Ed Welch: Who are we? Needs, Longings, and the Image of God in Man
What do people ‘need’, can only be understood by answering,”What does it mean to be human?”
Popular uses of word ‘need’
- Need-as-hyperbole-for desires eg I ‘need’ a chocolate. Generally need to have experienced whatever it is before have this ‘need’ desire for it.
- Biological need eg I ‘need’ some water, without which you may die. Problem comes when desire seen as biological need eg I ‘need’ sex seen as a biological need means abstinence is not a possibility.
- Need-as-hyperbole-for a-sense-of-psychological-and-social-well-being. Eg a ‘need’ for significance or self-esteem. If we don’t have it, then we will become psychological starved and weak and begin to act badly.
- Spiritual needs. We need Jesus and his grace. We need righteousness, forgiveness, and power to change.
This is our supreme need, but it has been stretched to include psychological aspects and many Christians now believe these needs to be met in Jesus eg we need to find our self esteem and personal significance in Jesus.
History of Needs
Even though we all feel hurt when let down by a friend, we don’t find psychological needs in biblical text.
We need to meet our bodily needs for good health. Scripture agrees with this: Matt6: 25-34 your heavenly father knows you need these things.” This need-deficient model worked well for medicine, but then applied in psychological area.
- Freud affirmed the ‘need for sexual expression’ and the ‘need for permissive parents.’
His model essentially reflected a need-deficit view of the person.
- Behaviorists such as Dollard and Miller took the simple stimulus-response model and added that we basic drives that motivate us.
- Maslow’s self-actualization theory says we have a hierarchy of basic needs at birth. When needs aren’t met, then people are unhappy.
All 3 agree that we have needs that need to be met and if they aren’t then there will be some kind of personal pathology.
Note: These only work in very individualistic society. Psychological needs are not particularly noted in Africa and Asia.
As Christians took this on board we understood that any reactive sin and misery resulted from an unmet need.
It feels as if God created us with these needs. But then why is scripture seemingly silent on it? Why did psychologists need to find out about it rather than any biblical scholars noticing?
- Larry Crabb: Our two greatest emotional needs are a sense of security and personal significance.
- Minirth and Meier clinics say we have a God-given need to be loved. They said we have love cups inside us that feel empty and need to be filled.
- Christian’s agree that we have unmet needs, but then resolve it by saying these needs must be met in Christ.
Fruit of this:
- 2 gospels: one for spiritual needs and one for psychological needs.
Our spiritual needs are dealt with through our sins being forgiven and us becoming children of God. Psychological needs met by Christ filling us with identity, significance and personal respect. But is this the gospel?
Shouldn’t the gospel be stopping us looking at ourselves and help us to become more preoccupied with loving God and others?
- Even secular circles are questioning this, because it makes us passive recipients rather than active interpreters and responsible actors in our world. We never take responsibility for our reactions because the blame belongs to someone else who didn’t meet our needs.
Why has the psychological needs construct remained so strong in Christian circles?
- Most people feel this sense of need.
- Even though psychological categories are not explicitly mentioned in bible people feel they can find it in the following two ways:
- The tripartite view of God: body; soul (psychological); spirit (spiritual)
Psychologists can now give us our understanding of the soul.
- The image of God in man
Larry Crabb’s image of God:
- Larry Crabb says that to be a person means to have deep longings for relationship that are tension free, full of deep loving acceptance with opportunities to make a diffs to someone else.
The Father Son and HS are in relationship and long to have relationship with us. Our longings are more passive – we want to be loved by someone else.
Larry’s summary of the image of God is that we are made for relationship, therefore we long for it.
- 2 ways of responding to this:
- We sinfully look to fill our longings with people and objects
- We look to Christ in dependence that he will fill our longings and needs.
- Implications of this model:
- Our deepest problem is longings, not sin.
- Therefore the gospel is more intended to meet our psychological needs than to cleanse us from sin.
ie Christ becomes primarily a needs-meeter and secondarily a redeemer
- Human relationships become about mutual need-meeting. Crabb will say that we cannot meet each others full needs, as only God can do that. Left with two mutually psychologically needy people whose mutual need-meeting is an expression of Gods more perfect need meeting.
- The natural resting point of need theories is my need, not the perfections of God whose image I was created to reflect.
- Could it be that we are called to love others not so much because the other person is empty and needs filling but because olives is the way that we imitate Christ, by which we reveal Him in the way we live our lives and so bring glory to God?
Alternative View:
The Person as Duality
‘Soul’ and ‘spirit’ are not definition type words- they get their meaning from context.
Matt 10:18: “Don’t be afraid of him who can kill the body but not the soul”. Meaning material and immaterial
1 Cor 7:34: refers to material and immaterial, but calls them body and spirit
James 2:26 “the body without the spirit is dead”.
Heb 4:12 means word of God is going to within the substance of the person, not dividing the person up.
Mark 12:30: we are to love the Lord your God with all your heart soul mind and strength is an accumulation of terms used to express completeness.
Soul and spirit are overlappingworlds that refer to the inner person.
The Image of God in Man
To understand the image of God in man, we have to understand who God is.
God’s goal is his own glory and God’s glory is God himself.
“For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be glory forever. Rom11: 36
With image-as-longing we would praise God for what he had done for me, though although God does deserve thanks for what he has done, He deserves praise simply because He is God.
The Israelites burst into praise because of who God is Ex 15:11. God’s glory fills the earth Num 14:21.
His glory specifically filled the tabernacle. The tabernacle took a human form in Jesus, and Gods presence and glory are now reflected in us. A synonym for God’s glory is His holiness. The holiness emphasizes that he is awesome and separate. Although God is the matchless one who is to be feared, His glory-holiness is shown in mighty acts of intimate involvement with His people. We see His involvement through love and justice.
This picture of the God of glory doesn’t seem to reflect a ‘longing for relationship’. God is completely fulfilled in himself. God’s love reaches into relationships broken by sin, teaching broken people to love Him and others. His judgment shows sinners are estranged from him/
There are many pictures or images of God in the bible:
- Loving bridegroom expecting a spotless bride
- Redeemer
- Judge, yet his son becomes our advocate
- Father
- Mother
- Submissive son
- Suffering servant
- Friend
- Shepherd
- Potter….
Each picture is an expression of his glory-holiness. God is these things. Whenever we these things in the created world, it is a reflection of the original
The glory-holiness of God
Expressed in love and compassionexpressed in justice
Fatherfriendservantredeemerpotter
All these attributes of God are merged into one in Jesus – the image of God’s glory.
Jesus passion was for the glory of the father eg before crucifixion “Father, glorify your name.” John 12:28)
The deepest desire on the heart of Jesus was the glory of His father, and this desire was expressed in Jesus’ love and justice.
Who is the person?
The object of Gods greatest affections is God himself: The Father, Son and HS. He has a great love for his glory and wants His glory to fill the earth.
People are similar to God in that the object of our affection is Himself. We should delight in God just as he delights in himself. This is expressed in a passion to proclaim his glory and to declare his kingdom is coming. We reflect God’s image, as did Moses. However we don’t have to have an occasional appearance by God, we come into Gods presence through faith. By faith we have the indwelling glory of the HS and can grow to become more radiant rather than fade, as did Moses.
2 Cor 3:18: “And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into His likeness with ever increasing glory, which comes from the spirit.”
The essence of the image of God is that we rejoice in God’s presence; love Him above all else; and live for His glory not our own.
Basic question:
How can I bring glory to God?
Not
How will I meet my longings?
We are in relationships that are bad – because of sin. So we long for tension free relationships, but rather than focus on our longings, Jesus summarizes the core issue of human life as being Love the Lord your God and love your neighbor. Jesus imaged God bypioneering and perfecting faith and obedience, fulfilling the conditions of acceptability. So by grace we are accepted because he was acceptable and we can grow in faith and obedience.
Image bearing is expressed in simple acts of obedience – loving God and loving your neighbor. God’s glory is manifested in concrete acts of love and justice, so we are to mimic God in love and justice.
We do this, by imitating the various images of God provided for us in scripture: the father who spends time with his people; servant-God etc.
In Genesis, man is called to bring glory to God by imaging Him in caring for the sub human kingdom, reproducing and being obedient to Him by not eating the fruit. He could not reproduce on his own, so God made woman. The image of God is not complete in an individual. So we do need each other, but not to fulfill our psychological deficits. The NT testament outworking of reproducing is the Great Commission, which cannot be carried out by one person. God’s glory is displayed in corporate body more fully than it is in individuals.
Although people remained image bearers, Adam’s disobedience brought fundamental changes. Man started to say as Adam did, “I want…” which leads to idolatry.
Is it possible that the “I want” of Adam is the first expression of psychological needs? Is it possible that psychological yearnings come when we refuse to love God and receive His love?
Longings have much in common with lust. To elevate our desire for love and acceptance to the point of ‘need’ is to yell out: “I want!” I must have! These longings would not exist if we had been willing to love God and not ourselves.
A biblical response to these lusts is to repent rather than to look for satisfaction. The cup of psychological cravings should be broken not filled.
The scripture indicates that we need God, but we need Him as the image we are to reflect, we need him because we have spiritual needs, and we need him for life itself. Scripture also indicates we need each other, but we don’t need each other to fill a created emptiness. We need each other to reflect Gods glory.
We are living in a sinful world where we are sinned against and in a world that is under the cure. This leaves us with an emptiness, but one that is the result of curse and death etching themselves on our psyche and not the result of being created with psychological longings.
The emptiness is also an expression of the fact that weneed Gods righteousness to replace our spiritually destitute condition. It reminds us that we are without any ability to atone for our sins.
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