Abstract
The variety of ways of construing how humanity is in the image of God suggests a profound interrelation of tradition and context in theological reflection on the imago dei. For example, Colin Gunton has recently argued that the dominant ways of interpreting the imago dei at the present time are stewardship and the duality of male and female. It is not hard to see how contemporary discussions on the relations between humanity and non-human nature, and between men and women, inform such a selection. The recent work of Peter Hodgson furnishes us with a second example: being in the image of God, he argues, comprises three spheres: self-relatedness, other or world-relatedness and wholeness. Again, it is not hard to discern how such a construal is informed by the identification of three dilemmas which are, Hodgson considers, constitutive of our contemporary (Western) context: liberation from unjust social relationships; relations between Christianity and other religions; relations between humanity and non-human nature. In the presentation of the imago dei, we may safely say, tradition and context are deeply interrelated.In what follows, I shall develop one aspect of recent Christian tradition—that sociality is the mark of the imago dei—in order to explore how humanity might be in the image of God in a technological society. Thus in the last two sections of this paper, I ‘expand’ Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s reading of humanity as social by including the themes of spatiality and temporality. It is as social, spatial and temporal, I shall argue, that humanity is to be understood as imaging God.
Published Version
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