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Imaging God: Creatureliness and Technology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
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The variety of ways of construing how humanity is in the image of God suggests a profound interrelation of tradition and context in theological reflection on the imago dei. For example, Colin Gunton has recently argued that the dominant ways of interpreting the imago dei at the present time are stewardship and the duality of male and female. It is not hard to see how contemporary discussions on the relations between humanity and non-human nature, and between men and women, inform such a selection. The recent work of Peter Hodgson furnishes us with a second example: being in the image of God, he argues, comprises three spheres: self-relatedness, other or world-relatedness and wholeness. Again, it is not hard to discern how such a construal is informed by the identification of three dilemmas which are, Hodgson considers, constitutive of our contemporary (Western) context: liberation from unjust social relationships; relations between Christianity and other religions; relations between humanity and non-human nature. In the presentation of the imago dei, we may safely say, tradition and context are deeply interrelated.
In what follows, I shall develop one aspect of recent Christian tradition—that sociality is the mark of the imago dei—in order to explore how humanity might be in the image of God in a technological society. Thus in the last two sections of this paper, I ‘expand’ Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s reading of humanity as social by including the themes of spatiality and temporality. It is as social, spatial and temporal, I shall argue, that humanity is to be understood as imaging God.
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- Copyright © 1998 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
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3 Bonhoeffer's work–especially Creation and Fall (London: SCM Press, 1959)Google Scholar, Act and Being (London: Collins, 1962)Google Scholar, Sanctorum Communio (London, Collins, 1963)Google Scholar–is central to the reaffirmation of human life as social for Christian self‐understanding. Barth took up, but then somewhat restricted, Bonhoeffer's account (see Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics III/1 (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1958), p. 194fGoogle Scholar. The Trinitarian renaissance in contemporary theology has supported and extended this direction. The work of Jürgen Moltmann is a good example; for his most recent detailed statement, see Moltmann, , God in Creation: An Ecological Doctrine of Creation (London: SCM Press, 1985), pp. 215‐243Google Scholar.
4 Of course, Augustine does not interpret the imago dei as social. Instead, in a reading which became determinative for Western theology, Augustine on the one hand ascribed the imago dei to the faculty of reason (City of God XIII, 24) and understood the three‐fold form of the human intellect by analogy to the Trinity (De Trinitate XIV, XV)–both these point towards individualism. Yet, O'Donovan correctly notes that ‘In Augustinian political theology.sociality itself was given in creation’ (O'Donovan, Oliver, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 14)Google Scholar. For the nature of created humanity as social: see Augustine, City of God XII, 28; XIX, 5. An attempt to revive this Augustinian aspect is made by Daniel Hardy, W., ‘Created and Redeemed Sociality’, in Gunton, C E and Hardy, D W (eds.), On Being the Church (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1989), pp. 21‐47Google Scholar.
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23 Niebuhr, Reflections on the End of an Era, p. 284.
24 Fox, Warwick, Toward a Transpersonal Psychology (Dartington: Resurgence, 1995), pp. 16‐17Google Scholar notes how Christians use the imago to separate humanity from non‐human nature.
25 Such a contrast merely replays the antithesis noted by Karl Marx between the ethos of industrial capitalism and the sensibility of romanticism.
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27 Iowe this phrase to Daniel W. Hardy.
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35 Borihoefier, Dietrich, Letters and Papers from Prison (London: SCM Press, 1971), p,282Google Scholar.
36 I am very grateful to Niels Henrik Gregersen for his insightful comments on an earlier draft of this article.
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