More than animal

But the Bible never stops there. Humankind is mortal, but we are not purely animal. To speak as if we were gives the lie to the idea of the image of God. And so the Bible uses other terms as well: soul, heart, spirit and body.

Taken together with ‘flesh‘, they give us an account of our nature as being open to the worlds both of flesh and of spirit.

The Bible has an integrated view of human nature. It never sees us as the sum total of different compartments: flesh, soul and spirit. The Bible writers were certainly people of their own time and used their own terms to describe humanity. Yet they believed most firmly in what we today call the ‘psychosomatic unity’ of the person - the interdependence of body, mind and emotions. Body, soul and spirit are terms the Bible uses to show us as people at home in this world, but with the capacity to reach beyond ourselves to the world of the spirit.

The biggest mistake is to think of ourselves as owning a soul as we would a suitcase or an umbrella. This was the way the ancient Greeks thought. Greek or ‘Hellenistic’ culture was the background to the first centuries of the church. In Alexandria, for instance, theologians tried to relate their faith to this way of thought. Not surprisingly, this Greek view of ‘soul‘ and ‘body‘ infected the early church, whose catch phrase was ’soma-sema’, the body a tomb. To their mind, the soul was released from its prison at death and set free.

The same idea is expressed in the song: ‘John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave, but his soul goes marching on.’ It seems to assume that there are two John Browns, the physical John who went to war, now dead, and the spiritual John, now in heaven. It shows how easy it is to fall into thinking that the real ‘me’ is somehow different from my physical body.

Humanity’s fall is not just a theological statement; human history and experience show us that the image has been defaced in us all. As Paul puts it, ‘We have all fallen short of God’s standard’. But does this mean that God’s image has never been seen in its fullness since the beginning? No, because Jesus Christ is the perfect image of God. That is the New Testament’s bold declaration. The task of his mission was to lead us back to God and to restore the image in us.

This is where the New Testament connects the study of Christ with the study of humankind. Because Jesus is both true likeness of God and perfect man, he is the promise of a renewed humanity. To be ‘in Christ‘ is to belong to a ‘new humanity‘, just as to be ‘in Adam’ is to belong to the old, sinful humanity. The apostle Paul wrote of the ‘new nature which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator’. As the ‘image of the invisible God‘, Jesus is the model of what men and women were created to be.

God’s grace in the world

Sin is a reality. It is divisive and tragic. But God is still a loving creator. His ultimate purposes are not thwarted by us. Sin and evil never have the last word in God’s creation.

God’s love is seen as he acts to care for us and to restrain evil. This is expressed in the word ‘grace‘. Grace is God’s way of giving himself freely. We see it in its full glory in Jesus‘ death on the cross, which shows us just how much God loves us. But God’s grace is also experienced in his personal, day-by-day caring and loving. We can distinguish two aspects of grace: ’special’ and ‘common‘.

* Special grace refers specifically to God’s grace as it reaches those who want to follow Jesus. It is God’s way of blessing his people, the church, as he saves them and gives them his Holy Spirit.

Common (or general) grace applies to everyone alive; it stems from God’s universal Fatherhood. His grace is received by us all, whether or not we are Christian, as we share in the many blessings of life. Through our sin we have lost any claim on him, yet he still gives abundant tokens of his generosity and goodness day by day. These gifts are showered on all, regardless of creed, character or colour.

Perhaps the clearest expression of God’s common grace is as he preserves truth and morality among people. Christians do not have a monopoly of true and good things and neither is morality the province of the Christian alone. Everyone keeps some sense of what is true, good and beautiful, and this is due to God’s grace.

Paul sees a further result of this common grace. It opens people’s hearts and minds to the goodness of God, and so prepares them to receive God’s special grace in Jesus Christ. When we look around at everything good in the world, it speaks to us of a loving God who wants us all to know and experience his love and enter into a deeper relationship with him.

But the Bible adds a further and remarkable point. People stand out not by what they do but by what they are. This is expressed right at the beginning, in the creation story of Genesis 1. God said, ‘Let us make man in our image after our likeness.’ It is a theme taken up and developed in other parts of the Bible: we are not like the other creatures; we share God’s nature in a special way.

What do we reflect of God?

It is difficult to be very precise about what this sharing of God’s nature means, though many theologians have tried.

The main point behind this very important Bible idea of the ‘image‘ is that humanity has been created for a special relationship with God, intended to be personal and eternal. We are above the rest of creation and given ‘dominion’ over it, not because of the things we can do, but because of the intimate relationship which God wants to share with us. In the Bible ‘doing’ is always secondary to ‘being’. As God intended us, we were called to live life fully in his presence, developing spiritually, mentally and morally as children of God on whom the Creator delights to pour his love.

‘Made in God’s image‘ therefore describes us as people who are open to God’s call and able to respond to his claims. Yet within this very general picture of humankind’s close relationship with God there are particular features which stand out:

True knowledge of God and holiness. We were not created morally neutral. The Bible asserts that we were created as moral beings and that our relationship with him is intended to be one of transparent purity and holiness. The modern assumption is that our moral sense comes through education and group pressure; Christian teaching is that God created us with the knowledge of right and wrong. The coming of sin into human life, however, affected not only our moral state but also, more seriously, our relationship with God.

Intellectual power. We are rational creatures and share in God’s rationality which is seen in creation. Humankind’s intelligence can be seen in the urge towards creativity — in art, science, religion, play. But, as with every other part of our nature, this creativity too has been infected by the blight of sin. None of our achievements has ever come out quite untainted; we have found ways of using all of them for some harmful purpose.

• Spirituality. The Bible teaches that we are made for fellowship with God. As the Westminster Confession so beautifully puts it: ‘The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him for ever.’ We can only find true self-expression and deep fulfilment when we find God.
• Immortality. We were made for eternal life with God. This is the clear teaching of the Bible. It is not ours by nature. It is God’s gift to his children. Opinions differ about whether humanity was originally created immortal. Some argue that death only came into the world when humankind sinned. Others hold that humanity, according to the Bible, is just as much ‘flesh’ as the rest of the animal kingdom, and that the ‘death’ that came with the fall is not physical death, but spiritual separation from God.
• Dominion. The Genesis account speaks in the same breath of our creation in the image of God and our dominion over the rest of creation. Our higher position in creation is God-given. He is Lord of all, and in a limited fashion we share in his lordship. The whole story sets out in full technicolor the glory and honour with which humanity is crowned and the awesome responsibility that comes with it.

All this makes it plain that the Bible idea that we were created in the image of God is a crucial tool for a Christian understanding of human nature. The vivid story of the idyllic life in Eden gives expression to a real relationship with God which was meant to endure.

Primal tragedy

Humanity has fallen from its destiny and calling. Adam and Eve were confronted with a choice. They chose sin and independence from God. The image of God in humanity has, by that choice, been spoiled and distorted. As the Genesis account portrays it, Adam and Eve were made for fellowship with God and for sharing in his love and generosity. Their fate, through rejection of God, was to be separate from his life. They ‘fell’ from grace and it became our fall.

As with the account of our creation, so with our fall, there are different views of how to take the story. Some hold that, unless we believe in a literal, historical fall that actually affected the whole human race, we undermine the central Christian facts of sin and salvation. Others see the Genesis story as plainly figurative, describing poetically the deep alienation between God and humanity. The story is saying that we are sinners and need God. Every person is ‘Adam’ and every person has ‘fallen’ from the righteousness God intends for us.

The human condition is tragic. Something wonderful has been lost. And yet, even after our fall and in our sin, we have not completely lost the image of God. It is spoilt, but not destroyed.

Providence is the care God takes of all existing things. So its range and depth are immense. The word itself is taken from

Abraham’s promise to his son Isaac on the way to sacrifice: ‘My Son, God will provide the lamb for the burnt offering.’ ‘There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow,’ says Hamlet in Shakespeare’s play. This is God’s rule as moral governor over all the universe.

There is also God’s forgiveness of the sinner. God’s great acts of salvation are all part of God’s activity in providence:

The exodus of the Israelites from Egypt; the death of Jesus Christ for mankind’s redemption; the promise of new creation. One important aspect of the idea of providence is as the special exercise .of God’s creative power, to bring about some beneficial result. This may be the salvation of a people, the provision of manna in the desert, the sending of prophetic teaching, or the simple gift of a humble heart to receive wisdom. It may be a heart open to the gift of the incarnate Christ, as Mary’s was, or one receptive to the word of God, as we today may be.

The ways in which we perceive providence will depend on how we understand God:

• It makes a big difference whether we think of God the Creator personally or impersonally. If the Creator is not viewed personally, then the focus will be on ‘nature’, with broad generalizations to do with natural explanations. There will be little scope for providence in history, in miracles, in personal life; it is an approach which follows the tone of this anti- supernatural age. But if the providential God is seen as a personal Creator, then his goodness will be seen in what he does within time — in miracles, in the intimacy of personal experiences, in historical actions.

Such a God will be one who enters into a person’s life, who responds to prayers, who suffers and rejoices with human beings. At the same time, since our failures are a wronging of the whole created order, private forgiveness, although a real kind of personal providence, is not enough. So the apostle Paul anticipates that ‘the groaning of creation‘ will only cease when the children of God are fully and finally redeemed.

• Our understanding of creation also vitally affects how we see providence. As has been said, if we think of God the Creator as working immanently within his creation, there is less or no distinction between creation and providence. On this basis, God does not work in history and the reality of God’s entry into human existence is obscured, if not denied. But the Bible’s way of speaking is of ‘the Word’, Jesus Christ, through whom ‘God made all things; not one thing in all creation was made without him’. It speaks of a God who has definite purposes for creation, and of the practical realization of those purposes.

The Bible also expresses a very special relationship between the Creator and his creation: one that is personal and spiritual, rather than impersonal and mechanical. It shows us that there is a link between creation and obedience, since it shows God as a God who reveals himself and creates men and women to respond to that revelation. In spite of humankind’s disobedience and the cosmic consequences of sin upon creation, the providence of God in his acts of goodness work, not merely for the sustaining of creation, but also for its redemption.

The goodness of God

Providence takes us into the ideas of God’s glory and holiness. In many religions, worship is the desire for religious harmony in awe of God’s holiness, majesty and greatness. His glory and holiness appear to be the focus of worship. But the biblical doctrine of providence goes much further, for it also celebrates the goodness of the Creator. It is the goodness of the Creator that evokes both worship and obedience. God’s glory may rightly draw wonder and praise from his creatures, and God’s holiness may evoke our sense of creaturelinéss and sin. But it is God’s goodness that truly brings forth human obedience.

To the person who believes in God the Creator, this world order is not an impersonal ‘nature’, whose mechanistic systems mock our deepest needs and aspirations as people. Rather, it is a created order that reflects on the Creator, who is good and who continues to do ‘all things well’. Then we can see, as Paul saw, that ‘in all things God works for good with those who love him, those whom he has called according to his purpose’.

“I have shown man the glory of your works, as much of their unending wealth as my feeble intellect was able to grasp.”

Johannes Kepler was not original — it was derived from classical antiquity. In technical invention, the Chinese had reached a higher level of sophistication than the Europeans, and at a much earlier stage. Why then was the decisive step to modern science not taken centuries before in Greece or China?

Historians have tried for many years to find an answer to this question. There are many different activities and attitudes which may have played a part. But among the various factors which have been proposed, the Christian faith invariably appears as a major influence. It enters in three ways:

• As a result of beliefs basic to Christianity as a whole;
• Through particular developments going on in
• Christian belief and church structure at the time;
• Because of the interplay between religious and secular trends.

A predictable universe

One of the basic Christian beliefs underpinning the new scientific enterprise was that when we observe how the material universe works, we are looking at the activity of God. It is therefore an eminently worthwhile study, with a definite spiritual spinoff. What is more, God did not influence the universe in an arbitrary fashion; he chose to operate through laws which applied everywhere and at all times. This emphasis on order, on the predictable, is one without which there can be no science. It was supplemented by the Christian view of history as a line running from point to point, rather than an endlessly repeating cycle of events. For science is an activity which moves on and builds, and only if people see the world doing the same will science come to mean much.

A more specific factor for the origins of science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was that Christians were in dispute over the nature of authority, and where authority came from. This played a significant role in overthrowing traditional views of the universe. Other issues in the Christian thinking of the time had a bearing too. For example, the Protestants were for playing down the pre- Reformation emphasis on contemporary miracles, and this led increasingly to a belief that God normally acts through secondary causes, rather than by direct interference. Science was seen as the best way of describing these secondary causes.

Besides its direct impact, Christianity also set the scene for science through the influence it had on the structure of society in Western Europe. One obvious area in which the

How clearly the sky reveals God’s glory! How plainly it shows what he has done!

Greek and Chinese societies differed from the Western European was in their attitude to manual labour. The former saw this as a fundamentally demeaning activity; the latter did not. This difference, rooted in the Christian basis of society, permitted the growth of a mixture of practical experiment and theory which is an essential feature of modern science.

That Christian ways of thinking had an impact on the origins of science can be seen as we read the comments of the early scientists themselves. Virtually without exception, they saw their investigations of the world around them as a religious activity. Its justification, for them, lay in the better understanding it provided of God’s handiwork.

Greek understandings of the beginning

Thoughtful Greeks, in the five or six centuries before Christ, had great interest in the question, in what sense did the world have a beginning?

• Some Ionian philosophers thought such a beginning had a material basis — water, air, fire, matter.
• A moral view was taken by Anaximander who first speculated that it was necessity, ‘guilt’, or the order of time that led to the infinite becoming finite. But he could not conceive of the universe coming into being through an outside cause; rather it was an ordering process, whereby the infinite came into active existence.
• To the Pythagoreans, it was number that was the principle of all things in the world, evidenced in the principles of musical harmony.
• The pre-Socratics, such as Parmenides, were to argue that mind is what brought about the beginning and the logos (the Word) was the ordering principle of all things.
• Plato thought not of a principle but of an event, the world-soul which, as ‘the unmoved mover’, set the universe in motion.
• Aristotle alone seemed aware of an absolute beginning which so awed him that he hardly made any attempt to determine its meaning. He appears to reject all previous attempts to give a precise philosophical form to the concept. Instead, he confines himself deliberately to the observable world, whose ‘beginning‘ must be the supreme cause.

Modern science and the beginning

Modern science is also limited in what it can say about ‘the beginning‘. This is because of the tentative nature of what it can say about the origin of the universe. There are three major schools of thought on this today:

• There are the evolutionary theories of the universe, such as those of Lemaitre and Gamow. They argue for an initial concentration of matter, out of which ‘the cosmic egg’ was hatched (Lemaitre) or the ‘big- bang’ explosion took place (Gamow). The former theory is no longer tenable scientifically. The latter can speak only of a relative rather than an absolute beginning.
• Then there are the steady- state or continuous creation theories of Hermann Bondi and Fred Hoyle, which see no evidence of a beginning. The universe has always existed and always will exist. Thus it is impossible to speak of an origin of the universe, since no origin is conceived possible.
• The theory of the pulsating universe accepts the ‘big-bang’ hypothesis, but denies it has only collapsed once. Instead, it lays open the possibility of cyclical recurrence, of an infinite number of cosmic explosions. This theory echoes James Hutton’s pronouncement in 1795 in his book The Theory of the Earth, ‘it has no vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an end.’

A yet more fundamental question is whether science can ever establish that the universe has had an origin in time. Some say this is impossible, because science cannot study an event for which no explanation can be given. Obviously, there could be no physical causes before an absolute beginning, so scientific study could not enter such a field. Science then can never hope to establish an absolute origin for the universe, which means it cannot disprove it either. So, more clearly than Aristotle’s conclusion thousands of years earlier, modern science can really say nothing about the origin of the universe. Therefore there is no intrinsic contradiction between science and faith on the matter of the beginning of all things.

Creation in Christian thought

The ‘big-bang’ versus ’steady- state’ controversy is not restricted to the scientists. It has its echoes in Christian ideas of creation. Some theologians think of God primarily as ‘immanent’, working from within his creation. Others see him much more as ‘transcendent’, intervening in his creation from outside and beyond it. The first group understand God the Creator as eternally creative; they do not fully distinguish between God as the Creator and as the Sustainer of the universe. But the second think that God created the universe in a decisive act, and that since then all has been upheld by his sustaining providence. These different views of God’s sovereignty stem, it is worth repeating, from different ideas of the character of God.

Orthodox Christianity firmly links together two pairs of ideas: ‘creation from nothing’ with God’s act of creation, and ‘continuous creation‘ with God’s providence. It resists any attempt to merge these two sets of ideas into one. When some modern theologians do confuse creation with providence, they have a reason: they want to show that the ground of our being is God’s endless creativity. But the Bible sees no contradictionbetween God’s once-for-all creation and his continuing creativity; in fact it affirms both.

The problem with the immanent view of creation, that God is within the universe to shape it, is that it leaves a gap where God’s act of creation should be, and so leaves the believer with an incomplete vision of the universe. Only a God who reaches beyond the universe could ever have created it. Yet all the theological approaches inevitably leave some distortion of the grandeur and mystery of the doctrine of God as Creator. None can cope with all its fullness and range.

This will help to show the distinctiveness and power of the Bible’s account of creation.

Creation in the ancient Near East

The recitation of creation stories in the ancient world bore little resemblance to our detached discussions on creation today. To these ancient peoples it was a matter of worship. Their sagas were not like the telling of fairy tales, but recitations of the annual religious festivals. Recounting these stories had the serious purpose of seeking both to preserve the order of society and to guarantee order and life before the threats of chaotic forces.

Their interest in creation stories was not then the intellectual interest of how-it-allbegan, but the desperate desire to continue to triumph over the hostile gods and fates that constantly threatened them with death. Through ritual drama, the primordial events recorded in the myth were brought back into action. These people believed that, when they enacted the creative deeds of the gods at the appropriate season, and recited the proper formulae, the renewal and revitalization of nature was assured. These creation myths served to reactivate in a magic way the first acts of creation.

These ancient stories range in time from the myths of the Sumerians, in the fourth millennium BC, to the Canaanite texts found at Ras Shamra, written in about 1400 BC. They concern such subjects as the origin of the gods; the defeat of hostile forces of chaos by heroic gods who then release the forces of life; the upholding of order by kingly figures in a world ever on the verge of chaos; the emergence of the world as it is from a primordial state in which earth and sky were unseparated.

The Genesis account

There are certain points of resemblance between these ancient near-eastern stories and the Bible’s account of creation in the first chapter of Genesis. How far do these stories go back to a common faith — the events of which Genesis tells? It is impossible to know.

The differences, however, far outweigh the resemblances. The primary motive for the creation stories of the ancient pagan world was human preservation in the midst of chaos and uncertainty. Human anxiety was an important ingredient; the basis of these creation stories was how to survive in a threatening world.

The biblical purpose and narrative of creation is very different. There can be no question of the origin of the gods, for the first words are: In the beginning, God.’ He has no antecedents, no origin. The power of the word in pagan thought was inherent; it goes forth in its own power. The power of the word in the Bible is according to its source, so that when ‘God speaks, it is done’. When God speaks it is not some kind of physical emanation, but the spiritual expression of God’s will. Creation then is related to the conscious, moral, personal reality of God himself.

The creation narrative opens with a description of how things were ‘in the beginning’, when the earth was ‘without form’ and ‘void’. Here, unlike the myths of the ancient world, chaos has no divine power, nor does it represent any threat, even when ‘darkness was upon the face of the deep’.

For the ‘Spirit of God‘ broods over it all, as the moral governor of the universe, in omnipresence and creative power over all ‘the waters‘.

This prelude sets the theme for the following two sets of ‘creation days‘, three in each:

God ‘forms’ in the midst of a world ‘without form’

Day 1 Division of light from darkness (verse 4)

Day 2 Division of lower waters from upper waters (verse 7)

Day 3 Division of lower waters from dry land (verse 9); creation of vegetation (verse 11)

God ‘fills’ in the midst of emptiness (void)

Day 4 Creation of light in the sky (verse 16)

Day 5 Creation of water animals and birds (verse 4)

Day 6 Creation of land animals and man, and the provision of food (verse 29)

The six days of creation focus on the sabbath day, the day by which all the work of creation is over. As the day of rest, God reveals the purpose of the sabbath as a day’of celebration and worship of a good God who has made all things ‘good’.

Unlike the Babylonians who saw the seventh, fourteenth, twenty-first and twenty-eighth days of the month as days of ill omen, when mankind lived in uncertainty of the fates, the Hebrews rejoiced in the sabbath as evidence of the sovereign power and goodness of God. The ‘days‘ of creation begin with the sunset rather than the sunrise, perhaps to indicate that every day begins with God and not by the natural agency of the sun. The practice of Israel was to start the sabbath as a holy day with the sunset of the previous day.

There is no reference to any cause other than God’s word. Several points follow this fact:

The unargued cause is God. No proof is given of the Creator. He lives outside all explanation. Indeed,

• God is not an explanation, as philosophers would like to make him. Rather he is a reality to be confronted and his creation is a fact not a consequence. He will not be bound by human explanations. Likewise in the Bible, creation is assumed and not explained. The Hebrew word for ‘to create’, which is used of both creation and redemption, is uniquely God’s activity.
• The story introduces an indefinable era:the absolute beginning of all things. Since space and time are both God’s creation, the event includes the creation of time also.

The Genesis account does not say whether anything existed before creation. The prelude tells us how God formed and filled the formlessness and void that came into being in his first act of creation. But it is not revealed what, if anything, he used to create the universe. To safeguard the reality of a God above and beyond all material things, the church fathers developed the notion of God creating ‘out of nothing’ — uninfluenced, unrestricted, uncaused by anything. It is a form of theological shorthand to indicate that God is sovereign over creation. Thus God’s creativity is quite unlike ours. Human beings depend on materials, musical notes, words, for their artistry; God created when nothing was to hand for him to work on.

Charles Lyell, who was staunchly opposed to evolution, calculated in 1859 that life had been on earth not less than 300 million years’. Speculations that extinct species had perished in Noah’s flood or that they were remains of previous creations destroyed by God seemed increasingly improbable. But those who denied that God had created each species uniquely did not at this stage find general acceptance. This was because no one could envisage how biological change (evolution) could take place.

Charles Darwin (1809-82) and Alfred Wallace (1823-1913) independently came up with a plausible mechanism, based on their observations of the variation of animals and plants in different parts of the world. Darwin and Wallace argued that, in the struggle for survival experienced by every living thing, those individuals with a helpful inherited variation are likely to leave more progeny than those lacking the variant, and that this will lead to adaptive divergence between populations living in different environments, in other words to evolutionary change. These ideas were presented at a meeting of the Linnean Society in London in 1858, and Darwin expanded them in a book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection published the following year.

The main scientific problems about this method of evolution were resolved in the 1930s when it became accepted that known genetical processes could act to produce the changes found in fossil series. Many discoveries since have borne on these ideas, such as:

• how genes work;
• the occurrence of favourable mutations;
• methods of ageing the earth;
• how new species arise and persist (many examples of this are now known);
• the actual strengths of selection in nature affecting the speed of evolutionary change;
• the existence of large numbers of missing links.
• All have confirmed this ‘neoDarwinian’ synthesis.

As with any scientific topic, there are problems still to be faced, and some scientists, especially in the field of human origins, tend to make sweeping statements on the basis of thin evidence. But it is certainly untrue that an increasing proportion of biologists and geologists are having doubts about the theory as is sometimes alleged.

Merely an ape?

Great controversies have raged round the subject of Christianity and evolution. Often the difficulties have been greatly exaggerated. But some problems remain, of which two are major:

• Does evolution imply that the living world is simply the result of chance mutations?
• Is humanity ‘merely’ a species of ape, rather than a special creation in God’s image?

Christians have tackled the first difficulty in very contrasting ways. Some have argued that the Bible shows us a God who works through natural processes, thus controlling and using the mechanisms studied by scientists, some of which are apparently random in their occurrence, such as the mutations that affect the genetic composition of all populations.

As far as humankind is concerned, the problem revolves round what we mean by being made ‘in God’s image’. If this is taken to mean qualities God gave to a chosen animal at a particular time in history, then there is no difficulty about accepting the conventional scientific view of human evolution. The Christian believes that his ancestors subsequently fell from fellowship with God, but this is outside the scope of the scientist, either to confirm or deny. On the other hand if, as some Christians hold, the idea of ‘God’s image’ requires that God created the human body and soul together in a separate act, then clearly the Christian must part company with any theory that we have genetic continuity with other animals.

The evolution controversy for Christians is about how we interpret the Bible: the fact of creation is not in doubt. The importance of the debate lies in the understanding that we may come to about how God works in his world.

Today people would acknowledge the influence of outside forces on human beings. We are not so autonomous as we once supposed. To an extent, we can be controlled, and sometimes we are. People’s experience, in many parts of the world today, goes along with Jesus‘ teaching to suggest that personal outside forces (angels, demons, spirits) can and do influence the behaviour of human beings.

The spirit world in the Bible

The Bible makes a clear distinction between God and the created universe. The creation of the heavens and the earth refers not only to the material side of the universe but to the spiritual side as well. The thrust of biblical teaching is that the spirit world (the unseen) belongs to the created order. Human beings, of course, are part of both the material and the spiritual creation. This means that, just as we have the capacity for relationship with God, the uncreated Spirit, so we are open to influence by other purely spiritual beings.

This is not to suggest that God created both good and evil spiritual beings. Demonic beings must have taken to evil after their creation. But a proper understanding of the spirit world in the Bible requires that angels and demons be classified as part of creation. Spirits are therefore part of the same realm of experience as human beings. This would explain why, for Jews, for the early Christians and for many peoples of the world today, the activities of spirits in everyday life seem normal and expected.

Angels

God accomplishes his purposes in this world by several means. One of them is through his special messengers, angels. They are spirits at the service of God. Angels proclaim God’s will and plan to human beings; they help those in difficulty. In spite of their special role, they are not to be worshipped or given any of the honour due to God alone. They are God’s servants for our good and our salvation.

Demons

The existence of demons is linked with that of Satan. Like Satan, demons were once numbered among the good angelic beings. But, as we learn in Jude 6, they ‘did not stay within the limits of their proper authority’. The presence of evil in God’s good creation will, of course, always be a scandal. Demons are Satan’s angels in the world; they accomplish his purpose of working against God’s purposes.

The belief in the activities of personal spiritual beings disturbs many in the world today. Some see the New Testament accounts of demon possession entirely as instances of mental illness. But many others (if not most) readily believe in the activities of spirits. Demon possession is quite understandable for them. The mistake this group sometimes makes is to ignore mental illness altogether.

To be ‘possessed’ by a spirit from ‘outside’ is quite different from nervous or mental disorder, and has different symptoms. It is important not to confuse them.

The New Testament presents us with various accounts of casting out demons in the ministry both of Jesus and of the apostles. They are not to be dismissed lightly. Demon possession is just as real as psychological disorder, and it troubles many today, as it did in New Testament times. As the apostle Paul wrote, ‘We are not fighting against human beings but against the wicked spiritual forces in the heavenly world, the rulers, authorities and cosmic powers of this dark age.’ These ‘cosmic powers’ do not only attack individual lives; they also infect the structures of nations and societies.

By his death and resurrection, Jesus conquered the power of death and Satan. By his name the apostles healed the sick and cast out demons, for there is no name above that of Jesus. Christians wage an important spiritual war, in which they are called to put into effect the victory Jesus Christ has already won. As they demonstrate his power over evil spirits, they will weaken Satan’s rule and strengthen God’s kingdom.

• The primal religions have a deep sense of the unity of all life. The African has never made the division between the sacred and the secular which those living in the West have made. There is no special sphere of religion. As one African writer has put it, The Christian is religious from time to time; the African when he lives in his traditional religion is religious all the time.’
• Judaism has a deep continuity of faith and life. The Jew has great faithfulness to his calling. There is a danger in this conservatism. It may result in failure to be open to new truth. But to have a firm grounding in the past is the best way to have confidence in the present, and adventurous expectation in relation to the future.
• Islam is the faith of surrender. True Muslims are distinguished by an integral sense of the reality and presence of God. This gives a wholeness and unity to their lives.

• Hindu spirituality is notable for its inwardness. Hindus have learned to pass from the seen to the unseen, to realize the hidden mystery that is always there.
• Buddhism reminds us that seeking deliverance is a very serious business. It demands discipline in meditation, in study, in the ordering of life according to the set principles of the religion. There is no casualness in their approach to matters of religion.

So we may find that all those whom we have studied have seen something important about God. Does this mean there can be revelation of God elsewhere than in Christ and the Bible? Perhaps the clearest way to answer that question is to turn to some words of Jesus: ‘God is light and in him is no darkness at all. I am the light of the world.’

When a person recognizes something true about God, it means he is catching a glimpse of Christ, in whose life and teaching the character of God was revealed in full clarity. The difference between Christianity and the other religions is not basically between truth and error, but between total and partial understanding.