Is the biblical view of humanity dangerous, then?
It is dangerous to anyone who does not wish to think of every other human being as their image bearing “neighbor” or to love him or her as such.
It is dangerous, for example, to everyone who wishes to “assimilate man without remainder to the rest of nature,” insisting that (after all) there is nothing very special about human beings as a class, and certainly not as individuals.
Biblical faith is also dangerous to those who have become confused about where the boundaries between science and philosophy lie and who think that because human beings are, in some sense, products of a great evolutionary struggle in which only the fittest survive, society itself should be organized on that same basis.
Biblical faith is dangerous, moreover, to those among the powerful who would like to be left alone to use and oppress the weak and to those among the rich who would like to be left alone to use and oppress the poor.
Such faith threatens all those for whom the current social order is everything or for whom individual human beings are merely dispensable flotsam and jetsam on the great sea of inevitable social change.
It challenges every “ends justifies the means” and every “greatest good” argument.
It confronts any idea that anyone is too young or too old, too black or too white, too sick, too different, or too foreign to have the same rights as everyone else, including the right to life.
It opposes any diminution of the importance of the individual person out of regard for the convenience of other family members, the health of the economy, the good of the state, or the well-being of the planet.
The biblical idea about the human being is, in truth, very dangerous.
~ Seriously Dangerous Religion: What the Old Testament Really Says and Why It Matters by Iain W. Provan
