Tag: Carmen Imes

What It Means to Bear God’s Name and the Significance of Not Taking God’s Name in Vain

We who take God’s name are His representatives in the world.

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In a previous blog article, I tried to summarize the view developed by Old Testament scholar, Carmen Imes, on what it means that human beings are made in God’s image. I have only summarized her view as I understand it from a conversation on the Holy Post podcast (with some thoughts of my own added in), but she wrote a whole book about it!

The book, Being God’s Image: Why Creation Still Matters, was recently published as a prequel to her previous book, Bearing God’s Name: Why Sinai Still Matters. The previous book on bearing God’s name, in turn, was distilled from Imes’ doctoral dissertation.

Her observations are profound in my book! (Which I don’t have because I am speaking figuratively now.) Having summarized her view on human beings being made in God’s image, I am turning now to the significance of bearing God’s name and not taking His name in vain.

Imes says we don’t bear (take on) God’s image because we are (already made in) God’s image, but we do take on (bear) God’s name if we are His covenant people. The significance of taking on God’s name is what is implicated in the third commandment: thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain.

In Carmen Imes’ first book, Bearing God’s name: Why Sinai Still Matters, she explores the commandment not to take the Lord’s name in vain. She argues for what she calls “missional reading”. Thus, she says we should not understand this command simply as a rule to be applied to our speech and how we refer to God verbally. She says the meaning is much broader, deeper and more fundamental than that.

This commandment implicates our whole lives! We who take God’s name are His representatives in the world. We bear or carry His name, so what we do, and who we are, and how we represent God, who’s name we carry, matters deeply!

Every human being is made in image of God, but only God’s covenant people bear His name. Every member of the human race is invited to join the covenant community, but until people join themselves to God’s covenant community, they do not take His name.

Thus, Imes says, “It’s impossible for a nonbeliever to take God’s name in vain.” They haven’t taken His name at all, so they cannot violate the command not to take God’s name in vain. If a person doesn’t take God’s name in the first place, he/she cannot take His name in vain.

Remember that God revealed His proper name, Yahweh, only to His covenant people. Yahweh was not revealed to all people at the time the commandments were given to Moses. The name of God, Yahweh, was only revealed to Israel in the context of the covenant God made with them.

In New Testament verbiage, we are ambassadors of Christ if we have been born again and accepted Christ as our Lord. When we are born again, we take on the “heredity” of God as His children. When we accept Jesus as Lord, we “take his name”: we become identified as Christ followers, traditionally known as Christians.

Because we are followers of Christ who bear his name, everything we do and say is a reflection of Him. We are representatives of the kingdom of God. We carry His flag as we live our lives in the world. (If, indeed, we are not ashamed to be called by His name.)

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The Surprising Significance of Being Made in God’s Image

The ultimate significance of human beings being made in God’s image is that we are to love (value) our neighbors and even our enemies.

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ROME, ITALY – MARCH 08: Michelangelo’s masterpiece: The Creation of Adam in Sistine Chapel

What does it mean that human beings are made in God’s image? What does it mean that God commands us not to take His name in vain? New answers to these interrelated themes might surprise you.

Carmen Imes wrote a book called Bearing God’s Name that explains for common folk like me the conclusions she developed in her doctoral dissertation. She just published a new book called Being God’s Image, a kind of prequel to the first book. I recently listened to her talk about these things with Skye Jathani on the Holy Post podcast that inspires my writing today. (The conversation starts at 54:20 if you want to hear it from her mouth.)

The commandment not to take God’s name in vain is where the conversation started, but being made in God’s image is actually the prequel to that “story”, and the significance of bearing God’s name (in contrast to being God’s image) is central to the story.

I am going to start with the backstory (in the beginning), what it means to be made in God’s image, and what it means to bear God’s name before opening a new understanding of the commandment not to take God’s name in vain, according to Carmen Imes.

Imes says that some theories entertained by the church misperceive the significance of the revelation in Genesis to people in that culture filled with false idols. They miss the mark and fall short of the reality that is expressed in Genesis.

Imes says, “The majority of the views out there through the centuries attached the image of God to some human capacity or function. That view makes the image of God something we do or are qualified to do by having a certain capacity.”

Rationality is ascribed by some to being made in the image of God. The reasoning is that we are intellectually superior to animals; therefore, rationality is what it means to be made in the image of God.

Others have ascribed being made in the image of God to our social and political ability to govern ourselves. Still others believe our morality and conscience are what distinguish us from the animals as being made in God’s image.

These things certainly distinguish human beings from other creatures created by God, but Imes says these human capacities, true as they are, do not accurately convey what the biblical text actually says. Imes says that applying the differences between humans and the animals to the text is just “theological speculation” (eisegesis – imposing our own thinking on the text).

This view of what what it means to be made in the image of God is not true to the biblical text, and it is not justified by the text. Exegesis of the text (pulling the meaning from the text, and not from our conceptions applied to the text) reveals a different view for what it means to be made in God’s image.

Imes goes back to the source material (Genesis) to rediscover a meaning that is truer to what the text actually says. She also reads the text in light of its context, the Ancient Near culture, to determine more precisely what it means that human beings are made in the image of God.

The backstory begins in Genesis 1:27:

God created mankind in his own image,
    in the image of God he created them;
    male and female he created them.

The Hebrew word translated “image” in this passage is tselem, meaning literally an image. Strong’s Concordance describes the word further as “a phantom, i.e. (figuratively) illusion, resemblance; hence, a representative figure, especially an idol — image, vain shew”. (See BibleHub)

We resemble or are representative of God, though (perhaps) we are not (yet) true (100%) representations of God. Given the Hebrew meaning of the word, tselem (with overtones of “phantomlikeness” and resemblance – implying something less than the real thing), perhaps we are merely phantom resemblances at this time.

I would note that we may only have the potentiality of being truly like God. In the New Testament, we find that we must be born again to become God’s progeny, His children, his ambassadors (representatives) and to be found “in” Christ, who is the exact representation of God in the flesh (not merely a resemblance).

Perhaps, we only have the potentiality to be truly like God, but that doesn’t discount the fact that we are created in His image – as Adam and Eve were created in His image – as we are. This understanding sheds new light, perhaps, on the first commandment: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me”; and it sheds new light on the second commandment: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.”

I am going beyond, now, what Carmen Imes says in the conversation, though I think it follows from her observations. I will also get to the surprising nuance she finds in reading Genesis 1:26-27* for what it says in the context of the Ancient Near Eastern culture.

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