The variety of ways of construing how humanity is in the image of God suggests a profound interrelation of tradition and context in theological reflection on the imago dei. For example, Colin Gunton has recently argued that the dominant ways of interpreting the imago dei at the present time are stewardship and the duality of male and female. It is not hard to see how contemporary discussions on the relations between humanity and non-human nature, and between men and women, inform such a selection. The recent work of Peter Hodgson furnishes us with a second example: being in the image of God, he argues, comprises three spheres: self-relatedness, other or world-relatedness and wholeness. Again, it is not hard to discern how such a construal is informed by the identification of three dilemmas which are, Hodgson considers, constitutive of our contemporary (Western) context: liberation from unjust social relationships; relations between Christianity and other religions; relations between humanity and non-human nature. In the presentation of the imago dei, we may safely say, tradition and context are deeply interrelated.

In what follows, I shall develop one aspect of recent Christian tradition—that sociality is the mark of the imago dei—in order to explore how humanity might be in the image of God in a technological society. Thus in the last two sections of this paper, I ‘expand’ Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s reading of humanity as social by including the themes of spatiality and temporality. It is as social, spatial and temporal, I shall argue, that humanity is to be understood as imaging God.

A metaphor is implied when one speaks of a person of “culture”, a “cultivated” person. The word “culture” here derives from agriculture, the tilling and planting of the soil to yield a harvest of nourishing things.

Culture in this broad sense means simply, as Jacques Barzun defines it, “the interests and abilities acquired by taking thought.” Any thoughtful person is potentially a person of culture. Culture is not bookish or remote, not the province of the idle, the rich or the overeducated. On the contrary, it is essential to a meaningful life.

The Church clearly has a mission in the world of culture in the broad sense of ‘taking thought’ about things that matter. But such discussion often neglects the fact that most adult Mass-goers commonly relate to the Church through their parish. Since parish life is how most people experience the Church, one can legitimately ask what it is about parishes that touches culture. In what way do they carry on as communities, not only of the heart and spirit, but also of the mind?

How do laity work in the world, as Gaudium et Spes mandated them? How do parish priests “interpret the signs of the times” as the Directory on the Ministry and Life of Priests directs? Paul VI said throughout Evangelii Nuntiandi that we must pay attention to the culture in which we immerse ourselves and not react to it passively but creatively. How, at the broadest level?

Whatever the activity of the parish, whatever the spirituality of the laity and priests there, Scripture is a part of their experience.

In the preface to his edition of Manilius, Housman lamented that ‘Our own great age of scholarship, begun in 1691 by Bentley’s Epistola ad Millium, was ended by the successive strokes of doom which consigned Dobree and Elmsley to the grave and Blomfield to the bishopric of Chester.’

Unlike Blomfield, and his own immediate predecessor at Lincoln, Edward-King, Hicks is not favoured with any mention in the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. Nor was he a giant among classical scholars. But thanks to the recent publication of a selection from his diaries*, we can see him as we can see few others of his kind; these glimpses afford welcome (especially in the light of recent turmoils at Lincoln Cathedral) evidence of a good man of versatile virtues, proof that moving from academe to a see need not be a stroke of doom for classical scholars, and refutation of the old adage that nothing improves by translation except a bishop.

There was no controversy over the Dean who welcomed Edward Lee Hicks to his see in June 1910. Though unremarked in Neville’s edition, he was none other than Hicks’ old Oxford tutor and examiner, E. C. Wickham, fellow-classicist and editor of Horace, whose death Hicks will presently lament, as was his wont, in choice Latin, mindful of Samuel Johnson’s instructions that ‘Epitaphs should be in Latin, as every thing intended to be universal and permanent should be.’ But ecclesiastical as well as secular immoralities were a constant thorn in Hicks’ side, thanks in large measure to the astonishing country parsons he encountered in his far-flung jurisdiction, a gallery of characters worthy of the Trollopes (Anthony and Joanna) and Barbara Pym.

English Catholic literature, invigorated by Celtic tributaries, has been of fast and luxuriant growth, rich in diversity and broad in achievement, contributing generously to the cultural mainstream. A torrent of poets, novelists, essayists, historians, journalists and spirituality writers have entertained, sustained, instructed, defended and promoted the Catholic community, and rendered it intriguing, even attractive, to outsiders by sharing their belief and their humanity. In so far as they are direct, Catholic writers reflect themselves in relation to Catholicism—their chief reference point. Lapsed writers are relevant if they continue to engage Catholicism in serious dialogue, or maintain Catholic values. Catholic writers can be spoken of as ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative': the liberal values community, freedom and relevance, respects independence of mind, and aspires to understanding and toleration; the conservative values order, law and traditional forms, respects power, and aspires to conformity and exclusivism.

Since 1850 non-Catholics have generally thought that Catholicism is inimical to intellect and creativity; and the Church has indeed liked to picture itself as united, uniform, unchanging, righteous,infallible and ideologically lucid to the point of being mechanistic; and consequently there appears to be a conflict between the god-like Church and the human realities in which writers deal, between inflexible ‘Law’ and the fact that literature is of life, with the wind blowing where it listeth.