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A Christian Anthropology
What is a Christian anthropology?
A Christian anthropology studies what the bible teaches about the nature of humans.
Imago Dei
A bible based anthropology usually starts with the Genesis account of the creation of man. .
Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.
In God’s creating activity, man and woman are singled out from the animals and the rest of physical creation as special, because nowhere else in Scripture is anything else that God creates defined as in his ‘image’ or ‘likeness’.
A harmony of views
There are three broad views on what it meand to be made in God’s likeness.
These views are not really in competition but are different aspects of the same truth contained in the opening chapters of Genesis.
The essence of God
The ontological view concerns the essence of God, what are his attributes. God does not manifest himself in physical form: he’s metaphysical and this therefore means that in some way we mirror his essence or nature, both through our body and what we call the soul. This is often referred to as the ontological view of Imago Dei.
The church fathers were the first to study more thoroughly what Imago Dei (image of God) means, and Tertullian saw free will as the essential mark or stamp of the divine image. Augustine suggested that God and humans share some ontological2 component, trait or quality that essentially defines us: memory, intelligence and will.
Varying views were held among the Reformers and Reformed theologians, but the dominant view has been that there’s both a narrow and a broad definition of what it means to be made in God’s image. The narrow definition describes a spiritual dimension, or the virtues of holiness, knowledge of the truth and righteousness that humans possessed before the fall. In the narrow definition this divine image was lost in the fall of humankind and could be reclaimed only through redemption. However, a broader view of Imago Dei accepts that humans possess other attributes of God, such as intelligence, natural affections and freedom to choose, and that these are retained by all of humanity.
Truth
The Hebrew root ‘emet is used in various ways the OT in terms related to truth and conveys the ideas of stability, support, faithfulness and conformity to fact. God, speaking through the prophet Isaiah declares ‘I the Lord speak the truth; I declare what is right’ (Is 45:19). The word is also used to convey the idea of conformity to reality as opposed to something erroneous as for example the response of witnesses in Isaiah 45:9 ‘Let them bring their witnesses to prove them right, and let them hear and say, it is true’.
The NT usage of the term for truth accords with these OT concepts and also implies the absoluteness of truth, such as when Jesus prays for his disciples, ‘Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth’ (Jn 17:17).
Reality
The idea that truth is conformity to reality is referred to as the correspondence view of truth and is key to our thinking about what is actually output by the Large Language Models (LLMs) of Generative AI applications like ChatGPT. These systems generally don’t output specific quotes from individuals but produce a natural language synthesis from the training text corpora, raising the question, ‘how do we know it’s true’. We cannot attribute the output to a specific person or text. If we were to use the Bible texts as an example, simply outputting an amalgam of such texts, albeit in plausible natural language responses to questions posed, would be a distortion of God’s revelation to us that has been carefully preserved over centuries.
Revelation through language
Language is the means by which God reveals himself and truth (his word) to us. The emulation of natural language by an artefact, such as ChatGPT, that purports to be the same as that spoken or written by a person should raise serious ethical concerns for Christians who are called to mirror the Biblical correspondence meaning of truth. This understanding should also cause us to reflect carefully about whether such tools can be used in the Great Commission without compromising this calling. As the Apostle Paul writes to the Ephesian Christians, ‘having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbour,’. In using the likes of ChatGPT we must be careful to avoid what the prophet Isaiah laments about truth.
’truth has stumbled in the public squares’
Moral Agency
When God made Adam and Eve He gave them freedom to choose – moral freedom. They chose, against God’s command, to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil when they were tempted in the garden of Eden. This choice ended with disastrous consequences for creation and humankind.
Free will is foundational to moral responsibility, regardless of whether one thinks morality has external agency or not. As a concept it’s therefore important in the debate about AI potentialities, as well as in framing ethical questions in the use of AI and our relationship to it. It’s also important in relation to the moral responsibility at the heart of the ethical debate about self- drive vehicles and autonomous weapons. Effectively, when we step into a self-drive taxi or our own self-drive vehicle, we’re handing over moral agency to that vehicle.
Knowledge & Reason
God, is a reasoning, logical and intelligent and who is truth itself. That he’s a reasoning God is seen in Isaiah’s vision concerning Judah and Jerusalem, where God communicates his view of the waywardness of his people. God nonetheless encourages them to repentance and forgiveness.
Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord
Our ability to reason is a precious part of what it means to be human. It’s special to us and we don’t see it mirrored in animals. This ability to reason is communicated in language, both spoken and written, at a level unique to humans. We see reason worked out in Adam’s relationship and communion with God, in his understanding of what God was telling him and acting upon it – such as in naming the animals that God brought before him.
This is why we must careful how we think about Generative AI and avoid anthropomorphising it and imagining that it reasons and thinks like a human, that it is a human created intelligence that might even surpass ours.
Working & Creating
The act of creation itself shows us that God is a God who works and creates. Work was also part of God’s design for humankind and clearly a part of the natural order when he created Adam and Eve and they tilled and kept the garden.
The corruption of sin
The fall of humankind, described in Genesis 3, changes what we’re like because of the introduction of the corrupting power of sin. No longer do we love perfectly or think completely rationally, no longer do we seek justice and righteousness as God does, because of our selfish desires. Nonetheless, we remain creatures made in his image, made of his essence, and some of the nature of God is still seen, even in fallen humankind.
Restoring the Image
This image begins to be restored when we’re redeemed by Christ, as Paul reminds the Colossian Christians when he tells them that they’re to be renewed after the image of their creator (Col.3:10).
... you have put off the old self with its practicesand have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.