The God Who Looks Like Us: A Liberating, Male-and-Female, #TrulyHuman Imago Dei

January 22, 2015 | By: Larry Eubanks 1 Comment

What do you think?

God is spirit and has no physical form except in the incarnation of Jesus. This truth has led us to understand the imago dei in purely non-physical ways. Being made in the image of God, it is said, means that among the rest of creation only humans have souls.+

Or that humans have free will and can act beyond mere instinct.+

Or that only humans have the capacity to have dominion over the rest of creation.+

Or that humans have an intellectual capacity far above any other animal.+

Or some such.+

While I don’t deny that any or all of these things may be true, I think that when interpreting Genesis 1:26-27, we jump to the spiritual too quickly and miss the most obvious meaning.+

We look like God. Or, perhaps more to the point, God looks like us.+

Elohim looks like a human. He doesn’t look like a bull. The Canaanites envisioned El as a bull, and there is some conjecture that the etymology of name Marduk, the chief Babylonian god, refers to a bull calf.+

God doesn’t look like the gods of our oppressors, Genesis 1 is saying. But it is saying much more as well.+

Read more at http://www.missioalliance.org/the-god-who-looks-like-us-a-liberating-male-and-female-trulyhuman-imago-dei/?utm_content=buffera2307&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer