The whole man
2
A UNITY OF NATURE AND GRACE
At this point it is important to note a historical relationship. Calvin was born in 1509. His Institutes were written in 1536. Leonardo died in 1519, the same year as the Leipzig Disputation between Luther (1483-1546) and Dr. Eck. The king who took Leonardo to France at the close of his life was Francis I, the same king to whom Calvin addressed his Institutes. We come therefore to an overlapping of the Renaissance with the Reformation. To this problem of unity the Reformation gave an entirely opposite answer from that of the Renaissance. It repudiated both the Aristotelian and the Neo-platonic presentation. What was the Reformation answer? It said that the root of the trouble sprang from the old and growing Humanism in the Roman Catholic Church, and the incomplete Fall in Aquinas’s theology which set loose an autonomous man. The Reformation accepted the biblical picture of a total Fall. The whole man had been made by God, but now the whole man is fallen, including his intellect and will. In contrast to Aquinas, only God was autonomous.
This was true in two areas. First of all there was nothing autonomous in the area of final authority. For the Reformation, final and sufficient knowledge rested in the Bible—that is, Scripture Alone, in contrast to Scripture plus anything else parallel to the Scriptures, whether it be the church or a natural theology. Second, there was no idea of man being autonomous in the area of salvation. In the Roman Catholic position there was a divided work of salvation—Christ died for our salvation, but man had to merit the merit of Christ. Thus there was a humanistic element involved. The Reformers said that there is nothing man can do; no autonomous or humanistic, religious or moral effort of man can help. One is saved only on the basis of the finished work of Christ as he died in space and time in history, and the only way to be saved is to raise the empty hands of faith and, by God’s grace, to accept God’s free gift—Faith Alone.
So there is no division in either of these areas. There is no division in final normative knowledge—on the one hand, between what the church or natural theology would say and what the Bible would say; nor, on the other hand, between what the Bible and the rationalistic thinkers would say. Neither was there division in the work of salvation. It was Scripture Alone and Faith Alone.
Evangelical Christians need to notice, at this point, that the Reformation said “Scripture alone” and not “the Revelation of God in Christ alone.” If you do not have the view of the Scriptures that the Reformers had, you really have no content in the word Christ, and this is the modern drift in theology. Modern theology uses the word without content because Christ is cut away from the Scriptures. The Reformation followed the teaching of Christ himself in linking the revelation Christ gave of God to the revelation of the written Scriptures.
The Scriptures give the key to two kinds of knowledge—the knowledge of God and the knowledge of men and nature. The great Reformation confessions emphasize that God revealed his attributes to man in the Scriptures and that this revelation was meaningful to God as well as to man. There could have been no Reformation and no Reformation culture in Northern Europe without the realization that God had spoken to man in the Scriptures and that, therefore, we know something truly about God because God has revealed it to man.
It is an important principle to remember, in the contemporary interest in communication and in language study, that the biblical presentation is that, though we do not have exhaustive truth, we have from the Bible what I term “true truth.” In this way we know true truth about God, true truth about man and something truly about nature. Thus on the basis of the Scriptures, while we do not have exhaustive knowledge, we have true and unified knowledge.
THE REFORMATION AND MAN
We thus know something wonderful about man. Among other things, we know his origin and who he is—he is made in the image of God. Man is not only wonderful when he is “born again” as a Christian, he is also wonderful as God made him in his image. Man has value because of who he was originally before the Fall.
I was recently lecturing in Santa Barbara and was introduced to a boy who had been on drugs. He had a good-looking, sensitive face, long curly hair, sandals on his feet and was wearing blue jeans. He came to hear my lecture and said, “This is brand new, I’ve never heard anything like this.” So he was brought along again the next afternoon, and I greeted him. He looked me in the eyes and said, “Sir, that was a beautiful greeting. Why did you greet me like that?” I said, “Because I know who you are—I know you are made in the image of God.” We then had a tremendous conversation. We cannot deal with people like human beings, we cannot deal with them on the high level of true humanity, unless we really know their origin—who they are. God tells man who he is. God tells us that he created man in his image. So man is something wonderful.
But God tells us something else about man—he tells us about the Fall. This introduces the other element which we need to know in order to understand man. Why is he so wonderful and yet so flawed? Who is man? Who am I? Why can man do these things that make man so unique, and yet why is man so horrible? Why is it?
The Bible says that you are wonderful because you are made in the image of God, but that you are flawed because, at a space-time point of history, man fell. The Reformation man knew that man was going to hell because of revolt against God. But the Reformation man and the people who, following the Reformation, built the culture of Northern Europe knew that, while man is morally guilty before the God who exists, he is not nothing. Modern man tends to think that he is nothing. These people knew that they were the very opposite of nothing because they knew that they were made in the image of God. Even though they were fallen, and, without the non-humanistic solution of Christ and his substitutionary death, would go to hell, this still did not mean that they were nothing. When the Word of God, the Bible, was listened to, the Reformation had tremendous results, both in people individually becoming Christians and in general culture.
What the Reformation tells us, therefore, is that God has spoken in the Scriptures concerning both the “upstairs” and the “downstairs.” He spoke in a true revelation concerning himself—heavenly things—and he spoke in a true revelation concerning nature—the cosmos and man. Therefore, they had a real unity of knowledge. They simply did not have the Renaissance problem of nature and grace! They had a real unity, not because they were clever, but because they had a unity on the basis of what God had revealed in both areas. In contrast to the Humanism which had been set free by Aquinas, and the Roman Catholic form of Humanism, there was, for the Reformation, no autonomous portion.
This did not mean that there was no freedom for art or science. It was quite the opposite; there was now possible true freedom within the revealed form. But, though art and science have freedom, they are not autonomous—the artist and the scientist are also under the revelation of the Scriptures. As we shall see, whenever art or science has tried to be autonomous, a certain principle has always manifested itself—nature “eats up” grace, and thus art and science themselves soon began to be meaningless.
The Reformation had some tremendous results and made possible the culture which many of us love—even though our generation is now throwing it away. The Reformation confronts us with an Adam who was, using twentieth-century thought-forms, an unprogrammed man—he was not set up as a punch card in a computer system. One thing that marks twentieth-century man is that he cannot visualize this, because modern man is infiltrated by a concept of determinism. But the biblical position is clear—man cannot be explained as totally determined and conditioned—a position that built the concept of the dignity of man. People today are trying to hang on to the dignity of man, and they do not know how to because they have lost the truth that man is made in the image of God. He was an unprogrammed man, a significant man in a significant history, and he could change history.
You have then, in Reformation thought, a man who is somebody. But you also have him in revolt: and he really revolts—it is not “a piece of theater.” And, because he is an unprogrammed man and really revolts, he has true moral guilt. Because of this, the Reformers understood something else. They had a biblical understanding of what Christ did. They understood that Jesus died on the cross in substitution and as a propitiation in order to save men from their true guilt. We need to learn that, when we begin to tamper with the scriptural concept of true, moral guilt, whether it be psychological tampering, theological tampering or any other kind of tampering, our view of what Jesus did will no longer be scriptural. Christ died for a man who had true moral guilt because he had made a real and true choice.
MORE ABOUT MAN
We must now see something else about man. To do this we must notice that everything in the biblical system goes back to God. I love the biblical system as a system. While we might not like the connotation of the word system, because it sounds rather cold, this does not mean that the biblical teaching is not a system. Everything goes back to the beginning and thus the system has a unique beauty and perfection because everything is under the apex of the system. Everything begins with the kind of God who is “there.” This is the beginning and apex of the whole, and everything flows from this in a non-contradictory way. The Bible says God is a living God and it tells us much about him, but, most significantly perhaps, for twentieth-century man, it speaks of him as both a personal God and an infinite God. This is the kind of God who is “there,” who exists. Furthermore, this is the only system, the only religion, that has this kind of God. The gods of the East are infinite by definition, in the sense that they encompass all—the evil as well as the good—but they are not personal. The gods of the West were personal, but they were very limited. The Teutonic, the Roman and the Greek gods were all the same—personal but not infinite. The Christian God, the God of the Bible, is personal-infinite.
This personal-infinite God of the Bible is the Creator of all else. God created all things, and he created them out of nothing. Therefore everything else is finite, everything else is the creature. He alone is the infinite Creator. This can be set out as follows:
THE PERSONAL-INFINITE GOD
He created man, the animals, the flowers and the machine. On the side of his infinity, man is as separated from God as is the machine. But, says the Bible, when you come on to the side of man’s personality, you have something quite different. The chasm is at a different point:
THE PERSONAL-INFINITE GOD
So man, being made in the image of God, was made to have a personal relationship with him. Man’s relationship is upward and not merely downward. If you are dealing with twentieth-century people, this becomes a very crucial difference. Modern man sees his relationship downward to the animal and to the machine. The Bible rejects this view of who man is. On the side of personality you are related to God. You are not infinite but finite; nevertheless, you are truly personal; you are created in the image of the personal God who exists.
REFORMATION, RENAISSANCE AND MORALS
There are many practical results of these differences between Renaissance and Reformation thought. Illustrations could come from a wide field. For example, the Renaissance set women free. So did the Reformation—but with a great difference. Jacob Burckhardt’s work The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, published in Basel in 1860, is still a standard work on these subjects. He points out that the women of the Renaissance in Italy were free, but at the great cost of general immorality. Burckhardt (1818-1897) takes pages to illustrate this.
Why was it? It goes back to the then current view of nature and grace. These things are never merely theoretical, because men act the way they think:
LYRIC POETS—“SPIRITUAL LOVE”—IDEAL LOVE
NOVELISTS AND COMIC POETS—SENSUAL LOVE
In the upper section you have the lyric poets who taught “spiritual love” and ideal love. Then, below, you have the novelists and the comic poets who taught sensual love. There was a flood of pornographic books. This element of the Renaissance period did not stop with the books themselves but carried over into the kind of lives men lived. The autonomous man found himself in a duality. You feel this in Dante, for example. He fell in love with one woman at first sight, and he loved her all his life. Then he married another woman who bore his children and washed his dishes.
The simple fact is that this nature-grace division flowed over into the whole structure of Renaissance life, and the autonomous “lower story” always ate up the “upper.”
THE WHOLE MAN
The Reformation’s biblical view was, and is, very different. It is not a Platonic view. The soul is not more important than the body. God made the whole man and the whole man is important. The doctrine of the bodily resurrection of the dead is not an old-fashioned thing. It tells us that God loves the whole man and the whole man is important. The biblical teaching, therefore, opposes the Platonic, which makes the soul (the “upper”) very important and leaves the body (the “lower”) with little importance at all. The biblical view also opposes the humanist position where the body and autonomous mind of man become important and grace becomes very unimportant.
The biblical position, stressed at the Reformation, says that neither the Platonic view nor the humanist view will do. First, God made the whole man and he is interested in the whole man. Second, when the historic space-time Fall took place, it affected the whole man. Third, on the basis of Christ’s work as Savior, and having the knowledge that we possess in the revelation of the Scriptures, there is redemption for the whole man. In the future, the whole man will be raised from the dead and will be redeemed perfectly. And Paul says in Romans 6 that even in the present life we are to have a substantial reality of the redemption of the whole man. This is to be on the basis of the shed blood of Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit through faith, even though it will not be perfect in this life. There is the real lordship of Christ over the whole man. This is what the Reformers understood and what the Bible teaches. In Holland, for example, more than in Anglo-Saxon Christianity, they emphasized that this meant a lordship of Christ in culture.
So it means that Christ is equally Lord in both areas:
GRACE
NATURE
There is nothing autonomous—nothing apart from the lordship of Jesus Christ and the authority of the Scriptures. God made the whole man and is interested in the whole man, and the result is a unity. Thus at the same time as the birth of modern man in the Renaissance there was the Reformation’s answer to his dilemma. In contrast, the dualism in Renaissance man has brought forth the modern forms of Humanism, with modern man’s sorrows.