What Do I Say When . . . ? (eBook)

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Human Dignity

One fall Saturday our family went to run errands and then grabbed lunch afterward. As we were leaving the restaurant, a family was entering the restaurant. Our paths crossing, I noticed in the family was a young boy in a wheelchair with severe disabilities. We could tell the boy caught our young girls’ attention (they did not awkwardly stare as much as just notice). When we got to the vehicle but before we drove off, I (Andrew) said to the girls, “Girls, I noticed that you saw that young boy in the wheelchair. How should we treat people who for whatever reason cannot use their legs or whose minds may not function properly?” To my delight, one daughter spoke up and said, “Well, God loves that person and that boy is made in God’s image, so we should be kind and help where we can.”

Perfect answer. That answer proved to me that it is those small conversations along the way that accumulate into a worldview. For a long time, we had been working to instill a concept in our children’s minds that only Christianity can fully hold to—human dignity. We did not do this through assigning them books. We have made the intentional plan to drop in these teachings when opportunities allow in the humdrum of daily life.

Christians cannot overlook the tremendous significance of this teaching. Christianity alone provides the best solution for a coherent reason to value a human person and the necessary authority to confidently guarantee it.

This is an idea that all societies require and that other thought systems or worldviews try (and fail) to develop on their own. Every society is governed by ideals that only Christianity can truly explain and resolve with definitive clarity.

At the heart of all political views, religious traditions, or cultural systems are beliefs, stated or unstated, about the value of the human being. Do human beings have actual moral value? Do humans have rights that actually matter? Or are humans mere carbon and water molecules that gained consciousness by sheer coincidence and blind chance? How does one arrive at the conclusion, a conclusion not subject to the whims of mere human opinion, that human beings bear a unique value and that this value should be recognized in and protected by law? What prevents a government from overpowering its own citizens and dispensing with them at will?

From beliefs about the appalling tragedy of the Holocaust to horror at America’s past involvement with slavery, modern society hinges upon beliefs about human beings—that human beings are worthy of protection from threats of abuse, wanton endangerment, and tyranny. The question is: Can non-Christian systems arrive at a position of human dignity on their own that does not end up being arbitrary? For example: Why does modern America assign human dignity regardless of skin color such that racism is considered morally wrong (which it is), but the same modern America overlooks human dignity on the basis of size and development and thus approves of abortion? There’s an inconsistency at the root of modern America’s dilemma on human dignity. Christianity has no such dilemma.

Generally people don’t think that human dignity can exist apart from a profound appreciation for the human being as a special product of God’s own making. Even atheists will admit this idea. As one atheist publicly acknowledged, “We may have to accept that the concept of the sanctity of human life is a Judeo-Christian notion which might very easily not survive Judeo-Christian civilization.” The same author goes on to observe three options facing the atheist with the idea of human dignity. He writes,

The first option is to fall into the furnace [admitted despair in having no dignity ethic]. Another is to work furiously to nail down an atheist version of the sanctity of the individual. If that does not work, then there is only one other place to go. Which is back to faith, whether we like it or not.1

Governments exist for the sake of protecting and facilitating the ability of human beings to live together without wantonly destroying one another. What any earthly political regime believes about the worth of human beings will impact how its people are treated. The question is not whether there will be a concept of dignity (or indignity) at the heart of our culture; the question is whose concept of dignity reigns supreme.

Biblical Teaching Overview

Human dignity. What is it? Dignity refers to the moral worth of a human being simply from existing—not from an attribute based on skin color, cognitive ability, athletic skill, age, height, location, or anything else. The good news of human dignity from the Christian worldview is that it is not parceled out by the sovereign decrees of human government or human opinion. There is nothing you or anyone can do to truly subtract from, or even add to, the dignity that someone possesses. We may think we can subtract dignity when we mock or insult someone. But because Christianity teaches that we do not bestow dignity upon a person (we only recognize it), it is impossible for us to truly take it away. Dignity resides within the person.

Human dignity exists as a result of humanity being made in God’s image.Christians arrive at this conclusion about human dignity because of who makes human beings—God. Genesis 1:26–27 declares:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

So God created man in his own image,

in the image of God he created him;

male and female he created them.

Though theologians debate the full meaning of “being made in God’s image,” what every theologian who honors the Bible as God’s word recognizes is that Scripture places a pronounced emphasis on the unique status of human beings compared to the rest of creation. As human beings we are not only existent and animate, we are beings whose faculties resemble God’s: we can reason with our minds and relate to one another in love. We can organize our activities to reach preconceived goals.

Human dignity is not a mere social construct, brute fact, or convention arrived at by consensus or whatever majorities deem it to be. To be truly protected from arbitrary human opinion, dignity must be and is a divine concept that speaks about the unique status of human beings alongside the rest of God’s creation. Because dignity is bestowed by God, it is issued with an unbreakable and unchangeable bond and guarantee. As there is no shadow of change in God, so there is no change in the value that God places on human beings.

There’s an internal moral logic to the value that Scripture places on the identity and dignity of human beings. The fact that Scripture calls us to love our neighbor assumes we are to respect our neighbor’s existence (Mark 12:30–31). Since Christians believe that dignity is the result of divine action, there is also a divine consequence. If you were asked why human beings have dignity, the answer is simply: “Because they do.” That might sound like circular reasoning, but if dignity does not exist as a divinely brute fact of someone’s existence, then dignity is something that can be added to and subtracted from based on the change in human opinion. Once that type of logic is introduced, it spells disaster for those whom people might recognize as having, perhaps, less dignity. It’s no surprise that the history books are full of episodes of government wanting to get rid of people whose lives are considered a “drain” on society. If dignity is not an absolute property tied to one’s existence, whether that person—or group of people—is worth respecting can change from one person to another. Every imaginable human injustice has occurred because one group of human beings failed to respect the equal dignity of the other.

The idea of human dignity is a truly unique and revolutionary concept that Christianity introduced into the world. Before Judeo-Christian thought came to predominate in certain areas of the world, it was difficult to say why someone’s existence should be respected. Christianity says that people are owed respect, honor, and their existence because God delights in creating humans. So much of what we take for granted as Christians living in today’s world is built upon the tradition of human dignity that Christianity brought into the world. If we are to respect the so-called “rights” of other human beings, we do so in confidence that rights are real because human beings have real moral worth and moral aspects of their being that are worthy of protection. For example, the universities, hospitals, and the rule of law that so much of our society hinges upon stems from Christian beliefs about the dignity of the human person: that human beings are rational and thus education is valuable for its own sake, that human beings should be treated with healing compassion, and that human beings deserve equal protection under the law (Luke 6:31).

Human dignity stands as the foundation for Christian opposition to any assault on God’s image bearers. Christian opposition to any number of social evils is based on our understanding of human dignity. Because all human beings are what they are—human beings made by God—we do not...