference between the cultural use of evil and the Christian use of sin is that while both words may be used to describe the same phenomenon, sin deliberately understands our actions in relation to God as the absolute, objective standard of right and wrong. In our culture, the use of evil simply expresses our abhorrence of something; in the Bible, the word sin expresses God’s abhorrence of it. But in the absence of God as the moral standard, there is no reason why we should not cheat, lie, defraud, and injure others. In the absence of God, these things really cannot be evil; they can only be called evil. As God disappears from our culture, the realm of sin has correspondingly become contracted. But the tragedy of such a situation is that when we lose God as the objective standard of the good, it leaves people eventually speechless before life’s brutalities and atrocities. We continue to sin, but now we cannot explain it. Life becomes inexplicable to us, and we lose what it truly means to be human, along with any remedy to our sin, found in God’s provision alone.
The Tragic Rise of Tyranny and Totalitarianism
With a rejection of a Christian view of humans, human dignity and moral categories are lost, and sadly, the door is opened to unbelievable tyranny resulting in some form of totalitarianism. Don Carson makes this point in his book, The Intolerance of Tolerance.[16] A secular-postmodern society may have lost the category of sin, but it does not eliminate the horrible reality of sin. In a postmodern society, power is now placed in the hands of relativists, who in turn attempt to make themselves God. Instead of lex rex (God and his moral law over the king), postmodern societies deify the State. Mark it well: all societies are religiously grounded: there is no “neutral” space or “naked public square.” Either the true and living triune God will rule over us, or humans will attempt to elevate themselves to the place of God, which always results in tyranny.
16. D. A. Carson, The Intolerance of Tolerance (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012).
Critical theorist Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) basically makes this point in his influential essay, “Repressive Tolerance.”[17] “Tolerance is an end in itself,” but in order to achieve it, the “oppressed” will have to overthrow the “law” by violence.[18] But the problem is this: On what moral grounds is Marcuse making these decisions, other than the subjective, arbitrary decisions of what he determines is the “oppressed”? In the end, without an objective standard, this results in simply another form of tyranny imposed on others. As Carson reminds us, “Unchecked, this new tolerance will sooner or later put many people in chains.”[19]
17. Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in A Critique of Pure Tolerance, Robert P. Wolff, Barrington Moore, Jr., and Herbert Marcuse (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 81–123.
18. See Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” 82, 115–23.
19. Carson, “Sin’s Contemporary Significance,” in Fallen: A Theology of Sin, ed. Christopher W. Morgan and Robert A. Peterson (Wheaton: Crossway, 2013), 36.
The tragic irony of secular-postmodern view of humans is that instead of “liberating” us, it results in nothing but enslavement. In fact, as Herbert Schlossberg reminds us, this enslavement starts with the intellectuals who attempt to work out the implications of their worldview. As he states, “The better educated he is, the more likely the humanist is to believe that people are like machines and need to be programmed, and the more likely he is to believe that he should be one of the programmers.”[20] Indeed, as Schlossberg continues, any view that “divinizes man, it turns out, only divinizes some men.”[21] The end result: untold tyranny, abuse, and totalitarianism.
20. Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1983), 87.
21. Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction, 87.
A generation ago, Francis Schaeffer warned us about this. He knew that the rejection of a Christian view of God, self, and the world always leads to statism, which seeks to repristinate the city of Babel all over again. In our foolish attempt to dethrone God, we enthrone man, but given that humans are finite and fallen, it is an awful substitute.[22]
22. See Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? in The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer, 5 vols. (Westchester: Crossway, 1982), 5:211–52.
Today, such thinking is found in people like Yuval Harari. Harari is an Israeli philosopher, atheist, transhumanist, homosexual, and senior advisor to the World Economic Forum and its founder and chairman, Klaus Schwab. From a completely secular, evolutionary, and postmodern view, he argues that truth and morality are merely human social constructions. Since humans are simply evolved animals, then it follows that by biological and cyborg engineering—along with medical advances—we can make man a “god” in the Greek sense of Zeus and Apollo. Harari contends that we can continue to evolve from “Homo sapiens to Homo deus,” thus attaining “divinity.”[23] In fact, he believes we will overcome death itself since
23. Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (New York: Harper Perennial, 2017), 47.
every technical problem has a technical solution. We don’t need to wait for the Second Coming in order to overcome death. A couple of geeks in a lab can do it. If traditionally death was the specialty of priests and theologians, now the engineers are taking over . . . True, at present we don’t have solutions to all technical problems. But this is precisely why we invest so much time and money in researching cancer, germs, genetics, and nanotechnology.[24]
24. Harari, Homo Deus, 23.
But what moral framework governs Harari’s thinking? For him, it is only that which society constructs since there are no God-given, created, natural rights. In a recent video, Harari is clear on this point. He argues that most legal systems believe in human rights.
But human rights are just like heaven, and like God—it’s just a fictional story that we’ve invented and spread around. It may be a very nice story . . . You want to believe it, but it’s just a story. It’s not reality. It’s not a biological reality. Just as jellyfish and woodpeckers and ostriches have no rights, homo sapiens have no rights also . . . The only place you find rights is in fictional stories humans have invented and spread around. And the same thing is also true in the political field. States and nations are also, like human rights, and like God, and like heaven, they too are just stories.[25]
25. Frank Bergman, “WEF Mastermind: ‘Human Rights are Fiction, Just Like God,’” January 24, 2024.
But in this re-making of humanity, Harari is also clear that we will not need all of the world’s population. Most people will become “useless” in the sense of unemployable, and as such, we need to reduce the world’s population through global control. Harari claims that a new class system will soon emerge that will separate global elites from the “redundant” general public. He argues that most of the world’s population will be of little use to the global elite, meaning they will no longer be “needed.”[26] As we re-make man by bio-engineering and utilizing artificial intelligence, people will be replaced, and the world will be a better place for it.
26. Bergman, “WEF Mastermind.”
But how will this occur? As with all non-Christian thought, Harari invests this power in the state. As he asserts, we once thought that the “right to the pursuit of happiness [was] a restraint on state power,”[27] but no longer. If humans have the right to be happy, then it is the duty of the state to bring it about. And given that happiness is totally determined by our biology, states must forget about “economic growth, social reforms and political revolutions . . . [instead] we need to manipulate human biochemistry”[28] through drugs, vaccines, and “sophisticated ways of manipulating human biochemistry, such as sending direct electrical stimuli to appropriate spots in the brain, or genetically engineering the blueprints of our bodies.”[29] Yet this raises an important question? Who will control the manipulation? Mark it well: if anthropology is not grounded in Christian theology, then the grounds for human dignity, our basic rights and freedoms, moral norms are not possible, and what will result is totalitarianism by people who view themselves as “god.” This is the inevitable consequence of non-Christian thought. Our rejection of God has not led to “freedom” but tyranny and incredible heartache.
27. Harari, Homo Deus, 32.
28. Harari, Homo Deus, 39.
29. Harari, Homo Deus, 41.
The Need for Theological Anthropology
There is an important lesson for Christians to learn in the midst of our collective identity crisis. We will never understand correctly who we are and what our true problem is in terms of sin before God and all of its disastrous implications apart from a theological anthropology. Ultimately, the question, “What is man?” can only be answered in terms of the triune God and his divine revelation telling us who and what we are.
In contrast to Alexander Pope is John Calvin. As Calvin begins his Institutes, he makes this profound statement: “Without knowledge of God there is no knowledge of self.”[30] In other words, contrary to our society, we only begin to know who we are once we view ourselves in relation to our Creator and Lord. Apart from doing so, as the Enlightenment project has demonstrated, it simply leads to disaster and a denial of who humans truly are. In the end, non-Christian views of humans are incoherent and self-refuting. They are incoherent in explaining who we are in terms of our value, dignity, and significance, and they are incoherent in explaining what is wrong with us in terms of our sin. The church has a wonderful opportunity to speak the truth in love and to do it with courage since it is the Christian worldview alone that provides the metaphysical and epistemological ground to uphold human significance and value, along with what is truly wrong with us in terms of our sin. Our society cannot make sense of either, which has led to the disaster we witness on a daily basis.[31] What is desperately needed to address the need of the hour is a Christian view of humans in all of its biblical and theological depth and breadth.
30. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 vols., ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), I.1.2 (1:37).
31. On this point, see Os Guinness, Our Civilizational Moment: The Waning of the West and the War of the Worlds (np: Kildare, 2024).
Although much could be said in terms of the specifics of a theological anthropology, Christian theology minimally affirms two crucial truths. First, humans are unique and significant because we are created in God’s image. Scripture explains us in relation to a personal beginning (Gen. 1:1)—the triune God—who has created us in an ordered, designed, and purposeful way. As such, we are beauty and not beast! Second, given the fall of Genesis 3, we who were created great are now moral rebels before God, deeply flawed by sin to the very core of our being. We who were created to know God and to rule as vice-regents over the world have turned against our Creator, which has brought ruin into the world and destroyed everything in our path. Yet our flaw is not due to our creation but to our willful rebellion against God. For this reason, the only solution to our problem is the sovereign and gracious initiative of God on our behalf. Sin does not belong to our essence. We remain God’s image, but now morally corrupt and spiritually dead. But thankfully, by God’s sovereign grace and action, sin can be removed from us by faith in Christ’s finished work and the Spirit’s transforming power in us.
This Christian anthropology is what is needed in our day as the antidote to the dust of death that non-Christian views have brought. But will the church have courage to stand against the foolish ideas of our age and to recover in boldness the truth of God’s word without compromise? Will we also have the courage to live out the truth of who we are in all our value and fallenness, and to uphold the significance of human life, human sexuality, marriage and the family, in a day that stands in direction opposition to the truth of Scripture? And will we have the courage to stand against the rising totalitarianism of our age, and to live as a counter-culture as we display to the world what it truly means to be human in every area of our lives? And will we proclaim Christ Jesus the Lord as the only hope for this fallen human race that so desperately needs to hear the truth of God’s word in all of its beauty, depth, and fullness?
