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Being God's Image: Why Creation Still Matters - Dr. Carmen Imes
143 Plays1 year ago
Why should the caretakers of the land care about it if it's all gonna burn? Matt and Nick chat with Dr. Carmen Imes about her book 'Being God's Image.' She explains the importance of regular spiritual practices and how her work relates to everyday life and our understanding of human identity. Commenting on the connection between the image of God and creation care, Dr. Imes emphasizes that the Christian hope is thoroughly practical and political. She also discusses the role of Jesus in embodying the image of God. Additionally, she shares about her upcoming projects including a commentary on Exodus and a curriculum on scripture and multicultural identities.
Resources Referenced: Being God’s Image by Carmen Imes, Bearing God’s Name by Carmen Imes, Torah Tuesday Podcast by Carmen Imes, An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax by Bruce K. Waltke and Michael Patrick O'Connor
Theme Song: Believe by Posthumorous
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Transcript
Introduction to Dr. Carmen Imes and her Influence
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome, everyone, to the Reparadimed podcast. Today, we're excited to share a conversation we had with Dr. Carmen Imes. Dr. Imes is the Associate Professor of Old Testament at Biola University. She's the author of Bearing God's Name, Why Sinai Still Matters and Being God's Image, Why Creation Still Matters, which is the subject of our conversation today. She does weekly Torah Tuesday YouTube videos, and she's a contributing author to Christianity Today. Dr. Imes, how are you today?
00:00:28
Speaker
I'm great. How are you guys? Fantastic. Nick, you've got some personal connection to Dr. Amz's work. You talked about that a little bit. Yeah, for sure. And actually, I first read your book bearing God's name in 2020. So obviously, a bunch of different things were going on in the world at that time. But that's when I read your book. It really inspired me in a couple of ways. It was during a period of time where I was also considering making regular spiritual practices like daily prayer more important.
00:00:55
Speaker
And so what I ended up doing, I was studying the Lord's Prayer at the time, I was inspired by that idea of carrying the name of Yahweh with me, that I'm representing Yahweh in my life as a follower of Jesus. And so I took up saying the Lord's Prayer every day, our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name and may it be revered in my life. And then also the Shema.
00:01:17
Speaker
And then also I turned this into a daily mantra as well. He's showing you a human. What is good? What does Yahweh require of you? To do Mishpat justice, to love Hasen covenant loyalty, and to humbly walk with your God. So your work actually aided and inspired me to make those three passages, prayers in my daily life, which I've kept up with for the last couple of years. So I very much appreciate that personally.
00:01:43
Speaker
Oh, thanks for sharing that. The book came out right before the pandemic and it was a terrible time to release a book. On the other hand, it was a wonderful time in that all of the sudden people had time to read and all of the sudden everyone and their brothers started a podcast. And so that's where I think podcasting took off and it's been an absolute joy to connect with people all over the world to talk about these things.
Understanding God's Image and Name
00:02:07
Speaker
Sure.
00:02:07
Speaker
Yeah. So today we're primarily going to talk about your work, being God's image, why creation still matters. Yeah. So you mentioned in this book that being God's image and bearing God's name, two ideas that you've written about are related, but that they're not the same thing. You also mentioned that Jesus ties these two concepts together. Could you expound on this? Cause I think this kind of helps really introduce both of these books that we're going to be talking about a little bit here.
00:02:32
Speaker
Yeah, so both of these books talk about human identity and vocation. But I am convinced that while every human being is the image of God, only the covenant people bear his name. So the covenant people are like a subset of humanity. God elects all of humanity to represent him to the rest of the created world. But then he elects Israel to be his covenant people or bear his name among the nations.
00:02:58
Speaker
And both of these themes are caught up in the life of Jesus because he sees himself as a name bearer. He prays, hallowed be thy name, taking on himself the vocation of Israel to represent God's name to the nations and to represent it well, to carry it well. But he also sees himself as a human. And so he refers to himself all the time as a son of man, which is a fancy way of saying human.
00:03:23
Speaker
And because he is embodied in his incarnation, and then he physically dies and is physically raised to life, he becomes a really important piece of our understanding about what it means to be human. If Jesus had simply died and his spirit lived on in all of us,
00:03:44
Speaker
then perhaps our bodies wouldn't matter so much, and we too could just discard our bodies at death and be spiritually united with Christ. But the Scriptures testify that Jesus physically was raised, and so that is where we get the subtitle to my book, Why Creation Still Matters. Because God makes humans and gives us this exalted status among all that He's created, and He appoints us to rule over creation,
00:04:10
Speaker
And that vocation is not set aside but is actually vindicated or reinforced by Christ's incarnation, resurrection, and ascension.
00:04:19
Speaker
Yeah, one thing that we noted in your book is you've done a really good job of obviously bringing all the scholarly aspects to it, the solid work in the ancient Near East and things like that. But as Richard Middleton said in the foreword, you've sneakily woven in serious biblical scholarship into what seems to be a breezy conversational book addressing readers. So we appreciate the way you've written it because I think it's accessible for anybody. And we really appreciated the overall message.
00:04:48
Speaker
What's that sound I'm hearing? Is that on your end? Yeah. So it's our tree lighting ceremony today. And so they have this big stage they just built and now they're practicing the drums. Great. All right. It's so sorry.
The Complexity of 'Image of God' and Human Identity
00:05:01
Speaker
I could literally go all the way home and we'd still be hearing it. That's funny. I was just making sure that wasn't something here.
00:05:07
Speaker
So in our podcast, we discussed a little bit that in the image of God, you and other scholars have espoused the translation as the image of God. Could you explain the bet of identity and also your translation that follows humans being made as the image of God or humans are the image of God?
00:05:26
Speaker
Sure. And this is the nerdiest part of whole book. And unfortunately, I have to talk about it right at the beginning because I want to explain why I'm not going to use the traditional language throughout the rest of the book. And I'm not going to usually, unless I forget, talk about being made in the image of God.
00:05:44
Speaker
And the reason why is prepositions are tricky to translate from one language to another. They're very flexible that the Hebrew preposition bet has half a dozen or more ways that it could be translated in English and no preposition in any language maps exactly onto another preposition in another language. What we have to ask ourselves is what are the interpretive possibilities that it means? And when you first take Hebrew and you're learning your basic vocabulary words, when you learn Bek,
00:06:13
Speaker
the sort of standard dictionary definition is in. And so we just learn to plug in in everywhere we see it attached to something. But the fact is that in is only appropriate in certain cases. And I don't think any of those cases pertain to this particular use. So the preposition bait
00:06:32
Speaker
can be translated as in if the sense is spatial or temporal. So it could be talking about location or time, but that's not what we have here. Sometimes it's translated according to, and that is appropriate in a place where hearing or learning about monetary standards.
00:06:51
Speaker
And again, that doesn't pertain here. We could say realm or manner. So with regard to the image of God, he made them, that doesn't quite work either. So it seems to me that the best and most plausible option here is the bait of identity.
00:07:07
Speaker
What that indicates is that it's introducing another word like a synonym for the thing that's already been said. And so Walt Key and O'Connor in their grammar of Hebrew syntax say that the use of this preposition marks the capacity in which an actor behaves as serving as or in the capacity of. So this indicates that God made humans as his image.
00:07:31
Speaker
It's much simpler just to say we are his image. And I think that's the sense of what's going on here, that we are the image of God, which is why I titled the book, Being God's Image. I took out the preposition altogether in the title because I think sometimes the preposition gives people a sense that we're not quite the image of God, but we're like the image.
00:07:51
Speaker
And I wanted to show what I think the scriptures are saying and that is we are the image of God. That is our God-given identity. We have another example of the same grammatical construction in Exodus 6 verse 3 where God is speaking to Moses and he says, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, I revealed myself as El Shaddai. And that's another place where we have the bait attached to a title, El Shaddai.
00:08:16
Speaker
He's not saying he introduced himself in El Shaddai. He said, I am El Shaddai. There's an identity statement there. It's not that he's trying to be like what El Shaddai is. Yep. So there's precedent for reading it this way. This is not a new idea to me. David Clines wrote about this decades ago already. And many Old Testament scholars have picked it up. Not everyone, but many have said, yes, this is the best way to understand it.
00:08:40
Speaker
Yeah, I actually think it fits pretty well with a lot of the usages in the ancient Near East for kings and things like that. Not that I'm extremely proficient on that, but what I've read, it seems like it fits in accordance with that. Christians have oftentimes, particularly in the past, thought of the image as certain spiritual elements that we humans have, the capacity to reason, or sometimes even like something tangible inside of ourselves.
00:09:04
Speaker
This seems to be foreign to the ancient Near Eastern context. Other Christians have seemed to espouse a view that would make the image simply a function to perform. You, I think, distinguish your view from that as well. You and others have argued that the image is an identity, like a representative role, that implies a vocation or a function. Could you just expound on that a bit?
00:09:27
Speaker
Yeah. This might seem to those listening that like we're splitting hairs. Okay. So you don't want to say it's a function, but it's an identity that implies a function. So what's actually the difference? I think this is actually really important to get right. Because if we don't.
00:09:42
Speaker
If we attach the image of God to a human capacity or an action or even a function, then someone who doesn't have very strong capacities is suddenly less human or less of the image of God.
00:09:58
Speaker
It results in a sliding scale where some humans are more the image of God than others. If you attach it to rationality or even relationality, think of someone who is autistic and so they're on the spectrum and maybe has a more difficult time with relational connections. Does that mean they're less of the image of God? And I would say emphatically, no. If you have a human body, you are the image of God's full stop. There's no gradations of images.
00:10:27
Speaker
And so I think it's important not to tie the image to capacity that the Bible doesn't do that. The Bible says we're not to murder other humans because humans are God's image. And so it doesn't say don't murder another human if they can make a really productive contribution to society or if they're really smart or if they're able-bodied.
00:10:46
Speaker
So that's why I think it's important for us to decouple it from capacity or from function, because you could have a very able-bodied, high-capacity person who then falls into a coma or is otherwise injured. And are you saying that they've now lost the status as God's image if they can't function anymore by doing what images are meant to do?
00:11:09
Speaker
And I would say, no, even someone in a coma or even an unborn child is the image of God. Our identity as God's image doesn't depend on what we accomplish. By the way, you can probably hear many images of God making noise outside my office. They're practicing for a big Christmas concert tonight. They are creating culture, yes. They are fulfilling their function.
00:11:31
Speaker
So the image of God in the Hebrew Bible seems to me to be pretty similar to how that phrase is used in other ancient Near Eastern texts, which isn't surprising at all. However, in contrast to the other ancient Near Eastern texts, there are some key distinctions. One of them is that all of humanity is called God's image, not just the king.
00:11:52
Speaker
And I realize that's the case sometimes in the A&E literature, but it seems like most of the time it's talking about the ruler or the king. And secondly, women and men are the image, not just one or the other. So here's my question that piggybacks on that. What went wrong in Genesis three, and how can the Christian community bring restoration to the mutual rule that men and women share? Can you solve world hunger while you're
Human Identity and the Fall
00:12:20
Speaker
solving that question?
00:12:20
Speaker
Actually, I am quite convinced that world hunger would be solved if we lived in accordance with our true identity as God's image. As images of God, we are meant to steward the resources of creation in a way that's collaborative, not just with other humans who look just like us, but with humans of other sexed embodiment. So it's not just men who are supposed to rule over creation, but it's women who are supposed to rule over creation.
00:12:46
Speaker
It's so fascinating to me that when God talks about the vocation of humans to rule over creation, He lists what we're supposed to rule over, and He never says that we rule over other humans. And then in Genesis 3 in the curse passage, one does start ruling the other.
00:13:04
Speaker
The first time we see, I think, an asymmetrical power imbalance between humans is in the consequences to the fall. And so what I find so fascinating is that the church has for centuries
00:13:19
Speaker
leaned into Genesis 3 and thought that by doing so we could achieve a Genesis 1 and 2 kind of world, that we would see God's glory restored and see creation ordered and flourishing.
00:13:35
Speaker
by maintaining the asymmetry that is expressed in Genesis chapter 3. I think it's a travesty because in Genesis 1 and 2, we see male and female as God's image, both told to rule. Eve is introduced as Adam's azer, kenegdo, which is translated in some English translations as helper, but helper is not a great word
00:13:57
Speaker
given its connotations in the English language. This is one place where I get a little nerdy again in the book to say that the word azer occurs almost a hundred times in the Hebrew Bible, either as a noun or a verb. And about half of those times it's referring to Yahweh as someone who comes alongside to help. So clearly it's not a subservient helper. Sorry, quickly in that context, you would have connotations of deliverer then if it's Yahweh coming alongside. Yeah.
00:14:26
Speaker
He's clearly the superior one in the partnership. And the other half of the time that Azer is used, it's describing a military ally who comes and rescues you from an attacker that you are not strong enough to fight on your own. And so when God appoints the woman, he is asking her to be a suitable ally in carrying out the work that God has given the man to do. That word is never used to describe what a servant does for their master.
00:14:55
Speaker
I don't see any asymmetry in this language of helper. It really is, let's get this job done together. And I think that we've missed it. As the church at large, we've missed this and we have assumed that men need to do the leading
00:15:12
Speaker
and the ruling and that women are to come along and support them from behind. I don't know, making sandwiches, sweeping up afterwards. I don't know what we think. Giving birth. But it's clear that in Genesis 2, they both have a task to do. So in Genesis 3, what happens? The woman who was created to help Adam accomplish his task instead leads him into disobedience. They were both given a job to subdue the earth.
00:15:41
Speaker
What they should have done is subdue that serpent who came in and called into question God's command. Eve should have been smashing the head of that serpent the moment he opened his mouth. That was her job to do as a guardian of sacred space, as a guardian of God's garden. And she failed to do that. And so that introduces an asymmetry into the relationship as the man and the woman no longer trust each other and then no longer collaborate well together.
00:16:07
Speaker
Yeah, what do we do to fix it though, Dr. Ives? Can you help us out real quick? It's not a real quick thing, but I do think we need to find ways to collaborate and to respect and honor the gifts that all of us bring to the table and to see each other not as adversaries or competitors or as threats or as potential temptresses, but to work together to get the job done.
00:16:30
Speaker
Yeah, I appreciate that. We agree with you that the image of God hasn't been lost, as has sometimes been thought in Christian theology.
Power, Empire, and Idolatry
00:16:38
Speaker
But as we live now and create in our fallen societies, in a world that is very non-ideal, that doesn't feel anything like a garden, where even our relationships between each other, particularly between men and women are all screwed up, when we are living in this environment outside the garden, so to speak, and when we try to create culture, we tend to create
00:17:01
Speaker
And empires tends to be abusive. You connect this empire building with idolatry. Could you elucidate that connection for us a little bit? Sure. We didn't say this when we were talking about the introduction of this term image in Genesis 1, but maybe it would be helpful for me to just circle back and say that the Hebrew word for image is selem. And a selem is an idol.
00:17:25
Speaker
Yeah, so it's a physical statue that represents the presence of someone who is not otherwise visibly present. And so a king might set up a statue of himself to remind everybody who's boss, even when he's away. And in a temple, a statue or idol
00:17:42
Speaker
represents the presence of that deity to focus worshipers toward that deity. So when God appoints humans as his image, he's saying we are the three-dimensional representatives of his presence, and this is simultaneously an exalted status and a demoted status.
00:17:59
Speaker
Like it's at the same time saying, wow, look at us, we represent the presence of God. But it's also saying we are not God. It's like keeping us in this really interesting middle space where our job is to point to the creator and to his sovereignty and to his goodness.
00:18:17
Speaker
And what goes wrong in scripture and in history is that we begin to point to ourselves instead of pointing to God. We fail to collaborate with each other and instead we want power for ourselves. So instead of sharing power, we consolidate it and that's how you get an empire. You keep trying to gobble up more and more land for yourself to make yourself more and more wealthy. Thinking of even Tiglath-Pileser, the Assyrian king who
00:18:43
Speaker
He was a genius when it comes to war, if being good at war is a good thing. And what he does is pioneers new ways of making weapons and of traveling longer distances. And he creates the first standing army. And if you have a standing army, then you need to have food to feed them. And these guys are not farmers. Like in the past, you would have men who are farmers and then they get called up to work. These men don't have any land that they're farming. They're just full-time soldiers.
00:19:10
Speaker
So then you need to conscript other people to grow food for them. And so you have to keep conquering more and more land to feed the army that's protecting the land that you've already conquered. And it's this vicious cycle that has to keep growing and keep amassing more to itself. So yeah, empires. Idolatry is, I think, a key role in that because idolatry is an attempt to connect with a deity who you think will give you what you need or want
00:19:39
Speaker
to become successful or to flourish. And so any time Israel turns away from Yahweh as the provider of their needs and turns to another God, they are at the same time demoting Yahweh by associating Him with a false God, but they are also demoting themselves.
00:19:57
Speaker
because they're the ones who are meant to represent God and they give that glory to another by worshiping idols. So it's this vicious cycle that really ruins things in the Old Testament. We have lots of examples of this.
00:20:09
Speaker
It seems like every element of that role that humans were designed for is just flipped on its head. You've talked a lot about in the book about this image of God, men, women, humanity are supposed to be co-rulers. When one person starts trying to rule through oppression of other people, they've, like you said, attempted to elevate themselves, but really they've put themselves lower than they were supposed to be by trying to put other image bearers lower. And the whole system is just, it has no chance of succeeding at that point.
00:20:35
Speaker
Right. If we look at leadership or rulership as a zero sum game, that only one person can lead and the others have to follow, then we end up with this kind of self exaltation, race to the top and putting others down. And I think if we can learn to give away power and learn to collaborate, that starts to set things back on track as God intended.
00:20:58
Speaker
That sounds a little bit like this guy from Nazareth that I've heard about. Imagine that. Circling around to one of the more fundamental things in your book, one of the more fundamental ideas, this connection between the earth, the land, Adamah, and humanity, Adam. Yeah. Yes. Can you just talk about that connection a little bit more?
00:21:16
Speaker
Yeah, there's definitely a word play there that Adam comes from Adam that the human comes from the ground. And it's fascinating because again, it's simultaneously a connects Adam with or connects humans with the ground.
00:21:33
Speaker
showing us that we belong to the earth, we belong to this creation, we are part of it. But then the appointment of Adam as God's image then exalts him above that.
Role of Humans in Creation
00:21:44
Speaker
So we're like within creation, but appointed by God to rule over it. So it's very similar to this overall idea of exaltation and demotion. And I think that points again to this idea of creation still mattering.
00:21:58
Speaker
that our bodies are not just shells to be discarded, but they are an essential part of our identity. They are central to who we are and what it means to be human. So we're not getting rid of these someday. God is going to remake us or renew us, restore us in some way. There will be continuity between our new creation bodies and the ones we have right now.
00:22:20
Speaker
Yeah, the difference between the Jewish resurrection hope, resurrection theology, and that of the Platonistic, maybe Gnostic version, where the world of the forms is where we want to be, and this bad world is as bad as it could ever get, and we don't really want to be here anyway.
00:22:36
Speaker
that platonic thinking has so seeped into the church so that we end up sharing the gospel as if our bodies are incidental, don't matter, can be set aside, that we ask Jesus into our heart, by which we mean like our soul or the immaterial part of ourselves, and so that we can go to heaven when we die, and we picture that as a very floaty kind of place.
00:22:58
Speaker
when in fact what the Bible teaches is new creation on this world that God is restoring this earth and we will have an embodied existence here with the resurrected Christ. That's something that I really hope to help the church recover because I feel like I've been in lots of church communities where we just haven't taken seriously our embodiment. Don't you know that this world is not my home? I'm just passing through and my shoes are leading up somewhere beyond the blue.
00:23:24
Speaker
Yeah, no, I write about that poem in the book and how much it rubbed me the wrong way when I first heard it as a teenager because I loved my life. I loved the work that God was calling me to do and I found joy in it and it felt so weird to just want to escape it. And now I understand better theologically why that was jarring to me.
00:23:45
Speaker
And unfortunately, this devaluing of our bodies can go along with devaluing the rest of creation too, for a lot of Christians. Can you talk about the connection between being the image of God and creation care?
00:23:57
Speaker
I mean, that's the very first thing that God says. It's the first thing God specifies as the task of humans, is to take care of this created world, to fill the earth and subdue it, to rule over created things. In Genesis 1, at the end of the chapter, God specifies our food sources, and then He specifies the food sources of animals, and it's the same food source.
00:24:21
Speaker
So evidently we're supposed to share with the animals, the edible plants. So there is from the very beginning, a vision for human cultivation of the earth and human care for it. I think this is hard to hang onto for two reasons. A, most of us now live in cities where we are completely disconnected from the production of food. And so we get our meat,
00:24:47
Speaker
at Walmart wrapped in styrofoam packages with plastic. We don't see the animal before it's slaughtered. We buy our vegetables and fruits out of bins where they just appear beautiful and ready to eat. And we don't invest ourselves in the cultivation of these foods. And so there's a sense of disconnect from creation care just because of how we get our food.
00:25:11
Speaker
I don't even want to have to wash my vegetables after I buy them. Yeah, right. Please do that for me. And then the other factor that I think gets us away from creation care is this platonic idea we've already talked about, that our bodies don't matter, that we're escaping this world eventually to go somewhere beyond the blue. And I think if we took seriously the new creation and took seriously our human vocation as stewards and caretakers, then it would change our relationship with the planet.
00:25:39
Speaker
Not necessarily to the extent that we all plant gardens in our backyard. Not everyone has a backyard, but it does matter. I personally don't have a garden. I have a yard and I have some fruit trees and it's great to cultivate those. These beautiful tangerines and oranges just show up, which is so cool. But I do pick up the fallen fruit and I cut the dead branches. So I do a little bit, but what I do more of is picking up trash as I walk to work.
00:26:07
Speaker
Because even though the property that I'm walking on isn't technically mine, this world belongs to God and I'm appointed as its steward. And so any trash on the ground is trash in my backyard. And so that's one thing that I can do to contribute. Where I live in Southern California, we have a little stream that goes through campus. It goes straight to the ocean. And so that's an added motivation to me. Like if there's a plastic bottle in the stream,
00:26:34
Speaker
NEMO is the next one who's going to see it. And so I take it personally, like I'm part of the safety net to keep trash from going into our oceans, that sort of thing. I think we should be thinking about recycling, about sustainable use of resources in every way possible. One reason we bought a house within walking distance of Biola is so that we wouldn't have to be so dependent on fossil fuel, car transportation.
00:26:58
Speaker
Being able to walk to school, walk to church, walk to the store is something that I value because I feel like it helps to reinforce my connection with the land. Yeah. Sometimes there's additional costs though to trying to live this way. As you mentioned, I appreciate that you mentioned that you aren't like growing all your own fruits and vegetables yourself because most people find themselves in that reality, in an urban environment where they get their food from somewhere else who did grow those fruits and who did
00:27:26
Speaker
kill those animals and process them for them most of us are in that situation in order to purchase our food that is more ethically sourced that usually ends up costing more which complicates the matter it actually costs a lot more to be honest we can talk a lot about that but some people will actually use that to justify i actually think it's more important
00:27:48
Speaker
to use my funds to save my funds by buying as cheap as possible because I can do more gospel work or I can give these funds to someone who has more needs. I can give these funds to Bible translation, something that's more gospel oriented than
00:28:05
Speaker
However, sustainable living, something like that, that sounds nebulous. So sometimes it feels like there's a conflict between trying to be a good steward of the land and trying to get people saved for heaven, right? So I guess like you actually described this a little bit, this I'll be out of here theology. You describe this in your book.
00:28:26
Speaker
You write, if I believe my destiny is elsewhere, why invest in this planet's long-term health?
Christian Responsibility and Hope
00:28:33
Speaker
And I would just add to that, especially when you could use those savings to invest in Bible translation, another more gospel centered word. Right. Many people probably agree with that statement. If I believe my destination is elsewhere, why invest in this earth? So why are they wrong?
00:28:48
Speaker
Yeah, first of all, your destination isn't elsewhere. This is the planet God gave us, and He plans to remake it and restore it. I talk briefly in the book about how I understand the fire of Peter's letters. He talks about the elements burning in the fire. That's usually where people point when they're wrestling with this idea that the earth will persist. They say, what about this passage that says it's all going to burn? I see that as a refining fire, not a destroying fire.
00:29:15
Speaker
So God is burning up what doesn't belong here so that he can restore things. Kind of similar to how a farmer might burn their field to burn the weeds away and to kind of re-fertilize for planting new growth. If I'm not mistaken, that same kind of vocabulary is used for the judgment upon nations. In fact, including Israel, I think as well. And I don't think it was literally burned in judgment. Yep. That's a good example. Yeah.
00:29:41
Speaker
I don't remember the other part of your question. Why are people wrong to only be orientated towards the next world or something like that? Yes. The other piece of that is that creation care actually is a way of loving our neighbor. It's a way of fulfilling our God-given vocation, but I think people are too quick to separate gospel from creation care. If the Bible presents creation care as central to our human vocation,
00:30:08
Speaker
then our faithfulness to do that is itself a witness to the Gospel and to the Creator God who loves all people. I talk in the book about how we tend to export our messiest and most dangerous industries to impoverished areas, either in our own country or overseas.
00:30:29
Speaker
So we don't often see, if we're wealthy enough to afford buying stuff at Walmart, we're not seeing the implications of having procured those resources in the way that they were procured. And so I think it's a false dichotomy to say, oh no, I want to just focus on the gospel.
00:30:48
Speaker
because there are real people who are living and dying in communities where they don't have access to clean water, clean air, healthy food, because of what we are buying and using. This is a complicated thing. I think it's especially difficult because it takes a lot of time to research and figure out how to buy sustainably, how to eat sustainably, and how to love our neighbor in that way. And not everybody feels like they have the capacity for it.
00:31:16
Speaker
So this is one place where I think working for legislative changes and actually trying to elect officials who will care about these realities and to pressure industries to have more sustainable standards actually then has an exponential effect.
00:31:33
Speaker
so that we don't all have to individually try to pick and choose between things, but that we raise the standards for everyone environmentally so that we're not flushing our sludge into the rivers that are gonna kill the fish so that people can't eat downstream. Yeah, it does seem to me that it is a little bit short-sighted to say, let it burn, let's focus on the gospel, because I wonder what that does to the Christian testimony if
00:31:57
Speaker
Jesus doesn't return before it's all burned up, if that makes sense, to the carnage such that this place will be very inhospitable in a couple hundred years. What if Jesus doesn't decide to return for a couple hundred years and we have a few thousand more to go? Which seems likely, right? The early Christians thought he was coming right away and we are now 2,000 years later, so what makes us think it's not going to be another 2,000 years? We should not be short-sighted about these things.
00:32:25
Speaker
Yeah. I think it's interesting, listening to you talk about this, you'll talk about loving your neighbor as part of environmental care. And I think I'll speak to myself here for a long time. I very much thought of those as two very separate issues. So if I would have had to put them in some sort of a ranking, like love your neighbor, you know, I can point to that verse. That one's easy for me to say, yes, that one's super important. It was very easy for me to ignore the way that those two ideas were connected.
00:32:49
Speaker
and that by not caring about environmental issues, that was in a lot of ways actually just pushing those issues down onto people who had less availability or less resources available to try to avoid those issues.
00:33:02
Speaker
Exactly. I had an experience where I was flying recently and I was going through security and the woman behind me in line noticed that I had a water bottle, a disposable water bottle in my backpack. And I don't buy disposable water bottles, but if someone gives one to me, I will drink it and then reuse it. So it's a sort of midway point. I should probably just be at the point where I refuse it altogether.
00:33:25
Speaker
When I'm traveling, I don't like to carry glass around in my suitcase. So I'm going through security. The woman's like, Oh, you have a water bottle. And I said, Oh yeah, it's empty. She said, there's a trash right there. And I said, Oh no, I'm going to fill it up on the other side of security. And she looked at me kind of funny. And it strikes me that not only is that better for the environment, but it also saves me money. I don't buy water in airports because I bring a bottle so that I can fill it up in the drinking fountain, which then saves money for missions.
00:33:55
Speaker
By caring for the earth, I'm also freeing up resources for other kinds of gospel ministry. So the two do not have to be opposed to one another. I think you're definitely right. A little bit of creativity and thinking differently about these things can go a long way.
00:34:10
Speaker
I kind of want to start heading toward the end here by focusing on Jesus. You discuss how we find our human identity best expressed even in this fallen world in Jesus of Nazareth. Could you elucidate that a little bit more for us?
00:34:26
Speaker
The New Testament describes Jesus as the image of God. And many people have assumed when they come to that that, of course, Jesus is the image of God, he's God. And one thing I argue is that Jesus is not the image of God because he's God, although he is God, just to be clear. Jesus is the image of God because he's human.
00:34:46
Speaker
to be human is to be the image of God. And it's because Jesus took on human flesh that he is the image of God. And what's different about Jesus is that he is living in alignment with that identity. We are also the image of God, but we often live according to false narratives, according to false definitions of success.
00:35:06
Speaker
or ways of looking at others around us, we pursue the wrong things thinking they will bring about flourishing. And so I think one of the beautiful things about watching Jesus is that we can see in Him a model of how to live out our identity as the image of God. He shows us what it looks like. God hasn't left us to just figure it out on our own. He's come and showed us Himself.
00:35:27
Speaker
I was in a conversation with a coworker recently, and I was just talking about the idea of the image of God and how this is supposed to tell us who humanity is, how we're supposed to live, really what we were designed for. And he kept saying to me, you know, this feels so ethereal. It feels so theoretical. It's not practical. It's hard for me to imagine what this actually looks like.
00:35:45
Speaker
And I got so excited. I was like, this is where it gets really good because our idea of the image of God is not just some idea, just two people in a garden and trying to figure out how that applies. We've got Jesus of Nazareth who came and walked around in the dirt of Galilee in Jerusalem and demonstrated for us exactly what this was supposed to be. I think that's pretty amazing. I think so too. When in doubt, follow Jesus as our model. Are you saying, what would Jesus do? Not a bad idea.
00:36:15
Speaker
My last question for you. You say in chapter 10 that the Christian hope is thoroughly practical and political. What do you mean by that? Yes. What I mean is that the gospel has political implications. When you say Jesus is Lord, you're saying Caesar is not. And the Bible calls us to put our hope in God as King and to show our greatest allegiance to God as King and to participate in His reign.
00:36:44
Speaker
And that's a political claim that demotes all human political leaders as we in the U.S. enter another election year cycle. Yay, yay. It's always election season in the United States. As we enter election season, some Christians have an impulse to just withdraw completely and say, none of this matters. I'm tempted to do that too. And there is some truth to that. However,
00:37:09
Speaker
Because the gospel has implications for actual people and actual institutions and the way society is run, it matters for us to be involved in politics because it's one way of exercising stewardship and rulership over creation.
00:37:24
Speaker
So we participate not in order to gain glory for ourselves or because we're listing up any particular human as our ultimate hope, but because God appoints humans on his behalf as rulers and government is part of how that rulership takes place. And so we should care about who is in power and how they are stewarding that power. Are they collaborating well with others or are they exploiting others?
00:37:51
Speaker
Are they stewarding resources well on earth or are they exploiting those resources for only financial gain? That's a short-term goal with long-term ramifications that are negative. I think we do need to engage as Christians and care about it because it's part of the vocation that God has given us as His image.
00:38:11
Speaker
How about that for a paradigm for selecting our political leaders? Let's select the leaders that are best representing Yahweh, the God of heaven and earth, the one who created all, and who are best fulfilling the vocation that the image of God calls us to. I feel like that would take a lot of people off the list. It might not exactly tell us who to vote for, but.
00:38:32
Speaker
I'm not sure who else will be left. One of the beautiful things about the doctrine of the image of God is that it's not just referring to Christians. It's referring to all humans. Every human being is the image of God. And while none of us can fully know ourselves or fully become all we were meant to be outside of a relationship with God, I think this doctrine actually does make space for seeing value and dignity in people who've not yet come into alignment with God.
00:39:02
Speaker
that because they have this God-given dignity and impulse to the degree that they're living that out well, they can lead well, even without being Christians. I guess I'm saying we don't have to only just check someone's church membership roster, but we can see how they're living that out. Because we can all think of politicians who claim to be Christians, claim to be followers of Jesus, but their policies towards
00:39:29
Speaker
the environment, towards international politics, towards people in the other party, towards anybody in communities who aren't like theirs, doesn't actually bear out what the Bible teaches. And so I think we need to think a little bigger when it comes to politicians. For sure. Yeah, I appreciate that wisdom. Any other work or anything that you want to plug? Anything you're working on now that we can look forward to coming out in the future?
00:39:55
Speaker
Just about every day I work on my commentary on Exodus for Baker Academic and that's the kind of fertile ground from which my Torah Tuesday videos come. So I'm sharing in advance the things that I'm learning. I'm also working on a really cool project on scripture and multicultural identities with one of my colleagues here at Biola. Oscar Baldelamar is a cultural psychologist and he studies the development of ethnic identity among adolescents and I'm
00:40:22
Speaker
partnering with him to create a curriculum for adolescents in which we help them wrestle with their own ethnic identity in light of scripture. So we're highlighting all the people in the Bible who are immigrants or refugees or who have bicultural status or who are in a multicultural context. And we're using that as a launch point for helping young people think about their own ethnic identity in light of that. It's lots of good fun.
00:40:47
Speaker
Yeah, so today we were discussing primarily Dr. Im's book, Being God's Image, Why Creation Still Matters. We highly recommend it to any of our listeners. Thanks for coming on the podcast with us today, Dr. Im's. Thanks so much for having me.