Are People Basically Good? (Crucial Questions)

by R.C. Sproul

Finally, it has been said—not only by theologians, but also by historians and philosophers—that man is Homo religiosus. Part of the identity of humanity is our capacity for religion. But Calvin made the observation that man is a fabricum idolorum—an idol factory—so committed to religion that, even if he removes himself from the living God, he will replace his concept of God with a god made of his own hands.

In the Christian faith, we understand what it means to be human through the lens of Scripture.

So the knowledge of God and the knowledge of man work together; they are interdependent. The Scriptures tell us that man is made in the image of God. In some way, we are like God, so the more we understand who God is, the easier it is for us to understand who we are. And the more we understand what it means to be human, the more insight we can gain about the character of God.

Man is answerable to God; he’s ruled by God. He is a creature, but he has a position of responsibility, authority, and privilege over the rest of the world. Yet, even though we are distinguished from creation, ultimately, we are linked to the creation, so that when humankind fell, the whole world suffered.

The phenomenological perspective says that if you want to know what it means to be human, you need to study human beings now in their normal patterns of activity. Examine behavioral patterns, and on the basis of sufficient research of behavioral patterns, you can arrive at a description of statistically normal humanity and then build an ethic upon that description.

The biblical, theological view of man is that mankind in its creation is normative, but what we observe in man is dreadfully corrupted and under judgment. Thus, a descriptive analysis of normal behavioral patterns only provides a profile of a normal sinner. Which brings us back to the question at hand: Does that normal sinner still bear the image of God, or has the image of God been lost in him?

The Bible, then, is clear that man continues to bear God’s image.

Bearing God’s image means that we resemble Him.

But what uniquely stamps us as bearing the image of God has to do with our ability to mirror and to reflect the character of God. The image that God gave to us, the likeness that He has put in us as creatures, is an ability to show what it means to be holy.

But if Jesus’ humanity is a perfect humanity, and if He displays the image of God in its fullest sense, then to look at Him is to behold the glory of the Creator. That’s what an image does: it reflects, mirrors, and reveals a likeness, a similitude of the original.

In other words, at the heart of Judeo-Christian theology is a notion that when God created man, He made him soul and body—and when He redeems man, He redeems him soul and body.

Platonism is a form of dualism, meaning there are two equal and opposite forces—in this case, the spiritual and the physical—that are in constant conflict and that cannot be reconciled. Christianity does not teach this with respect to man. When we say that man is body and soul, we do not mean these are in competition or tension; rather, Christianity teaches a duality—that is, man is a harmonic unity composed of two aspects, the physical and the nonphysical. There is duality, but not dualism.

The term accidental refers to those properties of an object that are not part of its essence; they may exist or not exist without changing what that object truly is.

On the other hand, essential properties are those that are part of the essence of a thing. Remove that property, and it ceases to be that thing. Sin is not essential to humanity, unless someone believes that God made humanity sinful at the beginning. If sin is essential to humanity, then that would mean Jesus was either sinful or not human. So, sin is not essential. Adam had no sin when he was created, yet he was still human. Jesus has no sin, but He is still human. Believers will have no sin when they get to heaven, and they will still be human.

In other words, sin is not an external blemish, but something that goes to the very core of our being.

In this theory of sin, which is found in nineteenth-century liberal philosophy and twentieth-century existential theology, evil is regarded as being a necessary component of finitude: we sin because we are finite.

The biggest problem with finitude as an explanation for man’s fallenness and sinfulness is that it places the blame for man’s sin ultimately on God and absolves humanity from any kind of responsibility. It’s the ultimate moral copout, whereby I say not that the devil made me do it, but worse than that: the Creator made me do it, because He made me finite. To err is human, and since I’m just being human, God is obligated to forgive me.

God will never judge us for being finite, but He will justly judge us for being disobedient.

Part of the reason why no one ever achieves the standard of righteousness that God requires is because no one understands what the standard is. We’re blinded as to what is right and what is wrong.

When we talk about original sin, we don’t mean the sin that Adam and Eve committed, but the result of that first sin. Original sin refers to our sinful condition. In other words, we sin because we are sinners; it is not that we are sinners because we sin. Since the fall of mankind, it is the nature of human beings to be inclined and drawn toward sinfulness.

At the very moment we’re conceived, we have already participated in the fallenness of the human condition. Thus, we are born with a disposition and an inclination to sin. That’s what original sin means.

God commands belief in Christ. God doesn’t invite people to come to Christ—He commands it. It is the moral duty of a human being to submit to the lordship of Christ and to embrace Christ in faith.

It’s not that man is a servant to the tyranny of God; man is in bondage to himself and his own sinful predispositions.

He said that those who are fallen are addicted to sin.

Augustine was explaining the biblical concept that freedom means the ability to choose what you want, whereas having free will means having the power to make choices according to what you want rather than according to what is imposed upon you by someone or something else.

Not only may a free person choose according to his desires, but to be free means he must choose according to the deepest desire he has at the moment. We always choose according to the strongest inclination or the greatest desire that we have. We cannot choose against our strongest desires. If someone had a terrible temptation to do something he desperately wanted to do but which was against God’s law, but at the last minute he had the moral courage to say no, it would be because in the end his desire to obey God was greater than the draw of the temptation. We always act according to the strongest inclination that we have at a given moment; that’s the essence of making choices. That’s what freedom is: the ability to choose according to what you want.

He said man in his fallenness still has the ability to choose what he wants, but in his heart there is no desire for God or the things of God. If he is left to himself, the desires of man’s heart are only wicked continuously. His heart and soul are dead to the things of God. That’s our natural state; the Bible says that we are dead to the things of God in our fallen condition, because our sinful condition deadens the soul to them. I still have freedom to choose what I desire—but if I don’t have any desire for Christ, will I ever choose Him?