Few biblical motifs have generated as much theological heat as the imago Dei. The idea that we are created in the image and likeness of God, found in Genesis 1:26–27, begs for theological elucidation. Its deceptive simplicity opens up a world of questions.

At first glance, the doctrine of the imago Dei looks like a definition of human nature, but upon closer inspection, it redirects our gaze toward God. We are the image of the divine, yet when we look closely at ourselves, we see but a mirror. The mirror reflects a God who cannot be captured by human sight. So what is it we see in ourselves? A hermeneutical circle sets the mind to spinning.

Where the mind grows dizzy, however, the heart rejoices. Few biblical ideas have provided so much solace and satisfaction as the imago Dei. Genesis singles out human beings, from all of creation, as the image and likeness of God. The mind asks, so what are we? While the heart responds, whatever we are, we are like God!

Perhaps the very fact that we can ask who we are provides the best clue to our divinely appointed role in the world. That is what philosophically inclined theologians have argued throughout the centuries. Those who ask questions for a living have been certain that our reason best reflects God's nature, but this seems like a particularly severe case of wishful thinking. Far from stroking the mind, the imago Dei boggles it. Yet the question lingers: How can we be the image of an imageless God? Without a clear picture of God, the imago Dei looks empty and bare.

J. Richard Middleton's The Liberating Image is clear, careful, and comprehensive. Middleton, who teaches biblical studies at Roberts Wesleyan College, is well known in theological circles for publications on postmodernism and Christian belief. Remarkably, he is as much at home in the latest debates about Sumero-Akkadian creation accounts as he is in arguments about the nature of truth. He writes with one eye on scholars in their study carrels and the other on Christians in the pew. The result is biblical scholarship that is religiously relevant without being watered down.

Middleton is also forthright about how his personal background has shaped his understanding of the imago Dei. He grew up white in predominantly black Jamaica, emigrated to Canada and then the United States, where he settled on "Jamericadian" as the best term to describe his cultural hybridity. His experiences of dislocation and alienation have inspired him to treat Genesis 1:26–27 as something like a biblical declaration of human rights. The image of God is liberating, he argues, because it authorizes the entire human race to represent God's rule on earth.

Middleton is efficient in demonstrating the futility of looking for some part of human being that best reflects the divine. The Old Testament resists dividing humans into distinct constituent parts. Middleton also is quick to dismiss the idea that it is the human body itself that is the image of God. He admits that excluding the body from the image results in a dualistic anthropology that is out of place in the biblical worldview. Nevertheless, he sticks to the idea that the image has to do with what we are called to do in the world, rather than something as trivial as what we look like.

And isn't that obvious? Since I don't think so, I should state up front my own interpretation of the imago Dei. I think this idea is at once impossibly simple and profoundly surprising. The image of God makes little sense in the Old Testament context, where it is mentioned explicitly only three times (Genesis 1:26–27; 5:1, and 9:6). If we are to rescue it from hopeless obscurity, it must be taken both literally and christologically. Our bodies look like they do because God decided from eternity to become incarnate in Jesus Christ. Simply stated, we are like God because we are like Jesus.

Our bodies are not an accident of evolution any more than the Incarnation is a divine afterthought to the Fall. God did not become incarnate in order to look like us. Jesus could ascend to heaven because he has been the Son from eternity, and our bodies will be glorified in heaven because their form is a reflection of his. This does not mean that the flesh of Jesus is the same as the second person of the Trinity, but it does suggest that the imago Dei is a thread that runs through and ties together the pre-existent Christ, the uniqueness of humanity, the specificity of the incarnation, and the resurrection of the body.

How else do we explain why Paul calls Jesus "the image of the invisible God" (Col. 1:15)?  And how else do we explain all of the passages in the Old Testament that imply the corporeality of Yahweh? When God appears to Ezekiel as having "something that seemed like a human form" (Ezek. 1:26), is Ezekiel the victim of a crude anthropomorphism? Or does Ezekiel see the Son of God, who, as the original copy, so to speak, is the prototype for the image in which humans are made?

The problems involved in conceiving how the identity of the eternal Son is the key to the uniqueness of humanity are, no doubt, overwhelming, which might suggest that Middleton's interpretation of the imago is on safer ground. In the ancient Near East, it was common for kings to set up statues of themselves as a symbol of their rule. These statues—or images—were a reminder that the physical absence of the king did not prevent his exercise of power. Middleton argues that the author of Genesis both draws from and subverts this practice by democratizing the idea of a king's image. Genesis portrays all humans as "God's living cult statues on earth."

But Middleton's position is not without problems of its own. The Genesis creation account, for example, portrays God as an artisan and not a king. Moreover, most scholars think that the beginning of Genesis reflects a priestly tradition that would hardly have imagined humans taking the place of, or even sharing in, God's power. In answering these questions, Middleton argues that God does not simply abdicate his power by transferring it to us. The royal function of humanity cannot be taken to mean that God is active only in human history while humans are delegated to rule over nature. The Psalms are full of declarations of God's providential rule of nature.

As this discussion demonstrates, the connection of the imago Dei to representations of royal rule leads immediately to a host of questions that extend beyond the confines of Genesis. Middleton is up to the challenge. He argues that Genesis is "intentionally subversive literature" because it allows ordinary people to be "significant participants in the historical process." The imago Dei thus grounds Israel's egalitarian social organization prior to the monarchy. Middleton even goes so far as to suggest that the Protestant doctrine of the priesthood of all believers can be found, in latent form, in the imago Dei. If this seems like a stretch, his discussion of idolatry is theologically illuminating. The most fundamental problem with idolatry, he suggests, is not that it imbues something physical with divine power, but that it diminishes the honor of the idol worshipers, who should not be so quick to give up their own status as representatives of the divine.

Middleton's analysis thus comes full circle to his own multicultural biography. God's response to the Tower of Babel is especially significant, he argues, because it demonstrates how God intended for political power to be diffuse rather than consolidated by imperial ambition. The scattering of Babel's population should be interpreted as redemptive, not punitive. For Middleton, Genesis shows us how we are liberated from all forms of oppressive authority because God has chosen to share his authority with us.

This seems like a big burden to me. Why would we want to exercise some of God's power? Middleton suggests that God takes a big risk in inviting us to share his power, and of course, if God did that, Middleton would be right. Most ancient theologians locate human liberation in our submission to divine rule, which is utterly trustworthy and serenely imperturbable, but Middleton reverses this relationship. We can trust God because he trusts us.

Such speculations about divine power serve to demonstrate just how insufficient Genesis is for the development of a theological anthropology. Middleton jumps too quickly from the imago Dei to human rights and responsibilities in a multicultural, liberal democracy. The missing link in his argument is, of course, Jesus Christ. Ian A. McFarland makes this clear in The Divine Image, which can be read as a constructive counterpart to Middleton's Old Testament exegesis. McFarland teaches systematic theology at Emory University's Candler School of Theology, and his book is one of the most impressive works of theology that I have read in recent years. For those who are worried about the sorry state of academic theology, this book is good news indeed.

McFarland gets right to the point by observing that Genesis does not say that human beings are the image of God. That honor belongs to Jesus alone. To see him is to see God (John 14:9). The ambiguity of the imago Dei should not incite us to run headlong into speculations about what constitutes human nature. Instead, it should lead us to contemplate the nature of Jesus Christ, who is "the exact imprint of God's very being" (Heb. 1:3).

Nevertheless, McFarland hesitates to embrace the whole person of Jesus, including his body, as the image of God. The reason for his hesitancy is Jesus' maleness. McFarland doubts that we can separate Jesus' maleness from our understanding of his identity, yet he wants to avoid treating his gender as an independent source of knowledge. These are legitimate concerns, but the fear of making maleness a divine attribute should not lead us to detach the imago Dei from the uniqueness of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. Without an original image, we run the risk of making copies that are little better than forgeries.

McFarland is keenly aware of this danger, but he is willing to risk its consequences. He argues that Jesus has not yet been fully revealed to us, so that we must be on the lookout for further clues to his identity. McFarland draws from the apophatic or negative theology of Eastern Orthodoxy to make this point. What we see in Jesus is nothing less than God, but God remains beyond our knowing. That God cannot be captured by our knowledge is not a metaphysical principle for McFarland. Instead, it is something we know by knowing Jesus Christ. The divine is both revealed and hidden in Jesus. Apophatic Christology argues not only that it takes faith to confess Jesus as the Christ but also that even with graced eyes, there is always more to Jesus than what we think we know.

So how do we see Jesus today? What exegesis is for Middleton, epistemology is for McFarland. His emphasis is not so much on Jesus as the image of God as Jesus as the lens through which we see the world. He is less interested in keeping our gaze on Jesus than in figuring out where we look in the world today for his reflection. At times, this leads McFarland to treat Jesus as a blurry or poorly cropped image of God, so that we have to look elsewhere to complete the picture. In other words, we need more information to make a proper identification of the divine.

To this end, McFarland introduces the important idea of protocols of discernment. Jesus provides the criteria for how we are to find the divine image in others, but protocols are a helpful means of focusing our perception. The protocols McFarland discusses, with great insight and agility, are the veneration of the saints and the preferential option for the poor. He even goes on to talk about finding the image of Jesus in marriage, communion, and baptism, in chapters that make original contributions to those topics. He also dismantles the argument, popular among many theologians these days, that the disunity of the church so fragments the body of Christ that it makes the process of discernment futile.

McFarland covers so much ground so efficiently that his original focus almost gets lost, and one wonders if he is not running from the idea that the body of Jesus is itself worthy of our attention. For McFarland, the body of Jesus is corporate, not individual. Jesus is the head and all humans comprise his body. We know Jesus best in other peoples' bodies, not his own. McFarland struggles against the dissolution of Jesus' identity in humanity as a whole, but the very fact that he has to struggle on this issue demonstrates a weakness in his theology. A more fully Trinitarian account of the imago Dei would show us how to avoid losing Christ in our neighbors by reminding us that the best way to love our neighbors is to help them find Christ. Jesus Christ, after all, reigns in heaven, while the Holy Spirit prepares us to enter into his presence with perpetual adoration.

Like many theologians today, McFarland is worried about Christians who idolize Jesus. He wants to make faith practical, but can theologians really persuade nonbelievers that they need to believe in the imago Dei in order to believe in human rights? The beauty and glory of the imago Dei surely has to do with less mundane matters. McFarland's talk of protocols is illuminating, because that word refers to the etiquette of formal diplomatic missions. According to the protocols of academic theology, the practice of Jesusology is insensitive to other faiths and betrays a blatant disregard for the urgent demands of social justice. Yet surely it is impossible to idolize the true and only image of God!

Most theologians, if they pay attention to the human body at all, try to explain how the relationship between humans and the divine excludes any thought of resemblance. While it is true that in heaven we will see Jesus more clearly, it is just as true that when we get to heaven we will see that the incarnate Son really does resemble the Father. Otherwise, the dark glass through which we see Jesus in this life would be so impenetrable as to render us blind. The imago Dei assures us that there is an essential correlation between humanity and God that guarantees our basic intuitions into God's nature. We can properly imagine that God is like us because we are like God. In a world saturated with images, we are the only images that count, and we count only because we were made according to the specifications of someone else.

Stephen H. Webb is professor of philosophy and religion at Wabash College. His book Dylan Redeemed, a theological and political re-evaluation of Bob Dylan, will be published by Continuum later this year.

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