(Ir)religiosity

The inaugural theme over at Open Table Theology is over the Imago dei.  Yesterday, thanks to Matt Scott, I kicked off the conversation this month with my post “The Relational Image of God:  Embracing the Other.” I am re-posting it here and I would invite you to visit Open Table Theology and join in our dialogical experiment.

“God created humankind in God’s image,” so the old aphorism goes, “and we returned the favor.”  No doubt it is true.  Appeals to God and God’s nature have been made to justify some of the most horrific atrocities and some of the most beautiful miracles.  “God” becomes the ultimate judo move, the Ace in the hole, the secret weapon that can be used to appeal to the better and worse angels of our finite human nature.  When you stop and think about it our view of God and God’s nature  and our ideas who or what God is have implications for everything.  Literally.  Everything.  Not to mention the Imago dei.  What does it mean to be created in the image of God?

We could phrase it in different way and ask the same question St. Augustine posed so long ago in his Confessions:  what is it that we love when we love our God?  Who is it that we love when we love our God?

Whatever our answer I think most of us will agree that whatever this image entails, it is common among all human beings.  That is to say, we are all created in God’s image. All.  The terrorist and the freedom fighter, the American and the Arab, the Muslim and the Christian, the homosexual and the heterosexual, rich and poor, liberal and conservative, progressive and evangelical — all share this common thread.  We all have something within us, call it a divine spark or our common humanity, we all share this essence, this characteristic, this divine stamp upon our being.  It is inescapable.

Torturing the Divine Image?

This raises some interesting questions.  A little over a month ago a Pew Poll revealed that most churchgoers — 54% to be exact — believe that torture can sometimes be justified.  Torture.  Torture?  Towards another human being created in the image of God?  What does that say about our view of God and God’s children?  A few days prior to reading the Pew Poll I stumbled across one of those “new” bibles that are all the rage these days.  This one was called The American Patriot’s Bible and it claimed to convey the ways in which “the story of the United States is wonderfully woven into the teachings of the Bible.”  What of other nations?  Are not citizens of every nation created in the image of God?  What kind of God privileges the United States over the rest of the world?  I wonder, what does this say about Americans’ view of the image of God when we publish jingoistic bibles and the majority of us support torturing others for the ‘good of our country?’  Is the Imago dei only valid if one is American?  Is particular only to us?

God is beginning to look more and more like Jack Bauer and Christians more and more like nationalistic Americans than we might care to admit. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m sitting on at least one more post about violence but until I get through the rest of my finals and finish up my papers this week I won’t have much time to work on it.

Instead I want your help with something.  A few days ago Matt Scott announced the topic of discussion for the month of June over at Open Table Theology.  To inaugurate this new experiment in generative conversation we will be discussing the Imago dei.

I’ve already got a few thoughts and a possible direction (or two) that I may take my piece, but I’m gonna cheat a little bit.  I’m wondering what your thoughts are.  What do you think about the idea of Imago dei?  What is the Imago dei?  What does it mean to be created in the Image of God and what are the tangible ramifications of such an assertion?  In other words, given your idea about what the Imago dei is, how does that change or affect your mode of being in the world?

I was reading parts of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt‘s Empire this morning and I ran across a really interesting section in which they are quoting Marx and Engels (Don’t run away!  I’m not trying to make Communists out of anyone!).

“The bourgeoisie,” Marx and Engels write, “compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates the world after its own image.”

This is interesting because I place a great amount of importance upon the Imago dei in my theology.  Moreover, I interpret the concept as a broad sort of foundational etiological myth from which our common humanity is derived and by which we pursue justice, reconciliation, and all those other warm fuzzy words.

So that being said, I wonder what it means to radically assert the veracity of the Imago dei presently in the midst of our failing economic system.  Clearly we have misplaced our trust and relied upon a system of exploitation and greed.  To assert that we are indeed created in the image of God is to say that we derive are meaning from God as we participate in the divine life.  It seems to me that we have betrayed that trust opting instead to derive our meaning from the unrestrained free market, participating in the life of consumption.

We have thus traded the Imago dei (the image of God) for the much more destructive Imago comburo (the image of consumption) that is indicative of our current economic crisis.

Perhaps a radical reordering of priorities should be in order.