Reading Genesis 1-11 in the 21st century is difficult. It's as hard as reading Revelation, and for the same reason. If I wrote, 'And I saw an Orange Man, coming out of the water, and he devoured the Mexicans, and the socialists, and he destroyed everything in his path,' you would have some idea of what I was talking about. But in 2,000 years' time, how would people take it? Perhaps they would start a new religion waiting for The Orange Man.
Both the early, 'mythical'* chapters of Genesis and the later, 'mythical'* chapters of Revelation use ideas and images (nowadays some people would use the word 'tropes') that were common currency when they were written. Comparing the creation stories of Genesis 1-3 with other creation stories that were written around the same time can yield incredibly exciting and fruitful revelations. By finding out how the Israelites' stories are different from their neighbours', we can see what they were trying to say that distinguished them from all the other national religions of the time. (For a great little book exploring these ideas, click here.)
In the 1970s a statue of King Adad-It'i was found in Syria. Written on his cloak was an inscription in Aramaic that uses the phrase, 'This is an image (selem) and likeness (damut) of [the king]', the exact same wording used in Genesis 1:26 when God says that humans are God's image and likeness. Wowsers. Here's my take (thanks initially to Crispin Fletcher-Louis): we humans are like statues of YHWH, we are YHWH's idols! It's not that God bans idols - physical representations of God in creation -because God hates them, it's that WE are the idols and God doesn't want any distractions!
I love this idea, but this week I've pushed it on another step.
Let's face it, if God never changes, what's wrong with a regular statue? In fact, wouldn't a solid, unchanging statue be a better representation of a solid, unchanging god? Why bother making living, growing beings that change over time to be your image and likeness, unless you, too, are a living, growing being that changes over time?
Why is this important to someone who is trying to develop a model of human maturity?
Well, firstly, because our dominant model of the Abba of Jesus was imported from Greek philosophy. According to Plato, God isn't worth much unless God is perfect in every way, and that includes being completely unchanging. If God could change, so the argument goes, either God's former state or new, changed state must be less than perfect. This doctrine of immutability prevents God from ever feeling anything (because that would be a change in God), from ever learning anything, from ever changing a plan or a decision.
It should be clear that this Greek, philosophical God is not very much like the passionate, loving, involved and, yes, changeable God of the Bible. Yet the doctrine of God's immutability sits behind a lot of other Christian doctrines. It may make logical sense, but it doesn't make sense of why God's supreme revelation is a learning, growing, feeling, changing person called Jesus of Nazareth. And it doesn't make sense of why God would choose us to be their image and likeness. (You can find out more about this perspective here.)
Secondly, this static view of God can often bleed over into a static view of Christian faith. Either you are or you aren't a Christian. Whether it's baptism, confirmation, 'praying the prayer' or something else, we have created static (and boundaried, and policed) definitions of faith and church and belonging. Perhaps it is in becoming that we are most godlike, not being (and certainly not doing). We, like God, are an unfinished story. Our past (in)forms us and our future calls us, but here in this moment we have the option to choose becoming or unbecoming.
A lot of the motivation for my study has been a dissatisfaction with two things:
(a) Measures of church 'success' that focus on raw numbers and take no account of whether being part of a particular church is transformative of the individual, the church itself or the local community
(b) Meeting people in (and out of) churches who have been Christians for many years but are still really, um, un-Christlike.**
So if becoming is baked into the being of God and humans, surely we need to think about what it is that we are becoming? That takes us back to last week's post on telos, and me on the road to discovery...
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*By mythical, I don't mean to say that these passages don't have any factual/historical content, only that the truth they're communicating is more symbolic and not primarily factual/historical.
**This is not an academic measure! As I have got older, I have come to appreciate the biblical idea of the fruit of the Spirit - that if we are giving way to the Spirit of God, then slowly but surely our character will change.
Image by Wayne Pitard - https://vici.org/image.php?id=14085, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=94522226
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