But you see how we Understand. Humanity. in large measure controls how we treat. Human beings. How we value human beings.
And so an integral part of any Christian life and worldview must include within it. A Christian Anthropology. a Christian understanding. of what it means to be human. Human beings have inherent worth because we're made in God's image.
If we try to understand our existence without God, then what results is not only a profound sense of meaninglessness, but a loss of our human dignity as well. Thank you for joining us on this Saturday edition of Renewing Your Mind. I'm Josh Mann and I'm delighted to have you with us as we continue our study in A Blueprint for Thinking. This series from RC Sproll is designed to help us think about and understand the world that we live in. In addition to this teaching series, today's resource offer includes another series from Dr.
Sproul. The Consequences of Ideas This series offers 35 messages exploring the ideas that have shaped our modern world. Speaking for myself, this series was absolutely formative for me as a new believer. not only because it helped me understand the world that I live in, but because it taught me how to respond with the truth of God's word. Stick around until the end of today's message, and I'll tell you how to receive both of these teaching series.
But first, here's RC on the source of human dignity. In the realm of philosophy, The subject that has been on center stage. In the twentieth century, has not been epistemology. Epistemology dominated seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophical investigations. It has not been metaphysics which dominated ancient philosophy and medieval philosophy.
The dominant question of philosophy in the 20th century has been the question of anthropology. What does it mean to be Anthropos? to be man or human. That's been the overarching question. And there's a reason for that.
It's not again by accident that the crisis in anthropology. followed In history. the eclipse. of belief in God. in Western Civilization.
Where God is no longer at the center of people's thinking. It is inevitable. That the question of human dignity. Becomes a matter of grave concern. The ancient philosophers tried to give definition.
to what it means to be human. We know the expression if it looks like a duck. That walks like a duck. If it quacks like a duck. Chances are it's a duck.
Sometimes we have difficulty giving precise definition. to entities around us and in this world. Plato. mused over the question, What is it that makes a human being distinctively human? What separates us from the other animals?
And finally, in desperation, he defined a human person as a featherless biped. No, it's fun. A duck without feathers. until one of his students hurled a plucked chicken over the wall of the academy with a sign on it which said, Behold Plato's man. It was featherless and it had two feet.
What does it mean? to be human. What is man? You remember the psalmist asked that question. Said, O Lord, our Lord, how excellent, how majestic is your name in all of the earth.
When we consider the heavens, the work of your hands, the sun and the stars, and all that thou hast ordained, we inevitably ask the question: what is man? That thou art mindful of him. But you see how we understand. Humanity In large measure controls, how we treat. Human beings.
how we value human beings. And so an integral part of any Christian life and worldview must include within it. A Christian Anthropology. a Christian understanding. of what it means to be human.
I keep wondering what my guest is. pondering. You know he hasn't said a word since we started this. He doesn't seem to even be bothered by my constant interruptions. It just goes on pondering more and more, it seems, intently.
He's satisfied to be alone. Doesn't have to be in a crowd. But I wonder what he's thinking. Perhaps he's pondering the question. that every one of us asks some time or another.
Who am I? What is the meaning? of my life. The biblical image that is used more often than any other image. For human life.
is an image drawn from nature. This is the image. of grass. The grass that grows, it springs up, it's germinated by the cool rains. And the warmth of the sun and the process of photosynthesis.
It flourishes for a season. But then, as the sun beats down upon it. It withers. And it dies.
Sounds has a very pessimistic view of the matter, doesn't it? But even in the most upbeat portions of sacred scripture, from time to time the writer will stop to remind us, don't forget, all flesh is grass. We live in the middle of the day. Our three score and ten. Then we wither And we die.
And in light of the fragility Of human existence. We have to ask what's it all about? Do we have significance? Do we have meaning? Is there any real value?
to human life. We live in a time, I believe, of unprecedented pessimism. With respect to the significance of human personhood. After the Holocaust. of World War Two.
After the camps were exposed. The soldiers returned. France was liberated. It was then that the works of Men like Camus, And Jean Paul Sartre. began to receive exposure across the world.
And Sartre, perhaps the most penetrating dramatist that the French nation produced in the 20th century, is also a technical philosopher. And he commented frequently. Out of the milieu of Atheistic Existential Philosophy In one of his books, I remember trying to secure a copy of it back in the sixties, and I had to special order it to get it because nobody had it in stock in the city of Pittsburgh, and I had to wait months to get it. It was a little book entitled Nausea. And the book Nausea was Sartre's.
perhaps most vivid description of the futility and meaninglessness of human existence. His final comment. was that man is a useless Passion. A useless passion. A passion, ladies and gentlemen, is a feeling.
an intense emotion. that we express, something that consumes us and controls our very being. It's not just a casual concern. Remember Paul Tillich used to say that a person's God can be defined or identified once you identify that person's ultimate concern. That about which you are most Passionist.
Most caring. It is a given about our humanity that we do care about things, don't we? that we have feelings. Every person in this room and every person that sees this has wounds that have never healed. from something they heard somebody say, to them.
or about them. in their lifetime. We care. We feel We laugh. We weep.
We become afraid. We don't just think. Thinking alone does not define the essence of our humanity. In fact, you can even sense in the thinker here That there's not simply cerebral activity taking place. But what else is communicated here?
It's an attitude. Huh? I'm not sure what the attitude is, but it's certainly not one. of frivolity. He is not in a mood of partying at the moment.
He's got different feelings. that are absorbing him. in this posture. Our feelings change. The one thing about our feelings is that they always change.
I always say the person who commits suicide, if they would have waited 24 hours, they probably wouldn't have done it. How quickly our feelings and our emotions change. But the question that Sartre was wrestling with is All this caring. All this feeling All this hurting. All this rejoicing.
Does it matter? Does it mean anything? And his conclusion was No. It doesn't. That we are bundles of passion, bundles of feeling, bundles of care.
and all of our caring is nothing more and nothing less than an exercise infutility. It's useless. Because humanity has no meaning. At that point, when Sartre made that comment, he was merely echoing the philosophy that Nietzsche had propagated a century before. Even Nietzsche's biological heroism.
He understood to be an exercise in futility. Because Nietzsche's bottom-line anthropology Was one that could not be rescued even by the appearance of the Superman. Because Nietzsche said At the bottom All there is. Yeah. The nail.
The nothingness The Abyss. That man is involved in the world. In a chaotic Endless myth. of a recurring cycle that has no definitive origin and no purposeful destiny. Round and round and round we go.
But no progress. And no meaning. I profoundly disagree with Sartre, and I profoundly disagree with Nietzsche. But I'll tell you what, I have so much more respect for those two philosophers than I have for the dominant species of armchair philosopher that we find in our culture today. The modern or the contemporary humanist.
I have to be candid with you. In my judgment, humanism as a philosophy, though it is the dominant philosophy in our culture today, is pseudo-intellectualism. It is a philosophy that I am convinced does not merit or deserve serious consideration by intelligent people. Because bottom line, it's silly.
Well, what do I mean by that?
Well Here's what humanism teaches us. The humanist teaches us. that the Supreme Big Ergo. of this created universe is man. That we are the creatures of highest dignity and value and esteem.
And they extol virtues like honesty, integrity, industry. And they march for the preservation of human rights all over the world. The humanists will be in the avant-garde of civil rights. Won't they? Because they want to protect.
The dignity of mankind. And yet if you ask that same Humanist From whence cometh human dignity? He has no possible answer, because the same time that the humanist is telling you how important and valuable and dignified human beings are, the humanist tells us that man emerged from the slime as a cosmic accident. And he is moving relentlessly. to non-being.
His origin is utterly insignificant, and his destiny is equally insignificant, but somehow, in between the two poles of his existence, he has all this dignity and value. That's why I say it's silly. Francis Seyfer once said about the humanist that the humanist has both feet firmly planted in mid-air. The humanist is on a roller coaster without brakes. This humanism is nonsense, but it's persuasive nonsense because it speaks to a need in the human heart.
We want to believe that we have significance. We want to believe that we have dignity. we want to believe that our passions matter. and that they're not useless. That there is more than the abyss of nothingness of which Nietzsche spoke.
That there's more to life than contemplating, as Camus said, the ultimate question. Maybe it's the question the thinker's contemplating, the question of suicide. It's got to be more than that, the humanist says. But the humanist lives on borrowed capital. Humanism could only emerge really from a society that had previously been committed to a meaningful origin.
and a meaningful destiny to the human race. What humanism has done is rejected Christianity and try to replace their secular worldview in what they have rejected, not realizing that they have rejected the very foundation for the humanity that they seek to extol. And I say to the humanists with all cynicism. If I come from nothing, if I'm going to nothing, I am nothing, and why should I care who sits in the front of the bus or on the back of the bus? Why do I care whether it's white germs or black germs?
that have rights in this world. I keep asking the humanist to give me a reason for his faith. I keep asking the humanist to give me one reason why I should treat any human being with dignity, other than that he simply has the preference that I do it. Do you see that humanism is based on sentimentality? It has no metaphysical foundation, no epistemological foundation, and certainly no theological foundation.
It is an anthropology. with no support. Based on Sediment. The Christian Worldview teaches that man totally depraved. That mankind is the most wicked creature on this planet.
apart from the visitations of Satan himself here. That of all the creatures that inhabit this world, man is the worst. That the great ecological problem with planet Earth is not because of an overabundance of rats. But an overabundance of people. It's people who have plunged the world into ruin.
The whole creation groans in travail because of mankind. The whole creation is under a curse. Because of mankind. And that which is grass. is more than grass, it is unspeakably wicked.
And mankind, the moral judgment that God gives to mankind, that there is none righteous, no, not one. There's not even one who does good. No, not one. People don't want to hear that. I say that's one of the reasons they reject Christianity and not only Christianity in general, but particularly Reformed Christianity, because Reformed Christianity talks about the total depravity of human beings.
They're born in sin, the original sin. We extol human freedom. Man's free will. Ignoring the fact that the term free will never occurs in the Bible, The concept's there in terms of human responsibility, yes. But the emphasis of the Bible is on the bondage of the human heart.
It's captive to evil passions. It's not useless passion. Sinful passion is is what defines humanity. People say, I don't want to believe in that kind of a view of anthropology. It's depressing.
It's the highest view of man. the world has ever seen. There is no religion. No philosophy. Under the sun.
that takes sin as seriously as Christianity does. Do you ever wonder why that is? Because we have a morbid fascination with morality? No, no, no, no. Christianity takes sin seriously because it takes people so seriously.
And Christianity says It is a serious matter when one human being violates another human being. When one human being hates another human being, When one human being steals or rapes or kills another human being. That's serious. And that's raw. You see.
Cool. epistemology, metaphysics. fit together. driving us to the concept of God. Our doctrine of God determines our doctrine of man, and our doctrine of man drives us to ethics.
As an integral a necessary dimension. of our life and world view. The Bible says that man, of all of the creatures, Was uniquely created. In God's image. That we alone have a profound capacity and ability to reflect and to mirror to the rest of creation the very character of God.
That we are called to be mirrors of God's holiness. That's why when we sin. Our sin is so serious. Because not only do we violate each other, But we lie to the creation about the nature of God. We're involved in cosmic treason.
We have free will in the sense that we have the power to do what we want. We don't have free will in the sense that we have the power to do what we want with impunity. Because over and above my free will always stands the sovereign authority and the power of Almighty God. And if your anthropology makes man sovereign, Your anthropology is not Christian. You can have man as free, but never autonomous.
Remember that God is free. And his freedom is a higher freedom than my freedom. I am free only within the limitations of God's freedom. I hear Christians say that God's sovereignty is limited by human freedom. When I hear them saying that.
I make certain assumptions. The first assumption is it didn't come from this guy. Yeah. The first assumption I make is that that Christian has really never thought about what they've said. They heard somebody else say it and they're just repeating it.
They haven't thought about it for five minutes. Because I'm afraid if they thought about it and then said it, And they wouldn't even be a Christian. Because if God's sovereignty is limited by human freedom. God is not God. That's blasphemy.
So, we need to integrate our understanding of man. in light of our understanding of God. Because we get our identity from being made in the image of God. God is not made in the image of man. He is sovereign, we are not.
Our humanity is defined by him. Yeah. And therein we find dignity. We have an origin. in the divine purpose of God.
We have a destiny in eternal glory that the Father has prepared for us from the foundation of the world. Therefore, Everything that happens between creation and consummation matters. There are no useless passions. It matters. how we treat white people and black people.
Jewish people. Any kind of people. Because they're created in the image of God and they bear that image even in their sinfulness. We are called to love. to love them.
as we love ourselves. What an important truth for us to reflect on today. Whether we're stuck in traffic or engaging with people online, Every person that we interact with is someone we're called to love. because they bear God's image. This has been the Saturday edition of Renewing Your Mind.
I hope you've been enjoying these messages from Dr. Sprohold that are designed to help us think like Christians. If you'd like to go deeper into this study, you can receive A Blueprint for Thinking and The Consequences of Ideas when you donate today. These two teaching series from Dr. Sprol offer 40 messages to help you understand the world that you live in.
and how to respond with God's truth. Give your gift today at renewingyourmind.org to receive lifetime digital access for both series. We'll also send you a copy of the DVD for the consequences of ideas, along with a digital study guide. Believing the truth is not the same thing as obeying the truth. I hope you'll join us next week as Dr.
Sproll introduces us to the world of ethics. to help us consider how to live out the truth that we confess. Here. on Renewing Your Mind.
