What does it mean to be human?
You might ask me, why am I discussing this? Isn’t being “a human” obvious?
What it means to be human is being redefined before our eyes and has been for years. As a “boomer,” I easily remember the signs carried by civil rights protesters in the 1960s: “I am a Man.” One protester’s struggle to identify as a human being then has become another protester’s struggle to denigrate human beings now.
Truth matters when we are defining our basic humanity. If, as Professor J.P. Moreland (BIOLA) explains, that “truth is that which allows us to cooperate with reality,” then the culture of confusion doesn’t care about truth. Instead, they are trying to alter reality, which is a much tougher go than altering truth.
For example, it seemed easier when abortion of pre-born humans was declared “not murder” by the Supreme Court. It seemed easier when the institution of marriage was “redefined” by the Supreme Court. Whenever the Supremes redefine human reality, they are contributing to the culture of confusion. The problem for the culture of confusion is that the Supremes aren’t working fast enough. For those who target reality, it’s not that easy anymore.
Altering personal socio-economic reality seems harder now. Personal initiative, self-motivation, and individual responsibility are character qualities that improve personal position, economic status, and well-being. Pursuing character qualities is a tougher go when you’re throwing bricks through windows.
The truth is that Christians believe God created us in His image. We bear the image of God in our human standards, choices, and intellect. God’s goal for us is not our comfort—it is our character. The Bible informs us on what it means to be human. But humanists cannot countenance the thought of being made in the image of God. Dr. Abdu Murray puts it best in his book, Saving Truth:
I’m reminded of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s famous statement (or infamous—opinions vary) that “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Surely that can’t be correct. That kind of self-definition is at the heart of autonomy, not liberty. We don’t have the intellectual foundation . . . if an essential part of each person’s liberty is to decide what they are and what other people are.
Young teenagers are being taken by their parents to doctors for “gender reassignment” surgery. Too young to vote or even be emancipated, children as young as twelve or thirteen are undergoing what other cultures might define as genital mutilation. Or, they take puberty blockers for the sake of trying to discover their own humanness. And their parents are facilitating this. Even people on the left are appalled and demonstrably speaking out against this child abuse. May God help us.
This post-truth culture of confusion has emerged from a time where we have subjugated truth to our own freedom. The Bible tells us that all truth is preeminent to freedom—that truth leads to freedom. True freedom comes from God, and the truth that sets us free is found in relationship with God the Father, through His only Son Jesus Christ. But now we are told that the truth does not really matter anymore. If that’s so, what is the source of our future freedom? Do we now crave comfort instead of truth? Is it just our own pleasure that we crave, regardless of the truth? No, and the answer is actually much worse than that.
Autonomy
If the truth is no longer the arbiter of the best ideas, when the best ideas themselves have no definition, then the only way we may determine the best way to live is by who wields the greater power. Today, our culture seeks autonomy. Autonomy has no boundaries. The word itself suggests anarchy and disorder: Auto (meaning self) and nomos (meaning law). Our post-truth culture seeks self-law, or autonomy—a society without boundaries. And they need this autonomy to fundamentally redefine what it means to be human.
A culture of confusion craves autonomy, not truth. Truth necessarily has to have boundaries, and our culture doesn’t want to have any boundaries. And if as a culture we do not decide how to organize ourselves with the best ideas, then we are left to decide these matters by who has the most power. This is what we’re seeing today in the streets of Portland, Seattle, and Chicago.
This is why elections in our current American culture are not about the best ideas—that’s a smoke screen. What they are really about is who gets the power to decide how they, and hence we, will be defined. In our culture, the only way anyone can obtain any power over others is if those others give it to them freely. If there was ever a truth the culture of confusion understands, it’s this one about elections.
The Bible tells us about and leads us to true freedom and away from the yoke of our own enslavement to self-law. Yet people have been led to believe that Biblical rules are arbitrary. They don’t like them. That’s why they turn from the Bible. They think it’s a freedom restricting book. There are boundaries in the Bible. But in the culture of confusion preferences have taken priority. It’s progressive to be autonomous. It’s bigoted to be bound by standards.
We do not know when the culture stops before it goes off the edge of anarchy. In the culture’s constant craving for autonomy, in any and every good sounding idea, many who lead in the culture of confusion have become like Gods who do not know what they want—other than power. But this is what we’re seeing on the streets of Portland, Seattle, and Chicago. Surely, as a culture we are dangling over the abyss.
And still, we must have limitations on our own freedoms and autonomy. We erect a fence in the backyard so our children may go out and play. Our airline pilots are licensed and have demonstrated recent currency to perform flight maneuvers—like takeoffs, and landings—so that we may arrive safely at our destinations. We routinely check and service our cars so that we have a confidence the brakes will work when we need them. And, we do these things at our own expense of time, money, and autonomy. True freedom has boundaries.
Free Will
All freedom requires some limitations even on college campuses—even in the creative realm of the arts. I cannot improve upon a section of G.K. Chesterton’s book Orthodoxy, who from his chapter, “The Suicide of Thought,” had this to say:
“All the will-worshippers, from Nietzsche to Mr. (John) Davidson, are really quite empty of volition. They cannot will, they can hardly wish. And if anyone wants a proof of this, it can be found quite easily. It can be found in this fact: that they always talk of will as something that expands and breaks out. But it is quite the opposite. Every act of will is an act of self-limitation.
“To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else…Every act is an irrevocable selection and exclusion. Just as when you marry one woman you give up all the others, so when you take one course of action you give up all the other courses…. It is the existence of this negative or limiting side of will that makes most of the talk of the anarchic will-worshippers little better than nonsense.
This could be why what I’m seeing on the news these days makes no sense. Here’s more from Chesterton.
“Anarchism adjures us to be bold creative artists, and care for no laws or limits. But it is impossible to be an artist and not care for laws and limits. Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold, creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe. The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits. You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature.
Humanity can try to redefine itself. But regardless of efforts to seek a neocortical gender or a new socio-economic reality, humanity cannot free itself from the laws of its own fundamental nature. Finally, here’s this from Chesterton.
“You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel. Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end. Somebody wrote a work called “The Loves of the Triangles”; I never read it, but I am sure that if triangles ever were loved, they were loved for being triangular. This is certainly the case with all artistic creation, which in some ways is the most decisive example of pure will.”
If art is “in some ways . . . the most decisive example of pure will,” and even art has limitations, what does this say about truth and what it means to be human?
Summary
The truth is that the Bible supports human freedom. But it does not support human autonomy.
In our culture of confusion, people cry for freedom, but what they really want is autonomy, and in that pursuit will always find themselves enslaved to their own finite view of existence and may not be able to determine why that’s happening. In fact, their future without God has already been determined. As prominent atheist Richard Dawkins puts it, they just dance to their DNA. There is not hope. Their future is little more than an elaborate mechanism playing itself out, and even love itself is mechanistic and illusory.
The Bible says that we are created in God’s image and we bear that image. It is for freedom that Christ has set us free from the chains of sin-filled living. This is for our benefit. To be sure, God is the God of all comfort. He comforts those who seek Him and find Him. But God’s goal for us is not our comfort—it is our character. We are free to choose to follow Him—or not. We are not free to alter the consequences of that choice. For Christians, this is what it means to be human: we bear the image of God.
If you seek re-definition of your humanity, you will be dissatisfied when you discover that your humanity still has boundaries. And then you will realize that you cannot alter the consequences of that re-definition. For whichever side of the cultural divide you find yourself, the following statement still applies.
The truth matters, especially when it involves defining what it means to be human.
For more on this subject, I commend to you this excellent resource referred to often in this post:
Murray, Abdu. (2018). Saving Truth. Zondervan.
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