Fall 2024 · Vol. 53 No. 2 · pp. 194–195
Book Review
Being God’s Image: Why Creation Still Matters
Carmen Joy Imes. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2023. xii + 231 pages.
The most important thing to say about this book is that it is useful—useful by both design and execution—for everyone, from professors, pastors, and church leaders, to Bible study groups and individuals.
Let me begin with some of its formal features. Each relatively short chapter (around fifteen to twenty pages) includes one or two sidebars that address specific interpretive questions (for example, “Science and the Christian” on reading the first chapters of Genesis; “Is Life Really Meaningless” on the translation of the Hebrew word hevel in Ecclesiastes) and concludes with a section of “Key Ideas” in several bullet points, followed by “Digging Deeper,” a bibliography of about a half dozen further readings. In the Appendix (189–93), Imes supplies “Resources from The BibleProject,” with QR codes seamlessly directing the reader to YouTube videos on topics relevant to each chapter. Finally, a set of “Discussion Questions” (195–201) is provided for each chapter. Imes is evidently deeply read in scholarship pertinent to each chapter, as indicated in the footnotes and bibliography, but the whole text is written with a light and personal touch; at times Imes even directly addresses the reader in the second person with challenges to deeper thought and action. All of this amounts to a highly informative, memorable, and enjoyable tour through the question of what it means to be human in God’s creation.
Imes’s guiding claim is in the title: humans are created not in God’s image, but as God’s image. What does it mean to be God’s image, which according to Imes is not “lost” after the fall but remains the fundamental meaning of being human? This question grounds the discussion of key biblical texts from Genesis to Revelation. In this sense the book amounts to a substantial account of biblical anthropology and could readily function as a core text in a course of introduction to the Bible. Imes finds crucial aspects of this anthropology in Israel’s wisdom literature, from which she shapes significant reflections on finitude, mortality, suffering, sexuality, and doubt. The brief study of Ecclesiastes (with the reflection on hevel noted above) is a gem; the NIV translation of hevel as “meaningless” has always been a travesty, which Imes rightly corrects.
Of course, central to any biblical study of human nature are the early chapters of Genesis. Here again we note how useful this book is. Clearly, the target audience throughout is (conservative) evangelical Christians. (Why else would there be significant sidebars on “Gender and Ministry Roles” [47–49] and “What about the Rapture?” [165–68]?) But Imes is not content to leave that interpretive tradition unchallenged. In chapters 1 and 2 she provides the background and tools necessary to read the early p. 195 chapters of Genesis as liturgy and myth (though she doesn’t use that word) rather than literalistic “scientific” and “historical” accounts of “origins.” At the same time, she doesn’t push hard against conservative creationist readings, leaving openings for them to grasp the main theological points of the text, if not the alternative literary readings. I believe she might have pushed harder. What remains confusing is Imes’s continued use of the past tense relative to these texts, giving the impression that there really was a “once upon a time” when Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden and sinned and were expelled. There are other ways to write about the primeval stories that more coherently indicate their suprahistorical meaning.
Importantly, in the second half of the book Imes gives a great deal of attention to Jesus as the true human image of God. The gospels and the New Testament more broadly display the reality of Jesus as the one in whom the human image is recapitulated (Irenaeus) and renewed. Imes is especially good at drawing out connections between John’s gospel and the creation narratives, showing how John as well as Paul is intent on revealing Jesus as the Second Adam. Essential sidebars in these chapters include reflections on “The Gender of Jesus” (110–11), “Reckoning with Racism” (152–54), and “Disability and the Image” (157–58). Participation in the human reality of Jesus—incarnate, resurrected, and ascended—generates the new humanity in individuals and in the “beloved community,” the social reality of the church. The sidebars just mentioned above give concrete shape to the meaning of the new humanity in Jesus.
Finally, Imes turns to Romans 8 and the book of Revelation to assert the embodied and creational scope of God’s work of new creation. Here she disabuses readers of escapist and disembodied understandings of the end times and eternal life (hence the lengthy sidebar on the “rapture” [165–68]), showing how the New Testament witnesses to the resurrection and renewal of all creation as essential to comprehending what it means to be the human image of God wholly restored in Christ. However, there are some missing components here. While Imes hints from time to time at the economic and political implications of the new humanity in Jesus (177, 179), these remain mostly off the horizon of discussion. In our current world of massive social upheaval, a chapter reflecting on human beings as intrinsically also economic and political would certainly have been warranted, even necessary.
This is a book that could and should be read and discussed in many settings, including small groups, churches, introductory Bible or theology courses, and individual study.
