On "Learning in War-Time"

Read the essay: Learning in War-Time

What are you doing here?

When professor Adriana Ribeiro posed this question, I wasn’t quite sure how to answer.  I’m here because this is where I’m supposed to be, I thought.  This is my class.  If I don’t attend I’ll fall behind.  I’ll get bad grades.  I’ll disappoint my family.  I’m also here to learn, because I like learning.  I chose to be here—I want to be here.  The same holds true of the question, What are you doing at Calvin College?  My culture and my family expected that I go to college, and I was excited to go, to learn more about literature and languages, and how to share my passion with others through teaching.  I chose Calvin because of its size, its relative proximity to my home and family, its strong emphasis on vocation and cultural engagement, its community, its academic reputation, its highly regarded English department.  And, because in the end, after visiting several good colleges, I felt that Calvin was where God wanted me to be. 

In “Learning in War-Time”, Lewis argues against those who ask why young men should waste their time and energy studying during war-time, when all attention should go towards aiding the war-effort.  Education continues to be important, not only because war is insignificant when compared to the pursuit of knowledge, but because all of human life, academic, military, and otherwise, is dwarfed by the reality of heaven and hell.  The question is not really, “Should we study with a war on?” but, “Should we study when such a small amount of time stands between us and our eternal destinies?”  If one can justify learning “under the shadow of these eternal issues” then whether it is war or peace-time should make little difference in a scholar’s life.

 Furthermore, war, Lewis points out, is really not significantly different from peacetime.  It doesn’t create a “new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it.”  There are always crises and calamities occurring all around us that, if we chose to pay attention to them, would seem infinitely more important than sitting in a library or a classroom improving our minds.  “Human life,” Lewis says, “has always been lived on the edge of a precipice…Life has never been normal.”  Yet, scientists and philosophers and historians continue their work.  Discoveries are made.  Books are written and read.  Life as we know it goes on.

Lewis then goes on to talk about the three ways in which war disrupts a life of learning—excitement, frustration, and fear—and makes some very insightful comments about death:

“What does war do to death?  It certainly does not make it more frequent; 100 percent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased…Yet war does do something to death.  It forces us to remember it…War makes death real to us.” 

This constant reminder of our own limitations and mortality is healthy for the Christian life, a blessing in disguise.  So often we walk through life, pushing aside thoughts of death and what awaits us afterwards.  In wartime, however, these thoughts can no longer be ignored, and as we are forced to face our own end we must also wonder what lies beyond it, and keep our spiritual state in the forefront of our minds.

However, at its heart, this is an essay not about death or war or even heaven and hell, but about vocation. 

<In progress>

On "The Fall"--Chapter 3 of Engaging God's World

Plantinga begins his chapter on the Fall with an interesting contradiction.  Rather than simply focusing on the world’s brokenness, and on human suffering and pain, he quotes the first verse of the hymn, This Is My Father’s World, which lauds the beauty and magnificence of God’s creation.  Even after the Fall, creation is still good—we see that goodness in blue skies and warm, sunny days, in soft snow and pouring rain that nourishes the earth, in trees and grass and sand and stone.  And there is also goodness in human life—health, friendship, kindness, even selflessness.  The horror and difficulty of the Fall is not that it introduced evil into the world as an entity separate and isolated from everything else.  Rather, evil is a corruption, a failure of what is good.  It is parasitic; Plantinga describes it as “burrowing” into the heart of things—relationships, dreams, political systems—and intertwining itself so closely with the good that it becomes nearly impossible to dig it out.  My professors said, “Goodness is the soil in which evil grows,” and it’s not hard to imagine it as a seed—just a small, contained thing which, given water and a little time, will send out roots in every direction and, like a tenacious weed, survive until each last one is pulled out.   

Someone once told me that Christian Reformed thinking was Augustine and Plato, Plato and Augustine—and while that’s obviously not entirely true, it’s fascinating to see just how many ideas presented by Plantinga and by Lewis can be traced back to one of those two thinkers.  (Lewis wasn’t Christian Reformed, but he did admire John Calvin’s teachings.)  The idea of evil as a corruption or shortcoming of good, rather than an independent force is very much Augustinian.  So is the idea of original sin presented later in the chapter.  As Plantinga defines it, original sin is humanity’s collective addiction to sin, our “habit” that we no longer have the power to break free of on our own, begun by Adam and Eve in the garden.  Thus, sin is not merely isolated incidents of wrong-doing, but a general pattern of behavior that reaches across all times and places. 

But who is to blame for sin?  With such a view of original sin, it might seem easy to blame Adam and Eve—after all, they started it.  However, just underneath this question of “Who’s to blame?” lies a much stickier, much harder question to tackle—if God is all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing, why does He permit sin and evil to exist at all?  If God is immanent in creation—that is, intimately involved in everything that happens, big or small—how can anything happen that is contrary to His will?  Does God ever use sin to accomplish His purposes (for example, through the temptation, torture, and execution of the innocent Christ)?  How can sin be a part of God’s plan for the world’s redemption, and yet against His wishes, His designs, His commands? 

This is often called the “problem of evil,” and Plantinga doesn’t consider it in much depth.  He asserts that “God is perfectly holy and therefore hates sin,” and moves on.  Certainly, this is true.  God is holy, and God does hate sin.  But this doesn’t answer the question at hand.  If we didn’t accept that God was holy and hated sin, there would be no question at all. 

Historically, philosophers and theologians have dealt with the problem of evil in a variety of ways.  Fortunately I left all my notes from last semester at home, so I won’t go into depth about them here.  There are two ways that I think deserve mentioning, however—and, ironically, both come from former Calvin College philosophy professors!  The first, pioneered by Alvin Plantinga (brother of the Plantinga who wrote Engaging God’s World) is called the Free Will Defense.  Very, very briefly stated, it says that because it is better to be free than not to be free, God desired to create beings who possessed free will. However, in order to have free will one must have the ability to choose to do good—and therefore must also have the ability to choose not to do good.  Thus, though God created human beings with the ability to sin, this was actually part of the world’s original goodness.  The blame for sin is entirely in human hands.

The second way is not so much a defense as an acceptance of the fact that the existence of sin and suffering is a mystery—something that we, as human beings, are incapable of answering or solving on our own.  Last semester I read Nicholas Wolterstorff’s book Lament for a Son, a collection of reflections on his grief over the death of his son, Eric.  When faced with the problem of evil and its very close, personal presence in his life, Wolterstorff responds by pointing out God’s silence—and His suffering.  God does not tell us why He permits sin and evil to exist, but, as Wolterstorff notes, He does not simply stand by, a passive observer of human misery.  Rather, in Christ God freely enters into our sadness and desperation and makes it His own.  He suffers alongside us, as one of us, until, finally, He dies for our sakes.  God, too, Wolterstorff realizes, knows the pain of losing a beloved child. 

We may not understand why God allows there to be sin and evil in the world, why He allowed the Fall, but we can clearly see His response to sin—a response that He calls us to emulate: mercy and compassion, grace and forgiveness, and self-sacrificing love.

On "The Poison of Subjectivism"

Read the essay: The Poison of Subjectivism

If The Weight of Glory was my favorite of Lewis’s essays so far, this one is definitely my least favorite, mostly because it’s content is almost identical to that of the first few chapters of Mere Christianity, which I read just a few days ago.  During our class discussion, one of my group members wondered aloud why Lewis would write two pieces that were so similar.  To be honest, I’m not sure.  But, if I had to take a guess, I would say that, though Lewis’s arguments and examples are the same, the purpose of the two works is different.  Mere Christianity is meant to persuade people to accept the Christian faith, or, at the very least, admit the rationality of such beliefs.  The goal of this essay, on the other hand, is to point out the existence of a particular problem in society—the growing popularity of subjectivism.

Lewis defines subjectivism as a lack of faith in the power of human reasoning.  Once, people assumed that they could use their own thought processes to observe the world around them and discover truth.  Now, however, they have begun to question whether their minds are capable of grasping truth at all because, when subjected to scientific scrutiny, thoughts appear to be merely “the epipheomena which accompanies chemical or electrical events in a cortex which is itself the by-product of a blind evolutionary process.”  This ties right back to Meditation in a Toolshed—there is danger here in looking only at one’s own thoughts and in looking only along them.  When seen from the outside, it is impossible to appreciate the real value and complexity of human thought; one puts too little faith in the human mind.  When seen from the inside, however, one is tempted to put too much faith in one’s own reason, not realizing how easily deceived or unbalanced the brain is, and how limited its power to conceive, process, and understand. 

In the realm of science, subjectivism presents little danger because the scientist must trust that his powers of reason and observation are capable of uncovering truth—else his work would be pointless.  It is “practical reason”—our sense of right and wrong—that Lewis is worried about.  When subjectivism creeps into the moral realm, it convinces people that “right” and “wrong” are no more than social conventions.  Each society has its own standards of behavior; and since such standards are a human invention, they can be flawed, misguided, or downright cruel.  Reformers hope to create new, intentional moral systems that better benefit the human race.  The very idea of progress, or improvement upon “traditional” systems of morality is impossible, however, without an underlying belief in an absolute standard of right and wrong.  How are we to judge whether an idea is “better” or “fairer” than another unless we know of something perfectly good and just to compare it to?  If there is no fixed standard of perfect morality, then all moral systems are equal—and, in that case, traditional morality is just as “good” a system as any other.

 Lewis then addresses the idea of moral “progress,” attacking the use of the word “stagnant” to describe a fixed, unchanging standard of morality (he does the same in The Screwtape Letters, if memory serves).  Just because water stinks when it does not move, he says, doesn’t mean that anything that stays still must spoil.  In fact, many things do not change, and are the better for it, like mathematical truths.  Furthermore, not all change is positive change.  When things become dirty, we don’t call that progress—we clean them, returning them to their original, unsoiled state.  Similarly, morality is something which is permanent, and the better for it.  In fact, if we are to make moral progress at all we must have a “changeless standard” of right and wrong.  As Lewis says, “if good is a fixed point, it is at least possible that we should get nearer and nearer to it; but if the terminus is as mobile as the train, how can the train progress towards it?”  During our class discussion, however, one of my classmates brought up a good point.  While it is important to acknowledge that a fixed standard of morality is necessary for progress, it is also important to strive to make progress.  Our standard of behavior may not be able to stagnate, but our behavior itself can.  Just because right and wrong do not change doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t continually change in our quest to conform more and more closely to what is Good. 

Just a quick final note—the influence of Plato and Augustine is evident in a lot of Lewis’s work; this essay is no exception.  In fact, in the fourth paragraph Lewis even mentions Plato by name.  However, I was surprised when, near the end of the essay, I stumbled across the Euthyphro dilemma!  That is, the million dollar question from the end of Plato’s Dialogue with Euthyphro, originally “Is what is pious pious because it is loved by the gods, or do the gods love it because it is pious?” and rephrased here as “Are these things [the actions prescribed by the moral law] right because God commands them or does God command them because they are right?”  Lewis comes up with essentially the same answer to the dilemma that my philosophy teacher did last semester, though with much greater eloquence—that “God neither obeys nor creates the moral law” but is Himself a Goodness which is “uncreated,” which “lies…on the other side of existence” and, mysteriously, is itself “the ground of all existence.” 

On Mere Christianity, Book 1 chapters 1-4

Unfortunately, I did not have time to read all of Mere Christianity like I did with The Screwtape Letters—for one, I didn’t have a copy of Mere Christianity handy, and second even the few chapters I read for class were much weightier than Screwtape.  This is a book I should set aside a week or two’s worth of evenings to walk through and ponder.  If you hurry through his arguments, you’ll miss a lot of their depth and beauty.

In Mere Christianity, Lewis lays out a thorough and methodical argument for the rationality of Christian belief, beginning, not with the existence of God or the divinity of Christ, but with the idea of a universal “moral law” under which all human beings live and according to which we judge our behavior and that of others.  This moral law is a “natural law” in that all human beings have an inborn sense of it; however, it is different from other natural laws like the law of gravity or the law of heredity in that human beings can choose whether to follow it or not.  A snowflake has no choice about following the law of gravity—it falls whether it wants to or not.  A person, however, may steal even though he or she know that stealing is wrong.

A problem arises, however.  First, looking at the great diversity of human cultures that have existed throughout history, and seeing that every culture has different values, practices, and beliefs, how can we possibly claim that there is a universal “moral law”?  Morality, since it differs based on culture, must be a product of culture, a human creation.  If morality is a human creation, however, it can be flawed.  It is not absolute.  Thus, it can be changed or abandoned entirely without any real consequence—there is nothing of substance backing it up.

Lewis argues that even those who claim there is no universal standard of right and wrong really believe that there is, and that this belief is evident in their actions.  Though they may use the apparent absence of a fixed morality to excuse their own behavior, they are quick to point out when someone has treated them unfairly.  And in order for something to be ‘fair’ or ‘unfair’, doesn’t there have to be a mutually agreed on standard of behavior between the people involved?  Thus, the moral law is real and binding, no matter how inconvenient it may be; and all human beings, though they are aware of the moral law, fail to keep it perfectly. 

Lewis then refutes two objections—first, that the moral law is just another of humanity’s instincts, and second that it is merely a “social convention”, as evidenced by the fact that moral values are passed down to us as children by our parents and teachers.  An instinct, Lewis says, is “a strong want or desire to act in a certain way”—for example, to find food, or mate, or even to help someone else in need.  However, there is a difference between wanting to help someone and knowing, deep down inside, that you should help them, even at great risk to yourself.  This sense of what a person should do is the moral law, and it guides us when deciding which of two conflicting instincts (such as our desire to help someone and our desire for self-preservation) to follow.  Lewis then points out that , while it is true that we learn about the moral law from others, that does not necessarily make the moral law a human creation.  Many of the things we learn about have not been invented by human beings, but merely discovered—such as mathematics, biology, and the laws of physics.  The moral law is one of these things, and we can tell that it is so because it is the standard by which we judge the moralities of other times and places to be “better” or “worse” than our own.

And finally, Lewis moves on to what lies “behind” the moral law—to the question, “Why is there something and not nothing?”  Broadly, one can take a materialist view which states that the universe as we know it exists by chance, or one can take a religious view, which states that the universe came about under the will and direction of Something, or Someone.  This is, in my opinion, where Lewis’s argument ceases to be completely water-tight.  He is not seeking to prove the existence of God, like Aquinas or Anselm, but to show how rational such a view is, and how likely it seems compared with the materialist view.  The argument he offers in favor of it is a good one—that, if there were a guiding force behind the universe, it would be expected to reveal itself to us in something like the moral law we all experience. 

It’s a bit harder to tie Mere Christianity to my own life than Screwtape or even many of his essays.  In conclusion, I’d just like to emphasize how much I enjoyed Lewis’s style of argument.  His points were easy to understand, and he moves slowly enough that I had no trouble keeping up with him.  As I said, his main aim seems to be not to prove that Christianity is true, but to persuade people that it is true—a far greater service and far more effective at convincing people to believe, I think, than a purely logical argument in favor of God’s existence.  There is no philosophical or logical jargon here, and even an absence of Lewis’s normal poeticism.  He is plain-spoken and down-to-earth.  If I have time in the next couple of weeks, I would love to continue reading Mere Christianity.

On The Screwtape Letters, Letter XII

I actually ended up reading all of The Screwtape Letters, but in this post I’m only going to be reflecting on letter XII, Screwtape’s letter on encouraging the outward practice of the Christian life while inwardly turning the “patient” more and more towards seeking after his own worldly desires and away from seeking God. 

In the letter, Screwtape warns Wormwood, a younger, less experienced devil, to be patient in his tempting, and not try to hurry his victim into huge, spectacular sins.  If the man deviates too far from how he knows a Christian should act, he may realize that he has begun to drift into sin and repent.  Instead, he encourages Wormwood to keep presenting him with small, seemingly innocent sins—talking lightly and loosely with his non-Christian friends, for example, or neglecting to pray.  Slowly but surely, these small sins will add up to a larger and larger change in what the man thinks and how he lives, until he is finally and permanently lost to Hell.  As Screwtape says, “the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

If that’s not blood-curdlingly scary, I don’t know what is. 

The key in keeping the man from repenting is that all his “small” sins will create in him a “vague, uneasy feeling that he hasn’t been doing very well lately,” while at the same time he still believes, because of his outward habits, that his “spiritual state is much the same as it was six weeks ago.”  This guilt will essentially drive a wedge between him and God.  Where six weeks ago he was eager to confess his sins, eager to spend time in prayer and worship, now he is unable to think about any of those things without embarrassment, and, consequently, does them only superficially and with great reluctance.  Though he still attends church, he is unable to concentrate and learn anything through the sermon or participate in Christian fellowship.  He gladly accepts any excuse to abandon his prayers.  In effect, his faith becomes empty, a hollow shell of practices that lacks any substance or conviction.  He is a true Christian no longer, but simply an outwardly religious man.

How many times have I felt that same vague uneasiness, and let it push me away from God?  Or, rather, let it convince me that I should push God away from me, with resolutions to improve my behavior.  When I have something better to report, I’ll pray again.  When I’ve stopped disrespecting my family, when I’ve tamed my rampant pride, when I’ve started reading scripture regularly, then I’ll come back.  The problem is that my resolutions are impossible to keep—I can’t accomplish even those small things without constant prayer for God’s help and encouragement.  And, at the same time, all of those well-intentioned efforts are directed inwards, towards myself.  Most of the Screwtape letters are devoted to listing all the ways in which a person can be made to think about him or herself rather than others.  Getting caught up in your own sense of failure and brokenness is just as selfish as being puffed up with a sense of your own power and perfection.  Repentance—throwing yourself on God’s mercy without any thought of “self-improvement”—is the only solution to both.

On "The Weight of Glory"

Read the essay: The Weight of Glory

This is by far my favorite of all of Lewis’s essays that I’ve read so far.  For so short a work, it covers an incredible range of topics, and in each Lewis’s strong, persuasive voice creates a feel of truth and immense importance that is impossible to ignore.  I’ve noticed this element in almost all of Lewis’s work; in fact, in class today, when we were listening to a radio program on which Lewis’s friends, students, and colleagues remembered him, I heard one of the guests criticize it.  Lewis, he claimed, sometimes used this gift to support opinions which were narrow-minded and chauvinistic.  Though he wrote eloquently, Lewis was still a human being with flaws and faults, a good example but not a perfect one. 

The part of this essay which stood out to me the most was that Lewis begins his discussion of glory with the idea of longing.  Aha! thought I.  I’ve already written a blog post on longing, and spent quite a bit of time before that thinking about and wishing for things past or out of reach.  Lewis addresses longing a bit differently than Plantinga, however.  In fact, one of the first ways in which he mentions it is in conjunction with his story of the schoolboy.  Lewis’s argument is that Christians are not greedy or self-serving by hoping for a heavenly reward.  Working towards a reward is not wrong in every case, but only in those cases where the reward one seeks does not naturally proceed from the work one does—for example, wooing someone doesn’t naturally lead to wealth; it does lead to marriage.  So, while courting someone for the sake of money is wrong, courting someone in the hopes of attaining marriage is not.  Sometimes it is more difficult to see the connection between one’s present toil and a valid reward, however.  A child studying Greek doesn’t realize at the time that his studies will one day allow him to enjoy classical Greek poetry.  Similarly, the average Christian is unable to grasp how, eventually, eternal life will grow out of his everyday struggle to follow Christ.  All he can do is obey, until eventually “poetry replaces grammar, gospel replaces law, [and] longing transforms obedience, as gradually as the tide lifts a grounded ship.”  Slowly but surely, our longing for heaven will turn our unquestioning obedience into a life of joyful service and humble gratitude and praise.

This longing for heaven is planted deep inside of each of us.  Lewis calls it an “inconsolable secret,” one we “cannot hide and cannot tell.”  We are all like people in love—in more earthy terms, it’s like we have a crush on glory.  Glory is so desirable, yet so far out of reach that we can hardly describe what it is we want, and yet we want it so badly that everything we see and hear and do reminds us of it.  We can’t stop thinking about it, and whenever anyone mentions it the truth becomes painfully obvious.  We’ve fallen head-over-heels. 

Our longing for glory is different than our desire for another human being, however, in that it is the foundation of all our other yearnings.  It is not, as Plantinga said, that our longing for God is an element of all our earthly desires.  Rather, all of our earthly desires are contained by and flow out of our thirst for eternal life in the presence of God.  We could not yearn for anything if we did not, underneath it all, yearn for that.  Furthermore, if we fail to recognize that our desires for transient things are really just echoes of our true desire for everlasting things we will fall into idolatry, chasing after fading pleasures and times gone by until, having slipped through our fingers, they ultimately leave us empty and alone.

But what is it we are really longing for?  What is glory?  At first, it seems to mean either fame or an outpouring of inner light.  The former seems impossible in heaven, however, and the later an inadequate description.  Surely there is more to glory than being “a kind of living electric light bulb.”  Glory, as Lewis defines it, is being recognized and affirmed by God.  It is what comes at the end of parables, when the master tells his good servants, “Well done.”  Just as a child is deeply pleased at being praised by a parent or teacher, so someday we will be able to delight in hearing that we have pleased God.  Praise will no longer lead to puffed-up pride, but simple and complete humility.  Glory will be when we realize that we are exactly who God created us to be, and rejoice in that fact.

Lewis ends with the idea that the seed of glory—our potential and longing for it—is already planted in each of us, and every day, by our thoughts and words and actions, we help determine the way that seed will grow in those around us.  In some it will blossom into Heaven; in others, it will be twisted into Hell, and “all day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations.”  The responsibility for our neighbor’s glory rests partly on our shoulders.  This is the “weight” of glory that we must bear, the knowledge that “the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare,” and, whichever the case may be, we will, somehow, be partly to blame. 

"Meanwhile the cross comes before the crown, and tomorrow is a Monday morning."

On "Creation"--Chapter 2 of Engaging God's World

Why did God create?  It’s an initially puzzling question.  Certainly not because He was bored, or needed company, or purely for entertainment.  Theologians speak of God having asiety—His existence is not dependent on anything outside of Himself; and, furthermore, His existence—the eternal perichoresis of the three persons of the Trinity—is whole and perfect in every way.  God did not need to create anything.  However, creation was also a purposeful act.  It was not an accident; no part of it was governed by pure chance, or by another mind.  Rather, God created because creation is an act fitting to His character, and what He created also reflects who He is.

In class, my professors brought up an interesting point: we often take pride in the fact that human beings are the pinnacle, the climax of God’s creation.  But we ignore the other implication of our being created last, namely, that the rest of creation existed before us, and without us.  “Human beings are the crown of creation,” professor Adriana Ribeiro said, “but a person can live without a crown.”  So what is the relationship of the rest of creation to God?  As a child, I was always raised to believe that human beings were the only creatures capable of knowing and worshiping God.  Rocks, trees, rabbits, and even stars may give glory to God by their sheer beauty and magnificence, but they cannot chose to praise Him, or fail to do so.  They have no wills, no souls.  And yet, we recognize that all of creation is fallen, and needs to be saved.  Plantinga disagrees with me, fancifully speaking of humpback whales praising God with their songs and breaching, and all non-human creatures “[lifting] up their praises to God…with a spontaneity and consistency far greater than our own.”  While I do believe that God loves everything He created, and that all of creation points back to its masterful Creator (general revelation), this seems like a bit of a stretch.  Ultimately, however, it’s impossible for us to know whether non-human creatures can praise God.

As human beings, however, we see very clearly in scripture that we were created to praise God in everything we do—by loving one another, by worshiping, through prayer and even—and, perhaps especially!—through our work.  To be human means to be finite, bound by time and space and limited in our capacities and resources, and dependent.  So much in life is beyond our control, from the time and place of our birth, to our family, to our deaths.  Furthermore, because we are created by God we do not have the freedom to ‘create’ or ‘recreate’ ourselves, as in the ‘creative anti-realism’ that Plantinga describes.  Only God knows who we are and who we ultimately will be.  Being finite creatures also means that we need rest.  Plantinga describes how God created the cycle of work and rest by instituting the Sabbath, and that, though God does not need to rest, the rhythm of work and rest is one way in which we “image” God, who rested on the seventh day.

What is meant by the “image of God”?  Human beings are image-bearers of God in that we are given dominion over the rest of creation—a dominion which, Plantinga points out, should be modeled on God’s dominion over us.  Just as God rules us with mercy, grace, and selfless love, so we should seek to follow His example in our stewardship of creation.  Being made in the image of God also means that we have certain rights, to life, respect, etc.  It means that we are communal creatures, made to be in relationship with one another just as the three persons of the Trinity exist in relationship.  We must strive for unity, and love, forgive, encourage, and be patient with one another.  Finally, being made in the image of God is a call to follow the example of Christ, the only perfect image of God, in His suffering, death, and, ultimately, His resurrection.

Eight themes of creation:

1.       All of creation was created good, and is redeemable.

2.       Creation has purpose and order, some of which human beings can discover and understand.

3.       God created out of nothing; creation is separate and distinct from God.

4.       We should love creation, but be careful not to worship it.

5.       Work and marriage—as created things—are essentially good!  Human beings can serve God in celibacy or marriage, and in all kinds of honest work.  No job is more “Christian” than another.

6.       Being made in the image of God confers responsibilities—such as stewardship of creation—and rights.

7.       Being made in the image of God also means that we “image” God both individually and as a community. 

8.       Finally, being created in the image of God gives meaning to our lives (we are not products of random, meaningless chance) but does not mean that we ourselves are God.  Our status as creatures should be both an honor and a reminder of our dependence on our Creator.