Human beings are priests; our value is worship

LLMs are causing all sorts of angst and discussion these days, most noteably in the recent encyclical Magnifica Humanitas which I have yet to read. There is a duality of doom on one side and evangelical fervor on the other. For now, these thoughts from from author L. M. Sacasas in his Substack "The Convivial Society" point me forward in a laudable way:

We’ve made machines that can fly faster and farther than the swallow-tailed kite, but in no way does it follow that the kite should cease from its flight or that it is somehow diminished because of the advent of flying machines. That there is something else in the world that flies tells us nothing about whether the kite ought to fly.

It seems to me that we would be better off if we were less preoccupied with the question of human uniqueness, if we took for granted that we are creatures of certain sort making their way in the world with a distinct set of capabilities and potentialities and that we ought to exercise these capabilities and develop these potentialities not because they make us special but because they make us happy.

I will set aside for a moment the question of whether machines, LLMs specifically, can think or reason or use language in a manner that corresponds to the human use of language, etc. But let us grant for arguments sake that they can. They can certainly generated passable simulations of such things. But why should this mean that I ought not to think for myself and with others? Why should I cease from inhabiting the playground of language because a machine can pretend to play in it as well? Why should I abandon the exercise of judgment or the pursuit of knowledge? We must pursue these things not because the dignity of our humanity is on the line, but because our joy is.

This is a good turn, but it is not turn enough. Human beings were not made for what we do. Certainly what we do is marvelous. But we were made to be priests. Priests receive their value from the calling they receive from their god and from the personal and corporate worship they do and produce for their god. This river of value flows from the Source of value and go back again to that Source.

So let's get our anthropology set and calm down about these new tools we've invented. The ability of the greatest LLM or robot may meet or surpass that of human beings, but we do not receive value from those abilities. The joy of the Lord is our strength. I rejoiced when I heard them say, 'Let us go to the house of the Lord.'

__________

[1] An adjacent though unrelated idea. "AI is not a unitary actor." wrote Joanna Bryson. "It is not unitary, and it does not act. . . It is a set of software engineering techniques and digital services. Thus it is meaningless to discuss what AI will do, or to look for singular solutions about how to govern it."

[2] Microsoft's post "Towards Humanist Superintelligence" written in November 2025 should not be forgotten. "Technology’s purpose is to help advance human civilization. It should help everyone live happier, healthier lives. It should help us invent a future where humanity and our environment truly prosper. . . . Any technology that doesn’t achieve this is a failure. And we should reject it."

Jürgen Moltmann's Man: Summary: Chapter 3a

Chapter 3: Images of man and experiments

[Note: This chapter could be an examination and critique of high-profile concrete utopias for the anthropological models they represent.]

Having examined environmental factors that affect human anxieties and hopes, Moltmann now turns to ask about anthropological models that people employ to understand the self.  He notes, too, that models always contain a salvific program for wholeness and liberation.  Stretched over a Christian schema of creation, fall and restoration, modern anthropologies beget images of human identity, alienation and the restoration of true character.  Some, of course, dismiss such hope as childish fantasy and set themselves to making use only of the tools at hand.  Yet, these ignore the truth that human beings cobble their own futures, improving or condemning themselves.  To ignore this is to treat human persons like lab specimens and not like creatures who both interrogate themselves and live by the results of such interrogation.  Therefore, in studying anthropological models, care should be taken to realize that a kerygma always hides under the surface of so-called objectivity.

A. The Utopia of the total man

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was the first to ask of capitalist industrial society what sort of anthropology it made.  “What men are,” he reasoned, “coincides with what they produce and with how they produce.” (Marx) “There is no nature of man which precedes the existence of man; on the contrary man is what he makes of himself.  He is the producer and product of his work.”(48)  What does capitalism, then, mean when it makes of human beings consumers?  What does it say of human beings when their work is the narrowest of contributions upon an industrial or technological assembly line?  What does it mean for the nature of humanity when its labor is sold for the purposes of others?  “Man has lost his true nature and become alien to himself.”(49)  Thus, human beings must win back their identities.

Moltmann diagrams the threefold matrix of relationships from which Marx assembles his thoroughly secular doctrine of alienation.

(1) The product of work is an alien object which belongs to someone else.  This is a consequence of capitalism.

(2) The work itself is not determined by the worker but by those who own the means of production.  This is a consequence of industrial methods of production and is, essentially, the incarnation of a new class structure which calls one’s job title who one is.

(3) The new class structure created by (1) and (2) narrow the range of possibility capable of human beings to one thing: having.  “Private property has made us so stupid and partial that an object is only ours when we have it.” (Marx)

Having listed these, Moltmann attacks them with the same critique brought against all those who would deny any hope to anthropology.  He teases the kerygma of harmony and peace, the concept of totality, from underneath Marx’s industrial protestations.  Marx, he says, always ascribed to the romantic ideal of the total man.  If alienation is best revealed in the proletariat, then the liberation of the proletariat would begin a realization of the ideal of humanity.  Private ownership of the means of production allows the hitherto alienated to enjoy the production of their labor.  Specialization is removed through cross-training, so that each person has multiple abilities, “each can become accomplished in any branch [of activity] he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow.” (Marx)  With the overthrow of capitalist industrial models, the society of having will be replaced by a “free association of individuals”, “the [concrete] Utopia of a society of authentic human existence.” (53)

Though not endorsing Marxism, Moltmann goes on to say that some course of action must be taken to reduce misery and raise the humanity of society.  “It is therefore entirely to the point to examine the Utopia of the total man critically, without thereby claiming to be examining the whole of Marxism.” (54)  What he finds is that Marx’s program for the elimination of alienation is doomed to failure because it never addresses anything but bourgeois alienation.  It never addresses the existential alienation forever present in humanity itself.  Human programs, he concludes, can never achieve the messianic vision of the total man.  Human history cannot free itself from its own historicity.  The failure of attempts to do so is obvious when it is realized that human beings are never identical with themselves.  If they could be brought into such an identical relationship with themselves and with nature, he would be infinite (re: Moltmann’s criticism of “direct encounter” in the introduction to Chapter 1). This is not to condone alienation, but to say that Marx’s programmatic method cannot provide a satisfactory solution.  Marx’s atheism, together with Feuerbach, holds that human beings are their own highest being; there is no need for humble subordination before a divine power.  Except this usurpation, says Moltmann, merely places a human rump in the seat of power, it does not abolish power altogether.  “That which previously had an authoritarian effect by the authority of the absolute will now become totalitarian in the claim to totality of the total society and of its total man.” (56)  The Party is God.  The Party is now the context of all meaning.  Everyone involved knows this to be a lie, “Man is … not a being in a species, like the animal.” (57)  History, rather, open and uncompleted with its possibilities for humanization and freedom, is the species to which human beings belong.

“The hope for the future which the Christian faith holds is not the ‘solution of the riddle of history’ in a unity of being of man, nature, and God, but a new creation of man in his world, in which the contradictions of the present are raised to a new and lasting response to God. . . . Christian hope is directed not toward the ‘total man’, but towards the ‘new man’.”(57)

Furthermore, “It is not as the authority of authorities that God’s reality is experienced, but as the power of the release of the bound and the power of the future for the hopeless.” (57)  Faith in the crucified Lord brings this-worldly solidarity with the alienated, but it never forgets the future of God, and so is always able to hope, and even in darkness.  The missionary call of God’s future enervates those tempted to a religious contentment with the present, yet the grace of God’s identification does not thus deny concrete circumstances.  Christianity challenges Marxism with the narrow limits of its anthropological definition.  Where is the humanity?  Marx’s challenge to Christians, says Moltmann, is whether they do, in fact, forget the social and political consequences of their confession.  Do you, too, forget your fellows?  Christianity and Marxism, he suggests, each profit from the question of the other.

“The criticism of the ‘Utopia of the total man’ which we have set out here is not intended to assist in a rejection of Marxism, but to forward its release to be itself, and to achieve the humanity which is contained in its humanistic traditions, but is also concealed by these." (59)

B. The Revolution from the Right

The world of the bourgeoisie was an idyllic dream.  Its apex position in the universe, gained through increasing industrialization, is now threatened by conflicts resulting from that same industrial process.  The economic power of the middle classes has grown inversely with their political power.  Thus, they are insecure and, even while hating themselves for doing it, purchase security at the cost of their own social position.  The bourgeois embraces its own protest.

“While the bourgeois world was originally committed to a universal society of the citizens of the world … the reaction against the international involvement and responsibilities of the modern world leads men to creep back into the nest which is called in Germany ‘holy fatherland’ or in America ‘God and my country.” (65)

The sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies gave such desire a voice in his book, Community and Society (1887).

In Community and Society, Tönnies outlines two basic possibilities human social life: community and society.  The former is a living thing, a lasting thing, bound together by natural processes: marriage, family, nation.  The latter, society, is a mechanical aggregate bound ideologically but not naturally together.  Societies unite for a purpose, for some practical advantage in which investment yields return.  They are limited constructions, and require from their members only what is needed.  Tönnies’ prejudice against the latter is no secret.  His dialectic can be forced onto society from any vantage point, and always the original community of genuineness begets a society of organization; culture over and against civilization.  What is needed, then, is a restoration of community the rootless, uncreative alienation of society.  Ironically, “A ‘restored’ community is a man-made community, and lacks all that which is praised as constituting its natural growth” (62)

Moltmann then traces the “community” idea of “people, nation and fatherland” in the political transitions of Germany, from the First World War, through the period of the Weimar democracy and into Hitler’s Reich.  In all of these, he identifies a “folk community” of the radical right, including the Evangelical church, which understood itself to be the protector of true community.  “’The People” in opposition to all industrialization:  Community vs. Society.  History is on the side of the right, this Revolution from the Right, “unfulfilled history is stores up in the village against the big city.” (64)  The state is the battleground, and, once in power, the Right will use the state to bring freedom.  The middle-class declaration that faith is a private matter now declares a new and altogether patriotic religion, a “hallowing of the national character by God” becoming a “substitution for God of the idol of the nation, to which the pious due of patriotism was owed." (66). Minorities and outcasts need not convert.

“What,” asks Moltmann, “does the Crucified Jesus to do with the gods of the fatherland?” (67)  He makes it plain that Christianity names no national religion, nor can it without denying its own nature.  Thus:

“Christians who find the identity of their Christian faith in the crucified Jesus are bound to be aware that they form strangers in their own nation and in their own people.  This is the price of their freedom.  Having this freedom they will not despise their own country, but support the institutions and movements which lead to greater democratic and social freedom. . . . The religion of anxiety can only be effectively overcome by the religion of freedom.” (67)

C. The law of the ideal man

Moltmann, having examined the concrete utopias arising from class and tradition, turns to examine another ideology existing within the legal system of nations: the lawful Citizen (Moltmann uses just ‘man’, but ‘Citizen’ is preferred for the purpose of this summary).  The Citizen, as a projection of the communal humanity of a people, is the yard stick of fairness and justice.  It is flexible in definition, its justice changing only so quickly as migrating demographics will allow.  No one person enjoys a private ideal.  The Citizen is an amalgam of all.  “Even the modern ‘pluralistic’ society exists only on the basis of a conformity attained through agreement on what is in common.” (68)  Yet, asks Moltmann, when each nation’s ideal Citizen is considered alone, does it withstand the test of humanity?  Is each paragon of legal justice just?  Is a truly valid legal ordinance even possible?

“Is there a higher court of appeal, before which the law in force must be justified, or can anything count as law which has been established by agreement?  Can men come to agree on just any image of man they like, or is there (at least in theory) a humanity on which these images of man must be patterned in different societies?  And if anything like this higher court of appeal exists, who is responsible for this court of higher responsibility, and who is authorized to put what it says into words?” (69)

Moltmann then lists a few legal examples taken from German reforms in the early 1970s.  These include statements on marital monogamy, legal protections for human life vs. any individual’s decision to die and the proscription of general lawfulness.  His purpose in listing these reforms is to demonstrate that underneath such legal categories exists a central standard of moral self-determination, a standard which rests in pure anthropology and not legal definition.  “Moral self-determination is asserted to be an elementary part of the constitution of man.” (70)  Aha!  An a priori kernel of free and responsible decision making constituting an idealized (legalized) image of man.

Yet, what of the social human being?  Can we really isolate out the “I”, cut away all interconnections, and hang justice upon the remainder?  Such abstraction, Moltmann maintains, is the assumption behind verdicts which emphasize punishment-for-retribution rather than, he says, punishment-for-resocialization.  (How far, I wonder, does this criticism parallel Moltmann’s construction of a purely social model of the Trinity in protest against the authoritarian (monotheistic) Trinity of the ‘Wholly Other’ postulated by Karl Barth?)

And what about objective moral law?  Didn’t the Third Reich exploit the changing ideology of the Citizen in order to subject justice itself to the sovereign control of their Führer?  “Is there … a ‘nature of man’ which can be used as a criterion of the rights of citizens in all societies? … Who decides what belongs to it and what does not?” (72)  Moltmann begins tracing the historical basis of natural law.

His search ends with the Stoic understanding of the one-to-one relationship between the laws of the State and the logos of God.  The divine order of being is the measure of the moral order.  “Not everything is right therefore which is decided upon by the agreement of the citizens, but only that which corresponds to the nature of man, and to the divine order of being.” (73) 

Moltmann’s judgment is that both the legislative ideas of human nature and of a divinely sanctioned moral law are pleasant ideals with no real connection to the historic existence of human beings.  Natural law, or other labels for sole and authoritative legal principles, can be interpreted to any end for the advantage of the powerful.  Human beings are constantly messing with what is biological about themselves; human biology is not a mirror for essence.  Furthermore, natural law itself can be shown by research to have changed over time.  Unfortunately, the cry for proper governance cannot be shirked.  Some agreed-upon definition of the lawful Citizen is required for legal systems to exist.

Moltmann attempts to find a solution through invocation of a future hope for humanity.  “The contents [of the agreed definition of moral law and human nature] may be historically conditioned and changeable, but the intention which is contained in it is unconditioned and invariable.” (74)  The future is a powerful idea in the moral purposes of any civilization.  Human beings do aim at ‘future rights’ as they anticipate the development of their common life.  It is the “unavoidable task of altering the world, of healing it, of bettering it, of making it more worthy of man and more worth living in, that can be regarded as the norm of justice.” (75)  Approaching questions of justice from this perspective, he says, removes ideological fantasy and replaces it with a “concrete Utopia of the rights of man and to a legal system which is intended for citizens of the world.” (75)

Christian churches are partly to blame for clinging to the ideology of the lawful Citizen.  They have baptized legal systems with categories of divine law and the God of law.  Such a God, however, is a punishing, authoritarian judge handing down punishment upon sinners and the guilty of the world.  That is why, he says, the religious typically support the death penalty.  It is not a leap made necessary by the Bible.

The God of the Bible, says Moltmann, is a God of freedom.  “Righteousness in respect of the covenant is founded on the free self-determination of God and on his promise of fidelity, in which he gives sureties for the future of his people.” (76)  (If developments from Moltmann’s Crucified God can be brought to bear, his meaning becomes a little clearer.  God himself suffered his own punishment in the surrender to death of the Son and in the giving over of the Son to death by the Father.  There is simply no judgment left, but only the life-giving benefits of the resurrection through the Spirit of the Crucified.  This is why Moltmann can say, “It [God’s righteous law] demands nothing therefore that it has not itself previously given.” (76) which can only be an allusion to Augustine’s glorious aphorism: “Command what you will, Lord, and then give what you command.”)

Christians should then cease equating national law with divine retribution, and should, instead, attempt to encode love into the fabric of their national legal character.  Love, he writes, is found in seeking the rights of one’s neighbor. “Love, as a category of law, does not give any man up, but has regard for his possibilities, including the as yet unrealized possibilities God has for him.” (77)  what is needed, he continues, is an understanding of legal punishment which, rather than further institutionalizing a lex talionis, seeks to meet evil with good and thus usher in a better world.

“The ‘law of the ideal man’ can easily change into inhuman demands.  It seems to make more sense to give practical expression to hope for really human men by means of love for other men, and especially by love for guilty man.” (78)

(This reviewer has to wonder if there is not the hint of a post-millennial eschatology of the Kingdom of God in Moltmann’s enthusiasm for love as a national category of law.  For, after all, Moltmann himself has said that one’s eschatology is one’s politics and vice versa.) 

See Man: Chapter 2

See Man: Chapter 1

Jürgen Moltmann's Man: Summary: Chapter 2

Chapter 2: Humanism in an industrial society

(Read Chapter One)

A. ‘He who rides on the tiger can no longer get off it’

In the last chapter, Moltmann asked where the question of “Who am I?” arose in the context of the exterior world. Now, however, that world has changed. “We now come,” he writes, “to the specific social and political problems of humanity in present-day industrial society” (22).  In this context, it is no longer the naturally given circumstances of human life which have been true in every age, but the surrounding self-made environment, new to this age, in which the question is asked. In this new world it is not as if nature’s domination has been thrown off and freedom attained by industrialization. Rather, “technologies and bureaucracies arise which have a similar anonymously concealed power to make mankind dependent and powerless”(23).  It is not as if people who before did not belong to any environment now do. Rather, even though the environment is a human construct, it is no more human than before. Human beings are aliens in a world of their own making. From this situation two problems arise:

(a) a pan-human technological consciousness unique to history;
(b) a growing suspicion about the absolute goodness of the unrestrained growth of technological power.

In the first case, the material of technology has become so fused with human awareness that it is hard to know where one ends or begins. Still, the resulting cyborg race is not wholly unfamiliar. “Man is conscious of being a part of a larger unity. But this interplay between the ‘I’ and the larger context has not yet produced a human form”(24).  We are aware of all people as a whole, the world is our community, yet the immensity of human need overwhelms individual compassion. “Everyone is aware of more misery than he can alter, for the chances of active intervention are limited”(Ibid).  Psychoses of guilt and powerlessness are the result.

Then, of course, there is the Enlightenment holdover of belief in the essential goodness of expanding technological achievement and power. What, however, is the point? Now that we can satisfy every need and desire, what is the basis for this continued sophistication which looks more and more like fanatical fatalism every day? Has the myth of progress eclipsed the concrete needs of human life? Do we even have the legislative sophistication or the collective ability to stop the works and consider our options? “The God of the machine, who promised everything to everyone, seems now like an evil spirit, who draws everything toward destruction”(26).

What then, given the changes of human definition and the inertia of industry, can be done to humanize the whole and remove the danger of self-destruction that is everywhere a possibility?

B. The ‘spectre of industrial society’ and the longing for the ‘whole life’

In light of the above situation, humanity divides into two ghostly armies: the spectre of the industrial employee and the spectre of the luddite exorcist. In one exists the religion of emancipation, in the other the religious desire for security. The former Moltmann calls “capitalist society”, “bourgeois society” or “technocracy.”[1] The latter he names, “nationalism,” “fascism,” “anarchism” or “left-wing radicalism.” Such multiplication of labels illustrates an inability to see the whole context. “The unlimited possibilities of technical society have from the beginning evoked in the human consciousness optimistic enthusiasm as well as images of apocalyptic terror.” Moltmann intends to discuss them in that order: industrial hope and desperate anxiety; and to end with “individual elements in the longing for the whole life” (28).

C. The everlasting kingdom of peace

Industrialization has seized upon the ancient expectation of a Messianic kingdom of peace and made it its own. The economic state, coming on the heels of states religious and political, is a final stage of political and social peace and communal blessing. Permanent technological expansion releases humanity from the bonds of tradition and the need for transcendence. The secular city is the fulfillment of Christian hope.

“The secular city, in which the knowledge of skills of mankind are concentrated today, and in which the new urban life is lived, is a foreshadowing of the City of God in heaven. As the heavenly City of God, according to the old prophecy, has no temple, so the modern megalopolis is already religionless and is inhabited by men come of age.”(30)

D. The shelter in the end of the world

Industrialization means thus: nature becomes a raw material; “Men live without experiencing life, and so feelings of coldness and poverty of experience become mass phenomena.”(31) “Instead of putting the stamp of humanity upon his own nature, he becomes nothing more than the imprint of his occupation or of his specialized knowledge” (32).  Needless to say, not everyone greets secularism with open arms. And, in the face of it, kill or be killed, the creative maelstrom of chaos becomes a legitimate option of protest. “If this world is torn down, the new birth will be forced on” (34).[2]

Interestingly enough, the destructive, apocalyptic protest against industrialization comes not from the lower classes but from the middle-class bourgeoisie. Moltmann asks why this is so, and finds the answer not in economics but in morals. The pantheism of the secular city which identifies God and the world removes, he says, surprise and freedom. The “rationalized cosmos of connections, relationships and dependencies” which is the secular city has no room for human variety. No one may truly have themselves; each individual is too necessary within the infinite dependencies which make up the modern industrial machine.[3] Homogeneous humanity is needed for continued industrial process.

“Because men have clearly demanded too much of this modern industrial world, and expected from it a heaven of self-realization, the disappointment hinted at, which has already often been experienced, changes into an experience of this world as a hell of self-alienation.”(36)

Moltmann concludes his diagnosis by recommending that work be denied its divinity and that human beings decry further idolatry. The present situation must be bluntly accepted. This world is what it is, a tug-of-war between humanity and inhumanity. What is needed, he says, is “a transcendental support for hope … as a basis for a ‘hope against hope’, and a hope against the disappointments of life on earth” (36).  This support, or basis for hope, “is the critical ‘yes’ response of love, which goes beyond the absolute ‘yes’ of shallow enthusiasm.” It is the basis for real cultural criticism and change, because it arises from suffering, from the disconnect between what is and what could be, from the awareness of a larger possibility beyond the borderlands of actual human relationships.[4] This sort of disconnect occurs historically in three types, from which Moltmann claims human rights are born within industrial society. These are: social romanticism, ‘inward emigration’, and Utopian consciousness. What follows is a treatment of each.

E. Social romanticism

Social romanticism is the memory of the good ole’ days. Times change so fast that people can no longer understand them. New situations are resisted without resistance. “[Social romanticism] just sanctions them by its powerless dreams of yesterday” (37).  Underneath its posture, however, is a romantic belief in the secret of origin and the existence of an organic world of historical dimension. Moltmann correlates social and political Romanticism. Both appear in times of crisis, but provide only emotional answers for rational needs. God, he writes, does not sanction mythologies of family and fatherland, but offers, instead, the crucified Christ.

F. Inward emigration

“By inward emigration we understand a retreat of the educated intellect from circumstances which are deplored as being mindless” (39).[5] Outer society is abandoned for a secret region of inner peace. Politics and economics are unclean and subordinate to the holy pursuits of inner, true humanity. Moltmann brings two criticisms to bear upon this attitude. First, addressing the émigré love of high culture, Moltmann observes that such an attitude parasitically feeds upon the very world process and politic which it despises. Second, measuring the distance traced between the inward émigré and everyday life, he finds a vacuum of power. The criticisms of the hearth never effect the institutions of the street, thus denying society the very minds and ideas that could ultimately humanize it. “But should not authentic Christian belief prepare rather for the incarnation of the human in inhuman circumstances, even if this means denying oneself and taking up one’s cross?”(41)

G. The Utopian consciousness

Moltmann does not use “utopia” pejoratively. What he does is describe two types of utopianism: social utopias and concrete utopias, a method borrowed from neo-Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch. The difference between these utopias manifests in their relationship to the real. Social utopias do not relate to society past or present, but “to a future life of society which is not yet there” (42).  On the other hand, concrete utopias address objectively real possibilities. Consequently, the latter, “offer to the present the future it desires as a real possibility. They do not totally embody the present ‘system’, but rather uncover the future with which this present is already pregnant” (Ibid).  Humanity needs the real criticism made available by concrete utopias, even if larger world evils can be addressed only one problem at a time. What Moltmann likes most of all about concrete utopias, however, is the open definition of society within their suppositions.

“The freedom of man, if it is understood as creative freedom, has its area always in the realm of the possible, and in the future which the present opens up ahead. Where one of these elements, freedom, possibility or future, is given up, the others too fall away. Concrete Utopian thinking is therefore indispensable for the freedom and humanity of mankind.” (43)

A concrete utopia casts out beyond present limitations. It critiques the way things are, draws human hopes and drives human beings forward into the unknown and unreal. Concrete Utopias mediate between reality and otherworldliness.

Moltmann finds in the parallelism of otherworldly and concrete exemplified by the strategy of Concrete Utopianism a suitable place for beginning discussion of the kingdom of God. “The basis of Christian hope,” he writes, “lies in faith in the crucified Son of Man. It is in him that the wholly other kingdom of God has set foot on earth.” Consequently, it exhibits in the person of Jesus Christ the before-mentioned parallelism. It is both “hidden under the cross” (Luther), becoming visible only in times of crisis, temptation and struggle, and incarnates itself as love “in those possibilities which one has or finds.”(44) He then ends his chapter with a display of rhetorical dialectic upon the theme:

“This love grips this life as if it were everything, and yet at the same time knows that that which is not all there is. It denies itself as passionately as if with death everything were over, and yet it hopes in the resurrection of the dead. It finds God in the concrete, and yet it knows that everything concrete is transcended by God.”(45)

__________



[1] “Technopolis [signifies] the fusion of technological and religious components into the base on which a new cultural style has appeared. . . . Technopolis represents a new species of human community.” Harvey Cox. The Secular City. (New York: MacMillan, 1965): 5-6.

[2] In the article, “Apocalyptic Terrorism and the New World Order”, Moltmann argues that Sept. 11, 2001 represented a collision of eschatological ideas. “This was the attack of the terrorist ending of the world on the [Western] global perfection of world history.” Moltmann lists three essential conditions for modernization developed in the West: (1) separation of religious community and civil society; (2) recognition of freedom of worship; (3) recognition of the human rights of women. He therefore believes that Islamic fundamentalism forms the most serious threat to the world today because it protests against all three conditions, unifying as it does church and state, religion and culture, and religion and economy.

[3] One of the bases of human insecurity in society today, says Moltmann, is a crisis of hope. The social roles of society leave youth no room for “finding oneself or one’s identity in them....Instead of finding himself, man becomes a representative for something else – a company, an administration, or a corporation.” Human Identity in Christian Faith Raymond Fred West Memorial Lectures on Immortality (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974): 3..

[4] God’s call, which creates suffering, is then a transcendental: “We too are unfinished women and men, poised to become what we are. Our restless self-questioning is not derived from some innate human property, an inherent cor inquietum or an immanental “openness to the world” within us, but instead arises from the charge and commission of God, the promissio inquieta, the eschatological “openness to the world ahead of us” which then beckons and disturbs the human consciousness.” G. Clarke Chapman, “On Being Human: Moltmann’s Anthropology of Hope” Asbury Theological Journal Vol. 55 No. 1 (Spring, 2000): 71.

[5] Cf. Jürgen Moltmann, God for a Secular Society (Fortress, 1999): 41-42.

Jürgen Moltmann's Man: Summary : Author's Preface & Chapter 1

Author's Preface

Moltmann begins his book Man with a statement of intent. He means to "portray what it is to be human." But what is man? "Nothing less is meant by the key-word `man'," he writes, "than the public history of men's questioning and seeking, of their failures and humiliations."

But when do we start asking such questions? Where are the answers found, and how can they be evaluated? How can he hope to even begin such a task, especially since there is not place of objectivity since he himself is a man? Such presumption, he continues, is worth it because he, "sees in God the worth of the question-able being which we all are, and therefore sees theology as providing the theme for anthropology."[1]

Moltmann says that it is important to "explore ways for man to become man," because humanity itself is changed by its coming into self-knowledge. [2] There is a value, he says, in the questioning; this against temptations to skepticism. The questioning relationship between God and man, a relationship of such closeness that, "a book about `Man' will inevitably slip into being a book about God," means skeptical limitations are undone. It "makes much open to question which we regard as unquestionable and obvious, and much else again full of hope which we regard as hopeless.[3]

Chapter 1: What is man?

Who are we? Where do I stand myself?

The question “Who am I?” arises from every encounter a human being has with the exterior world, and indeed, from even his own consciousness. He must ask the question, for he must live, yet there is no ‘getting behind’ the self for proper observation. The answer dwells, then, in hypothetical infinity. Yet, if it wasn’t so, then the self would die, for “as we experience being human, we experience it as a question, as freedom and as openness.” Being human, then, “is an experiment in which we ourselves are taking part and are at risk”(2).  Observation will give no answer. At the same time, there can be no direct encounter. The solution cannot be sought through a total unveiling of the mystery of who we are. Rather, it exists upon a balance between mystery and revelation; “between the fundamental self-questioning of man and the answer by means of which he takes control of himself”(3).  The self is a limit and an openness, both of which must be respected.

This is true socially, politically, historically as well as individually.[4] Historical answers, especially when they are temporally successful, offer both a useful basis for social life and openness toward future fulfillment. Even in this context, however, no real answer to the question “Who am I?” can find a solution. Yet, there is an avenue available through comparison with others.

A. The question arises from the comparison of man with the animals

Biological anthropology begins when the question “Who am I?” is sought by comparison of human beings with animal life. Such a comparison leads to one certain result: human beings are strangers in the world.[5] Unlike the environmental and instinctive ‘fit’ animals display, human beings are a species displaced upon the globe. “His task,” writes Moltmann, “is to find what his nature is”(5). Education is how human beings live in their environment, and that is the source of imagination, creativity, culture and, above all, language. “He is in a very real sense both a creator and the creation of his language. He catches in the net of language a world which is open to him and overflowing with stimuli”(7).[6] Through reason, and through action, human beings set themselves apart from the animal world for freedom.[7] Still, the question is not exhausted, but moves on to other comparisons.

B. The question arises from the comparison of men with other men

Cultural anthropology begins when the question “Who am I?” is sought by comparison of human beings with one another in the context of families, tribes, and nations.  Moltmann contrasts two historical strategies in which human beings have sought to live together.

The first strategy is derived from the belief in common innate ideas of the reason.  This idea, this humanitas - the likeness and unity of all people on the basis of a common nature – contrasts with an anxious ethnocentrism that pits one against another.  Unfortunately, humanitas came to divide people into the educated citizen and the unrefined barbarian; the pantheist and the polytheist.[8]

The second arises from the Judeo-Christian belief in one God, maker and judge of all people.  “The expectation of the coming kingdom of God unites all the individual destinies of men and the histories of the nations into a common world history.”(9)  Though it has taken many centuries to see anything approaching a common history, this strategy for unity has always had one significant advantage: the inclusion of difference underneath the umbrella of future history.  Not homogenous but pluralistic community.

Enlightenment anthropology combined these two strategies and produced the constitutions of modern states.  Such constitutions described human beings not as they were, but, instead presented, “a challenge, and a concrete expression of Utopia.”(10) Their visions of hope and freedom have charmed the whole world, and become dreams not easily forgotten.[9]

There is no doubt that cultures are different and historically conditioned.  Cultural anthropology studies them, then, in the discipline of ethnology.  It can also, however, attempt to advance, to humanize human kind.  This desire, humanitas, is a messianic hope for the fulfillment of humanity’s humanity.  Taken together, “it belongs fundamentally to man’s nature that he both is man [ethnology] and has to be man [humanitas]”(11).[10]

Cultural anthropology’s answer to the question “What is Man?” is culture, defined as the soul’s attempts to understand itself.  Through transitory cultural images which arise from out of an inner, amorphous, “creative germ-cell” and vary across history and geography, humanity “attempts constantly to complete itself.”  This desire, culture, attempts to close up (limit) the openness of biological incompleteness.  To the origin of this openness, this incompleteness, cultural anthropology cannot speak.  The question is not exhausted, but moves on to other comparisons.

C. The question arises from the comparison of man with the divine

Religious anthropologies such as those found in theology, metaphysics and poetry arise from religious statements about the fate and destiny of humanity.  “In the presence of the gods man recognizes his own non-divinity, his lowliness, and his earthiness”(12).  Here, however, the question, “What is man?” takes on a new context.  Here it is understood as a question asked of human beings by God.  It is not a question human beings ask, but one that is posed by the experience of suffering.  People are put into question here like they are in no other sphere.  “Here the question ‘What is man?’ can no longer be answered objectively with reference to his soul, his deficiencies, or his creative power.  It becomes concentrated into the person question, ‘Who am I, my God, before you?’”(14)  Against such mystery, humanity hopes for revelation which is a hope for the answer of the self.  “It is only in the coming of God himself, who endlessly puts this life in question, that the revelation of the secret of man can be hoped for”(15).[11]  It is the depth of the heart, with its subsequent existential crisis, that begets religious anthropology.  Still, religious anthropology is not specific to Christianity.  To ask about Christian anthropology is to go still further.  For the Christian, the question is still not exhausted.

D. Ecce Homo! Behold the man!

For the Christian, the question, “What is man?  Who am I?” arises not from a comparison with animals, with other men, or even with the numinous, but out of a call, “at the point at which man in his life is charged with something impossible by the call of God.”  “The divine calls, which demands of him a new being, places him at an insuperable distance from himself, and involves him in a change of identity.”(16)  In short, the Bible does not answer the existential question, but gives meaning to existence by opening up the future through the promise of a God who goes with and before.  People ask about limitations, God’s presence offers infinite possibilities.  Jesus Christ is the figure of this new way forward.  Christ is true God and true man, into his future goes all human questioning.  Jesus’ identification with the outcast, with the non-human, makes them human.  His is a humanization of all people.  “In this crucified Jesus men have again and again been able to see themselves in the course of history”(19).  The crucified Christ unifies all people, because all are the same under the knife-edge of suffering.  “God became man in order out of proud and unfortunate gods to make real men.” (Luther)  “Christian anthropology is an anthropology of the crucified Lord”(20).  It does not overcome other forms of anthropology, nor is overcome.  It is the challenge for liberation cast up against all form of safe pretence, deceit and deception.  It is the rescue of humanity from man.

Go to to chapter two.

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[1] Moltmann, then, is not an empiricist. He agrees with Heidegger’s criticism of objectivity. The escape from the solipsistic tradition of radical doubt and skepticism began when Descartes attempted to remove all a priori and replace them with the cogito and ended in Meditation 3 when he made God (logos) foundational for knowledge again. Kant had the same problem, albeit in a far more sophisticated manner. After brilliantly codifying his categories, he could never answer the question of how it is possible for one who is subject to the categories to step outside them, to transcend them, in order to describe them? Heidegger, following Husserl’s phenomenological lead, brushes aside the attempt and regains Plato’s original insight: the philosopher is one who contemplates the relations of the higher forms. Except, for Heidegger, there is no world of the forms. Instead, he sets about exploring the existential structures of Da-Sein, which is not the absolute ego vs. the world, I-It, but the transitive self in a field of relatedness. Furthermore, from the perspective of human beings “thrown” into the world, God is the only non-subjective point, I-Thou.

[2] How is humanity changed?

[3] [Thom] I couldn't help but contrast this with Calvin's Institutes 1.1, in which Calvin says that wisdom consists entirely of two parts: knowledge of God and of ourselves. I wonder, though, at Calvin’s sentence, "it is perfectly obvious, that the endowments which we [human beings] possess cannot possibly be from ourselves; nay, that our very being is nothing else than subsistence in God alone." Moltmann does not reflect such a metaphysic. When Moltmann treats of human being-ness it is examined upon its own bottom and not against the negative spaces of God. Yet, both men come to the same, hopeful end (God the Creator), as Calvin writes, “Every person, therefore, on coming to the knowledge of himself, is not only urged to seek God, but is also led as by the hand to find him.” (1.1.1) A final question: Does Moltmann interrogate anthropology to discover God or to discover the quality of life before God? Hopefully, the answers should present themselves as the theologian begins to answer the question, "Why do human beings question their own humanity?"

[Alan] It does seem that his anthropology starts from below rather than, like Calvin's, from above. But I do wonder if he is fully consistent with his premises. Moltmann makes the crucified Lord the critical criterion for his theology, but it seems in Man the cross is at best a challenge rather than determinative of his conclusions. (Am I correct in assuming that his chapter on the anthropology of the crucified Lord comes last?) [Furthermore, there is a strong resemblance to] Karl Rahner's theological anthropology. For instance, Rahner writes the following about the transcendent structure of knowledge:

"In spite of the finiteness of his system man is always present to himself in his entirety. He can place everything in question. In his openness to everything and anything, whatever can come to expression can be at least a question to him. In the fact that he affirms the possibility of a merely finite horizon of questioning, this possibility is already surpassed, and man shows himself to be a being with an infinite horizon. In the fact that he experiences his finiteness radically, he reaches beyond this finiteness and experiences himself as a transcendent being, as spirit. The infinite horizon of human questioning is experienced as a horizon which recedes further and further the more answers man can discover.” (Foundations, pp 31-32)

[As in Moltmann, t]here is limited openness to everything (the infinite) in how humans constantly question reality to grow in knowledge. Rahner later will assert that the infinite horizon is God, that the structure of transcendental experiences masks the natural revelation of God (p 170) and that philosophical proofs for the existence of God are merely secondary thematizations of a more basic transcendental experience (pp 68-71). I wonder how much of Rahner does Moltmann explicitly cite? And perhaps more interesting is how much of Rahner is hidden in Moltmann's thought?

[4] Cf. JM member Mike Gibson, “The church, then, corresponds to the reality of Christ’s resurrection, whereby the resurrection as the reality of the future, and as the beginning of the resurrection and new creation, means that the church herself is an echo of the resurrection, a community of those living in the beginning of the resurrection of the dead.” draft chapter. “The Redemption of Time in the Church of the Risen Christ” pp. 12ff. available in the /Files section by permission of the author.

[5] Existentialist ideas of “Alienation.”

[6] Culture in general and language in particular are tools used to further the quest for self-realization.

[7] Karl Rahner understands freedom as fundamental power to decide about and actualize the self.

[8] Moltmann describes the Western humanitas tradition as a category of law in the lecture “Who is Man?” In this lecture, he says that the adoption of the idealism of humanitas has led to “humanitistic suicide caused by despair resulting from man’s impossible dream. And since the bourgeoisie has been the bearer of that ideal humanism for 200 years, we may also talk then of a self-destruction of the bourgeoisie.” Human Identity in Christian Faith Raymond Fred West Memorial Lectures on Immortality (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974): 2, 5. The two positions, humanitas as gospel-openness and humanitas as law seem at odds, and, as of this note, I’m not sure how to reconcile them. Some investigation as to whether he treats humanitas in God for a Secular Society would be helpful.

[9] “Bloch's practice of ideological criticism discerns emancipatory utopian dimensions even in ideological products, ferreting out those aspects that might be useful for radical theory and practice.” Douglas Kellner, “Ernst Bloch, Utopia and Ideology Critique,” Illusions [e-zine] accessed February 9, 2004. cf. Kellner and Harry O’Hara, “Utopia and Marxism in Ernst Bloch,” New German Critique 9 (Fall 1976). Ernst Bloch. The Spirit of Utopia. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. “Since Christian ideology .. always defined what was best in the human social structure, as the embodiment of what the concept of utopia means as the "Kingdom of God" on earth, a recapturing and re-creation of Eden itself as social form, any political ideology that advocates motion toward the "best" necessarily can be, even must be, defined as Christian at some level of its articulation. The classless state of pure democracy in Marxian ideology cannot be distinguished effectively from what anyone else would call the re-creation of the Garden of Eden in purely political and social forms.” Frederick Martin, “Ernst Bloch: ‘The Spirit of Utopia’,” [article on-line] accessed February 9, 2004.

[10] Ethnology as limit; humanitas as openness.

[11] Rahner’s “self-transcending being.”

Channeling Napoleon Hill

What follows is a comment made to a post that my pastor, Father Jody Howard, made following an article in the Living Church about the challenges facing the Episcopal Church. At the end of the article, Rev. Dr. Neal Michell, canon for strategic development in the Diocese of Dallas, writes, “The problems facing our church are spiritual in nature. We have not been faithful enough disciples of Jesus Christ. We have not reached out to those around us with the Good News of Jesus Christ.” My response is as follows:

Brueggemann's call for a return to personal discipleship is definitely part of the solution; however, that is simply not enough. That may become a vibrant monasticism or fundamentalism, (which may be the option that best exemplifies God's design for the church in the world. For me, the jury is still out on that one. And if it does come down here, I choose monasticism over fundamentalism.) but it will not solve the puzzle of why there simply isn't traction in the culture. In my mind, this is a problem with language and with anthropology. Language because there is simply no longer a common linguistic "game" that allows people to talk about religious ideas. (And, one might say, this is part of a broader problem: that the public square has so collapsed that even talking about ideas of public consequence has been reduced to grandstanding, party politics, and the manipulation of conspiracy theories.) Anthropology because the formula for a whole human being living a human life no longer includes the habits and practices of faith as a necessity but has relegated it to, at best, an app that can be downloaded and run on the software of the self if one so chooses, for reasons that are highly personable but lend themselves to the psychotic, the aesthetic, the social/political, or even the pragmatic--but certainly not the necessary. Western human beings are practical atheists, one and all, and it is a struggle even to be religious for the religious. The church catholic in the West has ignored these extremely thorny philosophical problems and applied, instead, Western and especially American ideas of individualism and success-through-right-action (channeling Napoleon Hill).

theological anthropology; Walter Brueggemann; missions; culture; atheism; modernity

the imago Dei and the Happy Life

Genesis chapter one reads:

Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth." So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." (vv. 26-28 NRSV)

This text is the origin of the biblical and theological understanding of human beings as made in the image of God (imago Dei). It is a doctrine with profound implications for our understanding of the meaning and value of human life. It is also a doctrine about relationships: the relationship between God and humanity; the relationship between human beings and the creation; and the relationship between the sexes—“in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”

What I want to do here is to summarize a chapter entitled “The Image of God: A Theological Summary” from the book Created in God’s Image (Paternoster Press, 1986) by the late Reformed theologian Anthony A. Hoekema. And why am I doing this? Well, I find that over time I refer to this book quite a bit. It was my first introduction to the centrality of the imago Dei, and continues to be a touchstone to which I return. And the overall point is that the re-creation of the image of God in human beings is the goal of human life and the recipe for human happiness. Psychology has a definition. Aristotle had a definition. So does Scripture, and that definition is the imago Dei.

The Image of God: A Theological Summary

The entire constitution, every bit of a human being, mirrors and represents God. As a mirror reflects, so people should reflect God. When a human being is what he or she ought to be, others should be able to look and see something of God: something of God’s love, God’s kindness, and God’s goodness. Human beings also represent God. As God’s ambassadors to the world, humanity represents the authority of God, speaks for God, and should be wholly about the furtherance of God’s program in the world. And no one should neglect the body in this, for the body is absolutely necessary on both counts.

Structural and Functional Aspects

Does the image of God refer to something innate in the person—to what people are—or does it refer to actions—to what people do? Theologians have stressed one or the other aspect over the centuries.

Those who place the image in something innate, something in the structure of the human person have cherry-picked various capacities: reason, for example, or morality, religious sensitivity, responsibility, free will, and even aesthetics and creativity. Really, though, it is all of these. By the image of God in the broader or structural sense, we mean the entire endowments of gifts and capacities that inform what human beings do.

Now in the twentieth century, the stress has been on functional, on what people do; on human beings as they worship, serve, love, etc. Relationality is the key word; people are incorrigibly related, both to one another and to God. People aren’t just what they are, but are also what they do. This addresses a narrower slice of the human being, the relational slice, and so it is absolutely ethical, concerned chiefly with relationships. That means, of course, that in every way it should be informed and governed by the character of the triune God, who is relational in his very being.

Hoekema argues that both is and does, structure and function, should be taken together to circumscribe the whole of what is meant by the image of God. Yet, the structure he takes to be secondary and the functioning as primary. What we have (structure) is given for a purpose (function), and so it is the function which is more important (and it was the function that was lost).

God has created us in his image so that we may carry out a task, fulfill a mission, pursue a calling. To enable us to perform that task, God has endowed us with many gifts--gifts that reflect something of his greatness and glory. To see man as the image of God is to see both the task and the gifts. But the task is primary; the gifts are secondary. The gifts are the means for fulfilling the task. (73)

The biblical data is quite clear: even after the fall, the image of God remained in humankind, but it was also lost. And this division between structure and function allows us to see just how this could be. For the structure remained unchanged, but the function was twisted, broken, and perverted. Human beings were no longer related to God, and so, when that chief relationship left, its straightening and informing effect on all other acts and relationships was taken, too. Indeed, what makes sin so serious is precisely the fact that humanity now uses God-given and God-imaging powers and gifts to do things that are an affront to its maker. The image of God is not lost, but marred in fallen human beings—and that damage must be renewed even as the relationship is renewed.

Christ as the True Image of God

Jesus Christ is the image of God par exellence (Col. 1:15). Looking at him, we see what human beings as the image of God should be like. Obviously there are aspects to Jesus that are removed from us. Not many persons have joined to their human nature one that is fully divine. Yet, this divine nature doesn't really come into play here. We aren't asked to be God, but to image him, and so the human Jesus, being truly and completely human, is not removed from us. And what is imago about Jesus is not reason or intelligence, but, as Hoekema points out, love in action. Hoekema plots this in 3 directions.

• Jesus was wholly directed toward God, (Matt. 26:39).


• Jesus was wholly directed toward the neighbor, (Mark 10:45; John 15:13).


• Jesus rules over nature, (Hoekema refers to Jesus's miracle-power over nature and the demonic).

These three directions prove quite helpful in our developing understanding. First, we saw that the imago takes in the complete human being both structurally and functionally. And now we see the whole person in action along three broad relationships. "In sum, from looking at Jesus Christ, the perfect image of God, we learn that the proper functioning of the image includes being directed toward God, being directed toward the neighbor, and ruling over nature" (75). (All three of these relationships can be found in our Genesis passage, and I hope you'll take a second and re-read it with them in mind.)

Human beings in This Threefold Relationship

Hoekema spend a few pages detailing each of the three relationships just mentioned, but we don't have the space for that. Instead, I'm going to pull out the best material from his discussion of each one.

To be a human being is to be directed toward God. Human life is entirely lived coram Deo--as before the face of God, in love, trust, obedience to him, in prayer and worship, thanksgiving and in public, familial, corporate, and even political action. This vertical relationship is basic to a Christian anthropology. Indeed, here is where we pick up that thread of criticism with psychological well-being.

All views of man that do not take their starting-point in the doctrine of creation and that therefore look upon him as an autonomous being who can arrive at what is true and right wholly apart from God or from God's revelation in Scripture are to be rejected as false. (76)

Human beings can never be "man-in-himself" (G. C. Berkouwer). We are responsible to God, and do all to and for the glory of God.

To be a human being is to be directed toward one's neighbor. "Male and female he created them," that's what the Genesis passage says. People are not complete in themselves, they need others. The imago doesn't exist alone, but in community with others--and though the marriage bond is discussed in this passage in Genesis, Hoekema and all other theologians do not limit the image to covenantal/sexual union. Jesus, after all, was never married. And in the life to come, when humanity will be totally perfected, there will be no marriage (Matt. 22:30). Human beings are incomplete apart from others.

Man's relatedness to others means that every human being should not view his or her gifts and talents as an avenue for personal aggrandizement, but as a means whereby he or she can enrich the lives of others. It means that we should be eager to help others, heal their hurts, supply their needs, bear their burdens, and share their joys, loving others as ourselves. It means that every human being has a right to be accepted by others, to belong to others, and to be loved by others. . . . Man's acceptance of and love for others is an assential aspect of his humanness. (78)

Note that here we discover an argument against racism or sexism that isn't rooted in 1960's-era rights-speak.

To be a human being is to rule over nature. The main thing here is that dominion does not mean what you think it means. We hear that as absolute power over, and for the purposes of fulfilling our wants. But, remember, the restored image of God always takes God's desires into account. The Hebrew roots behind the words in Genesis translated "subdue" and "have dominion" are more about gardening, shepherding, and cultivating than they are about the industrial revolution. And Hoekema is careful to say that this Genesis mandate includes the development of human culture "not only agriculture, horticulture, and animal husbandry, but also science, technology, and art." Theologians today are making much of the green-aspect of this part of the image; we should take care of the planet we're on, its flora, fauna, and wildlife. It is a better basis for ecological stewardship than arguments that either equate human beings with animal life, so that we should conserve because everyone has a right to a piece of the pie, or that try and motivate a green attitude by painting picture of ecological apocalypse. The Christian needs neither argument, but only that God be glorified in our use of his creation.

All three of these relationships are interrelated, and only human beings operate simultaneously in all three. They also reflect God's own being. Humanity's responsibility to and conscious fellowship with God reflects God's own love and fellowship with humanity. The relationship of human beings with others reflects God's own inter-Trinitarian life. And humanity's stewardship of the earth reflect God's own supreme dominion (see Psalm 8.5). The image of God flows out from human beings along these three planes, and it is within them that we perform the image.

Anyway, now we turn to the imago Dei as it has existed historically. In order to understand the imago, we have to understand it in the light of creation, fall, and redemption. Remember, though, all three of the above relationships exist at each stage.

The Original Image
Hoekema, following in the footsteps of theologians before him, wants us to know that human beings were not created as consummate, perfect images of God. They were, as it were, "in a state of integrity" but had not fully developed in the image of God. Theirs was a provisional existence that awaited a probationary test for completion. At this stage, see, there was still the possibility of sin. They were able not to sin (posse non peccare), but were not yet not able to sin (non posse peccare). Their image of God existed at a boundary, and God's command "not to eat of it" stood in the way of its perfection.

The Perverted Image
Alas, they sinned. The fall into sin does not annhilate the imago but perverts it. "The image in its structural sense was still there--man's gifts, endowments, and capacities were not destroyed by the Fall--but man now began to use these gifts in ways that were contrary to God's will" (83). In the place of the relationship to God, there appeared idols (Rom. 1:20-23), perversions of man's capacity for worshipping God. In the place of a loving relationship toward others, those relationships are selfish manipulations, or indifference, or alienation. "Hell is other people," (Jean-Paul Sartre).

He uses his gifts of speech to tell lies instead of the truth, to hurt his neighbor instead of helping him. Artistic abilities are often prostituted in the service of lust, and God-given sexual powers are used for perverse and debasing goals. Pornography and drugs have become big businesses; their purpose is not to help others but to exploit them. The motto of many in today's world seems to be, 'Every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost.' Man is still inescapably related to others, but instead of loving others he is inclined to hate them."

And, finally, human beings now exploit the earth for selfish purposes, exploiting and stripping it, polluting it and using its secrets to wage war. Human culture--literature, art, science, tecnology--magnifies the whole, praising it and its achievements instead of God.

The image is still there, but malfunctioning. Crippled all the way down. Corruptio optimi pessima: the corruption of the best is the worst.

The Renewed Image
It is the redemptive process, the ordo salutis that describes the restoration of the image. Human beings are set right again, so that they can properly function in those three relationships. All three persons of the Trinity are intimately involved. The ordo salutis, then, is this (and remember, though we list them they are actually a unitary work of God often occuring simultaneously to each other):

• regeneration: by the preaching of the Word, the Spirit acts to make dead people alive again, placing them into living union with Christ. This is the cause of faith, and the beginning of every other part of the order of salvation.


• conversion: confession of faith and act of repentance in the believer


• justification: an instantaneous act whereby the sin and guilt of a believer are imputed to Christ and the righteousness of Christ is imputed to the believer. The believer is made righteous.


• adoption: believers in Christ become sons and daughters of God, joint-heirs with Christ of every blessing, with all the corresponding rights and priviledges.


• sanctification: Pimarily the work of the Holy Spirit operating through Word and Sacraments, the restored image of God is manifested to greater and greater degrees.


• glorification: The image is perfected in the new creation, and human beings, now dwelling in perfected bodies, no longer have to worry about sin, being now non passe peccare, not able to sin.

The renewal of the image of God involves a broad, comprehensive vision of the Christian view of man. The process of sanctification affects every aspect of life: man's relationship to God, to others, and to the entire creation. The restoration of the image does not concern only religious piety in the narrow sense, or witnessing to people about Christ, or "soul-saving" activities; in its fullest sense it involves the redirection of all of life. . . And is discovered in its richest form in Christ together with his church, or in the church as the body of Christ. (88, 89)

Finally, in this section, Hoekema spends some time making sure his reader understands that the renewal of the imago, though primarily accomplished by the Holy Spirit, is also a cooperation. We are encouraged to put to death our old self, to cast off sin, and to pursue holiness. The renewal of the image is something in which we take an active part. While in this present life, believers are genuinely new but not yet totally new. The image is breaking out through believers into the world, but it is not yet seen competely and perfectly in them.

The Perfected Image
The imago Dei in humanity will only shine out in perfected brilliance when believers are finally glorified. And glorification is not a return to Eden, but a fuller form of human being. Adam and Eve could never have been said to "partake of the divine nature." Just as Christ has been raised and glorified, so those in him will be raised and glorified--their image patterned after His. We can't say much about what this state will be like, but we can say that it will still include all three of those above-mentioned relationships. Hoekema goes to great lengths to stress a new creation that is full of variety and expression, creativity and energy, a world in which the imago Dei as it finds fulfillment in the whole of the perfected human race acts perfectly along all three of those dimensions.

In the life to come we shall see the image of God not only in its perfection but also in its completion. All of God's people, from every age and every place, resurrected and glorified, will then be present on the new earth, with all the God-reflecting gifts that hae been given them. And all of these gifts, now completely purged of sin and imperfection, will be used by man for the first time in a perfect way. Then, throughout eternity, God will be glorified by the worship, service, and praise of his image-bearers in a scintillating and totally flawless recreation of his own marvelous virtues. (101)


Concluding Observations
Hoekema's concluding observations amount to three points. First, that we must always treat people in light of their destiny. Quoting C. S. Lewis: "It is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit." And this should drive us to corporate holiness and also to mission in the face of perdition. I like this quote by John Calvin:

We are not to consider that men merit of themselves but to look upon the image of God in all men, to which we owe all honor and love. Therefore, whatever man you meet who needs your aid, you have no reason to refuse to help him. Say, "he is contemptible and worthless"; but the Lord shows him to be one to whom he has deigned to give the beauty of his image. Say that he does not deserve even your least effort for his sake; but the image of God, which recommends him to you, is worthy of your giving yourself and all your possessions. (Institutes III.7.6)

Second, that the imago Dei should deeply inform how the church is and acts. "Our concern in evangelizing people is not just to "save people's souls," but to restore the image of God to its proper functioning in all of life, to the greater glory of God. And third, that sexual difference does not cease in the new creation. Not that sexual procreation will continue--Jesus was plain on this one--but that our sexuality, such an intimate part of our individuality, will not only be retained but enriched, and that the future community will demonstrate the complex wholeness of men and women properly related to each other. This is a strange ending, but one that affirms rather than denies God's creation, and though I don't understand in a logical way why God would continue male and female into the next world, I see that a neutered humanity is no real humanity at all.

The doctrine of the image of God touches so many aspects of the Christian life. The imago to me is the central "why" behind so much of Christian ethics and ecclesiology. Understanding this gives great value in seeing so many disparate ideas congealing underneath one great head. It is Christian anthropology, and it does not deny, or limit, but fulfills everything about human being and life, affirming human beings in their physical, psychological, spiritual, economic, cultural, and indeed in every portion of their lives.

imago Dei; anthropology; theosis; divinization; ethics; Aristotle; virtues.