See Volf, Public Faith; Volf and Croasmun, For the Life of the World.
3. Volf and Croasmun, For the Life of the World, 44.
4. Brooks, Second Mountain.
Acknowledgments
I owe a huge debt of thanks to a dear friend of forty-five years, Toni Contreras, whose stunning technical skill on the computer was exceeded only by his generosity in giving me, freely and graciously, of his own precious time. Without you, Toni, old friend, this book, for which even you found the formatting difficult, simply would not have seen publication. Thank you!
Introduction
The texts in this book, with one exception, were written over the last fifteen years and vary widely in style and subject matter. I have updated them where this seemed necessary. Apart from the three long essays, they were given as talks in parish churches. All of them are rooted in one way or another in the seminal biblical text in Genesis 1:26–28. Verse 26 reads:“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; man and woman he created them.” This foundational Judeo-Christian anthropological principle is a revelation. It is not an inference from nature. One cannot read it off from the world around us. I believe it to be a fundamental God-given truth that Jews and Christians, in different ways, can use to bring theoretical coherence and practical responses to many of the challenges and baffling questions facing mankind in our day. How is it that lawful order and structure in the universe are, by a variety of means, apprehensible by human beings? Or how is it that what we call beauty is a reality eluding exact definition yet one that men and women perceive and cherish and seek tirelessly, in all cultures, to express in one form or another? What is this “beauty?” What does it signify? Or further: Is there a common human nature, an anthropological unity underlying the various ethnic and tribal expressions to be found on our planet, or is any such notion, or imagined commonality, necessarily a social construct, be it religious, philosophical, or juridical? (The relevance of this issue to current discussions about human dignity and rights cannot be exaggerated.) Or again: Whence comes the essentially religious nature of human beings, in the sense that we all experience a hunger for a transcendent reality, an inner longing for justice, peace, love, joy, freedom, and immortality, even within the existential reality of violence, cruelty, oppression, suffering, and death that characterizes human history? Whence comes this yearning for plenitude—for the absolute, for dynamic perfection—when the daily reality of human life falls far short of any such ideal or hope? How are we to understand the relation of this longing for a supranatural truth and love uniting human beings and indeed all creatures, with the intuition we also have of being ontologically integrated in an infinitely complex earthly and cosmic natural environment to which and, in a mysterious sense, for which we feel ourselves to be responsible?
The first two papers in this collection that make up Part One broach the question of our knowledge of God through natural theology on the one hand and—with specific reference to the resurrection—through divine action/revelation on the other. Emphasis is put in the first paper on a kind of natural theology based not on philosophical argument of the Thomistic sort, but rather on the explanatory power of theologically based insight into the natural world, even if such insight cannot actually give us personal knowledge of the Creator. By virtue of our being made in God’s image, we have the capacity to intuit, discover, and explore the phenomenal order in every aspect of the universe. All of these aspects are integrated in a coherent unity which, upon reflection, makes nonsense of the notion that sheer chance has produced the cosmos and everything in it, including human life. It is not that chance is absent, but rather that it is to be discerned within an overall context of law, in a relationship that allows a creative balance of freedom and order in the deployment of energy and matter. I devote a number of pages to reflections on mathematics, cosmology, and evolution, and conclude with a few thoughts on beauty and mystery.
In the second paper what is underlined is the impossibility, in our finite and fallen state, of our knowing the true God without his self-revelation. The supreme moment of this divine self-revelation is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. But it must also be evident that if mankind were not made in God’s image, we could not possibly either desire or receive this divine self-revelation. At the heart of Christ’s resurrection is the revelation of the God who is life and love. This corresponds perfectly to the deepest desire in the heart of all of us, even in our alienated state. I consider at some length the theme of Christ’s second coming as the necessary conclusion to his redemptive action on behalf of mankind, and I go on to reflect briefly on the nature of life after death and on the final judgment.
My underlying point in both essays in Part One is that we would not be able to know God in any way whatsoever—neither by reflection nor by intuition nor by revelation—if he had not created us in his image.
The lengthy essay on the imago Dei that follows in Part Two is an intensive discussion of this seminal anthropological revelation in Genesis 1 and serves as the centerpiece of the book and the thematic reference for all the other texts. It starts off with a discussion of genocide that leads into a sustained critique of the nihilistic side of modernity and postmodernity, of which, I suggest, the underlying cause is our progressive rejection of the Judeo-Christian God since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and hence, logically, of man/woman as made in God’s image. In no way do I presume to cover all aspects of what we may take the imago Dei to signify, but I do wish to underline the great importance, in our age of genocidal violence, technological revolution, genetic and genome manipulation, moral anarchy, and anthropological confusion, of recovering the basic truth about mankind provided by this biblical vision. Western society’s retreat from God and from the imago Dei has opened up a black hole in our culture, sucking us into successive forms of ideological totalitarianism made possible by technological power and seeking, at bottom, to transform the ontological truth of man-made-in-God’s image into its inversion, God-made-in-man’s image.
My analysis of the imago Dei is to be seen against this dark historical backdrop. I argue that the core meaning of the imago Dei is relational, and that qualitative factors, such as our rationality and moral freedom, are to be understood within this relational context. We are ontologically bound to our Creator. Our rebellion against him entails an inversion of the imago but not an effacement of it, and we are seeing the ultimate outworking of this inversion in our day. We are alienated from our Creator but not essentially separated from him because our very nature is to be made in his image. Herein lies the explanation of all our idolatries but also of the possibility of our being redeemed by our merciful Creator. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, our Redeemer, is the very image of God (Col 1:15; Heb 1:3), who can identify with us and become man and save us precisely because we are made in his image, that is, in God’s image.
I go on to discuss at length the nature of this Creator and Redeemer God in whose image we are made, as he has revealed himself in the Old and New Testaments. This leads on to cosmological and teleological issues, remarks about homosexuality, and finally to a concluding exploration of the imago Dei in relational terms, as noted above, showing how human dignity and unity, freedom, reason, and our human capacity to love, are all rooted in our nature as creatures made in God’s image. It is, indeed, the ontological truth of this revelation, restored to the positive relational mode through the incarnation, passion, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ, followed by the sending of the Holy Spirit, that accounts for the gradual emergence, in cultures shaped by the church, of concepts such as the unity of mankind, the essential value and dignity of all human beings (regardless of qualitative inequalities of whatever kind), the worth of the individual person and his/her vocation to be free and not enslaved, and the consequent belief in human rights.
I close with a few remarks recalling the earlier analysis of human rebellion as it moves in our day to eliminate God and replace him with man. By means of a technology-based ideology of individual autonomy and a false idea of freedom, we are trying to appropriate and exploit for our selfish purposes all the variety of gifts that God has given us in his creation and through his redemption in Jesus Christ. Blindly, violently, foolishly, we are