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What is Man?
Bible question #2

copyright@2009

Richard Eric Gunby

In the opening chapters of Genesis, the Bible teaches about

creation and most specifically the creation of man, as in
mankind. Man was created. The primary texts for our present
study are 1:26-27, 2:7, 18, and 21-23; here from the ESV:

26
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."

27
So God created man in his own image,

in the image of God he created him;

male and female he created them.

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then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed

into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.

18
Then the LORD God said, "It is not good that the man should be alone; I will

make him a helper fit for him."

21
So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he

slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. 22And the rib that

the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought

her to the man. 23Then the man said,

"This at last is bone of my bones

and flesh of my flesh;

she shall be called Woman,

because she was taken out of Man."

I want to focus our attention on some of the more explicit things

these passages say, or reasonable deductions from these texts,
about man’s creation.

Man is a formed body of dust made alive by the infusion of

the breath of life (i.e., the life-force or life principle). Thus man
is earth elements organized; and vitalized. But saying such in
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the modern world raises the question, is the human simply and
only a material living creature? The answer to which is no.
Man is more than just a mere physical human being, for two
very important reasons. First, he is an image bearer (something
which comes on top of the material reality, so to speak). He is
made in the image and likeness of God and thus bears God’s
image (best summed up as personhood); second, man is greater
than the sum of his constituent parts. The living human being is
indeed greater than just the addition of his or her parts. This is
precisely because living man has or experiences a measure of
transcendence. Man transcends the sum of the parts he is made
of in his experience of life in this earth environment, in which
God has placed him. This transcendence is expressed in many
ways including but not limited to: mind, heart, soul, spirit, will,
self-awareness, and feelings.

Please understand it's not that any of these are to be thought

of as standalone items, separable from the rest of the whole
living creature (i.e., the living body) called man. That is not
what we mean, nor what the Scripture teaches. Rather, these
various perspectives of the non-material “components” of man
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are best understood as projections. These aspects of man are

real, dynamic, and vitally significant projections of the living
body. That’s why when the body dies, they too die. And that is
also precisely why a central eschatological message of all of
Scripture is resurrection. The body must come to life again (re-
animation), in order for the whole person (the body and its
projections) to live again.

Think along these lines. There is no man, nobody, no

person, no image born, existing or in existence apart from the
living body and its projections. Like the images that you see on
a movie screen, projected there by a movie projection machine,
so also, in analogy, the heart, soul, mind, and spirit are utterly
dependent upon the body’s projection of them. In example, you
cannot have a mind apart from a living functioning brain.
Therefore we now readily perceive that man is viewed
wholistically in the Scripture, with the concurrent logical
understanding that man is indivisible: the whole man lives, the
whole man dies; the whole man is resurrected.
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The Biblical portrayal of man is not mystical, not one along

the lines of spiritualism and Greek dualism. The Scripture in no
wise expounds any concept of a supposed self-separating at
death so-called immortal soul. All such machinations are neo-
Platonist in origin, and medievally endorsed corruptions of
what the Bible actually teaches. Rather, the idea present in these
many and quite varied scriptural expressions of man (heart, soul,
mind, spirit), is wholeness as in the whole living body (i.e.,
organism) that they are associated with, but nonetheless a
wholeness inclusive of transcendence. Under this heading, on a
practical level, transcendence is best summed up as the concept
that each man or woman is unique, and therefore irreducible in
their uniqueness and individualized self-awareness. God is the
unique living God; man is His unique God-like creature.

We readily observe from the Biblical texts that man is the

result of a creative act of God. God is said to have personally
and directly formed man; at that stage a lifeless body of dust.
God then directly made him become alive by personally
breathing the breath of life into him. It would seem to me that
this precludes any idea of man having evolved from lower life
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forms. Man, considered as a separate species, could not have

evolved as such, simply and precisely because man began as a
fully formed (i.e., developed, organized, completed) though
lifeless body. Man is not, if one is to believe the Scripture, an
end result of evolution.

Assuming one wanted to embrace evolution as fact, how

would one get around the emphatically precise and unmistakably
clear scriptural language in these accounts? (That one should
entertain some perceived need to go around them is perhaps just
as relevant an inquiry, is it not?) The modern approach is to
interpret these accounts allegorically. Therefore, while it is
indeed affirmed as a true teaching about creation, it is not at all
thought to be presenting the science of creation, as such.
Science here means historically accurate narrative that
corresponds to the known space/time history facts. Rather,
modernists would say these accounts should be viewed as broad
strokes of, shall we say, superimposed or over-arching “truths.”
This allegorical way of handling the text has become the
accepted approach for most everyone in the Christian world (of
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the West) today, excepting for a very few –largely those of strict
fundamentalist persuasion.

I am not a fundamentalist; never have been. Yet I believe

that the Genesis passages before us present as clearly and
unmistakably as possible straight forward rubber meets the road
literal historical truth. I believe the Bible is inerrant (without
error) in all that it teaches and affirms. I believe such because
Jesus himself said that the Scripture cannot be broken, as in
proven wrong regarding anything it teaches or affirms. The
Bible, speaking for itself, seems unabashedly to affirm the
direct, personal, and near instantaneous recent creation of man.
So, what shall we say about this allegorical approach?

First off, there is no linguistic justification for it. None.

This is not, in example, apocalyptic literature (Revelation,
Daniel, and other books of the Bible are rife with allegory).
Also, this is not Hebraic poetry; there are no indications
whatsoever at all of it being poetry. None. Secondly, many of
the truths present here demand a literal understanding (i.e., to
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take it as straight forward historical narrative) because near

countless other Biblical passages depend upon a presupposed
literal perspective of these passages. Thirdly, I think
tremendous problems arise if we were to take these passages as
allegory. If the Biblical creation account is allegorical, then
“The Fall” too must be allegorical. (You no doubt see where
this is going.) If the creation and fall are allegorical in nature,
why need we anything save an allegorical salvation, and perhaps
even an allegorical Savior? And of course that is where the
modernists have sought to take us: “God is not a bloodthirsty
God, there is no blood sacrifice, no blood (based) salvation in
the words of Jesus,” they would argue. Rather, “Jesus
exemplifies love, the gospel is a poetic picture of love, even
sacrificial love; love, love, love, love, love,” is their constant
refrain. “It doesn’t matter if Jesus is even historic, I mean who
cares –it is the mythos of self-sacrificing action –that is what is
truly important, that is the real gospel message: you too can
love as he did!” Hence the disdain by most modernists of the
Apostle Paul’s writings, especially of those scriptures detailing
the substitutionary and propitiatory nature of Christ crucified.
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And thus on the other end of the spectrum, as it were, in

response, I take the opening chapters of Genesis in the
objectively verified literary form in which they appear: that of
historical narrative. And I believe the best way to interpret them
rightly is to seek to apply sound exegetical efforts, as in to
understand them the way the author intended they be
understood, and in the way the original readers and hearers
would have understood them. I also fully affirm Scripture to be
reliable in all that it says and teaches, regarding any subject it
touches upon, including science, chronology, and any kind of
history presentation.

Does that mean I am anti-science (including being against

the assured results of modern paleontology, biology, geology,
astrophysics, and more)? No, I am not anti-science. But yes, I
do take violent exception to the incredibly deceptive,
atheistically-based evolutionism, which is so dominate in the
modern secular science’s world majority.

What can I say? God and me –we’re a majority too. 

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*****

The above is an exposition of:

Biblical Hebraic Wholistic Anthropology

The present author first coined this precise and extremely

accurate (though somewhat hefty) subject heading. 