May Issue of The Worldview Bulletin-Pt. 1

The Battle Over Human Nature | Does God Have a Wonderful Plan for My Life?

Welcome to the May issue of The Worldview Bulletin! Below, Paul Gould and Paul Copan, in separate essays, examine different aspects of what it means to be human from biblical and philosophical perspectives. Gould argues for the importance of recognizing a distinct human nature, and Copan unfolds the implications of Revelation 2:17 for the unique purpose God has for each of us. David Baggett begins a series in which he evaluates the reasons why Bart Campolo (son of noted Christian sociologist and evangelist Tony Campolo) underwent a deconstruction of faith, and Melissa Cain Travis kicks off a series critiquing David Hume’s criticisms of the design argument, which are still prevalent today. We conclude with a collection of interesting news and notable book deals!

Seek First the Kingdom,

Christopher Reese

Editor-in-Chief

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Contents

Part One

1. Dallas Willard on the Battle over Human Nature

   by Paul Gould

2. Does God Have a Wonderful Plan for My Life—or Just for Human Life in General?

   by Paul Copan

Please see the second email for Part Two of the newsletter.

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Dallas Willard on the Battle over Human Nature

By Paul M. Gould

One of the fault lines in culture concerns the question of humanity. What does it mean to be human? Is there a nature—an essence—to humanity that grounds our flourishing? Are we made in the image of God or are we organized mud (as Sean Carroll wonderfully puts it)? Many of the political and social issues of our day are fundamentally metaphysical: battles over the nature of reality, including the nature of God and humans. Of course, the battle over human nature relates to our spiritual formation (or deformation) too. It makes sense then why the enemy has sown confusion and doubt and strife regarding the question of our humanity. In this month’s Worldview Bulletin, I’ll consider Dallas Willard’s discussion in his wonderful book on spiritual formation Renovation of the Heart, as we consider the question of human nature.[1]

In our disenchanted world, there is no place for essences. Anything goes—and, of course, anything follows from such a falsehood. As a result, as Willard notes, culture has become characterized by “rage.” This is truer today than it was when Willard wrote in 2002: “[The idea that human beings do not have a nature] becomes a part of the unchecked political and moral rage against identity that characterizes modern life.”[2] And, “This is a rage predicated upon the idea that identity restricts freedom.”[3] If we have essences that determine our ends/purposes/teleology, then there are limits to what I can do and what I ought to do, and such limits are an anathema to a culture (including, rather unfortunately, a Christian culture) that prizes individual freedom above all else.

Willard thinks that the battle over human nature reveals two things. “First, it tells us that the issue of human nature is of great importance—too important for us to leave alone. We must deal with this if we are to have anything useful to say about spiritual formation and about the spiritual life that Jesus brings.”[4] I agree. And this is why philosophy is SO IMPORTANT! The battle over the nature of humanity is a philosophical—and theological—battle. Christian philosophers are on the front lines here and humans flourish to the extent that we first understand what it means to be human and then how we’ve been created to “run on” the power of the Spirit.

“Second, [the battle over human nature] tells us that the confusion now publicly prevailing over the makeup of the human being may not be due to its inherent obscurity. Rather, it may be due to the fact that it is a field where strongly armed prejudices—assumptions about what must be the case, ‘don’t bother me with facts’—prevent even well-intended people from seeing what, at least in basic outline, is fairly obvious, simple, and straightforward.”[5] This too is an important lesson. The battle over human nature is not just metaphysical, it is spiritual. There are forces aligned against humanity that work for our demise and destruction. If you want to better understand the spiritual nature of the battle over humanity, I recommend C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength. The book, written in 1945, is prophetic. If we fail to understand the nature of humans, we become vulnerable to cultural “conditioners” or manipulators, and eventually, we lose our humanity (for more on this, check out season six, dropping in early June, of the Eudo Podcast. Our season six topic:  C. S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy).

So where can we go from here? Again, Willard is instructive:

This current state of affairs may prevent otherwise thoughtful people from seeing the value of what has traditionally been regarded as the best of “common sense” about life and of what has been preserved in the wisdom traditions of most cultures—especially in two of the greatest world sources of wisdom about the human self, the Judeo-Christian and the Greek, the biblical and the classical.[6]

This is a great place to start. For in the Western tradition, we find a picture of human flourishing. Humans are created to flourish by being rightly related to God, self, others, and our end/purpose. Moreover, the Greek and Christian tradition has delivered to us a seven-fold picture of what that flourishing looks like. The flourishing person is a certain kind of person, a person that exhibits the virtues of wisdom, courage, temperance, justice, faith, hope, and love (for more on this seven-fold picture of human flourishing, check out season two of the Eudo Podcast on the virtues and vices).

Today, there are many important social and political battles over the sanctity of life, the nature of marriage, and the questions of gender, race, and sexuality. All of these questions, however, are rooted in a deeper question: is there a human nature and if so, how does that inform how we ought to live? My challenge: dig deep, into philosophy and theology, spiritual formation, and the life of the Spirit for your flourishing and the flourishing of all.

Notes

[1] Dallas Willard, Renovation of the Heart (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2002).

[2] Ibid., 28.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid., 28­–29.

[6] Ibid., 29.

— Paul M. Gould is an Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion and Director of the M.A. Philosophy of Religion program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. He is the author or editor of ten scholarly and popular-level books including Cultural Apologetics, Philosophy: A Christian Introduction and The Story of the Cosmos. He has been a visiting scholar at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School’s Henry Center, working on the intersection of science and faith, and is the founder and president of the Two Tasks Institute. You can find out more about Dr. Gould and his work at Paul Gould.com and the Two Tasks Institute. He is married to Ethel and has four children.

Image by James Wheeler from Pixabay

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Does God Have a Wonderful Plan for My Life—or Just for Human Life in General?

By Paul Copan

“All Men Are Created Equal”

We’re probably familiar with the old Four Spiritual Laws’ opening question: “Do you know that God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life?” Now there is a lot of good news contained in the answer to that question! But isn’t this question that pertains to all human beings without distinction? What’s true of one is true of all. God commands all people—every person—to repent so as to receive salvation (Ac. 17:30).

In a good deal of Christian apologetical, philosophical, and theological writings, many in these guilds will refer to the imago Dei (image of God), “human flourishing,” “the chief end of man,” “You have made us for Yourself, O Lord,” and other such generalities—beautifully and vitally important ones—but generalities nevertheless.  What about the particularities? What about you (singular) and me? After all, doesn’t God know the number of hairs on my head, my sitting down and my rising up, my path, my lying down? Doesn’t he know my thoughts from afar? And doesn’t Jesus love me such that he gave himself for me? Sometimes in highlighting our corporate identity in Christ and the necessity of community, sometimes this theme may be obscured.

Metaphysical Equality

The fact that we are created as possessors of the same metaphysical status is an equality to be celebrated as God’s image-bearers.  This message is important in our era of confused and ever-changing identities; personhood seems so ephemeral and fluid in modern-day discourse. What’s more, having lost touch with our metaphysical roots, we as individuals seem increasingly dispensable. Perhaps when our temporal utility expires, we fade into eventual and permanent irrelevance. In the words of Pink Floyd, “All in all you’re just another brick in the wall.”   According to this outlook, one just enters life and then exits, ending up a nobody and resting in an unvisited tomb. It seems that the biblical emphasis on the divine image never looked so inviting.  

Individual Identity: From Scotus to Seuss

But this metaphysical equality also furnishes the basis for extraordinary individual uniqueness. Now, I am not trying to emphasize or defend “Western individualism.” I am speaking of a biblical individual uniqueness. Consider the medieval philosopher John Duns Scotus. He wrote that each individual human being has a unique essence. It’s not just that one is a member of the human race, but one has a “this” (Latin: haec),[1] that is, an individual essence or “this-ness.” Philosophers today refer to this as a haecceity (commonly pronounced “heck-say-et-ee”).[2] We don’t just have a human nature. Socrates has his own essence (Socrateity)—and you have your essence, and I have mine.

Fast forward to the modern world. The much-loved Dr. Seuss rightly emphasizes individual uniqueness in his Happy Birthday to You!

If we didn’t have birthdays, you wouldn’t be you.

If you’d never been born, well then what would you do?

If you’d never been born, well then what would you be?

You might be a fish! Or a toad in a tree!

You might be a doorknob! Or three baked potatoes!

You might be a bag full of hard green tomatoes.

Or worse than all that . . . . Why, you might be a WASN’T! 

A Wasn’t has no fun at all. No, he doesn’t.

A Wasn’t just isn’t. He just isn’t present.

But you . . . . You ARE YOU!  And, now, isn’t that pleasant!

. . . . If you’d never been born, then you might be an ISN’T!

An Isn’t has no fun at all. No he disn’t.

He never has birthdays, and that isn’t pleasant.

You have to be born, or you don’t get a present.

Dr. Seuss trumpets the appropriate response:

Thank goodness you’re not just a clam or a ham

Or a dusty old jar of sour gooseberry jam.[3]

But beyond what Scotus and Seuss have to say about each person’s own nobody-like-you identity, the Scriptures themselves strongly support this idea.

The Lord of All, Who Knows My Name

We’ve noted biblical texts that emphasize God’s personal concern for—and intimate knowledge of—each one of us. Here is another biblical text that makes each person’s unique “this-ness” perfectly clear.

Revelation 2:17: “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes, to him I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, and a new name written on the stone which no one knows but he who receives it.”

Scottish pastor and author George MacDonald commented on this in his sermon “The New Name.”[4] He said that a name of an ordinary kind—think of “John,” “Alison,” “Shelby,” and so on—has nothing essential to it. And no external characteristics such as eye color, facial features, or height could be considered my own essential features—features worthy of distinguishing one person from all the rest. We can’t quite point to internal things either—character qualities, intelligence—that express our unique individuality. But in this passage, we see that Christ gives “the essential thing, and not any of its accidents or imitations.”

In addition to the image of God which marks each human being, it also grounds each person’s individual uniqueness. The late Eugene Peterson observed: “There is the unique, irreproducible, eternal, image-of-God me.”[5] The divine image grounds our own individual uniqueness.

In MacDonald’s sermon, he continues: “And for each God has a different response. With every man he has a secret—the secret of the new name. In every man there is a loneliness, an inner chamber of peculiar life into which God only can enter. I say not it is the innermost chamber—but a chamber into which no brother, nay, no sister can come.”

It is in this chamber “in God himself, into which none can enter but the one, the individual, the peculiar man….  This is that for which he was made—to reveal the secret things of the Father. By his creation, then, each man is isolated with God; each, in respect of his peculiar making, can say, ‘my God’; each can come to him alone, and speak with him face to face, as a man speaketh with his friend. There is no massing of men with God. When he speaks of gathered men, it is as a spiritual body, not a mass. For in a body every smallest portion is individual, and therefore capable of forming a part of the body.”

MacDonald suggests three beneficial implications of this uniqueness.   

A deep contentment: “Let [God] call me what he will. The name shall be precious as my life. I seek no more…. To be a thing that God cares for and would have complete for himself, because it is worth caring for—is not that life enough?”  And again: “I am his; his idea, his making; perfect in my kind, yea, perfect in his sight; full of him, revealing him, alone with him.”

A release from the judgment of others: “Gone then will be all anxiety as to what his neighbour may think about him. It is enough that God thinks about him. To be something to God—is not that praise enough?”

A reality-orienting kingdom perspective: MacDonald’s sermon closes with this prayer: “But, Lord, help them and us, and make our being grow into thy likeness. If through ages of strife and ages of growth, yet let us at last see thy face, and receive the white stone from thy hand. That thus we may grow, give us day by day our daily bread. Fill us with the words that proceed out of thy mouth. Help us to lay up treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt.”

C. S. Lewis adds this insight on Revelation 2:17: “And what shall we take this secrecy to mean? Surely, that each of the redeemed shall forever know and praise some one aspect of the Divine beauty better than any other creature can. Why else were individuals created, but that God, loving all infinitely, should love each differently? And this difference, so far from impairing, floods with meaning the love of all blessed creatures for one another, the communion of the saints. If all experienced God in the same way and returned Him an identical worship, the song of the Church triumphant would have no symphony, it would be like an orchestra in which all the instruments played the same note.”[6]

Notes

[1] Haec is the feminine (or neuter plural) rendering in Latin, hic the masculine, hoc the neuter.

[2] I prefer the pronunciation “heck-ay-et-ee.”

[3] Dr. Seuss, Happy Birthday to You! (New York: Random House, 1959), n.p.

[4] This sermon can be found at https://bibleportal.com/sermon/george%2Bmacdonald/the-new-name. Thanks to Rob Garcia for pointing me to MacDonald’s work in his Society of Christian Philosophers lecture at Palm Beach Atlantic University, West Palm Beach, FL (January 2022)—and other illuminating thoughts reflected here.

[5] Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 23.

[6] C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: HarperOne, 2001), 155.

— Paul Copan is the Pledger Family Chair of Philosophy and Ethics at Palm Beach Atlantic University. Learn more about Paul and his work at paulcopan.com.

Image: Catedral de la Purísima Concepción (Tepic, Nayarit) - portal vault mural of Revelation Chapter 3