Two Ways News is a weekly collaboration between Phillip Jensen and Peter Jensen – a newsletter and podcast on a topic to encourage gospel thinking for today (subscribe at twoways.news).
Phillip and Peter discuss the great climax of Genesis 1 in the creation of humans in God’s Image in this episode. What is the image of God? In what way are we in the image of God? What are humans, and who are we? This teaching of Genesis 1 has stood the test of time in identifying God’s universal identity and value of humans.
The previous episode is The Goodness of God.
For a talk on the subject listen to The Failure of Man and the Proper Man, a talk on Psalm 8.
WHAT AND WHO ARE HUMANS?
Phillip Jensen: Welcome again to Two Ways News. We now get a look at humanity in Genesis 1. We have focussed on the first few words, but it’s the sixth day when humans are created. The pattern of the chapter changes.
Peter Jensen: Please explain what you just said.
Phillip: The pattern remains much the same as you go through the chapter until you come to the sixth day, when suddenly God says, ”Let us make” instead of “Let there be.” Then he makes something in his own image and gives to humanity, whom he makes, the responsibility for caring for the world. Genesis 1:26-30
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
And God blessed them and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so.
It is all different from the rest of the chapter, while at the same time, it’s the same. We are made, we are created, and we are like the animals in being living creatures.
Peter: It reflects what most cultures have done. Who are human beings? That must be one of the questions that every human being asks themselves and every culture has asked and answered. Who are we? Are we anything? Are we nobodies? Are we simply animals? In your experience, as you look at our contemporary culture, which has drifted so far away from the Bible, what sort of answers do you see being given to the question of what is man?
Phillip: Identity is one of the big 21st century questions, but the identity is two-sided. What am I as a human being? Who am I amongst the human beings that are here? Am I a who, or am I only a what? You see, a tree is not a who. Only humans are a who, but that depends on what I am. If I’m no different from the tree, the cow, or the dog, then ‘What am I?’ and ‘Who am I?’ are the kinds of questions we need to wrestle with. Speciesism is one of those modern kinds of words that come from Professor Peter Singer. Professor Singer is an atheist, and he’s made it quite clear he does not believe in mankind, in humans, or being created in the image of God because he does not believe there is a God. Therefore, he explicitly denies this passage. He now has no basis for differentiating one species from another, except for what is sentient, having self-awareness thinking. He creates a whole new ethical system of living out of the fact that humans have no particular differential authority, rights, or value than animals.
Peter: I asked a veterinary surgeon to tell me what they think about the Australian soul at the moment. He said that one thing they noticed in his profession, is that animals are now treated as humans. I would say, as substitutes for humans. Why would that be the case?
Phillip: Rabbits and cats are a big problem in Australia. The rabbits cause terrible problems in their speedy replication which destroys environments and, therefore native animals, but cats are much worse. Cats are carnivores. They kill the birds and the like. People have an emotional attachment to their cats. Considering the amount of money people spend on veterinary costs and the sense of persona that they put upon their cats, it is an alternative to having children.
Replacing humans with cats is part of what is happening. Many baby boomers don’t have grandchildren. They have granddogs and grandcats because their children have decided not to have children. Those grandchildren are replaced by dogs or cats.
Peter: What is this telling us about humanity?
Phillip: There’s a shock coming. Our reproduction level is now less than 1.5 per female, but you need to have 2.1 in order to replace yourself. As a society, we are breeding ourselves out of existence.
Peter: Would Professor Singer have anything to say to this?
Phillip: What he’s saying is more the morality of how we treat our animals. He is against eating them, against raising them for food, against treating them in any way less than how we would treat humans. Mind you, it affects how he would treat humans. He believes in euthanasia. He believes in abortion, late-term abortion, and the first twelve months after birth abortion. Because he says, what’s the difference between aborting the child the day before it’s born and aborting the child the day after it’s born? It is the same creature. If it’s not going to be loved, cared for, or looked after, one that is defective in some kind of physiological form, then no, it is perfectly appropriate to not kill, of course, but to euthanize the child. Likewise, just as you would put down an injured dog or horse, when an elderly person has got such injuries that mean they cannot now sustain themselves, then it’s a perfectly appropriate thing to do. He changes the morality and ethics of relationships by his speciesism.
Peter: What does the current confusion, about who human beings are, have to do with things like purpose and meaning? What purpose or meaning can you give if you have no higher power, no God, to talk to you about this?
Phillip: Well, it’s quite clear in the writings of people like Professor Dawkins that we don’t have purpose and meaning. It’s also true in Peter Singer’s book on ethics. His last chapter asks why be moral. He says there’s no reason and there is no meaning. You have to find meaning in life. You create the meaning of life. He talks about people having higher purposes, which, under his own philosophy, is impossible. For instance, he talks about other people finding meaning in stamp collecting. Their meaning of life is their hobby of collecting stamps. You create your meaning. What I am comes back to who I am. I’m a stamp collector. I’m a rugby league follower. But I’m no different from animals in terms of morality because there is no morality.
Peter: We live in a highly moral age, or I should say a moralistic age. People find a sense of meaning and purpose by assuming strong moral positions and fighting for them. The temperance movement of the 19th century was dealing with a real problem, but it was driven. If you had an ounce of alcohol, you were cast out more or less. There is a wowser sense to the modern world, at least in some quarters.
If there is a purpose and meaning, it is one that you make up for yourself. You allow your heart to be possessed by this moral drive that gives you meaning and purpose. But it is so often a drive in the wrong direction.
Now, if Singer is being logical, where does this sense of moral drive come from? What’s all this about?
Phillip: The inconsistency of the atheistic position is great. Dawkins has a great moral appeal to giving up religion which he regards as harmful to humanity. But he also says there’s no meaning. There’s no purpose. In a world that has just evolved accidentally, there is no morality. There is no right, there is no wrong, no good, no evil. But we are different from animals at exactly this point. Nobody is criticizing the lion for eating another animal. But if a human eats another human, it is a different story. We think cannibalism is savagery. When you read Darwin, he keeps calling people savages. They were dealing with the savagery of cannibalism. We’ve got to get rid of that.
Peter: That leads us to some important matters because Darwin’s words, “savage” there, were very typical of his day. I’ve been reading Sherlock Holmes stories. In one of the early ones, there is a murderer, a pygmy-like person from one of the Indian islands who murders people with blowpipes. The description of this person is that he is a savage. Conan Doyle felt that the world was divided into upper class, upper breeds, and lower breeds. This has impacted Australia. Some people believed that murdering the original inhabitants of Australia, the Indigenous people of Australia, was not murder because they were not murdering a human being. You were murdering something less than a human being. Hence, the importance of the book written by Dr. Harris called One Blood – a quote from Acts 17. God has created all the nations of the earth, one blood, so that you cannot look at another race of people, and say they’re less than us, and they don’t deserve to live. It was some Christian people who made the most fuss about this and insisted, for example, that murderers be brought to book when they had murdered Indigenous people. We are one blood.
Phillip: The study of anthropology began at Liverpool University in the 1870’s. But Social Darwinism gave us a scientific study of humanity with this concept of civilization and culture driven out of our physiology. Eugenics was the reputable study of scientific people right up until the 1960s. It lay behind Hitler’s view. It lay behind the view of some Australians’ attitude to our Indigenous Australians. The Aboriginal peoples have been studied as being less than human. We have magazines like the Bulletin making fun of the missionaries protecting the Indigenous Australians back in the 19th century.
This is what the racism of Adolf Hitler was. Because of eugenics, he believed that the Aryan race was superior and that races such as the Jews were diminishing the quality of human life. This was also true of people with disabilities, and people with mental illness. They also need to be removed because every time they breed and reproduce other people like themselves, the quality of humanity is weakened. Racism was about humanity rather than about tribalism.
But Christians have always held from Genesis 1 that all humans, every human, male and female, have their dignity, their experience, and their place in their creation of being part of the image of God. Every individual is to be treated with respect. You see it even in the slightly deistic version that the American founding fathers had: “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.” The people who said it practiced slavery, some of them, and it was only men that they’re talking about, whereas the Bible says man, not men, is created in the image of God. Male and female are created in the image of God, and everybody is in that category.
So what are we? We’re not in the image of God because we speak or because we’re clever or because we use our thumb against our fingers or because we use tools. We do all those things because we are in the image of God. It’s not the equipment that makes us in the image of God. It’s because we’re in the image of God that he equips us to do the role of ruling the world, as he would, namely by caring for it.
Peter: We are all in the image of God, and we need to say that. And we need to defend that great truth against the foes who say it doesn’t matter, or it’s not true. It is clear that even though human beings have fallen into sin, you may say that the image of God has been distorted in us through human sin, but you can’t say it has been removed from us, nor of any human being.
When the New Testament deals with ‘the image of God’ words, we discover that there is one who is the image of God, one who is described as the last Adam. We have the first Adam, who is such a disaster, and the last Adam, who is the image of God. The challenge in the New Testament is how we are all to grow into his likeness, the likeness of the image of God, and his name is Jesus. It is not just as individuals but as the one fellowship of Jesus Christ, who, when we work together as we should in church, will grow into the likeness of Christ, into the image of Christ. Colossians 3:9-10
Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.
Phillip: The big problem of young people today is identity. Who am I? I am in the image of God. That’s who I am. I find my identity in my creation and my relationships. But most people are trying to find their identity in their feelings or their achievements. And they are not finding it. So, we need to work a few more times on ‘the image of God.’
