The Old Testament and the Sanctity of Life | CBHD.org

The Old Testament and the Sanctity of Life | CBHD.org
One of the most important contributions of the Old Testament creation theology is its implicit universality. Those familiar with the Bible tend to take this universality for granted, but it is an enormously important dimension of Old Testament creation theology and must not be overlooked. Consider the fact that all references to humanity in the early Genesis narratives are references to all humanity. God says, “Let us make humankind in our image.” This explicitly includes “male and female” (Gen. 1:26-27), and implicitly includes every male and female. The shedding of anyone’s blood is banned in Genesis 9:5-6 on the basis of everyone’s status as the image of God. Delegation of dominion is extended to all humans—William Brown describes this as the “democratization of royalty in the creation account”—such that we are all kings.1 Psalm 8 reflects on the “glory and honor” with which humanity as such is “crowned.” There is no hierarchy offered here between subcategories of human beings: Jew or non-Jew, male or female, young or old, slave or free, sick or well, friend or enemy (cf. Galatians 3, where Paul can be taken to argue that this original human egalitarianism has been renewed in Christ). The fact that such distinctions dominate much of human history and even creep into biblical law and narrative represents a weakening of this implicitly egalitarian and universalizing theology of creation.2 There is but one God who makes one humanity. This is a non-negotiable element of biblical creation theology.

The oneness of humanity in part results from our common origin not just in one Creator God but in one shared ancestor. The creation narrative found in Genesis 2 tells a story in which God begins to create humanity by creating one person first. Here the older, less gender-sensitive English style actually helps us: God creates “man[kind]” by creating “a man.” The first woman is then formed out of the first man. From them come absolutely everyone else. Paul put it this way at Mars Hill: “From one he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth” (Acts 17:26). Paul actually offers a wordplay here—from enos (one) to ethnos (nations/peoples). However unlike each other the different ethnoi may seem, we came from the same place. From one person, came all people. One might say that Genesis 1 teaches the universality of the imago Dei, and Genesis 2 teaches a primal human unity by narrating a story in which all human beings come from one common ancestor. In our origins, we are one race—the human race.

Doctrine of Man in the Old Testament

Doctrine of Man in the Old Testament
Throughout the OT the relationship of man to nature is everywhere stressed. As man shares with nature share with man in the actualities of his living. Thus, while nature was made to serve man, so man on his part is required to tend nature (Gen. 2:15). Nature is therefore not a sort of neutral entity in relation to man's life. For between the two, nature and man, there exists a mysterious bond so that when man sinned the natural order was itself deeply afflicted (Gen. 3:17 - 18; cf. Rom. 8:19 - 23). Since, however, nature suffered as a result of man's sin, so does it rejoice with him in his redemption (Ps. 96:10 - 13; Isa. 35, etc.), for in man's redemption it too will share (Isa. 11:6 - 9).

But however deeply related man is to the natural order, he is presented nonetheless as something different and distinctive. Having first called the earth into existence with its various requisites for human life, God then declared for the making of man. The impression that the Genesis account gives is that man was the special focus of God's creative purpose. It is not so much that man was the crown of God's creative acts, or the climax of the process, for although last in the ascending scale, he is first in the divine intention. All the previous acts of God are presented more in the nature of a continuous series by the recurring use of the conjunction "and" (Gen. 1:3, 6, 9, 14, 20, 24). "Then God said, 'Let us make man.'" "Then", when? When the cosmic order was finished, when the earth was ready to sustain man. Thus, while man stands before God in a relationship of created dependence, he has also the status of a unique and special personhood in relation to God.


Man's constituents
The three most significant words in the OT to describe man in relation to God and nature are "soul" (nepes, 754 times), "spirit" (ruah, 378 times), and "flesh" (basar, 266 times). The term "flesh" has sometimes a physical and sometimes a figuratively ethical sense. In its latter use it has its context in contrast with God to emphasize man's nature as contingent and dependent (Isa. 31:3; 40:6; Pss. 61:5; 78:39; Job 10:4). Both nepes and ruah denote in general the life principle of the human person, the former stressing more particularly his individuality, or life, and the latter focusing on the idea of a supernatural power above or within the individual.
Of the eighty parts of the body mentioned in the OT the terms for "heart" (leb), "liver" (kabed), "kidney" (kelayot), and "bowels" (me'im) are the most frequent. To each of these some emotional impulse or feeling is attributed either factually or metaphorically. The term "heart" has the widest reference. It is brought into relation with man's total phychical nature as the seal or instrument of his emotional, volitional, and intellectual manifestations. In the latter context it acquires a force we should call "mind" (Deut. 15:9; Judg. 5:15 - 16) or "intellect" (Job 8:10; 12:3; 34:10), and is frequently employed by metonymy to denote one's thought or wish with the idea of purpose or resolve. For one's thought or wish is what is "in the heart," or, as would be said today, "in the mind."

These several words do not, however, characterize man as a compound of separate and distinct elements. Hebrew psychology does not divide up man's nature into mutually exclusive parts. Behind these usages of words the thought conveyed by the Genesis account, that man's nature is twofold, remains. Yet even there man is not presented as a loose union of two disparate entities. There is no sense of a metaphysical dichotomy, while even that of an ethical dualism of soul and body is quite foreign to Hebrew thought. By God's inbreathing the man he formed from the dust became a living soul, a unified being in the interrelation of the terrestrial and the transcendental

The Old Testament View of Human Nature

The Old Testament View of Human Nature

No age knows so much and so many things about human nature as does ours, yet no age knows less about what man really is. Having lost their awareness of God, many people today are concerned primarily with their present existence. The loss of awareness of God makes many people uncertain about the meaning of life, because it is only in reference to God and His revelation that the nature and destiny of human life can be truly understood.

The question of human nature has been a consistent concern in the history of Western thought. In chapter 1 we noted that, historically, most Christians have defined human nature dualistically, that it consists of a material, mortal body and an immaterial, immortal soul which survives the body at death. Beginning with the Enlightenment (a philosophic movement of the 18th century), attempts have been made to define man as a machine that is part of a giant cosmic machine. Human beings hopelessly are trapped within a deterministic universe and their behavior is determined by such impersonal and involuntary forces as genetic factors, chemical secretions, education, upbringing, and societal conditioning. People do not have an immaterial, immortal soul, only a mortal, material body that is conditioned by the determinism of the cosmic machine.

This depressing materialistic view that reduces human beings to the status of a machine or an animal negates the Biblical view of man created in the image of God. Instead of being "like God," human beings are reduced to being "like an animal." Perhaps as a response to this pessimistic view, various modern pseudo-pagan cults and ideologies (like the New Age) deify human beings. Man is neither "like an animal" or "like God," he is god. He has inner divine power and resources that await to be unleashed. This new humanistic gospel is popular today because it challenges people to seek salvation within themselves by tapping into and releasing the powers and resources that slumber within.

What we are experiencing today is a violent swing of the pendulum from an extreme materialistic view of human nature to an extreme mystic, deification view. In this context, people are confronted with two choices: Either human beings are nothing but preprogrammed machines, or they are divine with unlimited potential. The Christian response to this challenge is to be sought in the Holy Scriptures which provide the basis for defining our beliefs and practices. Our study shows that Scripture teaches we are neither preprogrammed machines nor divine beings with unlimited potential. We are creatures created in the image of God, and dependent upon Him for our existence in this world and in the world to come.