The Question of Human Identity
The Full Christian Answer to Modernity’s Crisis
Western society today is roiled by the question of identity. Most of us are not scholars with gifts and time to devote to the countless books and studies and endless arguments concerning racism, LBGTQ rights, homosexual “marriage,” transgender polemics, donor sperm and eggs, surrogacy, family breakdown, pornography, increasing divorce, declining population, person theory, abortion, euthanasia, hate speech, and the freedom of religion. We are aware simply that everywhere we turn, we are confronted by venom, dissension, accusation, and conflict. Everyone’s assertion of his rights takes precedence over all other considerations. Sober and honest rational debate has become rare indeed. Confusion is ubiquitous.
The Church’s view of human identity needs to be made clear, for many Christians are as confused as their unbelieving friends. This essay proposes to look at a number of the key anthropological texts of the Bible in an effort to set out a simple, coherent Christian vision of human identity that will be helpful, theologically and pastorally, as we seek to present the gospel to a distraught and agitated world.
Our Created Human Identity
Our first text is Genesis 1:27–28:
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
This text presents a mythical vision of creation, a revelation, through the power of imagination, of universal reality and deep truth we could not know otherwise. Two points need to be made here: (1) It is the male and the female together, sexually complementary and of equal dignity, who are created in the image of God, and the first commandment they receive is to procreate and take dominion over the rest of God’s creation. This is our primary human identity and our vocation. Any notion that a homosexual union, intrinsically sterile, might have a God-given legitimacy, is ruled out. (2) Man (in both sexes) is created in the image of God; this is the ground of human dignity and of any rights we may legitimately claim. But man is not by nature, in himself, the image of God. Only Jesus is by nature the image of God (Col. 1:15; 2 Cor. 4:4).
The second text is Genesis 2:7:
The Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
The other animals were also “living creatures” (Gen. 1:20,24), but they lacked the God-breathed spirit of life that made of Adam the image of his Creator. Adam was a different order of being from the other animals, related spiritually to God his Creator.
The third text is Genesis 2:20b–24:
George Hobson is a poet and retired priest in the Episcopal Church of America who has spent many years working in the ecumenical/charismatic movement in France. He earned a doctorate in theology at Oxford University in the 1980s and in the 1990s served as Canon Pastor at the American Cathedral in Paris. He taught later in theological colleges in developing countries, including Rwanda, Haiti, Pakistan, and Armenia. He has published six collections of poetry and two books of theological/social analysis.
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