When we talk about “worldview” issues, we’re really talking about answering the “big questions” that every human being asks at some point: what do we believe about God, ultimate reality (or “metaphysics”), knowledge, ethics, and human nature.

Douglas Groothuis has posted an essay that deals with the big question of human nature (emphasis mine):

In the 17th century, a young scientific and philosophical genius named Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) marveled at our enigmas and inscrutability:

What sort of freak then is man! How novel, how monstrous, how chaotic, how paradoxical, how prodigious! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, repository of truth, sink of doubt and error, the glory and refuse of the universe!

Yet this was no mere marveling. Any worldview worth its rational salt needs to offer a sufficient explanation for both human greatness and debauchery. Pascal goes on: “Man’s greatness and wretchedness are so evident that the true religion must necessarily teach us that there is in man some great principle of greatness and some great principle of wretchedness.”

Pascal believed the answers were found in the Bible. We find greatness in humanity because we are made in the divine image (Genesis 1:27). However, that image has been defaced (but not erased) through the fall (Genesis 3; Romans 3). There is something wrong with every aspect of our being, but we remain noble in our origin. There are, to invoke Cockburn again, “rumors of glory” found in humanity.

The essay concludes with the necessity of receiving the answer from God rather than just figuring it out on our own, because God’s answer includes a Savior:

The Christian worldview conserves both our greatness and our wretchedness in a profound revelation, something not available to unaided human reason, as Pascal points out:

Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself. Be humble, impotent reason! Be silent, feeble nature! Learn that man infinitely transcends man, hear from your master your true condition, which is unknown to you. Listen to God.

The biblical account of our creation and fall best fits the facts of human reality. However, we must “listen to God” — that is, attend to what God has spoken in the Bible — to discover this liberating truth.

Pascal further counsels us that the biblical account reveals that there is a Redeemer for royal ruins — Himself, a King, who became a man in order to rescue those who are “east of Eden” and standing at the brink of eternity. Pascal says that in Him we find hope for our deposed condition: “Jesus is a God whom we can approach without pride and before whom we can humble ourselves without despair.”

Though we are royal ruins, we can find total forgiveness, redemption and eternal life through the one who truly understands our condition.

I encourage you to read the whole thing.