Blut und Boden, Blood and Soil

The Nazi's had a saying, blut und boden, which means "blood and soil." This idiom represents the theory that the person you are is solely the result of your genetic heredity (blood) and your environment (soil).

Though Nazi Germany has fallen, and violently so, this belief is still on the intellectual scene. For instance, the infamous evolutionary biologist and best-selling author representing the "New Atheism," Richard Dawkins, has said that we are just dancing to our DNA (a reference to the 'blood' in 'blood and soil'). This idea that a man is nothing more than the chance product of his DNA and his environmental, social, and familial influence is a necessary facet of naturalistic Darwinian and Neo-Darwinian evolution.

Think about it...

If there is no God, no purposeful Creator, and the universe is simply a vast collection of intrinsically valueless and purposeless matter and energy hurtling through time and space with no particular direction or goal, then how can we be anything more than the outcome of blut und boden?



But...

If there is a God, and if we were created purposefully, and if there are external and internal forces other than genetics and environment shaping who we are, then we're so much more than the sum of our genes and our experiences; we are dancing to more than the music of our DNA. We are dancing to the music of the Singer who created the universe with a sentence... "let there be."

Now, in an ironic twist, whether or not the principle represented by blut und boden has any merit, the phrase is true in a theological sense. It goes like this:

In forming Adam from the earth, God stooped low and "got His hands dirty," so to speak, and created man in His own image. So man is the product of soil, if nothing else.

Then man, in seeking to serve himself and fulfill his own selfish desires, created god in his own image, thus "stooping low" and "getting his hands dirty" in a different sense...

So, in seeking to re-create man in His own image God stooped low again, this time getting His hands bloody, and that at the hands of man whom He sought to save. So, man again stooped low and this time getting his hands bloody as he murdered the very God who gave him life and who was at that very moment dying in order to give him eternal life.

Every man is the product of blut und boden.

We know that we were formed from the soil, but in light of the above, how are we the product of blood?

Either you are guilty of the blood of Christ, or you are declared innocent, not guilty, through the blood of Christ. Either way your state in relation to the blood governs your decisions, thus forming who you are.

Guilty of the blood or innocent through the blood; which are you?