Man, made in the image of God, has a purpose - to be in relationship to God, who is there. Man forgets his purpose and thus he forgets who he is and what life means.
-Francis Schaeffer
Who are we?
What does it mean to be human?
Are we here to procreate? To dominate? To luxuriate? To make gingerbread houses?
These questions betray more than just existential fussiness. It is only when we discover the reason a thing exists that we can try to move towards the realization of its purpose. If we were to present a visiting alien with a shiny new egg-beater as some token of peace, he would likely be more confused than appeased. For all he knows, it could be a weapon, a tool, or a musical instrument. Without some guidance — dare we say, some revelation — the poor creature is no closer to an omelet than before.
The question of life purpose is (obviously) of infinitely more consequence than the question of an egg beater. We may place it among what we call the fundamental questions. Deciding which career path to pursue, who to marry, and where to live are important questions, but putting fundamental significance on only important questions is like making sure the seatbelts in a roller coaster are secure while ignoring the fact that the track disappears just after the first loop.
Furthermore, going wrong where it concerns the fundamental questions is also the best way to secure the failure of all important questions to follow. Failing to understand the purpose of marriage will mean we end up marrying the wrong person — however right they might have been had we understood marriage. Failing to understand the purpose of labor will exclude us from ever finding the right career. Failing to understand the nature of house and home will lead to a restless life of perpetual homelessness.
Understanding our purpose (fundamental) leads to understanding our proper function (important).
To this end, we would like to spend the next number of articles attempting to construct a rudimentary Christian anthropology. Thankfully, we are better equipped than the poor three pigs who had to build wolf-proof structures using just sticks and scraps. In fact, between what is revealed in creation and what is revealed in the Scriptures, we have “everything we need for life and godliness.”
As an academic discipline, anthropology (literally the study of human beings) has become a somewhat murky field — as, by the way, are most things that come down to us from academia. If you ever find yourself with an embarrassingly accessible idea, the best solution is to hand it over to a guild of seasoned academics. Within a short time it will have become so mangled that it will barely be recognizable from the able-bodied creature you once knew it as.
One of the main problems with modern anthropological studies is it’s unholy union with archaeology; which itself wouldn’t be so bad if not for the archaeologist’s unholy union with Darwinism; which itself wouldn’t be a problem if not for Darwin’s conviction of a non-intelligent universe.
Being that authorless books tend to struggle in the whole area of being understood, the question might then well be asked — why bother? What possible use could there be in studying culture, ethics, social development, or language? Whose to say any of it means anything? Why should we go to all the trouble of organizing the principles of a discipline when the cosmos’s next drunken spasm might suddenly blow it all to hell? What, ultimately, must the study of history be but one giant conspiratorial rolick — discerning chains, connections, and developments when there is every reason not to do so?
Another problem is that not only is Darwinism based on a meaningless system, but also an insufficient system. What seems to me the fatal flaw in the machine is that it can’t account for the slightest anomaly which veers outside the strict rules of a closed materialist system. Chesterton notes:
For we must remember that the materialist philosophy (whether true or not) is certainly much more limiting than any religion . . . The Christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe. But the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle. [He] is not allowed to retain even the tiniest imp, though it might be hiding in a [flower].
The problem here is that we live in the kind of world in which it is difficult to maintain an airtight materialism. There are simply too many accounts of spirits, gods, ghosts, and miracles for us to reasonably discount them all as the ravings of lunatics. But the materialist must do exactly this. He must close his eyes and put his fingers in his ears. He must be like the child who has already decided that a piece fits in a puzzle, even if it is apparent to everyone else that it doesn’t belong there.
There’s also the whole subject of hope.
For Darwin, hope is neither a rational nor desirable state of mind. In fact hope may prevent you from doing what you need to do in order to survive. In attacking hope, however, Darwin hasn’t just picked a fight with an idea, but with the human soul itself. Hope is the breath of life — without it, we calcify into nihilist pessimists, who Chesterton defines as those who take a kind of “gloomy pleasure in saying unpleasant things.” Thus the materialist must do everything in his power to prevent anyone, including himself, from acknowledging the logical end of his doctrine. If nothing means anything, then all his labors are also for nothing. If nothing means anything, then in constructing his arguments in theories, he is braiding the very rope that will hang him.
In all this, we see not the reasonableness of Darwin’s arguments, but the desperation of human pride. Pride is the great obstacle that defeats most apologetics before they even start. For the Christian apologist isn’t simply attempting to bring logic to bear on illogicity, but to corner a cat that would rather die than be washed. Only in this case it is a man who would rather be damned than become like a little child.
Another problem with secular anthropology is that for all it’s boasts, it actually ends up being of very little use to anybody. At best it can tell us what may have been at a certain point in history. It cannot tell us whether our ancestors were right or wrong, nor whether their systems should have been abandoned, nor whether they should be revived. You can’t build a system of ethics based on the fossil record. You can’t navigate an ethical quandary by knowing the prehistoric land use of the Black Rock Desert. You can’t derive an “ought” from an “is.”
What we are aiming at in a Christian anthropology isn’t a desperate attempt to reconcile an irreconcilable world. Rather, it is our desperate attempt to convince the unreconciled of the world’s inherent reconciliation. This is at least part of what Chesterton was trying to achieve in his classic work, Orthodoxy. He wasn’t just appealing to the rationality of atheists, but almost to the atheist’s sense of self-preservation. Wouldn’t you rather live in a world where you can confidently expect the sun to come up each morning? Wouldn’t that be better than anxiously gnawing your bedsheets every night in the insane hope that the mindless cosmos will yet again crash it’s symbols and summon the dawn? That the heavens will recall the well-loved palette of sunrise and sunset? That the sun will recall the proper concentration of hydrogen needed to maintain it’s temperature?
Isn’t it much better, healthier even, to affirm a single Mind that “preserves both man and beast.” Who “covers the sky with clouds, and supplies the earth with rain and makes grass grow on the hills.” Who “upholds all things by the Word his power.” In such a world, anthropology — and all “-ologies” in fact — can find a home.
A Christian anthropology begins with the assumption of a God who can be known. If he his indeed our author, then only he can tell us the nature and boundaries of the story we find ourselves in. Without such revelation, we are all that little child — trying desperately to work out the nature of this puzzle, getting it wrong, but having to convince ourselves that it still works. This is why we need not just another anthropology among others, but a definitive anthropology — an anthropology which can function as a litmus to all others.
This we have in the Scriptures.