S1E7: Biblical Anthropology

 S1E7:  Biblical Anthropology

Techumanpurpose · S1E7 Biblical Anthropology

It matters what you think of humans, but it is a very mixed history.

From the 10 Commandments we read: 

And God spoke all these words verse 2 “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.


3 “You shall have no other gods before[a] me.

4 “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.

5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me,

6 but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.


From which we rightly derive that we should not make and image or sculpture or likeness or representation of Yahweh.

Curiously because they were very expensive items we do not have any (probably) Ancient Near Eastern temple images. p158 Hundley, M.B. Gods in Dwellings: Temples and Divine Presence in the Ancient Near East) 2013

But wait there is a problem back in Genesis 1. There where humans are declared the image and likeness of God we get a different meaning of the term entirely.

The three invented meanings of image Gen 1.

• Morality – sense of good and evil
• Relational (with each other and God)
• Reason / rationality / wisdom

Why does image (object / drawing etc) mean image in one place and human qualities in another place?

Perhaps because we don’t read the Bible as a complex narrative.

Further and more problematically, the morality, relational and reason rationality concepts have been used to research and design AI.

But what if the text means exactly the same thing.

Watts 2002.

Read this way the whole of Israel's Scripture and the New Testament make a whole lot more sense.

The command not to make an image in the commandments is because Yahweh already has an image - every single human being. 

Go love your neighbour.

The point is  most of Israel's laws are not about serving God - most are actually about how to serve other human beings.

This then is the test of every technology. How does it fit within the narrative of humans being Yahweh image - his representatives within his Temple Cosmos.

What was Paul doing:

"What was the Apostle Paul trying to do: he was founding and maintaining communities - worship based, educational, egalitarian, philanthropic, fictive kinship groups" (non biological kinship I suspect - kinship of the imagination). N T Wright.

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