imago piccati
In the Image of Sin?
I have been thinking on how we talk about humanity. How we speak of ourselves, especially for those who claim belief in God, tells volumes of unspoken truths. I see theological conversations as improvisation sessions in which we cooperate and learn from one another. An idea has come out of my consideration of multiple conversations and comments online. I believe many Christians see humanity in terms of sin. This view makes sense within streams of Calvinism because that theological framework sees humanity in terms of sin. But for us Wesleyan-Holiness folk, we understand the Christ event to be a recapitulation, or reconciling, event. For us, we should see humanity in the way we believe God sees humanity.
We can be forgiven for assuming that God sees us as sin. Or that God cannot even look our way without saying “magic salvation words” because that is how popular Christian culture portrays God. I find it extremely ironic that a people who value holiness over culture get caught up in a culture that is often at odds with who we claim to be. Wesleyan-Holiness folk believe God sees creation as good. As my friend Daron Brown put it at the Church of the Nazarene (COTN) 2023 General Assembly, “Sin is part of our story but it is not the first part of our story. The truth is grace is more original than sin. Humanity is created in the image of God.” What a beautiful thought and one that shines in a proposed new Article of Faith for the COTN. This is proposed to become Article V, moving sin to Article VI and so on.
The text of the new Article of Original Goodness reads this way:
We believe that in the beginning the Triune God created the heavens and the earth and everything in them out of nothing but love. Within God’s loving and covenantal intention for all creation, God has created humanity uniquely in the divine image so that human beings are engaged in a mutual relationship with God, each other, and all creation. Entrusting to humanity the responsibility to fill the earth and exercise protective custody over his creation, God has pronounced creation as very good.
This is straight out of Genesis chapter one and shows how seriously we take the truth in that passage. Ironically, the literalist may ignore the literal text we read in Genesis:
Then God said, “Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over the cattle and over all the wild animals of the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”
So God created humans in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” God said, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the air and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. (Gen 1:26–31b)
God saw everything made was very good. The pushback against this new article included claims that Article I mention humanity in creation. Article I only mentions God as creator, so any link to humanity is implied. Of course, those same critics claimed sin was dropped from revisions to entire sanctification even with the implied and explicit word sin within it. Irony again…
What I am thinking is that while we claim we see humanity as created in the image of God, theologically, the imago Dei; we act and speak in ways that sound more like a humanity created in the image of sin, or imago piccati. This is only partially tongue in cheek, but I believe that many in the Wesleyan-Holiness movement hold to the imago piccati as an overarching way of seeing human beings. It explains the leaning in to language of depravity even as we claim prevenient grace. Our understanding of grace is that it is responsible rather than prescriptive. We respond to grace given rather than we are given grace in response to action.
Responsible grace leans into the beauty of understanding the imago Dei in a call to relationship as a friend reminded me, Craig Keen explains. I think this is where the voices of theologians like Keen and Tom Oord are improvised in cooperation because we cannot see the imago Dei outside of relationship regardless of how open and relational we may be.
There is a beauty in the imago Dei that rejects any form of the imago piccati. I pray all Christians can see humanity considering the imagi Dei rather than any form of imago piccati. “Grace is more original than sin.” The Christ event shows us that grace is superior to sin.