To Be Like God?
A Language of God reflection
The podcast series Uniquely Unique has come to an end. We set out to answer the question, “What does it mean to be human?” After working through scientific and philosophical issues, we come in the last episode to the theological answer: human beings are made in the image of God.
OK, so what does that mean?
Like most of our language, there is a metaphor going on here. And curiously, it is a visual metaphor: we are an image, a picture, a reflection of God. Curious, I say, because we don’t actually think God looks like anything, right? So instead, “looks like God” must mean something more along the lines of “is like God.” If someone helps a little old lady across the street we might say, “that looks like a Cub Scout” and we don’t mean the person has the physical characteristics of a Cub Scout, but rather that they are imitating a Cub Scout.
So is that what we mean by human beings having the image of God? That we are to be imitators of God? Ephesians 5:1 seems to agree: “Therefore be imitators of God.”
But maybe that’s not speaking to what it means to bear God’s image. We’re reminded in the episode by theologian Andrew Torrance that there are only a handful of references to the image of God in Scripture. So we shouldn’t expect to definitively sort this out. And my aim in this short article isn’t at all to attempt that task. Instead, I’m just reflecting a bit on another passage that doesn’t use the phrase “image of God” but seems like it should be relevant to the question of what humans are and what we’re supposed to be.
The most famous passage on what kind of thing a human being is comes from the very first chapter of the Bible.
“Then God said let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness” (Genesis 1:26).
The second most famous passage about human beings might be this one from Psalm 8:
“What are human beings that you are mindful of them? The sons of man that you care about them? You’ve made them a little lower than God” (Ps. 8:4-5).
Some English translations say “a little lower than angels.” But the Hebrew word there is elohim, which is the exact same word used in the Genesis 1:26 passage that is translated “God.” And curiously (there’s that word again), it is a plural noun, which is why we get God saying “let US make humankind in OUR image.” Later Christians would read the Trinity back into such passages, but pretty clearly the ancient Hebrews had something else in mind. Remember the opening of the book of Job, where the “sons of elohim” come to Yahweh with a complaint? There seems to be a kind of divine council with multiple heavenly beings. The later monotheism of Jews squashed that kind of talk. But the stories are still there, and the Psalmist said we’re created just a little lower than them — whatever they are.
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Speaking of stories, the one I’m really interested in here comes from Genesis 3. Adam (“the man”) and Eve (“the mother of all living”) are hanging out in the garden, and for some reason there is a crafty serpent in that paradise too.
It asks Eve, “Did elohim really say you’re not supposed to eat from any tree in the garden?” No, she answers, just the one in the middle, because we’ll die if we eat from that one.
“Give me a break” says the serpent (paraphrasing for the present day). “God knows that if you eat from that one, your eyes will be opened and you’ll be like elohim, knowing good and evil.”
Now the story gets really curious... It sounds like Adam and Eve have their eyes closed and don’t yet know good and evil. But then next sentence is “the woman saw that the tree was good for food.” So she could see; they weren’t literally blind; the bit about opening their eyes was a metaphor. But also, she saw that it was good, when it has been strongly implied that they didn’t yet know good and evil?!
I’ve always thought it was unfair when this story was pressed into the service of being an account of the first human sin (which I believe to be Augustine’s interpretation of Paul’s interpretation of the story), that they were being blamed for doing something bad when they didn’t even know good and evil. But maybe they did have some inkling of good and evil, right and wrong? At least they must have been able to see when something looked good to eat — which may not be the moral sense of good at all (ancient Hebrew doesn’t have a whole lot of words to work with). Not sure.
At any rate, what happens when they get this new knowledge of good and evil? Are they able to make definitive judgments about slavery being wrong, or whether we should drink beer or watch Game of Thrones? No, “the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked” (Gen. 3:7). That’s the big reveal? They now know they’ve been running around naked, and they now know this is wrong. Must be more metaphors.
Whatever it’s a metaphor for, clearly God isn’t happy about it. Now it is “Yahweh elohim” who talks and hands out a bunch of curses and makes garments of skin for the people. Then the divine council meets up again and Yahweh elohim says, “Look, the man (adam) has become like one of us.” So we’d better take some protective measures to keep those pesky humans from also becoming immortal. The elohim drive Adam and Eve out of the garden, and post some armed cherubim at the entrance to keep them out.
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So from this story, it sure seems like God doesn’t want humans to be like God. They weren’t created to know good from evil, and once they do know good from evil, they better not live forever. I’m not sure what to make of this. Aren’t we supposed to be more God-like, or at least more Christ-like (which once we get to the Trinity, should amount to the same thing—at least in essence!).
One option is to say something like this: In Genesis 1, the image of God is given to the humans, whereas in Genesis 3, the humans were attempting to take it for themselves. Then we could have a good sermon about grace, and that we shouldn’t be trying to earn our salvation by the good things we do. That would be a good, orthodox sermon. But it sure doesn’t seem to be the lesson we’d get from Genesis 3 on its own.
And speaking of orthodox, or rather the proper noun with the same spelling “Orthodox”, our religious cousins from the East have long had a tradition of “theosis” of becoming like God. And they wouldn’t get an argument from 2 Peter, where our goal is to “become partakers of the divine nature” and it goes on to give a long list of things we should “make every effort” to do. And I already mentioned Ephesians 5 and the command to imitate God. Did those New Testament authors read Genesis 3?
I don’t raise all these issues to cast doubt on Scripture and its authority for Christians. I might be raising them, though, to cast doubt on our ability to definitively say exactly what some passages of Scripture mean. Theology is the act of trying to make sense of what God has revealed through Scripture, and that is a very human activity, and therefore subject to all the flaws and limitations of who we are. But it also points toward one of the distinctives that sets us apart from other created things: we are the kind of thing that tries to figure out what kind of thing we are. No other creatures have made podcast series about what kind of thing their species is. Even if we don’t figure it out precisely, there’s something good and holy and maybe even divine about the attempt.
Curious.