As every biblical scholar knows, Genesis 1-11 is a late addition to the patriarchal narratives of Genesis 12-50, which were composed in the earlier Iron Age of the preexilic period, and which reflect legendary memories of ancestor heroes from the even earlier Bronze Age, whose primary importance is as foundational culture creators rather than as historical individuals. In the tales of the patriarchs, Yhwh, the national deity of Ancient Israel and Judah, appears in human form as a deity much like other Near Eastern and Mediterranean gods. Like them, too, there’s a good argument to be made that in the original form of several of these tales Yhwh is the father of the ancestor heroes, making them erstwhile demigods reclaimed by the later editors of the Bible as demythologized prophets. And insofar as these patriarchs turn out, in the oldest narrative histories of the Bible, to be the ancestors specifically of the Davidic kings of Judah, who are also presented as sons of Yhwh (Ps 2:7-9), there’s a pretty clear argument in play here: Yhwh is the ancestor of the nation and, especially, the heroic lineage of the king, his current, reigning son. So, the monarchy, the Jerusalem Temple which the monarchy built and runs, and the royal city itself all enjoy a kind of privilege of divine protection from destruction. This theology likely became very popular in the aftermath of the Assyrian invasion of 701 where, unlike the northern kingdom in 722, Judah and Jerusalem under the rulership of Hezekiah successfully withstood the Assyrian invasion. With the king, Yhwh’s human son, representative, and even partial incarnation, the little nation of Judah felt invincible, even when surrounded by the great powers of the Near East.
But when Babylon destroyed both monarchy and Temple in 586, this theology was no longer solvent: new theories of the deity and his relationship to the world, humanity, and the people of Israel became necessary to explicate the defeat. In Babylon itself, the exilic community of Judahite survivors forged new, more durable forms of their ancestral culture, and their scribes were newly exposed to the cults, myths, and theologies of their conquerors.
That’s the context in which Genesis 1-11 was written. Scholars have long noted the parallelism between the stories of creation and flood with those of the Enuma Elish, Atrahasis, and Gilgamesh epics, respectively, and given that these tales also exercised profound influence as far westward as the Aegean world of Homer and Hesiod, the inference that they have shaped the biblical mythology is also reasonable. It is not, to be clear, that Ancient Israelites and Judahites could never have heard these stories previously: they are very ancient and quite popular, with many parallels in both Semitic and Indo-European cultures of the ancient world. Indeed, some of the texts in this anthology, like the Yahwistic creation account in Genesis 2:4b-3:24, are probably preexilic in origin, though they have been edited by an exilic scribe. But overall, scholars feel pretty sure that in the form they appear in in the Bible, there’s a specifically exilic and Mesopotamian, Babylonian flavor to these tales.
Counter to traditional form, I won’t here reproduce the entire argument as to why, but I will emphasize one specific prong of the argument, the anthropology of Genesis 1:26-28. To do so requires a quick refresher on the overall shape of the creation story in Genesis 1:1-2:4a, the so-called “Priestly” creation: in this text, God (Elohim, not Yhwh) creates not by molding preexistent earth, as in the Yahwistic account, but by shaping the primordial waters of chaos through speech. In six days’ worth of divine speech-acts, the created world is accomplished, in ways parallel to the creation stories of other late Iron Age cultures (both Mesopotamian and Egyptian). But the specific connection to the Babylonian Enuma Elish is to be found in the seven-day structure and the climax of human creation in the image of God. Read in comparison to the other text, Genesis is presenting the universe as God’s Temple, and human beings as his idols in the cosmic Temple, which is why only after creating them does he rest, or take up residence, within the Temple.
Now, the language of the “image of God” is derived from a whole world of Bronze and Iron Age royal and priestly theologies in which these officials are seen as human extensions, children, and representatives of the divine. It comes from a world where people used to literally, and ubiquitously, depict their gods, including their divine royals. But there’s something revolutionary and subversive about what the author is saying when we put him in his context. In a world where Judah’s own pretensions to have a divine ruler had been proven false, its temple burned, and which was still very much dictated by competition between would-be god-kings and their priestly apparatuses and massive temple complexes, this author imagines the universe at large as God’s Temple and humanity at large as his priest-kings. In a world still defined by political turmoil and imperial machinations, this author makes a bold decision to mute the theomachic elements inherent in his own tradition and in the tradition he is adapting—there’s a potential set of references in this text to the chaoskampf, God’s primordial fight with the Sea and its monsters, but it is subordinated in this text to the uncontested supreme power of the divine decree—in favor of a world whose design favors divine and therefore creaturely rest.
The Priestly creation story, in other words—and some scholars have argued this is true of the Priestly Source in general—is trying to democratize a very elite, hierarchical set of religious and theopolitical ideas that were common to the world in which it was composed, and would continue to be for centuries, through Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman rule. So when we read of human beings, male and female, created in God’s image and entrusted with dominion over the world, we see the language of absolute monarchy in the text, but reading the text in its context, we should clock the democratizing spirit of the subtext. The image of God takes the power of kings, high priests, and emperors and gives it to everyone.
Now, this is a preface to the modern reception of the concept of the imago Dei, which is at the heart of modern theological anthropology. When we theologize about what it is to be human, we often turn to the concept of the divine image to help explain it to ourselves and others. But in our context, we face questions that authors in the biblical tradition rarely faced, or at least not through the specific lens of a concept of the image of God. For example, we face questions about the image of God as it relates to sex and gender: God creates human beings, “male and female,” in the image of God. But does this mean that they are equals—and if it does, what do we do with the manifestly patriarchal, and sometimes downright misogynistic, character of so much of the Bible? It would seem that Paul had resolved this question with his suggestion that in Christ, through baptism, the binary of “male and female” has been surpassed—but the history of Jewish and Christian theologizing about the sexes, much less practice, does not afford us much room for confidence that this has been well understood if so. What about the same-sex attracted, the gender non-binary, and/or trans folks—does “male and female” include them? Are they, too, the image of God? Scholars like AJ Levine argue, persuasively to my mind, that “male and female” is a merismus: it expresses a polarity embracing a spectral range of possibilities, not a harsh binary. As I’ve written in a few places here, it would seem that the Christian tradition provides plentiful resources for deconstructing traditional notions of biological sex and gender as confusions of archetypes with the material circumstances that can only ever imperfectly represent and incarnate them, and that liturgically, we are called all the time to embody archetypes not immediately keyed to our sex identify or social gender. So, I would say, yes, the image of God also includes them. Does it include differently abled people? The Bible shows some sign of progress about such things: where in the Priestly corpus itself, for example, eunuchs are forbidden to join the worshiping congregation of Yhwh, Trito-Isaiah provocatively imagines Yhwh accepting them in the assembly. In the Gospels, Jesus talks about those who have been mutilated entering into the life of the world to come with their wounds transfigured into signs of glory—a vision that probably reassures some differently abled people and frightens others, I imagine, but one intended to be inclusive all the same. A consequence of insisting that the image of God is equally and ubiquitously present in all humans, including those whose faculties and abilities are for whatever reason unrealized, inhibited, or alternatively developed, is that reducing the image of God to a particular feature or function of humanity comes to be insufficient, because someone is always excluded by this definition. Likewise, any essentialist doctrine of the image of God, associating it with some abstract human essence that is either reducible to words or defies explanation, also becomes problematic: that would seem to separate what it means to image God as humans from our concrete, messy humanity. We are left with a sort of aporetic anthropology at this impasse. So we need some kind of mixed essentialist and processual doctrine of the divine image, one which finds the image in potency and act, in nature and in nurture, in clade and culture, as one continuous reality. Here again, there’s precedent in our traditions. In Gregory of Nyssa, for instance, riffing on elements of an idea first proposed by Philo of Alexandria, the true Human Being is the multihypostatic super-unity of all human beings, considered in their formal protological and final eschatological state; there’s a Humanity that exists in step with all humanity.
What about our cultural others—in the biblical context, non-Israelites? Gentile inclusion in Israel’s future salvation and in the world to come is an emergent theme over the course of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament alike: yes, gentiles, too, are the image of God. In the modern world, the successor to this biblical framework seems obviously to be not only our ethnic, cultural, and political others—though these remain important others to include—but religious ones, too. The Christian can only conclude that whatever claim they lay to be fulfilling the image of God they do so most intimately with Jews and Muslims, and that likewise the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Jain, the Sikh, the indigenous practitioner, the modern secularist—one gets the point—is every bit as much the image of God as he or she is. And this makes humanity at large, and the human experience as a multifaceted whole, something divinely significant. Cutting into the argument between critical religious studies and theology on the role of human creativity and culture in the evolution of religious belonging, behavior, and belief is precisely this insight: that human construction is not a competitor with divine revelation, because the human spirit is keyed to the divine spirit. Conversely, that also means that the image of God is at play in all human cultural activity and production. In some sense, this is already implied in the Genesis text itself: “Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it” is, at least, a command to culture-creation. So to study human evolution, to study human geography, societies, religions, history, literature, and so on, is, at least for a Christian, to study how God reveals God’s self in the human being.
Now, if one makes it this far—and to be clear, lots of modern theology on the image of God does basically make it this far—one has achieved a robust theological humanism worth writing home about. But three rather thorny problems endure even for those that find this particular peak in the range.
First, the history of image of God anthropologies is not very pretty, as is best laid out in recent memory by MJ Rubenstein in her excellent book Astrotopia. The concept of the image of God in the history of Christianity in particular has justified mass colonialism, enslavement, and exploitation of other humans: to many ears, the notion of such an inclusive imago Dei today, while a welcome act of repentance, is insufficient reparation. To this we can only answer with more repentance, not with clever words.
Second, we live with knowledge that our religious ancestors did not have—namely, of our biological ancestors. We know that Homo sapiens, our species, were not the first or the only of the genus Homo—that is, not the only humans. And the genus Homo shares ancestors with all apes, all mammals, all animals, all plants, fungi, and microbes—all life, cumulated over two billion years. Can we realistically hold the image of God hostage to our species, which is after all so young (only 200,000 to 300,000 years old on our four billion year old planet), when we share our DNA, our very flesh, our very form, with so many different creatures before us, with us—and felled by us? What’s more, several of our fellow creatures are remarkably “intelligent,” as far as that word is meaningful, by our self-referential standards: other apes, dolphins, cephalopods, dogs, pigs, corvids, and the like show highly advanced emotional and rational faculties. And those less “like us” still have an awful lot of our feelings, our responses, and our affections, upon close inspection. Biologists, zoologists, botanists, ecologists, including investigators of the natural world in its antiquity, and the like lead us to wonder what it could be about Homo sapiens that justifies our divine iconicity in isolation from the natural world we descend from and with.
This is still a new problem for Western religions, whose ecological consciousness is comparatively young and still awakening at a broader level; but it is less so for Eastern religions, where the human, the animal, the plant, the fungus, the microbe, and so on have always been seen as one continuum of life and consciousness. Yet at the same time, there is no explicit doctrine of the image of God by which the subjugation of the natural world has ever been justified. To be sure, there are implicit analogies which link the divine to the human in unique and intimate ways in these traditions; but there has been no Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, or Sikh pillage of the world in any way comparable to that carried out by Western, Christian powers. Perhaps the image of God is a bad idea for all who are our relations?
A third problem is more hypothetical, and concerns a different set of problems raised by our advanced knowledge. We not only know the age of life, but also that of our planet: four billion years old, orbiting a star roughly as old, in a peripheral galaxy awash among trillions, one of billions of stars in that galaxy alone, in a visible universe that is, by our current measurements, around 14 billion years old. Our evolution has happened in tandem with the evolution of the universe: in fact, it’s an expression, a part of the evolution of the universe. It’s possible that the universe is really infinite, and in it pockets of spacetime and matter periodically explode with energy into individual universes that interact directly with one another, or else it is possible that this universe is realized in every possible state simultaneously, or some combination of these: at a certain point on the scale of possible multiverses, the distinctions break down. We have pretty strong reasons, on the basis of the size and age of the cosmos and conditions for the rise of life more or less like ourselves to exist, to think that we’re not alone in this particular universe. And that’s just looking at the conditions of our specific niche of life and intelligence where they might plausibly be replicated elsewhere; it doesn’t consider the ways our definitions of life itself, or of intelligence, might be inadequate.
Can the image of God reasonably exclude such creatures? It seems unthinkable to say so, especially if we were to withhold divine iconicity from creatures much more sophisticated than ourselves, who have potentially spread their cultures quite far across the stars. Surely, anyone out there like us, or higher than us, deserves at least the same level of recognition we’re willing to afford ourselves.
But these are problems for the notion of humanity in the image of God if, and only if, we take the concepts of humanity and the image of God in a restrictive sense, as equivocal with Homo sapiens. And, admittedly, that is normally how Christian theologians in particular take the imago Dei--even when they’re otherwise more progressive in their understanding of what it means. But I would suggest that the specific reason for that is that, to bring this home where I started, we have not fully democratized our notion of what the image of God entails. We have not followed the subtextual trajectory of the text, and are instead caught at the level of the letter, failing its spirit.
Recall that in its origins, the application of the image of God to all humanity in Genesis 1:26-28 was a democratic move. It took the dominant political model of the ancient world and redistributed it anthropologically, as a way to empower a people newly subject to foreign rule. The text, the letter, is monarchic, because the broader context is monarchic; but because the immediate context is one of exile, and disempowerment, so the subtext reads as democratic. To adhere to the letter in this instance, insisting on a royal and priestly humanity whose dominion is one of subjugation, as the image of God, means in this instance undermining the subtextual spirit of the text, its real intention.
Perhaps, then, what we need in our act of reception, to preserve the subtext, is to reframe our text within our context. So what does the image of God mean in a world that (at least for now) is primarily defined not by the politics of imperial monarchies but by those of democracy and republicanism (with the caveat that, of course, we are undergoing a challenge by the former to the latter even now)?
Many theologians get part of the way here by reframing the “dominion” of the divine image as stewardship, and by considering, therefore, the call to “subdue” subversively as a call to take care of creation. But while I applaud these as better vocations than that of straight dominion, they sit awkwardly without the interposed framework, in which we contemplate the image of God not so much as a royal but as a ministerial or presidential vocation. What would it mean to see the divine image less as a divine right of kings and more as a prime ministry or a presidency—an elected position, from above by God and from below by natural selection—in which the incumbent has a real responsibility to their constituents, insofar as they are fellow citizens of the same cosmorepublic? Theoretically, at least, even a first citizen of a republic, head of government and/or of state, is accountable to the same laws that condition the lives of its citizens. But such an office also has a real vocation of summing up and leading its society, a job to do. On this read the image of God is about caring for creation and leading it forward: the editor of Genesis 1-11 knew what they were doing in putting this creation story immediately before the older one, in which the first humans are put in the Garden of Eden to “work the land and till it.” Family, culture, work, and worship are some of the primary things that make us distinctively human, and so we can trust that they are very much what the image of God looks like in exercise. But when we don’t do them, or when we do them poorly or even toxically, neither God nor nature is beholden to us. Even if we do them well, it falls within their purview to issue, as it were, a vote of no confidence, to call for new elections.
This democratic model of the divine image allows us to do several things together that previously seemed contradictory. First, it lets us celebrate our human uniqueness: there really is something special to being us, some weight of destiny towards which our dreams gesture.
But also, second, it allows us to avoid a kind of chauvinism, for on this model we can acknowledge that all that we are in act exists also in potency in the cosmos as a whole: and insofar as we are beings of process, who changed to get to this point, will change again, and are not therefore anomalous, we can safely assume that we are not the only beings to hold our station. The Septuagint translation of Genesis 1:26-28 gets at this by reminding us that we are created according to the divine image, which Philo capitalized upon to suggest that the true image of God is the Logos, and humans are said to be the image of God by virtue of their analogical likeness to the Logos. So in theory, as every being shares in the Logos, the divine image is potentially present in every being, and any being may cultivate it processually into the divine likeness through the development of reason, virtue, and compassion. Perhaps we are not even the first on this planet to do so, and perhaps we won’t be the last; hopefully, we’re not the only ones around (but, we really probably aren’t).
And, finally, this model for the image of God charges us with a sense of responsibility that is neither imperialistic nor paternalistic towards the world. The old royal language of antiquity can continue to be a meaningful archetype, especially when we use it to understand the way in which our election to our post is a divine election, a choosing from above. But the newer democratic language expresses an equally important truth, that our own survival, development, and striving to flourish has elicited our election by nature and by time, and should we prove unworthy of our station, we can be thrown out of office.
Our current model of international relations between such powers, while it has a set of ancient precedents, also gives us means of imagining what the image of God means in a vast cosmos potentially filled with life. Homo sapiens have the image of God, but so would other beings serving in the role of caretakers and leaders of their environments; Homo sapiens have the image of God, but that connects us rather than divides us from whatever intelligent life we might encounter elsewhere. Should we potentially encounter other image-bearers, whether here at home or elsewhere in the cosmos, our new job becomes, on the plane of our relations, to establish peace, the common good, and common flourishing in community as far as possible. We might also see here that the political enterprise has, therefore, not only a human, but a cosmic and theological significance too.
Lest this all sound completely novel, I’ll close by pointing to two antecedents. First, this was Philo’s anthropology, and before him it was the Stoics’. In the now-lost Republic of Zeno of Citium (fingers crossed for the Herculaneum library to have this one), the founder of the Stoic school spun his own concept of the ideal society, a global koinon in which every human was a kosmopolitēs, a citizen of the universe. Philo casts Adam in the role of this kosmopolitēs, framing God as the king of the universe and the human being the first citizen in the cosmic city. The common paradigm for anthropos and kosmos alike is the Logos, who contains and embraces the intelligible superstructure of the world in which the human being plays the role they do, but which also therefore provides the common origin and reference point for humans and non-humans in the world. So, the more democratic model of the polis has been used to understand the concept of the image of God in the past: the real-world context may not have been democratic in an egalitarian manner that we would recognize, to be sure, but it was still more democratic, and even more ecological, than the historical context that informs the Genesis story itself.
Second, most ancient religious and philosophical traditions, but more pertinently Platonic, Stoic, Jewish, and Christian resources, introduce an analogy not only between the divine and the human created in the divine image, but also between the universe at large and the human being. The kosmos in this point of view is framed as the macanthropos, the large human (Purusha in Hinduism, Adam Kadmon in Jewish mysticism), while the human being is the mikrokosmos, the “little universe.” This piece secures our democratic, ecological reframing of the image of God, because it helps us see two things. First, it necessitates that humanity only possesses the divine image while also being the microcosm: its creation in or according to the divine image, with the responsibility to cultivate the divine likeness progressively through virtue and culture creation, is an identity and a vocation that is experienced together with humanity’s sense of itself as reciprocal to the universe. The New Agey and pop-sci spirituality way of saying this, that you are the universe experiencing itself, is in fact correct by traditional theological standards: and so if you are the universe experiencing yourself, then you are also the universe experiencing itself as the divine icon. Second, then, it means that the divine image is collectively and individually stamped on the nature of all things, and that there is an anthropic principle to the cosmos which is currently manifest in and as us (and, probably, among others too). Raimon Panikkar called this the “cosmotheandric” principle, that God, world, and human being are keyed to one another, and so any sense we have of divine iconicity has to be an iconicity that in some sense manifests the world’s relationship to God while also representing God to the world.
So the divine image is not exclusive: it’s inclusive and unitive. It’s not purely identitarian or vocational: it’s a matter of essence as well as of existence, of nature and nurture. It is therefore abused when it is appropriated in the service of regressive attitudes towards fellow humans and the natural world. To reinvest kingly power in a collective, even if one retains the archetypical language of kingship, is really a democratic ethos, one that invites us to see ourselves as constituted by relationship with the universe and, through the universe, with God, even as the universe is able to see God, and God is able to take up his rest within the universe, through us.
It seems to me like a lot of the points here about all creation existing on a spectrum of divine image-ness should be pretty uncontroversial on a traditional metaphysics of participation. If created existence can never be anything other than a finite expression of God's own qualities, it seems like you would have to work pretty hard to justify any one creature being a divine icon to the exclusion of others, even if some are divine icons to a higher degree than others.
To me the fact that in Gensis Yahweh fills the animals and all with his breath and makes them too of the clay/primodrial waters is telling , or at least as i've always read it that they to and all things are filled and out pouring with the image.