CHAPTER EIGHT MADE IN THE IMAGE OF GOD THE ACCOUNT OF CREATION IN GENESIS 1 CONTAINS SEVERAL repet-titive patterns. Perhaps the most striking pattern is the phrase, “And then God began to say, Let [something] begin to be” (see Gen. 1:3, 6, 9, 14). God willed the light, firmament, land and sea, and heavenly bodies into existence. God expressed the idea, and it took shape. Centuries before Plato, the Hebrew Scriptures expressed the priority of the Idea over the Image. When the creation account moves from inanimate matter to life, however, a startling change in the pattern occurs. God does not say, “Let there be grass on the earth,” or “Let there be moving creatures that have life in the waters,” or “Let there be living creatures on the earth.” Instead of following the established pattern, God creates life in a different way. He involves what he has already created in the bringing forth of life: “And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good” (Gen. 1:11-12 KJV). God brings a prior creation into responsibility for cooperating to accomplish his purpose. Instead of willing plants into existence, God wills that the earth produce the plants, and the earth complies. The will of God also included provision for the continuing appear- ance of life through reproduction signified by seed, and later by procreation of animals. The creation of plants establishes a new pattern for the creation of life forms. God wills for the earth to produce plants. Likewise, he wills for the waters and the earth to produce animal life. It does not happen as a spontaneous, natural occurrence. It happens as a 125126 Wuere Dip We Come From? result of the earth and the sea responding to the will of God. Though the waters brought forth animal life (1:20), God created that life (1:21). In other words, Genesis emphasizes that regardless of the circumstances under which life appeared, it happened as a result of the creative activity of God. Some translations of the Bible make a careful distinction between the Hebrew words for “make” and “create” which are found interspersed throughout Genesis 1. The word for create (bara) refers to the exclusive activity of God (Gen. 1:1, 21, 27; 2:3- 4). The word for make (asah), on the other hand, does not imply the exclusive activity of God (Gen. 1:7, 16, 25-26, 31; 2:2). Nonetheless, even when God is one step removed, Genesis empha- sizes that even his “making” is “creating.” For instance, God deter- mines to make man in his image, but when it happens, Genesis gives a threefold emphasis that man as male and female was cre- ated by God (Gen. 1:26-27). The Genesis 1 account of creation lays out a series of phases of creation which involve qualitative differences, beginning with the difference between light and darkness, air and water, water and earth. Plant life represents another significant qualitative difference in creation from inanimate matter. The introduction of animal life represents another qualitative distinction from plant life. The cre- ative activity of God described in Genesis 1 concludes with another qualitative distinction. God determines to “make” an animal in his own image. What is the image of God? What is any image? Again, Genesis 1 anticipates a central element of Plato’s thought by several cen- turies. Plato taught that an Image is a mere representation of an Ideal. It is not necessary to pursue Plato’s development of the dis- tinction between an Ideal and its Image to appreciate the qualita- tive distinction between God and people. A statue is an image of a person. By viewing a statue, someone can develop an impression of some of the aspects of the person the statue represents. Yet the statue cannot move, think, talk, feel, or experience the host of other experiences essential to being a person. To say that people are made in the image of God is to say that a gigantic qualitative gulf exists between people and God. To say that people are made in the image of God is to say they are not God. This statement may seem simplistic to many who read the Bible from a Christian perspective, yet over a billion peopleMade in the Image of God 127 believe they are inseparable from God. Major forms of Hinduism and Buddhism would hold such a view. The Genesis 1 account of creation speaks to this theological issue by making two distinctions with respect to people. They are made qualitatively different from other animals because they are made in the image of God. But because they are made in the image of God, they are qualitatively different from God. The word for “people” or the “human race” in Hebrew reflects the relationship of people to the rest of creation. The collective Hebrew noun for male and female humans is adam. The Hebrew word adam comes from the Hebrew word for “dirt,” the feminine noun adamah. The relationship of people to the earth raises another serious theological issue. From the earliest times until the present, groups of people in various cultures have believed that the earth itself is divine and living, as the Great Mother. Forms of this belief have involved ancient religion in India and Canaan, the Artemis worship of the Ephesians, the Druid worship of the Celts, animistic religions of Africa and the Americas, and contemporary feminist and ecologist religion in the United States and western Europe. While God may create life from earth and water, the Genesis 1 account makes clear that the earth is not among the living, repro- ducing work of creation. The earth takes no initiative, nor does it “give birth.” Genesis 1 does not concern the scientific dimension of the nature of life so much as it establishes the theological under- standing of the origins of life. In the presence of many rival reli- gious explanations of the origin of life, Genesis 1 emphasizes that people and all other living things are the result of the creative work of God, regardless of how he may have used the earth and the sea in the process. In a culture dominated for fifteen hundred years by a Christian worldview, one might easily suppose that the account of the cre- ation of people is about people. In a much larger world with many competing worldviews, however, the striking feature of the account of the creation of people focuses on what it tells us about God. It is only about people because people are made in the image of God. When these lines were written in a Hebrew community thousands of years ago, the world had numerous explanations for the origins of life, and more numerous explanations of what kind of God or gods exist. As the West enters a post-Christian era, the old Western