Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 07:2 (Fall 2025)
Article: What Is Man?
Author: Jonathan E. Swan

Eikon 7.2 (Fall 2025) p. 4

What Is Man?

Jonathan E. Swan

Jonathan E. Swan is Executive Editor of Eikon

What Is Man?

What is man? There is little doubt that this is the primary question of our age. And it is one that the Bible not only asks (Psalm 8), but provides a definitive answer. Yet, modern man has largely rejected its wisdom, and we encounter the destructive consequences daily.

Downstream from the denial of God’s definition of man lie the grim realities not merely tolerated, but promoted in our culture. We see such realities in the wanton disregard for life in abortion, euthanasia, and the destruction of human embryos used for IVF and scientific study — the latter of which comes with the promise of societal “advancement.” We see it in our culture’s re-conception of sex, from a good to be enjoyed within marriage for both intimacy and to beget a family, to a mere expression of one’s individual desires.

From this transformation came the radical redefinition of marriage, moving from a procreative union to one of self-fulfillment. No longer is marriage — a covenantal commitment between husband and wife — considered the irreplaceable, foundational institution from which families are formed and strong communities built. Thanks to our technological evolution, we no longer need such a passé view of marriage, not with IVF and surrogacy on hand to make and purchase babies-on-demand.

In all of this, the ironic, dual degradation

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and commodification of children, as objects of either inconvenience or luxury, stands out in the contrast between both abortion and surrogacy.

Along the way we slowly, then suddenly, began to redefine ourselves entirely. Through progressive waves of feminism, we made man and woman socially interchangeable; through the sexual revolution, we made man and women sexually interchangeable; through cultural revolution, the sexual revolutionaries completed their capstone project by mainstreaming the “T” in LGBT. Transgenderism has now made man and women ontologically interchangeable.

For this reason, transgenderism has stood out as the definitive icon of our culture’s confusion over what it means to be human. This confusion evinces itself in the dissolution of definitions for man and woman. We literally can no longer define what a woman is. And since we can no longer define what a woman is, we go a step further and dismantle related designations, such as “mother,” and replace them with more “inclusive” (i.e., politically correct) terms, such as the intentionally gender-ambiguous, “birthing person.” All of this pro...