A Guide to Christian Theology - Lesson 28

A Guide to Christian Theology
Dr. Gerry Breshears
th104-28
Humanity
Lesson Transcript

So I want to take another topic here today and that topic is the whole issue of humanity. So the verse I'd do here is from Psalm Chapter 8, "What is man that thou art mindful of him?" To keep the King James phrasing, what is man that thou art mindful of him? And that's a question I want to ask coming into that, and that question of what is human? What is it that God has done in creating humans? What's our purpose for being here? There are a lot of questions far more than we can go into here in this short study, but there are some things that are really important here, I think.When you talk about human, the first thing we want to say about human is, if you go back to Genesis chapter 2 verse 7, talks about God who has...

Now, this is the second look at the creation narrative. The first looking from a cosmological perspective, now it's focusing particularly on humanity. So verse 7, the Lord God formed a man, that's Adam. Not the man, Adam, the name, but Adam, a particular man, and then Adam can be humanity. So it can be all those meanings. He formed man from dust from the ground, breathed his nostrils of breath of life and man became a living being. If you do that literally you'd say it's a living soul. So what we're saying here fundamentally is God is creating a living person and that living person has two components, dust plus breath or body plus spirit, something like that. When I think of key aspects of humanity, what I wanted to say, first of all, is that humans come from the direct creative activity of God.

Again, I'm looking at the notes here that you have available to you. Humans originated from the direct creative activity of God. And the picture that's here is the God who created heaven and Earth is now getting his hands dirty in the dust and forming a body and then breathing life into it, and man becomes a living person. So humans originated from the direct creative activity of God and not from random application presently operating natural law. This is the big point of difference. This is the huge difference between what we can call evolutionism, which rules God out, and it comes through common descent and things get more and more complex until you finally have human. Frankly, it doesn't work scientifically. But what scripture is saying here is God is the direct creative act. Now, there's a difference between evangelicalism, going back to what we talked about in true creation.

I believe that God actually took dirt and breathed life into it. I think the picture here is a fairly literal picture of what God did. I think humans are a de novo creation, something brand new and categorically different in many ways than other animals. But I also have to say there's a real continuity with animals, because the term here in 2:7, nefesh haya in Hebrew, if you go back to chapter 1 verse 21, this is Genesis 1:21, "God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing." Well, that phrase living thing is nefesh haya. It's exactly the same word as Genesis 2:7, though it's disguised in the translation. God created the creatures of the sea and every nefesh haya, living soul, if we translate it the same way we did King James in 2:7, which water teams and moves about according to their kinds, and God said it's good. God blessed them and said, "Be fruitful and increase."

And then down in Genesis 1:24, "Let the land produce living creatures." Guess what? Nefesh haya. Living souls, according to their kinds. So this is that commonality as nefesh haya, living beings, is common to sea creatures, whales and such, perhaps maybe could salmon be nefesh haya? I said it as I'm looking at the Columbia River out here. Animals, cattle, dogs, maybe even cats, are nefesh haya, and humans are nefesh haya. As living beings, beings with life in them, that's common to all of us. The differentiation that's huge between human nefesh haya and cow nefesh haya or dog nefesh haya... I'm thinking of dogs because I was driving over this morning and there was a traffic jam and I think, "What is going on up here?"

And I couldn't quite see, I got up a little bit closer. And there's a guy who had stopped his car and he's out beside his car and there was a pitbull on the street on a leash and the guy was trying to pull the pitbull and it was not pulling. And the entire traffic stopped in favor of this dog. I don't have any idea I was able to get around it and get on over to recording time. But do we treat dogs with respect? I hope we do. They're living beings. Are spiders living beings? Are they nefesh haya? No. My pretty wife murders spiders, if you can imagine that. My pretty wife murders spiders instead of exercising dominion over nefesh haya. What should you do with nefesh haya? You should treat them with respect. What should you do with a spider? You should exercise dominion and relocate it to its proper domain, which is outside, in Sherry's estimation. But she murders spiders.

I say that a little bit lightheartedly. She actually does murder spiders, that's true. But see, nefesh haya is a living being, humans are living beings, there's a continuity there. So my friends who work in the BioLogos area, they're saying that God took high order hominids and did something special in that high order hominid so it became the image of God. That's the distinguishing point. And so they're saying that through common descent, God guiding providential and working through common descent or what we might call evolution, though that always carries an anti-God connotation to it, that God used that common descent and created humans, but then the breathing of life somehow God puts image of God's status into them. And so that's a different way. But whether you're a BioLogos person that says there's an evolutionary history behind the human or as I'm inclined to think that's a brand new creation, we both agree it's a direct creative act of God and there's a unique personhood associated with the image of God that comes out of that.

That's the heart of what we're saying here. And so I think of human, that's the fundamental thing. It's not random application present operating natural law. It's God's creative activity. Whether it's de novo as I think, or whether it's by him doing common descent and doing something special on Howard or hominid, we still believe it's there. And the key thing to sin is we're created in God's image and likeness in Genesis 1. And then we get into another point of debate. And when does humanness begin? And I'm absolutely deeply committed to the idea that humanness begins at conception, and I'm absolutely deeply committed to the idea that humanness ends at natural death, the separation of body and spirit. And I think all the way in between, humans are to be treated with respect and dignity. And that's part of the reason I'm so strongly pro-life, from conception to natural death, I want to support humans in all of those places.

Now there's details in there. I don't think that human souls preexist and then get a body, as Mormons would say. I don't think that there's a cycle of reincarnations as you would see in Eastern religions and some of the new age stuff. And the question there that comes out of that is, what is that point of uniqueness? And so that's where I want to take us back again. And we're in Genesis chapter one. And when I look at Genesis chapter one, "Then God said, let us make mankind in our image." And we've already looked at that us, and I think the us is a tiny little seed that's going to flower into full bush of trinity later on, but it's not here yet. This is not Trinity, but it's a seed that will say that Trinity's buried inside there as the bush flowers later on.

So I think just as the Trinity is three persons in one essence inherently relational, it says, "Let us make mankind in our image." This is not Adam the man, this is humankind. Why do I believe that? Because going on, it says that they may rule over the fish of the sea. So in this point there is a corporateness to that image of God, not just an individualness. So the ruling over. And you get this little poem down here in verse 27. "So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created," It should be him there in NIV. This is a place where I disagree with NIV. The Hebrew is a singular. God created him talking about the unity of the race, and then male and female he created them. That's plural. That's the diversity that comes in. And that image of God is at the center of things. We'll look at what that means in just a minute.

But that's a key thing is this image of God. And so in verse 27, God blessed them. So humans are blessable and different than animals. Animals get blessed too, but to be fruitful, fill the earth, rule over. And that ruling work that's part of image of God is unique to humans. So the image of God is a blessable, image bearing covenant partner to work with God and establish his rule over all of creation. So that's a key part of what we're talking about. What is the unique point in a human is that we are image of God, we're blessable, image bearing covenant partners with God to work with him, to do his ministry in the world. And that's true from the beginning of creation all through the new heavens and new earth. I think that's common all the way through. There are some attendant questions in there, and in your handout I have several biblical words.

And just really quickly, I want to do just a look at some of these biblical. Words because this is a place where the English meaning of these words and the biblical meaning of the word that's trended with that English word, is significantly different. So if I look at the term spirit, which is ruach in Hebrew and pneuma in Greek, if I look in the Greek or Hebrew and I see how the word spirit is used there in relation to humans, it's what you see... Well, let's look at some passages. I've got them noted here for you. If you look at Romans 8:16, "The spirit testifies with our spirit that we are God's children." Now if we're God's children, we're co-heirs, we share in his sufferings or we might share in his glory, and he goes on there. What is the word spirit there? It seems to me that the word spirit there is the whole. Person because it's not just our immaterial self that suffers, it's not just some God oriented part of me that suffers, it's all of me.

I think that this is a place where if we think about this, the spirit is the entire person, not just a piece of the person. If I go back to Romans chapter one, he begins at verse eight, Romans 1:8. "I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you because your faith is being reported all over the world. God whom I serve in my spirit in preaching gospel, his son is my witness, he'll come to remember you." What does spirit mean there? Does that mean some immaterial substance within Paul? I don't think so. He doesn't preach with his immaterial spirit, he preaches with his whole person. And I think we misinterpret things many times because you read the English and you read an English meaning of spirit, which is immaterial substance of some sort, and miss the point that he's talking about the whole person. Why does he use that?

I think what he's doing there is he's saying a person is related to God and carrying out God's command. So in filling the blanks there, I think a meaning of spirit is the whole person in relation to God. Sometimes it's the inner person as opposed to the outer person, so spirit versus body, and it can be used in similarity to the soul or spirit. I'm not going to unpack all these for you. But I want to bring in the idea of the word spirit, pneuma or ruach, can be the whole person and don't just assume when you see spirits immaterial substance. Same thing with soul, nefesh or psuche. If I look at the word soul in English, I almost always mean in contemporary English, an immaterial substance. So we think body and soul. Body is physical, soul is immaterial. But in the Bible it's talking, many times, most of the time about the living person. So Genesis 2:7, body plus breath is living soul, nefesh haya. That's the whole person.

And the word nefesh almost always means a living person or a living being. It only occasionally is referring to a immaterial part of the person. Matthew 10:28, "Don't fear human kill your body only, but fear human kill, body and soul." At that point the psuche is referring to an immaterial or part of the person. But usually it's a whole person. So again, we get some of these things and we get really into it. I'll not read through the rest of these there in front of you, I'll just tell you a couple of stories. I was with a couple last night and in our conversation, my friend Joel was talking about, I had it in my head, but I didn't have it in my heart. I had it in my mind, but I need to get it down to my heart. Well, what's the distinguishing between mind and heart at that point? Well, mine means I cognitively get it, in a factual sense, but I don't emotionally, deeply get it.

I left my heart in San Francisco and the heart is the seat of the emotions, all that kind of stuff. But see, biblically mind and heart are almost synonymous. Think of Romans 12. "I urge you brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice. Don't conform to the past world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind." Is that just as factual cognitions that are being renewed? No, no, that's fundamental. And heart is the same kind of thing. Proverbs 4:23, "Above all, guard your heart for from it flow the wellsprings of life." Heart and mind biblical are the control panels of your life. They're the fundamental values, assumptions, allegiances, that guide your life. And mind and heart are virtually synonymous in scripture. But in English, we made them cognition versus emotion. And so our English translations actually distort some of the meanings that come up. I'll show you my favorite one.

Matthew 22:37, "Teacher, what's the greatest commandment in the law? And Jesus said, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind." He's quoting from Deuteronomy chapter six. So Deuteronomy 6:5, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your strength." Let's look at that Deuteronomy thing. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your strength. If you go back and do the study in the Hebrew words, the word heart, you've got on your handout there, except you guys probably don't have the handout. But you do. What is heart on the handout there/ heart is the control panel. It's the inner allegiances, the inner values, the inner assumptions that guide your heart. So Proverbs 4:23, "Above all, guard your heart for from it flow the springs life."

So it's talking about the inner control panel. And then with your soul, well biblically, what is nefesh? Nefesh is the whole person, body plus spirit. So now he's saying love the Lord God only with your inner control panel, your fundamental values and assumptions, both with your whole person, all of your speech, all of your actions, all of the things you do. It's talking about with my whole person as an individual. And then with all of your strength, what in the world does that mean? Well, again, if you look at it in Hebrew, the word would translate literally as your muchness. What in the world does that mean? Well, it means all your relationships all around you and all the relationships that you have in your community. Now you see the English doesn't do well at all, because heart and soul are usually pretty much synonymous, and strength is weird. Do I need to go do some weightlifting or something?

But see, if you look at it biblically, it's my control panel, it's my body plus spirit, it's my relationships, are all to be demonstrating the love of God. And this is why I think we need to take a look at those biblical words and take the biblical definitions of the words rather than the English definitions of the words because it comes out to some very different kinds of things. A related question, how many parts to a person? And see what I want to say. First of all, I want to say one person. The first thing I say is one person. I always want to begin there. Not pieces of a person because I'm not a pieced person. I hope I'm a peaceful person, but not a pieced person. Begin with one person. So I serve the Lord with everything I am. My control panel, my whole person. So I begin with one person as a thinking, deciding, feeling, relating being. Then the next thing I want to say is there are two essences to a person.

There's one person as you see in the handout you all have, there's a single person. There are two aspects, material and immaterial. And those are what I'm going to call an interacting duality. So one person, a thinking, feeling, deciding, acting person. But there are two essences to a person, material and immaterial. And that's what you see in Genesis 2:7, is we see that dust plus breath becomes living person. And I think that humans are both material and immaterial substance. So the whole mind body distinction, if you studied some philosophies, is significant. The place where this is becoming a huge point of controversy right now... And I'm saying they're interacting duality, both essential, both influencing the other. So when Jesus is in the garden and it's late night, it's been a long day and he goes off to pray and says, "Watch with me." He comes back to Peter and James and John and they're asleep.

And he says, "Gosh, I needed you guys." And then he gives this thing, the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. What's he saying here? Your desire is there but you just don't have the energy left to do it. So your body affects your desires and you can't do what you want because your body won't let you do that. In other places, I'm tired but I just do it so I can go both directions, each influencing the other, both important, and the person is a combination of the two. The place for this becomes a dispute these days is in the whole issue of transgender and that sort of thing. And that's a very big controversy and I think by the time you see this, it'll still be a very big controversy. And the question is, what defines a person? And if you're in the trans world, what defines the person as how I perceive myself. I see myself to be a woman, therefore I am a woman. And so the desires are the fundamental aspect of a human.

When I grew up in the church, it was a similar kind of thing. The spirit was the real person, the body was a tool of the person. The body was a bad thing that actually held back my spirit. My spirit loves God, but my body is full of sexual, physical, covetous desires. And so the body is a bad thing. And what I want to do is leave the body behind and go be a spirit person. That was common teaching in my context for a long time. See, that's not interacting duality. The spirit is the person, the body is a piece of the person that's actually a problem. Same thing in the transgender today. The desires, the self-perceptions are the person, the body is a tool. So in the trans world, if my desire to be a woman doesn't relate to my body, which is male, fix my body.

And same thing, one Christian, one non-Christian largely, but it's not interacting duality, it's the spirit, the immaterial central. If you typically go to the doctor, they're going to be materialists. Your body is everything. So you've got a problem, we're going to shock you, we're going to cut you, or we're going to chemical you. How many doctors end up praying with you? Well mine does because he's a believer and that's why I picked him to my primary care physician. And we have a spiritual connection as well as a physical connection. But see typically, well what's coming up a lot now is in the psychological community. We have a really good counseling program at Western. And in much of the counseling material, the DSM, it's more and more moving toward physical and things are looked at as disease to be dealt with.

Medication and talk therapy is becoming less and less significant in the mainstream counseling world because people don't believe the reality of the immaterial, self. So you go to the physical self, and you certainly go to the religious self in the secular counseling community. And where I'm going to, again, come out is interacting duality. There's material. So your hormones are really important. If they're off, it's going to really mess you up. But your spirit is important too. And if you've got trauma in your life, that can mess up your body. If you're living a stressful life, you can respond very negatively with your physical self. Interacting duality. That's where I come from. I think that's the best way to do things. Two essences. One person, two essences in interacting duality. But now go down one more level. How many parts to the person? Well, let's open our Bibles and look. 1 Thessalonians 5:23. "May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through." Now what did he say?

May your whole what? Spirit, soul, body. And if you look back to the Greek, spirit has the article, soul has the article, and body has the article. So I translated it, literally I'd say, may the spirit, the soul, and the body be kept blameless till the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. How many parts to the person? Well, it's really simple. There are three. Here it is. And it's talking about your whole person is made up of spirit's, soul, and body. And that was really critical to my theology for a long time. Well, is that always true? Well, if you look at Luke chapter one, this incredible song of Mary. Luke 1:46 is where it starts. "My soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior." So there she's got a soul and she's got a spirit, and with both of them she glorifies God. Luke 1:46, 47. The Magnificat. So she's saying with her soul and with her spirit, and they're different things.

I could go further with this, but let's stop there. I had that and from my understanding, the spirit was good because that's where God dwells, the inner holy holiest of the temple. The soul and the body are bad. The soul is my emotions, my thinking, and it always bad. Never trust your thinking, never trust your emotions because they're irredeemably sinful. Body, full of passions and such. It's a mess. It's bad. Go with the spirit and lead the spirit controlled life. So the Holy Spirit lives in my spirit and that's where the good stuff is. Soul and body. So if you come into counseling, why worry with your damaged emotions? Of course they're damaged. But trying to mess around with your damaged emotion isn't going to solve anything. Get to the spirit and then let your spirit control your soul. And I could go a lot further where that went in the theology I embraced deeply for a long time. But here's what happened.

I don't know how to personalize exactly, but I went to Matthew 22, my theology book took me there. It worked well being like that until I went to seminary. And my theology text, I'm going to personalize it because Louis Berkoff's book... So Dr. Berkoff said, "Gary, would you open your Bible? How many parts to the person?" I opened my Bible, went to 1 Thessalonians 5:23, "May your whole spirit, soul, body." It's so simple. He said, "Good. Could you turn over to Mark 12:30?" "Oh sure. Love the Lord your God with all your hearts, all your soul, with all your mind and all your strength." It's a great passage, second to love your neighbor as yourself. I've meditated on it deeply, I've taught it. It's amazing verse. Love it. He said, "How many parts to the person?" I said, "Three. 1 Thessalonians 5:23." "No, no, in this verse, how many parts to the person?" I said, "I didn't talk about parts of the person. This is talking about loving the Lord to God is everything you are." "Yeah. How many parts to everything you are?" Oh, look at that.

Heart, soul, mind strength. Huh, four parts. Well, that's weird. I got the thing of it. Wait a minute. Spirit, soul, body, heart, soul, mind, strength. They're both whole person. Well, okay, let's put them together. The common one is soul. How many parts do I have now? Because if I have three, it's trichotomy, if I have two, it's dichotomy. If I put the two verses together, I get six. What is that? That would be [inaudible]. That's not going to work in a Baptist church. We do not do sex in a Baptist church. And six of course is the number of imperfection. I'm being more than slightly sarcastic here. But see, that passage, even though I knew it really well, never occurred to me as relevant to the passage, never occurred to me as relevant to the discussion. I had already blocked 1 Thessalonians 5:23, and I looked at this and it's an irrelevant passage. It's not irrelevant. It's actually the same thing. He's saying whole person and he's listing three in 1 Thessalonians, he's listing four in Mark.

If you go back to Deuteronomy, it's three and the teacher comes back and says, "Love the Lord with all your heart, understanding and strength." And Jesus is okay with that. If you go to the Luke passage, Luke 1:46, the Magnificat, where you've got soul divided from spirit. I didn't know about Hebrew poetry. Hebrew poetry is characterized by parallelism. You say the same thing with different words. And what I took to be that soul and spirit are different, when I learned about Hebrew parallelism, I realized that's saying the same thing with different words. Now I do this in part to talk about the theological method I'm trying to palm off on you. Talk to people who have different views and try to understand them because you might learn something. And what I learned at this part is there's not just two parts of the person, there are not just three parts of the person, there's not just dichotomy. There are two essences, but there are more aspects. So I now call myself a polycotomist.

There are many, many aspects of a person. So what I put here is that there are many aspects or perspectives of person. So when I use the term spirit, I'm talking about the whole person, basically from a God side, if I talk a person, use soul, I'm talking about the person's living, thinking, mortal being. If I use the term heart to refer to the whole person, I'm talking about the person, the aspect of their control panel. If you use the term body to whole person, I'm talking about them more as an active being. So when I'm the body of Christ, that's talking about me and my actions, I actually act in a way that shows God. So I'm a polycotomist. And they're different words, but all these words, many times mean the whole person. So body means the person turned outward in action. Spirit means a person relating to God. They're not three parts to the person, they're one person, two essences interacting duality, many aspects or perspectives of person, and we're very complicated beings.

So that's where I come out on basic humanity. We're proud of God's creative activity, we're unique in the image of God, we have commonality with animals that we're living beings, but distinction in the worship side of our life. But many commonalities. And I think all living beings should be treated with respect. But humans have a unique role, and that would be from conception to natural death in my judgment. A lot of complications on both of those. And that the whole person needs to be looked at. And I can't take part of my person and say that's central and negate the other part, which I did for 40 years in my theological thinking. The spirit is a real person because that's what departs to go be with God. The body goes to the grave and is always sinful. I'm now looking at all of those as things that are being renewed as a whole person. So that's basic stuff of humanity.