How blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked,
Nor stand in the path of sinners,
Nor sit in the seat of scoffers!
2 But his delight is in the law of the Lord,
And in His law he meditates day and night. Psalm 1:1-2
What does it mean to be genuinely human? This is a question philosophers, world religions, little kids, and others have been pondering for the millennia. Rather than speculate though, as Christians we have the more accurate way, the more concrete way; God’s way for answering said question. As is the case with everything in the Christian kingdom, our existences are contingent ones; existences that have a ground and condition from their antecedent reality in the One who has always already and eternally existed. The Christian’s conscious existence (over against the pagan’s unconscious existence) is a gifted, a graced, a given existence; an existence extra nos (‘outside of us’). Humanity simpliciter (simply, or at base) has an image, according to Scripture; and its image isn’t inherent to humanity writ large. Humanity’s image is in fact God’s image for us in the freely elect humanity of Jesus Christ; the humanity elected for us ever before the foundations of the world. When Adam and Eve were originally created, they weren’t created in an ontological vacuum; they were in fact created in the image of God: “13 For He rescued us from the domain of darkness, and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son, 14 in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. 15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation” (Col. 1:13-15). As such, one implication of this, is that humanity is humanity, humanity has sanctity and dignity, in and from God’s humanity for them, for us, in Jesus Christ. That is to say, to be human, is to be reconciled with God; since this is what humanity, in the ‘image of God,’ was created for. To be human, biblically understood, is to be in right relationship with the living and triune God; this is humanity’s telos (‘purpose’), to be in an intimate relationship, a penetrating relationship, a participatory relationship with God.
An old-time dispensational preacher and teacher, Harry A. Ironside (someone whose commentary set I’ve read completely back in my early years), has the following to say in his commentary on Psalm 1; in regard to the theme of our question on humanity:
The first Psalm is the inspired introduction to the entire book. We may say that we have here, in contrast, two men, the blessed man and the wicked man. The blessed man is the Second Man, the Lord from heaven; the wicked man is the first man.
Notice the opening verses. “Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the Lord; and in His law doth he meditate day and night. And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.”
Who is this blessed man to whom our attention is directed as we open this lovely Old Testament book of praise and prayer? Observe in the first place that the tenses as we have them here do not exactly convey the thought of the original Hebrew. It may be rendered, “Blessed is the man that hath not walked in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stood in the way of sinners, nor sat in the seat of the scornful.” He is not here expressing the blessedness of a man who was once a sinner and has been turned to righteousness and now no longer walks in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful. But he is telling us of the blessedness of the Man who has never done any of these things, the Man who never took his own way, the Man who never walked with the world as part of it, who never did a thing in opposition to the will of God. Who is that man?[1]
It is close to 30 years ago that I read the above from Ironside, and it has stuck with me since then. Ironically, this type of thinking is abundantly present in Karl Barth’s thinking and corpus as well. Clearly, there is a different informing theological and contextual/cultural background behind Ironside and Barth; but at a thematic (‘spirit’) level there is definitely some overlap between the two on an theoanthropology. Barth develops these things deeper and further than Ironside did, as a churchman and preacher, yet, I find it interesting that the same insight, about the humanity of Jesus, because of the pure force and witness of Holy Scripture, stands out to both of these men; men who, typically, would never be mentioned in the same sentence.
Here is how Barth begins to develop this theme, in regard to the humanity of Jesus, and how that implicates humanity in general—that is coram Deo (before God).
§45
MAN IN HIS DETERMINATION AS THE COVENANT-PARTNER OF GOD
That real man is determined by God for life with God has its inviolable correspondence in the fact that his creaturely being is a being in encounter—between I and Thou, man and woman. It is human in this encounter, and in this humanity it is a likeness of the being of its Creator and a being in hope in Him.
1.JESUS, MAN FOR OTHER MEN
Real man lives with God as His covenant-partner. For God has created him to participate in the history in which God is at work with him and he with God; to be His partner in this common history of the covenant. He created him as His covenant-partner. Thus real man does not live a godless life—without God. A godless explanation of man, which overlooks the fact that he belongs to God, is from the outset one which cannot explain real man, man himself. Indeed, it cannot even speak of him. It gropes past him into the void. It grasps only the sin in which he breaks the covenant with God and denies and obscures his true reality. Nor can it really explain or speak of his sin. For to do so it would obviously have to see him first in the light of the fact that he belongs to God, in his determination by the God who created him, and in the grace against which he sins. Real man does not act godlessly, but in the history of the covenant in which he is God’s partner by God’s election and calling. He thanks God for His grace by knowing Him as God, by obeying Him, by calling on Him as God, by enjoying freedom from Him and to Him. He is responsible before God, i.e., He gives to the Word of God the corresponding answer. That this is the case, that the man determined by God for life with God is real man, is decided by the existence of the man Jesus. Apart from anything else, this is the standard of what his reality is and what it is not. It reveals originally and definitively why God has created man. The man Jesus is man for God. As the Son of God He is this in a unique way. But as He is for God, the reality of each and every other man is decided. God has created man for Himself. And so real man is for God and not the reverse. He is the covenant-partner of God. He is determined by God for life with God. This is the distinctive feature of his being in the cosmos.[2]
Unlikely consorts, Barth and Ironside are; but in this thematic instance we can see how Barth complements and develops what Ironside only leaves in nascent form (indeed, and “metaphysically” differently than Ironside might have imagined). As an aside: this helps to illustrate my own in via. Many of the so-called “pietistic” “biblicist” evangelical preachers and thinkers hit upon themes, incidentally even, purely because of their warmhearted dedication to the Jesus and triune God of Holy Scripture. They would hit upon themes, deeply theological themes, purely because they were intent on following the contours of Holy Scripture. It is this background that made me “someone in waiting” for a Barth or a Torrance; they, respectively, because of their commitment to following the contours of the Bible, identified many of the same themes as these “North American evangelical pietists.” But because of their theological training, context, and background had the ideational resource to develop said biblical-theological themes that the pietists could only ever inchoately identify.
What it means to be a man, to be a woman, to be human, as Ironside and Barth, respectively, have both identified, is grounded fully in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. He indeed is ecce homo, ‘behold the Man,’ Christ Jesus. He is what it means to be genuinely human before God; uniquely as the Son of God. There is “no Man behind the back of Jesus,” He indeed is the Man from whence and towards which all of creaturely being has its being. To be concretely human in this world is to be in the man from Nazareth, Jesus Christ; since there is no world, or creaturely reality without His elect humanity come first (His is the inner reality of the covenant between God and humanity, of which the created order finds its external meaning).
5 For there is one God, and one mediator also between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, . . . I Timothy 2:5
[1] H. A. Ironside, Studies on Book One of the Psalms, accessed @ studylight.org 01-12-2024.
[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics. The Doctrine of God III/2 §45 (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 1.