V WHAT IS MAN?

THE IMAGE OF GOD … 110 

Humanism: Hellenic Christianity … 110

Humanism rejected Augustine … 113

Humanism rejected: the Reformation … 115

Modem times: irrationalist confusion … 117

NOTES AND REFERENCES  … 128

PART 2: THE ETHIC OF CHRISTIANITY

V

WHAT IS MAN?

THE ‘IMAGE OF GOD’

God’s action in sending ‘revelation through the precepts and example of His prophets makes sense only if human beings are worth the effort—if they have a special value. There are many kinds of value in the natural world that exist ‘naturally’—independently of any revelation. But the highest kind, moral value, can only exist through the agency of human beings—to whom, therefore, revelation is sent. Man is the gateway through which the highest value enters the natural world and becomes real: it does so when, as Jesus taught, the individual soul freely enables its will to be ‘determined’ by the Will of God. By definition, moral value is the one kind of value that cannot be given in nature. It is man who gives real existence to the highest realm of God’s Will, who ‘completes’ its full realization in the world. That is the true measure of our dignity and our place in the creation. Jesus’ absolute dedication to teaching the ‘first commandment’—’l   seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent me’ (John 5:30)—rests upon the potential of human being to create moral value in the world, to do God’s Will. That potential is not, in the pure ethic of Jesus, conditional upon anything else: it is not, for instance, conditional upon being born in a particular community. Rather, that potential is what defines being human: Jesus’ ethic was universalist.

But that ethic, and the affirmation of man’s innate worth on which it rests, had a history after Jesus. From Jesus’ followers it received a variety of interpretations which we shall now study.

Humanism: Hellenic Christianity

Among the Evangelists, Luke’s treatment stands out most clearly. He describes Adam as ‘the son of God’ (Luke 3:38), a status higher than ‘image of God’. This contrasts sharply with Paul’s use of ‘image of God’ to characterize Jesus (2 Corinthian 4:4). But that same phrase

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is applied by Paul also to men; ‘the image and glory of God’ (1 Corinthians 11:7), a dignity Paul expressly denied to women. He was responding to the problem of whether, as required by Jewish Law, a man’s head should be covered during prayer (1 Corinthians 11:1-10): he was certain it should not be because only that need be covered which is a cause of ‘shame’. In the creation of man there is no cause for shame; man is ‘made after the similitude of God’ (James 3:9); the human body is ‘the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God...’ (1 Corinthians 6:19). These words gave rise, after Paul, to the view that the divine likeness of man is in his nature, as God created it. However, Paul also asserted that being ‘image of God’ is a dignity that is acquired through conversion, through being ‘raised’ with Christ. In other words, it is not innate; it belongs only to ‘the new man… renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him’ (Colossians 3:10). The implication is that being ‘image of God’ is a dignity lost until restored (‘renewed’) by conversion to Christianity.

It is the second view that Paul really held. He only asserted the view that being in the ‘image of God’ is an innate quality for the sake of the argument against covering the head in prayer: he wanted to be rid of even non-essentials of Jewish Law. Also, he wished to exhort the Christians not to fornicate but, instead, to respect and honor their bodies (1 Corinthians 6:13-20). Paul’s general estimate of man is as a fallen creature, a sinner. According to C.H. Dodd (1958, p.102), Paul saw mankind as ‘fighting a losing battle against Sin. For Sin had laid claim to the whole range of man’s physical or psychical existence’. Paul could not have maintained that man’s nature was good—which being ‘image of God’ implies—and give to Jesus’ death the meaning of a sacrificial atonement.

Paul’s emphasis on man as a fallen creature, one who lost his original dignity, is quite new. Certainly, Hebrew Scripture ‘knows nothing of the idea that henceforth the image of God in man has been lost.’¹ The first Christians were therefore slow to take in this Pauline idea. Those of them who were of Hellenic rather than Jewish background would also have had difficulty grasping it. The Greek poets had all seen men as descendants of’ the gods (see Jaeger, 1945, vol.1, pp.20-1). The philosophers regarded human rationality as the divine spark in man, a distinction peculiar to him (see e.g. Aristotle De Anima, 2, 1, 2). The Stoics came close to identifying man with God, as a way of stressing his moral responsibility (for example, Epictetus: ‘You are a fragment of God. You have within you a part of Him. Why then are you ignorant of your kinship?...’ Discourses, 2, ch.8 (Loeb edn)).

The Hebrew Scripture, the Old Testament, is, of course, explicit on this point: ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness’ (Genesis 1:26; see also 5:1, 3, 9:6). Although Genesis 6:12 allows that ‘all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth’, God does not hold man down for this; ‘My [God’s] spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh’ (6:3). For the spirit in man is wholly divine,

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‘breathed’ into man directly from the divine source (2:7). Being in the image of God is the reason why man can be morally judged by himself and by God; ‘Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed, for in the image of God made he man’ (9:6). Spirit and body together, man is only a little lower than God (Psalms, 8:5; see also 84:2).²

In the Apostolic Fathers, the value accorded to man’s simply being man happily unites the Hebraic Genesis view to that of Hellenic culture. They are unanimous that man is the masterpiece of the Master-Creator, endowed with all the faculties necessary to make his life blessed and happy: ‘Man, the most excellent and from his intellect the greatest of His creatures, did He form in the likeness of His own image...’ (1 Clement 33:4), God gave man ‘the goal of peace’ (19:2) because being God He does good to all creation (20:1); echoing Genesis 2:7, ‘His breath is in us’ (21:9). Similarly, Barnabas 6:12, echoing Genesis 1:31, urges us to understand that God was pleased with ‘our fair creation’. The author of the Epistle to Diognetus is so moved that he breaks into a psalm-like rhapsody: God created creation itself for the sake of man whom He loved, ‘to whom He gave reason, to whom He gave mind, on whom alone He enjoined that they should look upward to Him... to whom He promised the Kingdom of heaven and earth.’³

Of the later Fathers of the Church, Clement, Bishop of Rome, wrote in The Clementine Homilies, usually attributed to him, ‘For the image of God is man’ and ‘He who wishes to be pious towards God does good to man, because... man bears the image of God’ (Homily 11, ch.4). He commends good actions to fellow human beings because such actions can be accounted as good done to God, whose likeness we are. Gregory of Nyssa (d. circa 395), following a clearly Hellenic line, wrote that man is the image of God as a good portrait is a likeness of the person it portrays: he notes particularly that human perception and understanding, and human virtues, are derived from divine originals (1893 edn, p.391). Throughout this age in which Plato and Aristotle ruled the Western spirit with little challenge, the Genesis concept of man as ‘image of God’, now understood in essentially Hellenistic terms, prevailed. By nature man was good, and his goodness was analyzed into physical but, more often, spiritual (rational) qualities which belonged to him through creation, that is, innately, and which were also cuItivable.⁴

The Pauline doctrine was dormant, ineffective, throughout this period. But the Christian dogma which needed that doctrine was being elaborated; grounds for it had to be found. Irenaeus (circa 200) contrived a distinction between the ‘image’ (zelem) and ‘likeness’ (demuth) of Genesis 1:26, regarding them as two different qualities. His aim was to suggest that man loses one (demuth interpreted as ‘righteousness’) through the Fall, but keeps the other (zelem interpreted as ‘innate image’). The basis of lrenaeus’ reasoning is false: the Hebrew terms cannot bear the meanings he forces on to them.⁵ Be-

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sides, the Hellenic influence in his time was too strong to allow so radical a split between what man ‘ought to be’ and what man ‘is’. While the influence of Christian dogma continued to grow, the problem of what to do about the idea that man was created in the image of God, i.e. created good, remained unsolved. It was not until Augustine that the notion acquired its truly Christian character.⁶

Humanism rejected: Augustine

Augustine was sufficiently close to Hellenic culture to define ‘the image of God’, at last partly, in Platonic terms. To memory and knowledge, Augustine joined love as innate, inalienable human faculties. The sum and activity of these faculties is what we call ‘spirit’ which is that very ‘image and likeness of Thee on account of which he [man] was set over all irrational creatures’ (Confession, Bk 13, ch.32). Every man has this endowment, as it were, by nature, simply by being God’s creature. But, Augustine goes on to argue, this is not the ground of man’s excellence or value. His excellence, according to Augustine, no longer lies in his being endowed with the ‘image and likeness of Thee’, but in his making a certain use of it. But surely the value continues to be there, even if not rightly exercised? Augustine argues that it does not. To justify his position, he arbitrarily contrives a distinction between the Biblical expressions ‘after our image or likeness’ and ‘after his kind’. Had God meant to create a being wholly different from or superior to the rest of creation, Genesis would have said that God created man after his (man’s) own kind, i.e. utterly unique. The expression ‘after Our image’ implies that God created man so that he might tum to Him and, as it were, realize a rapport with Him. That is a possibility for which only a tendency has been built-in within man’s self. Augustine, like his contemporary Tertullian, seemed unable to read the ‘Us’ of the Scripture (for example in Genesis 7:26) without becoming obsessed with the literal sense of the plural form. Tertullian spent a great deal of energy on trying to deduce a trinitarian concept of God from such usages (see his Against Praxeas, esp. chs 12-13, and Ante-Nicene Fathers, 3, pp.607ff). Augustine had the same purpose and repeated many of Tertullian’s arguments (On the Trinity, Bks 9-14). He did contribute a new ‘trinitarian’ conception of consciousness (subject, object and act of perception) which was meant to be ‘image and likeness’ of a trinitarian deity.⁷ The naïveté and crudity of Augustine’s argument have been noted, and the argument put aside, in subsequent Christian theology. But his conclusion abides: ‘the true honor of man is the image or likeness of God, which is not preserved except it be in relation to Him by whom it is impressed’ (Bk 12, ch.11), The innate qualities of man’s rationality (memory, imagination, knowledge, love) are in themselves the likeness of God, but in man they have yet to become like God. To become like God they must be subjected to God. Augustine had, unmistakably, revived a side of Pauline doctrine lost in the Apostolic and early Fathers; he had intro-

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duced an ethical demand, a condition, upon man’s being ‘image of God’.

Two devastating consequences followed in practice from Augustine’s doctrine. Firstly, the universalism of the ethic of Jesus was brought to ruin. Jesus was sent to the world to save all mankind. All of mankind (who, according to Psalms 8:5, are next only to the angels) are worthy (and in need) of God’s mercy conveyed to them through His revelations. That worthiness for the mercy of revelation is expressed in man’s being ‘image of God’. In Augustine’s doctrine, this unique distinction became an instrument of value but not itself a value. The creature, uniquely endowed by God had to use that endowment in the right way in order to realize its potential: man was not already, but had to become, ‘like’ God. And the right way to become was, inevitably, Christian: the guidance of Christianity became the necessary condition of man’s being ‘image of God’. Without that guidance, the faculties of man (memory, understanding, etc.) are ‘foolish’,⁸ and he loses the ‘likeness of God’, collapsing instead into ‘the likeness of beasts’.⁹ In practice, this doctrine accords the dignity of being in the image of God only to Christians: it thus represents a relapse from the universalism of the ethic of Jesus into the particularism of the Jews; a relapse into the notion of being separate from the rest of mankind, ‘special’, ‘chosen’. As we shall see below, Calvin recognized Augustine as a predecessor who had anticipated his (Calvin’s) doctrine of a predestination for ‘election’, for being ‘of the chosen’.

The second, equally devastating, practical consequence of Augustine’s doctrine was the subjection of the human mind to something external to it. In Genesis, and in the view (under Hellenic influence) of the Apostolic Fathers, the mind of man, being of ‘the image of God’ by its very nature, had been thought worthy to freely work out or discover the laws and principles of being as and when it found them. But no longer: ‘For the mind becomes like God to the extent vouchsafed by its subjection of itself to Him for information. And... it obtains the greatest nearness by that subjection which produces likeness...’ (On the Morals of the Catholic Church, 12). Human understanding was made subject to faith,¹⁰ which in practice meant subjection to the faith as taught by the Church of Rome. The very purpose of that subjection was the reproduction, in the human soul, of the divine Trinity which is the central tenet in all church dogmatics. The mind was not supposed able to know or to discover the Christian God, the Trinity, or even God in general, for itself: there could be no natural theology. The mind became God-like only in the measure to which it subjected itself to the truth as understood and taught by the Church of Rome. Indeed, mind was not truly mind at all until and unless it accepted the faith as taught by the Church. A mind reasoning, remembering, imagining, loving outside the guidance of Church dogma was not God-like, but ‘beastly’.

There is a possible consolation in the notion that, in strictly formal terms, being in the image of God is an always present potential even

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when the individual stands apart from faith (from the Church) (On the Trinity, 12, ch.14). But who is truly content in the possession of something which has no worth in itself but only in its relation with something else? And, more important, why should that something else be the truth of Church guidance? If guidance is to be given externally, if the free exercise of mind is vetoed by it, how is one guidance to be preferred to another—except arbitrarily, irrationally? In this way, Augustine’s doctrine opens the gates to irrationalism of every kind. For the veto on the mind need not be exercised only by the God of Church dogma but can be as well exercised by any prejudice, any illusion advocated with sufficient conviction.

This doctrine of Augustine is the bridge on which every Christian theory of man has passed. It adopted the concept of man’s being in the likeness of God only to insist on its orientation to the faith and dogma of the Christian church. The first image was natural; the second conditional, acquired. The second image (of the Christian being in the likeness of God) was needed to justify the properly Christian virtues and to exalt the person who realized them. Throughout the history of Christian thought, it has held a place of unquestioned superiority over the first.

Under the influence of Islamic rationalism emanating from the Muslim centers of learning in Sicily and Medieval Spain, Christian thought did develop a taste for the natural image of its ancestors, the Semites of Genesis and the Hellenic rationalists. But this appreciation of the divine image as natural rationality was never strong enough to liberate itself from the guidance of the Church, the authority of Christian virtue, the ‘laws of grace’, to which Augustine had subjected it. In Thomas Aquinas, it attained the fairest flowering it was ever to attain in Christian thought. But even there, despite its freedom to range over a wide realm of human activity and thought, it was subject to the authority of the Christian order, always hovering above it. The gap separating the two orders was never bridged, since neither had the power to reach out to the other. The lower, or natural-rational, order was not to constitute an independent realm, but had to be subject to directives from above. It could indeed go a long way by its own laws since these were not in opposition to the laws of grace. But there was no doubt where the final word lay in matters where any opposition arose. The values of the natural-rational order were not only inferior to the values of the Christian order, but logically subject to them—as means are subject to ends.¹¹

The Age of Scholasticism enjoyed a brief spring. But the storm against the natural-rational order was already gathering momentum, and broke in the epoch-making event of the Reformation.

Humanism rejected: the Reformation

Luther, the first leader and author of the Reformation, was primarily interested in freeing the Christian, as Christian, from the domination

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of the Church of Rome. Salvation, or communion with the Godhead and the maintenance of that communion, he thought, need not depend upon the organized church. The Christian may achieve his own salvation by himself, ‘by faith alone’. If faith alone is sufficient for salvation, that which faith restores (and which must have been lost before) cannot be anything which man has by nature. For what man has by nature cannot go out oil and then be put back into, existence. In Luther’s view, therefore, being in the likeness of God is not something in man by nature, by man’s simply being man. Rather, this likeness is a virtue which Adam once had, and which he once lost, which every Christian after him, once did not have and which, by means of his Christian faith, he has now regained and may enjoy. Being in the like-ness of God is a part of man only as a potentiality, as God’s intention for man. Man is valued therefore only on account of ‘righteousness’, or of being one of ‘the righteous’, that is, of being a good Christian. (Vain to interject here that Genesis nowhere says God created righteous man in His own image and likeness, only man, plain and simple.) Clearly this is the climax-of Tertullian’s and Augustine’s thought. It stands at the furthest possible remove from that Hellenistic humanism under which all mankind is in the image of God. With Luther, the pursuit of the Christian’s glory, welfare, and freedom to assert himself as Christian, struggling for expression for many centuries, has found its full voice.

Luther accused the scholastics of confusion in referring to both the natural man and the Christian as in ‘the likeness of God’, the one potentially, the other actually by the grace of God through the Christian revelation. For, in Luther’s mind only the righteous Christian could deserve that excellence, the other was bound to corruptions of the flesh. Luther recalled 1 Corinthians 15:48 and, more particularly, Ephesians 4:21-4, where Paul had distinguished the ‘old’ man who is ‘corrupt according to the deceitful lusts’, and commanded; ‘be renewed in the spirit of your mind;… put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness’. Luther saw nothing good in the natural-rational order; man was not good at all except by ‘renewal’, the act of faith which alone was necessary for salvation. Commenting on Genesis 1:26, he wrote: ‘Memory, will and mind we have indeed; but they are most depraved and most seriously weakened, yes, to put it more clearly, they are utterly leprous and unclean. If these powers are the image of God, it will also follow that Satan was created according to the image of God, since he surely has these natural endowments…’ (1958 edn, vol.1, p.61). Only Adam before the Fall had the necessary faith and lived the God-like life. And since then, it is only by Christian faith that there have been men at all in ‘the likeness of God’—the rest (whatever they did with their minds, wills, bodies) may as well have been in the likeness of Satan. Luther says that ‘when we speak about that image [i.e. being in ‘the likeness of God’], we are speaking about something unknown. Not only have we had no experience of it, but we continually experience the opposite’

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(p.63). Nevertheless, Luther feels free to describe Adam’s pre-Fall condition as physically superior to what it became after the Fall (p.62). Evidently, moral lapse can cause physical degeneration but salvation by faith cannot reverse that degeneration!

Since the Reformation, Christian thought has held solidly to the doctrine that being in ‘the likeness of God’ is being in Christian relation to God. Having that likeness by nature (and not by grace or by faith) is dismissed. Calvin, commenting on Psalms 8, called the idea a ‘relic’ whose function was to make man inexcusable before God. Man’s reason and other faculties are now necessarily seen as bent upon falsehood and evil: ‘To the great truths, what God is in Himself and what He is in relation to us, human reason makes not the least approach’ (Institutes, 2, 2, 18). Of course, a Christian is ‘firmly persuaded that God is reconciled and is a kind Father to him’ (Institutes, 3, 2, 14). But this persuasion, this knowledge, is not accessible to anyone else who is not already a Christian. It follows inexorably, that if the only way to know and to love God (and be loved by Him) is to be a Christian, then a person must be a Christian ‘by nature’. There cannot be a duty, there cannot be a desire, to know and love God, unless being or wanting to be a Christian is already implanted in a person ‘by nature’. Calvin pursued this line of thought to the bitter end: he was compelled to uphold the view that a person is predestined to either salvation or damnation.

Modern times: irrationalist confusion

Calvin’s eloquent condemnation of man’s depravity in the state of nature inspired another Christian thinker to even more bitter, more eloquent condemnation. By this time, man’s state of nature was universally described by Protestant thinkers as sin. The works of Soren Kierkegaard (see References, p. 136 below) stand as the greatest monuments to that enmity to human nature which Augustine and then the Reformation had built upon the insights of Paul. Nothing at all remains of the idea that man is in his very nature ‘the likeness of God’. Nothing in nature (though lovely) is there or is as it is because God loves it so, Kierkegaard asked: ‘Would it not be a sorry delusion of the lily’s, if when it looked upon its fine raiment it thought that it was on account of the raiment that God loved it?’ (1944b, p.23). Man exists in the image of God only when he agrees ‘to be nothing through the act of worship’. Thus, (1948, pp.211-12): ‘the act of worshipping is the resemblance with God, as it is the superiority over all creation’. This is the climax of the tradition which began by subordinating the value of the natural in man to that of the religious in man.

Kierkegaard’s equation of the divine image in man with the act of worship and then his understanding of worship as a commitment to knowing one’s nothingness before God is symptomatic of the nihilism into which the Western Christian spirit has fallen in the modern age. Even though man’s ‘nothingness’ is valued as such specifically in re-

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lation to God, it is true to say that modern Western Christian consciousness can no longer grant to natural man any worthwhile place in the world. Rather, man is seen—certainly by Kierkegaard –as the negative, Satanic being who must be made ‘nothing’ before he can start on the road to value. Not-being what one is by nature is the ethical ideal of Christian nihilism. Certainly not all modern Christian thinkers have been nihilists; but there is not one who has not, somehow, to some degree, been touched by this mood, since Kierkegaard gave to it its classic expression.

Current Christian thought on the subject of the image of God in man has generally remained true to Augustine and the Reformation, but with the corroding tendency to Christian nihilism just noted. Nowhere has the problem come into better focus than in the controversy between Emil Brunner and Karl Barth in the 1930s. The records of this controversy constitute the main body of literature of contemporary Christian thought on the nature of man. Paul Ramsey, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and many other modern writers on Christian ethics, have developed their thought in connection with this controversy and their writings can be seen as footnotes to the discussions of Brunner and Barth.¹²

Brunner opens discussion with the question whether or not knowledge is at all possible without presuppositions (1939, pp.57ff). Having decided that it is not, he gives as the presupposition of any Christian knowledge of man the ‘Word of God’. Carefully, he distinguishes between the ‘Word’ as Old and New Testament and the ‘Word’ as ‘faith in Christ’: ‘As the materialist maintains that man must be understood from the point of view of matter... so the Christian faith asserts that we can only understand him in the light of the Word of God… All merely natural understanding of man is a misunderstanding’ (pp.64-5). The true value of man is to be found in Christianity’s Jesus Christ because ‘in Him God reveals to us His being and our being’ (p.66). This Christian valuation, self-evidently, cannot be either understood or criticized from a non-Christian standpoint. Because it is based upon the ‘Word’ as Christ, and not as Scripture, it cannot even be challenged on the basis of a different interpretation of Scripture. This theory is therefore vigorously dogmatic: ‘The word of the Scripture, which points back to Jesus Christ and the Word in the beginning, is not given to us except through the message of the Church, which hands down to us, translates and explains the Bible as the Word of God’ (p.67). (With this anti-critical stance Barth was in full agreement.)¹³

Brunner goes on, echoing the opening of John, to tell us that the Word (as well as being ‘Christ’ and ‘Scripture’) is also the ‘source of Being’ (pp.70ff.), Since every man (Christian or not) has being, since he exists, he must stand in some necessary relation to the Word. This relation is twofold; man is the product (creature) of the Word that created him, and he confronts the Word in himself as a hearer and recipient of it. Man is ‘grounded in and upheld by the Word. This is

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no mere phrase or figure of speech, but a simple and realistic expression of the fact that man lives ‘by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God’ [Matthew 4:4]’ (p.71). Just how the two aspects of ‘product’ and ‘recipient’ are fused together in man, Brunner does not explain, satisfying himself with vague analogies (pp.71-2).

But understanding that fusion of ‘product’ and ‘recipient’ is the very crux of the matter. Grant that the Word gives being or life to man; man is created. But how does he then know who his Creator is? The Word is supposed also to be the first principle of knowledge, of scriptural revelation: but how? How can it be of the very nature of man to ‘receive’ the Word in this sense? Finally, the Word that gives life is also supposed to be Jesus Christ, the Word as incarnated in history. But precisely because incarnated in history, this Word cannot have given life to man before Christ. Therefore, it makes not much sense to say man in general receives the Word (in Christ). There remains an unexplained gap between how man receives ‘being’ and how to receives ‘knowledge’ (consciousness of his Creator, conscience for example). To claim that the two are equivalent, as Christians do, meaning that in receiving the Word as being (life) man is also receiving the Word as Christian consciousness, is merely an assertion of faith. For, while it is obvious that every man has life and some sort of ethical consciousness, it is not at all obvious how that consciousness can be categorized as the Word (of Christian Scripture or Christ)—except, of course, in Christians.

Leaving that problem aside, Brunner asserts that all men are recipients of the Word—even where the Word is not understood and where Christ has never been heard of. It is common to all humanity; the Word sustains as well as creates: ‘everything has its continued existence, not merely its origin... in the Word’ (p.79). However shaky its foundations, this is an attempt to rest man’s humanity on something independent of being a Christian: ‘The fact that man has been created by means that he, the actual man, even in his godlessness, is upheld by the Word of God’ (p.79). This universalism was bound to provoke Barth for whom ‘true’ humanity is equivalent to Christianity. Barth (1960, pp.130-1) reproached Brunner for allowing sin within humanity, i.e. within the rationality given to man by the creative Word. By allowing that man could, while still being man, be irrational, irresponsible, refuse Christ, etc., Brunner had presented sin as a ‘foreseen possibility within the rationality and responsibility given to man’. This meant, for Barth, that sin must ‘have its root in the Word of God in which man has his being’. To allow man the freedom to be loyal or disloyal to Christ and still be God’s creature, the ‘product’ of the Word, seemed to Barth contradictory. He called it, derisively, a ‘strange paradox in the teaching of Brunner’ (p.13).

In defence, Brunner fell back on the Old Testament notion of imago dei, man as the image or likeness of God. He noted that Old Testament scholars are unanimous that ‘the imago dei describes man as he now is’, not as he might have been before the Fall (Brunner, 1939,

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App.1, p.500). As this view of man is too universalist to accommodate Christian dogma, Brunner defines imago dei as ‘formal’ in the Kantian sense—that is, a merely theoretical entity without specific, material content. In other words, imago dei is not fully defined until Christ (the New Testament) defines it; man is not fully man until he is a Christian: ‘to be like Him-Jesus’ (1 John 3:2) is ‘absolutely the sum total of the hope of salvation, and thus of the message of the New Testament as a whole’ (p.501). The human powers and faculties are visible in all men—personality, moral choice, reason, a measure of dominion over the other creatures, etc., are found in all men, sinful or otherwise. For that very reason, Brunner turns to those passages in Paul where the ‘primal imago... is torn out of its Old Testament...rigidity [and replaced by] the imago as being-in-the-Word-of-God through faith’ (p.501). (Brunner ignores passages in the New Testament which uphold the ‘old’ meaning of ‘the likeness of God’—e.g. 1 Corinthians 11:7; James 3:9).

What Brunner’s verbal acrobatics mean is that the faculties with which man is endowed by nature (not by Christian grace) are open to sin: they are not in themselves of value. If that is so, ‘the likeness of God’ has been, in exactly the sense Kierkegaard meant, annihilated. Barth picked up this point, rightly insisting that it was meaningless to talk about ‘the likeness of God’ if this likeness had no value until Christ provided it. To rescue his position, Brunner reverts to a line of argument initiated by lrenaeus in the second century after Christ. The imago dei of the Old Testament has two natures—an ‘image’ and a ‘likeness’. With the Fall, the ‘likeness’ was destroyed until restored by Christ. The ‘likeness’ of God in man is an ethical likeness which can be destroyed by sin and restored through redeeming faith in Christ. The ‘image’ of God in man, on the other hand, is amoral and exists universally and necessarily in all men: it is by this ‘image’ that men have the capacity to hear the Word and so abide by it. It does look as if Brunner means by ‘image’ lrenaeus’ faculty of reason (spiritual intellect) through which human beings, as it were, participate in the Divine (which is all intellect).

In fact, Brunner emphatically distances himself from (what seems to us) so generous a view of man. He does so in two ways. First, he argues that the concept of ‘image’ as pure rationality or spirituality was a mistake which the early Fathers made because of their Hellenic bias (Brunner, 1939, pp.362ff). The Genesis view sees the ‘image’ in body as well as spirit: the body ‘is the most solid and impressive manifestation of the creaturely character of man’ (p.374); the body is ‘that which is intended to distinguish the being of the creature from the being of the Creator’ (p.375). Moreover, the body is not merely a case or a framework which contains the real human being... [It] extends right into the center of the mind itself’ (p.375). (Brunner does not intend any deprecation of the body, nor of man for association with a body, if anything, he overindulges in mystical naturalism (see p.388). His point

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is, rather, the-separation between God and man which is, as it were, waiting to be healed.)

Second, Brunner teaches a particularly Christian view of the nature of God. He maintains that the Word from God to man is not a command but a gift: ‘not first of all a demand but life; not law but grace. The Word... is not a ‘Thou shalt’ but a ‘Thou mayest be’ (p.98). The proper response is the dedicative, ‘Yes, l am Thine’ said by man to God. Thus the creation of man is the Word (God) communicating with Itself, summoning man to take part, a sort of Self-giving by God and waiting for the human response. This view is necessary if the Christian account of the nature of God (gratuitous Self-sacrifice for man’s sake) is believed to be true. Further, this view is the presupposition of Brunner’s doctrine that only the Christian faith knows the true meaning, the true content, of what being human is. Only in Christian faith is God conceived of’ as a trinity of persons related to one another in love. In conceiving of God as a person so concerned for His creatures as to offer them His love before He is asked—before, even, the love is needed—Brunner lays the ground for the conclusion that only in the Christian faith is such a God recognized when the need for Him is established after the Fall.

How is that need known and felt by man? But Brunner is in haste to answer instead how that need is supplied; to do that he abandons altogether any attempt to give definite, consistent meaning to man’s being created in ‘the image of God’. ‘I teach with Barth,’ he categorically asserts, ‘that the original image of God in man is destroyed... and with it the possibility of doing, or even willing, what counts before God as good, and consequently the freedom of the will is lost’ (Brunner, 1939, p.105).¹⁴ To recover ‘the original image of God’ is to become a Christian; not to be a Christian is to be a person in whom ‘humanity’, the very possibility of doing anything to please the Creator is ‘lost’. But straightaway Brunner retracts; showing little respect for the laws of thought, he now tells us: ‘To lose the image of God is only a figure of speech’ (p.105). ‘So far as clear ideas are possible in this realm,’ he apologizes, ‘what we can say is this: Man’s relation with God, which determines his whole being, has not been destroyed by sin, but it has been perverted. Man does not cease to be the being who is responsible to God, but his responsibility has been altered from a state of being-in-love to a state of being-under-the-law, a life under the wrath of God’ (p.105).

This piece of thinking in opposite directions, pretending they are one direction, convinced no-one: certainly not Barth. All Brunner’s efforts to revive and elaborate a distinction between being in ‘the image of God’ and in ‘the likeness of God’ are wasted by this one principle of Christian doctrine which he had never doubted anyway. As a real, material value, the image of God in man cannot be given otherwise than directly in man’s nature. It cannot be merely a virtue or temperament or formal quality if the Word gives it being. If the Word gives it being it must be real and have a material content. So that

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which is ‘destroyed’ or ‘perverted’ must have been real too and existed materially. Which takes us back to the question asked earlier: how can the Word be received by man before the Word (Christ) has been given? Brunner’s ideas are in such confusion that he double-thinks and double-talks; here is another example: ‘in this perversion [of the image of God through sin]... human nature still always reveals the traces of the image of God in the human structure, so that actually it is the formal ‘human’ element which betrays man’s lost origin’ (p.514).

Against the confusion of Brunner, Barth’s view at first appears clear-cut. First, in the Fall, the image is completely lost; second, there is no contact with God in fallen man, third, in faith in Jesus Christ, the contact and the image are restored in what must remain a ‘mystery’¹⁵. Later, however, as Barth’s doctrine develops (presumably after the controversy with Brunner), he sees man’s being in ‘the image of God’ as the condition of being man at all; the ‘image’ constitutes ‘man’s very existence as such [as man] and as a creature of God’ (Barth, 1960, vol.3, pt 1, p.207). In the Fall, man lost not just his moral potential, but his very status as man. After the Fall, man is not man but ‘a different being altogether’ (vol.3, pt 2, p.288). He goes on: ‘We take sin lightly if we spare sinful man this reproach, giving him the evasion that as a sinner he has forfeited and lost his humanity, or that God has created him in a humanity in which he can choose either to be man or not, and in which inhumanity is more probable than humanity.’ Thus for Barth, theology’s definition of man is implacably opposed ‘to every attempt to seek real man outside the history of his responsibility to God’. A man who sins wanders from a path which, even when he leaves it, remains ‘the definite and exclusive path of man’ (p.227). Only ‘the humanity of Jesus’ is properly, truly human: everyone who falls short of; or fails to acknowledge, this criterion is ‘non-human, i.e. not yet or no longer human’ (p.226). Barth does not flinch from the conclusion that non-Christians (even Christians who are not Jesus-like) are non-human (p.226): ‘That which is incompatible with this similarity is ipso facto non-human’.

Barth’s evidence for the claim that being in ‘the image of God’ consists in a ‘similarity’ between the ‘saved’ man and the humanity of Jesus, is that the Bible (which Barth regards as the sole authority for knowledge of God’s words, thoughts, and deeds) says: ‘Let Us make man in our image’. Following the crude reasoning of Tertullian, Barth takes the plural ‘Us’ as evidence that God is a Trinity, one person of which consulted the others before joint decision to make man in ‘Their/His image.’ Genesis 1:27 affirms that God did in fact create man in His image and that He created them male and female. This, for Barth, indicates an equivalence between ‘the image of God’ and ‘male and female.’¹⁷ Man’s relationship with women—for Barth a no-nonsense matter of ‘begetting and bearing children’ (l960, vol.3, pt 1, pp. 191ff)—constitutes ‘a sign... that the One of whom he [man] is the image and likeness... has in and with His creation constituted Himself his pledge and hope’ (p.191). Clearly this notion needs some spelling

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out. Barth provides it in one of his extensive footnotes. He wonders at the failure of all scholars before him to attain his insight: ‘Did they perhaps find it too paltry, too banal, too simple, or even morally suspect that the divine likeness of man should consist merely in his existence as man and woman?’ (p.195). Then, reading out of Genesis 5: 1-2 all the evidence he thinks he needs, he asks: ‘Could anything be more obvious than to conclude from this clear indication that the image and likeness of the being created by God signifies existence in confrontation, i.e., in this confrontation, in the juxtaposition and conjunction of man and man which is that of male and female, and then to go on to ask against this background in what the original and prototype of the divine existence of the creator consists?’ (p. 195).

This evidence, for Barth, achieves two goals. To his satisfaction, it establishes his account of the nature of man, then it establishes the Christian account of the nature of God. Of course, Barth’s theory of knowledge would not allow statements about the nature of God to be derived from what we know from direct experience of the nature of human relationships. He is careful to insist that ‘there can be no question of anything more than an analogy’ (p.196). Nevertheless. This analogy between human relationships and the Divine nature is offered as a way of thinking about, and understanding, that nature. It seems to us crude, and indeed blasphemous, for a Christian theologian to propose that the relationships between the persons of the Trinity can be understood in terms of human ‘begetting’ and ‘bearing children’.

Seen in wider perspective, Barth’s account of man is not, strictly speaking, a theory of man at all. It is rather a theory of Christ according to the dogma of the Church. Barth has merely deduced his theory of man and the image of God from that dogma, embroidering it here and there with observations drawn from Scripture and, more rarely, from secular knowledge. The ‘nature of man’ is set quite explicitly within the framework of Church dogmatics which is, of course, the title of Barth’s work: ‘We must continue to base our anthropology on Christology. We must ask concerning the humanity of the man Jesus, and only on this basis extend our inquiry to the form and nature of humanity generally... As we turn to the problem of humanity, we do not need to look for any other basis of anthropology than the christological’ (Barth, 1960, vol.3. pt 2, pp,207-8; see also p.132).

Because Barth so deliberately and resolutely confines his understanding of man to the dogma of the Church, his doctrine of man cannot be universalist. It is incompatible with any open-mindedness about God’s revelation in any source or period other than as the Church recognizes. Barth’s doctrine is therefore separatist and particularist. We should not be blinded by the apparent naturalism of his discussion of the relationship between man and woman into thinking that he allows full humanity to man without the condition that man be related Godward through (or in) Christ. His insistence that ‘the image does not consist in any particular thing that man is or does... it is constituted by the very existence of man as such and as a creature of God’

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(1960, vol,3, pt 1, p. l84) is particularly misleading. The one principle to which he is unswervingly loyal is: that God is known only to the man to whom He is revealed in the incarnate Christ, and that it is only the man who acknowledges that God was in Christ who is man at all: ‘…the proclamation of faith and the Church must start out in all strictness from the fact that there is no independent man as such. There is only the man for whom Jesus Christ has died and risen again, whose affairs He has taken into His own hands’ (pp.167-8). No man exists as man until and unless, like Barth, he sees God in this separatist manner as ‘God in Jesus Christ’—which is not the manner of Jesus himself, but of Christian Church doctrine as defined by councils, by means of counting heads and by overriding and persecuting those whose heads refused to be counted.¹⁸

David Cairns has dealt Barth the severe critique he deserves (1953, esp, chs 13-14). Cairns rightly points out that natural revelation must be the presupposition of any Christian revelation. How could one maintain (as Barth’s thesis does) that the history of mankind had continued for many thousands of years in a world belonging to God where yet God has been either unwilling or unable to reveal Himself to the many millions of men and women who had therefore to live and to die without any ray of light from Heaven (Cairns, 1953, p.202). Such a God would not even be omnipotent, let alone loving. He concedes to Barth, though unnecessarily, that the revelation of Jesus was the only one which revealed to man his guilt (p.200). But granted this, ‘there must have been in the heathen before conversion, a certain actual knowledge, or at least a possible knowledge of God which made the heathen guilty before the coming of Christ... [without which knowledge] there can have been no guilt’ and Christian guilt would be not a ‘revealed’ but a ‘created’ one (p.201). Indeed the first 250 pages of Barth’s Church Dogmatics, vol.2, pt 1, ‘The Knowledge of God’, stand as the greatest monument to Christian irrationalism and anti-intellectualism. In them Barth sings with much eloquence the perversity of the human mind, its incapacity, delusion and folly. The pity is that so much talent and energy should have been so taken in by a particular Church doctrine as to proclaim the falsity of human reason on its behalf—when that very doctrine too is, for all its eloquence, just as human and may therefore be just as false and perverse.

In Protestant theological circles, Karl Barth enjoys extraordinary authority and following. Many recognize him as ‘the outstanding Protestant theologian’, as a responsible source commended for working ‘solely through the objective presentation of fact’ and for always attempting ‘to verify details from first hand sources’. Indeed, the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church exalts him as ‘the most notable Christian prophet of our times’.¹⁹ No wonder that most Christian (or other) studies of the doctrine of man end up by commenting on Barth’s views with little or no original contribution of their own. Many works could legitimately be regarded as little more than extended footnotes to the Brunner-Barth controversy and to Barth’s doctrine in particular.²⁰

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Paul Tillich is also recognized by the authority of the same Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church as a ‘leading contemporary exponent of Protestantism’. A critic describes him as ‘one of the principal architects of the new theological structure that has been erected on the ruins of idealistic liberalism... both in Europe and America...[whose doctrine] will have contributed to the reform of the modern Church and the reintegration of modern culture’ (Horton, 1952, p.26). Tillich’s doctrine of man underlies all his writings and has to be ‘gathered’ from them. The account in the second volume of his Systematic Theology (1951-57, pp.29-44), though not a summation, is fairly indicative of his range of thought on this question.

The two terms necessary to an understanding of Tillich’s argument are ‘essence’ and ‘existence’ (corresponding in most respects to ‘formal’ (theoretical, possible) and ‘actual’ (real, material)). Before the Fall, man was ‘essence’; after it ‘existence’ though the ‘essential’ nature of man was not annihilated in the Fall. Tillich emphasizes, as Brunner did, that ‘before the Fall’ is not a time that existed. To seek to describe the ‘original’ state of man is pointless. ‘Adam before the Fall and ‘nature before the curse’ are states of potentiality. They are not actual states. The actual state is that existence in which man finds himself along with the whole universe, and there is no time in which this was otherwise. The notion of a moment in time in which man and nature were changed from good to evil is absurd, and it has no foundation in experience or revelation’ (Tillich, 1951-57, vol.2, pp.40-1). It follows that ‘creation and the Fall coincide’. God created goodness, but this goodness was never actualized, never existent (p.44). If man was ever ‘not-fallen’, this can only have been as an idea in God’s mind. The only way Tillich has of describing the ‘not-fallen’ state is as ‘dreaming innocence’. ‘Dreaming’ Tillich uses because it ‘anticipates the actual... dreaming [is] a state of mind which is real and non-real at the same time—just as potentiality.’ He uses ‘innocence’ because the idea is a sweet, unrisked potentiality; when risked ‘the actualization too would end the state of innocence’ (p.33). These expressions are offered apologetically, as the best we can do to grasp the ‘non-fallen’ state. But the fact is that whatever words we use can only come from our ‘fallen’ state. It would be more honest to say that we do not and cannot know anything about a transcendent idea in the mind of God. To attribute to it ‘dreaming’ and innocence’ is about as helpful as attributing virtue or sorrow to the square root of minus one.

Anyway, the ‘dreaming-innocent’ idea of man in the mind of God passes from this ideal state to an actual state; in doing so it has fallen. The idea cannot become actual without also becoming ‘fallen’. Moreover, this becoming actual/fallen is not by God it is by man: man decides to become actual: ‘Man himself makes the decision and receives the divine curse for it... Only through man can transition from existence to existence occur... Man is responsible for the transition from essence to existence because he has finite freedom and because all dimensions of reality are united in him’ (1951-57, vol.2, pp.39-40).

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Tillich thus imputes guilt and responsibility to an uncreated idea which has no being at all except in God’s mind. But how could such an idea incur guilt? How could it be held responsible? How could it decide to undertake the transition to actuality, in other words, to create itself? What role did God have in this other than as a spectator?

Tillich is not a rigorous thinker. Had he been, he would not speak of pre-Fall man as an individual capable or incapable of responsible decisions contradicting or harmonizing with the idea of man in God’s mind. On Tillich’s own terms, pre-Fall man is pre-creation man, pre-existing and therefore non-existing man. Guilt presupposes choice: was the idea of man, the ‘essence’, free to decide to become ‘fallen’, to become ‘existence’? Apparently not: ‘if estrangement [i.e. the separation from God, the Fall or creation] were based only on the responsible decisions of the individual person, each individual could always either contradict or not contradict his essential nature... there would [then] be no reason to deny that people could avoid and have avoided sin altogether’ (p.41). He therefore affirms that ‘Christianity must reject the idealistic separation of an innocent nature from guilty man’.

Tillich is evidently in a dilemma. If man could have avoided the Fall, then man’s sin would not be ‘universal’ and ‘necessary’, a part of his nature. If sin is not a necessary part of man’s nature, then neither is the Christian dogma of redemption by atonement.²¹ On the other hand, if man could not have avoided the Fall, then either God willed it and is the responsible author of evil, or God is not omnipotent and the Manichean heresy, that is, an independent, separate ‘god of evil’, is affirmed. Neither alternative is compatible with Christian dogma.

Though it has broken down, Tillich struggles on with his argument. For the dogma of redemption by atonement to work, man must be by nature sinful and he must be responsible for being sinful. Since man could not avoid the Fall, the Fall must be inevitable, destined. For him to be held responsible, the inevitable, destiny, must be (somehow) man’s fault too. Tillich locates destiny as a sort of force in nature (the world as it comes into existence along with man) constraining and limiting freedom of being: he mentions the ‘collective unconscious’, then ‘bodily and psychic strivings’; ‘tiredness, sickness, intoxication, neurotic compulsions, and psychotic splits’; ‘animal nature... at conflict with [man’s] human nature’. All these conditions and constraints of real life illustrate well Tillich’s earlier point that man’s freedom is ‘finite’ (unlike God’s) which is ‘infinite’ (pp.31-2). But this is not the point at issue. The problem we have is not man’s ‘finite freedom’, the state he is in once created, after the Fall. The problem is to explain what freedom man has before the Fall, and so explain how it is that man is responsible and therefore ‘guilty’ (and, we might add, therefore in need of redemption by atonement).

At this point Tillich abandons any pretense to rational argument and rushes into the irrationalism which had been waiting to receive his argument all along. He simply asserts: ‘moral freedom becomes

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‘Pelagian’ [i.e. over-optimistic about the potential of human intellect] only if it is separated from tragic destiny, and tragic destiny becomes ‘Manichean’ [i.e. over-pessimistic about the inevitability of human evil] only if it is separated from moral freedom’ (p.42). In other words, the extremes of either heresy can be avoided, provided one is willing in each case, to hold the particular thesis and hold its exact opposite at one and the same time. This surrender to contradiction seems not to worry Tillich at all: he is content to be true to Christian dogma even at the price of that minimum of integrity with the rules of reason which is the basis of intelligible discourse.

This brief survey of the history of the Christian answer to the question What is man? has shown that Christianity is anxious to hold on to a measure of goodness in man. It had an image of a pre-Fall state of idealized goodness and happiness. It uses this image to construct an argument for what man ought to be. Under the influence of Greek humanism, the Apostolic Fathers understood human nature in this wholesome if idealized manner, and saw man’s moral task as being what he ought to do in order not to fall. Jesus’ message, on this view, was the lesson against the Fall, against falling. They did not think that the meaning of Jesus was in any way lessened by regarding him as someone sent by God to teach mankind to preserve the divine image in man, to cultivate it and exercise it to the full and thus to become like the Creator, to actualize what is in man as a real potential. Adam’s Fall is on this view only Adam’s and its truth-value is metaphorical and didactic.

But right after the time of these Apostolic humanists, Christian doctrine took a sharp turn. The forces which produced the Nicene Council thrust their way to victory in one council after another thereafter and began to make themselves effective. Essentially, these forces were dogma, irrationalism, and every kind of intellectual violence. Beginning with the distinctions of Tertullian towards the close of the second century, they came gradually to dominate the whole structure of Christian ideas. They first conjoined the state of fallenness to that of goodness; then they alternated them; then made them mutually exclusive; and finally denied essential goodness altogether in favor of essential fallenness. The motivation of this development was clear throughout. The whole effort of Christian intellect was devoted to the justification of an unjustifiable dogma: man had to be in helpless need of saving before he could be saved by divine atonement. In the theology department of the mind of Western Christendom, the ‘Dark Ages’ were never outgrown. For even as the Roman Catholic Church was struggling (under Islamic influence) to dissipate the gloom of the Fall, the ‘Dark’ forces were regrouping. They struck most powerfully in the Reformation where, in Calvin, they even surpassed their own Augustinian inspiration. The rationalism of the last two centuries occasioned another ‘Dark’ victory in the thought of Kierkegaard.

It might be said that at this end of the present century, Christian theology is beginning to re-open its eyes to the nature of man. No sur-

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prise that, after eighteen centuries of ‘Dark’ thoughts, the Christian mind is dazzled and dazed by the light and speaks in utter confusion, asserting and denying and asserting. Christian dogma still stands strong and heavy. But no-one is taken in by the kind of irrational nonsense which a Tillich or a Barth have said on this subject, perhaps not even themselves. The evidence furnished by their own lives, as well as the lives of the greatest number of contemporary Christians, whether individual or collective, denies the dogma. It shows an unshakeable faith in man as he really and actually is, in his essential goodness and worth, regardless of whether or not he has acknowledged the dogma, and therefore in spite of failing (as the dogma insists) to realize his humanity. A new phase in the history of Christian doctrine must be anticipated.

But we must not lose sight of the fact that this whole history is a growth from the seeds of a dogma sown in the equivocal insights of Paul. And in order to understand it well, we must study the individual theses of the dogma. Only then can we appreciate the need which pushed, and still pushes, the greatest minds of Christendom to commit themselves to making the unworthy and illogical assertions that they make.

Notes and references

Notes

¹           G. von Rad, on ‘image’ in Kittel 1935-57.

²           Some Old Testament scholars have contested that the Hebrews or their Scripture held so high a view of human nature. Their arguments are rather desperate and unconvincing attempts to cling to (and supply with Biblical support) a dogma that simply won’t hold up. Nygren, for instance, rejects the view expressed in Genesis 1:26-7, 5:1-3; 9:5-6 because (1) the number of these verses is too small to convince him, and (2) they belong to a later version [‘P’] produced under Hellenic influence in the fifth century BC. This argument is borrowed from Lehmann (1918, p.11). Lehmann insists (despite innumerable instances in the Old Testament and the explicit meaning of Psalms 8:5 and Amos 4:13) that ‘…no prophet, no psalm... has any suggestion of such a likeness of nature between God and man’ (Nygren, 1953, p.230). G. von Rad and Eichrodt conclusively refute the kind of argument put forward by Nygren. Both held that the Biblical witness to the image of God in man appears (where it should) at the point where the origin of man is narrated; that although the passage is late [i.e. from ‘P’|, it does not mean that man is there regarded as wholly a part of created nature since, after the creation of nature, there was a pause, a counsel-taking and then man was created, thus implying man’s otherness and distinction (see Eichrodt, 1933, vol.2, p.58; G. von Rad, in Kittel 1935-57, vol.2 ‘Die Gottesebenbildlichkeit im A.T.’, pp.387-90). Eichrodt adds to this (on pp.60ff.) an argument from

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the general Biblical concept of divine nature: ‘If we remember the whole manner and fashion in which the Godhead is pictured in Genesis 1, how He appears from the first lines as conscious and powerful will, and continually bears witness to Himself through insistent purposive creation, we shall be forced to find man’s likeness to God as indicated by the author, in his spiritual superiority, which expresses itself not only in his higher rational endowment, but above all in his capacity for self-consciousness and self-determination; in short in those capacities which we are accustomed to regard as typical of personality... The gift to man of the imago dei [image of God] in the formal sense indicated by us, implies nothing less than a connection with God through which man, even as a sinner, remains a rational being capable of spiritual fellowship with God’. Wheeler Robinson has pointed out that both textual strands in Genesis are one in their assignment to man of a central place in their narratives, everything being made for his sake. The nature-psalms also argue the same estimate of man’s nature. While Psalms 8:5 definitely lifts man above creation, 104:14ff and 45:9ff in Psalms, and Proverbs 8:22-31, make service of man the very purpose of the created world (Robinson, 1913, pp.61-2). Summing up, Robinson concludes (p.68); ‘the result of our... study of the Old Testament doctrine of man has been to bring out... in the first place... the high place and dignity of man postulated by the moral and religious experience of the Hebrew. Man is the center of the created world, with little less than angelic rank; man is endowed with the power to rebel even against the will of God…’  C. Ryder Smith (1951, pp29-30) claims that Genesis 1:26 refers to a physical resemblance between man and his Creator which allowed for the retention of that image, as a necessary correlate of human nature, after the Fall.

³           Epistle to Diognetus 10:2. From this chorus of praise, 2 Clement and the Shepherd of Hermas seem to differ. However in asserting that human nature was ‘fallen’, both were trying to impress their audiences with the need for repentance. In doing so, they implied even greater honor to man. 2Clement compares man to clay that is still being fashioned and urges him to correct it before it is too late. Evidently, like other Greek thinkers, 2Clement took it for granted that man is not a ‘finished’ creation, that man is to be his own ‘finisher’, endowed with the capacity and duty to complete God’s work in time (2Clement 8:2). For Hermas, whatever ill there may be in man is too minor to disqualify him from God’s blessing (Shepherd of Hermas, Mandate 3, 3:4-5).

⁴           Struker (1913; reviewed in Brunner 1939, pp.503-4), concluded that image is used exclusively in the formal sense, imago =the humanum (reason, freedom, speech, special position of man, etc.). This usage is represented by Melito (Apol. C. 6; see Struker, 1913, p.42).

⁶           Laidlaw (1879, p.132) has established beyond question that there is no real distinction between these terms (See his article ‘Image’ in the Hastings Dictionary of the Bible). This is also the view of C. Ryder Smith, 1951, p.37; David Cairns, 1953 p.20; and James Orr, 1905, p.54; and others.

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⁶           We are not exaggerating Augustine’s contribution in this regard. Calvin wrote (Institutes, 2, 2, 4): ‘Although the Greeks beyond all others...have exceeded all bounds in extolling the ability of the human will, yet such are the variations, fluctuations or obscurities of all the fathers except Augustine, upon this subject that scarcely anything certain can be concluded from their writings.’

⁷           The crudity of Augustine’s reliance on the letter of the Scripture (which his non-Semitic consciousness cannot grasp inwardly) is sometimes quite offensive: ‘But in respect of that image indeed, of which it is said, ‘let us make man after our image and likeness’, we believe and after the utmost search [sic] we have been able to make understand--that man was made after the image of the Trinity, because it is not said, After my, or After thy image’ (On the Trinity, Bk 14, ch.19, opening).

8          ‘… The trinity, then, of the mind, is not therefore the image of God, because the mind remembers itself and understands and loves itself: but because it can also remember, understand and love Him by whom it was made. And in so doing it is made wise itself. But if it does not do so, even when it remembers, understands, and loves itself then it is foolish’ (On the Trinity Bk 16, ch.12),

⁹           ‘… The slippery motion of falling away (from what is good] takes possession of the negligent... and beginning from a perverse desire for the likeness of God, arrives at the end at the likeness of beasts... While his honor [i.e. that of using his essentia or image as the Christian faith demands] is the likeness of God,   his dishonor is the likeness of the beast’ (On the Trinity, Bk 12, ch.11),

¹⁰          R. Niebuhr understood Augustine correctly when he wrote (1941, voI.1,

p.58): ‘It [human life] can, therefore understand the total dimension in which it stands only by making faith the presupposition of its understanding’. Augustine could not have made himself clearer on this point: ‘Although, unless he understands somewhat, no man can believe in God nevertheless by the very faith whereby he believes, he is helped to the understanding of greater things. For there are some things which we do not believe unless we understand them; and there are other things which we do not understand unless we believe them’ (Ps. 118, Sermon 18, 3).

¹¹          Aquinas wrote (Summa Theologica, 1, 93, 4); ‘We must say that when man is said to be in the image of God in virtue of his intellectual nature, he is chiefly in God’s image according as his intellectual nature is most able to imitate God. His intellectual nature chiefly imitates God in this, that God understands and loves Himself. Whence the image of God can be considered three ways in man. In one way according as man has a natural aptitude for understanding and loving God, and this aptitude consists in the very nature of the mind, which is common to all men. In another way, according as man by act of habit knows God and loves Him, but imperfectly, and this is the image by conformity of grace. And in a third way according as man knows and loves God in act perfectly, and this is the image according to the likeness of Glory’. The way of ‘glory’ or of a perfection akin to the divine, the ‘third way’, may be left aside. The first two concern us particularly: (1) Evidently, Aquinas follows in the foot-

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steps of Augustine, by distinguishing a natural faculty from the exercise of that faculty. (2) Like Augustine, Aquinas is guilty of an error in reasoning. If the mind is like God and God contemplates and loves Himself by nature, the mind should contemplate and love itself by nature, not God who is different and other than itself. (3) The mind does in fact love itself; hence the need for grace. For it is the mystery of grace operating mysteriously that effects the reorientation of an otherwise self-bound loving and contemplating mind. It is on such flimsy ground that the Thomistic order of grace enjoys its supremacy and exercises its authority.

¹²          Brunner’s statement of the problem is in his Man in RevoIt, 1939; Barth’s in his Church Dogmatics, 1960, vol.3, pt 2. Brunner also wrote a pamphlet entitled Natur und Gnade, to which Barth answered with an article entitled Nein, both published together under the title, Natural Theology, 1946, Bles, London. Finally, Brunner criticized Barth’s views on the subject: ‘The New Barth’, Scottish Journal of Theology, 1951, pp.123-35.

¹³          See Barth’s article ‘Nein’ (note 12 above).

¹⁴          Also in Natur und Gnade, p.9. (See note 12 above.)

¹⁵          This seems to be the substance of his Church Dogmatics, vol.1, pt 1 (1960). It is, however, in Knowledge of God and the Service of God (1938, pp.40-50) that Barth elaborates the view that though man was created for the sake of the image, he is unable to restore it after it has been lost and that God therefore has taken it upon Himself to do so by sending Jesus.

¹⁶          Barth, 1960, vol.3, pt 1, pp.191ff. There is not the slightest evidence that the Old Testament concept of Jahweh, or ‘Lord’, ever involved such plurality or such male-female relationship as Barth asserts it did. Otherwise, there should have been other passages in which this is in evidence. It is not sufficient to point, as Barth has done, to such passages as Genesis 3:22 (‘J’-based as it may be), 11:7, Isaiah 6:8 etc., in which a plural pronoun is used for God, The evidence required is that these plural usages mean plurality within the Divine Being.

¹⁷          (Barth, 1960, vol.3, pt 1, p.190). ‘When man and woman beget and bear children by the divine permission and promise;... they continually realize in themselves the sign of this hope [the genuine hope on God which constitutes the imago dei]. This human activity is the sign of the genuine creaturely confrontation... which is the image and likeness of the divine form of life’ (pp. 190-1). It is an unwarranted construction to interpret Genesis 1:26-7 as implying such ideas. In the first place, the punctuation of this passage is that which the rabbis of the sixth-seventh centuries after Christ have given us in the Masoritic text and is usually accepted by scholars as, for want of anything better, a copy of what the older generations in pre-Christian days might have had. But this punctuation in no wise makes possible such an equivalence as Barth asserts. The ASV reading, ‘So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created him; male and female created he them’ is twisted by Barth as if to read, ‘So God created man in his own image; God created him, male and female, which image is the image of God.’ To prove the existence within

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the Godhead of the male-female relationship, Barth also cites Hosea 1:2ff, 2:2ff, 16, 3:1ff; Isaiah 54:5ff, 62:5; Jeremiah 3:1ff, 6, 4:30, etc.; Ezekiel 16:1, 23:1; 2 Corinthians 11-2; Ephesians 5:23ff; Revelations 12:1, 21;2. With the possible (and relatively unimponant) exception of Revelations 12:1, the citing by Barth of every one of these passages not only does not bear out what he claims for it, but furnishes, in every instance, a fresh piece of evidence for a typically Western failure of understanding. Yet another example of that Western-Christian consciousness which, when it confronted the truth of Jesus couched in the poetical terms of Arab (Semitic) consciousness, was incapable of understanding that truth immediately, of grasping its meaning intuitively. Rather, it wallowed in the most crude and unintelligently literal interpretations of its paraphrases and figures of speech. It is, in its details and overall, identical with that Persian Shī’ī literalist analysis of the Qur’anic poetry which asked, with regard to verse 7:54 of the Qur’an, How does God ‘sit down’? and attempted to deduce a pantheistic theory of the world from verse 28:88 (‘Everything is perishing except the face of God’) and verse 2:115 (‘Wheresoever ye turn, there is the face of God’). The Hebrews did conceive of Zion, of Israel, as of a wife, loyal or otherwise to her husband, i.e. to Jahweh; and Paul did, in like manner, conceive of the Church of Christian community as wedded to Christ. But this by no means proves that within the Godhead anything analogous to the male-female relationship exists. On the typical failure of Western understanding to appreciate intuitively the forms of poetry peculiar to Arab (Semitic) consciousness, see Faruqi 1962.

¹⁸          Barth mistrusted, perhaps even despised, human reason except when it accepted the guidance of Church doctrine. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church sums up his philosophy thus: ‘The Christian message, he held, affirmed the supremacy and transcendence of God, whose infinite superiority to all human aspirations means the worthlessness of human reason. Since the Fall, which brought man wholly under the dominion of sin, his natural capacities including his reason, had been radically perverted… ’ (See ‘Karl Barth’ in Cross, 1957.) Barth’s resentment of the free use of reason may be explained as a reaction to the ‘natural theology’ exploited to serve the goals of the Nazi party and German National Socialism. Barth writes of the burning question when ‘the Evangelical Church in Germany was… confronted by a definite and new form of natural theology, namely, by the demand to recognize in the political events of the year 1933, and especially in the form of the God-sent Adolf Hitler. A source of specific new revelation of the German nature-and-history myth’ (1960, vol.2, pt 1, p.173). But this can be refuted, surely, without reasoning to the extremist position which Barth adopted in the famous Barmen declaration (for which he was chiefly responsible); ‘Jesus Christ, as He is attested to us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God, whom we have to hear and whom we have to trust and obey in life and in death. We condemn the false doctrine that the Church can and must recognize as God’s revelation other events and powers, forms and truths, apart from and alongside this one Word of God’ (p.172). Barth went so far as to try

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and re-introduce into Christian thought—which had for centuries now cultivated a positive attitude to sciences and arts—a sympathy for mysticism and irrationalism. The fierce, even violent, separatism of the Barmen declaration, rests not (in the words of the declaration) on ‘the one Word of God’ and ‘Jesus Christ is that one Word’, but on one specific interpretation and understanding of it. A Muslim, not to speak of another Christian theologian, might very well accept that thesis without deducing from it the anti-human, anti-world separatism Karl Barth deduces. Even the Barthian qualification, ‘Jesus Christ, as he is attested to us in Holy Scripture’ might be accepted not only by a Beryllus, a Marcion, a Carpocrates, or a Hippolytus, but by many a modern Christian acquainted with the history of that scripture, who would find his Jesus Christ in his own personal experience rather than in ‘the Church’, or the cold writings of another, though earlier, fellow-Christian. Secondly, Barth prefaces this sectarianist Barmen thesis with John 14:6 and John 10:1, 9, in order to give it scriptural authority. But these verses do not support him at all. There, Jesus was cautioning Jews against seeking blessedness by means of Jewish Law, and the teachings of the advocates of Jewish political reconstruction rather than through his own gospel of radical self-transformation. By ‘l am the door’ he meant, in the poetical form peculiar to the Arab (Semitic) mind, that the new way of life and being which he was teaching is ‘the way, the truth and the life’. To understand this, as Barth and Western Christianity do, to mean that Jesus was there indicating his own person, rather than ‘the will of my Father’, is crude, to say the least, and points to the ‘unpoeticality’ or ‘literaIness’ into which Western-Christian consciousness has been molded through the ages.

¹⁹          Cross, 1957, p.135, on Barth. During my visiting fellowship at the Faculty of Divinity of McGill University, 1959-61, l was struck by the enthusiasm with which students in the Faculty received any mention of Barth, and their attribution of the ‘new Calvinist’ and ‘Biblical’ revivals in their own circles directly to his influence. Sydney Cave’s estimate (1949, p.211) is: ‘It is significant that the revival in our generation of neo-Calvinism, with its fresh new emphasis on the sovereignty of God and the incompetence of men, should be associated with the name of Karl Barth... In our country, too, neo-Calvinism has now great influence. ‘Modernism’ has ceased to be modern.’

²⁰          Just under hall of Cairns’ 250-page study (1953) deals with Karl Barth and Brunner exclusively. Though sharply and wittily critical of many positions Barth takes, the book ends with little progress on the question of the ‘image of God’ in Christian thought. Indeed, Cairns end up by embracing Barth’s thought and temperament. Condemning Aldous Huxley’s Ape and Essence, Osbert Sitwell’s Noble Essences and Plato’s Republic for failing to give a sufficiently solid basis for the dignity of man, he concludes with words which Barth could not have written better: ‘If l do not know that man is the one for whom Christ died, and with whom God wills, with all the force of His grace, to be joined in incarnation, death and eternal destiny, then is not disgust with humanity almost an inevitable result of a prolonged survey of the human scene... ?’ (pp.251-2). For-

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getting his own criticism of Barth for throwing out the baby of natural theology with the dirty bathwater of Nazi theology, Cairns exclaims: ‘What other view of man can compare with this [i.e. the Christian] for splendour, and for power to awaken compassion and resist injustice?’ (p.252). Granted Christianity does awaken compassion, etc., it does not follow that without it, compassion does not arise; that without it man can have no dignity or worth whatever, nor that without it, man becomes so callous as to say of the brutality of totalitarian governments; ‘… it does not matter so very much after all’ (p.252). Reinhold Niebuhr (1941) falls back on Augustine wherein he finds the fount of everything good in contemporary Christian thought about the nature of man. ‘Though the Protestant reformation,’ he writes, ‘must be regarded, generally, as a revival of Augustinianism both in view of the human situation and its interpretation of the plan of God to meet that situation, it could hardly be claimed that Martin Luther adds any significant insight to the Augustinian view of the image of God in man’. Calvin is commended inasmuch as his thought agrees with Augustine’s. Martin Heidegger and Max Scheler are also quoted for the same purpose, namely, the continuation of the Augustinian thesis. The former’s Being and Time is ‘the ablest non-theological analysis of human nature in modern times... [especially as, or because, it] defines this Christian emphasis succinctly as ‘the idea of transcendence’’. But in Heidegger the capacity for self-transcendence (which defines human nature as its universal, necessary condition) is utterly free, and not aimed at any point outside itself—Prometheus being its archetype—it is a value in itself, intrinsically. By contrast, self-transcendence in Augustine (and, presumably, in Niebuhr) is extrinsic; it has an axiological ground and end in the God of the New Testament. In Heidegger, the aim of self-transcendence is pure being, a purely neutral, a-axiological concept. (‘The Evil appears together with the holy in the radiance of Being as such’, Platon’s Lehre von der Wahrheit mit einum Brief über den Humanismus, 1947, p.112). At times, this pure being is itself understood by Heidegger as transcendency, as simply being transcendent. From this standpoint, ‘pure being’ should be regarded as Christianity’s very devil-concept. Finally, for Heidegger, death can never be transcended because beyond it, there is no being of any kind for anyone, whether God or man. Heidegger’s thought does not belong in, certainly does not support, the Augustinian thesis it is pulled in to support. Niebuhr makes comparably improper use of Max Scheler. The latter’s Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos is quoted to confirm the thesis of self-transcendence. The pas-sages quoted, however (Scheler, 1947, pp.46-47; Niebuhr, 1941, vol.1 p. 162) prove nothing of the sort. Niebuhr writes: ‘Max Scheler, following the Biblical tradition [sic] proposes to use the word ‘spirit’-Geist-indistinction to the Greek nous [mind] to denote this particular quality and capacity in man, because it must be ‘a word which, though including the concept of reason, must also include, beside the capacity of thinking ideas, a unique type of comprehension for primeval phenomena—Urphänomenen—or concepts of meaning and, furthermore, a specific class of emotional and volitional capacities for goodness, love, contrition and rever-

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ence’. ‘The nature of man’, he declares, ‘and that which could be termed his unique quality transcend that which is usually called intelligence and freedom of choice and would not be reached if his intelligence and freedom could conceivably be raised to the nth degree...’ Scheler is obviously describing the primal consciousness of value—original, immediate intuition (Wesenschau) of an entity of ideal being, namely the value—which is quite other than discursive consciousness which reasons with concepts (Vorstellungen). Hence, the need he sees for ‘transcending’ reason to something that includes both it and the activity of the value-intuiting sense which is an equally genuine knowledge of being. ‘Spirit’, in this Schelerian sense, is peculiar to man and therefore defines his being man: this is absolutely not what Augustine’s thesis has in view. Niebuhr’s quotation of it therefore is at once illegitimate and futile.

²¹          Tillich rejects this view and proudly puts himself in the tradition of ‘the early church, Augustine, Luther, and Calvin, the Reformers… [and finally] the neo-orthodox and existentialist theologians’ (1951-57,vol.2, p.41). He brands the rejected view as Pelagian in contradistinction to Augustine’s; semi-Pelagian, in contradistinction to the Reformers; and, finally, as moralistic Protestantism in contradistinction to the neo-orthodox and existentialists.

References

Barth, Karl (1938) The Knowledge of God and the Service of God according to... the Reformation (Gifford Lectures 1937-8) trans. J.M. Haire and I. Henderson, London,

Barth, Karl (1960) Church Dogmatics, trans. G.W. Bromley and T.F. Torrence, T. & T, Clark, London, vol.3.

Brunner, Emil (1939) Man in RevoIt, trans. Olive Wyon (from Mensch in Widerspruch: Die Christliche Lehre vom wahren und vom wirklichen Menschen (1937)), Lutterworth Press, London,

Cairns, David (1953) The Image of God in Man, SCM Press, London.

Cave, Sydney (1949) The Christian Estimate of Man, (repr.) Duckworth, London.

Cross, F.L. (1957) (ed.) Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, Oxford University Press.

Dodd, C.H. (1958) The Meaning of Paul for Today, Fontana Books, London.

Eichrodt, Walther (1933) Theologie des Alten Testament, J.C. Heinrichs, Leipzig,

Faruqi, lsmaʻil R. al- (1962) On Arabism. ‘Urubah and Religion, De Brug Djambatan.

Gregory of Nyssa (1893 edn) On the Making of Man, 5, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., Christian Literature, New York.

Horton, W.M. (1945) ‘Tillich’s Role in Contemporary Theology’ in Kegley and Bratall (eds) l952.

Jaeger, Werner (1945) Paideia, Oxford University Press, New York.

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Kegley, C.W. and Bretall, R.W. (eds) (1952) The Theology of Paul Tillich, Macmillan, New York.

Kierkegaard, Søren (1939) Fear and Trembling, trans. Robert Payne, Oxford University Press.

Kierkegaard, Søren (1944a) The Sickness Unto Death, trans. Walter Lowrie, Princeton University Press.

Kierkegaard, Søren (1944b) Philosophical Fragments, Princeton University Press.

Kierkegaard, Søren (1946) The Concept of Dread, trans. Walter Lowrie, Princeton University Press.

Kierkegaard, Søren (1948) The Gospel of Suffering and the Lilies of the Field, Augsburg Publishing House.

Kittel, G. (1935-57) (ed.) Theologisches Worterbuch zum Neuen Testament, Verlag von W. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart.

Laidlaw, J. (1879) The Bible Doctrine of Man (Cunningham Lectures), Edinburgh.

Lehmann, E. (1918) Skabt i Guds Billede, Lunds Universitets arsskrift.

Luther, Martin (1958 edn) Luther’s Works, Concordia Publishing House, St. Louis.

Niebuhr, Reinhold (1941) The Nature and Destiny of Man, 2 vols, Scribner’s, New York.

Nygren, Anders (1953) Agape and Eros, trans. P.S. Watson, SPCK, London.

Orr, James (1905) God’s Image in Man, Hodder & Stoughton, London.

Robinson, H. Wheeler (1913) The Christian Doctrine of Man, 2nd edn, T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh.

Scheler, Max (1947) Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos, Munich. (Also 1930, Darmstadt.)

Smith, C. Ryder (1951) The Bible Doctrine of Man, Epworth Press, London,

Struker (1913) Die Gottebenbildlichkeit des Menschen in der urchrist lichen Literatur der erzten zwei Jahrhunderte.

Tillich, Paul (1951-57), Systematic Theology, University of Chicago Press.

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