Made in God's image — what it means to be human

Psalm 8 asks the question every person asks sooner or later, usually at night under a sky full of stars: "When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him?" (Psalm 8:3-4).

What are we? Are we accidents of chemistry, a little more complicated than monkeys? Are we spirits trapped in bodies? Are we valuable only if we are useful — if we earn, produce, or belong to the right family or tribe?

The Bible's answer comes on its first page.

The words of Genesis

Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. 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..." 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

Three things stand out.

First, the language changes. Throughout Genesis 1, God says "Let there be..." and things appear. Here he says "Let us make..." — a pause, a deliberation, as though something especially significant is happening.

Second, the word "image" appears three times in two verses. The Hebrew word is tselem, which elsewhere often refers to a statue or physical representation. The second word, demut ("likeness"), means resemblance. Most scholars think the two words overlap heavily rather than describing two different things.

Third, the image is given to "man" — adam, meaning humankind — and immediately explained as "male and female". Men and women bear the image equally. Neither is more like God than the other.

Theologians often call this doctrine the imago Dei, Latin for "image of God".

What does the image mean? Three answers

Christians have understood the image in three main ways. They are not enemies; each catches something true.

What we are (the structural view)

For much of church history, the image was understood as the qualities that make humans distinct: reason, a moral conscience, the ability to choose, awareness of God. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas both emphasised reason. This view is right that humans have capacities no animal has. Its weakness, if pushed alone, is that it can make the image sound like a list of abilities — and then people with fewer abilities seem to have less of it.

How we relate (the relational view)

Some twentieth-century theologians, notably Karl Barth, stressed relationship. God is Father, Son and Spirit in eternal love, and humans image him by living in relationship — with God, with one another, and especially as "male and female". This view is right that we were made for relationship and that isolation is not good for us (Genesis 2:18). Its weakness is that Genesis 1 itself does not explain the image mainly in these terms.

What we do (the functional or royal view)

Many Old Testament scholars today point to the very next words in Genesis 1:26: "and let them have dominion". In the ancient world, kings would set up statues of themselves in distant cities to show who ruled there. Kings were sometimes even called the "image" of their god — meaning they represented that god on earth. Genesis takes that idea and gives it to every human being. Not just the king, but the farmer, the servant, the woman, the child: all are God's royal representatives, placed in his world to care for it on his behalf.

This is probably the emphasis closest to Genesis 1 itself. But it does not cancel the other two. To rule wisely you need reason and conscience; to rule well you need right relationships. The best answer is that the image is a status God gives — every human is his representative — which shows itself in our capacities, our relationships and our calling.

Every person has dignity

This is where the doctrine stops being abstract and becomes very practical. If every person bears God's image, then how I treat a person is connected to how I treat God.

C. S. Lewis put it in one of the most quoted sentences he ever wrote, at the end of his sermon The Weight of Glory: "There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal." He meant that every person you meet is an eternal being, and will one day be either glorious beyond imagining or ruined beyond imagining. That should change how we look at the person who serves us food or sweeps the road.

The image of God speaks directly to some of the deepest wounds in our societies.

• Tribalism and ethnic hatred. Genesis says every human descends from the same first parents and bears the same image. Paul told the Athenians that God "made from one man every nation of mankind" (Acts 17:26). No tribe or ethnic group is more human than another. Prejudice between ethnic groups in Nigeria or anywhere else is not a cultural quirk; it is a denial of Genesis 1.
• Racism and caste. The same logic condemns racism of every kind — the racism that justified the Atlantic slave trade and colonial contempt, and also any caste system that marks some people as permanently untouchable, such as the osu system historically practised in parts of Igboland. Christians who fought slavery repeatedly appealed to this doctrine.
• Abuse. Beating a wife, exploiting a house-help, abusing a child or trafficking a girl is an attack on someone who carries God's likeness. The same is true of children accused of witchcraft and cast out of their homes — a cruelty that still happens in parts of West Africa.
• The unborn. Scripture speaks of God forming us in the womb (Psalm 139:13-16). Christians have therefore held that the unborn child is a human life bearing the image, and that abortion takes that life. This conviction must be held together with compassion for women in desperate situations, many of whom carry great pain and need the church's help rather than its contempt.
• Disability. In many places, people with disabilities, or with albinism, are hidden, mocked or even attacked. The image of God says they are fully human, fully valuable, and fully welcome in the church. Jesus went looking for exactly such people.
• Contempt in speech. James points out the absurdity of praising God and then cursing "people who are made in the likeness of God" with the same mouth (James 3:9). Insults, slander and mockery are image-violations too.

Made to work and to rule

The first thing God says to humans after making them is a blessing and a task: "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion" (Genesis 1:28). In Genesis 2:15, God puts the man in the garden "to work it and keep it".

Notice when this happens: before sin. Work is not a punishment. The curse in Genesis 3 makes work painful and frustrating, but work itself is part of being made in the image of a God who works. God creates, orders, names and cares for his world; we do the same in smaller ways.

Timothy Keller makes this point in Every Good Endeavour: the farmer, the nurse, the trader, the engineer and the mother at home are all continuing God's work of bringing order and flourishing to creation. Your job is not merely a way to earn money for church. Done well and honestly, it is part of your calling as an image-bearer.

"Dominion" does not mean domination. A good king rules for the good of his people, not for himself. Humans are called to care for creation as God would — which rules out both worshipping nature and wrecking it for profit.

The image marred, not lost

Genesis 3 tells how the first humans rebelled against God (the companion article Creation and the fall explores this in depth). The effect on the image was serious. We still reason, but our reasoning is bent by self-interest. We still relate, but our relationships are full of blame, fear and domination. We still rule, but we exploit the earth and each other.

Yet the image remains. After the flood, God says, "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image" (Genesis 9:6). The reason murder is so serious is that the victim is still an image-bearer. James says the same thing in the New Testament (James 3:9).

An old picture helps here. A coin bearing the king's face may be scratched, dirty or bent. But it still bears the king's face, and it still belongs to the king. Jesus used a coin to make a related point: give to Caesar what bears Caesar's image, and to God what bears God's (Matthew 22:20-21). What bears God's image? You do.

Christ, the true image

The New Testament makes a startling claim: Jesus is "the image of the invisible God" (Colossians 1:15). He is "the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature" (Hebrews 1:3).

Adam was made in the image of God. Jesus is the image of God. If you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus. And if you want to know what a human being was meant to be, look at Jesus too. He is everything Adam failed to be: perfectly obedient, perfectly loving, ruling not by crushing others but by serving them and laying down his life.

This is why the incarnation matters for our humanity. God the Son did not despise human nature; he took it on, permanently. Humanity is not something to escape. It is something to be healed.

Being remade

Salvation, then, is not only forgiveness. It is restoration of the image. Paul describes Christians as those who "have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator" (Colossians 3:10). And he immediately adds that in this new humanity, "there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all" (Colossians 3:11). Restored image-bearers stop sorting people by tribe and class.

The process is gradual. "We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another" (2 Corinthians 3:18). As we look at Christ — in Scripture, in prayer, in worship — we become like him. That is sanctification.

And it has an end. "We know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is" (1 John 3:2). Romans 8:29 says God's purpose is that we be "conformed to the image of his Son". On the last day the image will be fully restored, and more than restored. That is glorification.

Why it matters to you

If you have ever been told you were worthless — by a parent, a husband, a teacher, a culture — Genesis 1 contradicts that voice. God made you in his image, on purpose, and called the result "very good" (Genesis 1:31).

And if you have ever looked down on someone else, Genesis 1 contradicts that too. The person you find hardest to respect bears the same image you do.

The second-century bishop Irenaeus is often summarised as saying that the glory of God is a human being fully alive. In Christ, that is what God is making us.