The Biblical and Christian Worldview
for the 21st Century

Additional Notes on Anthropology

"Pascal so profoundly pointed out ... the greatness and the miserableness of man.  He longs for truth and is false by nature.  He yearns for rest and throws himself from one diversion upon another.  He pants for a permanent and eternal bliss and seizes on the pleasures of a moment.  He seeks for God and loses himself in the creature.  He is born a son of the house and he feeds on the husks of the swine in a strange land.  He forsakes the fountain of living waters and hews out broken cisterns that can hold no water (Jeremiah 2:13).  He is as a hungry man who dreams that he is eating, and when he awakes finds that his soul is empty; and he is like a thirsty man who dreams that he is drinking, and when he awakes finds that he is faint and that his soul has appetite (Isaiah 29:8).

"Science cannot explain this contradiction in man.  It reckons only with his greatness and not with his misery, or only with his misery and not with his greatness.  It exalts him too high, or it depress him too far, for science does not know of this Divine origin, nor of his profound fall.  But the Scriptures know of both, and they shed their light over man and over mankind; and the contradictions are reconciled, the mists are cleared, and the hidden things are revealed.  Man is an enigma whose solution can be found only in God."  (Herman Bavinck, Our Reasonable Faith, Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1956, 1980, page 22-23)