Understanding the 'Imago Dei'

The Thought of Barth, von Balthasar and Moltmann

Dominic Robinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317004592
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

As theologians across confessional divides try to say something significant about human dignity in our contemporary society, there is fresh interest in the ancient Christian doctrine that the human being is created in the 'imago Dei'. Theology is grounding responsibility for others and for the world around us in this common vision that the human being's infinite horizon lies in a divine calling and destiny. Robinson examines the 'imago Dei' debate through three giants of twentieth century theology - Karl Barth, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Jürgen Moltmann. This is placed against a survey of the principle developments and distinctions relating to the doctrine in the history of Christian thought, which in itself will be valuable for all students of Theology. A fresh analysis of ecumenical contributions places the development of the doctrine in the context of the ongoing process of ecumenical dialogue on the dignity of the human person, with special reference to this theme in the first encyclical of Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est. Whilst 'imago Dei' is the focus of this book, Robinson invites the reader to see its relevance to theology as a whole on a specifically ecumenical canvas, and relates directly to more general areas of theological anthropology, grace, salvation, and the relationship between God and the world.

Chapter 1
“Imago Dei”: The Historico-Theological Background

The Account in Genesis

God created man in the image of himself,
in the image of God he created him,
male and female he created them.
(Genesis 1:27)1

This single verse of scripture presents the basic teaching that the human person is made in the image of God, in the imago Dei. For the theological community who seek to understand this teaching it is the fundamental scriptural reference. Thus, if we are to understand the history of the theological debate we must first place this verse of scripture in its own context.

The verse in question comes towards the end of the first chapter of the book of Genesis, the narrative account of the origins of creation in the Old Testament. This chapter tells us how God created heaven and earth, day and night, water and dry land, plant life, fish and birds, animals, and then, after this God created humans in the image of himself. Then we are told that this final element of God’s work, humanity, represents the pinnacle of the created order. The world which God has created is in fact created for humanity. The environment in which man and woman will live is his and her dominion. “God blessed them, saying to them, ‘Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and conquer it. Be masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of heaven and all living animals on the earth’” (Genesis 1:28). Then we are told at the beginning of Chapter 2 that after God had finished this creative work, and having pronounced that all that had been created was very good, God rested.

The following two chapters focus on this pinnacle of God’s excellent created order, humanity, made in God’s own image. In Chapter 2 we read how God fashions man from the earth and breathes life into him. Thus he becomes a living being. God plants a beautiful garden, a “paradise” as it is translated in the Septuagint, and places man there. God gives an admonition: “You may eat indeed of all the trees in the garden. Nevertheless of the tree of knowledge of good and evil you are not to eat, for on the day you eat of it you shall most surely die” (Genesis 2:16–17). Then God creates woman as a companion for man.

It is then, in Chapter 3, in this paradise called Eden, that we are given the narrative of what will later be known as the Fall. Tempted by a serpent, for the Judaeo-Christian tradition that is to say the power of evil or the Devil, the woman eats of the fruit of the tree of good and evil, and gives some to the man who also eats of it. Both realise that they are naked and hide. God appears and because they have done what was forbidden expels them from Eden to live in the ordinary world. Because of what human beings had done there would be pain and hard labour for them and their descendants. “For dust you are and to dust you shall return”, God says to the man. God also condemns the serpent to crawl on its belly, eat dirt and to be forever the enemy of the woman and her offspring.

This basic narrative has given rise to volumes of interpretation over the centuries. However, if we are to first of all place it in its own context, it seems worthwhile asking ourselves who actually wrote it. For Biblical scholars this can be a complex question. What we can affirm is that the authorship of Genesis is unknown. Furthermore there is a basic disagreement as to whether the text we see today is more the work of an editor or that of a single writer. Clifford and Murphy, writing in The New Jerome Biblical Commentary,2 favour the widely accepted view that the Genesis narrative was originally an oral epic. This was recorded by editors in written form and then edited several times more down to as late as the sixth century BC. This view has been widely credited by many Old Testament scholars who have traced the sources of the narrative.

Biblical criticism since the eighteenth century has generally regarded there to be four main editorial traditions at work on these ancient accounts of the origins of the world in Genesis and the ancient accounts which formed the other four books of the Pentateuch. Murphy, in his introduction to the Pentateuch in The New Jerome Biblical Commentary,3 introduces these briefly, stating clearly that these generalisations he makes are not absolute. The tradition Old Testament scholars have called “J” is marked by vivid storytelling and promise of fulfilment. “E” emphasises morality and the call to faith and fear of the Lord expected by Israel. “D” stresses adherence to divine commands under threat of punishment. “P” is concerned with cult, ritual and genealogies. This editing process was surely complex and so, if we are to accept this view of how the text was formed, we are to conclude that the text of Genesis we read today is a complex mixture of different teachings on the divine origins of the world and of the place of human beings within it. It is good to be aware of that as a mark of caution at the outset of our study.

Nevertheless, today not all scripture scholars agree that the creation of the text of Genesis is so complex. Wenham, in the recently compiled Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible,4 entertains the real possibility that the work of one single creative author is an important factor in the compilation of the book. Wenham, while leaving the question of authorship open, returns to the ancient tradition that Moses was the author. “The brilliantly told narratives and tight structure of the book of Genesis make it difficult to believe that it simply evolved out of oral tradition or was the compilation of a mere editor. It bears the stamp of a powerful creative author, but who that was we cannot know. If Moses was as significant as biblical tradition paints him, we may credit him with the first draft of the book.”

However, let us step back from the question of authorship and turn to the narrative itself which the Judaeo-Christian has inherited. For regardless of exactly who wrote or edited this narrative, it is generally agreed that this seminal narrative was for centuries embedded in the tradition of the people of Israel and the ancient near East before theologians began to interpret it. Clifford’s introduction to Genesis in The New Jerome Biblical Commentary5 highlights how in Mesopotamian culture scribes explored the origin of things through narrative. There were many creation epics in circulation. In particular the Atrahasis story contains themes similar to those in the narrative of the creation and Fall of humanity. Human beings are created by the gods to maintain creation. They offend the gods because they spread and make noise. The gods punish the humans. Then a fresh beginning is made through one surviving man. So the Genesis account is not alone in exploring major questions about the relationship between God or the gods and humanity through a narrative of creation. What is true is that, however it was compiled and against whatever cultural background, this account has formed a significant basis of the Christian understanding of the relationship between God and humanity. At the very centre of this understanding is the assertion that humanity is made in God’s image. So let us state in straightforward terms what this seems to mean.

God made humanity in his own image. Thus God placed humanity in a unique position vis-à-vis himself. Humanity is, as is all creation, very good, but human beings are created with a special dignity. Human beings are given such a special dignity as creatures made in God’s image that they are placed in a paradise, the Garden of Eden. So the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches: “the first man was not only created good, but was also established in friendship with his Creator and in harmony with himself and with the creation around him”.6 Then came the Fall. In the Christian tradition what humanity did to be expelled from Paradise has generally been understood through what we term original sin. Because humanity, although very good and made in God’s image, was expelled from paradise, so humanity inherits the tendency to sin. Thus our being created in God’s image, because of that first sin, entails our tendency to sin. As the Catechism explains the teaching:

God created man in his image and established him in his friendship … A spiritual creature, man can live this friendship only in free submission to God. The prohibition against eating “of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” spells this out: “for in the day that you eat of it, you shall die”.7 The “tree of the knowledge of good and evil”8 symbolically evokes the insurmountable limits that man, being a creature, must freely recognize and respect with trust. Man is dependent on his Creator, and subject to the laws of creation and to the moral norms that govern the use of freedom. Man, tempted by the devil, let his trust in his Creator die in his heart and, abusing his freedom, disobeyed God’s command. This is what man’s first sin consisted of.9 All subsequent sin would be disobedience toward God and lack of trust in his goodness.10

Such is the basic teaching we inherit. It is now time to turn to the interpretation of Christian theologians down the centuries.

Augustine

By far the most influential of the Fathers on the developing understanding of imago Dei was Augustine. Early in his career, in his work De Diversis Quaestionibus11 he stated:

Because man is able to participate in Wisdom through the inward man, it is according to the latter that he is said to be created ad Imaginem, in order that he might be fully formed by this Image with nothing intervening and in such a fashion that nothing could be closer to God. Thus he would truly know, and live, and be. No created thing could be greater.12

It is important to be clear about what Augustine seems to mean. This requires us to make some distinctions. Firstly, Augustine identifies humanity’s being created “ad Imaginem” with the interior ability of human beings to participate in Wisdom, that is to participate in the life of the true image of God. For Augustine the image of God himself is the second person of the Trinity, the Word. It is according to this relationship to the true image of God himself that humanity is said to be “ad Imaginem”. Humanity itself is not in fact the “imago”, the image of God as though we reflect God in a mirror. Rather humanity is placed in a special relationship with God. This basic relationship marks off humanity from all other creatures.

This basic truth, however, allows us to say that each individual human being has a “likeness” (“similitudo”) to God. Each individual human person has a special dignity proper to himself which constitutes his own particular relationship with God and his fellows. It presents to each and everyone the possibility of living, knowing and being in a way which begins to find beyond himself the God according to whose image one has been created. Thus, at the very heart of Augustine’s thought, we have the basic notion that humanity is made with a special dignity which is generic yet also deeply personal to each individual. Thus we may draw close to God or distance ourselves from him. As Farrugia puts it, quoting Augustine in De Trinitate:

[I]t is likeness that constitutes and accounts for either closeness or distance between God and the human person: “For one does not approach God across intervals of time and space but by likeness, and by unlikeness he draws away from him”.13

So how does Augustine explain the next stage of the narrative of this special personal relationship? In other words, how does he understand human beings’ response to grace as actually an incorporation into the life of Christ who has claimed him? This narrative will be crucial for trying to understand the theological traditions which flow from it. First of all we must be clear that Augustine affirmed the fundamental Judaeo-Christian faith in a Creator God who makes all things, including humanity, good. This straightforward interpretation of the Genesis account is a fundamental starting point. “All of nature, therefore, is good, since the Creator of all nature is supremely good.”14 So, in making humanity “ad Imaginem Dei”, God made humanity good.

Now, however, there is an important distinction to make which will underscore an aspect of Augustine’s thought which would serve to play down the emphasis on human dignity but highlight the negative tendency in humanity to turn away from God. The basic intrinsic difference between God and humans made “ad Imaginem Dei” is in fact a characteristic distinguishing us from God which we share with angels. God is immutable but human beings and angels are mutable. On this distinction he forms the basis of his teaching on the Fall in Chapters VIII–XIII of his work Enchiridion on Faith, Hope and Love. Augustine declared that “the cause of the evil is the defection of the will of a being who is mutably good from the Good which is immutable”.15

It is through this mutability that the Fall occurs. Through it humanity can be both ignorant of the good and desire that which is not good. “This was the primal lapse of the rational creature, that is, his first privation of the good. In train of this there crept in, even without his willing it, ignorance of the right things to do and also an appetite for noxious things.”16 When the first human chose to turn away from the good this had a catastrophic consequence for the whole human race:

From this state, after he had sinned, man was banished, and through his sin he subjected his descendants to the punishment of sin and damnation, for he had radically corrupted them, in himself, by his sinning. As a consequence of this, all those descended from him and his wife (who had prompted him to sin and who was condemned along with him at the same time) – all those born through carnal lust, on whom the penalty is visited as for disobedience – all those entered into the inheritance o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 “Imago Dei”: The Historico-Theological Background
• 2 Karl Barth
• 3 Hans Urs von Balthasar
• 4 Jürgen Moltmann
• 5 Concluding Reflections: Broader Horizons
• Bibliography
• Glossary
• Index