Here's the Person

---This is a continuation of a previous post entitled "Where's the Person?"---

Evolution abysmally flops in attempting to explain personhood. Darwin divests us of who we are, leaving us as nothing more than conglomerations of atoms and molecules, the complex piecing together of sugars, amino acids, and nucleotides. Through its concept of emergent properties, evolution fancies to explain who we are, but it's tale is as feasible as a just-so story. It's akin to the yarn that Aaron spun for Moses, "I threw the gold into the fire, and out came this calf. It just appeared! Amazing, isn't it?!"

But it is no use to show the insufficiency of evolutionary theory unless we can present an alternative that accurately describes the reality of who we are. Even if evolution tailspins when describing the personhood that is within each of us, what are we left with if there is not some other explanation that leads to the fulfillment of the longings within us. What of these longings though? Are they real? Am I simply writing from my own experience that which is not true of the whole of humanity?

Listen. Can you not hear the common theme rising and falling throughout the song of humanity? The long, low notes lift their sorrows in the somber tones of the old negro spirituals. They blow across the obliterated fields of the oppressed and war weary people, opening the refugee's mouth in hopeless cries of terror and despair. And still those notes move on through the throes of shattered history, played on the broken heart strings of the wounded spirit of every man and woman. This is the dirge of suffering, the mournful music of throbbing hearts as they yearn for something more - an end to the evil within us, around us. The doleful howl echoes through us all, our longing sigh for rest.

What says the student of Darwin? What consolation does he offer for the child afraid of the dark, the weeping widow, the man born blind, the unfortunate victim of malicious crime? None. What explanation can he afford to explain our rose? Where on the cold steel of the dissection table lies her personhood?

All our longings for rest and rescue, all our hungering for something more, all our pleadings for justice and mercy - the gospel answers these cries. Here they have deep meaning, significance rooted in the person of Jesus. No more are they the meaningless results of vacillating gene pools. They find a fountainhead in the stamp of God that lies on who we are as creatures made in the image of our Creator, meant to be in relationship with Him. We cannot divorce who we are as persons from who we are as creatures. Significance dies when God does. It lives afresh in Christ, gasping forth as the breath draws anew into his now glorified body. In Him, the rose of our humanity blossoms to fullness, and though it may wilt and wither into the grave, yet it will rise again. That same breath that rushed upon and into Him in the tomb will cross His gentle lips to breathe new life into all who are His.

"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." -C.S. Lewis