I think it's safe to say that Adolf Hitler
wasn't all bad. He may have been one of the baddest of the
bad of all of human history, but even in the depths of our sinfulness as human creatures,
sometimes by accident it seems, or unintentionally, we're able to, at least outwardly, conform
to the good as the theologians have defined as "civil righteousness." What I was thinking of was at least Adolf
Hitler celebrated Christmas on occasion, and he did it with a generous, kind-hearted spirit
by which he distributed presents to his friends at his own expense. I mean, he wasn’t Ebenezer Scrooge. So I mean, we have to say that nice thing
about Hitler is that he did give presents to his friends. In fact, before he became the Führer of Nazi
Germany, he, one year, gave the same present to all of his close acquaintances and friends,
his cronies, people like Goebbels and Hermann Göring and Adolf Eichmann and Himmler and
the rest, whose names have gone down in infamy. That year, Adolf gave each one of them a personal
copy of Friedrich Nietzsche's book Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In the German edition of that book Nietzsche,
of course, announced the death of God and called for the birth of the Übermensch, the
Superman, who would take humanity to new heights and to create a new world order. The philosophy that Nietzsche developed under
the aegis of this concept of the Übermensch, or the Superman, was called "biological heroism." Now, what he meant by that was that he thought
that it was important to weed out the weak, the impotent, the lazy persons of the human
race. Nietzsche was convinced that his own century
was decadent, nineteenth century Europe, and it needed a new leadership that would inaugurate
and usher in a new humanity. And so, he looked for the creation of a master
race of people. And in Hitler's madness, he took Nietzsche's
book as his blueprint for creating the Aryan race. In my lifetime, ladies and gentlemen, it was
a matter of serious dispute on the continent of Europe whether Jewish people could genuinely
be considered human or at least fully human. In our own nation, in the nineteenth century,
serious debates were held in conjunction with the issue of the abolition of slavery over
the question, "Does the African Negro have a soul?" Is that Negro a person or mere property or
chattel? That may sound totally shocking and astonishing
to you, but the reality of the situation is that people's humanity can never be taken
for granted. In the realm of philosophy, the subject that
has been on center stage in the twentieth century has not been epistemology. Epistemology dominated seventeenth and eighteenth-century
philosophical investigations. It has not been metaphysics, which dominated
ancient philosophy and medieval philosophy. The dominant question of philosophy in the
twentieth century has been the question of anthropology, "What does it mean to be anthropos,
to be man or human?" That's been the overarching question, and
there's a reason for that. It's not, again, by accident that the crisis
in anthropology followed, in history, the eclipse of belief in God in Western civilization. Where God is no longer at the center of people's
thinking, it is inevitable that the question of human dignity becomes a matter of grave
concern. The ancient philosophers tried to give definition
to what it means to be human. We know the expression, "If it looks like
a duck, if it walks like a duck, if it quacks like a duck, chances are it's a duck." It's like the little boy that went to Sunday
school and his teacher said to him, "Johnny, what is it that is gray and furry and has
a great big long bushy tail?" And Johnny said, "I'm sure you want me to
say Jesus, but it sounds like a squirrel to me." Sometimes, we have difficulty giving precise
definitions to entities around us and in this world. Plato mused over the question, what is it
that makes a human being distinctively human? What separates us from the other animals? And finally, in desperation, he defined a
human person as a "featherless biped," a duck without feathers, until one of his students
hurled a plucked chicken over the wall of the academy with a sign on it which said,
"Behold, Plato's man." It was featherless, and it had two feet. What does it mean to be human? What is man? You remember the psalmist asked that question. He said, "Oh Lord, our Lord, how excellent,
how majestic is Your name in all of the earth. When we consider the heavens, the work of
Your hands, the sun and the stars and all that Thou hast ordained, we inevitably ask
the question, 'What is man that Thou art mindful of him?'" But you see, how we understand humanity in
large measure controls how we treat human beings, how we value human beings. And so, an integral part of any Christian
life and worldview must include within it a Christian anthropology, a Christian understanding
of what it means to be human. I keep wondering what my guest is pondering. You know, he hasn't said a word since we started
this. He doesn't seem to even be bothered by my
constant interruptions. He just goes on pondering more and more, it
seems, intently. He's satisfied to be alone, doesn't have to
be in a crowd, but I wonder what he's thinking. Perhaps he's pondering the question that every
one of us asks some time or another, "Who am I? What is the meaning of my life?" The biblical image that is used more often
than any other image for human life is an image drawn from nature, this is the image
of grass. The grass that grows, that springs up, it's
germinated by the cool rains and the warmth of the sun and the process of photosynthesis. It flourishes for a season, but then as the
sun beats down upon it, it withers and it dies. Sounds as a very pessimistic view of the matter,
doesn't it? But even in the most upbeat portions of sacred
Scripture, from time to time the writer will stop to remind us, "Don't forget, all flesh
is grass." We live our threescore and ten, then we wither
and we die. And in light of the fragility of human existence,
we have to ask, "What's it all about? Do we have significance? Do we have meaning? Is there any real value to human life?" We live in a time, I believe, of unprecedented
pessimism with respect to the significance of human personhood. After the Holocaust of World War II, after
the camps were exposed, the soldiers returned, France was liberated, it was then that the
works of men like, Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre began to receive exposure across the world
and Sartre, perhaps the most penetrating dramatist that the French nation produced in the twentieth
century, was also a technical philosopher, and he commented frequently out of the milieu
of atheistic existential philosophy. In one of his books, I remember trying to
secure a copy of it back in the sixties, and I had to special order it to get it because
nobody had in stock in the city of Pittsburgh, and I had to wait months to get it. It was a little book entitled Nausea. And the book Nausea was Sartre's perhaps most
vivid description of the futility and meaninglessness of human existence. His final comment was that "man is a useless
passion," a useless passion. A passion, ladies and gentlemen, is a feeling,
an intense emotion that we express, something that consumes us and controls our very being. It's not just a casual concern. You remember, Paul Tillich used to say that
a person's God can be defined or identified once you identify that person's ultimate concern,
that about which you are most passionate, most caring. It is a given about our humanity that we do
care about things, don't we? That we have feelings. I hear my little grandchildren fighting with
each other and calling each other names, and the one will rebuke the other and say, "You
hurt my feelings." I remember when I was a little kid and somebody
would insult me and I would cry, and I'd go home to my mother and cry, and she would say,
"Listen, don't let these people get you down. Whenever people say unkind things about you,
you just go back and you say, 'Sticks and stones will break my bones, and names will
never hurt me.'" That was my defense, right? Did you ever learn that? Yes, that transcends generations. Did they have that in your day? You see, they even had it before I was alive. And so, I tried it. There was this guy in our town who used to
beat up on me, and I'd come home crying, and he would call me all these terrible names. And one day he was calling me all these names,
and I just looked at him, and I said, "Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names
will never hurt me." And what I was thinking inside was, "This
is a lie." Because sticks hurt and stones hurt, but you
can get over those. But the insult, the insensitive criticism
can paralyze your soul until you die. Every person in this room and every person
that sees this film has wounds that have never healed in their souls from something they
heard somebody say to them or about them in their lifetime. We care, we feel, we laugh, we weep, we become
afraid. We don't just think. Thinking alone does not define the essence
of our humanity. In fact, you can even sense in The Thinker
here that there's not simply cerebral activity taking place, but what else is communicated
here is an attitude. I'm not sure what the attitude is, but it's
certainly not one of frivolity. He is not in the mood of partying at the moment,
huh? He's got different feelings that are absorbing
him in this posture. Our feelings change. And one thing about our feelings is that they
always change. I always say that a person who commits suicide,
if they would've waited twenty-four hours, they probably wouldn't have done it. How quickly our feelings and our emotions
change. But the question that Sartre was wrestling
with is all this caring, all this feeling, all this hurting, all this rejoicing, does
it matter? Does it mean anything? And his conclusion was, "No, it doesn't." That we are bundles of passion, bundles of
feeling, bundles of care, and all of our caring is nothing more and nothing less than an exercise
in futility. It's useless, because humanity has no meaning. At that point when Sartre made that comment,
he was merely echoing the philosophy that Nietzsche had propagated a century before. Even Nietzsche's biological heroism he understood
to be an exercise in futility, because Nietzsche's bottom line anthropology was one that could
not be rescued even by the appearance of the Superman because Nietzsche said, "At the bottom,
all there is "das nichts", the nihil, the nothingness, the abyss. That man is involved in a chaotic, endless
myth of a recurring cycle that has no definitive origin and no purposeful destiny. Round and round and round we go, with no progress
and no meaning." I profoundly disagree with Sartre, and I profoundly
disagree with Nietzsche. But I'll tell you what, I have so much more
respect for those two philosophers than I have for the dominant species of armchair
philosopher that we find in our culture today, the modern or the contemporary humanist. I have to be candid with you. In my judgment, humanism as a philosophy,
though it is the dominant philosophy in our culture today, is pseudo-intellectualism. It is a philosophy that I'm convinced does
not merit or deserve serious consideration by intelligent people because, bottom line,
it's silly. Well, what do I mean by that? Well, here's what humanism teaches us. The humanist teaches us that the supreme being
of this created universe is man. That we are the creatures of highest dignity
and value and esteem. And they extol virtues like honesty, integrity,
industry. And they march for the preservation of human
rights all over the world. The humanist will be in the avant-garde of
civil rights, won't they? Because they want to protect the dignity of
mankind. And yet, if you ask that same humanist, "From
whence cometh human dignity?" he has no possible answer, because the same time that the humanist
is telling you how important and valuable and dignified human beings are, the humanist
tells us that man emerged from the slime as a cosmic accident, and he is moving relentlessly
to non-being. His origin is utterly insignificant, and his
destiny is equally insignificant, but somehow in between the two poles of his existence,
he has all this dignity and value. That's why I say it's silly. Francis Schaeffer once said about the humanist
that "the humanist has both feet firmly planted in midair." The humanist is on a roller coaster without
brakes because humanism is nonsense, but it's persuasive nonsense because it speaks to a
need in the human heart. We want to believe that we have significance. We want to believe that we have dignity. We want to believe that our passions matter
and that they're not useless. That there is more than the abyss of nothingness
of which Nietzsche spoke. That there's more to life than contemplating,
as Camus said, the ultimate question. Maybe it's the question the thinker is contemplating,
the question of suicide. There's got to be more than that, the humanist
says. But the humanist lives on borrowed capital. Humanism could only emerge, really, from a
society that had previously been committed to a meaningful origin and a meaningful destiny
to the human race. What humanism has done is rejected Christianity
and tried to replace their secular worldview in what they have rejected, not realizing
that they have rejected the very foundation for the humanity that they seek to extol. And I say to the humanist with all cynicism,
"If I come from nothing, if I'm going to nothing, I am nothing, and why should I care who sits
in the front of the bus or on the back of the bus? What do I care whether it's white germs or
black germs that have rights in this world?" I keep asking the humanist to give me a reason
for his faith. I keep asking the humanist to give me one
reason why I should treat any human being with dignity, other than that he simply has
the preference that I do it. You see that humanism is based on sentimentality. It has no metaphysical foundation, no epistemological
foundation, and certainly no theological foundation. It is an anthropology with no support, based
on sentiment. The Christian worldview teaches that man is
totally depraved. That mankind is the most wicked creature on
this planet, apart from the visitations of Satan himself here. That of all the creatures that inhabit this
world, man is the worst. That the great ecological problem with planet
earth is not because of an overabundance of rats but an overabundance of people. It's people who have plunged the world into
ruin. The whole creation groans in travail because
of mankind. The whole creation is under a curse because
of mankind, and that which is grass is more than grass, it is unspeakably wicked. And the moral judgment that God gives to mankind
is that there is none righteous, no not one. There's not even one who does good, no not
one. And people don't want to hear that. You see, that's one of the reasons they reject
Christianity and not only Christianity in general, but particularly Reformed Christianity
because Reformed Christianity talks about the total depravity of human beings that they're
born in sin, original sin. We extol human freedom, man's free will, ignoring
the fact that the term "free will" never occurs in the Bible. The concept's there in terms of human responsibility,
yes, but the emphasis of the Bible is on the bondage of the human heart. It's captive to evil passions, it's not useless
passion. Sinful passion is what defines humanity. Now people say, "I don't want to believe in
that kind of a view of anthropology, it's depressing." It's the highest view of man the world has
ever seen. There is no religion, no philosophy under
the sun that takes sin as seriously as Christianity does. Did you ever wonder why that is? Because we have a morbid fascination with
morality? No, no, no, no. Christianity takes sin seriously because it
takes people so seriously. And Christianity says, "It is a serious matter
when one human being violates another human being, when one human being hates another
human being, when one human being steals or rapes or kills another human being. That's serious and that's wrong." You see how epistemology, metaphysics fit
together, driving us to the concept of God. Our doctrine of God determines our doctrine
of man, and our doctrine of man drives us to ethics as an integral and necessary dimension
of our life and worldview. The Bible says that man of all the creatures
was uniquely created in God's image, that we alone have a profound capacity and ability
to reflect and to mirror to the rest of creation the very character of God, that we are called
to be mirrors of God's holiness. That's why when we sin our sin is so serious,
because not only do we violate each other, but we lie to the creation about the nature
of God. We are involved in cosmic treason. We have free will in the sense that we have
the power to do what we want. We don't have free will in the sense that
we have the power to do what we want with impunity, because over and above my free will
always stands the sovereign authority and the power of Almighty God. And if your anthropology makes man sovereign,
your anthropology is not Christian. You could have man as free but never autonomous. Remember that God is free, and His freedom
is a higher freedom than my freedom. I am free only within the limitations of God's
freedom. I hear Christians say that God's sovereignty
is limited by human freedom. When I hear them saying that, I make certain
assumptions. The first assumption is, it didn't come from
this guy. The first assumption I make is that that Christian
has really never thought about what they've said. They heard somebody else say it, and they're
just repeating it. They haven't thought about it for five minutes,
because I'm afraid if they thought about it and then said it, then they wouldn't even
be a Christian. Because if God's sovereignty is limited by
human freedom, God is not God. That's blasphemy. So, we need to integrate our understanding
of man in light of our understanding of God, because we get our identity from being made
in the image of God. God is not made in the image of man. He is sovereign, we are not. Our humanity is defined by Him, and therein
we find dignity. We have an origin in the divine purpose of
God. We have a destiny in eternal glory that the
Father has prepared for us from the foundation of the world. Therefore, everything that happens between
creation and consummation matters. There are no useless passions. It matters how we treat white people and black
people, Jewish people, any kind of people, because they're created in the image of God,
and they bear that image even in their sinfulness. We are called to love, to love them as we
love ourselves.
