Yes, We're Created In The Image of God. Now What?
A Skeptic's Response to Activist Uses of Biblical Commentary
It’s true—the Bible says that human beings are created in the divine image (tzelem Elohim). (See Genesis 1:26-27 and Genesis 5:1). Yet should the Bible’s anthropological account direct our ethics and politics to a specific end? Why do so many seem to think that this teaching means we must agree with policy X or political platform Z? Rabbi Yitz Greenberg says the fact that we are created imago Dei teaches the absolute or infinite value of every human life.
Of course, if he’s right, and we took the teaching seriously, then it’s either so utopian as to be practically irrelevant or so radical as to render everything we do problematic, an obvious violation of the basic teaching. Even pacifism fails, because in not fighting, we allow those who do fight to decide whose lives are most worth preserving.
A third option is that cognitively recognizing and affirming the absolute value of human life needn’t be an obstacle to rank ordering which lives are more or less worth saving (which is effectively and implicitly what every policy and policy maker does). One should live with cognitive dissidence—feel that each life is valuable while choosing to bet on an ideological platform that inevitably values its friends and supporters over its enemies.
Politics is, in part, about prioritizing different needs, different groups’ interests, different objectives. It’s messy and it’s intrinsically partisan, subjective.
I’m not sure that being created in the divine image translates into a modern concept of human rights, as if the Bible was just sitting there, waiting, hoping we’d reach the conclusion we only came to after WWII (and still haven’t realized very meaningfully or consistently) if only we knew how to read better. It’s hard to believe the Bible’s anthropology is basically leading exclusively and teleologically to the same place as the platform of the French Revolutionaries.
If being created in the divine image is directive, it seems vaguely so. There is nothing wrong with seeking to apply the principle in one’s life, but it behooves activist-commentators to be intellectually honest, and to admit that their applications of the principle are in excess of what the text says.
To summarize:
1) The principle of the infinite value of human life may or may not be what Genesis is teaching.
2) The principle is vague and mostly non-instructive.
3) There are no objective criteria by which one can measure whether one is honoring the principle.
4) Ethical and political life are messy, conflictual, and rooted in prioritization, all of which make it impossible to enact the infinite value of human life.
5) At most, the principle is negative—it forbids wanton destruction and excess cruelty. But barring the sadist and the sociopath, can’t reasonable people disagree and disagree vastly about what constitutes wanton destruction and excess cruelty?
6) It seems implausible that the Bible’s message is basically the same as whatever ideology happens to be in vogue at the time of the interpreter. And if there is no point of disagreement between the Bible and contemporary culture, then one of them is redundant.
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