Theology in the Raw - S2 Ep1078: What Does It Mean to Be God's Image? Dr. Carmen Imes

Episode Date: May 22, 2023

Dr. Carmen Imes earned her Ph.D. in Old Testament from Wheaton College and currently serves as an Associate Professor of Old Testament at Biola University. She's the author of two books: Bearing God's Name and Being God's Image--both published by IVP. Imes has appeared on more than 50 podcasts and radio shows and launched her own YouTube channel where she releases weekly "Torah Tuesday" videos. She is a guest blogger for Christianity Today, The Political Theology Network, and The Well (InterVarsity's blog for women in the academy and professions). Imes is also a frequent speaker at churches, conferences, and retreats. Before earning her Ph.D. from Wheaton College, Carmen and her husband served as missionaries in the Philippines with SIM International, reaching out to ethnic minorities. Imes loves introducing students to the rich insights of the global church. In this podcast conversation, Dr. Imes talks about what it means to be--not bear--God's image and why it matters. 

Hey friends, welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. My guest today is Dr. Carmen Imes, who is an Associate Professor of Old Testament at Biola University and Talbot School of Theology. She has an NMA from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, a PhD from Wheaton College. She's the author of two books. The first one is Bearing God's Name, and the most recent one that's about to be released is Being, not Be bearing, but you'll see what I mean, why I had to correct myself, being God's image. And that's the focus of our conversation. We look at what it means to be God's image, not just bear God's image, but be God's image and some of the ethical implications of that. So please welcome to the show for the first time, the one and only Carmen Ives. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I'm really excited.

Well, as I said offline, I've not read your book. It's not, well, it actually might be out by the time people are listening to this podcast, but I'm so excited about the direction you're going in the book, what I think, you know, just in talking to you about how not only understanding God's image, but also how does that, how do we use that to bring to bear on, on really important ethical topics today? So anyway, thank you for coming on the podcast. Yeah. Thanks for having me on. It's good to, good to finally meet you.

Yeah, you too. I've known your, so, you know, I, I've known of your name. Okay. A little backstory because I, I, you know, just, you know, you'd notice different scholars, you know, and stuff. And I noticed you were teaching at Prairie Bible College way up in Canada. Yep. So I came really close to getting my first teaching job there back when I was searching for a teaching post fresh on my PhD. And I was getting denied by everybody.

And they were one of the only ones that said, yeah, let's, let's talk further. And then it was so funny. I don't know if I should say this publicly, but the guy who was about to hire me, you know, hire me, he says, Hey, here's, you know, here's, you know, what we offer, you know? And I looked at it and I was just like, I'll take minimum wage. I just need a job, you know? And the, the, the salary was remarkably lower than any other salary I've seen. And I noticed it was way up in, in a very cold area of Canada. I'm from Southern California. So I'm looking at this and deep down, I'm thinking, well, I'll take anything at this point, you know? But then the guy trying to hire me says, well, are you sure you don't have any questions about the salary?

at this point, you know? But then the guy trying to hire me says, well, are you sure you don't have any questions about the salary? And I was like, well, this is a little lower than I was thinking, but better pounding nails, I guess, you know? But he's like, yeah, we're really trying to, we're really trying to work on that or whatever. But I'm like, are you trying to talk to me? They have increased their salary since you applied probably. I was there for four wonderful years. And although the pay was not amazing, the community was amazing and we actually really miss it. And we saw it as a missional place, you know, like we had been missionaries for 15 years. So we were used to living frugally and God provided a house for us. And we had a wonderful thrift store on campus that that provided lots

of clothing and other needed things at rock bottom prices so we're just so so thankful for our years at prairie it was a great experience i got the sense of that you know and that's you know i don't know too many scholars that go into scholarship for the money it's not you know so yeah i i would take a rich community and a vibrant place of learning and teaching over, you know, a higher paycheck. So that makes sense. And now you're at Biola. How, well, let's, let's go back. Just tell us really quickly, how did you get into scholarship? Was this something you were always passionate about or what's the story behind that? I always loved to learn and I always loved the Bible,

but like many women who love to learn and love the Bible, I wasn't sure there was a place for me in it, right? I wasn't sure what does a woman do with this? And I hadn't seen it modeled. And so my sense of calling was to missions. And so my husband and I became missionaries. And while we were overseas in the Philippines, I started working on a master's degree. And it's just really clear that the academy is what I'm built for. I just love learning. I love books. I love the academic calendar.

I love what happens in the classroom. I love what happens in the professor's office. And so our thought was that we would be missionaries for a good chunk of time. And then eventually I'd come back and teach missions maybe at a school, but we didn't stay overseas long enough to do such things. We were only there two and a half years. So you don't become a missions prof with two and a half years of field experience. And really my love for scripture never went away. And over the years, I worked through my own understanding of what the scriptures teach about women's roles and came to the place where I really believed that God had gifted

me to teach and was calling me to teach. And so we dove right in. And I did my master's at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary while I had little kiddos. I had two daughters when I started seminary, and then we had our son partway through. And so entering into the PhD, my kids ranged from three years old to fifth grade. And so it was a family endeavor to get me through the PhD at Wheaton College. But yeah, such a rich experience. Wow, that's awesome. That's awesome. And then now you're at Biola University, right? I am, yeah. And I've been here, this is my second year here, and it's been a great

experience. I think I've been most surprised at how similar it feels to Prairie, actually, culture-wise. I thought Southern California would be a far cry from the prairies of Alberta, but I find that my students are so similar and namely they love Jesus. They are eager to understand the scriptures and they're very kind to each other and to me. And so, it's just been a really warm and welcoming place. I wondered if Southern California would be like, my students would be too cool to talk to me or I wouldn't be cool enough. Like, I wasn't sure what to expect. I'm from Colorado. You know, California is where all the Valley girls were.

I just didn't know. But it's been such a beautiful community and I love my students and my colleagues. Well, I'm a huge Biola fan. They do sponsor the show from time to time. So there's a sense of which I do, you know, get, get paid for that, but just here, they're paying me to say this. You're not paying me. This is, I love, uh, the culture there. Um, your, your president, uh, Barry is just one of those humble,

wise people, you know, I've, I've ever met every, I was just there touring the campus actually a few weeks ago with, with my daughter who is exploring colleges. And every dean and prof and all the way like the film department and everybody, they all were so passionate about the supremacy of Christ. And they're like, look, we'll teach you film. We'll teach you all the videography. We're good at what we do. But here's what we're mainly passionate about. We want to release solid Christ followers into all areas. Everybody was so passionate about that. And that's, I think why it feels similar to Prairie

because nobody goes to Prairie or to Biola unless they want Bible. It's not like people are like going to hold their nose to take Bible classes and really are here for film because Bible is such a big part of our core curriculum that you take a lot, you take a lot of Bible and theology. And so, you could go do your degree elsewhere and not have to do that if that's not what you want. And so, I find that students actually want to come to class and they actually want to engage. And so, it doesn't feel like pulling teeth to get people interested in the Old Testament, which is super fun for me. I had a fun, they had me down for like two days of speaking. Man, they ran me to the ground. days of speaking, man, they ran me into the

ground. It was morning to night nonstop, but I had, I mean, interact with such a wide range of, of students all the way from like groups of students that didn't really feel like they fit, but they were, I was like, we want you here all the way to like conservatives and more people just trying to figure out where they're at. And yeah, I just, I loved it, man. I love, I missed that college age, you know, where people were just on that, on that part of their journey, you know, with asking hard questions. I love that. I love it too. And that's what, what first planted the seed in me was just all the hours I spent in my professor's offices when I was in college asking them questions and it wasn't always Bible questions. Sometimes it was,

should I be dating this guy? Should we get married? How do I move into missions? There were lots of life questions and decision questions, and I felt like my professors were so kind to come alongside and mentor me through that. And I thought, boy, this is the best of both worlds where there's a pastoral dimension to the job. And, and yet there's also the study and writing and teaching aspect to it. And I love, I love both equally. I love office hours. Yesterday, I was the one tearing up during office hours, just hearing students' stories and, and walking them through some hard things. You know. A student could come and say, man, I just can't get this paper right. And we discover it's not about the paper. It's that this paper for him had become a question of whether he belonged in the academy. There was so much weight on the assignment. It wasn't just,

Like, there was so much weight on the assignment. It wasn't just, how do I format it? But can I cut it? Am I enough? Do I have what it takes? And so being able to pivot the conversation to talking about what he has to offer the academy and how sometimes the academy squeezes out all of those who are not sort of the typical student cookie cutter student. And so just to be able to invite students from a wide spectrum of life experiences and viewpoints and social locations to come in because we want their voices and because they have a contribution to make, that's been so much fun. That's good. Oh, man. And so you said you have two kids? I have three. Three kids.

Yeah. I just, I don't know. I just want to acknowledge something that maybe, I guess, not to jump into the deep waters right now, but that men, especially in the debate about women and leadership and all that stuff, like, you know, I did a PhD and my wife was home with our kids and I would go to the office 10, 12 hours a day. That was rude. That was, I mean, I loved every second of it, but it was one of the most hard, most difficult things I've ever done. Yeah. I can't imagine doing that as a hard enough as a

father, but as a mother, I just, again, leave it aside all the debate. Just can we just step back and say that that is profoundly remarkable that you had pushed through something that is intrinsically nearly impossible with little kid, the physical, mental, emotional, physiological, just stress that, and yet you earned a PhD from Wheaton, which is not an easy school to earn a PhD. I think I would say, you know, it's not a cakewalk for anybody, but the key is partnership and support, like finding support. And so for me and my husband, we have in each season, we've kind of re-described what is life going to look like? Who does the laundry? who does the grocery shopping, who helps the kids with their homework. And so we've, you know, there are certain things that

only I can do, namely give birth and breastfeed. But actually, everything else can be done by either of us. And my husband is a wonderful father. And so we had a schedule during my PhD in which every 15-minute segment of the day was designated for something. And he was working a split, split, split, split shift doing full-time mission work, doing admin and logistics for our mission organization from early, early in the morning to late, late at night, but getting the kids ready and off to school, doing all the grocery shopping and the cleaning. While I was at the library, I would get up early, go to the library and work till three. And then I'd come home, get the kids from school and be with them until bedtime. So we had a way of carving things up so that we're both fully engaged and fully involved. And so I agree

with you, it would be absolutely impossible to do if you're doing everything by yourself, if you're doing all the traditional things that moms have done, and none of it plus all of the academic journey, but we carved things up in different ways. And by the time I started the PhD, my youngest was three years old. So we were out of the breastfeeding stage. Everything else was fair game for either of us to invest. And we just made sure that I had a chance to connect with every kid every day. So we had kind of a rotating system of time with mom, plus after school. My husband would make dinner and put it in the fridge, ready to go the oven. He would like prep it all so that when I got home, I could just focus on the kids and I didn't have to be cooking. I could just take what

he prepared and stick it in the oven and focus on the kids and their homework and whatever. So I feel like it was a rich time for our family of like all of us pulling in one direction. You know, we made, I made a chart with thermometers on it. Like, you know, when you do a fundraiser and you're like watching the thermometer fill up as the funds come in, I had charts, I had thermometers for each of my categories of comprehensive reading and the dissertation so that when mommy finished reading a book, the kids got to take turns coloring in the thermometer so that they were celebrating with me. You know, if I finished a dissertation chapter,

that meant we could go out to eat or we got ice cream. And so there was a collective sense of we're in this together, which was fun. Then we reached the point where they thought, yeah, probably mom will never, ever be done. I'll believe it when I see it. So it worked pretty well for three years and then they kind of burned out. We have, we have, we've had a tradition, uh tradition early on, at least when I'd submit a book manuscript, like when I was kind of at least done, like off my plate, you know, we would all go to Chili's and get usually like chips and salsa and a dessert. And especially, you know, early, I can think of the first book I submitted, first couple. I mean, we were, I was working two jobs to make ends meet. It was just really tough.

So to go out, we rarely, rarely went out. So, I mean, it was such a special time and now, you know, I've written a few books and now it's like, dad, have you written a book recently that we can go out again? It's like, it's kind of lost its excitement, you know, but yeah, those are, those are just fun ways to include the whole family and what can be challenging, you know, times. And I would say my wife and I more recently, cause now she works full time. Like she runs the organizations that I feel like I work for her now, which is awesome. But now, so we've, we've learned to do more, I guess what you learned in a PhD where it's like, this is wrong because zone, zone defense. And there is no kind of, you do this, you do that.

So if I do any laundry, I'm helping my husband out because he normally does it right. He does all the shopping. You know, I'm like, Hey hon, we're out of cream cheese. And he puts it on his list. Like that's just, there's no, there's no verse in the Bible that says the woman has to do the grocery shopping. Oh, we should get into it that, but I want to get into your book because that would be a fun one to pursue. But, um, let, okay. So your your book that, again, I think this will, if I know the timing right, your book will be coming out probably in a week or so when people are listening to this. Bearing God's Image. You're tackling one of the most, I don't want to say complex, maybe it's complex, but what does it mean to bear God's image? And I love that you tease out all the practical implications of this, but let's start with

what does it mean to bear God's image? I know that you keep it big. Yeah, so I'll start with a correction. It's not, so my first book was Bearing God's Name. This one is Being God's Image. And so being rather than bearing, and there are lots and lots of people, like the majority of people who talk about the image of God talk about bearing the image or talk about imaging God, but I actually start the book by trying to make what I hope is a strong

case for why we should shift that language, because I believe that every human being is the image of God. It's not something we carry, which sort of makes it like an extra add-on that could be then taken away or dropped or lost. The image of God is fundamentally who we are. To be human is to be the image of God. It can't be lost. It can't be diminished. It can't be destroyed. It's not defined by its function. Although it's expressed in functions, I don't attach image to our capacities or to our function. So when people talk about imaging God, turning the word image into a verb, it makes it something we do rather than who we are.

So I don't know if, I'm sure that all readers will not decide to agree with me on that, I'm sure that all readers will not decide to agree with me on that, but I hope that I persuade lots of people that we are the image and that that identity, that human identity then has implications for all a host of what we see in our world, a lot of the forms of discrimination or neglect or abuse that we see in our world, it begins with an assessment of someone else's humanity that is somehow diminished. For example, if rationality was the basis for the image of God, if we're the image of God because we're rational creatures, then we could actually plot humans on a sliding scale of how much reason do they exhibit. And then as soon as someone is in a stage of dementia or in a coma or if they're born with an intellectual disability, then that seems to imply that they're less the image of God than other humans. And I think it's very important to say that every human being has equal dignity. So, so that's, that's sort of my starting point in the book. That's super clear. I've heard, you know, at first, well, your colleague, Ryan Peterson,

who's done work on this, I think if I remember correctly, he made the same correction. I think I used the phrase bearing. He's like, watch, I like being more. So yes. Yeah. I actually based. So, so my first book bearing God's name was based on my dissertation work at Wheaton. It's a re-examination of the command not to take the Lord's name in vain, which I argue is, um, is really an acknowledgement that Israel bears God's name.

And so it's telling them you belong to me. I've put my name on you. So, now live like you belong to me. So, it's a missional, ethical reading of that command. This book was a very different sort of project because it's not based on my dissertation research. It's based on other people's dissertation research, like Ryan Peterson. So, he was actually my starting point for kind of clarifying or shifting the nuance to say, no, we are the image of God. That's our human identity. And so based on his work and the work of Richard Middleton, Kathy McDowell, John Kilner, others who wrote their dissertations on this topic, I've kind of assembled what I think is the best of each of their insights and then said, okay, given this foundation, now let's chase this through the rest of the

Bible and then into the implications for behavior and for Christian ethics. I really like Middleton's work. I read most of it, of the ones you listed. Yeah, the liberating image. Would you say that he's pretty spot on in your estimation? I would. Yeah. He actually wrote the forward to this book. We're on the same page about the image. I love how he talks about that rulership is not the content of the image, but it's the implication of the image. So, it's not that we are the image of God because we rule.

image. So, it's not that we are the image of God because we rule. We rule because we're the image of God. So, the starting point is that human identity that Ryan Peterson talks about, but then it's meant to be expressed in benevolent stewardship, benevolent rulership over creation. I think when we get those in the right order, then again, it helps with, well, what happens when, how are we going to talk about humans who aren't ruling over anything or who are not in a place where they have the capacity to do much, whether it's because of severe disability or they're super young, you know, an infant or a pre-born child, or if we're talking about someone in their later years and they've begun to lose capacities, what does it mean to rule? Well, if we come back to this is our human identity, and now let's talk about the ways of expressing it, but we don't

attach the image to that expression. I think that is helpful. You're stressing just more the ontological object of reality that we bear God's image, not trying to separate it from the function. The function flows from the ontological reality, but the image of God is intrinsic to the ontological reality. Okay. Yep. It's intrinsic and it can't be diminished or destroyed. And that idea I first got from John Kilner. He spoke at ETS.

He gave a plenary session at the Evangelical Theological Society. I think it was my first year back in 2012 or something. Now I don't remember for sure the year. Oh, that wasn't my first year. Would have been in seminary. So we're talking maybe even 2009, 2010. He gave a talk on that. And he said, I used to teach that the image of God was diminished after the fall, or that it was, you know, lost in some way, that when Adam and Eve choose to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, their status as God's image is somehow compromised. And he said, he went on to make what I thought was a really compelling case that the Bible doesn't support that view, that if you carefully and closely read the text, that is not what's lost.

Certainly, there's a breach between humans and God. There's a separation. There's antagonism between them and God and between them and each other and between them and creation. But it never says the image is lost or diminished. And if we turn to chapter 5 of Genesis, we see image of God language being used again for humans. If we turn to chapter 9, this is where I think it's especially compelling. After the flood, God tells Noah, here's why you can't kill each other.

Because you're the image of God. you're the image of God. And so, if it's still true after the flood, and if it's still true after the fall, then I don't think we can say that it's been diminished. Okay. What almost, I'm just trying to think of an analogy, like, say a tree had a disease or something, you know, that disease, you know, sin is a disease, whatever, like, that doesn't mean the tree is any less a tree. It's still a tree. It's tree-ness is not compromised at all. It's just, it's a tree in need of some kind of healing, some kind of restoration. Is that, I mean, I don't know if that's too simplistic or. Yeah, you know, an illustration that I like to use to describe it is, I think there's a strong notion of kinship related to the image.

And we see that in Genesis 5 where Adam's son is his image, just like we're God the image. And we see that in Genesis 5, where Adam's son is his image, just like we're God's image. So, there's a kind of family relationship that is implied by our status. And if you have a child who rebels against you, wants nothing to do with you, your relationship is strained, but there's no possible way of erasing the biological family connection. You are their parent, no matter whether you're talking to each other or not. And they are your child. You can't erase the ontological fact that they came from your seed, right? So, I think that's how I like to talk about it.

And I would agree with those who hasten to point out that there is a problem after the fall. I agree that there's a problem and that there's brokenness. I would follow Haley Goranson Jacob has a wonderful book on glory in Paul. And I'm kind of building on her work by saying, I think what's lost at the fall is the glory, not the actual image. So, at the fall, humans retain their status, their dignity, but then they're not living congruently with that identity. And when we don't live in congruence with our God-given identity, there's a loss of glory. So, what we're being, in the New Testament, when we're being conformed to Christ, who is the image of God, I think that's saying Christ is human, just like we are. He's the image of God and we're the image of God.

But he exhibits a glory that's supposed to result from being the image of God that we've lost because we're not living in alignment with that identity. And so there's a possibility as we conform to Christ to be restored to the glory we were intended to have. That's super helpful, actually. This episode is sponsored by World Concern. World Concern is a Christian humanitarian organization that is addressing some of the most significant needs in the world today. For instance, there's been a devastating drought that's hit Somalia. I don't know if you've heard about this, but it's become one of the largest humanitarian crises in the world today. Four relentless years of drought have destroyed the country of Somalia. In 2022 alone, over 40,000 people have been killed from the drought and children and families continue to have ongoing needs, the basic necessities of life, food, water, and of course, ultimately the love of Christ. So

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12 bucks feeds a family for a whole month. So I invite you to pray. We should always pray. And I invite you to take action. Please consider giving a gift of 12 bucks. No, let's say 24 bucks. Let's help two families. Consider giving a gift of 12, 24 or more dollars to help families survive this hunger crisis. You can give today at worldconcern.org forward slash theology. That's worldconcern.org forward slash theology to embody the love of Christ toward family and children in need. I'm curious, and I want to get really quickly to the practical implications because

that's kind of where the rubber meets the road. I've always been intrigued by, I guess more of a question, why is such a profoundly significant idea, doctrine, us being God's image? It's so hard to grasp. It's deeply ingrained. I know. It's crazy. I'm embarrassed now to go look back at my books and see how many times I said bearing down. Oh, no, no. Preston, I just read the audio book of my own book and it's kind of scary how many times I said bearing the image in the book

where I argue that we should say bearing the image. Oh, okay. No, it's deeply ingrained. Why does the Old Testament hardly even mention it? You mentioned, you know, obviously Genesis 1, Genesis 5, Genesis 9, 6, I think it is. Is it even mentioned elsewhere in the New Testament? In the New Testament, you have James, James 3, I think, and then most of the other references that image of God are referring to Jesus. Is it just such an assumed notion that it doesn't need to be mentioned?

Or why hardly? It's a fascinating question. So I began my work in Exodus at Sinai talking about bearing the name. And I began to think, well, this is weird because I love tracing this theme of bearing God's name through the Bible where God has placed his name on his covenant people. And now we're invited into this vocation of representing him. That's really cool. And it's compelling. And I see it everywhere. But it only starts midway through Exodus.

So what about the first part of the story? Like, how could we tie this all together? And people kept asking me, when I talked about a representative view of bearing God's name, they kept saying, oh, isn't that kind of like being the image of God? Like, or bearing God's image, they would say, that we're representatives of God ruling over creation. And so, then my response was, okay, so it's similar in that it's a representative role, but it's different in its scope. Every human being is the image of God, but only the covenant people bear God's name. And so, I think what I see happening in Scripture is that first we get introduced to the wider

human purpose. But because things get derailed in Genesis 3 and humans lose that closeness with God, God inaugurates this next project, which is an inner, like you could think of it as an inner part of a Venn diagram or a next level up on different tiers of election maybe, where he says, okay, I want to restore all creation. I want to restore humanity to their purpose. So, I'm going to choose this subset of humanity to then mediate my will and my love to the nations and they can be reconcilers, right? my love to the nations, and they can be reconcilers, right? So, I think the reason why image of God kind of disappears is because we have a focus on the covenant people who bear God's name. And once we get to Jesus, who's the climax of that covenant, then we can start talking about,

what are the implications for all humanity? Once we have the people of God reconciled with God, ready to reach the nations, then we can go back to talking about the image. That's my best guess. That makes sense. I mean, sometimes the concept can be everywhere without the word necessarily occurring, right? And I hear you saying that this concept underlies so much of other super important aspects of God's story. Okay, so when you're making a distinction between bearing and being, you know, I immediately was thinking what you kind of hinted to, you know, people with disabilities or people, even somebody who's like unconscious or whatever, like they don't, um, cause if you put too much in the rationality

or function of humans, then you're just excluding a chunk of humanity. So in terms of the implications, um, is that one area you dive into with, with, uh, disability and then, yes, I have a couple of sections in the book on disability and I've actually dedicated the book to, uh, a dear neighbor of ours in, in Alberta who is developmentally disabled and the best neighbor anyone could ask for. Just a really super kid. He's 20 now, 20 or maybe about to turn 21. And he was cheering me on every day I'd come home from work and he'd stop me in the cul-de-sac and say, first he'd ask about my COVID symptoms. He would say, I'd roll down my window and he'd say, do you have any symptoms? And I'd say, no symptoms.

And he would ask for my imaginary COVID card and he would pretend to scan it. And then he would give me the green light to go home. And then he'd quickly ask me, did you write about me in your book today? And I'd have to say, no, not yet. Like, how many words did you write? So I only wrote 200 words today. So he was checking on me every day. And then he'd say, what are you having for dinner?

I'd say, I don't know, Colton. You tell me what I'm having for dinner. He goes, you're having spaghetti. Because he actually, every day after school, would go to my house and help my husband with chores. So he would watch while my husband's getting dinner ready. So then I would show up and Colton knew what I was eating before I did. So anyway, just a dear, dear neighbor. And so yeah, I have

a couple of sections where I explore different dimensions of disability. I've become increasingly convinced that we operate with a, we tend to operate with this cookie cutter image of a human, the ideal human in our mind, who is usually white, male, middle-aged, able-bodied, married with children. Like there's this very specific kind of like, this is the default. And then anyone who's not that, so like a single man or an older man or a younger man or a black man or a Latino man, like are all kind of one step removed from that center cookie cutter. And I've heard people talk about this, but I've now been sitting with it for a few

years as I worked on the book. And I'm just convinced, you know, I saw it in my office yesterday, as a student came and said, I don't know if I'm enough. And what he saw about himself is he's wildly creative and full of energy and full of vision. And when he looks at his male professors, he doesn't see that. He can't map himself onto who they are or what they are. And so, then he kind of self-selects, like, I guess I don't belong here. And maybe I should go into theater where the things that I naturally am are welcomed instead of sort of sidelined or there's not really a place for it here. And so I am convinced that we have been deeply affected by this cookie cutter idea. Descartes, I'm not a philosopher, so I'm just dabbling here. But it's Descartes who said,

I think, therefore I am. And I'm just so convinced that's not biblical. We don't exist. We aren't ontologically or existentially here because we think. We're here because God made us His image. Our identity is grounded in what God says about us or who God says we are not in some kind of self determination that happens when our neurons are firing because then the moment that your neurons don't fire as rapidly as other people want them to or in the same ways that other people then you don't fit man I love the drill down into that. How do we change that perception? Because here you have, like you said, these male rational teachers, like they're doing anything, but like that could unintentionally if the people who are up front happen to be kind of more this cookie cutter. Again, I have nothing against not saying anything. How do we address that persona so that people are unintentionally made to feel like maybe I'm lesser than or I don't fit in? I get this a lot from men that don't exhibit what our culture would say are stereotypical masculine traits. Same thing.

And then, again, even if they're always saying it, there's a culture here that could unintentionally make people feel like I'm less of a man or, or God forbid, they would feel like I'm not a godly man because the church is embodying kind of this kind of masculinity or, or femininity, which is really shaped more by cultural assumptions than the Bible. Yep. Yeah. I mean, who does, who does do the grocery shopping? Who does do the laundry? Like we we've lived that reality and my husband has had to wrestle with, well, what do you do about play dates when, you know, you, your kids want to get together. And normally it's like the moms will chat while the kids play. It's like, well, what do you do now? And, um, yeah, I, I think there are some

really practical, um, deliberate things that we can do to help widen the net and help people to know that their voices are, their voices matter. I'm part of an organization called Every Voice, a center for kingdom diversity. We have a website and we're working to help diversify what people are reading in theological education. And this is a group of conservative evangelical professors who believe it matters that our students are not just reading white men, but are reading a wide variety of voices. So in the classroom, I try to be really intentional about who are my students reading. And one way I've held myself accountable with that is I put a picture. If I ever quote someone in class, like in the PowerPoint, I put up a quote. I put a picture of the person as well because our insights aren't

coming out of nowhere. They're coming from who we are and the way we see the world. And so I want students to get a sense for what is the context of where this quotation is coming from. And a picture gives us a slice of that. It's of course, does not tell the whole story. We have plenty of white students at Biola who are third culture kids because they grew up in other contexts or they're from mixed race families, or they, um, they're from different socioeconomic backgrounds. So there's, there's a lot of diversity that you can't see in a picture. But what I'm trying to do is expose my students to more voices because I want my students to see, I want them to see themselves in the story, in the biblical story and see themselves in scholarship, that people like them do contribute to scholarship and that

their voices are welcome. Another thing I've done is try to be intentional about the kind of biblical art that I put in my slides. So, uh, Lady Wisdom is a black woman in my slides. Like I used to have a white woman there and one day I went, wait a minute, why, why is she white? We're in the Middle East. Like, like she doesn't need to be, she doesn't need to be white. And so just like subtle ways that I'm trying to signal that there's more diversity in scripture. I'm working on a collaborative project now with a psychology professor here at Biola. His name's Oscar Baldolimar, and he's a brilliant cultural psychologist, and he specializes in adolescent development of cultural ethnic identity. And we're working on a project where we're making a curriculum for churches that help students navigate their own exploration of cultural background and identity with reference to biblical characters who are multicultural. We've got a lot of them. There's a lot of people who change countries or cultures or who are hybrid in some way, like Moses, who's Hebrew, but raised by an Egyptian mom and then marries a Midianite and

then goes back and he never really feels fully at home in any of those spaces. And we have students who don't feel at home in any space because they have some kind of hybrid identity. So, helping them to see that the Bible is not a story of whiteness, but it's a story of a multicultural family of God. That's one thing that we're doing. A few years ago, when I first got to Prairie, an idea occurred to me one day. I thought, I wonder, of my own personal library, you know, hundreds and hundreds of books, I thought, I'm curious how many of these are written by women. And so, I went through my entire office and I turned around backwards every book that was written by a man, not because I want to get rid of them or because I didn't learn anything from them. I've learned so much from men. Every single Bible theology

professor I've had has been a man. I've never had a woman in class professor. So I just, I turned it all so that you could see the pages rather than the spine. And I left the spine showing of books by women. And it was incredible how few books I had in my personal library by women. And that's a testimony to the fact that I wasn't asked to read women all through Bible college, all through seminary, all through grad school. I think I was asked to read four books by Bible college, all through seminary, all through grad school. I think I was asked to read four books by women out of the hundreds of books that I read. And so I just, it was a kind of a visual act of noticing and kind of wondering. And so now I've been working really hard to diversify my library because what I'm collecting, then it impacts what I'm reading, which impacts what

I'm sharing with students. So, all with the idea that we need to, if we want to break out of the cookie cutter idea and recognize the full diversity of the body of Christ and all that each cultural background has to bring to the table, then we have to be talking to people who don't look like we do. So disability was probably the newest area for me to explore as I wrote the book. I hadn't collected any books up until that point written by or for disabled people or about the Bible from a disability perspective. And so that's where I started to dive in. And I was like, wow, there's so much here that I haven't thought about before. Who did you read? I'm curious. I've been dabbling a little bit too.

Yeah. So, so Bethany McKinney Fox's book, uh, disability in the way of Jesus was my entry point. And that book was just so profound. Uh, the first chapter alone was worth the price of the book. Um, just re helping me realize that I had certain assumptions about what it's like to be disabled and what disabled people want that I was wrong about. And I am just really at the beginning of the learning stages in that. But I also picked up a book called, I think it's The Bible and Disability, edited by Sarah Melcher, maybe, and Jerome Shipper, Amos Young. Those are some names that keep coming up in biblical studies, right? Amos, he's kind of a guru, I think. Yep, he is.

And that book is like a one volume. It's Baylor University Press, one volume commentary in which every chapter is about a different part of the Bible and kind of surveying what do we see about disability in this book of the Bible. And so I haven't read it from cover to cover, but as I'm working on projects, I'll look or have students look to see, okay, what do we need to know in this book about like what's happening here that we might not be noticing if we're not coming from a place of kind of acknowledged or diagnosed disability. So I host this conference every year called Exiles in Babylon. We tackle kind of four or five different topics in like three-hour chunks, you know.

And one of the ones we did this year was disability in the church. And it was so fun. A lot of people admitted to me that they said, look, coming into this, that was the one I was least excited about. And it was, I think, hands down, everybody said that was the most impactful. Like I was, they were like, I did not, this opened my eyes up to things that I've never thought about. And yeah, it's just a topic we just, I like you, I'm just probably a couple of years in kind of thinking and rethinking and reading and talking and stuff. And it's just like my learning curve is just being really bent upwards.

But what, okay. So what are some other yeah. Ethical areas you deal with? Oh, and by the way, I know, I know you're, you're on a bit of a time crunch. You, you just give me a, maybe a peace sign when you got like two more minutes and I'll try to land a place for you. If that's okay. That's fine. That's fine. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I talk about race and race relations.

I talk about disability. I talk about age, a bit about ageism. I talk about vocation and not just in the sense of the ideal choosing what you want to do with your life, but what happens when you can't work. I tell a story about a season of underemployment for my husband that was really demoralizing. And I just heard from a reader yesterday that that part of that chapter really ministered to him. So, I talk about gender roles and, you know, what does the Bible say about this and ground things. Since the subtitle of the book is

Why Creation Still Matters, I spend quite a bit of time in the first few chapters of Genesis showing how it's our human embodiment that qualifies us to be the image of God, and that our bodies matter, our sexed embodiment matters, you know, male and female, and then that there's this partnership, an inherent partnership in chapters 1 and 2, where both are the image of God. Male and female are both the image of God, and we are both told to rule, and there's no hierarchy as I see it in chapters 1 and 2. It's not as though, you know, Adam is made before Eve in chapter 2, but that priority

of timing doesn't seem to imply a priority of authority. The first time we see a deliberate or explicit hierarchy is in chapter 3 after the fall. And so, I kind of tease that out. What would it look like if we took seriously the need to conform to God's vision for gendered partnership in doing the work He's laid out for humans to do. I talk about marital status a bit and interact with the work of Wes Hill a bit in that section as I talk about singleness and the image. Do we have to be married and having babies to be the image of God?

And the answer to that is no. I think, you know, male-female dissimilarity is a prerequisite for procreation, but I don't think procreation is the essence of the image of God because even animals are male and female and supposed to be fruitful and multiply in chapter one. So, I don't think that's a necessary entailment of being the image. And so, I explain why grammatically, chiastically in that section. And then I go on to explore eschatology. So, if Jesus, I think this is something that we don't talk about enough. Jesus is incarnate. He comes in a human body. He dies in a human body. He is raised to life in a human body and ascends in a human body. So, as I quote later in the book, a human is now a member of the

Trinity. You know, after Jesus' ascension, we have this picture of like there's a human in the Trinity, and I don't think that's fully appreciated. There's been such a deep-seated idea that you ask Jesus in your heart so you can go to heaven when you die. And we picture heaven as this disembodied existence where we're floating around in the clouds. And I just think it's essential for us to recognize if God wanted to give us a disembodied existence, he did not need to send us an embodied savior. He sends us Jesus in a body and Jesus still has his body. And we're looking forward to new creation,

not the obliteration of creation, but the restoration of creation in which our embodied selves have a role to play. That's I've never, it's so simple, but I've never heard it framed like that, that there's a human in the Trinity. Yeah. Isn't that something? Yeah, yeah, yeah, but he's God. Yeah, he's also 100% human, right? And that's the Orthodox Christian view is 100% deity doesn't detract from his humanity at all. So we do have a human in the, however you want to slice it, we have a human in the Trinity. I've never, it just sounds jarring to even say, but such a strong theme in scripture

with so many implications. And yeah, do you feel like in our society, even the church where we kind of don't appreciate the theological necessity of embodiment? We absolutely don't. We don't because I, you know, I've seen it in conversations with young people. You talk about resurrection and they kind of look at you funny, like, well, yeah, I believe Jesus rose from the dead. No, Jesus is the first fruits. Like, we are all going to raise from the dead. Like, our bodies are going to come up out of the ground.

When Jesus appears to his disciples, he has scars. There's continuity between His body that was on the cross and the body that shows up to them. There's continuity. And I just don't think we've sat with that enough. And I think, you know, in all your work on sexuality, you know that embodiment is a hot topic. those and there are so many um people who feel a sense of disjunction or dysphoria with their body to body dysmorphia and i think um if we recovered the bible's teaching on embodiment it it has something to offer that conversation uh about who am i i'm not something apart from my body body. The real me is not something amorphous, purely spiritual or soul. My body is part of the real me. And I hadn't really thought through

that implication as I was writing. It's hit me more after the implications for our current cultural moment. But I would say while I was writing, we were going through the pandemic and everything was on Zoom. And I predicted this coming. I said, we are going to have a lot of people talking about embodiment when this is over because we're experiencing life in two dimensions, but we're meant to experience it in three dimensions. And we're going to be thinking a lot about what does it mean to do church three-dimensionally? Does it matter? Can I just log on to YouTube and watch a pastor preach? If church is all about hearing a sermon, I can do that from my living room. Is there something more? Is there something three-dimensional

that's essential about being the church? And so, I kind of explore and press into that a bit in the book. This is something that I appreciate with more liturgical kinds of churches. I had a friend of mine who went from non-denominational evangelical to Eastern Orthodox. And that was one thing he said, one of the huge selling points, one of the many in his mind, you know, is that the Eastern church really takes seriously the holistic nature of embodiment. I mean, when you go into a service, you know, evangelicals like, you know, where's the 45 minute exegetical sermon? How come it's just a homily? And the Orthodox people were saying, well, where's the incense? Where's the incense? Where's the candles? But it's all designed. It's

not reducing humanity. It's the rationality, which Orthodox people would say evangelicalism does. They're trying to say when you experience community and the table, like it's a whole-bodied experience. Touch, taste, smell, sounds, feelings. And I think that's so important for evangelicals to recover in some sense that we need to think more holistically about our bodies. And Bethany McKinney Fox talks about that in her book on disability, that when we have a purely rational church service, people with disabilities are excluded because they can't track with a three-point complex 45-minute sermon, but they're there to worship Jesus and there

are ways to worship and be the body of Christ that are simpler. And so they've actually completely restructured their services around more participatory models. So we get up and walk around, We draw things. We carry things. We hear things. We smell things. There's a lot more to our gathering than just receiving information. And I think we could do more of that in the evangelical world. Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely. Well, Carmen, I don't want to get an angry email from your dean saying I took one podcast. You're supposed to be at a faculty meeting. Mishap your meeting. But man, so Being God's Image is your latest book, your first book, which draws on your dissertation, right? Burying God's Name, Why Sinai Still Matters from IVP. So thank you so much for the conversation. Wish we can go longer.

Where can people find your work? I know you have a website on Biola's website. Do you have a separate website you can point people to? I have a blog on Blogspot, carmenjoyiams.blogspot.com. I'm on YouTube. I have my own channel. I release videos every Tuesday.

We're recording this on a Tuesday, so it's Torah Tuesday today. I'm working my way through Exodus and kind of going slow and showing insights as I work on commentary on Exodus. And I'm on Twitter and Facebook. People can easily find me there. I have a lot to say. Well, keep saying it, Carmen.

It was a joy talking to you and many blessings on your life. Yeah. Thank you, Preston, for having me. It's great to talk. This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network.