This week, Joe asks Jamie a question from a listener: What does it mean to be created in the image of God?
Jamie Dew: Hey everybody. My name's Jamie Dew.
Joe Fontenot: And I'm Joe Fontenot.
Jamie: I want to welcome you back to our podcast, The Towel & the Basin.
Joe: And today we're actually going to be looking at some listener questions for our podcast. And so if you have a question, you can go to jamiedew.com/questions and send them in. And so this first question, which we've had a few questions about is about the Imago Dei.
Jamie: Okay.
Joe: Okay. So specifically, what does it mean to be created in the image of God?
Jamie: All right. Yeah. So Imago Dei means Image of God. And this is a distinct claim of Christianity. When you look at the various worldviews on tap today, all of them will say something about what a human being is. All of them have an anthropology. So for example, according to a naturalist perspective, a human being as simply a highly evolved being that shares an ancestry with everything else. And so there's a degree to which, and a very real sense in which according to naturalism, where there's nothing distinct about us at all, except in terms of degree we're smarter and more evolved. And so, in that sense though we're not really unique or special.
Jamie: You could compare and contrast that view with what the Christian view would say about this. And on this view, basically Christianity says that we, unlike any other part of creation, any other being within creation, we are at the very, you could say pinnacle of creation in the sense that we, unlike the oceans, or the stars, or the plants, or the animals, or anything else like that, we bear the image of God in our being and in our person.
Jamie: Now when we talk about image bear, what we don't mean by that... It's a bit of a metaphor that the Christian faith is using here. So when we talk about image bearing, typically that word image connotes something physiological, right? So a reflection is an image. A shadow is an image. A picture is an image in some way. And so when we think, "Oh, we're an image of God," our first tendencies will be to say we look like God. In fact, I can remember in college once doing a presentation on a philosophy class of a sub brand new to Christianity. And I took up this topic and I remember talking about how we must look like God or something like that. My professor was very quick to correct me that, "No, that can't be it as God is himself, not a physical being of course." And so this doesn't mean that. Now it is interesting, I will say sort of in my quick defense that Christ takes on human flesh, so he is the ultimate human being.
Jamie: So anyway, when we talk about image, this is a bit metaphorical, right? So the Christian faith has understood this and at least two major ways. The first major way would be what we call an essentialist type of approach. And on this approach, basically it's going to say, "Well, a human person bears the image of God because we have something in our nature," right? There's something fixed. An essence, if you will, that we have that other things don't have. And that essence is that we are made for relationship with God.
Jamie: Now I know probably in most cases though that essence is described in cognitive ways. So for example, they would talk about our cognitive abilities and the unique opportunities that those cognitive abilities afford to us. So for example, you and I are smart enough and cognitive enough, we have a level of cognition unlike other creatures that render us capable of a relationship with God, in communion with God. So, that would be sort of roughly what the essentialist approach would say to that.
Jamie: There's another view taken up by theologians like John Calvin, that would be what we call a relational view. And so in this one it would agree that yes, you and I are the kinds of beings that have the ability to have a relationship with God. But image bearing is found actually in that relationship with God. So if we're in proper relationship with God and in communion with God, then image bearers. When sin is present and when we are cut off from God, some would say within that camp we no longer bear the image of God because we're like a lost person for example.
Jamie: So roughly those are two different ways that the Christian faith has articulated this concept of image bearing. I have to admit, and look, I mean I have no disrespect for the way that Calvin goes with this, but I guess you could say I have typically thought of this in more of the essentialist way. One, I mean even their post fall and then by fall if you're not familiar what I mean by that, after Adam and Eve eat the fruit and the curses come upon creation and lostness now prevails throughout the world. I mean, the Bible still continues to talk about us in the likeness of God, in the image of God and things like that. And so I'm inclined for that reason to think it's not per se lost like that.
Joe: Right, so everybody has the image of God, not just Christians, is what this [crosstalk 00:05:12]-
Jamie: It seems to me that there's something still about humanity that spiritually, cognitively, and every other way really genuinely is still different, number one. I also tend to think that even in lost folks, you still see... Well, there's debate, can lost people do good things? And yet one side's saying, "Of course they can," and then you've got another side saying, "no they can't, because if they could do good things, then that would give them merit before God. And we know that they don't get to heaven that way." But I would say to that, well, of course you don't get to heaven through your good work. So even if we grant that a lost person can do good deeds, it doesn't follow from that, that they're actually gaining merit.
Joe: Right.
Jamie: We know that God's currency within his economy, you don't pay your bills that way.
Joe: It's not a meritocracy.
Jamie: That's right.
Joe: Yeah.
Jamie: You come through grace and faith. So anyway, you have some that would say those types of things. I'm inclined still to see this as something having to do with our essence. Well, I'm not trying to venture into the debate between can a lost person do anything good or not. What I would say is that even amongst lost people, you see shadows at least. You see faint reflections at time to varying degrees of the initial goodness that God creates and instills within the fabric of creation and then specifically with lost people. They're not doing anything that gives them any merit before God. The Bible is very clear that doesn't work that way. But it does explain when someone that doesn't know Christ does something that's genuinely beautiful or genuinely valuable to us. I think we see that because there's this shadow of the image that's still there. So I tend to think of it in terms of essential ways.
Jamie: Now having said that, I'm not content that the standard essentialist ways of thinking about the image are robust enough. So what I mean by that is that when you hear somebody within the essentialist camp talk about this image of God, they're going to tend to talk about these cognitive abilities that render it possible for us to have a relationship with God. And I think it's at least that. But I think it's got to be more than that, right? I mean, so there's this... When God says about us, human beings, "Let us make him in our image, male and female," it seems to be suggesting to us that these creatures are going to be very different from the rest of creation. And well, they're going to be like us in certain ways.
Joe: Yeah.
Jamie: So would that explain our superior and advanced cognitive abilities compared to the rest of creation? Absolutely. But wouldn't that explain a whole bunch of other things where we are also different from the rest of creation? So here's just one example and we could probably think of many examples of this. What about our creative capacities and abilities? It's interesting to me that this statement about our likeness to God or our bearing in the image of God is also found in a part of scripture where the overwhelming theme is God is the creator. And then he creates man, puts him in a garden to tend the ground and cultivate the ground and there's a sense in which as man cultivates, there's a stewardship component of that. But there's also a creative component to that. Our creative abilities are not creation ex nihilo, out of nothing, right? Like God's is.
Jamie: God, when he makes something, he made it from nothing. The stuff, the material did not yet exist. And that's how he makes. We can't do that. He makes a world, now there's material stuff and from that material stuff we can bring into existence new things from the stuff that already exists. So ours is not a creation ex nihilo, but there's still a creative component to that. There's still a sense in which when Adam and Eve tilled the ground and worked the ground and cultivated it, cultivation entails not just stewardship but also creation. And I think this explains a lot about us in comparison to the rest of animal kingdom and other things. I mean, look, dogs don't create things, right? Some primates may be able to take a femur bone and figure out how to use it as a hammer, but at a very, very low level.
Joe: Primitive.
Jamie: Yeah. But we have the ability to... Think about the things we create. We create airplanes and write poetry and sing songs. As creatures, we are just astoundingly creative. Where does that come from? I think it comes from the fact that we are like Him in some lower way. And I'll just say this real quick. Theologians of all, we don't tend to do this now, theologians don't, but once it was very popular for theologians to distinguish in God's attributes and what they would call communicable attributes and incommunicable attributes, which is to say his incommunicable attributes are attributes that God bears that only God can bear. We could never bear those. So for example, immutability, God does not change. Well, we do change, right? So we don't bear that attribute.
Jamie: But then there are other attributes that God has that are what we call communicable or that we would have called them communicable. And what that means is they can be communicated to us in such a way or shared with us to a certain degree. So for example, righteousness, God is righteous and he is that supremely, perfectly. We can become righteous in Christ and our lives can bear out a righteousness, but ours is nowhere near the comparison to God. So the communicable ones would be things where we share it to some degree, some very small degree, but we clearly get it from him. And it seems to me, being an image bearer, makes us the kinds of beings that make it possible for those types of divine attributes to be shared in us to some small degree as well.
Joe: Yeah. I think also too, and something that you kind of touched on briefly was that by being image bearers, we have value.
Jamie: Yeah.
Joe: And it kind of really speaks to just the value of people in general. Animals are valuable and plants are valuable and the environment's valuable, and all these kinds of things, but there's something special about us.
Jamie: Yeah. So I mean anything, I mean, consider the logic of this. If God made it, then there is an intrinsic value into it, period.
Joe: For sure.
Jamie: I mean, surely we would not want to say of something that God made that it's useless or valueless. I mean, I think that's kind of an indictment on the triune God if you say that. So if it has being... Interestingly, Thomas Aquinas takes up this question in a related way. He's asked the question... In the Summa Theologiae he's dealing with all these very [fontune 00:12:02] questions and Thomas takes up the question as to whether or not there's any goodness in Satan. And to my students, shock and horror, he answers, yes. It's not a moral goodness. And so he's very clear. It doesn't mean that he thinks Satan makes good decisions or has... At the end of the day, he's really just a good guy.
Joe: Just misunderstood.
Jamie: Misunderstood or misguided. No, he absolutely discounted any of that at all. But what he says, is that even Satan still has existence. He still has being. And by virtue of the fact that he exists and has being, being comes from... God himself, is being and being flows from God. And so to the degree to which he still has existence, then there is still something basically right about that because that can only come from God. So roughly if it exists, if it has being, then there is an intrinsic divine value to that. But there also seems to be a hierarchy to creation as well, right?
Jamie: So there seems to be things that take greater value. And when you read the Genesis one account and then followed by Genesis two, you cannot read that and walk away with any other impression other than that all of the grandiose things that God made and the beautiful things that God made, at the end of it all, human beings are particularly special and particularly valuable. "Because these and only these," does God say about them, "and these reflect me in a specific way." So there is an intrinsic value of greatest worth of creation, seems in human beings. Yes.
Joe: Excellent. Well, that's really helpful. For everybody listening, if you have questions about this or if there's a specific point you want to follow up on, shoot us a message at jamiedew.com/questions and we'll throw it in the queue and look at it.
Jamie: It'd be lots of fun.
Joe: All right, thanks Jamie.