KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 19 September
What is man, that thou art mindful of him?
The words of Psalm 8.4 reflect the teaching of Genesis 1 about the nature of our humanity and our place in the created order. It captures what one of the priest’s prayers at Mass names explicitly: “O God who didst wonderfully create yet more wondrously restore the dignity of our humanity”. The Hebrew word in the Psalm actually means mortal but in both the Greek Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate, the gender neutral anthroposand homo, meaning humankind, are used, thus tying the Psalm passage to the Genesis text and to the word ‘ha’adam,’ again an all-encompassing sex neutral term for our humanity. In English that term, following the Hebrew in Genesis and the Greek and the Latin translations, has been rendered generically as man. ‘Ha’adam’ is Adam, not (yet) as a name but as a comprehensive and descriptive term – man meaning humankind.
Genesis 1 presents creation as an orderly affair which proceeds not in a temporal order but in a logical process of distinguishing one thing from another. Man, ‘ha’adam’, is a creation of the sixth day, at the end of that process but not as an afterthought and not as an accident. Genesis 1 says that man, ‘ha’adam’ is made “in the image of God,” the creator. God as Creator is utterly distinct from creation and emphatically not created since God is the intellectual principle of all reality. At once connected to everything else in the created order, from dust to angels, only about Adam, man, is it said that he is made in the image of God. It suggests profoundly the dignity of our humanity. And as the Christian prayer indicates, there is the concept of dignity both in creation and in redemption. These are powerful ideas that shape a whole tradition of ethical discourse.
This idea of our humanity as having a special relation to the Creator is critical to the Judeo-Christian understanding and carries over into Islam. That sense of connection is also there in Hinduism in the relation between the Atman, the self, and Brahma, the Creator. The idea of image becomes a matter of considerable controversy in the relations between Islam and Christianity, reflected in such things as the iconoclastic controversy in the eighth and ninth centuries that contributes to the different artistic representations of religion, not only between Islam and Christianity but also within the Christian world between East and West. One of the Islamic Hadiths – collected saying of Mohammed – speaks of Adam being made in the image of Allah. For Jews, Christians, and Muslims, one point is clear. Man made in the image of God is not God, not divine. Yet the idea of image confers a certain dignity.
Almighty God, who didst call thy servant Theodore of Tarsus from Rome to the see of Canterbury, and didst give him gifts of grace and wisdom to establish unity where there had been division, and order where there had been chaos: Create in thy Church, we pray thee, by the operation of the Holy Spirit, such godly union and concord that it may proclaim, both by word and example, the Gospel of the Prince of Peace; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.