"Who are We that You are Mindful of Us?"
A Biblical Theological Anthropology
Rev. Everett L. Miller
In Psalm 8, David gratefully asks the question of God, “What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” David knows that the infinite, creative, holy God that he worships does not have to care for him or for any other person. So he asks this rhetorical question as an act of praise and thanks for the fact that God chooses to care for humanity. This is a question that has kept philosophers and theologians and all of us regular folks busy for millennia. Who are we human beings in relation to God?
Well, if you believe in the God of the Scriptures, the first thing you would say about humanity is that on the most basic level, human beings are creations of God. But so are dogs and fleas and grass and trees. We all know there is something different about us, though, or at least there should be. This is what the author of Genesis calls, “the image of God.” In Genesis 1 we read, “ Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness…’ So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them and God blessed them.”
When the Jews lived in exile in Babylon they were surrounded by a religion that had a very different view of where humanity came from. The Babylonians’ creation myth said that two Gods, Marduk and Tiamat fought a war. Marduk killed Tiamat and used her insides to create the heavens and the earth. Then Marduk killed Tiamat’s husband and used his blood to create human beings as slaves to the gods. So the Babylonians believed that humanity came forth from violence and were simply slaves to the gods. The Jews, on the other hand, said that their God created humanity peacefully, with care, with blessing, and even in God’s own image. This is a very different way of looking at things: that human beings weren’t just made to be useful but also to be in relationship with God and one another. David says that human beings have been made “a little lower than God, and crowned…with glory and honor.”
So humanity is created by God in the image of God, which could include all kinds of things like reason, self-awareness, love, creativity, etc. But unfortunately any time we talk about humanity from a Christian perspective, we can’t stop with our being created in the image of God, but we must also talk about the distortion of that image: sin. It is not very popular to talk about sin, or to even use that word, in many circles these days. Even in the circles in which sin is a safe subject to bring up, it is usually only other peoples’ sin that is talked about. But as Paul says about humanity: “There is no distinction for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Sin is the common condition of humanity.
And sin isn’t just the bad stuff we do, the individual mistakes we make, but the condition of humanity as a whole. In a very real way, if someone does not believe in the reality of sin, then the entire gospel begins to unravel, because if you are not a sinner, you do not need a savior. Sin is a fact. It exists. The Scriptures tell us that when God created humanity, sin wasn’t the original plan, but we human beings, from the very beginnings decided that we could get by on our own, without our loving Creator, in whose image we are all created. The prophet Isaiah puts it this way: “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way.”
If you recall, last week I mentioned the time in history called the Enlightenment and an idea that went along with it, that of Deism or the belief that God created the world to run on its own then left. Another idea that came out of this time period is that humanity could do well on our own to continue making the world a better place and working toward peace through advances in the sciences. While I think all of us are thankful for things like penicillin and the automobile, this idea that we could do just fine on our own came to be questioned during the 20th Century. Why would that be? Well here are a few reasons: World War I, when the wonderful advances of the human race resulted in the first modern war and the deaths of 15 million human beings created in God’s image. The Nazi Holocaust when well over 6 million Jewish, Catholic, Homosexual, and other people created in the image of God were murdered in the Nazi effort to create a “better” and “more advanced” society. And World War II, the deadliest war ever, when human ingenuity led to the deaths of 55 million human beings created in the image of God. After witnessing the bloodiest century in the history of humankind, even many religiously skeptical people began to realize that when we humans are left to our own devices, tragic events often occur.
Despite the often tragic consequences, we human beings have chosen to go our own way and brought sin into the world. This sin causes separation from God, from one another, from the rest of creation, and even from ourselves through the severing or perverting of these relationships. When we pervert these relationships, no matter what kind of relationship it is, that is sin against God because ultimately all of our relationships, whether with people or things, reflect our relationship with God.
Theologians argue over whether or not sin can be defined as one particular overarching impulse. For many sin can be defined as pride of some sort. Yet, for many others it can be described as a lack belief in their own importance. Both are put in check by God. To the prideful person, God might say, “You only have importance because of me. Get over yourself.” To the person who does not believe in their own importance, God might say, “You are extremely important because of me. I want you and other people need you.” In both of these, God turns us out of ourselves and to God and others. In fact, St. Augustine believed that the Fall and sin were basically a turning in on yourself and away from the other and God. This can happen to individuals, to families, even to churches and communities. Some say that sin is basically selfishness and everything that stems from it.
I have also heard it said that sin is basically the fact that we are prone to do anything to avoid being human, meaning we either try our hardest to be more than human or to be less than human. By more than human I mean that we go after power over other people or creation; we attempt to be self-reliant and to replace God. By less than human I mean that we begin to act like animals by giving into any violent or sexual urge that might hit us.
While I think all of these definitions of sin do a pretty good job of exploring the issue, I also really like the church reformer John Calvin’s idea of sin as well. He says that fundamentally sin is lack of trust in God. This would mean that everything from violence to greed to self-loathing to oppression to racism all goes back to a lack of trust in God. That’s certainly worth thinking about.
So far we know that biblically speaking human beings are creations of God, created in God’s own image to be in relationship with God and one another, and that we are blessed by God. Yet, we also know that we human beings have chosen to go our own way and brought sin into the world. This sin is not just the individual things that we do, but it is the common condition of humanity which has been described in numerous ways such as pride or severed or perverted relationships with God, one another, creation, and ourselves. It has been called a refusal to be human, meaning the constant attempts to be more than human or less than human. It has been described as an underlying lack of trust in God. And it has been described as turning in on yourself or selfishness. This infests not only individuals, but communities, societies, and economic systems.
And if we as human beings are honest about it, we admit that no matter how hard we try there is nothing that we can do about it on our own. As the Apostle Paul wrote of himself in Romans 7: “For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.” This isn’t a cop-out, a sort of “the devil made me do it” statement. This is just the realization that no matter how hard you try to escape from sin you can’t do it. And here’s the kicker: nothing can happen to fight against this predicament until you or I or whoever comes to the realization that this is the case.
This brings me back to John Calvin. He spent his entire adult life working on his gigantic two volume theological masterpiece, The Institutes of the Christian Religion. And in the very first sentence of the more than 1,500 pages he writes, “Nearly all wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.” From the very get-go Calvin is saying that if you are going to try to come to know God then you better be prepared to get to know yourself and admit some things about yourself before you can know anything about God.
This process of getting to know ourselves is often not very fun. One of my favorite authors, Frederick Beuchner writes, “The voyage into the self is long and dark and full of peril, but I believe that it is a voyage that all of us will have to make before we are through.” John Calvin puts it this way: “We cannot seriously aspire to [God] before we begin to become displeased with ourselves. For what [person] in all the world would not gladly remain as he [or she] is—what [person] doesn’t remain as he [or she] is—so long as he [or she] does not know himself [or herself].” Let me repeat the first part of that statement: “We cannot seriously aspire to God before we begin to become displeased with ourselves.”
On the very first page of this enormous theological classic, Calvin seems to be saying that each of us must come to grips with the fact that I am a sinner just like everybody else and there is nothing I can do about it on my own. Each of us must come to the point where we say with the Apostle Paul, “Wretched [person] that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” This is the beginning of knowledge about yourself and subsequently knowledge of God. Because as Calvin says, “the knowledge of ourselves not only arouses us to seek God, but also, as it were, leads us by the hand to [God].” This is the theological version of the old psychological truth that you cannot get help for your problem until you admit that you have a problem.
When I was in college, this book, called Life After God by an author named Douglas Coupland was one of my favorite books. I’m not sure why I liked it so much because it is a pretty depressing book about a young man who is leading a kind of pointless and sad existence filled with broken relationships and addictions. Maybe I liked it because at the end of over two hundred pages of these desperately sad and introspective stories, on the next to last page the narrator says this:
Now here is my secret: I tell it to you with an openness of heart that I doubt I shall ever achieve again, so I pray that you are in a quiet room as you hear these words. My secret is that I need God—that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love.”
The narrator of that book seems to have come to the dark, yet freeing realization that “We cannot seriously aspire to [God] before we begin to become displeased with ourselves.”
So who are we human beings? We are creations of God, each and every single one of us all over the world beautifully created in God’s own image to be in relationship with God and with one another. Yet we have chosen to go our own way and subsequently sin is the common condition of humanity. We are sinners, each and every single one of us all over the world and there is nothing that we can do about that fact on our own. As the narrator of Douglas Coupland’s book says, “[we are] sick and can no longer make it alone. [We] need God to help [us] give, because [we] no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help [us] be kind, as [we] no longer seem capable of kindness; to help [us] love, as [we] seem beyond being able to love.” Who are we human beings? We are sinners in need of a Savior. But there is hope. And this hope is the one who has been called “the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” This hope is Jesus.
Well, if you believe in the God of the Scriptures, the first thing you would say about humanity is that on the most basic level, human beings are creations of God. But so are dogs and fleas and grass and trees. We all know there is something different about us, though, or at least there should be. This is what the author of Genesis calls, “the image of God.” In Genesis 1 we read, “ Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness…’ So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them and God blessed them.”
When the Jews lived in exile in Babylon they were surrounded by a religion that had a very different view of where humanity came from. The Babylonians’ creation myth said that two Gods, Marduk and Tiamat fought a war. Marduk killed Tiamat and used her insides to create the heavens and the earth. Then Marduk killed Tiamat’s husband and used his blood to create human beings as slaves to the gods. So the Babylonians believed that humanity came forth from violence and were simply slaves to the gods. The Jews, on the other hand, said that their God created humanity peacefully, with care, with blessing, and even in God’s own image. This is a very different way of looking at things: that human beings weren’t just made to be useful but also to be in relationship with God and one another. David says that human beings have been made “a little lower than God, and crowned…with glory and honor.”
So humanity is created by God in the image of God, which could include all kinds of things like reason, self-awareness, love, creativity, etc. But unfortunately any time we talk about humanity from a Christian perspective, we can’t stop with our being created in the image of God, but we must also talk about the distortion of that image: sin. It is not very popular to talk about sin, or to even use that word, in many circles these days. Even in the circles in which sin is a safe subject to bring up, it is usually only other peoples’ sin that is talked about. But as Paul says about humanity: “There is no distinction for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Sin is the common condition of humanity.
And sin isn’t just the bad stuff we do, the individual mistakes we make, but the condition of humanity as a whole. In a very real way, if someone does not believe in the reality of sin, then the entire gospel begins to unravel, because if you are not a sinner, you do not need a savior. Sin is a fact. It exists. The Scriptures tell us that when God created humanity, sin wasn’t the original plan, but we human beings, from the very beginnings decided that we could get by on our own, without our loving Creator, in whose image we are all created. The prophet Isaiah puts it this way: “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way.”
If you recall, last week I mentioned the time in history called the Enlightenment and an idea that went along with it, that of Deism or the belief that God created the world to run on its own then left. Another idea that came out of this time period is that humanity could do well on our own to continue making the world a better place and working toward peace through advances in the sciences. While I think all of us are thankful for things like penicillin and the automobile, this idea that we could do just fine on our own came to be questioned during the 20th Century. Why would that be? Well here are a few reasons: World War I, when the wonderful advances of the human race resulted in the first modern war and the deaths of 15 million human beings created in God’s image. The Nazi Holocaust when well over 6 million Jewish, Catholic, Homosexual, and other people created in the image of God were murdered in the Nazi effort to create a “better” and “more advanced” society. And World War II, the deadliest war ever, when human ingenuity led to the deaths of 55 million human beings created in the image of God. After witnessing the bloodiest century in the history of humankind, even many religiously skeptical people began to realize that when we humans are left to our own devices, tragic events often occur.
Despite the often tragic consequences, we human beings have chosen to go our own way and brought sin into the world. This sin causes separation from God, from one another, from the rest of creation, and even from ourselves through the severing or perverting of these relationships. When we pervert these relationships, no matter what kind of relationship it is, that is sin against God because ultimately all of our relationships, whether with people or things, reflect our relationship with God.
Theologians argue over whether or not sin can be defined as one particular overarching impulse. For many sin can be defined as pride of some sort. Yet, for many others it can be described as a lack belief in their own importance. Both are put in check by God. To the prideful person, God might say, “You only have importance because of me. Get over yourself.” To the person who does not believe in their own importance, God might say, “You are extremely important because of me. I want you and other people need you.” In both of these, God turns us out of ourselves and to God and others. In fact, St. Augustine believed that the Fall and sin were basically a turning in on yourself and away from the other and God. This can happen to individuals, to families, even to churches and communities. Some say that sin is basically selfishness and everything that stems from it.
I have also heard it said that sin is basically the fact that we are prone to do anything to avoid being human, meaning we either try our hardest to be more than human or to be less than human. By more than human I mean that we go after power over other people or creation; we attempt to be self-reliant and to replace God. By less than human I mean that we begin to act like animals by giving into any violent or sexual urge that might hit us.
While I think all of these definitions of sin do a pretty good job of exploring the issue, I also really like the church reformer John Calvin’s idea of sin as well. He says that fundamentally sin is lack of trust in God. This would mean that everything from violence to greed to self-loathing to oppression to racism all goes back to a lack of trust in God. That’s certainly worth thinking about.
So far we know that biblically speaking human beings are creations of God, created in God’s own image to be in relationship with God and one another, and that we are blessed by God. Yet, we also know that we human beings have chosen to go our own way and brought sin into the world. This sin is not just the individual things that we do, but it is the common condition of humanity which has been described in numerous ways such as pride or severed or perverted relationships with God, one another, creation, and ourselves. It has been called a refusal to be human, meaning the constant attempts to be more than human or less than human. It has been described as an underlying lack of trust in God. And it has been described as turning in on yourself or selfishness. This infests not only individuals, but communities, societies, and economic systems.
And if we as human beings are honest about it, we admit that no matter how hard we try there is nothing that we can do about it on our own. As the Apostle Paul wrote of himself in Romans 7: “For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.” This isn’t a cop-out, a sort of “the devil made me do it” statement. This is just the realization that no matter how hard you try to escape from sin you can’t do it. And here’s the kicker: nothing can happen to fight against this predicament until you or I or whoever comes to the realization that this is the case.
This brings me back to John Calvin. He spent his entire adult life working on his gigantic two volume theological masterpiece, The Institutes of the Christian Religion. And in the very first sentence of the more than 1,500 pages he writes, “Nearly all wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.” From the very get-go Calvin is saying that if you are going to try to come to know God then you better be prepared to get to know yourself and admit some things about yourself before you can know anything about God.
This process of getting to know ourselves is often not very fun. One of my favorite authors, Frederick Beuchner writes, “The voyage into the self is long and dark and full of peril, but I believe that it is a voyage that all of us will have to make before we are through.” John Calvin puts it this way: “We cannot seriously aspire to [God] before we begin to become displeased with ourselves. For what [person] in all the world would not gladly remain as he [or she] is—what [person] doesn’t remain as he [or she] is—so long as he [or she] does not know himself [or herself].” Let me repeat the first part of that statement: “We cannot seriously aspire to God before we begin to become displeased with ourselves.”
On the very first page of this enormous theological classic, Calvin seems to be saying that each of us must come to grips with the fact that I am a sinner just like everybody else and there is nothing I can do about it on my own. Each of us must come to the point where we say with the Apostle Paul, “Wretched [person] that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” This is the beginning of knowledge about yourself and subsequently knowledge of God. Because as Calvin says, “the knowledge of ourselves not only arouses us to seek God, but also, as it were, leads us by the hand to [God].” This is the theological version of the old psychological truth that you cannot get help for your problem until you admit that you have a problem.
When I was in college, this book, called Life After God by an author named Douglas Coupland was one of my favorite books. I’m not sure why I liked it so much because it is a pretty depressing book about a young man who is leading a kind of pointless and sad existence filled with broken relationships and addictions. Maybe I liked it because at the end of over two hundred pages of these desperately sad and introspective stories, on the next to last page the narrator says this:
Now here is my secret: I tell it to you with an openness of heart that I doubt I shall ever achieve again, so I pray that you are in a quiet room as you hear these words. My secret is that I need God—that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love.”
The narrator of that book seems to have come to the dark, yet freeing realization that “We cannot seriously aspire to [God] before we begin to become displeased with ourselves.”
So who are we human beings? We are creations of God, each and every single one of us all over the world beautifully created in God’s own image to be in relationship with God and with one another. Yet we have chosen to go our own way and subsequently sin is the common condition of humanity. We are sinners, each and every single one of us all over the world and there is nothing that we can do about that fact on our own. As the narrator of Douglas Coupland’s book says, “[we are] sick and can no longer make it alone. [We] need God to help [us] give, because [we] no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help [us] be kind, as [we] no longer seem capable of kindness; to help [us] love, as [we] seem beyond being able to love.” Who are we human beings? We are sinners in need of a Savior. But there is hope. And this hope is the one who has been called “the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” This hope is Jesus.
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