A tactic that has been used for a long time to justify the slaughter of a population of humans, is to “dehumanize” them in your own mind or in the mind of your army and nation. Hitler, for example, dehumanized the Jews. It didn’t seem wrong to get rid of a sub-human class that was polluting the gene pool. People bought this rhetoric. Slave owners dehumanize their slaves. If they are not fully human, you can treat them like property, like animals. The unborn are dehumanized in the minds and talk of those who want the right to abortion. None, or at least few, of them would endorse murdering children. However, if they are not children but rather an unwanted and unnecessary body part, you can tear them apart.
The tactic of dehumanizing is repulsive. It does raise a fundamental question that is much harder to answer than you would think. What is a human? I know I am a human, but what exactly am I? In recent articles a Stanford scientist has been reported of concluding that we have no free will. He has determined that all our decisions are simply based on brain chemistry and that we are just biological machines. This has been the dehumanizing claim of hardcore Darwinists for a while. It is also plainly false. Everybody knows that they exercise a form of free will all the time. You make decisions that you don’t have to make all the time. The problem with a study like this is the methodology and the philosophy behind it. Yes, brain chemistry and electrical activity cause certain actions, but the chemistry and electrical activity do not happen because of cause-and-effect with the world. At least not unless you stick electrical probes in our brains. Our brain activity is not the decision-making process, but rather the result of it. There is a free mind behind these things. So, is a human a conscious mind? Or in the terminology of the Bible, is a human a soul?
God has made us to be eternal beings. The soul, which is not exactly our consciousness, is an eternal part of a human. It is not the complete human, however. We may not like our bodies. Sinful nature gives us good reason to not like them. But consciousness does not a human make. The combination of the soul with a body gets us closer. Today, I am a soul connected to a mortal, sinful body. I am also conjoined in a way that I don’t fully understand to Jesus. The Bible says that I am “in Him”. Jesus asked for this in the one prayer we get to overhear:
20 “I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, 21 that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.
John 17:20-21 (ESV)
The connection to Christ doesn’t make us human, but it puts us in line to realize the fullest nature of what we are meant to be. We will temporarily dump our damaged earthly bodies at our death. If we are “in Christ”, we will move to Heaven and acquire a body appropriate for that space. At the time of Judgment Day, we will return to Earth and acquire a resurrected Earthly body. I don’t think that means that we lose our Heavenly body. I think it means that we can freely move between both. At that time, we will be really alive. A soul and two bodies.
For now a soul and one, damaged body is what we are. That is a human. Damaged and devolving or not, humans have some remaining aspects of the “image of God” and as such no one has the right to dehumanize or kill without God’s specific instruction. This goes for the unborn, for the Jews, for the Palestinians, for people being trafficked for sex or labor, for everyone. Governments have some leeway to exercise “the power of the sword” (Romans 13), but face tough scrutiny if they use it.
Humans are not expendable biological machines. Humans are not a scourge of the environment. Humans are eternal and valuable. Humans also are endangered by their sin to not realize their God-planned potential. Humans need that connection to Jesus.
Giving Christ 