DialecticSkeptic
Reformed
- Jul 21, 2022
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Then I agree with you: That view is certainly problematic.
It also differs from my view significantly, which holds that being an image-bearer is likewise a covenantal reality, not an ontological one per se. In other words, prior to God's covenant relationship with mankind established with Adam in the garden of Eden 6,000 years ago, humans were not his image-bearers. My view assumes that the imago Dei in humanity is best understood as a covenantal reality grounded in divine election and expressed in royal-priestly vocation. According to the sovereign purpose of God, mankind was chosen not on the basis of intrinsic capacities but by the sheer grace of divine appointment, an election that conferred a unique status and a corresponding calling: to represent God by exercising dominion over creation, cultivating its fruitfulness, and mediating his presence within it.
Thus, the imago Dei is not a static essence possessed by nature, nor merely a set of human faculties, but a dynamic identity rooted in God's electing love and ordered toward an eschatalogical mission. In Adam, this elect vocation was defiled and forfeited; in Christ, the true and perfect image (Col. 1:15; Heb. 1:3), it is restored and fulfilled. Those united to Christ are recreated in that image (Eph. 4:24; Col. 3:10), renewed in knowledge, righteousness, and holiness, and called to fulfill the original mandate now transfigured by the cross and directed toward the eschatological new creation.
To better understand my view of being an image-bearer, see J. Richard Middleton, The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1 (Brazos Press, 2005).
You seem to think that my view has image-bearing humans doing morally wrong things without being guilty of sin because there was no covenant relationship (and therefore covenant theology is not only flawed but contradicts what God has revealed about morality and himself). But, as I said, this fails to reflect my view because they weren't image-bearing humans.
We appear to be working from two very different anthropological frameworks. My view is at home within a Reformed, federal, covenantal framework. You seem to be approaching this from an Orthodox, essentialist, participatory framework. In my view, the imago Dei is not an intrinsic property possessed by every human as such; it is a covenantal identity, an office and vocation conferred by divine appointment within the structure of God's covenantal relationship with man.
This is not to deny that God's moral character is eternal, immutable, and universally binding (it is). However, it does say that moral accountability in a judicial sense presupposes a covenantal structure to God's relationship with man. Prior to that relationship established in Eden, human acts may have violated God's eternal moral character but they were not counted as transgressions due to the absence of covenantal structure (cf. Rom 5:13, "sin is not taken into account when there is no law").
I am not denying human dignity or the moral law; I am saying those realities are ultimately anchored in Christ, not nature. Christ does not merely restore a lost image; he is the true image into whose likeness the saints are being renewed. That is the coherence and strength of covenant theology; it is not a liability.
In the final analysis, this doesn't "push covenant theology to the breaking point," but is rather entirely consistent with it. This all flows from the redemptive-historical framework of scripture. I get that your system cannot absorb it, but that does not amount to a critique of it. Your anthropology may sound more plausible to certain strands of tradition, but mine does align with the logic of redemptive history as revealed in the text.
If we are dealing with humans as image-bearers, then it is not just wrongdoing but sin. Prior to that covenant relationship, it was moral wrongdoing but not sin.
How can it be extreme on an ontological level if sin is defined not ontologically but covenantally (vis-a-vis the eternal moral character of God)? I am not defining sin as ontological failure in the journey toward likeness (homoiosis) and deification (theosis)—that's the Eastern view—but as lawlessness (1 John 3:4), transgression (Rom 4:15), and covenantal breach (Hos 6:7; Rom 5:14). It would be question-begging to presuppose your own hamartiology when criticizing mine for not sharing it.
To clarify, covenant doesn't create morality, it administrates accountability: Moral reality is grounded in God himself, whereas covenant is God's chosen means to formally structure, express, and administer his eternal moral character. It is not an arbitrary addition to reality; it makes explicit and judicially actionable what was already implicit morally. In other words, moral wrongdoing existed before Eden but sin did not, which is to say that acts contrary to God's holy nature were objectively wrong even before Eden but they were not judicially reckoned as transgressions (Rom 4:15; 5:13) until Eden. Covenant makes moral wrongdoing accountable, i.e., sin is moral wrongdoing counted, imputed, and judicially actionable.
No, I do not. As Derek Kidner explained, Adam would've had contemporaries distributed throughout the world, and at Eden God would have "conferred his image on Adam's collaterals, to bring them into the same realm of being. Adam's federal headship of humanity extended, if that was the case, outwards to his contemporaries as well as onwards to his offspring, and his disobedience disinherited both alike" (Derek Kidner, Genesis: An Introduction and Commentary (InterVarsity Press, 1967), pp. 28-29.) There was never a time, in my view, when some humans were image-bearers while other humans were not.
Is this proposing an omphalos hypothesis?
Incidentally, I have no idea what it means to say that humans "evolved virtually" (i.e., not in actuality). How can something evolve without existing? I can understand (but ultimately reject) the idea that God created humans in their current form a few thousand years ago and that man has wrongly supposed from his observations that we evolved, but I cannot yet grasp how something can be said to evolve in a virtual sense.
Also, the recreation of mankind by Christ as the last Adam did not occur in the same pattern if, in the one case, man existed virtually and, in the second case, man existed in actuality. The pattern would be similar, but not the same—which is fine—whereas in my theologoumenon the pattern is the same: The first Adam takes existing mankind down through the fall, the last Adam raises existing mankind up through the cross (literally reverses the fall), both through federal headship (in Adam vs. in Christ).
(Just to be clear, "the cross" is a synecdoche for the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.)
While I appreciate the clarity, I did know what that term means. Being an avid student of theology, church history, and philosophy has expanded my vocabulary tremendously.
That word has 28 letters. There is a much longer word in major English dictionaries, comprised of 45 letters—
- pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis,
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