The Question of our Day
by Adam J MacLeod, AAC:
What is a human being? That is the most important question of our day. If we do not answer that question then our neighbors cannot access the Gospel. Ignorance of human nature prevents people from understanding the good ends for which we are created, and therefore from understanding actions and habits that destroy those ends, and therefore from understanding sin, and therefore from understanding the Gospel.
Ignorance of human nature also extinguishes within people the desire to see God. God made us to bear the embodied form of the Source of all goodness. Insofar as the original design of human beings is to bear God’s likeness on earth and to co-order all of creation with Him, to be human is to reveal within the four dimensions of time and space what God is like and what he does. Our neighbors don’t care to recognize God when he acts in the world unseen because they have not learned to recognize his image and agency in the person standing before them, whom they can see. This is not only because Christians often behave badly but also because our neighbors are functional determinists and subjectivists who cannot understand rational agency to create and order for the good.
The gospel has no purchase in our culture in large part because it is unintelligible to most of those around us. True, we live in a depraved time, and the Gospel grows no roots in stony hearts. But the Gospel no longer even gets as far as the heart. The more immediate problem is that the Gospel does not penetrate past eyes blinded by determinism and ears deafened by subjectivism. No one will respond to the offer of salvation who believes that he has nothing to be saved from, who thinks of himself as a meaty machine driven by his genes to satisfy as many of his desires as he can before his existence fades into nonexistence. No one will seek after his maker who does not know his own nature, nor that it is originally good.
We must rebuild knowledge of human nature if we want the Gospel to make sense.
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