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The climax of creation is, of course, the creation of mankind,
the last act of creation on the last day, the sixth day of the creation week.
v 26 The first question is why does God say "let us
make" and not "let me make?" Jewish commentators have taken the statement
to refer to the heavenly court, the angels, to whom God is addressing himself. Others have
seen it as a statement of "self-deliberation," God, as it were, speaking to
himself. Others have taken it to be a plural of majesty, akin to the usual word for God in
Hebrew, which is always plural though matched with singular verbs. This was a feature of
Hebrew syntax that was used to express the particularly exalted nature of the subject.
This is not the only time we encounter this "us" in this part of Genesis: cf.
e.g. 3:22; 11:7. Many have taken the view that Derek Kidner summarizes this way in his
commentary: "It is...the plural of fullness, which is found in the regular word for
God...used with a singular verb; and this fullness, glimpsed in the Old Testament, was to
be unfolded as triunity..." (We do have reference here in Gen. 1:2 to the Holy
Spirit, though it is only much later that we come to the full understanding of the Spirit
as another person in the Godhead.)
The second question concerns the use of the word
"man" for the human being, both male and female. This was, the Bible leaves us
in no doubt, a God-given name. Genesis 5:2 makes this even more explicit. you are aware,
perhaps, that the Hebrew word "man" is the same word as "Adam," the
context determining whether we should read the noun or the proper name. You are aware, of
course, that this way of speaking about the human race has become highly controversial in
the last twenty years. And the cultural prejudice, very new but very powerful, against
this biblical way of speaking is quickly making its way into the practice of evangelical
churches and institutions. Evangelical colleges and seminaries are now recommending, if
not requiring that students write papers employing only gender neutral terminology:
"person" replacing "man"; "he/she" or "they"
replacing the generic "he"; even "spouse" replacing
"husband" or "wife." New Bible translations are featuring this change.
There is no longer "man" at Gen 1:26 but "human beings" or
"humanity" or the like.
I still wait for an argument in favor of this abandonment of the
Bible's way of speaking that does not patronize the Bible itself. People who supposedly
revere the Bible as the very Word of God have, in large numbers, joined the chorus for
changing the Bible's consistent pattern of referring to human beings as "man." I
fear, however, that they do not care much that this seems so clearly to amount to passing
judgment on the Bible and its teaching, as if, somehow, God couldn't find the proper words
to use in referring to the human race. "Man," after all, is the term God himself
used; it is the name he gave to mankind. The fact that it happens also to be the name for
one sex of the two, the one that God made first and to whom God gave headship in human
life, is his doing. Had he wanted another name he could certainly have found one;
he did not. What is more, he consistently maintains this way of speaking all the way
through the Bible and he relates this order suggested by the name to many other features
of the biblical doctrine of gender, teaching us that the name "man" for the
human race reflects the nature of things this is, that this name is important. We can
rename the animals if we want to, because God left it up to man to name them in the first
place; but to rename man is, it seems to me, an act of rebellion against God, a refusal to
wear the name he has given us, because people today do not want to accept its meaning and
significance.
It is particularly distressing to me that though feminists
perfectly well understand the importance of changing the name for the human race (it is a
fundamental tactic of revolution: "citizen," "comrade"; words carry
meaning!) evangelicals blithely accept the change as harmless, as if changing the
terminology does not, in any important way, change the meaning, the significance of the
Bible's teaching about the human race. The feminists themselves know better. Listen to
Daphne Hampson, a feminist scholar who has renounced Christianity, but who sees clearly
that feminism and orthodox Christianity, that is historic, Bible-believing Christianity
are in agreement that one either accepts the Bible's way of speaking about men and women
or one gives up Christianity altogether:
"Feminism represents the death-knell of Christianity as a
viable religious option....It is conservative Christians who, together with the more
radical feminists, perceive that feminism represents not just one crisis among many. For
the feminist challenge strikes at the heart of Christianity....Christianity is a religion
of revelation with a necessary foot in history. It cannot lose that reference as long as
it remains Christianity. And that reference is to a patriarchal history." [Theology
and Feminism, pp. 1,5; in Touchstone (Fall 1995), p. 23] She is right. If the
Bible is wrong about the way in which it thinks and speaks about human beings, from
beginning to end, if it must be corrected at such a fundamental point, connected as it is
to the way in which it speaks about God as well and the ethics of human life it teaches --
even connected as it is to the Incarnation -- Christ became a male--, then our confidence
in it is misplaced and we must seek a new authority for our thinking. But the Bible is not
wrong; modern society is wrong; feminism is wrong; and nature proves it a thousand times a
day. And the Bible will still be here and still be true, and men and women will still be
constrained by the nature God gave them when feminism is no more. People can throw off the
name and they cannot throw off what it means.
Let me tell you what my practice will be. I want to be sensitive
to my generation and put no unnecessary obstacles in the path of those who do not yet
believe. I too will use "him and her," "he and she," etc. however
clumsy and irritating it may be. But, I will also continue to use the generic masculine
and refer to the human race as "man". To do anything less, when the world is
clamoring for the church to abandon the Bible's way of speaking, in my judgment would be
to betray Holy Scripture and its teaching about the human race. For the reason they don't
want to call it "man" is because they don't want any such conclusions to be
drawn from the fact that the male came first in the order of nature and of words, such
conclusions as Paul draws, for example, in 1 Cor. 11 and 1 Tim. 2.
The third question posed by these weighty words in v. 26
is what precisely is meant by "image" and "likeness." What does it
mean that man is made in the image of God? First of all, we can say that the two terms are
not separate and distinct things, as if we are made both in the image and the likeness of
God. The NIV is correct in leaving out the "and" that you sometimes find between
the two in English translations. The words are used here as synonyms and are used
interchangeably elsewhere in Genesis (e.g. 5:1,3). The simple meaning is, of course, that
the image of God is all of that by which human beings are "like" God in some
way, in particular it is man's nature as a rational and morally responsible being capable
of the knowledge of God and of fellowship with him on the level of personality. This is
suggested clearly by the use of the same terminology to describe Seth's relationship to
Adam, his father, in 5:3. Seth was born in Adam's image -- he was like his father in
nature. He was not his father and there were many differences, but he was like his father
in many important ways.
It has long been argued as to the best way to state the nature of
this image and that is a more interesting than important question. Suffice it to say here
that according to Holy Scripture the image has two aspects or dimensions. It has long been
noticed that, according to the Bible, the image is that moral and spiritual likeness to a
holy God that was lost by man at his fall into sin. We know that because the Bible teaches
us that by redemption in Christ we are being renewed in the image of God in
knowledge, righteousness, and holiness, until finally we become like him because we
see him as he is.
But, it is also a biblical teaching that fallen man remains a
bearer of God's image. This point is made, for example, the basis for capital punishment
in Gen. 9:6. Theologians have, therefore spoken of "the broader and narrower aspects
of the image of God" or "the formal and material aspects" the broader or
formal aspects being that structural nature that separates man from all other creatures as
capable of moral and spiritual life and communion with God and that characterizes even
fallen man; and the narrower or material aspects of the image being those moral qualities
of holiness lost in the fall and restored in Christ.
What is perfectly plain is that the image of God is what
distinguishes man among all the creatures; it is the emphatic new thing in the creation of
this last of the land creatures on the sixth day!
v 27 We will have cause to deal more positively with the
significance of gender in the creation when we come to chapter 2.
v 28 The famous "creation mandate," or
"dominion mandate," the divine commission given to man to rule the earth, to be
responsible for the earth and all that it contains -- certainly only as God's vice-regent.
He remains the Sovereign! This is the consequence, of course, of the divine image. It is
because he alone bears God's image that man has either the capacity to rule the world or
the accountability for the world. (No animal creates culture, can exploit the resources of
the world as man can and has. Or as James puts it in 3:7-8: "All kinds of animals,
birds, reptiles and creatures of the sea are being tamed and have been tamed by man."
The moving of this whale to Oregon last week is a great example of this dominion. Of
course the fall has made that dominion often deeply selfish, foolish, and evil and to the
earth's harm and the harm of its creatures, not to their good.)
In the time that remains I want to draw from the account of the
creation of man the Bible's most fundamental perspective on human beings, the Bible's own
definition of a human being. So much begins here, so much depends upon getting this right.
And it will not surprise you, perhaps, that in this also the Bible's teaching is
dialectical, or polar, requiring us to believe, at the same time, two things about man
that are not easy to reconcile with one another, however true they both are. Indeed, the
errors of thought about man, his nature, his salvation, I would say, are almost always the
result of permitting one pole of this truth about man to throw the other pole into the
shadow, to permit one of the Bible's messages about man to silence the other.
The poles are these: on the one hand man is a creature,
owing his life and existence to God; utterly dependent upon God; on the other hand, he is
a person, by which the Bible means that he is a rational, morally responsible being with
freedom, even freedom to act in ways displeasing to God, man's creator.
Now, you see both poles of the truth about man plainly set out at
the very beginning, in the account of man's creation.
Man is a creature. He owes his existence to God. In this he is
like all the rest of the creatures. He is utterly dependent upon God. Notice the ways in
which man is linked with, joined with the other creatures in these verses. He shares the
sixth day with the rest of the sentient creatures. According to 2:7,19 he was made of the
dust, just as they were. In 1:29-30 we read that he is provided for with food in the same
way that God provided for the other creatures he had made. Comparing 1:22 with 1:28 we
learn that man reproduces in kind, under a blessing from God, just as the rest of the
living creatures do. In all of these ways, and many others not specifically mentioned in
the creation account, man belongs with the other creatures, is like them, and is utterly
dependent, as they are, upon the provision God made for his life.
But, at the same time, man is utterly unlike the rest of living
things. He alone is made in the image and likeness of God. He alone is make capable of
ruling the earth and so he alone is given the responsibility to do so.
He alone, among all the creatures, is able to make decisions that
change the direction of life in the world, to set goals and to move in the direction of
those goals. He alone lives in the future as well as in the past and present. He alone,
among the creatures, has the capacity of mind and will to create things, in a secondary
way, to produce new things from the earth and to use those things to create still more
things. He alone is able, therefore, to produce culture. Had God left only the animals
lower than man in the world, the world would be today as it was on that sixth day, the
life of living things continuing in the same channels marked out by the limitations of
life governed by the unchanging pattern of natural determination and instinct and not by
creative intellect. Only man is, what someone has called "a creature of option."
[Hoekema, p. 6]
I do not mean to disparage the animals, of course. They are
wonderful and what they can do is marvelous beyond words. Because God created the
natural--invented it out of his love and artistry--He demands our reverence. The animals
are also a demonstration of the genius and glory of God who made them. They do, of course,
think in a certain way, communicate to a certain degree. In strength and speed and
adaptability to environment, etc. they often surpass man. But they do because they were not
created with the capacity to rule and so recreate the environment to their own advantage,
as man was. The animals can not build cities, invent ever more sophisticated tools,
develop language, art, commerce. The animals cannot exploit the resources of the natural
order to produce everything from music to space travel.
Now, as I said, the Bible is always alternating between these two
truths about man: that he is a creature and that he is a person.
In his address to the Athenians, Paul stressed man's
creatureliness: "God gives all men life and breath and everything else," and
"in him, we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:25,28). He makes the same
point even more bluntly and absolutely, in Romans 9, when he says that God is the potter
and man is the clay.
But the same Bible teaches us that man's actions are free and
responsible, so free and responsible that God is just to hold him accountable for them.
Untold numbers of times in the Bible man is addressed in the freedom of his personhood:
"Choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve..."
"We implore on Christ's behalf: Be reconciled to God."
It is our task to hold these two truths about man together in a
continuing tension. All secular views of man fail to take into account his creatureliness
and so utterly distort the meaning of his existence by refusing to recognize the
fundamental fact that he lives and moves and has his being in God and is utterly dependent
upon God for his life and his life in every respect. Some secular anthropologies -- or
views of man -- are at the same time deterministic and treat human beings as if their
lives were nothing but the product of forces beyond them and their control. These deny the
personhood of man as taught in Holy Scripture.
William Provine, the Cornell biologist reduces human life to
biology and admits that his view leaves no room for free will. B.F. Skinner held that man
was the product of his total environment, biology and the external circumstances of his
life. His book was, consistently enough, Beyond Freedom and Dignity. He was denying
the true personhood of man.
Interestingly these two errors, the denial of one pole of the
continuum of truth or the other, can be found in Christian thinking as well. Arminianism
can be said to fail to do justice to man's creatureliness, his dependence upon God, in
their desire to defend man's freedom and independence. Certain hypercalvinistic views fail
to do justice to man's personhood in their unbiblical over-emphasis upon man's total
dependence upon God. We are to hold fast to both truths: man is utterly dependent upon God
-- for life and for salvation; he is also a free creature, responsible for the use of his
mind and will. This is the great mystery of man, the wonder of man, the burden of man, and
the hope and promise of man.
So much more could be said in the development of this double
perspective on man in Holy Scripture. But let me conclude.
The other day I was in the car with my daughter and we heard a
traffic report informing us that traffic was snarled in several Seattle locations, in one
case because of an injury accident, in another because of an injured dog in the road.
We both had the same immediate response; more interested in and
more given to pity for the dog than for the injured human beings. We chuckled at that, but
hidden in that preference is a most important truth.
We often prefer animals to some human beings precisely because
the animals are not human beings: our expectations of animals are so much lower and so
much more easily met. Human beings, with all of their moral and intellectual abilities and
powers, ought to be so much more than they are. They are a chronic disappointment to us.
Only of human beings could this be said, as one has, that man is "one vast
need." It is because they are men that they can be so evil, it is because they are
men that they can be so good, it is because they are men that they so disappoint us, and
so please and elate us. Being human beings ourselves, we can too easily take for granted
what a breathtaking thing a man is. A creature yes, but in very important ways a creature
who is also like God.
Someone whose sinful failure to live up to his nature, we all,
therefore, instinctively and rightly regard as a great wrong! But someone whom we are
ourselves wrong not to consider and look upon always as God's masterwork, the purpose of
this entire world, and alone, among all the creatures, the object of God's eternal love
and Christ's terrible sacrifice of himself.
Or, as Rabbi Duncan once put it: "Oh what a solemn thing it
is to be man! Made so exalted, fallen so low, capable of being raised again so high."
It is a very large part of true wisdom to live every day in the constant awareness of that
single fact!
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