The image of God

Made in his image

At the climax of the creation account the language changes. Until now God has said "Let there be"; now he says, "Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness" (Genesis 1:26).

So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.

Genesis 1:27

The Hebrew word for ‘image’, tselem (צֶלֶם), usually means a visible likeness, such as a statue or a carved figure. Human beings are the one part of creation made to show, within the world, something of the God no one can see. And this image belongs to both sexes alike: the man does not bear it more than the woman. For the questions this raises, see Does the Bible put women down?

Most traditions hold the image was not lost when humanity fell. After the flood God forbids murder and gives the reason: "for in His own image God has made mankind" (Genesis 9:6). James rebukes believers who bless God and then curse "men, who have been made in God’s likeness" (James 3:9). Sin has defaced the image deeply, as the lesson on original sin explains, but it has not erased it. (Lutheran confessions, using the word for original righteousness, say that was lost.)

You made him a little lower than the angels; You crowned him with glory and honor. You made him ruler of the works of Your hands; You have placed everything under his feet

Psalm 8:5-6

Yet this crowned creature is made of dust. "The LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living being" (Genesis 2:7). Matthew Henry puts it in one line: "Flesh and spirit, heaven and earth, must be put together in him" Matthew Henry.

What the image is

Scripture never defines the image in a sentence, and the church has seen several sides of it. They are less rival theories than facets, and many Christians hold them together.

The first is a likeness in reason, will and moral nature. Many of the Fathers and the medieval theologians found the image in our power to think, to choose, to tell right from wrong and to know God. Augustine traced in the mind's memory, understanding and will a reflection of the Trinity, and taught that the image shines most brightly when the mind remembers, knows and loves the God who made it Augustine, On the Trinity.

The second is relationship. "It is not good for the man to be alone," God said (Genesis 2:18). Theologians such as Karl Barth saw the image in relationship itself: in God addressing human beings and their answering him, and in man and woman facing each other as partners Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics.

The third is a royal calling. Genesis 1:26 ties image and rule together in one sentence. Ancient kings set up statues of themselves across their lands to mark their reign, and a king could be called the image of a god. Many Old Testament scholars read Genesis against that background: every human being, not only the king, is God's living image, placed in the world to care for it on his behalf. That rule is stewardship, not exploitation; the man was placed in the garden "to cultivate and keep it" (Genesis 2:15).

The Westminster Shorter Catechism gathers these together: "God created man male and female, after his own image, in knowledge, righteousness, and holiness, with dominion over the creatures" Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q10. Calvin held that the image has its chief seat in the soul, in mind and heart, yet that no part of us, not even the body, is without some spark of it Calvin, Institutes 1.15.

This is why every human life carries the same dignity: the unborn child and the dying, the disabled, the poor and the stranger. "Whoever oppresses the poor taunts their Maker" (Proverbs 14:31); the way we treat a person is the way we treat the one whose image that person bears. Work belongs to the calling too. It is not a curse but a share in God's care for his world, and rest comes with it, as God rested on the seventh day (see the lesson on creation).

Christ, the true image

The New Testament shows us the original from which the copy was made.

The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.

Colossians 1:15

The Greek word is eikōn (εἰκών). Paul speaks of "Christ, who is the image of God" (2 Corinthians 4:4), and Hebrews calls the Son "the exact representation of His nature" (Hebrews 1:3). We were made to reflect God; Christ reflects him perfectly.

Irenaeus saw here the heart of salvation. Humanity was made after the image of the Word, he taught, but the Word was not yet visible, and so the likeness was easily lost. When the Word became flesh, he made the image visible in himself and restored the likeness for good, so that what we lost in Adam we recover in Christ Irenaeus, Against Heresies. Irenaeus distinguished the image, in our created nature, from the likeness given by the Spirit; Calvin read the two words as a Hebrew repetition naming one thing.

So believers are being renewed into that image. They have "put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator" (Colossians 3:10), and God has predestined those he foreknew "to be conformed to the image of His Son" (Romans 8:29).

And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into His image with intensifying glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.

2 Corinthians 3:18

Holding up a tax coin, Jesus asked, "Whose image is this … and whose inscription?" (Matthew 22:20). Hilary of Poitiers draws the lesson for those who bear God's image: "It behoves us also to render unto God the things that are His, namely, body, soul, and will" Hilary. A coin belongs to the one whose image it bears, and so do we. How that renewal goes on day by day is taken up in the lesson on holiness and perseverance.

Body, soul and spirit

How many parts make up a human being? For most of the church's history the answer has been two: body and soul. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and the Reformers held this, and Calvin wrote that a human being consists of a soul and a body. Those who hold it point to Jesus' words about those who "kill the body but cannot kill the soul" (Matthew 10:28), and take ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ in Scripture as two names for the same inner self, seen now as the life of the body and now as open to God. The Catholic Church likewise teaches that distinguishing soul and spirit does not mean that we have two souls Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Others count three parts: body, soul and spirit. They point to Paul's prayer that "your entire spirit, soul, and body be kept blameless" (1 Thessalonians 5:23), and to the word of God that "pierces even to dividing soul and spirit" (Hebrews 4:12). The spirit, they hold, which communes with God, is distinct from the soul, the seat of mind, feeling and will. Some early Greek Christian writers spoke this way, a number of holiness and evangelical teachers developed it in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in Korea and elsewhere it became widely known through books such as Watchman Nee's The Spiritual Man.

Both views read the same Scriptures with care, and both hold that the whole person is God's creation, that the body is good and will be raised, and that a human being is one person, not a soul passing through a body. For more on what we are and why we are here, see What is a human being? and Why do we exist?

Every person you meet today bears the image of God, and so do you. In Christ that image is already being restored, and "when Christ appears, we will be like Him" (1 John 3:2).

Practice