4.1 What is a human being?

Last night I had a final meeting with another group of philosophy students. We were filling in some gaps. We principally talked about what a human being is. Here are my own musings, going beyond the class to what I think.
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1. What is a human being? There are a couple obvious answers, I think, as a Christian.

First, I involve a body. Whatever else I am, I have a material component. Some of course would say that a body is all we are.

We are, at the very least, highly complex animals. I hear that my DNA is about 98% the same as the DNA of a chimpanzee (yours too -- it's not just me). It's alarmingly 60% the same as a chicken's -- again, not just me. Yours too.

The behaviorist B. F. Skinner (1904-1990) famously pointed out that humans can be manipulated using the same techniques as you can use to train a dog. [1] "Chocolate?" Sheldon asks Penny on Big Bang Theory as he "conditions" her not to talk when he gives her sweets. 

Nevertheless, Skinner assumed that we were only animals. I don't think a Christian should have a problem with a sense that we are animals. [2] It seems undeniable from any objective point of view. The question is whether that is only what we are. 

Are we just roadkill waiting to happen? Christianity says a resounding "NO!"

2. There is a second answer that Christians give to this question, and it is more important, I think. Maybe it is more important because it has deep implications for how we treat other people. It is a distinguishing belief -- or at least should be.

That is the belief that humans are created in the image of God (Gen. 1:26-27). I have found that it is very easy to say this. It is much harder to parse its implications. I don't think it should be hard. It just is because a large number of people -- including people who call themselves Christians -- don't want to follow its implications out in society and the world.

There is an "egalitarianism" of sorts that follows from this belief because there are no gradations in the image of God. Egalitarianism in this context means that you and I are equally valuable qua human beings. [3] You are not "more" of the image of God than I am, and I am not "more" of the image of God than you are. It is a statement of "ontology" or "being." That is, it is a statement of who we are.

The Declaration of Independence put it in a secular way: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [and women] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights." We'll talk about rights (vs. graces or privileges) at another time. The point is that, no matter what an individual human being's instrumental value might be -- our usefulness. All human beings as human beings have intrinsic value.

3. It's worth expanding a little on this point. If you have to choose between saving my life and saving the life of a president, you should save the president. He or she plays an immensely important role in the world. Me? I'm a blogger. The instrumental or useful value of a president is immensely greater than my instrumental value.

When we say that a human being is intrinsically valuable, we are saying that human beings have worth whether they do anything or not. We will get into the details of when human existence begins in a person life and when if ever it ends. But assuming a body is a human being -- a "person," as it were -- that individual has intrinsic value and worth.

This was the great offense to humanity that was Joseph Mengele, who experimented on those who were in the concentration camps of the Nazi regime. He did not consider Jews to be human beings. For that reason, he did not consider it immoral to cause them great pain by experimenting on them. Ironically, his experiments intrinsically assumed that they were of the same species as he was -- he was experimenting on them to learn about the human body, I presume.

4. When we get to the fifth section of this journey, we will pick up this train of thought as we launch a discussion of ethics. Although ethics is bigger than human to human interaction, it is understable that we focus mostly on how we should treat other human beings when we think of ethics. 

From a biblical and Christian standpoint, we have a responsibility to give all human beings a certain dignity as bearers of the image of God. The image of God is not conditional. It is a fundamental aspect of human identity. This is why, from a Christian perspective, even a serial killer should be treated with some fundamental dignity -- indeed, the nature of their crime is that they did not treat their victims in that way. To treat them as they treated others is to come down to their level. [4]

We should emphasize again that, as a fundamental value, human dignity is not dependent on what a person does. In the current debates over immigration, human dignity is not dependent on whether a person is "legal" or "illegal." This is true even from a secular, Constitutional perspective -- the Constitution ascribes certain core rights to people regardless of what they have done. And it is even moreso the case from a Christian perspective.

Disregard for the "rights" (or privileges, if you would prefer) of a human being is thus anti-Christian and anti-American.

5. Human value is thus part of our "ontology" -- it is part of who every human being. Even the dead should be treated with respect. 

I suppose that there is a sense in which human value is derivative. To speak of the "image" of God suggests that we mirror God. We reflect God. If God did not exist, our value would cease to exist.

However, God's not going anywhere. In fact, God is a necessary Being. All existence is contingent on God's existence. In that sense, the value of all creation is derivative from God.

For this reason, while our value (and existence) is derivative from God, it is "inalienable." We can go ahead and say that it is intrinsic to our ontology. It is part of who we are and cannot be removed or detatched from us.

6. Throughout the centuries, there have been varied perspectives on what the image of God might be. I find almost all the suggestions to capture a truth about who we are as humans.

In Genesis, it is a political image. God rules over the creation; humanity "rules" over the creation. The image of God in Genesis has to do thus with our position or status in relation to the world.

However, theologians have also spoken of the "natural" and "moral" image of God. [5] To use these terms in my own way, we can reason at least analogously to God reasoning. And we can make moral decisions analogously to God making moral judgments.

There is some level of reasoning in a chicken or chimpanzee, but it does not come close to the capacity of an average human being. So Christians believe that God is supreme intelligence. Our ability to think comes nowhere close to God's, but there is a meaningful resemblance all the same.

I would suggest that humans are the only species that makes moral judgments. Perhaps I would almost make this claim by definition, although I hope there is an empirical basis for the claim as well. 

To put it another way, killer whales and vicious dogs don't sin even though they can seem quite "mean" from an anthropomorphic perspective. But we are simply ascribing human characteristics to them. [6]

That is to say, we might suggest that humans have a moral image of God that an orangutan does not.

7. I suppose from a non-theist perspective, some of these latter claims might seem disputable. Is human rationality and moral thinking simply a more developed version of the capacities of less complex animals? Perhaps such debates are not outside the bounds of Christian debate as well.

The core point is what seems essential, namely, that all human beings should be given a fundamental dignity and value qua human beings. From a secular standpoint, such value can be seen as part of a social contract -- I agree to assign value to other human beings under the agreement that they will assign such value to me.

Hopefully, we will be able to convince AGI to respect us under some similar agreement. But that's a topic for another time.

[1] B. F. Skinner, The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis (Cambridge, 1938).

[2] Although I seem to remember my mother resisting this idea in some random conversation we had.

[3] I thought I'd work in the Latin qua for fun here. It means "as." We are equally valuable as human beings. What's philosophy without a little Latin here and there?

[4] Many in the modern world -- Christians and non-Christians alike -- take this principle to imply that the death penalty should not be a punishment. The question becomes whether it can be administered humanely, in my opinion, and under what circumstances.

[5] John Wesley's classic treatment of the image of God can be found in his sermon on "The New Birth." Of course, Wesley was largely premodern and didn't interpret biblical texts in context. That doesn't mean, however, that his theology was necessarily wrong at those points. The truth of an inference is not dependent on the strength of one's exegesis (a.k.a. the genetic fallacy).

[6] We have brainstormed the thought experiment in a Science and Scripture class I have taught whether it would make sense to hypothesize that homo sapiens before Adam and Eve did not sin because they were not yet fully "human" in a moral sense. What do you think?

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1.1 What is philosophy?
1.2 Is philosophy Christian?
1.3 Unexamined assumptions
1.4 Socrates and the Unexamined Life

2.1 The Structure of Thinking
2.2 Three Tests for Truth
2.3 Plato and Aristotle

3.1 Faith and Reason
3.2 Arguments for God's Existence
3.3 Suffering and Evil
3.4 Augustine and Aquinas

4.2 Beginnings and Endings
4.3 Free or Fated?
4.4 The Soul
4.5 Existentialism

5.1 Human Value (graces)

What is a Christian? 1

What is a Human Being?
We human beings have multiple dimensions. I am not certain how these categories all play out inside me. I am not sure whether they are in the world itself or whether they are just helpful for us to process the world. But they are useful categories. They help us discuss matters that are true about us in the world.

1. There is our thinking, reasoning capacity. This is the part of us that has to do with ideas. We draw conclusions from premises. We make hypotheses about the world by gathering data. We reflect using certain rules like 1) if a is completely true and 2) b is fully entailed within a, then 3) b is also completely true. No one has ever shown an instance where such rules of logic are not true.

2. We have emotions and feelings. These are typically reactions to the world mediated by our personalities and brain chemistry. We are angered by something or saddened by something. We are motivated to "fight for freedom" or demotivated from doing anything. They can also churn within us without clear external cause. We can have moods and chemical imbalances.

Our emotions often connect our perception of the world to action. Emotions are neither about truth nor morality, but they can move us toward or away from them. Temptations often come in the form of emotions, but it is our choices that most fully reveal who we are.

3. We make choices. We have volition or "will." Sin properly so called is a matter of our choices. We cannot fully control what goes through our head. Indeed, there are situations of addiction where we cannot control our choices. However, under normal circumstances, it is our choices that most indicate who we are, who we choose to be.

Many aspects of who we are fall outside our control, at least initially in life. We cannot control who our parents are. We cannot control whether we are born with a male or female body. We cannot control the socio-economic status with which we come into life. From a Christian standpoint, these are relatively trivial characteristics.

It is our choices that reveal who we truly are. We start out in life a slave to fallen impulses. We do not have control over what we choose. The draw of temptation is with us our whole life. But a Christian has a power source beyond the world that we see. The Holy Spirit can empower our volition to be able to choose the good.

For heuristic purposes, let us call these three aspects of a person the main constituents of the mind--reason, emotion, and volition. Let us call the general tendencies of our mind--our ways of thinking, feeling, and acting--our personalities.

4. We also have bodies. Our brains are part of our bodies and thus there is clearly a physical component to our reason, emotions, and will, to our minds. We experience our minds as more than our bodies, whatever the underlying reality might be. As Christians we often speak also of a spiritual dimension of a human being. This is human identity as it relates to God and matters of virtue.

To distinguish spirit here is to say nothing of the metaphysics. These categories are heuristic. They allow us to talk about the world without committing to a particular configuration of the world in itself, das Ding an sich in Kantian terms. [1]

We will resist calling the spiritual realm, "supernatural." To call that realm "supernatural" may be to smuggle in a distinction from Descartes and the seventeenth century. [2] We are not committing to any ontology here, to any actual configuration of existence. We are not committing to dualism and certainly not to any Gnosticism. It is simply the case that we can talk about spiritual things as a category that reflects an aspect of humanity.

5. One might think of the human mind as an intersection between our brains and our "spirit," from one perspective what we might call our souls. From another perspective, we might call our "living souls" the essence of us that continues into eternity in whatever form our glorified bodies might take (cf. 1 Corinthians 15). [3] The part of our mind that relates most directly to the spiritual is our volition. The choices we make reflect most directly our connection to God.

The pattern of our choices over time is our character. Some of us are as consistent inside and out as an arrow flies. Some of us have a churning of conflicting impulses within us but still shoot like an arrow in the choices we make. In one sense, the latter person shows greater strength of character, greater virtue, because their choices are made with greater intentionality.

While there is an external virtue to the person who does the right thing every time without turmoil or conflict, there is perhaps a greater virtue for the person who does the right thing every time despite conflicting impulses. Morality is most meaningful as a function of intentionality.

In the end we are not simple beings. Despite Descartes' belief that my "I," my "soul," was a unitary, simple entity, I am a swirling mixture of factors. I do not always know who I will be in a particular moment until that moment comes and a choice is made. I am not one desire. I am many conflicting desires.

5. Thus far we have focused on who we are as individuals. Thus far we have potentially followed a course of Western individualism and Cartesian subjectivism. By contrast, part of human identity is social and relational. Further, more important than me looking out at the world is God looking in at it.

Being a Christian certainly relates to my internal world. But who I am is not primarily a matter of my choices toward myself. Scripture formulates who I am more in terms of my choices in relation to God and others, my external world. The fundamental Christian ethic is to love God and love neighbor.

So as an individual I may be body, mind, and spirit. However, God is focused especially on how I interact with "him" and others. [4] Indeed, our spiritual dimension is more a matter of our relationship with God and others--movement beyond ourselves--than an internal matter, although we may experience the spiritual as an internal matter.

6. Our identity is thus bigger than being the mere "thinking things" that Descartes thought we were in the early 1600s. We are creatures who live in community, in culture. We are communities of practice. We have cultural rituals that also define us. We share common symbols that embody our collective identity (e.g., a Bible, a flag, a Steeler's sweatshirt). We have community stories that tell us who we are. [5]

The biblical cultures were "collectivist" cultures where identity was much more a matter of the groups to which one belonged than a matter of how an individual might have defined him or herself. Bruce Malina has helpfully summarized human identity in such cultures as a matter of gender, genealogy, and geography. [6] However, we should neither endorse group or individualist culture as the proper one. Both have strengths and weaknesses.

Who we are is both a matter of the subjective (internal, tending toward the individualistic) and the objective (external).

7. God's perspective is of course the truly "objective" perspective. God sees das Ding an sich. God knows all the facts of the universe in all their proper relationships to all other facts. This is what absolute truth is, the God's eye view.

We have only fractional access to God's view. Even Scripture was revealed within the categories of those to whom God was speaking initially. The Bible is thus incarnated truth, truth revealed "in the flesh" of those to whom God wanted to communicate. Otherwise, no one would understand.

There is a subtle narcissism when we think our understanding of the Bible is absolute truth. Those who think such things are unaware that they have a particular worldview and particular paradigms, which are functions of their culture. [7] They are like fish who do not realize they are swimming in water. If they would say, "the Bible is absolute not incarnated truth," what they really mean is, "My understanding of the Bible is absolute truth." They thus imply that their worldview and their culture has finally arrived, not knowing how to read the Bible in its own original cultural contexts.

However, a real understanding of the Bible reveals that the Bible made sense to all those to whom it was first revealed. The words of the Bible made sense to them. They had paradigms. They had worldviews. The vast majority of the words of the Bible, perhaps even every word, made sense within the cultural frameworks of their original audiences. Since my/our paradigms and worldviews are different from theirs in many respects, reading the Bible in context is like an intercultural experience, reading someone else's mail from another time and place. The Bible is for us as Scripture, but its books were not written directly to us.

We can thus take the stance of critical realism. Truth about the world exists. It is what God "thinks." But our apprehension of that truth is overwhelmingly colored and skewed by our finitude and fallenness. We do not see the world as it but through a glass darkly. A former professor at Indiana Wesleyan University also used to say rightly, "but we do see." [8]

8. From God's perspective, humanity is created "in the image of God" (Gen. 1:26-27). The people of God both within Scripture and history have long reflected on what this image might be. In Genesis, it is first the position of humanity within the creation (the "political" image). However, it has been extended to refer to other aspects of a human such as our ability to reason and the eternality of our souls (natural image). Wesley also refer to our moral image as that part of us that could become righteous and holy. [9]

The above musings on the image of God all reflect to one degree or another the culture of the thinker, and they all point to truth. Genesis comes from a collective culture and so is focused on humanity's identity as a group within the groups of the creation. Wesley was a child of the Enlightenment and focused on individualistic features like personal morality and will.

Perhaps most helpful is to think of humanity in the image of God as a reflection of human value. Human life is sacred because we are reflections of God. No human life can be treated casually or trivially, even when we are speaking of morally reprehensible individuals. It is not that we have inherent rights, as if I am intrinsically valuable apart from God--more on this subject to come. It is rather the fact that we are loved by God that makes us valuable. We are valuable because we are reflections of God.

9. What is a human being? We are the image of God in some state of relation to God. We are "spirits in bodies." We are social, relational beings that live in communities of storied identity and practice. We are thinking, feeling, choosing things.

[1] Kant argued in The Critique of Pure Reason that we cannot know the world as it is in itself, the "thing in itself" (das Ding an sich). We can only know the world as it appears to us, the "phenomenological" world.

[2] Descartes sharply distinguished the natural world of our bodies from the spiritual world of our souls. This created a sharper dichotomy than had existed before. Prior to Descartes, existence was more of a continuum of being, and the ancient Greeks could think of the soul or life-force as thin material.

Descartes thus creates a distinction between the natural and the "supernatural" realm. Both become entirely separate modes of existence with completely different rules. Modern science can now treat the world as a machine that follows laws. Deism can emerge as a perspective that sees God as creator but not as involved in the world. The spiritual becomes something entirely different than the natural. See especially Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1992).

[3] The Bible has more than one picture of the soul, all of which give truths about human identity. These reflected the "psychological" paradigms of the various cultures within the Bible. Treating the eschatological whole of an individual as a person's soul leans toward the Hebrew construct that talked of the human nephesh as the whole living being. Treating it as a part of a person leans toward the Platonic detachable soul. Both images can be useful.

[4] God has no sexual organs. God is thus not literally male. This is a metaphor, an anthropomorphism, a portrayal of God in human terms to help us capture a glimpse of God in one aspect.

[5] While the term worldview is often limited to ideological systems, N. T. Wright helpfully expands it also to include core practices and rituals, key symbols, and common narratives. See N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992).

[6] Cf. especially, Portraits of Paul: An Archaeology of Ancient Personality (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1992).

[7] Paradigms are particular patterns and systems of understanding by which people at a particular time and place process the data of the world. These change over time and are an element of culture. See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 4th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2012). A worldview is a collection of paradigms that show coherent patterns. As mentioned in n.5, a more holistic understanding of worldview moves beyond the ideological to the cultural.

[8] Dr. Glenn Martin. I generally disagreed with Dr. Martin's overall perspective, which I considered unreflective in its foundations. However, I agreed with him on this point.

[9] E.g., in his sermon "On the New Birth."

C5. Human beings were created in the image of God.

Almost done with the section on creation. Here is the next post in my theology in bullet points series. The previous one is here.
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Genesis 1:27 reads, "So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them." Christians believe that humanity was created in the image of God. But what is the image of God?

Basically, to say we were created in the image of God indicates that God created us like him in one way or another. Some Christians think the image of God is something "in" us, like our reason or moral thinking. Others think it is something about us, like our place in relation to the rest of God's creation. Others think it is our ability to form relationships. No doubt these are all ways in which we are like God.

1. There seems to be some truth, therefore, in all these suggestions, and we might summarize four ways in which we were created in God's image. First, 1) we were created in the "governmental" image of God. God created humanity at the top of the food chain. This seems to be the original meaning of Genesis 1:27, for the previous verse reads, "Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."

Genesis thus draws a direct connection between humanity being God's image and our function as the dominant species of the earth. Humanity was created to have "glory and honor" within the creation (e.g., Heb. 2:6-8). You can see the parallel between God and humanity here. God rules the heavens and earth. Humanity rules the life of the earth.

From a Christian standpoint, this is not license to destroy the earth but, especially in the modern day and age, a responsibility to steward the creation for God. We have "subdued" the earth more than at any other point in history (Gen. 1:28). Now, like the stewards to whom the king gave various amounts of money to keep for him (e.g., Matt. 24:14-30), we must take care of God's creation in a way that will return him a healthy, prosperous earth.

2. Two other key dimensions of the image of God in humanity are 2) natural image and 3) the moral image. John Wesley speaks of these two in his sermon, "The End of Christ's Coming," meaning the purpose of Christ's Coming. The natural image, for Wesley, consists of human a) understanding, b) will, and c) freedom. All of these were marred, according to Wesley, when Adam sinned.

Like God, humans have understanding of their world. Like God, humans make decisions with their will. Like God humans have the freedom to choose one thing over another. All of these were seriously impaired, Wesley taught, when Adam sinned.

However, even prior to the Fall, there were key differences between us and God. Adam may have reasoned more perfectly than us, but his knowledge was still finite. By contrast, God's intellect is infinite and his knowledge is infinite. In fact, he creates truth.

So we might say that part of the image of God in us is our ability to reason and make choices. [1]

3. The moral image of God in us, according to Wesley, was the "righteousness and true holiness" that Adam had originally. For Wesley, Calvin, and Augustine before them, humanity completely lost the moral image of God in the Fall. No one is able now, in his or her own power, truly to do good.

But originally, these all believed, Adam was free and able not to sin if he had so chosen (posse non peccare, "able not to sin"). Part of the original image of God, now completely lost, was the ability to act morally according to our own free will.

4. Modern theologians like Karl Barth an Emil Brunner have added a modern touch to the image of God by suggesting that it is in relationship with God and others that we show ourselves to be in the image of God. As the members of the Trinity have related to each other from all eternity past, so now we demonstrate the image of God as we exist in relationship with him and with each other.

5. Most of these conceptions of the image of God go well beyond the biblical use of the word. In the Old Testament, as we have already shown, humanity has a certain glory and honor, a prime of place, within the creation as a "reflection of God." You don't kill another human being the way you might kill a deer because it is like attacking God (cf. Gen. 9:6).

James 3:9 continues this line of thought in the New Testament. You shouldn't curse another human being because all human beings are made in God's likeness. All human beings deserve a certain dignity and respect because they are reminiscences of God on the earth. Christians don't treat other human beings as mere animals.

Christ, as the perfect human, is the image of God par excellence. He is the "image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation" (Col. 1:15). Those who have seen Jesus, have seen the Father (John 14:9).

God created human beings as his "image" on the earth. He crowned humanity with glory and honor in the creation. He created them to rule and steward the earth. He created them to explore and discover. He gave us minds to think and wills to choose. He created us for relationships with him and each other. He created us to be good, and wants to restore that broken image even today.

I am my brother's keeper. I must treat all other human beings with respect, for all human beings were created in the image of God.

Next Sunday: C6. God intended us to live forever.

[1] Most Christian pictures of human make-up from the past are "pre-modern." That is to say, they take humanity as it appears within the paradigms and worldview of the thinker and see that pattern as something that is really within a person. They take an understanding that is "phenomenological" (the world as it appears to us) and unreflectively assume it is "ontological" (part of a person's actual being).

So to say the human mind is composed of intellect, emotion, and will is a fine reflection of human mind as it appears to us, as it functions in the world. But we shouldn't confuse this breakdown with the actual composition of the human brain in some way. It is a great "heuristic" model for thinking about the way our minds work. It is functionally true. It works to describe the way we behave.

All biblical breakdowns of human personality are phenomenological. We should not take language of the soul, bipartite or tripartite, as literal language of our actual composition. These are rather pictures of human beings as we function in the world, framed within the paradigms and worldviews of the biblical authors. The next article discusses the soul.

Image of God

Finally getting back to some philosophy. The last post was on the soul.
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Thus far in the chapter we have looked at the human person from four different angles. We started with those who have viewed us as biological machines. From a Christian standpoint, this much is true, but it is not nearly the whole picture. Then we looked at the extent to which human identity is "socially constructed," that is, the degree to which we draw our identity from the social groups and contexts in which we grow up and live. Again, Christianity would historically see more to human existence than the mere constructs of particular societies. Further, Christianity's understanding of salvation has set us on a trajectory that tends to transcend visible social groupings and group-embedded identity. Since being a Jew or a Greek, a male or a female, a slave or a free person--or any visible indicator--cannot tell that a person is part of the people of God (Gal. 3:28), the usual external indicators of identity become quite inadequate. [1]

The third angle was that of personal choice, existentialism. Existentialism focuses on the potential for each of us to create our own identity for ourselves, to make ourselves into anything we want to be. Again, while Christianity can certainly accommodate a view that sees individual choice as essential to becoming a Christian, we would not believe that truly authentic existence is something anyone can create from any direction in life they choose. We believe that there are right and wrong choices, no matter how much you might invest yourself in the choices you make.

Finally, we looked at the traditionally Christian view that we have souls or spirits within us that survive death. Although the idea that the soul might be the primary container of our identities largely dates to Descartes, Christians have long associated the soul or spirit as the part of us that survives death until the time of the resurrection when we are reunited with a transformed body. In the last section, however, we saw that much of the work the soul is made to do in modern Christian thinking is itself largely a modern innovation that at least can be questioned from a number of different angles, including that of the Bible itself.

In this final section of the chapter, we want to consider if thinking about how humans as the image of God might stand at the heart of a Christian view of human beings. Yes, we are biological machines whose self-understanding derives significantly from our social context. Yes, a privilege of Western society in particular is the freedom to determine who we are in many more respects than people at other times and places. Yes, whatever the mechanism, we believe all humans continue to exist at death and that they will eventually be re-embodied. But more than anything else, a human is a reflection of God. A human person is an image of God.

Just like the soul, the idea of the image of God has also shifted somewhat over the centuries. As Western culture after Descartes became more individualistic, so the image of God more and more became something inside of me as an individual. [2] This was a crucial shift. Prior to Descartes, the image of God was something about me that reflected the divine order of things. What humans are reflected in part what God is. God is ruler of the universe. So God created humanity as His image to rule the created order. [3] Other aspects of us as humans that were often thought to reflect characteristics of God and the order of the world were our rationality and our potential for moral righteousness.

[textbox quote: The image of God in Wesley: natural, political, moral]

The Reformers from the time of Martin Luther increasingly looked at the image of God as something almost completely destroyed by Adam's sin in the Garden of Eden. [4] It became something we largely do not have in the present but that Adam had in the past. They focused primarily on the "moral" image as something completely lost in the Fall of humanity. Yet another current view focuses on the image of God as something greater than anything Adam had in the past but that we are destined to have in the future, at the time when God restores all things.

All of these views go well beyond anything in the Bible. Genesis is not very specific as to what the image of God in humanity might be, although in 1:27 it seems to relate to men and women governing the world. Paul and others in the New Testament seemed to relate this position of honor in the creation to Psalm 8, which the NRSV translates,

"what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor. You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas" (8:4-8).

As His image, God has granted humans a position of honor in the world that is a reflection of His own honor. Here is no sense of human rationality or even morality. We simply reflect God. The place He holds over all is the place He has assigned humanity in the world. A man should not cover his head when he prays because his head reflects God (1 Cor. 11:7)--to see the honor of a man is to see the honor of God. Similarly, one should not harm an innocent human because you are harming the image of God (Jas. 3:9). These are all pictures, but we can easily synthesize them into a Christian way of thinking about what we are as human beings created in the image of God.

First, even if one only looked at humanity as biological machines, we are clearly the dominant beings on the planet, at least as far as we can see. [5] The idea that humans "rule" in the animal kingdom--even if we are poor rulers at times--seems beyond question. We hold a position of honor in the created order that does reflect the role God has in relation to the entire creation. Part of that high position does include a higher rational and moral capacity than the rest of the creation, which reflects our sense of God as the perfect thinker and absolute standard of goodness. In this sense, Christian thinkers throughout the ages have fastened on legitimate aspects of what we are as humans, even if they read much more into the image of God than any biblical author was thinking.

However, what is perhaps more important for us today is to recognize that humanity in the image of God is intrinsically valuable and meaningful. Prior to Descartes and the Reformation, the value of humanity in general was a reflection of the very order of things, of the world. Meanwhile, the value of an individual human might be a matter of the social class to which they were born. There was no sense of development. It was assumed that a person who turned out to be great must have always been great.

After Descartes, thinkers no longer simply assumed an intrinsic order to things. A person's choices might show them to be great, and a person might start from nowhere and rise to greatness. The late 1800s saw Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and the birth of psychoanalysis, where events in a person's childhood were seen as formative influences that combined to make a person what they became. The nature/nurture controversy began, which would eventually become the question of whether what we are is more a function of our genetics or the environment in which we grew up.

Nevertheless, we can to a great extent return to the thinking of the Christians of the ages by thinking of how God thinks of humanity. If humanity--if indeed all the creation--is important to God, then it becomes a moral offence to mess with any of God's "stuff" and especially with humanity, which Scripture has declared to be the image of God in a way that the rest of the creation is not. This fact of God's perspective toward us makes us intrinsically valuable, despite the fact that we might also be biological machines that think and make moral choices.

[1] Although to be sure, visible Christiantity soon developed its own set of visible indicators so that group-embedded identity has continued to dominate the history of Christianity as well, another indication that homo sapiens is a herd animal.

[2] I am highly dependent in what follows on Charles Taylor's The Sources of the Self.

[3] This would seem to be the primary sense of the image of God in Genesis 1:27.

[4] The late Stanley Grenz spoke of a shift to a "relational" view of the image of God in the Reformation, followed by a more "dynamic" view as something God wants to restore in us at the time of Christ's return. See Theology for the Community of God, **, 168-73.

[5] Leaving out of consideration the spiritual realm for the moment.
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As a side note on Steve Deneff's sermon this past Sunday:
Pastor Deneff made an interesting contrast between contemporary Westerners who are more "performance" based and the Bible world that was more "identity" based. This laborious chapter I've been hammering out in bits and pieces for months says similar things but in different terms.

First, what he is talking about is part and parcel of the ancient world, indeed I consider it the default of the human animal everywhere. His "identity" is really a function of a collectivist and honor-shame culture, as discussed previously.

Second, it is a pre-Descartes view of a person that sees who we are as a function of orders outside ourselves, an order to the world that is out there, as discussed previously and above. I think it can be recovered (as above) by seeing our truest identity as what God thinks of us. But the "performance" view--I am what I do--is one possible perspective as a result of the Cartesian slide, IMHO.

Wesley's "End of Christ's Coming"

Chris Bounds put me on to John Wesley's sermon, "The End (or purpose) of Christ's Coming" as a good place to see his breakdown of the image of God. I was looking for his sense of what the image of God in humanity consists of.

The sermon is quite interesting. Wesley's knowledge of Latin literature is impressive, which he quotes in Latin. He has the right understanding of Romans 7 as far as he goes ("Personating a man convinced of sin, but not conquering it").

He seems to demonstrate the "modern" sense of human will as found aptly in, for example, the philosophy of John Locke (Adam "was endued with a will, with various affections [which are only the will exerting itself in various ways]"). Augustine also of course talked about two wills, but not in terms of human understanding making choices, at least as I understand it. For Augustine these wills are a matter of God's choosing rather than ours.

His reading of the Genesis text is fully pre-modern a mirror reading of the text from within his own worldview, while at the same time incorporating the questions of old ("whence the origin of sin"). Important to realize that we often reinterpret the words of the ancients without realizing it, putting our thoughts into their words. So the comment that Satan "sinneth from the beginning" means that Satan was the first one to sin.

Wesley mentions two elements of the image of God in this sermon--the natural image and the moral image. I didn't find the political image in this sermon. Wesley includes within the natural image 1) understanding, 2) will, and 3) liberty. This framework seems decidedly impacted by the post-Cartesian paradigm shift.

The moral image has to do with the original "righteousness and true holiness" that Adam had and we have lost entirely apart from Christ. The political image is humanity's commission to rule the earth, impacted decidedly by the Fall.

In Genesis, I find only the third sense of the image of God, that humanity was intended to rule the creation as God rules His creation. In the NT, the image seems understandably to have a sense of reflecting the honor of God or the glory of God. I can't think of any places where it has anything to do with understanding, free will, or volition. I can't think off hand of any places where it has to do with an original moral righteousness either--this is all post-biblical expansion of Paul expanding on Genesis, for all I can tell.

These things are of interest to me, but I am more interested in how we today might conceptualize human beings as being in the image of God. The two key biblical senses of the phrase still seem most pertinent:

1) God has appointed us stewards of His creation. We are the most empowered of his creatures--which of course includes our greater understanding, our greater liberty, our greater sense of choices to make. We thus have the greatest responsibility among God's creatures.

2) Every human individual reflects the greatness of God. To harm any individual (here I am not speaking to issues of justice) is to mess with God's stuff.

I am the greatest of novices when it comes to image discussion after the New Testament. I welcome enlightenment of fundamental discussions I do not know.