Friday, February 24, 2006
(12:37 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Image of God
I don't have time to post, but I keep coming up against something that bothers me in my theological reading. Many liberal theologians (counting identitarian theologians among the "liberal" camp) seem to deploy the idea that humans are "created in the image of God" completely unreflectively, as though it were self-evident that once someone is recognized as being created in the image of God, salutary moral consequences will ensue. That is to say, once someone is recognized as being in the image of God -- or, parallel with that, as being "fully human" -- that person will be accorded all the rights and privileges to which human beings are entitled, first among them being "respect." Another way of putting this (among very liberal theologians) is that there is something "divine," perhaps a "spark" of the divine, in each and every one of this, and our negative treatment of each other results from failure to "recognize" said spark of the divine. We can't think of Christ as having a monopoly on this divinity, because it's essential to see divinity in every human being, because then salutary moral results will necessarily follow. And who could possibly be opposed to good moral results? QED: humans are all created in the image of God, are all divine in some respect.Right.
My only question is this: Where did anyone ever get the idea that in the modern world, we're all about showing "respect" toward the "divine" or the "sacred?" Where did people get this crazy idea that under the tenets of liberalism (broadly construed), our primary goal is to make sure not to violate anything sacred? Isn't it in fact exactly the opposite, so that the test case for the exercise of liberal rights is precisely to draw cartoons gratuitously insulting what Muslims (for example) take to be sacred? Isn't irreverence our most precious cultural value, the key to "edginess"? Why this big rush to redeploy the language of piety in service of some kind of political goal when the driving creative force in modernity is the critique and rejection of piety?
(I'm of the school that human beings do not "retain" some kind of "image of God" and are not "divine." Human life is not, or at least should not be regarded as, "sacred.")
