HOMO PRECARIUS:
PRAYER IN THE IMAGE AND LIKENESS OF GOD

by

Craig Keen

Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But while joined by many bonds, which one precedes and brings forth the other is not easy to discern (Calvin 1960, 1.1.1).

Theology is anthropology (Feuerbach 1957, xxxvii).

            It is interesting that we homo sapiens--we who claim to have risen beyond the earth from which we were sculpted, who claim to be so discerning, so wise--know so little about ourselves. And yet we want to know; and despite the shortness of our reach, despite the emptiness again and again of our hands, we grope on for the slightest trace of that which makes us distinctively human. It is a preoccupation that we have and have had especially since the time of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). But we have always (as far as our backward self-scrutiny can tell) wanted to know who we are; and we have always, even if secretly, wanted to know that we are not to be taken lightly. Is it any surprise, then, that when we come upon Genesis 1:27 at the very beginning of our holy book, we straighten up and take notice? "And God...." God who has just called the universe into being merely by the force of his word, God who is sovereign over light and darkness, waters and sky, earth and world, and the living things which move where these contend, this God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness...."^[1]  

            Indeed, we have not only taken notice, we have read this passage with great energy, struck as we have been by its unusual import. When our various interpretive labors have been done, we have found and brought to one another different meanings, sometimes a welter of conflicting perceptions. Claus Westermann counts nine different prominent interpretations of Genesis 1:27 (Westermann 1984, 148 - 158).^[2] Which is it? Does this verse affirm that human being as such is God's representative, viceroy, vizier, attorney in this world?^[3] Or is it rather that "image" here is a more pointed power-term, indicating human exercise of "dominion," as the following verse says, over the rest of God's creatures?^[4] Or is the divine image a kind of minimal "natural" similarity to God that is to be distinguished from a loftier supernatural divine likeness that was added to it in our first parents?^[5] Or is the image the "spiritual qualities or capacities" that make us humans at least relatively unique, capacities such as freedom, personality, understanding, self-consciousness, intelligence, or  immortality?^[6] Is it simply our bodily form?^[7] Or is it more broadly "the person as a whole"?^[8] Does the verse have a more specifically Christological significance, indicating that humans were created long ago, with the coming Christ as their destiny?^[9] Is the image of God a yet unobtained goal toward which we are created to move?^[10] Or is it our being "God's counterpart," the one whom God addresses as "you," the one who can reply as "I"?^[11]

            But what if we have miscalculated in our analyses of ourselves and this verse? What if we have prepared ourselves so much for a certain kind of answer to our questions that we have missed a very different one, an answer that one might read in our holy book? Westermann thinks that this is precisely what has happened:

            This survey. . .reveals a common trait: all exegetes from the fathers of the church to the present begin with the presupposition that the text is saying something about people, namely that people bear God's image because they have been created in accordance with it. The whole question therefore centers around the image of God in the person.... Scarcely one of the many studies of the text asks about the process that is going on.... There can be no question that the text is describing an action, and not the nature of human beings.

            Most interpretations presume without more ado that the verb "create" can be understood in itself and apart from the context in which it is set. But the text is speaking about an action of God, and not about the nature of humanity.... In any case, what the Old Testament says about the creation of humanity in the image of God has meaning only in its context, namely that of the process of the creation of human beings....

            [The point of the passage is that] the creation of humanity has as its goal a happening between God and human beings...; it is not a question of a quality in human beings.... God has created all people "to correspond to him," that is, so that something can happen between creator and creature (155, 157, 158).^[12]

            Westermann's reading of Genesis 1:27 provides an intriguing alternative to the typical approach to the text. Here we have the notion that the image of God is not to be located in the human being, but rather in the region between the human being and transcendent God, in the region opened up by God's movement to the one who is irrevocably his creature. Thus the image is very much the image of the God who approaches and addresses the human and only thereby sets the human apart as unique. This means that no matter how hard one looks at the human being, it is only as one's gaze slips from the human to the God who addresses the human that one comes to find the uniqueness that constitutes the imago dei. The image of God is not simply there in us or about us, a brute matter of fact lodged, located, statically in place. The image rather comes; it comes as a gift that never becomes a possession, that never ceases being a gift. Genesis 1:27, therefore, speaks first of the God whose movement yields that which is most distinctive in the human being, and only then, derivatively, speaks of that human to whom God moves. Westermann is saying that the address of God is an event that calls, that challenges us to respond. Thus, it is not so much that the human "images God." It is much more that the human is "imaged by God."

            This in turn means that the human is the one who answers the call of God, who lives from the insuperable gift that God gives, who turns to the God who first turns to humans, who thus is only in the space opened by God's image. It means that this human prays. The implication of Westermann's argument is that the human being, according to Genesis 1:27, is to be thought of as the prayer invited by God, is to be understood as homo precarius. That is, insofar as being human is being in the image of God, prayer is not something added to the human being as if without it the human would remain essentially unchanged. Rather, it is prayer, specifically the prayer called forth by God's address, that makes us human.

            The one theologian cited again and again by Westermann as having understood the passage,^[13] as having avoided the "false start" that has taken almost all interpreters down a path away from the text, is Karl Barth, whose now classic treatment of Genesis 1:27 is found in the Church Dogmatics, 3/1. Although Westermann would not embrace all that is said in that section (he rejects the Christological-Trinitarian reading of the text), his weighty words of approval invite a closer examination of what Barth has to say. Barth's understanding of human life lends itself precisely to the notion that the human being is prayer, i.e., is an openness to the openness of God. However, the position advocated by Barth and Westermann is not entirely new. Its continuity with older Protestant thought is illustrated, e.g., by John Wesley's notion that salvation is simultaneously an event of prayer ("prayer without ceasing") and the restoration of the human being in the image of God. Both of these positions will be examined in what follows.

Where the Spirit of the Lord Is, There Is Freedom

            The theology of Karl Barth is a theology of revelation. It is certainly also a theology of the wholly other God; but Barth speaks of this God only as he speaks of the apocalyptic event in which God makes himself known, in which God opens himself, bares himself to what he is not (1947, 314-315; 1975, 298).^[14] Indeed everything Barth says, whether of the finite or the infinite, the temporal or the eternal, the human or the divine, emerges finally from that event in which two utterly alien realities, one creature, the other creator, become one. All theological utterances are to be received here. 

            It is because of the exhaustively constitutive nature of God's self-revelation in Barth's theology that late in his career he could (to the surprise of many) write of "the humanity of God" (1960b, 37-65). The wholly other God comes close, so close that one cannot speak of God in isolation from his coming: and his coming entails us. To understand who God is is to understand who God is in the event of his self-revelation. But it is equally true that to understand who we are as humans is to understand who we are in that same event. Where God and human being are one is where God is most really God and human being is most really human being. Thus Barth refuses to speak in abstraction from revelation either when he speaks of God or when he speaks of human being: they are equally inseparable from that revelation. Anthropology is theology: in order to speak of human being, one must first and last speak of God. And so, when Barth explains the doctrine of the image of God, he does so by thinking human being at the place where the outgoing reality of God occurs.

            Further, the revelation of God, according to Barth, is the history of Jesus Christ, the concrete history of this concrete human being. This is the history of God's radical grace, this is the space opened as God goes out to what God is not, to what is radically other than everything God is, this is where God gives himself unreservedly (1975, 315; 1957, 257-321). God is utterly laid bare here, and so is human being. What occurs here has no referent beyond itself which gives it meaning and worth. This God is God. This human being is human being. All purported divine events as well as all purported human events are to be judged here. There is no higher court of appeal. This human history, as particular as it is, is that to which all human histories are to be referred; i.e., because God is radically here as this history, it is constitutive of human being as such, it defines human being. 

            Moreover, the presence of God as this history is not a casual and static presence. It is not simply there like a marble in a jar. Rather, the unity of this history occurs as two radically different natures concur in the heat of their difference, as an act, a movement, of mutual self-giving, of mutual kenotic love. The history, which is this human being and is this God, is the "yes" spoken by each to the other. Therefore, what happens in the profound relation between this human and the God who is here revealed is that human being is made known as the creature utterly given over to God (der Mensch für Gott). What occurs as Jesus Christ is the reality of every human being  (er ist. . .der wirkliche Mensch). Everything human is human only here, in him, in his life and death.  In other words, human being is created to occur precisely as Jesus occurs: as the concrete and particular event of absolute openness to the God who is absolutely open to him, as the history of God with us and of us with God, as the history in which there is no distinguishing what human being is about from what God is about (1948, 64-241; 1960a, 55-202).^[15] Jesus Christ is the concrete history of human being utterly given over to God; the entirety of his history is human being corresponding to God.^[16]

            If the history of Jesus Christ is the defining event of human being, then human life is to be understood in relation to him from the very beginning. Indeed, since God is at work here, the history of Jesus Christ must be traced beyond the very beginning to the heart of God. The outgoing of God that occurs with us as a human history, the outgoing of God that lays God bare to us, the outgoing of God that is indistinguishable from the what and who of revelation, is an outgoing at work already and transcendently within the divine reality. God not only appears to be love; God is love, and that from all eternity. The history of Jesus reveals that God in himself is never simply in himself, but is even there an outgoing movement of self-giving. For example:

Among all other men and all other creatures He [Jesus] is the penetrating spearhead of the will of God their Creator: penetrating because in Him the will of God is already fulfilled and revealed, and the purpose of God for all men and creatures has thus reached its goal; and the spearhead to the extent that there has still to be a wider fulfilment of the will of God and its final consummation, and obviously this can only follow on what has already been achieved in this man.... And if the man Jesus is the penetrating spearhead of this will of God. . .His existence is determined from the beginning, before the foundation of the world. This can be said only of Him.  For He alone is the man, the creature, in whom the will of God has already been fulfilled and by whom the enemy of being has been slain and the freedom of being attained. He alone is the archtypal man whom all threatened and enslaved men and creatures must follow. He alone is the promise for these many, the Head of a whole body.... If now in the vast sphere of human fellowship and history we have to do with the man Jesus, it is because His existence was eternally resolved in the sovereign will of God to save us and all creation: resolved before all things, before being was even planned, let alone actualised, before man fell into sin, before light was separated from darkness or being from non-being, and therefore before there was even a potential threat to being, let alone an actual; resolved as the very first thing which God determined with regard to the reality distinct from Himself; resolved as the all-embracing content of His predestination of all creaturely being (Barth, 1960a, 143-144).

            The resolution of God, therefore, occurs in the inner life of God.  God goes out because he is essentially outgoing even in himself. That is, the revelation of God to his other signifies the same dynamics at work in the inner divine life. God is alive and moves even within himself; i.e., there is an other at work within God.^[17] God is God only because his unity occurs in this movement of othering. This, Barth maintains, is the implication of God's revelation in Jesus Christ. From here Barth moves to Genesis 1:27. He, of course, knows that the history of the Christological interpretation of Genesis has not been an altogether pretty sight. Yet he does not on that account draw back from letting the implications of the notion that Jesus is the Christ, the hope of Israel and the world, the eternal Son of the Father, unfold even here.^[18] 

            The creation of human being is an event in which God moves to the outside. In that event, Barth argues, human being is set in motion in the direction of that movement of God.^[19] We are created toward the creator who comes to us. Again, there is in God an outgoing, and it is to this outgoing that human being is created to move. The outgoing of God is not something separate from God himself. God indeed remains the mystery, the wholly other, the transcendent one, high and exalted, precisely when he is closest. Thus the outgoing of God is a kind of repetition of the hidden one, a kind of "over-against" (Gegenüber)^[20] of God to God, a kind of image of God.  Again, God moves to what he is not without ceasing to be what he is. God's moving to what he is not is still true God. Yet it is the one God again, as the image of God.  God, whom we confront as we are formed from the ground, is the transcendent one come close, the true, utterly undiluted, undiminished image of the true God. Human being is created to move to this outgoing, to this image, to stand out in it, to go after it.^[21] In other words, human being, not in itself the image of God, "is created in correspondence [entspechend] with the image of God" (1958, 197; 1945, 222),^[22] is created speaking (sprechend) out (ent-)^[23] in answer to the divine image; speaking freely with what it is and is called to be, and only thus being human.^[24] The image of God is God's being that in going out calls to us. The human "correspondence" with the image of God is our being the answer to that very image which is God himself as his call, his voice, his word (see Jüngel 1976a, 231-236; 1989, 124-153).

            It is, Barth says, this complexity in God that moves behind the Pauline understanding that Jesus Christ, unlike Adam, is the very image of God.^[25] His history is identified with God's image not because he exceeds human life, but because he is human life in its most comprehensive sense.  God created Adam and Eve to correspond to, i.e., to answer his call, his image. What the early chapters of Genesis lay out as failing to occur in their history is precisely what happens as the history of Jesus Christ. In fact, the correspondence of Jesus Christ to God's image is unrestricted: whatever he is about is what God's outgoing is about. Therefore, to say "Jesus Christ" is to say "the image of God" (Barth 1960a, 62, 64; 1958, 201-203). In this way Jesus Christ, qua the image of God, is the point of the creation of human life. Adam and Eve were called into being as a hope that opens to the coming history of the fullness of God with us. That is precisely what the history of Jesus is. Therefore, it is to this that they are essentially related; when God created Adam and Eve, it was to the coming Christ that he looked (1958, 191, 204-205).^[26]

            This remains the destiny of human life, whether or not one turns from God, whether or not one "falls."  Since it is not a human possession but a gift, and a gift of a most persistent giver, the image, the voice of God, cannot be lost. It continues to call to every child of Adam and Eve, whom the gracious creator will never leave or forsake (1958, 200).^[27]

            The being of the human is, therefore, that which acknowledges its source, ground, and object as that which lies outside itself and yet has come in mercy and grace.

We may thus say that the being of man is a being in gratitude. His history as constituted by the Word of the grace of God, his being therefore, continues and must continue in the fact that it is a being in gratitude.... The Word of grace and therefore grace itself, it can only receive. But as it does this, as it is content to be what it is by this Word, as it thus exists by its openness towards God, the question is decided that it is a being in gratitude. It has not taken the grace of God but the latter has come to it; it has not opened itself but God has opened it and made it this open being. And it now is what it has been made. But it cannot be without itself actualising this event. It is, as it is under an obligation to the God who has seized the initiative in starting this history; as it is referred to Him in respect of its whole attitude. It is in the strength of its promise which God makes to it, that He is its Helper and Deliverer. As God comes to it in His Word, it is a being open towards God and self-opening, transcending itself in a Godward direction (1960a, 167-168).

Such gratitude is the essence of prayer.^[28] To be human for Barth is to move in the open relation which is initiated by God. That is, to be human is to be responsive before God, in all the concreteness of daily life, in all the complexity and confusion of an uncertain world. Yet it is to be responsive in the gratitude which is joy and freedom before the mercy and love and openness of the God who in Jesus Christ has said a resounding "yes" to human being, and thus has called to the newness of life what otherwise would be swallowed by death. Thus, for Barth to take human being as something approachable and knowable apart from the history of Jesus is to fail to understand what his history in fact signifies for those who have the hope of being human only in his death and resurrection.

Christ Is All And in All

            The ideas at work in Barth's account of Genesis 1:27 resonate with many of the ideas at work in the theology of John Wesley: God's grace is God himself lovingly at work in the lives of his creatures; God is prevenient, going out to us before we are in any position to respond; God addresses the human being as a whole; God's address liberates us to the Christ who is the human reality that we, too, were created to be; in Christ we find our destiny. However, Wesley's explicit account of the meaning of the imago dei clashes with Barth's. Indeed, it is striking how much Wesley draws attention to the human being as a reality whose meaning is found in itself, as a proper substance in which proper qualities reside. Thus it is also striking how much his position falls prey to the critique of Westermann. However, there is something more at play in Wesley, something that eludes the simple definitions that he had been taught so well and which were part of the stock-in-trade of the typical learned divine of his time.

            As one would expect, there is in the more than 60 years of Wesley's commentary on the doctrine of the imago dei a great deal of traditional material.^[29] He is doing little more than repeating classic treatments when he speaks of the doctrine in 1730 as "a truth that does so much honour to human nature" (1987c, 292) and in 1790 as indicating "the greatness, the excellency, the dignity of man" (1987b, 162); or when he speculates about the strength, clarity, infallibility, justice, and speed of human understanding, will (or "affections"), and "liberty" in their original, paradisiac state (1987c, 293-295; 1985d, 188; 1985a, 475; 1985c, passim; 1985b, 409-410; 1987b, 162-163); or when he describes undefiled human being as "resembling" God (1987c, 293), as "an incorruptible picture" of God (1987d, 354), as "like" God (1985b, 409). Even when Wesley speaks of the "total loss" of the image (1985e, 185; 1987b, 162) or more moderately of the loss of "the moral image" (1985b, 410), he is repeating a then familiar Protestant notion. 

            Though making use of these ideas (however ineffectually), Wesley writes with considerably more energy and interest when he attends less to the human subject, its powers and dignity, and more to the gracious God who delivers us in Christ. The work of God in Christ is a liberation for Wesley, viz., from the darkness and despair of sin, to the God who thus "restores" and "renews" us in his own image (1987c, 293; 1987d, 354; 1985e, 185; 1986, 204). Even as he affirms the notion that the image of God can reside in us, Wesley shifts attention away from us to the God who lovingly comes to us.^[30] Further, though the terms that he inherits make the imago proper to the human subject, the vision within which Wesley locates these terms is profoundly expropriating: "It is of his mercy that he made us at all.... But if he has made us, and given us all we have, if we owe all we are and have to him, then surely he has a right to all we are and have, to all our love and obedience" (1987a, 153). There is finally no claim to possession in Wesley. What God does in us is not our property. Indeed, the hallowing, which is our being restored in the image of God, is a "living sacrifice" in which whatever I am is yielded to God.

            Moreover Wesley's elucidation of the imago dei is not all talk of substance and quality. It can also be explicitly and profoundly relational. Life in God's image is, for Wesley, "man dwelling in God and God in him, having uninterrupted fellowship with the Father and the Son through the eternal Spirit" (1985a, 475-476; see 1984b, 184). That is, human being in God's image is a being whose center is shifted to the outside, to the one who in love has come first to us. Such divine love is an outgoing granted by the outgoing grace of God. Again:

O trample under foot. . .all the things which are beneath the sun--'for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus'; for the entire renewal of thy soul in that image of God wherein it was originally created.... Let nothing satisfy thee but the power of godliness, but a religion that is spirit and life; the dwelling in God and God in thee... (1984d, 498).

            Wesley in his last years by no means abandons the categories he had used for decades to explicate the imago dei. However, he began to describe the doctrine in a rather different way. It became clear to him that phenomenal human qualities (the understanding, the affections, freedom of will, etc.) are shared with animals and that the distinctiveness of human life is to be found elsewhere. Such qualities remain part of the meaning of our being created in God's image, but they are not constitutive of "the supreme perfection" of the human being. That which is most uniquely human, that which when lost most deprives us of what we essentially are, is our being "capable of God," "capable" of knowing, loving, obeying, and enjoying God (1985c, 439, 441-442, 449-450; 1987a, 153). 

            This term "capable of God," however, is not clear. It seems to affirm that human beings, at least when not ravaged by sin, have resident in them a power which makes them able to grasp the divine reality.^[31] Yet the term as used by Wesley can be read differently. If one thinks of the word "capability" in the light of its history, it begins to speak not of a quality in the centered human subject, but of an openness, a capaciousness, that calls the centered subject into question.^[32] In other words, in our time the word "capability" carries about it connotations of a kind of native potency that under the right circumstances might be actualized. The word, of course, does not in fact have such a narrow denotation and indeed there is nothing in the theology of Wesley that would lead one to expect him to maintain that even the most Godly creature has an inherent power to grasp the divine. "None feel their need of Christ," he writes, "like these [who live without sin]; none so entirely depend upon Him" (n.d., 53); and "it is pride. . .to ascribe anything we have to ourselves" (n.d., 95). If Wesley again and again maintains the utter dependence of the redeemed upon the Redeemer, of the sanctified upon the Sanctifier, then it is unlikely that his conception of the human "capability of God" would be attributed to inherent human nature as it exists in itself, even under the power of the Spirit. His is a theology of grace which struggles to expropriate what we otherwise are so inclined to claim as our own. The work of the Spirit is not to deposit new goods in our storehouse of property. The Spirit "fills" us with the love, the openness of God.

            This is not to say that being "capable of God" is merely a passivity, something which comes to us as if we were not involved. Wesley's usage is richer than that. For Wesley, a "capable" human being receives from God, certainly; but the receiving human also restores to God what has been received. In that sense capability is a gratitude, a thanksgiving, a joy, a prayer  fluctuating in its facility between the passive and the active. To be "capable of God" means to be utterly yielded to God, to be agape, heart, soul, mind, and strength. To be "capable of God" is to be "capable of being filled" by God. Thus:

When we have received any favor from God, we ought to retire. . .into our hearts, and say, "I come, Lord, to restore to Thee what Thou hast given; and I freely relinquish it, to enter again into my own nothingness. For what is the most perfect creature in heaven or earth in Thy presence, but a void capable of being filled with Thee and by Thee; as the air which is void and dark, is capable of being filled with the light of the sun, who withdraws it every day to restore it the next, there being nothing in the air that either appropriates this light or resists it? O give me the same facility of receiving and restoring Thy grace and good works! I say, Thine; for I acknowledge the root from which they spring is in Thee, and not in me" (n.d., 113).^[33]

Being capable of God is an openness to God which receives whatever God gives and receives it without laying claim to it. Being capable of God is being a "void," a "nothing," that waits in active anticipation of what is to come. It is a rhythm which is gifted, which is and remains a grace-gift.

            Further, this is not for Wesley a private matter between me and the Spirit of God. Restoration in the image of God comes to me only in the Christ who threw his life open and thus is prophet, priest, and king. That is, to be filled with God is, according to Wesley, to be filled with God in the Christ who enlightens, hallows, atones:

The holiest of men still need Christ, as their Prophet, as "the light of the world."  For He does not give them light, but from moment to moment; the instant He withdraws, all is darkness. They still need Christ as their King; for God does not give them a stock of holiness. But unless they receive a supply every moment, nothing but unholiness would remain. They still need Christ as their Priest, to make atonement for their holy things. Even perfect holiness is acceptable to God only through Jesus Christ (n.d., 82).

Such giving retains the precariousness of every gift qua gift. Christ as love bestows love. He gives himself and as we receive him we take on his nature. In this way we come to give. To grasp after the light, to hoard the holiness given by the holy one, to take that holiness as holy in itself, is to fail to understand that light and holiness are Christ and Christ is agape. Only in the crucified one is there the free resurrection life of joy, thanksgiving, and prayer. Moreover, to be filled with God in Christ is to be filled with the Holy Spirit:

[T]he life of God in the soul of a believer. . .implies a continual inspiration of God's Holy Spirit: God's breathing into the soul, and the soul's breathing back what it first receives from God; a continual action of God upon the soul, the re-action of the soul upon God; an unceasing presence of God, the loving, pardoning God, manifested to the heart, and perceived by faith; and an unceasing return of love, praise, and prayer, offering up all the thoughts of our hearts, all the words of our tongues, all the works of our hands, all our body, soul, and spirit, to be an holy sacrifice, acceptable unto God in Christ Jesus. (1984a, 442)

"Restoration in the image of God" is the restoration of a capability of God which opens us to God the way lungs are opened to fresh air. We receive and we yield what we have received in a rhythm of love, praise, and prayer. Restoration in the image of God is bringing back to God what he has given, it is releasing one's grip, emptying one's pockets, yielding one's very life as a sacrifice to the One to whom the crucified one prayed.

            It would have been all but impossible for Wesley to abandon a tradition which for over a millennium and a half had located the image of God in the human being. However, though the imago is dear to him, though he refers to it time and time again, he looks finally not to something we can get, something that can be made proper to us, but to something we can give. Oddly, what makes us most truly human is adherence to Jesus who in his absolute human perfection, in his being all that a human is to be, emptied himself, gave himself away, with his eyes and ears trained on a silent sky. Though Christ utters a prayer from the cross, it is perhaps better to say that the crucifixion as a whole is one long, uninterrupted prayer that begins with his first cry in that dirty stable in Bethlehem. Wesley calls for us to turn to God and trust God even as we hang abandoned and alone. This is finally what it means to be a creature in the image of God.

The One Who Calls You Is Faithful

            The term "restoration in the image of God" is a synonym in Wesley for the hallowing of human being (1985b, 204). It is, therefore, not without significance for the meaning of the imago dei that Wesley explicates the idea of entire sanctification by appealing to the phrase that makes up 1 Thessalonians 5:17, "pray without ceasing" (n.d., 17-19, 61, 84, 114).

God's command to "pray without ceasing," is founded on the necessity we have of His grace to preserve the life of God in the soul, which can no more subsist one moment without it, than the body can without air. Whether we think of, or speak to, God, whether we act or suffer for Him, all is prayer, when we have no other object than His love, and the desire of pleasing Him (n.d., 109).

To be hallowed is to be in Christ what we were created to be; it is to be creatures in God's image and after his likeness; it is to be human; it is to pray. To pray is to ask of an other earnestly, humbly, without demand. Prayer is supplication, a plea for grace. To pray is to place oneself at the mercy of an other. It is to seek the favor of this other and to wait. It is to voice one's concern and to listen for the other's reply. It is to forsake one's rights, to yield to the other, and there to abide. 

            Prayer has no certain outcome. Since one makes no demand and claims no privilege, its end is from the perspective of the supplicant completely out of control. Therefore, the customary posture of prayer is kneeling with one's head bowed and one's neck exposed and vulnerable. One gives oneself to the possibility of a fatal blow from the other, over whom one has relinquished all rights. It is therefore no small wonder that our English word "precarious" has been derived from  prec_rius, the adjective form of the Latin prec_r_. 

            Genesis 1:27 invites us to think of human being as called forth by the freedom of God. Human being is a vulnerability coram deo. It has vis-à-vis God no right or privilege, no ground upon which to stand and make a demand, no foundation upon which to build its case. Human being lives simply by the mercy of God, from moment to moment, and that since the first day that God breathed into Adam's nostrils. Humans are created to be vulnerable and to acknowledge vulnerability--oddly, with thanksgiving. Thus, humans are created to pray. Let us for once be humble enough to admit that none of us is homo sapiens. Let us for once be humble enough to admit that we are created not as something in ourselves, but as something for God; that you are and I am homo precarius.  "We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's" (Romans 14:7-8). This is an uncertain way to be, no doubt; there is, nonetheless, a significant blessed assurance to such a life of prayer. It is as if God in going out to us provides us with all that is needed for us to freely live from and to his outgoing, in his image and after his likeness.

WORKS CITED

Barth, Karl. 1945. Die kirchliche Dogmatik. Vol. 3, Die Lehre von der Schöpfung, part 1. Zürich: Evangelischer Verlag A.G. Zollikon-Zürich.

________. 1947. Die Kirchliche Dogmatik. Vol. 1, Die Lehre vom Wort Gottes, part 1. Zürich: Evangelischer Verlag A.G. Zollikon-Zürich.

________. 1948. Die Kirchliche Dogmatik. Vol. 3, Die Lehre von der Schöpfung, part 2. Zürich: Evangelischer Verlag A.G. Zollikon-Zürich.

________. 1957. Church Dogmatics. Vol. 2, The Doctrine of God, part 1, trans. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.

________. 1958. Church Dogmatics. Vol. 3, The Doctrine of Creation, part 1, trans. J. W. Edwards, O. Bussey, and Harold Knight. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.

________. 1960a. Church Dogmatics. Vol. 3, The Doctrine of Creation, part 2, trans. Harold Knight, et al. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.

________. 1960b. The Humanity of God, trans. John Newton Thomas and Thomas Wieser. Atlanta: John Knox Press.

________. 1963. Evangelical Theology: An Introduction, trans. Grover Foley. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

________. 1975. Church Dogmatics. Vol. 1, The Doctrine of the Word of God, part 1, trans. G. W. Bromiley. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.

Bird, Phyllis A. 1991. "Sexual differentiation and divine image in the Genesis creation texts." The Image of God: Gender Models in Judaeo-Christian Tradition, ed. Kari Elisabeth Børresen. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

Buber, Martin. 1970. I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

Børresen, Kari Elisabeth, ed. 1991. The Image of God: Gender Models in Judaeo-Christian Tradition. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

Calvin, John. 1960. Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press.

Feuerbach, Ludwig. 1957. The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers.

Jüngel, Eberhard. 1976a. "The truth of life: Observations on Truth as the Interruption of the Continuity of Life," trans. Richard W. A. McKinney. In Creation and Christ: Studies in Honor of T. F. Torrance, ed. Richard W. A. McKinney. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.

________. 1976b. The Doctrine of the Trinity: God's Being Is In Becoming, trans. not named. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

________. 1989. Humanity in Correspondence to God. In Theological Essays, trans. J. B. Webster. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.

Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1958. On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, trans. John Oman. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Weekley, Ernest. 1967. An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English. Vol 1. New York: Dover Publications, Inc.

Wesley, John. 1984a. "The Great Privilege of Those That Are Born of God" [1748]. The Works of John Wesley. Vol. 1, Sermons, 1, ed. Albert C. Outler. Nashville: Abingdon Press.

________. 1984b. "Justification by Faith" [1746]. The Works of John Wesley. Vol. 1, Sermons, 1, ed. Albert C. Outler. Nashville: Abingdon Press.

________. 1984c. "The Righteousness of Faith" [1742]. The Works of John Wesley. Vol. 1, Sermons, 1, ed. Albert C. Outler. Nashville: Abingdon Press.

________. 1984d. "Sermon on the Mount, II" [1748]. The Works of John Wesley. Vol. 1, Sermons, 1, ed. Albert C. Outler. Nashville: Abingdon Press.

________. 1985a. "The End of Christ's Coming" [1781]. The Works of John Wesley. Vol. 2, Sermons, 2, ed. Albert C. Outler. Nashville: Abingdon Press.

________. 1985b. "On the Fall of Man" [1782]. The Works of John Wesley. Vol. 2, Sermons, 2, ed. Albert C. Outler. Nashville: Abingdon Press.

________. 1985c. "The General Deliverance" [1781]. The Works of John Wesley. Vol. 2, Sermons, 2, ed. Albert C. Outler. Nashville: Abingdon Press.

________. 1985d. "The New Birth" [1760]. The Works of John Wesley. Vol. 2, Sermons, 2, ed. Albert C. Outler. Nashville: Abingdon Press.

________. 1985e. "Original Sin" [1759]. The Works of John Wesley. Vol. 2, Sermons, 2, ed. Albert C. Outler. Nashville: Abingdon Press.

________. 1986. "On Working Out Our Own Salvation" [1785]. The Works of John Wesley. Vol. 3, Sermons, 3, ed. Albert C. Outler. Nashville: Abingdon Press.

________. 1987a. "The Deceitfulness of the Human Heart" [1790]. The Works of John Wesley. Vol. 4, Sermons, 4, ed. Albert C. Outler. Nashville: Abingdon Press.

________. 1987b. "Heavenly Treasure in Earthly Vessels" [1790]. The Works of John Wesley. Vol. 4, Sermons, 4, ed. Albert C. Outler. Nashville: Abingdon Press.

________. 1987c. "The Image of God" [1730]. The Works of John Wesley. Vol. 4, Sermons, 4, ed. Albert C. Outler. Nashville: Abingdon Press.

________. 1987d. "The One Thing Needful" [1734]. The Works of John Wesley. Vol. 4, Sermons, 4, ed. Albert C. Outler. Nashville: Abingdon Press.

________. n.d.  A Plain Account of Christian Perfection. Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press of  Kansas City.

Westermann, Claus. 1984. Genesis 1-11: A Commentary, trans. John J. Scullion, S. J. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House.

Footnotes:

            ^[1]"Since biblical interpretation came in contact with Greek thought and the modern understanding of humanity, scarcely any passage in the whole of the Old Testament has retained such interest as the verse which says that God created the person according to his image. The literature is vast. The main interest has been on what is being said theologically about humankind: what is a human being? What is striking is that one verse about the person, almost unique in the Old Testament, has become the center of attention in modern exegesis, whereas it has no such significance in the rest of the Old Testament and, apart from Ps. 8, does not occur again" (Westermann 1984, 148).

            ^[2]Some of these are compatible with others of these nine. At times the same writer will put two or more of them together. However, there is a diversity here that itself speaks of the difficulty of reading this short verse.

            ^[3]Westermann deals seriously with this view, noting that there is considerable evidence that the phrase "image of God" occurs in the broader world of which the ancient Hebrews were a part. There are extant Egyptian and Mesopotamian records which speak of a king as the image of a god. It is clear in these texts that the king is being described as the representative of the god. So, the argument goes, Genesis 1:26 says also that human being as such is God's representative in this world. However, Westermann comes finally to reject this reading of the passage. A representative represents another before some third party. Westermann says that this is certainly not the meaning here. Further, the passage stands within a broader literary whole ("P") with a specific conception of the holy God, and it is "inconceivable that P could have meant 'wherever a human being appears, there God appears.'... P could conceive of an appearance, manifestation, or representation of God only as a holy event, completely outside the range of ordinary events. He could not possibly think of a human being as standing in the place of God on earth" (153). Finally, there are also to be found a few Egyptian and Mesopotamian references to the creation of the human being in the image of the god. Although these do little to show positively what Genesis 1:26 means, they are different enough from what is said more specifically about the king to be a rather strong warning against hasty generalization (154).

            ^[4]Westermann considers this to be one of the less convincing interpretations of the passage.  His rather summary dismissal is this: "A whole series of studies has shown quite correctly that this opinion is wrong, and that according to the text dominion over other creatures is not an explanation, but a consequence of creation in the image of God" (155).

            ^[5]Westermann dismisses this interpretation: "It is generally acknowledged that Gen. 1:26f. is not speaking of a distinction between the natural and the supernatural and that such talk about the person does not accord with the Old Testament. There is unanimity in the abandonment of the distinction." (149) 

            ^[6]At times these "spiritual qualities" have been taken as the "natural image" in us to which  supernatural likeness may be added. Westermann rejects this interpretation of the verse as well as the contrasting interpretation to follow ("the image of God" as "the external form" of the human) because in his view the Old Testament refuses to split human beings into a spirit and a body. See below.

            ^[7]Of course, this would be very difficult for later participants in the Judeo-Christian tradition to affirm. However, at this early stage of development, the argument runs, abstraction has not yet overcome the concrete thinking that looks to "external form."

            ^[8]In other words, a human being is simply a human being, certainly with various dimensions and modes of action and passion, but a whole human being nonetheless. To look for a spirit distinct from a body or a body distinct from a spirit is to look for what is not there. Westermann quotes W. H. Schmidt with approval: "The most recent exegesis has managed to pry the phrase 'in the image and likeness of God' free from an idea foreign to the Old Testament, namely the separation of the corporeal and the spiritual." Westermann adds: "The discussion whether the image and likeness of God referred to the corporeal or the spiritual aspect of the person has brought us to the conclusion that the question has been placed incorrectly. Gen. 1:26f. is concerned neither with the corporeal nor with the spiritual qualities of people; it is concerned only with the person as a whole." He concludes: "There can now be basic agreement that when Gen. 1:26 talks of the image and likeness of God, it envisages the whole person, and not just the corporeal or the spiritual side" (150).

            ^[9]This is another of the interpretations that Westermann takes to be relatively minor. His rejection of it is accounted for in this way: "Such an explanation however is forced to say that fallen humanity is not the image of God." In other words, Westermann is saying that according to this view those who have failed to conform to Christ are cut off from God's image (which, he would maintain, is untenable). However, there are other ways of thinking about this Christological notion of the imago dei.

            ^[10]Westermann spends almost no time with this reading of the text. He does note that, since the time of the fathers of the church, it has gone out of fashion (should add "in the West"). He is willing to quote a more recent (again, Western) advocate (A. M. Dubarle): "The image of God is not a static quality conferred once and for all, it is a call to imitate in action the one whose image is carried. It is a call to live a life of religion: 'Be holy, because I am holy'" (155). Perhaps this view can yet be rehabilitated and made an ingredient in a more adequate understanding of the imago dei.

            ^[11]This position becomes that of Karl Barth and of Westermann himself, when contextualized somewhat differently. Although his critical remarks are framed in such a way that they seem to be directed at all nine interpretations of the imago, obviously he is not attacking himself.

            ^[12]The emphases in this quotation have been added.

            ^[13]That is, the theologian who understood that it concerns human being holistically, that it concerns human being as God's counterpart, that it concerns not a quality in human being, but an event for which we were created, etc.

            ^[14]Dieser Gott selbst ist gerade nicht nur er selbst, sondern auch sein Sich-Offenbaren (1947, 315).

            ^[15]"God acts as Jesus acts. The divine work is accomplished in the work of this man. And the work of this man consists in the abandonment of all other work to do the work of God" (1960a, 62). "In Jesus Christ there is no isolation of man from God or of God from man. Rather, in Him we encounter the history, the dialogue, in which God and man meet together, the reality of the covenant mutually contracted, preserved, and fulfilled by them" (1960b, 46).

            ^[16]"To sum up, the distinctiveness of this creature consists in the fact that it is for God.  That it is for God means that it is for the divine deliverance and therefore for God's own glory, for the freedom of God and therefore for the love of God" (1960a, 70-71). This means that his identity as this specific human being is his mission from and to God. However, he is not dissolved into the divine work. There are two natures here in this one history, this one person.

            ^[17]In other words, the revelation that occurs as the history of Jesus Christ means that there is a trinitarian movement in the transcendent reality of God. There is a You addressed by the divine I. There is a Son to the sovereign Father. 

            ^[18]"Here, too, we can only say that, if the hope of the Old Testament was not meaningless, if its covenant-history really had a supremely definite and concrete goal, if Jesus Christ really was Israel's Messiah, the Son of God and therefore the fulfillment of Israel's own existence, the meaning and goal of its whole course, and therefore the answer to the enigma of Gen. 1: 26f., Paul did not represent any innovation in relation to the Old Testament but pointed to its fulfillment" (1958, 202). 

            ^[19]It might be helpful at this point to remember the title of Eberhard Jüngel's fine book  (1976b) on Barth's doctrine of the Trinity, Gottes Sein is im Werden, or God's Being Is In Becoming.

            ^[20]Though translated (in 1958, 184 and passim) as "counterpart," the literal meaning of Gegenüber is "over-against," "that which is opposite."  Consequently, it is often translated in other contexts as "object."  The meaning here is that there is in God not homogeneity, but a living movement, a vis-à-vis, a reciprocal outgoing.  Explicating this idea yields, of course, Barth's doctrine of the Trinity.

            ^[21]Barth's German translation (1945, 221) centers on the phrases "in our image" (in unserem Urbild) and "according to our likeness" (nach unserem Vorbild). These German nouns, Urbild and Vorbild, are not easy words to translate. The prefix ur- indicates that which is primordial, originary. The prefix vor- indicates that which is or goes before. Since Bild simply means image, these prefixes say something subtly important about the kind of image in relation to which human being is created. That is, humans have not been created with God's image in them, they have been created with a certain direction to an image that is originary in God, with a certain direction to an image that is happening already in God. Thus human being is called ein Abbild (in contrast to the divine Urbild) and ein Nachbild (in contrast to the divine Vorbild): literally that which is lower than the image and that which goes after the image, respectively (1945, 212). The image that is originary in God, the image that goes before in God, is an otherness (ein Gegenüber), a divine You to the divine I, at work at the heart of the divine life.

            ^[22]The emphasis in this phrase has been added.

            ^[23]"Ent-, insep. and unaccented prefix; in composition with other words indicates establishment of or entry into a new state or abandonment of an old state" (The New Cassell's German Dictionary 1971, s.v. "ent-").

            ^[24]Rather like Martin Buber's prayerful "I-You" (Buber 1970, 54 and 122-182).

            ^[25]Paul's daring equation of the man Jesus . . . directly with the divine image is an unprecedented and radical innovation" (1958, 202).

            ^[26]This exposition of Barth's conception of the image of God has left aside his famous discussion of the analogia relationis, the notion that involved in our being created in God's image is our being created in relation as male and female (a discussion owing much to Bonhoeffer's work).  There are two reasons why this has not been drawn into this study: (1) it is not directly related to the main line of argument of the paper; and (2) it is not central to Barth's own discussion. Barth makes clear that when placed outside the more important notion of the analogia fide (our being created in and for God's image, related to [ana-] the image [logos]), our being male and female merely makes us akin to the animals, which are similarly differentiated (1958, 194-197). Thus, on this point Barth is not quite as far removed from the position of Phyllis Bird as she thinks (Bird 1991, 5-20).

            ^[27]Westermann quotes Horst's positive reading of Barth: "When he speaks of human existence he is not speaking of a quality in the person, or of something which the person, cut off from God, can dispose of, or of something or other which might be counted among one's possessions.  He is speaking rather of human existence as blessed by God, who in his sovereign freedom has ruled that the human being alone out of all creatures is to be his counterpart and to correspond to him, and with whom he will speak and share and who in turn must talk to him and live 'in his presence' (lit. before his face)" (1984, 151).

            ^[28]Cf. what Barth writes of theology as prayer: "Human thought and speech cannot be about God, but must be directed toward God, called into action by the divine thought and speech directed to men, and following and corresponding to this work of God. Human thought and speech would certainly be false if they bound themselves to a divine 'It' or 'Something,' since God is a person and not a thing. But human thought and speech concerning God could also be false and would at any rate be unreal if they related themselves to him in the third person. What is essential for human language is to speak of men in the first person and of God in the second person. True and proper language concerning God will always be a response to God, which overtly or covertly, explicitly or implicitly, thinks and speaks of God exclusively in the second person. And this means that theological work must really and truly take place in the form of a liturgical act, as invocation of God, and as prayer" (1963, 164).

            ^[29]One of the more significant recent treatments of the history of the notion of the imago dei is The Image of God: Gender Models in Judaeo-Christian Tradition, ed. Kari Elisabeth Børresen.  The essays by Børresen and Douglass in particular help provide a context for understanding Wesley's thought on the doctrine.

            ^[30]The favor of God is greater, for Wesley, even than life itself: "the best, indeed the onlymeans under heaven given to man whereby he may regain the favor of God, which is better than life itself, or the image of God, which is the true life of the soul, is the submitting to the 'righteousness which is of faith', the believing in the only-begotten Son of God" (1984c, 214).

            ^[31]The Oxford American Dictionary (1980) defines the word as "1. competent. 2. having a certain ability" (s.v. "capable").

            ^[32]"F., Late L., capabilis, receptive, in early theol. use, from capere, to hold" (Weekley 1967, s.v. "capable").  See also the O.E.D., s.v. "capable."  Further, the suffix "-able" is a much more ambiguous term than its spelling might first suggest.  It has the sense "given to, tending to, like to, fit to, able to."  The adjective "able" (though used, of course, at the end of this string of terms) grows from an entirely different root (O.E.D., s.v. "able," "-able," "-ble").  Neither capere nor - ble is a power-word.

            ^[33]The whole remarkable passage from which the selection has been taken is as follows:  "Charity cannot be practiced right, unless, First, we exercise it the moment God gives the occasion; and , Secondly, retire the instant after to offer it to God by humble thanksgiving. And this for three reasons: First, to render Him what we have received from Him. The Second, to avoid the dangerous temptation which springs from the very goodness of these works. And the Third, to unite ourselves to God, in whom the soul expands itself in prayer, with all the graces we have received, and the good works we have done, to draw from Him new strength against the bad effects which these very works may produce in us, if we do not make use of the antidotes which God has ordained against these poisons. The true means to be filled anew with the riches of grace is thus to strip ourselves of it; and without this it is extremely difficult not to grow faint in the practice of good works.

            "Good works do not receive their last perfection, till they, as it were, lose themselves in God. This is a kind of death to them, resembling that of our bodies, which will not attain their highest life, their immortality, till they lose themselves in glory of our souls, of rather of God, wherewith they shall be filled. And it is only what they had of earthly and mortal, which good works lose by this spiritual death.

            "Fire is the symbol of love; and the love of God is the principle and the end of all our good works. But truth surpasses figure; and the fire of Divine love has this advantage over material fire, that it can reascend to its source, and raise thither with it all the good works which it produces.  And by this means it prevents their being corrupted by pride, vanity, or any evil mixture. But this cannot be done otherwise than by making these good works in a spiritual manner die in God, by a deep gratitude, which plunges the soul in Him as in an abyss, with all that it is, and all the grace and works for which it is indebted to Him; a gratitude, whereby the soul seems to empty itself of them, that they may return to their source, as rivers seem willing to empty themselves, when they pour themselves with all their waters into the sea.

            "When we have received any favor from God, we ought to retire, if not into our closets, into our hearts, and say, 'I come, Lord, to restore to Thee what Thou hast given; and I freely relinquish it, to enter again into my own nothingness. For what is the most perfect creature in heaven or earth in Thy presence, but a void capable of being filled with Thee and by Thee; as the air which is void and dark, is capable of being filled with the light of the sun, who withdraws it every day to restore it the next, there being nothing in the air that either appropriates this light or resists it? O give me the same facility of receiving and restoring Thy grace and good works! I say, Thine; for I acknowledge the root from which they spring is in Thee, and not in me'" (112-113).

            This passage does not harmonize well with those in Wesley that suggest the placement of the image of God in the human subject. Here, whatever the human is or has is given back to its source in God. The implication is that the restoration in the image of God is restoration of oneself away from oneself and to God.

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