The Image of God

"Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image (tselem, צֶלֶם, image, a concrete representation; the same word is used elsewhere for idols, statues, and painted images), after our likeness (demuth, דְּמוּת, similarity, resemblance; an abstract noun that tempers tselem: not an exact copy but something like it). And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.' So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them" (Genesis 1:26-27).

Several observations: (1) The plural "us" (naaseh, let us make) is the divine deliberation of Genesis, debated as to whether it refers to the Trinity, the divine council, or a royal "we" of majesty. (2) The image is immediately connected to dominion: the image-bearer rules on YHWH's behalf. (3) "Male and female he created them", the image is not carried by the male alone but by the human pair (and by extension, by all humans). (4) Genesis 5:1-3 echoes the language: "When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God... Adam... fathered a son in his own likeness, after his image." The transmission of the image is parallel to the transmission of human nature, all humans share the image.

Three dominant interpretive traditions attempt to identify the content of the imago Dei:

(1) Structural view (the dominant Western tradition from Irenaeus through the medieval period): the image refers to specific human capacities, rationality, morality, self-consciousness, freedom of will. The soul's rational and moral faculties constitute the likeness to God. Augustine identified the image with the soul's triadic structure (memory/understanding/will, paralleling the Trinity). Thomas Aquinas: the image is in the soul's intellectual nature. Critique: the Genesis text does not specify capacities; the structural view risks making the image smaller for humans with diminished rational/moral faculties.

(2) Functional view (dominant in Old Testament scholarship since the work of Gerhard von Rad): the image refers to what the human does, not what the human is. Ancient Near Eastern parallels are decisive here: in Egyptian and Mesopotamian texts, the king is the "image of the god", placed in the land to exercise royal dominion on the god's behalf. Genesis democratizes the royal image: every human is the image-bearer/royal representative of YHWH in the creation. The image = the role of representing and ruling. The connection of "image" to "dominion" in 1:26 supports this view.

(3) Relational view (Karl Barth and the Barthian tradition): the image is not a human property but a relationship, specifically, the I-Thou relationship with YHWH (and among humans: "male and female he created them", the differentiated-and-united human pair reflects the relationality within the divine life). The image cannot be abstracted to a quality; it is lived in the relationship. Critique: this view risks making the image dependent entirely on the relationship rather than something that persists even when the relationship is broken.

The Fall does not destroy the imago Dei, but it distorts it. The evidence: Genesis 9:6 (after the Fall and the Flood) gives the prohibition of murder its ground in the image: "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image." The image is still present after the Fall, it is the ground of human dignity and the seriousness of murder. James 3:9 also assumes the post-Fall persistence of the image: "With it (the tongue) we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God."

However, the image is distorted: "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick" (Jeremiah 17:9). The rational, moral, relational, and functional aspects of the image all suffer from the Fall. The mind is "darkened" (Romans 1:21, "their senseless minds were darkened"), the will is enslaved to sin (Romans 6:17, "slaves to sin"), the relationships are fractured (Genesis 3:12-13, blame-shifting), and the dominion mandate is distorted into exploitation and destructiveness.

The Reformation tradition distinguished between the imago Dei in the broad sense (the formal human properties, rationality, morality, relationality, that persist after the Fall) and the imago Dei in the narrow sense (the original righteousness, holiness, and knowledge, what the Reformers called the justitia originalis, that was lost in the Fall and must be restored by grace).

Colossians 1:15: "He is the image (eikon, εἰκών, exact image, precise representation, copy) of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation." Christ is the perfect eikon of the Father, the same word the LXX uses to translate tselem in Genesis 1:26. Adam was made in the image; Christ is the image. The distinction is key to the New Testament's anthropology of restoration.

2 Corinthians 3:18: "And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image (eikon) from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit." The transformation of the image-bearer back toward the perfect image happens by beholding Christ, the Spirit-work of progressive sanctification transforms the fallen image toward the Christ-image.

Colossians 3:9-10: "You have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image (kat eikona, according to the image) of its creator." The new self (the regenerate person) is being renewed in knowledge, one of the specific image-properties (knowledge of God, the narrow imago Dei) that was lost in the Fall is being restored.

1 John 3:2: "Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is." The eschatological promise is image-restoration: we shall be like him. The final state of the image-bearer is Christlikeness, the image perfectly restored in the resurrection.

The Sanctum reads every human being as an image-bearer of YHWH, the most basic ground of human dignity (Genesis 9:6, James 3:9). The Sanctum's engagement with the full sweep of Scripture is oriented toward the restoration of the image: the journey from distorted-image (Genesis 3) through renewed-in-knowledge (Colossians 3:10) to Christlike in glory (1 John 3:2). The entire sanctification and glorification trajectory is the story of the image-bearer becoming what YHWH always intended.