The Image of God

Summenary Ep. 6 Robert Jenson on the Image of God…Theology has used the word “freedom” as a slogan for this distinction between humankind and nature.That distinction, by the way, comes from the Greeks. Freedom, for Aristotle, was rather limited in its scope. Women stayed home having babies and caring for them because they were thought to be a part of nature. Servants, too, were bound by nature insofar as they had to do whatever it was they were doing. Like women, they were thought to be bound by necessity like any other part of nature. The free man, by contrast, is the one who is free from nature in the sense that what he does he does not have to do, which in Aristotle’s immediate political context, meant he is at liberty to attend to the business of the city, to be an office-holder, to vote and attend when the city assembly met, to serve in the army. All these are the proper doings of those who are not bound to nature. What Christianity did to this distinction was to say that on account of what we read about in Genesis, all humans are free. That is to say that human beings are not simply items in the natural processes as the Greeks had thought women and servants were.To be free in this way is to be capable of being a kind of counterpart or conversation partner of God. This, in my view, is the heart of what is meant by the claim that human beings are made in the image of God. To be made in the image of God is to be something like God’s “counterpart.” What it means to be created in the image of God is that human beings are creatures with whom God can have an active exchange, a back and forth, a relationship.The other thing that happens with humanity that does not happen with the animals is that God strikes up a conversation. Among the animals in the book of Genesis, the human animals are the ones that God talks to and who are expected to talk back. God strikes up a conversation with human beings. So it turns out that the counterpart relationship is effectively a discourse, a back and forth of address and response.Notice, then, that the doctrine of the imago dei is just an extension of Israel’s basic principle of religion. God talks to Abraham and Moses, and Moses and Abraham talk back. But now it is not just Moses or Abraham, and that is to say it is not just Israel; it is simply the human race as such. In the beginning it is the human race that is in conversation with God. This of course raises a question: precisely how is it that the God of Israel talks to Moses? How is it that somehow God speaks to us? Many Jewish, Muslim, and Christian theologians would say that God speaks to us through the moral law. But there is a more fundamental answer still: you pray. It might be possible, then, to say that according to Genesis and so according to Jewish and Christian theological tradition, the human being is defined as the “praying animal.” You will see this reflected throughout the history of the church from Augustine to Hildegard of Bingen to Barth. What do they constantly exhort you to do in the perilous journey through this life? Pray!So to be made in the image of God is to have a role, and that role is to be in a relationship and a discourse with God and to occupy a place in the story that God has and lives with his people. And that story is not random, but has a plot. And the plot is given to it by the presence in the story of its author. What is really there within each of us, instead of what the Greeks call a physis, is rather something in which each of us participates—an ongoing drama with a plot. The human plot, the human story that is actually in progress, the play that is actually being produced, does have a plot and the plot is given to it by the presence of the author as also one of the dramatis personae. The story holds dramatically together and we do therefore indeed have something in common precisely because the author is triune, the triune God that I attempted to construe for you. In God, personal identity is indeed prior to essence. God the Father is first of all Father of that other personal identity the Son and he has that nature we call divine nature only in and by and on account of that relationship. The relationship and the personal identity given in the relationship—Father to the Son—that is the first fact about God. And that he is God—and then we will start laying out predicates: omnipotent, omnipresent, and so on—that is the second thing. So also then the Son: Jesus of Nazareth is first of all the Son of the Father and only thereby does he have the “divine nature.” So also then the Spirit: the Spirit is first of all the mutual Spirit of the Father and the Son together and only by and in that relationship can he be construed as divine. In God the personal identities are constituted in each one’s relationship to the other two.And then, in that one of those three is one of us; our life together has a structure determined by the structure of the divine life. We have something in common by which we hold together, through which we can come together. We have that which in Greek thought was enabled by the notion of nature in that God is the God I tried to evoke for you earlier. So, I am who I am—and of course Popeye would say, “And that is all that I am, I am Popeye the sailor man!” And that is a drastic statement of personal identity—in and by my relational place in the history God has with us, and just and only so there is indeed something we may call human nature if we wrench that word from some, at least, of its original associations and make it mean something like the word I have been using, the “plot” of the human story.NOTE: If you want to read along in this series on Robert Jenson’s A Theology in Outline, you can find the PDF of next week’s reading below: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com