Called to be Human
Pennsylvania Coal Town, Edward Hopper (1947)
“There’s no greater tragedy than an uncalled life.”
A friend of mine from our cohort of the Center for Pastor Theologians lamented for a loved one during our annual gathering earlier this month, as we reflected on the joys and sorrows of the past year. It was a poignant expression of grief over her despair at having lost her sense of vocation, of being called to something, and loved by someone, greater than herself.
As we began this essay series exploring what it means to be human, we noted that the central biblical concept of imago Dei, or the image of God, can be understood in three ways: our rational nature, our being made for relationship, and our being called to vocation. Last month we looked at the relationality inherent in being a human being, made in the image of a triune God. This month, we turn our attention to this concept of being called, or what is often called vocation.
Made in God’s Image
“Man is neither angel nor beast,” wrote Pascal, [1] but neither is humanity a hybrid of the two, according to the book of Genesis. The bible presents humanity as spiritual, and yet irreducibly material, a psychosomatic unity of body and soul. Humanity is an animal, and yet set apart from the rest of the animals and given charge to rule over and care for them.
The creation account found in the first chapter of Genesis begins with the world “formless and void” - a chaos, uninhabited and uninhabitable. The first chapter of Genesis presents God’s work of creation as an ordering of the chaos. He forms what is formless, separating and ordering the chaotically mixed elements of the cosmos - light from darkness, waters above from waters below, dry land from sea. Then he fills what is empty, populating his creation with sun and moon, with birds and sea creatures, with vegetation and animals. And at the apex of his creation on the sixth day, before the great rest that completes his work on the seventh, is humanity.
The text of Genesis 1 is highly structured, full of rhythmic patterns. God speaks his creation into existence with ten words, introduced with the phrase “And God said…” Eight times God speaks the words “Let there be…” or “Let the earth bring forth…”; six times we hear the repeated phrase, “And there was evening and there was morning…” But the creation of humanity breaks many of these patterns, indicating its uniqueness. The text reads:
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 air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” - Genesis 1:26-28 (RSV)
The pattern-breaks are numerous. Earlier in the creation narrative, the text speaks of God appointing the sun and moon to rule over their respective realms of day and night (Gen. 1:16), but here God grants humanity “dominion” over all of creation. As Bruce Waltke writes, “[t]he impersonal ‘let there be’ (or its equivalents) of the seven preceding creative acts is replaced by the personal ‘let us.’ Only in the creation of humanity is the divine intent announced beforehand. The formula ‘and so it was’ is replaced by a threefold blessing. In these ways, the narrator places humankind closer to God than the rest of creation.” [2] As Blocher puts it, “man was created… for a purpose and for a person: on the one hand, in order to subdue the earth; on the other hand, the man was made to be with the woman, and the woman with the man.” [3]
Most striking is the statement by God that “man (is) in our image, after our likeness.” “Whereas the other creatures are created ‘according to their kinds’ (Gen. 1:21, 24, 25),” Waltke writes, “humanity is made ‘in the image of God.’” [4] What does this mean? At its simplest, the text simply indicates that humanity reflects God in some unspecified way. And yet, the concept is central to the biblical understanding of human dignity. Later in Genesis, God will prohibit the taking of human life, “for God made man in his own image.” (Gen. 9:6 RSV); the New Testament letter of James condemns cursing humanity, “who are made in the likeness of God.” (Jas. 3:9 RSV) Christianity argues (along with Judaism and some forms of Islam) that the fact that humanity is made in the image of God is what confers incalculable dignity on every human being - human dignity is not, in other words, simply assumed. There is a clear reason that humanity is set apart. And so it is worth asking, despite the immediate text’s relative silence, what it means to say that humanity is made in the image of God.
A Unique Calling
What sets humanity apart is not in the first instance a set of capacities, but a calling. The image of God entails a vocation, and the capacities that indicate humanity and make it unique - such as our rationality, linguistic capabilities, creativity, and so on - are given in service to that vocation. It is the vocation that is primary. The crucial implication is that the loss of capacities does not entail the loss of that image or of human dignity.
What is that vocation? Simply put, it is to manifest God’s presence within the world. This way of phrasing it, used by Wheaton theologian Marc Cortez, [5] captures two separate facets of what it means to bear the image of God. First, humanity manifests God’s presence in a representational sense: in some way, by our very existence, we show what God is like. And second, humanity manifests the presence of God in a representative sense: we are called to care for God’s creation in service to our Creator, bringing order where there is chaos.
From Capacities to Calling
The characterization of the image of God in terms of capacities held sway among Christian scholars until the middle of the 20th century. But more recently, driven in part by archaeological research that has provided insights into the original Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) context of the book of Genesis, a shift has taken place. Today, the dominant view among biblical scholars is that the image of God refers rather to humanity’s vocation or calling, the purpose for which humanity was created - that is, that it provides an account of human identity and the meaning of human existence, rather than a metaphysical account of human nature. [6]
Recent biblical scholarship stresses the covenantal nature of the relationship into which God calls humanity in the early chapters of Genesis, and even the covenantal structure of the texts themselves. [7] Mendenhall, in particular, noted the similarities between Israelite covenant texts and a contemporaneous group of documents known as Hittite suzerainty treaties - both, in turn, structured similarly to the Pentateuch as a whole and individual texts within it (such as the book of Deuteronomy). [8] In these texts, a covenantal relationship between two parties (often a lord and his vassal, e.g. an emperor and a subordinate regional king) would be established by a historical prologue, followed by sections detailing how the parties would relate from that point. In this view, the book of Genesis serves as just such a historical prologue.
In light of this context it is unlikely that the image of God refers primarily to attributes, capacities, or the metaphysical nature of humanity, and more likely that the author is concerned with the nature of the role humanity is called to play within its covenantal relationship to its Creator. [9] Various capacities may set humanity apart from the rest of the creation; rationality and language may be valid indicators of what is unique to humanity. But the capacities are not constitutive of the image of God, because the image is a vocation, and capacities are given in service to the vocation. As Marc Cortez has put it, “Traditionally, people have associated the image with one or more human capacities (e.g., rationality). On the divine presence view, however, such capacities cannot define the image since a divine being does not depend on the capacities of the idol to manifest its presence. … We would thus need to say that the basic meaning of the imago Dei has nothing to do with any particular capacities of the human person, even though capacities remain necessary for the ways in which we live in response (function) to the reality of being made in the image of God (essence). We are called to use whatever capacities we do have to carry out the divinely intended functions as a consequence of the truth that we are images of the living God.” [10] Or, as theologian Richard Lints writes, “...the question of the qualities inherent in humankind (the image bearer) is derivative from and secondary to the teleological claim of Genesis 1 that the imago Dei reflects God.” [11]
Can we be more precise about what this reflection entails? In the original Hebrew text, man is said to be made in the image (tselem) and likeness (demut) of God. Current scholarship has made the following points about these words:
First, the word tselem typically refers to a concrete image or statue of a god, as in Numbers 33:52. [12] Indeed, as Lints has pointed out, beyond the first chapters of Genesis, the word almost always refers to an idol, a physical manifestation of one of the gods of Israel’s neighbors. [13] As numerous theologians and scholars across the Christian tradition have pointed out, God’s command to make no image of him for use in worship (the second commandment, Exodus 20:4-6) must be understood in correlation to his creation of man in His image: man is to create no image of God because God has already created His own image, which is humanity itself.
Second, it is notable that the text says that humanity is made in the image of God - not the body alone, nor the soul, nor the mind, but the “psychosomatic unity” that is the human being, explicitly including the diversity of male and female. [14] Thus the image of God is borne in full by the totality of every individual human being: Lints writes that “according to Gen. 1 the whole human person represents God’s royal rule, without any intended emphasis on the spiritual or physical aspects of human identity carrying on this role.” [15]
Third, an image is representational of its original. In reflecting God, humanity in some fashion shows the rest of creation what God is like and represents His presence within creation, [16] albeit in a way utterly derivative of and dependent on the original. [17]
Fourth, the image is also representative of the original. An image “functions as a ruler in the place of the deity.” Here Waltke cites Hart: “In the Ancient Near East it was widely believed that a god’s spirit lived in any statue or image of that god, with the result that the image could function as a kind of representative or substitute for the god wherever it was placed. It was also customary in the ANE to think of a king as a representative of a god; obviously the king rules, and the god was the ultimate ruler, so the king must be ruling on the god’s behalf. It is therefore not surprising that these two separate ideas became connected and a king came to be described as an image of a god.” [18] Although this interpretation has only recently gained sway among biblical scholars, it has ancient provenance, dating back to ancient Judaism. [19] But today, the understanding of “image” as indicating representation and representative rule “has become the dominant interpretation, supplanting the interpretation of image as ‘spiritual qualities.’” [20]
Cortez summarizes, “we need to view the imago Dei as a declaration that God intended to create human persons to be the physical means through which he would manifest his own divine presence in the world.” [21]
It is worth noting the radically democratizing effect of this definition. As Waltke points out, the Hebrew text stands apart from its ANE counterparts in applying the concept of the image of God not only to the king, but to all of humanity. He cites a letter written to a seventh-century Assyrian king, Esarhaddon, which says in part that “A (free) man is as the shadow of god, the slave is as the shadow of a (free) man; but the king, he is like unto the (very) image of God.” [22] Blocher cites a study by Erik Hornung adducing many more examples of this phenomenon. [23] In contrast, Hart writes that the Hebrew “text is saying that exercising royal dominion over the earth as God’s representative is the basic purpose for which God created man,” adding that “man is appointed king over creation, responsible to God as the ultimate king, and as such expected to manage and develop and care for creation, this task to include actual physical work.” [24]
Does the additional statement that man is made in the “likeness” (demut) of God add anything to the concept? Here opinions have varied. Patristic and medieval theology considered that the “image” of God referred to rationality, while “likeness” referred to an original righteousness lost at the fall. [25] Scholarship since the Reformation (including Calvin), on the other hand, has tended to assume that the words are synonyms. [26] Waltke argues that it is unlikely that the words are mere synonyms, but also disputes the medieval distinction. In his view, “the word likeness serves to clearly distinguish God from humans in the biblical worldview.” [27] In other words, likeness emphasizes that humanity, while made in the image of God, is not divine - a creature, not the Creator. [28]
Vocation and the Image of God
To summarize, we have argued that the teaching that man is made in the image of God refers primarily to a vocation by which humanity reflects its creator. This vocation, described in Genesis 1:26-28, is expressed in two particular tasks: humanity is to “[b]e fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it.” [29] The vocation exists within a covenantal relationship in which humanity exercises representative rule over creation on behalf of the Creator - which implies that the subduing of the earth is not a matter of capricious domination, but of nurture and care, continuing God’s creative work of bringing order where there is chaos. [30] Waltke and G.K. Beale have noted a connection between the twofold vocation. In Genesis, humanity is placed within a garden, a bounded place of great order and beauty, outside of which lies tillable ground, and then wilderness. But as Adam and Eve fulfill their calling to “be fruitful and multiply,” they will necessarily have to push back the borders of the garden to accommodate a growing population - they will be required, that is, to “subdue the earth” as they fill it. [30] In other words, the creation narrative indicates that the image of God consists of the vocation - common to every person regardless of individual capacities or characteristics - to make of all the earth an ordered place, a place literally more humane, fit for God to dwell with his people. [32]
The value placed upon the whole of the human being is most clearly demonstrated in the one to whom the Bible refers as the perfect image of God, Jesus Christ (Colossians 1:15; Hebrews 1:3). [33] In him, God himself took on humanity, including a human body; he suffered and died, and was raised from death, in that same body, never to abandon it (Philippians 2:5-11, John 20:24-29; Luke 24:36-43; Acts 1:1-9; Philippians 3:20-21). The Bible talks of him as only the “firstfruits”: in the resurrected body of Christ, we have a picture of the ultimate status of all human bodies, which are not to be discarded but restored to perfection (1 Corinthians 15). The image of God introduced in Genesis is the beginning of Christian reflection on the nature of what it means to be human, but Christians ultimately see what it means to be human, and the value that God places on our full humanity, in the person of Jesus.
What are the implications of these ideas for MIT and the Octet Collaborative? Here we can point out two. First, the notion that the image of God is a vocation that involves the nurture and development of the world generates tremendous enthusiasm for the work we are all called to, including the work of the scientists and engineers at MIT that the Octet Collaborative serves, whose work is one of the most fruitful ways for humanity to serve that calling. Second, however, the image of God also raises robust barriers to all forms of dehumanization, and preserves space to question critically the development of technologies which may violate the dignity of human persons, regardless of their benefits.
Parts of this essay are excerpted from “In the Image of our Choosing? Personhood, the Image of God, and the Ethics of Gene Editing,” published in Techne: Christian Visions of Technology, Gerald Hiestand & Todd Wilson, eds. (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, 2022)
[1] Blaise Pascal, trans. Honor Levi, ed. Anthony Levi, Pensées, no. 257 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
[2] Bruce Waltke, Genesis: A Commentary (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2001), 64; N. Sarna, Genesis (JPS Torah Commentary 1) (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 11. Calvin wrote that “God certainly might here command by his bare word what he wished to be done. But he chose to give this tribute to the excellency of man - that he would, in a manner, enter into consultation concerning his creation. This is the highest honor with which he has dignified us.” John Calvin, eds. Alister McGrath and J.I. Packer, Genesis (Crossway Classic Commentaries) (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2001), 25.
[3] Henri Blocher, In the Beginning (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1984), 90.
[4] Waltke, Genesis, 65; Richard Lints, Identity and Idolatry (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2015), 58; D.J.A. Clines, “Humanity as the Image of God,” in On the Way to the Postmodern: Old Testament Essays, 1967-1998, vol. 2 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 448.
[5] Marc Cortez, ReSourcing Theological Anthropology: A Constructive Account of Humanity in Light of Christ (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Academic, 2018). Owen Strachan has recently argued for a similar understanding of the Image of God, as “an ontological reality that leads into function. … The human race is a living testimony to its Creator.” Owen Strachan, Reenchanting Humanity: A Theology of Mankind (Geanies House, Fearn, Ross-shire, UK: Christian Focus Publications Ltd., 2019), 29-30. John F. Kilner offers a similar account (in which the image indicates that humanity bears a special connection to God and is intended to reflect God and glorify Him) in his expansive treatment of the Imago Dei, albeit with a dynamic at its center in which even pre-fall humanity was always destined to be made fully the image of God in union with Christ, who alone is the image. John F. Kilner, Dignity and Destiny: Humanity in the Image of God (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2015), especially Ch. 7.
[6] Lints, Identity and Idolatry, 23; D. Kelsey, “Personal Bodies: A Theological Anthropological Proposal,” in Personal Identity in Theological Perspective, edited by R. Lints, M. Horton, and M.R. Talbot (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2006), 139-158.
[7] Meredith Kline, Images of the Spirit (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1980); G.E. Mendenhall, Law and Covenant in Ancient Israel and the Ancient Near East (Pittsburgh: Biblical Colloquium, 1955).
[8] Lints, Identity and Idolatry, 45.
[9] Lints, Identity and Idolatry, 35, 60; Blocher, In the Beginning, 87; Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997), 451.
[10] Cortez, ReSourcing Theological Anthropology, 113.
[11] Lints, Identity and Idolatry, 60.
[12] Blocher, In the Beginning, 84.
[13] Lints, Identity and Idolatry, 79.
[14] Waltke, Genesis, 65; Clines, “The Image of God in Man,” 53-103.
[15] Lints, Identity and Idolatry, 71n38.
[16] Waltke, Genesis, 65-66; D.J.A. Clines, “The Image of God in Man,” Tyndale Bulletin 19 (1968), 53-103.
[17] Lints, Identity and Idolatry, 29, 59; Blocher, In the Beginning, 82; see also G.K. Beale, We Become What We Worship: A Biblical Theology of Idolatry (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 16.
[18] Waltke, Genesis, 66; Clines, “The Image of God in Man,” 53-103; I. Hart, “Genesis 1:1-2:3 As a Prologue to the Books of Genesis,” Tyndale Bulletin 46 (1995), 315-336. Lints, Identity and Idolatry, 69.
[19] Blocher, In the Beginning, 80.
[20] Waltke, Genesis, 66n46; Blocher writes, “no exegete defends this distinction [referring the image of God solely to humanity’s spiritual dimension] any longer…” - Blocher, In the Beginning, 80. Lints cites Westermann, Genesis: An Introduction as arguing that “royal representation is the majority view for interpreting the meaning of the image of God. Lints, Identity and Idolatry, 69.
[21] Cortez, ReSourcing Theological Anthropology, 115.
[22] R.H. Pfeiffer, State Letters of Assyria (New Haven, Connecticut: American Oriental Society, 1935), 234 (no. 345), quoted in Clines, “The Image of God in Man,” 84.
[23] Blocher, In the Beginning, 86.
[24] Waltke, Genesis, 66; Hart, “Genesis 1:1-2:3 As a Prologue to the Books of Genesis,” 322, 324. See also Lints, Identity and Idolatry, 69; K. Mathews, Genesis 1-11:26 (NAC, Nashville, Tennessee: Broadman & Holman, 1996), 169; J. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), 114, 116. We should acknowledge that there remain some modern scholars that continue to focus more on attributes than vocation in defining the image of God, such that even those who acknowledge humanity’s royal commission see this as being something for which he is fit by virtue of the image, e.g. capacities. Von Rad, for instance, writes that “This commission to rule is not considered as belonging to the definition of God’s image; but it is its consequence, i.e. that for which man is capable because of it.” G. von Rad, Genesis (OTL, London: Westminster John Knox Press, 1972), 57; cited by Lints, Identity and Idolatry, 69n29; see also G. Bray, “The Significance of God’s Image in Man,” Tyndale Bulletin 42 (1991), 195-225; and Blocher, In the Beginning, 90.
[25] Luther followed this interpretation as well. Blocher, In the Beginning, 81.
[26] Waltke, Genesis, 66; Calvin, Genesis, 26.
[27] Waltke, Genesis, 65-66, 66n51; Clines, “The Image of God in Man,” 53-103; Lints, Identity and Idolatry, 32.
[28] Blocher, In the Beginning, 82.
[29] Note that while the sun and moon are appointed to rule over the day and night on the fourth day of creation (Gen. 1:18), the sea creatures and birds are commanded to “[b]e fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” (Gen 1:22) The fact that the vocation given to humanity combines these two is another indication of the uniqueness and supremacy of humanity within God’s creation.
[30] For the sake of space we have focused on the major theme of representative rule in describing this covenantal relationship, drawing on imagery depicting God as Lord over creation and humanity as his vassal king. But it is worth noting that the biblical texts are richer in metaphor than this. Scholars including those cited here – Waltke, Beale, Lints, among others - have noted the liturgical shape of the creation narrative in Genesis, suggesting that in creating the cosmos, and Eden in particular, God has constructed a temple, and appointed humanity as his priest. Likewise, ANE covenant documents often presented the parties in filial terms, with the superior party acting as an adoptive father. In their context these images do not compete with one another, but add dimensionality to the understanding of the vocation that is constitutive of being made in the image of God.
[31] Waltke, Genesis, 186; G.K. Beale, “Eden, the Temple, and the Church’s Mission in the New Creation.” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 48 (2005), 11-12.
[32] Support for this contention comes from the last chapters of the Bible, in which the Apostle John’s vision of the ultimate state of all things includes what appears to be a garden city, and the declaration that, “Behold, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away.” Revelation 21:3b-4 RSV. This argument, of course, assumes that the biblical canon can be read as a whole.
[33] Recent theological anthropology, as with theology more generally, has exhibited a “Christological turn,” emphasizing the need not only to end but to begin reflection on what it means to be human with the person of Jesus; Cortez, ReSourcing Theological Anthropology, is an excellent and accessible recent example. There is much to commend in this approach, notwithstanding the greater focus we have applied to the text of Genesis 1 here.
