By Ranald Macaulay and Jerram Barrs
Solway. 202 pages. £7.00
The suggestion that we have leant more on Plato that the Bible in our conception of what it is to be human may leave you slightly cold, but the authors of Being Human contend that it has wrongfooted all our thinking: from how we relate to God to how we peel potatoes.
This is a reprint of a book which came out some years ago, but continues to be extremely relevant. Macaulay and Barrs argue that if we give the physical world the thumbs down, and the spiritual world the thumbs up, and draw Plato's line between them, then our notion of spiritual maturity will collapse into either asceticism or mysticism. We will either spend our time suspicious of the physical world and trying to loosen our attachments to it (if not by sitting on a pole in the desert, then by avoiding art galleries); or we will cultivate a 'higher spirituality' and will see our relationship with God as a series of non-rational encounters.
The book corrects these inadequate views of both God and humanity by taking us back to Genesis. There we see that the grounds of our being lie in a God who is not just infinite, but who is personal, and who has made us to live in relationship with him. What is liberating is the reminder that, as his Creation, this world is the arena within which we are to express that relationship. So I show him love not by denying this world, but by living out his values in it; and I relate to him, not by mystical encounter, but by listening to the Word he has spoken and by talking to him in the language he has given us to use.
All this is healthy, though I think that the attempt to explain what it is to be made 'in the image of God' as to be made 'like God' is in danger of undermining their argument. In so many ways, we are not like God, so the door is opened to colouring in the 'image of God' language with an arbitrary selection of all the qualities that we most cherish in humanity. It seems to me to be more accurate to see the 'image of God' as underlining the relationship God has set us in, so that our identity as persons is found in him, rather than in the abstract and therefore impersonal notion of creativity which Macaulay and Barrs prize above all.
The book gives us some useful tools with which to think through key areas of what it means to be human - from how to grow in holiness to how we are to understand families. Once the basic framework is established in creation, the implications of the Fall are held in view and the rest of the book functions as a good reminder that all our thought and experience must be scrutinised by the death and resurrection of Christ. Perhaps it attempts too much, and some of its logic is rather loose, but it sketches out the sort of areas that we could all do with thinking some more about.
