Imago Dei

I've begun teaching a grade 4 class here and I was talking one time with them about the concept of what it means to be created in the image of God. All of the kids, except for one, insisted that the idea of image was a physical one: that God had a real body. The one child who disagreed kept repeating, "No, God is a spirit!" Finally, I did weigh in that the one child was the one who had the idea and that the imago dei, or image of God, was not about the physical.

Now, we look at children and understand that developmentally, they go through stages of thinking and believing from the concrete to the more abstract. The idea of imago dei as a literal, physical concept is almost impossible for children to shake until they acheive a certain level.

It has occured to me recently that fundamentalist Christians who take umbrage with the concept that we have evolved at all are, in a sense, stuck at the level of thinking that imago dei is a physical idea. They struggle with, as I have in the past, the idea that we are just a few ticks off, genetically speaking, from the chimpanzee. The concept that we are mammals is uncomfortable for a fundamentalist and my idea here is that, in some unconscious way, they can't get over the idea that imago dei is physical is some way.

This is yet another way that fundamentalist thinking is really a betrayal of the core doctrines of Christianity.