The first half of each semester I teach Introduction to Christian Ethics, all we do is build a moral vocabulary. I do this, not because there aren’t an infinite number of material questions that I want to have time to discuss, but because if I have one course with them, it’s more important for me that they have a grasp on moral vocabulary and concepts than it is how to diagnose and discuss the au courant moral questions.
Don’t get me wrong—I spend a lot of time reading about particular moral questions, like violence and immigration. But unless we have a sense of how we are thinking, all of our action will tend to be reactionary, mirroring the presumptions brought to us by the question itself, in its framing, possibilities, and inviolable boundaries. As the philosopher Wittgenstein put it, sometimes our language goes on holiday: it pretends that words don’t have referents and meanings and gets draped over anything and everything as a justification for whatever we wanted to do anyway.
It’s not to say that moral language is immovable: our language describing the moral life has and does fluctuate, shift, coronate and depose. But at some point, apart from asking what our language is doing, it does everything, and thus, not much in particular.
One of the biggest offenders here? The “image of God”, the imago Dei if you’re fancy.
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The “image of God” in ethics references the being-ness of a human creature, that it has value and worth independent of what it does purely by virtue of being created by God. It images God, and as such, should be treated with dignity and respect. So far, so good. But absent any other considerations, imago language is pretty banal: it doesn’t really do anything other than encourage non-violation of the subject. Being created in the image of God, on its own, just tells me that something has intrinsic worth, but it doesn’t tell me whether or not that worth has ultimate limits, or whether that being’s thoughts and agency should be infinitely enabled, or how to adjudicate between images if they conflict. It’s the theo-ethical equivalent of me telling someone that “that is my child”: it’s a statement of fact, and probably of value, but I can’t necessarily deduce value from fact in that way.
(I mean, in the case of my children, yes—they are of infinite value. But you get the point.)
Let’s use the immigration debates as an example: as thousands of Hatians appeared underneath a bridge near Del Rio, a similar—and very tired—dynamic appeared in the discourse surrounding the migrants. On the one side, you had a group talking about the need for law and rule and boundary, that we need mercy but not without some order. On the other side, you had a group talking about imago Dei, that the migrants were created in the image of God as well, and that this justifies the unlimited welcome of Hatian refugees.
For what it’s worth—as we saw in the previous installment—I’m sympathetic to the second conclusion, i.e. the welcome of refugees, as consistent with the intent of the UNHCR 1951 statement which still provides the framework for refugees globally. Migration is an act of volition, but it’s rarely an act of pure volition, or if it is, of malicious intent. And such, hedging on the side of mercy as a polity is good, not only because of what it means for the ones asking for mercy, but because it encourages the body politic to think and act from a standpoint of mercy.
But the language of “image of God” doesn’t get us anywhere from a moral standpoint, apart from cutting off the possibility of abusing migrants. In fact, it doesn’t really stand as a counterpoint to the law-and-order arguments: to say that the migrants are to be thought under the rubric of “law and order” means that I’m not thinking of them as outside that framework, but that I think they’re equals in that way, and thus, law is a framework which all parties stand under. Put more directly, law is one way in which equal dignity can be applied (despite the fact that innumerable unjust laws continue to be made every day).
So, if both sides—the ones arguing for limited entrance and those arguing for expanded entrance—both agree that migrants have dignity and worth, what work is imago Dei doing? Not much, or at least, nothing that gets us closer to a moral standpoint. This is why imago language has to be connected to another concept, that of telos: the concept of ends, of asking what a being is ordered toward. If we have freedom, what is that freedom for? If we are good, what is that goodness for? What does it make possible in us? If we ascribe God’s image to someone, what does it mean for a person to live into that, to make that flourish?
This is where the discussions get more rich, more productive, and where imago Dei does its work: by cutting off the worst responses, by reminding us that laws can be unjust and thus not truly respecting that dignity, and by keeping us from offering solutions which don’t actually address the concrete dignity of a person. To use our example here: it’s not enough to a) refrain from being cruel to migrants, but we must b) also ask in what ways our laws are unmerciful to the needy, and c) ask how our solutions presume ridiculous standards for those in need, i.e. finding legal counsel in a country in which they do not know the language or customs.
Imago Dei is a defensive ethic: it protects and secures. But used alone, it can lead us to think we’ve done mercy when all we’ve done is set someone free without any way to be free. It’s the starting point, but not the end of our ethics.