UU Society of Cleveland

February 3, 2008

Imago Dei

by Rev. Colin Bossen

In the first chapter of the book of Genesis we find the following passage describing the origin of humanity:

God created human beings in his own image;
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.

The idea that God created humanity in God's image is called the imago dei. This idea lies at the root of much of the teachings about human nature in the Western tradition. Human beings are supposed to have some sort of sacred nature, to be the children of God in the way that no other aspect of creation is, because we are the imago dei. The source of human goodness comes from God by virtue of our likeness to God. This morning I want to posit the opposite. We are not the imago dei. God did not create us. Humanity created God and when we did we created God in our own image.

That might sound shocking. I am not making an argument for atheism. Instead I want to engage in an exploration of tempered iconoclasm. Some of the ideas that I am exploring today draw from the theologians I studied this last month, theologians who wrestled with the intersection of philosophy, science, theology and mathematics. Let me pause now to define iconoclasm. The Oxford American Dictionary defines iconoclasm as "the rejection of religious images or icons as heretical." I would change the definition slightly and argue that religious images and icons are dangerous rather than heretical. To argue there is such a thing as heresy is to endorse orthodoxy and that, as a religious liberal and Unitarian Universalist, is not something I am about to do.

I think that religious images are dangerous because they reduce the divine to a particular thing, a thing that can be quantified, studied and possibly dismissed. By the divine I mean the mystery of creation and destruction at the heart of the universe and the sense of awe and wonder in which it fills us. This is only a partial definition and, as I would argue, it can never be a complete definition. If we allow the claim that the divine looks like, or is defined as, a particular thing we allow that it may not be another thing. This creates space for dangerous religious bigotry of the your God does not look like my God so therefore your God cannot be God type. Religious images reflect the culture and the environment of the believer as much, if not more, than they offer hints of the divine essence. Forget this and you will almost certainly enter into religious conflict. So, when I say I am in favor of tempered iconoclasm then I am saying that we should acknowledge the power that religious images have but only use them with great caution and with the knowledge that they are only partial symbols.

I am sure many of you are familiar with the story of the three blind men and the elephant. In the story three blind men encounter an elephant. Each touches a different part of the elephant and from this sense experience derives his understanding of what he has encountered. When a fourth, in most telling of the story a wise, man asks the blind men what an elephant is they each reply differently based upon what part of the elephant they have encountered. The first man rubs his hands across the elephants' legs and answers that an elephant is like a pillar. The second grabs hold of the elephant's tail and replies that the elephant is like a rope. The third, who has encountered the elephant's trunk tells them that they are both wrong and that an elephant is like a water spout. In some versions of the story the blind men then begin to argue about who has the best understanding of an elephant. In other versions the fourth man, the observer, is kind enough to explain to them that they are all partially right, an elephant is like all of these but an elephant is more than all of them as well.

There is an ultimate reality to which we are all a part but we can no more understand its true nature than the blind men can understand the elephant. The story of the blind men and the elephant is, for me, a teaching story about the nature of the universe. We each see only a part of what is going on. Sometimes by cooperating we can expand our vision but in the final analysis what we know and what we can know is somewhat limited.

Those of you versed in philosophy will understand that the blind men, the elephant and I are making an argument for metaphysical monism and epistemological dualism. In lay terms epistemology is how we know things and metaphysics is what there is to know, the reality of which we are a part. To say that my metaphysics are monistic is to say that I think reality is of one unified substance--everything is somehow connected and related to everything else--and that there is no separate realm of the spirit. But to admit that my epistemology is dualistic is to admit that while I am part of a unified universe I cannot ever perceive it precisely or entirely. I am like a blind man encountering an elephant, I do not have all of the senses necessary to perceive the world as it is. The closest I ever get is an approximation tainted by my own human abilities, experiences and cultural location.

Less you think that I engaging in some theological and philosophical slight of hand let me suggest that science and mathematics show the clear limits of human knowledge. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, for example, demonstrates that it is not possible to know both the location and the momentum of a sub-atomic particle at the same time. There are several other theorems and theories from the worlds of physics and mathematics that suggest that as a species we will always be like the blind man encountering the elephant. We will never be able to learn all there is to know about the universe.

I love Wallace Stevens poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" because it touches on all of this. The poem is a series of thirteen verses each of which presents a different view of the blackbird. No one vision captures the entirety of the blackbird. Each verse catches only the impressions of an aspect of the bird, impressions that are incomplete. The blackbird, however, is not fragmented by the multitude of different images it inspires. It is the same bird no matter how it is viewed. The blackbird, the poet, the observer and, arguably, the reader are all part of the same reality. As Stevens so beautifully writes:

"A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one."

But while all one is we each experience the universe differently. And so there are thirteen, or an infinitude, of different ways of looking at the blackbird. Each offering only an approximation of the actual bird.

And this is the danger of creating an image of God. The universe is much too big for one image to capture its divine essence. In fact, the word God is too limiting for the totality of the universe. It is a human construct that tries to encapsulate all that we know and all that we do not know. Unitarian Universalist theologian Forrest Church writes this about the problem of the language and imagery of God:

"...God is not God's name. God is our name for that which is greater than all and yet present in each--the life force, the ground of being, being itself. So defined, God is beyond knowing or naming..."

When we attempt to make an image of the divine we create pictures of ourselves and not of God. We have the imago dei because we are the ones thinking about God. We use human language and artifact to create our theologies and visions of God. These things are products of our culture, our experience and our physiology. They are much too limited to accurately describe being itself.

If you doubt that the pictures we create of the divine are anything but human creations I invite you to consider the images of Jesus that appear throughout the world.

If you look at European art, particularly art from the Renaissance, you will notice that Jesus looks like a European. In some images his skin is fair, his eyes are blue and his hair is light brown or even blonde. This is the image of Jesus that appears most often in popular culture. Yet, it is almost certainly not an accurate one. Jesus was a Jew from the Mediterranean and he was most likely of a dark and swarthy complexion. Early Christian art, when it can be found, often depicts him in this way.

By depicting Jesus as a European, Europeans claim him as their own. They, at least implicitly, disavow his Semitic origins and suggest that the white man is the imago dei. They make a God in their image and then proceed to worship him, in doing so they worship themselves.

African American liberation theologians such as James Cone have tried to reverse this and claim Jesus, or more precisely Jesus Christ the messiah, as a black man. Cone and others do this in order to challenge notions of the imago dei and to place Jesus among their community, as part of a community that is oppressed and is in need of liberation. By doing this they are able to use the black Jesus as an image for libratory political work. As liberation theologians they too are creating God in their own image.

To some extent there is nothing wrong with this. Religious language is largely a matter of metaphor. It is a way to express and understand something that cannot be completely understood by saying that it is like something else. In orthodox Christianity, for example, God is viewed as incarnate in Jesus because Jesus was thought to be a perfect human being. Depicting God as human makes it easier to understand what God is like. Yet God is not limited to a particular human being, even orthodox Christians have to expand their vision of God to include the Holy Spirit and God the father. An incarnate Jesus is not enough to satisfy the orthodox Christian need for the divine. More metaphor is needed.

Pantheistic faiths like Hinduism and Greco-Roman paganism also show the metaphoric, and for that matter, anthropomorphic nature of human conceptions of the divine. In such faiths human emotions, elements of nature and characteristics of civilization all have their own gods. In some cases there is even a tradition of household gods where each family has its own deity to whom it offers sacrifice and prayer.

The rich diversity found in human's spiritual life suggests to me that, as a species, human beings have a need for the divine in our lives. We need to acknowledge the mystery, wonder and awe that infuse our beings. Life and death, being and nothingness, are great mysteries which we will never fully understand, even if grasp the fullness of the scientific complexities behind them. With the exception of the various Marxist-Leninist countries, which arguably hold totalitarian communism as a state religion, no country or culture has existed that has not had religion. When humans gather together we create religions. Our religious nature sits somewhere near the heart of our human nature. As Karen Armstrong writes, in her book, a History of God: "...it seems creating gods is something that human beings have always done. When one religious idea ceases to work for them, it is simply replaced."

The Chicago theologian George Burman Foster put it slightly differently when he wrote: "A man creates whatever concepts and principles he may need in order to make himself master...of his environment. To the same end were the gods created."

The ideas we have about God serve our needs. We create gods in order to explain the unexplainable, gain comfort in the dark of the night and help us justify our actions. In times of crisis the gods we create serve as a source of comfort.

That it is not to say that there is not something behind all of the ideas and images that exist of the divine. The mysteries of the universe are real, we will never really know why we exist or the meaning of life and death. The problem is that all of images and ideas of the divine can confuse us and limit us from simply experiencing the awe and wonder that surrounds us. As the Zen saying reminds us, do not confuse the finger pointing at the moon with the moon itself. The images and ideas we have of the divine are like the finger. They are not being itself but merely a referential to it.

These images of the divine can be important. They can challenge us. They challenge us the most when we realize that what we see in them is our own reflection. We can learn something about, and from, our neighbors and friends when we realize that their images of the divine contain their reflections as well. And then, when we understand that both images are incomplete, we can learn from each other.

This then, ultimately, is one of the functions of our religious community. It can help us ensure that we do not put too much of ourselves into our images of the divine. It challenges us to be tempered iconoclasts and remember that all religious images and words are just approximations.

We are like the blind men and the elephant. We each have our own little piece of the puzzle. I might encounter something that resembles a pillar and you might feel a rope. We gain a slightly larger understanding when we cooperate and compare our own particular knowledge. We will never get a complete picture but we can strive to have a better one. And we best do that together.

Amen and Blessed Be.