the image of god

October 25, 2021/Paul Windsor/
One of the gracious privileges of my life was to be able to head off, as a 21 year old, to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS, near Chicago) to complete an MDiv degree.  It shaped me, sandwiched as it was between the other profound ‘shapers’ — growing up in a culture-not-my-own (in India) and pastoring a church far-from-the-madding-crowd (in Invercargill).
However, I had a critique of the TEDS years.  I graduated with a ‘departmentalised’ mind.  The curriculum was aligned to New Testament, Old Testament, Church History, Systematic Theology etc — but without an exercise to thread the departments together and help me be integrated in my philosophy and practice.  The expectation was that it would just somehow happen after graduation.
This was not satisfactory.  If ever given the opportunity, I was determined to experiment with an alternative approach.  Twenty years later that opportunity came.  We developed a new course out of nothing — an at-through-to course in which students looked at a cultural text/symbol, exegeting it carefully, before passing it through a biblical-theological lens and then on to a missional-pastoral outcome.  While imperfect in its design in those early years, it was an important statement.
I learned a lot by watching students struggle with this process.  One memory stands out.  No matter what the starting point in the culture at which they looked, once they started considering the lens through which to pass it, the truth about human beings as the ‘image of God’ was never far away.  It is life-giving.  It is transformative.  I found myself taking a particular interest in this doctrine…
2021 is 100 years since John Stott was born and 10 years since he died.  I welcomed the opportunity to mark the year by reading this collection of Stott’s essays (link here), with its Introduction by Mark Labberton — having been invited to write a review of it for the New Zealand journal, Stimulus.  The essays were (mostly) written from 1977-1981, the very same years in which God was turning me from thoughts about medicine and drawing me towards pastoral ministry — with listening to Stott at Urbana ’79 being the pivotal moment and TEDS being the training destination (arriving in 1981).

One essay (from 1972) engaged this doctrine of the image of God. It is vintage Stott (although I have changed “Man” to ‘Human Beings”!): 

1. Human beings have an intelligence, a capacity to reason and even to evaluate and be self-critical.
2. Human beings have a conscience, a capacity to recognize moral values and make moral choices.
3. Human beings have a society, a capacity to love and be loved in personal, social relationships.
4. Human beings have dominion, a capacity to exercise lordship over creation, to subdue the earth and to be creative.
5. Human beings have a soul, a capacity to worship, to pray, and to live in communion with God. 
These capacities (mental, moral, social, creative, and spiritual) constitute the divine image, because of which human beings are unique (246).
[Hmmm, I wonder if he’d express #4 in this way in 2021? Maybe ‘steward’, rather than ‘subdue’?]
This kind of approach has been foundational for me.  However, in the intervening years, I have found myself also returning, again and again, to the specific verse which announces the ‘image of God’ to us in Genesis 1.  This verse tells us so much about God, in whose image we are made.  (Almost) every single word has impacted me.  
Here, let me show you a slide that I have used to show how this happens…

To discover, in those early years, that I can be one who speaks brought confidence to my calling (with God’s words).  To discover, in those middle years, that I can be one who creates brought renewal to my journey (in God’s world).  To discover, in these latter years, that I can be one who initiates and relates brings transformation to my leadership (among God’s people) … and all made possible, by God’s grace and under his hand.

What about you?
nice chatting
Paul

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About Me

paul06.16

the art of unpacking

After a childhood in India, a theological training in the USA and a pastoral ministry in Southland (New Zealand), I spent twenty years in theological education in New Zealand — first at Laidlaw College and then at Carey Baptist College, where I served as principal. In 2009 I began working with Langham Partnership and since 2013 I have been the Programme Director (Langham Preaching). Through it all I've cherished the experience of the 'gracious hand of God upon me' and I've relished the opportunity to 'unpack', or exegete, all that I encounter in my walk through life with Jesus.

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