“Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule. … So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them.” — Genesis 1:26a, 27
I take a pencil, and on a piece of thick, textured paper, I draw a line, horizontally. With that one left-to-right movement of my hand, I have divided the heavens from the earth.
I will add yellows and oranges and scarlets above — let there be light.
I draw another line, this one curved, to separate the waters from what will become the land. I fill my sea with blue washes and chroma, ensigns of depth and mystery, wonder and even danger. On the land, trees, vegetation, perhaps a frog or a pig. Verdancy.
Tom Steagald
I look at the work of my hands and consider it good. After a few days and more interactions, I hope it will be very good.
I am not creating ex nihilo, of course; that is God’s oeuvre alone.
Still, my water colorings are nothing other than my attempts to reiterate the creating Word that was spoken at the First. They are my best God-ward flatteries, homages and doxologies to the Maker, and for me a particular kind of proof that I am made imago Dei, in the image of God.
That bedrock affirmation is a fearful, wonderfully prophetic and, above all, powerfully pragmatic doctrine — a bulwark never failing against the many self-defeating idols we create and adore. And against despair.
Sadly, I hear precious little about said doctrine. Perhaps if I were still in school I would hear more about how — despite so much admissible evidence to the absolute contrary — humans are made imago Dei: in the image of God.
Then again, I might not. Of late, the very notion of imago Dei feels like an anachronism: An erstwhile doctrine, a throwback idea, a discussion from another time.
God’s fingerprints
The first chapters of our mythic pre-story (Genesis 1-3) tell us that, apart from Sabbath, humans were the last of God’s creative works. Uniquely, we were not created by fiat; instead we were “hand-rolled,” if you please, formed from a scoop of fresh earth dampened with divine sweat — the final piece and pinnacle of an intentionally created and integrated realm we call Eden.
With God’s fingerprints all over us, and with the divine breath to animate us, we would find meaning each day in tending the Garden. Our wages? That in the cool of the evening we would “walk together” with each other and the Maker.
We might still wish.
Only something went horribly wrong. “Eating the forbidden fruit” was but a gesture of what we might call theos-envy — the desire to be gods unto ourselves.
Ever since, if we in the West have been both overly concerned with sin and “depravity” (most often in its individual and moral expressions), we have remained mostly oblivious to how our theos-envy blights our sense of social justice.
Rightly understood, however, the doctrine of imago Dei demands we treat “them,” whoever they are, with namaste respect and selflessness, making everything from our sleeping arrangements to our treatment of the poor and outcast a matter of eternal significance.
And all of it attributable to theos-envy, to malignant narcissism and the despair that produces nihilism and gnosticism, and the inclination to do only what is right “in our own eyes.”
The most potent antidote to all such personal and systemic “corruption” would seem to be a healthy (and balanced) sense of the “original blessedness” that attended our construction, and specifically, that we were made not gods, but images of God, with all the ennobling empowerment appertaining thereto.
Given the world as it is, however, and us as we often are, it is almost impossible to discuss a “good creation” or the imago Dei with a straight face.
And what does it even mean, anyway, beyond the lexical, to say humans are made imago Dei? What characterizes that contention?
The power of death? The power to heal? The ability to self-transcend learn, to self-deny, to differ? All such statements are partly right; most are susceptible to deformity; none are able to carry anywhere near the full weight of priestly or prophetic corrective.
No surprise then that with precious few exceptions — Matthew Fox, Richard Rohr — there are not many who spend very much time promulgating a doctrine that could help us rethink war, gender bias, social inequity and the like.
Or are there? I mean, I could be wrong. I have not been in school in a long time, and it may be that classroom and over-coffee discussions still seek to parse out what it is to be made imago Dei.
Back in the day, we were left to quote Mr. Rogers’ mother, who looked for and applauded the “helpers.” In fact, we knew there were folk who were demonstrating, incarnating what we were unable to precisely define.
(I am ashamed to admit I thought more than once of Justice Potter Stewart’s famous phrase regarding pornography but adapted it to the matter at hand: I cannot define imago Dei, but I know it when I see it.)
Wishful thinking
After decades of ministry, I am still trying to define imago Dei. Not formally so much, or even theologically, but pragmatically. I will be bold to say that, at the very least, the term and the doctrine of imago Dei testify that God is not made imago viri: in the image of man.
That, however, is precisely the conclusion reached by the many cultured despisers of our faith (or of religion at all).
We know we are going to die; so we find a way to pretend we are not going to die forever.
We stare into the vastness of the cosmos and work to convince ourselves we are not actually alone, and so we invent and then postulate a First Cause, a Power beyond all powers, who knows and cares for us.
We manufacture and advance, in the case of Christians, the idea of a Savior stronger than the grave — and as a demonstration of our thanks for sharing in that triumph, we put to the sword or burn at the stake those who disagree.
And of course, we “hear” an intelligible word from an ineffable Spirit, even though our best radio telescopes hear only static or silence.
Make believe. Wishful thinking. Faith as believing what you know ain’t true.
Over the long millennia, collectively and more or less cooperatively (if with many false starts, controversies and armed conflicts, which they cite as further evidence of religion’s futility and danger) we created “the God of gods” in our image — to give us a sense of comfort for our existentially and politically horrified selves.
And if that kind of denial and projection are all there is to see here, we are of all people most to be pitied. Or despised.
Theos-envy
You may be more familiar with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and the other “new atheists” than you are with Yuval Noah Harari. Their tired filibusters against religion in general, and Christianity in particular, are but faint echoes of faith’s more serious critics: Feuerbach, Freud, Nietzsche and others.
Harari’s theos-envy is somewhat different. Yes, his materialism both presupposes and concludes that God is a fiction, that atoms and molecules are the only reality — “There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.” And, yes, that the extent to which we are religious is proof only that we remain debilitatingly neurotic as a species.
But that leads him, when he turns futurist, to postulate a distinctly secular “remnant” theology.
“I think it is likely in the next 200 years or so homo sapiens (at least those with means — TRS) will upgrade themselves into some idea of a divine being, either through biological manipulation or genetic engineering or by the creation of cyborgs, part organic part non-organic.”
I do not mean to be dismissive — I mean, President Barack Obama read and recommended Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind — but that particular quote sounds like the original pitch for “Best of Both Worlds,” an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. In it, Patrick Stewart’s Captain Picard was assimilated into the Borg collective.
What he describes, though, is a distinctly materialist form of evolution; better, a creation of our own intelligent design that already renders most current human endeavors meaningless (or, as the Borg would say, “irrelevant”). How can anything matter when what we will be, will be as far removed from what we are now as homo sapiens is from the neanderthals.
So, cue Freddie Mercury, I guess: Nothing really matters. Nothing. Really. Matters.
Unless it does, which is the implication of a robust doctrine of imago Dei, which is the priestly, prophetic and orthodox corrective to the peculiar form of self-loathing at the heart of Harari’s perspective. To proclaim the imago Dei is to contend that humans are, each and all, fearfully and wonderfully made, formed for meaning and purpose.
That meaning and purpose imbues things with meaning. And with temptation, for at least as long as most of us remain on this side of Harari’s ark — how many were on the first one? Eight? The irony of Harari’s middle name is thick — the things that matter can matter too much, causing us to create idols as effortlessly as the Mesopotamians. Our idols just have different names — among them tribalism, wars, wealth inequality, Christian nationalism and the like.
Now, the reasoning of the skeptics does offer a somewhat compelling interpretation of why, for all the religious “conversions” that occur faith to faith, tradition to tradition, the world itself does not seem to be any more hospitable or gracious better than it ever has been. It is hard to ignore that, despite the call to “do unto others as you would have them do to unto you” — to turn the other cheek and forgive those who hurt us because, in St. Paul’s words, we owe each other a debt of “mutual love” — there is no end to our warring madness, as Fosdick put it.
Fearfully made
Wonderfully and fearfully made suggests we are wonderfully and fearfully made.
We are acquainted with anxiety about the inevitabilities of finite existence. Ever-more sophisticated tools for diagnosis tell us nothing we don’t already know.
Even before high-powered telescopes and celebrity cosmologists on YouTube, our ancestors intuited at once both how miniscule we are and how unimportant we and our concerns could seem to be. But that is not the only way to read what is “written” in the sky.
Case in point: In several YouTube videos, Professor Brian Cox makes, to my ears, a compelling case for the possibility that our planet is perhaps unique in all the galaxy, or even other galaxies. He grins like a school boy, seems to delight that we are here, now, and capable of learning and conversation; his agnosticism as to what happened before the Big Bang, if there was such a thing (“we just don’t know”) leaves some room for a Creator and the creation — although he “officially” denies any actual evidence for either.
I find myself wanting to say, “What you proclaim as unknown I proclaim to you as known.”
We are not in denial about death or the possibility of death. But the imago Dei presupposes and concludes that God is, and God cares, for us and our salvation. So while we might say we are desperate people living in precarious times, we recall that we are told over and over again to “fear not.”
That command speaks not only to our individual apprehensions but also to our ethical responsibilities. Broadly and rightly understood, the doctrine of imago Dei demands we treat “them,” whoever they are, with namaste respect and selfishness-denying grace — which in and of itself makes everything from our sleeping arrangements to our treatment of the poor and outcast a matter of eternal significance.
And Jesus’ command to love, meaning serve our enemies, is the deepest intimation that, for whatever else it might mean, being made in the image of God means that we, like God, are to regard the just and unjust, the righteous and sinners, in the same exact way.
I wonder if the spiritual, ethical and peace-making translation of imago Dei might be, copycat: “Be ye therefore perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.”
Revealing truth
Picasso said, “Art is a lie that reveals the truth.”
And so I take the paper. I guide the pencil. I rearrange and reframe the emptiness before me.
As I do, my hand is an extension of my spirit. My faith broods over outlines and shadows. My brooding spirit finds connection with God’s Spirit as I draw, erase, paint, correct, deepen, soften, blend, outline, add, subtract, rework. And sometimes to no good effect (once, in order to preserve valuable paper, I held an effort gone horribly wrong under a spigot in hopes of washing it all away so I could start fresh. Yeah, no. It didn’t work the First Time either.)
Thankfully, a YouTuber watercolor artist reminded me there are no mistakes, only happy accidents
And so, now, I take what remains — not least my chastened self-awareness — and work with both the intentional and the accidental. I begin again with outlines and graded washes for background. Much as Eden is a background. I move to chromas and detail. Only gradually do broad strokes give way to detail, to create a little world of images that, if you know where and how to look, are themselves imago Thomou, images of Tom, of my soul and spirit.
And sometimes I catch my breath. My throat clutches: I have painted better than I can, revealing more than I could have expected. As if by inspiration, and grace.
My little works — my mostly private gallery — are pictograms of a language I do not know and will never master, hard as I might work. But crude as they are, they are of great worth: That to say, pale and inexact as my brightest works may be, they are nonetheless both occasioned by and prove that I, too, despite so much evidence to the contrary, am made imago Dei, in the image of the creating God.
If so, then we get a powerful sense of what the Real Artist even now is up to — there are beautiful imitations of God’s working to correct and refine and incorporate even our accidents into the work he began so long ago.
We call it grace. And reconciliation. And while there is no perfect analogy, at least I take from imago Dei a compelling illustration of what we copycats, male and female, are to be about. Now. And in the as yet unknown future.
As it was in the beginning, in other words, it is now and ever shall be. World without end. Amen.
Tom Steagald is a retired United Methodist pastor living near his grandchildren in Spartanburg, S.C. He watercolors, plays bass and golf (about equally) and is trying not to kill a new bonsai tree.