The deterioration of our natural environment under the impact of a rampant technological society is one of the major crises of our time. For many analysts, a primary cause of this crisis is the influence on Western culture of the Judaeo-Christian concept of the human being as having "dominion" over the rest of creation. In this book, Douglas John Hall does not attempt to exonerate historical Christianity from that charge. But, he argues, confession alone is not enough. The crisis of nature forces us to rethink our whole understanding of the relation between humanity and nature - an understanding that is based on the concept that human beings are created in the image of God (imago Dei). Hall carefully examines the biblical, historical, and theological meaning of this term, which, more than any other biblical expression, became Christianity's symbolic way of designating the essence of the human. Hall argues that the image of God is not an endowment - it is not something that human beings "have";rather, it is a quality that pertains to our relationship with God. We should think of imago as a verb, not a noun, he says. The human vocation