Hey everyone 👋,
I wrote in Christianity Makes Perfect Sense! about how some truths are deeply unfashionable, and how the discomfort a truth produces is often the surest sign that it is worth sitting with. This post is in that spirit. I want to talk about something that I have been turning over in my head for a long time, something that Christianity itself, read carefully and without the institutional filters, actually supports with a startling degree of directness. The title gives it away so I will not pretend there is a mystery: Jesus was right, and among the many things he was right about is this one, which most church hierarchies have buried so thoroughly that most Christians have never encountered it. He was right that you are, in some profound and irreducible sense, divine. That you carry within you something that the tradition calls godlike, that you are not merely a creature made to bow down and wait, but a being made from the same substance that the Gospel of John calls the Word, the very creative principle through which all things were made. I know how that sounds. I know it reads either as arrogance or as heresy depending on who you are. I am going to spend the rest of this post making the case that it is neither, that it is actually the oldest and most straightforward reading of the text, and that the institutions which suppressed it did so not because it was false but because it was dangerously empowering.
I should say upfront that I am not a theologian and I have never claimed to be. I am someone who grew up with very complicated feelings about religion, as I described in Just Don't Pick Up the Brush, in a village where religion was wrapped tightly around community identity and it was very hard to separate what was actually in the text from what the local authorities decided the text meant. I read the Bible on my own, away from institutions, away from authority figures, and when I did that I kept finding things that shocked me. Not because they were dark or frightening, but because they were so much more generous, so much more expansive about what a human being is, than anything I had been taught. That gap between what the text actually says and what I was told the text says is what this post is about. And I do not think it is a gap produced by ignorance. I think it is a gap that has been maintained deliberately, because the idea that every single human being carries something divine is one of the most democratizing and most politically dangerous ideas in the history of human thought. Power does not survive the equal distribution of its own source, and if every person is in some sense divine, then no institution can claim a monopoly on God anymore.
I should also be honest about where I am coming from religiously, because I think it matters for how you receive what I am about to say. I was Muslim on paper. Born into it, raised inside it, surrounded by it. But paper does not mean anything to me anymore, and it never really did. As I wrote in Just Don't Pick Up the Brush, I spent a long time after that as agnostic, standing on that thin, uncomfortable line between belief and doubt, genuinely unsure whether anything was out there and deeply skeptical of every institution claiming to speak for it. That skepticism has not gone away. But something shifted, slowly and without ceremony, as I kept reading. Not reading theologians or apologists or anyone trying to sell me a system, but reading the actual words attributed to Jesus, the specific arguments he made, the things he said to people who were suffering, the things he said to people who were powerful, and the things he said about what a human being fundamentally is. I am not a Christian in the institutional sense. I do not belong to a church, I do not follow a creed, and I hold plenty of the same questions I always have. But I follow Jesus's teachings in the sense that matters to me: I think he was telling the truth, I think the truth he was telling is the most important truth I have encountered, and I think it has been buried under two thousand years of institutional management. This post is my attempt to dig it back up.
Let me also connect this to the broader thread running through several of my recent posts. In Life On Earth is 100% AI Generated Slop, I argued that the world is optimized for plausible appearances rather than ground truth, and that this applies as much to social institutions as to language models. Religious institutions are not exempt from this critique. They are, in many cases, the original appearance-optimization machines, producing outputs that look like truth, sound like authority, and smell like holiness, while often encoding the preferences of whoever held the pen. But the text is still there. The ground truth of the scriptural record, whatever you think of its origins, is still available to anyone who reads it, and what it says about human nature is not what most institutions have wanted you to hear. This post is my attempt to read it honestly, to take the most uncomfortable passages seriously, and to follow the logic wherever it leads.
The Verse
There is a moment in the Gospel of John, chapter ten, verses thirty-three through thirty-six, that I think is the most underappreciated exchange in the entire New Testament. The religious leaders have accused Jesus of blasphemy for saying "I and the Father are one", and his response is, to put it plainly, astonishing. He does not back down. He does not explain away the claim. Instead he turns to the Hebrew scriptures and asks his accusers a direct question. He quotes Psalm 82:6, which says, "I said, you are gods", and then he makes a logical argument so sharp that it has never been successfully refuted in two thousand years of theological commentary. He says, in effect: if your own scripture, which cannot be broken, calls human beings gods, on what grounds do you accuse me of blasphemy for saying I am the Son of God? That is not a dodge. That is a detonation of the entire premise of the accusation. He is saying that the concept of human beings having a divine nature is already in the text, is already Scripture, is already established, and that his claim is therefore not an invention or an overreach but a specific instance of a general principle.
The verse he quotes, Psalm 82:6, reads in its fuller form: "I said, 'You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you;'" The Hebrew word translated as "gods" is elohim, the same word used for God throughout the Old Testament, including in Genesis 1:1, where it says "In the beginning, God (elohim) created the heavens and the earth". The psalm uses the same word, elohim, to address human beings. The standard institutional response to this has been to say that the psalm is speaking about judges or magistrates, people who had been given delegated authority to render divine justice, and that the word "gods" is therefore just a title of office rather than a statement about nature. That interpretation is not obviously wrong, but it is not obviously right either, and what matters for our purposes is that Jesus did not restrict it that way. He quoted the verse, said "the scripture cannot be broken", and then used the existence of human beings called elohim as the foundation of his own defense in John 10:34-36. He did not say "yes but that was only about judges". He treated it as a general statement about humanity, and he used it accordingly.
The scholar Michael Heiser, who spent his career studying the divine council worldview in ancient Near Eastern literature and the Hebrew Bible, has argued extensively that Psalm 82 is not simply about human judges (1). He argues that the psalm depicts a divine assembly, a council of beings who were given governing authority over the nations by the Most High God, and that the accusation against them is that they have failed in their responsibility to maintain justice. The phrase "you will die like men" in verse seven, which has often been used to prove the addressees are human, Heiser argues is actually a statement of judgment rather than a statement of nature; it is saying that these beings, as a consequence of their failure, will now be stripped of their divine status and die as mortals do. This scholarly debate is not resolved, and I am not pretending to resolve it here. But it does mean that the easy institutional dismissal of the verse, the one that says this is just about human judges and therefore has no broader implications, is not the settled consensus of biblical scholarship. It is one reading among several, and not necessarily the strongest one.
What I find most compelling about the John 10 passage is not any particular resolution of the Psalm 82 debate, but the fact that Jesus, in the most heated confrontation of his ministry, with his life literally on the line, chose to ground his defense in the assertion that scripture already teaches the divine nature of human beings. He did not say "you are misunderstanding me, I am not claiming to be divine". He said "you are inconsistent, because you already accept that human beings can be called gods, and my claim goes no further than that". Read that slowly. The defense of his own divinity was the observation that divinity is not as rare or as exclusive as his accusers assumed. That is the argument. That is the text. And if you believe the scripture cannot be broken, as Jesus explicitly said, then you have to reckon with what that argument implies about every human being.
What Genesis Said
The argument from John 10 would be interesting on its own, but it becomes overwhelming when you read it alongside what Genesis says about human origins. Genesis 1:26 reads, in the English Standard Version: "Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.'" This verse has been discussed, disputed, and dissected for thousands of years, and I do not pretend that everything about it is clear. But a few things are not in dispute, and those few things are enough to make the point I want to make. The first thing that is not in dispute is that the word translated "image" is the Hebrew tselem, which is the word commonly used for a physical representation or statue of a deity in ancient Near Eastern contexts. When a king placed an image of himself in a distant province, that image was understood to carry the authority and presence of the king. It was not the king, but it participated in the king's identity in a functional and representational sense. When Genesis says that human beings are made in the tselem of God, it is doing something extraordinary: it is saying that every human being is a representation of divine presence in the physical world, in the same way that a royal statue represented a king's authority in an outlying territory.
The second thing that is not in dispute is the radicalness of applying this language to all human beings. In the ancient Near Eastern world from which Genesis emerged, the language of being made in the image of a god was reserved for kings. Kings were the image of the deity. Ordinary people were not. When Genesis 1:26 applies tselem to humanity without distinction, it is not describing existing norms. It is shattering them. It is making the universal claim that every person, regardless of birth, rank, or nationality, carries within themselves the functional representation of the divine. The scholar Phyllis Trible pointed out decades ago that this democratization of the divine image is one of the most politically subversive moves in ancient literature (2). It takes a concept that was used to justify royal power and extends it to everyone, which means it simultaneously undermines the exclusive claim of any ruler to divine status. If everyone is made in the image of God, then no king is more divine than the slave who built his palace.
The third thing worth noting is what follows immediately from the declaration that humans are made in God's image. Genesis 1:28 says that God gave humanity "dominion" over all living things, and that verb, the Hebrew radah, is used elsewhere in the Bible specifically for the exercise of royal authority. This is not a coincidence. The grammar of the passage is deliberate. Humanity is created in the image of the divine, and humanity is given the exercise of royal power. The two go together in the logic of the text, because an image of a king is expected to exercise that king's authority. The implication is not that humans should act like tyrants. It is that humans carry, by nature, by virtue of what they are, a form of authority that in the ancient world was associated exclusively with the divine. That is a staggering claim, and it is sitting there on the first page of the Bible, waiting for anyone who is willing to read it without the institutional filters that have been layered over it for two millennia.
I want to be careful here, because I think precision is important and I do not want to overstate the case in a way that is easy to dismiss. The text does not say that human beings are identical to God. It says that human beings are made in God's image, and those are not the same thing. An image of a king is not the king. But an image of a king participates in the king's identity, carries the king's authority, and cannot be understood in isolation from the king it represents. The theological tradition has often used this distinction to minimize what Genesis is saying, to reduce the imago Dei to a list of specific moral or rational capacities that humans have in common with God. But the ancient context of the language suggests something more functional and more relational than that. It suggests that humanity's very existence in the world is understood as a form of divine presence, that every person is, in the most literal sense the text supports, carrying God into the world just by being what they are. That is not a minor doctrinal detail. That is the foundational anthropology of the entire scriptural tradition, and we have spent centuries treating it like a footnote.
I also want to connect this back to Psalm 90:2, which is one of the key passages about God's infinity: "Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God". This verse establishes that God exists outside of time, that the divine nature is not bounded by birth or death, beginning or end, the way finite creatures are. The interesting question is what it means for beings made in the image of this infinite God to exist as finite creatures. The dominant tradition has said that the image is present but diminished, that humans participate in divine-likeness in a limited way while remaining fundamentally bounded. But the mystical traditions within Christianity, which I will come to shortly, have asked whether the limitation is intrinsic or whether it is something that can be dissolved through transformation, whether the finite image can, through some process of union with its infinite source, come to participate in the infinity it represents. That question is not answered by Genesis alone. But Genesis plants the seed of it, and the rest of the scriptural tradition spends a great deal of time watering it.
The Verse Paul Almost Let Slip
If the Genesis passage is the founding statement of human divinity and the John 10 passage is the moment when Jesus explicitly asserts it in an argument, then the passage I want to discuss next is the one that the institutional church has spent the most energy trying to contain. 2 Peter 1:4 says something so direct that it is genuinely startling when you read it without preconceptions: God's promises have been given to us so that through them we "may become partakers of the divine nature". The Greek word there is theias phuseos koinonoi, which translates with remarkable precision as "sharers in the divine nature". Not sharers in divine favor, not recipients of divine grace in a general sense, but partakers of the divine nature itself. The Greek word phusis is the word for nature in the ontological sense, the kind of nature that makes a thing what it is. And koinonoi means sharers or participants in a deep, structural sense, not observers or admirers from a distance.
The Eastern Orthodox tradition took this verse more seriously than any other major branch of Christianity, and it built an entire theology around it under the name theosis, which is usually translated as deification or divinization. The core idea of theosis is that the human being is called to participate in the life of God, not merely to obey God's commands or to be forgiven by God's grace, but to actually share in the divine nature in a way that transforms what a human being is. St. Athanasius of Alexandria, writing in the fourth century, summed it up in a sentence that theologians have been quoting ever since: "God became human so that humans might become gods". He did not mean that humans would become the Creator or replace the Trinity. He meant that the Incarnation opened a path for human nature to be so thoroughly infused with the divine life that the boundary between creature and Creator, while never eliminated, becomes permeable in a way that it was not before. That is a serious theological claim, and it was made by one of the most respected theologians in Christian history, not by a heretic or a mystic on the fringes.
The way that Orthodox theology has usually navigated this is through the distinction between God's essence and God's energies, developed most fully by Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth century. The essence of God, in Palamas's account, is entirely transcendent and unknowable, and humans never participate in that. But the energies of God, which are understood as the real and active divine life that permeates the world and makes contact with creation possible, are genuinely participable. Humans can be united with the divine energies in a way that transforms them, and this transformation is what deification means. The analogy Palamas and others used was the image of iron placed in a fire: the iron does not become fire in its nature, but it takes on all the properties of fire, the heat and the light and the consuming energy, through genuine contact. That is what theosis looks like in Orthodox theology, and that is one of the most rigorous and most ancient Christian attempts to take Second Peter 1:4 seriously rather than explaining it away (3).
I want to be honest about why this matters to me personally, and not just as a theological argument. I have spent years in situations that felt like there was no door, no way forward, no resource left, and in those situations the question of what a human being fundamentally is becomes more than academic. When everything external is stripped away, when the career is destroyed as I described in Technology Has Destroyed My Livelihood, when the future looks like a wall of nothing, the question of whether there is something inside that is not subject to the same entropy as everything outside becomes the only question that matters. I am not claiming that the answer gave me a magical solution or that reading a verse in Second Peter solved my problems. I am saying that the difference between believing you are a finite biological process that will eventually terminate and believing you carry something that is, in its origins, infinite and divine, is not a small psychological difference. It is the difference between a temporary accident and a being with permanent value, and that difference affects everything about how you relate to suffering, to failure, and to the possibility of continuing.
There is also a connection here to what I wrote in Be Aware of The Current UFOs Pandemic. Remember, We Are Alone, where I argued that if we really are alone in the universe, then the weight of consciousness falls entirely on us, and we had better take that weight seriously. The theology I am describing in this post takes that weight with maximum seriousness. It says that human beings are not accidents in an indifferent universe. They are, in the most literal reading of the scriptural text, images of the infinite, bearing within themselves something that is not bounded by time or space in the way that ordinary matter is. That does not resolve all of the scientific questions about consciousness and matter. But it is a framework that demands we take human beings seriously, that refuses to reduce them to mere information-processing systems, and that grounds human dignity in something more fundamental than utility. Given everything I have written about how the tech industry and the economic system treats human beings as consumable inputs rather than ends in themselves, a theology that says every person carries something infinite is not just comforting. It is a political demand.
The Kingdom and the Infinity
There is a passage in the Gospel of Luke, chapter seventeen, verses twenty and twenty-one, that is short enough to quote in full. The Pharisees ask Jesus when the kingdom of God is coming, and he answers in Luke 17:20-21: "The kingdom of God is not coming in ways that can be observed, nor will they say, 'Look, here it is!' or 'There!' For behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you". The translation is disputed, because the Greek can mean either "in the midst of you", meaning among you as a social reality, or "within you", meaning inside each person. Both are defensible translations, and both matter for what I want to say here. But the combination of both meanings is what I think the verse is actually pointing at: the kingdom of God is not a future external event that humans wait for passively. It is a state of reality that is already present, already available, already latent in the nature of the beings who are asking the question.
This verse has been the touchstone of the mystical tradition within Christianity for two thousand years. The medieval mystic Meister Eckhart, who was charged with heresy for saying it too directly, spent most of his life elaborating the same core insight: that the divine ground of the soul and the divine ground of God are the same ground, that there is a depth within the human being that is not separate from the depth within God, and that the spiritual life is not about traveling somewhere else but about going deeper into what is already there. Eckhart was not making this up. He was reading Luke 17:21, Genesis 1:26, Psalm 82:6, 2 Peter 1:4, and a dozen other passages, and he was following the logic of the text more consistently than the institutions around him wanted him to. His sermons, which are available to anyone who wants to read them today, contain some of the most ferociously honest theological thinking in the history of Christianity (4). The idea that the divine is not somewhere above you but at the core of what you already are is not a deviation from Christian teaching. It is one of its oldest and most persistent threads, showing up in different forms in Origen, in Augustine, in Maximus the Confessor, in Gregory of Nyssa, in Thomas Aquinas's doctrine of the soul's capax Dei, its capacity for God.
The connection to infinity is direct. If the kingdom of God is within you, and if God is, as Psalm 90:2 says, "from everlasting to everlasting", then what is within you is not bounded by time in the ordinary sense. This is not a claim about biological immortality or about the physical body surviving death. It is a claim about the nature of whatever it is within a person that participates in the divine. The Johannine writings make this point repeatedly. John 17:3 defines eternal life as knowing God, not as a future reward but as a present state of cognition and relationship. John 10:28 has Jesus saying that eternal life has already been given to those who follow him, in the present tense. 1 John 3:2 says "we are God's children now", again present tense, not a future condition but a current ontological status. The infinity the tradition ascribes to God is not, in the New Testament texts, understood as entirely absent from human experience. It is understood as present, available, and in some sense already constitutive of what a human being most deeply is.
I want to say something about what this means in practice, because I think the mystical tradition sometimes makes it sound so abstract that people cannot connect it to anything real in their lives. When I say you are infinite, I do not mean that you will live forever in a biological sense or that your current circumstances do not matter or that suffering is an illusion. I mean something more specific and more verifiable in experience: that the part of you that observes your circumstances, that witnesses your suffering, that thinks about your thinking, has a relationship to the specific conditions of your life that is not one of simple identity. Your circumstances are finite. Your losses are finite. Your failures are finite. But the capacity to be aware of all of those things, to witness them, to turn attention onto them, seems to have no natural limit. You can always go one level deeper. There is always another layer of awareness below awareness. And the tradition I am describing says that this recursive quality of consciousness, this fact that awareness seems to have no floor, is not a coincidence or a quirk of neuroscience. It is evidence that consciousness is participating in something that is, at its roots, not subject to the same limitations as the material world.
The philosopher David Chalmers called this the hard problem of consciousness: the question of why there is subjective experience at all, why there is something it is like to see red or to feel grief or to wonder about one's own existence (5). The hard problem is hard precisely because it resists the kind of explanation that works for everything else in science. You can explain how the brain processes information, how neurons fire, how patterns emerge from complexity. But you cannot explain, within the framework of purely physical description, why any of that physical activity is accompanied by experience. Why is there something it is like to be a brain, when there is presumably nothing it is like to be a thermostat or a wind tunnel, even though all three are complex physical systems processing information? That question, Chalmers argues, points to something about consciousness that is not fully captured by the physical description, and I think the scriptural tradition I have been describing is offering an answer that no amount of neuroscience has yet ruled out: that consciousness participates in a dimension of reality that is not fully exhausted by its physical substrate, that the awareness within you reaches beyond the boundaries of the body that hosts it, and that this reaching beyond is the seed of what the tradition calls the divine.
What John 17 Reveals
The most stunning theological statement in the entire New Testament, in my opinion, is not in Romans or in Corinthians or in Revelation. It is in John 17:20-23, where Jesus is praying and says the following: "I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us... The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one". Read that one more time. He is asking that human beings become one with God and with each other in the same way that he is one with the Father. He is not asking for a looser version of that unity, a kind of distant relationship or a formal legal standing. He is asking that the same kind of unity that exists within the Trinity, the most fundamental theological category for the divine nature, be extended to encompass humanity. That is the most radical statement of human divine potential in the entire scriptural canon, and it comes from Jesus himself, in what Christian tradition has called his high priestly prayer.
The implications of this verse are enormous and have been carefully avoided by most institutional Christianity, because they are almost impossibly difficult to contain within a hierarchical religious structure. If human beings are expected to be one with God in the same way that the Son is one with the Father, then the distinction between the sacred and the profane, between the holy and the ordinary, between the clergy and the laity, becomes philosophically unstable. If every person carries within them the capacity for the same union with God that the tradition reserves for Christ, then every person has an immediate access to the divine that does not require church, priest, ritual, or institutional intermediary. That is a terrifying claim for any institution whose power depends on controlling access to the divine, and it explains why this verse, though it is sitting there in every Bible that has ever been printed, is almost never preached on in the terms I am using here. The institutions that control the interpretation of the text have a very strong incentive to read "that they may be one" as a call to institutional unity, to church membership, to doctrinal agreement, rather than what the grammar and the context actually say, which is that Jesus is asking for the same quality of union between humans and God that exists within God's own nature.
The theologian Karl Barth, who was certainly not a mystic or a theological liberal, wrote extensively about the idea that human nature has been taken up into the divine life through the Incarnation in a way that changes the baseline status of every human being (6). Barth's argument is that when the Son of God became human, the divine and the human were united in a single person in a way that permanently altered the relationship between divinity and humanity. It is not just Jesus who is transformed by the Incarnation. Because Jesus took on human nature, human nature itself was touched by the divine in a way it had not been before, and that touch is not confined to Christians or to believers or to any particular group. It extends to all of humanity, because what was taken up in the Incarnation was human nature as such, not the human nature of any particular subset of people. This is Barth's doctrine of universal Christology, and while he resisted drawing all the conclusions that his own logic seemed to license, the direction of his argument is unmistakable: the Incarnation makes a claim about what every human being is, not just about what Christians believe.
I have been building this case slowly and carefully, and I want to stop for a moment to say why, because I think clarity about the argument matters here. I am not saying that all humans are God in the sense that God traditionally means, the omnipotent, omniscient, uncaused first cause of everything. I am saying something more precise and more supportable: that the scriptural tradition, read without the institutional filters, consistently describes human beings as bearing something divine in their nature, that this something is not a metaphor or a moral analogy but a genuine ontological claim about what human beings are, and that the implications of this claim for how we treat human beings and how human beings think about themselves are so significant that they deserve to be taken seriously rather than domesticated into harmless Sunday morning sentiment. The church domesticated this claim because it was politically threatening. I think we should de-domesticate it, not to tear down any institution, but because the truth of it, whatever institutional inconvenience it causes, is the most important thing I know about being human.
The Infinite Is You
This is the section where I want to say the hardest thing, and where I want to be most careful, because I can already feel the objections taking shape on the other side of the screen. The hardest thing is this: the infinity you carry is not something you achieve. It is not the result of hard work, spiritual practice, moral correctness, or church attendance. It is not conditional on your behavior or your beliefs. It is not a reward for anything. It is constitutive of what you are at the most fundamental level, and it cannot be taken away from you by your circumstances, your failures, your doubts, or anyone else's judgment of you. The reason I want to say this is that the alternative, the version where your divine standing must be earned or maintained or certified by an institution, is not only bad theology but is actively harmful psychology, and I have watched it destroy people who deserved better.
The scriptural basis for this is actually quite strong. When Genesis 1:26 says that God made humans in the divine image, there is no condition attached. It does not say "God made those who follow the law in his image" or "God made the righteous in his image". It says God made man, humanity, in the divine image, as a statement of creation, not a statement of criteria. The imago Dei is not something you earn. It is something you are born with, by virtue of being human, and nothing you do removes it. The same is true of the John 17 prayer. Jesus is not praying that certain deserving humans will be brought into unity with God. He is praying for all those who will believe through the disciples' word, and the scope of that prayer, as the tradition has always understood, is universal. He is praying that the union with God that he embodies will be extended to all of humanity, because that is the logic of the Incarnation: if the divine took on human nature, then human nature itself has been elevated, and every human being in history is touched by that elevation whether they know it or not.
I want to connect this to something I talked about in An Empty Life Filled With Constant Suffering, where I described years of feeling like I was not enough, like the gap between where I was and where I wanted to be was evidence of some fundamental deficiency in me rather than evidence of the normal difficulty of navigating a high-entropy system while carrying heavy psychological weights. The framework I am describing in this post does something important to that feeling. It does not tell you that your circumstances are fine when they are not fine. It does not tell you to feel good about a bad situation. What it does is insert a stable foundation below the circumstances, a claim about what you are that is not touched by what is happening to you. No matter how badly the world has treated you, no matter how comprehensively the system has failed you, no matter how empty the current chapter of your life feels, you are still, in the ontological sense that Genesis and John 17 are pointing at, a bearer of something infinite. That is not a self-help mantra. It is a metaphysical claim with two thousand years of theological development behind it, and I think it is both true and urgently needed by people who have been convinced by their circumstances that they are nothing.
The researcher Brené Brown has done significant work on the distinction between what she calls "shame" and "guilt", and her distinction maps almost perfectly onto what I am talking about here (7). Guilt says: I did something bad. Shame says: I am bad. Guilt is specific and correctable. Shame is global and constitutive. What I am arguing in this post is that the scriptural tradition, properly read, offers the most radical possible antidote to shame: it says that what you are, at the most fundamental level, is made in the image of the infinite. Not what you have done, not what you have achieved, not what anyone thinks of you. What you are, in the deepest ontological sense, is an expression of something that is from everlasting to everlasting, as Psalm 90:2 says, something that was before the mountains were brought forth and will be after they pass away. That is not a claim about your performance. It is a claim about your nature. Performance can fail. Nature cannot. And if your nature is, at its root, a participation in the divine, then your failure to achieve any particular thing says nothing about your ultimate worth.
Let me also say something that I think needs to be said plainly and without hedging. The system that tells you that you are not enough, that your value is conditional on your productivity, your achievement, your compliance with its criteria, is a system that benefits from your belief in your own inadequacy. I wrote about this from the economic angle in As Engineers, LLMs should pay us for tokens usage, where I argued that the tech industry extracts value from human creativity and intelligence while making the humans feel lucky to be allowed to contribute. The same dynamic operates at the level of religious institutions, where the message that you are inherently insufficient and must rely on the institution's mediation to access the divine is a message that keeps people dependent and controllable. Jesus's actual message, the one that got him killed, was that the kingdom of God does not require an institutional intermediary, that it is already within you, that the divine is not something to be dispensed by a hierarchy but something to be recognized in the self and in every other human being. That message was dangerous in the first century and it remains dangerous now, because it renders the gatekeeping function of any institution philosophically null.
You Are Not Alone
I want to spend this final section on something that I think is the most personally difficult aspect of everything I have been arguing, which is what it means to carry something infinite within a finite, suffering life. Because I am not writing this from a comfortable position. I am writing this from a position where I have had to fight for everything I have and where many of those fights have produced very little, as I described across multiple previous posts. And I am painfully aware that telling someone who is suffering that they carry something divine can land as the most useless thing anyone has ever said to them, less than an empty platitude, because it does not change the material circumstances that are causing the suffering.
So I want to be honest about the limits of the argument. The infinity I am talking about does not solve your financial problems. It does not fix the job market. It does not undo the damage done by a childhood spent in poverty or by years of psychological trauma as I described in Just Don't Pick Up the Brush. It does not make bad systems good or make unjust institutions just. It does not even guarantee that you will feel infinite or divine or anything other than exhausted and beaten down. The human capacity for suffering is real, and the tradition I have been citing is deeply honest about this. Psalm 88, the only psalm in the entire collection that ends without comfort or hope, is in the scripture for a reason. Job's protest against undeserved suffering is in the scripture for a reason. The cry of dereliction from the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me", is in the scripture for a reason. The tradition does not pretend that carrying something divine makes life easy. It says that carrying something divine makes life significant, regardless of how easy it is.
What carrying something infinite does, in my experience, is change the relationship between your circumstances and your identity. Circumstances, even severe ones, are temporal. They have a beginning and they have an end. The worst suffering in my life has been terrible while it lasted, but it has not lasted forever, and the part of me that survived it was not the part that had good circumstances. It was the part that had, in some inarticulate way I am only now finding words for, a ground that the circumstances could not reach. I am not saying this to be inspiring. I am saying it because I think it is accurately descriptive of what the tradition calls the divine image within the human being, and what I recognize, looking back at the worst periods of my life, as the thing that did not break even when everything else did. Whether you call that the imago Dei or the divine spark or the soul or the witness consciousness or just the deep structural fact of your own awareness, it is a real feature of human experience, and the best theology I have encountered is the theology that points at it honestly rather than domesticating it into a set of rules.
I also want to connect this post back to what I said at the very beginning, about the political implications of taking the divine nature of every human being seriously. If every person carries something infinite, then every person's suffering matters infinitely. Every person's dignity is non-negotiable. Every person's potential is unbounded in principle, even if bounded in practice by circumstances. The systems that reduce people to their productivity, that treat human beings as machines for generating economic value, that extract creativity and intelligence and labor from workers while returning as little as possible, are not just economically unjust. They are theologically incoherent. They are treating beings who are, by the most careful reading of the most ancient and most central texts in Western civilization, made in the image of the infinite, as if they were disposable inputs into a production process. That is not simply a policy failure. It is a category error of the most fundamental kind, and the scripture I have been quoting in this post, the scripture that Jesus himself staked his defense on in the most critical moment of his life, is the clearest possible statement of why that category error matters.
I do not know if any of this will change anything for anyone reading it. I know that my own ability to keep going, through years that felt like walking through concrete, has depended in some significant and inarticulate way on a belief I could not always justify philosophically but could not entirely abandon either: that there is something in every human being, including the worst versions of me, that is worth taking seriously, that is not reducible to a temporary performance or a set of circumstances, that is, in the language of the tradition I have been reading more carefully as I get older, touched by something that was before the mountains were brought forth. Jesus was right about a lot of things. He was right about what the scripture says. He was right about the divine nature of human beings. He was right that this truth is not owned by any institution and cannot be kept from anyone. And he was right that it is, in the end, the most important thing a person can know about themselves.
Till next time 👋!
References
1. Heiser, M. S., The Divine Council in Late Canonical and Non-Canonical Second Temple Jewish Literature (doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2004); see also his popular work The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible, Lexham Press, Sep 1, 2015, ISBN 978-1577995562
2. Trible, P., God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, Fortress Press, 1978; see especially Chapter 1 on Genesis 1 and the democratization of the imago Dei. For a recent scholarly synthesis see also Middleton, J. R., The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1, Brazos Press, 2005, ISBN 978-1587431104
3. Palamas, G., The Triads, translated by John Meyendorff, Paulist Press, 1983. For an accessible modern treatment of theosis in Orthodox theology, see Christensen, M. J. & Wittung, J. A. (Eds.), Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions, Baker Academic, 2007, ISBN 978-0801034404
4. Eckhart, M., The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, translated by Maurice O'C. Walshe, Crossroad Publishing, 2009; for the scholarly debate over Eckhart's orthodoxy see McGinn, B., The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart: The Man from Whom God Hid Nothing, Crossroad Publishing, 2001, ISBN 978-0824519148
5. Chalmers, D. J., Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 1995;2(3):200-219. Available at https://consc.net/papers/facing.html. See also his landmark book The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, Oxford University Press, 1996, ISBN 978-0195117899
6. Barth, K., Church Dogmatics, vol. III/2, The Doctrine of Creation: The Creature, T&T Clark, 1960, §43-45. For an accessible overview of Barth's anthropology see Busch, E., The Great Passion: An Introduction to Karl Barth's Theology, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, Eerdmans, 2004, ISBN 978-0802803603
7. Brown, B., I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn't): Making the Journey from "What Will People Think?" to "I Am Enough", Gotham Books, 2007; see also her academic work: Brown, B., Shame Resilience Theory: A Grounded Theory Study on Women and Shame, Families in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Social Services, 2006;87(1):43-52
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