Feature
Image-Bearers for God
Does Biblical Language for Man Matter?
On Ash Wednesday this year I attended my parish church and was marked by the priest with the Sign of the Cross, along with the words: Remember that you are dust and to dust you will return. As powerful as the symbolism of the act is, the words fell flat.
Or is it just me recalling the old wording: Remember, O man, that thou art dust and to dust thou shalt return? The priest pausing mid-sentence—O man—and addressing each worshiper as “thou,” rather than gliding past with an indeterminate “you.” Each of these “thou’s” shares a common humanity: all are man, heirs in sin of the one earthly father and heirs in Christ of the one Heavenly Father. But the word had to go, because the sin and shame of “man,” so we are told, is actually the sin and shame of “mansplaining.”
Surely one can find a substitute for O man. O person? O human? O differently gendered? Failing that, just move on to O-mit. Hence we get the Anodyne Standard Version, which must be authoritative because it bears the imprimatur of the International Council on English Liturgies.
“But the Millennials simply don’t get it.” Well, if, as they say, praying shapes believing (lex orandi, lex credendi), it is equally true that believing shapes praying. And how shall they hear without a preacher? If “O man” is so obviously scandalous in our day, would it really be too much for the priest to give an explanation when inviting the people to the altar rail? Perhaps, he might instruct them, bearing the name of Adam is of a piece with bearing the cross on one’s brow
My goal in this essay is to make a case from Scripture for traditional language for man and for understanding how men and women, each in a particular way, are “image-bearers” of God. In this whirlwind tour of the Bible, I shall focus on the foundational texts in Genesis, the Gospels, and the Letters of St. Paul.
Creation & Fall: From Man to Adam
We begin at the beginning with language for God and man: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27). Right at the outset, let’s note: grammatical gender and number do not always correspond to the referent. This is true in all gendered languages. So in this verse, the one God of Israel (’elohim) is grammatically plural. In Hebrew, “spirit” (ruach) can be grammatically feminine or masculine, and in Greek it is grammatically neuter (pneuma). It is also true that gendered nouns, pronouns, and verbs often do indicate how the referent is conceived.
“God created man in his own image.” God is uniformly indicated in both Testaments with masculine pronouns, as is the Spirit on occasion (John 4:24). Grammatical gender aside, the masculinity of God as revealed in Scripture is beyond dispute: the Son makes the Father known (John 1:18), and he is addressed by Jesus and the Holy Spirit as “Abba, Father” (Mark 14:36; Rom. 8:15; Gal. 4:6). The Triune God, while not a male (Numbers 23:19), is masculine, and any attempt to imagine a gender-fluid deity is simply idolatrous.
Second, the Hebrew word for “man” (’adam) occurs grammatically in the singular only. There are no Adams or Adamses in the Bible. Since the first chapter of Genesis is describing the different “kinds” of God’s creatures, it is proper, I think, to translate the word as “man-kind.” Just as other verses in this chapter describe different creatures propagating “according to their kind,” so Genesis 1:27–28 specifies that mankind comes in two sexes, “male and female,” by which means they are commanded to “increase and multiply” sexually.
Each of the creation narratives has a climactic moment. In Genesis 1, it is God creating mankind in his own image. In Genesis 2, it is the male recognizing his female counterpart. Yet Genesis 2 retains the use of the noun “man” for the first human being: “Then the Lord God formed the man (ha-’adam) of dust from the ground (’adumah) and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature” (Gen. 2:7).
Stephen F. Noll (Ph.D., University of Manchester) is Professor Emeritus at Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, and retired Vice Chancellor of Uganda Christian University. Many of his essays on Anglican issues have been collected in The Global Anglican Communion: Contending for Anglicanism 1993-2018. He blogs at www.contendinganglican.org.
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