A Biblical View of Man

From the Manse - July/August 2001

I am not yet officially back to work, and yet in the last three weeks I have conducted a funeral, a marriage, a baptism and an ordination of elders. In addition, I have handed out Sabbath School prizes and conducted several services. Not bad for someone who is still recuperating from major surgery!

It is easy now to look over the past five months of my enforced sabbatical and to wonder what it was all about. But then I recall sleepless nights of intense agony, days of complete immobility and moments of sheer despair, and I hope that I have emerged from the experience a little wiser, and a lot more thankful.

There are some experiences in life which, I am convinced, are designed to show us that we are nothing, that 'the best of men are only men at best'. These experiences are sent to show us that in ourselves we are nothing, and that we are completely dependent on the sustaining and keeping grace of God. It is after we have imagined ourselves to be something that we are taught that really there is little to us.

Yet, for all that, there is something to us -- something so unique and masterly that the very image of our Creator is stamped upon our being. Our bodies are remarkably complex, yet perfectly suited for living in this world. Our minds are conscious of processing information and thought in a way that even the most complex computers cannot match. And, dependent though we are on gadgetry, technology and machinery, we can be moved to the depth of our being by the sound of music or the colours of the sunset.

So although Shakespeare wrote about man as the 'quintessence of dust', he also had to describe him as a work beyond praise, 'noble in reason ... infinite in faculty ... in form, in moving, express and admirable'. The biblical doctrine of man accords man much more dignity than the scientific theory of evolution. We are not some higher species of animal, but the very image of God himself. And although sin has damaged us in our aims, conscience and knowledge, it has not robbed us of that image; to lose the image of God is to cease to be human.

That implies, first, that we need to recover the high view of man which the Bible endorses. That view tells us that from the point of conception to the point of death, we are to guard against any reductionist view of human life. For all our objections to Roman Catholic dogma, the Roman Catholic church has been at the forefront of the anti-abortion movement (and no-one, perhaps, more articulately so than the late Cardinal Winning). On this issue, at least, the voice of the churches should be loud and clear.

It implies, secondly, that our relations with one another ought to be modified by respect, deference and charity. In the words of the Bible, we ought to regard others more than ourselves. Too often quick to condemn, criticise and discourage, we ought to remember that each human being stands on the apex of God's created order, and that there our speech, therefore, ought to be "seasoned with salt".

Third, it implies that there ought to be a role for everyone in our activities, whether in community, school or church -- none ought to be excluded; all ought to be involved. There has been much in the media recently about discrimination -- and rightly so. In Christ Jesus, there is no Jew nor Greek, no bond nor free, no rich nor poor.

So, in a world of reductionist views, and of inhumanity and strife, let us try to capture once again the high view of human nature which the Bible teaches and declares.