Imago Dei: Man/Woman Created in the Image of God

Implications for Theology, Pastoral Care, Eucharist, Apologetics, Aesthetics

George Hobson

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781532689987
  9781532689994
• eBook ISBN:
  9781532690006
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología cristiana

The question "What is human nature?" is in vogue today. Like everything else, this concept is being deconstructed in the context of the reigning ideology of individualistic materialism. Is there a fixed human nature, or is this simply a manipulatable social construct with no objective reference? This book says: "Yes, there is: the imago Dei: man/woman created in the image of God." Hobson argues that this text from Genesis 1:26-28 is a God-given anthropological revelation that establishes the relational bond of human beings with their Creator and also with his creation, for which the imago equips us to be responsible stewards. Many of Hobson's essays were delivered as talks in parishes. They explore from multiple angles the import of the imago Dei for theological and sacramental reflection, apologetics, aesthetics, art, and, at a hands-on practical level, for pastoral counseling and inner healing. His texts, one of which opens with a discussion of genocide, contain incisive critiques of the dark side of modernity alongside wide-ranging demonstrations of the pertinence of the imago Dei to the current debates about human dignity and rights. His book is a ringing call to the church to take the measure of the value of this anthropological revelation for its proclamation of the gospel.

Part I

KNOWLEDGE OF GOD

The Explanatory Power of a Trinitarian Natural Theology

(Talk at the American Church, Paris)

I

The practice of natural theology has traditionally been an effort to prove or demonstrate the existence of God by arguing from observed phenomena in nature on the basis of universal rational principles. It has been conducted separately from theological discussion of the God of revelation, the God revealed through the incarnation to be triune: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The perception that there is order within nature has always led to a felt need to explain this order. The classical Christian response shows the influence of the Greek notion of a universal logos, or cosmic order, and of Aristotelian cosmology, combined with Paul’s insight in Romans 1:20 that God’s power and nature have been understood and seen through the visible creation. Up until the twentieth century, this Christian response has been the rationalistic one of inference from nature to a first cause, on the assumption that God’s existence is universally perceptible and philosophically demonstrable.

Let me describe briefly two quite different examples of this traditional approach to natural theology. In the thirteenth century, which saw the rise of scholasticism and an intense stress on reason, Thomas Aquinas set out his Five Ways, or Proofs, of God’s existence, which involve tracing back to a First Principle the existence of motion, causality, contingency, degree of value—implying an ultimate perfection—and design or purpose. The basic argument for all Five Ways is that an infinite regress in any of these instances is rationally incoherent, and that in every case a First Cause, an Absolute Source, must be predicated. The existence of motion, for example, implies a Prime Mover; or, what exists might not have existed, so a Necessary Being must be predicated beyond the reach of contingency; or, directionality—what appears to be purposefulness—is to be observed in nature, in organic growth and in human action, so an Original Designer must be inferred or deducted; or, at the ethical level, the existence of natural law and the human conscience which constrains us and yet which is clearly not the result of our own will or reason, points to a metaphysical source beyond ourselves. This kind of approach to the question of the existence of God, while strong philosophically and persuasive to a believer, is vulnerable to the criticism (in my view weak, but the determined unbeliever can make anything count as an objection) that it involves what critics call flat assertion on the basis of ignorance, and that the inference in each case to a personal primary being called God is arbitrary.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, arguing within the mechanistic cosmological framework of Newtonian thought as it had developed in the eighteenth century, William Paley saw the universe, and this world in particular, as a watch—that is, as a mechanism—from which he logically inferred a Watchmaker. He lived in the period of early industrialism and saw the apologetic potential of a mechanistic analogy to demonstrate the necessary existence of God. Paley adduced many other natural features to support his basic argument that contrivances in nature are inexplicable without reference to a Designer, but his mechanistic approach, in keeping with the tenor of his age, was vulnerable to the same criticism as Aquinas’s arguments; moreover, with respect to the specific watch analogy, the atheist philosopher David Hume pointed out that the world could just as well be compared with a plant or some living organism for which a strict design argument was philosophically untenable. This last criticism became even more forceful later in the century when Darwin observed that an appearance of design arises naturally in the course of evolution.

In the twentieth century, the Swiss theologian Karl Barth objected strongly to the independent aspect of traditional natural theology, by which he meant the development of arguments for the existence and nature of God separately from the biblical revelation of God the Trinity. Not only could natural theology, so conceived, not give knowledge of the Trinitarian God, but it split discussion of the knowledge of God into two parts—the first concerned with the one God that reason was supposed to be able to demonstrate, and the other concerned with the triune God revealed through Jesus Christ. Barth perceived that this was theologically and methodologically unacceptable. It was not that Barth ruled out the possibility of seeing traces of the Creator God within nature, or that he saw no place for rational structure in our knowledge of God, but he insisted that such a structure must be coordinated with revelation if it was not to be misleading abstraction.

The approach to natural theology—to the question of how a Christian is to consider the relation of nature to God—depends on one’s point of view, on what one sees. The modern world is very conscious of perspective, of point of view. It is evident that the fact that all human beings are rational does not mean we all see nature—the world out there—in the same way. Cultural context and religious experience fundamentally influence what and how we see. A converted Christian person will see evidence of God in nature, because he or she believes God is the Creator. A nonbeliever is not likely to see the same thing in the same way, obviously. This insight, common today, means that although the traditional approach to natural theology has been useful in its time, it is no longer really serviceable.

The main point to be made in this regard is that knowledge of the true God revealed in Scripture and supremely in Jesus Christ cannot be read off nature. One can sense—as Paul insists in the text from Romans that I mentioned a moment ago—God’s reality in the power and order of nature, yes, but one cannot, by virtue of human reason, infer or deduce the Trinity from natural phenomena. In recent years, a new approach to natural theology has been emerging which takes its starting point from within the Trinitarian framework. Its aim is not to prove or even argue for the existence or nature of God, but to give evidence of the explanatory power of the specific Christian vision of reality based on revelation, with respect both to scientific discoveries and to everyday experience.

II

I want to look now at how the apostle Paul talked about nature when addressing a crowd of curious Greek intellectuals in Athens. The account is in Acts 17:22–34. Paul recognizes that the people are religious and worship a variety of objects. In his wanderings in the city he had seen an altar inscribed “To an unknown god,” and he declares to his listeners that he will proclaim to them who God is. He does not proceed by using rationalistic arguments, as one might have expected in a Greek context. He refers immediately to the Creator of “the world and everything in it,” and goes on to call this God Lord and to declare that God had given mortals life and breath and had set out times and spatial boundaries for nations so that humans would search for him and perhaps find him. The Greeks had no concept of such a personal Creator of all things—the Platonic notion of a demiurge was as close as they had come to such an idea—but a vague sort of pantheistic sense of a divine presence was clearly in the air, and it was to this religious intuition among his listeners that the apostle was appealing.

To support this approach he quotes two Greek poets, Epimenides and the Stoic, Aratus, to the effect that in God “we live and move and have our being . . . for we too are his offspring” (v. 28). He then makes his decisive move, which is to declare that this God, of whose existence the Greeks have an intuition but no knowledge, calls people to repent—that is, basically, to change their way of seeing reality, which will change the way they act—because he—this God—has fixed a day when he will judge mankind, and this judgment will be carried out by a man whom God has appointed and whom, as an assurance of this, he has raised from the dead.

What is interesting for our purposes here is that Paul, in making his case for the true identity of the deity whom the Greeks call “the unknown god,” puts his emphasis on the creation of the world by this God and on God’s act to raise from the dead, in historical space/time, a man whom he has designated to be judge of the world. Paul does not speak explicitly here of this man as God—of the incarnation—but he does stress the resurrection. He does not use the rationalist tools of argument commonly used by the Greek philosophers when trying to take account of the religious impulse or to transcend it.

The God whom the Greeks have an intuition of, but who is very different from their ideas about him, is the Creator of nature and an actor in history. He is not to be identified with nature, but, as its Author, he is intimately associated with it. He is a personal deity who has dominion over the beginning and end of all things, over the destiny of mankind, over life and death. To speak truly of God, to identify the true God, one must speak of concrete nature, of the material world: God is the one who creates and orders nature and who acts within it to judge and redeem. His self-revelation happens in and through the material creation. Whether one accepts this argument or not—some Greeks did, some did not—it is evident that Paul’s vision provides a kind of coherence to the material world and to man’s destiny within it that neither the Greeks’ religiosity nor their philosophizing could provide. It is my contention that Paul’s vision, in its full-fledged Trinitarian shape, provides us too, living in the context of modern science, with a way of seeing all aspects of reality that gives them coherence and intelligibility.

III

Let me now approach this Trinitarian question from an anthropological angle. A philosophical stance adopted by the majority of the scientific community is what is called critical realism. It holds, in agreement with common sense, that there is an objective, external world out there separate from us, the observers, but also that we, as knowers, are subjectively involved in that world by virtue of our interpretation and appropriation of it; at the level of quantum phenomena, moreover, it is the case, the physicists tell us, that we actually influence that world out there by our experimental observation of it. Cognitive neuroscience of perception is showing that we exist in relation to the natural world, that our mental representations of it shape the way we see and understand it, and vice versa—in a word, that we are participants in nature, interactive with it; we do not create reality as such, but we do act creatively upon it—we are certainly not simply passive recipients of sensory data.

For our purposes, what I want to do here is to suggest the theological ground in Scripture for this relationality of mankind to nature, a relationality that philosophers at least since Kant have recognized and that neuroscience is confirming in our day. We are not so-called objective observers. Yes, our self-consciousness—unique in nature—gives us distance from the material world, but it does not separate us intrinsically from that world, in the manner of Cartesian dualism. The strict subject-object schema is transcended by the reality that we are integrated constitutionally into this material world that is God’s handiwork. By referring to the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, we can gain the theological perspective that undergirds this reality.

Genesis 1 reveals that God is t...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Knowledge of God
• Part II: The Imago Dei
• Part III: Pastoral Theology
• Part IV: Eucharistic Theology
• Part V: Apologetics
• Part VI: Aesthetics
• Bibliography