C. Michael Patton and Rhome Dyke · The Theology Program · 62 minutes
Lecture by C. Michael Patton, Th.M., and Rhome Dyke, Th.M., from The Theology Program, published on their public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
The course on humanity and sin opens with a question the teachers could barely find in any systematic theology: why did God create man at all? Patton asked his own wife and got the answer most of us would give: I do not know, I have always wondered that myself. Before the course ever reaches the fall, free will, or the image of God, it clears away the wrong answers, that God was lonely, that God needed help, that God needed worshipers, and builds the foundation everything else will rest on: a God who creates because he is eternally self-giving. Listen for what God himself says about Adam being alone.
Humanity and Sin is a study of the nature of humanity and the nature of sin: the prefall and postfall state of man, the historical debates, with much time on St. Augustine and Pelagius, the implications of being created in the image of God, and the hard questions about sin itself. What is it? Where did it begin? Why did God allow it? Are there different kinds? The teachers do not promise to answer every question to anyone’s satisfaction, but they promise to walk through how the history of the church has handled them and what the live options are. And they warn from the start that whatever you conclude here must fit into your whole systematic theology: your doctrine of humanity will shape your doctrine of salvation, your doctrine of God, and everything downstream.
The first objective is striking: the student will come to know God more fully by coming to know himself more fully, since we are made in God’s image and reflect him. One theologian, the teachers note, said that knowing yourself is the first point of knowing God, and knowing God the first point of knowing yourself; the two are interrelated. The course will also weigh the fall’s effect on the mind, morals, and will of man, defend the concept of original sin, and critically evaluate two modern errors at once: the secular notion that people are all good at heart, and the evangelical overcorrection that flattens every trace of human dignity. While man is not what he is supposed to be, he retains great dignity, reflecting the glory of God.
The teachers point back to the chart from the introductory course showing Protestantism dividing into two great camps, and they locate the dividing issue right here: free will. What is it? Have we ever defined it? Is it limited? Where does the sovereignty of God enter, and if God alters the will, is that fair? Is Adam’s sin imputed to us so deeply that, as Augustine held, we retain free will but have lost liberty, able only to choose evil? These questions run from Luther’s debate with Erasmus through Calvin to Jonathan Edwards, and this course will finally tackle them. The case studies press the hardest one: was it fair for Adam’s sin to be counted to our account?
A university anthropology class studies the origin, behavior, and development of humans, mostly asking where man came from. Biblical anthropology begins where the university class ends, because a theist already confesses that man is created by God. The course definition, flagged as quiz material: anthropology is the study of the purpose and nature of humanity in both its prefall and postfall state. That prefall and postfall distinction governs everything, and it reaches forward to the post-resurrection state as well, since what man will be later tells us something about what man is now.
The teachers push against the folk theology of an esoteric afterlife, all clouds, harps, and walking through walls. Scripture presents the resurrection life as the restoration of what we were supposed to be: work, responsibility, growth, relationships, even measuring and improving, since failures are not sins. The biggest difference will be the eradication of sin. Paul compares the present body and the resurrection body to a seed and its plant: genuinely continuous. And the destination, they clarify, is not a disembodied heaven but a resurrected body in the new heaven and new earth. Christ is our best example of a resurrected body, though he is in some ways unique. Even a merely perfected version of ourselves would be more glorious than anything we know.
How you view humanity determines whether you believe people can save themselves, aid in their salvation, or contribute nothing at all, and that in turn shapes your view of God’s sovereignty: dominoes falling in every direction. Anthropology sits underneath sociology, politics, and the family, underneath the century’s debates about the roles of men and women, underneath abortion, cloning, and personhood, and underneath psychology, where two extremes face off: one says every mental struggle is a matter of the soul and only God may touch it, the other says everything is ultimately chemical and God has nothing to do with it. The teachers would start an evangelism class here, a bioethics class here, a missions class here, and, as they add, a counseling class here, because every counselor is working from some anthropology.
Your anthropology shapes how you treat people. If the image of God is wholly lost in the fall, then no one has dignity, and you will treat people, and yourself, as worms. If instead people are all good at heart, only bent by circumstances, you will minister as though sin were a surface problem. The teachers argue the Bible strikes a balance the culture and the church both miss: we are truly fallen and truly corrupt, and we are still dignified. Gregory Boyd’s point is pressed: how you answer the question of what it means to be human will decide your views on human rights, government, the treatment of animals, life support, abortion, and cloning.
Patton went looking through the anthropology sections of the systematic theologies expecting the first question to be the obvious one, why did God create man, and almost nobody asks it; the textbooks open with the image of God instead. Grudem was the only one he found who begins there. The Westminster catechism answers a related question, saying that man’s chief and highest end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever, and the teachers like the reciprocity in that answer. The Declaration of Independence quietly assumes an answer too: a Creator who endowed man with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And against the popular slogan that it is not about you, Patton pushes back: if God is a giving God, then in a real sense it is also about us, because his giving is for our good and our joy.
The teachers clear the ground. God did not create man: that is naturalism. Man is an eternal extension of God: pantheism and panentheism, where there was never a time we did not exist because we are part of God. God needed help keeping up the new creation, or God needed a companion: both fail on the doctrine of aseity, that God needs nothing, the truth behind his own rhetorical questions in Scripture, that he owns the cattle on a thousand hills and would not tell us if he were hungry. And the companion answer forgets the Trinity: there is eternal companionship within the Godhead, Father, Son, and Spirit. God has never been lonely.
Here the teachers turn to a detail that unsettles the usual evangelical script. In Genesis 2, Adam has a perfect, sinless, personal relationship with God, the very thing we urge on people, and God himself declares that it is not good for the man to be alone. Adam was with God, and yet alone. God is so much more than man that man needs a companion he can relate to, and relating to her helps him relate to his Creator. This, the teachers argue, is where the theology of community begins, and ultimately the role of the church: Jesus says the world will know his disciples by their love for one another. Loving God was never designed to be a purely vertical affair; God looks down on our horizontal love and is blessed by it.
Fill in the blank in the sentence God needed and whatever you write will be wrong, because it runs the arrow toward God. The right direction runs outward from God as an attribute: he is creative, and he is love, gracious, kind, self-giving, and all of these are outward acts. When God saw Adam alone, he did not say this man is not yet ready to worship me; he said it is not good for the man, and made a helper suitable for him. He was thinking of man. Worship, the teachers insist, cannot be demanded; it is the natural response to something already true, given because of a realization of who God is, as we love because he first loved us.
No verse states outright why God created man, but the witnesses accumulate. Psalm 8 marvels that the God of the heavens cares for man at all, made him a little lower than God, crowned him with glory, and set the works of creation under his feet: the psalmist is confused by how giving God is. Job 7 asks the same astonished question. First Corinthians 10 locates the glory of God in eating and drinking, the mundane and everyday, as the Lord’s Supper itself uses ordinary bread and wine; 1 Peter 4 says whoever speaks and whoever serves does so from God’s supply so that in everything God is glorified. Ephesians 1 says we were predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things after the counsel of his will, and Romans 8 runs the chain from predestined to called to justified to glorified: God intends to share his glory. Daniel 12 promises that those who have insight will shine like the brightness of the heavens. And when the world asks where God is in a famine or an earthquake, the question always lands as an indictment on the church, the body through whom God has chosen to be visibly at work.
Genesis 1 opens as pure narrative: no purpose statement, no explanation, no in the beginning God was lonely. Patton’s four-year-old daughter answered his question with because he was lonely, and the text simply will not say that. The first so that arrives in Genesis 1:26: let us make man in our image, so that they may rule over the fish, the birds, the cattle, and all the earth. Man is made in God’s image, male and female, blessed, told to be fruitful and to subdue the earth, and handed every seed-bearing plant for food. Genesis 2 slows down: God forms the man from the soil, breathes life into him, plants a garden, and fills it with trees pleasing to the eye and good for food, pleasing not to God, who needs neither beauty nor food, but to man. A reader who stopped here would say: this God gave just to give, like a parent whose greatest enjoyment is giving to a child. And the giving does not stop at Eden; it runs through the giving of his Son to the giving of his glory.
Before there is any sin, Adam has an assignment: cultivate and keep the garden. No weeds, no thistles, no hard ground yet; the fall is what makes jobs a struggle, not what makes jobs. The assignment itself is part of the gift, because man is created with the need for significance, to excel and make a difference, and God self-givingly supplies something to excel at. Then the one restriction: eat freely of every tree, but not of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for in the day you eat of it you will surely die. Nothing was inherently evil in the tree; the command could have attached to anything. The tree is there to give man the choice, and without the tree there is no temptation, without the temptation no option, and without the option man is a robot acting out a script. The freedom to choose is itself part of the image of God, the capacity that allows man to choose God, and man made the wrong choice.
Is the Bible clear or obscure on the motivation behind man’s creation? Somewhat both. There is no verse that says this is why. But we can conclude that God is a creative God; that his receiving glory is an outcome of creation more than its stated purpose; that God created in order to share his glory with others; and, with Ephesians, that he created to accomplish his will, whatever end that holds. The frame the whole course will build on is this: God created us because he is a giving God, and though our fallen state keeps us from fully partaking of what he has given, God is restoring it, and in the end it will all be restored.
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Tap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all seventeen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. Why do the teachers warn that your conclusions in this course cannot stand alone?
2. What is the first course objective, and why is it possible?
3. Where do the teachers locate the issue that divides Protestantism into its two great camps?
4. What is the course’s definition of anthropology, flagged as quiz material?
5. How do the teachers describe the life of the resurrection?
6. What are the two extremes the teachers describe in views of psychology?
7. What balance do the teachers say the Bible strikes about fallen humanity?
8. Which theologian did Patton find actually opening his anthropology with the question why did God create man?
9. How does Patton respond to the slogan that it is not about you?
10. Why does the answer God needed a companion fail?
11. What is startling about God’s declaration that it is not good for the man to be alone?
12. Where do the teachers say the theology of community, and ultimately the role of the church, begins?
13. Why do the teachers insist that worship cannot be demanded?
14. What do the trees of the garden, pleasing to the eye and good for food, reveal about God?
15. What does Adam’s assignment to cultivate the garden show about work?
16. Why, according to the teachers, was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden at all?
17. Which conclusions does the course draw about why God created man?
All seventeen correct. Lecture 1 is complete.
Patton could hardly find a systematic theology that asks why God created man, and even his own wife answered, I do not know, I have always wondered. How would you have answered before this lecture, and what in your answer, if anything, ran the arrow of need toward God rather than out from him?
Adam walked with God in sinless fellowship, and God still said it is not good that the man is alone. Where have you treated the Christian life as a purely vertical relationship, and what would it look like this week to love God through the horizontal relationships he has given you?
The teachers argue that work existed before the fall and that the assignment itself was part of God’s gift. How does it change your Monday morning to see your work not as a curse to escape but as a place God has given you to be significant and to bring him glory in the mundane?
Psalm 8 stands amazed at the giving God: when the psalmist considers the heavens, the moon and the stars God set in place, he asks what man is that God should think of him, and yet God has made him a little lower than the heavenly beings, crowned him with glory and honor, and set the works of his hands under his feet.
The lecture’s own assignments: begin the seven key terms early rather than late, and take up the first case study, discussing with someone whether it was fair for Adam’s sin to be counted to our account. The honors reading is R. C. Sproul’s Willing to Believe, a persuasive history of the free will debate the teachers largely agree with, and they warmly commend Richard Pratt’s Designed for Dignity as a balanced treatment of human dignity sunk in ruin yet not erased. The course turns next to the constitution of man: what are we made of?