Human Dignity and Bioethics

74 | Robert P. Kraynak
is mysterious but benevolent. Although the beginning of the universe
is shrouded in mystery, the Bible indicates that God gave the universe
a certain rational order: it is divided into heavens and earth, and
the earth is filled with plants and animals that reproduce “after their
kinds” like biological species, and the creation is an ordered hierarchy
with a special status for human beings as the only creatures made
in the image and likeness of God. The claim that humans are made
in the image of God—the Imago Dei—is the Biblical and Christian
charter of human dignity which gives them an exalted rank above
the plants and animals but a little lower than the angels or God. One
of the challenges of the Bible is to figure out what constitutes the
divine image in man: is it reason, language, free will, a physical trait
(such as upright posture), immortality, capacities for love, holiness,
and justice? For Christian theologians like St. Augustine, who was
influenced by Plato and classical philosophy, it seemed obvious that
the divine image in man referred to reason. Hence, Augustine wrote
in his commentaries on Genesis that “it is especially by reason of the
mind that we are to understand that man was made in the image and
likeness of God”; even the erect form of the body testifies to this view,
since it enables man to look up and contemplate the heavens. 20
Yet, if one actually examines the Bible, one is struck by how difficult
it is to make such inferences. There are only a few references
to the Imago Dei in both the Old and New Testaments, and they
are ambiguous about what precisely constitutes the divine image in
man, from which I draw the conclusion that the Bible avoids equating
human dignity with any particular traits in order to teach people
that it is not a set of attributes that confers human dignity. Rather,
human dignity and the duties implied by it (such as the command to
“love one another”) are ultimately grounded in God’s mysterious love
for man above all the creatures of the universe, giving every human
being an inherent dignity independent of their physical and mental
traits. In short, the Bible grounds human dignity in God’s “mysterious
election” rather than in essential attributes. This broadens the
meaning of humanity and extends the concept of the soul beyond
rational consciousness to include the mysterious divine image, while
still acknowledging reason as a secondary feature of humanity that
permits natural and social hierarchies according to the perfections of
reason in certain areas of life.