On the Doctrine of the Imago Dei (Man in God's Image)

Introduction:
Perhaps no other doctrine of the Christian faith goes against the philosophical grain of modern sociocultural paradigms as abrasively as the doctrine of man created in the imago Dei. The smoke of controversy and protest encircled around this foundational doctrine can be seen clearly simply by observing the prodigious energies with which the droves of committed secularists propound their naturalistic theories regarding human and cosmological origins. Such materialistic theories run the gamut of ideas from the random, spontaneous generation of the universe to the accidental emergence of life from purposeless, unguided, primordial matter. The vehemence with which these theories have been promulgated in the last one-hundred-plus years is positively legion.

Yet, the inherently contradictory intellectual posture present among those who advocate these secularist doctrines is made manifest in their common commitment to upholding various humanitarian and philanthropic ideals. It is “right” they suppose to help your fellow man and be a good steward of nature and its resources even though, as one modernist philosopher has put it, we remain nothing more than “grown up germs.” Or, as existentialist Jean Paul Sarte has said, man is but “a useless passion.” Secularists, it would seem, are attempting to live out an irreconcilably contradictory worldview—living on the borrowed capital of theists who alone provide a reasonable basis for the true dignity of humankind. Namely, that human value and worth is derived solely from the fact that they are created in very image of God and, further, are deemed His. Thus, being God’s very own, we are inestimably valuable because we belong to Him. Humanitarianism, then, on the part of the Christian theist in particular is firmly grounded in the immutable fact that to do good to one’s fellow man, is to do good unto God Himself who not only sustains man, but determines his ultimate destiny (Mat 25:40; Acts 17:28/Mat 10:28).

The secularist, however, who bemoans such tragedies as that of September 11, 2001, are in fact attempting to redeem theistic currency under some other banner. Yet just as the dollar is an utterly worthless document without the backing authority and promise of the American government, so to is outrage at the tragic loss of life a baseless emotion without acknowledging the Life Giver. As theologian RC Sproul has commented, if all we are is grown up germs, than the more appropriate reaction to tragedy should be a yawn! The violent death of thousands of people bears little contrast from watching a firecracker blow up in an ant hill.[1]

Thus, it is not only for reasons pertaining to philosophical issues that confront the church that the doctrine of the imago important. Rather, its seminality in arriving at one’s entire theological construct cannot be overstated. How one goes about their understanding of man’s creation in the imago Dei is determinative of virtually every ensuing doctrinal affirmation.[2]

In dealing with this fundamental doctrine of the historic, Christian faith, this article is divided into four sections. The first section will cover the general background issues involved in the formation of the doctrine, namely, its Biblical evidence and systematic import for the task of Biblical exegesis and theological construction.

The second section will identify and explain the major theological models of the imago Dei that have surfaced in the history of the church.

The third section offers a critical analysis of these models and will draw conclusions about each position offering, finally, a conclusion as to which model seems most faithful to the Biblical portrait of the nature human beings.

The final section provides a theological praxis for the imago doctrine in the context of the modern church and its missiological task.

Biblical corroboration for the doctrine of the imago Dei is strong. The very expression, “image of God,” appears, in relation to humans specifically, twice in the very first chapter of Genesis (v. 26, 27) , again in chapter nine (v. 6), and also in Paul’s discourse on ecclesial conduct in 1 Corinthians, chapter eleven (v. 7). Paul, in fact, uses the concept of the imago Dei as his theological foundation upon which to advance his teachings (as will be seen, the doctrine is used in a similar way in numerous other places as well, both Old and New Testaments, as the substantiation for various teachings and mandates). A multitude of other references and allusions to the doctrine appear in such places as Genesis 5:1, Romans 8:29, 2 Corinthians 3:18, 1 Corinthians 15:49, Colossians 3:10 and Psalm 8:5 (many of these possess both static and eschatological import).

Perhaps the best known of the aforementioned passages is Genesis 1:26-27 which reads:

26 Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” 27 God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.

As theologian, Millard Erickson, suggests, verse 26 is a statement of intention on the part of God which includes the terms image and likeness (the relationship of these two words will be discussed later).[3] We notice immediately that only the former term, image, is repeated in verse 27. Genesis 5:1b, Erickson points out, is a “recapitulation” of God’s handiwork as explicated in Genesis 1 where only the latter term is used saying, “…In the day when God created man, He made him in the likeness of God” [emphasis added].[4]

In Genesis 9:6, the imago Dei is cited, implicitly, as the foundational principle upon which God’s post-fall mandate against committing murder is seated saying, “Whoever sheds man's blood, by man his blood shall be shed, for in the image of God He made man.”

The importance of this reiteration of the imago Dei in the post-fall time period of Genesis 9 (i.e., the Noahic period) is crucial as Erickson explains: “While this passage does not say that humans still bore the image of God, but only that God had created them in the image of God, it is clear that what God had earlier done still has some bearing or effect, even at this post-Fall point.”[5]

As concerns the New Testament canon, references to the image of God are seminal in conducting a full-orbed exegesis of the texts in which they appear. For, just as in the Old Testament, these references constitute the very basis upon which numerous practical, theological teachings are founded.

Two passages in particular mention the imago Dei in direct relation to the creation of man, namely, 1 Corinthians 11:7 and James 3:9.[6] In the former, Paul explains that man is not only created in the “image” of God but that he is God’s “glory.” Thus, glory is connected with being created in God’s image. In the James passage, the author uses the imago Dei as the basis for condemning the issuance of hurtful words extended from one human being to another. Rather, he says, “with the tongue we [should] praise our Lord…”

In sum, both Old and New Testament references to humans as formed in the image of God are abundant and are offered both with current, practical import as well as eschatological import in the various sanctification/glorification passages cited above. Still, however, the question remains, just what is this “image” or “likeness” of which at least a vestige still remains in the humans God has created?

Despite such strong Biblical support and direct references to the imago Dei, no definitive theological explanation is ever set forth by the Biblical writers as to exactly what its constitution is. Thus, we must rely on our own rational faculties and a little “sanctified speculation” for the task of arriving at an basic understanding of it that remains consonant with and faithful to Scripture. Generally speaking, three categories or schools of thought have resounded throughout historic Christendom that attempt to make some sense of this teaching. These are the substantive view, the relational view, and the functional view.

The substantive view is that which understands the imago Dei to refer to certain qualities or attributes in humans that mirror those of God Himself. [7] Such faculties may include rationality, volition, affections, morality and so on.[8] The substantive view has been the majority report among theologians throughout the history of the church, concentrating typically upon various psychological or spiritual similarities between God and humans (only very radical, indeed heretical, fringe groups have held to any kind of literal physical similitude).[9]

One particularly thorny issue that has arisen over this understanding of the imago Dei (perhaps especially due to the fact that the faculty of reason is so frequently stressed by theologians) is the ostensible dichotomy of God’s creating man in His image versus His likeness (Gen 1:26). The theological traction gained by this dichotomy from the likes of such patristic theologians as Origen and Irenaeus has led modern Roman Catholicism to hold to a rather drastic contradistinction between the two concepts believing one, namely the image, to denote various faculties endowed to humans and retained by them after the fall (e.g., rationality, will, etc.), and the latter, i.e., likeness, to refer to a sort of “original state of righteousness.”[10]

To be expected, the Protestant Reformers categorically denied this distinction between “image” and “likeness” classifying it as a false dichotomy which placed the cart of theological construction before the horse of sound, Biblical hermeneutics.

Reformers such as Luther and Calvin viewed Genesis 1:26 as a form of parallelism designed to reinforce the truth of an important and foundational Biblical teaching.[11] More specifically, they viewed the two words as forming a hendiadys, that is, a grammatical construction in which two words have the same referent; a “one-in-twoness” of sorts. Other Biblical passages making use of the hendiadys seem to bear this view out such as the first chapter of Romans where Paul informs us that “the wrath of God is [being] revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness” [emphasis added].

Only very sloppy exegetics would rend from this passage a vast theological distinction between ungodliness and unrighteousness similar to the Roman Catholic exegesis of the Genesis 1 passage.

One might say that drawing such an extreme distinction between image and likeness from this passage is a rather “Procrustean” theory at best in which the passage is awkwardly wrestled into an entire preconceived theological construct that seems to add more to Scripture than it takes out (the reader will recall that, in order to get his visitors to fit into the iron bed, Procrustus would slice a bit of their arms and legs off instead of building a bigger bed!).

Forging ahead with a unitary understanding of the imago Dei, the Reformers hearkened back and expanded on earlier theories of the analogia entis, especially those associated with Thomism, which taught that there exists a correspondence or “analogy of being” between the created order and God as the purposive result of the Divine craftsmanship.[12] Thus, by force of resistless logic stemming from the singular analogia entis view, Luther and Calvin subscribed to what is commonly referred to as the “relic” or “remnant” theory of the image of God, namely that, although the entire constitutive nature of man has been horribly mangled by the fall, the imago Dei has not been completely eviscerated. Rather, a remnant of the divine image remains in man.[13],[14]

The substantive view has not, of course, been left unchallenged. In fact, neoorthodox theologians have, at times, been positively vociferous in their attackson the classical Reformed view (i.e., the substantive view).

Neoorthodoxy, then, has been anything but slow in making known its distaste for the classical conception of Scriptural anthropology. Much of this distaste , it seems, has metamorphosed into what is alternatively categorized as the so-called relational view of the imago Dei.

Neoorthodox theologian, Karl Barth, one of the leading proponents of this view, has been sure to challenge just about anything stemming from the concept of the analogia entis.

Barth much preferred the rather novel idea of an analogia relationis or the “analogy of relationship.”[15]

This view sees the image of God not as something in man, but rather in his relationship to God or even other humans.[16]

Barth further unpacks this view contending that the imago Dei finds its locus in the human capacity to reflect “the internal communion and encounter present within God.”[17]

Strangely, Barth suggests that this *encounter* rests squarely in the act of creation spawning *gender* distinctions, i.e., that there is an “I-Thou” dynamic within humanity just as within God.[18] Other neoorthodox theologians besides Karl Barth have been instrumental in developing the analogia relationis theories, such as Emil Brunner.

Erickson neatly sums up the cardinal tenets of the relational view of which the likes of Barth and Brunner both agree:

1. The image of God and human nature are best understood through a study of the person of Jesus, not of humans per se.
2. We obtain our understanding of the image from the divine revelation.
3. The image of God is not to be understood in terms of any structural qualities within humans; …Rather, the image is a matter of one’s *relationship* to God.
4. The relationship of the human to God, which constitutes the image of God, is paralleled by the *relationship between humans*.
5. The image of God is universal…Therefore, it is present in sinful human beings.
6. No conclusion can or need be drawn as to what there might be in a person’s nature that would constitute ability to have such a relationship.[19]

The final view for consideration is what is often called the functional view of the imago Dei. Essentially, this view holds the image of God to be contained primarily and manifested directly in that which a person does. Scriptural support for this view is sought by implication of the command given to man by God immediately following the imago Dei narrative of Genesis 1. Verse 28 records God’s command that humans, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” According to the functional view, the imago Dei is present in humans to the extent that they submit themselves to this fundamental mandate.[20]

Erickson is quick to point out that, while the relational view yields little toward the content of the imago Dei, this view attempts to determine—from the Biblical text itself—the very content of the image.[21] Thus, the act of exercising dominion over the earth is thought to actually be this content. As a historical note, it is not so surprising, given their denial of original sin, that the functional view was the popular, indeed confessional, view of the heretical Socinians.[22],[23]

In evaluating these three overarching views, it is the contention of the writer that, of paramount importance, is to consider some of the likely philosophical presuppositions that are poured into each categorical theology of the imago Dei.

Concerning the relational view (and its clear connection with neoorthodoxy), at least two likely presuppositions should be considered. The first is neoorthodoxy’s common conception of God as being totaliter aliter, i.e., “wholly other.”

Brunner and Barth, for example, both held to this view as have others the likes of T.F. Torrance, Donald Bloesch, Herman Dooyeweerd, Cornelius Van Til, and Al Wolters.[24]

Primarily, this view sees the application of human logic toward God (and therefore an analogia entis entailing such items as rationality and will) as purely a fool’s errand steeped in futility.

Talking about God is such a way, these theologians suggest, is just so much nonsense. The constitutive human faculties are thought to be unalterably “restricted to this side of the ontological boundary between God and the created order.”[25]

Simply stated, however, this view undermines the Christian faith implicitly. It is fatal to Christianity.

For, if human beings are utterly dissimilar from God, then there is no possible nexus or reference point through which meaningful or intelligible interchange can take place between God and humans.

Moreover, nothing whatsoever can be said about God. Calling God “good” or “righteous” doesn’t really mean anything since its merely a human concept being foisted on a God which can’t possibly lend itself to such ascriptions.

Logically speaking, though, this view is even fatal to neoorthodoxy’s own view about God regardless of their appeal to it being merely a human view. For the concept of the analogia relationis itself dies with this presupposition.

Thus, the presupposition of totaliter aliter is not only self-referentially absurd, but inexorably leads to little more than a “pious agnosticism.”[26]

Secondly, the relational view, as Erickson points out, is firmly entrenched in the philosophical clay of existentialism.[27]

Consistent with their view that ___the Bible doesn’t even become the “Word of God’ until one “meets” God in it___, Barth and Brunner hold the imago Dei to be meaningless until one *relates* to it.

The image is not “an entity that a human possesses so much as *the experience* that is present when a relationship is active.”[28]

As for the functional view, it seems intuitively obvious that it finds its roots, as Erickson points out, in modern philosophical schools of functionalism and pragmatism (perhaps even with a touch of verificationism thrown in).[29] Here again, the question of being or essence is sacrificed on the alter of functionality and usefulness.

Where are left, then, with the historic view of the Imago Dei as reflecting something much more substantive in God’s created humans that mirrors certain attributes found in God Himself (though, in reality, the imago Dei may indeed constitute some aspects emphasized in the other two views as well to the extent that they are antecedently grounded in the substantive view).

Thus, the imago Dei has more to do with the irrevocable ontological stasis of human beings (though vulnerable to impairment) than one’s moral or functional disposition toward God. Demons, for example, retain their ontological status as angelic beings despite their moral hatred of God.

A further consequence of embracing the Biblicity of the substantive view, is the idea of the image, in its post-Fall state, as being a remnant or relic of the primordial imago Dei. As demonstrated by the futility of a strictly relational view, there must be some similarity between God and the created order if revelation, whether special or general, is ever to occur.

No doubt the Reformers were careful to confess that a giant chasm does indeed exist between the faculties of God and man. But, to take this to the rash extremity of totaliter aliter, thus denying any analogia entis whatsoever, is simply to kill Christianity.

As regards the functional view, to restrict the image of God to this construct is to grossly minimize God’s handiwork in creating man, namely, that creature into whom God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life”(Gen 2:7). Biblically speaking, it is clear from a diversity of Scriptural passages that man is both intrinsically formed and, in the case of the regenerate, being further formed in the image of God.

As mentioned in the introduction, one’s view of the imago Dei is seminal in forming the rest of their theological construct.

The doctrine does not merely serve to distinguish man from animality. Rather, it sets the entire stage upon which humans are able to relate to their Creator at all and, therefore, receive salvation and be extricated from this “house of mourning” (Ecc. 7:4) in which Jesus promises much “trouble” (Jn 16:33) and be ushered into eternal life.

Today’s Christians may find refuge and great comfort in this doctrine. For, to be created in the image of God means that we have not only the ability, but indeed privilege, of relating to, serving, and loving our heavenly Father. Further, we may know that the very purpose of our being created, i.e., the optimal state of our constituent nature is most cared for and spiritually nurtured when we are seeking God’s face.

It is because of the veracity of the imago doctrine that humans possess Pascal’s proverbial “God-shaped vacuum” deep inside them which God may often use to draw us nearer.[30] Or, as Augustine put it, “You have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.”[31]

Being created in the imago Dei means that, just as a car is designed to run on fuel, so too are we designed to “run” on the Spirit of God.

Further, our inherent value is firmly established in direct relation to our being created in the image of an absolutely perfect and loving God. Human life is wholly precious to God (Ps 72:14). Biblically, we should strive to treat all peoples with the Divine view of life’s sanctity in mind.

Christians, being commanded to “give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” must show the world that the true basis for bewailing the suffering we see around us is in the inherent dignity of humans as being created by God in His image. This is the inestimable value that only the Biblical worldview places on human life as sacred in the eyes of God.

Which of those three "views" do some of you *feel* would just automatically be most appealing to females without further explanation?:

[1] Substantive

[2] Relational

[3] Functional

Just my observation:

Many more females (and the males they feminize) are involved in leadership in "the church" today, than in the days of the Reformers and for a short time thereafter.

Is it any wonder then that the visible church today esteems the experiential / relational _OVER_ the expositional / rational? (Or as Rush would say, "Symbolism _OVER_ Substance".)

Which of those three "views" do some of you *feel* would just automatically be most appealing to females without further explanation?: [1] Substantive [2] Relational [3] Functional ?

I think that implicitly your question draws a valid inference that the author did not. [In fact, I am not sure of the author's purpose in this extensive analysis.] But one does not need be a 'weatherman' to see that, in the tension between 'intellectual faith' and 'experiential faith', the author's 'substantive' category is going to tilt to 'intellectual' and the author's 'relational' category is going to tilt to the 'experiential'. But, I don't think you have to be a 'neo' to find some validity in the 'experiential' approach.

Moreover, I think I would like to know more about what the RCC sees in making the 'image'/'likeness' dichotomy which the author ridicules without explaning. Certainly, scholastics 'tilted' the same way the reformers did in terms of 'intellectual faith'. They all reasoned heavily as to the nature of God and usually from the same (Greek) philosophical bases. [Because of their focus on the cnetrality of the Scripture, the Reformers rephrased the scholastics' philosophical speculations into 'Bible language' but they kept almost all the central philosophical concepts.]

[By the way, I love the author's very honest term "sanctified speculation".]

I personally see the intellectual Mr. Wesley trying to restore some balance in the 'intellectual'/'experiential' tug-of-war with his comment on the "heart strangely warmed". Surely, the neo-orthodox did undermine 'reason' (one could say they 'de-sanctified the speculation'), but Mr. Wesley did not. He merely added the 'experiential' witness, but kept it tethered to the intellect.

I think there is probably very little that any 'side' of our usual debates will object to here. As to your precise question, while it is unquestioned that females will emphasize 'feelings' and therefore probably the 'experiential' side of the equation, I don't think that necessarily makes them into 'neos'. They are just not as comfortable with the 'intellectual' side of faith (on the whole and on the average) as males are. But I am not sure that necessarily translates to a different view of the 'image of God'. Just one man's opinion.

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