Members of the Doctrine Committee of the Scottish Episcopal Church and invited contributors have given us this wide-ranging series of essays on theological anthropology, with a focus on the imago Dei. There is scriptural reflection on the theme (from Nicholas Taylor and others) along with the presentation of options against their historical background. Some essays are theological, while others draw from various disciplines and perspectives to provide resources for theological reflection. Some combine both. Many draw practical implications.
Humanity’s vocation for the praise of God (John Reuben Davies), God’s indwelling of human creaturehood in the incarnation (Trevor Hart) and Jesus’ completion of humanity’s creation in terms of Divine Participation (John McLuckie) are all explored. David Jasper offers a secular theology, challenging those who retreat from hard theological engagement into piety at a time when the Church has to step up. But for this reader the specialist contributions from other fields were particularly stimulating.
There is a terrific chapter on compassion (and mindfulness) – compassion reaches out, whereas empathy can ‘retire hurt’ from the field of actual human need. From this, Harriet Harris makes her case for the compatibility of divine compassion with divine impassibility (also that learning compassion grows us more fully into the imago Dei).
Michael Fuller explores the question of human distinctiveness against the broadest backdrop, from AI and transhumanism to possible extra-terrestrial life to primates and hominid ancestors. Margaret B. Adam addresses humanity’s vocation of dominion from a theologically informed animal welfare perspective, bringing creaturely solidarity into the imago Dei. Eric Stoddart introduces the actual AI challenge, which is not the science fiction version but the far more down-to-earth problem of humans facing the fast-approaching tsunami of mass redundancy and the threat it represents to meaningful, world-shaping work. He addresses the theology of work and humanity’s vocation as co-creator with God, calling for this issue to receive greater attention.
Alison Jasper, in the final essay, names the elephant in the room of contemporary Church commissions examining theology of the human person, which is gender and transgender. She offers both an introduction to the field (I learned a new omni-term, heterocispatriarchalism, which neatly encompasses the feminist/Queer case against patriarchalism, heteronormativity and the gender binary seen as the only categories compatible with creation narratives in Genesis). She takes a more theopoetic line, alert to the unresolved complexities of life in God’s world, reading these texts in light of their pluralities – as pointers to God dealing patiently with our complicated humanness rather than insisting upon traditional norms.
Having contributed to collaborative volumes like this on the Doctrine Commission of my own Anglican Church of Australia, in response no doubt to related challenges, I note a key difference. Happily absent from this Scottish volume is the assertive presentation of a conservative Evangelical agenda: insisting on the clarity of Scripture for resolving all relevant concerns; along with the fallenness of nature, humanity and reason denying any meaningful recourse to empirical data and human experience. This agenda precluded dialogue, ensuring that the outcome was more a staking of contested claims.
One thing we disagreed about in that forum was the distinction between God’s image and likeness, the latter reserved for believers. This accompanied (desacramentalizing) calls from the Evangelicals for baptism to be removed as a requirement for church marriage. It is interesting that this issue did not come up in the Scottish Episcopal context of this volume.
What the Scots offer us is an attractive, humane and coherent Christian vision: creatively scriptural, generously traditional and pastorally motivated. Discussion questions accompany each chapter, helping to make this a resource for clergy, parish and ecumenical groups. Given the degree of coherence and spiritual commonality of purpose in these contributions, it might have been possible to come up with a joint report, with the essays appended. This was not always possible for Australia’s Doctrine Commission.
