The Demise of the Person

What is man?

What makes a person a person?

What makes you, you?

Familiar questions?

Led by the naturalistic philosophies and the human sciences, the traditional Judeo-Christian view of the person is under an insidious attack. In fact, your very personhood is under attack. The uniqueness of your personhood is being assaulted, discounted, distorted, and destroyed by technology, bureaucracy, media, the behavioral sciences, the judicial system, and even by recent advances in the field of bio medicine ... such as artificial insemination, cloning, genetic engineering, abortion, and euthanasia.

The machine of modern society is geared to absorb your individuality and rob you of your humanness ... distilling the human mind to nothing more than the boom and buzz of electrical impulses and chemical reactions.

The image of personhood that is emerging, particularly from the behavioral sciences, is radically distorted and far removed from the traditional and classical views of the person. The prevailing view of humanity is devoid of any concept that people are dependent on, or responsible to, a Creator God.

Stephen Evans described this attack this way, It is fair to say that the rise of the human sciences in the twentieth century has been marked by the demise of the person. That is, there is a definite tendency to avoid explanation of human behavior which appeals to the conscious decision in favor of almost any non-personal factors. The idea that God is the Creator of all things is forgotten. (Evans, C. Stephen, Preserving the Person: A Look at the Human Sciences, Grand Rapids, MI, Baker Book House, 1977, p. 14)

You know there's more to you than that!

Richard