Meaning of the Image

We human beings are very complex creatures. That's a given. Most of us also think we're of a different order from the animals, despite some similarities, because we think and feel at a different level. When Genesis 1 says we're made in the image of God, what does it mean?

The theologians would point to three things.

First, our minds and emotional makeup correspond to his. We think and feel in ways like God thinks and feels. One outcome of this is especially important - if our minds are like his, then he can communicate with us. An essential plank of my worldview is the belief that God has spoken to us, from outside our collected experience, to tell us the truth in a world that has come to believe that truth can't be found.

Second, there is moral position, a way of living, that God has chosen from his own nature to guide his own conduct and is supposed to be reflected in us. The Bible, God's word from outside, says things like "You shall be holy as God is holy," "love as he loved," and so on.

Third, "image" becomes a verb in the sense that we are to "image" God in the world, serving as his representatives to do his will in every aspect of our lives.

That's essentially it, but it doesn't answer the question of a Hitler or a BTK killer. Did God mess up when he made us in his image?

Questions about the Image of God

I had the unfortunate experience today of tuning in to CNN just in time to watch Dennis Rader, the BTK killer, do his acceptance speech before receiving his life sentence. I say "acceptance speech," because, despite the admission that he did terrible things, it sounded like a thank you address to the Academy.

Monsters live among us. They look like people, they have the DNA of people, but they are loathsome predators who, if there is any justice in the world, at minimum end up spending the rest of their lives locked in a cage.

The Bible says that human beings are created in the image of God. I'd like to explore that. What kind of imaging are we talking about? How does this relate us to God? Why does God think of us as a consequence? and so on.

But right now I'm hung up on the BTK killer. The issue I face is this: If the world can produce a Dennis Rader who tortured and killed a man, seven women and two children for personal gratification, then either he's outside the loop of "created in the image of God," or we have to explain how the wheels came off the image in his case. Is a monster still human? Is he like us only somehow worse?

Is being created in the image of God like buying one of those cheap cars that sometimes run OK but tend to self-destruct? If so, does God know what he's doing?

My summer photos

Here's some of the handiwork of the Creator. I took the pictures, but didn't create the scenes.

Speak and It's Done

The Genesis 1 account of the Creator God (in the Bible) seems so organized, so structured. When you read other ancient creation myths, like the Babylonian Creation Epic, they are filled with battling gods who destroy as much as they make, and who care very little for our world or its people.

But Genesis 1 is the epitome of calm. God speaks, then whatever he calls into being actually comes into being, then God declares it good, that is, utterly corresponding to what he wanted it to be.

You might think this makes a duller Creator than ancient mythology would normally tolerate, but I think it sets him apart. He's in control. He's organized. Given the utter complexity of every living thing on earth, if God is Creator, then his ability to pull together unbelievably complex phenomena into a flower or a bird or a person is like magic.

This God doesn't spend all his time thoughtlessly fighting with rivals. He doesn't seem to have any rivals. Instead, a world, a universe, is made along the same lines as a brilliant child turns Lego blocks into Battlestar Gallactica, except that this child would have had to create the very atoms out of which each Lego block was formed.

When you're creating the world, chaos doesn't cut it. A God who's utterly in control is what you need.

Creator

We're so used to thinking of our world as the product of millions of years of random mutation that the idea of a Creator God seems so dark ages as to be right out of the picture.

But then I get to thinking about the boundaries of the universe. Here we have a vast expanse that seems to go on endlessly. So there must be some kind of box around it, right? But a box implies an inside and an outside. So what's outside the box? Another universe with an even bigger box around it? Then what's outside that box?

This is a pretty foolish and non-scientific way to look at it, though. A lot of people who seem to know about these things say the universe probably loops, like one of those sound files that plays itself over an over forever. But I can't picture a loop. It has something to do with seemingly straight lines that actually curve. Who knows whether the loop explanation can fly?

So I'm left with saying that the universe has no boundaries. It just goes on forever, infinitely.

If that's what we have, then why would it be so hard to imagine an infinite God who created it? The alternative is that an infinite universe simply is, or somehow came into being by chance or a big bang (but where would the energy for a big bang come from?).

This brings up the whole question of the eternity of matter. Either matter always was or it came into being from some unknown cause. Matter implies energy which needs something - friction or heat or whatever - to activate it. So what got all of this going? Blind chance?

Or God?