# Christian Humanism



## ReformedWretch (May 29, 2005)

Is Michael Spencer (The Internet Monk) trying to be the new John Piper with this term? I mean we have Christian Hedonism, and now we're going to get Christian Humanism?

http://www.internetmonk.com/archives/2005/05/019914.html#more

Let's catch up. Several weeks ago, I shared with my readers that I was tossing the label of Calvinist. I said I would always describe myself as a "Reformation Christian" because I share- broadly- the commitments of the mainstream reformers in regard to issues of faith and church. While still a credobaptist, I do believe in the "covenant family" concept that the children of believers are part of the visible church. I affirm the Solas, but have an ecelctic and somewhat troubled relationship with TULIP as used in many quarters of the reformed world. I attempted to be a "Bad Calvinist" for a while, but that didn't work, as I found myself tied to a stake and doused with gas for saying I wasn't like many of my "truly reformed" conversation partners.

Instead of some form of Calvinism, I identified myself as a Christian Humanist and introduced the concept in a previous essay.

Therefore, I now call myself a Christian humanist, a tradition that encompasses a vast and diverse tapestry of Christian history, but which also calls into question much of the Christianity of our time. We are increasingly presented with the concept of a God-centered faith that has removed the incarnation from it's central place, putting there, instead, a kind of ambiguous, tangetial, uncomfortable awareness of human existence, constantly haunted by the tension between the "hallowing" of humanity in the incarnation, and the "polluting" of humanity in the reformed doctrine of total depravity.

It will now become my project, in future essays, to unfold Christian humanism as I understand it, and relate it to the faith of the New Testament and of the Creeds. I invite my readers to join me, to search along with me, to raise issues and questions, but to pray for me as I develop a more honest approach to the one thing we all share and possess with certainty: our humanity, and all the treasures centained therein. Pray that I will be able to help us, as persons made in God's image, to love God, neighbor and self together in the Trinitarian, incarnational love of Jesus Christ.

In this second of several short essays on Christian Humanism, I will begin to explore what I mean by this concept. This post will explore the question of knowledge as it is answered in Christian Humanism.

In the morning, when I rise
In the morning, when I rise
In the morning, when I rise, give me Jesus

Give me Jesus,
Give me Jesus,
You can have all this world,
But give me Jesus

When I am alone
When I am alone
When I am alone, give me Jesus

Give me Jesus,
Give me Jesus,
You can have all this world,
But give me Jesus

When I come to die
When I come to die
When I come to die, give me Jesus

Give me Jesus,
Give me Jesus,
You can have all this world,
You can have all this world,
You can have all this world,
But give me Jesus

So goes a beautiful contemporary worship chorus recorded by, among others, Fernando Ortega. Such "Jesus centered" devotion has a powerful emotional effect on those of us who are Christians. The longing such a song produces is one simple evidence that Jesus is, at a very deep level, more than just another person, character or relationship. Our deepest feelings of what is real in life are attached to Jesus, so that we can even think of the end of life as a Christ-transformed experience.

If I were to identify myself as a "humanist," it would be quite a different thing from a "Christian Humanist." Christianity and secular humanism are great philosophiocal adversaries in the contemporary culture wars. How can something that is avowedly anti-god ever be spoken of as Christian? (I suspect more than a few people would look at the label of Christian Humanist and conclude that the dominant theme is secular humanism, while "Christian" is just religious icing on the cake. Adding a few stories of a nice guy named Jesus helping old ladies across the street makes us all Christian humanists, in other words.)

Christian Humanism is, in fact, not a varnishing of secularism, but a reconsideration of what it means to be "God-centered" in our view of reality. For the Christian Humanist, God-centeredness is a concept that necessarily brings us to the incarnation, to Jesus, and ultimately to the knowledge of ourselves. Therefore, God-centeredness is inescapably humanistic, when the God that "centers" your reality is known only as a human being.

I am convinced that many of those Christians who have most consistently proclaimed the necessity of a "God-centered" worldview have given us, in all sincerity and godly zeal, a collection of distortions, not the least of which is to demote the significance of the incarnation to a place that endangers the character of the Christian faith itself. Despite our claims to be "pro-life," it appears to many of us that there is a remarkably anti-human component to a great deal of what is called Christianity today.

The question of knowledge is a fundamental philosophical question. It is easy to get lost in its intricacies. Yet, few of us become skeptics about knowledge. A professor of philosophy may teach that we can know nothing, yet he will drive his car home from work according to the information of his senses and the orderly universe presented to him through reason. An eastern mystic may proclaim that life is nothing but an illusion or a dream, yet how many of his disciples will consistently live out such a worldview? I have always found it fascinating that the core beliefs of eastern worldviews tend to undermine the reality of human relationships like marriage, yet such relationships persist in all cultures. Very, very few are prepared to say "We cannot know anything, and what we know cannot be certain." There is something deeply, desperately serious about our universal sense that the life we have been given is real and dependably true. As a Christian Humanist, I believe this is not an accident.

Human beings live their lives with intense loyalty to the belief that a foundational epistemology of human life comes from our own experience of the the real world. Of course, this doesn't solve all the problems of human knowledge! But it does mean that as our knowledge of ourselves, as human beings, increases, our knowledge of truth increases. It also means tht human experience, lived in "ordinary flesh and blood," is a dependable source of truth. With reasonable cautions in place, we can approach the question of knowledge without a suspicion of "tricks" preventing us from knowing the truth.

But how can we know about another person? As humans we can communicate our experiences and our journey in recognizable terms. This is one of the great joys of education. But what about communication and knowledge of what is very different from us? Like God....or a rock?

For example, it is quite possible that rocks have knowledge. It is possible that rocks have vast and sophisticated realms of knowledge. It is possible that rocks have ways of knowing that are completely hidden to me. If I am to consider the knowledge of a rock, it will not be as a rock, but only as a human being considering a rock. My knowledge is bounded completely by my experience of human life. So while I can examine the rock, label it, analyze it, test it, write about it, photograph it and develop theories about it, there is no point at which my knowledge ceases to be MINE and becomes the rock's knowledge of itself communicated to me.

How could I gain the rock's knowledge of itself? While there are many fantastic possibilities, the shortest routes are two: I could become a rock. Or the rock could become a human being. Of course, what the word "becomes" means in this scenario is virtually nonsense. There is no concievable way in which either entity could "become" the other, yet remain itself.

At this point, the Christian doctrine of the Trinity and the Incarnation come on the scene. Christians believe that God is God, yet all the while eternally being the three persons of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God is a being who is not bounded by "being oneness" as a human or a rock are bounded. And at the core of this mystery is the Christian doctrine of the incarnation, which says that God, in the person of the Son, became a human being, fully and completely, for us and for our salvation, without in any way ceasing to be God. This is the great presupposition of all Christian knowledge, and the key to the meaning of life.

It is of really vital importance that I quickly say that the incarnation is not a method whereby we are instructed on how to know God or how to become God. There is a communication of divine life and nature in Christianity, but this is not what we are talking about in the incarnation, and the incarnation is the heart of Christian Humanism. The incarnation is the crucial way God has chosen to make himself known to human beings. God became a human being. He took a body, a personality, a family, a culture, a history, a brain, a language, a time, and so on. All that is human, he became. All that is human, became- in the person of Jesus- fully God.

Travelling back to our analogy, if a rock were able to become incarnate as a human being, and speak from the perspective of "two natures," fully being both simulataneously, then knowledge would be possible. Why? Because now "rock-ness" could take on the form, feeling, shape, language and qualities of humanness. Communication and description would be possible. Correspondence of essence and experience would make it possible, to some extent, for a human being to know what a rock knows and what a rock is. Be very clear: apart from this, all our knowledge- true or false- would come from ourselves and we could not know anything outside of ourselves other than as we experienced it.

As a Christian Humanist, when I look at Jesus Christ, I see two persons, doing two things, and making two realities possible. I see God and a true human being, like myself. I see one who lives a sinless, yet fully human life, and I also see one who takes upon himself the complete reconciliation and mediation of God and humanity. Because of this reconciliation, I have a right standing with God, and I can know God through Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. Faith accesses this reality, but God in Christ alone makes it possible.

The New Testament clearly teaches that we come to know God in the person of the God/man Jesus Christ, and we do not know God without this incarnation.

2 Cor 4:6 For God, who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

Eph 4:13 until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ,

John 1:17-18 For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. (18) No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known.

1 John 1:1-3 That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life-- (2) the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us-- (3) that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.

I believe the New Testament affirms that true knowledge of God is possible through general revelation, but as a Christian, I must caution that this knowledge also comes to us through our human faculties, and is subject to the knowledge that comes to us in Jesus. For the Christian, God is always the God who reveals himself in Jesus. (How often did Jesus say that we were hearing/seeing/watching God in him?) God is not the god of general revelation with footnotes and appendix by Jesus. God is not the God of the Old Testament with a few added facts thrown in by Jesus. God is not the God of the Bible, featuring Jesus as a character. God is the God we meet, hear, and know in Jesus. There is no other God. There is no other truly dependable knowledge of God other than the knowledge we have of God in Jesus.

So as a Christian Humanist, I have a "God-centered" worldview, but I also admit that the truth about the God who is the center of reality comes to me in the person of Jesus Christ, and not in knowledge of God separate from Jesus, in rational inquiry that denies the incarnation as impossible or in mysticism that purports to inflate my knowledge to super-human/supernatural levels. A Christian Humanist may speak of God without speaking of Jesus, but he/she believes that the true God is revealed to us in Jesus, and there is no God who exists apart from or separate from the incarnation.

N.T. Wright puts it very well when he says that Jesus is the human face of God.

Western orthodoxy has for too long had an overly lofty, detached, high-and-dry, uncaring, uninvolved, and (as the feminist would say) kyriarchical view of god. It has always tended to approach the christological question by assuming this view of god and then fitting Jesus into it. Hardly surprising, the result was a docetic Jesus, which in turn generated the protest of the eighteenth century and historical scholarship since then, not least because of the social and cultural arrangements which the combination of semi-Deism and docetism generated and sustained. That combination remains powerful, not least in parts of my own communion, and it still needs a powerful challenge. My proposal is not that we understand what the word "œgod" means and manage somehow to fit Jesus into that. Instead, I suggest that we think historically about a young Jew, possessed of a desperately risky, indeed apparently crazy, vocation, riding into Jerusalem in tears, denouncing the Temple, and dying on a Roman cross"”and that we somehow allow our meaning for the word "œgod" to be recentered around that point.

We could only ask the "œkenotic" question in the way we normally do"”did Jesus "œempty himself" of some of his "œdivine attributes" in becoming human?"”if we were tacitly committed to a quite unbiblical view of God, a high and majestic God for whom incarnation would be a category mistake and crucifixion a scandalous nonsense. The NT, on the contrary, invites us to look at this Jesus"”the earthly Jesus, the Jesus of Second Temple Judaism, the kingdom-movement man, the ambiguous double revolutionary, the parabolic teaser, the healer, the man who wept over Jerusalem and then sweated drops of blood in Gethsemane"”to look at this Jesus and to say with awe and wonder and gratitude, not only "œEcce Homo," but "œEcce Deus."

This is Christian Humanism at its best. Our concept of "God" is now joined to the human person we know as Jesus.

Which brings me to the second concept of knowledge important to Christian Humanism: What we know of human experience teaches us about the incarnation, and therefore about God and ourselves.

Again, I return to the assumption that human beings accept their experience at "face value" as being true. Yes, we may argue endlessly about various aspects of human experience. Our interpretation of human experience is constantly at odds with other human beings, but we understand human experience itself as real and dependable. On this, there is remarkable agreement.

Take a Red State Conservative and a Blue State Gay Rights Activist as our examples. They disagree on thousands of things, many of them quite substantial and important. Yet, both love their families. Both know pain, fear, hope, and failure. Both know birth and death, beauty and confusion, loneliness and despair. In their differing grids of what compassion might mean in a particular political situation, they have little disagreement that compassion is a human value. Even as they disagree over abortion or Terri Shiavo, they share a sense of morality that causes them to fight for their interpretation of human existence.

As Christian Humanists, we take this raw data of human experience as vitally significant. It is the raw data of the incarnation of Jesus. It is in coming to know ourselves as human beings that we come to increasingly understand the depths of truth in the incarnation, and the God who revealed himself to us in Jesus. For the Christian Humanist, the data of the human journey in all its various forms, becomes the lines of the drawing that is the incarnation. It is not simply the study of the words of scripture that reveals God, but the close attention paid to all of human existence in the light of the incarnation, that reveals God in Jesus. Our knowledge of human experience, history, culture, behavior, etc. enlightens our reading of scripture. Scripture provides an immediate context, but the entirety of scripture, and the incarnation in particular, points us to a context in all that is human life, experience, knowledge and history.

The warning lights should immediately and rightly come on at this point. First of all, the fall is a very real component of our human experience that is not part of the God-revealed-in-Jesus. The fall has pervaded, distorted and perverted all of human reality. We must take account of the fall as we interpret human experience, and this is why scripture takes the PRIMARY place in our knowledge of God and of ourselves. In its truthful presentation of the divine/human story, it leads us to Jesus, who is the locus of scriptural inspiration and the the truth of the Gospel. In Jesus, we can see glory of God, but also the effects of the fall, and we can hear the Biblical story rightly. The Biblical story navigates the human story with the incarnation as our compass so we do not make shipwreck on the rocks of a naive humanism.

Secondly, the data of human experience can be manipulated. Take one subject of universal human interest: sexuality. The data of human experience could easily lead us to a very different kind of picture of what God has intended for human beings. This underlines the danger of general revelation on the level of human experience. Apart from Christ, and the Biblical authority we find in him, the data of sexuality would take us in contradictory directions, leaving us at the mercy of the postmodern competition for the power to make human language and experience mean whatever we want it to mean.

The Biblical story, therefore, stands in judgment on all other stories, and the incarnation causes us to affirm that Jesus is Lord of everything in human experience. For example, it is entirely plausible that the data of human experience would justify sex outside of marriage, but Jesus gives us his own words, culminating in Hebrews 13:4. Many other parts of the Biblical story tell us what real humanity means, and shows us the effects of sin on sexuality. The Biblical framework of the incarnation affirms what the Christian story teaches about sexuality, and it is not wise, or progressive or compassionate to rewrite the data. The truth will always bring us to Jesus, and to the kind of humanity we meet in him.

None of this takes away, however, the fact that we listen to all of human experience to learn more about that incarnation. We listen to all of human experience as a way of revealing the incarnation that brings us the Good News of God and man reconciled in Christ.

Christian Humanism will be distinctive in its interest in the broadest spectrum of human experiences. The Incarnation has staggering implications. Jesus entered into the experience of human growth. He became part of a family. He had a psychology and personality. He pondered the questions of science and philosophy. He appreciated art and beauty. He experienced sexuality, pain, temptation and loneliness. Without sin, he experienced failure. He lived in history, used language, participated in politics and economics. The extent of the incarnation's "ownership" of our human experience is complete. It is a failure of much of Christianity that it has little interest in large areas of human life, instead defining a narrow tract called "religion" and insisting that all significant human experiences happen within that fence.

The church has communicated that prayer is more important than economics, that evangelism is more important than the creation of beauty, that fearing evil is more "godly" than celebration and discovery. The message has sounded forth for generations: Christianity is a religion that despises human experience as hopelessly poisoned. A true Christian abandons the trivial and polluted life of the world for the secure fortress of the church and its interests. Christian Humanism rejects this on the basis of the incarnation.

Christian Humanism seeks to restore the two peaks of God's involvement with humanity: Creation and Incarnation. It seeks to remove the impression that the Christian faith represents a God who is the enemy of human existence and only interested in heavenly one. Christian Humanism believes that resurrection and the restoration of life to all creation is the eschatological goal of the glory of God.

The echoes of creation's glory resound in all human life and endeavors. The incarnation of Jesus reminds us that even in a fallen world, human experience has meaning to God. It "fits" with the God who made us and what God made us to be.

Christian Humanism believes that we can truly know God in the person of his divine/human Son, Jesus Christ, who is God, yet is in every way like us as well. Christian Humanism believes that all of human experience can glorify the God of creation and reveal the God who meets us in the incarnation. Christian Humanism rejects the animosity and despair that accompany so much evangelical teaching and practice. It calls on us to be full participants in every part of human existence that we see in the incarnation. If Jesus is the face of God, we recognize one who has become like us, that we might know Him and we might know ourselves in Him.

"If God is for us, who can be against us?" In Jesus, we meet a God who is for us, because he became us, that we might know Him.


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