2. A Vision of Humanness
2. A Vision of Humanness
Now let me share with you more fully my own vision and ideal of achieved humanness, the vision which I find evangelical Christian humanism embracing just as the Puritans and Wesley did in earlier days. I realize that I can only do this here in formulary terms, but I hope that even the sketchiest mental framework will be better than nothing at all, and of course we can all work privately at filling it in after the meeting is over! So I offer you this formula, which I believe crystallizes a great deal that is in the Bible. Humanness, the natural expression and fulfilment of the nature our Maker gave us, consists of a life-pattern of relationships in which God is adored and his image in us is fulfilled.
This formula, as you see, assumes three things: first, that relationships are of the essence of our life; second, that worship of God is natural to us, and necessary for our personal well-being; third, that as purposive action resulting in personal change is the shape of all our conscious living, so God's image must be thought of not just as something static and given, like a tattoo that stays on me whether I like it or not, but also as a condition which is more or less achieved according to how I use my God-given capacities. The given capacities (the image viewed formally) are powers of thought, of construction, of management, of moral discernment and of relating responsively to other rational beings. The fulfilment of the image (the image viewed substantially) consists of actual rationality, creativity, mastery of environment, righteousness and community. The first and second of these assumptions I must take for granted now (they would not, I think, be hard to defend if challenged); the third however needs to be spelled out.
Where do we learn of God's image in man? In the first chapter of Genesis, where, as the climax of the story of how God shaped up the glorious complexities of the natural order, we read this: "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness"—the two phrases mean the same—"and let them have dominion . . . over all the earth. ... So God created man in his own image; in the image of God created he him"—the repetition is for emphasis—"male and female created he them" (Genesis 1:26-7; cf. 9:6; James 3:9). We need not look outside Genesis 1 to find the five items which, as I urged above, combine to make up God's image in man, both as an endowment and as an achievement. Here they are.
First comes rationality, the gift of intelligence and the power to reason and make plans. Creation, as depicted in Genesis 1, was the work of a mighty mind, forming and executing purposes ("Let there be . . .") and then evaluating its own achievement ("God saw everything that he had made, and behold it was very good"). God made man in his own image to have dominion over the earth and all its contents: reason, on the pattern if not with the power of God's reason, was needed for that, just as man needed reason if God was to be able to address him in words. Man could not know, love or serve God without this endowment of reason with which to apprehend him. Rationality is thus the basic element in God's image, and is presupposed in fact by each of the other four items in it which we are to look at now.
Second comes creativity, the capacity to make things and thereby impart value to them. It is good that in this twentieth century, when for so many daily work has become a monotonous drudgery, we are at last starting to appreciate the preciousness of our natural creativity, and the importance of exercising it if we are to live full-orbed and contented lives. In Genesis 1 God appears as the great Creator; this fact about him fills the whole of verses 1-25; so that when he says, "Let us make man in our image," we are evidently meant to understand that God intends man, within his limits, to be a creator too.
It is man's privilege and joy under God to be artist and craftsman, producing as God did things that are good and have value. I, for instance, am a writer; I create books. I work hard at them, I put a lot of myself into them, and I get much joy from finding, as I sometimes do, that what I slogged away at now has value for somebody. Again, a homemaker puts her heart and her back into creating a place to live that is beautiful, comfortable and welcoming, and finds joy when her family and friends appreciate the value of what she has done. Again, married couples make babies; God gives them the thrilling though awesome privilege of creating new human life, and of molding and shaping the children's growth by the way they bring them up. Arts and crafts, performing skills, homemaking, family life—these are all spheres of creativity, in which this aspect of God's image in us is expressed and displayed.
Third comes dominion, mastery over created things. We read that when God resolved to create man in his image he said: "and let them have dominion." God made us with the intention that we should control our environment by harnessing and managing the forces of nature; thus our lives become an image of God's own lordship over all things. This amounts to saying that God summons men to create a culture, a civilization, in which through cooperation one with another life is made richer than otherwise it could be. The fantastic technological advances of our time enable us to go further in doing this than any previous generation could.
Technology is not intrinsically sinful or soulless. Granted, technology is often used sinfully and soullessly to gain wealth and power at others' expense, and our duty to be good stewards of God's precious creation, not raping and ruining it by wanton squandering of natural resources, is often disregarded. But that does not mean that technology is evil in itself, only that it is being misdirected and mishandled. "Let them have dominion" is in effect God's directive to us to develop a technology as a means of mastery.
The Creator is glorified when the possibilities of his creation are realized and developed by human enterprise, provided that this is done responsibly, in a way that benefits others. Recognition of our responsibility to use created things for the Creator's praise may be a rare thing in our time, yet dominion remains an abiding element of the image of God in human life.
Fourth in the list comes righteousness, by which I mean the doing of God's revealed will, so that our lives embody his moral preferences and make for his pleasure. We read that once God had made men he gave them their orders: "God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion . . ." (Gen. 1:28). The essence of righteousness is to obey God's orders and do what he says, for the will of our morally perfect God is the rule of what is right for us, his creatures. The Bible has a name for God's teaching on how we should live: the name is law, in Hebrew torah.
The biblical idea of God's law is not, in the first instance, that of a public legal code (though God gave Israel its public legal code), but of friendly authoritative instruction such as a wise father gives his children. That is what torah means. God's law is his kindly word to us as our Creator who cares for us and wants to lead us into rewarding paths. To be sure, disobedience to God's law will bring retribution, but the law was given not primarily to threaten us, rather to guide us into what is good for us. If God's law becomes a threat to us, that is because of our own negative and defiant attitude to it, just as civil laws protecting property, which are beneficial in themselves, become a threat to anyone who decides to become a burglar. What God commands is in fact no less good for us than it is pleasing to him; for the righteousness that he requires fits our human nature as our shoes fit our feet.
In these days in which we let ourselves be led so largely by the hunting and herd instincts of the jungle, and are reluctant to acknowledge any law save that of urges welling up from the depths of our fallen nature, it is well to be reminded that God's revealed law stands related to us human beings as the owner's manual stands related to our cars. You need not read the manual, or take any notice of what it says—but you can expect your car to give trouble if you handle it differently from the way the manual directs. And we can expect our human nature, which was designed to operate in obedience to God's law and experience freedom and fulfilment, contentment and joy in so doing, to give a vast amount of trouble if we break the bounds and use or, rather, misuse our humanity in a different way.
Think about sex, now, in the light of that last statement. This is an age of frank talk about sex: let me do a little frank talking on my own account. A moment ago we recalled God's command to man to subdue the earth. Note, however, that this was only the second thing God told man to do to the earth; his first appointed task was to be fruitful, and multiply, and fill it. But if procreation is commanded, then sexual relations are commanded, and sex is among other things fun.
Can it be that God actually commands us to have fun? Surely not, says somebody; at least, not that much fun! No, you are wrong. You are in good company, I grant you; the great St. Augustine, chief post-apostolic architect of all Western Christianity, held that sex within marriage for affection, affirmation, tenderness and pleasure, as distinct from the holy purpose of procreation, could never be quite right, and many noble souls since his day have swallowed this bitter teaching without a murmur. But by biblical standards Augustine was wrong, just as you are.
Look at the Song of Solomon—a canonical love lyric! Certainly, it is there to picture the Lord's love for his people, but that does not alter the fact that it is the duet of a committed and faithful human couple celebrating their mutual attraction and affection. And look at Proverbs 5:18-19 (RSV): "Rejoice in the wife of your youth ... let her affection fill you at all times with delight, be infatuated always with her love." There can be no doubt about it: when God told the man and the woman to multiply, he was telling them, and intending them, to have fun. For married couples, the joy of sex is commanded by God.
C. S. Lewis's Screwtape disgustedly called the Creator "a hedonist at heart," because he wants to see us happy and loves to make us so. No doubt God's direction of married persons into the pleasure of sexual love was one thing Screwtape had in mind. When in 1949 the Pope asked Louis Armstrong whether he had any children, the Baptist jazzman replied, "Not yet, but we're having a lot of fun trying." Armstrong's statement, though perhaps unexpected, was from a Christian standpoint entirely proper, as was the good laugh with which the Pope greeted it.3
There is, of course, another side to this coin. The Bible sets strict bounds to our use of our sexual powers. Relationships are to be heterosexual only, and limited to couples with a lifelong mutual commitment, and not planned in terms of a permanent refusal to procreate. Fornication, adultery and homosexual intercourse are ruled out, and it is made clear that the full God-intended joy (which is much more than the physical kick) will not be found along those paths. Abstinence within marriage will be right on occasion (1 Cor. 7:5), and virginity is the appropriate way of life for some. Jesus, who said this (Matt. 19:10-12), was himself an instance of it, and it would be hard to maintain that his humanity, or that of Jeremiah, who was told not to marry (Jer. 16:2), or that of Paul, who, whether a widower or deserted by his wife after his conversion, had no sexual partner throughout his ministry, was thereby diminished.
The standards of sexual self-control for all and sexual abstinence for some are explicit, and here as everywhere grace to live by God's standards will be given to all who seek it. Just as there is joy and fulfilment in using sex responsibly within marriage, so there is joy and fulfilment in obediently restraining sex outside marriage, both of which things God can enable us to do. And life's deepest joy will always be found in doing what we know to be God's will.
Now what is true of sex, the subject matter of God's first command to man in Genesis 1, is true of all divine commands. Sex is a paradigm case, a clear example of what is true of God's law in every sphere of life. Disregard it, affirming against it your own autonomy, and the result is strain and distress deep down, because in addition to displeasing God you do violence to your own nature. Keep the law, and in thus serving God you find freedom and delight, because human nature is programmed for fulfilment through obedience.
Deliberate doing of God's will is man's only truly natural way of living. As there are natural and unnatural eating habits, so there are natural and unnatural moral habits, and all defiance of divine law is unnatural and does us damage. You don't believe me? Well, I can understand that. One effect of the distorting twist called sin which the Bible diagnoses in all of us is to make it our habit not to believe what God says. More fools we!—for our disbelief does not make it untrue, and if we will not take God's words as our steppingstones to walk by they will become our stumbling blocks, over which we trip and fall.
Righteousness, then, meaning obedience to God's revealed will both in procreation and in all else, is the crucial and joyous fourth element in the image of God which we were all of us made to bear.
Fifth and last comes community, or togetherness. God made us to live in society— as John Donne said, no man is an island. Life is relationships, and we can only live fully human lives in fellowship with other people, in family, church, civil community, clubs, friendships and so on. Is this togetherness an aspect of the divine image? There are good grounds for saying, yes. Did you notice the plural pronouns in God's decision recorded in Genesis 1:26, "Let us make man in our image"? It is not the "us" of royalty or authorship (Hebrew knows neither of these idioms); it is the "us” of plurality. Here as elsewhere Hebrew, which has no lack of singular words for God, denotes him by a word with a plural form, and by plural pronouns. Why?
Christians down the ages have seen this plural as a hint—no more, but equally no less—of the personal plurality in God which becomes explicit in the New Testament disclosure of the Trinity. God, we now know, is intrinsically a society; provided you do not go over the edge into tritheism, you could even call him, as has been done, a corporation, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. (I am reminded of the printing at the top of an envelope that once came to me from the U.S.A.: God and Son Inc., Doing Business for 2000 years with Sinners Like You.) So it seems right to say that the togetherness which is essential to our well-being as persons is actually a further item in the image of God which we are called to reflect and embody in our life activities.
If, now, God's image in man consists, as we have urged, in the combination of rationality, creativity, mastery, obedience to God and community, which means togetherness with others, and if it is true that we were created with all these capacities so that we might actualize them in daily life, then we can see at once what a genuinely human life style will be like. It will unite worship with work, and responsible planning with creative use of created things; it will be marked by grateful and caring dependence on our family and friends and outgoing service of others, a Samaritanship shaped by the particular needs, material and spiritual, by which we find our neighbor beset. (Neighborliness, as the Good Samaritan story reveals it, goes as wide as need, and so can include both public and social service, such as Joseph and Daniel rendered in pagan governments, and personal spiritual ministry, such as Paul the missionary fulfilled to his converts.)
Such is the way of living for which God planned us, and only such living fulfils the deepest instincts of our nature. (Note, please, that I said nature, not body; the instincts of our nature go beyond, and are more basic than, the drives of our body.) Only such living as is described, therefore, realizes the dignity of human life and brings fulfilment to the human individual. Thus only this kind of living is truly natural. It is a mark of our sophisticated age to pine for what is natural—natural childbirth, natural foodstuffs and feeding habits, natural sound, or whatever. If we would also embrace God's teaching on the life style that is natural for us, what gain it would be!