Who Are We?

Who Are We?

Scripture: Psalm 8; Job 38:1-11; Genesis 1:26-32

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? Psalm 8:3-4

It sounds like a rhetorical question, doesn’t it? The implied answer is clearly “nothing,” or at least not much. We’re nothing significant, nothing worthy of God’s attention. Yet Psalm 8 continues:

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…. Psalm 8:5-6

Kind of gives you whiplash, doesn’t it? We’re nothing, but we are a little lower than God.[1] I have to admit that when I read it recently, or actually when I reread, for I had read it many times before, I was a bit taken aback, as I have been before, by the psalm’s extraordinarily high anthropology. I thought: Really? I found verses 3 and 4 that imply that we really are nothing of which God should be mindful to correspond better to my personal evaluation of humanity than the lofty assertion that we are a little lower than God in verses 5 and 6.

Pretty clearly the Revised Common Lectionary folks at least wanted to raise a question about that high anthropology, for they paired Psalm 8 with Job 38:1-11 in the readings for June 4. Those verses come near the end of the book of Job. Job’s story is well known, but I’ll recap it here briefly so you don’t have to go look it up if you don’t know it. Job is a perfectly righteous man having obeyed all of God’s commandments his whole life long. He has never sinned. We have to accept that somewhat dubious contention about him for the story to work. God has nonetheless allowed Satan to inflict horrendous calamities on him. His life has gone from idyllic to hell on earth. Three of his so-called friends appear and tell him over and over again that he must have committed some sin because otherwise God would not be inflicting these torments on him.[2] Job says no, I’ve never sinned. God, he says, must have made a mistake about him. If I could just plead my case to God all this would get straightened out, and my suffering would cease. In chapter 38 of the book God’s reply to Job begins:

Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind:

Who is this that darkens counsel

               by words without

               knowledge?

Gird up your loins like a man,

       I will question you, and you

               shall declare to me.

Where were you when I laid the

               foundations of the earth?

       Tell me, if you have

               understanding.

Who determined its

               measurements—surely you

               know!

       Or who stretched the line

               upon it?

On what were its bases sunk,

       or who laid its cornerstone

when the morning stars sang

               together

       and all the heavenly beings

               shouted for joy? Job 38:1-7

God goes on like this through all of chapters 38 and 39 of Job and beyond. God’s questions to Job seem as rhetorical as Psalm 8’s question about who we humans are that God should be mindful of us. The unavoidable answer is Job is nobody and was nowhere when God did God’s powerful acts of creation. So which is it? Are we little lower than God? Or are we nothing and nobody? What a question! Yet it is one we cannot avoid if we are going to take these texts seriously.

I said above that I struggle with Psalm 8’s high anthropology. I just don’t think that highly of human beings as a whole these days. We are so violent. We are so deceitful toward one another. We are in the process of destroying the only planet we have. In my country racism rules the day. Our politicians keep passing laws that benefit the rich, harm the poor, and have created a wealth gap greater perhaps than we’ve ever had. Especially in the United States we spend an obscene amount of money on the military and use some of our brightest and most creative people to invent more effective ways of killing people. We tolerate hunger, starvation even, in a world that would have enough food to feed everyone if it were equitably distributed, but it isn’t. My country represents around four percent of the world’s population but consumes around twenty-five percent of the world’s resources. All in all not a very favorable impression of human life, but one I can’t avoid.

And yet. And yet there is Psalm 8’s assertion that God made us little lower than God. There’s also Genesis 1:27 which says that we’re created in the image and likeness of God. I can’t imagine a loftier image of us human beings than that. So is the high anthropology of these scriptures just wrong? I am sorely tempted to answer that question yes, that high anthropology is just wrong; but I resist that answer as well. I don’t want the answer to be yes, but here’s the best I can do for an answer of no.

I can take it as a given that somehow God created us as better than we seem to be. God created us with free will, which as far as we know no other animal has to the same extent as we do. Free will is a characteristic of God, and our free will is one of the more obvious ways that we are created in the image and likeness of God. More about that below. We aren’t the only animals that create things, but we have the power of creation far more than any other animal does. We create enormous and complex things. We create tiny but elaborate things too. We create buildings and art. We create airplanes and music. We dance and sing. We create novels and poetry. We write philosophy and theology. We understand God perhaps most of all as Creator of all that is. We aren’t God, but one way that we reflect the image and likeness of God is in our ability to create.

We humans are meaning making animals. We want to know what everything means. We want our lives to mean something, and we want to know what that something is. Meaning is not a physical thing. We can’t touch it. It has no external shape or color. It is something intangible, ineffable, something that exists only in our minds. Yet it is as real as any physical object we ever encounter. We create it practically ex nihilo, from nothing, nothing that is except our experiences and our reflection on those experiences. We say that God made creation ex nihilo, ex nihilo that is except Gods essence as Creator. In our drive to create meaning for our lives we do indeed embody the image and likeness of God.

Perhaps the human characteristic that most shows that we are made in the image and likeness of God is our yearning for connection with God, the very source of our being. We yearn for connection with something beyond and greater than ourselves. It makes no evolutionary sense that we do. Yearning for connection with God is hardly necessary for our physical survival. Yet although especially in contemporary western culture many people say they don’t, we know that humanity generally does strive for connection with ultimate reality, with the ground of our being, for meaningful relationship with God. That we do makes sense only if we understand that we long for connection with the One in whose image and likeness we are made, namely, with God.

So yes, I think of humanity as made little lower than God as Psalm 8 says, yet all that I said above about humanity’s failings remains true. So how are we to understand creatures made little lower than God falling so short of the One in whose image and likeness we are made? Christianity has long explained it through the doctrine of the Fall, using the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden in a quite unjustifiable way. The faith has blamed humanity’s failings on the transgression of Adam and especially of Eve when they ate the forbidden fruit. That story may have a certain usefulness if we understand it as the myth that it actually is. I has none if we insist on understanding it as fact. We must however somehow explain why humanity so consistently falls short of it nearly divine origins.

I’m not sure anyone has ever explained it satisfactorily, but how we are created probably has a good deal to do with it. We are centered selves. Being a centered self doesn’t necessarily mean being self-centered. It means that we exist as individuals who observe and experience a world that appears to us to exist independently of us and outside of us. Each one of us is the center of our own world. Indeed to a considerable extent each of us creates our own world. Our nature as centered selves makes the temptation to live only for ourselves nearly irresistible. Most of us never resist it very successfully at all. Yet it turns out that having a world full of individuals living primarily for themselves is immensely destructive. It makes every other person and indeed the world itself for each of us an “other,” something apart from and potentially hostile to ourselves. At least in the early decades of life and for most of us for all of our lives we perceive our life task to be building up and benefiting ourselves rather than building up and living for others.

Every one of the world’s great spiritual traditions and every modern theory of psychosocial or psychospiritual development holds that the highest level of personal development is to live as a self but not for the self. It is to live out of the self for the benefit of others, especially others who particularly need whatever it is that we can give them. None of us ever does that perfectly. Most of us hardly do it at all. Rather than live for others we tend to live against others because we believe, perhaps subconsciously, that that’s how we build up ourselves.

In doing that we create conflict. Sometimes we tie benefit for ourselves to benefit for a larger entity, often a social category of some sort like class, gender, or race, or perhaps a faith tradition or a nation. We put the world’s larger entities into conflict with each other in the same way that we see ourselves as living in conflict with other individuals. We go to war. We exploit people whom we identify as other and therefore less. We hate members of other faith traditions. We identify the earth as other and use it to benefit only ourselves and indeed to benefit even ourselves only very short term.

We might well ask: Why does God let us get away with it? The answer has to be, I think, that part of the way we are created in the image and likeness of God is that we have free will, something I already mentioned above. God of course has or even is free will. Nothing can control the will of God except God. We have free will within the limits of our created nature. We can’t will not to be human, although far too many of us try to be God. We are free to will anything that it is possible for human beings to be or to do. So we will what is good for us individually, or at least we far too often do. God doesn’t stop us from wishing and doing evil because to do so God would have to limit our free will. The combination of our nature as centered selves who far too often become self-centered and our free will is, I think, the best explanation there is for why we humans so frequently act in destructive ways.

Yet we are created in the image and likeness of God, and that means we can do better. We will always be centered selves, but we don’t have to be self-centered. As I noted above, all of the world’s great religious traditions and contemporary theories of psychosocial or psychospiritual development hold that the highest level of personal development is for persons to live out of themselves for the benefit of others. When we develop as fully as we can into the image and likeness of God we find our greatest satisfaction in living for others. We work to make the world a better place for ourselves by working to make it a better place for all. When we do that we oppose war and other uses of violence and work for peace for all people. We work to end exploitation of some by others. We strive to preserve the earth as a supporting home for all who live on her today and all who come after us.

We are quite capable of living in those beneficial, life-giving and live-supporting ways. We are after all made in the image and likeness of God. We may in fact be only a little lower than God. We people faith believe that God calls us to that better way of living. Yet it should be obvious to everyone whether they believe in a call from God or not that living for the benefit of others is a better way than living solely for the benefit of ourselves. That way lies peace. That way lies fulfillment for every person. That way lies justice for all people. We all see those things as values, don’t we? We can do it. We always fall short, but we are made in the image and likeness of God. Let’s live like it, shall we?

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[1] There is a translation issue. The New Revised Standard Version translation of the Bible that I use has us little lower than God, but it has a translator’s note to the word God. It says that the Hebrew word here is elohim. Elohim is actually quite a problematic word. It is plural in form. Its most literal translation would be “gods.” The NRSV translator’s note suggests “the divine beings” or “angels” but not “gods” as an alternative translation. The NRSV’s translation of “God” reflects the fact that throughout the Hebrew Bible elohim, though plural in form (which we know because it ends “im”) is used as though it were singular. In those instances it is properly translated as “God.” Whether it is properly translated as God here is mercifully a question we need not answer.

[2] These friends express the highly problematic theology of the book of Deuteronomy, which says that if you obey God’s commandments you will live long and prosper and if you don’t you won’t. I don’t have to take on that issue here so I won’t. I have discussed it at length in Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians, Revised Edition, Volume Two, The Old Testament, Coffee Press, Briarwood, NY, pp. 136-139.