Ranald Macaulay and Joe Martin indicate how theistic evolution tends to distort what it means to be human
Scholars have wrestled for many years to try to explain the familiar expression ‘the image of God’.
From the middle of the last century, for example, Near-Eastern studies drew heavily on Mesopotamian parallels in which Babylonian kings were commonly described as God’s ‘image’. As a result biblical studies gravitated – not always helpfully, as we shall see – towards an interpretation of Genesis 1 in terms of ‘status’ rather than ‘structure’. Human beings, it was argued, are God’s representatives on earth like the Mesopotamian kings. They are God’s image because they are delegated rulers.
Adam’s attributes
Previously, for almost 2000 years, the church had focused more upon Adam and Eve’s likeness to God, that is, upon the unique attributes which God had given them. Their dominion was possible only because of their appropriate nature or structure, i.e. their likeness to God as persons. However, partly under the influence of evolution, the Mesopotamian interpretation was preferred – and needs now to be challenged. In fact it should always have been beyond dispute, first because the New Testament’s teaching on sanctification demands it, and second, because our Lord’s incarnation presupposes it.
Remade like Jesus
In relation to the former the apostle Paul says we need to be ‘… transformed ‘into (Christ’s) likeness’ (eikon in Greek i.e. image) with ever-increasing glory…’ Our whole life has to be re-formed to imitate his life, with our attitudes of heart being the key. Why? Because our human characteristics are what God is concerned about in salvation. It is these that constitute us his ‘image’. In relation to the incarnation, the man Jesus demonstrates what God intended his image-bearers to be in the first place. He becomes ‘the last Adam’ to recover what the first Adam lost.
In short, the ‘image’ is without real meaning apart from an intrinsic view of our human identity.
It was unfortunate that a Greek emphasis on reason (ratio) confused the medieval Church. The human intellect was selected as the distinguishing feature of our ‘image-ness’ – a misconception the 16th-century Protestant reformers quickly repudiated along with all forms of Greek dualism. Their stress was on the Hebrew view of the unity of body and spirit. They didn’t deny reason – think of their stress on the need to read and understand the Bible – but they expanded the image to include all we are as human beings. What was axiomatic to them was that we resemble God with a unique and God-like structure.
Theistic evolution
The approach taken by most theistic evo-lutionists (TEs) is different. Through purely physical forces, they suggest, organic life gave rise to ape-like creatures whom we now call ‘homo sapiens’. These creatures had language, creativity, beauty, and a system of ethics and religion. But, like other species, they had to struggle to survive. They were selfish, angry and cruel. They died. They were not God’s image. They were definitely not made for eternity. Their significance was no greater than, say, toadstools or tigers.
They only became the image of God in the fuller sense when God intervened to give them what one writer calls ‘a delegated value and status…by divine decree’.1 The level of speculation in all this is obvious: for example, were just two homo sapiens individuals chosen (like Adam and Eve!), or many more; were they sinners before their ‘adoption’ and then sinless after it; did their moral Fall involve a specific and inexcusable choice like that in Genesis 3? The point is: nothing like this appears in the Bible or in Christian theology before the end of the 19th century.
Adam did not graduate
The traditional pre-Darwinian view was different. Adam and Eve came through a divine act in history. Though they were part of an organic matrix involving millions of species, they were in a class by themselves. They didn’t need to graduate to a higher form of existence.
They already had a personal relationship with their Maker because they were like him. (Animals were different: though sentient they lacked rationality, though communicators they lacked language; though ‘organisers’ and ‘constructors’ of a sort they lacked imaginative creativity. They were admirable but not personal. That’s why Scripture calls them simply ‘brute beasts’.) We call this the intrinsic view of God’s image. Adam and Eve were God’s divinely decreed rulers, but only because they had the capacity for it. The extrinsic view derives from status rather than structure: ‘… the value and status of humankind is established not by intrinsic capabilities but by divine decree’.2
Why the need for the second, we ask? Answer: to accommodate evolution theory. All TEs believe that organic life came out of purely physical means within an overarching providential order. But is this enough to explain homo sapiens? Can personality really be derived from a purely impersonal process without a supernatural and miraculous intervention at the beginning? We think not, and we believe Scripture points us to this reality through the supernatural dimension inherent in every aspect of human behaviour.
Not that a miracle takes place whenever any of us does something. But, as C.S. Lewis puts it: ‘… the supernatural element in man concerns us solely as evidence that something beyond Nature exists. … his rationality is the little tell-tale rift in Nature which shows that there is something beyond or behind her’.3 Lewis isn’t advocating the Greek view mentioned earlier. He starts with rationality simply because he knows that it is inexplicable in material terms only. But his argument extends wider: ‘the same argument leads us to acknowledge a supernatural source for our ideas of good and evil’.4 So too with human choice: we don’t just ‘think’, we choose to think – and see, hear, feel, act, assess, reflect and love. At the very heart of our being, in fact, we show that we are neither mechanically programmed nor purely physical. (More could be said here about the structure of all reality, but that’s another topic.)
Designed rather than decreed
We conclude, therefore, that God’s image-bearers didn’t just evolve. They were designed to be rational, creative, choosing and moral beings. This is what makes them his ‘image’. But TEs tend to be uncomfortable about design. They worry about it implying successive acts of creation in Genesis 1; this can’t be the case, they say, because evolution is a random, physical process.
Similarly they prefer to speak of God’s image being ‘decreed’ rather than designed. They even avoid Scripture’s ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’ terminology though it crops up on every page of the Bible. This doesn’t, as is so often thought to be the case, require a Cartesian view of soul and body. It is not as if ‘a kind of magical essence or ethereal intelligence indwells a body like a ghost in a machine’.5 Far from it: ‘the body must be regarded not as the vessel or vehicle of the soul, but simply as its material manifestation, expression and occasion’.
The human never vanishes
This means that even if one should trace the life of the body back to its most primordial principles, one would still never arrive at that point where the properly human vanishes and leaves a ‘mere’ physical organism or aggregation of inchoate tissues or ferment of spontaneous chemical reactions behind. All of man’s bodily life is also the life of the soul, possessed of a supernatural dignity and a vocation to union with God’. But one finds barely a hint of this sort of language in TE descriptions of God’s image.
To conclude: although the TE explanation of Genesis sounds biblical it masks an essentially unbiblical theology. Though it affirms men and women as God’s image, it fails to clarify how the fundamental animal/human distinction arose in the beginning. And it seems to hesitate to say, unequivocally, that the person-ness of humanity (inexplicable to science) is the clearest evidence of God’s creation.
