What do you assume?

Recently I have found myself surrounded by people who claim to operate from both a Christian framework and a humanist framework (I will explain what I mean by this shortly). After spending some time thinking about it, I am convinced that these two views can not co-exist. This might seem a strange conclusion to reach based on how similar both frameworks can appear on the surface, but I am getting ahead of myself.

We know that Christians are to:

“See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.” - Colossians 2:8.

One philosophy that seems to have pervaded secular world and some streams of Christian thought is Humanism.

Humanism is a fairly broad philosophy. Entire books have been written about what humanism is and have not been able to reach definite conclusions ¹. To keep its critique to a manageable size, we will look at the Humanism of Abraham Maslow. His particular approach is the one most likely to be encountered and it relates directly to people.

When looking at how Humanism sees people, Humanism has been described as: “leading to a psychology that is not only centred on the human being but sets a positive value on those of his capabilities and aspirations that seem to distinguish him from lower animals and make him master of his own fate.” ² Some of the things Maslow specifically claims include:

People have a series of needs. These go from basic needs such as food and shelter to more complex needs such as love.
People move towards self actualisation, in fact it is the ultimate goal for the individual.
For people to become self-actualisers, they will be motivated by ‘Being-Values’ for example justice, beauty, humour truth, goodness… the list goes on.
Evil in people occurs because their basic needs (e.g. food & protection) are not met. Not from the essential nature of people.
People who have had their lower needs met and have become self-actualisers better able to tolerate having their needs frustrated.
Self-actualisers increasingly become what they are capable of becoming.

Just looking at these few claims of Maslow’s theory, I can see why it is an outlook on humanity that would be quite popular. It is realistic in its assessment of humans having basic needs that need to be met for you to be able to live your life, such as food, shelter and love. It also has a very high view of human beings with everyone’s working (at some level) towards self-actualising, being motivated by things that are objectively good such as truth, beauty and justice. Perhaps best of all, fixing things that are wrong with people is really just a matter of filling in with that missing need.

I think that one of the reasons it is so easy to want to combine Christianity and humanism is that in both, human life is inherently valuable. For Christians, all people are made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26, 27) and hence valuable. In Humanism, people are valuable because they are. Because of this shared affinity for the value of human life, Christianity and Humanism often look similar in their attitude to the poor, the sick and the needy (in fact the humanists can often be more zealous than the Christians in this area). Despite some similarities, they are only few and at a surface level.

Humanism has several big conflicts with Christianity. The humanist perspective does not consider that man is in a relationship with God. Nor does it acknowledge that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” - Romans 3:23. Humanism makes the claim that evil occurs due to the needs of the individual not being met. This denies our rejection of God ³. Such a perspective leads to a skewed view of humanity and waters down any need that we have for trusting in Jesus death on the cross to take the punishment for our rejection of God.

We have only briefly surveyed humanism and it’s incompatibility with Christianity. But there are many philosophies in this world that are not compatible with the message of the Cross and can easily influence our thoughts and worldview without us even noticing. We need to constantly compare the assumptions and beliefs we hold about the world and how it works to what the Bible says.