Man: The Image of God

Publisher Review:

This is the eighth volume to appear in the American edition of Professor Berkouwer’s Studies in Dogmatics. Like its predecessors, it stands independently of the series as well as being a part of a larger theological whole. Like the other books, too, this study in theological anthropology, or the Biblical doctrine of man, is a fine example of Reformed theology being defended and developed through interaction with a wide range of both past and present theologies and theologians, and through a fresh look at the Biblical message.

The subject of the book-the nature of man-“is today, more than at any time,” writes Dr. Berkouwer, “at the center of theological and philosophical concern. The number of studies that have taken this problem as their theme is almost innumerable.” But “this almost irresistible problem appears to many a mind not to have found a clear and obviously irrefutable answer…Indeed, there is scarcely another theme dealt with by human consciousness which has aroused so much controversy as this theme-the nature of man.”

The importance of Dr. Berkouwer’s subject can hardly be overestimated. For he is not concerned with some idea of man or some partial view of man; rather, like the Scriptures, he speaks of “living, actual man, in all his love and hate, his potentialities and limitations-in man who in our century has revealed himself in so many ways as a danger to his fellow man.” He is concerned to see man as he stands in the light of divine revelation, inescapably related to God in the totality of his existence.