In the Likeness of God : The Dr. Paul Brand Tribute Edition of Fearfully and Wonderfully Made and in His Image

by Philip Yancey and Dr. Paul Brand

• ISBN13: 9780310257424
• ISBN10: 0310257425
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-08-01
• Publisher: Zondervan

Summary

What does it mean, in practical terms, for us to be the body of Christ? Award-winning writer Philip Yancey gained dramatic insights through his friendship with Dr. Paul Brand. The renowned surgeon not only possessed a profound grasp of the spiritual metaphors contained in the human body -- the truths knit into its tissues and coursing through its capillaries -- but he lived them. Published in tribute to Dr. Brand, In the Likeness of God probes the realities he understood so intimately and modeled so well. This inspiring volume includes eight litanies by Paul Brand in praise of the body, eight pages of black-and-white photos, and a new preface by Philip Yancey. Most importantly, it brings together the complete, updated texts of Brand and Yancey's two Gold Medallion bestsellers. Fearfully and Wonderfully Made takes you on a remarkable journey through inner space -- a spellbinding world of cells, systems, and chemistry that bears the impress of a still deeper, unseen reality. In His Image explores five topics -- Image, Blood, Head, Spirit, and Pain -- to unlock the astonishing, living lessons encoded in our physical makeup. Each book is a unique message, complete in itself. Yet each is also an extension of the other. Together, these two uplifting books will open your eyes to the miracle of the human body, and how accurately and intricately it portrays the body of Christ. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Philip Yancey serves as editor-at-large for Christianity Today magazine. He has written twelve Gold Medallion Award-winning books, including Where Is God When It Hurts? Disappointment with God, The Bible Jesus Read, and The Gift of Pain. His books The Jesus I Never Knew and What's So Amazing About Grace? were also recognized as the Christian Book of the Year. His most recent bestseller is Rumors of Another World Dr. Paul Brand was a world-renowned and beloved hand surgeon and leprosy specialist until his death in 2003

Table of Contents

Preface	11	(20)
FEARFULLY AND WONDERFULLY MADE
CELLS
1. Members	31	(6)
2. Specialization	37	(7)
3. Diversity	44	(8)
4. Worth	52	(8)
5. Unity	60	(6)
6. Service	66	(9)
7. Mutiny	75	(10)
BONES
8. A Frame	85	(7)
9. Hardness	92	(6)
10. Freedom	98	(9)
11. Growth	107	(7)
12. Adapting	114	(7)
13. Inside-Out	121	(12)
SKIN
14. Visibility	133	(7)
15. Perceiving	140	(7)
16. Compliancy	147	(6)
17. Transmitting	153	(8)
18. Loving	161	(8)
19. Confronting	169	(10)
MOTION
20. Movement	179	(6)
21. Balance	185	(8)
22. Dysfunctions	193	(9)
23. Hierarchy	202	(10)
24. Guidance	212	(9)
25. A Presence	221	(110)
Notes to Fearfully and Wonderfully Made	229
IN HIS IMAGE
IMAGE
1. Likeness	235	(8)
2. Mirrors	243	(11)
3. Restoration	254	(23)
BLOOD
4. Power	277	(5)
5. Life	282	(12)
6. Cleansing	294	(10)
7. Overcoming	304	(16)
8. Transfusion	320	(11)
HEAD
9. Pathways	331	(14)
10. The Source	345	(11)
11. Confinement	356	(11)
12. The Way Out	367	(13)
13. The Way In	380	(17)
SPIRIT
14. Breath	397	(14)
15. Belonging	411	(10)
16. Go-Between	421	(13)
17. Listening	434	(13)
18. The Prompter	447	(14)
PAIN
19. Protection	461	(11)
20. Linking	472	(14)
21. Adaptations	486	(16)
22. Chronic Pain	502	(12)
23. Pain of God	514	(19)
Dr. Brand's "A Litany of Thanksgiving"	533	(16)
Paul Wilson Brand Timeline	549	(4)
Acknowledgments	553

Excerpts

In the Likeness of God Copyright © 2004 by Philip Yancey
Fearfully and Wonderfully Made Copyright © 1980 by Paul Brand and Philip Yancey
In His Image Copyright © 1984 by Paul Brand and Philip Yancey
Requests for information should be addressed to:
Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Yancey, Philip. In the likeness of God : the Dr. Paul Brand tribute edition of Fearully and wonderfully made and In His image / Philip Yancey and Paul Brand. p. cm. Previous editions entered under Brand, Paul W. Rev. ed. of the authors Fearfully and wonderfully made. © 1980, and In His image. © 1984. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-310-25742-5 1. Church. 2. Body, Human—Religious aspects—Christianity. I. Brand, Paul W. II. Brand, Paul W. Fearfully and wonderfully made. III. Brand, Paul W. In His image. IV. Title. BV600.5.Y36 2004 233'.5—dc22 2004005670
This edition printed on acid-free paper.
Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible: New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved. The King James Version. The New American Standard Bible, © Copyright 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977 by the Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.
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MEMBERS
I have been trying to think of the earth as a kind of organism, but it is no go. I cannot think of it this way. . . . The other night, driving through a hilly, wooded part of southern New England, I wondered about this. If not like an organism, what is it like, what is it most like? Then, satisfactorily for that moment, it came to me: it is most like a single cell. Lewis Thomas
I remember the first time I saw a living cell under a microscope. I was twenty-one years old and taking a short course in tropical hygiene at Livingstone College in England. We had been studying parasites, but our specimens were dead; I wanted to see a living amoeba. Early one morning, before the laboratory was cluttered with students, I sneaked into the old science building. The imposing red brick structure stood next to a pond from which I had just scooped some water in a teacup. Bits of decomposing leaves floated in the turbid water, smelling of decay and death.
But when I touched one drop of that water to a microscope slide, a universe sprang to life. Hundreds of organisms crowded into view: delicate, single-celled globes of crystal, breathing, unfurling, flitting sideways, excited by the warmth of my microscope light. I edged the slide a bit, glancing past the faster organisms. Ah, there it was. An amoeba. A mere chip of translucent blue, it was barely visible to my naked eye, but the microscope revealed even its inner workings.
Something about the amoeba murmurs that it is one of the most basic and primordial of all creatures. Somehow it has enlisted the everyday forces of millions of spinning atoms so that they now serve life, which differs profoundly from mere matter. Just an oozing bit of gel, the amoeba performs all the basic functions that my body does. It breathes, digests, excretes, reproduces. In its own peculiar way it even moves, plumping a hummock of itself forward and following with a motion as effortless as a drop of oil spreading on a table. After one or two hours of such activity, the grainy, watery blob will have traveled a third of an inch.
That busy, throbbing drop gave me my first graphic image of the jungle of life and death we share. I saw the amoeba as an autonomous unit with a fierce urge to live and a stronger urge to propagate itself. It beckoned me on to explore the living cell.
Years later I am still observing cells, but as a physician I focus on how they cooperate within the body.
Now I have my own laboratory, at a leprosy hospital on swampy ground by the Mississippi River in Carville, Louisiana. Again I enter the lab early before anyone is stirring, this time on a chilly winter morning. Only the soft buzz of fluorescent lights overhead breaks the quietness.
But I have not come to study amoebae. This morning I will examine a hibernating albino bat who sleeps in a box in my refrigerator. I rely on him to study how the body responds to injury and infection. I lift him carefully, lay him on his back, and spread his wings in a cruciform posture. His face is weirdly human, like the shrunken heads in museums. I keep expecting him to open an eye and shriek at me, but he doesn’t. He sleeps.
As I place his wing under the microscope lens, again a new universe unfolds. I have found a keyhole. The albinic skin under his wing is so pale that I can see directly through his skin cells into the pulsing capillaries which carry his blood. I focus the microscope on one bluish capillary until I can see individual blood cells pushing, blocking, thrusting through it. Red blood cells are by far the most numerous: smooth, shiny discs with centers indented like jelly doughnuts. Uniform size and shape make them seem machinestamped and impersonal.
More interesting are the white blood cells, the armed forces of the body which guard against invaders. They look exactly like the amoebae: amorphous blobs of turgid liquid with darkened nuclei, they roam through the bat’s body by extending a finger-like projection and humping along to follow it. Sometimes they creep along the walls of the veins; sometimes they let go and free-float in the bloodstream. To navigate the smaller capillaries, bulky white cells must elongate their shapes, while impatient red blood cells jostle in line behind them.
Watching the white cells, one can’t help thinking them sluggish and ineffective at patrolling territory, much less repelling an attack. Until the attack occurs, that is. I take a steel needle and, without waking the bat, prick through its wing, puncturing a fine capillary. An alarm seems to sound. Muscle cells contract around the damaged capillary wall, damming up the loss of precious blood. Clotting agents halt the flow at the skin’s surface. Before long, scavenger cells appear to clean up debris, and fibroblasts, the body’s reweaving cells, gather around the injury site. But the most dramatic change involves the listless white cells. As if they have a sense of smell (we still don’t know how they “sense” danger), nearby white cells abruptly halt their aimless wandering. Like beagles on the scent of a rabbit, they home in from all directions to the point of attack. Using their unique shape-changing qualities, they ooze between overlapping cells of capillary walls and hurry through tissue via the most direct route. When they arrive, the battle begins.
Lennart Nilsson, the Swedish photographer famous for his remarkable closeups of activity inside the body, has captured the battle on film as seen through an electron microscope. In the distance, a shapeless white cell, resembling science fiction’s creature “The Blob,” lumbers toward a cluster of luminous green bacterial spheres. Like a blanket pulled over a corpse, the cell assumes their shape; for awhile they still glow eerily inside the white cell.

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Excerpted from In the Likeness of God: The Dr. Paul Brand Tribute Edition of Fearfully and Wonderfully Made and in His Image by Paul Brand, Philip Yancey, Yancey
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