We human beings are a mystery to ourselves. We are rational and irrational, civilized and savage, capable of deep friendship and murderous hostility, free and in bondage, the pinnacle of creation and its greatest danger. We are Rembrandt and Hitler, Mozart and Stalin, Antigone and Lady Macbeth, Ruth and Jezebel. “What a work of art,” Shakespeare says of humanity. “We are dangerous,” says Arthur Miller in After the Fall. “We meet … not in some garden of wax fruit and painted leaves that lies East of Eden, but after, after the Fall, after many, many deaths.”
The Bible and Christian theology give expression to this mystery of the dignity and the danger of human beings in three related affirmations: we are created in the image of God; we are sinners who deny and distort our created being; and we are forgiven sinners, enabled by God’s grace to begin life anew in faith, to serve as Christ’s disciples in love, and to move in hope toward the promised fulfillment of life in the coming reign of God.
- Daniel Migliore
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