Erwin McManus: Genius and the Image of God
Erwin McManus also believes that human genius reveals the nature of God to us and highlights how sin has damaged our relationship with him. “Now let me give you a theological basis for that,” said McManus, pointing to the fact that before the Fall, God gave Adam the task of naming all the animals. This was something Adam did by himself because Eve had not yet been created.
“Adam doesn’t have a computer,” said McManus. “He doesn’t have a notepad. He doesn’t have anything. And he has to name every animal in the earth. And so I’m thinking the mental capacity to be able to remember the names of every animal he saw would be extraordinary. And then not only that, but the creative capacity to keep thinking of names is extraordinary.” Relatively few people now have such capacities now.
McManus referred to a study that suggests genius is a quality we are born with, but which disappears in most of us by the time we become adults. A study commissioned by NASA in 1992 found that 98 percent of 1,600 children between the ages of four and five tested at levels that qualified them as creative geniuses.
By grade school, that number dropped to 30 percent, by high school it dropped to 12 percent, and by the time those children had reached adulthood, the number was at two percent. “What you find,” said McManus, “is that there’s inherent genius in humans and that genius is lost.”
He continued, “And so when I look at the small window of human capacity before the Fall, what I have to wonder is maybe our view of human history is wrong. We tend to think of humans evolving and getting better. Maybe we actually digressed in the Fall, and what we’ve been going through is the reclamation of what was lost.”
This is a reclamation that Jesus accomplishes for us as we follow him and which McManus has observed in his own life. He said, “Coming to know Jesus has made me smarter, has unlocked my mind, has opened my imagination, has changed the basic construct of who I would have been as a human being.”
Watch the full interview with Erwin McManus below:
