5. The key to freedom
Chapter 4
THE PARADOX OF OUR HUMANNESS
Why am I a Christian? Not only because Christianity explains who Jesus was, and what he achieved on the cross, but because it also explains who I am. Twice in the Bible the question is asked, and to some degree answered: ‘What is man?’ (Psalm 8:4; Job 7:17). That is, what does it mean to be a human being? What is the essence of our humanness?
There are three reasons why this question is of great importance – personal, political and professional.
First, personal. To ask, ‘What is man?’ is another way of asking, ‘Who am I?’ It enables us to respond both to the ancient Greek formula gnōthi seauton (‘know yourself’) and to the modern quest for our own identity. There is no more important field for search and research than this. Until we have discovered ourselves we cannot easily discover anything else.
A story is told of Artur Schopenhauer, the nineteenth-century German philosopher of pessimism. One day he was sitting on a bench in a Frankfurt park. He looked shabby and dishevelled (as western philosophers sometimes do!), so that the park-keeper mistook him for a tramp. He asked him gruffly, ‘Who are you?’, to which the philosopher replied bitterly, ‘I would to God I knew.’
Douglas Coupland asks the same question today. He is the inventor of the now popular expression ‘Generation X’ – ‘X’ standing for the unknown identity of his generation. ‘They don’t have a name,’ he writes, ‘they’re an “X” generation.’ So ‘What makes humans...human?’, he asks. ‘We know what dog behaviour is: dogs do doggy things – they chase sticks...they stick their heads out of moving car windows.’ So we know the dogginess of dogs; but ‘what exactly is it that humans do that is specifically human?’1 Again, ‘What is the you of you?’, that is, the real you?2
Many answers have been given to this question, especially to the question wherein the superiority of human beings is to be found. It is amusing to review some of the answers given. A human being was described by Aristotle as a political animal, by Thomas Willis as a laughing animal, by Benjamin Franklin as a tool-making animal, by Edmund Burke as a religious animal, and by James Boswell (the gourmet) as a cooking animal.
Other writers have focused on some physical feature as our distinguishing characteristic. Plato made much of our erect posture, so that animals look down, while only human beings look up to heaven. Aristotle added the peculiarity that only human beings are unable to wiggle their ears. A Stuart doctor, however, was greatly impressed by our intestines, by their ‘anfractuous circumlocutions, windings and turnings’. Then in the late eighteenth century Uvedale Price drew special attention to our nose. ‘Man is, I believe’, he wrote, ‘the only animal that has a marked projection in the middle of the face.’3
None of these descriptions of our distinctiveness gives a complete picture, however, nor do they get to the heart of the matter.
We turn now from the personal to the political importance of the question about our humanness. The chief point of conflict between the rival ideologies of Marx and Jesus remains the nature of human beings. ‘Ideologies...are really anthropologies’, wrote J. S. Whale; they are different doctrines of man.4 That is, do human beings have an absolute value, because of which they must be respected? Or is their value only relative to the State, because of which they may be exploited? More simply, are people the servants of the institution, or is the institution the servant of the people?
Thirdly, our question has a professional importance. The great professions (e.g. in education and the law) and the so-called ‘caring’ professions (in medical, paramedical and social work) are all concerned with the welfare of human beings, whether they call them patients, pupils or clients. And how they treat those they serve depends almost entirely on how they evaluate them.
Having considered the importance of our question (personal, political and professional), we return to the question itself. The Christian critique of much modern philosophy and ideology is that it is either too naïve in its optimism about the human condition or too negative in its pessimism, whereas we dare to add that only the Bible keeps the balance.
Secular humanists tend to be very optimistic. True, they declare that human beings are nothing but the product of blind evolutionary forces. But they have boundless confidence in what they regard as our future evolutionary potential, especially that one day human beings will be able to take hold of their own history and control their own destiny. But that is too optimistic. It does not take into account what Christians call ‘original sin’, which is a twist of self-centredness in our nature and which has repeatedly thwarted the dreams of social reformers.
Atheistic existentialists, on the other hand, go to the opposite extreme of pessimism, even of despair. Because there is no God, they say, there are no longer any values. Although we must somehow find the courage to be, nothing has meaning and everything is ultimately absurd – which is at least logical if God is dead. Mark Twain, the famous American wit, although he lived long before the development of existentialism, nevertheless expressed a kind of existential cynicism when he said, ‘If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat!’5 But this is too pessimistic. It takes no account of the love, joy, beauty, heroism and self-sacrifice that have adorned the human story.
It is my contention that only authentic Christianity avoids both extremes, for what we need, to quote J. S. Whale again, is ‘neither the easy optimism of the humanist, nor the dark pessimism of the cynic, but the radical realism of the Bible’.6 For the Bible preserves the paradox, namely the glory and the shame of our humanness, our dignity and our depravity.
1. The Glory
It is in the very first chapter of the Bible that we hear the majestic words of God:
‘Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’
So God created man
in his own image,
in the image of God
he created him;
male and female
he created them.
(Genesis 1:26–27)
There has been much discussion about the meaning of the divine image in human beings. Some scholars emphasize that in the cultures of Egypt and Assyria the king or emperor was regarded as ‘the image of God’, representing him on earth, and that they had images of themselves erected in their provinces to symbolize the extent of their jurisdiction. Against this background God has entrusted a royal responsibility to human beings, appointing them to rule over the earth and its creatures.
In the unfolding narrative of the Bible, however, the divine image is clearly what distinguishes humans from animals, namely a cluster of unique human qualities.
First, there is our capacity for rational thought. Of course, animals also have brains, some more rudimentary than others. But they lack ‘understanding’ or intelligence (Psalm 32:9), whereas human beings are able to think, reason, argue and debate. We are also self-conscious. That is, we have the extraordinary ability to do what we are doing at this moment, namely to step outside ourselves, to evaluate ourselves, and to ask ourselves questions about our own identity. It is true that, astronomically speaking, as one scientist said to another, man is extremely insignificant. But then, astronomically speaking, his colleague responded, man is the astronomer! We are restlessly inquisitive about the universe. As Archbishop William Temple once said, ‘I am greater than the stars, for I know that they are up there, but they do not know that I am down here.’
Secondly, there is our capacity for moral choice. We have a conscience to discern between good and evil, together with a degree of freedom to choose between them. We are aware of a moral order outside and above us, to which we know we are accountable, so that we have an inner urge to do what we believe to be right, and a profound sense of guilt when we do what we know to be wrong.
But animals have no moral sense. For instance, you can train your dog (by repetitive punishments and rewards) to obey your commands and to learn that it is allowed to sit on only one chair in the lounge. If on entering the room you find it sitting on a forbidden seat, it will instinctively cower away from you, not because it feels guilty (however guilty it may look) but because it knows it’s going to be smacked.
Thirdly, there is our capacity for artistic creativity. When God created us in his own image, he made us creative like himself. We are ‘creative creatures’. So we draw and we paint, we build and we sculpt, we dream and we dance, we write poetry and we make music. Human beings are both imaginative and innovative. We appreciate what is beautiful to the eye, the ear and the touch.
Fourthly, there is our capacity for social relationships. Of course, all animals mate and reproduce, and care for their young. While some are gregarious (going about in flocks or herds), others develop highly complex social structures (e.g. bees, wasps and ants). But human beings hunger for the authentic relationships of love. Love is not just a disturbance in the endocrine glands! Everybody knows that love is the greatest thing in the world. Living is loving, and without love the human personality disintegrates and dies. Moreover, Christians know why love is pre-eminent. It is because God is love in his innermost being, so that when he made us in his image he gave us the capacity to love and to be loved.
Fifthly, there is our capacity for humble worship. There has been much discussion about the collapse of Euro-Marxism and its causes. Many believe it was due to its gross materialism. For materialism cannot satisfy the human spirit either in its communistic or in its capitalistic form. We know instinctively that there is a transcendent reality beyond the material order, and people are seeking it everywhere. The New Age movement is perhaps the latest evidence of this quest. Human beings do not live – indeed, cannot live – on bread alone, Jesus said, quoting from the Old Testament (Matthew 4:4; Deuteronomy 8:3), or, as Dostoyevski wrote, ‘man must bow down before the infinitely great’. We are most truly human when we are worshipping God.
Here then, are five human capacities (to think, choose, create, love and worship) that set us apart from animals and that together constitute the image of God in us. No wonder poets and dramatists have celebrated the unique dignity of human beings. Hamlet was hardly exaggerating when he said to himself, ‘What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties!...in action how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!’7
How I wish I could end this chapter here, and we could move on to the next topic, glowing with unadulterated self-esteem! But there is another and darker side to our humanness, which we wish we could forget, but which keeps reasserting itself and of which in our best moments we are thoroughly ashamed. As Mark Twain put it: ‘Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.’8
2. The Shame
Jesus himself spoke of this. Here is perhaps his most outspoken statement:
‘For from within, out of men’s hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and make a man “unclean”’ (Mark 7:21–23).
So Jesus did not teach the fundamental goodness of human nature; on the contrary, he insisted on our innate human capacity for evil. Indeed, in this passage there are four aspects of human evil that should engage our attention.
Firstly, the extent of evil is universal. We note that Jesus was not describing the criminal segment of society, or some particularly degraded tribe. No, he was talking with those religious and righteous people called Pharisees. And he made a general statement about the whole human race, namely that out of the heart of man (any and every man, woman and child) evil things come.
Secondly, the essence of evil is self-centredness. We have already noted this. Now Jesus gives a list of thirteen ‘evils’ and, when we study them, they are all manifestations of human self-centredness. They are the thoughts, words and deeds of which we become guilty when we fail to put God first, our neighbour next and ourselves last. I once took down the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary and looked up the words compounded with ‘self’ – words like self-assertion, self-indulgence, self-applause, self-advertisement, self-gratification, self-glorification, self-pity and self-will. There are more than fifty self-words that have a pejorative meaning. We evidently need this rich vocabulary to express our multifaceted self-centredness.
Thirdly, the origin of evil is the human heart. As has often been said, ‘the heart of the human problem is the problem of the human heart’. The Pharisees, with whom Jesus was in debate, had an external and ceremonial view of defilement and purity. They were concerned for the washing of hands and vessels, and the avoidance of certain foods. But Jesus emphasized not the external but the internal. What defiles us is not what goes into us (into our stomach) but what comes out of us (out of our heart).
One might almost say that Jesus was introducing us to Freudianism centuries before Freud. For what Jesus called the heart is roughly equivalent to what Freud called the subconscious. It is like a very deep well. Normally the thick deposit of mud at the bottom is unseen and unsuspected. But when the waters of the well are stirred by the winds of violent emotion, the most evil-looking, evil-smelling filth bubbles up from the depths and breaks the surface – anger, malice, lust, hatred, cruelty and revenge – and we are horrified to glimpse the evils of which our heart is capable.
Fourthly, the result of evil is that it defiles us. That is, it makes us unclean in the sight of God and unfit for his presence. All those who have caught even a momentary glimpse of God’s holiness have not been able to bear the sight – like Moses at the burning bush, who ‘hid his face, because he was afraid to look at God’ (Exodus 3:6).
This, then, is the shame of our humanness. Human evil is universal in its extent, self-centred in its nature, inward in its origin and defiling in its effect. This is not only the diagnosis of (arguably) the greatest ethical teacher in history, but it is also true to our own experience. It is certainly true of mine.
3. The Paradox
Now we are ready to bring together the glory and the shame, the dignity and the depravity, of our humanness. For human beings are a strange and tragic paradox. We are capable of both the loftiest nobility and the basest cruelty. We are able to behave at one moment like God, in whose image we were made, and in the next moment like the beasts, from whom we were meant to be for ever distinct. We are able to think, choose, create, love and worship; but we are also able to hate, covet, fight and kill. Human beings are the inventors of hospitals for the care of the sick, of universities for the acquisition of wisdom, and of churches for the worship of God. But they have also invented torture chambers, concentration camps and nuclear arsenals.
This is the paradox of our humanness. We are both noble and ignoble, both rational and irrational, both moral and immoral, both creative and destructive, both loving and selfish, both God-like and bestial.
I know no more eloquent statement of the human paradox than one given a good many years ago by Bishop Richard Holloway:
This is my dilemma...I am dust and ashes, frail and wayward, a set of predetermined behavioural responses...riddled with fears, beset with needs...the quintessence of dust and unto dust I shall return...But there is something else in me...Dust I may be, but troubled dust, dust that dreams, dust that has strange premonitions of transfiguration, of a glory in store, a destiny prepared, an inheritance that will one day be my own...So my life is stretched out in a painful dialectic between ashes and glory, between weakness and transfiguration. I am a riddle to myself, an exasperating enigma...this strange duality of dust and glory.9
The paradox of our humanness has a number of practical consequences – especially political, psychological and personal.
Politically, the human paradox or ambiguity makes democracy the best form of government yet developed. For ideally democracy recognizes both the dignity and the depravity of our human being. On the one hand, it recognizes our human dignity, because it refuses to push people around or to govern us without our consent. Instead, it gives us a share in the decision-making process. It treats us with respect as responsible adults.
On the other hand, democracy also recognizes our human depravity. For it refuses to concentrate power in the hands of a few, knowing that it is not safe to do so. So it is of the essence of democracy to disperse power and so protect rulers from themselves. As Reinhold Niebuhr put it, ‘man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary’.10
I come secondly to the psychological consequences of the human paradox. We all know the importance for our mental health of having a balanced self-image. Some people have crippling inferiority feelings and a very poor self-image. Others go to the opposite extreme. Carl Rogers, for example, the American founder of ‘client-centred psychotherapy’, came to believe that the core of our human personality is positive, and that we need therefore to develop an ‘unconditional positive self-regard’.11 This kind of thinking flourishes in the self-actualization movement and has overtaken many Christians, who argue that we are to love God, our neighbour and ourselves. But this means we are to love our neighbour as in fact, being fallen, we do love ourselves. It is not an exhortation to love ourselves, as is clear from three arguments. First, Jesus spoke of the first and second commandments, but did not mention a third. Secondly, self-love is the very essence of sin (2 Timothy 3:2). Thirdly, the love that is to characterize our lives is agapē love, which includes both sacrifice and service, and therefore cannot be turned in on ourselves. How can we sacrifice ourselves to serve ourselves?
What, then, is a balanced self-image? If we are neither to hate ourselves nor to love ourselves, how are we to regard ourselves? It is here that the human paradox comes in. We are to remember that human beings are the product of both the creation and the fall. So, then, everything in us that is attributable to our creation in the image of God we gratefully affirm, while everything in us that is attributable to the fall we must resolutely repudiate or deny. Thus we are called both to self-affirmation and to self-denial, and we need discernment to distinguish which is appropriate and when.
The third consequence of the human paradox is personal. We have seen that Jesus describes evil as both issuing from our heart and causing our defilement. It is clear therefore from this that we have a double need: on the one hand cleansing from defilement, and on the other a new heart with new desires and aspirations. And to me it is truly wonderful that both these are offered to us in the gospel. For Christ died to make us clean, and by the inward working of his Holy Spirit he can make us new. This is the logical application of the gospel in response to the paradox of our humanness; it is the fourth reason why I am a Christian.