Wired for Intimacy by William M. Struthers

Author:William M. Struthers [Struthers, William M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2009-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

PART 2

Healthy Masculinity and Sexuality

5

Made Male in God’s Image

What we think about how we are made affects every aspect of our life: what we can become, what we are capable of, what we are meant for, who we can love and what our limitations are. One underlying problem for many men is not pornography, but a wrong understanding of how they are made. They think of themselves as a soul trapped inside a body, enslaved to it. The soul is who they really are, not their body. Many think of the body as a shell that temporarily contains the soul and subjects it to base desires, wants and needs. The soul and the body are at war with each other, the soul longing for the good and the body craving the bad.

Many men believe that this soul is immortal and that if they want to live a good and holy life they must constantly battle against the evil cravings of the body. But is this a naïve view of our nature? Is it scripturally accurate? And does it fit with the findings of contemporary brain science? In order to understand our sexuality, we first have to address our humanity.

Theology: Three Views

What does it mean to be created in the image of God? In the Judeo Christian traditions, the imago Dei is found in three places in the book of Genesis. It appears first in the account of God creating man in Genesis 1:26-27:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

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

The Hebrew tselem is translated into imago in Latin and into English as “image.” The Hebrew demuth is translated into the Latin as similtudo and into English as “likeness.” These terms image and likeness appear a few chapters later, where they are switched in order and refer to Adam’s fathering of Seth: “he fathered a son in his own likeness, after his image” (Gen 5:3). Later in Genesis 9 the “image” returns, but this time it bears a warning that communicates humanity’s privileged and sacred position. “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image” (Gen 9:6). Because we bear the image of God, human life has an inviolable, sacred property. Humankind is to be treated in a manner that is different from the rest of creation. Systematically teasing out what imago Dei means has been a daunting task for many theologians. Theologians have understood imago Dei in several different ways (Hoekema, 1986).

The Image of God as Soul

The first category of understanding the image of God is as soul. Perhaps the best example of this view

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