Kruse Kronicle

What Does “Image of God” Mean? Part 3

Science and the Sacred: What Does “Image of God” Mean? Part 3

(This is the third of a three part series by OT scholar Peter Enns.)

One of the portraits the New Testament paints of Jesus is that of ultimate image-bearer of God. Jesus fully reflects God’s image; he is the true representative of God in his creation. No one embodies more fully this truly human quality.

We can begin where we left off last week, with Psalm 8. This psalm praises God for how he has exalted humanity: man is a little lower than God, crowned with glory and honor, and everything has been placed under his feet. Humankind, in other words, is one step below God, given authority to rule creation. Psalm 8 is fully consistent with Genesis 1:26-27 where “image of God” is described as ruling over all of creation.

In Hebrews 2:5-9 (see side-bar), the anonymous author cites Psalm 8 for a reason that might not be obvious at first glance: Jesus ranks higher than angels, a topic he began in 1:5. (In fact, all of Hebrews is one long “Jesus is better than…” argument, e.g. Moses, the high priest, and the tabernacle).

Psalm 8 supports his argument. Creation was not subject to angels, but humankind. The author of Hebrews reminds us that “everything” is put under human royal authority—everything is subject to him (v. 8). But the author of Hebrews laments, “Yet at present we do not see everything subject to him” (v. 8). The “him” refers to humanity. What we do see, however, is Jesus who is now crowned with glory and honor because of his death (v. 9). ...

... The image of God in Genesis is not about “what makes us human,” such as one’s soul. It is about the lofty role God has given humankind to be his representative rulers. That is what image means: nothing more—but nothing less.

Understood this way, we can and should speak of the image of God as marred, incomplete, subject to sin in all of us. The true image of God is only realized in the crucified and risen Son of God. And this gives us a much fuller understanding of the incarnation. The incarnate Son of God is fully God and fully human.

Jesus is the full image-bearer of God. He is the most human of any human who has ever lived. By faith, we too participate in restored humanity. Next week we will look at what that means for us today.

What Does “Image of God” Mean? Part 2

Science and the Sacred: What Does “Image of God” Mean? Part 2 by Peter Enns

Last week we saw that “image of God” in Genesis 1:26-27 means being God’s representative rulers in his creation. This is similar to two ancient practices: kings placing images of themselves in distant parts of their kingdom and the use of idols in temple worship. Both represent king or god and signal that they are present.

Let’s take this idea and see where it goes in the Old Testament.

No Idols

In ancient Mesopotamia, every nation had pantheons of gods and they all worshipped their gods through images. Israel’s first two Commandments were wholly out of sync with the ancient world. The Israelites were told: “I am the only God you will worship” (Exodus 20:3), and “don’t worship any images whatsoever” (20:4-6). The Second Commandment includes making images of Yahweh, which the Israelites broke in the golden calf incident in Exodus 32.

There are two reasons why Israel was told not to make images of Yahweh. First, unlike the other gods, Yahweh is distinct from what he has made. He cannot be captured by a carved image of animals or any other piece of creation.

Second, God already made an image of himself: humankind, a living image. By carving images to worship Yahweh, Israel would be creating an alternate “connection” with Yahweh. ...

Israel King in God’s Image

There is another important angle to bring into the picture. In the ancient Mesopotamian world, kings were the representative rulers of the gods; they ruled the people on behalf of the gods. Kings were considered god-like, sometimes referred to as “sons” of one god or another, and often worshipped as gods. ...

... Unlike the other nations, Israelite kings were never worshipped. Israel even had a skeptical attitude toward kingship (e.g., 1 Samuel 8). In fact, kings were every bit as subject to God’s rule as anyone else (hence, the prophets were free to call kings to account). But they still were anointed to embody the royal image-bearing role. Israel’s history of kingship is so tragic because the kings largely failed in reflecting this image.

Humankind in God’s Image

Unique to Israel, the role of royal image-bearer was conferred not only on a line of kings but also on all people—a striking notion in the ancient world.

Psalm 8:4-6 aptly summarizes what “image of God” means. ...

... This psalm is a great summary of what image of God means. There is nothing in all of creation that has a higher status than humanity. There is nothing in all of creation that is more god-like than humanity. The psalm is picked up by the author of Hebrews to speak of Jesus. Next week we will look at Hebrews and other NT passages to see how Jesus—and those who follow him—are the “image of God.”

The Imago Dei and God the Worker

Vanguard Church (Bob Robinson): The Imago Dei and God the Worker 

A Christian Perspective on Work, Part 1

According to Genesis 2:2, God is resting (“By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work.”)

However, according to John 5:17, God has continued to work (“Jesus said to them, ‘My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I, too, am working.’”). And Psalm 107:15 exhorts us to “thank the Lord for his steadfast love, for his wondrous works to the children of men.”

It is clear that God is not the watchmaker God, who wound up the Creation and now passively watches his creatures without doing anything. He is still at work. Our God is a worker.

This must mean that God does not “rest” as in taking time off from work. It must mean something else (which we’ll explore later when we address “Sabbath”). Suffice it to say that after the initial Creation, God entered the “rest” of enjoying his handiwork. He entered into a time of dwelling in and with the work of his hands.

God works.

And God creates humanity in the image of the Triune God that works. ...

Looks like Bob is starting a fascinating series.

Prosperity: Respect for the Individual

We hear much today about the destructiveness of individualism. It no doubt is a significant cultural issue. But only recently has such excessive focus on the individual emerged. Throughout history, individuals were considered subordinate to society or rulers. An individual's existence and liberty were maintained primarily at the pleasure of the societal elite. Elaborate religious and cultural customs often emerged that offered some protection for individuals, but the idea of all human beings being of equal status in some ontological sense was foreign to ancient cultures. Thus, even though the Greeks experimented with democracy for powerful Greek men, Greek philosophers also tendered instruction on how these men should manage and pacify their wives, slaves, and other social inferiors.

Judaism offered the unique concept of bearing God's image. Ancient Near East kings erected images (eikons) throughout their territory to symbolize their authority throughout the region. No doubt the first chapters of Genesis were calling this idea to mind when the first humans were called "images of God," told to fill the earth and to exercise dominion. They would be God's junior partners showing God's authority throughout the world. Unlike wooden or stone eikons, these living eikons would share the faculties of reason and creativity. As God's eikons, each human being has intrinsic value.

Extending from this "image of God" idea is the notion of human rights. While we often have a hard time defining precisely what we mean by human rights, we do have the belief that people should not be deprived of freedom or killed arbitrarily. We can also say that the ideas of "image-bearing" and stewardship are interwoven into the mindset that gave rise to the Western world and its economic institutions. We are steward-owners who have a sense of responsibility to those who, for whatever reason, need basic necessities. People have great intrinsic value and should be treated as such. In an era of hyper-individualism, it is hard to appreciate just how profoundly exceptional this valuing of individuals is in human history.

We also see the impact of this "image of God" thinking on property rights. The Old Testament code lifted up the private ownership of property not as a tool that serves the state's best interests but as the rightly ordered state of affairs established by God. Considerable portions of the Old Testament law are devoted to managing property disputes, and the Leviticus 25 Jubilee provisions were to ensure that no one would become permanently alienated from the land God had entrusted to them.

God calls us individually and corporately to be stewards of the created world. Property is to be held and used in trust for God, not the state. Since our personal survival depends on our ability to create and manage resources for our own well-being, economic freedom is closely tied to personal and political freedom. Therefore, while ownership is not absolute, neither is it to be arbitrarily violated by the state or other powerful people. Property ownership is intrinsic to the mission of being an eikon of God in the world. That some Enlightenment and Modernist philosophies have sought to make property rights paramount because of their indispensable role in pursuing personal autonomy doesn't alter the origin of this elevation of property rights.

Property rights and human rights as we know them could not have emerged without the idea of humanity in the image of God. Some will argue that the Enlightenment had a more significant impact on these concepts, but it was inextricably connected to understandings of human nature from Judeo-Christian thought. While the concept of human rights has now become a global feature, many cultures still resist Western notions of human rights that played such a key role in the rise of Western prosperity.

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Living Simply in Abundance (24)

I've suggested that we need to get in touch with the forces within us that distort our sense of need and be intentional in our financial management. Beyond this, I want to suggest that we must also become disillusioned.

Isn't it interesting that the word "disillusion" has a negative connotation? After all, if we are living an illusion, wouldn't coming to the truth be a good thing? Most Americans are trapped in an illusion that our existence is normal. We are cognitively aware that we have it pretty good, and that billions of people do not share our abundance, but it does not penetrate our consciousness. We are easily seduced into the illusion that our experience of the world is the norm. In reality, famine, disease, war, illiteracy, pestilence, and oppression have been the norm for humanity throughout the ages. It is our experience of abundance that is novel. We must be disillusioned by the idea that our existence is the norm. We need to lose our sense of entitlement and have our eyes opened to the gracious abundance in which we live.

When our illusions are dispelled, two things happen. First, we become deeply grateful for the abundance we have. The "need" monster is cut to size. Things that once consumed us lose much of their allure. There is often a great sense of freedom. Second, when we become aware of how little others have, we become aware of our ability to contribute to the betterment of others. Generosity springs forth from within our abundance. So what is the key instrument in our disillusionment? I think it is connection with people who are poor.

There is an old joke where a guy says, "I'm not a racist. I don't even know any black people." The fact is that many of us aren't indifferent to the poor because we don't even know any poor people. We need to be confronted with the lives of the poor. Ideally, I think every American Christian should be exposed to poverty in developing nations firsthand. There is nothing like seeing the conditions of the people who live off the garbage dump in Kingston, Jamaica, the squatter villages surrounding Monterrey, Mexico, or the Spartan existence of the poor in China. The sights, the sounds, the smells, and the voices make a permanent imprint on our psyche.

Four years ago, a Church I worked with had several poor urban youths from Kansas City, MO. One of the women at the Church, with a heart for Jamaica, organized a Christmas break mission trip for these kids. They spent more than a week working and getting to know the poor in a Jamaican village. Nearly all these kids, several of whom had never been outside the Kansas City metro area, returned transformed. They came back with a new appreciation for the opportunities they had available to them compared to the poverty of the Jamaicans they encountered. They were both more motivated to take advantage of the opportunities they had before them and developed a sense of the abundance they could share with others.

Years ago, Melissa and I located in an urban neighborhood that is by no means a slum, but it is squarely in the mix of urban life where we can't help but come into contact with people of differing economic status. We are involved with a couple of groups serving our area's poor. That brings us into contact with the people who wrestle with poverty issues.

Each of us has a different set of circumstances, but there are ways that every one of us can reduce our isolation from poor people, and we need to be intentional about doing so. We must be intentional about introducing our children to the lives of those without the material abundance we experience. More than most, this discipline has the power to break the hold materialism has on us.

With that said, we must not move from indifference toward poor people to romanticizing them. Poor people are human beings created in the image of God and intended for stewardship. Where injustice impacts their lives, we need to be partners in seeking justice. Where economic acumen is missing, we need to be about skills transfer and bringing poor people into a position of being stewards who participate with us reciprocally in the economy. We need to be open to what they may have to teach us.

We need to avoid romanticizing poverty itself. Over a decade ago, I heard Tom Skinner, an influential Black minister from Harlem, speak at the Christian Community Development Association meetings. He railed against Christians who came into his community and wanted to live in poverty in solidarity with poor people. His message was that if you have a problem with words like "profit" and "business," stay out of his neighborhood! The poor have been excluded from knowing how the economic game works. They need people they can learn the game from, not people who perpetuate ignorance out of some romantic notion of solidarity. Poor people do not want us to become like them. They want to share in our abundance.

It is beyond the scope of this series to say all that needs to be said here, but intentional identification with poor people is important to living simply in abundance. It both reshapes our distorted notions of reality and connects the lives of those with great material abundance with those without. We are finite beings with limited resources, but we can attach ourselves to one finite set of circumstances and start there. Which circumstances we attach ourselves to will be related to our context, our proclivities, and our passions, but we must find practical ways to invest a portion of our time and money in others.

Even better is when we live as communities among poor people or at least engage with them as part of a missional community. Needs are always well beyond the response of any individual, and the diversity of gifts within a community of Jesus' disciples makes it more likely that a range of resources will be brought to bear. The example of a community where others look after each other and then invite others into that community should be the norm for the Church. We have strayed far from this reality. We need to recover it.

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Living Simply in Abundance (13)

The Bible's recurring economic theme is that God owns all that exists. We were created to be stewards (corporately and individually) of God's resources, and God intends for stewards to live in community-wide abundance. Human rebellion entered the equation, and that intention has been terribly marred. Part of the Good News of the coming shalom of the Kingdom of God is the realization of community-wide abundance. It seems reasonable to conclude that foreshadowing the coming Kingdom in this age would also include improved material abundance. 

Yet the Scripture is very clear about the perils of wealth and abundance. There is the ever-present danger of finding our identity in our wealth and placing our trust in our abundance instead being in a relationship with God. Our simplicity of focus is lost, and our priorities drift out of alignment. We begin to distort justice in favor of preserving our abundance, and we become callous to the needs of the poor when we should seek justice and look for ways to expand abundant living to others.

Exactly how this temptation to idolize wealth evidences itself has varied across time and culture. Throughout most of history, only a small minority of human people could expect to amass much wealth. The events of the last 300 years have led to an unprecedented expansion in both the quantity and distribution of wealth in the world. I noted in an earlier post the worldwide real per capita annual income doubled between 12,000 BCE and 1750 CE, from $90 to $180. Since then, it has risen to more than $6,600. The percentage of people living on $1 a day has shrunk from about 84% in 1820 to about 15% today and is still falling. This expansion in material abundance is good, but how it has come about has caused some problems. A brief history review.

Some will argue that technological innovation (particularly the harnessing of steam, petroleum, and electrical power) was key to the rise of Western capitalism. There can be little doubt that such innovations were essential, but they were not sufficient in themselves. In retrospect, two profound cultural changes were necessary for modern capitalism to emerge from Medieval Europe: The flattening of hierarchies and the movement away from notions of fate and providence.

Medieval European society had a highly stratified and rigidly maintained hierarchy. God was at the top of the hierarchy, with everything neatly arranged in a status pyramid down to the peasant. It was very similar to the highly stratified Greco-Roman world. Everyone cared for those under him in the pyramid; total allegiance was expected of those above him. This arrangement effectively dampened the development of horizontally oriented relationships like voluntary associations and economic trade.

The notion of fate and providence also presented a barrier. The modern idea of risk and risk management did not emerge until around the fifteenth century. Until then, good or bad "fortune" encountered on a trade journey would simply be attributed to fate, the will of the gods, the work of sorcerers, or providence. In one sense of the word "risk," you could say that risk has always been around because people have always known that travel involves uncertainties. This is not what I'm referring to.

By risk, I'm referring to making studious evaluations of trade journeys that have been taken. We learn that merchants traveling route A often far exceed what merchants on routes B and C earn, but merchants traveling route A are more frequently robbed. We learn merchants with certain types of character and track records perform better than others. We learn that traveling at certain times of the year has greater trade advantages but a higher likelihood of weather-related problems. We consider all of these considerations (and more) and assign a statistical probability of success for any given trade adventure. Then we set about finding ways to allocate our resources to maximize return while minimizing losses.

As long as events are in the hands of fate and providence, our experience is one of the things happening to us that we cannot control. What emerged in the Middle Ages was the idea of a rational God who created an orderly universe. We could effectively manage future outcomes by discerning the order God had created. This simple concept that is so ubiquitous to us today is really only a few centuries old. It has its roots in the Judeo-Christian heritage.

I maintain that this leveling of hierarchies into more horizontally based orientations and abandoning excessive ideas of fate and providence in favor of reasoned risk assessment were good and needed developments. The rigid status hierarchies of the Greco-Roman world and Medieval Europe contradicted the fictive-family notion of being brothers and sisters in Christ. The growing realization about the orderliness of the universe, and the attempts to learn about God and the world through applications of reason and observation, seem to me to be wonderful expressions of the image of God at work in humanity. However, the emerging forces that brought about these changes, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment and Modernist eras, ushered in a new set of problems concerning economic life.

By the time of the Enlightenment, the agenda had become one of creating human autonomy over the created order by applying reason. Progress via reason would render God useless, and material abundance (among other things) would be the reward for shaking off past religious superstitions. An equality of humanity as God's image bearers, lovingly seeking to understand the world in faithful response to our mission as household managers over the earth, was supplanted by a vision that casts God out of the picture and elevated humanity as masters of their own destiny. Reason and science (of which the modern academic field of economics is just one expression) would save us.

The Enlightenment and Modernism, with much of the Judeo-Christian heritage employed by them, have successfully achieved material abundance. But in doing so, they have made materialism and consumerism idols. With God effectively (even if not formally) removed from the equation, Westerners have been taught to define themselves by their material progress, to find their very identity in their material quality of life. We have exchanged falsely finding our identity within a rigid hierarchy of Medieval social order with falsely finding it our material status.

Unfortunately, many who correctly sense the idolatry at work here, have mistakenly turned against the economic freedom that creates the abundance at precisely the time when billions worldwide could most benefit from experiencing economic freedom and exchange for themselves. The challenge is not to halt the production of abundance. The challenge is to involve everyone possible in the abundance while reorienting the values we feed into the economic system by simplifying our focus to be totally upon God.

But what about the environmental impact of pursuing abundance?

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Living Simply in Abundance (2)

As we leap into this discussion, I think we must ask what wealth is. What is the role of wealth and abundance in the biblical narrative?

I tend to think of wealth as both abundance beyond what is needed for basic subsistence and as anything we possess that can be used for economic exchange. (Do you agree? How else might we describe it?) Community-wide wealth and abundance is the normal condition of the created order, but human rebellion has corrupted it.

According to the biblical narrative, God places the first couple in the garden and gives them a mission. Fill the earth with his eikons and have dominion over the earth as co-creative stewards with God, bringing creation to its fullness. Human rebellion has frustrated that mission. God seeks restoration of shalom through at-one-ment in Christ. We are restored in relationship to God, each other, within ourselves, and nature. That restoration will be completed only at the last day.

The narrative gives us important insights into wealth and abundance. The biblical story begins in a garden and ends in an opulent garden city. Cities were the ancient world's symbol for human community, commerce, government, and art. In the end, God redeems human beings and their contributions to the world. Abraham was given great wealth as a sign of God's covenant. The Pentateuch repeatedly refers to entering "a land flowing with milk and honey." Passages like Deut. 8:6-10 speak of the abundance Israel will have if they keep God's covenant. There will be such abundance that the entire nation can rest from toil every seven years to celebrate Sabbath with God. Isaiah 25 features the great lavish eschatological banquet, which becomes a key theme of Jesus' teaching about the end of time. The description of the New Jerusalem is one of opulence.

Jesus also uses the idea of his people as the oikonomos, the household manager, the one who manages the estate in the householder's absence. It is the word from which we get "economics." God owns all that is, but we are the household managers working the estate and bringing it to fruition according to God's purposes. God brings about wealth, but we are participants with God in the process.

Human beings were not made for bare subsistence. God did not create us as cattle needing only food, water, and shelter. We are creative image-bearers of God. We were meant for stewardship of resources. Certainly, our employment is one way to exhibit these qualities but resources beyond subsistence make it possible for us to create, recreate, and celebrate in other ways. These resources may be put toward learning for learning's sake, for the development of recreational skills, for traveling and experiencing new places, for offering hospitality, or for the enjoyment of creating and maintaining a well-appointed home, to name just a few. God takes great delight in seeing the unique package of proclivities and passions God has developed in us evidenced. It gives glory to God. Abundance allows that to happen.

Having said all this, I feel compelled to make an explicit distinction. What I have just described is not a "name-it-and-claim-it" wealth and prosperity gospel where we manipulate God into providing us with goodies. The prosperity in the Bible is a broadly shared communal wealth that comes from a social ecosystem of covenantal relationships. It is part of the biblical vision of shalom. I just want to be clear here.

Now I've made my case that mere subsistence is not the biblical vision; we are still left with the dilemma that some people live in abundance while many do not. We will come to that issue, but first, I want to ask from where does wealth come?

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Economic Fallacies: "Work is Instrumental"

The "Work is Instrumental" fallacy views human economic labor as purely instrumental in service to higher pursuits of spirituality and intellect.

Humanity was created in the image of God. The image of God has primarily been understood through substantive categories throughout much of Western Church history. The substantive view is expressed in two ways: ontological and comparative. Ontologically, we are a spirit and, therefore, of the same substance as God. Comparatively, we are like God and unlike nature in some ways, but unlike God and like nature in other ways. How we are like God and unlike nature points to our image-bearing qualities. We are substantively the same as God. This usually is expressed in terms of matters of the mind, like reason and volition.

While this substantive understanding is true, as far as it goes, it does not go far enough. The substantive view alone has led to damaging dualisms of spirit vs. body and mind vs. body. Personhood is equated with one's spirit or mind. The body and material issues, including work and economic action, are merely instrumental to the spirit/mind half of the dualism.

Narrative scholars have come at the image of God from a functional view (and this view has existed as a minor theme throughout Church history). The functional view observes that, according to Genesis, we were created as material beings for a material world. We were placed in the world to be co-regents and stewards over the world. We are here to "work the garden" and bring creation to completion. Furthermore, there is eschatological importance to our work. We will be raised at the last day with new bodies to work a new creation with Christ. Christ is the firstborn of all creation, bringing all creation to its fullness. We participate with Christ in this work as his body in the world. As restored eikons, we will once again be co-regents and stewards of creation. Work and economic activity in the world is not incidental or instrumental. It is central to our anthropology and teleology.

But we must go further. The danger with the substantive and functional views alone is that they don't sufficiently locate us within the cosmos. They can lead to a low view of nature. Based on the Trinity, the relational view maintains that we exist only in relationship to others. "Others" includes God, fellow human beings, and the material world. We have a dual relationship with the material world. The material world is both the object of our work and the habitat in which we live. It was created good, but it is not complete. God owns it, yet we are stewards of it. (The very word "economics" comes from the Greek word oikonomos, meaning "household manager," the one who looks after an estate in the absence of the head of the household.) The Trinitarian God is complete without the existence of "the other." However, human beings can only be truly defined by their relatedness to God, other people, and the material world. But it is also true that the material world only has its full meaning in its relatedness to God and humanity.

When we work, we exhibit God's image in the world. Our work has eschatological meaning. The biblical narrative begins in a garden and ends in a garden city. Cities were the ultimate symbol of human commerce, government, and culture. In some sense, the cultural systems humanity is building today (including economic systems) will be redeemed and incorporated into the New Creation. At a more personal level, our work is part of our personal formation and spiritual sacrifice we offer to God. While some things are inherent in us at birth, others are more malleable. Our work, and the spirit in which our work is offered, forms us. That formation of who we are will be redeemed and carried over into the New Creation at the last day. Our work is also evangelistic in giving a shadowy witness to what work will look like when the New Creation is consummated.

The negative consequences of the "Work is Instrumental" fallacy are many. With no biblical mooring for understanding work, many in the Church unreflectively absorb the culture's ethos as they endeavor to live spiritually holy lives. Work is an extracurricular activity to "spiritual" living, but it is justified because it generates an income to be tithed to support those engaged in "full-time" Christian ministry. Genuine desire for spiritual growth becomes entangled with the propensity to ground our identities in materialistic and consumeristic ideologies. Some try to take God into the workplace, but this frequently translates only into personal piety and using the office as a staging ground for evangelism. Work itself has no intrinsic or eschatological value.

Other Christians recoil at the materialism they see in the Church. They adopt a more ascetic view of faith. People are to engage in economic pursuits only to achieve minimal sustenance that allows them to pursue "higher" spiritual and intellectual calls. Those who engage in economic activity beyond this level are suspected of being materialists who have succumbed to the baser values of our day. Here again, economic action is of value only insofar as it generates an environment where we can move on to more "spiritual" living. Economic activity has little intrinsic value.

Finally, those who champion social justice routinely direct their greatest energy at leveling differences in wealth instead of equipping the poor to become productive stewards. As we will see later, the Bible has much to say about care and provision for the poor but little about redistribution. The desire to radically redistribute wealth often belies a mindset characteristic of the communitarian wing of the Modernist era, where human beings are seen purely as consumers. (It also belies a belief in the Zero-Sum Game fallacy, which we will visit later.) There is a need for wealth transfers to the incapacitated and the hungry of the world, but if societal redistribution is the primary agenda, then human beings are reduced to just so many cattle that must be fed. Equipping people to work and fostering nurturing environments where the intrinsic human quality of work can flourish are made secondary.

Economic work is intrinsic to human beings bearing the image of God. Work has eschatological value. The "Work is Instrumental" fallacy leads to dualistic unproductive responses to economic questions, and it is probably the most widespread economic fallacy believed by Christians of all different theological and political positions.

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Imago Dei and the Material World (Part 4)

I closed my last post with the question, "How then does our work in this time of the Kingdom "already but not yet" have an eschatological impact?"

The first way our work has an eschatological impact is through our daily work. Through our work, we are formed and transformed. We come into the world with certain innate abilities and proclivities, but the relationships and experiences of our lives also form us. When we are resurrected and enter the New Creation, we enter as beings formed by the Old Creation. That which is righteous and whole within us is carried forward. That which is sinful and broken in us is burned away in the refiner's fire or transformed into that which is holy. Darrell Cosden and Miroslav Volf have both suggested that when we die, somehow God holds the "pattern" of who we are in his memory and rematerializes us transformed in the New Creation. Scripture doesn't explain how this work is done but calls upon us to trust God to make it so.

What does seem apparent is that our present selves carry forward into the New Creation. Work is basic to our ontology as God's image bearers. Our work shapes us. Therefore, though the physical results of our work may be transient, our work has eschatological value. This is true even for work that may not best match our gifts and abilities. Even work done as a slave can have eschatological meaning. (Colossians 3:22-24, Ephesians 6:5-8, 1 Peter 2:18-21)

A second way our work has an eschatological impact is that it images in the here and now the nature of work in the New Creation. When we work with the heart and mind of God, we give holistic witness to the nature of humanity in the age that is to come. We are called to be proleptic (i.e., living as though the future is in the present) communities of Jesus' disciples, and only a Gnostic-like dualism would permit us to interpret that to mean that our daily work, both what we chose to do and how we do it, has no bearing on proleptic living.

Finally, there is a way in which our corporate economic behavior as humanity carries over into the New Creation. Once again, that which is righteous and whole carries forward, and that which is sinful and broken is burned away in the refiner's fire or transformed into that which is holy. While material artifacts may or may not carry forward in some way, concepts like the wheel, with its many contributions to economic advancement, surely will. What Lee Hardy describes as "the fabric of our world," our accumulated knowledge and patterns of interaction somehow carry forward. I suspect that if indeed God is holding these things in his memory for re-materialization in the New Creation, the wisdom and contributions of lost cultures (including those of the oppressed) will also be incorporated into this fabric.

This fabric metaphor highlights something else that must be noted about the imago Dei. While individuals are the imago Dei, there is an equally important sense in which humanity, taken collectively, is the imago Dei. Our work has eschatological meaning for us as individuals, but our work is also incorporated into an organic and interconnected reality of the corporate imago Dei. The symbolization of the New Creation as a city, the New Jerusalem, suggests that something of our corporate cultural structures are to be redeemed and incorporated into God's eternal New Creation.

I began this series of four posts with the following:

“What are we to make of the world we live in? What is our relationship to the created order? Many Christians in recent years have reevaluated the significance of the material world in light of the biblical narrative. Recovery of eschatological and teleological frameworks has become central to this renewed interest.”

I've focused on the material nature of human existence, but God pronounces non-human materiality as good and therefore has value. "We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time." (Romans 8:22) Non-human nature is also part of God's redemptive plan. And since our stewardship includes bringing all of creation to fruition, care and provision for the natural world are incorporated into the fabric of our world. Indeed, the vision of the New Jerusalem is a city but a garden city.

Some Christians are regaining a better integration of ecology into their understanding of the mission of God. Regrettably, many still view human work as peripheral and instrumental. In fact, someone recently used the phrase Great Commission utilitarianism to describe the prevailing view of work within the Church. Work has no intrinsic or eschatological significance except insofar as it promotes evangelism. Some types of work are esteemed because they are deemed to contribute to personal care for people, but people who work in the marketplace are viewed at best with ambivalence and frequently with hostility. It is time to lose our dualistic conceptions and reintegrate work into our missional understandings. When people see and experience their daily activity as something directly connected to God's eternal things, watch out!

[Index]

Imago Dei and the Material World (Part 3)

Throughout most of history, the Church has taken an instrumental view of human work and economic activity. There is no question that work has such value. Through our labors, we provide food, clothing, and shelter. Work sustains us so we can do those distinctly human activities like worship God, meditate on who God is, educate our minds, and enjoy community with others. Our work gives us resources to share with others in need and invest in the lives of others. Within the context of the Church today, our work environment is often characterized as a staging ground for evangelism and a context where we can exhibit Kingdom principles of living. Work is also frequently valued because of the funds it provides for the Church's institutions, programs, and ministries.

In addition to the instrumental view, there has been teaching that values work in an ontological sense. It tends to be grounded in the creation narrative. Human beings were created to be stewards over the earth. Human labor is seen as a way to glorify God by dutifully caring for the created order, keeping the status quo until Christ's return when the pre-fall order of things will be restored.

These instrumental and ontological views express much of what the Church has taught over the centuries. There is little wrong with either of these views as far as they go. The problem is what they are missing: an eschatological view.

My shorthand observation for the eschatological view is this: The narrative of the Bible begins in the garden (Eden) and ends in a city (New Jerusalem). Many Christians today (especially postmodern deconstructionists) falsely attribute the idea of material progress to the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers appropriated the idea of progress from Christianity and wedded to the idea of human self-autonomy achieved through reason. The biblical narrative is pregnant with the idea of progress, including material progress, under God's direction.

Judaism introduced the idea of linear type. Ancient cultures had cyclical notions of time. Religious rituals celebrated the cycles of nature and sought to earn the gods' favor by honoring nature's cycles. Judaism postulated a beginning to creation. Humanity was created and instructed to multiply and fill the earth. Humanity was instructed to till and keep the Garden, but humanity was also instructed to "subdue" (kabash) and exercise "dominion" (radah) over the earth. The Hebrew words here are powerful and violent. They mean "to tread down; hence, negatively, to disregard; positively, to conquer, subjugate, violate" in the case of kabash and "to tread down, i.e., subjugate; specifically, to crumble off" in the case of radah. (Strong's Concordance)

Contrary to ancient notions of worshiping and conforming to nature, the Genesis account envisions humanity filling the earth and reshaping it, bringing creation to fruition. There is a linearity to the presentation of events. (It is beyond my scope here to give a fully qualified presentation of "subdue" and "dominion," but just for clarity's sake, I'm not suggesting the natural world has no intrinsic value and that it may be exploited for any purpose. I emphasize that passive preservation of pristine creation is not in sight in the Genesis account.)

After the fall and expulsion from Eden in Genesis 3, we see something new emerging in the Old Testament. From Noah, Abraham, and Moses, we see an unfolding vision of restored shalom (peace, security, prosperity, physical health, and healthy relationships.) God establishes a people to be a light to the world, and at the end of time, God will bring the entire world into his Kingdom and restore shalom. (Isaiah 25:6-10) As we know from other Old Testament writings, a messiah will lead people into this eschatological reality. This coming shalom unquestionably had material implications. Please revisit the listing of the blessings for obedience to God's covenant with Israel in Deuteronomy 28:1-14. Resist the temptation to spiritualize them in some Gnostic way or to explain them away because of prosperity gospel heresies. Material prosperity for all God's people is linked with shalom.

Christianity is where we see the idea of progress fully emerge. Rodney Stark points out that while Judaism had a linear timeframe, it tended to see the people of Israel processing through time instead of progressing through time. They were oriented to the past and keeping the Mosaic Covenant in anticipation of something God would do in the future. (Stark notes a similar orientation with Islam toward the writings of Muhammad in anticipation of a future reality.) Jesus comes announcing the Kingdom of God. He declares it is here but not yet consummated. Consummation will be accomplished upon his return.

Meanwhile, Christians are told to live as if the Kingdom is already here. (i.e., proleptically) The orientation shifts from compliance to a legal code in the past toward realizing a vision of a coming future. Christians are to be yeast in the dough of the world, causing it to rise and come to fullness, all the time aware that true fullness will not happen until Christ returns.

The physical image of the new order in its completeness is instructive. The new order is not a protological return to the Garden of Eden. The image is of a magnificent and abundant garden city called the New Jerusalem. Cities in ancient cultures were the highest symbols of human commerce, government, art, and culture in general. The image communicates that that made of human labor is incorporated into the coming New Creation and becomes the dwelling place of God with humanity. It suggests that progress in the development of human culture, including in economic and material well-being, is part of the unfolding vision.

Jesus is the prototype for the new humanity, the firstborn of the new creation. (Romans 5, 1 Corinthians 15, Colossians 1) And, "We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies." (Romans 8:22-23, NRSV) Christ is ushering in the New Creation, and we are united to Christ as his body and his temple on the earth. Therefore, we are also participating proleptically in his work of redemption and transforming creation (human and non-human). Few Christians have problems subscribing to the idea of a spiritual "leavening" occurring over time because of Christ working in the world but many Christians, in a dualistic split, are resistant to the idea of "progress" in human culture, including economic transformation.

How does our work in this time of the Kingdom "already but not yet" have an eschatological impact?

(Continued)

[Index]

Imago Dei and the Material World (Part 2)

Yesterday I presented the "spirit/mind versus material world" dualism within Christianity. I showed how it impacts our understanding of the imago Dei, the image of God. This dualism is not a recent development. It extends back to the beginning of the Church. The Hebrew world knew little of these dualisms, but once the Church entered the Greco-Roman world, biblical anthropology became corrupted with Greek anthropology. The Greeks viewed work as something fit only for slaves. Pursuits of the mind were the highest expression of humanity and could not be troubled with the cares of daily work.

Early in the life of the Church, scholarship and administration of the sacraments were elevated as the highest forms of Christian service. Later the Enlightenment elevated reason (matters of the mind and spirit) above all else, including God. Two competing forms of foundationalism emerged. They presumed that autonomous objective individuals could, through reason comprehend universal truths. One approach sought to identify elemental and universal truths upon which all other truths are based. (We see this strongly evidenced in the meticulous systematic theologies of Conservative Christianity.)  Another approach searched for universally shared experiences and sought to build unity around these common experiences (We have seen this well evidenced in much of Liberal Christianity). In both cases, work and human economic action have been peripheral concerns.

Yet work and economic action are precisely where most people spend their time. Because of the Church's dualistic formulations, it has been unable to speak intelligibly about economic issues except in the most inane ways. When the Church speaks to such issues in the West today, it tends to either assume the legitimacy of the present order without theological reflection or engage in "prophetic" critique framed more by Enlightenment/Modernist communitarianism than the biblical narrative. Miroslav Volf says it well in his book Work in the Spirit: Toward a Theology of Work. I quote him at length (emphasis is in the original.):

Given the paramount importance of work in both liberal and socialist economic and social theory, it is remarkable that in our world dominated by work a serious crisis in work had to strike before church bodies paid much attention to the problem of human work. Theologians are to blame for the former negligence. Amazingly little theological reflection has taken place in the past about an activity that takes up so much of our time. The number of pages theologians have devoted to the question of transubstantiation – which does or does not take place on Sunday – for instance, would, I suspect, far exceed  the number of pages devoted to work that fills our live Monday through Saturday. My point is not to belittle the importance of correct understanding of the real Presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper but to stress that a proper perspective on human work is at least as important.

One might object that the most basic things in life are not necessarily the most important, and that is hence superfluous to spend much time reflecting on them. Breathing is rather basic to life, but we do it twenty-four hours a day without giving it a second thought – until air pollution forces us to do so. Working, one might say, is much like breathing: its point is to keep us alive, and we need not bother with it until its function is hindered.

The parallel between breathing and working makes sense, however, only in a theology that subordinates the vita activa completely to the vita contemplativa. As Thomas Aquinas’ reflection on work illustrates, in such a theology the only real reason to work is to make the contemplation of God possible, first by providing “for the necessities of the present life” without which contemplation could not take place, and second, by “quieting and directing the internal passions of the soul,” without which human beings would not be “apt [enough] for contemplation.” But apart from the fact that work is necessary to provide for the necessities of the body and to quiet the passions of the soul, work is detrimental to human beings, for “it is impossible for one to be busy with external action and at the same time give oneself to Divine contemplation.” When a person inspired by the love of God does the will of God in the world, she suffers separation from the sweetness of Divine contemplation. Where the vita activa is fully subservient to vita contemplativa, there is no need to reflect extensively on human work since, as a mere means to a much higher end, it is in the long run accidental to the real purpose of human life.

The complete subordination of vita activa to vita contemplativa that has been basic to much of Christian theology throughout the centuries betrays an illegitimate intrusion of Greek anthropology into Christian theology. Faithfulness to our Judeo-Christian biblical roots demands that we abandon it. I am not suggesting that we should follow the modern inversion of the traditional order between vita activa and vita contemplativa and subordinate vita contemplativa completely to vita activa. I am not even suggesting that we should place them on an equal footing. I do propose, however, that we treat them as two basic, alternating aspects of the Christian life that may differ in importance but that cannot be reduced one to another, and that form an inseparable unity.

As soon as we ascribe inherent and not simply instrumental value to the vita activa (and thereby also to human work) we have answered the question of whether theological reflection on work is fundamental or marginal to the task of theology. … (69-70)

(Continued)

[Index]

Imago Dei and the Material World (Part 1)

What are we to make of the world we live in? What is our relationship to the created order? Many Christians in recent years have reevaluated the significance of the material world in light of the biblical narrative. Recovery of eschatological and teleological frameworks has become central to this renewed interest.

Until recently, most mainline groups had all but abandoned consideration of eschatology. Reflection on creation in light of eschatology had disappeared as well. Leaders had instead focused on achieving justice in the here and now.

For many fundamentalists and conservative Christians, Dispensationalist teaching and pessimistic attitudes in the wake of major changes during the twentieth century led to eschatologies where the material world is annihilated in a fiery apocalypse and "the elect" are raptured into an ethereal heaven. Personal salvation became everything, and the material world was of little consequence.

The prosperity gospel has also emerged in many charismatic streams of the church. Wealth and possessions are viewed as indicators of someone's spirituality. Prosperity is a reward for good behavior and trusting God, but the material world is unimportant.

These three twentieth-century responses reflect a duality of spirit (or mind) versus the material world. Concern about ecology has been one of the driving forces in recovering a theology that helps us interpret our relationship to the material world. Many prominent theologians now emphasize that the scriptural narrative presents a radical transformation and renewal of the old creation instead of replacing an annihilated old creation with a wholly new one. Therefore, what we do with the material world in the present has a bearing on the new creation that is to come. While I welcome the attempt to rectify dualism that deprecates creation, I've generally found that many champions of this less dualistic perspective on nature leave a substantial dualism in place about human anthropology. To see how this happens, let us ask what it means to be the imago Dei, the image of God.

I recently read Darrell Cosden's A Theology of Work: Work and the New Creation. He discusses substantive, functional, and relational views of what it means to bear God's image. The substantive view interprets the image of God in a couple of ways: ontological and comparative. Ontologically we are a spirit of the same substance as God. Comparatively, we are like God and unlike nature in some ways, but unlike God and like nature in other ways. Where we are like God and unlike nature, we exhibit the image of God. That tends to come down primarily to matters of the mind, like reason and volition.

These are the predominant views of imago Dei in Western Christianity. They have led to damaging dualisms of spirit vs. body and mind vs. body. Personhood becomes understood as one's spirit/mind. The body and material issues, including work and economic action, are merely instrumental to the spirit/mind half of the dualism.

The functional view observes that we were created as material beings for a material world. We were placed in the world to be co-regents and stewards over it. We are here to "work the garden" and bring creation to completion. There is eschatological importance to this. We will be raised on the last day with new bodies to work a new creation with Christ. Christ is the firstborn of all creation, bringing all creation to its fullness. As his body in the world, we are participants in that work. As restored eikons, we will be co-regents and stewards of creation once again. Work and economic activity related to the material world is not incidental or instrumental. It is central to our anthropology and teleology.

But the danger with the functional view alone is that it does not sufficiently locate us within the cosmos. It can lead to a low view of nature. The relational view maintains that we exist only in relationship to others. "Others" includes God, fellow human beings, and the material world. We have a dual relationship to the material world. The material world is both the object of our work and the habitat in which we live. It was created good, but it is not complete. God owns it, yet we are stewards of it. (The very word "economics" comes from the Greek word oikonomos, meaning "household manager," the one who looks after an estate in the absence of the head of the household.) Thus, while we have a functional mission, we have that mission within the context of right relationships.

While many who advocate concerns about ecology rightly seek to eliminate the dualities concerning nature, there is a large blind spot about dualities concerning human action. Human action in the material world and economic activity are not merely instrumental. The human mandate is to fill the world and to make it fruitful and productive. The biblical narrative begins in a garden and ends in a city. The city symbolizes human creativity, commerce, government, and human habitat. As Miroslav Volf, Darrell Cosden, and others have pointed out, there is something of fallen human creation that is redeemed and passes forward into the New Creation.

There is a strong strand of thought among those reflecting on faith and ecology that takes a "Matrix anthropology" view of human action in the world. The Matrix movie trilogy featured artificial intelligence that viewed human beings as a destructive planetary virus. This thinking tends to cast economic activity, beyond certain basic subsistence levels, as idolatrous. Nature takes on a deeply "spiritual" quality as opposed to the "profane" quality of that which is manmade. Economic activity is purely utilitarian. It sustains us in a romantically pristine and spiritual natural order so we may engage in the higher pursuits of spirit/mind. In other words, there is a continuation of the spirit/mind versus matter duality in understanding human existence.

(Continued)

[Index]

Living by Revealed Categories

I'm reading The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1 by J. Richard Middleton (a great book BTW!) In it, he quotes Jewish scholar Abraham Herschel on Christian theologians:

It has seemed puzzling to me how greatly attached to the Bible you seem to be and yet how much like pagans you handle it. The great challenge to those of us who wish to take the bible seriously is to let it teach us its own essential categories; and then for us to think with them, instead of just about them. (33)

As I was reading these words this weekend, I also found this post by Presbyterian (PCUSA) pastor John Shuck linked at Presbyweb:

And the bottom line for me is I really don't care what the Bible or Reformed Theology says about this or that or if its opinion on this or that is presumptuous enough to tell me how to live my life. I can make my own decisions. I am impetuously autonomous and an incorrigible smart-ass.

This means that...

• if even 500 verses of the Bible and
• if Jesus himself proclaimed on the Mount of Transfiguration and
• if Jesus appeared to me on my back deck in the glory of his resuscitated corpse and stated to me as clearly as the four p.m. sun is hot, that homoerotic love is a sin and that if I support gays and lesbians in their relationships I would join them in the fires of hell, I would look him in his piercing eyes and say (if I had the courage of my convictions):

"Fine then. Send me to your hell. You are wrong, Jesus."

Why? Because I know Tony and Mike. Because I know dozens of other couples and individuals and I know who they are and that what they do is as good and sacred as what anyone else does.

How is that for juxtaposition? And how shocking to discover that Pastor Shuck is not only Presby but an Emergent Village fan as well. :)

My observation is that, by a wide margin, Mainliners who have embraced the Emergent Village scene are political progressives who share perspectives on Scripture and authority similar to Shuck's (though not so boldly stated.) Meanwhile, political progressivism has become the "new" context for social justice with emerging types (when they are simply forty years behind mainline denominations and catching up.) The Mainline and Emergent fusion mutually love ecclesial autonomy and political progressivism.

While I had hoped some of the missional focus into a postmodern world grounded in God's narrative I saw exhibited by a local expression of Emergent I witnessed in my locale (Jacob's Well) might infuse the Mainline world, I suspect it will not. I'm disappointed to say that I suspect the more likely outcome is that Emergent becomes a platform by which the pastor Shuck's of the denomination extend their worship of political progressivism deeper into the mix rather than seeking to be defined by the categories of the Word. For me, this is Mainline retro, not emerging.

The Chief End

Scot McKnight had an interesting post at Jesus Creed last Thursday called Is the chief end … missional? You are no doubt familiar with the first question of the Westminster Catechism:

Q. 1. What is the chief end of man?
A. Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever.

(If you are Presbyterian and didn’t know this, then you may now turn in your membership credentials. *grin*)

McKnight was responding to a letter from a reader who wanted to know if being involved in the mission of God (missional) is the best way to express our chief end. As usual, McKnight made some thought-provoking observations.

He essentially believes that missional can replace the Westminster articulation. He understands God to be the eternal perichoretic Trinity. (Perishoresis meaning “…the mutual indwelling and absolute interpenetration of Father, Son, and Spirit…”) We are called to love God purely. He writes:

For Jesus the end of all ends is loving God and loving others — which means for Jesus we should look to love being the end.

And:

I think the word missional is at the heart of the perichoresis. The Father and the Son and the Spirit are “missional” with respect to One Another and, correspondingly, they are each hospitable to the Other. Which means that “missional” is another way of speaking of the perichoresis. Which means that missional is really about both acting in love and receiving in love.

I’m entirely on board with Scot’s emphasis on perichoresis. However, love is action. What I’m less clear about is what action would constitute loving God.

In Paul’s Idea of Community, Robert Banks examines the use of the word koinonia in the New Testament. We usually interpret the word as “fellowship.” He emphasizes that the word never means community for the sake of community. It’s always about fellowship or community from joint participation in a common mission. (page 57) Love and mission entail action.

Some say our purpose is fulfilling the Great Commission. But what happens when Jesus returns, and the Great Commission is fulfilled? The mission is over. We no longer have a purpose. The Great Commission cannot be our ultimate purpose.

The key lies in reflecting on our being or our ontology. Action flows from being. We were created for relationship, and we were created as corporeal beings living in a material world. Can non-corporeal beings have relationship and community? It would seem so, yet we were made corporeal. Why? Is there something about our ontology that informs us of our purpose? I think there is.

Gen 1:26-28

26 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."

27 So God created humankind in his image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.

28 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." (NRSV)

We were created to be co-creative partners (though junior ones) with the perichoretic Trinity in ruling over nature and bringing it to fruition. We are to be the corporeal representatives of God in the material order. Sin has entered the world, marring this mission, but we are told that we will one day have new bodies in a new creation. Our mission has not lapsed, and it will not end.

I submit that the “chief end of man” is to be co-creative stewards of creation in other-centered community with the perichoretic Trinity and each other. This combines mission and community while giving content to our action. Our primary love and glorification of God are expressed by participating in the mission for which we were created as a community: Exercising dominion and reflections of God.

This “chief end of man” is different from the mission of the Church. The mission of the Church is penultimate. The mission of the Church is to participate in God’s remedial mission of restoring humanity as co-creative stewards in community with the perichoretic Trinity. We best accomplish the Church’s mission by being images of the coming community in the New Creation and by giving testimony about who God is, what God has done, and what God plans to do.

Therefore, the primary locus of the mission of the Church is not as the gathered community on Sunday morning but as God’s people at work in the world, redeeming the daily routines of life and work, as we act in stewardship of the resources (people, money, possessions, mental faculties, all that is under our influence) entrusted to us. Our daily work is central to glorifying God in the present, and our daily work will be for eternity. The work of the gathered community is to foster solidarity among disciples as it equips them for the mission of taking the New Creation into the world, restoring God’s vision of co-creative stewardship in community with the perichoretic Trinity and with each other.

What do you think?

"Male and Female" in God's Image?

I recently wrote about the Equal in Being, Unequal in Role formula of complementarians, and its logical inconsistency. There is another variation of this claim that says that male and female "bear God's image," but male and female play "different" (eternally hierarchical) roles. This is usually framed something like this:

"The man's role is to lead and provide while the woman's role is to be subordinate and have children."

Thus, while being equally in the image of God, men and women play different roles ordained by God. Does this claim hold up under scrutiny? It does not.

First, "subordinate" is not a role. It is a relational posture. Citizen, private, or football player are roles (that may be subordinate to other roles like police officer, sergeant, or coach.) The is no role called "subordinate."

Second, it is critical to specify what we mean when we say "image of God." Francis Schaffer used to use two lists to illustrate what it meant to be in the image of God using two lists:

List 1:

God
…….
Humanity
Animals
Plants
Matter

This highlights ways God is "other" than us, and we are like nature.

List 2:

God
Humanity
…….
Animals
Plants
Matter

This second list illustrates that there are ways in which we are like God that nothing else is.

God created us for relationship and dominion. Male and female are in God's image and are to be coregents over creation. At a minimum, males and females exercise abstract reasoning, moral discernment, creative thinking, and leadership skills, among other things. In all these things, they are equal. Therefore, when we say that a woman's reason, moral discernment, and other image-bearing capacities must always be under a man's, it is to deny the very equality of being in God's image. They are not equally in the image of God. The woman is a lesser image.

We also need to revisit the two lists above and ask which list the childbearing "role" belongs to. It belongs on the first list. Childbearing is not a uniquely human trait. It is a mammalian trait shared with countless other species. Raising children is a distinctly human activity, and it is the responsibility of both fathers and mothers!

Therefore, let us revisit the complementarian claim:

"The man's role is to lead and provide while the woman's role is to be subordinate and have children."

This formula effectively reserves all those capacities to males that define human beings as image bearers of God and relegates women to roles shared by countless mammals on the face of the planet.

Finally, it will not do to say that God created male and female equal but then placed them in eternal hierarchy. This puts ontology (the way something was created) in direct conflict with teleology (the purpose for which it was created). It is to say God created woman to be equal in image but intended for her to live otherwise. Nowhere else in Scripture and theology do we find this kind of divide between ontology and teleology!

The idea that male and female are in God's image but have "different" (eternally hierarchical) roles does not hold under scrutiny.

KC Emergent Cohort Conversation

For those of you in the Kansas City area, the Kansas City Emergent Cohort is getting together tonight at the Wesport Flea Market in Westport (Home of the best-tasting and most artery-clogging hamburgers in the metro.) I have been invited to offer some reflections about economics in the Emerging conversation. I have given my little talk the title "The Image of God at Work in the 21st Century. Economic life and the Emerging Church." (Impressive, don't you think?) It is more like a set of observations to start a conversation. The objective is a conversation, not lectures. It starts at 8:00. Come hang out if you like.

Theology and Economics: The Gnostic Thread Through Church History

Gnosticism is one of the most resilient heresies in the Christian Church. It is alive and well today, directly impacting how we deal with economics. There have been many variations of Gnosticism, but they all share at least two elements: First, there is a belief in a secret knowledge accessible to some select group. Second, there is a distinct division (dualism) between the material and spiritual worlds, and the material world is viewed as evil or, at best, irrelevant.

Business and trade are of the material world. There has always been ambivalence in the Church toward these pursuits. We can trace this ambivalence back to the days of the Roman Empire. Economic trade was viewed as a disreputable activity by the educated Roman elite. They believed that a Roman citizen's only virtuous "business" was self-sufficient agricultural production through the operation of large villas. When the empire fell, and invaders destroyed the last vestiges of Pax Romana, much of society was thrown into chaos. The only place scholarly study took place was in monasteries or places where wealthy Lords would protect scholars. Literacy became the luxury of a very select few.

Scripture was effectively removed from the community and placed in the hands of a few educated elite ecclesiastical officials. During this time, an overly spiritualized view of the world also crept into the Church. Over the early centuries of the Church, the Lord's Supper, a common meal shared between believers around a table, became increasingly imbued with mysterious content. Only a person who was schooled in the great "mysteries" of the faith could preside over this and other sacraments. There was a growing chasm between the clergy (the specially called) and the laity (the common or vulgar people.) The clergy were spiritual, and the laity did secular work. The political elites of later centuries still carried a general disdain for economic trade. The ecclesiastical elites also shared this perspective, as they were usually from the same families and social circles.

In earlier posts, I wrote about the rise of capitalism in monasteries at the end of the first millennium. Because of their ascetic values, control over vast tracts of land, and strong work ethic in monasteries, improvements in agriculture and technology made them quite prosperous. This naturally created ambivalence for monks who had taken vows of poverty yet found themselves the wealthiest group in society. The Church increasingly became involved in international lending to the rising nation-states during the Middle Ages. There is no question the financial and political power gained by the Church had a corrosive influence on its ethics and leadership. This entanglement of the church in financial and political matters would lead some to conclude that business itself was evil and a corrupting influence. Nevertheless, the Church still looked unfavorably upon (officially at least) lenders and merchants.

The Reformation introduced the idea of the priesthood of all believers and the idea of individual calling. However, this new perspective perpetuated the practice of status-ranking various types of work while encouraging people to accept the calling (i.e., life situation) of where God had placed them. Merchants and financiers were still considered lesser, if not disreputable, occupations. Some of that began to change in England, which was given the moniker (intended to be derogatory) of "a nation of shopkeepers" sometime around the Napoleonic era by Continental Europeans. The idea of business as unseemly has largely persisted down to this day.

The problem at the end of the nineteenth century was that Enlightenment modernists had disestablished the Church as the final authority in culture. Ecclesiastical authority was increasingly ignored, and its condescension toward "worldly pursuits" was derided. The modernist had produced several decades of unparalleled economic growth and rising prosperity through entrepreneurs and financiers who were no longer "restrained" by ecclesiastical attitudes. All that was needed was for humanity to decide where they wanted to go, and humanity could go there. Humanity now had the physical and intellectual technology to apply material resources toward whatever ends they chose.

The culture was increasingly coming under the influence of secularized modernist worldviews, drunk with pride over more than two centuries of astonishing achievements. Some were inclined to welcome this progress into the Church with open arms, and others saw it as a threat to the Christian faith. It was in this context that Pope Leo XIII wrote his encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891. He recognized both the abuses perpetrated in the name of laissez-faire capitalism and foresaw the ominous rise of socialism and totalitarianism. Both of these were direct extensions of materialistic thinking. One was utterly individualistic, and the other communitarian. Both failed to honor the authority of the Creator beyond our material existence, and both failed to honor the balance of individual image bearers of God living in community. The Pope's effort was partly to establish a Christian anthropology that would inform how we think about economic behavior. It emphasized such things as being created as God's image bearers, being co-creators with God in the natural order, the importance of community obligations, and the importance of subsidiarity. It was actually quite prophetic.

However, the Roman Catholic influence was not strong in the U.S. then. Protestant Christianity was the driving force of the day. Unfortunately, rather than discerning a sound Christian anthropology, the Church in America became dominated by competing Gnostic-like dualisms that gave unhealthy interpretations to work in the material world.

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Theology and Economics: A Matter of Will

I have made the case that free market capitalism does not guarantee just economic outcomes. The synergy of property rights, scientific rationalism, capital markets, and technology and infrastructure are better understood as powerful amplifiers of human actions and values. Condemning the "technology" of free market capitalism for the evil in the economy is akin to blaming airplane technology for the atrocities of 9/11. Is there something inherent in airplane technology that leads to the willful destruction of tall buildings? At issue is the will of those using the technology.

Our Christian anthropology tells us two very important things about humanity. First, we were created in the image of God. We were created as economic beings who "work the garden" as stewards for the owner. This working of the garden was not just for conservation but for creative development and improvement. We participate as creative beings in community with a creative God. Economic activity is at the very core of our identity.

Second, humanity is in a state of rebellion. We are out of community with God and have substituted our personal proclivities for creation stewardship. Therefore, whether acting individually or collectively, we are prone to rebellion and corruption. So how might God address this dilemma?

One clear option is to annihilate humanity and start over. God has not chosen this option, although the story of Noah makes clear he considered it. A second option is for God to compel proper behavior. God could set in place consequences so negative for rebellious behavior that no one would dare disobey. Or, more efficiently, God could alter our minds so that we become automatons obeying his every instruction. This clearly would get "good behavior," but at what cost? As expressed in Scripture, God's vision is the desire for humanity to live in loving community with the triune God. If one chooses to honor God only out of fear of retribution or completely stripped of volition, can there truly be love toward God? Inherent in love is the ability to choose love.

If the gospel story is anything, it is the story of God's desire for loving community with humanity. He achieves that loving community by bending our will to him through costly grace. He tolerates and greets our outrageous rebellion against him with inconceivable acts of love and compassion, hoping to win us over.

This is not to say that God tolerates complete lawlessness. Scripture makes clear God has established earthly authorities to keep order. There are limits to the evil tolerated, but within those limits, a broad range of choices allows for limitless good and varying degrees of evil. God sets boundaries that provide us with the opportunity to choose the good. However, God does not coerce us into good behavior. In the words of G. K. Chesterton, God "…makes room for good things to run wild."

We can certainly conceive of dystopian worlds where people "do good" in response to totalitarian control of their lives. But this is not "doing good" in any biblical sense. It is merely avoiding punishment. There is no opportunity to choose the good; therefore, "doing good" is never internalized. There is no transformation of the will. Lift the restraints and the good ends. For Christians, this is an unacceptable path to achieving good. God is more about right relationship than right behavior.

Right behavior will naturally flow out of right relationship. Our wills must be bent toward doing good. We must be free to act on our transformed will for sound values to become internalized. We must ask about which systems work most efficiently or effectively and which systems nurture people into internalizing just values and acting on them.

For a diverse and complex economic system like free market capitalism to do sustained good and promote economic justice, it must have people who have internalized justice and good as its participants. They are the ones shaping the economic order, not some central authority. Therefore, while it is essential to have economic institutions that will amplify justice and good, these institutions alone are insufficient.

Democratic government gives us legitimate boundaries within which to do good. Free market capitalism gives us the greatest system ever devised for integrating and coordinating masses of people into a highly adaptive and effective economic life together. But where do the morals and values come from that are so critical to both government and economy doing the maximum good? Where is the human will shaped?

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Theology and Economics: A Quick Review

The Vision and Mission of God

Visio Dei (Vision of God) - The triune God existing in prefect shalom with all creation, dwelling in perfect community with His animate eikons as they fill the earth and fulfill their call to be stewards of creation.

Missio Dei (Mission of God) - Reclaim and renew all creation by calling into community broken eikons, filling them with His presence and transforming them into imperfect but compelling exhibits of the visio dei, until shalom is fulfilled at Christ’s return.

Two Great Commandments

Without describing it as such, over the last three posts, I have been writing about Jesus' two great commandments, the ethical heart of the body of Christ.

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” We are individually and corporately to have the mind and heart of God, thinking His thoughts and feeling His emotions, in all we do. We worship God primarily through the conformity of our being and action with His being and action.

“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” By being other centered within the social structures of our particular contexts, we subvert “the powers” and infuse them with God's love.

The Triune Call

Individually and corporately, we are called by God in three interrelated ways. (1) A call emanates from each person of the trinity, yet so integrated are they that each may be seen as emanating from all the trinity.

Call to Creation Stewardship - Father

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." (Genesis 1:28)

Call to Kingdom Service – Son

And Jesus came and said to them, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age." (Matthew 28:18-20)

Call to Exercise Gifts – Holy Spirit

To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses. (1 Corinthians 12:7-11)

Some  see an explicit expression of this triune call in 1 Corinthians 12:4-6:

There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but in all of them and in everyone it is the same God at work.  (TNIV)

Spirit – Gifts
Lord – Service
God – Works

Why Economics?

God has given us a narrative of His acts in history, which points us to sound stewardship of His creation. It gives us a vision of the ultimate outcome (the New Jerusalem) even though we know it will not be realized until Christ's return. The bottom line is this: All work done out of reverence for God and in response to his call and purposes in the world, whether at the office or in the home, whether for profit or no pay, is ministry! Creation stewardship is the first ministry God ordained and is the only call that extends into eternity. Evangelism and social justice are indeed essential works of the Church and part of our call to Kingdom service in this age. Kingdom service is only one piece of the triune call.

Interpretive Considerations

Craig Hill writes,

Believers today are employed at the same essential task as the New Testament authors, namely, the attempt to make sense of their world in light of God’s self-disclosure in Jesus. I call this the “But in Christ” project. Like us, the writers of the NT were located at particular moments in time and in specific cultural environments. Like us, they accepted much of their situation as a given; however, at certain points they realized that their situation as a given; however, at certain points they realized that their world was challenged by what they had seen of God in Christ. Those are the “But in Christ” moments. Yes, first-century this and first-century that about women, but in Christ “there is no longer male and female” (Gal. 3:28). I would contend that it is precisely at these junctures that the New Testament is most important and most revelatory.  (Craig C. Hill. In God's Time: The Bible and the Future. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, Co., 2002. 26.)

Hill uses slavery as an example. To conform to the New Testament would require the sanctioning of slavery. The "But in Christ" points us on a trajectory beyond New Testament life's status quo.

Hill introduced the "but in Christ" concept. I want to expand it just a little bit further. There are many "but in Christ" explicit statements in the New Testament. But there are many other implied "but in Christ" cases in the New Testament and "but as God's chosen people" cases in the Old Testament. Often the Israelites or Christians were given instruction counter to the surrounding culture without an explicit contrast being made to those cultures. For instance, when the law was given in the Torah forbidding slavery among the Israelites, all the surrounding cultures practiced slavery. Such directives should be given special attention because they teach us that God was moving in a different direction.

By observing these "but" instances in conjunction with other instances in the Scripture, we can often discern an arrow that points us on a trajectory from the story of the Bible, through our time, and on into the New Jerusalem.

Narrative Implications of Creation, Fall, and Eschaton

Creation Implications

• Ultimate ownership of everything belongs to God.
• Individual human beings were made in God's image, but as community, human beings give the fullest expression of God's image. Any elevation of either individuality or community over the other gives a distorted picture of humanity.
• Human beings, as individuals and communities, were made for stewardship of the earth on behalf of, and in community with, the triune God. There is no choice about being stewards for God. There is only the choice of just or unjust stewardship.
• The created world is important because God made it and values it.
• Human economic work (production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services; activity concerned with the material welfare of humankind) pre-dated the fall and is at the center of humanity's purpose.
• There is linear time and an unfolding purpose for creation.

Fall Implications

• Anomie - Human beings live in disoriented lawlessness (what sociologists call "anomie"). Human beings were created to be stewards over creation under God. They have been "cut loose from their mooring" in God through rebellion. They are alienated from God, disoriented from personal meaning, and in conflict with neighbor and nature.
• Settled in the land of wandering - The achievement of autonomy by finite human beings is the height of absurdity. Yet human beings have cut themselves off from God, the only source of meaning. Consequently, as delusional as it may be, human beings are ever engaged in "making a home" (building civilization) for themselves, which by definition, is an illusion. They choose not to honor God and can't live without meaning.
• Autonomous community - At the root of sin and rebellion is the desire to live autonomously and eternally. The perpetuation of the community is what gives the illusion of immortality. Consequently, all alternative challenges to the illusionary "home" a community creates must be suppressed, or meaning will be lost. Conquest and subjugation of all challengers, foreign and domestic, even nature itself, must be conquered.
• Autonomous individuality - The desire for individual autonomy is ever present in human beings and challenges community survival. Individuals often face the dilemma of wanting total autonomy but needing community to have meaning. Thus, there is always a tension in every human society between conformity that perpetuates community and yet placates a desire for personal autonomy.
• Economic Exploitation - Since human beings were created to be stewards over the created world, economics is at the heart of human-made civilization. The inclination is toward autonomous ownership by either individuals or the state.

Eschatological Implications

• The present mission and institution of the Church is temporary, while the call to creation stewardship is intrinsic to what it means to be human from the beginning of the biblical narrative to the end.
• Christians live as dual citizens. We are citizens of the world in this present age, but we are ultimately citizens of the New Jerusalem living proleptically in this age.
• The calls of creation stewardship, kingdom service, and use of spiritual gifts are all equally present and incumbent upon us in this age.
• Utopia, the full restoration of shalom, will only come at the time and in the way of God's own choosing. No one knows the time and manner in which it happens.
• Despairing resignation is unfaithfulness to God and a denial of God's transformative works in this age.
• Futurist activism is unfaithfulness to God and an attempt to usurp God's transformative role in the world.
• Because of the promise of the eschaton from we are free from the temporal order, and we are free to the temporal order. Precisely because our ultimate identity and meaning is not found in this age, we are free from the seductive but unattainable vision of personal or social utopias. Furthermore, because we have nothing of ultimate value to lose in this age, we are free to live in relation to the present world order in a way that honors God, even to the point of surrendering our very lives.

ECONOMIC RIGHTS AND ECONOMIC OBLIGATIONS

Justice

The biblical narrative teaches that human beings are made in the image of God. Because they are in God's image, each human being is entitled to expect dignity and respect. In our day, we refer to this as having certain rights. This cuts two ways for any given individual. First, each person should expect their status as an image bearer to be respected. Second, each person is obligated to respect the image-bearer status of others. There are both rights and obligations. This is also true when we think of the individual versus the community. The community should not disparage the image-bearing character of individuals, and yet individuals must have limits on their actions out of regard for fellow image-bearers.

Justice is the right balance between these competing rights and obligations. For Christians, it is not found in some codified morality. At it is the root, justice is grounded in the shalom vision of the Kingdom of God or the New Jerusalem. There is no God-ordained economic structure in the Bible. We have revelation of the character of God. We have a record of how God dealt with people in various ages. We have a vision of a coming age of shalom. From there, we are instructed to discern what is right and good.

Economic Justice

There are essentially three aspects to economic justice:

1. Distributive Justice – Addresses how capital and goods are distributed throughout society.
2. Commutative Justice – Addresses the truthfulness of parties to an economic exchange.
3. Remedial Justice – Addresses just compensation and punitive action when malicious or careless damage has been done to life, liberty, or property.

Jubilee Code

The Bible touches on all three types of economic justice, but the portion of Scripture that deals most directly with economic justice is found in the Sabbath and Jubilee Codes of the Old Testament. It is also the idea of Jubilee that Jesus draws on to characterize the nature of his ministry in Luke Chapter 4.

The Jubilee is often characterized as a time of debt forgiveness. It was not. The Jubilee had more in common with modern lease agreements. The Jubilee was held every fifty years. Land could be "leased" to another for an amount equal to the number of crops harvested from the time of the "lease" to the time of the next Jubilee. All leases were set to expire at the Jubilee. One's labor could be sold similarly, but slavery was not permitted among Israelites.

Jubilee Implications

The net effect was to ensure that each person and their descendants would never become permanently alienated from land and labor, the economic means of production. They would always have an ownership stake in God's work. The practices of Sabbath and Jubilee would have been powerful reminders of who it was that gave them the land in the first place and from whom all prosperity comes. However, there is no evidence that the Israelites ever practiced Jubilee.

New Testament

Jesus says little about economic systems per se. Jesus' focus seems to have been to orient us to the coming day of shalom and then have us reason back to our circumstances what is just and good.

THE CAUSES OF PROSPERITY

Many ask what causes poverty when poverty is the natural state in which we are born. The real question is what causes prosperity. Economic historians vary in their perspectives on which factors were more important than others, but William J. Bernstein's analysis isolates four factors that most economists would agree are central.

Four Factors

Property Rights – Individuals have to have a reasonable hope that the fruits of their labors will not be arbitrarily taken or destroyed. Otherwise, why invest time and resources into productive efforts. Property rights tie in with the idea of respect for the intrinsic value of each individual and their right to enjoy the fruits of their labor and decisions. It also ensures better and productive use of societal resources than communal ownership does. With private ownership almost all property is the focused attention of someone while communal ownership generally inspires people to take no more responsibility for property than they have to get by. Resources become grossly underdeveloped and employed.

Scientific Rationalism – Precise knowledge of how the world operates generates enormous power to manipulate the world for specific ends. Superstition and tradition, while often giving a sense of order, can also inhibit creative innovation. The idea that God is a rational being operating with a purpose in the world spawned the rise of science.

Capital Markets – Most of human history has been limited to land and labor as the economic means of production. Large enterprises need ways to amass a large a number of resources and mobilize them toward a particular end. Banking systems emerged in Europe along with ideas of corporations and limited liability equity investing. Along with them have emerged institutions that facilitate the movement of capital from one place to another.

Technology and Infrastructure – Reliable infrastructure for transportation, communication and energy are essential for a prosperous society. The application of scientific rationalism and effective capital markets has ushered in an explosion of new technologies that over the past two centuries has made infrastructures faster, safer, and cheaper than anything imagined in the past.

Christian Ethos

Undergirding all the development of these four factors in at least three ways has been the Christian ethos:

• Human Beings in the Image of God – Respect for individuals and their property is deeply rooted in the Christian ethos.
• Linear Time and Progress – All other religions have tended to be oriented toward stories and laws written in the past. Christianity introduced an orientation of the future world and used it as its organizing principle. The idea of progress is a distinctively Christian notion.
• Vision-Driven Discernment – Jesus left us with no instruction manual. What he left us with was a vision. Discernment becomes based on having a vision of a coming age while looking through the eyes of Jesus' followers at how Jesus communicated that vision into a particular context. From there, we must reason as to what is appropriate for our context. This use of reason eventually spilled over into analysis and understanding of the world, giving birth to science as we know it.

The four factors of prosperity were not a cosmic accident. They were direct results of a Christian ethos.

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Theology and Economics: Prosperity and the Christian Ethos

Over the last several posts, we have reviewed William J. Bernstein's four factors that led to prosperity in the modern world.

• Property Rights
• Scientific Rationalism
• Capital Markets
• Technology and Infrastructure

Various cultures have seen the emergence of one or more of these for some time. The ancient Greeks had a form of property rights for a few centuries in the first millennium BCE. The Muslims had some success with science and technology. But only in the West have we seen these four factors emerge as an organic whole. All four elements are essential. Any three without the fourth will not lead to sustained prosperity.

Why did this happen only in the West? Did the West win the equivalent of some cosmic jackpot where all the pieces just came together? Or was there something unique to Western Civilization that gave rise to these engines of prosperity? I believe that far from being lucky, the increase in prosperity is inextricably connected with the Christian ethos. Christianity brought three things to the Western way of "being" that have not existed elsewhere in human history: Individuals as the image of God, linear time and progress, and vision-driven discernment.

Humans in the Image of God

I began this series writing about eikons and showed how the biblical narrative consistently puts forward a vision of an earth filled with images of God. Ancient Near East kings would erect totems or images (eikons) throughout their territory to symbolize their authority throughout the region. No doubt the first chapters of Genesis were calling this idea to mind when the first humans were called "images of God" and told to fill the earth. They would be God's junior partners showing God's authority throughout the world. Unlike wooden or stone eikons, these animated eikons would share the faculties of reason and creativity. As God's eikons, each human being has intrinsic value. This perspective is novel to the Judeo-Christian heritage.

We see the impact of this thinking on property rights. The Old Testament code lifted the private ownership of property not as a tool that serves the state's best interests but as the rightly ordered state of affairs established by God. God calls us individually and corporately to be stewards of the created world. Property is to be held and used in trust for God, not the state. Therefore, while ownership is not absolute, neither is it to be arbitrarily violated by the state or other powerful forces. Property ownership is intrinsic to the mission of being an eikon of God in the world.

Also, the notion of human rights extends from this "image of God" idea. While we often have a hard time defining precisely what we mean by human rights, we do have the belief that people should not be deprived of freedom or killed arbitrarily. The Declaration of Independence eloquently says:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

We have a sense of responsibility towards those who, for whatever reason, need basic necessities. People have great intrinsic value and should be treated as such. In an era of hyper-individualism, it is hard to appreciate how profoundly exceptional this valuing of individuals is in human history. Property rights and human rights as we know them could not have emerged as we know them without the idea of humanity being in the image of God.

Linear Time and Progress

Human religions throughout history have had a cyclical view of time. Religious ritual was an exercise in honoring and appeasing the cycles of nature established by the gods. Life is an endless progression of cycles.

One of the most striking features of the Jewish tradition is the notion of linear time. There was a beginning. Time is moving on a course from that beginning toward some destination. For the Israelites, the end of the story was when a messiah would bring shalom to the nation of Israel and lift the nation to its place as God's exalted people. From the human perspective, life is about remaining faithful to a covenant laid out by God. Jews looked backward toward a promise and a code as they processed through time in anticipation of the future world.

Christ took this linear view of time and utterly transformed it. Jesus gave a vision of the future and called on his followers to orient their lives based on this reality. They were to give evidence of the future reality in the present and transform the world by doing so. Rather than looking to the past and processing through time, Christians are called to progress through time in active anticipation of a future reality.

The idea of progress is so ubiquitous today that it is hard to imagine how astonishingly novel this is in human history. Without the idea of progress, there would be little of the drive behind so much scientific research and technological development. Capital markets and the long-term orientation required to make them work would not have emerged without people who were disciplined to think in terms of realizing a different future.

Vision Driven Discernment

I wrote above that apart from the Judeo-Christian heritage, religion historically has largely been about bringing life into conformity with the cycles of nature. Ordering of lives is achieved through adherence to a set of stories and rituals. The cycles and the codes give order to existence. We "look back" to see patterns in the cycles or "look back" to the codes written long ago to determine appropriate action today. Even the monotheistic religions of Judaism and Islam have had this as a central element.

Jesus was completely disorienting. He reoriented our vision from compliance with the past to compliance with the future. Jesus gave a vision of the future (i.e., the consummated Kingdom of God or the New Jerusalem) and called his followers to live according to that vision. Yes, he gave some prescriptive guidance, but the organizing principle is a vision and the story that leads to that vision.

Jesus did not write anything down. As Rodney Stark observes:

Things might have been different had Jesus left a written scripture. But unlike Muhammad and Moses, whose texts were accepted as divine transmissions and therefore have encouraged literalism, Jesus wrote nothing down, and from the very start the church fathers were forced to reason as to the implications of a collection of his remembered sayings – the New Testament is not a unified scripture but an anthology. Consequently, the precedent for a theology of deduction and inference and for the idea of theological progress began with Paul “For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophesy is imperfect.” Contrast this with the second verse of the Qur’an which proclaims itself to be “the Scripture whereof there is not doubt.” (1)

Not only did Jesus, through Scripture, orient us toward the future, but by the very means through which he passed down his vision, he ensured that we would have to be active participants in the creation and realization of the vision. Despite the endless attempts by some fundamentalist influences in Christianity to use Scripture as a codified instruction manual for human behavior, the Scripture resiliently resists being boxed in this package. It is an unfolding story with a beginning and an end. Documentary evidence is given by the author of history about what is happening in the story. It invites humanity to enter the story and participate in its completion. One must interact with the story and understand each element in Scripture in terms of its own context and the context of the larger story contained within Scripture. It requires wrestling with a general but nonspecific ordering of the world in a future age. One has to deduce and infer appropriate action. In other words, instead of executing directives, we must actively reason our way to good decisions based on a story revealed by a reasonable God.

The necessity of reason in discerning God's will has had ramifications beyond theology. The discipline of reason eventually turned to the investigation of the material world. If God is a reasonable God, the world he created must be organized according to orderly principles. Therefore, we can systematically study and test ideas against reality until we determine the actual order of things. In other words, science. Without the discipline of reasoning our way to God's vision, one has to question whether scientific rationality would ever have emerged.

Conclusion

Bernstein and other economic historians have done great work identifying the factors that have led to our age of growing prosperity. What is rarely acknowledged (or only begrudgingly so) is that the factors that created the prosperity grew out of the ground of the Christian ethos and are inextricably rooted in it. Max Weber wrote his classic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism a hundred years ago, claiming that free market capitalism grew out of the Protestant Reformation (It is still used as a textbook in seminaries today.) On the contrary, economic historians and scholars like Rodney Stark have demonstrated that the rise of free market capitalism predates the Reformation by centuries. In fact, one can see a slow and steady emergence from the fall of Rome to the present. The expansive growth in prosperity is directly rooted in the Christian ethos.

(1) Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, New York: Random House, 2005. 9.

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Theology and Economics: A Summary so Far

The Vision and Mission of God

Visio Dei (Vision of God) - The triune God existing in prefect shalom with all creation, dwelling in perfect community with His animate eikons as they fill the earth and fulfill their call to be stewards of creation.

Missio Dei (Mission of God) - Reclaim and renew all creation by calling into community broken eikons, filling them with His presence and transforming them into imperfect but compelling exhibits of the visio dei, until shalom is fulfilled at Christ’s return.

Two Great Commandments

Without describing it as such, over the last three posts, I have been writing about Jesus' two great commandments, the ethical heart of the body of Christ.

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” We are individually and corporately to have the mind and heart of God, thinking His thoughts and feeling His emotions, in all we do. We worship God primarily through the conformity of our being and action with His being and action.

“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” By being other centered within the social structures of our particular contexts, we subvert “the powers” and infuse them with God's love.

The Triune Call

Individually and corporately, we are called by God in three interrelated ways. (1) A call emanates from each person of the trinity, yet so integrated are they that each may be seen as emanating from all the trinity.

Call to Creation Stewardship - Father

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." (Genesis 1:28)

Call to Kingdom Service – Son

And Jesus came and said to them, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age." (Matthew 28:18-20)

Call to Exercise Gifts – Holy Spirit

To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses. (1 Corinthians 12:7-11)

Some  see an explicit expression of this triune call in 1 Corinthians 12:4-6:

There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but in all of them and in everyone it is the same God at work.  (TNIV)

Spirit – Gifts
Lord – Service
God – Works

Why Economics?

God has given us a narrative of His acts in history, which points us to sound stewardship of His creation. It gives us a vision of the ultimate outcome (the New Jerusalem) even though we know it will not be realized until Christ's return. The bottom line is this: All work done out of reverence for God and in response to his call and purposes in the world, whether at the office or in the home, whether for profit or no pay, is ministry! Creation stewardship is, in fact, the first ministry God ordained, and it is the only call that extends into eternity. Evangelism and social justice are indeed essential works of the Church and part of our call to Kingdom service in this age. Kingdom service is only one piece of the triune call.

Interpretive Considerations

Craig Hill writes,

Believers today are employed at the same essential task as the New Testament authors, namely, the attempt to make sense of their world in light of God’s self-disclosure in Jesus. I call this the “But in Christ” project. Like us, the writers of the NT were located at particular moments in time and in specific cultural environments. Like us, they accepted much of their situation as a given; however, at certain points they realized that their situation as a given; however, at certain points they realized that their world was challenged by what they had seen of God in Christ. Those are the “But in Christ” moments. Yes, first-century this and first-century that about women, but in Christ “there is no longer male and female” (Gal. 3:28). I would contend that it is precisely at these junctures that the New Testament is most important and most revelatory.  (Craig C. Hill. In God's Time: The Bible and the Future. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Puclishing, Co., 2002. 26.)

Hill uses slavery as an example. To conform to the New Testament would require the sanctioning of slavery. The "But in Christ" points us on a trajectory beyond New Testament life's status quo.

Hill introduced the "but in Christ" concept. I want to expand it just a little bit further. Indeed there are many "but in Christ" explicit statements in the New Testament. But there are many other implied "but in Christ" cases in the New Testament and "but as God's chosen people" cases in the Old Testament. Often the Israelites or Christians were given instruction counter to the surrounding culture without an explicit contrast being made to those cultures. For instance, when the law was given in the Torah forbidding slavery among the Israelites, all the surrounding cultures practiced slavery. Such directives should be given special attention because they teach us that God was moving in a different direction.

By observing these "but" instances in conjunction with other instances in the scripture, we can often discern an arrow that points us on a trajectory from the story of the Bible, through our time, and on into the New Jerusalem.

Narrative Implications of Creation, Fall and Eschaton

Creation Implications

• Ultimate ownership of everything belongs to God.
• Individual human beings were made in God's image, but as community, human beings give the fullest expression of God's image. Any elevation of either individuality or community over the other gives a distorted picture of humanity.
• Human beings, both as individuals and communities, were made for stewardship of the earth on behalf of, and in community with, the triune God. There is no choice about being stewards for God. There is only the choice of just or unjust stewardship.
• The created world is important because God made it and values it.
• Human economic work (production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services; activity concerned with the material welfare of humankind) pre-dated the fall and is at the center of humanity's purpose.
• There is linear time and an unfolding purpose for creation.

Fall Implications

• Anomie - Human beings live in a state of disoriented lawlessness (what sociologists call "anomie"). Human beings were created to be stewards over creation under God. They have been "cut loose from their mooring" in God through rebellion. They are alienated from God, disoriented from personal meaning, and in conflict with neighbor and nature.
• Settled in the land of wandering - The achievement of autonomy by finite human beings is the height of absurdity. Yet human beings have cut themselves off from God, the only source of meaning. Consequently, as delusional as it may be, human beings are ever engaged in the enterprise of "making a home" (building civilization) for themselves, that by definition, is an illusion. They choose not to honor God, and they can't live without meaning.
• Autonomous community - At the root of sin and rebellion is the desire to live autonomously and eternally. The perpetuation of the community is what gives the illusion of immortality. Consequently, all alternative challenges to the illusionary "home" a community creates must be suppressed, or meaning will be lost. Conquest and subjugation of all challengers, foreign and domestic, even nature itself, must be conquered.
• Autonomous individuality - The desire for individual autonomy is ever present within human beings and challenges community survival. Individuals often face the dilemma of wanting total autonomy but needing community to have meaning. Thus, there is always a tension in every human society between conformity that perpetuates community and yet placates a desire for personal autonomy.
• Economic Exploitation - Since human beings were created to be stewards over the created world, economics is at the heart of human-made civilization. The inclination is toward autonomous ownership by either individuals or the state.

Eschatological Implications

• The present mission and institution of the church are temporary, while the call to creation stewardship is intrinsic to what it means to be human from the beginning of the biblical narrative to the end.
• Christians live as dual citizens. We are citizens of the world in this present age, but we are ultimately citizens of the New Jerusalem living proleptically in this age.
• The calls of creation stewardship, kingdom service, and use of spiritual gifts are all equally present and incumbent upon us in this age.
• Utopia, the full restoration of shalom, will only come at the time and in the way of God's own choosing. No one knows the time and manner in which it happens.
• Despairing resignation is unfaithfulness to God and a denial of God's transformative works in this age.
• Futurist activism is unfaithfulness to God and an attempt to usurp God's transformative role in the world.
• Because of the promise of the eschaton from we are free from the temporal order, and we are free to the temporal order. Precisely because our ultimate identity and meaning are not found in this age, we are free from the seductive but unattainable vision of personal or social utopias. Furthermore, because we have nothing of ultimate value to lose in this age, we are free to live in relation to the present world order in a way that honors God, even to the point of surrendering our very lives.

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Theology and Economics: Creation Implications

As we reflect on the creation portion of the biblical narrative, we can make the following observations and see the following implications for economics.

Observations (These are linked to my earlier post on creation near the start of this series.)

God ultimately owns all. The opening words of Genesis are, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,…" "Heaven and earth" is a euphemism for "all that is." God alone is eternal. All that exists ultimately finds its source in God and belongs to God.

Creation is Good. "God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good." (Genesis 1:31) Creation has value because God values it.

Eikons on a Mission. God created humanity in God's image. The Greek word for image is eikon, from which we get "icon." The kings of the Ancient Near East placed totems throughout the regions they controlled to symbolize their dominion over those regions. Adam and Eve, and later Noah, were mandated to multiply and "fill the earth." This is almost certainly part of what this Genesis passage alludes to in terms of creating humanity in God's image. Later God charged Israel with the task of being the light of the world to the other nations so they would repent and become God's eikons once again. Jesus' last words were that Christians would be Jesus' witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth. The biblical narrative ends with all the peoples of the earth in community with God as his eikons "filling the earth."

The difference between God's eikons and the eikons of earthly kings is that earthly eikons are inanimate. God's eikons are animate and share an essence with God that distinguishes them from the rest of creation. In that human beings were made "from the dust of the earth," they have material essence that connects them with the material world and makes them "other than" God. Yet human beings are moral creatures with self-awareness. They can make moral assessments other creatures cannot. Humans have a capacity for reason and creativity that other creatures do not have. In this sense, they are like God and dislike the rest of creation.

Imago Dei: Individual and Communal. Adam and Eve had no sense of an autonomous self. They were created as individuals, and as individuals, they bore the imago Dei, the image of God. However, Genesis makes clear Adam alone was incomplete. He needed Eve to have community and give full expression to the image of God. "The two becoming one" in Genesis 2 symbolizes the Trinity's mystical community. Just as humanity is birthed out of the mystical community of the trinity, so are children born out of the mystical union of a man and a woman.

The individual is important and valued but is not complete apart from relationship. God created humanity to be in relationship with God, God's self, others, and creation. Individually and corporately, we are the image of God.

Missio Dei: The Call of Creation Stewardship. Humanity was made for the world. Humanity was placed in a position over creation and under God. Humanity was given dominion over the earth and expected to use humanity's distinctive imago Dei attributes, like reason and creativity, to care for and creatively develop creation. It seems certain that as humanity expanded, this would have meant developing government and economic institutions in addition to the institution of the family. Thus, such institutions can be seen as part of God's work in the world through humanity. The critical aspect that must not be forgotten is that it is indeed God's work done in community with and through humanity. The use of creation for other than God's ends is injustice. We have no choice about whether or not to be stewards. We can only choose just or unjust stewardship.

Progress. Most ancient cultures viewed time as cyclical, and religion was an exercise in honoring and reenacting cycles. The creation of the earth, as described in Genesis, is a sequential process by an orderly God. God told humanity to fill the earth and have dominion over it; a progressive undertaking. Genesis effectively introduces the idea of linear time with events moving toward some end.

Implications

• Ultimate ownership of everything belongs to God.
• Individual human beings were made in God's image, but as community, human beings give the fullest expression of God's image. Any elevation of either individuality or community over the other gives a distorted picture of humanity.
• Human beings, both as individuals and communities, were made for stewardship of the earth on behalf of, and in community with, the triune God.
• There is no choice about being stewards for God. There is only the choice of just or unjust stewardship.
• The created world is important because God made it and values it.
• Human economic work (production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services; activity concerned with the material welfare of humankind) pre-dated the fall and is at the center of humanity's purpose.
• There is linear time and an unfolding purpose for creation.

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Toward an Evangelical Public Policy: Chapter 13

Toward an Evangelical Public Policy

Part III – Central Themes for an Evangelical Framework

Chapter 13 – Stewardship.

By R. Scott Rodin, vice president John R. Frank Consulting Group in Seattle, Washington.

The goal of this chapter is to look at six evangelical theological convictions that from a theology of stewardship, namely Christocentric epistemology, the Trinity, the creation of humanity in the imago Dei, the fall and the corruption of all creation by sin, the incarnation and atoning work of Christ, and the call of the Christian to a life of obedience, surrender, and service. (265)

Epistemology

Evangelical theology has based its epistemology on the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ. (265)

Evangelical theology is at its best when it seeks knowledge of God only through a participation in the life of the Son’s revelation of the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit. (266)

The Trinity

Rodin writes that human community is to be the imago Trinitatas, the image of the Trinity. Inherent in the Trinity is the interconnectedness of relationships. Stewardship happens in community.

Creation and the Imago Dei

The special, privileged work of the steward in God’s Kingdom is to be carried out on all four relational levels in which we were created: our relationship with God, with ourselves, with our neighbor, and with creation. (267-268)

Rodin goes on to conclude that we were created as covenant partners with God, we were created for personal wholeness, we were created for relationship with one another, and we were created as creatures to have dominion over creation. I particularly appreciated his observation that "have dominion" has a dual aspect to it. There is the responsibility for creation working and caring for creation, but there is equally a responsibility to God and his character who granted the dominion.

The Fall and Corruption of All Things by Sin

Rodin sees four consequences of the fall.

1. Humanity lost its status before God. In doing so we lost our very reason for existence.
2. Humanity replaces what was lost by "… with the desire to create, acquire, or take by force those things that would recreate purpose and meaning in life.
3. Prior to the fall there was no concept of an autonomous, independent self. It was incomprehensible to pre-fallen Adam and Eve, so thoroughly in relationship were they with each other and with God. The fall introduced the delusion of autonomous independence and thus marred relationships.
4. Because of the fall, humanity has moved from steward of creation in relationship to autonomous owner of creation.

Rodin points out that it is difficult to maintain an attitude of temporary ownership. Absolute ownership brings power. Money and wealth are what we use to maintain our autonomy and give meaning to our existence. Consequently, creation is valued only as it meets our needs and desires and ceases to have inherent value.

Rodin points out that the temptation is to be a part of the kingdom of God while also building a home for ourselves in this world. This "two kingdom" enterprise ends up with us trying to take absolute ownership in ways that are destructive of the four relationships for which we were made. (i.e., with God, with ourselves, with our neighbor, and with creation.) For example, Rodin writes,

Two kingdom people will begin to own their relationship to God, demanding that worship be done according to their standards and that the church conform to their own preferences. The moment this happens, worship ceases to be a stewardship response and becomes an ownership issue. Worship wars are often battles over ownership, not stewardship. (274)

Whether money, relationships, worship, or natural resources, that which was meant to be "owned" in community with God and others becomes twisted into a tool for maintaining autonomy.

The Restoration of All Things in Christ

We have the promise that one day Christ will restore all things. We must remember that it does not just mean a personal relationship with God but all four types of relationships. Relationship to God through Christ offers back meaning and purpose to our existence and frees us from the compulsion to seek absolute ownership. That freedom also enables the other types of relationship to be restored.

Toward an Evangelical Agenda for Stewardship

Four points for an evangelical agenda regarding stewardship.

The Response to Systems

No earthly economic system can incorporate the ethics of the steward in God’s kingdom. In our fallenness we can only at best construct systems that appropriate the spirit of such an ethic, and even then will constantly be at risk of giving in to our nature as kingdom builders. (277)

Rodin goes on to note that capitalism's strongest and weakest element is that it is based on the premise of ownership. Ownership is what inspires and disciplines many to work and be productive. No other economic system has shown the ability to lift people out of poverty like capitalism. But the ownership drive of capitalism also has contributed to finding our meaning in having instead of being. We cannot not adopt the capitalistic system uncritically.

The Response to Wealth

Rodin warns, "We must also not fall into the false logic that if blessings from God sometimes equal wealth, then wealth always equals God's blessing." (279) Scripture makes us very much aware that wealth is often amassed by the ungodly through ungodly means. Our wealth should be seen as a gift from God and used for God's ends.

The Response to the Environment

Rodin sees environmentalism as a natural extension of evangelical thinking though it has been neglected until as of late. He cautions against the pantheistic tendencies of many environmentalists. Instead, we need to learn how creation works and be concerned about its plight. We must be willing to sacrifice and make lifestyle changes as we work to redeem creation for its ultimate goal.

The Response to the Poor

Rodin highlights the Bible's preoccupation with the poor. He writes that we must have two things in mind. First, our response has to be both individual and corporate. We must address structures but also consider our personal presence and involvement with the poor. One without the other is useless. Second, our response has to be Christlike. I loved his observation that "Caring for the poor is not an activity, it is a lifestyle." (282)

Assessment

I found this chapter to be a gem. Rodin succinctly summarizes some very complex theological implications. I am especially drawn to his analysis of how our rebellion against God has led to the desire for autonomous ownership and delusional efforts to find meaning apart from God. This is an absolutely critical perspective that must be considered in any Christian ethics or public policy dialog.

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Toward an Evangelical Public Policy: Chapter 10

Toward an Evangelical Public Policy

Part III – Central Themes for an Evangelical Framework

Chapter 10 – The Sanctity of Life in the Twenty-first Century: An Agenda for Homo Sapiens in the image of God.

By Nigel M. de S. Cameron, Research of bioethics at Chicago-Kent College of Law (Illinois Institute of Technology) and president of the Institute on Biotechnology and the Human Future.

Cameron observes that life is becoming increasingly complex and technology is challenging us to reflect on moral questions we have never had to face. We try to deal with an array of problems one by one, but he believes these issues eventually come down to one question: What does it mean to be human?

At the fulcrum of every human culture lies a set of assumptions about human nature – what it means to be a member of the tribe. (214)

The difficulty is precisely that they are ubiquitous assumptions and not reasoned values. Change challenges our assumptions, forcing us to consciously address what it means to be a part of the tribe.

Biblical Foundations

Cameron believes that an appropriate Biblical anthropology has its roots in two biblical doctrines: creation and incarnation. He believes that Christians need to rediscover the worldview that maintains human beings have human dignity because they are in the image of God. He also maintains that Christ incarnate came in the form of a blastocyst, an early embryo, and sanctified human nature at all stages of its development.

The Bioethics Agenda

Cameron briefly describes the evolution of bioethics from medical ethics. Medical ethics largely addresses the ethics of medical practitioners. Bioethics is a multi-disciplinary enterprise that integrates thinking from a variety of perspectives. However, he writes that contemporary bioethics has largely ignored medical ethics and,

The focus of contemporary bioethics is largely on the development of procedures to enable people to make private decisions – there is little interest in forging a consensus on the basis of commonly held truth. Moreover, the field operates through articles and papers, conferences, and ad hoc centers and has produced few monographs and academic departments. It carries little baggage, historical or institutional, and that absence profoundly conditions the character of its discussions. (216)

He goes on to note that while mainline Protestants have engaged in bioethics, they have, in general, "accepted the broad terms of the secular writers who lead the field." (217) Roman Catholic scholars are all over the map. However, evangelicals are largely absent from the discussion.

From here, he turns to three categories of medical ethics.

Bioethics 1: Abortion, Euthanasia, and Experimentation

Cameron notes that while abortion sparked a belated political response among evangelicals, it has not translated into substantive discourse about the underlying bioethics issues at evangelical colleges and seminaries. Issues like embryonic cell research have largely been cast as a subset of the abortion debate focusing on questions of viability. The larger context is missing. He suggests that the debate has moved from whether or not an unborn life is human life to whether or not life is sacred.

Cameron interacts with the thinking of "radical philosopher" Peter Singer, who says "…seeks a basis for the preservation of the lives of (most) born persons" other than the sanctity of human life. (218) Cameron observes that historical evils like slavery emerged in tension with the idea of imago Dei, the image of God. He doesn't elaborate here, but slavery in Europe was de facto abolished by about 1000 C.E. The Roman Church had baptized slaves and banned enslavement of Christians through a series of edicts. Slavery re-emerged with Spain's early 15th Century conquest of the Canary Islands. It expanded with the conquest of the Americas and Africa by Spain and other European powers. The Europeans defined the natives as sub-human, and therefore slavery was acceptable. The rediscovery of imago Dei for enslaved people was slavery's undoing.

Singer's strategy is to define what makes one distinctively human and use that as the standard for arbitrating what is human. He includes characteristics like rationality, the capacity to communicate, and self-consciousness. Cameron observes that "We may celebrate these features of human maturity; it is something quite else to regard their denial as evidence of human absence." (219) Also,

His [Singer's] exclusion of other features and experiences that are typically human, and indeed morally relevant, such as infancy and age with their dependence, and handicap and sickness with their challenge to the caring community, destroys the credibility of a case that depends on reducing the human race to a selected group. (219)

Furthermore, Singer maintains that arguing intrinsic significance for humans is "speciesism."

Cameron responds:

Moreover, it is in fact Singer whose method closely parallels the racist. For the racist takes human beings – the human race – and on grounds that he or she considers “morally relevant” (skin pigmentation; ethnicity) determines that some member of this species shall be treated with human dignity while others shall not. The racist divides the human race down the middle, according to his or her own extrinsic criteria. That is exactly Singer’s method. (220)

Cameron ends by again pointing to the growing complexities and the narrow engagement by evangelicals.

Bioethics 2: Cloning and Genetics

Cameron sees this category as dealing with manipulating and manufacturing human life. It is "…focused on the use of technology to control, design, and perhaps improve human being at the fundamental level of genetics." (222)

Human beings creating human beings results in a great irony.

This act is stupefying in its scope. Humankind simultaneously claims the role of God while being reduced to playing the part of a mere thing, the dust of the earth out of which we were made and to which we foolish creatures choose to return ourselves; to become, in President Bush’s recent phrase, commodity rather than creation. (221)

Quoting C. S. Lewis, Cameron notes that what appears to be "man's triumph over nature" is, in fact, "nature's triumph over man." Cameron writes,

“…there is emerging a fresh paradigm in which it is recognized that taking a human life made in God’s image may not in fact be as serious, in his eyes, as making a human being in our own.” (222)

Bioethics 3: A Posthuman Future?

Cameron offers one paragraph about this third category dealing with the emergence of cybernetic technology, merging machines with the human organism. Here he is mostly descriptive as he warns about the ethical challenges it will bring.

The Challenge to Evangelicals

Until now the depth of our imaginative depravity had to be content with new forms of killing, the legacy of Cain and Abel. We confront now a new kind of sin, a fresh fulfillment of our conflicted fallen nature, the descendant of the Tower of Babel. This is our best opportunity to begin to frame public policy for biotechnology around an issue of high profile that has resonated with the public conscience. (223)

Our theological rationale is clear. Human beings are made in God’s image. The technological imperative that we read out of the “dominion mandate” in Genesis 1 lies in the context of the kind of being that God has made his human creatures to be. (224)

Cameron closes the chapter with George Bush's statement, "The Sanctity of Life in a Brave New World: A Manifesto on Biotechnology and Human Dignity."

I thought Cameron did a good job of presenting his perspective on a massively complex issue. I would have loved for him to probe more in any number of directions, but that was not the essay's objective. I agree most readily with his observations that evangelicals and a much broader spectrum of Christianity have yet to come to grips with these issues.

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Theology and Economics: Creation

Any meaningful economics discussion from a Christian perspective must be grounded in the epic narrative that God is unfolding in history. That narrative begins with the first two chapters of Genesis. At least six aspects of the creation stories have great importance as we begin to think about economics.

God created all that is, and all that is belongs to God. The opening words of Genesis tell us that God created "the heavens and the earth." This is a euphemism for everything that is. God hovered over the face of the desolate planet and brought it to life. God and the material world are not one and the same, but neither is God absent from the created order.

God created an orderly world. One of the most striking features of the Genesis stories, particularly Genesis 1, is the matter-of-fact sequential presentation of events leading up to humanity's creation. The Hebrew bara, indicating special creation, is used only in conjunction with the creation of matter, the creation of animals (nephesh), and the creation of humanity. All other mentions of "creation" or "made" have the connotation of someone "superintending the formation of" or "making out of existing materials." God is a God of order, and God loves to create. By studying the order of the created world, we come closer to the mind of God.

God created humanity in God's image. Genesis 1:26-27  says,

26 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." 27 So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. (NRSV)

Verse 26 introduces a peculiar conversation. If God is just about to create humanity, then with whom is God conversing? Most scholars believe this is a "conversation" within the Trinity. This "conversation" is a way to highlight the fact that something of profound importance requiring great contemplation is about to occur. It punctuates the moment.

The important occurrence is the creation of humanity in God's image. In what sense is humanity created in God's image? I believe verse 26 answers this. Human beings share bodies, minds, and emotions with a variety of other species on the planet. Our ability to reason and be creative using abstract thinking is unique. We can know the mind of God. Ancient Near East kings erected carved images of themselves throughout their kingdoms to symbolize their authority. (1) God distributes us as images (eikons in Greek) of himself throughout the earth. (2) The eikons are to rule over creation, care for it, and bring it to its full potential just as the king would.

God ordained both individuality and community. God created Adam first and entered into relationship with him as an individual. Individuals are of profound importance to God. But God created Adam out of the community of the Trinity and declared that it was not good for man to be alone. God created woman and united the two. Thus, while individuals are important as eikons of God, they are incomplete eikons apart from community. Any theology that embraces individuality to the destruction of community or elevates community to the point of devaluing individuals violates God's "both and" valuation of humanity.

God placed humanity over creation to be stewards and to be eikons of God's authority. I have already noted that God placed humanity in dominion over creation. Yet, as singer Don Henley once noted, "They don't make hearses with luggage racks." God ultimately owns all that is. We can have only one of two relationships when it comes to possessing material goods. We can forgo possessions or be stewards of them for God. Any sense of ultimate human ownership is a delusion.

But stewardship isn't just a default option. It is the mission of humanity. It is the universal call God has given us.

Genesis 1:28-30

28 God blessed them [Adam and Eve], 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." 29 God said, "See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. 30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food." And it was so.  (NRSV)

Just like the eikons of the ancient kings, God desires to have his image spread across the planet, marking his domain. But God's eikons are not lifeless images. They are animate eikons participating in God's work of creation and care. The call to creation stewardship did not end with the fall of humanity, nor has it been revoked at any later date. Bringing the created order to fruition, including human culture, is still our mission.

God established the ideas of linear time and progress. It is hard for us to fully appreciate how radical the Genesis story is compared to ancient cultures. While other cultures had creation myths, they believed the material world was eternal. Time moved in cycles (e.g., day/night, full moons, seasons, years, saeculum, etc.) The goal was to conform individual and corporate behavior to cycles ordained by the gods. Failure to do so would often bring the wrath of the gods. The modern idea of human events progressing toward ever-greater achievement was foreign to ancient thinking.

When the Jews appeared on the scene, they introduced the idea of linear time. There was a beginning to time and matter. There was a progression from formless earth to bountiful earth with Adam and Eve. The mission given to Adam and Eve was to grow in dominion and fill the earth with eikons of God. This is the genesis of the modern notion of history and progress. Events are moving from a starting point and progressing toward a conclusion.

1. Hans W. Wolff, Anthropology of the Old Testament, translated by Margaret Kohl, London: SCM Press, 1974, p.160

2. Thanks to Scot McKnight for putting me on to this eikon lingo.

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Magical City

I loved magicians when I was a kid. I remember watching Blackstone on television. Later David Copperfield came along. I remember seeing magicians at parties and events. It was always fun to watch. But then, in high school, I met a guy who did magic tricks. He showed me how a few tricks were done. I always knew that magic wasn't real (at least, that is my story, and I am sticking to it), but there is something both eye-opening and disappointing when the trick is exposed. The illusion no longer works. You can't go back to the illusion.

I learned from my magician friend that the key to being a good magician is to divert the audience's attention from what you are doing by attracting their attention elsewhere. It is also helpful if the audience wants to see an illusion. They want the illusions to work. That is why building rapport with a crowd is often helpful so they will willingly follow where you are leading.

The city, symbolic of human culture, is the same. Diversion from reality must be achieved at all costs. The dilemma between being unable to enter God's presence and the futility of living without God's presence must not become known. Therefore, an illusion of orderliness and safety is created. Institutions, rituals, myths, and philosophies develop that reinforce the validity of the illusion. No matter how degrading or inhumane, work is the unquestioned duty demanded by the city for the order it brings.

It is not necessary for the illusion to be effective with everyone or with every person all the time. It is sufficient that the vast majority buy the illusion most of the time. Ultimately, the city must keep the community in an "eternal present," for to suggest that there is an alternate reality in the future would call into question the legitimacy of the city today. Whatever future change there will be must be defined as an extension and expansion of the city's values. Therefore, talk of alternate futures, instilling hope in alternate futures, is deeply subversive. It could bring the illusion crumbling to the ground and release people from their numbing complicity in the illusion. Those that talk of alternate futures must be isolated as insane. If they cannot be so isolated, they must be defined as evil and repressed.

I have said God plans to redeem the city and make it God's. This enterprise has at least three aspects to it. First is the revelation that the door to God is not closed. The dilemma so fearfully being avoided is really no dilemma at all. There is a way home. Second is the destruction of the illusion and exposure of those who perpetuate it because of the privilege and power they receive from it. Third is freedom from the delusion in the hearts of individuals that keep them fearful and rebellious, wanting to embrace the illusion.

God is on a mission. He begins in a place called Ur of the Chaldees.

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