However, to understand and comprehend the Bible’s central message, Scripture cannot be read in a piecemeal way, as if we can isolate one text from another. Instead, we must approach and interpret Scripture according to what Scripture is, or better, Scripture must be read it on its own terms, which minimally requires us to affirm three truths about Scripture.

Three Necessary Truths About Scripture

First, Scripture is God’s Word written through the agency of human authors unfolding God’s eternal, comprehensive plan (2 Tim. 3:15–17; 2 Pet. 1:20–21). Given this truth, despite Scripture’s diversity of content, there is an overall unity and coherence to it precisely because it is God’s Word. Furthermore, since Scripture is God’s Word given through human authors, we cannot know what God is saying to us apart from the writing(s) and intention of the human authors. What Scripture says, God says. And given that God has spoken through multiple authors over time, this requires a careful intertextual and canonical reading in order to understand God’s full revelation of himself. As a progressive revelation, Scripture does not come to us all at once. Instead, as God’s plan unfolds, especially his redemptive plan, more revelation is given and later revelation, building on the earlier, results in more clarity and understanding from the perspective of the later authors. As more revelation is given, God’s unfolding “mystery” is unveiled, and we discover how the individual parts fit with the whole. Even more significantly, we discover who is central to that plan, namely our Lord Jesus Christ, and how we fit in that plan as his people.

Second, Scripture is God’s Word written over time, hence the idea of progressive revelation, which is the unfolding of God’s plan in redemptive history. Revelation, alongside redemption, occurs progressively, largely demarcated by the biblical covenants located within the larger categories of creation, fall, redemption, and the dawning of the new creation in Christ. Thus, to understand the “whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27), we must carefully trace out God’s unfolding plan as unveiled over time and specifically through the biblical covenants. This is why our exegesis of specific texts and entire books must result in a “biblical theology” that is concerned to read Scripture and “put together” the entire canon in terms of its redemptive historical unfolding. Scripture consists of many literary forms that require careful interpretation, but what unites the biblical books is God’s unfolding plan, starting in Genesis and creation, accounting for the fall, unpacking God’s redemptive promises through the covenants, and culminating with Christ’s coming and inauguration of the new creation by the ratification of a new covenant.

Third, Scripture is God’s Word centered in Christ Jesus. Although some think this statement is controversial, it is simply true to what Scripture teaches. As the New Testament opens, Jesus is presented as the fulfillment of God’s saving promises from the Old Testament (Matt. 1:1–17; Luke 1–3). All that has preceded Christ has in promise, type, and covenantal unfolding anticipated his coming. In fact, our Lord himself unambiguously teaches us this truth. In a magnificent statement, Jesus claims that he is the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets, meaning that the entire Old Testament not only pointed to him but that its continuing and abiding authority must be understood in light of his person and work (Matt. 5:17–20). By this claim, Jesus views himself as the eschatological goal of the Old Testament; the one the Old Testament pointed forward to and in whom all God’s plans and promises are realized.

But Jesus’ statement in Matthew 5 is not a one-off. In Matthew 11, as he teaches us about his relation to John the Baptist, the last of the Old Testament prophets, Jesus views himself as the focal point and center of all of history, the one who fulfills all of God’s plans and purposes in himself. The same truth is taught in Luke 24. As Jesus comes alongside to comfort two downcast disciples, he does so by going back to the Old Testament and rehearsing how the Law, Prophets, and Psalms properly spoke of him and anticipated the events occurring in his life, death, and resurrection (Luke 24:13–35, 44). Instead, of a crucified Messiah being something strange, it’s precisely what the Old Testament taught and anticipated. As Jesus unpacked Scripture, he powerfully explained how the Old Testament, properly interpreted, is about him, and that despite Scripture’s diversity, the entire Bible finds its center in Christ.

The author of Hebrews teaches us this same point in his opening thesis statement that governs his entire book. “In the past,” the author reminds his readers, “God spoke to our forefathers by the prophets” and he did so “at many times and in various ways.” God’s Word is given over time, and it points forward to something more to come. The phrase, “at many times and in many ways,” underscores this point. The Old Testament revelation was given by God and it is fully true and authoritative, yet it is purposely incomplete as it points beyond itself to Christ’s coming. But what the prophets looked forward to, namely “the last days” and the coming of Messiah Jesus, now, “in Son” (v. 2), is here. In other words, in Christ’s coming and work, the entirety of God’s previous revelation and redemptive purposes have now reached their fulfillment. All of this reminds us that there was no reduction of the Old Testament’s authority, but God intended the Old Testament to point beyond itself to God’s full self-disclosure in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Although these truths are plainly taught in Scripture and are crucial to remember if we are going to read and apply Scripture correctly, sadly today’s evangelical church has a difficult time making sense of these truths. We struggle over how Scripture, especially the Old Testament, is to be applied to our lives, and how it is rightly about Christ. The Old Testament has become a foreign book to many in our churches, and it is too often viewed with either disdain or embarrassment. But the problem with this attitude is that it denies what Scripture teaches. For example, it denies what Paul teaches in 2 Timothy 3:15-17. In this important text regarding the nature of Scripture, we often forget that Paul is first referring to the Old Testament as God’s breathed-out Word and thus fully authoritative for Christians. Paul assumes that the church’s doctrine and life is grounded in the Old Testament, since currently, the New Testament is still being written. For this reason, it is not only wrong but also dangerous to ignore the Old Testament since it, along with the New Testament, functions for us as the basis for how we are rightly to think about God and to live before him as his redeemed people in Christ. No doubt it is true that as Christians we are not “under the law” as a covenant now that Christ has come, and that we must carefully apply the Old Testament to us in light of Christ’s new covenant work. Yet, this does not mean that the entire Old Testament does not continue to function for us as Scripture, and thus demand our study and obedience.

Furthermore, neglect of the Old Testament undercuts the biblical and theological grounding for the New Testament, and thus seriously risks misunderstanding who Jesus is along with the entire message of the Gospel. Our Lord Jesus does not appear de novo in the New Testament. Instead, who Jesus is, what he has done for us in his redemptive work, is entirely dependent on the biblical-theological framework, content, and structures of the Old Testament, and unless we ground the Gospel first in the Old Testament, we will quickly lose the central truths of Christian theology. For this reason, ignorance of the Old Testament, let alone the New Testament, is no small matter. In truth, it’s a matter of life and death, and as such, given our lack of knowing the entire canon of Scripture, it is not surprising that the theological life and health of today’s evangelical church is in trouble.

Recovering the Bible’s Unity: Why In These Last Days Matters

Given this sober reality, I heartily recommend Graeme Goldsworthy’s In These Last Days: The Dynamics of Biblical Revelation. This book, written by one of evangelicalism’s premier biblical theologians, brings together years of study, teaching, and writing about Scripture and teaches us how to read and apply Scripture to our lives on the Bible’s own terms. Given that there is no greater need than to rightly know and love God by knowing and loving his Word, this book is a must reading if we want to take Scripture seriously and “to bring all of our thought captive to Christ.”

Although Goldsworthy reminds us that this work is not a full-blown biblical theology, it does offer the “big picture” of what Scripture is and how to read and apply it correctly for today’s church. Throughout the entire work, Goldsworthy underscores the importance of the historical nature of divine revelation, thus rightly reminding us that God’s redemptive work in history, along with his revelation of his mighty acts, is not static. This is why not all parts of Scripture relate in exactly the same way to other portions of Scripture, which in turn requires a careful reading and application of Scripture to our lives. As he persuasively demonstrates, unless we read texts in terms of their location in the progress of divine revelation, we will inevitably misunderstand and misapply those texts. Texts must be read in terms of their location in redemptive history, following the Bible’s own creation, fall, redemption, and new creation structure, and then seeing how these same texts are brought to their fulfillment in Christ. Unless we read and apply Scripture this way, we are not being faithful to God’s intent, and inevitably read Scripture in an incorrect and fragmented way.

Goldsworthy helps us see the “big picture” of Scripture in four main sections.

First, he reflects on the nature of Scripture which is foundational to reading it correctly. Here, and throughout the work, he demonstrates that biblical and systematic theology are in a symbiotic relationship so that we cannot have one without the other. Yet, he does so by staying true to the Bible’s own teaching and taking seriously that Scripture is God’s authoritative and divine speech to us, which demands that we receive it as God’s Word and read it as such.

Second, he turns to the God of Scripture, namely the triune Creator-covenant Lord, who is revealed to us across the entire canon, thus grounding Scripture in the doctrine of God, and demonstrating that Scripture’s primary message is about God and secondarily about us.

Third, Goldsworthy unpacks God’s works by developing across the entire canon crucial themes essential to reading and applying Scripture properly. Starting with the importance of creation, he moves to the fall, divine judgment, and God’s plan of redemption tied to the establishment of the kingdom through covenants, all leading us to the fulfillment of God’s plan in Christ. Throughout the entire work, he models how to follow the Bible’s own epochal structure of Old Testament history, prophetic eschatology, and fulfillment in Christ. By doing so, he repeatedly illustrates how to relate the parts of Scripture to their whole, centered in Christ, and thus how to be true to the Bible’s own presentation of itself.

Fourth, Goldsworthy finishes by showing how all of Scripture in light of its fulfillment in Christ applies to us, as those living in the new covenant era and not previous eras of redemptive history. Discussion of the gospel message and how we are to live as the church in light of Christ’s work makes this book more than simply one that traces out biblical themes across the canon; instead it is a book that carefully demonstrates how we are to live as the church today.

Given that many evangelical churches today are deficient in basic biblical and theological knowledge and literacy, this book is a must read to remedy this serious problem. For the church not to be tossed back and forth by every wind of doctrine (Eph. 4:14), the wisdom of this work is necessary. In a day where some in the evangelical world want to “retrieve” old paths that will lead us back to an allegorization of Scripture, Goldsworthy provides a Reformation alternative that is grounded in a proper understanding of sensus literalis. By reading Scripture on its own terms, as a progressive revelation that is unveiling God’s eternal plan centered in Christ, Goldsworthy offers us a proper “theological” interpretation of Scripture that recovers God’s Word for the church, and allows us to apply it rightly to our lives.

What is needed for the present hour is sound and faithful biblical and theological exposition, which this book magnificently and impressively provides. My prayer is that this book will be widely read and applied in our churches. If it is, then the evangelical church will be strengthened and fortified, and better equipped to know and glorify our triune God as we learn to proclaim anew the unsearchable riches of Christ (Col. 1:27–28) from the whole counsel of God (Acts 20:27).

Editor’s Note: The above is from the foreword of Graham Goldsworthy’s book In These Last Days. It is republished here with the gracious permission of the author and publisher.

However, a proper understanding of “biblical theology” is vitally important to the doing of systematic theology. Why? Because biblical theology is the discipline that seeks to understand the entire canon as God’s word, we cannot draw legitimate theological conclusions from Scripture apart from it. In other words, biblical theology serves as the biblical warrant for systematic theology. Given biblical theology’s importance for theology and given the fact that people mean different things by it, let me explain a bit more what biblical theology is, and why it serves as the biblical warrant for theology.

Biblical Theology

Biblical theology is the theological discipline that seeks to understand the canon of Scripture “on its own terms.” As such, biblical theology is the discipline that seeks to read specific texts (i.e., exegesis) in light of the entire canonical teaching of Scripture. Or, as Brian Rosner states: Biblical theology is “theological interpretation of Scripture in and for the church. It proceeds with historical and literary sensitivity and seeks to analyze and synthesize the Bible’s teaching about God and his relations to the world on its own terms, maintaining sight of the Bible’s overarching narrative and Christocentric focus.”^[1]

1. Brian Rosner, “Biblical Theology,” in New Dictionary of Biblical Theology, 10 (italics removed from original).

As an exegetical discipline, biblical theology is not presuppositionless. It approaches Scripture according to its own claim, namely that Scripture is God’s word written, and it presupposes the central truths of historic Christianity, hence the reason why it is a theological discipline. Since Scripture is God’s word written, it assumes that despite its diversity, Scripture is a unified, true, and authoritative revelation. And given that Scripture has come to us over time, Scripture is a progressive unfolding of God’s plan across a specific redemptive-historical plotline demarcated by the biblical covenants. As an exegetical method, it is sensitive to literary, historical, and theological dimensions of various corpora, as well as the interrelationships between the earlier and later texts in Scripture, thus relating the “parts” of Scripture to the “whole.” Biblical theology allows us to discern God’s intention through the authors of Scripture, which is most fully known in terms of the entire canon. As such, biblical theology provides the basis for understanding how texts in any portion of Scripture relate to the entire biblical teaching with the goal of learning better how to read and apply Scripture correctly, to proclaim “the whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27), and to “think God’s thoughts after him.” For this reason, biblical theology is foundational to theology since it provides the biblical warrant from a whole Bible for our theological conclusions. In other words, we cannot say what the Bible says on any matter apart from exegeting and understanding the entirety of God’s word across the entire canon.

Systematic Theology

This essential and foundational role that biblical theology serves for theology is also understood by properly defining what systematic theology is. Although people have defined systematic theology in a number of ways, I think the best way is to define it as follows: Systematic theology is the study of the triune God by the application of God’s word to all areas of life.^[2] The emphasis on “application” is important since it helps us think about what theology is and how it is to be done, and it also underscores why biblical theology is essential to the doing of theology. Minimally, doing systematic theology involves two steps.

2. For this definition, see Stephen J. Wellum, Systematic Theology: From Canon to Concept, vol. 1 (Brentwood: B&H Academic, 2024), chapter 1.

Apply the Entirety of God’s Word

First, systematic theology requires that we apply the entirety of God’s word. This not only assumes that Scripture, as God’s word written, is true and authoritative and thus foundational for our theology, but also that a right interpretation of Scripture is central to the doing of theology. Scripture is more than a collection of isolated texts from ancient history. Instead, Scripture is God’s unfolding revelation of his eternal plan that moves from creation to the new creation, centered in the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Thus, a correct reading of Scripture requires that individual texts be located in relation to the Bible’s unfolding covenantal story and ultimately in light of the entire canon fulfilled in Christ Jesus. As we read Scripture, careful attention must be given to the Bible’s own presentation of its content, categories, and teaching, which is precisely what we are doing when we do biblical theology.

In this regard, Charles Hodge’s well-known definition of theology requires modification, along with Wayne Grudem’s definition that is dependent on Hodge. For example, Hodge defines theology as “the exhibition of the facts of Scripture in their proper order and relation, with the principles or general truths involved in the facts themselves, and which pervade and harmonize the whole.”^[3] Likewise, Wayne Grudem defines theology as the study that answers the question: “‘What does the whole Bible teach us today?’ about any given topic,” which involves “collecting and understanding all the relevant passages in the Bible on various topics and then summarizing their teachings clearly so that we know what to believe about each topic.”^[4]

3. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology (reprint; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), 1:19.

4. Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology, 2^nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2020), 1 (emphasis removed).

No doubt there is truth in what Hodge and Grudem say. Theology does seek to know what the entirety of Scripture teaches on any given topic, hence the term “systematic.” Yet, the problem with such definitions is that they fail to do justice to what Scripture actually is. Scripture is not a theological dictionary or a storehouse of propositions or facts, although it is thoroughly propositional. Instead, Scripture is God’s authoritative word that is comprised of many literary forms that require careful interpretation, and it is an unfolding revelation given to us over time. Theology, then, does not simply collect texts and arrange them properly; Scripture already comes to us in a specific order and within its own interpretive framework.

Another way of stating this is that Scripture is a word-act revelation. It not only recounts God’s mighty actions in history; it is also God’s interpretation of his redemptive acts, through human authors, and thus true, objective, and authoritative. For this reason, Scripture’s own interpretations and descriptions are infallible, and they serve as our interpretive framework or “spectacles” for thinking about God, the world, and ourselves. Thus, to apply Scripture first requires that we interpret Scripture correctly as an entire canon. In fact, our task in reading Scripture is to understand the entirety of it and to “put together” Scripture “on its own terms,” which is the task of biblical theology. This is why we cannot do systematic theology apart from the doing of biblical theology since it is the biblical warrant for our entire theology.

Applying God’s Word to All of Life

Second, theology requires that we apply Scripture to all areas of life. Here is where it goes beyond biblical theology. Systematic theology is more than repeating Scripture; instead, it also has a constructive element to it. This constructive element not only puts together all that Scripture teaches; it also involves application to every area of life. This is why systematic theology is foundational for worldview formation, as it seeks to integrate God’s revelation in nature and Scripture as an exercise of “faith seeking understanding.” As we take the Bible’s authoritative teaching (given to us by biblical theology), we seek to understand Scripture in terms of application, logical implications, and metaphysical entailments. No doubt, we do so with help from the past, but we also seek to apply Scripture to the issues of our day in order to teach the church sound doctrine and refute the errors of both the past and present age. God has not given us his word for only one aspect of our lives; God’s word applies to every area of life, just as Christ’s Lordship is over everything.

We can illustrate this second step (which depends on biblical theology but goes beyond it) by referring to the doing of Christology. To answer the question of who Jesus is, we must first turn to the entire canon of Scripture (which requires the discipline of biblical theology). We must think through how the Bible presents who Jesus is from Genesis to Revelation as forged across the biblical covenants. But after we do so, we discover that the Jesus of the Bible is utterly unique; he is God the Son from eternity who, in the incarnation, assumed a human nature (John 1:1, 14). Yet, this biblical presentation, drawn from the entire canon of Scripture (i.e., biblical theology) raises some legitimate theological questions that require understanding and theological construction, even the use of extra-biblical language, concepts, and judgments. For example, how should we think of the relation between Jesus as the Son and the Father and Spirit? Or how should we understand the relationship between the Son’s deity and humanity, given the Creator-creature distinction (Phil. 2:6–11)? Or how do we make sense of Jesus’s statement that he does not know certain things, if he is God the Son and thus omniscient (Mark 13:32)? To answer these questions, the constructive element of systematic theology is done, which seeks to understand the whole counsel of God and to put together the biblical teaching in such a way that accounts for all the biblical data in the way that Scripture presents it. It is not enough merely to repeat Scripture; we must also make sense of it in order to disciple believers in the truth and to obey Scripture’s exhortation to always be ready to give a reasoned defense for what we believe.

Conclusion

Hopefully, by a proper description of what biblical and systematic theology is, we see that we cannot have one without the other. For systematic theology to be biblical, it must draw its conclusions from the entire canon of Scripture “on its own terms,” which is the discipline of biblical theology. Otherwise, our theological conclusions will not be warranted by Scripture, and if they are not warranted by Scripture, they do not command our faith and obedience. What our churches desperately need today is sound systematic theology, but we will never have a sound theology apart from its being grounded and warranted by Scripture alone.

We cannot do an exhaustive survey of the biblical data teaching the truth of Christ’s deity. Instead, we will focus on some key texts that summarize the New Testament witness to Christ and also teach significant truths that were foundational to the Church’s formulation of the Nicene Creed. It’s crucial to recognize the continuity between what Scripture teaches and what the Church confesses. The Jesus of the Bible is not different than the Jesus confessed in the Nicene Creed, although a different theological vocabulary is used to communicate the biblical teaching.

It’s also important to see that our Lord Jesus’s divine Sonship is unveiled across the Bible’s covenantal story. As Jesus’s eternal Sonship is revealed to us, he is first disclosed as the promised Messiah, David’s greater Son, who inaugurates God’s saving rule and reign. As the human son-king, he was first promised in Eden (Gen. 3:15), given greater definition through the covenants, and then epitomized in the Davidic king (e.g., Isa. 7:14, 9:6–7, 11:1–16; 52:13–53:12; Ezekiel 34). As the human son, he fulfills the role of previous sons (e.g., Adam, Israel, David). But, as the Old Testament unfolds, it becomes clear that this human son-king is not merely human; he is also the divine Son who alone does what God can do. This latter emphasis identifies the human Messiah with Yahweh in a unique Father-Son relation that transcends the human, thus becoming not only the seedbed for the New Testament’s presentation of Christ, but also for the Trinitarian dogmatic construction of the Nicene Creed. Jesus, the Messiah, is not merely human; he is also one with Yahweh: the eternal divine Son of the Father, who for us and salvation became human.

The New Testament evidence for Jesus’s eternal Sonship and deity is abundant. Building on the Law and the Prophets, the New Testament opens by identifying Jesus with Yahweh since he alone establishes God’s promised rule by inaugurating God’s kingdom through a new covenant in fulfillment of God’s covenant promises—thus doing what only God can do (Isa. 9:6–7; 11:1–10; Jer. 31:31–34; Ezek. 34:1–31). Also, along with the Father and Spirit, the Son fully and equally shares the one divine name and nature (Matt. 28:18–20; John 8:58; Phil. 2:9–11; Col. 2:9). Further, as we will discuss below, the Son is identified as God (theos) (John 1:1, 18; 20:28; Rom. 9:5; Titus 2:13; Heb. 1:8; 2 Pet. 1:1) because he is the exact image and correspondence of the Father (Col. 1:15; Heb. 1:3). As the Son, he inseparably shares with the Father and Spirit the divine rule, works, and receives divine worship (Ps. 110:1; Matt. 1:21; Eph. 1:22; Phil. 2:9–11; Col. 1:15–20; Heb. 1:1–3; Rev. 5:11–12). This is why Jesus has the authority to forgive sin (Mark 2:3–12), to say that all Scripture is fulfilled in him (Matt. 5:17–19; 11:13), and to acknowledge that he is from the Father as the Son, but also equal to the Father as the Son (Matt. 11:25–27; John 5:16–30; 10:14–30; 14:9–13).

With this basic overview in mind, let us now focus on five key texts that gloriously teach that our Lord Jesus Christ is the only begotten divine Son—texts on which the Nicene Creed was based and on which the Church faithfully formulated Trinitarian and Christological orthodoxy.

John 1:1–18

We cannot overstate the importance of John’s prologue for the entire Gospel and the New Testament. It reminds us that Jesus is the divine Word, the eternal Son of the Father, become human. In fact, these verses summarize, as D. A. Carson reminds us, “how the ‘Word’ which was with God in the very beginning came into the sphere of time, history, tangibility—in other words, how the Son of God was sent into the world to become the Jesus of history, so that the glory and grace of God might be uniquely and perfectly disclosed. The rest of the book is nothing other than an expansion of this theme.”^[1] This is also true of the entire New Testament.

1. D. A. Carson, The Gospel According to John (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992), 111.

How does the prologue identify our Lord Jesus Christ as the divine Son who became human? It does so by its use of “Word” (logos) and “God” (theos). John is the only biblical author to identify Christ by the title, “Word.” To establish its meaning, we need to locate it within the Old Testament, instead of looking outside of Scripture (despite its widespread use in Greek thought). In the Old Testament, “Word” is closely associated with the God who creates, reveals, and redeems—all by his Word (Gen. 1:3ff, 3:8–19; 12:1; Ps. 33:6, 9; 119:9, 25; Isa. 55:11). By the use of this title, John identifies Jesus, the Son, with God. But, second, by his use of “God,” John not only closely identifies the Word with God; he also teaches that the Word is God, yet simultaneously distinct from God (the Father).

In John 1:1, John uses a triadic structure to make these points. Each of the three clauses has the same subject, “Word,” and an identical verb “was” (ēn), and each clause progresses to the next. The first clause, “In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1a) teaches that the Word is eternal; hence Jesus as the Son is eternal. The second clause, “the Word was with God” (John 1:1b) affirms that although the Word is eternal he is also distinct from God (the Father), hence affirming an eternal Father-Son relation. The last clause, “the Word was God” (John 1:1c) affirms that the Word shares the full deity of God. Since there is only one God, this entails that within God there is a Father-Son relation that shares the one divine nature, hence a foundational verse in the Church’s dogmatic formulation of the Trinity. In this key verse, then, John declares that the Word has an eternal existence in personal intercommunion with God and that both share the same nature. And, as John will now explain, it’s this Word, God’s own self-expression—true God of God—who becomes human and is our Lord Jesus Christ (John 1:14).

However, before we turn to John’s teaching on the incarnation, it’s significant that John’s predication of “God” (theos) to Christ is not limited to him; it’s done at least seven times in the New Testament (John 1:1, 18; 20:28; Rom. 9:5; Titus 2:13; 1 Pet. 1:1; Heb. 1:8). Why is this important? Scripture applies many titles to Christ, but most of them refer to Christ’s deity and humanity, e.g., “Son,” “Son of Man,” and “Messiah.” But theos applied to Jesus is an explicit assertion that he is God. No doubt, the title “Lord” (kurios) is similar, but theos is more explicit.

Why is “God” not used more often, given its clear affirmation of Christ’s deity? Three reasons may be given. First, let’s not forget that Scripture states that the Son is “God” at least seven times and in key places. In fact, four different authors state it (John, Paul, Peter, author of Hebrews) and they do so consistently—immediately after the resurrection (John 20:28), into the 90s A.D. (John 1:1, 18), and in Jewish and Gentile contexts. Second, the predication of “God” to Jesus is carefully done in order to preserve Trinitarian personal relations. Normally, theos refers to God the Father, yet because the Son is God, theos can also be predicated of Christ. However, in order to preserve the personal distinctions within God, theos predominantly denotes the Father and kurios the Son. Third, Jesus is God the Son, but he is also human. If theos had become a personal name for Christ, it’s possible that Christ’s humanity could have been downplayed. But with that said, we must not forget that when theos is predicated of Christ, it explicitly teaches that he is the divine Son.

Let’s now return to John 1:14. Here we discover that the divine Word/Son became flesh, and thus fully human.^[2] But, who exactly became flesh? Who is the subject of the incarnation? John is emphatic: It’s the Word who became human, not the divine nature, nor even the Father or the Spirit. The acting subject (what the Church will later call, “person” [hypostasis]) of the incarnation is the Word. It’s he who united himself to a human nature (“flesh”), and now, he subsists in two natures. As God the Son, he remains what he has always been in relation to the Father and Spirit, fully and equally sharing the divine nature (John 1:1). But now, the Word/Son has assumed a human nature to reveal the divine glory and achieve our redemption. In that human nature, the Son is now able to live and experience a fully human life, yet without any change to the Son’s deity, since this would preclude him from displaying the fullness of the Father’s glory (John 1:14, 18) and accomplishing his mission to save.

2. See Carson, John, 117, where he notes how strong John’s language is. It’s possible that John is responding to an early form of Docetism (Gk. dokeō, to appear; this is the heretical teaching that Christ only appeared to be human). John is emphatic: to deny the genuineness of the incarnation is to deny the Jesus of the Bible and the Gospel (see 1 John 1:1–4; 4:1–3).

This point is reinforced by the inclusio that concludes the prologue: “No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is God (monogenēs theos), who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known” (John 1:18). In the Old Testament some saw visions of God (e.g., Exodus 33–34; Isaiah 6), yet they never truly saw God other than in theophany. But now, in the incarnate Son, the full disclosure of God is now made visible.^[3] John, along with the entirety of Scripture, teaches the exclusive, unique identity of Christ. Who is Jesus? He is the divine Son, one with the Father and Spirit, who now in his incarnation has become human to reveal and to redeem.

3. A comment needs to be made about monogenēs. Historically, monogenēs (from monos + gennaō) has been translated, “only begotten” (KJV) and used to warrant the Son’s “eternal generation” from the Father. Today, many think the etymology of monogenēs derives from monos + genos to mean “unique, only.” It is best to interpret it as “only begotten.” For this case, see Charles Lee Irons, “A Lexical Defense of the Johannine ‘Only Begotten’ ” in Retrieving Eternal Generation, ed. Fred Sanders and Scott R. Swain (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017), 98–116.

Colossians 1:15–20

Here is another key text that teaches that Jesus is the divine Son and which was also foundational for the Nicene Creed and the later Christological formulation. In the Patristic era, this text was used by the Arians to argue that Christ was the “firstborn,” i.e., the first created being and not God the Son. This interpretation continues today among Jehovah’s Witnesses, and sadly, numerous self-identified evangelicals are also confused on this point.^[4] However, against the Arians, the text unambiguously teaches the full deity of the Son, and significantly, that even as the incarnate Son, he continues to do the divine work of providence, inseparably with the Father and the Spirit—a truth that the Church’s formulation of the extra seeks to capture.^[5]

4. See the 2022 Ligonier Ministries and LifeWay Research Survey entitled “The State of Theology,” statement number six.



5. The “extra” means that Jesus, as the divine Son, is able to act in and through his human nature but also, he is able to act “outside” of it in his divine nature, inseparably with the Father and Spirit.

The text is divided into two main stanzas (Col. 1:15–17 and 1:18b–20) with a transitional stanza between the two (Col. 1:17–18a). In the first main and transitional stanzas, Jesus is presented as God the Son since he is the true image of God, the agent of creation, and the sustainer of the universe. In the second main stanza, Jesus is presented as the incarnate Son, who, due to his incarnation and cross-work, is our only Redeemer. Jesus, then, is supreme over all because he is our Creator and Redeemer. Let’s further look at the text in three steps.

First, the Son’s full deity is taught in Col. 1:15–16 in three staggering affirmations. The Son is first described as “the image of the invisible God,” which means that he possesses the very nature of God. The same thought is found in Hebrews 1:3a, where Christ is described as “the exact representation (charaktēr) of his being.” Although different expressions, they both teach that Christ is God the Son. In addition, “image” also suggests an echo back to our creation in God’s image. The idea is that the Son is the original image of God in his full deity (archetype), and that humans were created to reflect him (ectype). This makes sense of why the Son is not only the pattern of our creation, but also the one who becomes human to redeem us, and that in salvation, we are patterned after his glorified humanity (Eph. 4:22–24; Col. 3:9–10).

Furthermore, the Son is “the firstborn of all creation.” Contrary to the Arian interpretation, the context speaks of “firstborn” in terms of “pre-eminence” in rank and authority (see Ps. 89:27)—“supreme over.” This interpretation is confirmed by Col. 1:16—“for (hoti, because) in him all things were created.” The Son is not the first created being or part of creation, but its Creator. This truth is further confirmed by the third affirmation. The divine work of creation is attributed to the Father through the Son (hence Trinitarian agency), but also the extent of the Son’s supremacy in relation to creation is stated: all things were created “in him, through him, and for him (Col. 1:16). All of these affirmations together teach that Jesus is God the Son.

Second, the intervening stanza (Col. 1:17–18a) teaches the same point as it transitions to the work of the incarnate Son. The opening line, “And he is before all things,” looks back to Col. 1:15–16. The last line, “and he is the head of the body, the church,” introduces a focus on Christ’s reconciling work that is developed in Col. 1:18b–20. The middle line, “and in him all things hold together,” looks both directions as it presents Jesus as LORD because of who he has always been as the divine Son and because of what he does now as the incarnate Son. Specifically, Col. 1:17 teaches the Son’s preexistence and supremacy over the entire universe as its Creator and providential Lord. In fact, by the use of the perfect tense (sunestēken), the emphasis is on the Son’s continuous providential rule: prior to and after his incarnation. This entails that even as the incarnate Son, Jesus continues to uphold the universe and exercise divine cosmic functions. This seems to require that Jesus is able to act in and through both his divine and human natures, something that the Church’s affirmation of the extra tries to capture. No doubt, this raises some legitimate theological questions. Yet here we simply note that in Christological formulation, we must account for all the biblical data, namely, that the Son, even in the incarnation, continues to act as he has always done in relation to the Father and Spirit.

Third, turning to the second main stanza (Col. 1:18b–20), Jesus’s work as the incarnate Son is accented. The same Creator and providential Lord is also head over his people, the church, because of his cross-work for us. Thus, Christ is Lord twice, first as our Creator and second as our Redeemer. But Paul is still not finished. In Colossians 1:19, he again stresses Jesus’s deity: “For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.” This is not a temporary dwelling either (see Col. 2:9). What is true of God the Son prior to the incarnation is true of him post-incarnation: the entire fullness of deity (nature and attributes) resides in him.^[6]

6. The truth that the Son possesses all of the divine attributes is taught throughout the New Testament. Think of God’s communicable attributes. Scripture defines God’s love in relation to the Son (Rom. 8:35–39; Gal. 2:20; 1 John 4:10–12); Jesus is the righteous one (Acts 3:14; 7:52; 22:14), even the one whose wrath is God’s wrath (Rev. 6:16). In terms of truth, Jesus is full of grace and truth (John 1:14)—an allusion to Yahweh in Exodus 34—and the truth (John 14:6). Jesus is the perfect revelation of God (Heb. 1:1–3; cf. John 1:18; 14:8–9). Also, think of God’s incommunicable attributes. For example, the Son shares in the Father’s eternity (John 1:1; 17:5; Heb. 1:2). The Son possesses omnipotence (Eph. 1:19–20; Col. 2:10), omnipresence (Matt. 18:20; 28:20; Eph. 4:10), immutability (Heb. 1:10–12; 13:8), and omniscience (John 1:48; 2:25; 6:64; 21:17; Acts 1:24; 1 Cor. 4:5; Col. 2:9; Rev. 2:23). No doubt, in regard to omniscience, biblical authors also affirm, including Jesus, that the Son grew in knowledge and that he does not know certain things (Luke 2:52; Mark 13:32). How one reconciles this tension is part of Christological formulation, but it’s important to see that Scripture predicates both communicable and incommunicable attributes of Christ.

In this text, as in the entire New Testament, we see the constant emphasis on the only begotten Son, who is truly God (and thus homoousios with the Father) and who became truly man by his assumption of a human nature, and who, as the Son, acts in both natures.

Philippians 2:6–11

This text has also been at the center of critical Trinitarian and Christological debates. It has served as a proof-text for the “kenotic theory,” a phrase taken from the Greek verb, kenoō (Phil. 2:7), “to empty.” In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, some theologians taught that the Son “gave up” or “emptied” himself of some of his divine attributes in becoming human. The problem with such a view is that this text (and the entire Bible) doesn’t teach it. The incarnation is not an act of subtraction; it’s an act of assumption (or addition). In the incarnation, God the Son acts, from the Father and by the Spirit, to assume a human nature so that now and forevermore he subsists in two natures without loss of attributes in either nature. Also, it’s due to the incarnation that the Son is now able to live a fully human life and achieve our redemption as our new covenant head. Let’s look at how this text teaches these truths in five steps.

First, the text is broken into two parts, Phil. 2:6–8 and 9–11. In each section, two verbs describe the Son’s humbling himself in taking our human nature (i.e., “the state of humiliation”) and the Father exalting Christ because of his cross-work (i.e., “the state of exaltation”). The movement of the text is from the preexistent Son to his humiliation that results in his exaltation as the Son in a new role due to his obedience to the Father. When this text is read alongside other texts, we see evidence for triune agency and inseparable action terminating on the Son. The incarnation, then, is an act of the triune God by which the Father sends the Son; the Son assumes a human nature by the Spirit (Luke 1:26–38); and the entire action terminates on the Son and not the Father or Spirit (John 1:14; Phil. 2:6–8).

Second, the Son’s deity is taught by the phrase, “who, though he was in the form of God.” Here is an affirmation of the full deity of the Son with the Father. The text provides a contrast between two forms of existence of the Son: the glory he had from eternity as the divine Son and what he became by taking the “form of a servant” (Phil. 2:7). The Son who was and remains eternally and fully God has become fully and truly human.

Third, the next phrase is best translated, “he did not think equality with God something to be used for his own advantage.” The issue is not whether Jesus gains equality with God or whether he retains it since the text stresses that the Son shares full “equality with God” (Phil. 2:6). Instead, the issue is one of Jesus’s attitude regarding his divine status. The Son did not take advantage of or exploit his full equality with God to excuse him from the task of becoming our Redeemer. In this way, Jesus becomes an example for us (Phil. 2:5), while remaining in a category by himself.

Fourth, the controversial phrase in Philippians 2:7, “but he emptied himself” (or, “made himself nothing”) does not mean that in the incarnation the Son subtracted his divine attributes. The nature of the Son’s “emptying” was by the assumption of a human nature. Those who affirm the kenotic view make this text say something it does not say.

However, with that said, we must not miss the staggering point: the divine Son did humble himself by becoming human and choosing to die on a cross for us (Phil. 2:8), which is breathtaking. In fact, apart from the humbling of the Son in terms of incarnation and the cross, there is no salvation for us. But this is not the end of the story. Although the glory of the Son in the incarnation and the cross is hidden (krypsis) by his flesh, that hiddenness is only our perception of it. The only begotten Son of the Father did not become less than God. As he clothed himself in our human nature, he also bore our sins in that very nature. And in that act of obedience, as our last Adam and new covenant representative and substitute, he turned his great moment of vulnerability into the moment of greatest victory over sin, death, and the evil one.

Fifth, Philippians 2:9–11 concludes where the text began, with the Son exalted in the heavens. Only now, every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Christ is LORD in his “state of exaltation.” In Philippians 2:6–8, Christ is the subject of the verbs and participles, but in Philippians 2:9, it’s the Father who exalts the Son due to his work and obedience. The Father vindicates his Son and exalts him to the highest position and bestows on him the name LORD/Yahweh (from Isaiah 45:22–23).^[7]

7. This is not the only text that declares “Jesus is LORD/Yahweh.” The apostles repeatedly apply various Yahweh texts from the Old Testament to Jesus, thus identifying him as God. For example, see Exod. 3:14 with John 8:58; Isa. 44:6 with Rev. 1:17; Ps. 102:26–27 [LXX] with Heb. 1:11–12; Joel 2:32 with Rom. 10:12–13), etc.

In this magnificent text, Paul captures beautifully who Jesus is and why the incarnation took place. Jesus as the divine Son, along with the Father and Spirit, is Lord of all. However, to redeem us, the only begotten Son of the Father had to become human and die for us. In fact, apart from him becoming the last Adam and obeying for us in his life and death, there is no salvation for us. But as a result of his incarnation and work, the Father has highly exalted his Son so that now Jesus is Lord twice: first as the divine Son, and second as the divine Son incarnate.

Hebrews 1:1–4 & Hebrews 2:5–18

The entire book of Hebrews is centered on Christ and his glory and Lordship. Furthermore, in Hebrews, we find exactly what the entire New Testament teaches: Jesus is God the Son (e.g., Heb. 1:2–3) who by virtue of his incarnation and work has won our eternal redemption (e.g., Heb. 2:5–18). Jesus, then, is truly God and truly man, and both must be affirmed without dilution. God the Son cannot redeem us apart from his incarnation and cross-work, but because he became human, all of God’s plan and promises are fulfilled in him. In Christ alone we are justified, reconciled, and restored to the purpose of our creation—to know, obey, and love our triune God.

From the opening single, complex sentence, built around, “God … has spoken” (Heb. 1:1), the author unfolds the glory of Christ. As the author spans redemptive history, he reminds us that God has spoken in the Prophets but that the ultimate purpose of that revelation reaches its fulfillment in God’s Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. In Christ—David’s greater Son who is also the LORD—the promised “last days” and God’s long-awaited kingdom have arrived.

How does the author warrant such staggering claims? He does so by describing who Jesus is by giving a number of identity statements that remind us of the Son’s deity, humanity, and work. He first states that the Son is the “appointed heir of all things” (Heb. 1:2b). This appointment is best understood as referring to the incarnate Son’s work that installs him at God’s right hand as the Messianic King. Yet, the author also insists that Jesus is God the Son since he is the agent of creation (Heb. 1:2b), the radiance of God’s glory, “the exact imprint of his nature” (Heb. 1:3a), and the Lord of providence (Heb. 1:3b). All of these latter identity statements are explicit references to the Son’s deity. Also, like Colossians 1:15–20, the author reminds us that even post-incarnation, the Son remains fully God and continues to act as God, as evidenced in his cosmic functions (Heb. 1:3b). The author then returns to Christ’s work as the incarnate Son by stressing his work as our great High Priest—a work that he did for us and which no mere human (or angel) could ever achieve.

Then in Hebrews 2:5–18, the author finishes his argument that Christ is superior to angels. In doing so, he develops further who Jesus is as the divine Son and what he alone can do for us in his incarnation and cross-work. By the Son taking on our humanity, he has become the representative man of Psalm 8—the last Adam—who, as a result, is now able to undo the first Adam’s failure by his own obedient life and death for us. In Christ, the promised “world to come,” tied to the new creation, is now here.

This text is significant for at least two reasons. First, in a succinct way, the author gloriously unpacks the Bible’s story and explains why God the Son became man. Yet, there is also a second reason why this text is so important. In explaining the why of the incarnation, the author establishes that the kind of Redeemer we need must be truly God and truly human. He must be human because the only way to restore fallen man is by a greater Adam who obeys for us as our covenant head. Yet, he must also be the divine Son, otherwise there is no full forgiveness of sin.

Concluding Reflection

The Church’s Trinitarian and Christological formulation as defined by the Nicene Creed and the later Chalcedonian Definition is confessing exactly what Scripture teaches. As the Church confessed Christ as the only begotten divine Son of the Father, the Church rightly explained all that Scripture taught, namely that Jesus is Lord and Savior because he is God the Son incarnate. Although, the Nicene Creed employed a slightly different language to explain who Jesus is, such as homoousios (although most of it was directly from Scripture), the language used conveys the exact same meaning as what Scripture teaches. Also, the Church was extremely careful in her Trinitarian and Christological formulation because she knew that what was ultimately at stake was the glory of Christ and our salvation. For Christians, this must never become a minor point. Given who Jesus is, he must be our glory, command our obedience, and receive our complete trust and devotion. There are many good things to be concerned about in our lives, but none so central than knowing rightly our Lord Jesus Christ.

1. Reinhold Niebuhr, Man’s Nature and His Communities: Essays on the Dynamics and Enigmas of Man’s Personal and Social Existence (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965; repr., Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2012), 24.

But although everyone admits that there is something wrong with us, we do not explain the “human condition” in the same way. Why? Because one’s explanation of the human condition is worldview dependent. Yet from a Christian perspective, despite the diversity of worldviews, all non-Christian views explain the human problem in a similar way: the human condition is the result of a “structural” or “metaphysical” defect, not the result of our “moral” rebellion against God. And the main reason why is because of their common rejection of Scripture’s affirmation of God, creation, and specifically an historical Adam and fall. This is also why all non-Christian views end up not sufficiently grasping the true and serious nature of the human problem. This in turn inevitably leads them to underestimate the radical solution necessary to solve the problem, namely, the incarnation of the divine Son and his work to redeem, restore, and reconcile us to God and to destroy the power of sin in our hearts and lives. For this reason, all non-Christian explanations of the human condition and its solution are ultimately denials of reality.

The Significance of Genesis 3 for Theological Anthropology

Scripture’s explanation of the desperate nature of the human condition is directly dependent on Genesis 1–3, and especially chapter 3. Yet in our day there is probably no text of Scripture that is more scoffed at than Genesis 3. After all, what are to make of “talking serpents,” “forbidden fruit,” and “naked people?” Is this not the stuff of legend and myth? After all, have we not read Charles Darwin, who supposedly undermined our naïve understanding of this text? In our day, John Haught reflects this sentiment when he asserts: “Evolutionary science . . . has rendered the assumption of an original cosmic perfection, one allegedly debauched by a temporally ‘original sin,’ obsolete and unbelievable.”[2] Or, Paul Ricoeur states something similar: “The harm that has been done to souls, during the centuries of Christianity, first by the literal interpretation of the story of Adam, and then by the confusion of this myth, treated as history, with later speculations, principally Augustinian, about original sin, will never be adequately told.”[3]

But is this actually the case? I cannot delve into the numerous arguments against evolutionary theory, although there are many.[4] But the truth of the matter is that evolution’s grand metanarrative that seeks to explain God, self, and the world is a myth of gigantic proportions. For starters, evolutionary theory can’t account for ultimate origins, design, meaning, truth, rationality, moral norms, and human dignity, let alone what is wrong with us.

4. See J. P. Moreland et al., eds., Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2017).

This is why Genesis 3 can’t be dismissed so easily. In fact, in contrast to the mindset of our day, I contend that there is probably no text of Scripture that is more significant for our grasp of the true nature of our problem and the rationale for the Bible’s redemptive story than Genesis 3. As Herman Bavinck astutely notes, without the Bible’s account of the fall “this world is inexplicable.”[5] As such, Genesis 3 is crucial in describing how, in history, sin and death came into the human race, and how the desperate nature of human depravity is the condition of all people (Rom. 3:23). Furthermore, Genesis 3 reminds us that our situation is so awful that only God can remedy it, if he so chooses to do so, which thankfully he has done. Indeed, apart from Genesis 3, we have no explanation of how humans were created “very good” (Gen. 1:31) but are now in their present state: abnormal, fallen, and cursed. Genesis 3 alone gives us the only true explanation of our problem along with the Bible’s glorious solution in our Lord Jesus Christ. Apart from it, all explanations of the human condition are superficial, inadequate, and in the end, yield no rationale ground to think that our condition ultimately can ever be remedied.

5. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 4 vols. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003–8), 3:53. Italics removed.

In what follows, I will offer five reasons why Genesis 3 is crucial for understanding the nature of our human problem over against non-Christian views. In so doing, we will discover how Genesis 3 is foundational for Christian theology and for our understanding of why we need a Redeemer to rescue us from our desperate plight. It is not to be ignored.

Reasons why Genesis 3 is Foundational for Understanding Sin and Salvation

1. No Other Explanation for Humanity’s Fallen Sinful Condition

Genesis 3 alone describes how the entrance of sin and evil came into the world and the desperate nature of the human condition. Mark it well: Scripture and Christian theology take sin and evil very seriously, and both are explained in Genesis 3. The opening chapters of the Bible remind us of how God created humans unique as his “image and likeness” (Gen 1:26), morally upright, and in right relationship with him and with one another. Yet these same chapters also remind us how quickly we went from this “very good” (Gen. 1:31) and “no shame” (Gen. 2:25) situation to being exiled from Eden. Apart from Genesis 3, we have no explanation of why humans are both significant and now fallen, corrupt, under God’s wrath, judgment, and the sentence of death (Rom. 6:23; Eph. 2:1–3). Genesis 3 is the only place in Scripture that describes how, why, and when this occurred in the human realm.

2. No Other Explanation for Sin’s Universality

Genesis 3 alone explains why our now fallen, abnormal condition is universal. In Scripture, Adam is not only the first biological man that all humans descend from; he is also chosen by God to be the covenant head of all humanity, and thus our representative before God. By creation, Adam was created morally upright and able to obey God and thus to be confirmed in righteousness due to God’s covenant promise. Yet, sadly and tragically, by his one act of disobedience, Adam not only incurred God’s wrath and judgment for his own sin; he also acted on the behalf of all humans. As the covenant head of humanity, God imputed Adam’s guilt to all of his descendants, which also has resulted in our corruption and abnormality (Rom. 5:12–21; Eph. 2:1–3). For this reason, Paul can say that all humans, without exception (other than our Lord Jesus), “have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). Apart from Genesis 3 and Adam’s disobedient action as our covenant head, there is no way to explain the universality of sin and evil in us and in the world, which alone explains what we see around us and experience daily.

3. No Other Explanation For Why Sin is Not Essential to Humanity

In contrast to all non-Christian worldviews and sub-Christian views that deny the historicity of Adam and the fall, Genesis 3 refuses to equate finitude/creatureliness with sin. The significance of this point is momentous, so let’s develop it a bit more to grasp its full importance.

Scripture presents Adam as the first man of history, and his fall as an historical event. This means that sin and evil are not part of God’s original creation. All that God created—including humans—was created good and morally upright (Gen. 1:31). Sin and evil, then, were introduced into the world by Adam’s moral rebellion against God. Or, to employ older language, sin/evil and its consequences are “accidental rather than essential to being human, a point that Scripture reinforces both in terms of the goodness of the original creation and the promise of glorification.”[6] As such, Scripture doesn’t equate our creatureliness with our sin/fallenness.

6. Kelly M. Kapic, “Anthropology,” in Christian Dogmatics: Reformed Theology for the Church Catholic, ed. Michael Allen and Scott R. Swain (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2016), 184.

But in order to make this distinction, it requires a historical Adam and fall as taught by Genesis 3. However, if Adam and his fall didn’t occur in history, then we have to equate God’s creation of us with our sin/fallenness; humans simply were created the way we presently are. Thus, we would have to conclude that our sin is bound up with our creation and that sin is more of a structural/metaphysical problem than a moral/ethical one. In other words, without a clear distinction between Adam’s creation and fall in history, sin is not accidental to us but essential or intrinsic to what it means to be human.

The implication of such a view is both disastrous and destructive of the entire teaching of Scripture, which I will note below. But thankfully Scripture doesn’t teach that God created Adam structurally flawed so that what we presently are is what we have always been. As Andrew Leslie rightly reminds us: “[T]here is nothing inevitable about our God-given natures, no inherent design flaw, no hairline fracture, let alone any fatalistic divine determination, that would make our fall physically necessary or unpreventable, and therein somehow excusable.”[7] If this were not the case, then our human problem would be comparable to the ill-fated Ford Pinto—a car that came off its 1971 assembly line structurally flawed.

7. Andrew Leslie, “Incurvatus Est in Se: Toward a Theology of Sin,” in Ruined Sinners to Reclaim: Sin and Depravity in Historical, Biblical, Theological, and Pastoral Perspective, ed. David Gibson and Jonathan Gibson (Wheaton: Crossway, 2024), 742.

Yet apart from a correct understanding of Genesis 3, we would have to affirm, like the Pinto, that humans came off God’s assembly line flawed, thus equating our finitude/creatureliness with our sin, making sin intrinsic/essential to us. But thankfully Scripture rejects such an equation. Given that God created Adam good, and that in history he disobeyed God, sin is not intrinsic to us. Instead, sin is the result of an act of the will. The nature of sin, then, is not due to our finitude, heredity, environment, and emotional makeup. Rather, sin has everything to do with Adam’s and our willful transgression of God’s law (Gen. 2:15–17; 1 John 3:4).

All of this is good news in contrast to the alternative, and it is also foundational to Christian theology. Let’s capture its good news significance in three points.

Sin is Not Essential to Humanity

First, Scripture’s distinction between creation and fall in history allows us to view sin as ethical without reducing sin to our ontology, or essence. Sin is an act of the will, not something intrinsic to our nature. In fact, if sin is intrinsic to us then any appeal to freedom is also undercut. The bottom line is this: when sin is reduced to ontology it becomes “the very ingredients of being . . . [with] its seed and its root in the very creation.”[8] But thankfully this is not the case, given the historicity of Adam and the fall.

8. Henri Blocher, Evil and the Cross, trans. David G. Preston(Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1994), 63.

God’s Righteousness is Upheld

Second, the Bible’s distinction between creation and fall also upholds the goodness, justice, and righteousness of God. From God’s creative hand, humans and the world were created good, and not sinful, evil, and fallen. Thus, God is not to blame, and he is not responsible for the fallenness of this world; responsible creatures—including angels and humans—are. Yet if there was no historic Adam and fall as Genesis 3 describes, it would seem that God created us “flawed” from the start, thus making both sin part of our ontology and God responsible for it. Unequivocally, Scripture rejects such a conclusion as God’s glory and goodness are upheld as a non-negotiable. But apart from the teaching of Genesis 3, these wrong conclusions would follow. Hence Genesis 3’s importance.

Sin Can Be Reversed

Third, Genesis 3, with its distinction between creation and fall in history, also accounts for the Bible’s confidence that the problem of sin can be reversed. Why? Because if our sin is intrinsic to us, then what hope is there that we will be different in the future than what we have always been? In other words, if we are intrinsically fallen and structurally flawed from the moment of our creation, then what hope is there that we will be any different in the future? There would be none. But Scripture denies this possibility because the problem of sin is moral, and not ontological, which means that we can become what we once were. By God’s effectual work of regeneration and Christ’s obedient life and death for us, we can be re-made and restored to the purpose of our original creation. The Bible’s story is wonderful at this point: God created us good, but due to Adam’s sin in history, we are now fallen. But God can restore what was lost, not by scrapping us, but by transforming us to be what he created us to be in the first place (and even greater moral perfection in our glorification). Thus, given the Bible’s affirmation of a historic Adam and fall, Christian theology is able to affirm that sin is not part of our original, created nature, but that now—due to Adam’s sin—all humans are currently fallen, yet we may be redeemed and transformed by God’s provision of a Redeemer in Christ Jesus our Lord.[9]

9. Henri Blocher, Original Sin: Illuminating the Riddle, New Studies in Biblical Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 58–62.

4. No Other Explanation for the Resolution of Scripture’s Redemptive Story  

Genesis 3 gives us the needed rationale for the Bible’s entire covenantal story leading us to Christ and the new creation, and apart from it the Bible’s story makes little sense. As Henri Blocher states it, Genesis 3 not only “belongs decisively to the structure of Genesis and to that of the Torah,”[10] it is also uniquely situated in the entire canon to set up the nature of the human problem and to prepare for God’s gracious provision of a Redeemer.

10. Blocher, Original Sin, 32.

After Genesis 3 describes the effects of sin on the human race, it moves forward due to God’s promise of a coming Redeemer (Gen. 3:15) to anticipate a solution to and reversal of our sin. As we move from Genesis 3 through the Old Testament, the universal effects of Adam’s sin are evident. Sin wasn’t limited to Adam’s action; it was passed on to his children by imputation and transmission. For example, Cain kills his brother Abel (Genesis 4), and sin multiplies throughout all of Adam’s offspring. In Genesis 5, the constant refrain—“And they died . . .”—reminds us of Adam’s sin and that God’s verdict of death has not escaped anyone (Gen. 2:15–17; 3:17–19), other than Enoch, who is a glimmer of future hope (Gen. 5:21–25). However, in Genesis 6–9, sin is so egregious that God brings a global flood. Then in Genesis 11, we see that with the multiplication of Noah’s line after the flood, the human heart has not changed. Humans continue to raise their fist in rebellion against God at Babel. If we ever doubt that Adam’s sin affected all his descendants, all we need to do is see how Adam’s sin is transmitted to all of his progeny throughout history.

Yet alongside the desperate condition of humanity, we also have God’s promise to provide a Redeemer, a last Adam, who will reverse the effects of sin and death, and his promise to bring about a new covenant, resulting in the forgiveness of our sins (Gen. 3:15; cf. Jer. 31:31–34; Heb. 8). This glorious plan of redemption is unfolded step-by-step through the biblical covenants, which ultimately culminates in the incarnation and work of our Lord Jesus Christ. But why must God the Son become human? Why must he die on our behalf? The answer to these questions is answered in Genesis 3, and the entire context of God’s creation and the consequences of Adam’s sin on all of humanity. Adam in his covenant headship failed and disobeyed, thus bringing sin and death into the world (Rom. 5:12–21). But the divine Son, who assumes our human nature (John 1:1, 14) does so in order to undo what Adam did and to accomplish our eternal redemption, all because of God’s promise to reverse what Adam did in Genesis 3.

All of this is to say that the Bible’s entire covenantal story of creation, fall, redemption, and new creation turn on the loss of goodness in creation by Adam’s sin, and the restoration of goodness in Christ’s work. Without Genesis 3, we cannot make sense of the message of Scripture and our triune God’s plan of redemption.

The Folly of Denying Genesis 3

But note: once someone denies the historical significance of Genesis 1–3, and especially Genesis 3 (as many current theistic evolutionists do), then an alternative storyline must emerge. For example, Patrick Franklin—who is a theistic evolutionist and who denies the historicity of Adam and the fall—argues that “the incarnation of the Son was always part of God’s plan, because union with Christ by the Spirit was always God’s goal, irrespective of the Fall.”[11] In other words, as Hans Madueme astutely observes, “Franklin’s ‘incarnation anyway’ scenario moves like a forward slash from creation to consummation. Sin and redemption are ‘intervening acts’ that are marginal to the primary plotline from creation to new creation.”[12]

But why does Franklin make this move contrary to Scripture’s own structure? The answer is simple but consequential: this move allows him to explain (without affirming an historic Adam or fall) how “human sin/fallenness does not drive the logic of eschatological consummation; creation does (along with incarnation, the divine assumption of humanity).”[13] Yet by such a move, Scripture’s creation, fall, redemption, and new creation plotline is now recast to one of “creation-incarnation-new creation.”[14] But this recasting of the Bible’s story is highly problematic for at least two reasons. First, there is no biblical warrant for it, especially if we read Scripture on its own terms and not through the extratextual grid of evolutionary thought. Second, this alternative reading of Scripture uncouples Christ’s work from the fall, thus prioritizing Christus Victor over penal substitution, which sadly leads to a different understanding of the gospel.

This illustrates why Genesis 3 is so significant for our understanding of Scripture, theology, and indeed the gospel itself. As Hans Madueme rightly notes, when we lose Genesis 3 as history, we change “the overall shape of the canonical story and distort the interrelations of the doctrinal loci. Cutting ties with the first Adam leads theistic evolutionists to redirect emphasis to the last Adam. Since the dogmatic pressure must be released somewhere, they compensate by overemphasizing Christology and soteriology.”[15] But the cost is high. If we get the Bible’s covenantal story wrong, failing to understand the goodness of creation and the tragic results of the fall, we will also fail to grasp why the incarnation is necessary and what Christ’s redemptive, new creation work is all about. No wonder Genesis 3 is so important since it is foundational for understanding our entire vision of Christianity and the nature of the gospel.

15. Madueme, Defending Sin,243.

5. No Other Explanation for Christianity’s Uniqueness Among Other Worldviews

Genesis 3 is also significant because it sets Christianity apart from other worldviews in its explanation of sin and evil. As we have noted, all worldviews must explain sin/evil, but they do so differently. No doubt, there are questions and mysteries surrounding the “origin” of sin and evil tied to God’s eternal decree. But when we compare a Christian view of these matters to non-Christian views, we discover that these other views cannot explain the human condition as Scripture does, which results in their denial of reality along with serious consequences that follow. In fact, because all non-Christian views reject a historic Adam and fall, they make sin and evil part of our nature, which we have already noted leads to disastrous consequences. Here are some examples of some non-Christian views, which in the end are incapable of explaining the true nature of sin, and thus unable to provide any solution to it. All of this reminds us that we need a sound theological anthropology in regard to humans and sin, for apart from it, human thought independent of Scripture has no answers to the basic questions of life.

For example, naturalism—the idea that nothing exists beyond the material world—cannot make sense of the category of good and evil, ultimately leaving much of life inexplicable and without any hope for a solution to the human problem, and susceptible to dehumanization. Or some Eastern religions (e.g., Hinduism and Buddhism) and western cults (e.g., Christian Science) argue that sin and evil are merely illusory due to their metaphysical belief that all is “one.”[16] In these monistic views, “god” transcends both good and evil, and thus all good and evil are ultimately the same. But the problem is that if “good” and “evil” are the same, we simply cannot account for misery, pain, suffering, and death, let alone the human heart. Such a view is a sad and disastrous denial of reality.

16. On sin as an illusion, see Blocher, Evil and the Cross, 13–14.

Or other worldviews trivialize sin, which is another form of a denial of reality. Georg Hegel made “evil” a necessary step in the development of history, a view taught by evolutionists. Yet such a view cannot account for what we know to be the case: sin and evil is abnormal, hideous, and an intrusion that reflects what should not be. Again, it is only Genesis 3 that can account for what sin truly is, along with providing an answer to sin’s hideous nature in the sovereign work of the triune God centered in Christ. Or think of various dualist views that think of sin/evil as an equal “power” in conflict with the “good.”[17] Dualism, such as Gnosticism and Manichaeism that greatly affected the early church, holds that there is a moral conflict on the basic metaphysical level. There is a “good” power and an “evil” power in the universe, and they are equally matched. In the world these two powers are intermingled, and both are aspects of human nature.

17. On sin as dualism, see Blocher, Evil and the Cross, 15–16.

But again, such views are contrary to Scripture, and they offer no answers to the serious nature of the human condition. In these systems evil is often tied to matter, thus devaluing creation and our physical bodies. This not only denies the goodness of God’s creation, but it also robs us of a Redeemer who assumed a human nature, and in that human nature redeemed us from sin, securing our justification and the reality of a new creation. Ultimately, such views deny the uniqueness, transcendence, self-sufficiency, and absoluteness of God, since it posits another “eternal” thing that exists that is not subject to God’s sovereignty. Furthermore, such views, like all non-Christian views, make sin a “substance”—thus rejecting the notion of sin as a “moral” evil—which entails that there is no such thing as human responsibility, and ultimately no remedy for it.

Concluding Reflection

Any sane person knows there is something wrong with the human race, but it is only the Bible’s answer, grounded in Genesis 3, that truly explains what is wrong with us. All non-Christian views, in the end, are a denial of reality, and the consequence of such views is disaster, not only in failing to understand who humans are, but also in providing no solution to the problem of sin. If we fail to understand the true nature of the human problem, as Scripture defines it, we will never appreciate the Bible’s only solution to it. In this regard, Genesis 3 is indeed one of the most significant texts in Scripture, because apart from a correct understanding of it in its immediate context and in light of the entire canon, we will fail to appreciate our desperate condition due to Adam’s sin, and the glorious solution to it in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Three Views: Substantive, Functional, and Relational

In historical theology, three main views have been proposed to answer this question. First, there is the substantive view. This view identifies the “image” with a specific quality, capacity, or property in us, usually our reason, will, and/or moral capacities, all located in our souls. Given these common “properties” that all humans share, there is a common kind-nature that constitutes what it means to belong to the genus of humanity. Also, after the fall, we retain these properties despite the effects of sin. As such, fallen humans continue to be image-bearers yet now corrupted by sin. This has been the majority view in theology.^[1] Additionally, this view rarely identifies the human body with the image since God is immaterial, hence the identification of the intellect, will, and moral capacities with the image since those properties are most analogous to God.

1. This view is held by Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and John Calvin, plus many more.

Second, there is the functional view. This view identifies the “image” with what we do, specifically in God creating us to have “dominion” over the earth, not in a property we possess. As proof, this view notes the proximity of the creation mandate to the creation account (Gen. 1:26–28) and argues that we are not created “in” God’s image but “as” God’s image to function as those who rule over creation.^[2] Much of the contemporary impetus for this view is a more “holistic” understanding of humans and the reluctance to identify the “image” with a specific property; instead, the image is our functioning as God’s representatives and vice-regents.

2. In the contemporary era, this view has been taught by Gerhard Von Rad, David Clines, and J. Richard Middleton.

Third, there is the relational view. This view identifies the “image,” not with a specific property in us or our function, but with our ability to relate to God and to others. The “likeness” between God and humans resides chiefly in the experience of being free for the other. God, as the prototype, is free for us. By analogy, we have freedom to relate to God, our neighbors, and the rest of creation. In the twentieth century, this view was popular among some neo-orthodox theologians such as Karl Barth and Emil Brunner, but also with other contemporary thinkers.^[3]

3. For example, the view was taught by G. C. Berkhouwer, Robert Jenson, Thomas Torrance, and Stanley Grenz.

There is truth in all of these views but there is a twofold problem with them. First, these views veer towards reductionism by privileging one aspect of us at the expense of other aspects, and then identifying that one thing with the “image.” For example, think of the functional view. Ruling is certainly an implication of being created in God’s image, but image and rule are not equivalent. Always in Scripture, ontology (who we are) precedes function (what we do) so that the image has to be more than our function since we cannot do something without first being something. Second, these views do not sufficiently work first from the biblical text. They do not ask what “image and likeness” means in Scripture, and only then move to theological formulation. For this reason, we must turn to the biblical text and then revisit how we should think of “image and likeness” theologically.

Image and Likness in the Canon

From Scripture, there are three points to note.

First, although the number of texts that speak of humans in God’s image and likeness are few, they are all significant, starting in creation and linking us to Christ. Five texts identify humans as the “image of God” (Gen. 1:26–27; 9:6; 1 Cor. 11:7) or the “likeness of God” (Gen. 5:1; Jas. 3:9). A number of other texts refer to our renewal as believers to the “image” or “likeness” of God in redemption (Rom. 8:29; 1 Cor. 15:47–49; 2 Cor. 3:17–18; Eph. 4:2–24; Col. 3:9–11). Further, Colossians 1:15 teaches that Christ, the divine Son, is the true “image” of God, and thus the archetype of our being created as God’s image (cf. 2 Cor. 4:4; Heb. 1:3). All of these texts are not accidental but linked together from creation to Christ, and from the divine Son as the true image of the Father, the archetype (original) of our creation as the ectype (image).

Second, the foundational text is Genesis 1:26–28. Although people have disputed the meaning of the Hebrew terms for “image” (ṣelem) and “likeness” (dĕmût), an understanding of the terms is gained if we place them in the context of the canon and the ancient Near East.

“Image” (ṣelem)

In the Old Testament and its historical context, the concept of the “image of the god” conveys the idea of a physical representation of the “god.”^[4] Yet, in contrast to the ancient world where “image” is reserved only for the king, Scripture applies “image” to all humans, conveying the wonderful truth that all humans, both male and female, are God’s vice-regents—God’s servant-priest-kings—who are created to rule over creation as God’s representatives.^[5]

Further, being created “as” God’s “image and likeness” is followed by a purpose clause (Gen. 1:26c), which is best translated: “in order that they [humans] may have dominion,” that is, in order that they may function as God’s vice-regents. Yet this doesn’t mean that dominion is the definition of the image, as the functional view insists. Instead, as Graeme Goldsworthy rightly argues, dominion is “a consequence of” being created as God’s image.^[6] Our function, i.e., to rule over creation, is grounded in our ontology, i.e., that we are God’s image. Psalm 8 confirms this point, which describes humans in royal terms. Significantly, this text is developed in Hebrews 2:5–18 where it is applied to Christ, who is the true “image of God” as the divine Son (Col. 1:15; cf. Heb. 1:3) and the human “image” because of his assumption of our human nature. But more on this below.

6. Graeme Goldsworthy, According to Plan (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2002), 96.

Image, then, is a term that signifies what we are as humans as entire individuals and our rule over the world: God’s vice-regents created to rule over creation. “Image” isn’t merely identified with one property, nor reduced to our function; it’s a holistic term that refers to humans as humans. It assumes a specific ontology, although it isn’t fully specified. It also entails that God deals with creation on the basis of how he deals with humans, which first begins with the covenant headship of Adam. Goldsworthy nicely underscores this point when he writes,

Although God commits himself to the whole of his creation for its good order and preservation, humanity is the special focus of this care. Creation is there for our benefit. Humanity is the representative of the whole creation so that God deals with creation on the basis of how he deals with humans. Only man is addressed as one who knows God and who is created to live purposefully for God. When man falls because of sin the creation is made to fall with him. In order to restore the whole creation, God works through his Son who becomes a man to restore man. The whole creation waits eagerly for the redeemed people of God to be finally revealed as God’s perfected children, because at that point the creation will be released from its own bondage (Rom. 8:19–23). This overview of man as the object of God’s covenant love and redemption confirms the central significance given to man in Genesis 1–2.^[7]

7. Goldsworthy, According to Plan, 96.

“Likeness” (dĕmût)

“Likeness” is similar to “image,” but it isn’t an exact synonym.^[8] In historical theology, Irenaeus began a tradition that distinguished image and likeness too much, insisting that “image” referred to our reason and will, while “likeness” referred to our original righteousness. Later Roman Catholic theology identified “likeness” with the concept of a “superadded gift”^[9] of grace given to Adam in creation that allowed him to obey God. In the fall, the Catholic tradition argued that the “gift” of original righteousness was lost whereas the “image” (reason and will) remained. This opened the door in Roman Catholicism to a weakened view of sin’s effects on us and undercutting total depravity.

Although there is a slight distinction between image and likeness, the strong distinction between them is incorrect. Instead, the words refer to different aspects of the same reality: that we are created as God’s unique servant-kings, and the dual relationship we have, first to God and then to our rule over creation. “Image” refers to the latter, while “likeness” refers to the former. Likeness conveys the idea of “resemblance,” since its emphasis is “on the concept of comparison and likeness” and “on the relationship of the copy to the original.”^[10] Specifically, “likeness” specifies a covenant relation between humans and God that parallels the idea of “sonship.” Thus, due to our creation in God’s image-likeness, humans are created to know, love, obey, and resemble God in covenant relationship and to rule over creation as God’s servant-kings.

10. Gentry, Biblical Studies, 8.

Third, the linking of “likeness” and “sonship” is also significant as we move through the canon and the biblical covenants to Christ. Although Adam is not identified as a “son” in Genesis 1–2, he is in the New Testament (Luke 3:38). This is so because “son/sonship” carries a strong representational meaning.^[11] Adam is the “image-likeness/son” because he represents God, and by extension this applies to all humans—although Adam’s headship is also unique due to the covenant. Adam (and all of us) is to act in a way similar to God, under his sovereign rule, as God’s image-likeness. Significantly, later in the Old Testament covenants, “son” is applied to Israel (Exod. 4:22; cf. Hos. 11:1) and the Davidic king(s) (2 Sam. 7:14; Ps. 2). In every instance Israel as a nation and David and his sons are to act like God and to stand as his representatives to carry out his rule in the world, as Adam was to do before them. Not surprisingly, this teaching is fulfilled in Christ, who is the true image of God and the divine Son, who in his incarnation, becomes the image-son, the head of the new covenant, by the assumption of our human nature. In this latter sense, the incarnate Son is the antitypical fulfillment of Adam, Israel, and David.

11. On this point see G. K Beale, A New Testament Biblical Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), 401–2; Graeme Goldsworthy, The Son of God and the New Creation (Wheaton: Crossway, 2015), 59–82.

When we put this biblical data together, we can say the following. First, Christ is the true image of God (Col. 1:15) because he is the divine Son of the Father, who eternally subsists in and equally and fully shares the one undivided divine essence with the Father and the Spirit. Second, humans are created as the imago Dei, but in a real sense, this means we are patterned after the divine Son. Yet in regard to the Son, he is the “image” in the absolute sense because he is the eternal Son of the Father, while humans are the image only in a relative sense. As Herman Bavinck nicely states it: “The former [Christ] is the image of God within the divine being, the latter [humans] outside of it.”^[12] Humans are created as finite creatures patterned after the image of the divine Son. Third, since the Son does not merely bear the image; he is the image. So, humans, at a finite level are the image of God. Thus, we cannot identity the “image” with merely this or that property as the substantive view does; instead, humans, as entire individuals, are ontologically the “image and likeness of God,” created with intrinsic dignity and value.

12. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 4 vols., ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003–2008), 2:533.

In summary, “image” and “likeness” are terms that signify our uniqueness and dignity before God, and the representative role we play for the entire creation as God’s servant priest-kings. The terms are holistic referring to humans as a whole, that indicate a vertical relationship between humans and God that can be described in terms of obedient sonship, and a horizontal relationship between humans and the world that is understood as servant kingship.

Image and Likeness in Theological Formulation

Many theological conclusions could be given, but I conclude with five.

First, we cannot identify the “image-likeness of God” with a specific part of us; instead, humans as holistic beings are by definition the imago Dei. This is true for both males and females since both share in the same kind-nature that constitutes what it means to be human in contrast to other creatures.^[13] For this reason, humans are created with intrinsic value and significance resulting in a “sanctity of life” ethic. Scripture makes no distinction between “human tissue” and “personhood.” From the moment of conception, the developing fertilized egg is ontologically the imago Dei, and worthy of respect, protection, and care. In our day, as we live in the midst of a culture of death, the church must stand for human life in no uncertain terms.

13. On this point, see Kyle Claunch and Michael Carlino, “Gender Essentialism in Anthropological, Covenantal, and Christological Perspective,” Eikon 6.2 (Fall, 2024): 20–71.

Second, there is also a strong Christological aspect to our being created in God’s image-likeness. In historical theology, many, such as Augustine, argued that the “image of God” refers to the entire Trinity and not only the divine Son.^[14] There is truth in this, yet as Bavinck notes, “the meaning of the image of God is further explicated to us by the Son, who in an entirely unique sense is called the Word (logos); the Son (huios); the image (eikōn), or imprint (charaktēr), of God (John 1:1, 14; 2 Cor. 4:4; Col. 1:15; Heb. 1:3); and the one to whom we must be conformed (Rom. 8:29; 1 Cor. 15:49; Phil. 3:21; Eph. 2:23f.; 1 John 3:2).”^[15] So, while we were created in God’s image, we are not the original image since the eternal Son is the archetype image and humans are the ectype, obviously allowing for the Creator-creature distinction.^[16] The Son, then, from eternity is the pattern by which we are created, which makes sense of why the divine Son assumed our human nature (and not the nature of another creature) to redeem us. By being made in the image of God as a man, God the Son has become the incarnate Son, the last Adam, and the first man of the new creation, to restore what Adam lost in his sin.

Third, as for the three historical views on what the “image-likeness” of God is, there is truth in all of them, but in the end, they are all reductionistic. The substantive view is correct that image refers to our ontology, but it is incorrect in that the image of God is not merely one aspect of us (although our intellect and will are part of what it means to be created in God’s image). The functional view is correct that we were created to rule, but this also assumes a specific ontology that requires specification. The relational view is correct that we were created for covenant relationships, but “image-likeness” is not reducible to this. As created, humans are the imago Dei, which encompasses all of these views.

Fourth, in terms of the impact of the fall, Scripture teaches that our image-likeness was distorted, defaced, and corrupted by sin but not lost.^[17] For this reason, in redemption, by our union with Christ and the work of the Spirit in regeneration and sanctification, our defaced image is gradually restored, and ultimately fully restored in our glorification at Christ’s return. In redemption, we are truly made more human again, being conformed to Christ’s glorified humanity (Col. 3:10; 2 Cor. 3:18; Rom. 8:29).

17. Genesis 9:6, Acts 17:28, and James 3:9 all assume that the image of God remains even post-fall.

Fifth, although the Bible does not pit the individual over against the corporate, Bavinck is right to insist that the “image of God” in its totality is seen in humanity as a whole. No doubt, as individuals we are God’s image, but there is a sense in which “the image of God is much too rich for it to be fully realized in a single human being, however richly gifted that human being may be.”^[18] Thus, ultimately in Christ and the church, we will see the fullness of the renewed and glorified image of God, a day that the church should long for in eager anticipation.

18. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 2:577.

1. Daniel Strange, “Going Deeper,” Themelios 48.1 (2023): 26. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1947) also recognized this truth in the mid-twentieth century.

One of the reasons for this is due to the loss of the influence of the Christian worldview in the West. Prior to the seventeenth century, Christian theology largely influenced and shaped our society, but due to the Enlightenment, modernism, and now postmodernism, this is no longer the case, and our culture is now “suffering from a collective identity crisis.”^[2]

2. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, “Human Being, Individual and Social,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine, ed. Colin E. Gunton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 158.

What has also made our culture’s identity crisis more acute is the development of various technologies alongside these worldview changes. What we once viewed as “natural” and “fixed” has now changed with our ability to “remake” humans. In a day of test-tube babies, transgender operations, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and cloning, our society questions whether there is anything “natural” about us. No longer are humans viewed as created, designed, and ordered; instead, we are viewed as malleable beings who determine our “identities” solely by our own subjectivity. In such a context, pressing metaphysical and ethical questions have now arisen. Do we have a fixed nature? Do we have inherent dignity because we are created in God’s image or are we merely artificially made? Are we bare animals, by-products of an evolutionary process, commodities that can be technologically manipulated and re-fashioned for whatever ends we deem best? It is therefore no wonder that the question “What is man?” resounds with urgency today, and no wonder that our culture finds itself amid an identity crisis of monumental significance.

This is an important time for Christians for several reasons. First, we have an extraordinary opportunity to speak the truth of God’s word to our world with precision and force. Asking the question—What is man? —is one of the best ways to capture the attention of non-Christians regarding the truth of Scripture, to get them to think of worldview differences, and by God’s grace, to show them the futility of their view alongside the truth and power of the gospel.

Second, evaluating competing views of humans also has significant practical consequences since it affects every area of thought and life. For example, how one analyzes the nature of humans, what our problem is, and what we think the remedy is to our problem, directly impacts political, economic, and education theories, and much more. In fact, central to building a “culture” is a view of what humans are. Depending on whether you think people have intrinsic dignity, are naturally good or greedy, need more education, and so on, will determine what we think and how we act in other areas of life that are foundational to building a human society.

Third, what we think humans are directly affects how we treat one another, order a society, educate people, and create societal goals and aims. Much of the disagreement today we see among political parties and in the media on a host of moral issues as abortion and human sexuality stem from competing views of humans. Christians must address this.

So given the pressing need for Christians to bring the truth of God’s word to bear on these issues, this article will proceed in three steps. First, I will underscore the truth that our present-day identity crisis is directly due both to our rejection of a Christian view of humans and our embrace of various non-Christian views. Second, I will highlight the “tragic irony” of our society’s rejection of a Christian view of humans, which has resulted in serious consequences that threaten both the value of humans and our free existence as we presently enjoy it—precisely because of the rejection of a Christian worldview. Third, I will challenge the church to recover and live out a Christian view of humans as the only hope for the lostness of our society and ultimately for the glory of our triune God who has created us to know, love, and serve him, both now and forevermore.

What is Man? Beauty or Beast?

As noted, the question—“What is man?”—is an urgent one today. Central to it is the question—to borrow from the old Disney classic—Are humans beauty or beast? One’s answer to this question is directly tied to one’s worldview. For example, when David asks, “What is man?” in Psalm 8:4a, his answer is quite different than the answers given today. David answers the question in terms of humanity’s creaturely and image-bearing status before the greatness of God (Ps. 8:1–3, 5–9). In Scripture, unlike our society, humans are unquestionably creatures of significance precisely because we are created in God’s image. Scripture does not wrestle with the question of whether humans have intrinsic value since that is a given due to our creation by God. Instead, Scripture speaks of our fallenness that requires God’s gracious provision of a Redeemer. But for our society, the question of whether humans are intrinsically valuable is not a given, nor is the emphasis on our fallenness. Thus, our society is fixated on the questions of human “estrangement” and “meaninglessness” rather than knowing the answer that we are significant creatures who are now moral rebels against God.

Why are the questions and answers so different? This disconnect was not always so. In the West, given the influence of Christianity, humans were historically viewed in more biblical categories. But this all changed with the rise of the Enlightenment that witnessed a worldview shift away from Christian theology in at least two significant areas. First, the Enlightenment rejected a revelational epistemology for human rational autonomy. Humans were no longer viewed “from above” (i.e., from what God revealed about us in Scripture) but “from below” (i.e., from the standpoint of finite, fallen, human perspectives independent of Scripture). Second, there was a corresponding rejection of trinitarian theism. This was first replaced by deism and then evolutionary naturalism, and both hollow substitutes greatly affected how we think about human origins, design, purpose, and significance.

What resulted from these two major shifts of ideas? The West witnessed a rise of competing views against Christianity e.g., secular humanism, Marxism, existentialism, nihilism, behaviorism, deconstructionism, largely indebted to evolutionary naturalism now combined with a secular-postmodern-pluralistic perspective. Our culture then necessarily embraced competing ideas of what humans are, which for the most part resulted in confusion, a devaluation of humans, despair, meaninglessness, and growing dystopian visions of reality.

Sadly, ideas always have consequences, a point we will return to momentarily. The West’s “collective identity crisis” is largely due to our society’s rejection of a Christian view of reality, including its view of human value. As the West has turned away from Christian theology and its understanding of humans and embraced various secular-postmodern views, it has sought to explain who and what humans are solely “from below”—in terms of biology, chemistry, physics, and the social sciences—all framed within the confines and limits of evolutionary and methodological naturalism.

Not surprisingly, the enlightenment poet Alexander Pope’s method for the study of man is now the norm: “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of Mankind is Man.”^[3] Yet in seeking to “liberate” ourselves from God and his divine revelation, disaster has occurred. In truth, our attempt to understand ourselves “from below” is analogous to what happened to the prodigal son.[4] The prodigal son could only live “free” of his father until his money ran out. But once his money ran out, he had to return to his father because he could not function apart from him. In a similar way, humans can only follow the advice of Alexander Pope if they continue to live off the borrowed capital of Christianity, but once we jettison Christian theology, we soon discover that we have just undercut the warrant for our own dignity, value, and significance. In other words, we go morally bankrupt.

3. Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Man,” in Poetical Works, ed. H. F. Cary (London: Routledge, 1870), 225.

4. I am indebted to Cornelius Van Til for this illustration.

This is precisely what happened in the West. Instead of viewing ourselves as created by God, we sought to understand ourselves in terms of an impersonal, blind evolutionary process. But in so doing, if we remained consistent with this naturalistic worldview, we could no longer view ourselves as beauty; we are only beast. Over time, we gradually began to admit that humans are not creatures of value created by the triune-personal God, but rather products of impersonal causes. For a while, people continued to affirm human dignity, along with human rights—but failing to acknowledge that all these truths were borrowed capital from a Christian view of humans and not warranted by their worldview. As people sought to remain consistent with their secular-postmodern view, they ran out of money. In its place, humans were viewed solely as beasts, the product of the impersonal plus time plus chance. As Paul reminds us in Romans 1, in refusing to acknowledge our Creator, we explained ourselves solely in terms of created things. But the disastrous consequence of such a move is that the metaphysical and epistemological grounding for human value, purpose, meaning, design, reason, love, freedom, justice, etc. now has no basis. Sadly, such truths not only vanish from our thinking, but we also live out their loss in our lives.

The Tragic Irony of Secular-Naturalistic Anthropologies

From a Christian view, our present-day collective identity crisis is directly tied to our rejection of the Christian worldview and our refusal to acknowledge that we are creatures of God and responsible to him. The result is “tragically ironic.”

Let us focus on the word “ironic.” Beginning with the Enlightenment to our present-day, it has been fashionable to argue that “we have come of age,” that we have “freed” ourselves from the “burden” of viewing ourselves in light of Christian theology. Indeed, even the moniker “the Enlightenment” is evidence of the unbelievable pride and rebelliousness of this era’s intellectual thought. The term assumed that the previous era was “dark,” but now with either our rejection or our reinterpretation of Christianity, the “lights” have been turned on. Before us is a new era of “freedom,” “liberation,” and “discovery” of the unlimited potential of man—a potential that will ultimately result in a utopian future: the French Revolution, the subjective thought of Jean Jacques Rousseau, and the utopian dream of Karl Marx, and many others. Such thinking believed Pope’s dictum that the proper study of man is man, and that humans could finally liberate themselves from dependence on God and his Word. Instead, they thought, we could understand who we are solely “from below.”

Yet the “irony” of the situation is that this era up to our own day has not resulted in “liberation,” “freedom,” and a utopian future, but one disaster after another. In the twentieth century alone, we have witnessed multiple wars and the destruction of nearly one hundred million people at the hand of such “utopian” ideologies. The irony is that this way of thinking failed to realize that if one rejects the triune God of Scripture, one must also reject the human dignity of Scripture. In other words, one cannot simultaneously warrant the human rights that a biblical view of humans alone provides without also embracing the entire biblical worldview that views humans as God’s dependent image-bearers.

This is exactly what occurred in the West and its embrace of the Enlightenment mentality as worked out in both modernity and postmodernity. The West sought to liberate itself from the “restrictions” of Christian theology while simultaneously borrowing from it, at least for a time. The novelist Walker Percy notes this irony by observing that the conventional wisdom of twentieth-century thought about humans consists of two components, the first owing to modern science and the other owing to Christianity. On the one hand, secular thought sought to understand man “as an organism in an environment, a sociological unit, an encultured creature, a psychological dynamism endowed genetically like other organisms with needs and drives, who through evolution has developed strategies for learning and surviving.”[5] On the other hand, secular thought viewed man as “somehow endowed with certain other unique properties which he does not share with other organisms—with certain inalienable rights, reason, freedom, and an intrinsic dignity—and as a consequence the highest value to which a democratic society can be committed is the respect of the sacredness and worth of the individual.”[6]

5. Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle (New York: Picador, 1975), 20.

6. Percy, Message in the Bottle, 20.

But, as Percy notes, the problem with believing these two propositions simultaneously is that they are “radically incoherent and cannot be seriously professed without even more serious consequences.”[7] This is why as the Enlightenment morphed into modernity and postmodernity, it maintained the beastly first proposition but discarded the beautiful second. In so doing, it jettisoned the concept of human dignity, value, and significance. In many ways, postmodern thinkers have walked the path of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), who not only proclaimed the “death of God” but also the “death of man”—because even he knew that both stand and fall together. This is why people such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, given their embrace of the “death of God,” insist that human nature is not “designed” or “ordered” but completely malleable, even questioning whether humans have any value or dignity at all, other than what we subjectively construct.

7. Percy, Message in the Bottle, 20.

But from a Christian view, the irony of humans rejecting God and thus losing our beauty and dignity is not merely ironic, it’s also horribly “tragic.” In our rebellion against God and seeking to understand humans solely “from below,” the Enlightenment project has not resulted in its promised liberation and utopia. Instead, it has resulted in futility, despair, and meaninglessness, which has also opened the door to totalitarianism. Why? Because ideas have consequences. Our attempt to understand humans apart from God ultimately results in our own self-destruction.

Mark it well: anthropology that attempts to study humans apart from the glorious triune God who has created us for himself inevitably strips from humans their dignity and reduces us to the product of blind, impersonal forces. But if this is so, then humans have no intrinsic meaning and purpose, and such things as rationality, love, freedom, and justice are reduced to mere subjective human constructions (which is another way of saying that they are not objectively true). Even more: these wrong ideas regarding humans never remain theoretical. Inevitably, people act on what they believe, and this is where the tragedy is even more pronounced. Let us focus on three examples of the disaster that non-Christian thought has produced.

The Tragic Loss of Human Dignity

Apart from a Christian view of humans, there is no objective basis for human dignity, value, and significance, which is sadly not only acknowledged but acted on. For example, Robert Haynes, the president of the 16^th International Congress of Genetics says this:

For three thousand years at least, a majority of people have considered that human beings were special, were magic. It’s the Judeo-Christian view of man. What the ability to manipulate genes should indicate to people is the very deep extent to which we are biological machines. The traditional view is built on the foundation that life is sacred . . . Well, not anymore. It’s no longer possible to live by the idea that there is something special, unique, even sacred about living organism.[8]

8. Andrew Kimbrell, The Human Body Shop (San Francisco: Harper, 1993), 233–34.

But where does this lead? Tragically, it has led to the slaughter of human beings in multiple wars, countless abortions, infanticide, euthanasia, suicide, and more. In the twentieth century, millions of people were slaughtered on the altar of secular-naturalistic views of humans. Regarding abortion, in the US since 1973, an estimated 64 million babies have been murdered. In addition, in 2017, a Gallup poll found 73% of Americans supportive of euthanasia (assisted suicide) and 57% supportive of doctor-assisted euthanasia. Or think of Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at the Massachusetts Institute of Psychology, writing in defense of infanticide in the New York Times.[9] To be clear, infanticide is the deliberate killing of babies after they have been born. Consistent with his worldview, Pinker suggests that some cases of infanticide could be carried out even when there is no mental illness in the child, because “it has been practiced and accepted in most cultures throughout the world.” Pinker asserts that a capacity for neonaticide is hard-wired into the maternal genes by our evolutionary history. Mothers in primitive conditions had to make difficult choices between caring for their existing infants and nurturing a newborn, and so, “if a newborn is sickly, or if its survival is not promising, they may cut their losses and favor the healthiest in the litter or try again later on.” Pinker then argues that the same genetic disposition may trigger neonaticide in cases where pregnancies may threaten the mother’s health. He then suggests that various psychological conditions and cultural practices protect the mother from too great an attachment to an infant who may have to be let die. “A new mother will first coolly assess the infant and her current situation and only in the next few days begin to see it as a unique and wonderful individual.” He then suggests that in those first few days, killing an unwanted child is not only natural but also culturally acceptable on a wide scale.[10]

9. Steven Pinker, “Why They Kill Their Newborns” (Nov 2, 1997).

10. See Steven Pinker, “Why They Kill Their Newborns” (Nov 2, 1997) as cited in Phillip E. Johnson, The Wedge of Truth (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 111–12.

These are only a few examples of the tragic loss of human dignity in our society. We see this breakdown when a sleeping homeless woman is lit on fire in a New York subway. We see it when an unpopular student shoots up his classmates like a shooter in a video game. We see it when a woman sleeps with over 100 men in a day for monetized publicity. We see it when fertilized embryos are doomed to a frozen stasis because their parents didn’t want their undesirable genetic qualities. We see it when there are almost no down syndrome children in Iceland—because they have all been snuffed out before they drew their first breath.

We see it in the breakdown of the family, gender confusion, and our society’s determination to destroy marriage and the family as the basic building block of human society.[11] It’s also evident in our increased suicide rates. Suicide is one of the leading causes of death in the US, and it is on the rise, specifically among young people. Over 49,000 people died by suicide in 2022. In 2022, it was estimated that there were 1.6 million suicide attempts. Suicide reflects a general despair about the meaning and the purpose of human life, and it is one of the tragic consequences of a rejection of a Christian view of humans.

11. See Joy Pullmann, False Flag: Why Queer Politics Mean the End of America (New York: Regnery, 2024).

The Tragic Loss of Moral Categories

In addition to the loss of human dignity is also the loss of moral categories. David Wells argues that the twentieth century has seen three massive cultural changes tied to our rejection of a Christian view of humans that have affected how we understand ourselves. These shifts went from (1) character/virtue (moral categories) to personality (self category); (2) from nature (something fixed) to self-consciousness (individual, private); (3) from a shared sense of collective humanity to a vision of the self—“the I”—at the person’s center, which results in the inward look inside ourselves to find the answers to life.[12]

12. David F. Wells, Losing Our Virtue: Why the Church Must Recover Its Moral Vision (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998); idem, “Losing Our Religion: The Impact of Secularization on the Understanding of Sin,” in Ruined Sinners to Reclaim, ed. David Gibson and Jonathan Gibson (Wheaton: Crossway, 2024), 803–20.

Wells unpacks the consequences of these shifts:

Because of the first, we have slowly sloughed off the moral framework of life. Because of the second, a rampant relativism has been loosed on society, since no one’s self-consciousness is exactly like anyone else’s. A person’s understanding about life, about his or her place in the cosmos, therefore becomes private and individualized.[13]

13. Wells, Losing Our Virtue, 120.

In regards to the third,

this sets us apart from many other cultures, in which it would be inconceivable for people to imagine that they could look inside themselves for the answers to life. Even more remarkable is the thought that buried within are the balms for our wounds and moral failures. There is a touching innocence to this trust. It is almost as if no one has told us that we now live east of Eden, that these internal streams are also polluted waters.[14]

14. Wells, Losing Our Virtue, 122.

What implications follow from these movements away from the Christian view of humanity? Wells gives two important implications.

First, in our secular-postmodern view, we have rejected God as our transcendent reference, and thus have no objective basis for moral norms. As Wells reminds us, “sin is no longer defined in relation to God but, rather, it is thought of only in terms of the self.”[15] But with such a loss, the warrant for an objective standard of morality, justice, and law vanishes, replaced by the subjective construction of finite, fallen humans. In the end, what this leads to is the State taking the place of God and arbitrarily determining moral law, which should terrify all of us.

15. Wells, “Losing Our Religion,” 809.

Second, and building on the first point, “sin” has become a conceptual impossibility. The “death” of God also brings about the death of “moral categories.” In a postmodern era, sin is no longer defined in relation to God. In the place of “sin,” we have “evil.” But the convenient thing about the term “evil” is that it expresses moral repugnance without needing to make clear the standards by which the action is seen to be repugnant. The difference between the cultural use of evil and the Christian use of sin is that while both words may be used to describe the same phenomenon, sin deliberately understands our actions in relation to God as the absolute, objective standard of right and wrong. In our culture, the use of evil simply expresses our abhorrence of something; in the Bible, the word sin expresses God’s abhorrence of it. But in the absence of God as the moral standard, there is no reason why we should not cheat, lie, defraud, and injure others. In the absence of God, these things really cannot be evil; they can only be called evil. As God disappears from our culture, the realm of sin has correspondingly become contracted. But the tragedy of such a situation is that when we lose God as the objective standard of the good, it leaves people eventually speechless before life’s brutalities and atrocities. We continue to sin, but now we cannot explain it. Life becomes inexplicable to us, and we lose what it truly means to be human, along with any remedy to our sin, found in God’s provision alone.

The Tragic Rise of Tyranny and Totalitarianism

With a rejection of a Christian view of humans, human dignity and moral categories are lost, and sadly, the door is opened to unbelievable tyranny resulting in some form of totalitarianism. Don Carson makes this point in his book, The Intolerance of Tolerance.[16] A secular-postmodern society may have lost the category of sin, but it does not eliminate the horrible reality of sin. In a postmodern society, power is now placed in the hands of relativists, who in turn attempt to make themselves God. Instead of lex rex (God and his moral law over the king), postmodern societies deify the State. Mark it well: all societies are religiously grounded: there is no “neutral” space or “naked public square.” Either the true and living triune God will rule over us, or humans will attempt to elevate themselves to the place of God, which always results in tyranny.

16. D. A. Carson, The Intolerance of Tolerance (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012).

Critical theorist Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) basically makes this point in his influential essay, “Repressive Tolerance.”[17] “Tolerance is an end in itself,” but in order to achieve it, the “oppressed” will have to overthrow the “law” by violence.[18] But the problem is this: On what moral grounds is Marcuse making these decisions, other than the subjective, arbitrary decisions of what he determines is the “oppressed”? In the end, without an objective standard, this results in simply another form of tyranny imposed on others. As Carson reminds us, “Unchecked, this new tolerance will sooner or later put many people in chains.”[19]

17. Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in A Critique of Pure Tolerance, Robert P. Wolff, Barrington Moore, Jr., and Herbert Marcuse (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 81–123.

18. See Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” 82, 115–23.

19. Carson, “Sin’s Contemporary Significance,” in Fallen: A Theology of Sin, ed. Christopher W. Morgan and Robert A. Peterson (Wheaton: Crossway, 2013), 36.

The tragic irony of secular-postmodern view of humans is that instead of “liberating” us, it results in nothing but enslavement. In fact, as Herbert Schlossberg reminds us, this enslavement starts with the intellectuals who attempt to work out the implications of their worldview. As he states, “The better educated he is, the more likely the humanist is to believe that people are like machines and need to be programmed, and the more likely he is to believe that he should be one of the programmers.”[20] Indeed, as Schlossberg continues, any view that “divinizes man, it turns out, only divinizes some men.”[21] The end result: untold tyranny, abuse, and totalitarianism.

20. Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1983), 87.

21. Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction, 87.

A generation ago, Francis Schaeffer warned us about this. He knew that the rejection of a Christian view of God, self, and the world always leads to statism, which seeks to repristinate the city of Babel all over again. In our foolish attempt to dethrone God, we enthrone man, but given that humans are finite and fallen, it is an awful substitute.[22]

22. See Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? in The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer, 5 vols. (Westchester: Crossway, 1982), 5:211–52.

Today, such thinking is found in people like Yuval Harari. Harari is an Israeli philosopher, atheist, transhumanist, homosexual, and senior advisor to the World Economic Forum and its founder and chairman, Klaus Schwab. From a completely secular, evolutionary, and postmodern view, he argues that truth and morality are merely human social constructions. Since humans are simply evolved animals, then it follows that by biological and cyborg engineering—along with medical advances—we can make man a “god” in the Greek sense of Zeus and Apollo. Harari contends that we can continue to evolve from “Homo sapiens to Homo deus,” thus attaining “divinity.”^[23] In fact, he believes we will overcome death itself since

23. Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (New York: Harper Perennial, 2017), 47.

every technical problem has a technical solution. We don’t need to wait for the Second Coming in order to overcome death. A couple of geeks in a lab can do it. If traditionally death was the specialty of priests and theologians, now the engineers are taking over . . . True, at present we don’t have solutions to all technical problems. But this is precisely why we invest so much time and money in researching cancer, germs, genetics, and nanotechnology.^[24]

24. Harari, Homo Deus, 23.

But what moral framework governs Harari’s thinking? For him, it is only that which society constructs since there are no God-given, created, natural rights. In a recent video, Harari is clear on this point. He argues that most legal systems believe in human rights.

But human rights are just like heaven, and like God—it’s just a fictional story that we’ve invented and spread around. It may be a very nice story . . . You want to believe it, but it’s just a story. It’s not reality. It’s not a biological reality. Just as jellyfish and woodpeckers and ostriches have no rights, homo sapiens have no rights also . . . The only place you find rights is in fictional stories humans have invented and spread around. And the same thing is also true in the political field. States and nations are also, like human rights, and like God, and like heaven, they too are just stories.^[25]

25. Frank Bergman, “WEF Mastermind: ‘Human Rights are Fiction, Just Like God,’” January 24, 2024.

But in this re-making of humanity, Harari is also clear that we will not need all of the world’s population. Most people will become “useless” in the sense of unemployable, and as such, we need to reduce the world’s population through global control. Harari claims that a new class system will soon emerge that will separate global elites from the “redundant” general public. He argues that most of the world’s population will be of little use to the global elite, meaning they will no longer be “needed.”^[26] As we re-make man by bio-engineering and utilizing artificial intelligence, people will be replaced, and the world will be a better place for it.

26. Bergman, “WEF Mastermind.”

But how will this occur? As with all non-Christian thought, Harari invests this power in the state. As he asserts, we once thought that the “right to the pursuit of happiness [was] a restraint on state power,”^[27] but no longer. If humans have the right to be happy, then it is the duty of the state to bring it about. And given that happiness is totally determined by our biology, states must forget about “economic growth, social reforms and political revolutions . . . [instead] we need to manipulate human biochemistry”^[28] through drugs, vaccines, and “sophisticated ways of manipulating human biochemistry, such as sending direct electrical stimuli to appropriate spots in the brain, or genetically engineering the blueprints of our bodies.”^[29] Yet this raises an important question? Who will control the manipulation? Mark it well: if anthropology is not grounded in Christian theology, then the grounds for human dignity, our basic rights and freedoms, moral norms are not possible, and what will result is totalitarianism by people who view themselves as “god.” This is the inevitable consequence of non-Christian thought. Our rejection of God has not led to “freedom” but tyranny and incredible heartache.

27. Harari, Homo Deus, 32.

28. Harari, Homo Deus, 39.

29. Harari, Homo Deus, 41.

The Need for Theological Anthropology

There is an important lesson for Christians to learn in the midst of our collective identity crisis. We will never understand correctly who we are and what our true problem is in terms of sin before God and all of its disastrous implications apart from a theological anthropology. Ultimately, the question, “What is man?” can only be answered in terms of the triune God and his divine revelation telling us who and what we are.

In contrast to Alexander Pope is John Calvin. As Calvin begins his Institutes, he makes this profound statement: “Without knowledge of God there is no knowledge of self.”^[30] In other words, contrary to our society, we only begin to know who we are once we view ourselves in relation to our Creator and Lord. Apart from doing so, as the Enlightenment project has demonstrated, it simply leads to disaster and a denial of who humans truly are. In the end, non-Christian views of humans are incoherent and self-refuting. They are incoherent in explaining who we are in terms of our value, dignity, and significance, and they are incoherent in explaining what is wrong with us in terms of our sin. The church has a wonderful opportunity to speak the truth in love and to do it with courage since it is the Christian worldview alone that provides the metaphysical and epistemological ground to uphold human significance and value, along with what is truly wrong with us in terms of our sin. Our society cannot make sense of either, which has led to the disaster we witness on a daily basis.[31] What is desperately needed to address the need of the hour is a Christian view of humans in all of its biblical and theological depth and breadth.

30. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 vols., ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), I.1.2 (1:37).

31. On this point, see Os Guinness, Our Civilizational Moment: The Waning of the West and the War of the Worlds (np: Kildare, 2024).

Although much could be said in terms of the specifics of a theological anthropology, Christian theology minimally affirms two crucial truths. First, humans are unique and significant because we are created in God’s image. Scripture explains us in relation to a personal beginning (Gen. 1:1)—the triune God—who has created us in an ordered, designed, and purposeful way. As such, we are beauty and not beast! Second, given the fall of Genesis 3, we who were created great are now moral rebels before God, deeply flawed by sin to the very core of our being. We who were created to know God and to rule as vice-regents over the world have turned against our Creator, which has brought ruin into the world and destroyed everything in our path. Yet our flaw is not due to our creation but to our willful rebellion against God. For this reason, the only solution to our problem is the sovereign and gracious initiative of God on our behalf. Sin does not belong to our essence. We remain God’s image, but now morally corrupt and spiritually dead. But thankfully, by God’s sovereign grace and action, sin can be removed from us by faith in Christ’s finished work and the Spirit’s transforming power in us.

This Christian anthropology is what is needed in our day as the antidote to the dust of death that non-Christian views have brought. But will the church have courage to stand against the foolish ideas of our age and to recover in boldness the truth of God’s word without compromise? Will we also have the courage to live out the truth of who we are in all our value and fallenness, and to uphold the significance of human life, human sexuality, marriage and the family, in a day that stands in direction opposition to the truth of Scripture? And will we have the courage to stand against the rising totalitarianism of our age, and to live as a counter-culture as we display to the world what it truly means to be human in every area of our lives? And will we proclaim Christ Jesus the Lord as the only hope for this fallen human race that so desperately needs to hear the truth of God’s word in all of its beauty, depth, and fullness?

What must the church learn from the last few decades of American politics? In what follows, I offer ten lessons. These lessons are in no specific order, and some of them overlap with each other. But I offer them from what I have observed since I first moved to the USA in 1982. I have lived through Aaron Renn’s three worlds.^[1] Those who are called to be salt and light should take these lessons seriously as we seek to live in our present day for the glory of God and the good of the church.

1. Renn rightly proposes the Positive world until 1994 when Christianity was a general public asset, the neutral world from 1994 to 2014 where Christianity was neither generally a neutral asset, and the negative world from 2014 to the present when Christianity is generally viewed as a social liability. See Aaron Renn, Life in the Negative World . . .

1. The past decades revealed that the evangelical church was not biblically and theologically grounded and thus susceptible to cultural accommodation.

For many evangelicals, our interaction with politics revealed our susceptibility to cultural drift—being blown about by every wind of cultural change. No doubt, over the last decades we have witnessed many good movements arise—The Gospel Coalition, Together for the Gospel, etc.—all of which sought to ground the church biblically and theologically. But for some reason there was a disconnect between sound doctrine and its application to the political arena. Obviously, this was not true of everyone in these movements, but it is generally accurate.

For example, I arrived in 1999 at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS) at the tail end of the Conservative Resurgence. From the 1980s to the mid-90s, the Southern Baptist Convention appointed conservative trustees to the seminaries. These new trustees hired conservative presidents who hired faculty that gladly affirmed the Baptist Faith and Message. In this way, the SBC witnessed a return to biblical orthodoxy. But how “conservative” was this resurgence in our churches? Beyond confessional affirmation, how deep did our biblical and theological convictions go?

My hypothesis is that the movement toward so-called conservatism occurred in our churches at a time when the nation was also experiencing a “conservative” resurgence politically. During this time in the 1990s, Ronald Regan was elected, and the Newt Gingrich revolution took over the House of Representatives. We also witnessed the rise of such groups as the Moral Majority, and pressure was successfully put on President Bill Clinton in 1996 to sign the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). In many ways, it was fashionable to be a conservative, and the winds of culture were moving in that direction.

However, as we entered the twenty-first century and Barack Obama became President, given his left-wing ideology, massive changes occurred in the culture. We went from DOMA (1996) to Obergefell (2015) and embraced homosexuality and transgenderism as a “civil right.” When Ferguson occurred and the Obama administration fueled the fires of “racism” (although it was later demonstrated that the media narrative was false), many leaders within the evangelical church were quick to jump on board with the prevailing racist narrative, regardless of the truth. As we witnessed an embrace of a non-biblical sexual ethic, especially from 2010 on, evangelical leadership turned from loving confrontation to being “winsome.”

For example, J. D. Greear, former president of the SBC, made the astounding claim that the Bible only “whispers” about sexual sin. Not accidentally, he spoke this when the culture was radically shifting on these issues. While he later backtracked his comments, his original statement represents the kind of interaction too many evangelicals had to the changing winds of the culture.

These same shifts also occurred in church methodology and human sexuality. On the one hand, in the 1980s we embraced the seeker-sensitive church methodology in order to reach “unchurched” people. In the 1990s, this morphed to the “emerging church” and then to “progressive Christianity”—a movement more indebted to postmodernism than biblical Christianity. On the other hand, as the culture embraced so-called gay “marriage” and transgenderism, we also witnessed the rise of the gay-affirming ministry Revoice, less criticism of the LGBTQ agenda, and an increased rejection of complementarianism. Within certain segments of evangelicalism, these shifts were evidence that the church was not standing against the “spirit of the age.” Why did this occur?

There are probably numerous reasons, but ultimately it’s due to the fact that our churches were not biblically and theologically grounded, especially in applying Scripture to every area of life. Instead of interpreting the culture in light of Scripture, we interpreted the Bible by the lens of culture. It’s not enough to sign doctrinal statements and claim allegiance to the Nicene Creed. We must also apply these doctrines to the world according to Scripture. For example, our doctrine of the imago dei has political implications for how we vote, what policy agendas we support, our stand against the LGBTQ agenda, and so on. In 2024, the Democrat party has made abortion and LGBTQ issues its central focus, yet we have so-called “Evangelicals” for Harris, who even couch their support as fidelity to Christ. It’s staggering how our doctrine is so disconnected from life and politics, and how this betrays biblical authority, theological fidelity, and true love for God and our neighbor.

Ideas have consequences. What we have witnessed is that if the church is not properly grounded in Scripture and sound theology, we will embrace false ideas that will have disastrous consequences in our lives and the larger society. The church must return to biblical fidelity and the courage to apply Scripture in all its breadth and depth to every area of life. Instead of being tossed back and forth by every wind of culture, we must return to biblical faithfulness. What is needed is the exposition of Scripture that is applied to the issues of life, including the political.

2. The past decades demonstrated that David Wells’ assessment of the impact of “secularization” on the evangelical church was correct.

Theologian David Wells wrote several profound books starting in the 1990s that sought to assess the culture’s impact on theology, and specifically the impact of “secularization” on our theological thinking. His thesis was that as a society becomes more “secular,” it doesn’t necessarily make everyone an atheist. Instead, religion is “privatized” and removed from the public square. In turn, this reinforces the unbiblical “sacred” and “secular” divide, thus making theology publicly irrelevant but privately engaging.

Wells’ tragic point was this: many evangelicals have embraced this very mindset. Evangelicals continued to gather in subcultures and talk to each other, but this didn’t translate to actual engagement with the world. And if we did engage the world, it was by leaving our doctrinal convictions behind. We had “Jesus in our hearts,” but we did not bring the intellectual challenge of the gospel to our lives, specifically in our politics. This is why many Christians failed to speak to the issues of the public square. We even embraced the idea that the public square was off limits for Christians!

How did this influence of secularization impact many pastors? For many, they refused to engage political issues. Pastors would apply Scripture to the “private” lives of their congregants but rarely did they apply the text to their political lives, nor did they give basic guidance on how to vote.

Not only was this practice foreign to our forefathers, but more significantly, it’s contrary to Scripture. Many of us love the Puritans, but we would be surprised to know what strong rebukes and admonitions they gave to their political leaders. But today many pastors are allergic to this. And this is all part of the privatization of religion that David Wells analyzed.

No doubt, we must distinguish what the Bible addresses and what it does not. Pastors are not called to the weeds of every policy issue and turn our gatherings into political campaigns. But when Scripture specifically addresses issues that apply to our “public” lives, pastors must apply Scripture to these matters.

For example, our doctrine of humans has implications for how we treat one another from womb to the tomb. This in turn has political implications for the issue of abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, and so on. When we have political leaders who oppose God’s law and universal moral norms on these issues, pastors need to guide their people in these matters. But our doctrine of humans doesn’t just end here. A proper view of the imago dei impacts how we think of human sexuality, marriage, the family, work, welfare, private property, taxation, and so on. These issues are not merely “political,” but biblical, and not to help our people apply these basic biblical truths to the political realm is a failure to teach the whole counsel of God. Even if our society rejects God, all people are image-bearers and thus responsible to their Creator and Lord. All people live under God’s lordship, and Scripture speaks not only to our private but also our public lives. The secularization and privatizing of religion is organically related to the first point: the evangelical church has failed to be properly biblical and theological in every area of life.

3. The past decades showed that evangelicals took for granted the freedoms and liberties we enjoyed.

When Elizabeth Willing Powel once asked Ben Franklin at the birth of the United States: “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” Franklin famously answered, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Over the last number of years, the evangelical interaction with American politics has shown that we have taken for granted the freedoms and liberties we’ve enjoyed. We assumed that these freedoms couldn’t be lost. Yet we didn’t realize that the freedom of speech and freedom of religion must be fought for in every generation, just as the gospel must be passed on to every generation.

In 1961, Ronald Reagan also reminded us that the keeping of our liberties is an ongoing fight with these memorable words:

Freedom . . . is never more than one generation away from extinction. We don’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. The only way that they can inherit the freedom that we have known is for us to fight for it, to protect it, to defend it, and then hand it on to them with the well-thought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same. If you and I don’t do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like.

For Christians, we must also never forget that the liberties we enjoy in this nation did not come from nowhere. They are not the result of secular-modern or postmodern thought. Instead, such freedoms as speech and religion are due to the influence of Christianity on this country and they cannot be preserved without the continuing influence of Christianity. This point is something too many evangelicals took for granted.

As we look back over the last few decades, it’s not an exaggeration to say that we didn’t do a great job reminding the church that we need to fight for the freedoms we enjoy. Possibly, the one exception was the pro-life movement, which was kickstarted post-1973 by people like Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop (later the U.S. Surgeon General under Reagan). After the Roe v. Wade decision, many evangelicals were (unbelievably!) silent, and even more tragically, some endorsed Roe, including some within the SBC. Until the mid-70s the stand against the murder of the unborn was basically a Roman Catholic issue until Schaeffer almost single-handedly galvanized evangelicals to stand for life. This resulted in the formation of crisis pregnancy centers that sought to care for women and rescue the unborn from death, and such organizations as the Moral Majority who sought to defend life on the political front. Eventually this concerted effort led to the overturning of Roe in 2022, which was a wonderful day in the history of this nation. But sadly, simultaneously with the overturning of Roe, we also discovered that the hearts of the people had changed—even among evangelicals—since a number of professing evangelicals lamented the Dobbs decision. This was another example of evangelicals more interested in accommodating to culture than standing for what is true, good, and just.

However, beyond the pro-life movement, there has been little organization to defend our basic freedoms in the larger society. For example, after DOMA in 1996, we allowed the culture to drift to such an extent that within nineteen years, gay so-called marriage and transgenderism were embraced in the society. Evangelicals should have known that this was going to happen, but we didn’t pay attention to the drift around us. Marriage was already under attack by the introduction of No-Fault Divorce laws in 1969, and the acceptance of homosexuality began with the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in 1973 identifying it as normal, and then demanding gay marriage in 2010. The same pattern occurred for transgenderism when in 2008 the APA changed their view to see it as normal. When all of these societal shifts occurred, many evangelicals were oblivious to what was occurring around them, not realizing that if marriage is lost, so goes the foundation for society and all our freedoms with it.

In fact, as these cultural drifts occurred, many evangelicals not only stayed out of the political discussion, but they refused to vote. Vocal minorities who often show up to vote can have huge influence on our culture. Yet, many evangelicals tragically won’t even take the time to exercise their rights as citizens to preserve the freedoms that we enjoy. Such lethargy will only lead to the erosion of our freedoms and liberties—including the liberty to share the gospel freely.

The easiest way to stand up for our freedoms is to vote your Christian conscience, and to vote for those candidates who will best reflect what is good, right, and just. If we don’t vote, we are taking our freedoms for granted, and what we take for granted will soon disappear. Christians must resist a kind of fatalism that says “This world’s not my home. I’m just passing on through.” We are Christians and citizens, and as such, we have responsibilities to speak and act, ultimately for God’s glory and the good of our society. If we don’t stand up for what is right, who will?

4. The past decades taught us that evangelicals too easily bought into the idea that political leaders can “save” us.

This point is a balance to the previous point. Christians must stand for what is right, but we must also not think that our “salvation” comes from political leaders.

Let me lay my cards on the table. I can’t vote for the Democrat Party, given that they stand for the destruction of human life, marriage, the family, wealth, and basically all things biblical. Let’s be honest: a Party that rejects God’s natural/moral law is determined to destroy everything in society, and I can’t vote for a denial of God and harm to my neighbor. In my view, the Democrat party is a not an option for Christians.

But what about the Republicans (GOP)? As we think about political parties, we must first stand as Christians and not partisans. As a Christian, as I evaluate the GOP, I think it’s a disaster. Yet, there is still within it a direction that is not as anti-human as the Democrat Party. Further, the GOP still allows conservative Christians to influence their Party. So unless we’re going to start another Party, which presently is not viable, we have a binary choice. To sit out is not a responsible option since we lose the influence of our voice entirely. We need to make wise decisions, and for me, the only option is to vote GOP. Donald Trump is not my first choice, and I opposed him in the primaries, but as the candidate of the GOP, he’s the one I will vote for.

However, on the GOP side, there is a danger of elevating one person to “savior” status. Unfortunately, many Trump supporters have done this, and even too many evangelicals have jumped on this bandwagon. We have viewed our political leaders as messiah figures, which is very dangerous. Political leaders are all weak, fallible, and flawed. We need to vote, but as Christians we must not treat these political leaders as Messiahs. The Lord Jesus alone will save us, and we must not forget this.

Instead, with a proper view of our political leaders, Christians need to get involved in the political process and hold our leaders accountable. In fact, we saw this take place in the late summer of 2024. In Florida, Amendment Four is an immoral amendment that attempts to amend Florida’s Constitution to make abortion-on-demand constitutional until birth. Trump, who lives in Florida, refused to speak against it. But with influence from Christians and others, he eventually came out against it. Here we see how influence is still possible within the GOP, but no longer within the Democrat party, as they are determined to see the slaughter of babies until birth. Here is an example of how politicians won’t save us, but we still have a voice at the table to call political leaders and parties to stand for what is good, right, and just.

In the end, the hope for our nation is found in the gospel. The hope for our nation is found in Christians being true Christians, the church being the church, and then seeing the influence of the gospel on society as we then interact with it. We must not place our hope in any political candidate to “save” us.

5. The past decades revealed that evangelicals too often wanted power and prestige more than faithfulness, godliness, and unreserved commitment to the truth of God’s Word lived out in all of life.

We wanted a seat at the table, and often we sold our soul to get it. This point is something we have also learned from evangelical interaction with politics, and it’s true on the Evangelical Left and Right. On the one hand, the Evangelical Left sold their soul for a place at the table. When they get an op-ed piece in the New York Times or an interview with ABC News, it’s sad to see how they will not speak up on the key moral issues of our day. They will often address the issues that the mainstream media is happy to platform, but this only occurs if these evangelicals refuse to speak truth to power to the media themselves. Often what these evangelicals fail to realize is that the world is only interested in them if they play along and remain silent on what is right and good. Our seat at the table comes with a huge cost.

For example, think of Tim Keller. I appreciate much of his ministry and work. But when New York State legalized abortion until birth in 2019, Tim Keller wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times talking about racial issues—without the condemnation (or any mention!) of his State’s decision. How is this possible? How is this biblically faithful? One might object by saying that we don’t have to address abortion in every op-ed piece. No doubt, this is true. But when you are writing a piece at the exact same time when this murderous legislative action is occurring in your State, this is a failure to speak as a Christian in this crucial moment. This doesn’t mean that Keller is not pro-life. But it does reflect how his desire to get a seat at the table muted his faithfulness to speak out, which is precisely the problem.

We have also seen this occur with Russell Moore. When he was at SBTS he was a formidable complementarian, clear on moral issues, and a strong voice for what was good and just. But as he left and took over the helm of the ERLC, and then Christianity Today, his voice has become more muddled. It seems that he loves the accolades of New York Times and the left-wing media more than standing for biblical fidelity on life, marriage, complementarianism, etc. The same is true of people like David French, who has lost his voice in terms of biblical fidelity. All of this is an illustration of how the Evangelical Left has succumbed to the pursuit of power.

But this is also true on the Evangelical Right. I have had numerous discussions with Trump supporters who refuse to criticize him, even during the primaries. A number of evangelicals give their unilateral support for him, no matter what he says or does. But this is allowing political power to blind us.

As Christians, our first allegiance is to God and his word. We must be able to criticize both parties when they stand opposed to moral and natural law. We are not to be first GOP or Democrat, but Christians who speak the truth no matter what. Our commitment to the truth and our love for God demands nothing less.

6. The past decades continued to confirm Francis Schaeffer’s claim that the two values of our society are also the same values of many evangelicals.

Another lesson we ought to have learned from evangelicals’ interaction with politics comes from Francis Schaeffer. Years ago, Schaeffer argued that the post-World War II generation and their 1960s children were ironically the same in temperament. While outwardly they appeared to have differing interests and ethics, they both had the same two values: personal peace and affluence.

Schaeffer went on from this observation to draw this conclusion: if these are your two governing values, then you will give up all your freedoms to keep them. Thus, when the stock market crashes, we cry, “Government save us, because I want my money!” Or if someone warns you not to speak on a particular social issue due to repercussions, we say, “I don’t want to lose my job or go to jail. I want my personal peace.” The end result is that we do not speak up where we ought.

We make decisions, even in terms of political candidates, that are not governed by Scripture, but by those who will give us the ease we want. That’s the danger that Alexis de Tocqueville saw back in the 1830s when he visited America.^[2] In his Democracy in America, he asked what would happen if in the American Experiment the people voted for individuals who would give them money and promises instead of something good for them. If that were to happen, the entire country would be lost—and that’s where we’re at today. So, if someone promises us $25,000 to get a new house, it doesn’t matter that it will destroy the housing market, we will vote for them to keep our personal peace and wealth!

2. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2 vols. (New York: Vintage Books, 1945).

Maintaining our personal peace and affluence also keeps us from speaking up, because being disagreeable might result in losing wealth, influence, or prestige. But the Christian must resist this temptation toward the apathy that comes from chasing these two values. We have to be able to say, “Well, that’s fine. I’ll lose my seat. I’ll lose my job. I’ll lose my wealth. My God will provide for me, and I will follow him and stand for what’s right, come what may.” We need a church that’s going to be committed to the truth and not committed to going with the flow.

7. In the past decades, we learned that without being firmly grounded in the Bible and theology, evangelicals were too easily manipulated by the political strategies of our age.

I’m an American citizen, but when I came to the United States in 1982, I was a Canadian. What struck me was how certain sore issues from America’s past were used for manipulation of the political process. Specifically, I am thinking of the race issue.

Canada didn’t have the same racial division as in America. When I came to America and then moved to Chicago, the racial division was so heated that I thought the city was going to blow apart. The rhetoric in Chicago politics was horrible, as people regularly charged others with being an “Uncle Tom” and so on. What dawned on me was how “racial” language was used for political advantage. If you simply labeled someone a “racist”—and if the label got enough traction—this ended discussion and the slandered person usually backed down—even if he was not actually a racist.

What shocked me even more was how this same political tactic was being used in our churches to silence people. As we moved into the Obama era, everything became charged with racism, including moral issues that had nothing to do with racism—homosexuality, transgenderism, etc. And even such economic issues such as the “gender gap” now become a “white male wage gap” charged with racism! But making everything “racist” is a conflation of issues. However, due to the painful history of America and slavery, what was a wound in the nation was now being exploited to silence all political opposition and to drive a specific political agenda. This was especially true of the Democrat party, which used the “racist” language to their advantage. Amazingly, the church went along with it.

For example, many people were thrilled about the possibility of Barack Obama being the first African American president of the United States. But if you raised questions about what he actually believed, and evaluated him by the standard of his ideology, you were considered a racist. In fact, I was dumbfounded in the fall of 2008 when a major evangelical leader in SBTS’s chapel spoke of his support for Barack Obama. This was shocking because Obama’s actual worldview stood antithetical to Scripture, to the moral law, and to all that government ought to uphold. As time went on, this was made clearer as Obama’s radical agenda undermined the sanctity of life, marriage, family, wealth, property, and so on. But Christians were incapable of evaluating him on the basis of Scripture, and instead they looked at him through the prism of race.

However, once we so easily cave due to the potential charge of “racism,” it’s quite easy to see why the political left weaponized the LGBTQ agenda and made it into a “racial” issue. An immoral sexual ethic suddenly became a civil rights issue? Once this occurred, evangelicals did not know what to do. Instead of speaking the truth through the slander of being called “racists,” we succumbed to the political tactics of the Left and we were driven to silence.

This also occurred in the SBC with the adoption of Resolution 9 in 2019, which held up critical race theory as a set of “analytical tools” for learning. So many evangelicals didn’t realize that this very system of viewing people primarily as oppressors or victims brings destruction and division wherever it takes root. Again, the problem was that we weren’t theologically grounded and confident in the truth. Instead, we were easily manipulated by political rhetoric and fearful of being called names.

8. The past decades showed many evangelicals were too easily silenced in the public square by those on the political left who charged us with “theonomy” or “Christian nationalism.”

Just as we were silenced in the public square by being afraid of being labelled “racists,” so we were silenced by those who charged us with “theonomy” or “Christian nationalism.”

For example, when evangelicals raised their voices against the Obergefell decision (that legalized so-called gay marriage), and when they argued that it needed to be overturned just like Roe, our opponents responded with, “You’re a Christian nationalist; you’re a theonomist!” And especially when “Christian nationalism” was also identified as “white” (and thus racist), what did evangelicals do? Broadly speaking, we took the bait, and remained silent in the public sphere. Also, we dismissed those who were given that label—whether they claimed it for themselves or not. Publicly, many evangelicals were more concerned with avoiding these labels—and avoiding those who were associated with these labels—than they were with fighting godless principles in the public square.

One can legitimately debate over the use of the term “Christian nationalism.” Personally, I don’t think the term is helpful. If it is broken down and we argue that nation-states are better than global governments, then I am a “nationalist.” If we argue that Christians must influence their society, and pray that the gospel will have such an affect that our nation will uphold what is moral and just, then “Christian” may be applied. But strictly speaking only the “church” is Christian, and nations (although ordained by God) in this age are not “Christian” in the sense that we apply that adjective to individuals believers and the church.

However, the term was not used to make these necessary fine distinctions; instead it was used en masse to silence the church from speaking truth in the public square. Further, the “theonomy” label was used to this end as well. Instead of wrestling with the question: “By what standard will our nation decide moral questions,” the label of “theonomy” was used to reject any Christian influence at all. But the truth of the matter is that all nations are governed by laws. Yet the question is which law? There is no such thing as an objective “naked public square.” All people have a moral standard they operate by, but what needs to be argued is the nature of what it is. Political Leftists in our country are just as religious as any Christian and they operate with their own standards that they impose on society. When they force people to uphold abortion, gay marriage, the loss of parental authority for gender-confused children, then the laws that enforce and demand this are just as much moral laws, except they are contrary to God’s law. The battle in our day is which law will govern our society, not the red-herring of “theonomy.” Everyone is a “theonomists” in the sense of wanting to live out their totalizing worldview—the question is: which “theonomy?”

9. The past decades revealed that evangelicals did not have a strong sense of a Reformational view of calling and vocation, and in our daily lives living under the Lordship of Christ.

These final two points outline where we need to go in our current condition. A proper understanding of the Bible, particularly the Reformation, is that God has called us to have a vocation, a job, a calling over every area of life. In Genesis 1:26–28, the creation mandate commands mankind to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. This mandate has not been rescinded. It is picked up in the Noahic covenant, which continues until the end of the age. Societies, families, and work continue, and as image-bearers, vocation is central to our task of putting everything under our feet (Psalm 8), even in a fallen world. As Christians, we need to recapture a proper sense of vocation.

I’m very proud of my five children. My wife and I sought to raise them in the fear and admonition of the Lord as we prayed for their salvation and that their lives would be lived to honor and glorify God. All of them, by God’s grace, profess faith in Christ, which is what is most important before anything else. But I am proud that each of them has caught the sense of vocation and doing all to the glory of God. My oldest son serves the Lord in the difficult political arena seeking to bring God’s truth to bear in his work. My second son serves the Lord in the charter school system. He is an elder in his local church but he also sees that his education work is for God’s glory too. My third son serves the Lord through engineering, as he seeks to be faithful in his vocation and service. My fourth child, my daughter, serves the Lord in a Christian camp ministry, while my youngest daughter serves the Lord in the medical field as a nurse. Each one serves the Lord in their local church and in their vocation, seeking to be salt and light in this world.

What we need to recapture as the church is the sense of vocation and service to the Lord in every domain of life. This is how Christians impact the society and it’s something that evangelical theology has not emphasized enough.

10. The past decades demonstrated that the church needs to go back to “first things” and to be the church, which includes a recovery of the church as a counter-cultural institution.

The church needs to be the church. We not only need a biblical ecclesiology but also we need to recover a view of the church as a counter-cultural institution. As the church, the redeemed people of God, living under the Lordship of Christ, we need to witness to the world what a regenerate people look like: what it means to have a biblical marriage, raise children in the fear and admonition of the Lord, and how to serve the Lord in our many vocations. We need to live as God’s people, as an outpost of heaven broken into this world, and to reveal to the world what it means to be image-bearers who love God and serve one another.

As our world collapses from inside out, the church must serve as a compelling role model for the refugees of the World’s Vanity Fair. The church must be this counter-cultural institution. We have to show them how to raise children with glad firmness, how to work with diligent faithfulness, how to read books and the news with critical discernment. We must show them how to do all these things. We’ve farmed so much out to the state, and eventually the church must recover all of that. It has to teach people the Word of God and apply it to every area of life. The church is God’s new covenant people. We are the new creation living out our lives in this fallen world. We are part of God’s kingdom that has broken into the world in Christ, who has brought his saving reign. We are to obey God. We are to be conformed to the image of Christ. We are to show what it means to be an image bearer, and to be truly human. The world doesn’t show this. They can’t show this.

No doubt, the State has its role and the church is not the State. Each one belongs in its own sphere of authority that God has established. But it’s the church that will have to pick up the pieces of a dying State and culture. This means that the church will have to return to education, as it has done in the past, grounded in God’s Word. Today, we don’t need a privatized faith, but one that engages the world with the truth of Scripture.

The church must not be held captive to the philosophy of the day. Instead, we are to have a philosophy—a worldview, a theology—grounded in Christ and lived under his Lordship. We need to show in the church what it means to preserve life, to protect marriage, to value children, to rescue the unborn. If possible, we need to be involved with foster kids, to show them what it means to be a Christian and to witness the gospel to them. We need to train people how to work. People become Christians and they have been burned out on a whole system. They don’t know how to do much of life. You may have to, in your churches, teach these new Christians how to read, write, and do arithmetic so they can get a job. You may need to disciple them off the welfare system so that they can be restored to their human dignity and provide work and food for their families. That’s not just social action. That’s just the outworking of the Christian gospel. People need to know how to be human, and they need to know how to be Christian, and the church is the bright beacon of hope in the midst of a dark and decaying society.

Furthermore, we need to raise our children and grandchildren in such a way that if society does collapse, they will be able to pick up the pieces. We are going to have to teach our children in the church how to think not just about a narrow slice of doctrine, but to reckon with how that doctrine applies to running a business, and economics, and work.

All of this is calling the church to be the church. To speak God’s truth to the world, even if they don’t want to hear it. In this sense, the church is to be prophetic. Governments are established for their God-appointed task, which means we have to speak the truth to them when they stray. The church must have the courage to do that.

At the same time, the church is first and foremost to know and pursue after God. We must fear God, and as such, we are not to be those who accommodate to the culture. Our glorious triune God must be first in our lives, as we live our lives under Christ’s Lordship.

We also need to be a church that prays. Too often as we meet in small groups, we pray for various items, but rarely do our prayers encompass the entire world. But what happens before revival breaks out? The church prays. Praying for our country is not “political activism!” No, it’s people in prayer. God changes things. He will raise up people to make change. Yes, they have to be involved in society, but we need people who will pray. We need to pray for the spread of the gospel. We need to see people converted, and then there may be a groundswell that rises up and changes society. God has not promised that he will bring revival as he’s done in the past. But we pray in hope that he will do it again!

Ultimately, revival is what we need in our poor lost nation. But revival first starts with the church. We pray that God’s name will be hallowed and glorified in our society. If he doesn’t bring change, then we live under that persecution as many Christians have done, and we await the second coming of the Lord Jesus. But in the meantime, we are to be faithful. We are to pray. We are to live. We are to be a counterculture. And we must do that better than we have been. There are always exceptions, but we haven’t done that well over the last ten or twenty years. We’ve tended to drift, and we’re going to have to be something different than the world.

Concluding Reflections

Those ten lessons reflect my observations of the surrounding world over the last few decades. At the heart of these lessons is this: we need to keep the first things first. We need to be the church. And that doesn’t mean pulling out of society, but it means we have to teach the people the word of God. The gospel comes first.

This world is not going to change on its own. It’s only by the power of the gospel and the effects of that gospel as it spills over to society. That’s why in Hebrews 11 it speaks of that catalog of faith. Some saw glorious things. But some were sawn in two. Almost all of them faced persecution.

The author of Hebrews says the world wasn’t worthy of them, because ultimately, the very good of the world depends upon God’s people. God restrains judgment upon the world because His people are here. Common grace flows even from God’s saving purposes. So for the good of the church and ultimately for a spillover effect in the society, we need the Lord to revive us to be the church, being faithful and not accommodating.

Speak the truth. Have the courage to speak the truth. Francis Schaeffer preached a famous sermon where he pointed out that God uses little people to do great things. God doesn’t need all the large organization and big power figures and everything else. He doesn’t need big institutions. He just needs consecrated, faithful people—“little people”—to simply live for Him, glorify Him, stand up, make a difference, and be an influence in society. None of us are “big people.” We are just insignificant people. But in God’s hands, He can use even little people to do great things for his glory.

In January, 2023, I analyzed a common criticism raised against conservative evangelicals: that we are “single-issue” voters on the subject of the sanctity of human life. I evaluated the charge that in our voting we are reductionistic since there are other issues that Christians ought to be concerned about, not merely the life issue. For example, those who level this charge contend that to be pro-life also means that we must stand for racial justice, the protection of the environment, and various tax laws and economic policies that will protect the poor and the disadvantaged, etc. Since these other pressing issues are “Christian” too, it’s possible to vote for political candidates who aren’t pro-life but correct on these other matters—or so the argument goes.

My response to this common criticism often raised against us “single-issue” voters has not changed, although our present political situation is much more complicated, a point I will return to momentarily. I still contend that voting on the basis of whether a political candidate or party is “pro-life” is not reductionistic, but the crucial standard Christians must employ in their decision regarding who to vote for. I continue to argue that the pro-life issue isn’t comparable to other political issues because it’s foundational to all other issues. This is a point we must never compromise on. Our ethics must never be determined by our culture or the whims of a political party. The life issue is not a mere political disagreement over best policies. As foundational, the life issue is what determines how all these other policies and decisions are to be made.

As I noted, a political candidate may be rightly concerned about racial justice. Yet, such a concern hangs in mid-air if it is not grounded in a specific view of humans, and especially the truth that we are created in God’s image and that every human, regardless of ethnicity, has inherent dignity and value. In fact, how does one even argue for racial justice without first grounding it in human dignity? What does “justice” even mean if one views humans from an evolutionary view that reduces us to impersonal causes and robs us of any inherent dignity in relation to each other? Or, what determines the “goodness” of various economic policies, environmental causes, etc., apart from a specific view of humans and their created value and worth? All of our rights to free speech, worship, and so on, are all dependent on our view of God and his creation of humans in his image. This is why the life issue cannot be reduced to one issue on par with other issues; it’s foundational to them all. Unless we get this right, the other issues are without moral grounding and warrant.

Everything Flows Downstream from the Headwaters

Indeed, as Francis Schaeffer taught us well: “ideas have consequences.” If we embrace false ideas about the nature of humans, sadly and inevitably, specific consequences will follow. Not surprisingly, the chaos around us is due to the outworking of wrong ideas about humans, and the truth is this: if one denies the Christian view of the sanctity of human life, this denial will affect every moral and political issue. This is why voting for political candidates and parties that stand for life and oppose abortion is still where Christians must take their stand. What is most basic to any political system, government, and nation is its view of humans and whether all human life must be valued and protected from the womb to the tomb. As Scripture reminds us and history has taught us, if we deny that God is the Creator of human life and that each life is to be valued and protected—regardless of being in the womb or not, or regardless of one’s ethnicity, sex, age, and abilities— then inevitably what will follow is the devaluation of human life, along with an idolization of the State as the one who determines who lives and does not.

But we now face a dilemma in this year’s election. The GOP, which at least gave lip service to being pro-life, has now revised their thinking on the issue. Instead of affirming from their previous platform “the sanctity of human life” and that “the unborn child has a fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed,” and their support of “a human life amendment to the Constitution and legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to children before birth,” this has now changed. In its place, the GOP now say they “stand for families and life,” and given the Dobbs decision which returned the abortion decision back to the States, they now “oppose late term abortion.” But there is no longer a specific defense of human life from the womb to the tomb.

The Way Forward

What are Christians now to do in light of this? Our view of human life cannot change, and our need to vote for this “single” issue remains, but how do we now vote when there is no political party that is explicitly defending the sanctity of human life? I offer the following four thoughts.

First, Christians must not change their view of life.

Our view is grounded in the truth of who we are as God’s image. Our pro-life position has not changed, and the church must continue to stand for what is right and good. We love, obey, and fear God first; we never go with the ebb and flow of fallen human thought which stands in opposition to the truth of God’s Word and which in the end, is utterly self-destructive. Christians are to be salt and light in the culture, which means that we must continue to stand for life, both in word and deed.

Second, we must vote for what is best.

As we have always had to do, we must vote for candidates and a political party that best reflects God’s moral norms and law applied to society. The state is not the church, yet political leaders are to uphold what is good, punish evil, and do what is right (Rom. 13:1-5). What is truly “good” is not in the eye of the beholder but it is according to God’s moral/natural norms. He has established these norms all the way back in creation, and they continue in every era of redemptive history for all people. The sanctity of life, the protection of heterosexual marriage and the family, the valuing of the permanency and distinctiveness of male and female, plus the protection of private property—all of these are minimally the moral standards that we must hold our elected officials to. As Christians vote, we must vote for candidates and parties who uphold these moral norms, and if they do not, we must vote for candidates and parties who potentially may be persuaded to do so.

Third, we need to weigh the options.

In our two-party political system, we now need to ask: which candidates and party are even close to doing what is just and right? Given that none of our present political parties value all that they ought and (more significantly) don’t value what God demands that they do, we now have to vote for the party that is closer to what they ought to do, and which Christians still can influence. In our present election there is only one political party that is even close to this criterion. Sadly, the Democrat party has made it very clear that their entire agenda is to stand against what God values. They are on record wanting abortions until birth, the destruction of marriage and the family, the distortion of male and female, the loss of our ability to uphold biblical morality on these issues, and the theft of private property by government policies, taxation, and so on. There is nothing remotely close in the Democrat party that desires to uphold what is good, as defined by Scripture.

But what about the Republican party? Although, the GOP have now caved on the life issue, there is still a commitment to restrict abortion, to allow for freedom of speech and discussion on these issues so that Christians can still have a voice at the table, and so on. For Christians who want to obey God, to uphold the teaching of Scripture on the sanctity of human life, and to cast a vote to put in power individuals who are at least sympathetic with what is just, then there is only one option between the two parties for evangelicals in this election.

Fourth, we need to make a wise choice.

Someone may object and say that these are not the only options. A Christian could still decide to sit the election out and not vote at all. Although, this is certainly an option, I do not think it wise, and I would strongly encourage against it. Our country is greatly divided and every vote counts. Christians have an opportunity and responsibility to vote and to help slow the moral chaos that is evident around us. Also, even though our choice of candidates and a political party may not be ideal, the GOP is still lightyears better, morally speaking, on the life issue than the Democrats. Further, they are not opposed to the influence of Christians in their party on this issue. Thus, the choice to not vote and thereby allow the Democrats to win will guarantee more destruction of human life, marriage, and families. It will only continue the unraveling of the good, true, and beautiful. For myself, although the GOP is not what it should be, the choice is clear. We need to continue to vote pro-life to at least stem the flow of immorality and destruction that the Democrat party will certainly bring. The GOP is far from ideal, but at least they will not enact policies from the outset that are determined to destroy life. But this doesn’t mean that if the GOP wins, Christians can remain silent. Instead, we must make our voices know by getting involved in the political process and hopefully influencing future policies within the GOP, praying that at least by God’s common grace, he will restore a bit of sanity to this nation.

Conclusion

Apart from an outpouring of God’s grace, our nation is on the path of its own self-destruction, and as Christians we have a responsibility to exercise our right as citizens to vote against this path. If we truly love God and our neighbors, we must vote as Christians thinking about the daunting reality of the present situation we face—and to do so entrusting ourselves to our sovereign triune God who rules over all.

The Drift and the Stand

The first truth is ubiquitous throughout the New Testament. For example, think of Galatia. Paul himself is astonished at how quickly this church has turned to another gospel, which he makes very clear is “really no gospel at all” (Gal. 1:7). But Galatia is not an isolated occurrence. Think of Paul’s warnings to his young pastor-apprentice Timothy where he describes the “last days” as characterized by those who identify with the church but who are “always learning but never able to acknowledge the truth” (2 Tim. 3:7). Or, as Paul continues to remind Timothy: “For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear” (2 Tim. 4:3). Many more examples could be given, but the sad truth is this: the tendency is for fallen people, even those who profess Christ, to rapidly depart from the truth.

However, the second truth is also unmistakably taught. In light of the fact that people so quickly depart from the truth, Scripture exhorts us to “guard the good deposit” (2 Tim. 1:14); for leaders to “keep watch over yourselves and all the flock” (Acts 20:28); and for the entire church to “test the spirits to see whether they are from God” (1 John 4:1). Scripture is clear: We must love God and the gospel by being vigilant in proclaiming it, standing against those who attempt to replace it by “another gospel,” and faithfully passing it on to the next generation.

Nothing New under The Sun

What is true in the New Testament is also true in church history. In every era, the church is in a constant battle to stand for the truth and not to substitute it or “mix” it with something else. In the Patristic era, the church battled against Gnosticism and Arianism as she faithfully proclaimed Christ and formulated Trinitarian and Christological orthodoxy rooted and grounded in Scripture. In the Reformation, the church had to correct numerous errors of Roman Catholicism and stand firm on biblical authority and the finished work of Christ resulting in our justification, as reflected by the Reformation solas—sola Scriptura, sola gratia, sola fide, solus Christus, soli Deo gloria. In the rise of the “modern” world, the church had to stand against “liberalism” which sought to “mix” the gospel with worldview thinking that stood opposed to the truth of Scripture.

Today, the church must stand against forms of secularism, naturalism, pluralism, and postmodernism as represented by critical theories, the LGBTQ+ agenda, and the false ideologies of our age. In every era of the church, syncretism—taking the Bible and correlating it to the current thought of the day—has always been a constant danger for the church to stand against. For, in the end, syncretism results in a distortion and rejection of the truth of the gospel. But sadly, within the church, the call to stand for the truth has not always been heeded. Ours is a day of untethered niceness, winsomeness, and nuance, and too often these characteristics are a cover for accommodation. But the reality is this: until Christ returns, the church is called to stand for the truth of the gospel without compromise, which often requires a “loving confrontation” (to use the words of Francis Schaeffer).

How to Spot a Heretic

In light of these two truths, it’s important to ask: how do we recognize false teaching in order to counter it? Jeremy Jackson has suggested that what unites all heresies is the denial of Christ and his work.[1] I agree with him. So how do you recognize a “false teacher” or a “false view,” whether it’s an ancient or a present-day one? We must ask the all-important question: Who do you say that the Lord Jesus Christ is? What do you think about him and what he achieved for us?

1. See Jeremy C. Jackson, No Other Foundation (Westchester, IL: Crossway, 1980), 31–42.

Why is Jesus so central to all heresies? The answer is quite straightforward: He is the one who takes us to the heart of who God is, as the divine Son, the second person of the Trinity. To get him right means that we get our entire doctrine of God right, who is the Creator and Lord of all. Furthermore, to get his work right means that we grasp the God of sovereign grace who alone can save us. For fallen creatures, the idea of salvation by God’s grace—involving a real incarnation, effected on a cross, publicly demonstrated in an empty tomb, and doing something we cannot do—offends us. As sinful people, we have a hard time receiving Christ and his finished work; it reminds us that we have nothing to contribute. In our sin, we think we are good enough to save ourselves. But to grasp Christ and his work reminds us that salvation is by God’s sovereign initiative and invitation, not ours. God’s solution in Christ speaks to the nature of our radical problem! We think we can contribute something, but we cannot. We want to be our own Lord and master, so we hate the idea of a sovereign God and Savior. That is why getting Christ right is central to getting the truth of the gospel right!

But if a wrong view of Christ and his work is at heart of all heresy, then the remedy to false teaching and the temptation of syncretism is a proper view of Christ and his work. This truth is taught throughout the New Testament, but specifically in Colossians 2:6–10. The church at Colossae was in danger of succumbing to syncretism. They faced what some have called the “Colossian heresy.” This heresy seemed to be the attempt to dilute the glory, sovereignty, and sufficiency of Christ with some version of Greek and Jewish thought. This is why Paul warns the church to stand firm in Christ and not to “mix” the truth of Christ with the thought of the day.

Paul’s Warning to Avoid Syncretism

Paul’s warning is given in Colossians 2:8, which builds on what he has said in Colossians 2:1–7. Paul wants the church to be grounded and established in Christ, “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col. 2:3). He does not want them to be hoodwinked by “fine-sounding arguments” (Col. 2:4) that leads them away from Christ or seeks to “mix” the truth of who he is with some kind of viewpoint contrary to Scripture.

In fact, he warns them by reminding them what he has already said in the great Christological text of Colossians 1:15–20. In Colossians 2:6, he says that the church had “received” Christ Jesus as Lord, a reference to his discussion of Christ’s lordship in Colossians 1. “Received” is a technical term that speaks of the church receiving the apostolic message centered in Christ, and Paul exhorts them to continue to “live,” or (a better translation) to “walk” in Christ, being “rooted and built up in him” (Col. 2:7). In other words, do not depart from the apostolic gospel because in it alone is given Christ and all his glory.

Why ought we “to live” in Christ? Because “Christ Jesus is Lord” of all (Col. 2:6). In Colossians 1:15–20, Paul has already unpacked the nature of Christ’s Lordship and what this entails. Christ, who is the divine Son of the Father is the “firstborn,” i.e., supreme over creation because in and through him the Father has created all things (Col. 1:16). As such, the Son is Lord over the entire universe because he is the Creator and Sustainer of all things (Col. 1:1–17), and in fact, the entire universe has been created for him (Col. 1:17). As the divine Son, he equally and fully shares the divine nature with the Father and Spirit so that all knowledge and all glory are found in him. No wonder, Paul exhorts the Colossians to “live” in him. But there is even more: Christ is Lord because he is both the Creator and Redeemer. In him, due to his incarnation and work, he is “the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead” (Col. 1:18). In him alone is redemption and reconciliation, the forgiveness of sin, and the dawning of the new creation (Col. 1:13–14). By his creation and redeeming work, Christ is Lord twice, and as such he is supreme over all. Apart from him, there is no knowledge, no wisdom, no life, and no salvation. But in him, he is all that we need for knowledge, wisdom, life, and salvation. Indeed, in Colossians 2:6, there is an implicit warning given: to go to “another Christ” is utter foolishness given who he is and what he has done for us. Christ Jesus our Lord is more than able to meet all our needs; indeed, in him alone can our needs to be met. Nothing or no one can replace him. Christ Jesus is Lord!

It is this crucial point about Christ’s person and work that Paul reminds the Colossians about in Colossians 2:6–7 before he warns them explicitly in Colossians 2:8: “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ.” Paul’s warning is strong: “Don’t be kidnapped, or exploited, or carried off as spoil.” In other words, don’t be fooled by any thought that is not grounded in Christ. Paul’s warning and exhortation shows how seriously he stood for the truth and warned against the error of false teaching and teachers. In fact, Paul is explicit in what he has in mind, something that the church was in danger of capitulating to. Don’t be taken captive by “hollow and deceptive philosophy,” which is in contrast to the “glorious riches” in Christ (Col. 2:3). Such philosophy is “deceptive,” meaning that is seductive, misleading, and wrong.

Two Competing Philosophies

Paul is not saying that all “philosophy” is wrong. God is the source and standard of truth, knowledge, and wisdom and in loving God, we are to love the truth! Paul is not opposing human thinking, reasoning, and rationality. In fact, in Colossians 2:8, he clearly states that Christians are to ground their philosophy in Christ. Instead, what he is opposing is philosophy that is grounded in “human tradition” and not in the wisdom of Christ. As “tradition” it may appear to have an authority, but Paul denies that it has any divine origin at all. It is simply human. In fact, it’s not merely human because Paul goes on to say that behind these human “ideas” are “elementary principles,” which is probably a reference to demonic powers.

This is why Paul warns the church as he does. Not all “philosophy” is equal. There is a true philosophy but also a false one. Christians need discernment to know which one to embrace and the criteria is found in whether such “philosophy” conforms to Christ. In other words, the standard by which we are to evaluate all ideas, ideologies, and philosophies is the standard of Christ and his word. If human thought is not consistent with this standard, then it must be rejected. By itself, it has no authority, and ultimately it stands opposed to Christ. In other words, its teaching is not merely mistaken; it’s a denial of the truth that leads to error, spiritual slavery, and away from the truth that is found in Christ alone. This kind of false “philosophy” must be avoided like the plague and it needs to be critiqued by the standard of Christ.

Paul was very concerned that the Colossian church heeded this warning. This warning reminds us of the danger of syncretism. It is simply impossible to “mix” human tradition that stands opposed to Christ with Christ. The same danger faces us today. Human thought by itself has no authority. As human thought reflects something of God’s created order, what we call natural revelation, then it can say things that are true. But we only know that it is saying something true as we compare and contrast it with the truth found in Christ and his word.

Paul’s Remedy for Syncretism

Paul’s warning to avoid syncretism also gives his remedy on how to do so, which we have already mentioned above. In not wanting this church to be taken captive by hollow, empty human thought, as I noted, Paul is not denying that there is a true philosophy that we ought to embrace with joy. This true philosophy is not found in human tradition, but in Christ. And it’s found in Christ because Christ Jesus is Lord (Col. 1:15–20). In Colossians 2:9, Paul reiterates this same point by saying that we are to find our love of wisdom and knowledge in Christ alone because “in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form.”

This is a staggering statement, which reminds us once again that Jesus is the divine, eternal Son and thus of the same nature (homoousios) with the Father and Spirit. But Christ is not only the one in whom “God in all his fullness dwells,” but now, in light of the incarnation, God in all of his fullness now permanently resides in the incarnate Jesus in bodily form. It is on this basis that the later Chalcedonian Definition is made. Who is Jesus? Jesus is God the Son incarnate, i.e., the divine person of the Son who has always shared fully and equally the divine nature with the Father and Spirit, but who now permanently subsists in two natures.

It’s this Jesus, who is Lord that Christians have come to know and been united to in faith. This Jesus who is “head over every power and authority” (Col. 2:10) is now our new covenant head, due to his sovereign grace, so that in him, we are complete.

Two Applications

There are at least two implications for us.  

First, Paul gives us the warrant for a Christian worldview/philosophy, but not one that is grounded in non-Christian thought, but ultimately rooted and grounded in Christ. For this reason, we must test all ideas, philosophies, and ideologies by the standard of Scripture, which is nothing less than Christ’s word. The question we must always ask is this: Are the claims of non-Christian philosophy, science, psychology, sociology, etc. consistent with the truth of Scripture? This is the standard by which Christians are to judge all matters and critique all thought. If non-Christians say something that is true, then it is fine to accept it, but we only know this if it corresponds to what God has spoken in Christ Jesus our Lord. Christ and his word is the only standard by which we evaluate all human thought.

Second, we are to find our sufficiency in Christ. We are to find it in no one else. Why would we go after broken cisterns and trade our birth right for a mess of pottage? The constant temptation of the church is to go after every idea, fad, and gimmick. But given who Jesus is, in him we have everything for now and eternity. The one in whom the fullness of God himself dwells has come to our aid and given us all we need. We no longer need to feel oppressed by our sin, guilt, the powers, and so on. We are complete in him.

Syncretism is a constant danger for the church. Scripture repeatedly warns us against falling prey to its tantalizing lure. But the only remedy is Christ in all of his deity, glory, majesty, beauty, wisdom, and redeeming grace. May the church warrant what it believes only in Christ, and may we continue to live in him and find in him our all in all.

1. David L. Allen, Hebrews, (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman, 2010), 111.

While David Allen and I have had our disputes about the extent of the atonement and other matters found in Hebrews, this is a point on which we agree. Hebrews’ vertical typology, as Ardel Caneday demonstrated, is not dependent on Plato, Philo, or any other ancient philosophical system. Instead, the relationship of heaven to earth, type to antitype, old to new, shadow and substance is found in the Bible itself. As we discussed in our podcasts with Tom Schreiner, James White, and Matt Emadi, Hebrews is a Master Class on reading the Old Testament and reading all of Scripture in light of Christ.

While Platonism, as a system of thought developed from the writings of Plato (428–347 BC), was present in the first century, it is unlikely it had a significant role in forming the thoughts of New Testament authors. Nevertheless, in the centuries after the New Testament, the impact of Plato and what came to be known as Neo-Platonism did have an impact on the church. And in recent years, as interest in the early church has increased, Christian Platonism has grown in the interest, too.

But what is Christian Platonism? And why does it matter? And if it doesn’t change the way we read books like Hebrews, why give it a second thought?

The answer is that, whether you think about Christian Platonism or not, there are many training future pastors who are thinking about Christian Platonism and incorporating it into new books, commentaries, and journal articles. And thus, like the evangelical scholars that evaluated the claims that Hebrews was Platonic, we in our day need to do the same.

When someone with a prominent position says, “No Plato, No Bible,” we must decide—is that true? Is that overstated? Do I need to add Plato to my devotional reading? Who was Plato and what is this thing called “Christian Platonism”?

This month, we will answer those questions. And below, Steve Wellum will explain further why this month matters. But first, let me step back and rehearse how Christ Over All decides its monthly themes.

A Method to Our Madness: How Christ Over All Builds the Calendar

If you have kept up with Christ Over All, you know that every month we take up a new topic that is related to the Bible, theology, church, or culture. We intersperse these topics throughout the year to provide a well-balanced diet of biblical exposition, constructive theology, cultural commentary, polemical apologetics, and more. Some of these months are more devotional—albeit theologically devotional. Some of these months are more cultural and political.

Like Samuel Rutherford, we want to address matters of public theology, as he did with Lex Rex, while simultaneously, delighting in the beauty of Christ, as he did with The Loveliness of Christ. Without claiming to possess his skill or sublimity, our editorial process strives to balance polemics and piety.^[2] At a time when a commitment to winsomeness at all costs has led some to shrink back from addressing error out loud and in public, the reactionary error of bellicose public theology can obscure the simple command to “consider Jesus Christ, the apostle and high priest of our confession” (Heb. 3:1). Avoiding both ditches, we want to produce material that helps the church love Christ more, even as we engage in spiritual battle.

2. Additionally, for a vision of piety that is outward-facing and avoids passive quiescence, see C. R. Wiley, The Household and the War for the Cosmos: Recovering a Christian Vision of the Family (Moscow, ID: Canon Press), 2019.

To that end, we have considered Jesus in the book of Hebrews. And come November and December, we will again turn to Christ, his kingdom, and the praise he deserves. These two months will follow two heavily political months, as we offer counsel on voting to the glory of God in September and living wisely in a Leviathan state in October. In these four months, we hope to balance a vision of Christ with a framework for exalting Christ in all of life.

Still, before we enter the fall, this next month will be little more esoteric and academy-specific. That is to say, if terms like Plato, Platonism, Plotinus, and Participatory Exegesis are foreign to you, you may greatly benefit by reading the works presented this month; they will stretch you to learn church history as well as some of the contemporary trends of modern evangelical thought.

At the same time, these things may sound overly-esoteric. If so, you can take time to read through another month. And you can pray for the professors and institutions who are training the next generation of pastors. Indeed, this is why we take up Christian Platonism this month. For in those halls of sacred learning, discussions about this topic are being had today, and they will be trickling down to a church near you in the very near future.

As scholars of a previous generation introduced ideas of Platonism to the book of Hebrews, and other scholars, for the purpose of understanding God’s Word, had to dispute those claims, so too we have to discern the claims of Christian Platonism. Only, in this case, it is not a matter of questioning if Plato and Platonism impacted the inspiration of the Bible. It is a case, instead, of comparing what Scripture says to the ways that Scripture has been interpreted. In this way, we will engage church history this month, but also we will evaluate the gifts that Greeks bring.

Here’s a preview of that evaluation.

Beware of Greek’s Bearing Gifts: Plundering Plato without Becoming Platonists (by Steve Wellum)

Every generation of Christians has to decide what has priority in our doing of theology and applying the gospel to our lives. Is it Scripture as our final and supreme authority or is it Scripture plus some version of non-Christian thought? Throughout the ages, syncretism has been a constant temptation for the church. At its heart, syncretism seeks to combine the truth of Scripture with some form of non-Christian philosophy, science, psychology, etc. but when it does, the teaching and authority of Scripture is often compromised.

For example, the first great heresy of the early church was Gnosticism. Gnosticism prioritized Greek philosophy over Scripture, yet it also appealed to Scripture. In the end, its theological “synthesis” led to a denial of crucial biblical truths such as creation out of nothing, the importance of the material world, the reality of the incarnation, and the need for the bodily resurrection. In fact, the heresy of Arianism was indebted to a form of Gnosticism that led to a denial of the deity of Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity.

In addition, various hermeneutical debates such as the debate over a “literal” reading of Scripture versus an “allegorical” reading was also due to the embrace of Greek thought at the expense of reading Scripture on its own terms and due to its inspiration by which God communicates his truth to us through the agency of human authors. Examples could be multiplied where false teaching has crept into the church due to theologians not fully embracing Scripture alone as our final authority and the standard by which we evaluate all non-Christian thought.

Today, a number of influential, evangelical scholars are calling the church to embrace what is known as “Christian Platonism.” Their claim is that without some version of “Platonism” governing our theology, evangelical theology won’t be able to fully embrace the historic confessions of the church, especially regarding the doctrine of God, and we won’t have a sufficient answer to the secular, postmodern thought of our day. But is this claim true? That is the question we will answer this month.

No doubt, Christian Platonism requires careful definition and it can be used in a number of ways, even ways that are helpful. However, our concern is that it may inadvertently lead to a new form of “syncretism” that will eventually hinder our doing of theology and the health and life of the church. For this reason, we want to think about this “new” movement and some of its implications for the doing of theology. In other words, we want to reflect on its strengths and weaknesses and provide a preliminary evaluation of it for the church. Although the issue is complicated, we are concerned that Scripture is given priority in all of our thinking and lives, and that the thinking of any age is brought under the Lordship of Christ and his Word.

With this goal in mind, our focus this month will be to first understand what Christian Platonism is before we discuss some of its potential dangers for evangelical theology and practice.

In addition, we will get to know Plato, as well as some of the theological giants from the past who interacted with Greek thought without succumbing to a syncretistic form of theology. Indeed, we want to learn how to “plunder the Greeks,” without being ruled by them. As in every age of the church, we must learn to stand under God’s Word as our final authority, and thus to bring every thought captive to Christ.

May this month of reflection on this important trend in evangelical theology not only inform us about what is currently being debated in the academy, but also encourage us not to be held captive to the thought of our day (or the thought of the past) so that we are found faithful servants of our Lord Jesus Christ, who alone is our wisdom, righteousness, and truth.

Getting into the Book of Hebrews

So that is where we are going. But as we enter the new month, we do not want to forget the rich resources provided last month on the book of Hebrews.

As one of the most glorious expositions of Christ in the Bible, Hebrews provides a rich display of Christ’s priesthood, sacrifice, covenant mediation, kingship, and more. It is written to encourage disheartened saints to keep going and to not shrink back. And in the essays and podcasts listed here, we pray you may find the same grace (longforms in red).

“An Introduction to the Book of Hebrews” • Episode 3.34 • Thomas R. Schreiner, David Schrock, Stephen Wellum • Interview

“The Newness of the New Covenant” • Episode 3.35 • James White, David Schrock, Stephen Wellum • Interview

“The Kingdom of God in Hebrews” • Episode 3.36 • Matthew Emadi, David Schrock, Stephen Wellum • Interview

The Kingdom of God in Hebrewsby Matthew Emadi • The kingdom of God is foundational to the storyline of the Bible. Throughout Scripture, God is working to establish his rule over his people in his place. The book of Hebrews shows us that this kingdom has finally been brought about with the reign of our resurrected king. READ ESSAY

An Introduction to the Book of Hebrews by Thomas R. Schreiner • In this excerpt from his commentary, Dr. Thomas Schreiner introduces us to the book of Hebrews and its major themes. READ ESSAY

Stir Up One Another to Love and Good Marriages by Trent Hunter • Marriage matters. And since marriage matters, we should strive to prize and protect it. READ ARTICLE

Measuring the Tabernacle in Hebrews: How to See Biblical Types on Earth as They Are in Heaven by Ardel Caneday • Was the tabernacle a type of something greater to come or an antitype of a heavenly reality? The answer is “Yes.” Let’s allow the author of Hebrews to help us expand our understanding of biblical typology. READ ARTICLE

From Deuteronomy to Hebrews: The Promised Land and the Unity of Scripture By Gareth Lee Cockerill • When we trace the theme of the promised land across the canon, what do we find? That God is bringing his people into a final rest with him. Let us therefore press on to enter that land. READ ARTICLE

The Father’s Exaltation of the Son: The Book of Hebrews’ Use of Psalm 110 to Explain the Significance of the Resurrection, Ascension, and Session of Christ by Ryan Rippee • Why should we draw near to God with confidence? Why can we endure the arduous race set before us with hope? Because King Jesus lives, reigning over his creation and interceding on our behalf. READ ARTICLE

The Land Promise in Hebrews by Matthew Emadi • The book of Hebrews stirs up our longing for the Promised Land. This is no earthly city, however, but rather the heavenly city where we will dwell with our God. READ ARTICLE

Hearing God Right: A Closer Look at Hebrews 1:5 by Jim Dernell • In order to hear God rightly, we must know how to listen well. And we learn to listen well by paying careful attention to how the biblical authors themselves listened to Scripture. READ ARTICLE

Perfected and Perfecting: The Theme of Perfection in Hebrews by David G. Peterson • In order to dwell with God, God’s people needed to be perfected. And there was one man fit for the job—the God-man who had been perfected himself. READ ARTICLE

Does Hebrews 6 Teach You Can Lose Your Salvation? By Ardel Caneday • Does the warning in Hebrews 6 mean a Christian can lose his salvation? No. These warnings are a grace from God that helps true believers finish the race of faith. READ ARTICLE

ENCORE: Ten Reasons Why the Bible is the Greatest of the Great Books by Jim Orrick • While many great books have been written, the Bible has surpassed them all. Here are ten reasons why. READ ARTICLE

Our Priest in the Pattern of Melchizedek: Eight Conclusions Hebrews 5–7 Draws about Jesus the Messiah from Genesis 14:18–20 and Psalm 110:4 by Andy Naselli • The author of Hebrews knew how to read his Bible. What can we learn from him about the mysterious character of Melchizedek? READ ARTICLE

Why Did God the Son Become Human? By Stephen Wellum • Why did Jesus need to take on flesh to save us? Here are four answers from the book of Hebrews. READ ARTICLE

Christ Over All News and Notes

Finally, let me highlight two things as we wrap up.

First, if you live in Minnesota or are willing to walk, drive, or fly to the land of 10,000 lakes, the guys from Christ Over All will be there twice in September. I (David) will be speaking on the theme of priesthood in the life of the local church at The Pastor’s Seminar at Eden Baptist Church on Tuesday, September 17. And later that week (September 20–21), Steve Wellum, Brad Green, and Ardel Caneday will be speaking at Christ Bible Church on the subject of “Political Engagement in the Light of the Lordship of Christ.” If you can make either of those events, we’d love to see you.

Second, we invite you to prayerfully consider giving to the work of Christ Over All. As we come to the second half of the year, we are working on developing our website, adding a store, and continuing to provide resources to you for free. To make that happen, we depend on the gifts and financial contributions of friends and churches. If you are able and willing to help in this work, please talk to us or simply go to Christ Over All to make a one-time gift or become a monthly partner.

That’s it for this month. Until next time, let us all remember that Christ is Lord and all things are under his feet, so in all things let us exalt Christ.

Soli Deo Gloria!

The entire book of Hebrews focuses on the supremacy and glory of the Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. By expounding multiple Old Testament texts, and by a series of contrasts with various Old Testament figures, the author encourages a group of predominately Jewish Christians with the truth that Jesus has come as the Lord in the flesh to fulfill all of the promises and expectations of the Old Testament.

Beginning in Hebrews 1:1–4, the author uses a series of comparisons and contrasts to unpack his thesis that Jesus is superior to all of the Old Testament figures before him, including Moses, Joshua, and the high priests. But he begins by demonstrating that Jesus is superior to angels. First, Jesus is greater than angels who serve God because he is the divine Son (Heb. 1:5–14). In contrast to angels, the Son is identified with the Lord due to his greater name (Heb. 1:4–5), the worship he receives (Heb. 1:6), his unchanging existence as the universe’s Creator and Lord (Heb. 1:10–12), and the rule and reign he shares with his Father (Heb. 1:7–9, 13). Angels, on the other hand, are simply creatures and ministering servants (Heb. 1:7, 14); they are not God-equal with the Father. Second, Jesus is superior to angels because he has come to do the work that no angel could ever do. By assuming our humanity, the Son becomes the representative man of Psalm 8—the last Adam—who undoes the first Adam’s covenantal disobedience and ushers in the new creation by bringing all things into subjection under his rule and reign.

In Hebrews 2:5–18, the author focuses on the centrality of the incarnation to the fulfillment of God’s redemptive plan, which is his final argument for the superiority of the Son. In so doing, a four-part rationale for the purpose and necessity of the incarnation is given. Let us look at each of these glorious truths in turn in Hebrews 2:5–18:

⁵For it was not to angels that God subjected the world to come, of which we are speaking. ⁶It has been testified somewhere, “What is man, that you are mindful of him, or the son of man, that you care for him? ⁷You made him for a little while lower than the angels; you have crowned him with glory and honor, ⁸putting everything in subjection under his feet.” Now in putting everything in subjection to him, he left nothing outside his control. At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him. ⁹But we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.

¹⁰For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering. ¹¹For he who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one source. That is why he is not ashamed to call them brothers, ¹²saying, “I will tell of your name to my brothers; in the midst of the congregation I will sing your praise.” ¹³And again, “I will put my trust in him.” And again, “Behold, I and the children God has given me.”

¹⁴Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, ¹⁵and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery. ¹⁶For surely it is not angels that he helps, but he helps the offspring of Abraham. ¹⁷Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. ¹⁸For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.

1. The Divine Son Became a Man to Fulfill God’s Creation Intention for Humanity (Heb. 2:5–9).

The author demonstrates this point by an appeal to Psalm 8. In its Old Testament context, Psalm 8 celebrates the majesty of God as the Creator and the exalted position humans have in creation. The Psalm reminds us of God’s creation design for humans, namely that we were created as his image-bearers to exercise dominion over the world as his vice-regents (Gen. 1–2). In fact, in transitioning from the quotation of Psalm 8:4–6 to Jesus, Hebrews stresses the honor and glory of humanity by emphasizing how God intended that all things be subjected to Adam and, by extension, to all humanity: “Now in putting everything in subjection to him, he left nothing outside his control” (Heb. 2:8b). However, as we know from Genesis 3, Adam disobeyed, and as a result, all humanity is now under God’s judgment. Hebrews makes this exact point: “At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him” (Heb 2:8c). When we look at the world, we know that God’s creation design for humans has been frustrated; we do not rule as God intended us to rule. Instead of putting the earth under our feet, we are eventually put under the earth as God’s rebellious image-bearers.

Thankfully, this is not the end of the story. Just as Psalm 8 challenges us to look back to Genesis 1–2, it also challenges us, in anticipation, to look forward to our restoration. Given its position in the Old Testament, especially in light of God’s “first gospel promise” (Gen. 3:15) and the unfolding development of this promise through the biblical covenants, Psalm 8 speaks prophetically. David looks forward to a day when God will restore us to our created purpose, a restoration that will occur through another man—one who comes from humanity and identifies with us, who acts on our behalf like Adam of old, but who, instead of failure by Adam’s disobedience, gives us victory by his obedience (Rom. 5:12–21).

This is precisely how Hebrews 2:9 applies Psalm 8 to Christ: “But we see him who for a little while was made lower than angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.” Jesus is presented as the antitype of Adam. He is the representative human whose obedient humiliation in his incarnation and death kept the obligations of the covenant and secured his exaltation that he will share with his people. As Tom Schreiner nicely states, “In that sense, [Jesus] is the true human being, the only one who has genuinely lived the kind of life that humans were intended to live under God.”^[1] The rule promised to humanity has been taken up by the man Christ Jesus, who is restoring a people to bear the image of God in truth, making us truly human again.

1. Thomas Schreiner, New Testament Theology: Magnifying God in Christ (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 382.

2. The Divine Son Became a Man to Bring Many Sons to Glory (Heb. 2:10–13).

In the context of Hebrews 2, the word “glory” is not a reference to heaven; rather, it is a term from Psalm 8 referring to God’s intention to restore us to what he created humans to be. The imagery identifies Jesus with Yahweh who led Israel out of Egypt in the first exodus to make them into a people for his own possession and purposes. Jesus has now brought about the new exodus through his death and resurrection. As the “founder [archēgon] of their salvation” (Heb. 2:10)—a word which conveys the idea of “pioneer” (leader/forerunner and founder/victor)—Jesus is now leading a people out of slavery to sin and death (Heb. 2:14–15) and into the covenant life and representative reign under God that he has planned from the beginning. Jesus is the first man of the new creation. He is the trailblazer/champion who has won the victory for new humanity by opening up new territory through his redemptive work.

This new exodus and the glory of a new humanity depend on the Son’s suffering, which requires his incarnation. To bring many sons to glory, “it was fitting that he [God] . . . should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering” (Heb. 2:10). In fact, unless the Son took upon our humanity and suffered for us, there would be no suffering to help humanity, no fulfillment of God’s promises for humanity, and no return to the planned glory of humanity. Jesus’s suffering and death, then, was not a failed end to the incarnation but the precise purpose of it, all of which fulfills God’s plan to perfect a new humanity to rule over his good creation.

Also, Jesus himself was made “perfect through suffering,” or better, “through sufferings” (Heb. 2:10). The precise meaning of “perfection” in Hebrews is debated. In the present context, it’s best to understand perfection vocationally, namely that our Lord was fully equipped for his office. In addition, “through sufferings” is not synonymous with “the suffering of death” (Heb. 2:9), but it speaks of the sufferings through which Christ had to pass, which entails his entire experience of suffering associated with and leading up to Christ’s death. Thus, in order for Christ to fulfill his office of Mediator for us, he had to become one with us, and his entire human experience qualified him to become “our merciful and faithful high priest” (Heb. 2:17).

Finally, his human identification and suffering was necessary to “bring many sons to glory” (Heb. 2:10). God’s fitting action of perfecting the Son by the incarnation and his suffering serves as the basis for his people who are beginning to be restored to the purpose of their creation. Both the Son as sanctifier and the sons who are sanctified are all of one origin and “that is why he is not ashamed to call them brothers” (Heb. 2:11b). By the incarnation, then, the Son came to share in the source and suffering of our human nature. And his human identification and suffering was the only way to bring a ruined humanity into the glory of a new humanity.

3. The Divine Son Became a Man to Destroy the Power of Death and the Devil (Heb. 2:14–16).

Hebrews directly connects the incarnation with the destruction of all that holds the new humanity back from its divinely planned and promised glory: “Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery” (Heb. 2:14–15). In short, the destruction of our slave-master and our deliverance from the cage of fear requires that like us the Son would come to “share in flesh and blood.”

Scripture teaches that death is not normal to God’s creation; rather, it’s the result of sin (Gen. 2:17). Death is God’s penalty for our disobedience (Rom. 6:23). In judgment against our sin, God gave us over to the power of Satan (2 Cor. 4:4; Eph. 2:1–3; Col. 1:13). Created to rule over God’s creation as his image-bearers, we now cower in fear before God as those who are spiritually dead, which ultimately shows itself in our physical death. Our only hope is found in our “pioneer” (Heb. 2:10) who goes before us and defeats our enemies. We need a Savior who can deal with sin, death, and Satan by first sharing our common humanity. We need a Savior who would suffer and die in that humanity so that by his death the power of death is destroyed.

In fact, only as the incarnate Son can our Lord accomplish our salvation and defeat our enemies. It’s not angels he helps since he does not identify with or take on the nature of an angel. Rather, the Son identifies with the offspring of Abraham, his people, and leads them to glory in a new exodus of victory and triumph. By his incarnation and cross-work, the Son becomes our victor who wins the battle, and apart from him, there is no salvation. Our plight is so desperate that it requires nothing less than the enfleshment of God’s own Son, and his entire work of redemption for us.

4. The Divine Son Became a Man to Become a Merciful and Faithful High Priest (Heb. 2:17–18).

The mention of Jesus as our high priest introduces the office and work of Christ that the author of Hebrews will explore in great detail throughout the rest of the book (Heb. 4:14–5:10; 7:1–10:25). In the context of Hebrews 2, however, the high priesthood of Christ places a capstone on the argument for the purpose and necessity of the incarnation. The author begins by stressing the mandatory and comprehensive nature of the incarnation: “Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect” (Heb. 2:17a). In other words, to come according to the plan of God, the Son could not take on a partial or pseudo-human nature. The Son was under obligation by the Father to take on our humanity that exactly corresponds to our human nature, except without sin.

More specifically, two purpose clauses tell us that God the Son had to become a man, (1) “so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God”; and (2) “to make propitiation for the sins of the people” (Heb. 2:17b). Or, in the language of the early church, the Son could not redeem what he did not assume; representation requires identification. If the Son did not become one with us, he could not have redeemed us by his entire life and death for us.

Concluding Reflection

This four-part rationale from Hebrews 2:5–18 gloriously explains why the divine Son had to become human to redeem us from our sin and to restore us to the purpose of our creation. It’s no wonder that Jesus alone can save us, given our plight before God and the kind of Redeemer he is. May we ever learn to glory in Christ Jesus our Lord who loved us and gave himself for us.

1. Anselm, Why God Become Man? in Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works. Oxford World’s Classics, ed. Brian Davies and G. R. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

2. On this point, see Benjamin Wheaton, Suffering, Not Power: Atonement in the Middle Ages (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Academic, 2022).

Anselm’s work is often criticized for being too influenced by his 11^th-century culture. As the story goes, the transition from the Patristic era to the medieval/feudal era over-emphasized legal relationships by focusing on the concept of honor that required exact satisfaction to restore a person’s dishonored name. Seeking to interpret the cross within this feudal-legal(istic) framework, Anselm argued that Christ provided the exact payment or satisfaction for our sin.

However, this critique is simply false. Although Anselm lived in a feudal society, he wasn’t indebted to it in his understanding of the cross. Anselm didn’t view sin as merely a wrong done against an abstract principle or arbitrary law. Anselm spoke of sin as dishonoring God because God is the greatest of all Beings, the Creator and Lord of the universe. Thus, when Anselm speaks of God’s honor, he basically means God’s glory, as he grounds God’s glory/honor in God’s self-sufficiency (aseity) and holiness. For this reason, what is more significant to grasp about Anselm’s view of the cross is not his feudalism but the central role the doctrine of God plays in his view that the cross is a sacrifice that expiates our sin, propitiates God’s wrath, and satisfies God’s righteous demand against us, thus reconciling God to us and us to God (1.12-15).

We should not, therefore, treat Anselm as merely a cultural artifact of the medieval age. His work is a timeless expression of biblical truth and is still valuable for understanding the atonement today as a profound exercise in “faith seeking understanding.” In this article, I will attempt to capture his overall argument in five points before evaluating its strengths and weaknesses.

A Brief Summary of Why God Became Man?

First, Anselm’s treatise is written in the form of a dialogue between himself and his student, Boso, which seeks to answer the following question: “By what logic or necessity did God become man, and by his death, as we believe and profess, restore life to the world, when he could have done this through the agency of some other person, angelic or human, or simply by willing it?” (1.1) Ultimately, Anselm’s answer is that God cannot forgive our sin by a mere man or angel or by simply willing it. Instead, God can only forgive our sins by the provision of himself in his divine-human Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, who alone can satisfy God’s righteous demand against our sin by his obedient life and the payment of our sin. In the remainder of the book, Anselm sets out to give a rational and theological accounting of why this is so.

Second, in Book 1, Anselm argues against the popular ransom theory of Satan by demonstrating that: (1) the only necessity for Christ’s death is due to Christ’s willingness to endure the cross for our redemption; and (2) humans and Satan belong to God. As such, it is not Satan who must be satisfied but God (1.8).

Third, Anselm develops with more precision than anyone before him the idea that the atonement is first a satisfaction made to God. Anselm argues that there is a need for satisfaction because sin dishonors God’s name in the rejection of his majestic glory by the image-bearers that God created to rule under his sovereign authority. Anselm writes, “Everyone who sins ought to render back to God the honor he has taken away, and this is the satisfaction which every sinner ought to make to God” (1.11). Why can God not overlook the dishonor done to him and freely forgive humans without the demand for satisfaction? Anselm answers: Because of who God is as the moral ruler of the universe. For God to forgive without satisfaction would compromise his character and nothing could be “less tolerable in the order of things than that the creature should take away from the Creator the honor due to him, and not repay what he takes away” (1.13). In fact, if God were to forgive arbitrarily without satisfaction, God would annul the total moral order through which he has expressed himself in the world, and he would cease to be the most perfect being. Also, the sin in which humans are involved is our sin. We are responsible for not rendering to God the honor due to him and for our inability to do so (1.24). We have failed to satisfy the conditions of our existence and have brought dishonor to God. But God, the most perfect being, cannot allow his dishonor to go unpunished; he must restore the original creation to its balance and harmony.

Fourth, because of who God is and our responsible choices, there are two possibilities open for the satisfaction of God’s honor and the punishment of our sin: punishment must follow every sin or satisfaction must follow every sin (1.15). If God chooses punishment, he is vindicated but then his purpose for humans in creation is ultimately frustrated. Thankfully, God has chosen the more difficult way of satisfaction. But in choosing satisfaction for every sin, there is a major problem: humans must pay the debt of satisfaction, and yet we cannot because we have caused the dishonor and whatever we do in honoring God is only what we already owe. Besides, even if present debts could be paid, this would not compensate for past ones. Our human condition is this: “I have nothing to render to him [God] in compensation for sin” (1.20).

Fifth, in Book 2, Anselm argues that Jesus alone can save us because of who he is and what he does for us. Since our sin and debt before God is infinite, only God can pay it; but since we owe it, we must pay it: “There is no one, therefore, who can make satisfaction except God himself … But no one ought to make it except man: otherwise man does not make satisfaction” (2.6). The only solution to this dilemma is for the God-man to satisfy divine honor by paying for human sin. Thus, in order to redeem us, God the Son must become man to pay our debt as God in his life and death as man in which he fulfills the obligation we owe of perfectly obeying the Father. We come to benefit from the Son’s obedient life and death because, in Christ’s voluntary self-sacrifice, he wins an excess of reward—not for himself since he is sinless and perfect—but for sinners like ourselves (2.10; 2.19). Christ directs that his reward should be given to sinners to provide satisfaction for their sins, and the Father gives redemption, as a gift, to all who receive the Son (2.20).

A Critical Evaluation for the Church Today

In reflecting on Anselm’s monumental work, the main biblical-theological strength of his argument is twofold: it beautifully integrates the incarnation and atonement, and it locates the cross’s necessity in the nature of God. These points together provide greater precision in our understanding of the nature of the atonement, its necessity, and why Christ alone is Lord and Savior. Anselm clearly sees the centrality of God in the purpose of the cross and the problem of forgiveness: sin brings under God’s holy and just wrath the humanity he has promised to redeem. In these areas he is on solid biblical-theological ground, and we ignore these points to our peril.

Anselm’s argument, however, has at least two weaknesses.

First, Anselm does not fully explain how Christ atones for sin. Anselm explains how Christ satisfies divine honor, but what about sin? Is there still something we must do for our salvation? For Anselm, God says, “accept my only-begotten Son,” and Christ says, “take me and redeem thyself” (2.16) but this does not fully explain how Christ’s work is applied to us. What is missing is a strong emphasis on our covenantal union with Christ and Christ acting as our new covenant representative and substitute in his work for us. Could this be one of the reasons why later medieval theology took the idea of Christ meriting an excess of honor to argue for human merit and then inserted the church as the mediator of Christ’s work to sinners? Is it accidental that Thomas Aquinas moves in this direction? I don’t think so.

Aquinas interprets Christ’s excess of honor as a work of supererogation, i.e., a work that goes beyond what is required. As Gregg Allison explains, “For Anselm, this had meant that Christ’s infinite satisfaction through his death could be applied to the infinite penalty accumulated by humanity’s sin. But Aquinas viewed both the life and the death of Christ as a ‘superabundant atonement for the sins of the human race.’”^[3] Also, in regard to how the atonement is applied to us, Aquinas argues that it is “through faith and charity and the sacraments of faith,”^[4] which introduces human cooperation as necessary for salvation alongside Christ’s atonement. Specifically, the sacraments include baptism, which removes original sin and actual sins committed before baptism, and penance, which deals with our actual sins subsequent to baptism. In salvation, then, Christ’s superabundant work pays for our eternal punishment, but alongside his work, our actual sins are forgiven by our participation in the sacraments mediated by the church. In Aquinas, the church’s role fills the vacuum left unexplained by Anselm on how Christ pays for our sin and how it is applied through faith in Christ. As Allison rightly observes, it is not difficult to see “how this idea [of human merit] could turn into a system of human works designed to merit the grace and forgiveness of God.”^[5]

3. Gregg Allison, Historical Theology: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), 398. See Aquinas, Summa Theologica, pt. 3, q. 48, art. 2.

4. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, pt. 3, q. 49, art. 3.

5. Allison, Historical Theology, 398.

Second, and building on the first point, for all of Anselm’s stress on the incarnation he fails to “connect” Christ with his people. He fails to place Christ’s work within its biblical, covenantal context, and as such, he loses the sense of covenant representation and substitution. He doesn’t connect the life and death of Christ as the obedient incarnate Son who acts on our behalf as our mediator. By not thinking of Christ’s obedience as the head of the new covenant, Anselm loses the biblical rationale of how Christ’s righteousness becomes ours, how his death fully satisfies God’s righteous demands, and how we benefit from his entire work.

As noted, I am convinced that these latter points opened the door to the sacramental theology of Rome, which the Reformation thankfully countered. The Reformers returned to Scripture and placed Christ and his work within the biblical storyline and covenantal categories to reclaim the gospel of God’s grace in Christ via the Reformation solas—we are saved by God’s grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. Jesus Christ our Lord has acted for us as our covenant head, representative, and substitute. In solidarity with his people, Christ alone has accomplished and secured everything necessary and sufficient for our salvation. But with that said, Anselm’s work continues to this day as one of the most significant theological works on the atonement, and as such, it continues to be a “must read” for today’s church.