Every age of the church has its crisis moment, when the pressures of the world force Christians to choose: Will we bend Scripture to fit the spirit of the age and succumb to heresy, or will we defend “the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3)? The church has always been called to contend for the faith, not reinvent it.
Athanasius and the Cappadocians defended the deity of Christ against Arius and, later, the Eunomians. Cyril defended the unity of Christ’s person against Nestorius, while the church at Chalcedon defended the truth that Christ is one person in two natures, truly God and truly man, against Eutychianism. Augustine defended the necessity of God’s grace against Pelagius and his denial of original sin. The Reformers defended justification by faith alone against Rome’s doctrine of justification by works. And the Reformed churches at Dort defended the sovereignty of God’s grace in salvation against Arminius and the claim that salvation ultimately depends upon the autonomous will of man.
The Doctrine of Humanity
Today, the church faces a similarly significant doctrinal challenge. At the heart of our modern malaise is a battle between two competing doctrines of man: secular humanism’s doctrine of autonomous man and the Christian doctrine of man as a creature made in the image of God.
I can’t imagine Augustine or Calvin having to stop and ask what a human being is. But here we are. We do not get to choose the heresy of the day. We can, however, choose to respond to it by speaking the truth in love, refusing to be carried along by every wind of false doctrine (Eph. 4:14–15).
Secular people do not think about these doctrines in theological terms, but they are nevertheless theological in nature. Every cultural revolution rests on some understanding of God and man, no matter how loudly the leading revolutionaries insist that God has nothing to do with it.
When modern man sets aside God, he does not stop worshiping. He simply puts himself in God’s place. Once man becomes his own authority, he loses the objective standard outside himself by which he can judge the world. The old words from Judges suddenly sound remarkably current: “everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judg. 21:25).
Nearly every major cultural battle of our day is, at its root, a battle over theology.
Abortion denies the worth of human life made in the image of God. Transgenderism rejects the goodness and givenness of God’s design for humanity as male and female (Gen. 1:27; Matt. 19:4–6). The sexual revolution rejects the covenantal union of husband and wife as “one flesh” for the lie of pleasure without consequences (Gen. 2:24; Eph. 5:31–32). And the dystopian dream of merging man with machine promises that technology will finally free us from the creaturely limits God has given us.
All of these spread the same old lie from the garden: you can be God (Gen. 3:5).
Theology, then Ethics
Christians must not put the ethical cart before the theological horse. Ethics flows from theology, so before we can answer the question of what man is for, we must stand firm in our biblical understanding of what man is.
Scripture gives us the answer:
“So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27).
If man is nothing more than a body made up of flesh and chemicals, then human dignity becomes negotiable. If identity is something we invent for ourselves, then the body becomes raw material that we can reshape however we please. If man is merely an animal, then morality becomes little more than whatever a society allows. The target keeps moving. Survival of the fittest seems like a logical conclusion.
Imago Dei
But if man is made in the image of God, everything changes.
In The Weight of Glory (affiliate link), C. S. Lewis wrote:
It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.
All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations.
It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics.
There are no ordinary people.
You have never talked to a mere mortal. (45)
Human beings matter because they are creatures made for eternity (Eccl. 3:11). Every person we encounter bears the image of God and will one day stand before him in judgment (Gen. 1:27; 2 Cor. 5:10). Every human life possesses a dignity that cannot be given or taken away by the state. Every person answers directly to the God who made him, and every part of life is meant to be lived according to God’s design rather than our own (Ps. 24:1; 1 Cor. 6:19–20).
Christians must get used to saying this plainly and repeatedly: man is created by God, not self-made. He is a creature, not his own content creator.
He has a soul, which is eternal (Eccl. 12:7; Matt. 10:28). He has a body, which is not a disposable bag of bones but is essential to his nature. The Christian hope is not a gnostic escape from the body but the resurrection of the body (1 Cor. 15:42–49).
Man is also fallen. He is not basically good, nor is he a blank slate waiting to be shaped by his environment. Sin has corrupted every part of us (Rom. 3:10–18; Eph. 2:1–3).
Most importantly, man can only be made new through union with Jesus Christ. Christ is the true image of God, and only in him can ruined sinners be reclaimed and made new (2 Cor. 5:17; Col. 3:10).
Only Jesus can make us truly human.
