God, Humanity and Dignity

The difference God makes to who we are:

Four decades ago, Thomas Howard and J. I. Packer wrote Christianity: The True Humanism (Word, 1985). Now hard to find, thankfully it was reprinted in 1999 by Regent College Publishing. In the book the authors examined secular humanism and found it wanting, while claiming that it is really Christianity that upholds and affirms humanity, and gives us our real worth and value.

Packer and Howard look at how this works out in terms of things like identity, hope, freedom and culture. Chapter 7 discusses what the Christian view of things entails in relation to human dignity. Consider a few helpful quotes from the chapter:

The strong man can exult in his strength, and the soprano in her voice, and the bridegroom in his bride without becoming guilty of idolatry. Of course these are God’s bounty rather than our own products or possessions. But that is precisely why we must fully acknowledge their created glory, their beauty and capacity and delightfulness. If the seraph or the thrush or the chamois or the bride or the soprano all said, “No, no—it’s nothing. Don’t look at me. I’m a no-good, I’m a dud, I’m a worm,” they would not only be speaking falsely, they would be robbing their Maker of due gratitude. The mock-modesty that declines to accept compliments and to be gratefully realistic in recognizing God’s gifts both demeans the creature and dishonors the Creator. True dignity emerges, not in our faithless and fawning demurrals of worth, but rather in our learning how to bear this truly royal mantle of humanness, and this coronet of beauty or strength or talent or relational joy.

 

Sometimes the mantle is a mantle of pain and loss, and the coronet one of adversity. Not from jealousy, but for purposes of love, God does from time to time take away good things that he gave, and at such times sackcloth must replace holiday dress. It is harder to exult in this regalia. To believe in the value of such experience, and to offer it to God to use, and to thank him for the way he enriches through deprivation is not easy when one is in the thick of it. Here is where Christians turn to the Son of God for their cue. He was never more glorious than when, deprived of all human rights, he was robed in mockery and crowned with thorns. His Transfiguration on the mountain exhibited his glory under the aspect of brilliance; his Passion exhibited that same glory under the aspect of love. And here the disciples must be ready to go the way their master went. That is what Christ’s call to cross-bearing means. (p. 153)

The authors continue:

Cross-bearing is the long lesson of our mortal life. It is a part of God’s salvation, called sanctification. It is a lesson set before us every moment of every day. It concerns this strange and daunting business of how strain and pain—passion, in the sense of conscious suffering voluntarily accepted—may be transmuted into glory. If life were an art lesson, we could describe it as a process of finding how to turn this mud into that porcelain, this discord into that sonata, this ugly stone block into that statue, this tangle of threads into that tapestry. In fact, however, the stakes are higher than in any art lesson. It is in the school of sainthood that we find ourselves enrolled and the artifact that is being made is ourselves. Chisels, kilns, hammers, scissors, needles—these are the trappings we find in studios where beautiful work is being made. Translating all of this into ordinary daily experience, we see the sort of studio God has us in. We are constantly being chipped and banged and burned and cut and knocked into shape—not because the Artist hates his material but because he loves it and has an exquisite artifact in mind.

 

“Dear friends,” wrote John, “now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he [Christ] appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself; just as he is pure” (1 John 3:2-3). And everyone whom God has appointed for this destiny he prepares for it, using afflictions along with our other experiences as his tools for sculpting our souls.

 

Our picture of the artist’s studio reminds us that great beauty lies in all sorts of materials, beauty which is often brought out by procedures that look for all the world as if they are doing violence to those materials. That makes the picture an apt one for God’s work of sanctifying us. In our case the material is the most precious of all materials—created human beings—and the end product will be artifacts of inexpressible loveliness—Christlike human beings. For Jesus Christ, who was and remains perfect man no less than Son of God, is the model to which, so far as our natures can receive it, each single one of us is going to be conformed. We purify ourselves by decision and action, and God purifies us by the refining effect of experience, particularly experience that is felt to be adverse and diminishing, and so the life of grace goes on. (p. 153-154)

They go on to look at all this in terms of worship. We are most fully human when we worship our Creator. And worship is a 24/7 event, not just a Sunday morning affair. They write:

We were made to worship God. Worshiping is our supreme achievement and privilege, and our dignity is fullest as we do the thing we were made for. We enter into our own glory when we glorify God.

 

How then are we to worship? First, by praising God for every truth we know about him and by thanking him for every good gift and good experience, all of which come from his hand. Second, by learning specifically in and with the church to adore Christ the Savior. Third, by making worship out of all the materials of life, not just splendid talents and powers and triumphs and joys, but plodding routines and vexations and pains and humiliations and depressions and rejections and traumas and bewilderments as well. And as we labor to make offerings of worship out of these things—offerings of patience and goodwill and trust and fortitude and hope—so God is laboring in and with us to make us into the most glorious of all his works, namely, worshipers in the image and likeness of Jesus Christ. Christ’s life displayed human dignity to the full, for he worshiped and served God the Father to the full. To the extent that we follow him in this, our lives attain supreme dignity and display ultimate glory, too. But without this, whatever we do, however striking our achievements, there is neither real dignity nor true glory, only the ignoble pseudo-dignity and the short-lived pseudo-glory of the world’s applause and our own pompous conceit.

 

This is to say that the truest dignity, nobility, and glory are seen, not in heroes, pioneers, great rulers, great artists, or any other of the world’s celebrities as such, but rather in holy men and women of God who have learned the lesson of worship. Their powers and weaknesses, their successes and failures, their exultation and grief, all go up continually to the Throne as an offering. They pray and give thanks in all things; they love God under all circumstances; they hope in him at all times. In humbling themselves before God, in acknowledging their impotence and faultiness and constant need of his grace, and in disclaiming any form of self-righteousness or self-sufficiency, they find the integrity, honesty, poise, and calm which are dignity’s outward form. And from the happy knowledge of being God’s redeemed children, living by his forgiveness and secure in his love, they draw the incentive and the resources to be “steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord” (1 Corinthians 15:58, RSV), which is dignity and full realization.

 

It is a universal experience to feel and know when we observe such folk, poor and undistinguished as they may be, that we are witnessing true human dignity as we witness it nowhere else. Even though in the interests of secular humanist theory we may wish to deny this, our own consciences will convince us of it, as happened, it seems, to Herod in the presence of John the Baptist, and to Felix in the presence of Paul, and to Pilate in the presence of Jesus (see Mark 6:20; Acts 24:25; Matthew 27:11-18; John 18:33-19:12). Man’s lie is that our dignity forbids us to serve either God or our fellow humans, though it requires us to look for service from both – in other words, that our dignity justifies our egoism. God’s truth is that our dignity is only realised as we love and serve God for himself, and mankind for God’s sake, according to the two great commands in which Christ said that all the law and the prophets are summed up. The alternative is to demean and dehumanize ourselves by the sort of manipulative self-centeredness that rots the soul. The choice is ours. (p. 155-156)

I conclude with the chapter’s closing paragraph:

We have said enough to indicate what difference the Christian understanding of human dignity will make to our moral life. Acknowledging, preserving, and responding to the dignity of the other person, as God’s image bearer – summoned to wholeness and holiness in Christ – will always be one aspect of Christian decision-making. But this constant concern for man’s dignity will have no parallel where the Judeo-Christian frame of reference is left behind, and inevitably we shall then feel the draught. To be valued for oneself, as a person, is humanising, for it ennobles; but to be valued only as a hand, or a means, or a tool, or a cog and a wheel, or convenience to someone else is dehumanising – and it depresses. Christianity’s claim to be the true humanism is strengthened by the unique dignity that it finds in each individual. Secular humanism, though claiming vast wisdom and life-enhancing skills, actually diminishes the individual, who is left in old age without dignity (because his or her social usefulness is finished) and without hope (because there is nothing now to look forward to). Christianity compels us to humble ourselves before our Maker as the weak and foolish sinners that we are, constantly proclaiming him great and ourselves small. Therefore, since it seems that in every way Christianity forces us to put ourselves down, some, seeing no further, have revolted against it on this account. Yet Christianity reveals us to ourselves as the most precious and privileged of all God’s creatures, made in his image and redeemed by the precious blood of Christ, the incarnate Son. With this, moreover, Christianity sets before us Christ himself as our model of human nobility, our enabler as we seek to be like him, and our hope as we look beyond this glorious preparatory life on earth to one in heaven, which is yet more glorious and will never end. Let our readers judge which of the two positions does more to establish and uphold the dignity of man. (p. 162)

[1898 words]