Marriage and Mankind (Jerusalem Declaration 8.2)
Editor’s Note: This is the fourteenth in a series of articles by Dr. Stephen Noll, titled “The Jerusalem Declaration: A Personal Commentary.” Dr. Noll draws on decades of experience in the GAFCON movement, especially his role as Secretary of the Statement group that drafted the Jerusalem Declaration and its accompanying Statement. This article follows the first in his commentary on clause 8.
In Jesus’ dispute with the Pharisees over marriage and divorce, he said, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so” (Matt. 19:8). This rebuke gives us a unique insight into Jesus’ way of reading Scripture from first principles and claims to speak for the Creator himself. Similarly, he claimed that “the son of man is Lord of the Sabbath” (Mark 2:28). In these Synoptic passages, Jesus establishes his identity from the beginning (Heb. bereshit), as the apostolic authors further explicate (Col. 1:18; Heb. 1:10; John 1:1; 1 John 1:1; Rev. 1:17-18).
Sponsored
By linking the “unchangeable standard of Christian marriage” to the creation of humankind as male and female, clause 8 opens a doorway to consider a cluster of related issues concerning human nature that were not addressed prominently in the historic councils and formularies of the church and were not clearly foreseen in 2008.
In his recent book The Desecration of Man, Carl Trueman writes:
History shows that particular eras raise particular questions. The fourth century was preoccupied with the doctrine of God as Trinity. The fifth century wrestled with the question of Christ’s humanity and divinity. The sixteenth century witnessed turmoil with the sacraments and church authority. [SN – I would prefer “justification by faith alone.”] Today the struggle is over anthropology. The creedal aspect of church life must respond to this with a robust proclamation of what it means when the church declares that men and women are made in the image of God. That question, “What is man?” is the question for our time.
Carl Truman, The Desecration of Man, p. 193
In this brief essay, I expand on the meaning of clause 8 to address this question by looking briefly at several aspects of human nature in the image of God: body and soul, life and death, male and female, and ancient wisdom and artificial intelligence.
Body and Soul
Genesis speaks of God as Creator and of mankind uniquely formed in his image, male and female (Gen. 1:26-27). The second chapter overlaps by way of narrative: “And the LORD God formed man (adam) from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul (Gen. 2:7 – Heb. nephesh/ Grk. psyche). The classic understanding is that God created man as a whole person with a composite nature, “of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting,” as the Athanasian Creed states. Some make a further distinction between the animate soul and the human spirit’s capacity to know and love God (cf. 1 Thess. 5:23). Sometimes this capacity is referred to aggregately “with all your heart, soul, mind and strength” (Mark 12:30). Throughout the Psalms, however, the soul stands figuratively for the whole person before God.
Competing Accounts of Human Nature
As to body and soul, the main options are monism and dualism. Materialism, the predominant strain of monism and a child of modern science, treats the evolved body as the sole source of human identity. Transhumanism, a gnostic variant, holds that the fleshly body can be digitally transfigured and uploaded into the cloud to overcome death. The classic strain of dualism, whether ancient (Plato) or modern (Descartes), posits mind and body as independent entities within the human person.
The Bible is not philosophical in a strict sense, but its view, I think, is best captured in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas: the human person is one substance with two natures, corporeal and incorporeal, the soul being the form of the body. One corollary is that the immaterial (some say immortal) soul survives the death of the earthly body in an intermediate state. For believers, this means “sharing in the inheritance of the saints in light” while awaiting the restoration of the person, body and soul, on the Day of Resurrection (Col 1:12). The Burial Office gives this vision:
Almighty God, with whom do live the spirits of them that depart hence in the Lord, and with whom the souls of the faithful, after they are delivered from the burden of the flesh, are in joy and felicity…
Book of Common Prayer (2019)
For some contemporary theologians (e.g., N.T. Wright), the idea of “going to heaven” at death seems scandalous. Such a view, I think, lacks imagination and misses the vision of the church triumphant in heaven and the church militant on earth knit together in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of Christ.
Life and Death
Shortly after I returned home from GAFCON in 2008, a friend in the pro-life movement contacted me and asked why the Jerusalem Declaration addressed sexuality but had nothing to say about abortion. I did not have a good answer to this question. In my later book of Anglican Essays, I wrote:
In 2008 when our Statement group was considering these issues, we neglected to address one topic: life and death, which is equally rooted in Scripture and under attack in contemporary culture. I do not remember the topic coming up one way or the other. It should have. We just missed it.
Conception and Human Life
Clause 8 notes that procreation follows immediately from the creation of male and female in God’s image: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Gen 1:28). Contemporary embryology has confirmed the union of sperm and egg as the singular moment in which life in the womb begins. It is therefore reasonable to infer that God’s design for procreation of body and soul begins at conception.
The recent Anglican catechism (To Be a Christian) speaks clearly to life and death under the Sixth Commandment:
Why does God prohibit murder?
Because every human being is made in God’s image, all human life is sacred, from conception to natural death. Therefore, I may not take the life of others unjustly. (Genesis 9:6; Deuteronomy 9:4-13; Isaiah 46:3-4; Romans 12:19-21).
To Be A Christian, #309
The catechism then expands the biblical principle, along lines of the Sermon on the Mount, to include genocide, infanticide, abortion, suicide and euthanasia, as well as
sins of murderous intent, which include physical and emotional abuse, abandonment, willful negligence and wanton recklessness.
To Be A Christian, #310
Modern science has raised further bioethical questions about contraception, in vitro fertilization (IVF) and surrogacy, eugenic screening, assisted suicide, organ harvesting, and “genetic engineering.” Nearly twenty-five years ago, Leon Kass, chairman of President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics, warned darkly:
Human nature itself lies on the operating table, ready for alteration, for eugenic and neuropsychic enhancement, for wholesale redesign.
Man as Male and Female
Having noted that holy matrimony in the West is counter-cultural, let me turn to a more iconoclastic thesis: the worldview of the Bible is fundamentally patriarchal. Here is St. Paul praying a deeply Hebraic and Trinitarian prayer: “For this reason I bow my knees before the Father (pater), from whom every family (patera) in heaven and on earth is named…” (Eph. 3:14-15). Is this prayer not an outworking of Jesus’ own prayer: “Our Father in heaven… your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven”?
The same patriarchal worldview is, I think, found in Genesis. A few years ago, in an essay titled “Image-Bearers for God: Does Biblical Language for Man Matter?” I wrote:
“God created man in his own image.” God is uniformly indicated in both Testaments with masculine pronouns, as is the Spirit on occasion (John 4:24). Grammatical gender aside, the masculinity of God as revealed in Scripture is beyond dispute: the Son makes the Father known (John 1:18), and He is addressed by Jesus and the Holy Spirit as “Abba, Father” (Luke 14:36; Romans 8:15; Galatians 4:6). The Triune God, while not a male (Numbers 23:19), is masculine, and any attempt to imagine a gender-fluid deity is simply idolatrous.
Adam and the Fatherhood of God
The anthropological language of Genesis 2 is consistent with that of the first chapter: “Then the Lord God formed the man (ha-’adam) of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature” (Gen. 2:7). Here the man is both an individual male Adam (Gen. 5:1) and a generic type.
The particular “office” of the male in creation, Paul teaches, is to represent the Fatherhood of God:
I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God [the Father]… For a man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man.
1 Cor 11:3, 7
Woman’s Glory and Cultural Forms
What does this leave for the woman? Much in every way! She shares fully in the image of God, in Christ’s salvation, and in the work of the kingdom. She is the mother of all living, the mother of the Messiah, and the figure of Wisdom and the servant church. Her glory begins in her household, and her hospitality extends to the wider community, including the “poor and needy and sojourners” (cf. Heb 13:2). Her strength appears in patient endurance, what Leah Libresco Sargeant has called “the dignity of dependence,” sometimes as a widow or single woman and sometimes in the face of male obtuseness and brutality. (In a recent book, Lead Like Jael, Emma Waters presents a biblical mosaic of women of faith who are neither “girl-boss” nor “tradwife.”)
Each culture will indigenize the divine pattern in different ways. In the wealthy democratic West, women have more scope in their work and ministries, but are we sure our decadent culture deserves promotion as normative, and that many traditional societies are not just as happy as ours?
Ancient Wisdom and Artificial Intelligence
In his recent encyclical Magnifica Humanitas: Humanity in its Grandeur, Leo XIV invokes “the Spirit of wisdom who has dwelt in the world since its beginning (cf. Prov. 8:22-31)” (§3). He later contrasts the hubris of Babel’s Tower builders with the practical wisdom of Nehemiah’s repairers of Jerusalem’s walls (Gen. 11:1-11; Neh §§7-9). The Babel project (“come let us build”) is an idolatrous simulacrum of Eden and a repetition of the temptation to become like God, knowing good and evil (Gen. 3:5).
Questioning AI
This brings us to artificial intelligence (AI). Is AI merely an extension of practical wisdom, or does it have higher aspirations? I asked Gemini, Google’s AI, some questions:
Who are you?
I am Gemini, a large language model built by Google.
Who am I?
You’re the person chatting with me… Feel free to tell me what you’d like me to know!
Do you have a soul?
No, I don’t have a soul, feelings, or self-awareness. I am an artificial intelligence – a complex system of software and algorithms designed to process information, generate text, and help answer questions, but I don’t possess consciousness or personal experiences.
On second thought, however, how can a soulless algorithm “chat” with anyone? Where is the “I” in Gemini? There is something demonic, something of the Siren songs, in this reply. Evidence is mounting that digital media is corrupting the souls of a generation of youth, as Jonathan Haidt reports in The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.
A Pawn of Higher Powers
C.S. Lewis foresaw AI long before it was anything but a three-toed sloth. In That Hideous Strength, the fictional companion to The Abolition of Man, Lewis tells of the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments, which grafts a criminal’s decapitated head onto a Turing machine, the forerunner of today’s AI. Though N.I.C.E. claims to promote science for mankind’s good, it is the pawn of higher powers that bring the experiment to a gory end.
Artificial intelligence, I contend, may prove a useful slave like Caliban, but its inventors and promoters, I fear, may suffer a Babel-like delusion of grandeur, and its end may be man’s desecration before a false idol (1 Sam 5:1-7). Far better is Athens’ ancient wisdom and Jerusalem’s fear of the Lord, consummated in Christ “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col 2:3).
A Word Begins to Live
To conclude, am I abandoning the literal sense in treating Clause 8 expansively? As with Scripture itself, I would appeal my case with the words of the American poet Emily Dickinson:
A word is dead
Emily Dickenson, “A Word is Dead”
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.
Nor is my case the final word. As I argued in the essay on clause 7, a Gafcon Theological Commission should probe the fuller meaning of the Jerusalem Declaration.
Sources
- John W. Cooper, Body, Soul and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate (Eerdmans, 2000).
- Edward Feser, Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature (Eurospan, 2024)
- Jonathan Heidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Penguin, 1994).
- Leon R. Kass, Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge of Bioethics (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000), page 3.
- Leah Libresco Sargeant, The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto (University of Notre Dame Press, 2025).
- Carl Trueman, The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity (Sentinel, 2026).
- Emma Waters, Lead Like Jael: 7 Timeless Principles for Today’s Women of Faith (Regnery, 2026).
Image: Photo by Aflo Images from Aflo, courtesy of Canva. Digitally edited by Jacob Davis.
Published on
We Believe: We Look for the Resurrection of the Dead
Every Sunday, Christians rise to confess the faith once delivered: “We believe in one God… We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ… We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.” The Nicene Creed moves with a steady rhythm of affirmations, statements about what God has done in history, and what he has promised to…
Why Do Anglicans Pray for the Dead?
For those new to the Anglican tradition, it may surprise you that the Book of Common Prayer, in all of its major editions, offers prayers for those who have died in the Christian faith. We don’t just pray for those who mourn but for the departed themselves. We see these prayers for the dead in…
