The Image of Her Father

And God said, “Let us make a human in our image, by our likeness, to hold sway over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the heavens and the cattle and the wild beasts and all the crawling things that crawl upon the earth [Genesis 1:26].

I vividly remember the first time I sought to teach Genesis. It was about 1983 or so, about three years before Jane and I took the leap required for me to enroll in Duke Divinity School for graduate study. I was leading and teaching a wonderfully active and unruly crowd of young adults in the Sunday School department at First UMC, Gastonia. There were 25 or so of us in the class—mostly married couples. We were all in our late twenties and early-to-mid thirties.

One in the group—not me—really knew his Bible. Yet, he didn’t lord that fact over the rest of us. He had been raised in an academic family environment that had devoted as much time to Isaiah and Matthew as it had to Shakespeare, and so, he often enlightened the rest of us with his comments or probing questions.

We’d hardly dipped our toes into the proverbial waters described in Genesis 1:9, barely contemplated the sun and the stars, i.e., “the lights in the vault of the sky” [NIV], made known to us in 1:14, when this knowledgeable friend—let’s call him David—said he had a serious question about verse 26. Knowing his tendency to ask questions for which I had no adequate answer, yet trying to show some confidence, I reluctantly said, “Fire away!”

He retorted:

In Isaiah 45 [45:5], and several other places in the Old Testament, we hear God clearly say, “I am the LORD, and there is no other; apart from me there is no God.” The Oneness of God seems clear and central to both the Jewish and Christian faiths. I’ve wondered why then, when describing God’s creation of humanity, the God of Genesis 1:26 speaks in the plural, using “us” and “our” image?

Before I could say that I had no real clue, that while I’d reviewed two or three commentaries regarding the verse, and had wondered myself about God’s use of the plural, another member of the class quickly said, “Well, obviously, the verse is referring to the Trinity. The ‘us’ is the three persons of God.”

I think my response was something like, “Oh yeah, that’s probably what’s going on.”

And yet, even then, before I spent three years at Duke Div, I felt uncomfortable pushing a particularly Christian theological idea—the Holy Trinity—into the primordial text. After all, it took the Church 450 years to settle on the doctrine of the Trinity. And even then, much of it can only be explained through the context of holy mystery.

Assuming, for the moment, that the author of Genesis was Moses—the full discussion is for another day—did Moses decide to leave little Trinitarian clues in his text that would be meaningless for more than fifteen hundred years [i.e., from 1250 B.C. to 450 A.D.]? Is the OT filled with these little bits of a Christian quasi-Da Vinci code? Or, as a preacher friend has said on several occasions, did God, through God’s inspired writers, leave little “Easter eggs” sprinkled all through the ancient text, to be uncovered and enjoyed more than a thousand years later by us good Christians?

I think we need to be careful, else we end up arguing that Jews don’t understand their Bible, that we know more about it than they do. It is perhaps ok for us to read our Christian context back into the Hebrew Bible, but the Hebrew Bible (our OT) exists on its own, with or without our interpretation.

And so, my basic point here is that we needn’t search for Easter eggs. The Genesis text stands strongly on its own, thank you ma’am/ sir. And so while I don’t think this week’s OT reading speaks of the Trinity—although Sunday is, after all, Trinity Sunday, I think the Genesis author has something else in mind.

For example, what if the Creation story is not so much trying to tell us how we came into existence, but rather trying to tell us something important about God? What if the story is trying to show us that at God’s core, at God’s essence, at God’s most inner being, we have a deity who insists upon relationship? Let me try to unpack that thought.

First, a god that desires to live without relationships has no need to assign names to that which he has been created. That sort of god could ponder and enjoy creation on his own. But things get names so that they can be talked about. We name things so that tell stories about them, tell jokes about them, and speak fondly of them.

We inherit that trait from God. And so, in both Genesis Creation stories, God assigns names to various things. God called the dome Sky [1:8]. God called the dry land Earth and the waters that were gathered together he called Sea [1:10]. There would have been no reason to do so, except that God desired to have something, or more accurately, someone to converse with about these created things.

Second, while God’s creative act of forming Earth, Sky, and Seas, teaming with birds, fish, animals, plants, etc. is certainly majestic, those created things are neither self-aware, nor God-aware. It is only when God turns to humanity that God creates in a particular and peculiar fashion.

So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them [1:27].

God creates humanity in order that creation can be shared. And the best way to assure God’s self that God would be able to share was to create humanity in God’s own image. Through that act of creation, we all share a sort of divine essence, an ability to relate to the Creator and to that which is created. What is more, God doesn’t create a particular people (e.g., the children of Israel, Americans, Protestants); God creates all of humanity essentially as one.

For example, as important as the descendants of Abraham will become within God’s story of Creation and covenant, in this primordial story of first creation, we first encounter Adam, not Abraham. Moreover, the Hebrew word for human being is ben Adam, a child of Adam.

So all of us—Jews, Christians, Muslims, atheists, agnostics, Blacks, Whites, all other races, even Democrats and Republicans are all ben Adam. None have a special claim to humanity.

I understand that rabbinic tradition teaches that God created Adam [the male human being in the second Creation story, Exodus 2:4b-25] initially in singular form so that no one would be able to say to another, “My father was greater than your father.” In terms of our humanity, therefore, we have all descended from one father, just as theologically, we all are subordinate to and serve one Father.

Having been created in God’s image, both male and female, God’s moral world, therefore, leaves no room for sexism. Created in God’s image, humanity has no status barriers; they all go flying away. As St. Paul would later write,

There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor free; nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus [Galatians 3:28].

Viewed through the prism of Genesis 1:26-27, racism is, therefore, blasphemous, since it refutes God’s role in Creation. The hatred that is spewed from both sides of America’s “great divide” is similarly not just crass and harsh; it is wrong. When we hate, we shouldn’t expect God to join in with our hatred. Our target was made just as much in the image of God as we were.

Portions of the church have sometimes been used to prop up and defend sources of hatred. Slavery was sometimes rationalized, poverty was all too often ignored, riches were envied, prominence in society was lauded. I’ve lost my source for this thought, but again viewed through the prism of Genesis, through the prism of God’s wondrous action in creating humanity in God’s own image, genuine Judaism and Christianity are always countercultural, for they will always rebel against anything and anyone who assaults humanity and humanity’s dignity.

One final thought: unlike many of the other gods that have been worshipped over these many years, the God of Genesis is not known through any cast or molten image. Indeed, the God of Genesis will ban such representations in the Ten Commandments [Exodus 20:4-6]. Instead, God is known in a strange and unusual fashion—through the human beings who have existed and who still exist throughout history, where covenants are made, where decisions are debated and determined, and where promises and other commitments are honored.

The Genesis text teaches us that there is a staggering contrast between the fixed image (idol)—or career, stock portfolio, mountain cabin, closed-gate community, or political stance—and the Imago Dei. The God of Genesis 1 still calls out to us. The God of Genesis is still actively creating. The God of Genesis offers true relationship. All this is given. The only question: Will we respond?