The Image of God

Genesis 1:26-27 is the shortest important passage in Christian anthropology, and the first thing to say about it is what it does not do. It does not tell you what the image of God is. It says that God resolved to make humanity in his image and after his likeness, that he did so, that he made them male and female, and that they are to rule. Every account of the image you will ever read is a proposal about how to fill a gap the writer left open, and any teacher who presents his own proposal as the plain sense of the verse is not reading the verse carefully.

Two Hebrew nouns are in play. Tselem, translated image, is normally a physical representation: the carved and molten images Israel is told to destroy in Numbers 33:52, the image of Baal smashed in 2 Kings 11:18, and in 1 Samuel 6:5 the gold models of tumours and mice the Philistines send back with the ark. Demut, translated likeness, is more abstract, a resemblance or a pattern, used of the design of an altar in 2 Kings 16:10 and of the likeness of the living creatures and the likeness of a throne in Ezekiel 1. The prepositions differ too, be with tselem and ke with demut, and a good deal of ink has been spent on the difference.

It is mostly wasted ink, and the text itself is the reason. Genesis 1:27 uses image alone. Genesis 5:1 uses likeness alone. Genesis 5:3, describing Seth, uses both and swaps the prepositions over. Writers who use two words that carefully do not shuffle them like that. The most defensible reading of the Hebrew is that the pair functions as a single idea, with the second word colouring the first, and that the writer is repeating himself for emphasis in the manner of Hebrew prose everywhere. That conclusion has consequences for a tradition we will come to, which built a great deal on the distinction.

There is also the plural: 'Let Us make man in Our image.' The BSB prints Us and Our with capital letters, which is the translators' decision that the pronouns refer to God; the Hebrew has no capitals. That is not neutral between the readings below. A capital Us fits a God who speaks of himself and sits less easily with a God who addresses the angels, so a student reading only the BSB is nudged toward the readings in which God speaks of himself (self-address, trinitarian, majesty) without being told there was a choice. The BSB capitalises Us at Isaiah 6:8 as well, so the same nudge applies to the court parallel below, where the Hebrew gives no such signal. Four readings are current and all are held by serious people. The heavenly court reading takes God as addressing the angelic assembly, which is the ordinary furniture of Hebrew narrative at 1 Kings 22:19, Job 1:6 and Isaiah 6:8, where 'Who will go for Us?' has exactly this shape; the difficulty is that Genesis 1:27 then says God created humanity in his own image, singular, so whatever the court is doing it is not co-creating. The plural of deliberation or self-address takes it as God speaking to himself, which reads naturally and is what most Jewish interpretation has concluded. The trinitarian reading, standard in Christian writing from the second century on, hears the plurality of persons; its honest weakness is that no Israelite reader in 900 BC could have heard that, so it is a reading in the light of later revelation rather than a claim about the author's intention, and it should be stated that way. The plural of majesty is the weakest option, because Hebrew does not otherwise use first person plural verbs that way. The lesson does not need to settle this, and you should notice that none of the four changes what the passage says about humanity.

One more observation before the proposals. The passage moves straight from image to dominion, and then in verse 28 to blessing, fruitfulness and rule. Whether the dominion is the image, or follows from the image, or is the purpose for which the image was given, is precisely what the next section is about. The Hebrew syntax permits all three and does not decide between them.

The substantive account holds that the image is something humanity possesses: a set of capacities, or a kind of being, that resembles God. Reason and will are the usual candidates, with moral awareness, self-consciousness, language, and the capacity for God added by different writers. Irenaeus, Against Heresies V.6.1, distinguished the image, which is the rational and free constitution of a human being, from the likeness, which is the Spirit's conforming of that being to God and which was lost. John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith II.12, makes the same division and locates the image in mind and free will. Thomas Aquinas gives it the fullest scholastic treatment at Summa Theologiae Ia q.93: the image is found principally in the intellectual nature, because that is where a creature can imitate God's knowing and loving of himself, and Aquinas then distinguishes three degrees, the image of creation in every human being by nature, the image of re-creation in the just by grace, and the image of likeness in the blessed by glory. Augustine, De Trinitate IX to XV, looks for the image in the mind's memory, understanding and will, a triad that mirrors the Trinity. Calvin, Institutes 1.15.3-4, places it chiefly in the mind and heart and makes the content knowledge, righteousness and holiness, reading it back from what Colossians 3:10 and Ephesians 4:24 say is restored in Christ. That is a real argument from texts, not an inference from philosophy: if the new self is 'being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator', then knowledge belongs to the image.

The standard objection to the substantive account is that Genesis never names a capacity, and that grounding human dignity in rational function is dangerous, because it tracks a variable. An infant, a person with profound intellectual disability, a man in the last stage of dementia: if the image is reason exercised, their standing is in doubt, and the twentieth century supplies too many examples of what follows when it is. Defenders have a serious answer. Aquinas's three degrees already distinguish the image as a natural aptitude belonging to the kind from its actual exercise in an individual, so that the image is possessed by a human being in virtue of what kind of thing she is and not in virtue of her current performance. That answer holds, but notice that it moves the weight from exercised capacity to human nature as such, which is a step the earliest formulations did not obviously take.

The functional account holds that the image is not something humanity has but something humanity does, and specifically that it is representative rule. The case begins with syntax: God says 'Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness, to rule over the fish of the sea', and Genesis 1:28 repeats the commission. Note that the BSB's 'to rule' already reads the clause as a purpose, which is the functional account's reading; the Hebrew is a plural jussive, 'and let them rule', which can express purpose but could also be read as a further command or a consequence, and the weakness noted below is that the same clause structure would express either. It is strengthened enormously by the ancient Near East. Egyptian and Mesopotamian texts call the king the image of a god. Tutankhamun's throne name means living image of Amun. Tukulti-Ninurta I is styled the eternal image of Enlil. Assyrian letters address the king as the image of Bel. And a king who could not be everywhere set up statues of himself in outlying provinces, so that his rule was present where his body was not, which is exactly what an image does in that world: it stands for an absent authority and mediates his presence. The decisive piece of evidence is the Tell Fekheriye inscription, a ninth-century BC statue of a local ruler found in Syria with a bilingual Akkadian and Aramaic text, in which the Aramaic uses both a cognate of demut and a cognate of tselem of the same statue. Those two words, together, of a royal image. This is the best external control anyone has on the idiom of Genesis 1:26.

Defenders of the functional reading include Gerhard von Rad in his Genesis commentary, Hans Walter Wolff in Anthropology of the Old Testament, D. J. A. Clines in a 1968 Tyndale Bulletin article that set much of the discussion, and more recently J. Richard Middleton in The Liberating Image, who presses the political consequence: a royal title given to every human being is an implicit critique of every regime that reserves it. Catherine McDowell and John Walton add a cultic dimension, arguing that an image in that world is installed in a sanctuary and animated to mediate a god's presence, and that Genesis 2 presents the garden in temple terms. The named weakness is real: the ancient parallels establish that the idiom is royal, but they cannot establish that the rule is the image rather than its consequence, because the same Hebrew clause structure would express either. And Genesis 9:6 is awkward for the reading, because it grounds the prohibition of murder in something the victim is, not in a function he is currently performing.

The relational account holds that the image is found in relation, in the fact that a human being exists as a self turned towards another. Karl Barth gave it its most famous form in Church Dogmatics III/1 and III/2, taking the third line of Genesis 1:27 as definitional: humanity is in the image because humanity exists as male and female, an I confronted by a Thou, corresponding to the differentiation and fellowship in God's own being. Barth called this an analogia relationis, an analogy not of substance but of relation, and put it deliberately against the tradition that looked for the image in a faculty. Dietrich Bonhoeffer argued a version of it in Creation and Fall, and Emil Brunner a different version in Man in Revolt, distinguishing a formal image that remains from a material image that is lost in sin. The textual case is that the writer of Genesis 1:27 put male and female in the same verse as the image, twice named, and put nothing about reason there at all, and that Genesis 2:18 says it is not good for the man to be alone.

Eastern Orthodox personalism, developed by writers such as Vladimir Lossky and John Zizioulas, reaches a related conclusion by a different road, arguing that personhood is constituted in communion rather than in individual substance, and that this is what it means to be in the image of a God who is himself persons in communion. Stanley Grenz made a Protestant case along similar lines in The Social God and the Relational Self. The weakness of the account, in Barth's specific form, was pressed hard by Claus Westermann in his Genesis commentary and is now widely accepted: the third line of 1:27 reads most naturally as preparation for the blessing of fruitfulness in verse 28, since you need two sexes to be fruitful and multiply, rather than as a definition of the image; and Barth's move from sexual differentiation to the inner life of God is an analogy the text does not draw. Almost nobody now defends Barth's exact formulation. The wider relational emphasis, that a human being is constituted towards God and neighbour and not as an isolated container of properties, survives that criticism and is held across the traditions.

Where does that leave you? With three readings that are not, on inspection, competing answers to one question. The substantive account answers what kind of thing a human being is. The functional account answers what a human being is for. The relational account answers how a human being exists. A great many theologians now hold some combination, and there is nothing dishonest in that as long as you can say which part of the combination each text supports. What you should not do is pretend that Genesis 1 settles it, because the whole history of the argument is evidence that it does not.

Start with the fixed points, because they are firmer than the argument that follows. Genesis 5:1-3 stands after the fall and still speaks of the likeness of God. Genesis 9:6 stands after the flood, when human wickedness has just been described in the strongest terms scripture uses, and grounds the death penalty for murder in the present: 'for in His own image God has made mankind.' James 3:9 says that 'with the tongue we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who have been made in God's likeness', and the argument only works if the people being cursed still bear it. 1 Corinthians 11:7 calls a man the image and glory of God. No serious position in the history of the church holds that the image was annihilated, and a preacher who says it was is contradicted by his own Bible within eight chapters of Genesis 1.

The disagreement is about what remains and in what sense. The Eastern tradition, following Irenaeus and John of Damascus, distinguishes image from likeness: the image, the rational and free constitution of a human being, is retained; the likeness is the goal, conformity to God in virtue, which is lost and which the whole Christian life is about recovering. Theosis, becoming by grace what God is by nature, is the recovery of the likeness, and Gregory of Nyssa's treatment of human nature as capable of unending growth into God belongs here. The honest difficulty with this construction is the one section 1 identified: the Hebrew does not support a technical distinction between the two words, so the distinction is doing theological work on a philological foundation that has given way. That does not make it worthless. It makes it a theological distinction that needs a different defence, and Orthodox writers have supplied one, arguing that the image-likeness pair marks the difference between a gift and a vocation whether or not Genesis 1 is where the difference is first stated.

The Roman Catholic position, set out at the Catechism 405, is that original sin deprives human nature of original holiness and justice, so that human nature 'is wounded in the natural powers proper to it', subject to ignorance, suffering, death and an inclination to sin, but 'has not been totally corrupted'. The image is retained and defaced. The Catechism at 1701-1709 makes the image the basis of human dignity and of the moral life. Some older Catholic theology used the distinction between nature and the donum superadditum, the supernatural gift of original justice added to a nature already complete, so that the fall removed the gift and left the nature wounded but intact; that framing is less prominent now, and the Catechism does not put it that way.

The Lutheran Confessions speak more severely. The Augsburg Confession Article II says that since the fall all who are naturally born are born with sin, that is, without fear of God, without trust in God, and with concupiscence, and calls this truly sin. Luther in the Genesis lectures speaks of the image as all but lost, with what remains a ruin. But the Formula of Concord Article I, in 1577, is the place to look, because it was written against Matthias Flacius, who had pressed the language of total loss so far as to say that original sin is the very substance of fallen humanity. The Formula rejects that flatly: fallen human nature is still God's creature and still his workmanship, sin is an accident and not the substance, and to say otherwise would mean God is the creator of sin and that Christ did not assume our nature. That is a very sharp illustration of the boundary a doctrine of the image sets.

The Reformed tradition generally distinguishes a broader and a narrower sense. In the broad sense the image is what makes a human being human, rationality, dominion, moral agency, and it is retained, which is why Genesis 9:6 can say what it says. In the narrow sense the image is original righteousness, the knowledge, righteousness and holiness of Colossians 3:10 and Ephesians 4:24, and it is lost in the fall and restored in Christ. Calvin at Institutes 1.15.4 says the image was not utterly destroyed but was so corrupted that what remains is a frightful deformity, which is exactly the two-handed statement the distinction is built to make. Barth, characteristically, rejected the whole framing: for him the image is not a property that could be damaged in the first place but God's decision about humanity, and therefore it cannot be lost, because it was never ours to lose.

Notice how much these traditions agree on and how differently they say it. All of them affirm that the image survives and grounds human dignity. All of them affirm that something is badly wrong and needs restoring in Christ. The disagreements are about whether the damage is best described as wounding, deprivation, corruption or loss of a superadded gift, and those differences track larger differences about grace and nature that the next lesson on original sin will make visible. For now, be able to state each one in its own vocabulary.

Genesis 1:27 has three lines and the third is the one that has been read hardest: 'So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.' The singular him becomes the plural them in the space of five words. Whatever else this verse is doing, it forecloses one reading permanently. The image is not male. The text will not let you say that woman bears the image at one remove, or derivatively, or through her husband. Both are created, both in the image, in the same sentence, and the blessing and the commission in verse 28 are given to both.

That is a stronger claim than it sounds against the background of the ancient world the passage came out of, where the royal image language belonged to a king and where a woman's standing was ordinarily mediated through a man. It is also, by any honest reckoning, a stronger claim than most of the church's practice for most of its history.

One text has to be handled and not avoided. 1 Corinthians 11:7 says that a man 'ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of man.' Two things are worth seeing. First, Paul says the man is the image and glory of God and that the woman is the glory of man, and he nowhere says that the woman is not in the image. The parallel is not symmetrical: the word image appears in the first half and not in the second, and the second half changes the term the glory belongs to. Readers have taken that asymmetry both ways. Second, Paul writes four verses later that in the Lord woman is not independent of man nor man independent of woman, and that just as woman came from man, so also man is born of woman, and everything comes from God. Readings of 11:7 that make the woman less an image-bearer have to survive 11:11-12, and readings that treat 11:7 as saying nothing at all have to explain why Paul wrote it. This course has already worked that passage at length in the Hermeneutics track, and it is not going to be settled here. What can be said is that the systematic claim about the image rests on Genesis 1:27, Genesis 5:1-2 and James 3:9, and no proposed reading of 1 Corinthians 11:7 has overturned those.

Genesis 5:1-2 is worth a second look here for a reason easy to miss: 'In the day that God created man, He made him in His own likeness. Male and female He created them, and He blessed them. And in the day they were created, He called them "man."' The name given to the pair is the word for the species. The writer has gone out of his way to say that the term for humanity covers both, which is the same move Genesis 1:27 made and is exactly what a later reader needs in order to resist narrowing the image to one half of it.

A doctrine's history is part of its meaning, and this one has a history that runs in both directions, which is why it is worth teaching carefully rather than as a slogan.

The earliest sustained Christian attack on slaveholding as such, rather than on its abuses, is Gregory of Nyssa's fourth homily on Ecclesiastes, preached in Cappadocia in the 370s on the verse where the Preacher says he bought male and female slaves. Gregory's argument is the image, and he presses it without any escape hatch: the one who buys a human being is setting a price on what belongs to God, since the being he has purchased is in God's image and therefore beyond price, and in claiming ownership of God's image the buyer has set his own authority against God's. There is nothing else like it in antiquity, and it is worth reading in translation. In 1688 four Quakers in Germantown, Pennsylvania, sent up a protest against the slave trade that argued from the image and from doing to others as you would be done by; it is the first known such document in the American colonies. A century later the same doctrine did much of the argumentative work for Granville Sharp, Olaudah Equiano, William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect, and in the American debate for Theodore Dwight Weld and the abolitionist preachers.

The other direction is just as documented and must be said with the same plainness. The same chapter of Genesis that grounds human dignity in the image at 9:6 was raided at 9:25 for the curse on Canaan, which was misapplied to Africans and used for centuries to justify enslaving them, a reading that requires ignoring that the curse falls on Canaan, that no race is named anywhere in the passage, and that it stands nineteen verses after the image text. 1 Corinthians 11:7 was used to argue that women bear the image less fully than men. In South Africa a theology of separated peoples was built partly on claims about what the created order required. And in the medical and legal history of every country represented in this school there are categories of person, the unborn, the enslaved, the conquered, the disabled, whose exclusion from full protection was argued in learned language by people who could quote Genesis 1:27 and did.

Draw the right conclusion from that, which is not that the doctrine is useless. It is that a doctrine of universal dignity does no work at all until someone applies it to the person the society in question has agreed not to count, and that the application is the whole of the difficulty. Gregory saw it in 375; most of his contemporaries, reading the same verse, did not. When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted in 1947 and 1948, Charles Malik, the Lebanese Orthodox philosopher on the drafting committee, argued from convictions about the human person that came straight out of this tradition, and the declaration's final text deliberately states no metaphysical ground at all, precisely so that people who disagreed about the ground could sign the same sentence. That is worth knowing in both directions too: the Christian doctrine shaped the document, and the document could not say so.

For your own use, the practical edge of the doctrine is sharpest in three places. It says that a human being's worth is not a function of capacity, output, usefulness or standing, which means it is not reduced by illness, poverty, age, disability or disgrace. It says that the worth is conferred and not earned, which means nobody can be argued out of it by anyone who does not have the authority to confer it. And because of Genesis 9:6 and James 3:9, it says that how you speak of and act towards a human being is a matter between you and the God whose image that person carries, which is a considerably more alarming thought than anything about rights.