The Incarnation and the image of God

There's a lazy theological cliché that the imago Dei is what makes man unique. What sets us apart from the rest of creation. 

There's a grain of truth to that, or maybe more than a grain. In the creation account, man is said to be made in God's image–in contrast to all the other creatures (although angels don't figure in the creation account). 

Still, there's the risk of putting to much theological weight on that category. There's no exposition of the concept in Scripture. And in popular discourse, it's a catchall for whatever people like to think makes man distinctive. 

But that's just a segue to my primary point. The overemphasis on the imago Dei, which often functions as a theological shortcut, leads to the neglect of another distinctive. Of all the creatures in this world, including angels (who are our only rivals in the pecking order), God only became Incarnate as a human being. So the Incarnation is a singular tribute to human dignity. That's something else that sets us apart. God came down to our level, yet God had to make us at a certain level for that to be fitting. We had to be high enough in the hierarchy of creation for an Incarnation to suitable, to be the midpoint between the Creator and the creation. That's nothing to brag about. It's by virtue of how we were made, at or near the apex of creation, that the Incarnation lies at the median between the transcendent Deity and the immanent world. 

Ponder what it means that we have the capacity to relate to God at all. In that regard, compare animals to children. Animal intelligence ranges along a continuum. Many lower animals seem to be nothing more than machines with programming (very impressive all the same). Some insects have mysteriously complex behavior given the hardware. Same with bacteria. 

But even the smartest animals appear to have one-dimensional intelligence. By contrast, consider the budding intelligence of a child. Watch how their intelligence flowers at an early age. Even at that tender age, kids have three-dimensional intelligence, and it only deepens with maturation. 

By the same token, creatures must be at a certain threshold for an Incarnation to align. For that to operate in both directions. God relates to humans on our plane while we are able to relate to God, in our finite way. 

Gays and gender

I've discussed this issue on other occasions. For instance:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2015/06/gendered-souls.html

But I'd like to make a more specific point:

This goes to the issue of what makes homosexuality wrong. The basic argument is that men and women are psychologically as well as physically different in ways that make them complementary. 

Two apples comprise a couple of apples. They are interchangeable. By contrast, two shoes comprise a couple of shoes without comprising a pair of shoes. A pair of shoes is more than a twosome. It's a specific kind of twosome. A matching pair, where a left shoe and a right shoe correspond to distinctive differences and distinctive needs. 

If souls are essentially genderless, then there doesn't seem to be anything intrinsically wrong with homosexual attachment. But isn't that a pretty superficial analysis? 

Three views of human nature

http://journal.rts.edu/article/three-views-human-nature/

What's the image of God?

The image of God in man (Gen 1:26-27) is an important concept. In some way it distinguishes man from the animals. It grounds the prohibition against murder, and singles out the fitting punishment. Yet because the narrator doesn't define this category, it has spawned a vast theological literature of competing interpretations. In historical theology, it becomes a cipher for whatever theologians happen to to think distinguishes man from the animals, viz. rationality. More recently, you have functional as well as ontological interpretations. 

Some scholars distinguish between "image" and "likeness", but I suspect that here they are synonymous. A pleonastic expression for emphasis. 

On the face of it, the image of God presents a paradox: given Israel's aniconic piety, how can man be an image of an invisible deity? The very fact that the category is undefined suggests the narrator expected the target audience to be able to figure out what it means. There are two ways that could be. It could play on extrabiblical associations that were familiar to the target audience. Or it could play on intertextual associations. Genesis is part of a literary unit: the Pentateuch. 

Nowadays, one popular scholarly interpretation is that in the ancient Near East, the statue of a king or statue of a god stood for him. It represents his presence. It doesn't necessarily reflect his physical appearance, but his prerogatives. By analogy, man is a representative of God on earth, acting in his stead. 

This may be a perfectly adequate interpretation. I would, however, like to explore an alternative interpretation. In the Pentateuch you have angels. There are different kinds of angels, or angels under different aspects.

With one notable exception, angels are a class of creatures. They vary in appearance. Cherubim (and seraphim) may have multiple wings and multiple faces.

By contrast, you have humanoid angels. Outwardly, their appearance is indistinguishable from humans. In addition, angels can become luminous. 

Finally, you have a theophanic angel: the angel of the Lord. That's not a creature, but a local manifestation of Yahweh. 

The theophanic angel has a humanoid appearance (e.g. Gen 18), but it can also become luminous (e.g. Exod 3). The "burning bush" is something of a misnomer. The bush was never on fire. It seemed to be on fire due to a montage between the bush and the luminous angel.

Here's my point: human males resemble God insofar as the theophanic angel resembles human males. In that respect, the image of God could have a visual counterpart. It isn't necessarily just symbolic. To be made in the image of God could mean (at least in part) to resemble God insofar as humans look like the angel of the Lord. In that respect, there could be physical correspondence insofar as the theophanic angel assumes, or simulates, audiovisual and tactile properties. 

There's also an argument to be made that the theophanic angel is a Christophany. If so, it foreshadows the Incarnation. If so, it represents the culmination of this theological motif. On the one hand, Jesus and the theophanic angel are both divine. On the other hand, Jesus and man are both human. If the image of God is defined (at least in part) by reference to the theophanic angel, then Christ unites the twofold significance of that category in his own person. 

Going native

There's a tension in traditional anthropology, especially concerning the study of religion. Western anthropologists are secular. So they remain detached observers rather than participants. Diffident or disapproving outsiders. Yet this judgmental attitude is at odds with their cultural relativism.

Edith Turner is a noted anthropologist. Unlike the typical anthropologist, she crossed over. Frankly, it's terrifying to see a woman give herself over to the dark side, by embracing witchcraft. At the same time, this does afford an independent witness to the reality of occult forces.

One thing that's unclear to me when she refers to supernatural experiences among the Eskimo is whether she's describing Christian Eskimos, folk medicine, or a syncretistic amalgam of Christian theology and indigenous paganism. Modern Eskimos aren't like Eskimos from 500 years ago. Missionaries brought the Gospel to Alaska. There are churches in Alaska. You can watch televangelists. So it would be useful to see a more discriminating analysis.

In the past in anthropology, if a researcher "went native," it doomed him academically. My husband, Victor Turner, and I had this dictum at the back of our minds when we spent two and a half years among the Ndembu of Zambia in the fifties.

All right, "our" people believed in spirits, but that was a matter of their different world, not ours. Their ideas were strange and a little disturbing. Yet somehow we were on the safe side of the White divide and were free merely to study the beliefs. This is how we thought. Little knowing it, we denied the people's equality with ours, their "coevalness," their common humanity as that humanity extended itself into the spirit world.

Try out that spirit world ourselves? No way!

But at intervals, that world insisted it was really there. For instance, in the Chihamba ritual at the end of a period of ordeal, a strong wave of curative energy hit us. We had been participating as fully as we knew how, thus opening ourselves to whatever entities that were about. In another ritual, for fertility, the delight of dancing in the moonlight hit me vividly, and I began to learn something about the hypnotic effect of singing and hearing the drums.

Much later, Vic and I witnessed a curious event in New York City in 1980, while running a workshop at the New York University Department of Performance Studies, which was attended by performance and anthropology students. With the help of the participants, we were trying out rituals as actual performances with the intention of creating a new educational technique.

We enacted the Umbanda trance session, which we had observed and studied in one of the slums of Rio de Janeiro. The students duly followed our directions and also accompanied the rites with bongo drumming and songs addressed to the Yoruba gods. During the ritual, a female student actually went into a trance, right there in New York University. We brought her 'round with our African rattle, rather impressed with the way this ritual worked even out of context. The next day, the student told us that she had gone home that night and correctly predicted the score of a crucial football game, impressing us even further.

Since then, I have taken note of the effects of trance and discovered for myself the three now obvious regularities: frequent, nonempirical cures; clairvoyance, which includes finding lost people or objects, divination, prediction, or forms of wisdom speaking; and satisfaction or joy—these three effects repeating, almost like a covenant.

What spirit events took place in my own experience?

One of them happened like this. In 1985, I was due for a visit to Zambia. Before going, I decided to come closer than on previous occasions to the Africans' own experience, whatever that was—I did not know what they experienced. So it eventuated, I did come closer.

My research was developing into the study of a twice-repeated healing ritual. To my surprise, the healing of the second patient culminated in my sighting a spirit form. In a book entitled Experiencing Ritual¹, I describe exactly how this curative ritual reached its climax, including how I myself was involved in it; how the traditional doctor bent down amid the singing and drumming to extract the harmful spirit; and how I saw with my own eyes a large, gray blob of something like plasma emerge from the sick woman's back.

Then I knew the Africans were right. There is spirit stuff. There is spirit affliction; it is not a matter of metaphor and symbol, or even psychology. And I began to see how anthropologists have perpetuated an endless series of put-downs about the many spirit events in which they participated - "participated" in a kindly pretense. They might have obtained valuable material, but they have been operating with the wrong paradigm, that of the positivists' denial.

[...]

Later, in 1987, when I went to northern Alaska to conduct research on the healing methods of Inupiat Eskimos, I similarly found myself swamped with stories of strange events, miracles, rescues, healings by telephone hundreds of miles away, visions of God, and many other manifestations. It was by these things that the people lived. Their ears were pricked up for them, as it were. I spent a year in the village acting as a kind of pseudo auntie, listening to, and believing, the stories. And naturally, those things happened to me about as frequently as they did to them.

[...]

Ernie often accused me of not believing in these manifestations, but I protested that I did. How could I help it? Ernie usually had a bad time from Whites, who labeled his experiences "magical beliefs." But by then, I myself was within the circle of regular Eskimo society and experienced such events from time to time. I am now learning that studying such a mentality from inside is a legitimate and valuable kind of anthropology that is accessible if the anthropologist takes that "fatal" step toward "going native."

[...]

But we eventually have to face the issue head on and ask, "What are spirits?" And I continue with the thorny question, "What of the great diversity of ideas about them throughout the world? How is a student of the anthropology of consciousness, who participates during fieldwork, expected to regard all the conflicting spirit systems in different cultures? Is there not a fatal lack of logic inherent in this diversity?"

The reply: "Is this kind of subject matter logical anyway?" We also need to ask, "Have we the right to force it into logical frameworks?"

Moreover, there is disagreement about terms. "Spirits" are recognized in most cultures. Native Americans refer to something in addition called "power." "Energy," Ki or C'hi, is known in Japan and China, and has been adopted by Western healers.

"Energy" was not the right word for the blob that I saw coming out the back of a Ndembu woman; it was a miserable object, purely bad, without any energy at all, and much more akin to a restless ghost. One thinks of energy as formless, but when I "saw" in the shamanic mode those internal organs, the organs were not "energy." They had form and definition. When I saw the face of my Eskimo friend Tigluk on a mask, as I saw it in a waking dream, and then saw Tigluk himself by luck a few minutes afterward, the mask face was not "energy," laughing there. It was not in the least abstract.

The old-fashioned term, "spirit manifestation," is much closer. These manifestations are the deliberate visitations of discernable forms that have the conscious intent to communicate, to claim importance in our lives. As for "energy" itself, I have indeed sensed something very much like electrical energy when submitting to the healing passes of women adepts in a mass meeting of Spiritists in Brazil.

(Source)

Dmanisi fossils

Steve tipped me off about the following excerpt from a recent post by Todd Wood:

Let's think carefully about these claims. According to Thomas, there are anatomical reasons to conclude that Skull 5 is an ape. But in my own baraminological analysis of very similar skulls with similar anatomical traits, I found evidence that they are human. To me, Dmanisi illustrates everything I've been saying about the human baramin: the human family is highly variable, even to the point of producing humans that look ape-like in some of their characteristics. Even more exciting is that these Dmanisi fossils are basically from the same locality, making it very likely that they're all one highly variable population. That was the point of the original article, which I summarized previously. In an unpublished email to a reader, I excitedly pointed out that these are some of the earliest human fossils in the fossil record, and they're right there near the mountains of Ararat. Amazing!

I asked Dr. Wood if he might provide further info. He kindly replied. Here's his helpful response:

H. erectus fossils are conventionally dated to about 2 million years ago, making them stratigraphically the first human fossils we encounter in the post-Flood sediments.

Then you have their geographic location right there about as close to Ararat as you can get. It's absolutely remarkable that the earliest human fossils are close to Ararat. You can find out a bit more about the Dmanisi finds at Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_erectus_georgicus#Homo_erectus_georgicus

Should Christians Be Physicalists?

http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2010/marapr/shouldchrtnsphysicalist.html?paging=off

Soul Train's a-Comin'

Paul Manata plugs a new book on dualism:

http://aporeticchristianity.wordpress.com/2011/01/29/soul-hypothesis/

Aborting propositions

It would appear that a troubling consequence of Gordon Clark's view of persons, i.e., that they are identical to the propositions they think, i.e, they are propositions, is that it doesn't have the resources to argue that concepti, fetuses, and newborns should not be aborted or murdered.

Putting aside the incoherence of Clark's view, viz., he makes a distinction between the person and the propositions he thinks when there should be no distinction there, we have something like this:

x = y

x = the person

y = propositions the person thinks.

Now, if x and y are identical, then whatever is true of x is true of y, and vice versa.

Call concepti, fetuses, and newborns, Human Offspring, HO.

HO think no propositions, i.e., the set of propositions the person thinks is empty, it doesn't exist, i.e., y doesn't exist. But, where y does not exist, x does not either. Thus, HO are not human persons.

Two possible responses might be:

1. HO are human beings and it is immoral to end the life of a human being. However, I fail to see how a Scripturalist could argue for this distinction given Scripturalism. Second, it would be metaphysically impossible for a human being to become a human person if the latter is just a complex of propositions (HT James Anderson). I don't find this move to work, then.

2. HO do think propositions. I find this view highly implausible. It just seems false to say that concepti, for instance, have positive cognitive attitudes toward propositions. Indeed, same with a newborn infant. No doubt they have this potential, but it is not actualized yet. A potential to think propositions will not work for Clark's view, though. I am inclined to say that if Clarkians are forced to posit that concepti think in propositions, let alone think at all, this is simply an illustration of how desperate their view of persons is. Lastly, it goes without saying that I don't see how this view would be argued for from Scripture.

Therefore, I don't see how Scripturalists can wax indignant about abortion and infanticide.

To sin or not to sin

Two statements by Perry Robinson:

“Our view is in short that for agents that have a begining, namely Adam and Eve their use of the their natural faculties, namely their will and intellect are not yet fixed in the natural goodness. So while good and innocent, they are not yet righteous. That is acquired through practice. So while it is possible for them to fall here, once fixed in virtue, it is impossible for them to sin in heaven.”

“Fourth, if you wish to focus on the information we have about human nature then we had best start with the humanity of Christ since there is far more information about his human nature than we have about human nature in general. Furthermore, Christ is the model for all of humanity and all of humanity is summed up in him. And so the proper relation between humanity and divinity is set forth in Christology, not anthropology.”

On the face of it, this is a rather odd conjunction. Does this mean there was a time when Jesus lacked the property of righteousness? Before Jesus had acquired the virtue of righteousness through trial and error?

Likewise, does this mean there was a time before Jesus was impeccable? Was he able to either do good or evil until he acquired impeccability? Learn from his mistakes?

If Jesus is the paradigm of humanity, then Perry can’t invoke the divinity of Christ as the differential factor to ground the intrinsic righteousness or intrinsic impeccability of Christ, for that would also entail the intrinsic righteousness or intrinsic impeccability of all humanity in union with divinity via the hypostatic union.

War Pigs

The below is brief, and many things that could have or should have been said were left out; nevertheless, what follows represents some of my findings on the causes of war. The below is useful, I hope, in a few ways. One way in-line with the purpose of this blog is for apologetic use against the rantings of the new atheists. Another is the empirical confirmation of sin. Another is that I offer a sampling of my growing bibliography on war studies in case anyone is interested in further research.
_______________________________

Truly, the history of humanity is a history of violence. As one writer puts it, man is “the most dangerous animal” (Smith). One needs look no further than war. In this post, the term “war” will be used broadly, including not only paradigm cases of war, but also genocide, suicide terrorism, and ethnic cleansing. Though the phenomenon of war is undeniable, especially to those not currently in comas, the cause(s) might not be as clear. To find clarity, we will first look at two popular causes of war people like to bandy about—religion and irreligion—and declare a pox on both houses. Next, we will speculate that the causes of war are multiple. Finally, we will note that war is basic to human nature, and thus as complex as any human phenomenon. It is also not the purpose of this post to argue that all of the possible causes offered below are all right, but they probably have kernels have truth. One up-shot of this post is that the cries of the new atheists grow shriller and shriller by the minute. Extremism, whether religious or irreligious, is becoming more and more irrelevant as ways forward are sought that are congenial to a life in Babylon.

John Lennon did not find war groovy. Even though all Lennon was saying was give peace a chance, he was imagining much more. He asked us to imagine a world with no countries and no religion. It is supposed to be easy if you try. Once you imagine his world, you will see that there is nothing to kill or die for and everyone lives in peace. The sober-minded rightly said Lennon was dreaming. He quickly pointed out that he was not the only one. Apparently, Lennon did not understand that the force of the premise he dreamt up does not increase by adding more dreamers. That would be like trying to increase a product by multiplying by more zeros.

Lennon is not the only one who speculated that religion causes war. Take the remarks Bill Maher made in his recent movie, Religulous. Maher claimed that, “religion must die in order for mankind to live” while pictures of religious fanatics gearing up for war flashed in the background. The implication was not subtle, nor did Maher intend it to be. Similarly, Richard Dawkins, though more educated than Maher, nevertheless confidently asserted that, “To fill the world with religion or religions of the Abrahamic kind is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used” (Dawkins). These two authors are representative of how modern village atheists wage culture wars against religion. For as one of their rhetorical pugilists has contended: “Religion poisons everything” (Hitchens 14).

On the other hand, one historian educated at Oxford tells us that, “the secularist establishment’s accusations against religion as the primary cause of war are simplistic and ill-motivated; they have some important superficial validity but are far from the whole truth” (Pearse 15). So perhaps religion is not the only, or even the main cause of war. Can we find answers on the irreligious side of the coin?

After a blistering survey of “the bloodiest century of all,” Meic Pearse could claim that irreligion “has proved more lethal than religion ever was” (41). Now, if religion is one’s bête noire, then even communism’s reign of terror will be seen as the expression of “little more than a political religion” (Harris 79). But, given this level of wordsmithing, the idea that “religion” is to blame for the majority of violence becomes an uninteresting, and unfalsifiable dogma. Words, however, do not belong on a Procrustean bed.

Though finger pointing and culture warring seem to be all the rage today, it would be simplistic and naive to think that war follows necessarily from either religion or irreligion.

Since we see both religion and irreligion having a hand in causing war, it would seem that there might be some deeper causes. In fact, most “social phenomena are sufficiently complex—with data on many variables being either unavailable or inherently unquantifiable” (Sowell 37). That is why even after a massive study on genocide and mass killing; James Waller could not confidently assert that he fully understands the causes (297). Gathering scientific data on the causes of war is labyrinthine because the scientific study of war is a recent phenomenon. A survey of leading sociological journals between 1986 and 2000 reveal that “fewer than 1% deal with war, and none of them considered the causes of war” (Smith 35). Thankfully, especially for bloggers speculating about the causes of war, there has been tremendous effort to fill this void.

A survey of recent literature shows the causes of war to be bounteous. David Livingstone Smith points out that we can look at the causes of war from multiple angles, such as from the “standpoint of economics, politics, history, ideology, ethics, and various other disciplines” (xiii). To complicate matters even more, Smith finds that greedy multinational corporations eager to acquire resources often cook up genocides (219). Pearse also agrees with the greed factor, but “where that is too harsh a judgment,” wars arise from “the need for security” (118).

Other causes on offer make Tocqueville appear prescient for lauding “the great experiment.” For example, after studying government-sponsored killings for sixty years, University of Hawaii political scientist, R.J. Rummel, locates the cause for “democide” (i.e., government-sponsored killings) in various forms of government, e.g., totalitarian, monarchic, oligarchic, and democratic; with democratic being the least violent (Rummel). Rummel's position is of course more sophisticated than how it is laid out above, but this brief survey is not the time for detailed inspections of these various possible causes on offer. In line with the political, Thomas Farr finds that it is the degree to which a country allows religious freedom to flourish that plays a major role in expressions of civility antithetical to warmongering (Farr; so also Guinness).

Many would consider suicide terrorism a paradigmatic case of religiously motivated warfare. However, the world’s leading expert on suicide terrorism, Robert Pape, has drawn different conclusions. He amassed the first database of every suicide terrorist attack in the world from 1980 until 2005, noting that: “there is little connection between suicide terrorism” and “any one of the world’s religions.” Rather, it is the “strategic logic” of terrorists “to compel modern democracies” to withdraw their forces from what the terrorists “consider to be their homeland” (Pape 4). Pape points out that his data “casts strong doubt” on the claim that suicide attacks are the brainchild of misogynistic “religious fanatics.” The “demographic characteristics” show that most were “well beyond adolescence, most were secular, and many—the overwhelming majority in some groups—were women.” The “uncomfortable fact” is that “suicide terrorists are far more normal than any of us would like to believe” (Pape 241).

The last point—the normalcy of the killers—is the one that finds the most agreement in the current literature (cf. Guinness; Overy; Pearse; Rummel; Smith; Waller). Says Smith: “Purveyors of violence, terrorists, and merchants of genocidal destruction are, more often than not, people who fit the profile that Primo Levi painted of his Nazi jailers at Auschwitz: ‘average human beings, averagely intelligent, averagely wicked … they had our faces’” (4). That puts a damper on the currently fashionable Pollyanna view of humankind in a hurry. It might be, then, that although the above disparate causes are important, “there is one dimension that underpins them all: the bedrock of human nature. To understand war, we must understand ourselves” (Smith xiii).

Unfortunately, we must end our speculating here. Psychologizing about man’s charcoaled nature is beyond the purview of this blog post (Christians already have the answers from the back of the book). We are here to speculate about the causes of war (and later I will post some thoughts on a way forward). We have seen that war has many causes; unfortunately, our list may not be exhaustive. The closest we came to finding an underlying cause was in human nature. Peering into the mirror, then, may reveal ugliness no cosmetic can cover. “We have seen the enemy and he is us.”

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Dawkins, Richard. “Religion’s Misguided Missiles.” The Guardian 15 September 2001
guardian.co.uk .

Farr, Thomas. World of Faith and Freedom: Why International Religious Liberty Is Vital To American National Security. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Guinness, Os. The Case For Civility And Why Our Future Depends on It. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008.

Harris, Sam. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. New York: Norton, 2005.

Hitchens, Christopher. God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. New York: Twelve Hatchet Book Group, 2007.

Religulous. Dir. Larry Charles. Perf. Bill Maher, Tal Bachman, and Larry Charles. 2008. DVD. Lions Gate Entertainment, 2009.

Overy, Richard. The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia. New York: Norton, 2006.

Pape, Richard. Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. New York: Random House, 2006.

Pearse, Meic. The Gods of War: Is Religion the Primary Cause of Violent Conflict? Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP, 2007.

Rummel, R.J. Power Kills: Democracy as a Method of Nonviolence. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2008.

Smith, David Livingstone. The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007.

Sowell, Thomas. The Vision of the Annointed: Self-congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy.New York: Basic Books, 1995.

Waller, James. Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.