Chapter 1: What does it mean to be made in the image of God?
There's a lot of debate among theologians, but there's no debate in Scripture. Scripture unambiguously, clearly teaches that after the fall, man is still in the image of God.
Why do Christians believe in the sanctity of human life? Why did the Old Testament prescribe capital punishment for those who commit murder? Because all people are made in the image of God. And as a result, all of us, no matter what we believe, our status in life, whether we're inside or outside the womb, have dignity. Welcome to the Tuesday edition of Renewing Your Mind. I'm Nathan W. Bingham.
As I said yesterday, people today are having an identity crisis. People don't know what it means to be human. They can't explain why humans have worth, and they can't agree why or if human life is more valuable than animals in a zoo. So we're spending this week in R.C. Sproul's series, A Shattered Image.
Well, here's Dr. Sproul to help us consider what the Bible means when it says that we are made in the image of God.
In our first session in our study of the doctrine of man, we had a little historical reconnaissance where we skated lightly over various ways in which people have attempted to define our humanity in the biological sense or in the psychological sense by pointing to our mental capacities or to our ability to make choices, our volitional inclinations.
We saw a brief glimpse at attempts to define man in terms of his sexuality or in terms of his economics or existential philosophy and the rest. And I think that one of the philosophers in the 20th century wrote a book by a title that itself said something somewhat captivating. Herbert Marcuse wrote
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Chapter 2: Why is the sanctity of human life important to Christians?
book called The One-Dimensional Man. Have you ever wondered if you are who you think you are? There was an article in one of the recent women's magazines when it answered this question, how does a wife keep her husband monogamous? And the response that this psychologist gave to that question said that the insightful woman understands that when she's dealing with her husband, she's not dealing
Chapter 3: What is the biblical basis for capital punishment?
Well, in one sense she's dealing with one person, but in another dimension she's dealing with three persons. that that man that she married is part boy, part adolescent, and part mature adult. She said the wise woman will recognize that she has to deal with all three of those competing at times personalities that she has just married.
And I think that what Marcuse was trying to say and what this other woman was trying to say is that no human being is simply one-dimensional. in their makeup. You have a chemical dimension and your body chemistry influences your life. You do have a biological aspect to your humanity. You have a sexual dimension to your life. Your work is very important to who you are.
Chapter 4: How do human dignity and the image of God relate?
You have an economic aspect to your being. You have a sociological dimension, a psychological dimension, an ethical dimension, and you have certainly a theological dimension.
And any attempt, as I said earlier, to reduce the essence of a human being to only one of those is to produce a distortion, a simplistic distortion out of what it means to be human, because as human beings we are very, very, very complex. And it always amazes me when somebody would come up with a type and say there are four basic psychological types of human beings.
You know, the disc test, the driver, the influencer, and so on. Well, there may be general big picture trends or types of personalities, but the great beauty of the diversity of our humanity is that there are no two people in this room or in this world exactly alike. And the economic dimension drives this person not the same way this one is driven by it.
And that's part of the beauty in the diversity of God's creation. But what I want to do in this session is to look more closely at the theological aspect. And it is that. It's an aspect. It's a dimension to what it means to be human. The Scripture doesn't use this language often,
But where it does use it, it uses it in crucial and critical ways by defining man and male and female as a creature that is made in the image of God. We have a Latin term for everything, so naturally we have one for that. The Latin term for to be a creature in the image of God is the imago Dei. We call that aspect by which we are in the image of God to be the imago Dei.
Now that little phrase, that little theological description makes a couple of important statements. The first one is to call man the imago Dei, or the image of God, in the first instance differentiates man, all men, male and female, from God because it calls attention to whatever else it means to be human. The first thing it means is that we are creatures.
and all that that implies, finite, dependent, derived, accountable, that we are not God. We may be the image of God, but the image of God is not God. The image of God is subordinate to God. The image of God is a creature. And so the phrase, image of God, says about us, that we are to be distinguished from God. No human being is divine.
The second differentiation that this phrase does biblically and theologically is that it distinguishes mankind from all the other creatures in the world, that this sets man apart from the animals. sets man apart from the animals. This is a major motif in the biblical account of creation, that man, though he is subordinate to God, is given a role by which he is to have dominion
over all of the earth, that man is given a position of authority over the rest of the world. And there's a certain sense in which the world is a trust given to man with all kinds of responsibilities imposed upon him. And yet at the same time, the world is also a support system for man.
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