Man

Nature of Man

Man is not the center of all things nor the final arbiter of truth. But man is not merely one of many like creatures either. Man is uniquely made in the image of God, created and designed to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. This concept captures the heart of the Reformation, revolutionizing man’s self-understanding and purpose through the revelation of God. By knowing God rightly we know ourselves rightly.

That last sentence carries the argument of the previous page into this one. The Reformers did not arrive at a new view of man by studying man more closely. They arrived at it by hearing God more clearly, and the Westminster divines fixed the order in the first two questions of their Shorter Catechism. “What is the chief end of man? Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.” And immediately: “What rule hath God given to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy him? The Word of God, which is contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, is the only rule to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy him.”1 Man’s purpose and Scripture’s authority are set side by side, as though the one could not be known without the other. That pairing is itself the new anthropology in miniature.

Man in the Old Synthesis

Rome never taught that man was unfallen. The Council of Trent confessed that all men had lost their innocence in Adam and become “the servants of sin.” But it described the damage in measured terms: in fallen man “free will, attenuated and bent down as it was in its powers, was by no means extinguished.”2 Behind that sentence stood a picture of man in two stories. Medieval theology commonly treated the image of God as man’s natural endowment of reason and will, and original righteousness as a further supernatural gift laid on top of it. Cornelius Van Til described the result: “the image of God in man is not thought of as forming the very warp and woof of man, but as something that he received in addition to his natural being. The image of God is thought of as a donum superadditum.” And he drew the consequence: “From this conception of the image of God in man it follows that the fall of man was not a very serious thing. Man lost the additional something, but really continued to be quite natural and normal after the fall.”3

Rome held to that structure deliberately. In 1567 Pius V condemned a list of propositions drawn from the Louvain theologian Michael Baius, himself a Roman Catholic and a student of Augustine, among them the claim that “the integrity of the first creation was not an exaltation undue to human nature, but its natural condition,” and the claim that “free-will, without the aid of God’s grace, avails only to commit sin.”4 To deny the superadded gift was censured; to say that the unaided will can only sin was censured. On these terms, the fall stripped away an ornament and wounded a nature, but the nature itself, and above all the reasoning mind, came through largely intact. Van Til notes that for Aquinas “fallen man is not very dissimilar from Adam in paradise.”5

What the Text Actually Said

Here again the recovery of the original languages proved decisive. The distinction between the “image” and the “likeness” of Genesis 1:26 had long been read as two different things, one natural and one supernatural. Calvin, reading the Hebrew, would not allow it:

The “image” and “likeness” has given rise to no small discussion; interpreters searching without cause for a difference between the two terms, since “likeness” is merely added by way of exposition. First, we know that repetitions are common in Hebrew, which often gives two words for one thing.6 John CalvinInstitutes I.xv.3

If image and likeness are one thing, then the image of God is not a gift laid on top of human nature. It is what human nature is. And if the image is the whole man, then the fall touched the whole man. The Reformers read the apostle in the same plain way. Paul called the remaining desires of the regenerate “sin” (Romans 7:17–20). Trent acknowledged as much and then set it aside: “This concupiscence, which the apostle sometimes calls sin, the holy synod declares that the Catholic Church has never understood to be called sin, as being truly and properly sin in those born again, but because it is of sin, and inclines to sin.”7 The Westminster Confession answered in deliberately matching words: this corruption of nature, “although it be through Christ pardoned and mortified, yet both itself, and all the motions thereof, are truly and properly sin.”8 Where the council had the text and the tradition in tension, it kept the tradition. The Reformers kept the text.

The same was true of the will. Paul did not say that sinners were weakened in trespasses and sins, but “dead” in them (Ephesians 2:1). Trent anathematized anyone who said that “since Adam’s sin, the free will of man is lost and extinguished; or, that it is a thing with a name only.”9 Luther, answering Erasmus, saw that this was the hinge of the whole quarrel. Michael Reeves and Tim Chester summarize his point: we choose freely what we want, but “you do not choose what to want. For underneath our wills, directing and governing our choices, lie our hearts with all their inclinations and desires.”10

Not a Sicker Man but a Different Picture

It would be easy to summarize all this as the Reformers adding a gloomier estimate of man to the existing system. That would miss the point entirely. They did not adjust the damage report on a two-story house. They denied that man was built in two stories at all. Van Til drew out what followed for knowledge itself: “Sin has, according to Protestantism, vitiated the whole of the human personality, his intellect as well as his will. It is for this reason that man must rely on the Scriptures altogether for the true interpretation of all reality.”11 The doctrine of man and the doctrine of Scripture stand or fall together. If reason survived the fall intact, Scripture is a supplement. If it did not, Scripture is a necessity. Van Til’s image for the fallen mind is memorable:

It may be compared to a buzz-saw that is sharp and shining, ready to cut the boards that come to it. Let us say that a carpenter wishes to cut fifty boards for the purpose of laying the floor of a house. He has marked his boards. He has set his saw. He begins at one end of the mark on the board. But he does not know that his seven-year-old son has tampered with the saw and changed its set. The result is that every board he saws is cut slantwise and thus unusable because too short except at the point where the saw first made its contact with the wood.12 Cornelius Van TilThe Defense of the Faith

The intellect is not dull; it is bent. That is why the Reformed answer to sin is not the elevation of a sound nature but the restoration of a ruined one. Herman Bavinck put the principle in a sentence: God’s saving revelation “is a restoration, and not an annihilation, of God’s creative work, which was corrupted by sin. Revelation is a work of reformation. In re-creation, the creation is restored in all its formae and normae.”13 The old scheme ran from nature up to grace. The new one ran from creation through fall to redemption, and it took in the whole man at every stage.

The Dignity of the Ordinary

Nowhere did this new picture change ordinary life more than in the meaning of work. If grace merely perfected nature from above, the holiest life was the one furthest removed from nature, in the cloister and the vow. If grace restores the whole man in the station where God has placed him, then the farmhouse is as sacred as the monastery. Luther distinguished a man’s station (Stand) from his calling (Beruf), and it was faith that turned the one into the other. “God is milking the cows through the vocation of the milkmaid,” Reeves and Chester paraphrase him, and Luther could say that household chores “are more to be valued than all the works of monks and nuns.”14 Hugh Latimer said the same in England: Christ “was a carpenter, and got his living with great labour. Therefore let no man disdain to follow him in a common calling and occupation.”15 Calvin gave the principle its classic form:

This, too, will afford admirable consolation, that in following your proper calling, no work will be so mean and sordid as not to have a splendour and value in the eye of God.16 John CalvinInstitutes III.x.6

The same Bible that dignified the milkmaid’s work was put into her hands. Timothy George writes that the printing press and the vernacular Bible “did in a sense ‘unchain’ the Scriptures by making them available not only to scholars and monks but also to ploughboys in the fields and milkmaids at their pails.”17 William Tyndale had vowed as much to a priest: “If God spare my life ere many years, I will cause a boy that driveth the plough, shall know more of the scriptures than thou dost.”18 A ploughboy who can read the Word of God for himself has been told something about his own worth that no medieval hierarchy had told him. John Monsma traced the social consequence: the sovereignty of God “leads to the doctrine of the equality of men as men, since an inherent superiority of one man over another would be in contradiction with the absoluteness of the sovereignty of God.”19

Renewed after the Image

The Reformation’s doctrine of man was humbling, but it was never hopeless. The image that the fall defaced is the image that Christ restores, for He is Himself “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15), and those who are in Him have “put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him” (Colossians 3:10). Man is neither the center of all things nor one more creature among many. He is the creature made to bear God’s likeness, broken by his own rebellion, and remade in the Son. Only a man who has first been brought low can be lifted to that height, and only the Word that tells him the truth about his ruin can tell him the truth about his glory. To glorify God and enjoy Him forever is not a burden laid on human nature. It is human nature restored to what it was made to be.

Worldview Next: Redemption

Sources

  1. The Westminster Shorter Catechism (1647), Questions 1–2, in Stephen J. Nichols, The Reformation: How a Monk and a Mallet Changed the World (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2007), appendix, “Catechisms of the Reformation.” ↩
  2. Council of Trent, Session VI (January 13, 1547), Decree on Justification, chapter 1, in Theodore Alois Buckley, trans., The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (London: Routledge, 1851). ↩
  3. Cornelius Van Til, A Survey of Christian Epistemology, In Defense of Biblical Christianity 2 (Den Dulk Christian Foundation, 1969), chap. 5, “Historical Survey: Mediaeval Epistemology: Its Climax.” ↩
  4. Pius V, bull of 1567 condemning the propositions of Michael Baius, propositions 26 and 27, in Theodore Alois Buckley, trans., The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (London: Routledge, 1851), appendix. Baius (1513–1589) was a Roman Catholic theologian at Louvain; the condemned propositions were his, not a Protestant’s. ↩
  5. Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed), chap. 4, “The Christian Philosophy of Behavior,” §1. ↩
  6. Calvin, Institutes I.xv.3, in John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845). Online at CCEL. ↩
  7. Council of Trent, Session V (June 17, 1546), Decree Concerning Original Sin, in Theodore Alois Buckley, trans., The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (London: Routledge, 1851). ↩
  8. The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), 6.5. Full text: The Westminster Confession of Faith. ↩
  9. Council of Trent, Session VI, On Justification, canon 5, in Theodore Alois Buckley, trans., The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (London: Routledge, 1851). ↩
  10. Michael Reeves and Tim Chester, Why the Reformation Still Matters (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2016), chap. 3, “Sin: What Is Wrong with Us?” ↩
  11. Cornelius Van Til, A Survey of Christian Epistemology, In Defense of Biblical Christianity 2 (Den Dulk Christian Foundation, 1969), chap. 6, “Historical Survey: Modern Epistemology.” ↩
  12. Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed), chap. 5, “Christian Apologetics (Point of Contact).” ↩
  13. Herman Bavinck, Christian Worldview, trans. and ed. N. Gray Sutanto, James Eglinton, and Cory C. Brock (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2019), chap. 3, “Becoming and Acting.” ↩
  14. Michael Reeves and Tim Chester, Why the Reformation Still Matters (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2016), chap. 10, “Everyday Life: What Difference Does God Make on Monday Mornings?” ↩
  15. Hugh Latimer, quoted in Michael Reeves and Tim Chester, Why the Reformation Still Matters (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2016), chap. 10. ↩
  16. Calvin, Institutes III.x.6, in John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845). Online at CCEL. ↩
  17. Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers, rev. ed. (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2013), chap. 3, “Yearning for Grace: Martin Luther.” ↩
  18. William Tyndale, quoted in Vishal Mangalwadi, The Book That Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2011), chap. 9, “Revolution: What Made Translators World Changers?” The words come from John Foxe’s account. ↩
  19. John Clover Monsma, What Calvinism Has Done for America (Chicago, 1919). ↩