In a recent sermon, Rev. Jean Southard reminded us that the Bible says God created humankind in God’s image and we should live up to that image. At the time, I was grappling with an old idea that was new to me: What was God’s image in which we were created? Our New Revised Standard Version pew Bibles (recent English translations of Greek translations of ancient Hebrew scriptures with some help from St. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate translation) reads: “Then God said (apparently to a heavenly court): ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness . . .’ So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” (Genesis 1:26-27). Then, having created the other living things in pairs, in the next chapter God separates Eve from Adam (“Of the earth”) by by splitting off a rib. (Gen. 2:21-22). “Wait!,” we say; “God created man and woman in God’s image and then God had to separate the two? What’s going on?” The traditional, patriarchal explanation is that God (think an old man with a flowing white beard in the sky) created a male human and then adjusted his mistake by making Eve from Adam’s rib – or maybe these are two creation stories that have been cobbled together.
Today many of us do not think of God in anthropomorphic, purely masculine terms; we pay attention to the Genesis 1's intimation that God’s image was also female. Is there any way to reconcile these two pictures which our antecedents combined into one story? I was intrigued – and initially dismayed – at the suggestion that the ancients thought of God “in the round” so to speak, with male features on one side and female features on the other, and the Adam side was split from the Eve side so they could see each other, function independently but side-by-side, and be in relationship with each other. At first this seemed like a really weird idea, but the more I thought about it, the more I liked it: God’s image encompassing everything, adjusted for life on this planet where many species function in pairs; that’s a view I can live with.
I take the Bible seriously, but not literally, so what matters to me is concepts, not scientific facts about which the ancients knew nothing. They did pretty well with a general idea of the developmental sequence the universe and our world, even if they didn’t understand the details of evolution. I’m willing to give them credit also for an imaginative, non-discriminatory vision of an unknowable God. My understanding of God just got a whole lot bigger!
Lyn Pickhover, Awe-struckl