Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
—Genesis 1:26-27 (ESV)
If you look to Catholic and Protestant theology to find out what it means that human beings are made in the image of God, you’ll find a lot of differing explanations, containing a lot of wisdom, but mostly missing the key fact: in the ancient world, the phrase “image of God” primarily meant a statue of a deity in a temple. Worship in those days focused on those images; where the image of a god or goddess was, that god or goddess was understood to be present in the image. As a consequence, people believed that if they created these images and built houses for them, brought sacrifices and observed the ceremonies faithfully, they could ensure that their gods would be with them—and that if they didn’t, their gods would abandon them.
Genesis 1-2 take a very different view. All creation is God’s temple, and Genesis 1 shows us God building it for himself; then he resolves to create his image—human beings—to place within that temple. In Genesis 2:7, we see him forming his image out of the dirt—perhaps out of the heavy clay by the river, much as the priests of Egypt made their idols; then, having breathed life into the first human being, God installs him in the temple, in the garden which he has created for the purpose. In presenting God’s creative work in this way, Genesis makes it clear that the pagans and their idols are merely a poor copy of the one true God.
This was, and remains, a dramatic challenge to the pagan worldview; and odd though it may sound, it’s not only a religious challenge, but also a political one. You see, theologically, the pagan nations around Israel understood that their chief god, whichever one that might be, ruled their nation; but as a practical matter, clearly it was the king who ruled. Thus, logically, it must be that the king ruled the nation as the representative of the god, and so they spoke of the king being the image of their god—the god’s physical representation who ruled on his behalf.
This is of course a profoundly elitist view—only the most powerful and important person in the nation was worthy of this label; everyone else was less important, second-class. Their gods and goddesses would smugly accept their worship, but disdained to identify themselves with such insignificant creatures. Out of this came the mindset that some human lives were more important than others, which as a practical matter meant that your life was only important to the degree that you were of use to the king. From that sort of perspective, our modern notions of equality and human rights would have seemed like ridiculous drivel; if the king is the image of the god and you aren’t, obviously the king is greater and you are lesser, and you don’t have rights, you’re just allowed to do whatever the king wants you to do.
That was pretty much the way ordinary people were seen by those who ruled the nations around Israel—they existed to serve their rulers in whatever way those rulers might desire; which is why Genesis was such a radical text. Its insistence that all people are made in the image of God blew that elitism away and replaced it with a very, very different view of humanity—rooted in an equally different view of God. This was a God who identified himself not only with the important people, but with all people, declaring that he had created all people in his image; this was a God who had created humanity not to be his slaves, serving his comfort and doing his dirty work (which was why the Babylonians, for instance, believed their high god Marduk had created humanity), but in order that he might love us and we might love him.
There’s an important lesson in this: no human life is worth less than another. That might seem too obvious to need saying, but in fact it needs frequent repetition; the idea that some lives are worth less than others is one which keeps cropping up all over the place. These days, we see it in, among other places, the euthanasia movement, and in some of the arguments made in favor of abortion. Princeton professor Peter Singer is the clearest example of this, arguing at every opportunity that some people’s lives are not worth living—and that their family members should be free to kill them if it seems preferable. Against this idea, in all its forms, stands Genesis (and indeed the whole of Scripture), which declares unequivocally that God has made all people in his image, and loves all whom he has made. It is not ours to regard anyone as less important, or less human, than anyone else, no matter what excuses we might offer; whenever we look at another human being, regardless of any other considerations, we see the image of God in them, and we must treat them accordingly, without exception.
(Adapted from “Toledot” and “In the Image of God”)
I agree with the theology but think it is absurd to mention Peter Singer as a clear example of the idolatry of differing human value and yet not mention warfare or economic inequality or racism or sexism or other bigotries or nationalism or or or the many, many more powerful influences on the everyday life of billions apart from a single lightening-rod professor of ethics.
As for abortion, I don't think Genesis 1-2 is a very good support for an anti-abortion stance on it's own, since the human God makes is presented as a fully-grown adult, not an embryo…I know for your position you are drawing from other places, but the Genesis account itself doesn't do much to support a hard pro-life stance.
Peter Singer advocates legalized murder of the inconvenient. I do not say he has the broadest influence; I say he is the clearest and starkest example of something which is inherent in many other places and arguments.
As for the pro-life argument, I actually disagree, but it's not really germane, since I wasn't trying to support that from Genesis alone. Rather, I was using that as an illustration of something broader.
Rob,
Can you tell me some of your sources for this understanding of the "image of God" in the ancient world? I don't remember hearing this before, and I'd like to read more about it.
As for abortion, I don't think Genesis 1-2 is a very good support for an anti-abortion stance on it's own…
Jeremiah 1:5
🙂
Indeed.
Pauline, my most important single source is an unpublished dissertation (at least, it was still unpublished the last I heard) that was used in one of my seminary classes; the author compared the text of Genesis to temple construction texts of the Ancient Near East (I forget exactly which cultures, though I believe Egypt was among those she studied) and found that Genesis basically follows the form of those texts. On that basis, she concluded that the text of Genesis was deliberately structured to copy them–to show God building his temple, then forming his image and placing his image within the temple–as a way of undermining pagan claims.
Beyond that, you can see this for instance in Nahum Sarna's Genesis commentary:
The words used here to convey these ideas can be better understood in the light of a phenomenon registered in both Mesopotamia and Egypt, whereby the ruling monarch is described as “the image” or “the likeness” of a god. In Mesopotamia we find the following salutations: “The father of my lord the king is the very image of Bel (ṣalam bel) and the king, my lord, is the very image of Bel”; “The king, lord of the lands, is the image of Shamash”; “O king of the inhabited world, you are the image of Marduk.” In Egypt the same concept is expressed through the name Tutankhamen (Tutankh-amun), which means “the living image of (the god) Amun,” and in the designation of Thutmose IV as “the likeness of Re.”
Without doubt, the terminology employed in Genesis 1:26 is derived from regal vocabulary, which serves to elevate the king above the ordinary run of men. In the Bible this idea has become democratized.All human beings are created “in the image of God”; each person bears the stamp of royalty. This was patently understood by the author of Psalm 8, cited above. His description of man in royal terms is his interpretation of the concept of the “image of God” introduced in verse 26. It should be further pointed out that in Assyrian royal steles, the gods are generally depicted by their symbols: Ashshur by the winged disk, Shamash by the sun disk, and so forth. These depictions are called: “the image (ṣalam) of the great gods.” In light of this, the characterization of man as “in the image of God” furnishes the added dimension of his being the symbol of God’s presence on earth. While he is not divine, his very existence bears witness to the activity of God in the life of the world. This awareness inevitably entails an awesome responsibility and imposes a code of living that conforms with the consciousness of that fact.
It should be said that commentaries will often note the "image" language as used of the kings of the day, but not follow it back or really seek to understand the reason for it. I think this is one of those places where trying to understand the biblical text within a Western philosophical framework is really unhelpful.
Anon: That's true only in the case of Jeremiah – I'm not aware of any passage that says that God is concerned with every zygote everywhere, just a few scattered passages that God is involved in the birth of extraordinary people.
Rob: I've read a lot of Singer and I don't think that's a very accurate characterization of his arguments (some of which I find strong, others not so). Not the smallest problem is your assumption that the view that the instant a sperm fertilizes an egg is the instant at which that fledgling cell is fully a human being in every important way is correct…or even makes logical sense. You'd definitely have to deal with Singer's arguments more closely on that one I'd say…if you were so inclined of course.
Pauline, you should also check out Bruce Waltke's Genesis commentary (the best one-volume work on the book, imho) on this point.
just a few scattered passages that God is involved in the birth of extraordinary people
Except, Doug, that the whole witness of Scripture–including Genesis 1-2–won't allow that reductionistic interpretation. Also, this phrase
fully a human being in every important way
captures what's wrong about your theology, imho. It is not for us to judge "fully," or what ways are "important." What matters is that, barring human intervention or medical problems, the fertilized egg will grow and unfurl into a mature human being, and we have no right to interrupt that process for our own convenience.
As Emerson wrote, "Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed."