Essential Christian Beliefs

Freewill

by Douglas Miller

We continue our series of thoughts about essential Christian beliefs. Today we speak about human freewill and responsibility.

Made in the Image of God

We start with a striking and puzzling expression found in Genesis, chapter 1. It says in verse 26, that God said, “Let us make humanity in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, …
So God created humanity in his image;
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.”

Now that expression, that humanity is created in the image and likeness of God, is found nowhere else in the Old Testament. It is picked up and echoed in several New Testament passages. This emplhasis was strongly picked up by the Greek theologians of the 4th and 5th centuries; people like the great thanasius and Gregory of Nyssa. From them it has become a strong emphasis in the Greek Orthodox tradition of theology, although it is important in both Catholic and Reformed theology as well.

What does it mean? In what sense are we created in the image and likeness of God?

First of all. What it does not mean. It does not mean that God looks like a human being, with a visible body in the heavens somewhere, with two arms and two feet. It does not mean that God looks like a human being.

The people of the Old Testament knew that God does not look like a human being because they were taught to never make a statue of God. When God spoke to you at Sinai, you saw no shape, says the Book of Deuteronomy. The Ten Commandments instructed them not to worship God in the likeness of any human or animal or bird shape; not in the likeness of anything in the heavens above, or the earth beneath, or the waters lower than the earth. Do not bow down to them or worship them.

And why not. The first letter of Timothy speaks about God as “the King of kings and Lord of lords; who alone has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light; whom no one has ever seen or can see.” 1 Timothy 6, verse 16.

Passages like that led the early Christian theologians to stress that God has no shape or visible appearance. God is not a being existing in space and time, but is beyond space and time. More than that, God cannot be pictured in our minds, and any picture of God in our minds is an idol and not the true God. Indeed, God cannot be described in words. God is beyond all our words.

So, when Genesis, chapter 1 says, that we are “made in the image of God”, this does not mean that God is a being with a body like ours.

So what does it mean?

Read it within the setting of Genesis 1. That chapter has spoken about how God created light, and created the heavens and the earth, and created various creatures on the earth.

This means that human beings are also able to create. Not the absolute creating out of nothing that God has done, but able to be creative, to use the materials of the earth to provide for our needs, to create new inventions, to create art, and so on.

To be created in the image of God means that we are created with freedom of choice. God made us able to consider the choices, and to make our own decision about what we should do. We are able to consider what we need or want, and to find our own creative ways to achieve it.

It is this gift of freedom that marks human beings out from most of the animals. I know there is also research into the high intelligence of whales and dolphins, and the complex songs they use to communicate with each other; but most animals live a much more limited life, with a limited range of signals to communicate with each other, and with a predictable pattern of feeding and mating and protecting itself.

Freedom

This gift of freedom for human beings is seen in the gift of language, whereby communities can use complex sound sequences to convey quite complicated directions and thoughts to each other. There is no other animal with anything like human language. In human languages we continually coin new words to express new ideas, and we learn them from each other. Language enables one generation to pass on its learning to the next. Language enables human communities to understand each other in quite complex ways.

This gift of freedom is expressed in freedom of choice. God has created us, and given us freedom to choose. Freedom of choice is what makes us human. We are not machines. We do not do something because we are programmed that way. We do something because we choose to do it. There are many jobs we might do, and we train for one of them and do it. We can stay in our present employment or move to another one. There are many religions in the world, and we can consider the beliefs of each and make a serious choice. We make free choices all the time.

When the Roman Empire became Christian in the fourth century, one result was a strong campaign to abolish slavery. Gregory of Nyssa argued that it was not right that any person should own another person, just like you might own animals, because a person is made in the image of God. We cannot own the image of God. The result was that the Emperor Justinian provided so many means whereby a slave could become free, that slavery became voluntary.

But when we look at human freedom, we look into a fearful hole. On the one hand, freedom is the gift that makes us human. We are not an animal living largely by instinct. We are not a computer programmed to act in a certain way. We make free choices. It is a wonderful gift.

Freedom as horrifying gift

But the gift of freedom can also be a horrifying gift. You do not have to look very far in history to see people like Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin; people like Pol Pot, Kim Jong Il and Idi Amin; people who freely chose to play on people's fears to inflict great fear and violence on groups of people. When Stalin addressed a crowd, he would start with the most banal remark, like “Good evening Comrades”, and everyone would stand up and clap and clap, and the applause went on an on because nobody wanted to be seen to stop first. So he would use a bell to tell people they could stop clapping. That was the fear he inspired.

And the world continues to have such people. We now see the evil done by Moamar Ghadafi and Bashir al Assad, even if we were not saying so last year. There may be more vicious dictatorships in the world today that we do not find it convenient to name.

Sinfulness as addiction

However, human freedom is not without limits, and the most serious limit is our own sinfulness. What is sin. We could go through the Bible and make a list of rules, and regard sins as the breaking of these rules, but that would miss the point.

Sinfulness is putting ourselves first at the expense of others. Whether it is our wish to be important, our our wish to have sex with someone, our our wish for more property, sin is the pursuit of what we want regardless of the glory of God, and regardless of its effects on other people. Sin is basically self-centredness. It is pursuing what we want for ourselves regardless of its effect on other people.

In Romans 6, Paul talks about sin as like an addiction. The more we give in to it, the more it has power over us.

And sinfulness cannot be resisted without the grace of God. As forgiven people, God's Spirit gives us a growing wish to do God's will, and God's Spirit gives us the strength to live in ways that are right and good. God's Spirit enables us to be clear about what we should do and about what we should not, and to stand by that. And we call on God's Spirit to give us the strength to do what we should do. We cannot simply be Christians by our own strength, because the image of God within us has been seriously weakened by our own self-centredness. We need the indwelling presence of the Spirit of God to restore that strength again.

Human community in the Image of God

Now we began by speaking humanity as made in the image of God. An important part of that is that it is not so much each individual, but humanity as a community that is made in the image of God. We know God through the Bible, as the community of the three persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit; the community of the three persons who freely choose to cooperate with each other, and who share one purpose for our salvation.

And God's desire is to live in cooperation with humanity, and for human beings to live in cooperation with each other. When such cooperation happens, the image of God is still with us. When it fails to happen, we cease to be in the image of God.

As the book of Genesis says,
“So God created humanity in his image;
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.”

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