Imago Dei

From Dr. Tim Keller in response to Dr. Peter Singer from Princeton:

"If you don't believe in the image of God, what are you going to ground human rights in? You're going to ground it in capacities. If you can't protect the unborn you can't protect the newly born, you can't protect the mentally handicapped, you can't protect old people. It's a fact. It's logical. If you go back to the beginning of the Christian church, here's what you saw: they came into a Greco-Roman world that also grounded the idea of rights on capacities. Aristotle said that some races are too emotional, they couldn't reason because they didn't have the capacity for higher reason. They deserved to be slaves. And in the Greco-Roman world you had slavery, you had terrible poverty, you had lots of abortion, you had infanticide. It was perfectly legal…girl babies died of exposure. And you took the elderly and sick poor people and just let them die. And that was all legal; and it was done all the time."

Dr. Keller concluded:

"But the Christians came along and they believed in the Imago Dei. And because they believed in the image of God, from the beginning they were champions [of life] … they were totally against abortion, from the beginning. Because if you believe in the image of God you have to be… if human life is good, then nascent human life has got to be good. But they were also against infanticide. They were not one-issue people. They cared for the poor… They were champions of women; they were champions of orphans; they were champions of the weak; they were champions of the poor. And they were against abortion. And they put the rest of the culture to shame because of their belief in the sanctity of life."

"So God created man in his own image,

in the image of God he created him;

male and female he created them."

Genesis 1:27

This week is Sanctity of Life Sunday. What if we put the "rest of the culture to shame" because of our belief in the Imago Dei?