The Bible, Wisdom and Human Nature
concludes on this issue: ‘Both God and man have the capacity to long deeply.’99 Crabb’s language indicates that, for him, communicable capacities define ‘image of God’ and that these attributes are regarded as analogous not identical. An individual’s volitional response to their constitutional longings is at the centre of Hughes’ and Crabb’s models. This helpfully guards against a deterministic approach to human functioning, and in so doing promotes particularity and an emphasis on moral responsibility as to how we each try and meet our deep needs.
Human motivation – a biblical theology? Hughes’ and Crabb’s understanding of human longings emerge from two biblical concepts: ‘innermost being’ and ‘our soul’s deepest thirst’, both of which are found, among other places in Scripture, in John 7:37–38. Given the importance of these concepts to both models, the passage will be quoted in full:
On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, ‘Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.’ There is some dispute on linguistic grounds as to precisely what Jesus is saying about the water symbolism. In the New American Standard Bible translation, from which Crabb quotes, the term ‘innermost being’ is used instead of ‘within’ (NIV). The King James rendering is more literal: ‘belly’. The Greek word is koilia whose basic and general meaning is a cavity or hollow. In the New Testament, koilia is used to refer literally to the stomach (Matt. 12:40; Rev. 10:9–10); the womb (Luke 1:41–2; 2:21; 11:21; Acts 3:2); and uniquely according to Verbrugge, to the inner person ( John 7:38). Adams gives great anthropological weight to the ‘inner person’, which he believes is best summed up biblically by the word ‘heart’. He understands its major thrust throughout Scripture as denoting: ‘the entire inner life... the most far-reaching and most dynamic concept of the non-material (or spiritual side of) man’.100 Crabb concurs with Verbrugge in saying that koilia 74
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