John R. W. Stott has become one of, if not exclusively, my favorite author.  

The following is a chapter from his work entitled, The Contemporary Christian, chapter titled "The Human Paradox".  

Twice the question 'What is man?' (that is, 'What does it mean to be human?') is asked and answered in the Old Testament. And on both occasions the question expresses surprise, even incredulity, that God should pay so much atten­tion to his human creation. For we are insignificant in com­parison to the vastness of the universe, and impure in contrast to the brightness of the stars, even just 'a maggot' and 'a worm'.'

There are at least three major reasons for the importance of this question.

Personally speaking, to ask 'What is man?' is another way of asking 'Who am I?'. Only so can we respond both to the ancient Greek adage gnothi seauton, 'know yourself', and to the mod­ern western preoccupation with the discovery of our true selves. There is no more important field for search or research than our own personal identity. For until we have found ourselves, we can neither fully discover anything else, nor grow into personal maturity. The universal cry is 'Who am I?' and 'Do I have any significance?'

The story is told that Arthur Schopenhauer, the philosopher of pessimism, was sitting one day in the Tiergarten at Frankfurt, looking somewhat shabby and dishevelled, when the park-keeper mistook him for a tramp and asked him gruffly, 'Who are you?' To this enquiry the philosopher replied bitterly, 'I wish to God I knew.'

Professionally, whatever our work may be, we are inevitably involved in serving people. Doctors and nurses have patients, teachers pupils, lawyers and social workers clients, members of parliament constituents, and business people customers. How we treat people in our work depends almost entirely on how we view them.

Politically, it is arguable that the nature of human beings has been one of the chief points at issue between the rival visions of Jesus and Marx. Have human beings an absolute value because of which they must be respected, or is their value only relative to the state, because of which they may be exploited? More simply, are the people the servants of the institution, or is the institution the servant of the people? As John S. Whale has written, 'ideologies ... are really anthropologies'; they are dif­ferent doctrines of man.'

The Christian critique of contemporary answers to the ques­tion 'What is man?' is that they tend to be either too naive in their optimism or too negative in their pessimism about the human condition. Secular humanists are generally optimistic. Although they believe that homo sapiens is nothing but the product of a random evolutionary process, they nevertheless believe that human beings are continuing to evolve, have limit­less potential, and will one day take control of their own development. But such optimists do not take seriously enough the human streak of moral perversity and self-centredness which has constantly retarded progress and so led to disillusion in social reformers.

Existentialists, on the other hand, tend to be extremely pess­imistic. Because there is no God, they say, there are no values, ideals or standards any more, which is at least logical. And although we need somehow to find the courage to be, our existence has neither meaning nor purpose. Everything is ulti­mately absurd. But such pessimists overlook the love, joy, beauty, truth, hope, heroism and self-sacrifice which have en­riched the human story.

What we need, therefore, to quote J. S. Whale again, is `neither the easy optimism of the humanist, nor the dark pess­imism of the cynic, but the radical realism of the Bible'.

Our human dignity

The intrinsic value of human beings by creation is affirmed from the first chapter of the Bible onwards.

Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.' 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.' (Gen. 1:26-28)

There has been a long-standing debate about the meaning of the divine 'image' or 'likeness' in human beings, and where their superiority lies. Keith Thomas collected a number of quaint suggestions in his book Man and the Natural World. He points out that a human being was described by Aristotle as a political animal, by Thomas Willis as a laughing animal, by Benjamin Franklin as a tool-making animal, by Edmund Burke as a religious animal, and by James Boswell the gourmet as a cooking animal.' Other writers have focused on some physical feature of the human body. Plato made much of our erect posture, so that animals look down, and only human beings look up to heaven, while Aristotle added the peculiarity that only human beings are unable to wiggle their ears. A Stuart doctor was greatly impressed by our intestines, by their `anfrac­tuous circumlocutions, windings and turnings', whereas in the late eighteenth century Uvedale Price drew attention to our nose: 'Man is, I believe, the only animal that has a marked projection in the middle of the face.'

Scholars who are familiar with ancient Egypt and Assyria, however, emphasize that in those cultures the king or emperor was regarded as the 'image' of God, representing him on earth, and that kings had images of themselves erected in their provin­ces to symbolize the extent of their authority. Against that background God the Creator entrusted a kind of royal (or at least vice-regal) responsibility to all human beings, appointing them to 'rule' over the earth and its creatures, and 'crowning' them with 'glory and honour' to do so.

In the unfolding narrative of Genesis 1 it is clear that the divine image or likeness is what distinguishes humans (the climax of creation) from animals (whose creation is recorded earlier). A continuity between humans and animals is implied. For example, they share 'the breath of life's and the responsi­bility to reproduce. But there was also a radical discontinuity between them, in that only human beings are said to be 'like God'. This emphasis on the unique distinction between humans and animals keeps recurring throughout Scripture. The argu­ment takes two forms. We should be ashamed both when human beings behave like animals, descending to their level, and when animals behave like human beings, doing better by instinct than we do by choice. As an example of the former, men and women are not to be 'senseless and ignorant' and behave like 'a brute beast', or 'like the horse or the mule, which have no understanding'.' As an example of the latter, we are rebuked that oxen and donkeys are better at recognizing their master than we are, that migratory birds are better at returning home after going away,' and that ants are more industrious and more provident.

Returning to the early chapters of Genesis, all God's dealings with Adam and Eve presuppose their uniqueness among his creatures. He addresses them in such a way as to assume their understanding; he tells them which fruit they may eat and not eat, taking it for granted that they can discern between a per­mission and a prohibition, and choose between them. He planted the garden, and then put Adam in it 'to work it and take care of it'," thus initiating a conscious, responsible partnership between them in cultivating the soil. He created them male and female, pronounced solitude 'not good', instituted marriage for the fulfillment of their love, and blessed their union. He also `walked in the garden in the cool of the day', desiring their companionship, and missed them when they hid from him. It is not surprising, therefore, that this cluster of five privileges (understanding, moral choice, creativity, love and fellowship with God) are all regularly mentioned in Scripture, and con­tinue to be recognized in the contemporary world, as con­stituting the unique distinction of our 'humanness'.

To begin with, there is our self-conscious rationality. It is not only that we are able to think and to reason. For so, it may be said, can computers. They can perform the most fantastic calcu­lations, and do so much faster than we can. They also have a form of memory (they can store information) and a form of speech (they can communicate their findings). But there is still one thing (thank God!) they cannot do. They cannot originate new thoughts; they can only 'think' what is fed into them. Human beings, however, are original thinkers. More than that. We can do what we (author and reader) are doing at this very moment: we can stand outside ourselves, look at ourselves, and evaluate ourselves, asking ourselves who and what we are. We are self-conscious and can be self-critical. We are also restlessly inquisitive about the universe. True, as one scientist said to another, 'astronomically speaking, man is infinitesimally small'. That is so,' responded his colleague, 'but then, astronomically peaking, man is the astronomer.'

Next, there is our ability to make moral choices. Human beings are moral beings. Although our conscience reflects our upbringing and culture, and is therefore fallible, nevertheless it remains on guard within us, like a sentinel, warning us that here is a difference between right and wrong. It is also more than an inner voice. It represents a moral order outside and above us, to which we sense an obligation, so that we have a strong urge to do what we perceive to be right, and feelings of guilt when we do what we believe to be wrong. Our whole moral vocabulary (commands and prohibitions, values and choices, obligation, conscience, freedom and will, right and wrong, guilt and shame) is meaningless to animals. True, we can train our dog to know what it is allowed and forbidden. And when it disobeys, and cringes from us by a reflex action, we can describe it as looking 'guilty'. But it has no sense of guilt; it knows only that it is going to be walloped.

Thirdly, there are our powers of artistic creativity. It is not only that God calls us into a responsible stewardship of the natural environment, and into partnership with himself in sub­duing and developing it for the common good, but that he has given us innovative skills through science and art to do so. We are 'creative creatures'. That is, as creatures we depend upon our Creator. But, having been created in our Creator's likeness, he has given us the desire and the ability to be creators too. So we draw and we paint, we build and we sculpt, we dream and we dance, we write poetry and we make music. We are able to appreciate what is beautiful to the eye, the ear and the touch.

In the next place, there is our capacity for relationships of love. God said, 'Let us make man in our image ... So God created man in his own image ...; male and female he created them.'  Although we must be careful not to deduce from this text more than it actually says, it is surely legitimate to say that the plurality within the Creator let us make man') was expressed in the plurality of his creatures (`male and female he created them'). It became even clearer when Jesus prayed for his own people 'that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you'. And this unity of love is unique to human beings. Of course all animals mate, many form strong pair bonds, most care for their young, and some are gregarious. But the love which binds human beings together is more than an instinct, more than a disturbance in the endocrine glands. It has inspired the greatest art, the noblest heroism, the finest devo­tion. God himself is love, and our experiences of loving are an essential reflection of our likeness to him.

Fifthly, there is our insatiable thirst for God. All human beings are aware of an ultimate personal reality, whom we seek, and in relation to whom alone we know we will find our human fulfillment. Even when we are running away from God, instinc­tively we know that we have no other resting-place, no other home. Without him we are lost, like waifs and strays. Our greatest claim to nobility is our created capacity to know God, to be in personal relationship with him, to love him and to worship him. Indeed, we are most truly human when we are on our knees before our Creator.

It is in these things, then, that our distinctive humanness lies, in our God-given capacities to think, to choose, to create, to love and to worship. 'In the animal,' by contrast, wrote Emil Brunner, 'we do not see even the smallest beginning of a ten­dency to seek truth for truth's sake, to shape beauty for the sake of beauty, to promote righteousness for the sake of righteous­ness, to reverence the Holy for the sake of its holiness ... The animal knows nothing "above" its immediate sphere of exist­ence, nothing by which it measures or tests its existence ... The difference between man and beast amounts to a whole dimen­sion of existence.'

No wonder Shakespeare made Hamlet break out into his eulogy: 'What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! low infinite in faculty! in action how like an angel! in apprehen­sion how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!''

How I wish I could stop there and we could live the rest of our lives glowing with unadulterated self-esteem! But alas! There is another and darker side to our human being, of which we are only too well aware, and to which Jesus himself drew our attention.

Our human depravity

Here are some words of Jesus:

Again Jesus called the crowd to him and said, 'Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. Nothing outside a man can make him "unclean" by going into him. Rather, it is what comes out of a man that makes him "unclean". ... For from within, out of men's hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and make a man "unclean".'

Jesus did not teach the fundamental goodness of human nature. He undoubtedly believed the Old Testament truth that humankind, male and female, were made in the image of God, but he also believed that this image had been marred. He taught the worth of human beings, not least by devoting himself to their service, but he also taught our unworthiness. He did not deny that we can give 'good things' to others, but he added that even while doing good we do not escape the designation 'evil'.³ And in the verses quoted above he made important assertions about the extent, nature, origin and effect of evil in human beings.

First, he taught the universal extent of human evil. He was not portraying the criminal segment of society or some par­ticularly degraded individual or group. On the contrary, he was in conversation with refined, righteous and religious Pharisees, and generalized about 'a man' and 'men'. Indeed, it is often the most upright people who are the most keenly aware of their own degradation. As an example, take Dag Hammarskjold, Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1953 to 1961. He was a deeply committed public servant, whom W. H. Auden described as 'a great, good and lovable man'. Yet his view of himself was very different. In his collection of autobiographical pieces entitled Markings, he wrote of 'that dark counter-centre of evil in our nature', so that we even make our service of others `the foundation for our own life-preserving self-esteem'.'

Secondly, Jesus taught the self-centred nature of human evil. In Mark 7 he listed thirteen examples. What is common to them all is that each is an assertion of the self either against our neighbour (murder, adultery, theft, false witness and covet­ousness — breaches of the second half of the Ten Command­ments — are all included) or against God (`pride and folly' being well defined in the Old Testament as denials of God's sovereignty and even of his existence). Jesus summarized the Ten Commandments in terms of love for God and neighbour, and every sin is a form of selfish revolt against God's authority or our neighbour's welfare.

Thirdly, Jesus taught the inward origin of human evil. Its source has to be traced neither to a bad environment nor to a faulty education (although both these can have a powerful conditioning influence on impressionable young people), but rather to our 'heart', our inherited and twisted nature. One might almost say that Jesus introduced us to Freudianism before Freud. At least what he called the 'heart' is roughly equivalent to what Freud called the 'unconscious'. It resembles a very deep well. The thick deposit of mud at the bottom is usually unseen, and even unsuspected. But when the waters of the well are stirred by the winds of violent emotion, the most evil-looking, evil-smelling filth bubbles up from the depths and breaks the surface — rage, hate, lust, cruelty, jealousy and revenge. In our most sensitive moments we are appalled by our potentiality for evil. Superficial remedies will not do.

Fourthly, Jesus spoke of the defiling effect of human evil. 'All these evils come from inside', he said, 'and make a human being "unclean"." The Pharisees considered defilement to be largely external and ceremonial; they were preoccupied with clean foods, clean hands and clean vessels. But Jesus insisted that defilement is internal and moral. What renders us unclean in God's sight is not the food which goes into us (into our stomach) but the evil which comes out of us (out of our heart).

All those who have caught even a momentary glimpse of the holiness of God have been unable to bear the sight, so shocked have they been by their own contrasting uncleanness. Moses hid his face, afraid to look at God. Isaiah cried out in horror over his own pollution and lostness. Ezekiel was dazzled, almost blinded, by the sight of God's glory, and fell face down on the ground.' As for us, even if we have never like these men glimpsed the splendour of Almighty God, we know we are unfit to enter his presence in time or in eternity.

In saying this, we have not forgotten our human dignity with which this chapter began. Yet we must do justice to Jesus' own evaluation of evil in our human condition. It is universal (in every human being without exception), self-centered (a revolt against God and neighbour), inward (issuing from our heart, our fallen nature) and defiling (making us unclean and therefore unfit for God). We who were made by God like God are disqualified from living with God.

The resulting paradox

Here, then, is the paradox of our humanness: our dignity and our depravity. We are capable both of the loftiest nobility and of the basest cruelty. One moment we can behave like God, in whose image we were made, and the next like the beasts, from whom we were meant to be completely distinct. Human beings are the inventors of hospitals for the care of the sick, universities for the acquisition of wisdom, parliaments for the just rule of the people, and churches for the worship of God. But they are also the inventors of torture chambers, concentration camps and nuclear arsenals. Strange, bewildering paradox! — noble and ignoble, rational and irrational, moral and immoral, God­like and bestial! As C. S. Lewis put it through Aslan, 'You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve. And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth.''

I do not know any more eloquent description of the human paradox than one which was given by Richard Holloway, now Bishop of Edinburgh, at the Catholic Renewal Conference at Loughborough in April 1978:

`This is my dilemma .. .', he said, 'I am dust and ashes, frail and wayward, a set of predetermined behavioural responses, riddled with fears, beset with needs ..., the quintessence of dust and unto dust I shall return ... But there is something else in me ... Dust I may be, but troubled dust, dust that dreams, dust that has strange premonitions of transfigura­tion, of a glory in store, a destiny prepared, an inheritance that will one day be my own ... So my life is stretched out in a painful dialectic between ashes and glory, between weak­ness and transfiguration. I am a riddle to myself, an exasper­ating enigma ... this strange duality of dust and glory.'

Faced with the horror of their own dichotomy, some people are foolish enough to imagine that they can sort themselves out, banishing the evil and liberating the good within them. The classic expression both of our human ambivalence and of our hopes of self-salvation was given by Robert Louis Stevenson in his famous tale The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). Henry Jekyll was a wealthy and respectable doctor, inclined to religion and philanthropy. But he was conscious that his personality had another and darker side, so that he was 'committed to a profound duplicity of life'. He discovered that 'man is not truly one, but truly two'. He then began to dream that he could solve the problem of his duality if only both sides of him could be 'housed in separate identities', the unjust going one way, and the just the other. So he developed a drug by which he could assume the deformed body and evil personality of Mr. Hyde, his alter ego, through whom he gave vent to his passions — hatred, violence, blasphemy and even murder.

At first Dr. Jekyll was in control of his transformations, and boasted that the moment he chose he could be rid of Mr. Hyde forever. But gradually Hyde gained ascendancy over Jekyll, until he began to become Hyde involuntarily, and only by great effort could resume his existence as Jekyll. 'I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse.' Finally, a few moments before his exposure and arrest, he committed suicide.

The truth is that every Jekyll has his Hyde, whom he cannot control and who threatens to take him over. In fact, the con­tinuing paradox of our humanness throws much light on both our private and our public lives. Let me give an example of each.

I begin with personal redemption. Because evil is so deeply entrenched within us, self-salvation is impossible. So our most urgent need is redemption, that is to say, a new beginning in life which offers us both a cleansing from the pollution of sin and a new heart, even a new creation, with new perspectives, new ambitions and new powers. And because we were made in God's image, such redemption is possible. No human being is irredeemable. For God came after us in Jesus Christ, and pur­sued us even to the desolate agony of the cross, where he took our place, bore our sin and died our death, in order that we might be forgiven. Then he rose, ascended and sent the Holy Spirit, who is able to enter our personality and change us from within. If there is any better news for the human race than this, I for one have never heard it.

My second example of our paradoxical human situation relates to social progress. The fact that men and women — even very degraded people — retain vestiges of the divine image in which they were created is evident. This is why, on the whole, all human beings prefer justice to injustice, freedom to oppres­sion, love to hatred, and peace to violence. This fact of everyday observation raises our hopes for social change. Most people cherish visions of a better world. The complementary fact, however, is that human beings are 'twisted with self-centredness' (as Archbishop Michael Ramsey used to define original sin), and this places limits on our expectations. The followers of Jesus are realists, not Utopians. It is possible to improve society (and the historical record of Christian social influence has been notable), but the perfect society, which will be 'the home of righteousness' alone,' awaits the return of Jesus Christ.