to an existent (this cat) is a move quite beyond our ken. This cat—and how much more so this man or this woman!—will be distinct, with unique peculiarities within its species-normative genetic code. The move from a fertilized human cell to the particular human individual it will become—from the virtual being, through the becoming, to the actual being—involves an inconceivably complex process of embryonic information of which the dynamic—the vital principle—remains utterly mysterious.
All this, then, and much more is involved when we say, with the inspired writer of the Genesis text, that “God created humankind, male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27). It is clear that if men and women are created beings, they are essentially dependent on their Creator, both for their existence and for their maintenance in being. God does not impose on us a conscious awareness of this reality, because he wills that our relation with him be one of freedom, with no trace of a master-slave dynamic. The human being-as-creature is changeable, vulnerable, mortal: as created, he/she is an absolutely different order of being from the eternal, omnipotent being who is the Creator of all that is. What is important to see is that both the biological life of human beings, and the eternal life that they are offered (by virtue of Christ’s redemptive work) to share with their Creator, are gifts.
Man (man and woman) is not his own author; he is not and cannot be autonomous. Any creating he does, impressive and splendid though it may be, is derivative and secondary, using materials already at hand. Human beings cannot be original creators, since they themselves, and the world they inhabit, are already there as givens. Everything we have, we have received, as the apostle Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 4:7 in an effort to show the members of the church he is writing to that pride has no place among Christians (and should have none among men and women in general), since our very existence, and our existence as individuals with particular qualities, talents, and vocations, are gifts and come from God in the first place.
At bottom, what theologians call original sin is a refusal of this truth and of the God behind it. As Creator, God is responsible for our existence; as creatures, we are responsible to him for our existence. And this sets moral and material limits to our being and our doing. It is these limits that we refuse, and it is this refusal that generates all our human counterfeits of the creation and the re-creation that God accomplishes through his word. These counterfeits are simply attempts at self-creation and self-salvation.
There is no reason for human rebellion; it is irrational. The pretension behind it, with the infinite suffering it has entailed in the course of human existence, is bewilderingly stupid, given the enormous intelligence human beings are equipped with and deploy in other areas of their existence. But precisely that fact points up sin’s irrationality. Our will, much of the time, is not synchronized with our reason. By political and technological means (now including the possibilities offered by biogenetics, organ replacement, designer babies, reproductive cloning, and cryogenics), human beings, with mounting intensity and purpose (finding here, perhaps, the sense of purpose we have lost in losing sight of the providential God), seem determined to recreate their kind, to start, as it were, from scratch (obviously an impossibility), to do over God’s original blueprint, deemed faulty (because we perceive it through the distorting lens of the refusal of our createdness and the catastrophic consequences of our rebellion). The ultimate aim of this enterprise, of course, must be to overcome death itself.
It is important to see that this determination is not, at bottom, properly therapeutic, though an exaggerated therapeutic concern can lead in the same direction. It is of quite another order. We are talking about a remake, a re-creation. Modern man, to the extent that he is captive to a triumphalist ideology patterned on an engineering model, proposes to save mankind by engendering a new man, invulnerable to the corruption of the first man, and by placing him in a new Eden environmentally controlled to the last degree and not subject to the dangers and unpredictabilities of the first Eden.
It is this monstrous pretension—rationalistic to an extreme, yet completely irrational—that I call a counterfeit of the mandate given to humankind by God to tend and develop the world, including his own human society. A correlative counterfeit, invariably operative in genocidal enterprises and, basically, an essential component of all ideologies, is the racist drive to create, in a given territory, one homogenized people, to the exclusion of all alien others (an exclusion that logically entails the destruction of these others, or at the very least their subservience). This is the counterfeit of the biblical revelation of the unity and ontological equality of the human race, a revelation that the counterfeit denies and seeks to replace. Like the vision of the new man, it subverts the truth of the imago Dei and opens the way for boundless manipulation and oppression.
As technological power has increased, so have such utopian projections; and ruthless human beings, incarnating humanity’s drive to play God, have wreaked havoc as a consequence. The sequence of human cataclysms in the last century is evidence of this, each resulting from the perverse will to make man over in part by eliminating elements of humanity considered by the ideologues, according to self-serving criteria, to be subhuman. By claiming to be intrinsically superior, or by aspiring to be superhuman in the sense of greater than the Adamic prototype, the perpetrators of such abuses and atrocities become inhuman. The attempt by man to make himself in his own image is a misbegotten enterprise, a perverse use of the rationality with which he is gifted and in which he has put so much ideological stock since the Enlightenment; it is an enterprise fundamentally flawed because of the theological/ontological lie at its root that posits man as his own master; as such, it cannot but fall under God’s judgment and be doomed inevitably to disaster.
VI
Imago Dei: Who is the God Who Created Man in His Own Image? Divine Revelation through the History of the Jews and Supremely in the Messiah
It is God who created humankind in his own image. Who is this God? This is the second aspect of the imago Dei doctrine that we shall examine. The question is entirely legitimate, and the misguided answers men give to it in the wake of our inner refusal to accept our status as creatures (that is, as created and designed by an Intelligence infinitely higher than ourselves) account for the atheological animus of modern society and the ever-increasing hubris accompanying our impressive technological achievements. It may perhaps be said that the yawning gap between these achievements, where we manifest such formidable control, and our shameful and flagrant incapacity to master our ethical behavior and social relations, serves as the chief driving engine of the totalitarian will to reinvent ourselves by political and technological domination and manipulation.
Through the egocentricity of sin, we are a fractured species, yet we hold in our heart, by virtue of our being created in God’s image, a yearning for integrity, wholeness, and unity, in relation to our Creator and to the rest of his creation. But sin, in addition to causing our brokenness, also determines our response to it, which is to strive by ourselves to make things whole, unified, and harmonious. It is this striving that leads to totalitarianism at whatever social level it may manifest itself—to the assertion made by (self-) chosen elites of total control over others, using extreme force if necessary, to the point of turning men and women into objects, dehumanizing them, actually destroying them, in order to achieve the absolute domination and ersatz unity/wholeness/purity required by redemption. For, of course, the totalitarian/utopian enterprise (which always has a religious tenor because of its idolatrous belief in its own ultimacy) is invariably presented as a kind of redemption requiring purification and unification—and this, once again, as I have suggested, is an imitation of God’s work, a diabolical counterfeit of God’s saving plan for humankind through his chosen people, the Jews, and their (and the world’s) Messiah, Jesus Christ.39
It is here, precisely, in God’s providential saving plan for humankind, revealed to successive generations through the scriptural narratives, that we discover who God is.
Unless God reveals himself to us, we cannot know him as he is. This is because we are finite and fallen (in rebellion against the true God and blind to his goodness), while he is infinite and holy. Through beholding the glory and order of the world—his
