The Question Of Image

A few nights ago I attended a Shabbas - Sabbath - celebration at Temple Aaron, a Conservative Jewish synagogue in St. Paul. If you’ve never been to one try to get an opportunity; it’s a wonderful experience. But this one was a little different than most. To celebrate Martin Luther King’s birthday they had invited a mostly Afro-American singing group, The Metropolitan Men’s Chorus, to sing for the service. Can you imagine listening to “Let my people go” sung by African-Americans in a Jewish worship service? It was simply awesome. But the reason I mention it now is that before they started to sing, one of the members of the chorus spoke a few words of introduction and thanks, and concluded by saying, “If you don’t think I’m made in the image of God, you don’t have a problem with me. You have a problem with God.”

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

What does it mean, to be made in the image of God?

And what does it have to do with our relationship with him?

Image-of-God isn’t about appearance. That’s really obvious, once you stop to think about it... We’re told all throughout both the Old Testament and the New that God doesn’t have a body; he is spirit. Although some theologians have tried to argue that the fact that human beings walk upright, and gaze upward and outward, is a reflec-tion of the divine essence. But that doesn’t seems to me to hold much water; after all, penguins and ostriches walk upright as well. And although many of us spend rather too much of our time hiding our heads in the sand as ostriches supposedly do, I somehow doubt that ostriches have an equivalent claim to image-of-God status.

But do we care? Why do we care? Isn’t this more of the same sort of stuff that medieval scholars used to worry about, like “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” What has it got to do with you and me, now, trying to live as Christians in a very complicated and confusing world?

Well, do you know anybody with self-image problems? Have you ever struggled with an identity crisis? As far as I can tell from reading and talking to people, image and identity are among the biggest problems of American culture, especially for our young people. It certainly has been for me. Even though God has made some progress, I still struggle against perfectionism, the idea that I am only worth as much as my latest achievement. But if that’s how things worked we’d be back with the Pharisees trying to earn God’s favor.

Finding our worth in human standards of success or failure is a dead end. Every attempt to define what we humans really are about, without reference to God, have all been mistaken. We’ve seen in the last few decades that Marx’s idea that people are essentially economic beings is totally bankrupt. The rise and fall of the Yuppies showed that materialism - even when we’re successful - is incapable of providing purpose and value. In America, at least, the predominant secular view today seems to be that the key component of human identity is sexual. But pursuing fulfillment through sexuality leads to broken marriages, promiscuity, AIDS, abortion, and sexual violence of all kinds. Neither Wilt Chamberlain, with his boast of over a thousand sexual partners, nor Madonna, who marketed her sexuality for millions, can give us the answers. The questions of self-image and identity can only be solved by looking to God, and finding out what we, as redeemed persons, are supposed to be changing into.

What is in us, you and me, that God is trying to grow?

In order to answer that question honestly, that is, without just saying “because I said so,” I’m going to have to slash through a thicket of theological undergrowth, but bear with me: I promise you it will clear up eventually.

One of the earliest and longest-lived theories is that we are in God’s image be-cause of our reasoning capacity. The great medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas said that “the intellect is that whereby the rational creature excels other creatures; wherefore this image of God is not found even in the rational creature except in the mind...” That’s a very attractive thought, for people like me who tend to be rather cerebral. And even though we could design an entire graduate seminar on “The Intellectual Implications of the Image” I’m going to dismiss it with two observations. First, is intellectual achievement a sign of spirituality? I don’t think so, and the Apostle Paul in says, “Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has God not made foolish the wisdom of the world?” [1 Cor 20] And second, the thought that the more “intelligent” someone is, the more “image of God” he or she can lay claim to, is a very scary idea. Intellect, like sexuality, is a gift from God to be celebrated, and to be used according to the manufacturer’s directions - but neither one can hold up as the center of our existence. If we try to base our identity on either reason or sex we’ll be sunk.