Since
science is bound to a special-modal view of reality it can provide no answer to
the boundary questions of what it means to be human, of how humans are
different from animals. The central scriptural teaching relevant to this theme
is that human nature is centred in the human self, which scripture usually
calls the ‘heart’. As the deepest point
of human existence it is the centre of thought, belief, knowledge, will and
feeling. As Proverbs puts it: “Above all
else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.”
(4:23). The heart is the genuine, the
authentic, the true self. While man
looks at the outward appearance, it is only God who sees into a person’s heart
(1 Samuel 16:7; 2 Chronicles 6:30; 1 Kings 8:39; Jeremiah 17:9, 10). Despite the diversity of a person’s
activities and functions, these all lead out of and back to the heart. The heart represents the human person as an
essential unity; as such it is the focal point of the person’s relationship
towards, or away from, God. It is with
the whole, undivided heart that one must serve the Lord. It is thus also the root source of the good
and evil a person thinks or does (Matthew 12:34-35; 15:18)
Reformational
philosophy rejects an individualistic understanding of individual human
beings. Instead, it starts with the
spiritual fellowship of humanity in Adam and its renewal in Christ. In everyday
life we experience ourselves as a unity, an experience we indicate with the
word “I”. So for example we do not say
that my hand writes, but I write. Not,
my legs walk, but I walk; not, my mind or thought thinks, but I think and so
on. In our practical experience of life
we relate everything that plays a role in our life to our “I” as the central
point. It is the “I” that acts and
relates in multiple ways to the people, things and situations around us. All our possibilities are related back to
this central point as a kind of concentration point. Only God can know this
central “I”, the human heart, and as the ultimate subjective root of all human
activity it cannot itself become its own object of thought. This precludes the possibility of getting a
conceptual grasp of our central identity; a worked-out analysis is not possible
since I myself must be the agent of the analysis. This does not mean we can have no idea of the
human heart. However, since knowledge of
the self is dependent on knowledge of God, any idea of human nature will inevitably
reflect what people take to be the divine origin of all. When we talk about our
self in its many expressions and life activities we take a position almost as
if from the outside. Here it is common
to speak of the “self” which is, so to speak, the expression of the “I”, and so
we come to the problem of the unity and diversity of our being human.
The
traditional way of accounting for this is by the distinction between body and
soul. To speak of the human person as body and soul is not in itself a problem,
this language is consistent with the use in scripture and can be taken as different ways to emphasise the unity of the human person looked at as the
inward person and the outward person. Unfortunately the language of body and
soul has tended to move away from the unity of the person toward a view
that has the body as merely necessary for earthly life to be discarded at death
with the true person identified as the soul that lives on in a spiritual realm.
This approach has been very widespread among Christians despite
its pagan origins and many problems. Amongst Christian philosophers and
theologians there is now a move towards the conception of Thomas Aquinas which
gives greater weight to unity employing an Aristotelian model rather than the
more traditional Platonic form of dualism. Before exploring this issue more
fully we turn in the next section to an analysis of the structure of the outward person the human body.
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