Marginal Christianity

8.     Talk of salvation as restoration to the genuine humanity God created us for raises the question of who God created us to be in the first place. Who we assume or think ourselves to be determines the kind of salvation we can envision God achieving for us. Our Western heritage of individualism, especially in the form we experience it today, has decisively shaped the salvation we believe we experience. a.     We think of ourselves as “Billiard Balls.” Complete, self-sufficient, independent, we fancy ourselves moving through life as though around a billiard table. We make contact with other balls and the table rails which changes our direction but these contacts make no difference to who we essentially are. b.     The Bible tells us, however, that God made us like molecules, a configuration of atoms connected by various sorts of relations. We are not complete, self-sufficient, or independent; rather we are who we are only in re...

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...