Human Dignity and the Image of God

Genesis 1 builds slowly to its sixth day. Light, sky, sea, land, plants, lights in the sky, fish and birds, animals: each is spoken into being with a short formula and called good. Then the rhythm changes. God does not say let the earth bring forth, as he did for the animals; he says, 'Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness' (Genesis 1:26), and the verse goes straight on to say what this creature is for: to rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, the livestock, and all the earth. Then the narrator, who has been writing plain prose, breaks into three lines of poetry in verse 27, the anchor of this lesson. The word created appears three times, the image twice, and the last line says who is meant: male and female He created them. After that comes the blessing, the command to be fruitful and fill the earth, and at the end of the day the verdict, not good but very good (1:31).

Three things are settled by the text itself, and every historic Christian tradition holds them. First, the image is given to humanity as such, not to a class within it. The poem does not say God created kings, or men, or Israelites in his image; it says man, and then male and female, and the Hebrew word adam here is the word for humankind. Second, the image is not lost after the fall. Genesis 5:1-3 repeats it at the head of Adam's family line, and adds that Adam's son was in his father's likeness, after his image, which ties the divine image to ordinary human descent. Genesis 9:6 makes it the reason for protecting human life after the flood. James 3:9 makes it the reason Christians may not curse other people, and James is speaking of the very people we would most like to curse. Third, the image has a perfect instance. Paul calls Christ the image of God (2 Corinthians 4:4) and the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15), and he says that believers are being renewed in the image of their Creator (Colossians 3:10). So the image is something every human being has, and also something that has a goal, which is likeness to Christ.

What the text leaves unsaid is just as important. Genesis 1 never says what the image consists in. It does not say that the image is reason, or the soul, or the ability to love, or upright posture, or anything else. It says that God made man in his image and then says what follows: rule, blessing, fruitfulness, and later protection. That silence has given theologians room to argue for two thousand years, and section 2 sets out the three main answers. But notice before you read them that the moral weight of the doctrine does not wait for the argument to be settled. Genesis 9:6 and James 3:9 draw their conclusions from the bare fact that a person is made in God's image, without first deciding what the image is.

The Hebrew vocabulary helps. Tselem, image, is a concrete word. Elsewhere in the Old Testament it names idols and statues and the gold models of tumours and rats the Philistines sent back with the ark (1 Samuel 6:5): a solid, visible thing that stands for something else. Demut, likeness, is softer, a word for resemblance, the word Ezekiel uses again and again in his first chapter for things he can only describe as looking like something. The two words in Genesis 1:26 are probably not two different parts of a human being, as some early interpreters thought, but two ways of saying one thing: the human creature both represents God and resembles him. A statue of a king tells you who rules the place where it stands. A human being, set by God in the world, tells the world whose world it is.

That last point has strong support from the ancient world. A statue found at Tell Fekheriyeh in Syria in 1979, from the ninth century before Christ, carries an inscription in Akkadian and Aramaic describing the king it portrays, and the Aramaic uses words related to tselem and demut for the statue. In the nations around Israel, the king was the image of the god, and his statues were set up to mark his rule. Genesis takes that language and gives it to every man and woman. The farmer's wife, the slave, the child, the leper are all, in this account, royal images. That is a remarkable claim for an ancient text to make, and it is the root of everything this module will say about life and death.

Christians agree that every person bears the image. They have disagreed about what the image is, and the disagreement matters for ethics, because the answer you give can quietly decide who counts. Theologians usually group the answers into three families. Each has serious defenders and serious texts. Each also carries a particular risk when it is pressed on its own.

The first is the substantive or structural view: the image is something in human nature, usually the rational soul, the capacity to know, reason, choose and love. It is the oldest and most widely held view in the church's history. Irenaeus, writing Against Heresies around 180, distinguished between the image and the likeness, and later writers took that distinction to mean that the image is our rational nature, which remains after the fall, while the likeness is a gift of the Spirit that was lost and is restored in Christ. Augustine, in On the Trinity, looked for the image in the structure of the mind, in memory, understanding and will, which he saw as a faint reflection of the three persons of God. Thomas Aquinas, in the first part of the Summa Theologiae, question 93, located the image in the intellectual nature by which a human being can know and love God. The strength of this view is obvious: it explains why humans and not animals are addressed by God, given commands and held responsible, and Colossians 3:10 does connect the renewed image with knowledge. Its risk is just as obvious once you see it. If the image is the capacity to reason, then a person who has never had that capacity, or who has lost it, seems to bear less of it. No serious defender of this view draws that conclusion, and Aquinas held that the rational nature belongs to every human being as a kind of being, whether or not it can yet be exercised. But the view has to work to avoid it.

The second is the relational view: the image is not a thing in us but a relationship, first between God and the human being he addresses, and then between human beings, above all male and female. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his 1932 and 1933 lectures published as Creation and Fall, spoke of an analogy of relation rather than of being. Karl Barth developed it at length in the third volume of the Church Dogmatics, reading the last line of Genesis 1:27 as the explanation of the first two: God, who is himself a fellowship of persons, makes a creature that exists in the fellowship of man and woman. The strength of this view is that it takes the text's own explanation seriously, since the only thing Genesis 1:27 says about the image is male and female, and it fits the biblical picture of a God who speaks and of human beings who are made to answer. Its risk is that a person who has been rejected by others, or who cannot respond, might seem to be outside the relation. Its defenders answer that the relation that constitutes the image is God's to us before it is ours to anyone, and that God's address does not depend on our reply.

The third is the functional or royal view: the image is a task, the role of ruling and caring for the earth on God's behalf. Gerhard von Rad argued for this in his commentary on Genesis, and David Clines gave it a careful statement in an article called The Image of God in Man in the Tyndale Bulletin in 1968. J. Richard Middleton's The Liberating Image (2005) is the fullest modern defence. Its supporters point out that Genesis 1:26 moves directly from image to rule, that Psalm 8 says God crowned man with glory and honor and set him over the works of his hands, and that the ancient Near Eastern evidence in section 1 makes the royal reading natural. The strength of this view is that it ties dignity to vocation and makes every human being a royal representative, which Middleton argues was a direct challenge to the ideology of ancient kings. Its risk is that a person who cannot work or rule, the infant, the disabled, the dying, might seem to bear less of the image. Its defenders answer that the task is given to humankind as a whole and that a child is not less royal for being a child.

Many theologians now hold some combination, and one recent statement deserves mention because it addresses the risk head on. John Kilner, in Dignity and Destiny (2015), argues that the image is first of all a status God gives, a connection to God and an intention for each person to reflect him, rather than any attribute the person has. On his reading, the image is not damaged by sin or reduced by disability, because it was never a measure of how well anyone reflects God; it is God's commitment to the person. You do not have to accept his whole argument to see why it is attractive to people who work with the disabled and the dying.

A second disagreement runs alongside the first and should be named. Did the fall damage the image? Catholic and Orthodox theology, building on the image and likeness distinction, has usually said that the image remains intact while the likeness, the life of grace, was lost. Luther, in his Lectures on Genesis, said that the image in its proper sense was lost and must be restored in Christ, while a wider image remains. Calvin, in the Institutes (1.15.4), held that the image was not wiped out but was so corrupted that what remains is a terrible deformity. These are real differences about grace and nature, and you will meet them again in the doctrine of salvation. But notice what they agree on. None of them says that any human being can fall below the line of protection drawn by Genesis 9:6 and James 3:9. That agreement is the ground on which the rest of this module stands.

Scripture's treatment of disability is not simple, and it is better to say so than to choose only the comfortable texts. The law forbids cursing the deaf or putting a stumbling block before the blind, and grounds the command in the fear of God (Leviticus 19:14), which means God takes it personally when the disabled are mocked. David seeks out Mephibosheth, Jonathan's son, who is lame in both feet, restores his grandfather's land and gives him a permanent place at the king's table (2 Samuel 9:7, 9:13), and the narrator mentions his lameness again at the end, as if to say that it was not healed and did not need to be for him to be honoured. Jesus rejects the disciples' assumption that a man born blind is being punished for his own or his parents' sin (John 9:2-3). He tells his hearers to invite the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind to their banquets (Luke 14:13), and in the parable that follows the master's servant is sent into the streets to bring exactly those people in (14:21). Against that, some texts are hard. Exodus 4:11 has God telling Moses that he makes the mute and the deaf and the blind, and Leviticus 21 bars priests with physical defects from offering the sacrifices. Christians have read those texts in different ways, and you will meet the debate in the Old Testament Survey. What no reading permits is treating a disabled person as less human.

Christian thinkers who work closely with disabled people have pressed the doctrine further. Nancy Eiesland, a sociologist of religion who lived with a congenital bone disability, wrote The Disabled God (1994), in which she pointed to the risen Christ showing Thomas the wounds in his hands and side (John 20:27): the body of the risen Lord is not a body from which every mark has been removed. Amos Yong, a Pentecostal theologian whose brother has Down syndrome, wrote Theology and Down Syndrome (2007), arguing that people with intellectual disabilities are not problems to be solved by the church but members through whom the church learns what the body of Christ is. Hans Reinders, a Dutch ethicist, in Receiving the Gift of Friendship (2008), argued that the worth of a person with profound disability lies in being chosen and befriended by God, not in anything the person can achieve, and that this is true of every one of us. John Swinton, a Scottish theologian and former nurse, has written on dementia and on time, arguing in Becoming Friends of Time (2016) that a church in a hurry will always leave such people behind. These writers differ among themselves, but they agree on the main point, and it is the point the scriptures in the inquiry already made: worth is given, not earned.

In many of the places where students of this course live, the question is not academic. In some communities a child born with a disability is hidden, or treated as a curse on the family, or blamed on witchcraft or on the mother's sin, exactly the reasoning Jesus rejects in John 9. People with albinism have been attacked and killed in several East African countries, including Tanzania and Malawi, because of a belief that their bodies carry magical power, and the United Nations has repeatedly reported these attacks. Children have been accused of witchcraft, beaten and thrown out of their homes in parts of Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and in some cases those accusations have been made or confirmed by people calling themselves pastors. A church that preaches Genesis 1:27 and stays silent about these things has not yet believed what it preaches. A church that prays for healing is right to do so, but if it teaches that a disabled person remains disabled because of a lack of faith, it has repeated the disciples' mistake and added to the person's burden.

The same doctrine reaches both ends of life. The old, whose bodies and memories fail, are image-bearers to the last breath; the commandment to honour father and mother does not expire when parents become difficult to care for. The unborn, who cannot yet do anything at all, are the subject of the next lesson, and the dying of the one after that. You will find that most of the hard arguments in this module are arguments about whether some human beings, at some stage or in some condition, fall outside the protection Genesis 9:6 gives. Keep the lesson of the inquiry in mind when you reach them: the texts ground human worth in God's act, not in our abilities.

If the image belongs to humankind as such, then it cannot be distributed by tribe, colour, caste or class. Paul says it to the Athenians: from one man God made every nation of men (Acts 17:26). Job says it about his slaves: the same One formed us in the womb (Job 31:15), which is a startling thing for a master to say in the ancient world, and he says it as the reason he could not deny them justice. Proverbs says it about the poor: whoever oppresses the poor taunts their Maker (Proverbs 14:31), and he who mocks the poor insults their Maker (17:5). Each time, an insult to a human being is treated as an insult to the God whose image they bear.

The New Testament takes the same logic into the church. 'There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus' (Galatians 3:28). James forbids favouritism in the assembly, the rich man given a good seat and the poor man told to stand (James 2:1-4). Paul sends the runaway slave Onesimus back to Philemon no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a beloved brother (Philemon 16). Christians disagree about how far Paul meant that sentence to reach into the institution of slavery itself, and you will meet that debate later in the track. But they do not disagree that inside the church the slave and the master sit at the same table as brothers.

This is not only a Western story. Ethnic favouritism in the choosing of pastors, bishops and church workers is one of the commonest complaints in African and Asian churches. In parts of India, Christians of Dalit background, from the communities once called untouchable, have reported separate seating, separate cemeteries and exclusion from leadership in their own churches, sometimes for generations after their families were baptised. Module 5 of this track returns to race, ethnicity and tribe at length. For now the point is the foundation: if your church treats one tribe or caste as more fit to lead, to marry or to be buried in the front of the cemetery, it has contradicted Genesis 1:27 in practice, whatever it confesses on paper.

The history of the church on this subject is not a triumph and not a disgrace. It is both, and a student should be able to tell both halves of it without flinching.

On the side of defence, the record begins early. In the Roman world, unwanted infants, especially girls and the disabled, were often exposed, left outside to die or to be picked up and raised as slaves. Christians refused to do it. The Letter to Diognetus, probably from the second century, says that Christians marry and have children like everyone else, but do not expose their offspring, and Justin Martyr's First Apology condemns the practice. In the fourth century, Basil of Caesarea built a great complex outside his city, later called the Basileias, with places for the poor, the sick and travellers, and with care for lepers, whom his friend Gregory of Nazianzus describes him embracing. Basil's brother Gregory of Nyssa, preaching on Ecclesiastes 2:7, where the Preacher boasts of acquiring slaves, delivered one of the sharpest attacks on slave owning in the ancient world: he asked how anyone could put a price on a creature made in the image of God. In 1537 Pope Paul III issued Sublimis Deus, declaring that the native peoples of the Americas were truly human, capable of the faith, and not to be enslaved. At Valladolid in 1550 and 1551 the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas argued against Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda that the peoples of the Americas were not natural slaves. African Christians spoke for themselves: Olaudah Equiano, once enslaved, published his Interesting Narrative in 1789 and gave the British abolition movement a voice it could not ignore, and Samuel Ajayi Crowther, rescued from a slave ship as a boy, became in 1864 the first African Anglican bishop. In August 1941 Clemens von Galen, the Catholic bishop of Münster, preached publicly against the Nazi programme that was killing disabled and mentally ill people in Germany, at real risk to himself.

On the side of failure, the record is just as real. Christians owned slaves, traded them and defended the trade from the pulpit, sometimes using the curse of Genesis 9:25, though that curse falls on Canaan, not on Ham, and has nothing to do with Africa. Theologians in the American South wrote long defences of slavery from scripture. In South Africa, the Dutch Reformed Church gave apartheid a theological justification for decades, until the World Alliance of Reformed Churches declared at Ottawa in 1982 that apartheid was a sin and its theological justification a heresy, and the church itself began to retreat from it later in that decade. In the United States in the 1920s, a number of ministers preached sermons in favour of eugenics, the movement to stop people judged unfit from having children, and some entered sermon competitions run by the American Eugenics Society; Christine Rosen tells that story in Preaching Eugenics (2004). And in Rwanda in 1994, in one of the most Christian countries in Africa, neighbours killed neighbours in church buildings, a story the fourth lesson of this module tells at more length.

What is the lesson of a record like that? Not that the doctrine failed. In almost every case the people who defended dignity were appealing to the image of God, and the people who violated it were making an exception to it: these people do not count, or count less, because of their race, their tribe, their disability or their usefulness. Christians did not usually deny the doctrine; they limited it. So the test of whether you believe Genesis 1:27 is not whether you can recite it. It is whether there is anyone you have quietly excused from it. The list you made in the inquiry is where to start looking.

Every lesson in this track ends with a page for your casebook, the notebook in which you work real moral questions from your own setting, so that by the end of the track you have a written case study of your own. This module's pages are about life and death, and this first page is the foundation for the other four.

Head the page The image of God in my community. Copy Genesis 1:27, Genesis 9:6 and James 3:9 at the top. Then take the three groups you wrote down in the inquiry. For each one, write three things: how that group is treated in your community or church, by describing what happens and not by naming anyone; which of the texts in this lesson speaks most directly to that treatment; and one small, concrete thing your church could do to treat them as image-bearers. A small thing is better than a large one you will not do: a seat at the front, a visit, a disabled child welcomed into the children's class with an adult to help, a widow from another tribe invited to share a meal.

Then write one honest sentence about yourself, in private, answering the question from section 5: is there a group of people I have quietly excused from Genesis 1:27? You do not need to show this sentence to anyone. But if the answer is yes, pray over it, and keep it in mind as you work through the rest of this module, because every hard case that follows will press on exactly that place.