Human Dignity: The Foundation

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  On the most important phrase ever coined

  Nick Spencer says nobody really knows what it means – but that hasn’t lessened its impact.

  Download Link Transcript 1 min 50 secs
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  You could make the argument that phrase “image of God” – which is not a particularly common phrase in the Scriptures – you could make the argument that it’s probably one of the most important phrases that’s ever been penned by a human being. The problem is that (putting it provocatively) no one really knows what it means. And it’s been interpreted many, many different ways, and very often in ways that aren’t really there in the Scriptures.

  So, for an example, towards the end of the 17th century, it was quite popular to interpret the image of God saying, humans are rational. God is rational; humans are rational – that is how we are made in his image. Now, that’s not really there in the text. It’s interpreted different ways; we are relational in the same way as God, Trinity, is relational. We are creative. The God of Genesis 1 is a creative God; we are creative – we have a job to do, which is tending, caring, looking after creation and one another. Different ways of interpreting it.

  In a sense, it doesn’t matter too much how you interpret it, as long as you recognise that it is the image of God. And human beings are somehow linked to that which is of absolute value. So, somehow or other, when I’m engaging with you, in some attenuated or thinned out or disturbed kind of a way, I’m engaging with God. And again, that puts a real onus on me to respect you. How that respect cashes out differs in different ways, but the point is that respect is there.

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  On the idea that changed the world

  John Stackhouse explains how the Bible’s picture of humanity undermines social hierarchies.

  Download Link Transcript 1 min 11 secs
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  The basic idea in the Jewish Bible, right in the first chapter of their Bible and ours, that God created male and female in God’s image to be lords of the world, as God is Lord of the world, does put us all in the same role. There is no racial distinction, there’s no class distinction; as you are a human being, you are part of this species that is supposed to exercise this benevolent role of gardening the earth and tending the world. So in that sense, everybody is truly equal. The implications of that take a long time to work their way through the fallen, corrupt nature of human society, which tends to say anything but that. Human societies tend to be stratified – various kinds of social relationships to do with power. But eventually, that basic teaching undermines them all.

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  On the transvaluation of humanity

  Alister McGrath says that how we see people is hugely important.

  Download Link Transcript 1 min 21 secs
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  I think that the way in which we see somebody else determines the way we behave towards them. So if I were to see somebody simply as a commodity or something that’s there for my convenience, I’m going to exploit them. If I see them, as a Christian would, as bearing God’s image, or someone for whom Jesus Christ died, then I see them in a different way. I’ve got to love them, I’ve got to respect them. And that changes everything.

  And so what Christianity does is give you this template, this way of looking at the world, this way of looking at other people which means you value them in a different way. And this transvaluation of humanity is so important. It says you cannot commodify humanity. These are people who God made and loves, and we must therefore treat them in that way. So, for me, what Christianity is saying about human nature is a powerful and significant protest against the impersonal, even dehumanising ways of thinking about people that we find in so many secular philosophies.

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  On race, class, gender … and the gospel

  Edwin Judge says we reject discrimination because our culture is saturated in Christian ideas.

  Download Link Transcript 2 mins 10 secs
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  Western civilisation is comprehensively saturated with the ideals of the gospel and of the scriptural tradition. Somebody put it to me the other day in criticism of something I said about this that I am ignoring the three great formative forces in our culture (this is historically speaking), namely race, class, and gender. But notice: race, class, and gender are all rejected as criteria for deciding anything. It is discriminatory in our culture, in the West, discriminatory to allow for ethnicity, it’s discriminatory to allow for social class, it’s discriminatory between men and women if you differentiate.

  Where does that come from? Galatians chapter 3 verse 28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male or female in Christ, but all are one in Christ.” That is the rejection by St Paul of the three great dimensions of life: ethnicity, social position, and the human relationship, male and female. That is cancelled in Christ – that is, in one’s personal standing in Christ, those things are rejected. Exactly those things are now rejected today in our culture. And it comes, therefore, in my view, straight through from the preaching of the gospel absorbed across the centuries and translated particularly in more recent centuries into these anti-discrimination policies we now have.

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