Radically Re-Imaging the imago Dei: Hermeneutics, Anthropology, Deep Incarnation, Play
Robert Bruce Kelsey, Ph.D.
Abstract
In the last decade new visions of the imago Dei have emerged from new interpretations of the text in Genesis, from more thorough analyses of the anthropological evidence for behaviors usually associated with the imago Dei in precursors to Homo sapiens, and from advances in panpsychism, pantheism, panentheism, and ecotheology that reinterpret ‘received’ doctrine. Collectively these new visions offer an interpretation of the imago Dei that is “radical” in its departure from the traditional understanding of the term and its impact on human responsibility. However, the imago Dei is still typically interpreted from the theological and/or scientific vantage point the researcher has assumed, resulting in apparently disparate visions of the imago. This paper explores the consilience between these different perspectives, ultimately suggesting that the paradigm for the ‘new’ imago Dei lies in the phenomenological level of lived-experience, exemplified by play.
Keywords: imago Dei, Deep Incarnation, panentheism, Radical theology
“How radically can God be reconceived before ceasing to be God?”
– Philip Clayton (2017)
Niels Henrik Gregresen’s panentheist God is a “radical God” in the same sense that the Jesus and Paul revealed by Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan (2006, 2009) were radical: devotion and compassion replace conformity and compliance; social responsibility is an intrinsic duty not a means to a salvific end; and love not atonement invigorates humanity’s relationship with a very immanent God. This break from tradition also occurs in current discussions of the imago Dei.
The Social imago
On the traditional view, the imago Dei signifies our royal kinship with God: we are unique, privileged, and empowered to represent God on Earth by controlling, perhaps even dominating, the rest of creation. Andreas Schuele is one of the cadre of Biblical scholars and theologians who reject that view. Not only is it derived from an interpretation of Genesis influenced by Egyptian and Mesopotamian ideology, it ignores the evidence in the text (Scheule, 2011; Fergusson. 2013).
Schuele points out that the traditional view makes little sense because Genesis makes it clear that God has created everything ‘as it should be’, so there is no need of a human ruler: “The very fact that God’s final appraisal honours the whole of creation in a particular way appears in Genesis 1:1–2:3 as an important corrective to the idea that the human being should be understood as the best of them all. The special position of the human being is woven into a network of statements regarding the function and value of creatures, both in and of themselves and as an ensemble” (Schuele, 2011, 6).
Imaging God is a social responsibility: “…the concept of the imago Dei encompasses and combines two distinct relations, referring on the one hand to the relationship between human and non-human forms of life, and thus to the distinctiveness of humankind in the created world. On the other hand, the imago Dei is also a regulative for interpersonal relations between human beings. It applies not only to the human being as a species but also to each individual human being, who not only possesses the dignity of the divine image but must then also respect it in the encounter with every other human being” (Schuele, 2011, 6-7). In short, “…in the encounter with his or her neighbour, a person stands before the image of God, which he or she also is” (Schuele, 2011, 11).
The imago Dei is therefore both a constant, and a creative, responsibility: “… human beings, as the image of God, are not simply born into the world but rather have the freedom to shape and form it” and they image God to the extent that they exhibit “love, responsibility, care, and respect.” (Schuele, 2011, 13) Writing in a different context, Michael Welker captures the divine behavior we are to image in ourselves: “In creating, God not only acts but reacts, responding to that which has been created. In creating, God confronts the independence, the novelty, and even the need for completion of that which has been created” (Welker, 1997, 6-7).
Even without considering the new imago Dei in the context of Gregersen’s Deep Incarnation, it is obvious that this new imago Dei is radical: it has nothing to do with salvation or control, with dominance or hierarchical value of species. Suffering is not a symptom of sin, rather it is the price of self-actualization in a world of competing natural processes and sentient beings. Differences – be they ideological, biological, or behavioral – are not obstacles or challenges to be overcome, but rather invitations for us to become, in miniature, God’s act of completing the ‘creation’ of another.
Wessel Bentley, in an article exploring the imago Dei in light of Deep Incarnation, sums up the ethos of this new, albeit mundane, creator (or, perhaps more appropriately, imago celebrans):“Love acts as pointer to the imago Dei. … Other terms are needed to flesh out this notion. Relationship, mutuality, process and interdependence are words that come to mind. … Imago Dei (perhaps more of a verb than a noun) is the participation inthe interconnectedness of life, past, present and future,celebrating in the here and now that I am a human being” (Bentley, 2017, 4-5).
The Incarnated imago
The imago Dei was first conceived and described in a world-view quite different from ours, and its meaning has been debated for centuries. It stands to reason then that the imago itself is constrained by conceptualizations of the divine, of the universe, and of humankind’s relationship to the divine which, though not wrong per se, may be incomplete or imprecise or in need of re-specification in light of our current understanding of both science and religion. For example, as Wessel Bentley has argued, Paul’s view of the relationship between God, Christ, and Jesus, and the meaning of the Incarnation, are constrained by the three-tier universe that a priori separated the divine and the mundane (Bentley, 2016), and (understandably) the question about when and where the instantiation of the imago Dei took place in the evolution of humans would never have occurred to him (Bentley, 2017).
If Christ incarnated into Jesus, then Christ incarnated into the imago Dei (however we understand it) that was Jesus’ physical and spiritual ‘birthright’, suggesting that Christ’s mundane presence, words, and activities were, in some sense, a revitalization of the imago Dei. Niels Henrik Gregersen’s contribution is to focus our attention on what the incarnation of a perfect, timeless, divinity into our world tells us about living in that world.
For Gregersen, God pervasively “conjoins” with the physical world as a fully material, physical, emotional human: “…God’s own Logos (Wisdom or Word) was made flesh in Jesus the Christ in such a comprehensive manner that God, by assuming the particular life story of Jesus the Jew from Nazareth, also conjoined the material conditions of creaturely existence (“all flesh”), shared and ennobled the fate of all biological life forms (“grass” and “lilies”), and experienced the pains of sensitive creatures (“sparrows” and “foxes”) from the inside” (Gregersen, 2013, 375).
Gregersen’s point is that we must recognize that we, too, live in that conjoined state: “… with evolutionary genetics we have come to see ourselves as belonging to an ecological community beyond the skin and skulls of our individual bodies, embedded as we are in ecological networks, ceaselessly active as niche-constructors, and with a deep history behind us and in us, shared with our forebears” (Gregersen, 2013, 386).
This is the radical re-visioning of the imago Dei Gregersen’s view of the Incarnation offers us. The Perfect embraces imperfection; the Loving embraces violence, hatred, prejudice; the Eternal embraces the finite; the Immutable embraces evolution and the growth/decay/death of individuals and of species. And this God expects what in return? Nothing. There is no barter here. It’s a “simple” matter of taking responsibility.
That responsibility is not accepting existing doctrines, the truth of Scripture, or some specific model of the Trinity’s actions in the world: it isn’t credence. It is not avoiding sin oneself and trying to eradicate it in others: it isn’t evangelicalism. And finally, this responsibility is not a transaction where one trades good behavior for the afterlife: it is not salvific.
It is the responsibility of imaging God through the same promise and commitment that was His incarnation into a world of suffering and violence and hatred: it is learning to embrace God’s pain and returning what C.S. Lewis called the intolerable compliment with one’s own inclusive and unfaltering compassion and forgiveness. Gregersen emphasizes the suffering of an incarnated God’s “humility, poverty, continence, and the obedient subjugation under unfair conditions” (Gregersen, 2016a, 258) and the “intertwinement of life and death for the benefit of all creatures who in their own bodies experience life’s blossoming but also – and often painfully prematurely – become familiar with suffering and with the untimely termination of life” (Gregersen, 2010, 184). God incarnated affirms and exemplifies God’s compassion, a promise and a commitment to others regardless of stature or situation.
In a deeply incarnated world, all entities, all events, are significant both in their own right and in their potential to affect and inform those entities called Homo sapiens. The Word made flesh in us was neither reward nor promise. It was an invitation: “Logos is the active Information at work in letting differences into being at any moment, and in guiding and orientating creatures to recognize their concrete situation while orientating them toward their future development” (Gregersen, 2013, 381).
The imago Dei is exemplified not by commands and control, but by sympathy, concern, care, and action. I suggest it is an open, care-full, and inquisitive stance of being in the world. What shall we create to improve, correct, enhance, protect, propagate this moment and its roots in its past? How can we incarnate and express in our own way the Logos, being with and under and in, the future of everything around us?
The imago Dei of Deep Incarnation is not a problem of ontology or metaphysics or Christology, of rights or power or position; it is a challenge to our perspicacity, ingenuity, and courage.
The Evolutionary imago
Behind the contemporary discussions of the imago Dei lies an ontological assumption, a component of the hermeneutical horizon within which many contemporary theologians address the issues. “God” is not only “not us,” but is some transcendent being apart “from” us. There is less separation between humans and God in Deep Incarnation than in Deist theology, but “in, with, under, and as” still invokes the notion of a separate entity who can be intertwined with ‘us’ and the world. While some kind of separation is to be expected of panentheism as opposed to pantheism, the rhetoric of the discussions too often resonates a two-tiered cosmos with our world interpreted using scientific perspectives of complexity, emergence, and information, while God is still ‘something out there’ beyond our senses, thoughts, and experience, and the laws of science. (see, for example, Schaab, 2013).
This is one of the objections John W. Grula raises against panentheism. Grula (2008) argues that science leads us to see the physical and non-physical ‘worlds’ as a unity, and divinity is some kind of “radical immanence.” He contrasts this with the metaphysical separation of the physical and human worlds in Christianity and its secular religious successor, technology, where the perfection of humanity through technology and the invisible hand of economics promise a societal utopia they have failed to produce (Grula, 2008, 172).
Although the typical trajectories from Grula’s position of the “unity” of the physical and non-physical worlds are into pantheism or panpsychism, I suggest his “unity” is a valuable insight for panentheism – one that changes the how, when, and where of the “en” without falling into the usual traps of human privilege or reduction to the purely physical – and the imago Dei debate illustrates this well.
Theologians and scientists interested in theological anthropology have offered many arguments against two assumptions in the ‘classical’ vision of the imago Dei: 1) that the imago Dei was bestowed at a given time to a given instance of hominin, and 2) that the imago refers to a set of specific characteristics that are unique to humans, for example ““self-awareness, consciousness, intelligence, and rational decision-making” (Moritz, 2012, 310).
There is some evidence suggesting the imago Dei may be modern-human-specific. Burgess V. Wilson anchors his ‘empathic’ view of religious behavior in mirror neurons in the hominin brain. Mirror neurons activate “during the observation and execution of goal-directed motor actions” (Wilson, 2011, 309) and appear to be sensitive to context of the observed action, (intention, coherence with the surroundings, etc.). Mirror neurons “enable a capacity not only to predict the future course of a motor action with accuracy, but also to sense the [observed] agent’s intention or goal underlying the action” (Wilson, 2011, 310). Mirror neurons also appear to ‘learn’ observed behavior, since the neural activity reoccurs when the behavior is observed again. This is the basis for Wilson’s claim of empathy: mirroring supports “…a shared functional state, which produces a direct embodied experiential form of knowledge indicating the observee’s action intentions, emotions, and/or sensations, the presence of which imply sentience. This also produces the experience of interpersonal connectedness to the observee, and an experience of enhanced psychic stability” (Wilson, 2011, 311).
Since brains do not endure as bones do, we cannot determine when and where mirroring per se appeared. However, we can examine the artefacts and the behaviors of hominins using archeological evidence. This is the approach Johan D. Smedt and Helen De Cruz take (Smedt & Cruz, 2014). They examine evidence of shared attention, which they believe is the basis of any social or religious experience. Shared attention “lies at the basis of human cumulative culture. Sharing attention allows us to learn, and build on, cultural solutions of others, for instance through teaching and imitation.” (To put this in Wilson’s terms, shared attention can be considered a higher-level construct of the “embodied experiential” knowledge supported by the mirror neuron system.) Smedt and Cruz believe that shared attention is a prerequisite for an imago Dei to the extent that “a relationship with God can be conceived of as shared attention, as believers assume that God gives attention to them and other creatures, and aspire to share that attention through prayer, devotion, and practical life” (Smedt & Cruz, 2014,142). They note that the oldest evidence for shared attention known to date, the Oldwan tools, is dated between 2.6 and 1.5 million years BP.
Looking at other characteristics associated with the imago Dei, Joshua M. Moritz has argued there is no support for the “Homo singularis” position as he calls it (Moritz 2011, 317). Language, compassion, and symbolic behaviors that are essential components of religious beliefs and practice are essential components in the imago Dei, for these are how humans can understand and act in accord with “God”. These traits do not appear first in Homo sapiens – modern humans in the sense we naively think of them when reading the Creation story – some 50,000 years ago. Moritz presents evidence from Homo erectus, Homo floresiensis, and Homo neanderthalensis to demonstrate that many of the allegedly unique modern human characteristics existed outside of the Homo sapiens line – especially in Neanderthals. (It is worth noting that even the assumed differences between animal and human behavior and cognition are under scrutiny. See: Horan, 2019; Harrod, 2011; Deane-Drummonds, 2009; Robinson & Wotochek, 2021.)
Moritz concludes that modern humans are neither unique nor somehow different from their immediate predecessors and are not the only hominin to qualify for the imago Dei. “The incontestable existence of the nonhuman hominids—as beings from separate species who equally enjoyed language, reason, technology, and religious awareness—comprises the final empirical nail in the coffin of all scientific claims for human uniqueness” (Moritz, 2012, 66). The work of Johan D. Smedt and Helen De Cruz supports that view. For them these distinguishing characteristics are shared attention, morality and compassion, and symbolic behavior. Examining the archeological evidence, they push the date of these traits in ‘human’ evolution back before Homo sapiens to Homo heidelbergensis (700,000 BP).
The lesson from these studies is that the imago Dei is a capacity, not a state, and that this capacity is not restricted to a species or to an historical epoch. It is, however, subject to both physical evolution and socio-cognitive dynamics. The imago Dei is a combination of physical/material components (e.g., neurons), in action (as a result of, or the initiator of, ‘external’ events), within a context that involves others. This perspective on the imago Dei frees us from what Stephen Milford refers to as the “counterfeit choice” between substantive and relational definitions, between an imago grounded in ontology or in self-aggrandizing (and, Milford might add, politically convenient) doctrine.
Further, I believe the more holistic approach to defining the imago Dei in the studies reviewed here also resolves an issue in ‘scientific’ theology raised by Niels Henrik Gregersen. Gregersen takes issue with evolutionary cognitive theory of religion and its “agency detection device” that evolved from the recognition of would-be predators into a vision of a protective, compassionate god. His primary objection is that this view overlooks the social component of both knowledge and behavior. Genetics does not illuminate rituals like the Eucharist; it cannot shed light on social behaviors that are themselves a complex of perceptions, desires, and most importantly, relationships with others (Gregersen, 2016b).
Gregersen makes the point that an agency-focus does not explain the “containment” metaphor – the Son “in” Jesus, God “in” time, etc. For Gregersen, that “in-ness” is neither physical nor conceptual; it is experienced naively in the same sense we experience play, in our social interactions when we lose the awareness of “me as observer” and “you as agent” and respond more holistically as in an ensemble. To use Gregersen’s example, kinship, whether looked at internally as a felt-sensation or externally as a behavior, is based on social interactions as much as genetics. Genetics may predispose; the immediate (and evolving) environments actualize. Gregersen’s point is that we should be looking at organisms and their cultural and socially institutionalized environment.
The situation is clearly less doleful than Gregersen believed. As we have seen, scientific-theological research reveals a human mind that mirrors – affectively and cognitively – the “other”. In the laboratory, this “other” is another Homo or possibly an animal; in life, this same mirroring allows nurses who have seen dozens of Covid patients suffocate to death to muster a smile and comforting worlds to their new patient. And it is what makes the crucifixion meaningful, not as an abstraction in some doctrine, but as the ugly, painful, and ‘all-too-human’ event it was.
The research into the evolution of hominins and the characteristics of the imago Dei presented here shows that the social environment is both the effect of shared attention, mirroring, etc., and the ground of their evolution in capacity and expression. That research suggests that evolution, biology, and social systems together in ensemble create the image of self and of others, which is prerequisite to understanding more significant others such as God. The imago Dei is thus a dynamic relation both internal to and external to the individual human – it is more like a documentary film than a statue, more like a phenomenal stance in the world that discovers and expresses itself and evolves than a set of innate attributes rationally invoked and applied.
However, I also want to suggest that Gregersen’s emphasis on genetics obscures another valuable insight in his article – his invocation of “play”. Taken in the sense of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s notion of Spiel, play moves us: we are in it, it directs us, it creates our lived experience in its temporal field moment by moment (Gadamer, 1989). It has its rules and conventions, but these are not play an sich, for play finds its expression, its actualization, in our response to stimuli and events surrounding us, which are themselves responses to what the team or ensemble has already actualized in the event of playing. In miniature, it is a useful paradigm for our religious/spiritual experience that makes room for physics and biochemistry, communal behavior and “in-ness”, and transcendence of our diurnal self.
It is an event constructed by external forces such as physical field boundaries and the actions of other entities (hominins, balls, the clock that counts down the period, etc.), subject to but not determined by abstractions and doctrines (“rules of the game”), and yet in the event is experienced as our immersion in something “larger than us” that makes us (for a time) who “we” are. It is not eschatological or soteriological, it simply “is” something “in” which we, as imago celebrans, for the moment and with the moment, live and move and have our being.
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