An Author Interview from Books At a Glance
Theological anthropology – a biblical view of humanity – has become an area of doctrine that is front and center to many of our contemporary cultural concerns, and this new book is written to help us in just that way. I’m Fred Zaspel with Books At a Glance, and we’re talking today to Dr. Owen Strachan about his excellent new book, Reenchanting Humanity: A Theology of Mankind.
Owen, welcome, and congratulations on a really good book!
Strachan:
Thank you, Fred, that’s really kind of you. I appreciate your ministry and Books At a Glance very much.
Zaspel:
First, why the title: Reenchanting Humanity? Tell us just in broad terms what you aim to accomplish in this book and what contribution you hope to make.
Strachan:
I think that mankind has been disenchanted, and by that, I mean we have lost our sense of our God-made in nature. I don’t mean something beyond that, I don’t mean something starry and airy fairy. I mean very simply that we have been told, especially in the last 20, 30, 40 years that we are nothing more as human beings in a clump of cells we are involved animals there’s no telos to our humanity. There is no greater purpose, our bodies don’t signal anything about our identity. We’re effectively just human clay and we create ourselves into whatever we want to be, whatever we think we should be. In my view, this equates to a disenchanting of humanity.
In reality, if you look at the Scriptures, you see that we are made in God’s image and likeness. God himself formed the human race for his glory on the sixth day as the apex of his creation. And so, when you’re starting from that theological and theistic foundation point, you recognize that humanity has this glorious origin. We are not God. There is an infinite gap between us and the creator the creator/creature distinction as we call it in systematic theology and yet, we are the one being that moves on the earth that is made in God’s image and likeness. So, when you’re looking at a human person you are looking at a very distant reflection of God’s own appearance, which is quite a remarkable thing to say. Now the Fall has happened in Genesis 3. When we’re talking about disenchantment, we’re not simply recovering the image of God; we have to also do justice to sin, original sin, and even what we call total depravity. And yet, part of our recovery of humanity is going back to first principles, Genesis 1, and seeing who we are in God’s design
Zaspel:
A generation or two ago many floated the question, “Is God dead?” In turn now, you ask the question, “Is man dead?” What is that all about? And in what ways are you suggesting our generation has witnessed the “death” of humanity?
Strachan:
That is exactly right. Re-enchanting humanity doesn’t mean teaching every person automatically becomes the little flower that they were intended to be; we have to do justice to depravity and sin. But, we do also have to recognize that what has played out culturally and theologically in the last 50 years is nothing less than the death of humankind. The death of humanity, which as you alluded to a minute ago, followed the death of God movement.
Theology becomes a major deal in the American public square and the theological Academy about 50 years ago, maybe 60 years ago, and even then if you read the writings of death of God theologians, you see that they also have their sights on the traditional Western and certainly evangelical Reformed Protestant conception of the human person. They believe, in other words, that just as they are re-envisioning theology, such that God is dead and man is left to create his own meaning, so mankind needs to be re-envisioned as well. And that basically means that we do not have any greater purpose. We do not have duties to this creator-God. We are effectively alone in the cosmos. So, in that sense, humankind has died. It’s not that we have died physically, as if we don’t exist, but that we have died spiritually to our telos, our purpose.
Zaspel:
Okay, talk to us about our creation “in the image of God.” What is the significance of being God’s image-bearer, and what are some attending responsibilities?
Strachan:
There’s a wide-ranging debate among theologians who love the Lord and love God’s Word, about what it means to be made in God’s image. If you read 20 theologians and exegetes, you will likely get 18 to 20 different views on what it means to be made in God’s image. It is one of the toughest questions in Christian theology and one of the questions in Christian theology, about which there is very little unanimity of view.
My view, which I build in this book re-enchanting humanity off of some exegetes and theologians like G. K. Beale and John Kilner and others is what I call the ontological view. Others have called it that as well, but I’m really trying to make a case for it in a sustained fashion In this book. The ontological view means that the image of God is not reduced to a certain trait or quality or attribute or function even the image of God is who we are. In other words, we are the image of God in the text.
I go several texts, but I go especially to 1 Corinthians 11:7, speaking of the man juxtaposed with the woman in that passage, it says that the man is the image and glory of God. Genesis 1 does not say that directly, but if you’re building a whole Bible case by which to understand the image, you recognize that Paul there identifies the man directly, as the image of God, and I think by extension, the woman as the image of God. The man is made first, and yet, we can say, I think, linking things up biblically, that the man and the woman each are equally image bearers.
What this means Fred, I’m disagreeing a little bit with some in the Reformed tradition. Calvin, Luther and others Carl Henry, many in the reformed tradition tied the image to knowledge and to righteousness and those kinds of concepts. I think that those things are certainly bound up with our Fall. Don’t misunderstand, I don’t have a new understanding of total depravity that I offer in this book, but I do think that we need to understand that the human being is the image of God. What is this mean that practically?
This point means that when you’re looking at a child with down syndrome, a diminished intellectual capacity, you are not looking at a 72% image bearer, you are looking fully at an image bearer, when you’re looking at an elderly patient in the nursing home. They don’t even know who they are anymore. They barely know their name, so their capacity to care for themselves and contribute intellectually, in these sorts of things, has radically diminished, you’re still looking at it at an image bearer. When you’re looking at an ultrasound, and there’s a little human life in a mother’s womb, you’re looking at a developing image bearer. So, the image then isn’t something that waxes and wanes in us; we do absolutely need to be re-made in the image of Christ, so that’s another concept we can talk about if we need to, and I do talk about that. Nonetheless, every human being every human person is an image bearer. That’s the takeaway.
Zaspel:
That comes awfully close to Calvin. For example, you pick this up, about you can’t know yourself unless you know God. So how exactly are you differing?
Strachan:
I’m differing in that and I actually quote that famous passage from the Institutes that you just mentioned in my book, because I think it’s beautifully said and so truthfully said and this is one reasons where I think theologians can have slightly different handling’s of context, so long as we’re believing typical doctrine and yet have unity even if we have slightly different form formulations. Calvin and I would disagree, and that Calvin is one of many, and Kilner brings this out in his book, who would say that the images in some way lost, tarnished, destroyed, marred at the disfigured these sorts of concepts.
I actually don’t think that the Fall damages the image of God. I think that the image of God continues to be a fully applicable reality to every person after the Fall, where a lot of the reformed tradition argues that in some form. Yes, we have the image from creation. But then the image is effectively lost or marred or tarnished or something like that. I actually think that Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:49 captures this when he talks about how we have borne the image of the man of dust and now we bear the image of Christ.
The image of the man of glory, and so we don’t lose the image and many theologians who tie the image either exclusively or as part of a broader grouping of attributes to knowledge or to righteousness or to relationship to other things. They believe that we have lost the image, or at least, it’s been marred. I don’t think that applies. I think that the image of God actually holds steady after the Fall, so mankind is an image bearer before the Fall, and we are fully in image bearer after the Fall.
Here is where I do believe that the Fall deeply affects us, tragically affects us, irreversibly affects us, outside of Jesus Christ. That is, I believe that our functioning as image bearers is absolutely impaired and changed and damaged, but nonetheless human beings continue to be image bearers, albeit lost image bearers following Adam’s Fall in Genesis 3.
Zaspel:
How does this “image of God” idea relate to man as created body and soul?
Strachan:
I argue in Reenchanting Humanity that we are embodied souls, so we have a soul. We are made in terms of having a soul to know God forever and so we cannot reduce our existence to physicality, as some do. We are not in my view, called to be Christian physical lists then like Nancy, Murphy, and others would argue. I do think though that we also have to make the case the opposite way and say that neither do we fall prey to some kind of negative dualism where we think that the soul is good and the body is bad. So, God has created both body and soul, in my view, for his glory and we in turning to Jesus Christ through God-given regeneration. We are going to see the renewal of body and soul alike. And so, God wants our whole person worship for his glory.
So, it’s not just that are soul gets zapped effectively in conversion that comes through regeneration. It is that our entire person is redeemed and renewed. Our entire person is created to display the glory of God. We do that in certain ways even unwittingly of in our unregenerate state, and yet we only properly and rightly consciously glorify God through faith in Christ.
Zaspel:
The answer to this question entails endless implications, and you have already just touched on it, but fundamentally, how has the Fall affected humanity as God’s image bearers? At bottom, what has gone wrong?
Strachan:
That’s a great question. We have died spiritually in the Fall. We have fallen away from God; the human race in toto has lost God, and no one now in their own natural capacity can find their way back to God. We are born with sin and in sin; we have a sinful nature, and so are justly condemned by God in the cosmic courtroom of his justice. I have an entire chapter on the Fall and thus on sin, and on the judgment that sin will rightly bring. So, we are born with the death sentence. We are born with the wrath of God above our head and all this means connecting back to the image, per your question, that we are still image bearers in my view, after the Fall. That’s why Paul can say in 1 Corinthians 11:7 that man is the image and glory of God. Nonetheless, our functioning all those God-given capacities are now going to be put to evil ends. So, we are pervasively corrupted following the Fall, and we are lost we are we are dead in our sins and trespasses.
We need to say all of that even as we continue to repeat that we know who sinners are, we know who they were created to be. When we look at a fellow human being, we are looking at an image bearer a fallen, totally fallen, image bearer, and yet in image bearer and so what needs to happen is the gospel needs to claim this person and through saving faith, they need to be remade. When that happens, they will be changed from one degree of glory to another into the image of Jesus Christ. And now they will consciously intentionally live out their God-given functioning capacity to his glory.
Zaspel:
The contemporary mind has no room for a notion of fallen or depraved humanity, but you argue that we only harm humanity further by a refusal to embrace this truth. How so?
Strachan:
The best policy is always honesty—you never do yourself or anyone else any favors by not being honest. And so, in an ironic way, we Christians who believe in total depravity, help our fellow man when we share the so-called bad news of our human condition. In other words, when we teach people, when we proclaim, when we share that every human person is fallen in Adam. When we do so, we’re not spreading negativity; we’re not being a downer or a “hater” to use the modern terminology, we are actually speaking the truth in love (Ephesians 4:15) because we’re only reflecting reality today, Fred. I really think the Church has as much as ever in human history, the ministry of reality. So, everybody’s all in. You know when you’re training students, when you’re writing, as you and I both do, everybody’s all in on the ministry of grace. I mean that’s what sends our spirits soaring on a daily basis. The fact that we’re not left in our sins, Christ is raised, and we are justified, and we are even now sanctified, glorified, and definitively sanctified. We are headed for eternal glory. Praise God!
Yet, alongside and even before the ministry of grace, comes the ministry of reality, telling people how things actually are per God’s design and God’s Word. We have some serious work to do to get people out of a kind of wish fulfillment mentality. In other words, people really do think they can make the world as they want it today. Think about many college and university campuses right, if you don’t like American history, you can simply mute large parts of it and cancel many figures in it and reshape history.
And not just that, but in your college and university program now on many campuses, you can take a curriculum and get a degree that in no way challenges your basic assumptions of the world—that doesn’t in any sense suggest that anything you would believe would be wrong, or needing correction. This is the kind of climate and culture we’re in today.
So Christians, and I repeat myself, have the ministry of reality even before we come alongside and talk about Jesus Christ. The ground that we are preparing, Fred, is for people to understand that they can’t make the world the way they wanted to be. They can try, they are going to be frustrated, and that instead, we need to receive the world as God has made it and the world as God in his perfect, wise, all wise providence has allowed it to be ordained. That has all sorts of implications in many directions that we could talk about for the body, for bodily identity, for sin, for our own need of repentance, and so on and so forth, and I’m trying to make the case for that in this book.
Zaspel:
Okay, for the remainder of your book you explore various aspects of application and contemporary concern related to a biblical understanding of human identity. Let’s take time for some. First, work. Tell us what you’re after in chapter 3.
Strachan:
A Master of Theology of work, you’re right, that there are obligatory points that you can draw from my material from the Word of God, above anything I have to say, and yet I want Christians to see that you actually shouldn’t group work under ethics or something like that, or practical matters, the way it frequently is. You turn to your average systematic theology, they’re not going to say more than a couple pages, at least in many cases, about work.
Here’s the deal—work is what God has given us to do for much of our earthly days. It is of small wonder that many Christians would approach work as if it’s this effectively deep theology dies zone. They have to work for nine hours a day, and then they do other things that truly matter. What I’m after in Reenchanting Humanity and in the chapter on work, in particular, is the re-enchanting of work.
In other words, that we would understand that our work is of vital, absolutely vital, part of how we give God glory as redeemed people and was that way by intention—mankind is made to work. Adam and Eve are made in different capacities in different roles to give God glory by taking dominion of the earth through Adam’s working and keeping the garden (Genesis 2:15) through Eve’s childbearing and nurturing a family. God is up to something profoundly doxological, even before the Fall in terms of work. But even though the Fall leads to the cursing of work, in Christ, work can actually be recovered and repressed and aided, in other words, we can work on to God’s glory, Coram Deo as the Reformers rightly had it.
All this means, then, that we should approach our work as if it’s a theological reality. And I’m not talking about the exciting parts of work alone. I’m not talking about, you know, the stories of entrepreneurship that we all read that sends our mind worrying or business as missions. These are fantastic pursuits. Would that more people undertake them! Don’t misunderstand, I’m actually talking about, though, and I spell this out in the text, I’m actually talking about, the ordinary, humble, anonymous moments of our lives.
My argument trying to build it from Scripture, in this book is that the humble moments of our days are doxological moments just as the exciting explosive moments of our lives are doxological moments. I don’t think, Fred, that so many Christians often think about work, but I believe that we should approach work theologically and in the frankest terms, most of us are going to spend the heaping amount of time working.
I don’t think we should be functional sacerdotalists, and think that you know, when we go to church at 7 PM on Wednesday night. Or, you know, 10 AM on Sunday, well then our life really counts—that time of Sunday gathered worship the congregational worship, that is set aside for God. Don’t misunderstand me; I believe fully that that is special time. In other words, but it’s also special to be a Christian man or woman, grinding out your vocation humbly and usually anonymously day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute.
Zaspel:
So this is the Protestant doctrine of vocation?
Strachan:
I’m trying to make Protestant vocation “great again,” basically.
Zaspel:
When I was a seminary student it was scarcely necessary to spend time in theology class talking about human sexuality – issues were more commonly defined and understood in those days. But today things are different, and you take this up in chapter 4. Give us an overview of what you address here.
Strachan:
It is the longest chapter in the book. I think Christians have long assumed, at least many of us, that if we raise our kids in a kind of traditional cast, to take them to church, that they are just going to get the things they need to get about being a boy or girl man or woman. I am very much not convinced by that kind of perspective. That may once have been more or less close to the bull’s-eye, if it once was, it no longer is.
In other words, we should assume that our culture is absolutely about the business of pedagogical formation of our children, and it is training our children in nothing less than, and I make this case at length in the book, a pagan worldview. I do not believe we are dealing with Christianity and other religious versions of humanity against a slightly deficient, slightly different understanding of the human person, okay.
Building off of Peter Jones, a the long-time theologian at Westminster West, I argue that we are absolutely in a contest right now between Christianity/a traditional understanding of the human person versus paganism. I think that what we are dealing with is paganism, neopaganism, or in other words, an understanding of the human person that argues that the human person, is effectively not subject it all to God, to any kind of Lord, but is itself the human person is itself a kind of sub-Lord, sub-God, sub-deity, and we make our own given eyes to life the matter when we are able to enlist the body in our own kind of self-worship, and that means that there’s no basically, no practice, no activity, no identity that is off-limits to us. In sexual terms, that means that we can embrace homosexuality, transgenderism, polyamory and so on and so forth.
So Fred, when we see a case being made in Christianity today, of all places for polyamory case being defined urging pastors to deal with this issue well, and even going so far as to say that there are some good things that draw us to polyamory, or when we hear about how we should all except air quotes “gay Christianity,” I don’t think my argument is not that these are slightly deficient understandings of the Christian faith. My argument is that actually parts of the professing Church are falling prey to paganism and I try to make that case I’ll all leave off. At this point, but I try to make that case and Reenchanting Humanity.
Zaspel:
You’ve got a couple of more books coming out soon that the pickup on those subjects, right?
Strachan:
That’s exactly right. I appreciate it. I have three books coming out co-authored with my buddy Gavin Peacock. We wrote The Grand Design four years ago and that we have what does the Bible teach about lust, what does the Bible teach about homosexuality, and what does the Bible teach about transgender, are coming out in May, just about six weeks from now. They are short books. They’re not aimed at scholars, they are aimed at the pew there, aimed at Christians, others aimed at college kids who want to figure out what the Bible teaches about these very tough subjects that make basic case we make in all three books.
Gavin and I, speaking with one voice through our two voices, is that we should attack sin. Whether it’s heterosexual, lust, homosexual lust, or transgender proclivity we should tackle these sins and, by the way every other sin, not at the level of action as if sin is only wheeled conscious activity that we do intentionally and in a prolonged way. We should attack sin at the level of desire if it is sin to do it. It is sin to desire it. That’s our case that we’re making in these three books and that I make. Frankly at a more academic level and Reenchanting Humanity, and Fred, I don’t know about you, I won’t speak for you. I don’t think your average evangelical has been trained to see sin in this way, but I do have great confidence in evangelicals seeing the truthfulness of this argument because this is clearly what Jesus is after in texts like Matthew 5:21–30. It is clearly what the apostle Paul is speaking of what he saying to put our evil passions to death in a Colossians 3 way, so I don’t know that we’ve all been instructed in seeing that the root of sin is not actually the action, it’s desire, but I do think that is laying there for us to harvest plainly in Scripture.
Zaspel:
Yeah, I think some of this has gradually encroached on us, and we’ve not really thought critically about it enough.
Strachan:
Yes, a quick word there. If you make the case for seeing the sin of homosexuality spelled out in Romans 1:18–32 as first lying in depraved passions evil desires, wrong inclinations, flowing out of a totally depraved heart to make the connection between our prior discussion, actually what happens is not that you will come to see same-sex attracted Christians or Christians who feel gender dysphoria, so-called, as a separate category of sinner, or what actually happens is that you start looking at your own inclinations and your own desires and your own thought life that nobody else sees, and you start thinking, wait a minute. Everyone has a lot more to repent of here, then we’ve been told everyone should be repenting when they have a flash of lust, when they have a quick burst of anger at a family member, when they feel in a way that even hard for them to articulate why, jealousy or bitterness or something like this we could go on and on. We all have to repent at the level of desire and thought and inclination, not just a certain group in the church.
Zaspel:
Okay, before I let you go just walk us quickly through the rest of the book, chapters 5 through 9, so our listeners can know what to expect.
Strachan:
I am after a different theological understanding of issues like technology, justice, race and ethnicity, contingency, death, and then ultimately, a right understanding of Christ, who is the God-man, who is the second Adam, who is the one to whom all humanity points. Any lack, any failing that we see in the human person, alongside any capacity for good, even in a fallen person, is ultimately a signpost directing us not to look at humanity or any human person as if we are an end unto ourselves.
It is pointing, as I argue, ultimately to Jesus Christ, the God-man, the one who is perfect, the one he was impeccable, the one who perfectly fulfills the law of God, and honors God, is the true son of God, where Israel fails, and the one who dies on the cross to wash us clean, the one who rises from the dead to give us life over the grave, the one who ascends to the Father’s right hand in order to signal that the reign of God really has been enacted on earth.
Now, in this age, before the final age, and so ultimately all of those other chapters, I’m trying to do theological work from the Scripture in a biblical-theological kind of way, both by the way Old and New Testament, and then ultimately I’m trying to point and Reenchanting Humanity to the one who is our re-enchantment, namely Jesus Christ. And our re-enchantment, I make the case very plainly in the final chapter of the book, it does not come about through thinking sort of happy thoughts about how great Christ is and then how great we all are; our re-enchantment comes squarely and exclusively through regeneration leading to conversion exercised in saving faith in Christ and the objective finished work of Christ and repentance on that basis. So that’s our re-enchantment, in other words. This is where then I would diverge very sharply from people who would say, yeah we need to recover, you know, the meaning of humanity but many folks around us, as you well know, in theological circles and non-theological circles, would not locate that recovery in faith and repentance in the name of Jesus Christ, and that’s where I argue that’s the only way back to our true telos in Christ.
Zaspel:
Who would have predicted that theological anthropology would become a leading issue of the day? We’re talking to Dr. Owen Strachan, author of the new book Reenchanting Humanity: A Theology of Mankind. It’s an excellent exploration of the biblical doctrine of humanity in relation to contemporary cultural concerns. Certainly a “must have” book for any study of biblical anthropology and for understanding a biblical view of many contemporary concerns.
Owen, a really good book – thanks, and thanks for talking to us about it today.
Strachan:
You are very kind Fred; thank you.
