Image

October 2005-Final.
qxp 9/9/2005 10:26 AM Page 337
In This Issue
Volume 59 Number 4
October 2005
Image of God
339 EDITORIAL
341 CLONES OF GOD: GENESIS 1:26–28 AND THE IMAGE OF GOD IN THE
HEBREW BIBLE • W. SIBLEY TOWNER
The claim of the Priestly writers that the Creator made human beings in the divine image is both
audacious and ambiguous. This concept is empowering and suggests that the Old Testament
view of human nature is far more positive than our dour stress on human sinfulness has led us
to imagine.
358 KEEPING IT REAL: THE IMAGE OF GOD IN THE NEW TESTAMENT

• DEBORAH KRAUSE
Representing a mix of traditions from the Hebrew Bible, early Judaism, and Hellenistic popular
philosophy, Philo, and Paul understand the image of God as a means of both affirming God’s sov-
ereign authority over all creation and addressing the challenges of competing authorities in the
world.
370 WHICH WAY IS UP? AN EXPERIMENT IN CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY AND

MODERN COSMOLOGY • DOUGLAS F. OTTATI
Our theological pictures of God, the world, and ourselves sometimes change in order to take
account of scientific findings, ideas, and beliefs. How might they alter in response to recent
ideas about the cosmos and the place of us humans in it?
382 BIBLICAL IMAGES OF GOD AND THE READER’S “I” AS IMAGO DEI
• ANN W. ASTELL
Amidst Nazi persecution, Edith Stein discovered in the biblical images of God a mystical path of
identity formation leading to a transformative union with Christ.
BETWEEN TEXT & SERMON Major Book Reviews
408 The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1,

392 Psalm 8
by J. Richard Middleton
-Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty
-W. Sibley Towner
396 Matthew 3:1–12 412 Jeremiah 21–36 and Jeremiah 37–52, by Jack R.
-Raymond R. Roberts Lundbom
-Kathleen M. O’Connor
400 Matthew 26:6–13
-Elizabeth B. Ford 416 The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary, by Francis J.
Moloney
404 Hebrews 2:10–18 -C. Clifton Black
-Steven R. Harmon
420 Paul: His Story, by Jerome Murphy O’Connor
-Richard P. Carlson
424 Short Book Reviews and Notes

October 2005-Final.qxp 9/9/2005 10:26 AM Page 338
O F F I C E S TA F F DANNY MATHEWS
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Interpretation 339
Editorial
IN CONTRAST TO MUCH of contemporary alternative world of the reign of God

culture—at least in North America—where described by Jesus that stands over against
an image is most often understood to refer all earthly empires. Humans in the image of
to something politicians and advertising God owe everything to their creator.
gurus manipulate to their own advantage,
Two other essays in this issue approach
this issue of Interpretation investigates the
the notion of the image of God theological-
concept of image in a very different sense.
ly by looking carefully at the ways we
Two essays in this issue focus on the humans depict reality in general and there-
Biblical concept of the image of God in fore how we humans form our own images
humankind as described especially in of God and ourselves. Douglas Ottati
accounts of the creation in Genesis. W. provocatively suggests that in the light of
Sibley Towner reviews possible ways of our rapidly increasing scientific knowledge
interpreting what the Bible means when it of the vast expanses of time and space, our
describes human beings as creatures created theological images of God, God’s world, and
in the image of God. With Karl Barth, our place as humans in it need to be
Towner concludes that the image of God in revised. Ann Astell writes about Edith
humans describes their nature as relational Stein, the Jewish martyr and convert to
beings whose wholeness depends on right Roman Catholicism, who found in the writ-
relationships with God, nature, and each ings of St. John of the Cross an understand-
other. This makes the image of God a much ing of the image of God that she claimed for
more positive and empowering concept her own self image as she faced death at the
than other interpretations that emphasize hands of Hitler's executioners.
the loss of that image due to the effects of
Our cover illustration from the York
sin.
cathedral door places Adam and Eve secure-
The image of Caesar on a coin is the ly and naturally in the hand of God, their
starting point for Deborah Krause’s analysis creator and ours. It depicts a reality that lies
of the image of God in the teaching of Jesus beyond the manipulative capability of
and its subsequent development in the let- politicians and advertising gurus to a theo-
ters of Paul and his followers. She argues logical truth about what it means to be
that the image of God is a symbol for the human.
340 Interpretation OCTOBER 2005
CONTRIBUTORS D OUGLAS F. OTTATI

Union-PSCE
Which Way is Up? An Experiment in Christian Theology
W. S IBLEY TOWNER
and Modern Cosmology
Union-PSCE
Ottati works in the areas of theology and ethics, with
Clones of God: Genesis 1:26–28 and the Image of God
particular attention to recent statements and con-
Towner received his Ph.D. from Yale University. He was
structive arguments. He is the author of Jesus Christ
a seminary professor for 38 years, 27 of which were at
and Christian Vision (Westminster John Knox),
Union-PSCE. Among other books, he has published
Reforming Protestantism: Christian Commitment
commentaries on Daniel and Genesis, as well as the
in Today's World (Westminster John Knox), Hopeful
commentary and reflections on Ecclesiastes in the New
Realism: Reclaiming the Poetry of Theology
Interpreter’s Bible. He is a minister of the Presbyterian
(Pilgrim Press), and is a general editor of The
Church (USA). Towner and his wife Jane now live in a
Library of Theological Ethics (Westminster John
snug retirement home on the Chesapeake Bay from
Knox). He received his Ph.D. from The Divinity
which they occasionally sally forth to wet a line.
School of the University of Chicago.
D EBORAH K RAUSE A NN W. A STELL

Eden Theological Seminary Purdue University
Keeping it Real: The Image of God in the New Testament Biblical Images of God and the Reader’s ‘I’ as Image Dei:
Krause is Academic Dean and Associate Professor of The Contribution of Edith Stein
New Testament at Eden Theological Seminary, where Astell is Professor of English at Purdue University,
she teaches courses in the Gospels, biblical hermeneu- where she belongs to the faculties of the interdiscipli-
tics, and feminist biblical interpretation. She received nary programs in Religious Studies, Philosophy and
her Ph.D. in biblical studies from Emory University. Literature, and Medieval Studies. She is the author of
Her recent publications include a commentary, 1 six books, including The Song of Songs in the
Timothy (T&T Clark/Continuum, 2004) and the Middle Ages (Cornell University Press) and Eating
essays on the season of Epiphany in New Beauty: The Eucharist and the Spiritual Arts of the
Proclamation: Year B, 2005-06 (Fortress, 2005). She is Middle Ages (forthcoming 2006).
an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church
(USA).
Clones of God
Genesis 1:26–28 and the Image of God
in the Hebrew Bible
W. SIBLEY TOWNER
Professor Emeritus of Biblical Interpretation
Union-PSCE
The claim of the Priestly writers that the Creator made human beings in the
divine image is both audacious and ambiguous. Assuming that among other
things “image” means that human beings are able to enter into relationship
with God and God’s creatures, the concept is also empowering. It suggests
that the Old Testament view of human nature is far more positive than our
dour stress on human sinfulness has led us to imagine.
I n Morris West’s novel, The Clowns of God,1 a Pope is forced by the Curia to abdicate
because he has had a vision of the imminence of the apocalypse. In actual fact, the
great powers do threaten the world with nuclear extinction. Draconian abridgments
of civil liberties are taking place everywhere. Reservists are called; emergency plans are acti-
vated. In the face of all this, the deposed Pope and other dedicated, caring people heroically
struggle to save the world from catastrophe, beginning with the most vulnerable, a commu-
nity of mentally retarded children already marked for extinction in the first round of post-
strike triage. These care-givers are convinced that their disabled charges, “God’s clowns,” are
also God’s children, that they too bear in their persons the divine image, and that they too
deserve the same respect and security demanded by the rich, powerful, and mentally able
members of the community.
Can it be? Can it be that all of us alike—the saints, the sinners, the able, the differently
abled, Christians, jihadists, atheists—are in some limited way “clones of God,” who, to those
who have eyes to see, display God’s likeness? Of course, to speak of a “limited clone” is to
use an oxymoron. “Clone” is incorrect. But “image” is exactly the startlingly theomorphic
1
New York: William Morrow and Co., 1981.
and indubitably powerful claim of the Bible. Not only angels or demi-gods, not only
Pharaoh and Caesar, but also every peasant, pauper, and person possesses the gift of God’s
image. New Age religion and its antecedents in Eastern religious thought might imagine
that the human being, like all other things, participates in the all-encompassing Divine
Being, but that surely is a different understanding than the biblical one. The Bible empha-
sizes that human beings are distinct from the wholly other God, their Creator. And yet the
Priestly writer in Genesis would have us believe that something in us is an icon of God. The
daring and audacious testimony of that writer establishes the fundamental premise upon
which all further biblical anthropology is grounded:
Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them
have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over
all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”
So God created humankind in his image,

in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
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 air and over every living
thing that moves upon the earth.” (Gen 1:26–28)
When God created humankind, he made them in the likeness of God. Male and female he creat-
ed them and named them “Humankind” when they were created. (Gen 5:1b–2)
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. (Gen 9:6)2
The first step in this exploration will be to spread out on the table some of the wealth
of interpretations of the notion of imago dei, the image of God in humankind, that scholars
have offered. Before we attempt to sort through these proffers, selecting or modifying the
one that seems to come closest to the mark in the literal terms of these texts themselves, we
will inventory and discuss the issues that need to be addressed in these foundational texts
alone. Following a summary judgment about the meaning of the concept of imago dei in
Genesis, we will explore some aspects of the significance of this concept for the whole of
the Hebrew Bible.
2
This text links an apparently early law against murder with one of the three imago dei passages attributed to
the late Priestly source. The fact suggests that the “image” concept may have had a history prior to its elevation to
fundamental status by P. See J. Maxwell Miller, “In the ‘Image’ and ‘Likeness’ of God,” JBL 91 (1972): 289–304.
IMAGE OF GOD Interpretation 343
S O M E O F T H E P R O P O S A L S O N T H E TA B L E
Any survey of the many proposals regarding the exact meaning of the image of God in
human beings would necessarily be lengthy. Following the lead of C. Westermann,3 I note
that a number of larger categories of interpretation of this dramatic concept emerge. Some
of these categories overlap. Among them are: 1) the fullness of the eiko3n or image of God in
humankind is seen in the person of Jesus Christ (Col 1:15; cf. 2 Cor 3:18, 4:4); 2) the two
nouns in Gen 1:26 (“image” and “likeness”) are intended to distinguish the natural and the
supernatural qualities of God in the human being (e.g., Irenaeus, Delitzsch); 3) the image of
God consists in spiritual endowments such as memory, self-awareness, rationality, intelli-
gence, spirituality, even an immortal soul (e.g., Wis 2:23, Philo, Gregory of Nyssa,
Augustine, Aquinas, Schleiermacher, Eichrodt, Fohrer); 4) the image of God is manifested
in our ability to make moral decisions, which presupposes free will and a knowledge of
good and evil (e.g., G. W. Bromiley, Michael Morrison); 5) the image of God may also be
seen in the sometimes denigrated or “base” human emotions, especially love, qualities not
shared with animals (Augustine, a view rejected by Gregory of Nyssa4); 6) the image of God
is expressed in the unique human capacity for self-transcendence, from which, in turn,
beauty and the recognition of beauty emerge (Farley); 7) the image of God can be seen in
the external appearance of human beings (e.g., Gunkel, Humbert, von Rad, Zimmerli); 8)
the image is displayed when the human being serves as God’s deputy on earth, an idea often
expressed in royal ideology (e.g., Hehn, von Rad, Wildberger, W. H. Schmidt); 9) the human
being is God’s counterpart or partner, the “thou” which is addressed by the divine “I” (e.g.,
Buber, Brunner, Westermann); 10) the image of God in the human being consists precisely
in the division of humankind into female and male. This last interpretation was offered by
Karl Barth, who acknowledges his indebtedness on this point to Bonhoeffer.5 In his rich dis-
cussion of Gen 1:26–27,6 Barth focuses on v. 27 and its parallel in Gen 5:1–2. Barth asks,
“Could anything be more obvious than to conclude from this clear indication that the
image and likeness of the being created by God signifies existence in confrontation, i.e., in
this confrontation, in the juxtaposition and conjunction of man and man (sic) which is that
of male and female. . . .”7 This means that in the human being the quality that resembles the
divine prototype is differentiation and relationship, such as exists within the Holy Trinity. It
is I and thou. Such an understanding guarantees a dialectical answer to the question: Who
is the human being? The answer will begin: The human being is this and that, male and
female, ego and id, individual and collective, capable of mutuality and yet able to retain
identity, narcissistic and yet capable of self-transcendence.
3
C. Westermann, Genesis 1–11 (trans. John J. Scullion, S. J.; Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1984), 147–55. A greatly
expanded survey of modern proposals is offered in Gunnlaugur A. Jónsson, The Image of God: Genesis 1:26–28 in a
Century of Old Testament Research (trans. by Lorraine Svendsen; Lund: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1988).
Bibliographic information for the other authors indicated can be found in these works. Unfortunately, A. Schuele’s
essay, “Made in the Image of God,” ZAW 117 (2005): 1–20 was not available when this article was written.
4
J. Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 129.
5
Creation and Fall (trans. John C. Fletcher; London: SCM, 1959), 33–38.
6
Church Dogmatics III/1 (trans. J. W. Edwards, O. Bussey, and H. Knight; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958),
191–206.
7
Ibid., 195.
Finally, the real possibility exists that the Priestly writers deliberately used the vague
and multivalent terms “image” and “likeness” because they meant only to call attention to
the God/human likeness not shared by animals, but had no “definite idea about the content
or location of the image of God.”8
AN INVENTORY OF SEVEN EXEGETICAL ISSUES RAISED BY THE

F O U N D AT I O N A L T E X T S
1. Location in the text. Jewish tradition considers the seventh day (Gen 2:1–4a), recapit-
ulated by human beings in the institution of the Sabbath, to be the “momentous climax”
and “fulfillment” of all of God’s labors recorded in the creation account in Genesis.9 Yet,
from its position in the overall order of creation on God’s sixth and final working day, after
the creation of all other land animals, it appears that for the Priestly narrators, humankind
is God’s crowning work. No other creature is said to be in God’s image; no other creature is
blessed and gifted in the way humankind is (1:28–31).
2. Plural subject. At the moment prior to the creation of humankind, God says, “Let us
make humankind in our image, according to our likeness” (1:26a; see also Gen 3:22, 11:7).
Pre-critical Christian interpreters typically heard a reference to the Holy Trinity in these
words. The case can, of course, be made that if the godhead is indeed triune in nature,
every reference to God in scripture implies Creator, Christ, and Spirit. But that would be a
Christian dogmatic inference that presumably would not capture the meaning of the
Priestly writer of Genesis 1:1–2:4a. Others have argued that God simply uses a “plural of
majesty” here. On the whole, critical scholarship has settled on the notion of the Divine
Council as the best explanation for this unexpected use of the plural by the Creator.10 God
is speaking to the retinue of divine beings that cluster around the heavenly king. (Even
though it may be a pale remnant of earlier polytheism, the heavenly court is by no means
suppressed in the Hebrew Bible. See, for example, 1 Kgs 22:19–23; Job 1:6–2:6; Pss 82, 89:7
6; Isa 6:1–8; Jer 23:18.) The implication of this solution to the plural reference for under-
standing the meaning of imago dei in the P creation account is this: whatever it is in human
beings that mirrors God mirrors the divine realm as a whole. Gerhard von Rad put it ele-
gantly: “The extraordinary plural (‘Let us’) is to prevent one from referring God’s image too
directly to God the Lord. God includes himself among the heavenly beings of his court and
thereby conceals himself in the majority.”11 More recently Dean McBride has said, “Adamic
beings are animate icons; they are empowered by the ‘image’ and its correlative blessing to
8
James Barr, “The Image of God in the Book of Genesis—A Study of Terminology,” BJRL 51 (1968–69): 11–26,
esp. 13.
9
See, for example, Nahum Sarna, Genesis (The JPS Torah Commentary; Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication
Society, 1989), 14.
10
The evidence is assembled by P. D. Miller, Genesis 1–11: Studies in Structure and Theme (JSOTSup, 8;
Sheffield: University of Sheffield Press, 1978), 9–18.
11
G. von Rad, Genesis (OTL; trans. John H. Marks; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1961), 57.
be a terrestrial counterpart to God’s heavenly entourage.”12
3. Adam as a collective concept. A third issue raised by the Priestly language of Gen
1:26–28 is the meaning of the Hebrew noun ’a3da3m, now translated by the NRSV as
“humankind.” This is not another instance of NRSV periphrasis intended to eliminate a gen-
der-specific English noun (KJV, RSV: “man”). This collective sense inheres in the noun, as the
use of the plural imperative in 1:26b shows. The noun ’a3da3ma3h, “earth,” looks like a femi-
nine form of a masculine ’a3da3m, a grammatical relationship that could hint at a back-
ground in mythic narrative in which the ’a3da3ma3h is the mother or the wife of the ’a3da3m,
whom he impregnates when he plows and plants her. Were there such a deep background, it
would be more germane to the Yahwistic creation account in Gen 2, in which the Lord God
creates the ’a3da3m out of the dust of the ’a3da3ma3h (2:7). Indeed, the similarity of these words
to one another has led scholars to translate ’a3da3m as “earth-creature.”13 However, the
absence of any textual evidence that the two words were thought to be related as male and
female returns us to the word ’a3da3m itself. Though it sometimes is used in the Old
Testament as a proper name of the first man, especially in genealogies (e.g., Gen 4:25, 5:1–5;
1 Chr 1:1), it is not the word ’îsh usually employed when reference is to a single male indi-
vidual (see Gen 2:23, where’îsh and its feminine form ’îshsha3h are explicitly linked togeth-
er). Although with the definite article ha3’a3da3m can refer to a single male individual (e.g.,
Gen 3:8), the definite form can also be construed as collective (even in our key texts, Gen
1:27 and 9:6). The collective sense in Gen 1:26–28 is conveyed, as noted above, by the plural
verb “and let them have dominion,” and also by the added remark of v. 27c, namely, “male
and female he created them.”
4. Significance of male and female. Unlike the Yahwist in Gen 2:18–23, for the Priestly
writer both genders exist in this ’a3da3m from the outset. The collective noun ’a3da3m denotes
the first exemplar of all of us, i.e., “humankind.” The disclosure that both male and female
are included in ’a3da3m has implications that extend in two directions. Intrinsic to both the
divine prototype and the human counterpart are fellowship and relationship, though sexu-
ality is not intrinsic in both. (See “issue” 7 below.)
5. Semantics of “image” (s[elem) and “likeness” (de5mu<t). The Hebrew word for “image,”
s[elem, occurs seventeen times in the Old Testament. The usual etymology of the word
relates it, among other cognates, to an Arabic verb for “cut off,” and, though no verbal stem
for the term occurs in biblical Hebrew, the notion of “carving” is maintained in texts in
which the term denotes free-standing idols (e.g., 2 Kgs 11:18=2 Chr 23:17; perhaps Amos
12
“Divine Protocol: Genesis 1:1–2:3 as Prologue to the Pentateuch,” in God Who Creates. Essays in Honor of W.
Sibley Towner (ed. William P. Brown and S. Dean McBride; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 16.
13
E.g., Phyllis Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978), 77–87.
5:26). The usage broadens to include molten or cast idols in Num 33:52, Ezek 7:20, 16:17, as
well as the curative golden replicas of the pesky mice and tumors that the Philistines sent
back to Israel along with the purloined ark (1 Sam 6:5, 11). An “image” can either be two-
dimensional or a painted one (Ezek 23:14). It is instructive that in modern spoken Hebrew,
the related noun s[illu<m is a photograph.
Twice s[elem is used in a sense exactly opposite these examples of very physical repre-
sentation. In Ps 39:6, the poet says of the human plight, “Surely everyone goes about like a
shadow (s[elem). Surely for nothing (hebel—the opening word of Ecclesiastes) they are in
turmoil.” In a similar vein, another psalmist acknowledges to God the fate of the wicked:
“They are like a dream when one awakes; on awaking you despise their phantoms (s[elem)”
(Ps 73:20). So an “image” can be a mere semblance of a person.
All but one of the remaining occurrences of the term in the Hebrew Bible are in our
key examples, where God and human beings share the “image.” Should the evidence from
the other uses of s[elem in the Hebrew Bible tilt our understanding toward physical resem-
blance? Are we dealing with a major anthropomorphism here, where people are like living,
walking statues of God sent to speak and act for the king in all the corners of the royal
dominion? Further support for this view can be gained from the only other use of the term,
in Gen 5:3, where physical family resemblance is clearly in view:
When Adam had lived one hundred thirty years, he became the father of a son in his likeness
(de5mu<t), according to his image (s[elem), and named him Seth.
Or should we infer from the two uses in the psalter that the imago dei is not a physical
thing at all, but some other kind of semblance? Or as great writers and theologians are wont
to do, has the Priestly writer simply dared to recast a familiar term into a very new shape?
Or is it possible at all to discern exactly what this writer had in mind when he used the
term s[elem?
The semantic issues of Gen 1:26 also include the word set there in parallel to “image,”
namely, “likeness” (de5mu<t). This term occurs some twenty-one times in the Old Testament
as a noun, and has another five adverbial uses. It is derived from a fairly common Hebrew
verbal root, also well attested in other Semitic languages, meaning “resemble, liken.” It is a
somewhat more abstract term than s[elem, and can refer to similarities other than visual
ones (e.g., Isa 13:4a).14 Nearly half of the nominal occurrences are found in Ezekiel’s inau-
gural vision, wherein the prophet avoids saying that he saw God and the heavenly court by
14
J. M. Miller, op. cit., 293.
using such circumlocutions as “the appearance of the likeness (de5mu<t) of the glory of the
Lord” (Ezek 1:28). In Dan 10:16, the prophet reports that “one in human form (de5mu<t)
touched my lips,” by which he means an angel (apparently Gabriel). These usages seem to
imply a reflection or projection of a reality, more than the reality itself. But the resemblance
can be very revealing of the prototype as, once again, Gen 5:3 demonstrates when it says
that Seth was in the “likeness (de5mu<t), according to [the] image (s[elem)” of his father,
Adam.
In only two of our three key examples, Gen 1:26 and 5:1, are “image” and “likeness” set
in parallel to each other. Remembering that these texts tie together theology and anthropol-
ogy, the divine and the human realms, we may be drawn from the physicality implied in
“graven image” in the direction of resemblance, as in a face in a mirror or a photograph.
For those who have eyes to see, something about us is reminiscent of God and the heavenly
beings! The psalmist saw it and exclaimed, “You have made them a little lower than God
[or: the divine beings]” (Ps 8:5).15 The audacity of the claim is underscored by Isaiah of the
Exile, who sweeps away all human attempts to compare the incomparable Creator God to
any images of our own making: “To whom then will you liken God, or what likeness
(de5mu<t) compare with him?” (Isa 40:18). On the contrary, reply the Priestly writers, decades
later, in Gen 1:26–28. According to them, there is one likeness after all and it still inheres in
the refugee child, the President of the United States, great aunt Millie, you and me and bil-
lions of other exemplars, living and dead, of the creature called ’a3da3m.
6. Connection with “dominion” in Gen 1:26b. Syntax, too, raises an issue in our key vers-
es. Following God’s injunction to the council to create ’a3da3m in the divine image, God uses
a forceful third-person imperative (jussive) to define the role of the newly created ’a3da3m:
“and let them have dominion” over the newly created fauna of the earth. The etymology of
the Hebrew word ra3da3h, “to have dominion,” has been much discussed, its parallel with
ka3bash, “to subdue” the earth in 1:28 canvassed, and the sense both words have in other
texts of trampling, enslavement, and harsh rule by the powerful over the weak (e.g., ra3da3h
in Ezek 34:4; see also ka3bash in Jer 34:11,16; Zech 9:15 ) explored. Clearly it means that God
is conferring a kingly status upon ’a3da3m and invites humankind to rule over the rest of the
living creatures as God’s viceroy. “God is a power-sharing, not a power- hoarding God.”16
But in what manner is ’a3da3m going to rule over all the living things that God made and
pronounced “good” (1:25b)? When the other creatures look upon ’a3da3m as a royal or even
god-like figure, what will they see? A tyrant, an exterminator, a satanic figure? Or will they
15
Note, however, that Ps 8, reflective as it is of Gen 1:26–30, never uses terms like “image” or “likeness,” but
leans more toward “honor” and “glory.” See Barr, op. cit., 12.
16
Terence E. Fretheim, “Creator, Creature, and Co-Creation in Genesis 1–2,” WW, Supplement Series 1 (1992):
11-20, esp. 15.
experience the ruling hand of ’a3da3m as something as tender and gentle as that of their
Creator?
This is where syntax comes into play. For a number of years now, critical scholarship
has been in general agreement that the “dominion” which God assigns to the first tiny
human community over all the creatures of land, sea and air flows from the “image” of God
that God places within ’a3da3m alone of all the creatures. This flow is best seen if the con-
junction wa3w that introduces the clause “and let them have dominion” is construed not as
the coordinating conjunction “and” but as a subordinating conjunction; “so that.” The
Hebrew vocalization would support this proposal. The result would be a purpose clause
that could be translated: “Let us make ’a3da3m in our image, according to our likeness, so that
they may have dominion. . . .” Although the NRSV reading implies it, too, this reading would
make very clear the source of the “dominion” or hegemony with which God commissions
humankind. They are to exercise their kingly rule within the ecosphere in God’s manner,
the way God would do it. That means treating the creation with tenderness and apprecia-
tion for its intrinsic goodness and beauty. This syntactical understanding trumps the ety-
mological background of the words ra3da3h, and, by analogy, ka3bash, and suggests that in the
Priestly account of the human vocation, meanings consistent with the Creator’s own strong,
universal, but loving “dominion” are intended. A hierarchy there is, and it is to be respected.
“We cannot use as the justification for letting our neighbors starve the argument that we
must first feed the animals in our own house. We cannot let our children be endangered by
wild animals. Human beings have primacy over animals.” However, “the spread of human
beings is inseparably tied to the [caretaking] maintenance of the community of solidarity
with the animals.”17
7. Sexuality. A final issue raised by the key texts themselves is the relationship of human
sexuality to the image of God in us. Does the Priestly notice that God created ’a3da3m in the
binary form of male and female (Gen 1:27, 5:3) imply that God has a sexual nature and that
sexuality itself discloses the divine image? The text is not explicit about this, but strongly
implies that sexuality is conferred on humankind as a separate blessing (1:28 and 9:7), as a
kind of separate implementing action necessary to answer the imperative to “have domin-
ion.”18 Gen 5:1–3 underscores this understanding; there, the binary nature of the ’a3da3m cre-
ated in the “likeness” of God is reiterated, but the transmission of the “image” of Adam to
Seth occurs as a separate event of sexual generation. In summary, then, if we see the image
of the divine in the maleness and femaleness of humankind, it is not in their sexual con-
17
Michael Welker, “Creation and the Image of God: Their Understanding in Christian Tradition and the
Biblical Grounds,” JES 34 (1997): 447.
18
See Phyllis A. Bird, “‘Male and Female He Created Them’: Gen. 1:27b in the Context of the Priestly Account
of Creation,” HTR 74 (1981) 129–59. Bird warns against splitting off the command or blessing of biological repro-
duction in Gen 1:28 from the other aspects of image in vv. 26–27. The image of God is manifested in men and
women enlarging their sphere of “dominion” as they multiply over the face of the earth.
junction per se. That comes as a separate divine authorization of what would in any case be
necessary for survival, multiplication, and dominion. “Image” is manifested in their very
plurality and consequent fellowship.
THE MEANING OF IMAGO DEI
This assessment of the exegetical issues that flow from the key Genesis texts puts us in a
better position to adjudicate among the numerous proposals listed above. Taking account of
as many of the exegetical variables as possible, it seems to me that Karl Barth’s approach
sets us on the best track of any toward understanding and making good contemporary the-
ological use of imago dei. Barth’s position has been elaborated and taken in new directions
by the Canadian theologian, Douglas John Hall.19
Hall divides all the various ways of approaching the meaning of the phrase “image of
God” into two broad categories: “substantialist” understandings and “relational” under-
standing. Substantialists perceive the image of God as embodied in us in some physical,
emotional, or spiritual attribute, some substance or endowment, such as physical appear-
ance, rationality, immortality or freedom. A relational approach, on the other hand, like
that of Barth, “conceives of the imago as an inclination or proclivity occurring within the
relationship.”20 Hall supports this relational understanding because, as he correctly notes, all
the basic notions of biblical belief (shalom, justice, righteousness, love) are relational ones.
They exist only between sentient beings. Following Calvin, he argues that our vocation is
“to respond to [God] in such a way that God may be able to behold himself in [us] as in a
mirror.”21 As you will observe, this fits well with the meaning of the Hebrew word s[elem,
“image,” used here. It is that image that, when one sees it one says, “I know her! I can relate
to him!” The whole burden of Hall’s exploration of the theme of imago dei is to demon-
strate that a right relationship with God yields a right relationship with the rest of the crea-
tures of the world. “Relationship,” says he, “is the essence of this [human] creature’s nature
and vocation.”22
Actually, Gen 1:26–27 and its echoes in 5:1–2 and 9:6 point human relationships in
three directions.23 Of course, human beings are related to their creator, God, who placed the
divine image in them. This we express in worship and in obedience to the covenant will of
God for our lives. Second, we relate to other each other, beginning with the simple fellow-
ship of male and female. This we express in love and loyalty, and often do so sexually.24
Third, we find ourselves in relationship with the animals, plants, and the rest of the created
19
Imaging God: Dominion as Stewardship (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986).
20
Ibid., 98.
21
Citing T. F. Torrance, Calvin’s Doctrine of Man (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1957), 91.
22
Ibid., 107.
23
I owe insight on this triangle of relationships to Alan G. Padgett, “The Image of God in Scripture” (video-
taped lecture on Gen 1:26, 1 Cor 11:7–16 given at Azuza Pacific University, 1993).
24
See Benedict M. Guevin, Christian Anthropology and Sexual Ethics (Lanham, MD: University Press of
America, 2002).
order. The text calls this relationship “dominion.” We best express it in the kind of nurtur-
ing rule done on God’s behalf that is often called “stewardship.”25
Though the literal terminology of the Priestly account in Genesis (“image” and “like-
ness” of God) is used nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible, a broad view of the implications of
this language, construed as a relational concept triangular in shape, suggests that much of
scripture can be viewed through the lens of imago dei. All biblical anthropology turns out
to be theological anthropology, which means that a human being is defined by his or her
relationship with God and God’s other creatures. This view of humankind permeates the
entire Old Testament. The praise of God in the psalms, the codification and acceptance of
the covenant in the Pentateuch, the expressions of human love and love for the created
order in the wisdom writings and elsewhere all invite the reader of scripture to consider
how the inspired writers of the Hebrew canon reflected back to God the divine image in
their narratives, laws, and poems.
I will devote the remainder of this essay to addressing (as Old Testament exegete, not
systematic theologian or homiletician) six imago dei-related issues that arise from time to
time in discussions of the concept.
1. How can the image inhere in us, and yet we remain wholly other than God? Eastern
religion generally and its New Age manifestations in our own culture would have us believe
that “any sense of a division between oneself and others, between oneself and the material
universe, and between oneself and God . . . is an illusion”26 and that complete absorption
into the Absolute is a goal attainable by all. Quaker theology bridges the gulf between
Creator and creature in another way. It recognizes in human beings an Inner Light. Every
soul contains this modicum of God’s own Spirit and energy, known to George Fox and the
other early Friends as “that of God in everyone”, “the seed of Christ”, or “the seed of Light”
(John 1:9). Thanks to this discerning Inner Light, it lies within the power of everyone to
achieve salvation, i.e., to “become” children of God. Genesis 1:26–28 sees our status some-
what differently, according to the relational understanding of imago dei set forth above. In
no way is the distinction between God and humankind minimized or erased. Human
beings are blessed with a capacity to relate to God, neighbor, and world; indeed, we are
invited into fellowship with God and commissioned by God to do godly work in the world.
That work flows from the imago dei in us. God’s image enables the relationship, as Genesis
understands it. However, it is in the nature of relationship that it be reciprocal, that there be
two or more freestanding parties, able and willing to enter into the relationship or free to
25
William P. Brown discusses the biblical “work ethic,” its relationship to imago dei, and its implications for
understanding Qoheleth’s unique discovery of joy in the midst of toil in his essay, “‘Whatever Your Hand Finds to
Do’: Qoheleth’s Work Ethic,” Int 55 (2001): 271–84.
26
Peter Occhiogrosso, The Joy of Sects (New York: Doubleday, 1994), xvii. Recently the position was succinctly
stated by a Richmond convert to modern witchcraft: “I don’t believe we are made in the image of God. We are
God. I am divinity, but so is everybody and everything” (Richmond Times-Dispatch, January 8, 2005, B-7).
say No to it, as well. That truth may be only implicit in Gen 1:26–28, but the free give-and-
take between God and humankind throughout the narrative, historical, and prophetic
books of the Bible demonstrates that the relationship is between two wholly separate and
free parties. The “image” concept may lead us to describe ourselves, tongue-in-cheek, as
“clones of God,” but we are neither bits nor pieces of God, nor participants in the heavenly
council, nor in the great Absolute. We are God’s friends and partners, creatures made by
God out of earth and spirit (Gen 2:7), and given the awesome responsibility of primacy.
2. Can the image be smashed or defaced? Since early times, many Christian theologians
have taken the “fall” recounted in Gen 3 to be the story of the smashing of the mirror, the
irreparable loss of the “image of God” within us. A “fall” and loss of God’s image seemed
necessary in order that the great plot of the Bible, the drama of redemption, could get
underway. No sin, no savior. No smashing of the image in us, no need for the Christ, the
“image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation” through whom “God was pleased
to reconcile to himself all things. . .” (Col 1:15, 20). The Reformed Protestant tradition took
a particularly bleak view of the effects of that fateful afternoon in the garden. The early
Reformation Scots Confession of 1560 makes this loss explicit when it says that by the
transgression of Adam and Eve:
. . . generally known as original sin, the image of God was utterly defaced in man, and he and his
children became by nature hostile to God, slaves of Satan, and servants to sin.27
The Westminster Confession of 1647, still a fundamental standard in many Reformed

Churches around the world, echoes the theme:
From this original corruption, whereby we are utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to
all good, and wholly inclined to all evil, do proceed all actual transgressions.28
The problem with these antithetical juxtapositions of Gen 3 with Gen 1 is that nothing in
either Genesis text suggests that a basic change in human nature, a new anthropology, as it
were, could or did occur in the Garden. Assuming that Gen 3 is from the hand of the
Yahwist and is therefore much earlier than the Priestly first chapter of Genesis, the position
is even more dramatic. Even after centuries of additional theological reflection, the inspired
Priestly writers of Gen 1:26–28 could celebrate more clearly than ever the inalienability of
the divine gift of image to humankind. Indeed, they reiterate the language of “image of
God” in post-fall narratives (i.e., Gen 5:1b–2, 9:6). Sin and rage, human frailty and per-
verseness can obscure or distort the capacity—indeed, the inborn need—for relationships
with God, people, and the world around us. That cannot be doubted. But human nature,
27
“The Scots Confession,” ch. III. Actually, this view differs very little from that expressed in the 1546 “Decree
Concerning Original Sin” of the Roman Catholic counter-reformation Council of Trent.
28
Westminster Confession VI, 4.
shaped in the divine image, remains constant. That is the biblical witness.
3. Does the image develop within us or change over time, then? Do we manifest it further
with the maturation of faith? If “image” is an innate propensity toward relationship, that
capacity would, in the Priestly view, presumably always be present from childhood to matu-
rity as a fundamental element of biblical anthropology. This is not to say that apotheosis—
rising to divine status—is possible. This is not implied in Gen 1:26–28 or anywhere else in
the Bible. The mantra of Hebrew wisdom literature is this: “The fear of the Lord is the
beginning of knowledge” (Prov 1:7a). This teaching emphasizes the abiding gulf between
Creator and creature. “‘Fear of the Lord’ is the deeply sane recognition that we are not
God.”29
At the same time, scripture does not deny that the imago dei is displayed in individuals
and communities differently as maturation, experience, or character-building take place.
The sages of Israel understood this, too, when they continued their mantra with a sum-
mons to their pupils to the discipline of their elders and obedience to God’s torah: “Fools
despise wisdom and instruction” (Prov 1:7b). Accepting correction and teaching does not
mean settling for static personhood. On the contrary, because God is a living God, and “we
are made in God’s image, we are not ‘making ourselves up’ as we go along.”30 It would be
better to say that we continually draw upon that proclivity that, according to Genesis,
inalienably exists in human nature and we enact it—less than perfectly to be sure, except by
the man from Nazareth—in varying degrees of fullness.
In his commentary on Job31, Gerald Janzen suggests that maturation in the mind of Job
of the concept of the “image of God” is intrinsic to the solution of the book. Job has to get
over the tendency to instruct God in the requirements of justice as he and his community
understand justice.
The dilemma of Job points to the challenge and the difficulty in the human vocation to live as
the image of God—which, in this connection, means to take our human concerns for justice and
conceptions of justice seriously, as imaging divine concerns, and to recognize that God’s justice is
not reducible to our conceptions of it.32
As the Book of Job reaches its denouement, Job understands that as one who images
God, his life, too, will have to reflect the nature of God’s rule, with its tolerance for wild-
ness, chaos, freedom, and suffering. Janzen contends that as creature (“dust and ashes”)
humankind is “challenged to take up the divine image through engagement with the partly
determinate, partly indeterminate character of the world.”33
29
Ellen Davis, Getting Involved With God. Rediscovering the Old Testament (Boston: Cowley, 2001), 103.
30
Ibid., 100.
31
Job (IBC; Atlanta: John Knox, 1985).
32
Ibid., 242.
33
Ibid., 257.
4. What is the implication of the relational concept of imago dei for animals? The Bible
gives many tender and wonderful glimpses of the Sovereign’s own care for the world, from
which we lieutenants can extrapolate our own best behaviors toward our fellow creatures.
Four things on earth are small,
but they are exceedingly wise:
the ants are a people not strong,
yet they provide their food in the summer;
the badgers are a people not mighty,
yet they make their homes in the rocks;
the locusts have no king,
yet all of them march in rank;
the lizard you can take in your hands,
yet it is in kings’ palaces. (Prov 30:24–28)
The entire Wisdom tradition of Israel is full of observations of nature, as was wisdom
literature throughout the ancient Near East. Onomastica—lists of natural phenomena—
occur in Egypt, Babylon, and even in the Hebrew Bible (e.g., Prov. 30:18–31). The biblical
writers were keen observers and appreciators of natural phenomena. They saw excellences
even in the lowliest of creatures: in the ant’s prudence, the badger’s survival instincts, the
locusts’ social organization, and the neat way that the little gecko lizard with its big black
eyes has of sneaking into the royal precincts. The message of the sages to us is this: If you
are going to reign on God’s behalf in the world, as God’s chief ministers, then for pity’s
sake, do it the way God would do it. Display the image of God in you. Do it with wonder
and pleasure and tenderness. Do it with respect for the creatures and their individual com-
petencies. Do it aware that if they cease to exist, we too are impoverished and maybe even
we cease to exist.
In the speeches that Yahweh delivers to Job out of the whirlwind (Job, chs. 38–41), the
Lord presents a list of animate and inanimate creatures. The Lord first claims divine sover-
eignty over rain and snow, light and darkness, clouds and dew, constellations and the orders
of the heavens. Then Yahweh focuses down to the wilderness familiar to ancient Israel and
speaks admiringly of mountain goats, wild asses and oxen, hawks and eagles, and even the
incredibly stupid ostrich who crushes her eggs as she bungles around and yet, “When she
rouses herself to flee, she laughs at the horse and its rider” (Job 39:18, RSV). Climactically,
Yahweh then directs Job’s attention to the monsters, Behemoth and Leviathan. All wild
creatures pose threats to humankind, but these are the wildest of the wild. Though their
footprints lead out of the swamps of myth where they were doubtless enemies of God, in
Job they are simply the most grotesque and unlovable monsters of the land and sea respec-
tively. But Yahweh loves them, “Shreks” that they are, for they are the most fearfully won-
derful of all the works of creation.
Aware that the animals experience us as gods, our task is to enact God’s image in us
and to announce to the natural orders of the world, to the water and the air and the wild
things, “We bring a new respect to our relationship with you. We seek with you a genuine
encounter.” We owe the creatures an outpouring of charity, providential in the sense that is
knows no bounds, is out of control rather than selective, and does not know where to stop
until it includes all of creation. We seek the long-term discipline of stewardship, which
learns how to do things right so that our skills really enhance life round us.
5. What does the concept “image of God” say about biblical anthropology overall? If the
image inheres in all of us as a gift of the Creator and distinguishes us from the other crea-
tures of the world, and if human beings alone are invited into personal relationship with
God and that relationship empowers human beings to exercise rule in the earth, then we
are dealing with a very high view of human nature indeed! That stress is appropriate,
because as is so often pointed out, the Bible story begins in Gen 1 and not in Gen 3.
Although the gift of the image transcends the folly in the Garden and the mirror is never
smashed, theology and piety have often devoted more time to bemoaning the utter inability
of human beings to do good and to display the divine image within them than to celebrat-
ing the positive evaluation of human beings that the Bible gives. Secular science, too, when
it explores the evolution of homo sapiens from earlier life-forms, prefers to speak rather
coolly about random chance as the force driving the process rather than about divine pur-
pose. Gen 1, in contrast, invites us to celebrate who we are, whatever the physical mecha-
nisms may have been that got us here. In fact, the entire Old Testament gives us every rea-
son to acknowledge the primacy of human beings in the created order and our extraordi-
nary status “a little lower than God.” (Ps 8:5)
But primacy is no cause for arrogance, as the Priestly writer and the psalmist present it.
Rather it is an ascent to the position of God's steward. It is to serve as a mediator and a
conduit of goodness and health between the Source of goodness and the good creation. It is
the kind of tender, sensitive care for the world that is so richly exemplified in the writings of
that paleontologist and student of human evolution, Loren Eiseley. This man’s acknowl-
edgement of the preeminence of the human species among all the other creatures is
matched by his tender admiration for the eye of a frog that he catches, peering up from a
pond. This eye, more marvelous and complex in its evolution than all mechanical inven-
tions of humankind, leads Eiseley to adjure us human observers:
This is the most enormous extension of vision of which life is capable: the projection of itself
into other lives. This is the lonely, magnificent power of humanity. It is far more than any spatial
adventure, the supreme epitome of the reaching out.34
6. How far does this concept warrant us to “play God,” that is, to do God-like things such
as travel in space, listen for the “big bang,” or exterminate species? We are not gods, we are not
god-like, we are not even good much of the time. The full context of the canon of scripture
contains plenty of warnings about our capacity to make the moral choice of evil, even to
the extreme of crucifying our own Lord. It assures us of our need for repentance and
renewal of our three-fold relationship with God, each other, and the world. Yet, Genesis tells
us that we have a high, God-given vocation, to exercise dominion in the earth the way God
would do it. We are the prime ministers of the King of the Universe. We play Joseph to
God's Pharaoh. We recognize the limitations on our power, including the denial of any
right to “play God” (i.e., making arrogant claims of autonomy, engaging in genocide and
specie-cide, introducing pathogens and pollutants, proceeding without restraint and humil-
ity in such technologies as cloning or genetic engineering of foods, ruling with ruthless
autocracy, and the like). We are free to administer the creation for the general good, but not
to violate the orders put in place by the Creator. Right relationships imply space and free-
dom for the alligator and the ostrich, and shalom, that state of mutual help and respect,
between us and the forests and minerals of the earth.
Our future possibilities in this “dominion” that flows from God's image in us are bril-
liant, if we don't blow it. God put no boundaries on the positive mandate, save those inher-
ent in our creatureliness. When the psalmist looked up at the night sky, he cried, “The heav-
ens are telling the glory of God, and the firmament declares his handiwork.” (Ps 19:1) But
now, in the exercise of the dominion God has given us, we've been part way there, looked
back at our beautiful blue-green globe, and looked beyond the earth at galaxies by the mil-
lions. We’ve even sent probes out into the void, announcing our willingness to be friends.
Like our eyes, our ears, too, every day, are enlarging the scope of our leadership role within
the created order. The psalmist continued, “Day to day pours forth speech and night to
night declares knowledge.” (Ps 19:2) Now we can train our instruments on the very edge of
space and time and hear, we are told, the faint echo of the Big Bang itself. At the other
34
The Immense Journey (New York: Random House, 1946; repr. Time-Life Books, 1962), 33.
extreme of our new-found skills we have counted up all the genes that make us human and
are poised to correct some of the ones that have gone wrong.
In short, the Genesis assessment that we human beings are made in the image of God
and that from a right relationship with God flows nurturing “dominion” in the world
launches us aright. We neither are God’s clones nor are we “miserable offenders,” wholly
incapable of good. We are God’s creatures and chosen partners in the work of the creation.
We are given ever greater opportunity to be bearers of the divine image, that is, positive,
responsible stewards in the world, until the day that God makes all things new.

Keeping It Real
The Image of God in the New Testament
DEBORAH KRAUSE
Associate Professor of New Testament
Eden Theological Seminary
The image of God in the New Testament represents a mix of traditions from
the Hebrew Bible, early Judaism, and Hellenistic popular philosophy.
Throughout these traditions the theme is integrally connected to the search
for meaning in human existence. The Priestly Writer, Philo, and Paul under-
stood the image of God as a means of both affirming God’s sovereign
authority over all creation and addressing the challenges of competing
authorities in the world. Study of the theme provides a window into early
Christian experience and how such experience emboldened Christians to fol-
low Jesus in the proclamation of the Kingdom of God.
“Bring me a denarius and let me see it.” And they brought one. Then he said to them,
“Whose head is this, and whose title?” And they answered, “The emperor’s.” Jesus said to
them, “Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s and to God the things that
are God’s.” And they were utterly amazed at him.
Mark 12:15b–17
JESUS THE SAGE
Say what you will about the composed Johannine Jesus or the forceful apocalyptic
Jesus, I have always been most compelled by Jesus the sage who disarms everyone with wit
and wisdom. The quintessential example of Jesus’ wisdom in the synoptic gospel tradition
is the episode in Mark 12:13–17 and particularly where Jesus is confronted by a group of
antagonists (posing as friends) who challenge him about whether it is lawful to pay taxes to
the emperor or not. In response to their question, Jesus asks to see a coin. In recording this
sign–act, the gospel writers portray Jesus as deeply engaging in a socio–political–economic
matter, and yet soaring above all that embedded particularity, Jesus delivers a pronoune-
ment about ultimate things. When Jesus asks whose image (eiko3n) and inscription are on
the coin, he strides confidently beyond the territory of paying taxes and into the territory of
ultimate existence. The coin with Caesar’s image attests to the reality and power of Caesar.
It belongs to his empire and his world. Caesar may put his image on certain things, Jesus
says, but the things that are God’s, namely all things in creation, belong to God. Those who
seek to trap Jesus hope to engage him in a legal dispute between Torah and empire, but
Jesus’ response moves the question to theological ground. His response is that of a philoso-
pher raising questions of existence. In whose image are we made? To whom do we belong?
What is reality? I have always imagined this Jesus ending the scene by flipping the coin back
to its owner with a wink and the quip “for the troops.” In the midst of the fray, Jesus
remains centered in what is true about reality and what is ultimately important. No won-
der, as the gospel writers record, his opponents were amazed at him.
THE IMAGE OF GOD
Jesus’ wisdom with the coin stands in the midst of a complex mix of traditions within
the Hebrew Bible, Early Judaism, and Hellenistic popular philosophy about the image of
God. For Jews and Greeks, the question of God’s image in relation to God’s creation of
humankind and the world was an important concern. In the Hebrew Bible, the Priestly
writer articulates this concern in his story of the creation in Genesis 1:26–27. In the Greek
philosophical tradition, perhaps not too distant from the historical period of the Priestly
writer, Plato (4th century B.C.E.) engages the questions of creation and the relation of mat-
ter to its maker. In the Timaeus (92c), Plato describes the relationship between the ultimate
cause of matter (God) and creation as the relationship of “image” (eiko3n, 92c).1 For Plato it
is clear that the created world bears the image of its creator. In the popular philosophical
traditions of early Jewish scriptural exegesis, Philo of Alexandria interpreted Genesis 1–2 in
his treatises De opificio mundi and Legum allegoriae through the lens of Middle Platonic
thought.2 Not surprisingly, his examination of the relationship between God and humans
focuses on the notion of image (eiko3n) and how the relationship between God and humans
is to be precisely understood (e.g., Opif. 69–71).3 In the New Testament literature, the lega-
cies of both Israel’s scriptural traditions regarding God’s image and Greek philosophical
thought are richly evident. From the Jesus logion regarding the coin, to Paul’s meditation
on the heads of men and women (1 Cor 11: 7) and the veil of Moses (2 Cor 3:7–18), to the
deutero-Pauline school’s Christological hymn celebrating Christ as the image of the invisi-
1
I am indebted to my colleague Stephen J. Patterson, for referring me to Plato’s Timaeus and the scriptural
interpretation of Philo of Alexandria with regard to the theme of the image of God. Professor Patterson’s current
scholarship on the Gospel of Thomas (Hermeneia, Fortress, forthcoming) involves an exploration of the image of
God in the wisdom traditions of Early Judaism and Early Christianity.
2
Thomas H. Tobin, The Creation of Man: Philo and the History of Interpretation (CBQMS, 14; Washington,
D.C.: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1983).
3
Ibid., 56–77.
ble God (eiko3n, Col 1:15), to the declarations of John the Seer about those who worship the
image of the beast (e.g., Rev 15:2) the issue of the image of God in the New Testament
reflects a theological and philosophical struggle with some of the most important questions
of human existence. Who are we as humans, and to whom do we ultimately belong?
GOD’S IMAGE IN THE HEBREW BIBLE
Gerhard Kittel’s edited volumes of New Testament word studies, Theological Dictionary
of the New Testament, are tainted by Kittel’s own commitments to National Socialism and
Hitler’s demonic, fascist rule.4 However, it must be noted that the essays are variously
authored and some contain remarkably deft discussions of the etymological and interpre-
tive histories of New Testament terms with great sensitivity to Israel’s scripture and early
Jewish interpretation. Gerhard von Rad’s essay on the term “image” (eiko3n) in the Old
Testament is an important example. In his discussion of “divine likeness,” von Rad discerns
the complexity of Israel’s scriptural tradition regarding theological anthropology and parses
out a distinctive theological source in understanding the concept of the image of God. He
identifies the distinctive source of Israel’s theological anthropology as the Priestly tradition,
the source that many Protestant German interpreters (including, presumably, Kittel him-
self) disparaged as “late” and thereby suspect for its “Jewish” influence.5
The central point of Old Testament anthropology is that man is dust and ashes before God and
that he cannot stand before his holiness. Thus the witness to man’s divine likeness plays no pre-
dominant role in the OT. It stands as it were on the margin of the whole complex. Yet it is highly
significant that OT faith adopted this theologoumenon in dealing with the mystery of man’s origin.6
In his reference to standing “as it were on the margin of the whole complex,” von Rad
points to the tradition of the Priestly writer in Genesis 1. This tradition provides an impor-
tant theological counterpoint to the canonically pervasive prohibition of making images of
God (e.g., Ex. 20:4, Deut. 5:8) in light of God’s ineffability and sovereignty (e.g., Ex. 20:21,
Deut. 4:15, 1 Kings 8:12) and the human propensity to idolatry (e.g., Hosea 8:4). God is the
creator––not humans. Standing at the nexus of Israel’s devastating loss in the exile and the-
fragile hope of returning to Jerusalem, the Priestly writer offers the hopeful claim that God
is sovereign over all creation and has made humankind in God’s image.
Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind (’a3da3m) in our image (s[elem), according to our like-
ness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over
the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps
4
Robert P. Ericksen, “Assessing the Heritage: German Protestant Theologians, Nazis and the ‘Jewish Question,’”
in Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust (ed. Robert P. Ericksen and Susannah Heschel; Minneapolis:
Augsburg Fortress, 1999), 33-37.
5
Deborah Krause and Timothy K. Beal, “Higher Critics on Late Texts: Reading the Bible after the Holocaust,”
in A Shadow of Glory: Reading the New Testament after the Holocaust (ed. Tod Linafelt; New York: Routledge, 2002),
18-26.
6
G. von Rad, “eiko3n,” TDNT 2:391.
upon the earth. So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.’ (Gen 1:26–27)
According to the Priestly writer, God’s human creatures bear both the blessing and lim-
itation of being made in God’s image. Their origin and nature are bound to God, but as
creatures they are not the creator. When these roles are confused, as the Priestly writer knew
well, disastrous consequences ensued.
Von Rad notes that an important aspect of the Priestly writer’s understanding of the
image of God in humankind is that humans do not look like God physically, but rather
have the nature of God’s spirit (noted also in the Yahwist’s account of human creation in
Gen. 2:7) within them.While this is a minority view of theological anthropology in the
Hebrew Bible, there are other references. In a rare reference to the notion of humans in
God’s image, the Psalmist declares:
Yet you have made them a little lower than God,

and crowned them with glory and honor.
You have given them dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under their feet,
all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field,
the birds of the air, the fish of the sea,
whatever passes along the paths of the seas. (Ps 8:5–8)
The Psalmist is audacious to assign “glory” (ka3bôd) to human creatures. Such is most
often reserved for God within the Psalter. The opening of Psalm 8 is a good example: “O
Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory
above the heavens.” (Ps. 8:1) In Ps 8:5, however, in keeping with Gen. 1:27–28, God’s glory
is said to reside in humankind.
In their meditations on the image of God, the Psalmist and the Priestly writers present
early Jewish interpreters with grist to explore the divine–human relationship. In the cultur-
ally diverse context of the late centuries B.C.E. and early centuries C.E., interpreters such as
Philo, the apostle Paul, John the Seer, and the Gospel writers engaged Israel’s various tradi-
tions regarding the image of God in order to reflect on the ultimate questions of God’s real-
ity and human existence.
P H I L O A N D E A R LY J E W I S H S C R I P T U R A L I N T E R P R E TAT I O N
No writer of the late first century B.C.E. and early first century C.E. is more representa-
tive of the cultural diversity of Hellenism than Philo of Alexandria. As a pious and commit-
ted Jew, Philo engaged in fierce apologetics for his people and their right to worship, self-
rule, and assembly in Alexandria Egypt under Roman Imperial domination (Legatio ad
Gaium; In Flaccum). As a student of Middle Platonism and popular philosophy, Philo
engaged in his interpretation of Israel’s scripture with zeal for allegorical interpretation and
Platonic values that influenced centuries of Christian theologians including Origen,
Augustine, and many others. Philo of Alexandria was a thoroughgoing monotheistic Jewish
Middle Platonist. His writings represent well the close connection between Judaism and
Hellenism in the late centuries B.C.E. and early centuries C.E.
One of Philo’s most cherished topics of interpretation was the question of the creation
of humankind in God’s image from Gen 1–2. For a philosopher and an interpreter of
Israel’s scriptural tradition such as Philo, no other topic held such promise for understand-
ing what is of ultimate importance for human existence, the nature of what it means to be
human, and the relation of the creature to the creator. Philo’s scriptural interpretation was
influenced by Plato’s speculation on physics, the natural world, and the relationship of the
physical world to its maker in the Timaeus.
The most thorough scholarly examination in English of Philo’s exploration of the

theme of the image of God is Thomas Tobin’s The Creation of Man: Philo and the History of
Interpretation.7 In this study Tobin examines Philo’s commentary on Gen 1:26–27 and Gen
2:7 in several of his writings. Rather than seeing these verses as parts of two distinct
accounts, Philo reconciles them as if they belonged to a single account of the two stages of
the creation of humankind. The first stage is the creation of the human mind or reason
(nous/logos) in God’s image (Gen 1:26–27); the second is the creation of corporeal humani-
ty, as detailed in God’s scooping up mud from the ground and fashioning a creature of
earth (’a3da3m, Gen 2:7). As Tobin notes, Philo is not systematic in his interpretation of these
texts, and throughout his various writings he treats these ideas in different ways. Tobin sug-
gests that the reason for Philo’s ambiguity about the relation of the image of God to human
creation may be his Hellenistic cultural commitment to challenge anthropomorphic
descriptions of the divine.8 In this sense, Philo’s interpretations of Gen 1:27–28 and Gen 2:7
bear apologetic concerns rooted in his cultural context and not found in the scriptural
texts. The following interpretation of Gen 1:26–27 and Gen 2:7 illustrates the complexity of
7
Tobin, op. cit.
8
Ibid., 36ff.
Philo’s understanding of the image of God and the creation of humankind:.

After this he says that “God fashioned man by taking clay from the earth, and breathed into his
face the breath of life” (Gen 2:7). By this also he shows very clearly that there is an immense dif-
ference between the man now fashioned and the one created earlier after the image of God. For
the molded man is sense–perceptible, partaking already of specific quality, framed of body and
soul, man, or woman, by nature mortal; whereas he that was after the image was an idea or genus
or seal, intelligible, incorporeal, neither male nor female, imperishable by nature.9
For Philo, it is not the whole person, body and soul, that is created in the image of
God. To Philo (and to von Rad!) that would be to make God in our own image. Only the
inner divine element that is implanted in the human being bears God’s image. Philo names
this element variously. Most frequently he calls it “mind” (nous) following Plato. But he also
calls it “reason” (logos), “thought” (dianoia), or “spirit” (pneuma). As Philo sees it, God is
present to us in moments of spiritual depth, contemplation, and careful thought. The image
of God is imprinted on humanity’s greatest gift from God: the imagination.
In the same Hellenistic milieu, texts such as The Wisdom of Solomon and Sirach show
the breadth of Jewish concern with the theme of the image of God. Like the Logos in some
of Philo’s interpretation, the role of wisdom (sophia) is understood as the intermediary
between God and humanity in creation. The Wisdom of Solomon declares, “With you is
wisdom, she who knows your works and was present when you made the world” (Wis
9:9a). The creative presence of wisdom guides humanity in its dominion over creation (Wis
6:3ff). Wisdom is “a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and
an image of his goodness” (Wis 7:26). Wisdom is the knowledge of God’s will that corrects
and enlightens fallible human reasoning (Wis 9:15). These claims about wisdom derive
from Gen 1:27–28 in concert with Hellenistic philosophical concerns for understanding the
relationship between the mortal and the immortal, the finite and the infinite, in human
existence.
With Philo and other early Jewish writers, we can see how their interpretation of the
image of God was linked with Hellenistic popular philosophy to understand the nature of
reality and to define the meaning of human existence. Such analogues are invaluable in
identifying and appreciating the various ways in which Paul, the deutero–Pauline writers,
and the gospel writers engage the theme of the image of God as they struggle to relate the
gospel of Jesus Christ to human existence.
9
De opificio mundi 135 (Philo of Alexandria [trans. David Winston; Ramsey, NJ: Paulist, 1981], 103.)
T H E I M A G E O F G O D I N T H E N E W T E S TA M E N T A N D O T H E R E A R LY
CHRISTIAN TEXTS
As with the scriptural tradition of early Judaism, there are two predominant ways in
which the image of God is used in the New Testament. One, evident throughout Revelation
in the phrase “image of the beast,” expresses the prohibition against idolatry. The other,
seen in 1 and 2 Corinthians and in the deutero–Pauline epistle to the Colossians, is in keep-
ing with the philosophical speculation based on Gen 1:27–28 in the writings of Philo. In the
Gospels, Jesus never speaks directly about the image of God. However, the logion on the
coin and taxes may involve an engagement of both the idolatry prohibition and the philo-
sophical understanding of God’s image.While the text does not portray Jesus as meditating
on the nature of human existence using the image of God theme, the gospel accounts of his
preaching and teaching about the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven do preserve a
near corollary.
Within Revelation the use of the term “image” (eiko3n) reflects the prohibition of
images found in Deut 5:8 and Ex 20:4. John refers to the image of the beast seven times in
the text. In each reference John, in his apocalyptic worldview, divides those who worship
the Lamb (Jesus Christ) from those who worship the image of the beast. For John, the
image of the beast is the mark of Roman imperial rule and economic oppression. Like the
author of the Apocalypse, Philo in his political writings describes early Jewish struggles
with the image of the emperor and specifically with the ruler cult, both in Gaius Caligula’s
maniacal drive to erect his image in the Jerusalem Temple (Legatio ad Gaium 188), and in
the erection of ruler images in Diaspora synagogues (In Flaccum 41).10 For John, markets,
governments, synagogues, and churches are susceptible to the power of imperial presence.
The purpose of John’s vision is to urge his audience to stand fast in their worship and obe-
dience to God and to resist the image of the beast. In this sense, the image of the beast is a
representation for John of all that stands in opposition to the glory of God.
The use of the term eiko3n in the epistles of Paul and writers in the Pauline tradition
differs greatly from the way John uses the term in the Apocalypse. Drawing on the creation
story of Gen 1:27–28, Paul displays many similarities to Philo’s Middle Platonic under-
standing of eiko3n. Rather than referring to an idol symbolizing an oppressive power, the
image of God in Paul describes the intimate relationship between God and God’s human
creatures. For example, in 1 Cor 11:7 Paul argues that men in the congregation should not
cover their heads because they are the “image and reflection of God.” The use of the term
10
Kleinknecht, “eiko4n,” TDNT 2:388.
“image” clearly connects to Gen. 1:26–27 and the creation of humankind in God’s image.
As Paul continues his argument about men and women and head coverings, however, he
moves from the celebration of humankind’s unity with God to a delineation of the hierar-
chical differences between men and women in creation. Rather than being based in an exe-
gesis of Gen 1:27–28, this prioritizing of men over women appears to be drawn from Paul’s
understanding of Gen. 2:7–23.While I would argue with Paul’s exegesis of that passage, his
characterization of Corinthian males as examples of the image of God is an allusion to Gen
1:27–28. It affirms that God’s presence and purpose are immanent in human experience.
Another passage in which Paul engages the notion of image in relation to the divine-
human relationship is 2 Cor 3–5. In 3:18 Paul summarizes his confidence in Christ (2 Cor
3:4) with his challenging meditation on Moses’ veil (Exod 34:31–35) by declaring, “And all
of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are
being transformed into the same image (eiko3n) from one degree of glory to another.” Paul’s
use of the term “image” draws upon Gen 1:27–28 and Hellenistic philosophy to describe
what it means for the Corinthians to be “in Christ.” To be in the image of God, as he
explains in 2 Cor 5:16–17, is to be a new creation. The Spirit of Christ enables the
Corinthians to see the glory of God and to be transformed into God’s image. For Paul, as
for Philo, this new creation (based in Gen. 1:27–28) is not of the physical human being as
in Gen 2:7. As Paul says in 2 Cor 5:16, “From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a
human point of view.” Rather, God’s creation (or, for Paul, God’s new creation) involves the
“Spirit of Christ” and refers to a spiritual re–creation. The two-stage understanding of the
creation of humankind in God’s image seen in Philo’s De opificio mundi and reflective of
Middle Platonism seems to be at work in Paul’s understanding of the new creation in Christ
Jesus.
Paul’s use of the Genesis creation tradition is intended to explain the nature of the new
life in Christ. It is an explanation deeply informed by Paul’s understanding of God’s creative
activity and how human beings in Christ know God, albeit in a fragile way. As Paul notes,
“. . . we have this treasure in clay jars” (2 Cor 4:7). The concept of the image of God from
Gen 1:27–28 helps Paul delineate what is real about the experience of God in Christ Jesus. It
enables Paul to describe the glory of God he knows in Christ in the midst of the “clay” of
everyday human existence. Theologically, this clay reality of human existence underscores
the relationship between God as creator and humankind as God’s creatures made from
“clay.” As Paul says, “. . . we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that
this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us” (2 Cor 4:7).
Following Paul, the writer of Colossians presents a hymn in which God’s image
describes the relationship between God the Creator and Christ. In this hymn, Christ is the
image of God and he is the firstborn of all creation (Col. 1:15). The writer of Colossians
depicts Christ as the first part of a two-stage creation. He is, as in Plato’s Timaeus, the image
of the “intelligible” (namely, the eternal and invisible) God.11 As the firstborn of creation,
Christ is the one through whom all other things were created. As with other early Jewish
interpretations of Gen 1:27–28, this text reflects a very specific understanding of the rela-
tionship between the divine and the human in the order of creation. For the writer of
Colossians, Jesus Christ is the glue that holds all things together (“. . . and in him all things
hold together.” (Col 1:17) This relationship is the means to redemption in which the old self
is stripped off and the new self is put on and “is renewed in knowledge according to the
image (eiko3n) of its creator.” (Col 3:10) For Paul and his interpreters this putting on of the
new self (ritualized in the practice of baptism) was the means to a new creation. This new
creation in God’s image brought about a new way of being human in which there is “no
longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female,” (Gal 3:28) and “there is no longer
Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Sythian, slave and free; but
Christ is all and in all.” (Col 3:11) For Paul and his interpreters this is what is real about
being in Christ and having the mind of Christ. This is what it means to be in the image of
God.
Amidst the early Jewish and Christian interpretation of the image of God in the cre-
ation of humankind, one may wonder if these speculations influenced traditions about
Jesus. The canonical gospels yield scant direct evidence that Jesus referred to the image of
God in his preaching. Jesus refers directly to traditions about creation only in his teaching
on divorce (Mark 10:2–9). In the extra–canonical tradition of the Gospel of Thomas, how-
ever, there are several sayings attributed to Jesus that engage the theme of the image of God.
These sayings reveal that in some quarters Jesus was understood to have used the image of
God in much the same manner as Philo and Paul and his interpreters. In these sayings the
image refers to those aspects of humanity that relate to the realm of the “sensible,” as Plato
would name it. The images belong to the realm of the eternal. In the Gospel of Thomas,
Jesus points to that eternal realm as another reality in which God’s ultimate presence and
purpose dwell. The promise of this reality is eternal joy with God for those who are able to
see.
Jesus said, “When you see your likeness, you are happy. But when you see your images that came
into being before you and that neither die nor become visible, how much you will have to bear!
(GTh 84).12
11
Francis M Cornford, Plato’s Timaeus (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1959), 92 C.
12
“The Gospel of Thomas,” in The Complete Gospels (2nd ed.; ed. Robert Miller; trans. Stephen J. Patterson and
Marvin Meyer; Sonoma, CA: Polebridge, 2nd edition, 1994).
Although the canonical gospels do not portray Jesus reflecting directly on the image of
God, they do present him as a preacher and a teacher of an alternative way. The most char-
acteristic theme of this teaching in the canonical traditions is the kingdom of God. “The
kingdom of God has come near,” proclaims Jesus (Mark 1:15). This kingdom breaks the
authority of the powers and principalities and teaches God’s gracious provision (Mark 4:8;
6:30–44; 8:1–10) in the midst of the world’s stingy greed. This kingdom provides both the
courage to withstand the demonic and death-dealing powers of Caesar’s kingdom and the
assurance that the eternal realm of the creator to whom the whole world belongs is the real
world. Jesus stands asking for a coin. Holding the material image of Caesar in his hand,
Jesus winks. Through his questions he teaches quite plainly that what this coin represents is
puny. It bears the image of a temporal kingdom. Caesar’s kingdom has no ultimate value.
There is another reality, God’s reality, and humankind created by God bears the image of
the creator of all that is real. God’s children owe their creator for the whole creation. That is
what is real.
I H E A R T H E C L E A R B U T FA R O F F H Y M N
Throughout history God’s people have been sustained by the knowledge that they are
created in the image of God. In spite of the world’s cruelty and pain, they know beauty and
great joy. Although believers live in the flesh, they also live in the spirit in the presence and
wisdom of God. This is a mystical tradition that points to things that are not always seen in
everyday life, but are glimpsed in the power of God’s spirit with the internal eye of the
human soul. While deeply mystical, the traditions about God’s reality and the divine-
human relationship are not simple flights of fancy. As we see in the teaching of Jesus with
the coin, these traditions empower us to live out our faith in God in the midst of powers
that compete for our allegiance. As we see in the baptismal practice of Paul and his church-
es, these traditions encourage us to live as God’s new creation in Jesus Christ—neither Jew
nor Greek, slave or free, male and female—in the midst of a world where hierarchical and
oppressive divisions are all too real.
The wisdom and power of this vision of reality are captured beautifully in the 19th-
century hymn “My Life Flows on in Endless Song.” In the hymn, Robert Lowry gives voice
to the paradox of living as God’s new creation in Jesus Christ in the midst of this world.
The human soul, Lowry suggests in the tradition of the Priestly writer, Plato, Philo, and
Paul, is attuned to the song of God in the world. While this truth does not deny the reality
of suffering and pain, it does offer us the courage to know to whom we really belong.
My life flows on in endless song,
above earth’s lamentation.
I hear the clear, though far off hymn
that hails a new creation.
Refrain:
No storm can shake my inmost calm
while to that Rock I’m clinging.
Since love is Lord of heaven and earth,
how can I keep from singing?
Through all the tumult and the strife,

I hear that music ringing.
It finds an echo in my soul.
How can I keep from singing?
(Refrain)
What though my joys and comforts die?

I know my Savior liveth.
What though the darkness gather round?
Songs in the night he giveth.
(Refrain)
The peace of Christ makes fresh my heart,

a fountain ever springing!
All things are mine since I am his!
How can I keep from singing?
(Refrain)13
13
Text, Robert Lowry, 1826–1899; Music, Robert Lowry.

Which Way Is Up?

An Experiment in Christian Theology and
Modern Cosmology
DOUGLAS F. OTTATI
M. E. Pemberton Professor of Theology
Union-PSCE
Our theological pictures of God, the world, and ourselves some-

times change in order to take account of scientific findings,
ideas, and beliefs. How might they alter in response to recent
ideas about the cosmos and the place of us humans in it?
W hich way is up? Most often, you and I answer this question in a rather
immediate frame of reference. “Up” is above me. “Down” is below, the
direction in which things fall. But, of course, on our modern picture of
Earth and the cosmos, this answer is, at best, local and conventional. If I travel downwards
far enough, I will “come up” on the other side of the globe. If I keep going, I will travel “up”
into the sky.
A number of our forebears would have been shocked and confused at these statements.
Time was when many people envisioned themselves at the center of a three-layered cosmos
—really, a cosmos made up of three parallel planes: heaven above, earth in the middle, and
hell or the “underworld” below. On this picture (as well as some others), up was always up
and down was always down, no matter how far you went. What’s more, there were theologi-
cal implications. For many, heaven, the eternal habitation of both God and the blessed, was
a physical place above the clouds. Hell, the eternal habitation of the damned, was a physical
place below the (middle) earth.1
The heterodox Roman Catholic, Hans Küng, points out that “the naïve anthropomor-
phic notion of a heaven above the clouds is now impossible for us. God does not dwell . . .
1
My intention here is only to indicate a picture that was upheld with variations by a number of Christians and
often thought to accord with biblical views. Today, many scholars think it wrong to speak of the biblical picture of
the world. Claus Westermann says P, the writer(s) of Gen 1, works with a variety of received myths and stories, and
is not bound to any one description of creation. Indeed, with respect to P, “it is not really appropriate to speak of
a world picture.” See Genesis 1–11: A Commentary (trans. John J. Scullion, S. J.; Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1984),
20–21, 115-19. Others say Hebrew thinking about the cosmos was a mythopoeic collection of disparate images and
ideas. R. A. Muller, “World,” ISBE 4:1112–13, says the three-leveled picture (the heavens, the earth, and the lower
regions) should not be understood rigidly. Thus, the gods dwell in the heavens, but even the “highest heaven” can-
not contain God (1 Kgs 8:27; 2 Chron 6:18; Neh 9:6). The heavens can pass away like a garment, but God endures
forever (Ps 102:26).
in a local or spatial sense ‘above’ the world [or] in a ‘world above.’” In fact, he says, we have
been beyond the clouds and, for us, “the heaven of faith is not the heaven of the astro-
nauts.” Indeed, says Küng, “the heaven of faith is not a place but a mode of being,” a resid-
ing with the infinite, invisible, and incomprehensible God who cannot be located in space
or limited by time.2 Presumably, it would be similarly difficult to locate hell.
I do not begin with Küng’s ruminations because I think that everyone must agree.
There are plenty of people today who do not believe in the heaven of faith at all, and so are
relieved of the burden of having to “locate” it. There are also others who do, but who live
beyond the media range of moon-shots, space shuttles, space stations, and Mars probes,
and who remain unacquainted with modern scientific cosmologies. Some of them may very
well think of heaven and hell as physical places above and below earth. Still others may
agree with Küng’s critique of heaven as a physical place but also wonder what it possibly
can mean to speak of a non-spatial residing with the infinite. I begin with Küng’s remarks
only to illustrate a point: our theological pictures or visions of God, the world, and ourselves
sometimes change and adjust in order to take account of scientific findings, ideas, and beliefs.3
CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY
Why this should be so may become clearer if we take a moment to explore what
Christian theology is and does. In a semantic and generic sense, theology is logos of theos, or
discourse and reflection about god or the gods. Theology is inquiry into god or the gods. It
is the reflective attempt to understand god or the gods more fully. A statement, set of state-
ments, or discourse is theological if it has something to do with god or the gods.
Among other things, this means that many statements, sets of statements, and dis-
courses may be about matters of genuine importance, such as personal fulfillment, politics,
economics, or the moon and yet not be directly theological. On the other hand, statements,
sets of statements, and discourses about very many matters, including personal life, politics,
economics, and the cosmos may be theological if they refer to god or the gods, or if they are
made in a context that refers to god or the gods. The theological ethicist, James M.
Gustafson, says that he once attended a party where a colleague in chemistry challenged
him to say something theological. Gustafson said, “God.” And he regards theology (rightly I
think) as an attempt to understand all things in their appropriate relations to God.4 Or,
again, the great medieval Catholic, Thomas Aquinas, says that theology or holy teaching
2
Hans Küng, Credo: The Apostles’ Creed Explained for Today (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 161–62. John Calvin
did not deny the relevance of spatial categories when he contended that Christ’s body is in heaven. Still, he mocked
the idea that Christ dwells among the spheres or the planets, claiming instead that Christ’s body ascended altogeth-
er beyond the world, in Tracts and Treatises on the Doctrine and Worship of the Church (trans. Henry Beveridge, 3
vols. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1958), 2:290. Moreover, the notion that to dwell with God is to dwell beyond space
and time was also affirmed by some philosophically inclined classical theologians and is not original with Küng.
What we can say is that the travels of astronauts are among the reasons Küng has for rejecting earlier anthropo-
morphic conceptions.
3
If we accept modern scientific cosmologies, then we are not likely to think of heaven and hell as physical
places above the clouds and below the earth.
4
James M. Gustafson, “Say Something Theological!” (The Nora and Edward Ryerson Lecture at the University
of Chicago delivered on April 25, 1981 and printed by the University of Chicago Public Information Office.)
(sacra doctrina) expresses judgments about God and about creatures in relation to God.5
Relatedness to God is what unifies theological reflections.
As an historical matter of fact, however, most theology is not simply freewheeling,

generic discourse and reflection about god or the gods. It is also discourse and reflection in
the service of the teachings and doctrines of particular religious communities. Thus, Christian
churches through the centuries have stated their teachings and doctrines in creeds, cate-
chisms, and confessions. Christian theologians, such as Origen of Alexandria, Thomas
Aquinas, and John Calvin, have reflected on church teachings and doctrines, and they have
regarded themselves as teachers in the church. A good deal of Christian theology, then, has
been undertaken in church-related schools concerned with training leaders for the church.
And, this has been true from Origen’s Catechetical School in Alexandria, to Thomas’
University of Paris, Calvin’s College of Geneva, and my own Union Theological Seminary
and Presbyterian School of Christian Education.
The persistent connection between Christian theology and church teaching sheds light
on why our theological pictures sometimes change and adjust to take account of scientific
findings and ideas. Broadly speaking, Christian teaching and instruction is training in a
Christian way of living. It is training intended to help people interact with other persons,
objects, situations, and realities in a manner that is faithfully responsive to the God dis-
closed in Jesus Christ. That is, the church has an interest in helping its members interact
with their families, their possessions, governments, forests, fishes, and more in a manner
that is also faithfully responsive to God. Following the Puritan, Richard Baxter, then, we
may say that the church’s pastoral aim is the faithful formation of the people of God.6 The
church tries to help people live faithfully.
The critical point for our purposes here is that the enterprise of pastoral formation, or
of building up people in a faithful way of life, itself requires some reflective activity. It
requires that we articulate a vision or a picture. This is so because we need a vision or a pic-
ture of objects and others in relation to God if we are to know how to interact with them in
a manner that is faithfully responsive to God. If we are to interact with families, posses-
sions, governments, forests, and fishes in a manner that is faithfully responsive to God, then
we need to have some picture of how these things are related to God. And this is where
Christian theology comes in. Christian theology is the reflective attempt to picture or envi-
sion ourselves, as well as the many objects and others with which we interact, in relation to
the God disclosed in Jesus Christ. It is the reflective attempt to articulate a Christian world-
5
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: Volume I; Christian Theology (ed. Thomas Gilby, O. P.; New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1963), Ia, I, 3, 7 (pp. 121–5, 24–27).
6
Richard Baxter, Gildas Salvianus: The Reformed Pastor (ed. John T. Wilkinson; London: Epworth, 1939), 72–73.
view in the service of the life of faith.
Take our adolescent children. While they are sleeping until noon, talking interminably
with friends, challenging authorities, and lurching toward questionable decisions about
their futures, you and I are called to interact with them in a manner that is also faithfully
responsive to God. A Christian theological vision will portray our adolescent children as
gifts of God who are entrusted to our care for a time. It will emphasize (just in case we are
prone to forget) that we never really choose or control what we are given. It will insist,
despite occasional appearances to the contrary, that our adolescent children remain good
gifts. It will recognize that we have responsibilities to help and to guide our adolescent chil-
dren, but it will also indicate that they are not simply our personal projects and possessions.
As gifts, our children are never entirely defined by our own hopes and expectations. Indeed,
first and foremost, they belong to God, and there is an important sense in which our chil-
dren—no matter what their ages—are never simply our own.
By introducing the image “gift of God,” Christian theology helps us to picture ourselves
and our children in relation to God. It introduces a somewhat distinctive content about our
children in relation to us and to God that emerges from the Bible and Christian tradition.
(Remember that in many legal contexts, if I give you something, then it really is yours to do
with as you please.) This picture, in turn, informs our attempts to interact with our chil-
dren in a manner that is also faithfully responsive to God. But now for the additional point
that concerns us especially in this essay. It makes a difference whether or not we understand
our children as gifts of God, but it is also true that other things we know and believe about
our children can make a difference for how we understand them in a theological frame of refer-
ence.
For example, there is now a sizeable body of evidence to indicate not only that adoles-
cents need a lot of sleep, but also that their “biological timers” generally are set to stay up rel-
atively late and get up relatively late.7 A number of psychological perspectives also suggest
that adolescence is a time when persons’ identities are being formed with reference to emerg-
ing sexuality and thus redefined personal relationships, as well as by some rather experimen-
tal efforts to discern where one fits into a wider social world. Left to my traditional theologi-
cal images alone, I might judge the sleeping in, the constant attention to friends and peers,
the challenges to authority, and the questionable decisions not only a tad exasperating, but
also the results of a vaguely objectionable and morally corrupting self-absorption.8 But, once
7
Circadian rhythms (fluctuations that organisms exhibit over 24 hours) undergo age-related changes in humans
and in other animals, particularly with respect to sleep, and some seem hormonally related. See Frederica Latta
and Eve Cauter, “Sleep and Biological Clocks,” Handbook of Psychology, Vol. 3: Biological Psychology (eds. Michela
Gallagher and Randy J. Nelson; Hoboken: Wiley and Sons, 2003), 355–64; Mary Carskadon, “Work, School, Sleep,
and Circadian Timing in Adolescents,” Contemporary Perspectives on Sleep, www.Websciences.org/ adoles-
centsleep; “Inside the Teenage Brain: An Interview with Mary Carskadon,” Frontline, www.pbs.org, p. 2.
8
Current developmental thinking emphasizes the critical importance of “the adolescent peer context” and the
time adolescents need to interact with their friends. Margret Kerr, et. al. “Relationships with Parents and Peers in
Adolescence,” Handbook of Psychology, Vol 6: Developmental Psychology (ed. Richard M. Lerner, et. al.; Hoboken:
Wiley and Sons, 2003), p. 402. Laurence Sternberg, Professor of Psychology at Temple University, notes that parts
of the brain “responsible for things like sensation seeking” get turned on during puberty, while “the parts for exer-
cising judgment are still maturing.” See Caludia Wallis, “What Makes Teens Tick,” Time, 163, no. 19 (May 10,
2004): 61.
I factor in some recent findings and theories, perhaps I shall picture these adolescent traits,
not simply as chronic irritations, but also as classic characteristics of the adolescent human
creature, and so also of the gift I have been given. Indeed, I may come to recognize that, in
the economy of God’s world, and under certain conditions, these simply are some of the
things a parent must expect.
To summarize, the pastoral aim of the church is to help people interact with objects,
others, situations, and realities in a manner that is faithfully responsive to God. Christian
theology serves this aim by furnishing a vision or a picture of things in relation to the God
disclosed in Jesus Christ. It articulates a Christian worldview. This worldview is responsive
to the symbolic resources of the Christian community, e.g., the image of creation as gift,
but it is also responsive to other things we know and believe about objects, others, situa-
tions, and realities, e.g., studies of adolescent needs for sleep.
G O D, C O S M O S , A N D H U M A N I T Y
Now for someone who understands Christian theology in this way, an important chal-
lenge emerges from the cosmological implications of a variety of modern scientific find-
ings, theories, and perspectives. Consider space. As I have already mentioned, earlier
Christians often envisioned themselves at the center of a comparatively cozy cosmos. Over
the centuries, however, scientific theories and findings have contributed to a vastly different
outlook. The Copernican, heliocentric theory of the universe displaced Earth and human
beings from the center of the planetary system—a sufficiently disturbing prospect to have
contributed to Galileo’s later troubles with the church. What’s more, our displacement
seems only to have been radicalized by the stunning expansion in our picture of the cosmos
courtesy of calculations concerning its expansion from a big bang, as well as findings by
means of telescopes, satellites, moon shots, and space probes. The distances are staggering,
and the cosmos that we envision today no longer seems cozy so much as unimaginably vast.
There is also the matter of time. Our forebears may have found it plausible to figure
the age of the Earth in handfuls of thousands of years. But today, our calculations need to
take into account evolutionary biology and geology, not to mention theories and findings
concerning the origins of matter, stars, and planets. One result is that we now speak of years
in the billions. To help us picture this, my geologist friend from the Johns Hopkins
University, George Fisher, suggests that we convert the history of the cosmos and planet
Earth into a more familiar distance. Suppose that we “locate” the big bang on a South
Pacific island near the eastern coast of Australia, and then travel toward Virginia. Human
history would begin only a few yards away from my study in Richmond.
Finally, there is the question of where we fit within the sequence of things on Earth.
Many of our predecessors—theologians and philosophers alike—assumed that a great
chasm divides humans from animals, plants, and natural environments. Thomas Aquinas
thought that the image of God in humans is the rational soul and that, while we share this
intellectual endowment with the angels, there is nothing like it among the animals.9 A more
recent theologian put it this way. “Man is something other than animal, as animal is some-
thing other than plant.”10 Even more radically, perhaps, the Enlightenment philosopher
Rene Descartes claimed that humans are endowed with rational souls and emotions, but
that animals are mere mechanisms, machines without either feeling or thought.11 In any
case, by the mid-nineteenth century, there had emerged in the West an outlook we might
call “industrial humanism.” Two of its great representatives, Adam Smith and Karl Marx,
capitalist and communist, harbored significant disagreements. But they agreed that human
beings alone act to purpose, whereas nature is merely arbitrary and amounts to inert raw
material for human production.
Today, a number of findings and ideas point in another direction. Human life depends
on the formation and distribution of carbon, oxygen and other chemicals, as well as electric-
ity, water, and temperatures that fall within certain ranges. This is also true of the other life
forms we know of. The M.R.I. allows us to obtain detailed information about brain func-
tions, and it is not unusual for scientific papers to be delivered on neural correlates of con-
sciousness. The genome project has enabled biologists to observe that we share upwards of
98% of our genetic material with other species. (As it turns out, we are particularly close to
rodents.)12 Many people in our society today think animals are sufficiently similar to humans
to suffer terribly from the usual conditions under which they are farmed and slaughtered. A
number of researchers and philosophers now believe that the image of an evolutionary tree
or ladder with humans at the top overstates both the directionality of evolutionary processes
and the differences between humans and other species. They therefore prefer to picture us in
the upper reaches of a less hierarchical bush.13 And of course, one of the great lessons of
modern geology and evolutionary biology is that nature is not static. Nature has a history,
and, indeed, human history may be regarded as a part of this longer story.
The result is an outlook quite different from the industrial humanism that predomi-
nated in some circles only a century ago. True, we humans exercise distinctive capabilities of
9
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province; New York: Benziger
Brothers, n.d.), 1, 90, 2 (p. 459); 1, 93, 2–3 (pp. 470–71).
10
Emil Brunner, Our Faith (trans. John W. Rilling; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, n.d.), 35.
11
The philosopher, Mary Midgley, says that Descartes’ complete identification of the human soul and con-
sciousness with reason led him “to conclude that animals could not be conscious at all, and were in fact just
automata.” See Animals and Why They Matter: A Journey Around the Species Barrier (New York: Penguin Books,
1983), 11. Midgley refers to Discourse on Method, Part 5 in Philosophical Works of Descartes (trans. Haldane and
Ross; Vol. 1), 115–18.
12
“Functional and Comparative Genomics Fact Sheet,” Human Genome Project Information, Geonomics: GTL.
Microbial Genome Program. Home. www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/faq/compgen.shtml/, p. 3 of 8.
13
Mary Midgley, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978),
160–61.
intervention and reflection, but we are not beings entirely set apart, surrounded by a for-
eign, inert world. We are living organisms that have emerged from and are enmeshed with-
in a vast, interconnected ecology. Yes, we have distinctive capabilities and with these come
distinctive responsibilities. But neither the planetary ecology nor the evolutionary
sequences of life on Earth seem centered on us humans alone.
SOME THEOLOGICAL QUESTIONS
We are ready now to introduce some theological questions. Suppose we assume, as I

expect we must, that within a Christian frame of reference, the great God of glory intimat-
ed by the Bible and Christian tradition is indeed Lord of the entire cosmos. Thus, taking
into account the sorts of scientific findings and ideas we have just outlined, we should say
that the space God orders and brings into being is the vast cosmic space of stars and plane-
tary systems, billions of galaxies, black holes, and nebulae. The time that God governs is the
immense history of the cosmos. The sequence of life on Earth that God sustains is the com-
paratively lengthy and probably also incomplete one of molecules, bacteria, plants,
dinosaurs, humans, and insects interacting with somewhat stable but also developing and
sometimes dramatically changeable environmental conditions. Does it make sense, then, to
insist that we humans, who inhabit this small blue planet in an obscure corner of a galaxy,
are the crown of creation? Does it make sense to maintain that human beings and their fate
comprise God’s chief end?
The case against seems rather strong, and it is partly a matter of proportion. All the
world may be a stage, but isn’t God’s cosmos, as we have come to know it, a rather outsized
stage for the drama of human life and history? On a stage so vast, might there not be other
dramas, realities, and developments of equal or even greater importance that have taken
place, are taking place, or have yet to take place? Again, aren’t we saying that the cosmos
and even planet Earth were around for billions of years before humans appeared on the
scene? Aren’t we also saying that different species have emerged on Earth, survived and/or
flourished for a time, and then gone extinct? Isn’t it possible, or perhaps even likely, that the
human species also will come to an end well before the cosmos does?
Maybe so. And yet, even when faced with the modern portrait of a vast cosmos, as well
as a sequence of life on Earth characterized by ecological interrelations and interdependen-
cies, there has been at least one way for us to continue to place ourselves at the center of the
picture. “Yes,” we might say, “the cosmos is indeed vast. But it appears to be mostly cold,
dark, and inhospitable. When it comes to life and, most especially, to the conscious and
comparatively intelligent life of our own species, we simply have no evidence that there is
anything like it anywhere else. Moreover, precisely because we are intelligent, we are able to
appreciate God’s cosmos as no other creature can. We seem fashioned to appreciate it, and
it seems fashioned to be appreciated by us. Indeed, our recent probes, studies, and explo-
rations of everything from deep space to intricate ecologies and firing neurons seem rather
good examples of our distinctive capacity for appreciation.”14
This is where some recent findings from the red planet come in (courtesy of an orbiter
belonging to the European Union as well as our own rovers). There is strong evidence of ice
near the south pole of Mars. There is also evidence that in the past there has been water on
the Martian surface. But where there's ice and where there once was water . . . there may
indeed also have been a biosphere. I can’t help but note that London bookmakers started
taking bets during the early 1960s at 100 to 1 on whether life once existed on Mars. In
response to various findings, Ladbrokes, a well-known establishment, has since cut the odds
to 50 to 1 in August 1996, and to 16 to 1 in January 2004. On March 3, 2004, the day after
NASA announced that the rover, Opportunity, had found evidence that there once was sur-
face water on the planet, Ladbrokes quit taking bets.15 (Interestingly, Olivia Judson, an evo-
lutionary biologist recently has warned that rock samples containing Martian microbes and
bacteria might pose hazards on Earth. Remember what happened when the Spanish
brought smallpox and measles to the New World. Recall the consequences of transporting
starlings to North America.)16
Of course, this need not mean that Mars either has or does support life in anything like
the variety and developed forms present on Earth. But, in cosmic terms anyway, Mars is
incredibly near by. So, if there is another biosphere in our immediate neighborhood, might
there be many others scattered near and far? And, if there are many others, is it possible or
even somewhat likely that at least some have, do, or will support life in something like the
variety and complexity that Earth does? But if this is true, then the cosmos is not simply
cold, dark, and inhospitable. If this is true, then, when it comes to life and perhaps even
appropriately appreciative intelligent life, it's not necessarily all and only about us.17
This can be an unsettling thought. We seem chronically to assume that we are at the
center of things, and our assumption seems partly due to our finite perceptual equipment.
(Stand up, open your eyes, turn around in a circle, and you will be at the center of all you
14
This echoes the “Anthropic Principle” affirmed by some scientists, philosophers, and theologians. John
Polkinghorne favors a “strong” formulation “which alleges that the universe must be capable of evolving life,” and
also suggests teleology or design. What he thinks of prospects for life elsewhere is difficult to determine, although
he says “the unambiguous discovery that life independently arose on Mars, or elsewhere in the galaxy, would pro-
vide a vindication of those who feel that the universe is seeded with life.” See Science and Theology: An Introduction
(Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998), 36–40.
15
Marshall Poe, “Life on Mars: the Odds,” The Atlantic Monthly (June 2004): 49.
16
“Some Things Are Better Left on Mars,” The New York Times, 63 (April 19, 2004): A25.
17
When it comes to the question of life elsewhere, we can only speculate. Still, not only London bookmakers,
but also some scientists believe the odds in favor have improved. Michael W. Werner of NASA’s Jet Propulsion
Laboratory says, “the number of potential Earthlike planets in the galaxy is greater than we previously imagined.”
Some also think recent advances in planet detection bode well for finding habitable planets. See Science News: The
Weekly Newsmagazine of Science, 165, no. 23 (June 5, 2004): 355; 167, no. 25 (June 18, 2005): 387.
see.) In addition, more than a few theologians have tended to picture “the world as the the-
atre of human history.”18 And, of course, one might read the biblical narrative as ineluctably
human-centered. Within days of creating light, God makes humans. With the appearance of
Adam and Eve, history becomes the story of human salvation, and humans are present on
Earth right up to the apocalypse.
A more sophisticated theological version of this perspective begins with the idea that
God creates the cosmos so that God can redeem, and then (rather quickly) equates and/or
limits redemption to the redemption of humans. Karl Barth, the most important Protestant
theologian of the twentieth century, explained it this way. Creation is the external basis for
God’s covenant of redemption with human beings. “The purpose and therefore the mean-
ing of creation is to make possible the history of God’s covenant with man which has its
beginning, its centre and its culmination in Jesus Christ.”19 Or, again, “the whole cosmos
was precisely created that in it there might be this event and revelation—that man might be
what he is by the grace of God and for the grace of God.”20 In short, then, from the Big
Bang to the present day and beyond, across the virtually unfathomable span of space,
replete with almost countless stars and planets, the entire cosmos was created so that we
humans could be saved by the grace of God in Jesus Christ. But if I am correct, then this is
just the sort of mal-proportioned theologizing that cannot stand in face of our current
understandings of cosmic space and time, the evolution of life on Earth and the possibilities
for life elsewhere.
T O W A R D A N A LT E R N AT I V E T H E O L O G I C A L V I S I O N
We may begin to sketch an alternative theology by rethinking our theatrical imagery. If

all the cosmos is a stage, then it is far too vast for us plausibly to consider it the stage for
human history alone. Indeed, given the vast expanse of cosmos, the staggering cosmic time
frames, the astounding numbers of stars, planets, etc., perhaps we should think in terms,
not of a single stage, but of a world with very many different venues, theatres, stages, and
shows in many regions, cities, hamlets, and towns. Some productions may be located within
the same city or even the same neighborhood and district, and they seem sufficiently near
one another to share the occasional set design, orchestra, or even actor. Some, although
they take place in the same town, remain almost wholly unrelated because they run during
different seasons or even different eras. Others take place simultaneously but in regions
and/or cultures of our imaginary world so far removed from one another that they never
come into contact.
18
“Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World,” Vatican Council II: Volume 1, The Conciliar and
Post Conciliar Documents, New Revised Edition, (ed. Austin Flannery; Northport, N.Y.: Costello, 1975), p. 904.
19
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics. Volume III: The Doctrine of Creation, Part 1 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958), 42.
Hereafter cited as CD 3/1:42.
20
Barth, CD 3/1: 67.
We may suppose that there are dramas (or local sequences and lines of development)
on all of these stages.21 For those of us looking for signs of life, some sequences may seem a
tad boring and inactive (something like Andy Warhol’s famous film of the Empire State
Building in which, after a few hours, a bird flies by). But, of course, even lifeless venues
might include chemical and volcanic developments. Some stages, in addition to our own
planet Earth, might very well support more lively dramas. And, we cannot rule out the pos-
sibility that some of these livelier dramas have, do now, or (at some time in the future) will
support life forms that we might deem intelligent.
Now, on this picture of the cosmos, we cannot say that we humans are at the center,
and we cannot say that the entire cosmos was constructed for the benefit of humans alone.
But we can say that we humans have a “place and time” within the local sequence or line of
development on Earth. Here, in the midst of this particular planet’s dynamic ecology, we
have a habitation. We need not insist that, once sprung, our species necessarily will contin-
ue to flourish until entropy finally brings the cosmos to a close. Indeed, that particular
insistence seems entirely excessive. We need not claim that the human species necessarily
will continue right up to the end of planet Earth. (After all, we have quite a way to go
before our species gets as long in the tooth as the dinosaurs did, and we have many more
ways than they did in which we might hasten our own demise.) What we may hope for is not
that the human species will continue for all time, but that it may have, as they sometimes say
of plays in New York, a good run.
Nevertheless, when one considers the multitude of factors and relations that had to be
in place for our species to emerge and then also continue for a time, “a good run” is no
inconsiderable testimony to the sustaining qualities of God’s cosmic reign. Indeed, depend-
ing on what counts as a relevant line of development on Earth in which to place the human
species, the phrase “a good run” may indicate anywhere from 120,000 to two billion
years—a period that dwarfs the few thousand years of human history portrayed in the
Bible. It therefore should not be too difficult to retrieve (and perhaps also enhance) at least
some of what was meant by classical doctrines of providence and preservation.
But, of course, on this view, God’s reign encompasses the very many, even virtually
countless venues and sequences in addition to our own. This point might very well keep us
from thinking that grace and salvation in Jesus Christ require us to believe that all creation
is simply the theatre of human redemption. Indeed, I should be surprised if, on this revised
theological picture, we will want to insist that saving grace is available only to those who
21
Gordon D. Kaufman notes that there are multiple trajectories at different places in the cosmos, although, in
constructing his understanding of God, he rather quickly concentrates attention on what takes place in the evolu-
tionary trajectory on Earth. See In Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1993), 283, 317.
know and confess Jesus of Nazareth as Lord, since this affirmation clearly leaves the over-
whelming preponderance of the cosmos out in the cold. (It “leaves in” only one planet out
of billions upon billions of planets in billions of galaxies). We might instead consider the
idea that the Creator-Redeemer disclosed to us in Jesus Christ also is at work throughout
the cosmos. We might experiment with the idea that, in all the cosmos, no venue, no locale
and its particular drama or line of development, lies beyond the reach of the one true God
of grace. In any case, this particular bit of theological content (which does not derive from
modern sciences) surely accords with the penchant of the Bible and Christian tradition to
identify the God to whom Jesus points as the all-governing maker of heaven and earth.22
This brings me to a final theological point. John Calvin claimed that the world is the
magnificent theatre, not of human history, but of God’s glory. Indeed, said Calvin, “wherev-
er you cast your eyes, there is no spot in the universe wherein you cannot discern at least
some sparks of his glory.”23 Having undertaken studies of insects, Jonathan Edwards could
extol spiders as “wondrous animals . . . from whose glistening webs so much of the wisdom
of the Creator shines.”24 Edwards claimed in rather typical Calvinist fashion (but also in a
distinctly creative fashion for a Calvinist) that God’s chief end in creating the world is God’s
own glory, and that genuine piety hinges on a sense for the divine excellence. In short, both
men thought that we are equipped to appreciate a world that is not centered on us. Both
believed that the Bible supported them on this point.25 And, even if it no longer seems plau-
sible to insist that we humans occupy center stage, even if it appears that the Lord of the
cosmos rules venues and has purposes beyond our imaginings, something like their God-
centered vision remains a live theological option.
AN UNSCIENTIFIC POSTSCRIPT FOR A SCIENTIFIC AGE
Let me close with an unscientific postscript for a scientific age.

O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
What are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them?
Yet you have made them a little lower than the angels
and crowned them with glory and honor.
You have given them dominion
over . . . sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field,
the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea . . . (Ps 8)
22
An identification made, among other places, in the Apostles’ Creed. See J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds
(3d ed.; Essex, U.K.: Longman House, 1972), 131–39, 372.
23
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (ed. John T. McNeill; trans. Ford Lewis Battles; Philadelphia:
Westminster, 1960), 1.5.1 (p. 52); 1.5.5 (p. 58).
24
Jonathan Edwards, Scientific and Philosophical Manuscripts (ed. Wallace E. Anderson; New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1980), 154, 169.
25
Ibid., p. 353. Edwards believed that “to find out the reason of things in natural philosophy is only to find out
the proportion of God's acting.”
Psalm 8 is among the best known in the Bible. It begins by directing our attention to
the only God, the Sovereign whose name is majestic, and whose glory is set above the heav-
ens. It then turns our attention to the magnificent night sky, to the moon and the many
stars in sight. It acknowledges that all this falls within the purview of the Creator’s reign.
Only then, after having surveyed this spacious expanse, does the Psalm raise the question of
human beings. In the midst of the splendor of the heavens, the moon, and the stars, what
are human beings that they, too, should be objects of divine care and concern?
This is old, even ancient poetry and it conveys an old and even ancient piety. As we
have noted, it supposes a rather quaint and outmoded picture of the cosmos. Whoever
wrote it did so without benefit of either evolutionary biology or modern ecological studies.
Nevertheless, our experiment indicates that, even in an age of astrophysics, many of the
Psalm’s more important features seem intensified rather than rendered obsolete.
Look out into the night sky. We know that only a minute fraction of the stars, planets,
and other objects are visible to our eyes. There are galaxies and nebulae and black holes vir-
tually beyond our ability to depict them. If our calculations are correct, the whole thing has
been expanding from a single point for billions of years. What might be “beyond” or
“before” that point seems genuinely difficult to say.26 But, in any case, on a clear night, per-
haps the first thing to be said is that the panoramic view remains truly magnificent.
Now focus on the light of a single star. It has traveled an enormous distance, quite pos-
sibly having left its point of origin thousands of light years ago. And, of course, the light
from this particular star has traveled not only towards us, but also in other directions. It
appears, has appeared, and shall appear in the night sky of other planets and worlds, as
well.
When we look up at these things, we, too, may be moved to ask questions. What are
human beings that they have a place and time in this vast and intricate cosmos, that they
have emerged from an almost unfathomable set of interrelations, interdependencies, and
interactions, and that they have continued to be sustained for generations? And yet, they are
endowed with distinctive, even wondrous capacities and powers of intervention. They are
able to manage and to reshape plants, animals, and even their planetary habitat. They can
probe spider’s webs. They can appreciate the stars. “O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is
your name in all the earth!”
26
See, for example, Willem B. Drees, Beyond the Big Bang: Quantum Cosmologies and God (La Salle, IL: Open
Court, 1990), 41–75.
Biblical Images of God and the

Reader’s “I” as Imago Dei
The Contribution of Edith Stein
ANN W. ASTELL
Professor of English
Purdue University
Amidst Nazi persecution, Edith Stein discovered in the biblical

images of God a mystical path of identity formation leading to
a transformative union with Christ.
A s Edith Stein (1891–1942) recalls in her unfinished autobiography, her older

sisters often found her expression inscrutable and teased her, calling her “a
book sealed with seven seals.”1 Biblical imagery gives texture to the story of
her young life, which was originally intended as a “portrait of [her Jewish] mother.”2 Stein’s
self-reflection thus mirrors her practice of meditative exegesis. In the year before her arrest
by the Nazi SS agents at the Carmelite convent in Echt, Holland, on August 2, 1942, she
wrote a philosophical essay on the “image-language” of the Bible, drawing her inspiration
from a surprising source, the mystical writings of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (c. 500
C.E.). That essay is best understood as a companion piece to The Science of the Cross, a study
of Saint John of the Cross (1542–91). In that work she approaches the reformer’s life and
teaching from the viewpoint of the biblical images and symbols that predominate in them:
the cross, the night, the wedding feast. She was, in fact, writing about the saint’s death, his
“final kiss for the Crucified,” when the SS arrested her and her sister Rosa.3
Mark A. McIntosh has pointed to the “unflinching integrity” in Stein’s scholarly and
religious life as a postmodern “pattern for the re-weaving of spirituality and theology.”4 In
this essay, I argue that Stein’s last writings suggest a contemporary way to recover the for-
mative link between biblical images of the divine as objects of spiritual exegesis, on the one
1
Edith Stein, Life in a Jewish Family, 1891–1916: An Autobiography (vol 1. of Collected Works of Edith Stein;
trans. Josephine Koeppel, O.C.D.; Washington, D. C.: ICS Publications, 1986), 63. The phrase echoes Dan 12:4 and
Rev 5:5.
2
Stein, Life in a Jewish Family, 72.
3
Edith Stein, The Science of the Cross (vol. 6 of Collected Works of Edith Stein; trans. Josephine Koeppel, O.C.D.;
Washington, D. C.: ICS Publications, 2002), 314.
4
Mark A. McIntosh, Mystical Theology: The Integrity of Spirituality and Theology (Challenges in Contemporary
Theology; Oxford: Blackwell, 1998, repr. 2000), 3-4.
hand, and the revelation of the imago dei in the individual human person, on the other.
According to Stein’s own declaration, she was actually engaged in “constructing a philoso-
phy of the person” in her study of St. John of the Cross, pursuing a task possible “only in
modern philosophy”5 and consciously returning to questions that had occupied her earlier
in her 1916 doctoral dissertation On the Problem of Empathy, written under the direction of
Edmund Husserl. Exploring an implicit analogy between the deep structure of the human
person and the multiple senses of Scripture, Stein discovers a Dionysian anagogy in the
word of God that can lead not only to the soul’s mystical union with Christ, the Word made
flesh and the Image of the Eternal Father, but also to the eschatological end of an earthly
martyrdom in Auschwitz. “Come, Rosa,” she told her sister on the day of their arrest, “We’re
going for our people.”6
Stein’s original synthesis of the thought of Dionysius with the practice of biblical inter-
pretation belongs to a long tradition of such syntheses, beginning with Dionysius’s own.7 As
is well known, the influence of the Dionysian writings upon scriptural exegesis from the
sixth until the sixteenth centuries is both enormous and complex. In the early tradition best
exemplified in the commentaries by Origen, the process of exegesis itself was understood to
be a mystical way, aimed at the communal discovery of the hidden (and therefore mysteri-
ous or mystical) senses of the scriptures.8 Dionysius emphasized the effect this mental jour-
ney had on the individual members of the community, who were led through the anago3ge3,
the upward momentum or superductum of the scriptures themselves, to experience (in
McIntosh’s words) “an exegetical transformation that is essentially ecstatic in nature.”9 As a
result, Henri de Lubac observes, “a state of mind was created that affected exegesis itself and
the theory of the four senses, affecting everything, especially the definition of anagogy.”10 To
be precise, “in the tradition influenced by Dionysius, . . . a dissociation tended to develop
between the invisibilia and the futura, as between the mystic life and the meditation on
scripture” (p. 194). Countering that tendency toward dissociation resulted in a creative
series of medieval syntheses that “easily made up for what was lacking” in the Dionysian
texts themselves by reinforcing the historical sense (past, present, and eschatological) and
underscoring in various ways the interrelation “between the degrees of contemplation and
the hierarchy of the senses of scripture” (pp. 180, 190).
In turning to Dionysius as a guide, Stein followed in the footsteps of her spiritual

“father,” John of the Cross, whose famous “nada” gives unmistakable expression to negative
theology. She found in Dionysius a “brilliant mind,” whose “mystical theology” and “sym-
5
Stein, Science of the Cross, 5.
6
See Waltraud Herbstrith, O.C.D., Edith Stein: A Biography (2nd ed.; trans. Bernard Bonowitz, O.C.S.O.; San
Francisco: Ignatius, 1992), 180.
7
See Paul Rorem, Biblical and Liturgical Symbols within the Pseudo-Dionysian Synthesis (Studies and Texts, 71;
Toronto: Pontifical Institute Studies, 1984); Andrew Louth, Denys the Areopagite (London: Geoffrey Chapman,
1989).
8
On the developing meaning of the word “mystical,” see Louis Bouyer, “Mysticism: An Essay on the History of
the Word,” in Understanding Mysticism (ed. Richard Woods; Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1980), 42–55.
9
McIntosh, Mystical Theology, p. 46.
10
Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture (vol. 2; trans. E. M. Macierowski; Grand
bolic theology” complemented the “positive theology” of Saint Thomas Aquinas as alterna-
tive “ways to know God.”11 Most importantly, she found an avenue of approach to the
structure of the human person as a “spiritual person,” not just a “psycho-physical individ-
ual.”12 The question of this structure had remained open at the end of her dissertation,
which she completed in 1916, a few years prior to her baptism on January 1, 1922, the Feast
of the Circumcision. Stein’s answer offers a profound synthesis not only of history and mys-
ticism—the dark nights of Golgatha, the Shoah, and the soul—but also of biblical imagery
and the imago dei, scriptural exegesis and Christian anthropology, biblical interpretation
and theology.
In the Dionysian understanding, there are different ways of knowing and speaking
about God—different theologies—within the Bible itself, all of them “interconnected by the
intentions through which they point beyond themselves and . . . are ordained to the experi-
ence of God.”13 For Dionysius, Stein writes, “‘theology’ means Holy Scripture, ‘God’s Word,’
and ‘theologians’ means its authors, the sacred writers.” Inspired, “they speak of God because
God has taken hold of them or God speaks through them” (p. 87). Each bears witness to God
according to his experience of the divine, whether that experience comes through a vision
(“what the prophet sees or hears”); or through a historical event—personal or communal—
that has the arresting force of a divine intervention; or through a theophany in nature; or
through an encounter with an angel or a man of God; or by being “touched by God
inwardly without word or image” (p. 108.) Whatever his experience of God, the theologian
gives it verbal expression in the scriptures. “‘Consuming fire’” [Deut 4:24], for example,
suggested itself to Moses “as an image of God, since this was the way he experienced God.
There is a likeness, something objectively common, between the inexpressible thing that
happened to him and ‘consuming fire’” (p. 97).
In every case, the theologian forms “his images of God on the basis of his awareness
[Kenntnis] of God” (p. 97), but some images will be closer approximations than others. God
the Creator is the “Primal Theologian,” whose “symbolic theology” is all of God’s creation,
and Christ, “the living Word of God, is the highest of all theologians” (p. 87). The more
intimate and wordless his knowledge of God, the more appropriately the theologian can
“shape the image according to the original” and represent God as he “has come to know
him”(p. 108). The ideal image “presupposes a higher-level, spiritual penetration into what
was originally given in experience” (p. 101), but no sensible image can convey perfectly the
spiritual reality it represents. As a “dissimilar similitude,” every biblical image of God, there-
fore, is both a positive and a negative theology of him, a like and an unlike expression of
Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 195.

11
Edith Stein, “Ways to Know God: The ‘Symbolic Theology’ of Dionysius the Areopagite and Its Objective
Presuppositions,” in Knowledge and Faith (vol. 8 of Collected Works of Edith Stein; trans. Walter Redmond
(Washington, D. C.: ICS Publications, 2000), 84.
12
Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy (3d ed.; vol. 3 of Collected Works of Edith Stein; trans. Waltraut Stein;
Washington, D. C.: ICS Publications, 1989), 112.
13
Stein, “Ways to Know God,” 108. Successive parenthetical page references are from the same work.
what and who God is in the theologian’s divine experience.
As a reader of his own and of others’ scriptural “image-language,” the theologian is

thus led “to the knowledge of what is still unknown” (p. 100). This Dionysian anago3ge3 or
“leading above” of the biblical image (which presupposes a theophany both in the theolo-
gian’s experience of God and in the created, sensible world from which such verbal images
derive) corresponds, Stein explains, to the constitution of the spiritual person: “Gaining the
light of divine knowledge in this way tallies with our human nature. For our own life is at
once undivided and divided. And the part of the soul that is free of the need for sensible
images has the capacity to be destined for a simple, inner beholding of divine images, while
the part subject to sense impressions must be led up to the divine realities through typical
symbols” (p. 90). This “lifting up” is the special potency of the scriptures inspired by God:
. . . a word of Scripture may so touch me in my innermost being that in this word I feel God
himself speaking to me and sense his presence. The book and the sacred writer, or the preacher
that I was just hearing, have vanished—God himself is speaking, and he is speaking to me. . . .This
is at bottom the goal of all theology: to clear the way to God himself. . . . Holy Scripture counts
as “God’s Word” for us because therein he draws near to us, makes himself known to us, makes
his demands upon us. (pp. 110–11)
The scriptures fail to realize this sacramental potency, however, if the person reading
them fails to accept them “as God’s word”; in that case, it “becomes a dead letter. . . . It no
longer points beyond itself in a living way to the realm wherefrom it issues” (p. 114).
In this perceptive analysis of Dionysian doctrines and its contemporary significance for
an age when the scriptural letter is—perhaps to a greater degree than ever before—a scan-
dal and a stumbling block to believers and unbelievers alike, Stein actually returns (albeit in
another key) to themes that occupied her in her doctoral dissertation on empathy. When
she addresses the scriptures as imagistic expressions of personal, divine experience, she
effectively likens them to an array of human countenances whose facial expressions and
spoken words require a deeper, empathetic understanding. One cannot know what others
are feeling simply by mirroring their outward expressions; nor by imaging how one would
feel, were one in their place; nor by attributing to them emotions that one has felt in the
past under similar circumstances. True empathy, Stein argues, goes beyond this sort of
assumption or ego-centered projection (which effectively usurps the other) to an ethical
stance that stands with the other in the present, faces what the other faces, and bears it with
and for and in the other. Because the empathized experience is, by definition, the “experi-
ence of foreign consciousness”—the experience of the other, not the self—it “can only be
the non-primordial experience which announces a primordial one,” Stein writes.14 It is “a
kind of an act of perceiving” that fundamentally alters each one’s world view, allowing
humans to “comprehend the psychic life of their fellows,” even as that life remains irre-
ducibly other (p. 11). Stein goes on to assert that “believers . . . comprehend the love, the
anger, and the precepts of their God in this [empathetic] way” (p. 11).
Bringing this early insight to bear upon her later writing on scriptural images, one sees
that Stein is arguing for an empathetic approach to the individual biblical witnesses and
their theologies. It is not enough to encounter them. One must leave one’s own position to
stand with them—“at” not “in” their place—to face God from their perspective, to share in
their experience of the living God. Such empathy with the other’s divine experience cannot
substitute for one’s own, root experience, but it can extend and enrich it. In the case of a
non-believer, such empathy for a sacred writer can also prepare the way for a primordial
experience of God: “The person who knows and loves God from and in his living faith will
be eager to know him from ever changing perspectives . . . and again and again he will turn
to the Holy Scriptures. . . .The person of faith, of course, already has an “image of God” and
this he blends with the new images wherein he finds God portrayed. This is precisely how
he can enrich his own image with new features from these images.”15
The enrichment of Stein’s personal “image of God” by another’s is obvious from her
study of Saint John of the Cross. Having lost her own father at age two (as St. John had
early lost his), she was drawn into a special filial relationship with him as the co-founder
(with Saint Teresa of Avila) of the discalced Carmelites, the contemplative religious order
she entered in Cologne in 1934. The name she chose for herself—Sister Teresa Benedicta of
the Cross—pays tribute to both her spiritual parents. Just as St. John had changed his reli-
gious name from John “of St. Matthias” to John “of the Cross” in 1568, when he took up the
work of the Teresian reform, so too Edith chose her name with a great consciousness of her
particular calling. “In the order,” she explains, “the title incorporated in one’s name indi-
cates that God wishes to bind the soul to himself under the sign of a particular mystery of
faith. By changing his name, John showed that the cross was superimposed on his life as an
emblem.”16 So too, Edith accepted the cross as her life’s emblem. Born in 1891 on the Jewish
Day of Atonement, she found in the symbol of the cross a Christian continuity with her
Jewish identity, since “the Day of Atonement is the Old Testament antecedent of Good
Friday.”17 She took the words that St. John of the Cross had addressed to his beloved “spiri-
tual daughter,” Maria de la Cruz, as a personal inheritance: “My daughter, ask for nothing
14
Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, 14.
15
Stein, “Ways to Know God,” 109.
16
17
Edith Stein, “The Prayer of the Church,” in The Hidden Life: Essays, Meditations, Spiritual Texts (vol. 4 of
Collected Works of Edith Stein; trans. Waltraut Stein; Washington, D. C.: ICS Publications, 1992), 12.
other than the cross.”18
In her study of St. John, Stein emphasizes that the saint’s focus on the cross as a symbol
of identity is grounded in his scriptural meditation; appropriate to his physical asceticism,
psychological development, artistic temperament, and spiritual charism; and necessary for
the historical fulfillment of his mission for the Church. It gives a symbolic expression, in
short, to his biblically mediated experience of God, to his personal ideal or spiritual person-
hood, and to his destined apostolic task. Although much of The Science of the Cross consists
of quotations from, or paraphrases of, St. John’s own words carefully stitched together,
Stein’s original contribution is clearly evident in her Dionysian use of biblical images to
organize the materials and to support her philosophical and theological observations con-
cerning “the I, freedom, and person”—topics, she notes, that “do not derive from the teach-
ing of our Holy Father John of the Cross”(p. 5). In a letter dated April 9, 1941 (a date that
coincides with the composition of “Ways to Know God,” her essay on Dionysius’s “Symbolic
Theology”),19 she writes concerning her ongoing work on The Science of the Cross: “I feel I
have renewed vigor for creative effort. Holy Father John gave me renewed impetus for some
remarks concerning symbols.”20
For Stein, as for St. John, the cross is the biblical image par excellence. She records that
John “lived entirely in and with the Sacred Scriptures. . . .The entire Sacred Scripture—the
Old as well as the New Testament—was his daily bread.”21 Knowing the holy books “almost
by heart,” he found in them “the natural expression of his inner experience” (p. 17). In the
end, John’s constant meditation on the scriptures, which was nourished by his practice of
lectio divina, merged completely with his mystical experience and doctrine. In a summary
encomium, Stein observes:
Sacred Scripture is for him an ever-flowing source of teaching regarding the laws of the inner
life. In it he finds sure confirmation of what he knows from the most interior experience. On the
other hand, his personal experience opens his eyes to the mystical meaning of the sacred books.
The keen pictorial language of the psalms, of the Lord’s parables, even the historical narratives of
the Old Testament—all becomes transparent for him and always gives him an ever more abun-
dant and deeper insight into the one subject that counts for him: the soul’s way to God and God’s
activity in the soul. (pp. 36–37)
Particularly moved by “the passion narratives of the Gospel,” by the passages in which
Jesus speaks of the cross “in various senses,” and by the Pauline proclamation of the mys-
tery of the cross, John had repeated visions of the crucified Lord (pp. 18, 17, 24). Gifted
with an artistic temperament and talent, he drew and painted pictures of Jesus on the cross,
18
19
Extant correspondence shows that she began work on “Ways to Know God” in 1940 and finally submitted the
manuscript to Marvin Farber at SUNY-Buffalo on September 12, 1941. The essay was published posthumously in
The Thomist in 1946. See Steven Payne’s Foreword, in Stein, Knowledge and Faith, xii–xvii.
20
Stein, Letter 336, quoted in Science of the Cross, xxv.
21
Stein, Science of the Cross, 17. Successive parenthetical page references are from the same work.
made paper crosses, and carved simple wooden ones. Although he cautioned against a dis-
tracting use of religious artwork, he did not hesitate to make an appropriate use of them. As
Stein remarks, the image of the cross was so central to John’s “symbolic theology,” his per-
sonal experience of God and speaking about him—indeed, his very identity in relation to
God—that the external representation was an “imitation” of the “inner image” according to
which he strove to pattern his life: “The external image, one’s own artistic creation, can
always spur one on to transform oneself interiorly according to its meaning” (p. 13). “The
Crucified,” Stein writes, “demands that the artist, just as every person, follow him: that he
both make himself and allow himself to be made into an image of the one who carries the
cross and is crucified” (p. 12).
What does the cross symbolize? Stein mentions two basic senses. In the literal or his-
torical sense, the cross refers to the instrument of Roman torture and execution, the
“shameful wood,” on which Jesus died. In the moral and ethical (tropological) sense, “the
cross [is] the symbol [Sinnbild] of all that is difficult and oppressive and so against human
nature that taking it upon oneself is like a journey to death” (p. 17). These two senses do
not, however, give the full meaning of the cross, in which the faithful discover the self-emp-
tying love of God; the forgiveness of sin; the victory over death; the hope of bodily resur-
rection; and, finally, of the heavenly paradise where the wood of the cross appears, trans-
formed, as the tree of life (Rev 2:7).
All of these senses of the cross are vitally present in the life and writings of St. John, as
Stein demonstrates, but its personal significance for him as a theologian emerges as he
translates the emblem of the cross into another biblical symbol, that of night. The Gospels
themselves, of course, join the two images in their historical account of the crucifixion:
“From the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until about the ninth hour” (Matt
27:45). The union of the two highlights their differences, Stein insists. Although both the
cross and night are symbols, according to a broad definition of that term, the cross can be
defined more narrowly as an emblem. Whereas the cross derives from the realm of human
manufacture and tools and acquires its sublime meaning from its historical use, night is
something natural; it was created by God and thus belongs, in Dionysian terms, to the
“Symbolic Theology” of the “Primal Theologian.”
By connecting the cross to night as related symbols, St. John accomplishes the special
task that Stein, following Dionysius, attributes to all theologians: “to bring people who hear
their words to the point where they learn to see through nature [back to God].”22 John’s
22
Stein, “Ways to Know God,” 100.
own profound reading of the biblical theologians has led him, Stein suggests, to “read” the
world differently, with the result that the images of the cross and night—and all their vari-
ous senses—have become inseparably related for him through a kind of concordance. “The
cross,” Stein summarizes, “is the emblem of all that has causal and historical connections
with the cross of Christ. Night is the necessary cosmic expression of St. John of the Cross’s
mystical world-view.”23
Even as the cross has varying senses—historical, tropological, allegorical (doctrinal),

and anagogical—the night, too, has a manifold significance. Stein notes: “[St. John] was
extremely sensitive to cosmic night with all its tonalities” (p. 40). As the opposite of light,
“night is alike a foretaste of death” (p. 40). Stein, in fact, describes night much as Emmanuel
Levinas does the “There is” (Il y a): “Night is invisible and formless. . . . . Just as light allows
things to step forward with their visible qualities, so night devours them and threatens to
devour us also. Whoever sinks into it is not simply nothing; it continues to exist but as
indeterminate, invisible, and formless as night itself, or shadowy, ghostlike, and therefore
threatening” (p. 39). Night, however, is not always light’s opposite. Stein is quick to point
out that there are different kinds and phases of night, which has a “double face”: “The dark
and uncanny night is other than the moonlit magic night, which is flooded by a mild, soft
light” (p. 40). Associated at one pole with a terrifying darkness, formlessness, and death,
night is also a time, at the opposite pole, for sleep, love-making, fertility, and creation.
Christ’s birth, walk upon the water, agony in the garden, death, and resurrection all took
place in hours of darkness, forming a pattern of salvation to be renewed mystically in the
lives of his followers.
It was St. John’s genius, as Stein shows, to use the symbol of night to express and inter-
pret the meaning of the cross in the life of the Christian. He did so by relating the cosmic
night to the mystic night of the soul, using the “image-language” of night to speak appro-
priately about his own, intimate experience of the divine. The “image-language” which he
uses as an outflow of this experience is not merely a metaphoric transference, whereby one
becomes acquainted with “something unknown and inaccessible through something com-
monly known and familiar that it resembles” (p. 42). Rather, like the “image-language” in
the biblical witnesses from which it draws, it has the anagogic power to draw one beyond its
expressions, back into the original divine experience itself. In Stein’s words, “Something
intangible here and something intangible there, and yet clearly one overlaps the other and
can be used to access the other” (p. 42).
23
Stein, Science of the Cross, 42. Successive parenthetical page references are from the same work.
John famously describes the spiritual life as a mystical passage through the active
nights of purgation—first of the physical senses, then of the spiritual—to the passive night
of the spirit and bridal union with God. Stein highlights the human freedom entailed in
this journey, beginning with the “active entry into the dark night of the senses,” which is
“synonymous with ready willingness to take up the cross, and with persistence in carrying
the cross” (p. 49). This freedom steadily increases as the soul grows in its likeness to God,
having “freed herself from the devil, from the world, and her own sensuality” (p. 148). Only
when the soul is completely centered in God and thus at home with God in the “innermost
region” of her own being, does she have “the freedom to go to whatever place in her [con-
scious soul-life] she pleases, without having to leave her place, the place of her rest” (p.
159–60). This “deepest point is . . . the place of her freedom, the place at which she can col-
lect her entire being and make decisions about it,” because the soul is not alone there, but
resting in God, who provides the “ultimate standards against which everything else is
weighed” (p. 160). Following St. Teresa’s description of the seventh chamber of the soul,
Stein explains that “God lives ‘all alone’ in this innermost region of the soul . . . as long as
the soul has not reached the perfect union of love” with God (p. 162). The “highest act” of
spiritual freedom is the soul’s total self-surrender to the action of grace that draws her into
that union and thus into her own center of identity, which is “the place of most perfect
freedom” (p. 162).
The “I” that is formed at this innermost point is radically inter-subjective for Stein,
because it arises out of self-abandonment and self-surrender to an Other, to God. Such a
soul offers a sharp contrast to “the ‘I-human being,’ that is, the one for whom his own ‘I’
stands as the central point” (p. 163). In her doctoral dissertation of 1916, Stein had recog-
nized, “If we take the self as the standard, we lock ourselves into the prison of our individu-
ality.”24 Stein’s solution at that time had been to argue for the importance of empathetic,
inter-subjective experience. In The Science of the Cross, written twenty-six years later, she
returns to her earlier interest in the “personal structure” of the soul, its “unchangeable ker-
nel,” and its “zero-point of orientation,”25 but this time she finds that the soul’s true “I” is
always already inter-subjective and Other-centered. McIntosh explains, “The human person
has a self, an identity . . . but it is only able to actualize that provisional reality by existing in
relationship with the Giver of that personal identity.”26
In its bridal union with God, the “I” is finally formed, according to Stein, because the
soul is joined, in a free and total self-surrender, to the imago dei in which she was created,
the creative Word of God living within her, and through him, to the Trinity: “Mystical mar-
24
Stein, Problem of Empathy, 116.
25
See Stein, Problem of Empathy, esp. 61–63, 110.
26
McIntosh, Mystical Theology, 228.
riage is union with the Triune God.”27 Stein goes on to interpret “the mystical union . . . as a
participation in the incarnation”:
Every time that a soul surrenders so totally without reservation that God can raise her to a mysti-
cal marriage, it is as though he becomes man anew. Naturally, the essential difference remains
that in Jesus Christ both natures are one in one person, while in mystical marriage two persons
enter into a union and their duality remains intact. However, through the mutual surrender of
the two, a union results that comes close to the hypostatic one. (p. 261)
This “new creation,” this “I” of the person, is fully knowable only by God, who draws
the soul into union with him and gives each of his elect this “new name” (Rev. 2:17). It can
and must be symbolically expressed, however, through the “image-language” of the scrip-
tures, which mediates the soul’s anagogic approach to God and to the ground of her own
being, which is hidden in God. St. John’s title “of the Cross” is, in short, a name by which he
was called homeward to God, into the dark night that became, in the end, a bridal chamber
and a birthplace.
Edith Stein, like St. John, chose the name “of the Cross”—an emblematic title that gave
expression to her “inner image” of God. She expressed this image in a rich series of medita-
tions, poems, and prayers of self-offering for the cause of peace and as a ransom for the
Jewish people. Commenting on the choice of her Carmelite title, Stein wrote: “By the cross I
understood the destiny of God’s people. . . . Certainly, today, I know more what it means to
be wedded to the Lord in the sign of the cross. Of course, one can never comprehend it, for
it is a mystery.”28 In an era when Nazi persecutors sought to define her identity as a nega-
tion, a “non-Aryan,” she gave God the final right to determine who she was. For her, the
mystical night of God’s word and Word embraced and transformed even the terrible night
of the Shoah—a night she entered by actively taking up the cross.
27
28
Stein, Letter 287, quoted in Science of the Cross, xix.
Between Text & Sermon
Psalm 8 ELIZABETH HINSON-HASTY

Bellarmine University
U.S. SENATORS RECENTLY VOTED TO ALLOW drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a
victory that has left environmentalists bruised. Record oil prices, escalating gas prices, and
Americans’ fear of losing our hold on the comfortable and convenient life to which we are
accustomed was enough to convince the majority of the senate to buy the argument that we
need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. The Senate’s conclusion: ensuring American
access to fossil fuel is worth plundering one of the last pristine wilderness areas that remain
in our nation. While I have no statistical data to back up my observation, I have also
noticed a surge in the popularity of leather coats and furs. Not too long ago it was consid-
ered passé to wear such extravagant garments, especially in church. I will not be the first
one to point out that Americans’ appetites are increasing. The film Super Size Me recently
documented the effects on the human body of eating large portions of fast food. Elected
bodies debate ecological and economic issues and decide what to value more, irreplaceable
natural beauty and life or the comfortable and convenient standard of living to which
(many) Americans have become accustomed. Is the Artic National Wildlife Refuge to be
viewed as a hedge against dependence on foreign oil, or as a sacred trust of incalculable
wonder? What often appears to be the prevailing attitude toward the environment and ani-
mal-life is perhaps summed up well in the department store slogan: “It’s all for you!” This
approach gives pastors and other religious leaders another cue for preaching. Questions
concerning human dominion over the natural world are in the forefront once again.
In light of our contemporary context, it is tempting to argue against the use of domin-
ion language altogether. We too often associate dominion with control and domination.
However, the biblical text makes it difficult to avoid the use of dominion language. There is
no way to escape the psalmist’s view that God grants dominion to human beings. A superfi-
cial reading of Psalm 8 even seems to lend support to the idea that God’s gift of dominion
to human beings means valuing the natural world for the way it serves human needs and
using it for whatever we see fit. In v. 6, the psalmist uses the Hebrew word ma3s]al to refer to
dominion. “You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all
things under their feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the
air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas” (Ps 8:6). The
Hebrew word used in Gen 1:28 is from the root ra3da3h which means to subdue or to rule
over. While the Hebrew wording differs, the notion of dominion in Ps 8 is clearly reminis-
cent of the first creation story. Making this connection is noteworthy because the dominion
associated with what God has given to human beings comes with significant limitations.
Recall how the first creation story goes. A refrain is repeated after each thing is created,
the land and sea, birds and other living creatures, etc. The refrain, “And, God saw that it was
good,” reminds the reader of God’s appreciation for the creation. Every aspect of the cre-
ation is valued in and of itself. Christian theologian John Cobb argues that the first chapter
of Genesis does not support valuing the natural world from an anthropocentric perspective.
“On the contrary,” Cobb writes, “God sees that the created order is good quite apart from
the presence of human beings within it. This means, in philosophical language, that all
creatures have intrinsic value” (Matters of Life and Death).
J. Clinton McCann points out that “God’s ‘name’ or reputation is bound up with the
human performance of dominion, and human dominion is a responsibility that is to be
bounded by God’s ultimate sovereignty” (“Commentary on the Psalms,” New Interpreter’s
Bible Commentary). The primary actors in Ps 8 are not human beings; the primary actor is
God. “O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” is the proclama-
tion repeated at the beginning and at the end of the psalm. Rosemary Radford Ruether puts
this in another way, “The biblical witness is one of keen awareness of the limits of human
power” (Gaia and God). In the Hebraic worldview, human beings are limited by their own
impermanence and by the fact that their authority is always delegated to them by God.
“Nature is not private property to be done with as one wishes, but stewardship over an
earth that is God’s” (Gaia and God). Dominion in this context is framed as a partnership
between God and human beings and connected to the biblical concept of covenant. Those
who live in covenantal relationship, in partnership, consider their responsibilities in light of
their relationship with God, and their awareness of God’s care for, love for, and intimate
relationship with the natural world.
Americans are often prone to think of our own ability to manipulate our environment
and harness the power of natural resources as proof of God’s blessing upon our nation.
This view of prosperity contrasts that of the Hebrew Bible, in which the prosperity of the
land is directly linked to the righteousness of the Hebrew people. Ruether underscores how
Sabbath legislation shows the key relationship between justice and prosperity. Sabbath prac-
tice was not just about rest, but a way that the Hebrew people recognized that it was not
their activities that were at the center of the universe. Time and eternity met in the Jewish
Sabbath as the Jewish people remembered their present salvation was not in their own
hands, but ultimately in the hands of a God of creativity and liberation. Sabbath cycles cul-
minated in a fifty year celebration where balance between human beings, animals and the
land would be restored. “And you shall hallow the fiftieth year and you shall proclaim liber-
ty through the land and its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you” (Lev 25:10).
Worship leaders might further this idea by encouraging people in the pews to consider
how the way we treat the earth impacts God. The Brief Statement of Faith may move us
along in this discussion. “In sovereign love God created the world good and makes everyone
equally in God’s image, male and female, of every race and people, to live as one communi-
ty. But we rebel against God; we hide from our Creator. Ignoring God’s commandments, we
violate the image of God in others and ourselves, accepts lies as truth, exploit neighbor and
nature, and threaten death to the planet entrusted to our care” (Book of Confessions of the
Presbyterian Church USA 10.3.29–38). Could this confessional statement also nudge us to
remember how we violate God as we exploit both neighbor and nature? Isn’t a God who
affirms the goodness of and loves all creatures also vulnerable to the human exploitation of
the natural world?
What would our world, our attitudes, our practices, and even our political policies look
like if we began to see and value God, the environment, all creatures, and human beings in
mutually beneficial and covenantal relationship? Psalm 8 is a good beginning point for
reflection on these questions. God-given dominion does not give license to exploit.
Dominion thought of in terms of covenantal relationship brings with it the responsibility
to value the interdependence of God, all creatures, and the creation as well as the responsi-
bility to care for the earth as we have been cared for and loved by a God of limitless love.

Matthew 3:1–12 RAYMOND R. ROBERTS

Westfield, New Jersey
COMMON WISDOM HAS IT THAT THE THREE most important things in real estate are location,
location, and location. The same is true for people. “Since the divorce she’s been in a really
bad place.” “Our group just isn’t there yet. We’re stuck.” “I know I shouldn’t dwell on the
past, but I don’t know how to move on.” “None of his peers has any sense of direction.”
“Where are you on this decision?” You can better identify a person’s location by listening
than with maps and a Global Positioning System. Attitude is more important than latitude.
Whether the lectionary preacher addresses this text singly or as part of an Advent series
on Matthew’s messengers (other messengers include Jesus, John’s disciples, and Joseph’s
dream angel), this richly textured passage not only helps us locate ourselves, it also chal-
lenges us to move forward into God’s approaching reign.
WILDERNESS
The text begins by telling us that “John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of
Judea.” The wilderness is an important place in the Bible. The children of Israel passed
through the wilderness on the way to the Promised Land. The Isaiah text Matthew quotes
to illumine John’s ministry (Isa 40) supports building a highway through the wilderness to
transport the Babylonian exiles home. John preached in the part of Judea known as the
wilderness. He also preached during the Roman occupation, which we can view as a sort of
wilderness experience.
The preacher knows that the wilderness is not merely a place on a map, but is a fore-
boding region in the geography of the individual and collective soul. Jesus experienced the
wilderness as a place of testing (Matt 4:1–11). No one wants to linger in the wilderness
because it is desolate and dry. Its barrenness forces one to recognize one’s dependence on
God’s provision (Exod 16–17). The wilderness is a tiresome place, and one soon longs to go
back to the way things were before. Yet one cannot go back. Going forward can be hard too.
On more than one occasion the children of Israel walked up to the Promised Land, looked
across, decided that claiming the land was too hard, and turned back (Num 13:1–14:38).
When one doesn’t go forward and can’t go back, one must wander.
We often equate the wilderness with the disruption that follows illness, divorce, or
other loss, but it is worth remembering that the children of Israel wandered in the wilder-
ness after their liberation. Similarly, some young adults drift in the wilderness after they
leave home. For a time, the thrill of being on one’s own can obscure the truth that God’s
commands are signposts to freedom. Some would say that race relations in America have
wandered in the wilderness these past forty years for similar reasons, and we have yet to
claim the promise of the civil rights movement.
People who are in the wilderness wonder whether it ever ends. They ask how they can
move forward. John testified to the hope that although God may lead us into the wilder-
ness, God does not intend for us to stay there. John also reminds us that moving forward
may require significant change on our part.
CROSSING JORDAN
Although one supposes that John could have ministered most anywhere, John chose to
locate his ministry on the Jordan. In contrast to the Apostle Paul, who tried to reach as
many people as he could by going to the major cities around the Mediterranean, John made
the people come out into the wilderness to hear his message. Indeed, he could not have
made them travel out any farther and still be in Israel. It is an odd approach that only
makes sense if we recognize that John could not do what he was doing any place else.
The Jordan River claims a significant place in Israel’s history as the threshhold through
which the children of Israel entered the Promised Land. John stood on Jordan’s banks and
announced that heaven’s reign had come near and had called people to prepare for the
Messiah’s coming. John baptized people in the Jordan to wash away the past and inaugurate
a new future. When we put all this together, we see that John’s baptism enacted a retaking of
the land. Although we generally overlook the political ramifications of John’s ministry, they
did not go unnoticed by the Roman occupiers, and this may explain, in part, why he was
imprisoned and beheaded.
John’s border ministry suggests another sermonic angle. The church still connects bap-
tism with the proclamation of heaven’s approaching reign. We cannot understand baptism
apart from repentance and the intention to live life in the light of God’s rule. Those
involved in such radical ministry must have courage because the news of God’s reign and
the transformation it produces still threaten principalities and powers.
D I R E C T I O N A N D D E S T I N AT I O N
John called people to “repent for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” (Jesus echoes
this in Matt 4:17.) We see dimensions of this message more clearly when we refract it
through the prism of location.
John perceived that God’s reign was drawing near in Christ. This nearness should be
understood not only temporally but also spatially. Not only does God rule the world
around us, but God is also manifesting divine governance through the latent possibilities
that lie around us, waiting to be realized. The preacher, knowing that hope is a kind of dis-
cernment, may develop this by helping the congregation see the possibilities of God’s reign
that are still coming near in Jesus Christ.
Of course, announcing these possibilities is not enough. The preacher will also invite
people to participate in God’s reign by making the personal and social amendments that
John describes as repentance.
Repentance involves choosing a new spiritual and moral destination. Advent is a peni-
tential season, and the preacher may want to invite the congregation to consider where it is
headed. John spoke quite pointedly about the destination that awaited those who did not
change. He alerted those who rested on the laurels of a religious past that God was looking
for them to produce fruit. He informed them that they were dispensable, claiming that God
was capable of raising children from the stones. Furthermore, he warned that God was
ready to dispense justice and that God would soon appear on the divine threshing floor,
separating the wheat from the chaff. The chaff could look forward to unquenchable fire. His
message was unabashedly, “turn or burn.” The preacher will note that John’s message chal-
lenges easy universalisms and comfortable exclusivist theologies. The call to repent is an
invitation to accept responsibility. It denies that God’s future depends on everyone else
changing. By calling us to a radical, disruptive, and decisive change, it denies that we easily
grow in goodness. Repentance requires a conscious turning from sin and a deliberate turn-
ing to God. Both are necessary to effect transformation. The preacher will want to encour-
age people to believe that God’s grace makes this revolution possible.
ADVENT GPS
John reminds us that Advent is a season to invite people to choose their direction and
destination. It is the season to ask: “Where are you?” and “Where are you going?” It is a time
to ask: “How is God’s reign drawing near and even now lying dormant in unrealized possi-
bilities around you?” and “What will it take for you to participate in God’s kingdom?” It is a
time to call people to repentance because the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

ELIZABETH B. FORD
Matthew 26:6–13 Graduate Theological Union
Berkeley, California
SEVERAL WINTERS AGO ON A WOMEN’S RETREAT, a gift appeared at my door—a framed print
entitled, “She Who Loves the Lord.” It is a picture of a woman who has no features on her
face. The artist explains that she started creating these drawings when her young son, whom
she had adopted, began asking her questions about his birth mother. She wanted to
respond, but she did not know much, so she said, “I’ll draw you a picture.” She left the
woman’s face blank so that he could imagine what his birth mother looked like. The stories
of unnamed women in the Bible allow us to do the same thing. We imagine the faces of
women and men who step into the stories.
Reading this story from the twenty-sixth chapter of Matthew, I see the face of Dr. Ann
Thyle. After graduating from medical school in India with the highest test scores in the
country, Ann received an invitation to work at one of the most prestigious teaching hospi-
tals in Nairobi, where her parents lived. She decided instead to work for a mission hospital
that is part of the Emmanuel Hospital Association. She and her husband were going to try
it out for two years, but the work was so compelling that they stayed. That was twenty-two
years ago.
Ann’s father never understood her decision. Like the disciples, he cried, “Why this
waste?” Ann received the best education that was available to her, yet she chose to live in
obscurity in rural north India, serving the poorest of the poor. In all her years in the mis-
sion hospital, her father never visited her.
Just a few years before he died, Ann’s father was in north India attending a building
dedication at one of the universities he had founded. He made a side trip to see Ann. When
he saw the work she was doing, he said, “Now I understand.” Like the alabaster jar of costly
ointment the woman pours on Jesus’ head, Ann has made her whole life an offering to God.
Ann could have advanced cutting edge treatments for women, but instead she chose to pio-
neer a new way of giving medical care, treating patients as persons, crossing the boundaries
of class and caste.
Just as Ann discerned what was most important at the moment in time when she grad-
uated from medical school and received the call to work in the mission hospital, the woman
in our story discerns what is most important in this moment. Whereas she is present and
attentive to Jesus, the disciples miss the significance of this moment in his life.
Literary insights provide key signposts throughout the process of interpreting this text.
The unit marks the beginning of the passion narrative in Matthew. Most striking among
the literary features of the text is its frame. Before and after the anointing scene, the chief
priests appear in the palace of the high priest, first plotting to arrest and kill Jesus and then
paying Judas thirty pieces of silver to betray Jesus. Whereas Matthew portrays the male
characters—the chief priests, the disciples, and Judas—in a negative light, the woman
emerges as a model of devotion. Their calculating stands in striking contrast to her unmea-
sured giving. The larger frame reinforces the centrality of the woman’s action in the narra-
tive.
The structure of the passage suggests careful narrative construction. First, the narrator
describes the woman’s action. Then, the disciples react angrily, saying, “Why this waste?”
and articulate their objections. Jesus responds with a parallel question, “Why do you trou-
ble the woman?” and, after defending her, interprets her action. He concludes with a
resounding note of affirmation: “Wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the whole world,
what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.”
The relation of the anointing scene to the larger literary context in Matthew is also
telling. Earlier in Matthew, Jesus heals a leper and a woman in a trio of miracle stories
(Matt 8:1–15). In this case a leper is host and a woman comes “not as supplicant, but as
actor” (Elaine Mary Wainwright, Towards A Feminist Critical Reading of the Gospel
According to Matthew). She brings not a request, but precious ointment. The women who
approach Jesus in Matthew’s gospel become progressively emboldened. Peter’s mother-in-
law does not ask anything of Jesus; the hemorrhaging woman tentatively approaches Jesus
from behind and touches his garment; the Canaanite woman openly makes her request and
engages Jesus in dialogue; now this woman not only approaches Jesus but pours oil on his
head, a gesture he interprets as anointing for burial (Wainwright, 126). She is a strong fig-
ure, unlikely to buckle under criticism.
Variations of the story appear in each of the four gospels. Attending to the nuances
reveals what distinguishes Matthew’s account from the others and offers insights into the
history of interpretation. Of all the gospels, Matthew’s is the most sparing in detail. While
structurally similar to the other accounts, the economy of language in Matthew intensifies
the focus on the woman’s action. We know nothing of her identity or motivation, whether
she is a host, guest, observer, or intruder, whether she is married or unmarried, Jew or
Gentile. In Matthew, she is merely a silhouette, a woman with no features on her face.
Clearly, the gospel writers and early Christian communities were uncomfortable with
her anonymity, for they embellished their accounts. Luke adds that she was “a woman of
the city who was a sinner;” John identifies her as Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus.
There are other differences as well, namely, in whose house the scene occurs, the time of the
encounter in relation to the Passover (in Matthew, just two days away), whether the woman
anoints Jesus’ head or feet, who protests (the disciples, “some people,” a Pharisee, or Judas),
and the objection itself. In Matthew, we do not know the value of the ointment but only
that it is costly. The number of variations and layers of interpretation suggest that early
interpreters found this scene troublesome.
It is instructive to note who inhabits the margins of the text, for those on the edges—
Simon the leper and the unnamed woman—perceive clearly, not the disciples. Simon offers
hospitality; the woman pours ointment. The narrator identifies Simon only by his disease,
never acknowledging his presence (or absence) in the scene. Although the disciples take up
the most narrative space, the woman becomes the center of attention as the exemplar of
understanding. Her power comes through perception, not position. By virtue of her action,
she moves to the center and the disciples recede to the margin. They embody struggle in the
text, and readers struggle along with them. How familiar their objections sound! Many of
us identify with their resistance.
Knowing that something significant is happening in the life of someone we love does
not always make it register. Jesus told the disciples that in two days the Passover was coming
and he would be taken away to be crucified. Once the woman enters the scene, all they can
do is protest. On one level they are right. It is foolish of her to pour out the ointment. She
could have gotten a lot of money for it and given the money to the poor. Yet Jesus defends
her and says she has performed a “good work” or a “good service.” The rabbis at the time
spoke of two kinds of good work: giving money to the poor and burying the dead (Douglas
A. Hare, Matthew). Both are important, but burying the dead assumes a higher priority
because it has to be done at a particular time and calls for personal service.
Something happens when we are in tune with those around us and with their unspo-
ken needs, as this woman is with Jesus. How often our attention is pulled “out there” rather
than “right here.” The disciples’ concern for the poor, while important, keeps them from
being aware of the needs of the one in their midst. It is easy to love at a distance. Sometimes
we miss the hungry one who stands before us (cf. Matt 25:31–46).
The disciples see the ointment, not for what it is, but for what purpose it can serve.
Their focus is on profit, productivity, and potential. Some of us take a similar approach to
another precious commodity: time. Presbyterian minister and professor Belden Lane says,
“Even when I set aside time to be ‘wasted,’ I try to waste it in the most profitable way. . . .
Deciding to go to a movie with my wife . . . I unconsciously ask myself which film might
offer insights useful in teaching or writing. Quintessential American that I am, I do every-
thing for the worth that’s in it . . .” (The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and
Mountain Spirituality). I wonder if it is fear that motivates the disciples, fear of not having
enough. Maybe they are very much aware of Jesus’ impending departure, and they question
their own capacity to rise to the needs that are before them. Like them, we are called to act
out of faith, not fear.
The good news is that we are free to set aside the many tasks that consume our energy
and attention and to live fully in the moment that is before us. Beneath the ordinary experi-
ences we share with one another lie deeper moments of meaning. The question is, will we
attune ourselves to those around us and to the deepest call within us, or will we be drawn
away by lesser concerns? Whenever you feel something pulling you away, remember.
Remember her, the one who loved the Lord.

Hebrews 2:10–18 STEVEN R. HARMON

Campbell University Divinity School
“He himself was tested by what he suffered”—this is altogether low, and mean, and unworthy of
God. . . .God is incapable of suffering. But he describes here what belongs to the Incarnation, as if he
had said,“Even the very flesh of Christ suffered many terrible things.”
— John Chrysostom, Homilies on Hebrews 5
Only the suffering God can help.

—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 16 July 1944
HEBREWS 2:10–18 PROVIDES THE MOST straightforward biblical support for Bonhoeffer’s
declaration from Tegel prison: it is most fitting for God in saving human beings to “make
the pioneer of their salvation perfect through sufferings” (v. 10), and it is “because he him-
self was tested by what he suffered” that “he is able to help those who are being tested” (v.
18). The motif of God’s solidarity in Christ with those who suffer is intensified by its con-
nection on the First Sunday in Christmas in Year A of the Revised Common Lectionary
with the slaughter of the holy innocents (Matt 2:13–23). Yet John Chrysostom reflects the
received wisdom of the earliest interpreters of Christian Scripture on God’s relationship to
suffering when he denies passibility to God and the divine nature of Christ and relegates
the sufferings of Christ to his human flesh. What is the preacher who reads and proclaims
this text along with the communion of saints that includes both Chrysostom and
Bonhoeffer to do with these seemingly opposite perspectives?
If any readers of Interpretation were to deny the ancient orthodoxy of the impassibility
of God from the pulpit next Sunday morning, they would not face a heresy trial. Indeed,
they would merely be repeating the received theological wisdom of contemporary mainline
Protestantism: God suffers in solidarity with those who suffer, a concept now so axiomatic
that almost twenty years ago Christian Century editor-at-large Ronald Goetz could describe
it as “a new orthodoxy” (April 16, 1986, p. 385). If one were to contravene this “new ortho-
doxy,” however, she or he might well face an informal conversational inquisition by clerical
peers, especially by those who received their theological educations after the 1974 publica-
tion in English translation of Jürgen Moltmann’s The Crucified God. They would be quick
to remind our heartless hypothetical minister that after Auschwitz, after 9/11, after the
Southeast Asian tsunami, a theology that does not affirm God’s solidarity with those who
suffer is worse than irrelevant—it is untrue to the biblical story of the God who is revealed
in Jesus Christ and downright immoral as a word about God to a world that knows such
unspeakable suffering.
Theopassianism is a proper theological instinct for our milieu, and it is by no means

limited to the theologically educated. Even among theological neophytes from very conserv-
ative traditions, there seems to be a universal instinct to affirm the passion of God. When I
taught multiple sections of systematic theology as an adjunct professor at a seminary in the
mid-1990s, I assigned readings from classical affirmations of divine impassibility and more
recent advocates of theopassianism, then required the students to write an essay in which
they were to defend the appropriateness and relevance of either passibility or impassibility.
Without exception, these students defended divine suffering and were incredulous upon
learning that Christians had ever thought anything else about the God revealed in Jesus
Christ. Only a few months removed from having been theological laypersons themselves,
they represented the people in the pews of their congregations, for whom “only the suffer-
ing God can help.”
To chalk up this seeming reversal in common Christian opinion on God’s relationship

to suffering to the ignorance and barbarism of the ancients is to fall prey to a modern
chronological snobbery that cannot be sustained in our postmodern situation. To attribute
the patristic affirmation of impassibility simply to a Hellenization of an original Hebraic
belief in a passionate God is to distort the development of patristic thought. Most advocates
of theopassianism are dependent on Adolf von Harnack’s interpretation of patristic doctri-
nal development as the replacement of an original ethical gospel with a Hellenistic philo-
sophical theology in laying the historical plank of their case: influenced by the Stoic ideal of
apatheia, “passionlessness,” the church fathers reasoned that a perfect God could not share
in the human imperfection of being subject to suffering and the power of the passions and
so made impassibility a fundamental divine attribute. Paul L. Gavrilyuk sets forth a cogent
argument against this “theory of theology’s fall into Hellenistic philosophy” in his recent
book The Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought. He makes the
case that an opposition of patristic impassibility and modern theopassianism is a false
dichotomy. Unqualified expressions of both positions are problematic. More carefully quali-
fied expressions of both positions seek a positive relation of God to human suffering that
offers not only encouragement to sufferers of God’s solidarity with them but also a para-
digm for divinely empowered triumph over suffering and the passions by those who belong
to Christ. The remainder of this article considers the implications of Gavrilyuk’s conclu-
sions for interpreters and proclaimers of Heb 2:10–18.
T H E P R O B L E M W I T H A N U N N U A N C E D PA S S I B I L I T Y
To affirm that God suffers when God’s creatures suffer rightly maintains God’s sympa-
thy and solidarity with those who suffer. To affirm this without further qualification, how-
ever, overlooks the dissimilarity between God’s relationship to suffering and the human suf-
ferer’s relationship to suffering. Much human suffering is against our will; God’s suffering is
always voluntary. The sufferer may be powerless to do anything about the suffering; God’s
external relationship to this suffering makes it possible for God to offer compassionate aid
to the sufferer rather than merely joining the sufferer in being overcome by suffering. When
the minister assures the congregation on the basis of v. 18 that because God incarnate suf-
fered God is able to help those who suffer, this is good news because God both knows this
suffering and has a qualitatively different relationship to it than we do. Only the suffering
God can help, but it is only the suffering of the God who has greater power than we do over
suffering that is able to help. This is what the patristic insistence on divine impassibility
sought to safeguard.
T H E P R O B L E M W I T H A N U N N U A N C E D I M PA S S I B I L I T Y
While an unqualified theopassianism may run into a few theological dead ends if car-
ried to certain logical extremes, it is a far superior word about God than an unqualified
impassibility. An attribution of impassibility to God that does not also find ways to affirm
God’s personal involvement in suffering has the same problematic practical implications as
Docetism, Arianism, and deism. Orthodox Christian trinitarian theism has rejected these as
inadequate ways of imagining the divine because they posit a God who remains distant
from the human condition, even when performing the work of salvation. Thus when the
fathers maintained the impassibility of God, they did so as part of a paradox in which the
impassible God is passible as the incarnate Word, who is both the subject and the object of
perfection through suffering in v. 10.
While “God” is the subject that makes the pioneer of salvation perfect through suffer-
ing in the NRSV’s translation of v. 10, in the Greek text the subject is the more ambiguous
third person masculine pronoun. But in the exegesis of Theodore of Mopsuestia, the pro-
noun’s referent is the Word, the second person of the Trinity, who makes perfect through
suffering the human to whom the Word is joined in the incarnation. Thus in the economy
of salvation, God as the incarnate Word is both impassible and passible, the one who per-
fects through suffering and the one who is made perfect through suffering. In this way the
Word incarnate is “able to help those who are being tested” (v. 18)—objectively by sharing
flesh and blood and becoming subject to death in order to destroy death’s sway over those
who suffer and free them from its fear (vv. 14–15); subjectively by identifying with them as
a fellow sufferer whose mercy is grounded in the experience of suffering (v. 17); and by pro-
viding a paradigm for impassible suffering by followers of Christ themselves. Cyril of
Alexandria held that believers could share in the impassible passion of Christ whenever
they suffered, for through the Holy Spirit they have access to the qualitatively different rela-
tion to suffering that God has. In patristic perspective, God suffers impassibly—entering
into suffering without being overcome by it—and so may we.
Today’s preacher must proclaim emphatically that God does indeed know our suffer-
ing. Yet in doing so, it is not necessary to choose Bonhoeffer over Chrysostom, for the
fathers also imagined a God who suffers—and who is able to help as the God who has
power over suffering and makes it available to sufferers.

Major Reviews
The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1
by J. Richard Middleton
Brazos Press, Grand Rapids, 2005. 304 pp. $21.99. ISBN
1-58743-110-6.
WELL MAY WE ASK, “DOES the world need yet another

book on Gen 1:26–28 and the image of God in
humankind?” My answer is, “Yes, if it is Middleton’s
book!” It is an excellent contribution to biblical exegesis
and biblical ethics alike.
Professor Middleton confesses that imago dei has

been one of his major interests for many years, and it
shows. Maintaining a positive spirit all the while, he has
read practically everything on the subject from all parts
of the critical and theological spectrum. His own background is conservative and evangeli-
cal, yet he warmly acknowledges his scholarly debt to Brueggemann and Hanson, Fretheim,
and Levenson (even though he has serious disagreement with the latter’s book, Creation
and the Persistence of Evil). He is able to view the “image of God” issues from the perspec-
tives of the developing world and an ethnic minority, partly because he grew up as a white
person in Jamaica; however, he writes this book as an adoptive North American with a
Ph.D. from a Dutch university. He is his own man, challenging wisdom received from such
scholarly giants as Gunkel, Noth, von Rad, and Barr, and even casting doubts on the Priestly
source and the entire documentary hypothesis en route to erecting his own important posi-
tion.
Middleton begins his work by reviewing the insights of Old Testament scholarship
about the meaning of “image of God” in humankind. As do I in my article in this issue of
Interpretation, he joins Douglas John Hall (Imaging God: Dominion as Stewardship) in
grouping many of the proposals into the categories of “substantialist” or “relational” under-
standings of the concept. However, Middleton identifies a third category that he variously
calls a “functional,” “royal,” or “ruling” understanding of the meaning of “the image of
God.” Noting that the syntax connecting Gen 1:26a with verse 26b could be interpreted as
conveying “intention” or “aim,” he says, “The syntax. . . points to ‘rule’ as the purpose, not
simply the consequence or result, of the imago Dei” ( p. 53). Such an understanding opens a
way to see the human creature as the one delegated by God to take over the task of mediat-
ing and representing the divine presence on earth and, for that matter, continuing the work
of creation and rule even after God retires from the action on the open-ended and unfin-
REVIEWS Interpretation 409
ished seventh day (p. 291).
Considering various ancient Near Eastern sociohistorical backgrounds against which

Genesis 1 might have been written, Middleton settles on several Mesopotamian epic texts
that set forth the works of Marduk and the other creator gods as well as the status of
human beings in the creative order. The possibility that a human being might bear the
image of a god was granted in Assyria and Babylon, but it was bound to the elitist notion of
sacral kingship. All other human beings were created to serve the gods. Such an ideology
legitimated a rigidly stratified social order, and it guaranteed oppression of the masses.
Of this powerful and pervasive culture Israel provided an ideological critique. It

grounded its egalitarian social order in a “democratized” notion of imago dei in which all
human beings share God’s ruling function within the sacral temple that is God’s creation.
By perceiving in human beings the gift and responsibility of stewardship in the earth,
described as kingly rule shared by all, Israel delegitimated both royal and priestly hierar-
chies and elevated the status of the individual. As Middleton puts it, “All persons have equal
access to God simply by being human . . . . Humans are the only legitimate or authorized
earthly representations of God” (p. 207).
In addition to this elevated and egalitarian understanding of the role of humanity in

relation to the rest God’s creatures, a second major contribution of the cosmogony in
Genesis 1 is its rejection of the mythic theme of creation-by-combat. Where that myth
flourished and the gods had to grapple at the creation with chaos (variously reified as
Tiamat, Lotan, Leviathan, Rahab, the dragon, the sea), violence was built into ontology and
was in fact co-eternal with the gods. In the Old Testament, the myth of divine victory over
chaotic waters is usually employed to exalt God’s vanquishing of historical enemies, espe-
cially at the Red Sea (e.g., Ps 77:16–20; Isa 51:9–11). Middleton allows that the myth of cre-
ation-by-combat, ubiquitous in the ancient Near East, also is to be found in the Old
Testament, but only in about three cases: Job 26:7–14; Pss 74:12–17, 89:5–14. The problem
with the notion that God has to master a “worthy opponent” (Levenson’s term) at the cre-
ation of the world, is that evil/chaos is “given primordial status, [and] the conquest of this
evil/chaos to found the ordered enshrines violence as the divinely chosen method for estab-
lishing goodness” (p. 254). It is not difficult, then, to imagine persons linking militarism
and holy war to the work of religion. Furthermore, if one regards the imago dei as essential-
ly a gift to an elect humanity (as opposed to everyone else), then there is “a fundamental
us/them distinction, with only a win/lose alternative” (p. 252).
In Middleton’s view, none of this derives from a proper understanding of Genesis 1. He

sees no link there between creation and violence. The primordial ocean of Gen 1:1–2, the
waters of the second and third days of creation in Gen 1:6–10, are not mythological mon-
sters. In Gen 1:21 the sea dragons are creatures, not pre-existent opponents, of God. God
creates with great ease, against no resistance, by fiat. The author follows Brueggemann in
speaking of God’s gracious “summons” or “permission” for creatures to exist (p. 265).
The proper outcome of the idea of imago dei in Genesis is an ideology that is democra-
tic and nonviolent. Humanity should exercise its God-given mandate to rule in the earth
not in a manner animated by cosmogonic conflict, but gently and generously.
In the last chapter, “Imaging God’s Primal Generosity,” Middleton uses close rhetorical
observation to show that Genesis 1 is a story of a good creator who invites the creatures to
participate actively in the process of creation (e.g., “Let the earth put forth vegetation. . . .
Let the waters bring forth swarms,” Gen 1:11, 20). God does not “overdetermine the order
of the cosmos” (p. 286). Of course, the chief beneficiary of this generous offer of co-creativ-
ity is human agency.
To illustrate the “symmetry and dissymmetry” that he discerns in the Genesis 1

account, Middleton introduces diagrams of the Mandelbrot set (fractal geometry relating to
chaos theory) and the Lorenz Strange Attractor (a meteorological model that offers a con-
stant that exercises some governance in an otherwise never exactly repeating though essen-
tially symmetrical system). Candidly, these illustrations strike me as less than convincing.
Never mind that quibble. Middleton ends by advocating an ethic, rooted in the imago
dei, characterized by the exercise of “power with rather than power over” (p. 297). This is
exactly where I, too, want to end up.
Here are a few minor criticisms. The book lacks a bibliography, though its copious
notes are a rich source of recent scholarship on Genesis, imago dei¸ and ancient Near
Eastern religion. It does have an index, but the index is oddly incomplete in its listing of
scholarly citations in the book. Clearly, however, Middleton missed little that was relevant,
except for an article by S. Dean McBride, “Divine Protocol: Genesis 1:1–2:3 as Prologue to
the Pentateuch,” in God Who Creates (2000).
In my effort to encapsulate Middleton’s argument and outcome, I have highlighted cer-

tain points of his that have been made often enough by others (e.g., democratization of
imago dei, dominion as stewardship, cosmos as temple). It is true that he draws frequently
and deeply on the scholarly discussion. Yet, taken as a whole, his book is original and pro-
found; furthermore, its denouement in a fruitful discussion of the biblical basis of social
and environmental ethics is invigorating. Scholars and preachers alike, particularly those
who stress right relationships with the whole of creation as the key to human survival, will
find study of this book to be time well employed.
W. Sibley Towner, Professor Emeritus

UNION-PSCE
RICHMOND, VIRGINIA

Jeremiah 21–36: A New Translation with

Introduction and Commentary
by Jack R. Lundbom
The Anchor Bible 21B. Doubleday, New York, 2004.
649 pp. $68.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-385-41113-8.
Jeremiah 37–52: A New Translation with
Introduction and Commentary
by Jack R. Lundbom
The Anchor Bible 21C. Doubleday, New York, 2004.
624 pp. $68.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-385-51160-4.
JACK LUNDBOM, ALONG WITH Phyllis Trible and Walter

Brueggemann, was a student of James Muilenburg, the
eloquent articulator of rhetorical-criticism for biblical
studies. Lundbom is a well-known practitioner of
rhetorical-criticism and a highly regarded interpreter
of the book of Jeremiah. The publication of the second and third volumes of his Anchor
Bible commentary concludes a massive labor of love on his part and marks a welcome addi-
tion to Jeremiah studies. For biblical scholars and teachers, these works are treasure troves of
information, exposition, and interpretation relating to Jeremiah’s ferocious book. For pastors
seeking help with sermon preparation or theological reflection, I am not so sure.
The difficulties lie in the format of the Anchor Bible Series that presses heavily upon
matters of text, translation, history, and interpretive problems. Lundbom imparts vast
amounts of information about these in lucid prose on each portion of the text. He is highly
appreciative of Jeremiah’s rhetoric in its linguistic creativity, multiple genres, metaphors, and
persuasive claims. The books can serve ministers well by laying the groundwork for theologi-
cal and hermeneutical reflection, but they are theologically thin and require readers to inte-
grate the material from the commentary’s multiple sections themselves.
The two new volumes do not stand alone but need to be read in conversation with the
“Introduction” to the first volume (Jeremiah 1–20, 1999, 55-151). There Lundbom lays out
the rhetorical-critical method and discusses other critical questions of canon, divergences
between the Hebrew and Greek versions of Jeremiah, relationships between poetry and
prose, division of the book into literary units, historical settings of the book, and the life and
ministry of the prophet Jeremiah. This first volume is worth acquiring for its clear, detailed
exposition of rhetorical criticism (pp. 68-101). Lundbom teaches readers how to decide
genre and boundaries of texts and how to discover structural elements and the “configura-
tion of their component parts” (p. 72). By discovering the text’s effects, he shows how to
identify the text’s claims upon readers and makes it possible for readers to do similar work
themselves.
The commentaries follow a four-part division: “Translation” of the section of the text
under consideration, “Rhetoric and Composition,” “Notes,” and “Message and Audience.”
Lundbom’s translation for each volume appears in continuous form at the front of the book
and is repeated section by section in the commentary. He captures the cadences and heated
imagery of Jeremiah’s poetry. His word order, faithful to the Hebrew, is often surprisingly
effective in English.
By far the most original contribution of these commentaries appears in the “Rhetoric
and Composition” section where Lundbom applies rhetorical-criticism with fulsome,
scrupulous detail. He uncovers how the text creates its power, musicality, and rushing force.
In the process, he names structural features from a variety of perspectives and represents
them in graphs. For example, on Jeremiah’s narrative polemic against emigrés to Egypt (Jer
44:1–30), Lundbom divides the text in half according to the chapter’s two superscriptions
and further divides the two parts on the basis of Hebrew grammatical markings of closing
and opening that coincide with genre divisions (poetic oracles or narrative). With a second
graph, he presents structuring elements such as repeated syntactic structures, key words, and
repeated vocabulary. Finally, he divides the chapter in yet another way on the chronological
basis of past, present, and future. These accumulating literary features reveal a text that
speaks of evil in the past, present, and future.
With refreshing new insight arising from his literary work, Lundbom calls into question
standard assumptions of Jeremiah studies. First, he disputes the view that the more complex
Hebrew version, by contrast to the leaner Septuagint translation, is not the result of scribal
errors and additions. The expansive Hebrew text of Jer 44, for example, indicates “vigorous
discourse, something akin to the music of an organist who ends a grand performance by
pulling out all the stops” (Jeremiah 37–52, p. 155). Such is Lundbom’s sense of the literature’s
power. Second, Lundbom challenges the long-held assumption that Jeremiah comprises
three or more pre-existing literary documents combined in haphazard fashion. From his
close literary readings, he concludes that a far more inventive literary process takes place in
this book than a rough editorial patching would allow.
“Notes” on text and translation are amazingly thorough. They attend to deviations
between the Septuagint and the Hebrew translations and offer detailed information about
place names, unfamiliar terms, and cross references to texts biblical and otherwise, ancient
and modern. For example, Lundbom includes a lengthy accounting of the double spelling in
Jeremiah of the Babylonian emperor’s name, Nebuchadrezzar and Nebuchadnezzar.
Although the analytic divisions of Lundbom’s commentary are deeply erudite and clear-
ly written, I find little integration among its various levels of analysis. The “Message and
Audience” sections are the most disappointing throughout the two volumes. I expected to
find in them a synthesis of material so far discussed or a highlighting of central themes and
images, culminating in theological questions or reflections on meaning in the passage or in
relation to the whole book. Instead, these entries generally paraphrase the text almost in a
pre-critical fashion, as if one could successfully interpret the text at face value. Paraphrases of
the text’s “message” generally make little or no reference to the preceding analysis and leave
readers to assimilate the various sections of the work on their own.
By “message,” Lundbom typically means a straightforward retelling of the passage. By

“audience,” he means the groups in the population named in the text under study rather
than the “implied audience” of the book itself. Sometimes the audience is the whole commu-
nity, or kings, or priests, or in Jer 44, the expatriots in Egypt with whom Jeremiah is
immensely angry. But what are the text’s claims upon the readers? How might passages have
functioned for the audience of the book? Why, for example, is Jer 44 preserved and included
in this part of the book and not elsewhere in the redaction? How does it contribute to the
life of Judeans and to larger biblical theology that it should be preserved at all? In comment-
ing on the new covenant passage (31:31), however, Lundbom finds apt and startling analo-
gies between the text and the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. and between other texts and
words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther’s, and struggles in present day Palestine.
Among contemporary interpreters, “historical reliability” of the accounts of Jeremiah’s

life and words are a subject of deep controversy. Lundbom concludes the “Message and
Audience” sections by dating passages on the basis of the general history of the period. An
appendix at the end of Jeremiah 37–52 lists important dates of the period. Lundbom is no
historical literalist; he recognizes the difficulty of making an “historically precise reconstruc-
tion” from some of the narrative material (p. 51). Nonetheless, he trusts the text more than I
do, particularly in his presentation of Jeremiah’s life. The large amount of “biographical”
information about Jeremiah may be recorded simply to keep the details of his memory alive,
but it is likely that the portrayal of his life has further symbolic purposes to address the situ-
ation of a people devastated by the Babylonian invasions.
Most of the twelve appendices to the commentary are of great help to general readers of
the Bible: conversion tables of weights, measures, and distances; extensive lists of differences
between the Hebrew and Greek versions; names and dates of archaeological periods; and
even the names of the months in the Jewish calendar, plus a glossary of rhetorical terms.
Also important are two excurses, “The New Covenant in the literature of Judaism, including
Qumran” and “The New Covenant in the New Testament and Patristic literature to A. D.
325” (Jeremiah 21–36). Although fine descriptive histories of theological interpretation, these
two excurses stop short of implicating modern Christians in anti-Semitism on the basis of
the new covenant interpretation.
I think Lundbom’s commentary is too trusting of historical information, and wish it

were more attentive to critical theological questions, and more integrative of its own infor-
mation. However, I will use these reference books often and with gratitude for the depth and
breadth of their scholarship on nearly everything concerning Jeremiah.
Kathleen M. O’Connor
COLUMBIA THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY
DECATUR, GEORGIA

The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary

by Francis J. Moloney, S.D.B.
Hendrickson, Peabody, MA, 2002. 398 pp. $29.95
(cloth). ISBN 1-56563-682-1.
MOST READERS OF Interpretation will associate

Francis Moloney with his copious publications on
the Fourth Gospel; indeed, one of his recent vol-
umes completes the late Raymond Brown’s An
Introduction to the Gospel of John (2003). Moloney
refers to the present commentary as “something on
Mark” (p. xvii) that a Salesian brother encouraged
him to write, a “long digression” (p. xi) in prepara-
tion for a smaller guide commissioned by
Hendrickson (Mark: Storyteller, Interpreter,
Evangelist, 2004). Moloney is much too modest.
His commentary, The Gospel of Mark, commands the attention of pastors, laity, and schol-
ars, even in a season that has seen the publication of ten respectable commentaries on that
Gospel within the past four years.
Moloney’s contribution is clear, elegantly structured, and user-friendly. The first chap-
ter deals fully yet crisply with standard introductory issues: Markan priority among the
Synoptics (which Moloney favors); Mark as historian and theologian; the Gospel’s prove-
nance (after 70 C.E. but before 75 C.E., probably though not indubitably southern Syria,
“reasonably close to Jerusalem” [p. 15]); Mark’s plot and literary shape; a synopsis of
Markan theology. From there Moloney leads us into the commentary itself, subdivided into
four major sections: “Prologue,” Mark 1:1–13; “The Mystery of Jesus,” 1:14–8:30; “Jesus, the
Son of Man and Son of God,” 8:31–15:47; and “Epilogue,” 16:1–8. As the commentary
unfolds, these sections are further subdivided into thematic subsections, whose overall liter-
ary shape is analyzed before plunging into particular pericopae. Introduced at sensible
points are two helpful excursuses on “The Son of Man Discussion” (pp. 212–13) and “Son
of Man and Suffering Servant in Mark 10:45” (pp. 213–14). Moloney completes each major
section with a synthetic conclusion. The book ends with thirty-six pages of bibliography
and indexes of modern authors and ancient sources.
Each of the methodological approaches to Mark has by now become something of a

cottage industry in Gospel research. The temptation besetting any commentator is either to
ignore one at the expense of others or to become so enamored of a particular critical mode
that it distorts what a commentary ought to do: namely, interpret the biblical text instead of
forcing it to fit a preconceived template. Moloney is too levelheaded to fall into either trap.
He demonstrates confident mastery of the requisite linguistic, historical, traditional, and lit-
erary skills necessary to illumine the questions presented by each Markan pericope.
Throughout, however, his attention to the theological significance of the Evangelist’s dis-
tinctive narrative and rhetorical moves is resolute, though never tendentious. “Every ele-
ment in the story is there for a reason, which we will discover only by combing back and
forth through the text until it yields its own narrative coherence” (p. 22). Clergy and laity
can easily comb through Moloney’s own text; detailed conversation with other scholars is
properly consigned to footnotes. If there is a major, for that matter minor, scholarly com-
mentary on the Second Gospel that Moloney does not take into account—whether
Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant—I cannot detect it. One would think he had devoted his
entire career to digesting nothing but Markan studies. I am especially pleased to see
Moloney’s serious retrieval of older commentators who have been all but forgotten (such as
Lagrange, Évangile selon Saint Marc [1920], and Lightfoot, History and Interpretation in the
Gospels [1935]), as well as more recent interpreters (like Lane, Commentary on the Gospel of
Mark [1974], and Laverdiere, The Beginning of the Gospel: Introducing the Gospel according
to Mark [2 vols., 1999]) whose works have lately received short shrift. With all his interlocu-
tors, the author is unfailingly gracious, indicating when he stands with the majority or
minority while undeterred in explaining where and why he differs with other readings.
At the heart of Moloney’s understanding of Mark is its concentration on Jesus as God’s

agent for undermining traditional Jewish assumptions and the consequences of that for dis-
ciples who maintain only a “fragile relationship” (p. 162) with the one who has called them.
The cross—which, in Moloney’s view, functions for Mark much as it does for Paul (pp. 330-
31, 351)—transfigures the meaning and significance of everything: from the claims that
Jesus is God’s Son, Christ, and Son of Man (pp. 182, 267, 293, 304-5, 330), to “[t]he most
intimate of human experiences, the union between a woman and a man” (p. 196, regarding
Mark 10:1–12). Expressed theologically, the cross spells self-denying service, a radical recep-
tivity to and dependence on, not only Jesus who “is not a free agent” (p. 56), but also and
ultimately God, who underwrites Jesus’ ministry. This, for Moloney, is the essence of Jesus’
teaching on discipleship in Mark 9:30–10:52 (pp. 186-212). “The reigning presence of
God”– Moloney’s felicitous paraphrase for “the kingdom of God” (p. 49)—strips away all
religious security blankets, especially worship in Jerusalem’s Temple (pp. 216–35, on
11:1–12:12). Without ever making the claims falsely charged in Mark 14:57–58, Jesus sym-
bolically brought to an end the Temple cultus (11:15–19), whose destruction God ratifies in
15:38. Ironically, “the Markan community is conscious of being a temple of God, built upon
the person of the risen Jesus, rejected and slain by the leaders of Israel” (p. 302; see 12:6–11;
13:1–23).
Deeply paradoxical is the fact, in Mark, that Jesus’ own disciples consistently fall afoul
of the same scandal that trips up Israel’s religious leaders. Moloney perceives that hubris as
early as 6:30, wherein the Twelve return “telling him all the things ‘they’ have done and
said” without duly acknowledging the authority of the one who sent them (pp. 128–29).
Bracketed by the feeding miracles in 6:31–44 and 8:1–9, the Gentiles’ acclamation that
“[Jesus] has done all things well” (7:37) has made no discernible impression on his closest
followers in 8:14–21: “They should know better, but they do not” (p. 160). Repeatedly,
members of the Twelve supplant following Jesus, which is the hallmark of discipleship, with
misbegotten prerogatives for constructing discipleship in their own failed image (9:38–41;
10:35–45; pp. 188-92; 205-8). Finally, at 14:51–52, 66–72, and 16:8, the last of Jesus’ follow-
ers—the young man in Gethsemane, Simon Peter, and the women at the tomb—fail the
most basic criterion of discipleship: being with Jesus (3:14; pp. 297-300, 307-9, 348-49). Yet,
as the announcements in 14:28 and 16:7 verify, Jesus remains unconditionally faithful to
those who have lost faith in him: “What Jesus said would happen, will happen” (p. 351,
author’s emphasis; also p. 124). By stripping from every human being the last vestige of
competence, Mark’s abrupt ending, consistent with the whole of the Gospel, redirects its
readers to the only reliable basis for their own discipleship: God’s invincible triumph, per-
durable goodness, and constant initiative (pp. 352-54). “A reading of this mysterious gospel
challenges us to hope in the midst of ambiguity and failure” (p. 24).
Even from so terse a summary, it should be evident that Moloney has given us a com-
mentary that is theologically rich and pastorally sensitive. Predictably, in a Gospel so puz-
zling as this, one may pick nits with him in isolated matters. In the aggregate, however, such
quibbles would not touch the fundamental soundness of the author’s procedure and judg-
ment. If this volume’s freestanding dissociation from any series of commentaries were to
obscure its achievement, such would be a terrible pity. This is, simply, the finest one-volume
commentary in English on Mark that I know.
C. Clifton Black
PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Paul: His Story

by Jerome Murphy-O’Connor
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004. 259 pp. $21.00
(cloth). ISBN 0-19-926653-0.
JEROME MURPHY-O’CONNOR has been providing

insightful studies on Paul for four decades. A constant
feature of his scholarship is the ability to integrate
texts and the living contexts they both reflect and seek
to address. So, for example, through his many studies
on the Corinthian correspondence Murphy-O’Connor
not only makes the text come alive but the city, the
Christian community, and Paul himself become liv-
ing, breathing components of the text’s reality. In
many ways, this current study could serve as the epit-
ome of Murphy-O’Connor’s attempt to create this
lively and living integration.
Paul: His Story is founded upon Murphy-O’Connor’s previous book, Paul: A Critical
Life (Oxford, 1966). In that prior work, he sought to provide a biographical study of Paul’s
life replete with copious supporting footnotes, scholarly dialogue, and critical analyses uti-
lizing the Pauline letters (regarding as undisputed epistles all but Ephesians, 1 Timothy, and
Titus), Acts, and a wealth of background information on the social, political, and physical
geography of the first century world based on an array of primary and secondary sources.
Without disrespecting the results of his previous study, Murphy-O’Connor does note that
its “focus is on the arguments that sustain the conclusions. . . . The very nature of the
process ensures that Paul can never emerge as a vital personality. . . . In most instances he
comes across essentially as a disembodied mind from which pour theological ideas” (Paul:
His Story, p. vii).
In an attempt to present a more holistic, dynamic picture of this monumental figure

and his personality, Murphy-O’Connor now tells Paul’s story not as historical novel but as a
narrative biography. He does not reconstruct Paul’s conversations or speeches, but he does
try to describe the emotions, thoughts and experiences that led Paul to write certain things
and travel to certain places. This assures that reading this book is at the same time a
delightful, intriguing, and highly frustrating experience. It also means that any critique of
this book is at the same time an indirect critique of its predecessor since the arguments he
“established there are taken for granted here without further documentation: namely, the
chronology of Paul’s life, his relationship with his foundations, the problems he faced in
various situations, the composite character of certain letters, etc.” (p. vii). It is almost as
though the author is standing off to the side and constantly saying to the reader who has
serious questions about the biographical presentation, “Don’t worry. I established that in
the other book.” Unless one has read the prior study on Paul, the presentation of Paul
found here becomes shaky at a number of points.
So what might some of these shaky or questionable points entail? The chronology of
Paul’s apostolic career is probably the major one. For example, Murphy-O’Connor under-
stands the meeting between Paul/Barnabas and Peter/James described in Gal 2 and depicted
in Acts 15 (the so-called “apostolic conference”) to have occurred after Paul had already
established Christian communities in Galatia, Philippi, Thessalonica, and Corinth. This
directly contradicts the missional map Paul himself presents in Gal 1:18–2:1 as well as the
narrative of Acts 11–15. It also leads Murphy-O’Connor to claim that those European con-
gregations would have been daughter congregations of the church in Antioch which (from
his perspective) was the key to Paul’s “apostolic accreditation” for his first missionary trip in
Asia Minor and the Aegean rim. Even if he had supplied supporting argumentation or evi-
dence, this chronology is highly unusual and quite debatable, but without any supporting
evidence it leaves the reader grasping at straws in an attempt to make sense of this recon-
structed story in light of the scriptural evidence. Equally questionable is Murphy-
O’Connor’s reconstructed chronology of Paul’s later years which include imprisonment in
Rome, freedom, a Spanish mission that completely and immediately fails, a trip back east
(though avoiding contact with the Christians in Rome), additional travels in the provinces
of Macedonia and Asia, and a return to Rome resulting in execution in the year 67 C.E.
Again the problem is that Murphy-O’Connor does not provide any evidence to sustain this
reconstruction, and scripture itself provides no support for it. Other questionable claims
(or assumptions as the case be) include: Paul being born in Galilee; Paul being married at
an early age; Paul changing his mind regarding the Law at least five times; and Paul devel-
oping his theology of sin during his missionary travels as a result of his encounters with
people acting out of selfishness as a means of societal survival.
While readers may disagree with numerous details regarding Paul’s story, they will gain
a host of new insights into life and travel in the first century world. Murphy-O’Connor
gives a wonderful presentation of the profession of tent-making and why this would have
been an ideal vocation for a robust traveler such as Paul (easy to learn; easy to carry one’s
tools; easy to find employment since this work includes making awnings, repairing sails,
and constructing overflow housing in crowded urban environments). One gets a whole new
appreciation for Paul as he travels both by land (including what roads he would have used
and why) and by sea (when and how a voyage took place) as well as what staying for the
night at an inn would have been like for him. The meaning of table fellowship comes alive
through Murphy-O’Connor’s descriptions. He serves as tour guide in such important places
as Jerusalem, Antioch, Damascus, Philippi, Thessalonica, and Corinth so that not only does
the reader have a new understanding of what those cities were like but also what this would
have meant for Paul’s life and missional work there.
There is no doubt that Paul comes alive in these pages. Because this portrayal of Paul is
at times (by Murphy-O’Connor’s own admission) “hypothetical and imaginative” (p. vii),
and almost all support rests in his prior book, caution is advised in accepting many of this
book’s historical reconstructions of Paul’s life and ministry. Nevertheless, the descriptive
insights of the first century environment provided significantly enrich, broaden, and deep-
en one’s understanding of the world in which Paul lived and carried out his ministry.
Richard P. Carlson
LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY
GETTYSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA

Shorter Reviews
Reforming Theological Anthropology: be of interest to clergy and seminary students
After the Philosophical Turn to and faculty.
Relationality
by F. LeRon Shults DAVID H. KELSEY
YALE DIVINITY SCHOOL
Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2003. 248 pp. $35.00. ISBN NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT
0-8028-4887-7.
Women and Men in the Fourth Gospel:
THE AMBIGUITY OF THIS book’s title nicely cap-
A Genuine Discipleship of Equals
tures its double aim. In one way it seeks to iden-
by Margaret Beirne
tify ways in which Christian theological anthro-
pology needs to be changed, i.e. reformed, in the Sheffield Academic, London, 2003. 240 pp. $110.00
wake of a “turn to relationality” that is promi- (cloth). ISBN 0-8264-6667-2.
nent in recent philosophy and psychology. In
THIS LITERARY STUDY of the Fourth Gospel
another way, it seeks an anthropology that gen-
argues for the presence of six gender pairs in the
uinely represents the Reformed tradition.
Gospel, whose narrative function is to demon-
These goals are pursued concurrently
strate a “genuine discipleship of equals” estab-
through three parts of the book. The first part
lished by the Johannine Jesus. The criteria for
attends to issues concerning inter-disciplinary
determining what constitutes a gender pair is
work by inviting exploration of the conceptual
based on earlier work on gender pairs in the
space in which we each personally relate to rela-
Gospel of Luke, especially the work of Turid
tionality (ch. 2) and engaging in inter-discipli-
Karlsen Seim (The Double Message: Patterns of
nary conversation with educational psychology
Gender in Luke and Acts, Abingdon, 1995). These
(ch. 3) and cultural anthropology (ch. 4), build-
criteria include the presence of a common theme
ing on James Loder’s work in practical theology
in passages in which the characters are located
in the Reformed tradition. The three chapters of
and, if the passages are not in narrative sequence,
the second part exhibit the “hermeneutical func-
some form of literary parallelism such as struc-
tion of anthropological relationality” in
ture, verbal formulae, or imagery. According to
Reformed theologians regarding, respectively,
Beirne, the following gendered pairs meet these
methodology in Schleiermacher (ch. 5), anthro-
criteria: the mother of Jesus and the royal offi-
pology and trinity in Barth as contrasted to
cial, the Samaritan woman and Nicodemus,
Pannenberg (ch. 6), and the anhypostasis– enhy-
Martha and the man born blind, Mary of
postasis in Barth as contrasted to revisionist read-
Bethany and Judas, the mother of Jesus and the
ings of Leontius of Byzantium (ch. 7). Part three
Beloved Disciple, and finally, Mary Magdalene
sketches the import of “relationality” for con-
and Thomas.
structive proposals concerning human nature
While Beirne cites some older feminist
(ch. 8), sin (ch. 9), and image of God (ch. 10).
work, her book advances that work in introduc-
Shults offers an important overview of the
ing the study of male characters. Beirne is also
intellectual terrain in which new theological
right to move beyond the “representative”
anthropological porposals will have to be worked
approach to Johannine characterization, recog-
out. The book is not so much a programmatic
nizing the richness of certain Johannine charac-
proposal as a checklist of issues that must be in
ters. However, Beirne is not the first to make
the agenda of any reformed anthropology. It will
these observations, and it is unfortunate that she gy located in the New Testament texts and mod-
does not engage in dialogue with my previously ern psychological evaluations. Historical psychol-
published work on the Gospel that addressed ogy articulates the difference between then and
similar concerns with somewhat different results now regarding the following topics: identity and
(Men and Women in the Fourth Gospel: Gender personality, demonic possession, the body, con-
and Johannine Characterization, Scholars Press, cepts of interiority and exteriority, the process of
1999). perceiving, emotions, suffering, the experience of
While Beirne’s argument about the presence religion, and various behaviors (hatred, self-love,
of gender pairs is convincing, I am less persuad- sexuality, possessions, etc.). In each of these top-
ed that the pairs all demonstrate a discipleship of ics, Berger explores the New Testament concepts
equals. If earlier studies tended to elevate women that construct a psychology appropriate to the
without studying the male characters, Beirne’s ancient text, and differentiates that construct
study lacks a more nuanced examination of the from modern psychological understandings.
relationship between male and female characters. Berger’s is not a social scientific book that
Most puzzling is the absence of Peter in the explores the ancient Stoic, Epicurean, or
study, although the characters of Mary Platonist psychology in order to examine the
Magdalene and Peter (as well as the Beloved New Testament through them. Rather, Berger
Disciple) in 20:1–18 would meet the established writes an exegetical, pastoral, and theological
criteria. Considering the role of Peter vis-à-vis analysis intended to dramatize and describe the
Mary Magdalene would necessarily raise the actual psychological expressions contained in the
question of the status of the Petrine tradition New Testament.
and the role of the Twelve in the Gospel in gen- At the heart of Berger’s method stands good
eral. It may well be the case that these male fig- exegesis of many important passages, especially
ures are not viewed in the same way as a charac- the Pauline corpus and the Gospels, although
ter such as the man born blind. with a goodly number of references to the other
Still, the book adds to the growing number books of the New Testament. These are thorny
of New Testament studies that recognize “gen- texts that talk about the psychological realities of
der” does not equal “woman” but must also embodiment, sin, divine indwelling, sanctifica-
include a study of the construction of men, in tion, and salvation. Berger lays out their meaning
this case the male characters in the Fourth and significance not from the modern psycho-
Gospel. Moreover, a reading of the Fourth logical perspective, but from an analysis of the
Gospel such as this one could well promote a text that constructs an ancient model.
“genuine discipleship of equals” in the contem- The book is also pastoral. Berger models a
porary Christian church and that, after all, is way of looking at the vast difference in under-
what much feminist biblical scholarship is after. standing between the early Christians in their
milieu and modern, Western Christians in ours.
COLLEEN M. CONWAY The exploration of difference sets the stage for
SETON HALL UNIVERSITY
understanding the ancient others on their own
SOUTH ORANGE, NEW JERSEY
terms, in their own frames of reference, in their
own conceptual schemes. The preacher and the
Identity and Experience in the New
pastor need this information to be able to inter-
Testament
pret the text for community living and use. The
by Klaus Berger, translated by Charles Muenchow
fine exegesis leads to a thoroughly useful and
Fortress, Minneapolis, 2003. 298 pp. $27.00 ISBN 0- beneficial way of approaching the text.
8006-2779-2. Berger also writes theologically. The issues
of the ancient text have direct implications for
THIS BOOK PRESENTS what the author, Klaus
the life and practice of modern Christians. The
Berger, calls an historical psychological perspec-
biblical text has meaning and depth for moderns,
tive on the New Testament. Historical psychology
not because it mirrors modern sensibilities, but
differentiates between ancient views of psycholo-
precisely because it does not. Modern Christians,
by looking at the new Testament through histori- psalmists were “‘theologians’ unaware” (p. 45);
cal psychology, realize that they encounter a star- their “sense of wonder” and “fierceness of emo-
tlingly different world from their own, but a tion” underwrote the psalms (p. 61). In his theo-
world whose theology informs modern theology. logical analysis, Terrien sifts out the theme of
“Yahweh’s [elusive] presence” as central (p. 46)
RICHARD VALANTASIS and proceeds to highlight the various roles God
ILIFF SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY
assumes in the Psalter, from creator and judge to
DENVER, COLORADO
protector of the poor. Lamentably lacking is an
equally insightful treatment of the psalmists’
The Psalms: Strophic Structure and
view(s) of humanity.
Theological Commentary
Terrien’s commentary on individual psalms
by Samuel Terrien
begins with translation (which lapses into King
Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2003. 971 pp. $95.00. ISBN James English wherever God is addressed) and
0-8028-2605-9. “form.” He then moves to commentary (by stro-
phe), and concludes with “date and theology.”
PUBLISHED POSTHUMOUSLY, this one-volume
Terrien is particularly attuned to the poetic con-
commentary is the author’s final work. Although
tours of the psalms and their rich imagery. His
not a crowning achievement, it is a treasure full
theological analyses are provocative but occa-
of diamonds in the rough. Terrien sets forth
sionally idiosyncratic, laden with abstract and
three tasks: “to . . . elucidate the theological sig-
artificially constructed terms (some of which
nificance of these poems,” “to analyze their
could be typos) bereft of explication. While each
strophic structure,” and “to discover a link
psalm is introduced with a bibliography (which
between their archaic language and the intellec-
rarely goes beyond 1995), Terrien’s primary con-
tual demands of modern thinking and spirituali-
versation partner is himself (and, by extension,
ty” (p. xiii). His “structural analysis” enables him
Job). His historical and theological reflections are
to identify the strophic divisions within each
mostly musings, frequently cast as hypothetical
psalm, as well as highlight the “integral unity of
suggestions. Throwing caution to the wind,
composition.” Terrien includes an all too brief
Terrien dares to be historically specific for many
discussion of the literary integrity of the Psalter
psalms (e.g., Psalm 45 as a “love song” for Ahab
as a whole. While some posit Psalm 73 as the
and Jezebel). But whether you agree or disagree,
Psalter’s central pivot, Terrien adds Psalm 90 to
his reflections are consistently thought provok-
the discussion, thereby creating “two poles”
ing, even if you’re not sure what he means. But,
around which the Psalter is organized.
then, that’s vintage Terrien.
Terrien discusses in cursory fashion the
standard issues of ancient Near Eastern back- WILLIAM BROWN
ground, textual transmisson, and genre. More COLUMBIA THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY
space is devoted to the music of the psalms and DECATUR, GEORGIA
strophic structure. Although he overuses the
label “sapiential” or “wisdom” to describe many Isaiah 28–39: A Continental
of the psalms, he is quick to claim that the Commentary
Psalter is not so much a didactic manual as a col- by Hans Wildberger
lection of sacred songs “destined to perpetuate
Fortress, Minneapolis, 2002. 781pp. $75.00 (cloth).
the art of music in nights of distress as well as in
ISBN 0-8006-9510-0.
days of serenity” (p. 24). The style of the Psalter
is that of adoration, not instruction. Even Psalm THIS BOOK IS AN English translation of the third
1 is “fit to be sung, not spoken” (p. 71). Terrien and final volume of Hans Wildberger’s magisteri-
accords the office of “musician” equal status to al German commentary on First Isaiah. It is a
those of priest, prophet, and sage. The Psalter is a welcome addition to the English resources for
“musicotheca” that provides a portrait of Israel the study of First Isaiah, since Wildberger’s com-
coram deo and a picture of divinity coram mentary remains the most thorough, balanced,
humane (p. 45). Versed in poetry and music, the

and sober commentary on Isaiah 1–39. His commentary.

approach is critical, but not hypercritical, and Even with these caveats, however, this is a
theological, but not at the expense of historical very welcome volume. It will richly reward a pas-
reconstruction, text critical issues, and detailed tor or scholar’s careful and critical study.
exegetical discussion of the text. Wildberger
tends to attribute more material to Isaiah of J. J. M. ROBERTS
PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY
Jerusalem than many contemporary critics,
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
though he is quite willing to assign suspect mate-
rial to later editors and secondary revisions.
Zephaniah: A Commentary
In his treatment of Isa 29:1–7 and 31:4–9
by Marvin A. Sweeney
Wildberger captures very well Isaiah’s under-
standing of God’s “strange work” with Zion. Hermeneia. Fortress, Minneapolis, 2003. 227 pp.
Unlike many scholars, he is willing to preserve $47.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-8006-6049-8.
Isaiah’s paradoxical teaching that God will first
IN RECENT YEARS we have witnessed resurgent
use the nations, particularly Assyria, to discipline
interest in the prophetic books, especially the
his people and city, and then, at the last moment,
Book of the Twelve, in the form of commentary,
intervene to save them. In general, Wildberger’s
but the book of Zephaniah has been somewhat
grasp and explication of Isaiah’s complex and
neglected. Marvin Sweeney has written a well-
paradoxical theology is profound and com-
organized, well-argued commentary. As a part of
pelling.
the Hermeneia series, it offers a wealth of
Sometimes, however, Wildberger’s concern
insightful information and interpretations on the
for contemporary theological application causes
text. It broadens the readers’ perspective by pro-
him to overgeneralize and miss concrete details
viding illuminating interpretation of the various
important for understanding the text. Thus in
textual traditions such as the Masoretic Text,
his treatment of 29:15; 30:1–2; and 31:1, he
LXX, Scrolls from the Judean Wilderness,
underplays the insistence of Isaiah and his sup-
Targum, Peshitta, Vulgate and Old Latin Texts.
porters that the king should seek oracles from
These are treated here as independent literary
God through the prophet Isaiah before adopting
works, highlighting the different aspects of the
a particular political course of action. Hiding a
meaning of the prophecy of Zephaniah. The
plan from God in this context involves keeping
diverse textual traditions presented in their own
Isaiah out of the loop; it is a refusal to consult
socio-historical settings are highly effective and
the prophet for fear his opposition might prema-
make a welcome contribution to the study of
turely expose the secret plan to Assyrian spies
prophetic literature.
and so endanger its success.
Sweeney rejects the traditional tripartite
Wildberger has also failed to grasp the
division of the book of Zephaniah (judgment
extent to which Isaiah has made use of what
oracles against Jerusalem and Judah, judgment
William Holladay refers to as a “self-extended
oracles against the nations, and salvation oracles
oracle.” Isaiah’s ministry lasted for at least thirty-
of Jerusalem/Judah and the world). Instead, he
eight years (738–701 B.C.E.), and perhaps longer,
views the book of Zephaniah as “the presentation
and in that period of time it would be surprising
of Zephaniah’s parenetic speech to Jerusalem/
if Isaiah never returned to some of his old ora-
Judah in which the prophet calls on the audience
cles to reshape them to address new contexts. As
to seek YHWH” (p. 9). Thus the book is divided
Holladay noted, that seems to be what is happen-
into two halves: Announcement of the Day of
ing in Isa 28:1–6, 7–14. An oracle originally
YHWH (1:2–18) and Avoid Punishment on the
addressed to the leaders of the northern king-
Day of YHWH (2:1–3:20). Underlying this asser-
dom has been adapted to address the leaders of
tion is Sweeney’s claim that Hosea, Amos, Micah,
Judah. Wildberger’s failure to note this process
and Zephaniah (whose superscriptions are simi-
results in the fragmentation of material that
larly formulated, implying a common editor)
seems to hang together. Such dubious fragmenta-
were probably produced in the Josianic era to
tion of the text is fairly common in Wildberger’s
support the King’s reform program. Sweeney scholars and pastors alike. We are deeply indebt-
thus reads the book of Zephaniah as a prophetic ed to him for that.
call for national repentance and a renewed com-
mitment to YHWH. DANIEL HOJOON RYOU
CHEONAN UNIVERSITY
The gem of this commentary lies particular-
SEOUL, KOREA
ly in Sweeney’s judicious examination of the tex-
ture of the text. Unlike traditional form criticism,
The Septuagint
however, Sweeney’s “formal analysis” is grounded
by Jennifer M. Dines
in a thorough investigation of various linguistic
issues of syntax and semantics. T&T Clark, London, 2004. 196 pp. $29.95. ISBN 0-567-
Sweeney’s interpretation of the socio-histor- 08464-7.
ical setting of 3:14–20 does not make a strong
DINES ARGUES IN The Septuagint for the impor-
case. He reads this portion of the text as a prod-
tance of the Greek translations of Hebrew
uct of the Josianic era, a kind of exhortative
Scripture for understanding the period in which
address to Jerusalem under the Assyrian oppres-
Hellenistic Judaism developed and from which
sion reassuring the Israelites of future restoration
early Christianity emerged. She provides very
(pp. 193-96). Whether this reading can persuade
brief but knowledgeable discussions about the
many skeptics who see it as a later expansion in
origins of the Greek version and its reception
the (post-) exilic period is a moot question. Still,
history in second temple Judaism and in the first
Sweeney’s thorough analysis of the book of
four centuries of Christianity.
Zephaniah as a literary product during King
The reader new to the topic will find helpful
Josiah’s rule offers a convincing alternative read-
features. Dines’s brief summary characterizing
ing. His reading of the text also implicitly
each book of the Septuagint introduces the read-
explores the subtle difference between the pro-
er to the diverse corpus of texts that comprise
duction of the book and the reception and
the Septuagint in the broadest sense of that term.
appropriation of the produced text.
There is little Hebrew or Greek throughout the
In sum, the valuable contribution of
book to distract the general reader. All major
Sweeney’s commentary lies in his hermeneutical
issues important in Septuagint studies are
strategy, his synchronic and diachronic reading
addressed in seven brief chapters. There are sug-
of the text of Zephaniah within the Twelve
gestions for further reading at the end of each
Prophets. To him, the sequence “synchrony-
chapter and an extensive bibliography that covers
diachrony,” and not vice versa, is crucial, reflect-
the field well.
ing the influence of the “concept analysis school”
However, the brevity of the discussions
pioneered by R. P. Knierim. Reading the book of
forces a truncation of some important issues that
Zephaniah as a part of the Twelve Prophets and
might limit the book’s audience to the general
locating it between Habakkuk and Haggai com-
reader. For instance, the treatment of differences
pels Sweeney to read the book “in relation to the
between the Septuagint (LXX) and the Masoretic
Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem, Judah, and
Text (MT) is too brief to be useful to students of
the First Temple and the exile of the Judean pop-
biblical studies and does not well represent the
ulation in the early sixth century B.C.E,” (p. 2),
complexities that must be considered. Her state-
rather than in relation to Josiah’s religious and
ment “In any case, more often than not the LXX
political reform.
and the MT do not differ significantly, so that
The book will encourage a plethora of
what the LXX ‘means’ appears to be the same as
responses, some in agreement, others not. In any
what the MT ‘means’” is an unfortunate general-
case, Sweeney’s careful and cautious handling of
ization (p. 134). As Dines herself admits, the dis-
the text is a welcome addition to the prestigious
cussions she presents are “little more than point-
Hermeneia series. It will serve as a standard com-
ers to further study” (p. ix).
mentary for a long time to come, for seasoned
One strength of the book is its orientation
to the history of the Septuagint’s origins, recep- delivery that would win applause in the first-cen-
tion and use. For instance, Dines includes in the tury Mediterranean world” (pp. 3-4).
discussion of the origins of the Septuagint not This much would be a valuable contribu-
only ancient sources such as Aristeas and tion. But this is where Shiner’s book becomes
Aristobulus but also scholarly theories on the something more than just another bit of well-
historical circumstances that motivated the need written scholarship. He treats the text of Mark as
for a Greek version. She addresses some thought- sheet music that needs to be played to be proper-
ful challenges to the “interlinear model” promot- ly comprehended. Because he takes seriously the
ed by the Toronto school. Her discussion of notion that the Gospel of Mark grew out of and
reception history presents evidence from lesser- preserves oral performance tradition, Shiner
known ancient writers such as Demetrius the includes discoveries about Mark that grow out of
Historian and Eupolemus in addition to the his own performing of scenes from the story.
well-known references in Jospehus and Philo. Taking ancient advice seriously, he uses it to help
Moreover, she extends the trajectory of reception him perform the Gospel. Scholars have long spo-
history into the Christian era with material from ken of the Gospels and their relationship to “oral
Justin, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, tradition.” Out of Shiner’s work it becomes clear
Augustine, and Jerome. that there are things about these old oral texts
This clearly written and easy-to-read work that an interpreter only discovers from the inside
provides a good historical overview for those of performing the texts.
readers who are not concerned with technical This book will be useful to any biblical
detail or the original languages. interpreter, especially pastors and teachers. In
addition, it would be a good resource to use in
KAREN H. JOBES an undergraduate or seminary classroom. Study
WESTMONT COLLEGE
groups of lay people might initially quail before
SANTA BARBARA, CALIFORNIA
the citations from Cicero and Quintillian, but
they will, I think, quickly warm up to Shiner’s
Proclaiming the Gospel: First-Century
engaging writing and to the solid practical use he
Performance of Mark
makes of the ancient sources he cites. This is a
by Whitney Shiner
very good book.
Trinity, Harrisonburg, 2003. 214 pp. $23.00. ISBN 1-
56338-396-9. RICHARD SWANSON
AUGUSTANA COLLEGE
”WHEN I READ THE mockery [of Jesus on the SIOUX FALLS, SOUTH DAKOTA
cross] silently, I usually think of the cleverness of
Mark’s irony. When I perform it, I think about Ingesting Jesus: Eating and Drinking in
how nasty the mockery is” (p. 182). In this short the Gospel of John
revelation, late in Shiner’s book, you can hear by Jane S. Webster
something of the powerful contribution this
Society of Biblical Literature, Atlanta, 2003. 184 pp.
book makes.
$27.95. ISBN 1-58983-046-6.
Shiner understands Mark to be an ancient
oral/aural text, and studies it as such. In his IN A REVISION of her doctoral dissertation, Jane S.
study, Shiner demonstrates an impressive mas- Webster has taken up David Tracy’s challenge to
tery of the theory and practice of ancient reconsider the richness of biblical metaphor as a
rhetoric, and he uses this mastery to illustrate means of making biblical content accessible.
how scenes in Mark’s story could well have been Webster exegetes the “ingesting” metaphors in the
performed. Though Shiner notes carefully that Gospel of John: in particular, eating, drinking, and
we have no way of knowing exactly how Mark’s receiving inwardly that which is offered to human-
Gospel would have been performed, he directs ity by God. John’s meal settings and eating/drink-
his attention to reconstructing “an ideal delivery ing imagery are analyzed, bringing fresh insight
style for the time and culture” (p. 3). As he notes, into how these sensitivities might facilitate the
“We can fairly successfully recover the style of

reader’s exercising of faith as a salvific response to words of institution at the Johannine Last Supper,
God’s provision. but if the Eucharistic tradition is here implied, why
Webster performs her analysis over eight has the most likely Eucharistic connection gone
chapters by discussing the reference to Jesus as missing from John 13? Might it imply a critique of
“Lamb of God” by the Baptist (John 1:29, 36), the such formalizations? Webster does not say.
water-into-wine miracle and Jesus being “con- Webster leaves room for less formal and mul-
sumed with zeal” at the Temple-cleansing (John tivariant aspects of table fellowship and markers of
2:1–11, 13–25), “living water and dying food” Christian community that may have been part of
(John 4:4–42; 7:37–39; 12:24), “tasting life and the Johannine situation. Her study would be
tasting death” (John 6:1–71; 8:51–52), the supper helped by addressing further what is meant (and
in Bethany (John 12:1–7), the Last Supper (John not necessarily meant) by “Eucharist” in the
13:1–30; 15:1–17), the “first and last drink” (John Johannine tradition, and by considering martyro-
19:28–37; 18:11), and the Resurrection Breakfast logical associations with John 6:51ff. If ingesting
(John 21:1–25). These are followed by this state- the flesh and blood of Jesus is to be willing to share
ment: “This study concludes that the ingesting with him in his sufferings and death as a factor of
motif is an effective vehicle for conveying the sote- discipleship faithfulness, this “hard saying” is more
riology of the Gospel and ties this expression of plausibly the source of the disciples’ being scandal-
soteriology to the Eucharistic tradition” (p. 153). ized (parallel to Mark 8) rather than a cultic refer-
The book has many strengths, notably, the ence.
clear and lucid writing and the valuable analysis of Webster cites the indirect ways that the
symbolization and its functions within the Gospel ingesting motif is presented in John; the distinc-
of John. Particularly helpful is the treatment of tion between subtle allusion and explicit reference
disciples’ reactions, suggesting the way forward for is far from unimportant. Indeed, Tracy’s reference
readers in their own responses to Jesus. Webster’s to metaphor helping meanings come alive is fur-
study will be a valuable aid to other metaphor thered successfully here, and this book will be of
analyses in John and elsewhere. value to those interested in Johannine literary
Somewhat questionable are inferences of studies and in the life of the Church. Key, though,
“ingesting” where it is not explicitly mentioned in will be the ability to distinguish meaningful
the text: especially connecting the “Lamb of God” Eucharistic practice today from what may or may
reference to the Paschal Meal (there is no aspect of not have been the case in the more primitive
the reference that could not apply just as suitably Johannine situation.
to the Suffering Servant’s vicarious suffering and
death) and Jesus’ being “consumed” by zeal in John PAUL N. ANDERSON
GEORGE FOX UNIVERSITY
2.
NEWBERG, OREGON
A more severe weakness, though, is Webster’s
Eucharistic interpretation of John 6 and related
Cities of Paul: Images and
passages. Eucharistic associations in John appear to
Interpretations from the Harvard New
be present, but Webster neither clarifies satisfacto-
Testament Archaeology Project
rily what is meant by “Eucharistic,” nor does she
edited by Helmut Koester
engage the paramount conundrum resultant from
a ritualistic interpretation of John 6:53–54—unless Fortress, Minneapolis, 2005. CD-ROM, $199.00. ISBN 0-
one ingests the flesh and blood of Jesus (i.e., par- 8006-3673-2.
ticipates in a cultic rite?) one has no life. To tie sav-
THIS IS A VALUABLE, thoroughly prepared resource
ing faith to a particular religious form, if that is her
for instruction and research in New Testament,
inference, is not only anachronistic within its first-
ancient Christianity, and related fields. The editor
century situation, but it also threatens to displace
and his associates have assembled a huge collec-
the otherwise clear Christocentric soteriology of
tion of nearly 900 images from Greece and Turkey
John’s Gospel—the reason Bultmann felt John
that portray the world of the apostle Paul, his con-
6:51c–58 must have been added by another hand.
temporaries, and others in the early centuries of
Webster acknowledges the striking absence of the

the Common Era. The collection contains images a related one. It also can be used for scholarly
from Athens, Corinth, Delphi, Ephesus, Isthmia, research and quick reference. The text pages that
Olympia, Pergamon, Philippi, and Thessaloniki. accompany the images are much more than cap-
Users interested primarily in pictures of the tions, with descriptions and interpretations often
ancient cities that Paul wrote to or inhabited will several paragraphs in length, reflecting current
not be disappointed. In addition, the images information and scholarship.
include photographs of coins, inscriptions, and For all its strengths, the program is not with-
statues, as well as drawings, maps, and models of out problems. The four-page leaflet that accompa-
cities, buildings, and floor plans. All photographs nies the CD is insufficient by itself as a start-up
are of high quality, and a “zoom” function allows guide. Fortunately it directs the user to the “Help”
for close-ups and panoramas of the sites. button and the 23-page document available
There is an abundance of textual material as (“Cities of Paul—Help”) which contains tutorials
accompaniment. For any given image there is a on “How to Assemble a Slide Show” and “How to
notation of its location, description, and an inter- Create a Research Project.” Users will want to con-
pretation of its importance for study. When neces- sult it frequently. The instructions provided will
sary, as in the case of an inscription, a translation probably be sufficient for some users but should
is provided. A bibliography is not included with be more detailed. The publisher could remedy this
every image, but can usually be found close at easily by supplying a printed manual to accompa-
hand. For example, there is none with the “Map of ny the program.
Ephesus,” but there is an ample bibliography on One of the most laudable features of this
Ephesus under “History of Ephesus.” A useful program for classroom teaching is that it is possi-
Table of Contents is included along with a ble to take pictures from it and enter them into
General Index, and indexes for ancient authors, Microsoft PowerPoint or Apple Keynote. The task
architecture, coins, inscriptions, maps, names, and is not simple, but with patience and careful fol-
sculptures in addition to a helpful Glossary and lowing of the instructions in the “Help” docu-
an extensive Bibliography. ment, it can be done.
Although the intention of the program is to In the final analysis, the technical difficulties
increase understanding of the world of early that the program presents do not outweigh the
Christianity, many users will choose to employ it value of what is an innovative, informative, and
to illumine the world of New Testament texts in valuable resource. An immense amount of talent,
the classroom. To that end, the instructor can use scholarship, and work has gone into the produc-
the CD for the production of slide shows. For tion of this program.
example, if one is discussing Romans 16 and
draws attention to 16:23—where greetings are ARLAND J. HULTGREN
LUTHER SEMINARY
extended by “Erastus, the city treasurer” (NRSV)
ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA
— either the Index of Names (“Erastus
Corinthius”) or the Index of Inscriptions
Preaching Paul
(“Erastus Inscription”) allows access to the image,
by Brad R. Braxton
and a text page of the inscription’s location,
description, translation, an interpretation (includ- Abingdon, Nashville. 2004. 192 pp. $18.00. ISBN 0-687-
ing the question of the civic title and role of 02144-8.
Erastus in Corinth), and a brief bibliography.
BRAXTON OFFERS A GUIDE for preaching the let-
Since inscriptions are otherwise difficult to track
ters of Paul for those who are either unfamiliar
down, the inscriptions included can be extremely
with Pauline scholarship or unclear about the
useful. Other inscriptions include the Gallio
path from Pauline theology to the faithful prac-
Inscription (related to Acts 18:12–17) and inscrip-
tice of preaching. As an aid to preachers who are
tions concerning emperors Tiberius and Nero.
involved in the regular task of preaching, this
The program is interactive in that one can
book is pragmatic in its orientation, guiding the
switch back and forth between photographs and
practitioner through the multiple dimensions of
texts, skip texts, or move from one photograph to
faithful practice. Braxton recognizes that Paul’s
historical distance from the contemporary con- IT SHOULD COME as no surprise that a book enti-
gregation creates obstacles to the task, and he tled Grace in a series dedicated to preaching is a
acknowledges that readers may not accept Paul’s book about preaching grace. Hence this is a book
views on a variety of social issues. Nevertheless, aimed at pastors, lay preachers, elders, or anyone
he insists that readers who give Paul a hearing finding themselves in a pulpit on Sunday morn-
may discover that Paul’s message continues to ing.
speak to the contemporary situation through According to Stephen Farris, preaching grace
preachers who are equipped for faithful practice. should come naturally, but it does not. He offers
In the first three chapters, he lays the foun- several reasons for this difficulty. Most of us are
dation for this guide. After reflecting on Paul as a wary of grace. Grace is about receiving, whereas
model for preaching (ch.1), he summarizes we are much better at giving. Grace is about
Paul’s central convictions (ch. 2), and then dis- being dependent; we idolize self-sufficiency.
cusses the implications of Paul’s own statements Grace cannot be controlled, and this makes most
for contemporary proclamation (ch. 3). Braxton of us very uneasy.
argues that “preaching is the faithful, passionate Further, preachers prefer thundering “thou
reporting of God’s useful news” (p. 27). shalt nots,” offering group therapy and social
In chapters 4 and 5, Braxton offers a model analysis, or replacing the sermon with a Rotary
for interpreting Paul’s texts, giving guidance for talk to preaching grace. In addition, preachers are
moving from text to sermon. Using a specific much more comfortable speaking of obligation
passage (Rom. 8:26–23), he provides an example and responsibility, what “ought” to be done for
of the complete process of interpreting the text God rather than what God has done for us.
for preaching, focusing on textual, theological, As Farris addresses the difficulty in preach-
and congregational analysis and offering recom- ing grace, he does not enter into a lengthy discus-
mendations for the amount of time that the sion about the nature of grace, but simply defines
preacher might spend on each stage of the it as “the free and unmerited love and mercy of
process (ch. 4). Chapter 5 offers excellent exam- God” (p. 12). Throughout the book, he wrestles
ples of sermons from Pauline texts as well as cri- with a series of biblical texts and invites the read-
tiques from colleagues. The final chapter includes er to wrestle along with him. He has chosen peri-
a helpful bibliography of resources (including copes from the Pauline literature, the Gospels,
web sites) for the interpretation of Paul. and the Old Testament. For each text, Farris gives
As an introductory guide, this book fulfills excellent exegesis that frequently sets off sparks in
its purpose admirably. Its comprehensive the imagination of the reader. He concludes each
approach to every stage in the process of preach- chapter with a section on preaching grace from
ing Paul’s letters will benefit those who are per- the given text.
plexed about preaching Paul’s letters. However, The selection of texts is quite interesting.
many readers will discover that the book’s Some are passages any preacher would turn to if
strength is also its weakness. The ambitious he or she wanted to preach grace. In other cases,
scope in a small volume limits the thoroughness one might think that the author is looking for
of the treatment of important topics in the book. grace in all the wrong places. Who would turn to
Fortunately, Braxton’s bibliography offers assis- Psalm 119 or the parable of the pounds as a text
tance for the reader who wants to pursue these on grace? To the reader’s surprise, one finds that
issues in greater depth. grace—amazing and surprising as it always
is—was there all the time, but we did not know it.
JAMES W. THOMPSON Throughout the book, Farris tosses out gems
ABILENE CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY of preaching wisdom: such as its being a “fatal
ABILENE, TEXAS error to preach the demand of a passage but
Grace: A Preaching Commentary neglect the grace”; or “looking for the trouble in a
by Stephen Farris text is an excellent starting point” (p. 52); and
“The preacher’s task is like that of the head wait-
Abingdon, Nashville, 2003. 150 pp. $19.00. ISBN 0-687-
er, to say to Christ’s guests, ‘right this way; his
09046-6.
table’s waiting’” (pp 105-106). sent the Spirit’s movement in our midst. She
For those of us struggling to infuse our ser- then suggests how we can “tease our listeners
mons with theological depth and imagination, into unbolting the doors and giving the Holy
this gem of a book will be a welcome addition to Spirit access to their imaginations” (p. 116) as we
our libraries. It is worth the price and the time preach in more creative ways.
reading it just to hear the story about the mon- Most chapters of the book conclude with a
key with The Origin of the Species in one hand sermon, a helpful way of seeing how the spiritual
and the Bible in the other! and homiletical practices Clader advocates issue
in imaginative, prophetic words. Those inclined
TOM WHARTENBY toward a more expository style of preaching
GALAX PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH might challenge the degree to which the text
GALAX, VIRGINIA recedes into the background of her sermons, but
her homiletical approach and her call for preach-
Voicing the Vision: Imagination and ers who are faithful and attentive to the presence
Prophetic Preaching of the Spirit demonstrate ways of moving toward
by Linda L. Clader the creation of a “preaching community where
Morehouse, Harrisburg, 2003. 168 pp. $16.95. ISBN 0- eyes and ears are constantly opened to the
8192-1932-0. Spirit’s presence, where hearts are teased by
glimpses of possibility and hope, and where ulti-
PEOPLE OF FAITH HAVE long known that engaging
mately voices are empowered to proclaim the
the imagination is essential for belief. As those
Good News of Jesus Christ” (p. 6).
who live by “the assurance of things hoped for,
the conviction of things not seen,” we are called BEVERLY ZINK-SAWYER
to imagine a world beyond the confines of what UNION-PSCE
we have seen and touched and experienced. RICHMOND, VIRGINIA
Capturing this imaginative, prophetic dimension
of faith has been the challenge of preachers since Teaching the Bible in the Church
the dawn of proclamation, but naming imagina- by John M. Bracke and Karen B. Tye
tion as an essential component of preaching has Chalice Press, St Louis, 2003. 166 pages. $19.99. ISBN
occurred only in recent years as biblical scholars 0-8272-3643-3.
and homileticians alike have identified the
important connection between human imagina- THIS BOOK takes seriously both teaching and the
tion and the hearing and apprehension of the Bible without privileging one over the other. It
word. also considers the culturally formed worlds of
Linda Clader, Professor of Homiletics at the students and the cultural worlds of the Bible.
Church Divinity School of the Pacific, adds her The overarching aim is to describe a way of
voice to those who turn to the imagination as a teaching the Bible that is “transformative” rather
vehicle for the prophetic and holy word of God. than (merely) informative. These authors, an
Preaching with imagination, she argues, is not experienced theological educator and a respected
simply about “decorating a sermon” but rather biblical scholar, draw upon the fields of educa-
“about flinging open windows for the light of the tional theory, human neurological research,
Spirit; about setting doors ajar for God’s holy intercultural education, cultural studies, biblical
breath” (p. 5). That process of opening windows hermeneutics, and more.
and doors begins with the preacher’s own delib- In chapters that build upon one another,
erate work of listening for the Spirit, the Spirit’s they begin by describing the complex role of the
presence being a gift we receive as preachers and brain in the learning process. When teachers bet-
then offer to our congregations. Clader recounts ter understand how humans learn, they argue,
the biblical history of inspiration and explores they can order the processes of teaching so that
ways in which preachers can be more attentive to learning can have its greatest effect. The authors
the breath, scent, voices, and visions that repre- provide an accessible summary of some of the
latest brain research, useful in any number of

educational settings (teacher training, seminary model lesson plans for putting intercultural Bible
education courses, etc.). study into practice. Grounded in credible schol-
The next chapter describes how learning arship across multiple disciplines, these resources
patterns might shape teaching patterns (basic can equip educators and pastors for Bible study
and important guidance for less experienced as an intercultural venture aimed toward trans-
teachers). One of the most significant connec- formation. The relevance of brain research, cul-
tions between chapters is the increasingly con- tural analysis, and intercultural education to the
firmed understanding that the emotional com- study of scripture is convincingly demonstrated
ponents of learning are both unavoidable and here.
necessary. Teaching that aims to be “transforma-
tive” must intentionally, carefully, and with JANE ROGERS VANN
UNION-PSCE
humility invite human emotion into the learning
RICHMOND, VIRGINIA
situation. “Emotion drives attention, and atten-
tion is critical to learning and remembering. . . .
Holiness
In what way can I help this topic really matter to
by John Webster
them?” (pp. 40-41). The authors strongly support
teachers’ self-knowledge and self-awareness so Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2003. 116 pp. $18.00. ISBN
that the power inherent in teacher-student rela- 0-8028-2215-0.
tionships does not become distorted and/or
Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch
manipulative.
by John Webster
Teaching is always an “intercultural experi-
ence,” say Tye and Bracke, because teachers and Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003. 144 pp.
students each bring their own unique cultural $19.00. ISBN 0-521-53846-7.
perspectives. The intercultural component is
JOHN WEBSTER ARGUES in his book Holiness that
even more apparent when studying the Bible,
a Christian theology of holiness is an exercise in
which contains multiple cultural perspectives.
holy reason. It requires the sanctification of rea-
Reading and studying the Bible involve “interac-
son in which reason is put to death and made
tion” among the cultures of teachers, students,
alive by the terrifying and merciful presence of
and the Bible. Students develop an awareness of
the holy God. This implies that the context and
their own cultural framework as well as an
content of a Christian theology of holiness
appreciative awareness of other cultures though
derives from revelation, from the gift of God’s
opportunities for imaginative participation. The
presence as the Holy One. Such a theology is not
result is a kind of “intercultural competence”
an esoteric, abstract or general account, but
wherein participants are able to recognize their
rather finds in Holy Scripture its content, norm,
own cultural biases, enter into the cultures of the
and limit. Furthermore, it is a venture undertak-
Bible, and “stand in another cultural place and
en in prayerful dependence within the fellowship
see and understand the world from that perspec-
of the saints and aims at serving the confession
tive” (p. 86).
of the holy people of God and the sanctification
The intercultural approach opens the way
of the name of the triune God. Webster is, how-
for subtle and sophisticated interpretation of
ever, not only concerned with the holiness of
biblical texts, to which a whole chapter is devot-
theology, but also with the content of a Christian
ed. (No room for knee-jerk literalism here!) The
theology of holiness. Consequently we find in
multiple layers of meaning within biblical texts
the rest of the book a clear and informative
are made accessible in ways that offer rich gifts
exploration of the three inseparable themes of
for the church. The writers offer multiple exam-
the holiness of God, the holiness of the church,
ples of how the processes of intercultural educa-
and the holiness of the individual.
tion and biblical interpretation in the church
In the preface to Holiness Webster notes that
might be done.
his initial interest in the concept grew out of an
The final chapters of the book provide
attempt to construct a satisfactory account of
detailed descriptions of classroom practices and
what it means to speak of Scripture as “holy.” It
is therefore not surprising that we find similar thing else flows. Vann believes that “God is call-
themes in his reflections on the “holiness” of ing the church to be renewed at its life-giving
Scripture, published as Holy Scripture: A center, worship” (p. 10).
Dogmatic Sketch. The important focus of this Vann conducted extensive interviews with
book is that it deploys the language of the triune leaders and members of the congregations she
God’s saving and revelatory action in the discus- studied. She observes that “Worship stands at the
sion of the notion of Holy Scripture. The proper center of congregational life when (1) there is an
location for a Christian theological account of expectation of encounter of God in worship, (2)
Holly Scripture is therefore the Christian doc- preparation for worship is taken seriously by
trine of God. For Webster it is not possible to worship leaders and worshipers, (3) the pro-
understand Holy Scripture without an account grammatic life of the congregation supports
of the economy of God’s loving and regenerative worship participation for people in all circum-
self-communication. Hence faithful reading takes stances of life, and (4) reflection on worship is
place in the economy of grace. pervasive throughout congregational life” (p. 22).
In both Holiness and Holy Scripture, Webster To a large extent she allows the people in wor-
offers the reader trinitarian dogmatic sketches in ship-centered congregations to describe in their
the classical Reformed tradition. He interacts in a own words how they encounter God in worship
lucid and engaging manner with theologians like and how that encounter leads to reflection,
Augustine, Calvin, Ursinus, Bavinck, Bonhoeffer engagement in the world, and spiritual growth.
and Barth, as well as with some recent Most pastors would probably agree that
hermeneutical and social theories. It is clear, worship should be at the heart of every congre-
however, that Webster is highly skeptical of what gation’s life. Congregations can easily become
he calls conversational and comparativist theolo- distracted, however, by peripheral concerns such
gies. Theologians with a more postmodern or as liturgical style and musical taste. Market
constructive bend will probably not be attracted analysis, not theological integrity, becomes the
to these books. Nevertheless, both these books dominant motif. Vann demonstrates that congre-
offer rich reflections that rightfully challenge any gations that approach worship theocentrically
attempts to think of holiness and Holy Scripture might not become mega-churches, but they can
without employing language of the triune God’s and do transform the lives of their members and
loving and saving action. make their faithful mark in their communities.
By encountering God in worship and by
ROBERT VOSLOO reflecting and acting on that encounter, these
UNIVERSITY OF STELLENBOSCH
congregations seek to fulfill their vocation. They
SOUTH AFRICA
ask not, “What is the most successful strategy or
program?” but “Where is God in this?”
Gathered Before God: Worship-Centered
This book encourages us not to divide con-
Church Renewal
gregational life into programmatic categories,
by Jane Rogers Vann
but to seek unity at the life-giving core: worship.
Westminster John Knox, Louisville, 2004. 192 pp. I hesitate to recommend this book to worship,
$19.95. ISBN 0-664-22630-2. education, or mission committees, though each
would profit from it. It would be better read by
IN THIS INSIGHTFUL book, Jane Rogers Vann
entire sessions or congregational boards. Pastors
focuses on ten Protestant congregations that do
who share Vann’s passion for the centrality of
more than take worship seriously. For these con-
worship will find in this book food for the jour-
gregations, “Worship stands as the central act
ney, and those who don’t might well find cause
around which all other actions and reflections of
for repentance.
the congregation are configured” (p. 22).
Working as a theologically savvy Christian BRANT S. COPELAND
Educator, Vann describes how worship in fact FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
functions in many congregations, not as a means TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA
to an end, but as the source from which every-
Spirit and Resistance: Political Theology

and American Indian Liberation
by George E. Tinker
Fortress, Minneapolis, 2004. 144 pp. $17.00. ISBN 0-
8006-3681-3.
THIS VOLUME IS, AS George Tinker says in the

preface, “a beginning point for voicing an
American Indian theology of liberation” (p.xi).
This contribution is explicitly grounded in a
Native American experience and speaks to reality
from that perspective and context. Where applic-
able, Tinker includes other indigenous contexts
within the Western Hemisphere. Tinker chal-
lenges conventional understandings of political
thought and theology, and he calls for an exami-
nation of the effects of colonization on U.S.
indigenous peoples. He makes the case that the
healing and liberation of Indian communities
calls for Indian action, including a reconsidera-
tion of the gifts to be found within indigenous
thought, faith, and experience.
Tinker’s writing is significant because the
voice of American Indian peoples is not often
heard in circles of theological commentary. Why
have we not seen American Indian theologies
developed in the U.S.? The answer is complex,
and Tinker’s work provides some of the back-
ground necessary for understanding the kinds of
challenges American Indian peoples have faced
in their own homeland. It is not a feel-good kind
of book, but it is certainly one of substance that
calls people of faith within the U.S. to acknowl-
edge their place in this country’s dealings with
indigenous peoples. The act of such an acknowl-
edgement means that God’s spirit may yet be
able to bring individuals and communities from
places of brokenness to wholeness. In Native
American thought the healing of one is connect-
ed to the healing of all, and so we are bound by
our God-given relatedness whether we acknowl-
edge it or not.
JUDITH WELLINGTON
PRESBYTERY OF GRAND CANYON
PHOENIX, ARIZONA

Book Notes
From Every People and Nation: The Celebrating Romans: Template for
Book of Revelation in Intercultural Pauline Theology
Perspective edited by Sheila E. McGinn
edited by David Rhoads
Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2004. 296 pp. $36.00 (cloth).
Augsburg Fortress, Grove City, 2005. 282 pp. $22.00. ISBN 0-8028-2839-6.
ISBN 0-8006-3721-6.
This collection in honor of Robert Jewett reviews
African American, Hispanic/Cuban, Central and advances five approaches to Paul's most
American and Chinese readings come together in influential letter. The essayists' works include
this volume with womanist, ecological, feminist, rhetorical criticism, social-historical perspectives,
and immgrant perspectives for a wider under- feminist hermeneutics, contemporary cultural
standing of Revelation's message. conversation, and theological appropriation.
Persons in Community: Theological In Search of the Common Good:

Voices from the Pastorate Theology for theTwenty-First Century
edited by William H. Lazareth edited by Patrick D. Miller and Dennis P. McCann
Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2004. 197 pp. $18.00. ISBN T & T Clark, Harrisburg, 2005. 360 pp. $40.00 (cloth).
0-8028-2203-7. ISBN 0-5670-2770-8.
These essays from pastor-theologians examine Christian theology, biblical studies, and ethics
the concept of people as the image-bearers of come together in these articles that address the
God from biblical, doctrinal, and cultural per- notion of the common good. Commitment to
spectives. Together, they highlight insights from community and individual claims engage justice
ecumenical Christian tradition for the meaning and mercy, care of the weak, covenant, and the
and features of personhood in light of integrity, meaning of humanity and neighbor.
freedom, justice, peace, and living in loving com-
munity.
Constructive Theology: A Contemporary
Approach to Classical Themes
Ezekiel's Hierarchial World: Wrestling edited by Serene Jones and Paul Lakeland
with a Tiered Reality Fortress, Minneapolis, 2005. 309 pp. $30.00. ISBN 0-
edited by Stephen L. Cook and Corrine L. Patton
8006-3683-X.
Symposium. Society of Biblical Literature, Atlanta, 2005.
Leading North American theologians from the
288 pp. $39.95. ISBN 1-58983-136-5.
Workgroup on Constructive Christian Theology
Essays on Ezekiel tackle the multilayered hierar- offer a varied and innovative approach to ques-
chy within it by addressing themes of creation, tions, insights, historical conflicts, and contem-
priesthood, and land. Theological reflection and porary voices. An accompanying CD-ROM adds
biblical exegesis and criticism offer readers a resources for discussion, internet links, and a
means for evaluating Ezekiel's modern-day rele- writing guide for research papers.
vance.
Index Volume 59
January 2005
Manna and Sabbath: A Literary–Theological Reading of Exodus 16, Stephen A. Geller, 5-16
“Holy, as the Lord Your God Commanded You”: Sabbath in the New Testament, Sharon H. Ringe, 17-24
Christian Formation in and for Sabbath Rest, Dorothy C. Bass, 25-37
Reclaimed by Sabbath Rest, Robert Sherman, 38-50
April 2005
The Priestly Vocation, Thomas B. Dozeman, 117-128
The Prophet Jeremiah and Exclusive Loyalty to God, Kathleen M. O’Connor, 130-140
“Follow Me”: The Imperious Call of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels, F. Scott Spencer, 142-153
“The One Who Called You. . .” Vocation and Leadership in the Pauline Literature, A. Katherine Grieb, 154-165
The Called Life: An Essay on the Pastoral Vocation, Richard Lischer, 166-178
July 2005
Nature, Humanity, and Love in Song of Songs, Daniel Grossberg, 229-242
The Arithmetic of Eros, Tod Linafelt, 244-258
The Delight of Beauty and Song of Songs 4:1–7, F. W. Dobbs-Allsop, 260-277
Song of Songs: A Metaphorical Vision for Pastoral Care, Carol L. Schnabel Schweitzer, 278-289
October 2005
Clones of God: Genesis 1:26–28, and the Image of God in the Hebrew Bible, W. Sibley Towner, 341-356
Keeping It Real: The Image of God in the New Testament, Deborah Krause, 358-368
Which Way Is Up? An Experiment in Christian Theology and Modern Cosmology, Douglas F. Ottati, 370-381
Biblical Images of God and the Reader’s “I” as Imago Dei, Ann Astell, 382-391
Between Text and Sermon

Genesis 2:1–3, Steven S. Tuell, 51-53
Exodus 3:1–12, Kathy Beach-Verhey, 180-182
Exodus 8–11, Cindy Kissel-Ito, 54-56
Psalm 8, Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty, 392-394
Psalm 86:11–17, Andrew E. Arterbury, 290-292
Jeremiah 1:4–18, William H. Duke, Jr., 184-186
Jeremiah 31:31–34, David Rhymer, 294-296
Matthew 3:1–12, Raymond R. Roberts, 396-398
Matthew 14:13–21, Charles A. Summers, 298-299
Matthew 26:6–13, Elizabeth B. Ford, 400-402
Mark 2:23–28, Mikeal C. Parsons, 57-60
John 5:1–9, Karen Pidcock-Lester, 61-63

Colossians 3:1–17, Michael Barram, 188-190
Hebrews 2:10–18, Steven R. Harmon, 404-406
Authors
Arterbury, Andrew E., Psalm 86:11–17 (Between Text and Sermon) 290-292
Astell, Ann W., Biblical Image of God and the Reader’s “I” as Imago Dei, 382-391
Barram, Michael, Colossians 3:1–17 (Between Text and Sermon) 188-190
Bass, Dorothy C., Christian Formation in and for Sabbath Rest, 25-37
Beach-Verhey, Kathy, Exodus 3:1–12 (Between Text and Sermon) 180-182
Dobbs-Allsop, F. W. The Delight of Beauty and Song of Songs 4:1–7, 260-277
Dozeman, Thomas B., The Priestly Vocation, 117-128
Duke, Jr., William H., Jeremiah 1:4–18 (Between Text and Sermon) 184-186
Ford, Elizabeth B., Matthew 26:6–13 (Between Text and Sermon) 400-402
Geller, Stephen A., Manna and Sabbath: A Literary–Theological Reading of Exodus 16, 5–16
Grieb, A. Katherine, “The One Who Called You. . .” Vocation and Leadership in the Pauline Literature, 154-165
Grossberg, Daniel, Nature, Humanity, and Love in Song of Songs, 229-242
Harmon, Steven, Hebrews 2:10–18 (Between Text and Sermon) 404-406
Hinson-Hasty, Elizabeth, Psalm 8 (Between Text and Sermon) 392-394
Kissel-Ito, Cindy, Exodus 8–11 (Between Text and Sermon) 54-56
Krause, Deborah, Keeping It Real: The Image of God in the New Testament, 358-368
Linafelt, Tod, The Arithmetic of Eros, 244-258
Lischer, Richard, The Called Life: An Essay on the Pastoral Vocation, 166-178
O’Connor, Kathleen M., The Prophet Jeremiah and Exclusive Loyalty to God, 130-140
Ottati, Douglas F., Which Way Is Up? An Experiment in Christian Theology and Modern Cosmology, 370-381
Parsons, Mikeal C., Mark 2:23–28 (Between Text and Sermon) 57-60
Pidcock-Lester, Karen, John 5:1–9 (Between Text and Sermon) 61-63
Rhymer, David, Jeremiah 31:31–34 (Between Text and Sermon) 294-296
Ringe, Sharon H., “Holy, as the Lord Your God Commanded You”: Sabbath in the New Testament, 17-24
Roberts, Raymond R., Matthew 3:1–12 (Between Text and Sermon) 396-398
Schweitzer, Carol L. Schnabel, Song of Songs: A Metaphorical Vision for Pastoral Care, 278-289
Sherman, Robert, Reclaimed by Sabbath Rest, 38-50
Spencer, F. Scott, “Follow Me”: The Imperious Call of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels, 142-153
Summers, Charles A., Matthew 14:13–21 (Between Text and Sermon) 298-299
Towner, W. Sibley, Clones of God: Genesis 1:26–28 and the Image of God in the Hebrew Bible, 341-356
Tuell, Steven S., Genesis 2:1–3 (Between Text and Sermon) 51-53
BOOK REVIEWS
Allen, L. and T. Laniak, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther (Throntveit) 210
Allen, Leslie, Psalms 101–150, revised (Flesher) 86-88
Andersen, Francis I. And David Noel Freeman, Micah: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentaries
(Watts) 88-89
Bailey, Richard A. and Gregory Willis, The Salvation of Souls: Nine Previously Unpublished Sermons on the Call of
Ministry and the Gospel by Jonathan Edwards (Sasser) 97-98

Bailey, Kenneth E., Jacob and the Prodigal: How Jesus Retold Israel’s Story (Grangaard) 218-220
Balentine, Samuel E., Leviticus (Anderson) 67-69
Bartlett, David L., What’s Good About This News? Preaching from the Gospels and Galatians (Boyce) 220-221
Barton, John, Understanding Old Testament Ethics: Approaches and Explorations (Carroll) 70-72
Bass, Dorothy C. and Don C. Richter, Way to Live: Christian Practice for Teens (Turnage) 102-103
Baumann, Gerlinde, Love and Violence: Marriage as Metaphor for the Relationship between YHWH and Israel in
the Prophetic Books (Sharp) 214-216
Beirne, Margaret, Women and Men in the Fourth Gospel: A Discipleship of Equals (Conway) 424-425
Berger, Klaus translated by Charles Muenchow , Identity and Experience in the
New Testament (Valantasis) 425-426
Bracke, James M. and Karen B. Tye, Teaching the Bible in the Church (Vann) 436-438
Braxton, Brad R., Preaching Paul (Thompson) 434-435
Burt, Donald X., “Let Me Know You . . . “: Reflections on Augustine’s Search for God (Wooten) 108
Carr, David, The Erotic Word: Sexuality, Spirituality and the Bible (Yoder) 300-302
Clader, Linda L., Voicing the Vision: Imagination and Prophetic Preaching (Zink-Sawyer) 436
Clifford, Richard J., Psalms 1–72 (Jacobson) 86
Collins, Raymond, 1 & 2 Timothy and Titus (Krause) 74-78
Cooper, Burton Z. and John S. McClure, Claiming Theology in the Pulpit (Lester) 333
Cram, Ronald Hecker, Bullying: A Spiritual Crisis (Dawson) 102
DeSilva, David A., Introducing the Apocrypha: Message, Context, and Significance (Polaski) 89-90
Dines, Jennifer M., The Septuagint (Jobes) 429-430
Farris, Stephen, Grace: A Preaching Commentary (Whartenby) 435-436
Fox, Michael V., Ecclesiastes: The Traditional Hebrew Text with the New JPS Translation (Crenshaw) 192-194
Friedmann, Daniel, To Kill and Take Possession: Law, Morality, and Society in Biblical Stories (Wells) 104
Gaines, Janet Howe, Forgiveness in a Wounded World: Jonah’s Dilemma (Persons) 212-214
Garland, David E., 1 Corinthians (Polaski) 320-322
Garrett, Duane and Paul R. House, Song of Songs/Lamentations (Queen-Sutherland) 314
Gaventa, Beverly Roberts and Patrick Miller, The Acts of the Apostles (Walaskay) 304-306
Gench, Frances Taylor, Back to the Well: Women’s Encounters with Jesus in the Gospels (Reid) 318
Green, Joel B., Salvation (Mays) 325
Green, Gene L., The Letters to the Thessalonians (Bridges) 94
Gritsch, Eric W., A History of Lutheranism (Aune) 98
Hale, W. Daniel and Harold G. Koenig, Healing Bodies and Souls: A Practical Guide for Congregations
(Derrickson) 328-330
Harland, Philip A., Associations, Synagogues, and Congregations: Claiming a Place in Ancient Mediterranean
Society (Ferguson) 200-202
Hill, Craig C., In God’s Time: The Bible and the Future (Royalty) 310-312
Hoehner, Harold, Ephesians: An Exegetical Commentary (Fowl) 94-96
Holifield, E. Brooks, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War
(Vickers) 80-81
Hornik, Heidi J. and Mikeal C. Parsons, Illuminating Luke: The Infancy Narrative in Italian Renaissance Painting
(Talbert) 218
Horsley, Richard, Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Order (Nanos) 308-309
Hughes, Graham, Worship as Meaning: A Liturgical Theology for Late Modernity (Moore-Keish) 106
Hutton, Rodney R., Fortress Introduction to the Prophets (Stevens) 315-316
Jeter Jr., Joseph R., Preaching Judges (Holbert) 316
Johnson, Ben Campbell, Hearing God’s Call: Ways of Discernment for Laity and Clergy (Banes) 103
Kaiser Jr., Walter, Preaching and Teaching from the Old Testament (Wilfong) 316-318
Kaufman, Gordon D., In the Beginning . . . Creativity (Fisher) 325-326
Keller, Catherine, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (McFague) 82-84
Kidd, Richard and Graham Sparkes, God and the Art of Seeing: Visual Resources for a Journey of Faith (Towner)
326-328
Koester, Craig R., Revelation and the End of all Things (Sleeper) 96-97
Koester, Helmut, Cities of Paul: Images and Interpretations from the Harvard New Testament Archaeology Project
(Hultgren) 432-434
Kugel, James L., The God of Old: Inside the Lost World of the Bible (Brueggemann) 64-66
Lathrop, Gordon W. and Timothy J. Wengert, Christian Assembly: Marks of the Church in a Pluralistic Age
(Erling) 107
Lee, Nancy C., The Singers of Lamentations: Cities Under Siege (Middlemas) 210-212
Lester, Andrew D., The Angry Christian: A Theology for Care and Counseling (Bagby) 100-102
Lieu, Judith M., Neither Jew nor Greek? Constructing Early Christianity (Eisenbaum) 322-324
Loader, William, Sexuality and the Jesus Tradition (Reagan) 314-315
Lohfink, Norbert, Qoheleth: A Continental Commentary (Kamano) 88
Long, Thomas G., Testimony: Talking Ourselves into Being Christian (Gench) 221
Lundbom, Jack R., Jeremiah 21–36: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (O’Connor) 412-424
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McKenzie, Steven L., 1–2 Chronicles (Hooker) 209-210
Meyer, Paul W. edited by John T. Carroll, The Word in this World: Essays in New Testament Exegesis and Theology
(Gorman) 90
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Moloney, Francis J., The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary (Black) 416-418
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Noll, Mark, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Wallace) 204-206
Ostwalt, Conrad, Secular Steeples: Popular Culture and the Religious Imagination (Charles) 330
Peterson, Michael L., With All Your Mind: A Christian Philosophy of Education (Moran) 105
Pinn, Anthony B., Terror and Triumph: The Nature of Black Religion (Erskine) 100
Price, Daniel J., Karl Barth’s Anthropology in Light of Modern Thought (Gockel) 97
Rausch, Thomas P., Who is Jesus? An Introduction to Christology (Matera) 324-325
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Riggs, John W., Postmodern Christianity: Doing Theology in the Contemporary World (Smith) 331-332
Schniedewind, William M., How the Bible Became a Book: The Textualization of Ancient Israel (Tuell) 208-209
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Senior, Donald P. and Daniel J. Harrington, 1 Peter, Jude and 2 Peter (Elliott) 196-198
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Webster, Jane S., Ingesting Jesus: Eating and Drinking in the Gospel of John (Anderson) 430-432
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Webster, John, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch (Vosloo) 438-439
Wildberger, Hans, Isaiah 28–39: A Continental Commentary (Roberts) 426-428
Witherington III, Ben, Revelation (Reddish) 322
Witherup, Ronald, 101 Questions and Answers on Paul (Barram) 92-94
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Zink-Sawyer, Beverly, From Preachers to Suffragists: Women’s Rights and Religious Conviction in the Lives of
Three Nineteenth-Century American Clergywomen (Pope-Levinson) 332

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October 2005-Final.

qxp 9/9/2005 10:26 AM Page 337

358 KEEPING IT REAL: THE IMAGE OF GOD IN THE NEW TESTAMENT

370 WHICH WAY IS UP? AN EXPERIMENT IN CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY AND

BETWEEN TEXT & SERMON Major Book Reviews

408 The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1,

424 Short Book Reviews and Notes

INDEXED BY Academic Abstractions

PUBLISHER Union Theological Seminary and

EDITORIAL OFFICE (804) 278-4297

ADVERTISING Address advertising correspondence to:

PRINTING OFFICE Carter Printing Co.

IN CONTRAST TO MUCH of contemporary alternative world of the reign of God

340 Interpretation OCTOBER 2005

CONTRIBUTORS D OUGLAS F. OTTATI

D EBORAH K RAUSE A NN W. A STELL

342 Interpretation OCTOBER 2005

So God created humankind in his image,

Whoever sheds the blood of a human,

IMAGE OF GOD Interpretation 343

344 Interpretation OCTOBER 2005

AN INVENTORY OF SEVEN EXEGETICAL ISSUES RAISED BY THE

IMAGE OF GOD Interpretation 345

be a terrestrial counterpart to God’s heavenly entourage.”12

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IMAGE OF GOD Interpretation 347

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IMAGE OF GOD Interpretation 349

THE MEANING OF IMAGO DEI

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IMAGE OF GOD Interpretation 351

The Westminster Confession of 1647, still a fundamental standard in many Reformed

352 Interpretation OCTOBER 2005

IMAGE OF GOD Interpretation 353

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JESUS THE SAGE

359 Interpretation OCTOBER 2005

THE IMAGE OF GOD

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GOD’S IMAGE IN THE HEBREW BIBLE

IMAGE OF GOD Interpretation 361

Yet you have made them a little lower than God,

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The most thorough scholarly examination in English of Philo’s exploration of the

IMAGE OF GOD Interpretation 363

Philo’s understanding of the image of God and the creation of humankind:.

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Through all the tumult and the strife,

What though my joys and comforts die?

The peace of Christ makes fresh my heart,

IMAGE OF GOD Interpretation 369

Which Way Is Up?

Our theological pictures of God, the world, and ourselves some-

371 Interpretation OCTOBER 2005

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As an historical matter of fact, however, most theology is not simply freewheeling,