Psalm 8
I want to talk about identity theft. Now, when I mention identity theft you may think of that kind of crime that is so much a part of our computer age. Somehow an unscrupulous person gets hold of some crucial number, such as your social security number, and assumes your identity. This person then buys things in your name, opens credit card accounts, rents cars, all the while ruining your hard-won credit rating. Of course, since our newborns are assigned social security numbers before they go home from the hospital, some clever thieves steal the identities of our children or grandchildren. As a result, one day you discover your six-year-old grandson has run up quite a tab at a casino in New Jersey.
Of course, even if you’re not directly a victim of this kind of identity theft, you’re still impacted. We have to be on guard against eavesdropping shoppers when we check out at the department store, make sure we have an effective firewall on our computer, and find ourselves wishing we had invested in a company making shredders. So, let me encourage you to be careful this season.
I say that because I am going to talk about another identity theft, one that began well before the computer age. This kind of identity theft may even be more insidious than the better known form. The first kind of identity theft reaches into our bank accounts, the second reaches into our souls—all the while the thieves are denying the existence of our souls.
Phillip Johnson describes how the theft took place in what he describes as “the grand story” that permeates our culture. It is the fact that this story is so pervasive that makes it tough to be a Christian in our culture. The story, as Johnson tells it, has a familiar ring.
In the beginning were the particles and the impersonal laws of physics.
And the particles somehow became complex living stuff;
And the stuff imagined God;
But then discovered evolution.
It wasn’t long before we discovered our identity had been stolen.
But maybe I should stop to make an important distinction. “Evolution,” as Johnson uses the term, is Darwinism. Evolution is the term describing the process by which simple forms become more complex. Charles Darwin imposed his thinking on the process that other writers had already described. Darwin contribution was to say the process was unguided. If there was a ruling principle behind evolution it was natural selection or what is sometimes called “survival of the fittest.”
Many Christians are willing to accept evolution, they cannot accept Darwin. Whether those Christians are right in saying God might have used evolution to create the world is for books and journal articles to debate. For now, I’m just clarifying terms.
The problem is that so many evolutionists are also Darwinists. As a consequence, they freely admit—sometimes after a cocktail or two—that humankind was something of an accident; that we humans have no purpose.
Darwin was probably an atheist who, for the sake of his believing wife, claimed to be an agnostic. But many of his most vocal followers were outspoken atheists who took his ideas to their natural conclusion. These would include Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Hitler, Margaret Mead, and Alfred Kinsey. These are among the most prominent of the identity thieves who have been at work.
As a result of their work, many of us only know the identity that has replaced our original. We might put our new identity this way:
Humans are members of a species of mammalian bipeds, closely related to but not descended from the great apes; though not physically impressive, humans have a highly developed brain with intelligence higher even than that of the dolphins, though not possessing the marine mammal’s charm and placid nature. Humans have evolved with certain unusual traits. For example, unlike almost every other species, humans generally have an aversion to cannibalism. Even more unusual, many humans are convinced they are the favored creation of a Supreme Being who exists outside the bounds of the universe; fortunately, education has prompted many humans to abandon this notion.
In fact, since the identity thieves have been so effective I might need to remind you of what they have stolen. After all, they have been so effective you might not know the old answer to the question, Who am I?
If we could haul out our original identity papers, what would they say?
They would we are the special creation of God, created with the singular distinction of reflecting a semblance of our Creator, which semblance, though marred by sin, continues to impart value and purpose to the human race.
What does the psalmist say? He says we were created “a little lower than the angels.” The term “lower than the angels” can be translated as “a little lower than God.” The phrase could also be translated “a little lower than the angles for now.” That suggests there may be a greater day coming. In any case, David points to human beings possessing “honor and majesty.” Humankind, in the words of the older theologians, is the crown of God’s creation.
Drawn from the biblical materials, the implications of the Christian view of humankind are many and touch on a variety of pertinent issues.
While acknowledging that Humankind has a kinship with the animals, the Christian world-view insists that we humans are distinct from the animals.
To speak of the "human animal" is offensive to some, yet we have an undeniable kinship with animals. Like them we must breath oxygen, drink water, eat food. Cardiologists warn us about eating too much pork yet, until more recent developments, a valve from a pig's heart could be used to replace a faulty valve in an ailing human heart. The Christian world-view acknowledges our kinship with the animals but insists that we are more than mammalian bipeds.
After every step of Creation, God pronounced the product "good". Only after the creation of humankind did He say it was "very good". Eric Sauer named his study of humanity, The King of the Earth. He was underscoring the Bible's teaching that the Man and the Woman were given superintendence over the Creation. No other creature was given that commission. The AV's "subdue" doesn't do justice to what God intended Adam and Eve to do. They were being given a stewardship over creation. Adam and Eve were invited to enjoy, not exploit the creation. Though the Creation was perfect, somehow the work of Humankind could enrich it.
While acknowledging Humankind's uniqueness, the Christian World-view recognizes our dependence upon God.
Like all of Creation, we are dependent upon God for our existence; beyond that, we are dependent upon God for meaning and purpose in life.
It is this truth that prompted Augustine to say "there is a God-shaped vacuum in every man..."
Much of Humankind's spiritual history may be written as the story of our quest to be independent of the Creator. It is a story bound to end in folly and failure.
Consider this: every one of those thinkers I mentioned earlier-- Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Hitler, Mead, and Kinsey—were rabid atheists. Every one of them gleefully led the way to abandoning the old story of who we are. Marx believed religion was a tool of oppression, Nietzsche believed God was dead (meaning the very idea of God no longer had meaning), Freud believed God was a illusion created my men who both loved and wanted to kill their fathers, and Hitler was willing to sound like a Christian when it suited him but he hated Christianity with its sympathy for the weak.
We might imagine such thinkers as the masterminds behind the theft of our identity, masterminds who have used countless minions teaching on campuses, writing novels, making movies, and singing songs. They have been so effective we scarcely noticed the theft had taken place. But if we check carefully we will discover it has.
Those who have stolen our identity have erased our distinction and denied our purpose.
Consider this assessment written by one of the most influential men of the 20th century, a man who early in his life abandoned any meaningful belief in God.
I have found little that is “good” about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.
Sigmund Freud wrote those words in a letter to a friend in 1918. Freud would redefine the way many understood human beings, suggesting that we are to be defined in terms of our sexual drives.
Ingrid Newkirk, president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said, "Six million Jews died in concentration camps but six billion boiler chickens will die here in slaughterhouses." That startling comparison between the slaughter of Jews during the Holocaust and the slaughter of chickens for food is unnerving. How could she make such a comparison? She has abandoned the notion that there is a difference between humans and animals.
As long ago as 1938, journalist Walter Lippmann recognized the danger of the naturalistic view of humanity, the view which says we are the product of impersonal forces of nature and not the purposeful act of the Creator.
The decay of decency in the modern age, the rebellion against law and good faith, the treatment of human beings as things, as the mere instruments of power and ambition, is without a doubt the consequence of the decay of the belief in man as something more than an animal animated by highly conditioned reflexes and chemical reactions. For, unless man is something more than that, he has no rights that anyone is bound to respect, and there are no limitations upon his conduct which he is bound to obey.
This brings us to another result of the theft of our identity.
Those who have stolen our identity have left us with a morality that is tentative and purely utilitarian.
Not everyone who participated in the theft was a moral degenerate, but they may have succeeded in living above the implications of their morality. Yet some of these identity thieves rewrote the book on morality. Mead and Kinsey were key examples.
Margaret Mead and Alfred Kinsey probably share the honors of being in the vanguard of the sexual revolution. Both seemed to embrace the notion that whatever is done, sexually, is normal and ought to be allowed. While our culture may have resisted Kinsey’s endorsement of bestiality, it has certainly heard Mead’s approval of adolescent experimentation.
Whenever you hear someone say “If it feels good, do it,” you are hearing the echo of one of these identity thieves.
Of course, no society can live without some kind of ethical standard; even it’s simply one they have agreed upon by common consent. Such a standard will keep order at least until the common consent changes.
Daniel Calahan offers what he calls “minimalist ethics.” Stripped of religious trappings and any suggestion of our obligation to any Divine Being, this ethic simply says, “One may act in any way one chooses so far as one does not do harm to others.” At one level this probably sounds appealing. After all we are freedom-loving people and this is certainly a liberating viewpoint. But this economy-model ethic has some problems.
Certainly any such ethic begs the question: Why should I restrict my freedom simply because my behavior might harm another? What if I envision myself to be more intelligent, more gifted, more significant than the person who might be hurt by my behavior? If Marie and her husband have one child they are raising while my wife and I have three children we’re raising, why shouldn’t I steal Marie’s idea and claim it as my own so I will get the promotion and the raise?
When the standard isn’t really fixed, I can always rationalize exceptions to its demands. Couldn’t Jack the Ripper have argued, “These prostitutes are doomed to a life of poverty and misery, they will almost certainly contract some dreaded disease that will make their final days a time of pain and suffering; by dispatching them with my blade am I not acting benevolently toward them?”
Couldn’t Hitler have argued that the survival of the Aryan race was so essential to the future of civilization that the elimination of “inferior” races was excusable? Wait. That’s what he did argue.
Couldn’t we argue that this ethic rests on possessing the freedom to “act in any way one chooses” and thus those without that freedom are so severely handicapped the benevolent course would be to remove them? Indeed, since those who don’t possess such freedom are likely to impinge upon the liberty of those who do, wouldn’t eliminating them prevent their harming others by this impingement? Of course, wouldn’t this call for policies allowing us to eliminate such limited persons before they are born or after they have become too sick or old to live truly free lives? Wait. No, that’s just being paranoid.
Those who have stolen our identity have closed the door on hope beyond the grave.
I recently saw a television story in which a dying woman asked that her ashes might be used as fertilizer for a newly planted tree. That way, she would live on in the tree.
The identity thieves have brought us to this place. The grave or the crematory is the end. In the strange post-theft world, we have a complicated attitude toward death. On the one hand, our culture fights against death; on the other hand we declare death to be a friend, a “natural” part of life.
Bertrand Russell, mathematician, philosopher, writer, and atheist summed up the logical conclusion of those who conspire to steal our identity.
I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego shall survive. I am not young, and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is none the less true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting. Many a man has borne himself proudly on the scaffold; surely the same pride should teach us to think truly about man’s place in the world.[1]
I could probably say more about the impact of the great identity theft. Instead, I want to say something about what would happen if our proper identity were restored.
If our proper identity were restored we would discover that there is a fundamental unity in humankind. Darwin believed there were inferior races that would eventually disappear, the document attesting to our proper identity tells us that there is a solidarity to humankind, for as Paul said of God as the Creator who gave us our identity, "From one man [Adam] He made every nation of mankind to live all over the earth."
I could say a good deal but let me focus on just one point.
If our identity were restored we would discover we that we human beings reflect the image of God.
The foundation for this assertion is found in the Bible's insistence that Humankind was "created in the image of God", a statement made of no other creature. On two occasions in the opening chapters of Genesis we are told that God created Humankind in his image.
GE 1:26 Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth,* and over all the creatures that move along the ground." GE 1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
*****
GE 9:6 "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man.
The term "likeness" is equivalent in meaning to "image" and is used in the following verses: GE 5:1 When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God and James 3:9 where [James tells us it is wrong to curse] men, who have been made in God's likeness.
Christians have debated the exact meaning of "image of God" and have not yet reached a firm consensus other than to generally deny it refers to any physical likeness. (This is why orthodox Christians object to the Mormon view of God possessing a physical body.)
Rather, they have said it refers to spiritual characteristics which somehow "mirror" some of God's characteristics. As a result the "image of God" is thought to refer to some combination of our intellectual, moral, spiritual, and volitional qualities.
Complicating the search for a precise meaning is the fact of the Fall. Humankind is not what God intended it to be. Though most Christian thinkers concede that the image is marred because of sin, they nevertheless insist that Humankind still bears the image of God.
Possessing the image of God means we Human Beings were created as privileged creatures. The Westminster Shorter Catechism asserts "Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever."
There's a strangeness to the notion of enjoying God forever. We don't think of "enjoying God", we think of fearing God, of obeying God, but not enjoying him.
The identity thieves tell us, "Man's chief end is to outgrow God and deny him forever."
Surely all Creation brings glory to God, but we humans have the privilege to actively participating in glorifying God. We have the privilege of enjoying him.
Possessing the image of God means we Human Beings were created as spiritual beings.
The man and the woman were created with the capacity to have rich and wondrous fellowship with the Creator. The language of the Creation story suggests that they could walk and talk with God freely and without hesitation. Only after the Fall was there a barrier between the Creature and the Creator.
Despite the best efforts of the identity thieves, most of our fellow humans still possess a consciousness of some Higher Power and a yearning to have a relationship with that Power. As Augustine observed, "Our heart is restless until it finds rest in you, O Lord."
The myriad religions of the world are a token of that spiritual nature questing for God. The venerable Southern Baptist theologian W. T. Conner goes as far as to suggest that even those who deny the existence of God tend to "personify Humanity, or Nature, or the Universe." Look at the writings of many of the identity thieves and you'll find Nature capitalized.
We are spiritual beings and our restored identity speaks to that part of our make-up. It tells us we were created with a special freedom.
We have the freedom to know and respond to our Creator, to have a fulfilling relationship with the One who gave us our identity. At the same time, we have the freedom to deny and reject the Creator’s love. The identity thieves have told us that is the way to fulfillment. But, again, thieves are not known for their honesty.
CONCLUSION
We humans still bear the image of God, still possess a God-imparted value and worth, yet that image is distorted and marred. Because of this, we’re susceptible to identity thieves.
How can we make ourselves a little less susceptible?
--Ask serious questions about the shoddy thinking of the identity thieves. Statements like “Only that which can be tested in a laboratory is real,” can’t be tested in a laboratory—it’s a faith statement.
--Ask serious questions about the scarcity of evidence for the thieves’ claims. Where is the evidence that we have no souls, that the universe just happened? Where is the evidence for Sagan’s famous claim “the cosmos is all there is?”
--Ask serious questions about the motives of the thieves. Did the best-known identity thieves have a special interest in denying the existence of God and the claims of morality, especially sexual morality?
In the end, only one man was never confused about Who he was, Jesus Christ. When we trust him, we can begin become who God intended us to be. We can recover our stolen identity.
[1] Linda Edwards, A Brief Guide to Beliefs: Ideas, Theologies, Mysteries, and Movements, Louisville: Westminster-John Knox Press, 2001, p. 509.
