How would you explain [the] Imago Dei to someone losing faith in human rights?

Tallan ALexAnDER, on FACEBOOK

First I would say: Welcome to the club! For years now, I have found the Western human rights project to be deeply problematic.

This is not because I think the truth “underneath” human rights is unimportant, but for two related reasons:

1. Human rights currently lack an adequate philosophical and theological framework. Because it is very difficult to speak about transcendence and universality in an increasingly interconnected and allegedly “secular” world, human rights no longer enjoy (if they ever did) the kind of consensus for which the framers of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were hoping.
2. Human rights are, functionally, rather more arbitrary than most people like to admit. This is true for two reasons. First, many States just straight-up violate human rights all the time, especially of alleged criminals and terrorists; people who undergo military training also suffer things which, in any other context, would be grievous violations of allegedly universal human rights. Second, the Majority World/Global South has, in the last fifty years, gained their formal, political independence from Western colonial powers; scholars and citizens of these new states have legitimately questioned the extent to which “human rights” is a structure that imposes Western/Global North sensibilities and interpretations upon the postcolonial and anticolonial realities of their lives. (This can become difficult when, for example, many States abuse, torture, and kill LGBTQ+ peoples within their borders, and then frame Western opposition to such treatment as a failure of the alleged pluralism of the West or as a neo-colonial posture.

Rather than trying to find universal “secular” language for the value of human life (and its implied gifts and responsibilities), I prefer instead to turn to the Christian and Jewish spiritual traditions, with their concept of being made in the image of God (Latin: imago Dei).

In the Christian tradition as I understand it, the imago Dei is a mystery. This is a technical term: it does not mean that we can know nothing about it, but rather that its meaning is, perhaps, nearly as inexhaustible as the God who gives a mystery, including Godself, to humanity–there can be many useful, good, beautiful, and true interpretations. I also believe that mystery, for Christians, is tied intimately to life-in-the-body, living-as-a-body, and refers first and foremost to something about the body and ministry of Jesus the Christ.

Setting the Scene

The phrase “image of God” occurs for the first time in the first Creation Story of the book of Genesis, which is a wonderful Hebrew poem with repeated refrains that might have been used in Temple worship. Indeed, the structure of this story, probably written by a priest during or immediately after the return his people from exile in the Babylonian Empire, suggests that Creation itself has the structure of a temple. As we hear and visualize this reality, we hear these words being read:

Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, after our likeness, so they may rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move on the earth.”
God created humankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them.

Genesis 1:26-27, New English Translation (NET) Bible

The way I understand it, the Hebrew word for image implies something concrete, a statue set up to remind a people under covenant of the sovereign to whom they owe allegiance; the world likeness is more shadowy, hard to pin down. This is the paradox of the imago: we know it when we see it, but damn, is it hard to talk about in some basically adequate way!

But I also find two more things interesting. The image and likeness is for something like rulership; and “male and female” bear the image.

First, the Hebrew word here, when used in other places, can potentially have a very violent connotation–putting your foot on an enemy’s neck. But in this context (especially when supplemented by the second Creation story that takes up most of Genesis 2) the task of ruling is a call to “serve and protect” Creation–serve it so that it fulfils the joy for which it was created, and protect it from God’s Enemy (in the Christian tradition, the Devil), who would like nothing more than to “occupy” this new Temple. (Because I am writing this in the context of a global pandemic “served” with a side of systemic murder-racism, perhaps my readers can appreciate how corrupt human “rule” of the biosphere has become.)

Second, “male and female” bear the image. This not only says explicitly that females are equal bearers of the image, but also implies there is a (mysterious?) spectrum of bodies between and around these two “poles.” Both the Jewish and Christian traditions recognize and affirm bodies that are “not simply male” and “not simply female” (though we have not always lived up to the deeply humane things this recognition implies).

In Genesis 2, I believe that the adam‘s calling to name animals speaks to an important part of the imago Dei. What things and people “mean” is not simply determined by divine fiat, but in conversation between humanity and the Divine. (Thus, though this causes scandal to many political and religious conservatives, the contemporary concept of “social construction” seems to have biblical precedent!) In fact, the human capacity to name, to converse with God, is so important to the Jewish tradition that those humans who argue with God consistently are called God’s friends! Human beings, when we deeply know and trust the love of the Divine, have a responsibility to fight with God about the meaning of our lives and reality until we receive a blessing–the explosive goodness of God that causes everything and everyone it touches to flourish.

I believe that all of these things are aspects of the imago Dei–which is why, in brutal summary, I believe “human rights,” as a secular take on it torn out of its religious narrative and responsibilities, is anemic and woefully inadequate. This is one reason why, in Genesis 9 after Noah and his family survive the Flood in the Ark, the author of Genesis tells his hearers this message from the Divine:

For your own lifeblood I will surely require a reckoning: from every animal I will require it and from human beings, each one for the blood of another, I will require a reckoning for human life.

Whoever sheds the blood of a human,
by a human shall that person’s blood be shed;
for in his own image
God made humankind.

And you, be fruitful and multiply, abound on the earth and multiply in it.

Genesis 9:5-7, New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

Murder of a human being, even by an animal, is so serious in the Jewish and Christian traditions because of the “image of God” in humankind. The image of God language of Scripture says at least this: Human beings have a value, dignity, and calling that transcends all human or systemic or spiritual attempts to squash it. And the Love that made all things will “require an accounting,” not for violence, but to set things right. Image-bearers who know what we’re about will constantly confer on and require of everyone, in appropriate ways, everything that “human rights” asks us to recognize–and so much more.

That “more” has something to do, I trust, with the long journey of knowing, trusting, and fighting with God until, as God’s friends, we implement all that Love requires as we go. And in my opinion, such implementation requires more than the bare minimum and rigid structure of human rights. It requires the suppleness and wisdom of all of us together at our highest and most adult selves.

If even some of this is true, beautiful, useful, good–“human rights,” by comparison, is entry-level stuff.