What Does it Mean to Be Human?
Study Drawing for Morning Sun, Edward Hopper (1952)
I can’t imagine a better place to be in ministry than Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Perhaps you think you misread that. Cambridge, Massachusetts? But isn’t ministry hard there? Aren’t the people cold and unfriendly? Isn’t Christianity a weird oddity?
Well, yes, to all of those questions (although I prefer not to think of the people as cold and unfriendly so much as simply honest and direct about how they feel about you, and by the way who DO you think you are, changing lanes right in front of me like that?). Yes, ministry is often hard in Cambridge. But with the hardness comes hard questions, that force a reckoning between the gospel and real life, and which, if you follow them into conversation, form the basis for deep and authentic relationship. To do ministry in Cambridge is to be forced to be ready to give an answer to how Jesus changes our relationship to work, to money, to education, to family, to our own bodies, to sex, to technology, to politics, to the earth, to time and space itself — in short, to absolutely everything.
In my two decades of ministry here in Cambridge I’ve noticed that to enter into those questions is to come back, time and time again, to the same central question: What does it mean to be human? That, so often, is the question beneath the question. And so, this year, it is to this question that the Octet Collaborative will turn its attention in this essay space (and, as I’ll explain, across many other facets of our work at MIT): What does it mean to be human? Over the course of the year, we will explore varied specific aspects of this question - but for today, we begin by giving a general answer to the question, rooted in biblical theology.
Made in the Image of God
The Christian tradition has nearly universally given the answer that to be human is made in the image of God, keying off of this passage from the first chapter of the Bible:
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.
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 heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” — Genesis 1:26-28
So, simple enough: to be human is to be made in the image of God. But… what does that mean? And that is where things get a bit more difficult.
There is no verse in the Bible that provides us with a straightforward definition of the image of God, no statement that “to be made in the image of God mean…” And so, theologians and interpreters of the Bible have been left to wrestle with the meaning of this small but significant phrase for centuries: and wrestle they have, without giving rise to one single consensus.
We can, however, trace three main threads through the attempts to give an answer - and in the end, we may be able to weave them together. Throughout history, theologians have tied the image of God in humanity to rationality, to relationship, and to vocation.
Rational Animals
Historically, the meaning of the image of God has most commonly been drawn out with reference to human rationality. Augustine, for instance, wrote that “Man's excellence consists in the fact that God made him to His own image by giving him an intellectual soul, which raises him above the beasts of the field.” [1] Elsewhere Augustine writes that God made humanity “after His own image, not as regards the possession of a body and of mortal life, but as regards the rational mind with the power of knowing God, and with the superiority as compared with all irrational creatures which the possession of reason implies.” [2] Thomas Aquinas followed a similar logic, tying the image of God in man to his rationality and intellect, which “is that whereby the rational creature excels other creatures…” [3]. Augustine and Thomas both tie the image of God to God’s trinitarian nature through what has come to be known as the “psychological analogy”: that just as the Son can be understood to be a procession within God of the word according to knowledge, and the Spirit a procession within God of love according to the will, so humanity is characterized by the faculties of knowledge and will. (Note that this means that calling humanity “rational” goes beyond reference to mere cognition, to include will and love as well.)
Unsurprisingly, given the influence of these two theologians on the western tradition, this interpretation largely held sway through the early 20th century, among both Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians. But recently, a note of caution has begun to arise as theologians considered what it would mean to define humanity in terms of intellectual capacity - specifically, would it mean excluding from humanity persons whose intellectual capacities were not fully formed, or lost to age or injury? If humanity is grounded in capacities, the concern goes, then human dignity is something that can be acquired, and something that can be lost. As John Swinton warned, “If personhood is defined by whether someone does or does not have certain characteristics, qualities, and abilities then the tone and focus of the discussion does inevitably change. But that change is not necessarily for the better.” [4]
Made for Relationship
A second way of defining the image of God points to the inherent relationality of being human - that we are made for relationship with one another and, more importantly, with God. The most famous exponent of this view has been the 20th-century Swiss theologian, Karl Barth. Barth, commenting on Genesis 1:26-28, notes that in reference to the image of God, “the biblical witness makes no reference at all to the peculiar intellectual and moral talents and possibilities of man, to his reason and its determination and exercise… [but rather] that God has created him male and female, that he is this being in… relationship, and therefore in natural fellowship with God.” [5] Theologians who have drawn out what we might call this “relational analogy” have, like Augustine and Aquinas, pointed out the ways this concept images the Trinity: just as the triune God is eternally Father, Son, and Spirit, in relationship, so humanity is, from the beginning, made male and female: a differentiation that always already assumes the other, a diversity made for the purpose of unity.
Critics of this view, on the other hand, have questioned whether the male-female distinction is an adequate image of one God in three persons. They have also pointed out that both the relational account and the rational are entirely focused on characteristics internal to humanity, with no reference to how humanity is related to the rest of creation (a clear focus of the passage in Genesis 1). Do these accounts, critics have asked, provide us with any help in understanding what being human has to do with being a part of a wider creation, and how we might serve it on God’s behalf?
Called to Vocation
A final account of the image of God, focused on vocation, seeks to remedy this last critique. Recent biblical scholars have noted that although Genesis 1 provides no definition of the image of God, the concept is situated in the context of a blessing pronounced by God over humanity, calling human beings into a vocation, to “[b]e 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 heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” Beyond this, scholars have pointed out that the specific Hebrew words used in Genesis 1, tselem and demut (image and likeness), are most often found in ancient near eastern sources in reference to physical representations of gods (idols) placed in temples (in fact, following Genesis 1, the most frequent translation for the word tselem in the Old Testament is simply “idol”!). These statues were meant to be physically representative of the god, but they would also serve the function of exercising representative rule on the god’s behalf: where the image was, the god ruled, speaking with authority (and, of course, of necessity) through his priests. The difference in the biblical account is that God places no mere physical idol in His temple (the Garden); instead, He creates humanity in His image, to serve Him as both priests and kings, ruling over creation on his behalf. (One way to think about the second commandment that comes later, in the book of Exodus, is to observe that humanity is to carve no image of God because God already created his own image when he made humanity).
Much recent biblical scholarship favors the vocational understanding of the image of God. It has the advantage of not emphasizing capacities (intellectual or otherwise), as though these were the image of God, but rather understanding capacities like rationality as being given in service to a vocation to which all persons, regardless of capacities or characteristics, are jointly called.
Being Human at the Octet Collaborative
All three approaches to understanding what it means to be human in terms of being made in God’s image have their strengths. They certainly aren’t mutually exclusive, and indeed, our belief is that it’s best to draw on all three in seeking to answer the question: what does it mean to be human. In other words, to say that humanity is made in God’s image is to draw attention to the fact that women and men are rational animals (able to reason, will, and love), inherently designed to live in relationship, and called to a common vocation as stewards of God’s creation. We might note further that these three depend on one another: our capacities are given in service to our vocation and to our relationships; living in relationship with one another is necessary for us to serve our vocation.
Over the course of the year, we’ll have opportunity to explore more specific aspects of how being human exercises our rationality, depends on and fosters relationships, and serves our God-given vocation. For now, I want to conclude by noting the connections between the image of God and the work that Octet is doing at MIT.
Rationality, vocation, relationship. We are made to know, made to do, made to relate. It’s not a far leap to MIT’s own motto: mens et manus, mind and hand - theory and application. Of course, this only captures two of the three, but MIT’s own wellness initiative, Mind Hand Heart (led by faculty chair and Octet faculty advisor Roz Picard) completes the triad. So where does Octet come in?
The verse that animates all of our work is found in Jesus’ statement of the famous Shema, in Mark 12:29-30:
'Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.'
There they are again: mind, hand (strength), heart, plus one more. It is the soul which binds them all together, gives them unity, coherence, and resonance, and it is just here where Octet seeks to do its work, pointing beyond ourselves to the one worthy of our love and our worship.
One more triad: truth, goodness, and beauty, corresponding to mind, hand, heart, and to rationality, vocation, relationship. The Octet Collaborative pursues truth through its work to promote ethical wisdom in science and technology; we pursue goodness in our efforts to foster civil dialogue and intellectual hospitality, and later this year, we will introduce our first efforts to enhance the experience of beauty on the MIT campus, as we invite members of the community to delve into the science and experience of awe and wonder.
We hope you will join us this year, as we explore what it means to be human here in this essay space, and seek to put it into practice in our daily work among the MIT community to which God has called us.
[1] Augustine, trans. Richard Stothert, "Reply to Faustus the Manichæan", in St. Augustine: The Writings Against the Manichaeans and Against the Donatists, vol. 4, edited by Philip Schaff (A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, First Series) (Buffalo, New York: Christian Literature Company, 1887), 318.
[2] Augustine, trans. John Hammond Taylor, The Literal Meaning of Genesis (Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1983), Book 12, Chapter 29
[3] St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Summa Theologiae (available at http://www.op.org/summa/, accessed April 14, 2012), I.93. Aquinas quotes the passages of Augustine’s commentary on the literal meaning of Genesis cited above.
[4] John Swinton, “Introduction: Re-imagining Genetics and Disability,” in John Swinton and Brian Brock, eds., Theology, Disability, and the New Genetics: Why Science Needs the Church (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2007), 8.
[5] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, edited by Geoffrey Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, III/1 (London: T&T Clark, 2004), 183-92.
