The Beloved Community: Imago Dei as a Catalyst for Social Action

The way in which one conceives of imago Dei (the image of God in man) matters immensely because that view will determine how each man is related to and relates to God and his fellows. In this essay I will briefly consider what has been called thh “Relational View” of the imago Dei as espoused by Swiss theologian  Emil Brunner, and then demonstrate how this theological viewpoint can be related to the kind of social action championed by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the non-violent Civil Rights Movement. I will conclude that the Church of Jesus Christ is called to the same ends that King espoused.

Brunner introduce two senses of the imago Dei: what he calls a “formal” and a “material” sense, but at the center of Brunner’s conception of the imago Dei is love. He uses the notion of two senses of the image as a tool for human understanding and stresses that from God’s point of view the distinction does not exist.[i]

Rightly understood, Brunner’s argument follows this line. The idea of imago Dei is the beginning point. God created man in His image (Gen. 1:26). Being created in the image of God, man is subject to God. As subject, he has freedom, albeit a limited freedom. He was created to act in a certain way, but has freedom to act in a different, unintended way, which characterizes sin. This is what distinguishes man from all other creatures, and this freedom is what Brunner describes as the “formal” sense of the image of God. Man’s original God-given freedom requires a response which Brunner describes as the “material” sense:

The New Testament simply presupposes this fact that man – in his very nature – has been “made in the image of God”; it does not develop this any further. To the Apostles what matters most is the “material” realization of this God-given quality; that is, that man should really give the answer which the Creator intends, the response in which God is honored, and in which he fully imparts Himself, the response of reverent, grateful love, given not only in words, but in his whole life. The New Testament, in its doctrine of the imago Dei, tells us that this right answer has not been given; that quite a different one has been given instead, in which the glory is not given to God, but to man and to creatures, in which man does not live in the love of God, but seeks himself. Secondly, the New Testament is the proclamation of what God has done in order that He may turn this false answer into the true one.

Here, therefore, the fact that man has been “made in the image of God” is spoken of as having been lost, and indeed as wholly, and not partially lost. Man no longer possesses this Imago Dei; but it has been restored through Him, through whom God gives and glorifies Himself: through Jesus Christ. The restoration of the Imago Dei, the new creation of the original image of God in man, is identical with the gift of God in Jesus Christ received by faith.

The Imago Dei in the New Testament, “material” sense of the word, is identical with “being-in-the-Word” of God.[ii]

Brunner is emphatic about the proposition that man can only be fully human and thus can only be in the image of God when he “in Jesus Christ.” Man can only be understood by looking at Jesus, for he is human in the sense that God intended. And Jesus’ humanity is not expressed in genius (reason), but in love.[iii] So Brunner affirms “When the heart of man no longer reflects the love of God, but himself and the world, he no longer bears the ‘Image of God’, which simply consists in the fact that God’s love is reflected in the human heart.”[iv] So in this sense the “structural” or “formal” sense of the image is that God created man as subject and with freedom, but freedom to be used for a distinct purpose, and the “material” sense is the reality that man can and has used this freedom to a different purpose. Finally Brunner notes that the distinction can only be understood from the viewpoint of man and not God, because God did not create man to do right or wrong, but only to do right.

If the image of God is love, it follows that it must be relational, because even God cannot love without an object of love. If there is no beloved, there can be no love. This relational aspect is hinted at in Genesis in the words “Let us create” (Gen 1:26, emphasis mine). The Trinitarian God consists of an everlasting relationship of love between the persons of the Godhead. The intended relationship of God to man is that same relationship of love, but because man was created with freedom, and man did not use that freedom rightly, the image was lost. When through faith man becomes identified with God in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the proper relationship is restored. But even more, because the image is universal in humans, the love of God that is reflected in man must be reflected to man as well, in the form of love toward our fellows. If the image of God in man is a reflection of the love relationship of the Trinity, then the relationship between man and man must also reflect that.

Now, there are a number of fascinating avenues that can be explored with this assumption as a starting point. But for the purposes of this short study I want to focus only on how this understanding of the image of God provides a catalyst for social action. In doing so I will examine briefly the theology and praxis of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The central vision that drove Dr. King was the concept of “The Beloved Community.” We find this idea throughout his speeches and writings. Essentially, the Beloved Community is a society of “persons-in-community” living in cooperation and harmony and reflecting the image of God.[v] The community consists of all people. A widespread misconception about King is that as a Civil Rights leader his main concern was for African Americans, but it only takes a cursory glance at the corpus of he work to realize that he was always concerned with the idea of bring all people into fellowship.[vi]

The force that King envisioned bringing about and sustaining the community was what he called agape, essentially understood as the love of God. In an early speech describing nonviolence as a tool for building community King says:

In speaking of love at this point, we are not referring to some sentimental or affectionate emotion. It would be nonsense to urge men to love their oppressors in an affectionate sense. Love in this connection means understanding, redemptive good will. When we speak of loving those who oppose us, we refer to neither eros nor philia; we speak of a love which is expressed in the Greek word agape. Agape means understanding, redeeming good will for all men. It is an overflowing love which is purely spontaneous, unmotivated, groundless, and creative. It is not set in motion by any quality or function of its object. It is the love of God operating in the human heart.[vii]

Going further, King declared that agape is the force that creates, restores, and sustains the Beloved Community.

            The similarities between Brunner’s relational idea of the imago Dei and King’s concept of agape as the creating and sustaining force of the human community are striking. Whether those similarities are intentional remains a topic for further research, but the conceptual relationship cannot be denied. In an analysis of the development of King’s theological thinking Richard Wills concludes that to consider the “imago Dei” as a cooperative enterprise between God and humanity represents the culmination of King’s philosophy.[viii]

Wills suggests that the image of God underlay King’s activism in four ways. The first was that the imago Dei caused all men to be possessed of human dignity. The second was that the image entitled all men to commensurate rights (i.e., to equal treatment). The third was that the image endowed all men with the capacity to create justice, and the fourth posited that justice, and agape itself, are embodied in the Beloved Community.[ix] Thus the impetus and the means for building the Beloved Community are to be found in the image of God in man: agape, which as Brunner points out is the love of God reflected in and by man. Again, whether or not King’s ideal is informed by Brunner, Brunner’s explanation coincides with the thinking of Martin Luther King, Jr.

There remains, however, the method. How can this concept of agape as the imago Dei translate into the action required to inaugurate the Beloved Community? The answer lies in the Body of Christ. As Christians, following the lead of the Apostle Paul, we like to equate the Body of Christ with the Church. And I think ideally this is the proper understanding of it. But in praxis the Church as we know it today in North America cannot be equated with the Body of Christ, nor could it have been in the 1950s and 1960s during the Civil Rights movement. The reason for this is because the institutional Church does not reflect agape or the image of God, but rather has aligned itself with secular culture.

In his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” written to a group of white pastors opposing the non-violent anti-segregation campaign in Birmingham, Alabama as “unwise and untimely,”[x] King assailed the Christian Church for its collusion, through silence and outright support, with brutal segregationist policies.

So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent–and often even vocal–sanction of things as they are.

But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century.[xi]

So again I think ideally King envisioned that the Church and the Beloved Community could be co-equal, but that did not reflect the reality of his day and could only occur by a change of attitude on the part of the institutional Church. I will further argue that as a general rule this is true today as well.

            How can King’s philosophy of action to create the Beloved Community be associated with a relational concept of the imago Dei? The key is what King calls agape love, which I contend is the imago Dei. As noted above, agape love is the indwelling Christ, the love of God for God and also for man. But, also as noted above, love cannot exist in a vacuum. For love to exist there must be a relationship. The agape relationship between God and man is represented in an act: the Incarnation. The Incarnation is the total surrender of self by God for the sake of the beloved (Phil. 2:6-8). To reflect that love and thus possess the imago Dei those who are in Christ must also sacrifice self for other. Indeed that sacrifice is the image of God.

            Two human difficulties must be overcome in order to engage in the action required to bring about the Beloved Community. This was true for King’s practice of non-violent Civil Rights movement and it is true for the modern Church. Overcoming the first impediment requires the abandonment of the human idea about how to bring about justice in favor of God’s idea. The human idea sees the struggle for justice in terms of an adversarial relationship where one party wins and the other must lose. God’s idea sees the struggle as a sacrifice of self for the sake of all others, even enemies (Mt. 5:43-48).

The second obstacle is found in the relationship of the Church to the world. Like the Church King admonished from his cell in the Birmingham jail the modern Church too often sees itself as normative and thus tends to support the status quo. But the Church of Jesus Christ is the Beloved Community, a “holy nation” set apart from the world (1 Pet. 2:9-10). Even more, the Church of Jesus Christ is God in the world. This relates directly to the relational concept of imago Dei, because the Church is the Body of Christ (1 Cor. 12:12-26), and each individual is one with the body (1 Cor. 12:27).

What makes this so is agape. Agape characterizes the relationship of the persons of the Trinity and it is the same agape that characterizes the relationship of the members of the Church to Jesus Christ and to each other. Thus if the Church and its members do not relate to the world with agape love in the same unconditional, self-sacrificial way that Jesus relates to the world, then it is not the Church of Jesus Christ. If the world cannot look at the Church and see Jesus, it is not Jesus’ Church.

We may look at the career of Martin Luther King and conclude that his ideas did not work, or that the cost is too high. Dr. King was murdered and we are still far from achieving the Beloved Community. But these discouragements must not deter us. Whatever the outcome seems to be in the world our task is clear. In order to be called the people of God we must reflect His love in the world. And if that results in hardship and struggle we are privileged to share in Christ’s crucifixion.

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[i] Emil Brunner, Christian Doctrine of Creation and Redemption, (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1952), 61.

[ii] Ibid., 58

[iii] Ibid. 58-59

[iv] Ibid. 59.

[v] Rufus Burrows, God and Human Dignity: The Personalism, Theology, and Ethics of Martin Luther King, Jr, (Notre Dame, In.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 160.

[vi] “And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’" “I Have a Dream,” August 28, 1963, in James Melvin Washington, ed., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1991), 220.

[vii] Martin Luther King, Jr., “An Experiment in Love,” 1958, in James Melvin Washington, ed., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1991), 19.

[viii] Richard Wills, Martin Luther King and the Image of God, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 81.

[ix] Ibid., 114-136.

[x] Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter From Birmingham City Jail,” 1963, in James Melvin Washington, ed., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1991), 289.

[xi] Ibid., 300.

Anne Rice Quits Christianity. So What?

The other night in Systematic Theology class the topic of Anne Rice “leaving Christianity” came up and the professor read Rice’s words wherein she declared her decision:

I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being ‘Christian’ or being a part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.

Of course I had heard about this but I really didn’t think much about it one way or the other. My faith, after all, is not predicated on what someone else believes and I’m pretty sure God knows what’s up with Anne and doesn’t need my help sorting it out.

My first reaction to her statement was that it expresses immaturity and a real lack of understanding of the Christian gospel as I have experienced it, and I will hold to that. This is the kind of statement you would expect from someone who has gained their knowledge of Christianity from the secular culture; the kinds of things I myself might have said not that long ago.

Interestingly, the professor related to the class, mostly second and third year seminary students, that in his experience when charging Christian leaders to enumerate ten things Christianity was against the response was quick and thorough, but when challenged to enumerate ten things Christians were for the response of the leaders was quite different. Try it yourself. How long does it take to tick off ten things Christians positively promote?

Well, for some probably it will take less time than others and the timing isn’t really important, anyway. What is important is that this is a very real perception held by many both outside and inside the church, and not without reason. Americans tend to identify professing Christians with what they reportedly oppose. In a 2007 survey of young non-Christians, only 16% professed to have a “good impression” of Christianity, and still less “Born Again” (10%) and “Evangelical” (3%) Christians.[i] The following conclusions were reported by the authors of this survey:

In our national surveys we found the three most common perceptions of present-day Christianity are anti-homosexual (an image held by 91 percent of young outsiders), judgmental (87 percent), and hypocritical (85 percent). These “big three” are followed by the following negative perceptions, embraced by a majority of young adults: old-fashioned, too involved in politics, out of touch with reality, insensitive to others, boring, not accepting of other faiths, and confusing.[ii]

We can argue that these perceptions are not fair and represent neither what we believe nor how we act, but the fact remains that this is how we are identified. Clearly American Christians are not doing a very good job of telling our neighbors the “Good News”. And, assuming that Rice as a professing Christian was churched somewhere (if she wasn’t, that would explain a lot), we may not even be doing that well reaching our own members.

The first thing that came to my mind when challenged by the professor to think of ten things Christians are for was that we don’t really need to be for ten things. Jesus did not come with a ten point plan. We only need to make sure that we and everyone we come into contact with know that we are for one thing: amazing grace.

It is true that the Christian church in all of its manifestations is full of the most amazingly judgmental, spiteful, and hypocritical people, just like the world outside the church. It is also true that the sins of those within the church are just as wicked and just as offensive to God as those outside it. But that is no more true today than it was when God himself took on human form and poured himself out. He did that so that “a bunch of quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious” sinners, enemies of God who were completely lost and without hope, could enjoy abundant life. He also did it for no apparent reason (hence the term grace), and that is the Good News we should be shouting, by our deeds and our words, to each other and to everyone around us.

From the very beginning there have been those inside and outside the church who have misrepresented the Gospel. Late in the first century, when Christianity was just getting started but after many of the first Christians had passed from the scene, a lot of people who had not been around to see Jesus started to doubt the things that were said about him; the things he had said about himself. Some of them started teaching these things in the church. John, the disciple who Jesus loved and probably the last living disciple at the time, wrote the letter we now know as 1 John to set the record straight. He wanted to remind everyone before he died that he had been there and seen it all with his own eyes and to make sure everyone knew it was all true.

If you get a chance you should read 1 John. It’s short and contains some of the most amazing teachings in the Bible. In it he refocused the attention of the church to the one thing that matters. It applies to us because it is also the one thing we need to remember we are for, and that we must represent to the world around us if we are truly to be followers of Christ:

In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. (1 John 4:10-11 ESV)

This is the Christianity I found. Let us pray that Anne finds some of those Christians, and that they might be us.

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[i] David Kinnaman, UNchristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks About Christianity... and Why it Matters (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Baker Books, 2007), 25.

[ii] Ibid., 27.