Faith Journey

with Ray Waddle

Recently I encountered an ancient spiritual idea that reminded me there's always another way to behold this troubled world.

Picture this: Stationed in front of every human being on earth is a legion of angels calling out, announcing to all creation, "Make way for the image of God, make way for the image of God."

This spiritual lore is taken from Jewish mystical teaching, and I heard a minister (Presbyterian author Marjorie Thompson) tell it to a crowded room at a book conference. The audience went silent as this astonishing image sunk in — the sudden possibility that every human life could be so holy in this world of violence and anxiety.

Some people wept. That's when I realized what this secular era of stress and hazard was doing to us — starving us of sacred wonder and honor. Millions walk around absent of a dignified view of human life. Life is survival, uncertainty, disrespect — desecration of the image of God.

"Image of God" is a phrase as old as Genesis — mysterious and overlooked. But it is a potent idea with great ramifications for our turbulent politics and faith.

What could it mean to say people, all people, are made in the divine image? Debate has stirred for 2,000 years.

Twice in Genesis, it says God made human beings in God's image or likeness (Gen. 1:26 and Gen. 5:1).

This could mean:

• we physically look like God.
• we have some of God's moral traits, like creativity and mercy, and the responsibility to use them well.
• we are deputized to be God's stewards who advance divine values in human affairs.

Christians can be found all over the spectrum between optimism and pessimism on this question of divine image. One Protestant view says we utterly forfeited the image of God when Adam and Eve committed original sin and were tossed out of the Garden of Eden. The divine image was finally restored only by baptism or faith in Jesus Christ.

Other church bodies, more upbeat, teach that people retain at least a trace of the divine image. Some sects insist the image remains untainted: we and God are one.

There's a flip side to the image of God question: What kind of God are we talking about? One way to understand the many conflicts of our time — the terrorism, the genocides, the political deadlocks — is to see them as skirmishes between competing images of God.

Some worship a God who is always on our side, no matter what.

Some worship a divine image who anoints violence, no matter how ruthless.

Some believe God is a God who has chosen this particular generation to disclose all the apocalyptic secrets for destroying the world.

Some worship a God who is simply a bigger version of an authoritarian father, or a cosmic image of a nurturing mother.

And some insist the real God is utterly unknown. The creator of this world is a gnostic, inferior god playing a joke on us all.

Reading the Bible offers a corrective and a rebuke to every distorted image of God. The Psalms alone paint a rich picture of a biblical God of terrifying majesty whose quality is also mercy — mercy for the underdog, the stranger, the orphan — a God who expects us also to show mercy.

As if to keep us honest, or to keep us from forgetting God, God imprinted the divine image on each person. Perhaps this is what the human soul is, the bearer of God's likeness.

If that's true, then it's a most inconvenient doctrine.

It means that whenever anyone anywhere is humiliated or made to suffer, we offend and vandalize the image of God. It means a crime of biblical proportions is taking place every day in every neighborhood and every nation, whenever anyone is starved, bombed or mutilated. It means that global and local politics of compassion is not a sentimental slogan but a theological directive with unavoidable practical policy implications.

If the mystical idea is right, then every chance encounter with someone else is a cosmic drama played out with the help of an invisible angelic entourage. A Christian version says it another way. We meet the image of Christ in the neighbor, the Samaritan, "the least of these." Angels in tow or not, the image of God is coming around the corner this minute, in the eyes of the next person I meet.