In the Image of God: Humanity at the Dawn of Creation

He has showed you ... what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?
(Micah 6:8)

Many of those in the churches who are most concerned for the witness of the Christian faith in the social order find themselves hard pressed to describe a significant role for the Bible in that task of social witness. It is not that they do not honor the Scripture, but that it seems to become a kind of distant historical background rather than a direct resource in addressing the urgent needs of our broken world. A very committed pastor once said to me after I had spoken on biblical understandings of hunger issues, "That was interesting, but we really don't have time to be reading the Bible. People are starving out there."

One of the reasons for this is that Christian social witness in our time has become chiefly identified with the "doing" side of the Christian moral life. "What shall we do about X?" You can fill in any issue of concern: peace, racism, poverty. The emphasis is on decision making, strategy, and action. Some of the church's finest moments in our time have come when Christians made decisions of conscience and courageously acted on those decisions.

The Bible, however, does not make decisions for us or plan courses of action. Attempts to use the Bible as a rule book are not very successful. Broad moral imperatives of central importance do exist, such as the command to love our neighbor, but the church is left with the struggle to decide what the loving act toward the neighbor might be in a given situation. Many issues that our society faces, including nuclear war or environmental damage, were not anticipated at all by the biblical communities. Even when we share a common concern with those communities, such as feeding the hungry, we must make decisions and take actions in a complex global economic system totally unlike anything imagined in the biblical tradition.

Does this make the Bible remote or irrelevant to our Christian social concern? By no means! Alongside the concern for the ethics of "doing" are the ethics of "being." Christian social concern requires that we not only ask what we should do in a broken world, but we should also ask who we are to be. The shaping of the decision-makers is as important as the shaping of the decision. As we enter and are nurtured by the Christian community we form values, perspectives, and perceptions which inform our deciding and acting. The identity we bring with us as Christians deeply affects our participation in ministering to a broken world.

In the shaping of our Christian being or identity the Bible plays a central role. We encounter its witness in the preaching, teaching, and liturgy of the church, and we are shaped by it. Stories, hymns, histories, parables, and visions become as important as commandments and ethical teachings in molding the faith perspective through which we view our broken world and seek to mediate God's healing.

It is for this reason that those who are committed to the task of Christian social witness as a natural outgrowth of Christian faith must seek the broadest possible understanding of the biblical inheritance which is ours. To settle for a narrow acquaintance with our biblical traditions is to limit the faith vision we bring with us to the task of discerning God's will for a broken world. Unfortunately, for many in the church an entire portion of Scripture is inadequately known and poorly understood. Our use of its resources is highly selective and often pulled out of context. This portion is the Old Testament.

The Old Testament as Scripture

It is not uncommon to run across persons in the church who declare that they are New Testament Christians. The implication is that they can do without the Old Testament entirely, or that at best, the Old Testament has a less authoritative status than the New Testament. This is a bit like trying to affirm only one person of the Trinity.

In every period of its history and in all of its major traditions, the church has refused to part with the Old Testament or to reduce its status as fully Scripture in the church. The Old Testament as well as the New are considered to be the Word of God, and since we believe in only one God, the two portions of our Scripture are linked by witness to a single divine reality. The Old Testament was quoted by Jesus and the apostles as Scripture. To understand Jesus Christ as the center of our faith is not to reject the God of the Old Testament, but to see that same God acting out in Christ the final and fullest chapter in a great drama of God's salvation which began with the story of Israel.

Some of our attitude toward the Old Testament is due simply to a lack of acquaintance with its contents, but we have also been the victims of some misconceptions about the Old Testament.

Many believe that the church actually holds the Old Testament to be second-class Scripture, or that the church has replaced the Old Testament by the New. Such views are actually versions of a position taken by Marcion in the second century A.D. He utterly rejected the Old Testament as authoritative and accepted only the Pauline epistles and the Gospel of Luke as authentic witness to our faith. He believed that the God of the Old Testament was a God of law who was different than the God of love revealed in Jesus Christ. As he saw it, the purpose of God in Christ was to overthrow the God of law (who was also the Creator).

Marcion's views were declared heretical, and the early church opposed them by claiming the Old Testament to be a witness to the activity of the same God revealed to us fully in Jesus Christ. Thus, the early church declared the Old Testament as well as the New to be the Scripture of the church, the Word of God for God's people. This position was reaffirmed by its theologians, and later by the Protestant reformers and the early preachers of the U.S. religious movements and revivals. It is still the position of all major Christian traditions today.

Another misconception takes the form of caricature. The Old Testament is law while the New Testament is gospel. This is often meant to characterize the Old Testament as primarily judgment, and the New as grace. This caricature does not do justice to the richness of either the Old or the New Testaments. A picture of God's wrath and judgment can certainly be found in the Old Testament, and these pictures of God as warrior or judge are sometimes problematic to us. The same side of God's nature can also be seen in the New Testament in the book of Revelation, or Jesus' cleansing of the temple, or in some of Jesus' harsh words to the Pharisees and others who oppose God's kingdom.

On the other hand, the definitive picture of God's grace in Jesus Christ has already been preceded by a rich tapestry of witness to God's grace in the Old Testament: God's creation and blessing of the world, God's presence in history to bring Israel out of bondage in Egypt and to identify with all who suffer and are oppressed, God's call to become the covenant community, and God's forgiveness and comfort offered even to those whose sin takes them into exile.

The law is, of course, an important Old Testament theme but not as an end in itself. Unless law serves God's grace, we can find ourselves in bondage to the law, as the apostle Paul observed. However, when law follows grace it is not opposed to gospel, as Jesus himself proclaimed by saying, "Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them" (Matthew 5:17).

It is the goal of this series to recover the Old Testament roots of our faith and to highlight the manner in which these roots inform the witness of the church in the modern social order. Spiritual and social dimensions of faith interrelate in this series, as they do in the Old Testament. The constant working assumption is that the God revealed to us in Israel's story in the Old Testament is the same God who comes to us in Jesus Christ. We cannot fully understand who the New Testament proclaims Jesus to be unless we know the God who comes to us in Jesus as already revealed in the Old Testament story from creation onward.

It is always difficult to choose a starting point when dealing with the Old Testament witness as a whole. Israel as a people came to birth in the events surrounding the deliverance out of Egypt recorded in the book of Exodus. To start here would be to begin with God's salvation, and indeed, most of our best materials on the Old Testament have stressed the salvation history of Israel, the mighty acts of God in the moments of crisis. Only out of this awareness of its own salvation did Israel later begin to understand that God was also Creator and the giver of the promise to the ancestors in the stories of Israel's early traditions (Genesis). To begin with Israel's birth in Exodus would make sense.

Instead, however, we will start with the beginning not of Israel but of all beginnings. First we will look at creation. The whole of Scripture starts with creation and, by passing on the tradition in this form, the ancient biblical community must have intended us to encounter the God who creates before we go on to read of the God who saves. It is true that the creation stories that open the book of Genesis were put in written form later in Israel's history, but we are not concerned here with literary development. We will begin with the picture of what God intended us to be in creation. Our faith story culminates in Jesus Christ so as to return us to a picture of what we are intended to be—new creation.

In the Beginning

The materials that witness to Israel's faith in God as Creator are scattered throughout the Old Testament. The Psalms, several of the prophets (especially Deutero-Isaiah), and the wisdom literature (such as Proverbs and Job) all contain rich and important creation passages. In the limited space available here, however, we will look primarily at the two creation accounts that open the book of Genesis. They touch on all of the major elements of the Old Testament witness to Creator and creation.

The whole of Scripture opens with the well-known creation story in Genesis 1:1-2:4. This is the story that follows the formal, almost liturgical, seven-day pattern. In the beginning is a formless, watery chaos out of which God brings order by the mere command of divine word: '"Let there be light'; and there was light" (Genesis 1:3). Creation begins with the great elements of the cosmos: light, waters, firmament, dry land. It then moves to the various life forms on the earth: plants, animals, and finally humanity. The seventh day is the day of God's rest, establishing the sabbath as a memorial to God's creative work (Exodus 20:8-11).

The creation story of Genesis 1 is immediately followed and in many ways balanced by the creation account in Genesis 2:4-25. Throughout the story the human creature, created by God at the very beginning of the account, occupies the center of attention. Things do not seem to be created as separate orders; human beings, plants, and animals are all created for harmonious relationship. The Garden of Eden is the symbol of total and idyllic harmony. Even the earth itself is a part of this picture. Humanity is created from the dust of the ground, and the Hebrew words themselves indicate closeness: 'adam (humanity) and 'adamah (soil).

In this account God is the Creator, but not in the remote and sovereign sense of Genesis 1. God creates as a loving artisan, intimately shaping the first human creature and breathing life into it. God then responds to the needs of this human creature in subsequent acts of creation. God is concerned for harmonious balance in this creation, even to the point of dividing the first human creation into male and female to make the full relationship of sexual union and unity possible.

The God Who Creates and Blesses

Although these two creation stories are quite different in emphasis and details, they are marvelously complementary. This is especially clear in the pictures of God as Creator. Each account shows a different side of our faith understanding of God as Creator, and a lack of either would leave us with an impoverished and incomplete theology of creation.

In Genesis 1 the stress is on the absolute sovereignty of God. God's word alone calls the world into existence. Unlike the other ancient Near Eastern religions, God vanquishes no other primeval powers to create the world. In Babylonian mythology the god Marduk defeats the monster Tiamat in order to create. As a result Babylonian religion lived constantly with the need to re-enact that battle lest the order of creation fail.

The Hebrews, by contrast, knew a God who is declared in Genesis 1 to be unrivaled and who creates as an act of divine grace and freedom. Nothing compels the creation except God's own creative will. "The Lord by wisdom founded the earth; by understanding he established the heavens; by his knowledge the deeps broke forth, and the clouds drop down the dew" (Proverbs 3:19-20). Confidence in the absolute sovereignty of God is reflected in a sense of the reliability of the creation which is God's work.

A picture of the Creator only in terms of divine sovereignty could leave us with a remote and transcendent God. Fortunately Genesis 2:4 and following balances the picture with a stress on the relatedness of God. Here God fashions the first creature like a loving artisan, breathes the very breath of life into it, and relates caringly to the needs of this human creature. God walks and talks in the garden and is anguished when sin breaks the harmonious relationship in Genesis 3. In this story we come to know our Creator God as a caring, intimately related God, involved with the creation from the very beginning. It will not surprise us to find such a God involved once again in our redemption.

The combination of these two pictures of God the Creator points us to a unique dimension of the God of our faith. The sovereign yet related Creator foreshadows a constant biblical picture of a God whose power is expressed in vulnerability to the world's suffering, whose mysterious otherness comes close to us in intimate relationship. For those who know such a God, the exercise of power must always be tempered by caring relationship.

In these creation stories God not only creates, God also blesses. The verb itself appears in Genesis 1:28: "And God blessed them." The concept of blessing from God appears in the constant divine concern for the well-being of the creation. God pronounces each element of the creation good (Genesis 1); God provides for the care of creation (Genesis 1:28 and 2:15); sees to the provision of needs (Genesis 2:9,18); and continues to sustain all creatures, human and non-human: "These all look to thee" (Psalm 104:27).

We know the God of blessing not only as the Creator who called the world into being. We know this aspect of God in the ongoing reliability of the created order and in the divine presence that sustains life in all of its week-to-week rhythms. This aspect of God is present with us in all moments and is universally known by all humanity. God's intention in creation is for all to experience shalom, a Hebrew word which means wholeness.

In the Old Testament, the God who creates and blesses helps to balance traditions of a God who saves. The church in its use of the Bible has usually stressed the God who saves, for that is where we as a particular community of faith came into relationship to God. The mighty acts of salvation from the Exodus to the resurrection stress the particular moments of crisis in which we have known God's redeeming power. To acknowledge and serve this God who saves, the church is compelled to respond in the midst of the crises of our time by bringing aid and hope, both spiritual and material.

But God is not found in the crises alone. God not only acts to deliver but sustains us in all of life. To begin as we have with creation is to be reminded of God's relationship to all creation and not simply to our Judeo-Christian tradition. We are called not only to crisis intervention in a broken world but to the creation and maintenance of faithful systems of order that mediate the blessings of full life to all creation—both persons and environment. To know God as Creator will force the church not only to interventions of the moment, but to the building of shalom.

The Creation and the Creatures

The opening chapters of Genesis not only reveal to us something of the Creator; they speak also of the creation itself. It is here that we begin to discover what it means to be given life as a creature and to live that life in relationship to God and the rest of the created order.

One of the most important themes in the creation material begins in Genesis 1:26 with the statement that humanity is created in the image of God. Here Scripture affirms the unique and precious quality of every person, male and female, as a bearer of the image of God. This is a clear and unambiguous affirmation of the co-equal status of men and women as creatures of God. It is also a witness to the divine character as encompassing both maleness and femaleness, since both men and women bear the image of God.

Creation in the image of God is not just a gift; it is also a responsibility. To be created in the image of God brings with it the commission to care for the earth. It was the practice of ancient kings to erect images of themselves to represent their sovereignty in the far-flung corners of their empires. The biblical writer of Genesis has transferred this metaphor to the divine realm. In Genesis 1 God who is truly sovereign over all creation has chosen to place the divine image into human beings, as the representatives not of some inherent human right of our own to exploit the creation for our own needs but as the representatives or the trustees of God.

So the commission to have dominion over the earth (Genesis 1:28) is a trusteeship of divine right; a trusteeship of God's own care for the creation and an entrusting of that care to our stewardship. Except for Genesis 1 this theme of human dominion is found explicitly only in Psalm 8. In both instances exercise of dominion is accountable to God; it is not license for human indulgence. Thus, to have the gift of God's image is to also have the responsibility to show forth that image in relation to the whole of creation.

Another important theme in this material is the affirmation of the goodness of creation. At the end of the sixth day, "God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good" (Genesis 1:31). In biblical times this was a remarkable statement. Ancient cultures spoke of divine powers that inhabited all the realms of nature; hence, one often stood in fear and apprehension of the world, in need of magic or incantations to protect oneself and appease the gods. In contrast, the Hebrews express the assurance that God's sovereign power has been used to create a world that is benevolent and trustworthy. Further, it is clear that God's intention is that the goodness of creation be experienced by all of its parts, all persons and all of nature. It was not to be good for some and bad for others.

Those who know the vision of God's good creation cannot, therefore, settle for a world where the desire of some for an excess of creation's good gifts begins to deny enough for others. To insure that all participate in creation's goodness is a fundamental concern of Christian discipleship.

A third important theme is the interrelatedness of creation. Human beings are not self-sufficient. We are created for relationship to God, to others, and to nature. Genesis 2:18 tells us that God saw it was not good for the human creature to be alone. The story then goes on to express relationship to nature (the garden, animals) as well as with other human beings.

Human relationship includes the possibility of sexual relationship as a part of God's creation. The first creature (called 'adam, the general Hebrew word for humanity) is divided to make maleness and femaleness possible. No new creative forming from the dust takes place to make woman. Neither man nor woman exist until this point of sexual differentiation in the 'adam. The Hebrew word 'ezer, often translated as helper in Genesis 2:18, does not imply subordination. After all, the Bible often refers to God as our 'ezer. It is better translated as companion.

The Hebrew concept of creation is relational. We are not only created as trustees of God to experience the goodness of creation, but we are created to be in community with all creation. Only in this way can we experience God's intended wholeness or shalom. Each part of God's creation finds its fulfillment in interrelatedness with all. If some are denied wholeness then we all are diminished.

Opposed to this concept of creation as relational is a common and dangerous distortion of the biblical understanding of creation. It is the distortion of hierarchical thinking about creation. Over the centuries in the church the misuse of God's commission giving humanity dominion over the earth led to a hierarchical understanding that divided the relationship of the human to God and to nature.

Hierarchical understanding operates something like this. Picture a ladder of categories. At the top is God whose nature is pure spirit. At the bottom is the earth whose nature is material. Already you have a polarity between the spiritual and the material, the divine and the bodily. Ranged in between are the other orders of creation: humans, animals, plants. The closer you get up the ladder to God, the higher the moral worth attributed to that order of creation. Thus the earth itself is far from God and of little worth. This is hardly in keeping with the pronouncement of God that the creation was all very good.

Very early in the history of the Christian church a subdivided hierarchy of worth became the standard: God, males, females, other races than white, Jews, animals, plants, earth. This hierarchical understanding of creation became the foundation for entire superstructures of racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism. It was the custom in the medieval law codes to list the killing of a Jew in the section carrying the same penalty as poaching the king's deer. Jews were thought guilty of deicide and therefore worth little more than animals.

We all know that women and members of the non-white races have been slandered in the history of the church by defining their nature as closer to the bodily and animal orders of creation and therefore farther from God's spirit. They were said to occupy lower orders of creation, and this understanding in turn was used to justify slavery and denial of ordination to women, as well as a host of other racist and sexist actions. Some have suggested that in our century the poor have been added to the hierarchical list of those who are farther from God, while those who have been blessed with prosperity elevate themselves on the ladder to a position closer to God. The mere fact of being poor is treated by some as evidence of lower moral worth.

If we had really understood the wholeness of the relational creation pictured in Scripture, we could not have created that insidious hierarchical ladder. We would have understood that the welfare and the fullness of life for every part of creation is dependent on interrelationship and full participation of every other part.

The Brokenness of Creation

The Hebrew writers knew that the wholeness of creation that God intended was not a reality in human history. Thus alongside the pictures of creation stands a story in Genesis 3 of the broken creation. This story is closely attached to and flows from the garden creation story in Genesis 2. It is our first encounter with the biblical understanding of the nature and reality of sin.

Along with the other gifts of creation already discussed came the gift of human freedom. The man and the woman are given the capacity to make choices for themselves, and the choices are either for obedience or disobedience. It is the motif of the tree of knowledge in the midst of the garden (the tree of life does not figure in the story of chapter 3 until the end) which gives the possibility of human freedom. To eat of it is forbidden by God (Genesis 2:16-17). To have such freedom is a great gift, but with it comes human responsibility to live with the consequences of our choices. The consequence of eating from the tree of knowledge is said to be death.

What unfolds in the story of Genesis 3 is a drama that speaks to all of human existence concerning the meaning of our choices, the nature of sin, and the consequences of broken creation. It is important at the outset to note that this chapter does not exhaust the biblical perspective on sin. Sin is the word we use to describe how shalom, wholeness, is broken. This story speaks of that brokenness in one important way, but we will see other aspects of sin later in Israel's story (for example, covenant breaking).

Since this is a story of human freedom and responsibility, it is important to note that the biblical text is quite clear that the serpent is simply a "wild creature that the Lord God had made" (Genesis 3:1). No coercive outside power of evil exists to take the man and the woman off the hook of responsibility for their own disobedience. We might think of the serpent as the tempting occasion for disobedience that comes into every human life.

In this case the temptation is to "be like God, knowing good and evil" (Genesis 3:5). The aspect of sin highlighted in this story is the sin of overreach, attempting to reach beyond the limits of humanness to try for the prerogatives of God. Some theologians refer to this as the sin of pride. Pride is involved, but sin here is more than the attitude we associate with the word pride. It is the attempt to take destiny into one's own control as if we had no limits we must acknowledge.

Knowledge of good and evil does not refer to the ability to make moral choices. After all, in being given the capacity to choose obedience or disobedience, humanity already has that capacity by virtue of God's creation. In Hebrew, pairs of opposites are used to bracket a whole category. East and west means everywhere; day and night means all the time; good and evil probably means everything. The temptation is to want to know everything that God knows. In Hebrew the verb "to know" does not mean just cognitive knowledge. To know something is to be related to the reality of what is known. It can almost mean "to experience" something. Thus the man and the woman want to experience all that God experiences.

We must be careful in our interpretation here. This account does not imply that faithful life is against knowledge. It instead asks whether there are boundaries to human knowing that must be honored. How do we live in God's creation in a way that acknowledges the limits of our humanness and refuses to play God by reaching beyond those boundaries in ways that threaten to bring death?

There may be forms of knowing that we attempt for our own human pride and self-centeredness that exact death penalties. One wonders if nuclear technology and some forms of genetic research are not flirting with these boundaries in ways that affect the entire human race. But apart from these dramatic issues, the biblical story speaks of the thousands of temptations to make choices that will rearrange creation for our own benefit only to bring death—biological, social, or spiritual.

The consequences of sin in this story are many. Death in the Old Testament is not simply biological. For shalom to be broken, to be denied wholeness, is to experience death already. In this story the disobedient act immediately creates brokenness in the harmony of creation. The signs of this are the appearance of shame and fear and guilt. In the creation story, the man and woman were naked and not ashamed (Genesis 2:25). Now they are ashamed of their nakedness and attempt to cover themselves (Genesis 3:7).

Shame is the sign here of brokenness in the openness of relationship between the man and the woman. When God finds the couple hiding from the divine presence the man says he was afraid (Genesis 3:10). Fear is here the sign of brokenness in the trustful relationship with God. Finally, a great buck-passing ceremony takes place in which the man and the woman try to pass responsibility on to others rather than face their own choice and its consequences (Genesis 3:12,13). This is guilt, and it is the sign here of brokenness within one's own self.

In the penalties pronounced and the exile from the garden, the biblical writers are communicating to us their knowledge that we live in a broken world, far from the harmony of the garden. Many aspects of the reality of our lives remind us of what brokenness we have settled for when we were created for wholeness.

One element of these verses on the consequences of sinful choice needs special comment. A part of the brokenness that the woman experiences is said to be her subservience to her husband: "he shall rule over you" (Genesis 3:16). We must note carefully that Scripture understands such subordination of women to be a sign of sin and not the intention of God in creation. Those of us whose story now includes the event of Jesus Christ, the new creation, must ask more seriously than in the past whether the church is in the business of enforcing the curses of sin in the old creation, or demonstrating the wholeness of relationship between men and women that God intended by acting as the community of new creation.

Toward the Promise

We have spent a good deal of time on the opening chapters of the Old Testament. From these chapters we know much of the nature of God as Creator and ourselves as creatures, but as the story moves forward Creator and creature are alienated from one another. In the chapters that follow the alienation seems to grow. Sin abounds, and its consequences grow more violent.

In the Cain and Abel story, violence is directed toward an innocent brother (Genesis 4). In the story of the flood, sin and violence have reached universal proportions, and God is sorry that the world was created (Genesis 6:5-7). At the Tower of Babel, humanity attempts to assault the heavens themselves for their own glory: "Let us make a name for ourselves" (Genesis 11:4). The gulf between God and humanity seems to grow greater, as does the brokenness in humanity itself. Each story contains the consequences of sin: Cain's exile, the flood, the scattering and confusion of language. But each story also contains a sign that in spite of sin, God continues to care and act with grace: God marks Cain for protection, saves Noah, guarantees the natural order with the rainbow.

After the Tower of Babel story, no immediate sign of God's care emerges. We are dramatically suspended for a moment. Where can this escalation of sin and alienation end? It is then that we are shifted from stories that speak of all humanity to the story of a single man and woman and the people who spring from them. Genesis 12 begins the story of Abraham and Sarah. Significantly, their story begins with a promise, and it becomes clear that the story of this people of promise is the sign of God's grace. God acts to bridge the gap through relationship to a particular people. The story of God's relationship to this people is the subject of the rest of the Old Testament. By beginning with creation and broken creation, the Scripture reminds us that this people is not to be an end in itself but a means of God's grace to "all the families of the earth" (Genesis 12:3).

Bruce C. Birch was a professor of Old Testament at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C. when this article appeared.

This is part one of a six-part series on the Old Testament roots of our faith, published regularly in 1984.