So God created man in his own image

Everything unfolds from the principia, the principle of the being and knowing of all things, including our humanity. Such is the wonder of creation in its truth, its relation to the Creator. “God is the beginning and end of all things, especially rational creatures,” Thomas Aquinas reminds us, revealing how the Genesis story belongs to an intellectual consideration of the world as something for thought. So where are we in this story?

This week in Chapel we have pondered Genesis 1, looking at the pageant of creation in the first so-called five days and, then, on Thursday and Friday, the work of the sixth day which brings us to the creation of the ‘adam’, our humanity, collectively or generically speaking. ‘Adam’ here is not yet the name of an individual but the collective name for human beings. The story of creation in Genesis 1 is an unpacking of what is contained in the opening phrase especially as seen through the lens of John 1 and the traditions of Hellenic philosophy. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Creation is about an activity of distinguishing one thing from another within the unity of the world as an ordered whole, a cosmos, we might say. It is the unfolding of what is in the principia, God.

The significance of the Genesis account of creation lies in part in the repeated refrain that “God saw that it was good,” With the work of the sixth day, the whole of creation is said to be “very good.” Creation is an explicitly ordered affair; the formlessness, void, and abyss are all contained within the principle, God. This counters an ancient and modern view that posits chaos as prior to order and not just in a temporal sense. There is always the lingering fear in some ancient cultures, such as the Sumerians, that chaos will overwhelm and destroy all forms and aspects of order. That view results in a state of fearful uncertainty. Genesis frees us from the fear of the forces of an arbitrary nature by its relation to an intellectual principle. And our humanity?

Is humanity simply an afterthought, a left-over in the pageant of creation? No. Something quite wonderful and amazing is said alone about the ‘adam,’ about our humanity. Alone of all of the works of creation, only about our humanity is it said explicitly that we are made in the image of God. What does that mean? Creation is revelation, to be sure, the revelation of an ordering principle in the pageant of creation itself. All that we can say is that we are made in the image of that principle. It provides a very high view of the dignity of our humanity. To be made in the image of God also belongs to the essential goodness of the created order, something which is said not just to be good in each of its parts but the whole of it “very good.” We are at once connected to everything else in the created order and to God himself.

The idea of our humanity as made in the image of God is remarkable. It challenges us about who we are and about our relation to the rest of creation and to one another. To know that you are made in the image of God means that everyone else is made in that image. The high dignity of our humanity requires and demands a respect for every other human being and for the created order itself. All out of a sense of the principle, God, the beginning and end of all things who contains and upholds all things.

Creation is not a static event but a continuing process. To think about this high view of our humanity corrects and challenges our contemporary world with respect to how we treat the created world and how we treat one soother. We are made in the image of the Dominus, the Lord. Our so-called dominion means acting in the image of God the creator whose dominion is not about manipulation and exploitation and destruction but about order and care and conservation. Our ‘dominion’ does not license our abuse of creation and one another. Quite the opposite, it calls us to account. It calls us to who we are in the sight of God as made in his image. It means to think and to act in accord with God’s own thinking which is his acting.

This is the counter to a misreading of this chapter by fundamentalist Christians and literal minded atheists alike. Dominion here can only be understood in terms of what is made known about God in the pageant of creation. Creation is an orderly affair which reveals the care and concern of God, even a kind of compassion for creation, we might say.

This is the counter to our fears and uncertainties, to our follies and nonsense, to our abuse and misuse of the things of the world. Here is the high dignity of our humanity that challenges us precisely about our misuse of creation and one another. It recalls us to the deep truth and dignity of our humanity, to our freedom from the forces of nature out of a respect for the created world. Such is our freedom to God in whose image we are made. It calls us to respect for one another out of the God-given dignity of our common humanity.