”I tell my students, “One of the most important distinctions you will ever learn to make is the one between a distinction and a separation.” We say that a human being is a duality—he has a physical dimension and a non-physical dimension, which the Bible describes in terms of body and soul. If I distinguish a person’s body from his soul, I do no harm to him, but if I separate his body from his soul, I not only harm him, I kill him. By not grasping the difference between distinguishing and separating, Nestorius essentially destroyed the biblical Christ. ” -RC Sproul
Tag Archives: Doctrine of Man
What Communicable Attributes May or May Not Mean
If we think of God as having some attributes which we also possess, we may conceivably be doing it for one or the other of two reasons. In the first place, we may be doing it because we are making God in our own image. But, in the second place, we may be doing it because God has made us in his image.” -J. Gresham Machen, The Person of Jesus: Radio Addresses on the Deity of the Savior
What it Means to Bear the Image of God
“Each human person individually bears more of a reflection of God than the rest of the universe combined.” -Steve DeWitt
Three Words for Sin
“Three words for what sin is: sin, iniquity, trans-gression. ‘Sin’ is the word for the specific offence (thought, word, deed, whatever). It is what we have in mind when we say ‘I’m sorry for that’; ‘iniquity’ derives from a verb meaning ‘to be bent’, and points to the inner defect or warp in human nature which is the well-spring of all sin; ‘transgression’ translates the serious word ‘rebellion’, as of a subordinate against an overlord (e.g., 2 Kgs. 3: 7).” -Alec Motyer, A Christian’s Pocket Guide to Loving the Old Testament
Any Human Face Makes a Claim on You
“There is nothing more astonishing than a human face. Boughton and I have talked about that, too. It has something to do with incarnation. You feel your obligation to a child when you have seen it and held it. Any human face is a claim on you, because you can’t help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it. But this is truest of the face of an infant.” -Marilynne Robinson, said by character John Ames in Gilead
The Soul is a Creation of God
“Therefore we must take it to be a fact that souls, although the image of God be engraved upon them, are just as much created angels are.” -John Calvin
We Are Special (Even on Purely Scientific Terms)
What is a Person?
“What is a person? By ‘person’ I mean the particular kind of being that under the proper conditions is capable of developing into (or has developed into) a conscious, reflexive, embodied, self-transcending center of subjective experience, durable identity, moral commitment, and social communication who–as the efficient cause of his or her responsible actions and interactions–exercises complex capacities for agency and intersubjectivity in order to develop and sustain his or her own incommunicable self in loving relationships with other personal selves an with the nonpersonal world.” -Christian Smith
Loving Your Neighbor Requires Learning About: Psychosis
What Is Man?
“We human beings are a mystery to ourselves. We are rational and irrational, civilized and savage, capable of deep friendship and murderous hostility, free and in bondage, the pinnacle of creation an its greatest danger. We are Rembrandt and Hitler, Mozart and Stalin, Antigone and Lady Macbeth, Ruth and Jezebel. ‘What a work of art,’ says Shakespeare of humanity. ‘We are very dangerous,’ says Arthur Miller in After the Fall. ‘We meet…not in some garden of wax fruit and painted leaves that lies East of Eden, but after the Fall, after many, many deaths.” -Daniel Migliore
A Pilgrim's Theology 