Spheres of Awareness: 4 Unique Ways Humans Perceive Reality

By Kenneth R. Samples
Reasons To Believe

An implication of being made in God’s image is that human beings have a unique awareness of reality. That reality is wide and deep and extends to four basic philosophical spheres or dimensions of life. The awareness of and interaction with these spheres illustrates humankind’s uniqueness and makes the discovery of four critical truths possible.

Sphere 1: The Intellectual
Human beings are intellectual creatures. We are capable of rational thought, reflection, intentionality, and the capacity to use our minds to apprehend truth. The intellectual therefore focuses on the virtue of truth. For most of Western civilization, truth has been defined as that which corresponds to reality. So if my belief matches reality, then I know the truth (this is known as the correspondence theory of truth).

Sphere 2: The Moral
Human beings are moral creatures. We have a conscience and feel the pull of the moral ought or should. As moral agents, we weigh our duties and seek ethical goodness. The moral therefore focuses on the virtue of goodness. And the majority of Western civilization has viewed moral goodness as being prescriptive, objective, and discoverable rather than descriptive, subjective, and invented.

Sphere 3: The Aesthetic
Human beings are aesthetic creatures. We recognize, feel attracted to, and appreciate beauty. The aesthetic therefore focuses on the virtue of beauty. Aesthetics then involves the nature and appreciation of beauty, taste, and art. An aesthetic impulse seems to have been part of human culture from the beginning.

Sphere 4: The Spiritual
Human beings are spiritual creatures. We feel compelled to ask deep philosophical and religious questions. An intuition of God and a desire to be in right relationship with the divine characterizes the lives of the vast majority of people. The spiritual therefore focuses on the virtue of unity or wholeness. A spiritual need and drive seems to have been part of human culture from the beginning as well.

Reality in the Christian Worldview
The Christian worldview affirms that God is the transcendent source and ground of ultimate truth, goodness, beauty, and unity. Since human beings are made in God’s image, they possess intellectual, moral, aesthetic, and spiritual qualities and sensibilities. Humans alone are aware of and experience these four profound spheres of reality because they are like God. Exploring these four dimensions of reality brings great richness to human life because these spheres flow from and point to the divine being that is Ultimate Reality (the Triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit). Thus, serious reflection upon these spheres, something animals are incapable of, can tell us something special about God and ourselves.

Humankind’s fallen condition, however, negatively affects a person’s ability to fully recognize and appropriately embrace truth, goodness, beauty, and unity as God intended. For example, one of the ways that the Bible describes sin is “blindness” (Romans 1:18–32, 2 Corinthians 4:1–6), which distorts these virtues. Sin runs contrary to the qualities of God and instead causes human error, wickedness, ugliness, and disunity. Sin even causes human beings to misuse these four spheres of reality.

Yet redemption in Jesus Christ allows Christians to be united to the God of all truth, goodness, beauty, and unity. Through redemption, the image of God is restored within human beings so that they may properly appreciate and embrace these four profound dimensions of life.

Resources

• For more on the Christian worldview understanding of reality, see my book A World of Difference: Putting Christian Truth-Claims to the Worldview Test.
• To understand how the ancients viewed these four dimensions of reality and how they might guide one’s life and vocation today, see If Aristotle Ran General Motors by Tom Morris.

Infertility and the gospel: My story

By Jana Howerton

Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house; your children will be like olive shoots around your table (Ps. 128:3).

Recently, our young church has been filled with days of rejoicing for many mothers—Mother’s Day, hospital visits to a groundswell of precious newborns, child dedications, gender reveal parties. These are days of rich joy for many, but due to the effects of the fall (Gen. 3), they are days of deep pain for many others. The desire, longing and love to be a mother is there, and yet the olive shoots have not come.

My heart hurts for the woman who is experiencing the pain of infertility.  Infertility is a topic that people discuss very little, but I’ve read as many as 1 in 8 couples struggle with it. Infertility may not affect your family, but chances are you know and love someone it does.I understand and know the struggle because I have experienced the pain of infertility, as well.

The wait and the wondering

Every month, an eager bride excitedly waits to find out if this will be the month (finally!) she sees that beautiful little + sign. She spends her time dreaming of diapers and of the sweet little blessing God is surely going to add to her family. Be fruitful and multiply, right? Her doctor is so certain that she’s going to be able to get pregnant that she is starting to believe it, too. The thought of motherhood and babies is all too exciting, and her heart overflows with the dreams of what life will be like with children.

As the months pass and are then swallowed up into years, her doctor’s optimism starts to fade, and she is told that she will likely never conceive a baby without a miracle. She desperately tries to hang on to hope, believing she might be the exception. More time passes. Eventually, her enthusiasm and hopes fade, too, and she is met with the sorrow, shame and the extreme loneliness of it all. Questions fill her head: Who do I talk to about my heartache? Can anyone truly understand what I’m going through unless she’s experienced this herself? Why doesn’t God want me to have a baby? Is there something wrong with me? What does faith look like in my situation?

This may not be your story, but it is part of mine. The pain and shame I felt over not being able to give my husband a biological child was heart wrenching at times. It is a quiet pain that is often very lonely. But, in his timing, God does make everything beautiful. As God has worked in my heart, I can tell you that the story he is writing is our lives is full of his kindness, grace and mercy. He is good, and he can be trusted.

If you are struggling through the pain of infertility, please let me encourage you with a few ways that God has encouraged me.

1. We must counsel our hearts according to truth. Ask yourself: What does God’s Word say about you? What does God’s Word say about him? What is true and real? According to God, your infertility does not define you—his Word does. The cross says you are loved and accepted. You are not broken, and God is good all the time.
2. Don’t damage your friendships because you are in pain. You may be feeling hurt or jealous when you see others getting what you want. In this case, it’s a baby. Ask God to give you a heart that will rejoice with those who rejoice—one that is sincerely happy for others. And ask him for a friend who is able to weep with you as you weep (Rom. 12:15). Keep in mind that a friend loves at all times (Prov. 17:17), even if we are in pain; let us be people who give this unconditional love and who are able to receive it.
3. Reach out to a trusted friend. Sometimes, we might be tempted to think that if we don’t talk about it, it’s like it’s not real. I kept my pain and struggle hidden for many years, and it wasn’t until I starting talking about my sadness and being honest about it that I was able to start to allow God to deal with it and find peace in him. As I confessed all that was going on in my heart, God used the words of wise women and friends to bring healing to my heart (Prov. 12:18).
4. Jesus is our treasure. As much as we would like to think that if God would just answer our prayer for a child, we would always be happy and our longing would be satisfied, it just isn’t true. Yes, children bring joy and happiness, but they can never be the absolute focus of it without becoming idols. Jesus is meant for that place in our hearts and our lives. He must be the ultimate treasure of our hearts. Sometimes in his kindness, God allows us to continue without the thing we so desire because with it, we might not see Him; but, in our pain and longing our hearts might be turned to him.

Tim Keller says, “You’ll never realize God is all you need until God is all you have.” My prayer for you if you’re struggling through the pain of infertility is that you allow this time of longing for what God has not given you to draw you nearer to him. Our circumstances may not change, but we can allow God to change us, grow us and bear fruit in him.

You Can’t Have a Culture of Life if You Have No Culture at All

By Anthony Esolen
Crisis Magazine



It should be obvious to anyone who thinks about it for a moment that it is always far easier to destroy than to create.  One bomb or wrecking ball can shatter in an instant the cathedral that it took human hands and minds fifty years to build.

What is true of buildings is true of culture generally.

During the early and dark days of World War II, when the British army at Dunkirk had the sea behind them and the Germans before them, they sent a message back home consisting of three words: But if not. 

It was a brilliant message, because even if the Germans managed to intercept it and decode it, it wouldn’t have done them any good. “But if not” … what?

But the army knew that their countrymen would understand. It was more than a message regarding strategy.  It captured the heart of the war itself, a battle for the survival of European culture and civilization against the diseased fantasies of the Third Reich.

 

The reference comes from the story of the Hebrew youths Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, in captivity in ancient Babylon, who refused to bow down in worship before the statue of King Nebuchadnezzar.  The king summoned them before him in a fury and demanded their submission, lest he cast them into the fiery furnace.  Their reply was manly and direct:

If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king. BUT IF NOT be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.

 

The British people then roused themselves to action—ordinary men, anyone with a boat and a heart that beat warmly for God and country.  They crossed the channel in defiance of the enemy and rescued more than three hundred thousand men.

The incident reveals more than a common language.  It reveals a common way of life, and a common view of life.  The sterling words of the old King James Bible, a work of the highest culture, had long come to inform and vivify the ways of ordinary people.

That message could not now be sent, either to England or America. It would be incomprehensible.  That is not because the culture has changed.  It is because it has been destroyed, and the most energetic destroyers have been the very people whom we charge with its care: teachers, professors, statesmen, and artists.

Thomas Molnar had this to say about it:

Culture has come to mean … anything that happens to catch the fancy of a group: rock concerts, supposedly for the famished of the third world; the drug culture and other subcultures; sects and cults; sexual excess and aberration; blasphemy on stage and screen; frightening and obscene shapes; the plastic wrapping of Pont-Neuf or the California coast; to smashing of the family and other institutions; the display of the queer [that is, bizarre], abject, the sick.  These instant products, meant to provide instant gratification to a society itself unmoored from foundation and tradition, accordingly deny the work of mediation and maturation and favor the incoherent, the shapeless and the repulsive.

 

All in a day’s work at your local school, CBS, the BBC, the CBC, The New York Times, the Guggenheim, Broadway, Harvard, Hollywood, Cosmopolitan, the Playboy Channel, Princeton, your local school, Young Adult Fiction, the halls of Congress, Planned Parenthood, the “Adult” bookstore with no windows, your local school.

We want to raise up young people in a culture of life. Well and good. But that means that we require a culture, and that doesn’t happen by itself, especially not now, when all the forces of “education” and mass entertainment are ranged against the very possibility of a culture.

Imagine a scene of wholesale destruction. Every old and venerable structure has been reduced to rubble. People relieve themselves in the street. Sometimes they copulate there, too. Their “music” is little more than grunting and groaning. Their rulers are on the take. There are hundreds of thousands of old books in the mountain of stone and mortar that used to be the library. Most of those books are far beyond the capacity of the people to read. They sneer and snort at Shakespeare, because they can’t understand him. They’ve never even heard of Virgil. A lot of these people have taken to cannibalism.

Now then—you have retained some vague memory of a more noble way of life.  You have therefore arrived at a great truth. It’s perfectly obscure to most of your fellow rubble-pickers, who mock you and call you a prude, a Neanderthal, a medieval monk, a madman, a hater of the hungry, and so forth. Your precious truth is simply this: it is wrong to eat human flesh.

Well, that is no great burst of enlightenment, but it is a beginning. So what do you do?  Will you be content to say, “My children will do everything that everyone else is doing, but they will not eat human flesh?” They will be subhuman and subcultural, but their taste in dining will be restricted just a little?  Is that all?

Will you say, “Our family is not anthropophagous, but we will send our children to be taught by the same fellow that all the other parents use,” the one with the squalid leer, dabbling in excrement, contemptuous of any wisdom from the past?

That is where pro-life parents find themselves now.

Should we expect any help from places like Yale? Those places sponsor weeks for show-and-tell by whores and peddlers of sex toys. Any help from your local school? That would be like expecting Belial to lead you in prayer. There is no help from “the culture,” because there is no longer any culture; only the rubble of what used to be a culture.

What do you do, then?  Turn back, O man.  It’s time to recover and rebuild.

What does it mean to be made in God’s image?

By David Closson

The Christian faith and worldview is predicated on a set of nonnegotiable truths. One of these is that human life is inherently valuable. Christians have articulated and acted upon this transcendent understanding of human dignity throughout history, whether opposing infanticide and child abandonment, fighting against chattel slavery or engaging in civil disobedience to protest segregation. The powerful idea that every single person has inherent value is rooted in the image of God, a doctrine expressed in the opening chapter of Genesis.

Although “image of God” has become ubiquitous in Christian literature and conversation in recent years, it has not been robustly defined. Perhaps this is due to the lack of agreement throughout church history on what exactly constitutes image of God, which no doubt stems from the fact that Scripture declares but does not elaborate on the axiom in detail.

But much can and should be said. The fact that human beings are created in God’s image shapes the Christian worldview and affects how we see God, the world and one another. It informs how we understand the rest of the Bible’s story and provides a theological foundation for ethics and engagement. In short, a proper understanding of the image of God should animate everything we do, and as a result, we should endeavor to define it biblically; this will enable us to then survey what issues Christians should care about.

Different understandings of the image of God
Throughout church history, there has been universal agreement that image of God is a significant theological concept. But debate has abounded regarding what the image fundamentally refers to.

Some have argued in favor of a structural view that believes man’s ontological (the nature of being) qualities, such as rationality and cognitive capacity, constitute the image of God. These qualities distinguish man from the rest of creation. Early church leaders, such as Irenaeus and Augustine, as well as John Calvin, held variants of this view.

Another position is the relational view that stresses the importance of man’s relationships. Emil Brunner and Karl Barth advocated this approach, where being made in God’s image fundamentally entails living in relationship with God and others.

A third view is the functional or “vice-regency” position that posits man’s derivative authority to rule on behalf of God defines the image. Unlike the rest of creation, it is man that functions as God’s chief representative in the world. This view stresses the command to exercise dominion (Gen. 1:26-28).

The image of God and Ancient Near Eastern culture
It is evident in Genesis 1 that the Bible is content with simply asserting that man is somehow like God. Further elaboration is not provided. Why is this? As Bruce Ware has noted, technical terminology in speaking or writing is usually introduced and not explained in contexts where the audience is already familiar with specialized language. It seems fair to assume Moses was operating with this expectation. Therefore, considering Genesis 1 in light of the Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) usage of image of God might be helpful.

A seminal study on ANE images is David J.A. Clines' The Image of God in Man. Clines argues that ANE literature contains three commonalities in accounts that utilize image symbolism. First, a deity imputes a substance to an earthly king, enabling him to represent the divine. Second, the empowered king represents the deity by ruling as vice-regent. Third, only the king is ever given this privilege.

Applying this to Genesis, it is reasonable that Moses had this background in mind. First, God breathed into Adam the breath of life. Divine empowerment was requisite to function as God’s image. Second, man is tasked with exercising dominion and ruling as God’s vice-regent. Clines' third characteristic, however, does not apply. The Bible surprises us at this point by affirming that everyone bears God’s image. Clines' reconstruction of the ANE background is helpful and may account for why Moses did not furnish a more precise definition. His original readers would have had a framework to interpret image language and its connotations.

Through the lens of the ANE background, it is clear that certain aspects of the structural, relational and functional perspectives provide a holistic understanding of what it means to be made in the image of God (i.e., the structural serves the purpose of the functional carried out in relationship).

The image of God, therefore, includes both who man is and what he does. Ontological capacities and functionality are inseparably tied because the human person as a created whole is the image of God.

Man is like a statue erected by an ancient king—as the statue bore the image of the king and signified rulership, man bears God’s image in the cosmic temple of the world, representing his authority and dominion. Man is the visible representation of the invisible God. If one wants to know what God looks like, simply look at man, the crowning jewel of creation and the only creature made in God’s image and likeness.

The image of God and cultural engagement
One of the tragic results of sin is that man no longer properly images God; the remnants of the image have been marred. The relationship with our Creator is broken, and redemptive history bears witness to man’s inability to obey and honor God.

But the glorious truth of the New Testament is that restoration is possible through Christ, the perfect image of God (Col. 1:15), whose redeeming work restores the image to repentant sinners and establishes them as co-heirs with Christ.

In this light, the Biblical understanding of man’s creation in God’s image has stunning implications for Christian ethics. Not only is everyone created in God’s image, but every human being is a potential future ruler of the universe.

C.S. Lewis poignantly remarked: “It is a serious thing . . . to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship.”

In the new creation, God will once again set up his image bearers. But this time, God’s vice-regents will be perfect because of their union with Christ. Paradoxically, the new creation has already begun. It was inaugurated when Jesus was raised from the dead and will be consummated when he returns.

And as Christians waiting patiently for this day, we will endeavor to treat people made in God’s image with dignity and respect irrespective of gender, race, age, nationality or economic status because we remember our King’s words that as we did for “the least of these my brothers, you did also to me” (Matt. 25:40).

Thus, we will care for those caught in the vice grip of poverty. We will fight against human trafficking. We will uphold the dignity of the elderly and disabled. We will advocate on behalf of immigrants. We will work for religious liberty and conscience freedom. We will stand for marriage. We will promote racial reconciliation. And we will fight the culture of death in all its ugly forms.

We will do all this out of love for God and concern for those that bear his sacred image.