Letter From The Editor-In-Chief
Dear the Partners in the Ministry of The Living Pulpit:
On behalf of the publishing team of The Living Pulpit, I bring you blessings and greetings of peace. As usual, we will be publishing four issues this year. This first issue serves a dual role. It is our first issue as an open access journal available free of charge for individuals. We will be supported by the Lord’s provision including donations and fee-based subscriptions for organizations. This issue also brings proceedings of the Bible conference “In God’s Image” held at New York Theological Seminary on Monday, October 22, 2012. I am confident that this issue will capture the blessings poured out at the conference and transmit them to the wider community of The Living Pulpit.
Our recent conference has also confirmed how limited and limiting an English translation can be. As soon as we turn to the NRSV of Genesis 1:27, "So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them," we are obliged to ask: Is God him or her? It reminds me of the pages in A History of Civilization by Crane Brinton, John B. Christopher, and Robert Lee Wolff that describe how Peter the Great, the Russian Czar, sought to modernize Russia in the eighteenth century. He ordered the courtiers to shave their beards as part of his Enlightenment program, but his courtiers refused, saying, “The Bible says, God created man in his image.” From the way they received the Bible, they concluded that since men had beards, God must have a beard, too. Rather than lose God’s image, they would take death. Having mass martyrdom on his hands, the Czar permitted them to retain the “image of God,” but since it was a great privilege to have it on their face, they would have to pay tax on it. Courtiers who paid the beard tax were given a pendant in the shape of the beard, and any courtier was subject to being clipped without the proof of payment. The episode informs us how far humanity has come in recognizing that God created in God’s image all human beings, including those who, to borrow from Catholic writer Verena Wright, are maid in God’s Image.
The articles coming to you in this issue further explore the richness of the idea of “In God’s Image” from various perspectives including Jewish and Christian, historical and theological, ecclesiastical and evangelical. It is a cornucopia of scholarship distilled for enrichment of our soul and spirit. We are reminded that while human categories never suffice to exhaust the abundance of what it means to be created in God’s image, they lead us to pursue our conversation and reflection on the way God created us.
In Christ,
Rev. Dr. Jin Hee Han,
Editor-in-Chief
