More reflections on Woltersdorff’s video.
I’ve been taking the video in chunks. W lays out two Christian resources for tolerance (I’m reversing the order), love of neighbor and the imago dei. He’s obviously been working on the connection between the Imago Dei and our understanding of Human Rights and the thought occurred to me “how does the origins debate with respect to the Genesis account impact our ability embrace the profession that each person is made in the image of God?”
At Calvin College we’ve seen a vigorous debate about how the question of the historicity of Adam impact federal headship and Paul’s understanding of redemption in Christ Jesus. I have seen little discussion about how animal ancestry impacts our assumed preferential status of human beings as opposed to the rest of the animal kingdom. That status itself has been assaulted by various parties and the dismissal of that status I think is commonly accompanied by the dismissal of a vigorous belief in the Genesis accounts as history. If only an idiot would believe in what is presumed to be a naive historicity of the book of Genesis then of course only an ideo presumes to assert a preferential status for human beings in contrast to the rest of the animal kingdom.
I did a bit of thinking (and please help me with this) to try to imagine other passages of the Christian Bible that articulate an ontological preferential status of humanity as opposed to a functional preferential status, we award preferential status to human beings if they display the capacities of rationality, dominion, or some other qualification we assert, etc. I’m hard pressed to think of other passages of Scripture that assert the imago dei as forcefully and clearly as Genesis 1 and 2.
It’s interesting to think back to the “monkey trial” and Williams Jennings Bryan. I recall a treatment of the trial that noted that part of Bryan’s motivation for opposing evolution was how it was undermining an ontological preferred status for humanity as opposed to a functional one that was highly susceptible to racism as displayed in the American treatment of African Americans and the Nazi treatment of Jews and others. It is not difficult to see how quickly we award status based on performance rather than being.
I will have to give this more thought. Please jump in with ideas or things I’m not considering. pvk
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What about the incarnation? Redemption can be read functionally, but the incarnation surely has ontological implications.
I’m not a scientist, only a Science-Religion-dialog buff. That being said, we should be VERY careful about metaphysical/theological implications of scientific findings. To say that a new finding questions the theology of imago dei puts science as an authority for faith, over scripture. Some scientists like to do this, but they’re wrong.
Moreover, scientists themselves continually try to find the distinctions between humans and non-human animals BECAUSE it seems clear there is something significantly different. If not qualitatively different, then orders of magnitude different. The stories of trying to raise apes like humans (unsuccessfuly) are one example. Michael Polanyi, in his magnum opus Personal Knowledge, lays out the remarkably different developmental tragectories of apes and humans past about 6 months–while we can try to teach sign language to apes, humans can’t help but develop language skills at a mind-boggling pace. We are different creatures, even though our DNA is so similar.
I would suggest that the 2nd Genesis account allows for more continuity between humans and animals–the fact that God goes through all the animals to see if there was a suitable companion for Adam suggests that we might share many things in common with them–but not enough to find among them a suitable companion. Thinking forward–does not God’s creation, from the heavens to the flowers of the field to the lion and the lamb–provide fertile ground through which God can reveal himself? They all bear the mark of their creator, if not his “image.”
Inherent in the Calvin controversy–as I watch from a distance–is the ongoing and unfortunate suspicion of all things scientific in Evangelical America. And as Tim Stafford so astutely pointed out on his blog, that suspicion does them (I’m not sure I can still say “us” when it comes to Evangelicalism) no good.
Genesis seems too logical, too un-supernatural to be simply just another cultural account of creation. It bears very little resemblance to typical mythological accounts of creation in other cultures. It feels as if it was intended to convey literal and true (though not technically scientific) information about creation. The developmental progression from nothing to something to stars to planet to sea to sea creatures to air breathing animals to mammals to humans just seems waaay to cosmologically accurate to be mythological. If you accept the thought that the author of Genesis wrote by revelation it begins to make sense, especially if that revelation was visual. If God was “showing” the author a record of origins (as is typical of all the Old Testament seers and especially John the Revelator in the new testament) and if the author was experiencing the vision from the point of view of the earth, then everything falls together and the order of the 7 time epochs follows logically. One even gets the sense of God’s methodology of creation when the author says, “the seas brought forth” or “the earth brought forth”. Adam himself, as Carl Sagan or Morgan Freeman will tell you, was created from stardust, from earth. Would it not be possible that God used a form of interactive, directed evolution to evolve Homo Sapiens and then at some distinct point in recent time, breathed in His Spirit-breath to create the spirit of Adam, the culture-making, creative race? Just as Steven Jay Gould identified the “Cambrian Explosion”, a short period of time when life’s morphological diversity seems to explode, so we notice a cultural explosion among humans sometime between 10,000 and 60,000 BC. Writing, metal-smithing, farming, building construction, art, poetry, music suddenly appears in a few relatively brief cosmological seconds. I believe God breathed in His Imago Dei into two Homo Sapiens (out of a population of perhaps hundreds of thousands of Homo Sapiens), the federal heads of the human race. Just as God created the second Adam two thousand years ago by choosing from a population of semitic people and birthing by His Spirit, the Christ, Jesus.