On Bearing the Image of God

Q. What does it mean to be created in the image of God?

A. It means that we are free to make choices: to love, to create, to reason, and to live in harmony with creation and with God.

The first question on human nature referenced two aspects of that nature, being created in itself and being created specifically in the image of God. Last week I focused on what being created implies because the second question in this section on human nature directly addresses what it means to be created in the image of God.

The “image of God,” or, as you will often hear it in Latin, imago Dei, comes from Genesis 1:26: “Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” This notion, of being created in the image (or sometimes image and likeness) of God, has generally served as the place in Christian thought for identifying what makes humans unique among the rest of creation. As William Placher points out, there are roughly four aspects of our humanity that theologians have identified the image of God with: reason and free will; our being in charge of the world, of having dominion over it; our ability to be in conscious relationship with God; and our ability to live in relationship with each other (Essentials of Christian Theology, 134).

The definition from the Catechism is clearly located within the first of the four models, of the image being in reason and free will, although it also alludes to or partakes of the third and fourth. Given the importance of St. Augustine for not only the Western, but specifically the Reformed, tradition of Christian thought, and given Anglicanism’s place in the Reformed tradition, it is not surprising that our understanding of the image of God would focus on willing and thinking. Augustine famously looked for what in human beings would constitute the image of God as Trinity and found it in the human mind’s division into understanding, remembering, and loving, or memory, reason, and will, not only understanding, remembering, and loving itself but also and especially God (On the Trinity, XIV.4.15). The additional emphasis on harmonious communion with God and with the social and natural worlds likely stems from the fact that the twentieth century saw several prominent theologians, especially those of a “social trinitarian” persuasion, critique what could plausibly be construed as an overly internalized and individualized view of human nature in Augustine’s model.

It is fascinating, however, that this doctrine, so central to so much theological anthropology (that is, descriptions of what it means to be human in light of what we know about God), has such a sparse scriptural background. The four larger schools of thought regarding what “image and likeness of God” mean likely emerge from the fact that, as David Kelsey points out, “in addition to Genesis 1:26-27 there are only two other Old Testament passages that use the expression ‘image of God’” (Eccentric Existence, 922). Furthermore, the New Testament makes no mention of the image of God in relation to humanity in general but reserves it in one place for husbands and in two others for Christ specifically (Eccentric Existence, 936). Kelsey himself sees our relationship to the image of God not as something that each of us, or even all of us as a species, have in direct relationship with the Godhead, but instead something which we participate in by our reflecting the image of God in Christ, of our imaging the image of God. Moreover, it may be said that the image of God, despite its prominence here in the 1979 Catechism, is not a central focus for the variety of Anglican thinkers throughout the Episcopal Church and broader Anglican tradition’s history. If one looks to Love’s Redeeming Work, a compilation of theological writings from the Anglican tradition made by Geoffrey Rowell, Kenneth Stevenson, and Rowan Williams, one does not even find “image of God” or imago Dei as an entry in the general index. Two great Anglican theologians of the contemporary world, Kathryn Tanner and Sarah Coakley, likewise have no index entry for image of God or imago Dei in their works that touch on questions of theological anthropology. A third great thinker, Katherine Sonderegger, does have several entries for image of God, but her discussion is largely negative, explaining why the attempt to see the nature of God in an analogy drawn from the human mind is misguided (Systematic Theology: Volume 1, The Doctrine of God, esp. 195-200). Bringing this point up is not meant to denigrate or dismiss the centrality of the image of God for the Catechism, but it should at least make it more complex. It should remind us first that the Catechism exists within an unfolding tradition in which nothing is the final word, either what has come before or what it itself presents. And it should offer us an invitation to reflect further on the seeming dissonance in emphases: Why would the authoritative teaching document of our Church make central to human nature a concept that has not been nearly so important to so many of the great thinkers of our tradition. This is really not a rhetorical or loaded question—I don’t as of my writing this piece have an answer and I think it bears invites and deserves reflection.  

Notwithstanding the possible neglect in our own tradition, the concept of the image of God has been very important for the larger Christian tradition. This importance, though, means we should attend to and reflect on two of the central difficulties with identifying the image of God with specific human capacities, such as memory, reason, free will, or creativity. First is the problem of looking at capacities. Thinkers who focus on the intersection of disability and theology have rightly pointed out the problems with focusing on capacities that can be diminished or almost wholly absent in the severely disabled. Do we want to say that those with extreme memory impairments or very, very low IQs are not bearers of the image of God, or are bearers in a lesser degree? If not, do we have to say that the image of God admits of degrees, in which case the better your memory, the more creative you are, or the better you can reason, the more you bear the image of God? Given that those with mental illness and especially those with extreme cognitive impairments, are among the most marginalized people in society—and thus precisely the people Jesus most aligned himself with—it would seem extremely strange, perverse in fact, to claim that these people are not or are lesser bearers of the image of God.

At the same time, I don’t think we should too hastily confine reason, memory, self-reflective consciousness, or creativity to the domain of features that are incidental to human nature and relationship to God. Humans have, in the form of culture, art, language, science, and technology, done things that are unique or nearly unique among animals. Something that holds these two facts together, perhaps in creative tension, appears necessary. Perhaps the point is that the image of God belongs to humankind as a whole, as the verse in Genesis implies, meaning that the human species potential to act freely bears the image of God. Every person with human DNA, every member of the human species, would bear the image by virtue of being human. This is a rough draft of a solution, but it points to ways in which these two considerations could be brought together.

The second potential difficulty is the question of what it means to talk about particular human capacities. In other words, is bearing the image of God something that is necessarily specific to the species homo sapiens? We can imagine the possibility of species that evolve on earth to have similar capacities as us, or of sentient aliens, or potentially of robots with advanced artificial intelligence. Whether any of these beings do or even could exist given the contingent constraints of the physical and biological universe is certainly a matter for the natural sciences to investigate, but I can’t think of a logical reason why such beings could not exist. Should such beings come into existence or be discovered, would they bear the image of God? Some would say that there is something inherent about the biologically human that is necessary for being an image bearer, but I personally don’t see that as necessary. What seems important is unique role that is played, as embodied but spiritual beings, as creatures with self-reflective consciousness and free will. Should other embodied beings that have self-reflective consciousness and free well come into our awareness or come into being, I do not see why they would not be equally bearers of the image of God, both with the same possibilities for relationship with God and under the same constraints and corruptions of Original Sin, the possibility of which is the point we will turn to over the course of the next few weeks.

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