Russell Moore: Two Contradictory Gospels

At the same time, the pro-life movement, like the abolitionist and civil rights movements, necessarily entailed a theological vision. The central question behind the abortion debate, after all, was, “Is the fetus my neighbor?” A Christian articulation of reality had to, by necessity, lay out an accounting for what it means to be a person, and why this matters. That’s especially true when the issues related to human dignity have become, due to technology, much more complex, as they move into questions of embryonic research, reproductive technologies, genetic screening, and human cloning. The theological vision behind these questions though is applicable to issues far removed from the petri dish or the nursery crib. Those who develop a sense of how human dignity fits in the larger meaning of the universe have consciences that can be trained to see related issues of racial reconciliation, euthanasia, war and peace, treatment of migrants and workers, capital punishment and prison conditions, as well as the rapidly changing challenges to human uniqueness proposed by technologies that promise life-extension and even artificial intelligence.

These questions are not simply about equipping Christians to do the right thing in the arenas of statecraft and public culture. A Christianity that doesn’t prophetically speak for human dignity is a Christianity that has lost anything distinctive to say. The gospel is, after all, grounded in the uniqueness of humanity in creation, redemption, and consummation. Behind the questions of whether we should abort babies or torture prisoners or harass immigrants or buy slaves is a larger question: “Who is the Christ, the Son of the Living God?” If Jesus shares humanity with us, and if the goal of the kingdom is humanity in Christ, then life must matter to the church. The church must proclaim in its teaching and embody in its practices love and justice for those the outside world would wish to silence or to kill. And the mission of the church must be to proclaim everlasting life, and to work to honor every life made in the image of God, whether inside or outside the people of God. A vision of human dignity can exist within the common grace structures of the world, but a distinctively Christian vision of why humanity should be protected must emerge from a larger framework of kingdom and culture and mission.

On a Sunday this January, probably of whatever year it is when you read this (at least as long as I’m living), I will probably be preaching somewhere in a church on “Sanctity of Human Life Sunday.” Here’s a confession: I hate it.

Don’t get me wrong. I love to preach the Bible. And I love to talk about the image of God and the protection of all human life. I hate this Sunday not because of what we have to say, but that we have to say it at all. The idea of aborting an unborn child or abusing a born child or starving an elderly person or torturing an enemy combatant or screaming at an immigrant family, these ought to all be so self-evidently wrong that a “Sanctity of Human Life Sunday” ought to be as unnecessary as a “Reality of Gravity Sunday.” We shouldn’t have to say that parents shouldn’t abort their children, or their fathers shouldn’t abandon the mothers of their babies, or that no human life is worthless regardless of age, skin color, disability, or economic status. Part of my thinking here is, I hope, a sign of God’s grace, a groaning by the Spirit at this world of abortion clinics and torture chambers (Rom. 8:22-23). But part of it is my own inability to see the spiritual combat zone that the world is, and has been from Eden onward. The dark present reality didn’t begin with the antebellum South or with the modern warfare state, and it certainly didn’t begin with the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. Human dignity is about the kingdom of God, and that means that in every place and every culture human dignity is contested.

Even those who reject Christian doctrine, or even any religious teaching at all, can acknowledge that something seems wrong with the world. Cruelty and violence and injustice seem to be about more than just our learned behaviors but something almost hardwired into human nature itself. People would see the timing and the reasons behind this “fall” in different ways—whether it’s the rise of the industrial economy or the end of some prehistoric matriarchy or a thousand other scenarios. But the Christian accounting of humanity, in continuity with the Hebrew Scriptures, teaches that at some point in our primal past, humanity came into contact with a dark, mysterious, personal reality that was wild, intelligent, powerful, and in a state of insurrection against the Creator. These intelligences have been identified by different names in various cultures—spirits or watchers or powers or devils or demons. But whatever they are called, these forces seemed to have special interest in humanity, and in reframing for humanity how we should see ourselves.

The demonic elements of the universe wish for us to see ourselves as either more than we are or as less than we are. They wish for us to see ourselves as beasts, animals driven along only by our appetites and our instincts, and thus unaccountable morally to God. The quest to deify humanity, to unshackle ourselves for creatureliness, always leads not to the exalation of the human but to the degradation of the human. This is why the apocalyptic vision of the Bible is of a humanity that demands to be worshipped as a god that arises as a Beast out of the sea (Rev. 13:1).

A Human-Centered Universe

In order to understand why human dignity matters, and why human dignity is always contested, we must understand that the kingdom of God is centered on humanity. The universe is human-centered. I can imagine as I write this the bristling of some of you, especially those of you who are the most theologically orthodox and articulate. To say the universe is human-centered, you might think, sounds like the sort of heresy we often hear from those who wish to redefine God or his works in terms of human expectations or categories. What I mean, though, is that the universe was created to be governed, under God, by human image-bearers. The universe was called into existence as an inheritance for Jesus, that in all things he might have the preeminence (Col. 1:18).

The Old Testament tells us that the universe was not called together arbitrarily but by the Word of God (Gen. 1:3), a Word the New Testament tells us is not a thing but a person (John 1:1). The Scriptures affirm that the meaning of all reality is encoded in something the apostle Paul called “the mystery of Christ” (Eph. 3:4). This mystery is that in Christ there is a “summing up” of everything—not simply the aggregate of all souls but “things in heaven and things on earth” (Eph. 1:10) in the person of the incarnate, crucified, and resurrected Jesus. The order and harmony of the universe are described in the Genesis account of, for example, the regularity of times and seasons. This order is described in terms of a manifold wisdom of God, by the Psalms and elsewhere in the Hebrew Scriptures, and is grasped by non-Hebraic thought in the concept of the Logos</> or the Tao ordering the harmony of the cosmos. In the mystery of Christ, the mud of the earth—the substance from which humanity is formed—is joined to the eternal nature of God himself so that the material world is now connected, without confusion but also without separation, to God himself.

In Christ Jesus, God joins deity to humanity, permanently, in the human heir of the universe. It is not that Jesus was human, but rather than Jesus is human. God’s purposes in Christ, then, explain why the Scriptures take so seriously the dignity of humanity as created in the image of God (Gen. 1:27). Humanity, from the very beginning, is distinct from the rest of nature, including the rest of the living creatures, because of the mysterious image bearing. The image is debated among Christians, and has been for thousands of years.

Is the image primarily rationality (though the angels are certainly rational, and they do not bear God’s image)?

Is it primarily moral accountability (though, again, the angels are morally accountable)? Is it primarily the function of humanity in carrying out God’s will?

Such debates seem, to me, to be beside the point. The image of God, biblically speaking, is a mysterious reality in which the invisible world and even inanimate nature seems to recognize in humanity the distinctive mark of our Creator (Rom. 8:19-23). This image is about who we are—not just about what we do—but clearly the image of God defines and equips us to carry out God’s mission, ruling beneath and for him over the rest of creation. This is the end-result of redemption—a humanity once again, under God, on the throne of the cosmos.

Excerpted from Onward by Russell Moore. Copyright B&H Publishing Group 2015.

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