First posted on November 1, 2012 at jakebelder.com.

Earlier this week I posted about the importance of rooting our identity in the new life we have in Christ, noting the increasing tendency in some circles to conceive of ourselves as ‘sinful wretches’ even after the redemptive work of Christ has been applied to us. In response, Richard Greydanus, who I went to university with, suggested that this mentality stems from getting lost in the dialectic of sin and redemption. He hits on an important point, because our anthropology gets distorted when we fail to root it in the doctrine of creation.

When we view ourselves as fundamentally sinful beings, we see redemption as only addressing our sinfulness. While this is certainly a key part of the work of Christ (Matt. 1:21), it severely limits the scope of salvation. Redemption is about reclaiming and restoring the original goodness of creation (Rom. 8:20-21, Col. 1:19-20), including our humanity.

When God created human beings, he made them in his image, and established them as the pinnacle of his creation. He intended us to rule over that creation as his vice-regents, bearing witness to his cosmic rule as Lord and King (Gen. 1:28). Submitting to his Lordship and living righteous and holy lives is fundamental to who we are as humans. The fall into sin meant that we rejected God’s rule and forsook our calling. However, it is at this point that the doctrine of creation becomes so crucial, because sin does not have mastery over creation. Sin is a parasite that attaches itself to God’s good creation at every point and seeks to distort and ruin it, but it cannot undo what God has called good. It can mask it, it can obscure it, but it cannot undo it. As I said last time, sin has so distorted humanity that we are, apart from Christ, unable to do any good on our own. But this cannot be the starting point of our anthropology, because sin only masks and distorts the fundamental and original goodness of our humanity. When we allow it to define us, then our understanding of redemption is limited solely to the removal of sin, and ends up obscuring our humanity. The gospel becomes limited to justification by faith.

Our anthropology must begin with creation if we are to properly understand how we as humans are redeemed. Redemption, as I said above, is about reclaiming and restoring the original goodness of creation, and this is no less true for God’s redemption of his people. Christ not only deals with the problem of sin, but makes us a new creation, beginning the work of restoring us to our full humanity. As he does so, we once again become people who can take up our calling to rule over creation, and who can, as we are progressively sanctified, more and more bear faithful witness to the Lordship of Jesus Christ in every area of life.