MAN-01 In the Beginning

Have you ever come into a conversation in the middle? Or arrived at a performance after it already started? Or maybe you showed up late to a sporting event? Well, if you have, you understand that when we miss the beginning of something, it can be very confusing. When we don’t know how the story starts, we have trouble understanding why certain details are important, who the heroes and the villains are, and what the whole point of the story is. Something similar is true when we consider the human race. Knowing how we got here, how our circumstances came to be, and what we’re supposed to be doing is a huge help when it comes to understanding and managing the details of our lives.

This is the first lesson in our series, What Is Man?, and we’ve entitled it, “In the Beginning.” In this lesson, we’ll explore what human beings were like when God first created us, and placed us in the Garden of Eden. The title of this series — What Is Man? — should be familiar to most Christians, since it appears several times in Scripture. For example, Psalm 8:4 says:

What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him? (Psalm 8:4).

Every time biblical characters or authors asked, “What is man?” they were wondering about the nature of humanity. They wanted to know things like: who we are in relation to God, what our role on earth is, and what sort of moral capacities we have. To put it in formal theological terms, they were asking questions about anthropology. The word “anthropology” comes from two Greek roots: anthropos meaning “man” or “human being”; and logos, meaning, “study.” So, “anthropology” is:

In secular studies, “anthropology” focuses on things like the society, culture, biology and development of human beings. But theological anthropology is much narrower. Louis Berkhof, who lived from 1873 to 1957, defined it this way in part 2, chapter 1 of his work Systematic Theology:

Theological Anthropology is concerned only with what the Bible says respecting man and the relation in which he stands and should stand to God.