Theopedia

Image of God

“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 (ESV)

Definition

The image of God (Latin imago Dei) is the doctrine that God made humanity, male and female alike, to resemble him in a way no other creature does (Gen. 1:26-27). That resemblance consists in true knowledge of God, righteousness, and holiness: humanity was made able to know God truly, to will and do what is right, and to be holy as he is holy, with dominion over the rest of creation flowing from that constitution rather than defining it.1 This image grounds human dignity (Gen. 9:6), was corrupted, not erased, at the Fall, and finds its perfect instance and its restoration in Jesus Christ, “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15).23

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession states that God

“created man, male and female, with reasonable and immortal souls, rendering them fit unto that life to God for which they were created; being made after the image of God, in knowledge, righteousness, and true holiness; having the law of God written in their hearts, and power to fulfill it, and yet under a possibility of transgressing, being left to the liberty of their own will, which was subject to change.”1

This formulation names the image’s content directly: “knowledge, righteousness, and true holiness,” not bare rationality and not dominion by itself. It also builds in the seeds of the Fall — humanity was created upright and able to obey, yet “under a possibility of transgressing” — so the confession does not present the image as a static endowment but as something that could be, and was, lost in part. Reformed theology draws a further distinction to hold these pieces together: a broad sense of the image (rational, moral nature and embodiment, which every human still bears and which grounds the prohibition of murder in Gen. 9:6) and a narrow sense (the “knowledge, righteousness, and true holiness” named above), which was lost at the Fall and is “regained only in Christ.”3 Bavinck puts the principle this way: Reformed theology “distinguishes a broader and a narrower sense of the image but insists that they are intimately connected and that together they make up the full image of God.”3

Biblical Basis

Genesis 1:26-27 ties the image directly to dominion: “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.” God rules creation as sovereign; humanity, as his image, rules under him and answerable to him — never as tyrants, since the God whose rule they image is a God of grace.

The image also grounds human dignity and its protection. After the Flood, God tells Noah, “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image” (Gen. 9:6). Hodge reads this as more than an ancient penalty: humanity is “not only like God in the essential elements of his nature, but… also God’s representative on earth,” so that “an indignity or injury inflicted on him[/her] is an act of irreverence toward God” himself — and the command was given to Noah as the second head of the human race, so its force is not confined to one nation or age.2

Scripture also describes the image as damaged, not destroyed, by sin. Fallen humanity is still addressed as God’s image, owed the corresponding respect (Gen. 9:6; James 3:9), even while the “knowledge, righteousness, and true holiness” at its core has to be restored rather than merely maintained.

That restoration comes only through Christ. Paul calls him “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation… he is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:15-17). Believers are being renewed into a “new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (Eph. 4:24) and “renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator” (Col. 3:10) — deliberately echoing the very “knowledge, righteousness, and holiness” language of Genesis and the confession above. Paul elsewhere says believers are “being transformed into the same image” as they behold the Lord’s glory (2 Cor. 3:18) and are “predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son” (Rom. 8:29), a conformity John says will be complete “when he appears, [and] we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2).

Historical Development

Reformed and Roman Catholic theologians agreed against the Socinians and rationalists that the image belongs to the whole human constitution, not one isolated faculty, but they disagreed sharply on how the image relates to sin and grace. Rome held that Adam’s original righteousness was a supernatural gift “superadded” to a human nature otherwise pulled between its “inferior” and “superior” parts — Bellarmine’s own image was a “golden bridle” holding the lower nature to the higher, and the higher to God.4 On this account, losing the gift at the Fall left natural humanity essentially intact underneath; grace is chiefly an elevation of nature, not a remedy for sin’s corruption of it. Bavinck’s Reformed objection is that Scripture recognizes no such natural/ supernatural divide within human nature and no intermediate state “between being an image of God and a sinner” — receiving Christ’s righteousness restores “that which belongs to our very being,” not something added on top of it.4

Lutheran theology, by contrast, tended to locate the image narrowly in the “original gifts of righteousness” alone, which correspondingly lowered the body’s place in the image and inclined Lutheran theologians toward traducianism (the soul propagated along with the body) rather than the Reformed and Catholic consensus of creationism (each soul directly created by God). Reformed theology “incorporated the whole human essence in the image,” body included, while still holding its own broad/narrow distinction.5

Bavinck names the triune God, not Christ alone, as the image’s proper archetype: “It is therefore preferable to say that the triune God (not only Christ) is the archetype of humanity,” while cautioning against pressing psychological analogies (memory, intellect, will) between the soul and the Trinity too far.6

Alternative Views

Structural / narrower views. Some theologians, per Hodge’s survey, have located the image in a single faculty — reason alone (some scholastic and Lutheran statements) or dominion alone (so Limborch). Hodge and the wider Reformed tradition reject both narrowings, following Calvin’s own definition that the image is “the entire excellence of human nature,” rational and moral together, not one to the exclusion of the other.7

Functional / dominion view. Duby documents the case, built largely from the ancient Near Eastern background of Genesis, that the image is primarily about rule: ancient statues represented a king’s rule throughout his land, and kings themselves were considered living images of the gods, executing divine authority. He notes this reading is close to “the near consensus of opinion in current Old Testament scholarship,” and Genesis 1 does tie the image tightly to dominion.8 Duby’s own conclusion sets dominion within a larger structure rather than letting it stand alone: since Ephesians 4:24 and Colossians 3:10 describe the restored image as righteousness, holiness, and knowledge, those qualities must belong to the image at a more basic level than dominion, which flows from them rather than constituting the image by itself.9

Objections and Responses

The image is best understood as function (dominion), not a fixed constitution. Duby’s answer, above, is that Scripture’s language of the image being restored (Eph. 4:24; Col. 3:10) only makes sense if righteousness, holiness, and knowledge already belonged to the image before any dominion was exercised; dominion is what a rightly ordered image-bearer does, not what makes someone an image-bearer in the first place.89

If the image just is righteousness and holiness, did the Fall destroy it outright, or did humanity keep it fully intact? Both extremes miss the Reformed answer. Fallen humanity still bears the image in the broad sense — still human, still owed the respect due an image-bearer (Gen. 9:6) — while losing, and regaining only in Christ, the image in the narrow sense named by Ephesians 4:24 and Colossians 3:10.3

Rome’s superadded-gift model treats the loss of the image as the loss of an optional extra, not a corruption of nature itself. Bavinck’s Reformed answer is that this understates sin’s radicalness and misreads grace: Scripture knows no natural/supernatural divide within humanity and no middle ground between bearing God’s image and being dead in sin — union with Christ restores what is proper to being human, not something added above it.4

Related Doctrines

References

  1. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 4, “Of Creation,” para. 2. ↩ ↩2

  2. Charles Hodge, “Chapter XIX. The Law,” in Systematic Theology, Volume III (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 359-360. ↩ ↩2

  3. Herman Bavinck, “The Image of God,” chap. 11 in Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011). ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  4. Bavinck, chap. 11. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  5. Bavinck, chap. 11. ↩

  6. Bavinck, chap. 11. ↩

  7. Charles Hodge, “Chapter V. Original State of Man,” in Systematic Theology, Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 96-97. ↩

  8. Steven J. Duby, “To Whom Will You Compare Me?,” chap. 5 in God in Himself: Scripture, Metaphysics, and the Task of Christian Theology, Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), 234-235. ↩ ↩2

  9. Duby, 235-236. ↩ ↩2