Deuteronomy 4:32-40
2 Corinthians 3:7-18
Luke 16:1-9
Psalm 80:1-19
I think I’ll look at parts of this over a couple of days. As always, there are connecting threads between the passages, but sometimes I’m just more interested in the fragments, even in a single line. That might be picking and choosing, but I’d prefer to think it’s just one of the ways the Bible presents itself.
The lines from Paul’s letter talk about how Moses covered his face when we was still glowing after speaking with Jehovah (Ex. 34), and then how the new covenant allows for the face-to-face encounter. “but when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another…”
David and Sarah Dark (two friends in Nashville--she's a songwriter and singer, he's the author of several useful books including Everyday Apocalypse) use the phrase “Unveiled Faces” as the name for one of their discussion boards , the one for general “how’s things going sharing.” I’ve never asked David or Sarah about who designed what on the website. A fellow named James Stewart has done a lot. At any rate, the use of the phrase in this context strikes me as an idea I would expect from David, that the mirror in which we see the glory of the Lord are the faces of those people closest to us. It’s a neat, elegant formulation—designed in God’s image, both you and the person you talk to, so when you see the other in those terms you also see your inheritance of divine design.
The passage has a couple of several subtleties. It is still a reflection—a mirror yes, but a mirror can be distorting, even dark. Not quite there to face-to-face. And the mirroring of glory in unveiled faces is not a single event or state, but an ongoing process that feeds on itself to pass to new degrees. This adds sense to the community interpretation (and earlier passages in the letter indicate it is very much concerned with the practical business of community). As the community adds depth of affiliation and mutual understanding, the divinity it reveals increases. Or the divinity itself increases. Is it a matter of what is seen, or of what exists?
This passage describes the believers being transformed into the same image. Interesting to think about this in light of recent discussion in the Republican debate about evolution. Sam Brownback published an editorial in the Times trying to explain why he said he didn’t believe in evolution. He doesn’t clarify much of anything, but he does rely on the formulation that people were formed in God’s image, and as long as the scientists don’t try to dispute that we’re cool. I don’t think the theory of evolution has an opinion about God’s image one way or the other, so I guess Brownback’s saying he didn’t mean it when we raised his hand to indicate he didn’t believe in evolution.
But this passage from Paul makes the business of people and God’s image more fluid, more progressive—more evolutionary. People develop—evolve?—towards higher degrees of being in God’s image. And they do this after receiving the Word, not at the time of creation. So people before the New Covenant were not so much in God’s image, not like those in Paul’s formulation. If people are developing forwards after Christ, in the community of belief, could there not have been similar progression occurring in the direction back into time. It seems to me that we are free to see creation in God’s image as a movement towards this state. And it is a movement that does not finish. Creation is an ongoing process, not just something that occurred in 6 days. And if it is ongoing from the point where the narrative of the Bible picks up, why would it not have been ongoing before that, an infinite regression of creation fitting an infinite creator.
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