Creation and Fall/The Image of God on Earth

From YoKim

Gen. 1:26-27.

The Image of God on Earth

Then God said: Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let it have dominion over the fish in the sea and over the birds in^[1] the sky and over the cattle and over all wild animals and over all reptiles that creep about upon the earth. And God created human beings in God's own image - God created them in the image of God, created them as man and woman. ^[2]

GOD LOVES GOD'S WORK, loves it in that it has its own existence; for the creature honors the Creator. God still does not recognize God's self in the work, however; God beholds that work but not God's own self. To behold oneself means, so to speak, to recognize one's own face in a mirror, to see oneself in an image of oneself. But how could that possibly take place? God, after all, remains without qualification the Creator before whose feet the work lies; how then will God be able to find God in this work? The work does not resemble the Creator, it is not the Creator's image; instead it is the form that the Creator's command takes. What is decisive is that at the very moment when the Creator has brought it forth, the work is already torn away from, and alien to, the Creator; it is no longer the Creator. Even in its living nature the work IS dead, because it is created,^[3] conditioned - because, though it arises out of freedom, it itself is not free but conditioned. Only that which is itself free would not be dead, would not, as a creature, be alien or torn away. Only in that which is itself free could the free Creator behold the Creator.^[4] But how can what is created be free? What is created is determined, bound by law^[5] conditioned, not free. If the Creator wishes to create the Creator's own image, then the Creator must create it free. And only such an image, in its freedom, would fully praise^[6] God, would fully proclaim God's glory as Creator.

At this point the narrative is about us; it is about the creation of humankind. The Bible expresses the essential difference between this work and all God's previous creative activity by the way in which it introduces this work. The Hebrew plural here indicates the significance and sublimity of the Creator's action.^[7] It is also to be noted, however, that God does not simply call humankind forth out of nonbeing, as God called forth everything else; instead we are taken up into God's own planning,^[8] as it were, and thereby become aware that something new, something that has not yet been, something altogether original, is about to happen.

And God said: Let us make humankind in our image, after our likeness. Humankind is to go forth from God as the last work, as the new work, as the image of God in God's work. There is no transition from somewhere else here; here there is new creation. This has nothing whatsoever to do with Darwin.^[9] Quite apart from that issue humankind remains in an unqualified way God's new, free work. We in no way wish to deny humankind's connection with the animal world - on the contrary. Our concern, our whole concern, nevertheless, is that we not lose sight of the peculiar relation between humankind and God above and beyond this. The attempt - with the origin and nature of humankind in mind - to take a gigantic leap back into the world of the lost beginning, to seek to know for ourselves what humankind was like in its original state^[10] and to identify our own ideal of humanity with what God actually created is hopeless. It fails to recognize that it is only from Christ that we. can know about the original nature of humankind. The attempt to do that without recognizing this, as hopeless as it is understandable, has again and again delivered up the church to arbitrary speculation at this dangerous point.^[11] Only in the middle, as those who live from Christ, do we know about the beginning.^[12]

To say that in humankind God creates God's own image on earth means that humankind is like the Creator in that it is free. To be sure, it is free only through God's creation, through the word of God; it is free for the worship of the Creator. For in the language of the Bible freedom is not something that people have for themselves but something they have for others. No one is free 'in herself' or 'in himself' ['an sich']^[13] free as it were in a vacuum or free in the same way that a person may be musical, intelligent, or blind in herself or in himself. Freedom is not a quality a human being has; it is not an ability, a capacity, an attribute of being that may be deeply hidden in a person but can somehow be uncovered.^[14] Anyone who scrutinizes human beings in order to find freedom finds nothing of it. Why? Because freedom is not a quality that can be uncovered; it is not a possession, something to hand, an object; nor is it a form of something to hand; instead it is a relation and nothing else. To be more precise, freedom is a relation between two persons. Being free means 'being-free-for-the-other', because I am bound to the other. Only by being in relation with the other am I free.

No one can think of freedom as a substance or as something individualistic. Freedom is just not something I have at my command like an attribute of my own; it is simply something that comes to happen, that takes place, that happens to me through the other.^[15] We can ask how we know this and whether it is not once again just speculation about the beginning that is part of the fall-out of being in the middle. The answer is that it is the message of the gospel itself that God's freedom has bound itself to us, that God's free grace becomes real with us alone, that God wills not to be free for God's self but for humankind. Because God in Christ is free for humankind, because God does not keep God's freedom to God's self, we can think of freedom only as a 'being free for .... ' For us in the middle who exist through Christ and who know what it means to be human through Christ's resurrection, the fact that God is free means nothing else than that we are free for God. The freedom of the Creator demonstrates itself by allowing us to be free, free for the Creator. That, however, means nothing else than that the Creator's image is created on earth. The paradox of created freedom remains undiminished. Indeed it needs to be expressed as sharply as possible. Created freedom then means - and it is this that goes beyond all God's previous acts and is unique ](l't' €~OXTtV^[16] - that God's self enters into God's creation.

Now not only does God command and God's word comes to pass; now God enters into creation and so creates freedom. Humankind differs from the other creatures in that God is in humankind as the very image of God in which the free Creator looks upon the Creator's own self. This is what the older dogmatic theologians meant when they spoke of the indwelling of the Trinity in Adam.^[17] In the free creature the Holy Spirit worships the Creator; uncreated freedom glorifies itself in view of created freedom. The creature loves the Creator, because the Creator loves the creature. Created freedom is freedom in the Holy Spirit, but as created freedom it is humankind's own freedom. How does this created existence of a free humankind express itself? In what way does the freedom of the Creator differ from the freedom of that which is created? How is the creature free? The creature is free in that one creature exists in relation to another creature, in that one human being is free for another human being. And God created them man and woman. The human being is not alone. Human beings exist in duality, and it is in this dependence on the other that their creatureliness consists. ^[18] The creatureliness of human beings is no more a quality or something at hand or an existing entity than human freedom is. It can be defined in simply no other way than in terms of the existence of human beings over-againstone-another, with-one-another, and in-dependence-upon-one-another.

The "image that is like God"^[19] is therefore no analogia entis ^[20] in which human beings, in their existence in-and-of-themselves, in their being, could be said to be like God's being. There can be no such analogy between God and humankind. This is so in the first place because God - who alone has self-sufficient being in aseity, yet at the same time is there for God's creature, binding God's freedom to humankind and so giving God's self to humankind - must be thought of as one who is not alone, inasmuch as God is the one who in Christ attests to God's 'being for humankind' ^[21] The likeness, the analogia, of humankind to God is not analogia entis but analogia relationis^[22] What this means, however, is, firstly, that the relatio ^[23] too is not a human potential or possibility or a structure of human existence;^[24] instead it is a given relation, a relation in which human beings are set, ajustitia passiva!^[25] And it is in this relation in which they are set that freedom is given. From this it follows, secondly, that this analogia must not be understood as though humankind somehow had this likeness in its possession or at its disposal. Instead the analogia or likeness must be understood very strictly in the sense that what is like derives its likeness only from the prototype, so that it always points us only to the prototype^[26] itself and is 'like' it only in pointing to it in this way. Analogia relationis is therefore the relation which God has established, and it is analogia only in this relation which God has established. The relation of creature with creature is a relation established by God, because it consists of freedom and freedom comes from God.

Humankind in the duality of man and woman, that is, in its likeness to God, is created within the world of the fixed and of the living. And whereas the freedom of human beings over against one another consisted in being free for one another, humankind's freedom over against the rest of the created world is to be free from it. That means that humankind is its lord; humankind has command over it, rules it. And that constitutes the other side of humankind's created likeness to God. Humankind is to rule - though it is to rule over God's creation and to rule as having been commissioned and empowered to rule by God.

Being free from created things is not the same as, say, the ideal of the spirit's being free from nature.^[27] On the contrary this freedom to rule includes being bound to the creatures who are ruled. The ground and the animals over which I am lord constitute the world in which I live, without which I cease to be. It is my world, my earth, over which I rule. I am not free from it in any sense of my essential being, my spirit, having no need of nature, as though nature were something alien to the spirit. On the contrary, in my whole being, in my creatureliness, I belong wholly to this world; it bears me, nurtures me, holds me. But my freedom from it consists in the fact that this world, to which I am bound like a master to his servant, like the peasant to his bit of ground [Boden], has been made subject to me, that over the earth which is and remains my earth I am to rule, and the more I master it, the more it is my earth. What so peculiarly binds human beings to, and sets them over against, the other creatures is the authority conferred on humankind by nothing else than God's word.

This is said to us who, being in the middle, no longer know anything about all this and to whom it is all a pious myth or a lost world. We too think that we rule, but the same applies here as on Walpurgis Night: we think we are the one making the move, whereas instead we are being moved.^[28] We do not rule; instead we are ruled. The thing, the world, rules humankind; humankind is a prisoner, a slave, of the world,^[29] and masters it. And because we no longer rule, we lose the ground [Boden]^[30] so that the earth no longer remains 6 our earth, and we become estranged from the earth. The reason why we fail to rule, however, is because we do not know the world as God's creation and do not accept the dominion we have as God-given but seize hold of it for ourselves. There is no 'being-free-from' without a 'being-free-for'. There is no dominion without serving God; in losing the one humankind necessarily loses the other.^[31] Without God, without their brothers and sisters,^[32] human beings lose the earth. Already in sentimentally shying away from exercising dominion over the earth, however, human beings have forever lost God and their brothers and sisters. God, the brother and sister, and the earth belong together. For those who have once lost the earth, however, for us human beings in the middle, there is no way back to the earth except via God and our brothers and sisters. From the inception humankind's way to the earth has been possible only as God's way to humankind. Only where God and the brother, the sister, come to them can human beings find their way back to the earth. Human freedom for God and the other person and human freedom from the creature in dominion over it constitute the first human beings' likeness to God.

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