The First State—Knowing God in Innocence

To speak of theology in the context of Adam’s original state is to speak of what Adam reasoned about God prior to the fall. That begins with what God revealed to his reason. What were the attributes of the mode of this revelation? There were differences between the mode with Adam and the mode with those born to his race. Adam heard directly from God, and he heard in righteousness. However, there were also four important ways in which the truth of God was communicated to Adam that would also be true for the mode thereafter.

This truth is given to reason in modes original (a natural capacity at birth), discursive (whether deductive inferences from a priori principles or inductively from particular data a posteriori),1 ectypal (as opposed to God’s own archetypal knowledge), and dispositional (affected by the overall stance of the soul toward God).

For Owen this was natural and God-given, “not complete or fully in-born,” but “subject to increase and clarification by revelation.”2 For Junius, it is ectypal, which corresponds to that archetypal.”3 When these ectypes are in creatures, they are called communicated”;4 and it is dispositional in that “it can come near the entire subject through the grace of God and deviate from the same through an absence of that grace.”5 

If we take all of the relevant biblical texts, we may divide these by those truths (1) written on the heart of Adam and those (2) communicated by direct speech of God. The former is rooted in Romans 2:14-15 and the latter in Genesis 1-2. Now to speak of special revelation in the context of Adam’s original state is to speak of that aforementioned “direct” speech. Here Genesis 1:28-30 and 2:16-17 give us two explicit cases of divine speech, whereas Genesis 2:22-23 seems to at least suggest that Adam had the significance of female companionship interpreted for him by God as well. 

For Owen, it is the law itself—its requirement and Adam’s answerability to it—that formed “the doctrinal content of the theology of the first man.”6 That raises the question of whether the same law of nature was written on Adam’s heart as Paul speaks of it being written on the heart of mankind. While it is true that no single text of Scripture says that Adam had the law written on his heart, this still follows from the truth taught in Romans 2:14-15.

Everything else that Scripture teaches about that moral law (or natural law) implies that Adam had this law on his heart by virtue of him being made a rational-moral being. In other words, he was under this law as the image of God (Gen. 1:26-27), under a covenant relationship with commands that required rational reflection (Gen. 2:16-17), and because he had a nature existing within the wider sphere of nature and God’s moral universe. Hence the names “moral” and “natural” are fitting to describe this law. 

Boston describes what Adam had to obey as “the natural law, with the addition of that positive command.”7 He even sees the words of Jesus to the rich young ruler as expounding the covenant of works in the form of the commandments.8 Needless to say, Adam did not have those expressed commandments that Christ summarized to the young man. Yet if Boston is correct, then what he is calling the “natural law” is substantively the same as the moral law. He also argued from Ecclesiastes 7:29 that Adam’s original uprightness necessitates original law:

“This supposes a law to which he was conformed in his creation; as when anything is made regular, or according to rule, of necessity the rule itself is presupposed.”9

He speaks of Adam’s “perfect knowledge of the law,” so that he “could not want knowledge.”10 How so? This perfection of creaturely knowledge is never omniscience. Its perfection cannot consist in possessing the totality of knowledge in itself, but rather the comprehension and contentment with that knowledge sufficient to be and to do as God requires.

We turn from original revelation to the reasoning response in Adam, and we must keep in mind the nature of man as the image of God. For Vos, the image ought to be divided between the “essential and amissible image” and the “accidental and losable image”; the former being “the possession of intellectual capacities and capacities for making ethical decisions,” and the latter being “the good and moral qualities” of those essential capacities.11 From this division, it follows that essential intellect may function in the same mode after the fall as before, even though it be blown off course from the same good end. Rome was said to separate these two—placing those essential qualities under image and those they regarded as supernaturally added gifts (donum superadditum) under likeness—such that intellect and will were not decisively impaired by the fall.

It is at this point where Van Til drove a wedge in his reading of Thomas, and at least with respect to the donum superadditum, Bavinck prepared the way. Thomas’ natural theology, Van Til argued, followed from this incomplete view of the fall, such that the will which may by nature cooperate with grace is a function of that intellect which may perceive the grace of God so revealed in nature. Hence two potential extreme errors emerge.

At the one extreme, there is failure to account for sin’s downward weight upon the mind; and at the other, there is the eradication of the principle of mind. And between these two extremes, there is an equivocation over the word “nature.” The soteriological critique of natural theology was an axe that struck down all the way to very concept of what all counts as a nature.

There is an objective nature to immutable principles of intellect and there is an objective nature of man that is altered in Adam’s fall, but which utilizes those immutable principles subjectively. In fact, the nature-perspectives become an exercise in talking past each other. 

Now, did Adam have more knowledge than all other human beings? There is a sense in which that is true. If we distinguish original knowledge in its dispositional sense especially, Adam’s knowledge was uncorrupted. The implications of this can become speculative, but it is at least a fact to be reckoned with. However, there is another sense in which human knowledge has progressed. God is making the new creation greater than the original. Grace perfects nature, rather than simply restoring it. Within that telos to perfect humanity, there is also the aspect of progressive revelation, meaning that those in the new covenant have the completed canon of Scripture and the Holy Spirit in a special way. Thus we have the knowledge of redemption accomplished whereas Adam did not.

Pre-fall knowledge was holistic. Consider the threefold attributes of the image in Westminster Confession of Faith IV.2: “knowledge, righteousness, and true holiness.” Knowledge was always in harmony with the other moral attributes and for all proper Godward ends. The ends of all theology communicated to Adam included “the glory of God and the eternal happiness of the student-worshiper himself.”12

The idea is this: If human nature is logically coextensive with the covenant in which he exists with God, and if the chief end of the covenant is fellowship with God, including subordinate ends such as dominion, then the knowledge that God reveals must also be logically coextensive with that covenant and the way in which it is rationally processed must be driven toward those ends.

One question which follows must be this: Can we say that any knowledge which fails to exist toward this covenantal end is not properly knowledge but falsehood? We might think that even Plato’s definition of knowledge would have to accord with that, since knowledge cannot be of what is false but only of what is true. A second question seems to follow. Granting the first point is made in the right way, must we deny that knowledge is real knowledge which is not consciously directed toward man’s chief end? This question may seem to take on all of its relevance about postlapsarian man. However, the question is really about the essence of knowledge as such.

Junius had maintained this same holistic picture. “This was the state of natural theology in Adam, when nature was intact: that from principles shared, veiled, and imperfect, it had to be nurtured and caused to grow by reasoning, and then perfected by grace.”13 Because it was natural theology, supernatural wisdom was excluded; and the means of that development was not removed.14 Could Adam have been perfected in his knowledge by his own nature before the fall? “By no means!”15 That theology which would perfect man would be by God’s supernatural grace. Even though the Reformed Scholastics had a positive assessment of natural theology’s use among the regenerate, there was a heavy emphasis on natural theology in its holistic prelapsarian design. Since that design is decisively shattered in the fall, the ends of its parts are as well.

Of the great Reformed thinkers of the seventeenth century, Owen is among the most pronounced in subjecting theological reasoning to the shift from prelapsarian to postlapsarian states. There is at least the potential for the fallacy of composition in his thinking here.

While we can agree that the knowledge given in the creation was holistic, we must not agree that the failure of man to accomplish the whole eradicates the intelligibility of its parts, even to fallen man.

In fact this fallacy of composition—moving improperly from the whole to its parts—also commits a fallacy of equivocation, as the terms of intellectual awareness are used as though they mean the same thing as the terms of moral answerability. They are related, but they must be distinguished.  

Owen further states, “The first theology taught all things well and truly; its doctrine was all good but now no one could possibly conform to it.”16 No doubt such knowledge was communicated in the context of the covenant of works, and it is equally true that none born to the race of Adam can conform to it. But in the final analysis, Owen had blurred or ignored distinctions between (a) the totality of relations of prelapsarian “creational” knowledge and moral obligations in the covenant on the one hand, and (b) the postlapsarian intelligibility of many of those same objects of nature on the other. We can go as far as agreeing with Owen that the relationship between this natural knowledge and the covenant of works is still crucial and devastating to the unregenerate mind down to the present. That is, it is devastating to natural man in achieving those ends active before the fall. Whether it annihilates other ends remains to be seen. 

The Second State—Knowing God in Sin

The natural corruption of knowledge is a dynamic process. The divine act often called judicial hardening (e.g. Rom. 1:24, 26, 28) tends to suggest that this knowledge is not merely impotent, but that it exponentially multiplies. How then will natural theology fare in the life of even one sinful man or one whole depraved culture? Paul begins the relevant section in Romans 1:18-32 with man’s unrighteous suppression of truth. Here we must two questions: 1. What exactly is being suppressed (v. 18) if no knowledge of God is clearly perceived (v. 20)? 2. How is this suppression blameworthy if it is not deliberate enough to be a reasoned suppression?

In other words, even the most devilish acts of discursive reason about God will be forced to handle true things about God, even as one denies them. We might think for example of those statements by Francis Crick and Richard Dawkins about how upcoming biologists must keep in mind that what has the appearance of design is not in fact design.17 Then they proceed to say many things about how theists reason from that apparent design to the existence of a Designer. Now how many of these arguments that they work so hard to caricature would even register in their minds if there were not all sorts of true logical relations present to them? These are not merely capacities in the mind, nor even first principles in the sensus divinitatis. These are also true objects of reasoned knowledge pressing in on them. It is all of this which they suppress. 

Returning to the effects of the first state, we will recall that prelapsarian and postlapsarian knowledge must both be holistic. Vos draws forth the clear implication: “By falling away from something to which he was wholly disposed, which constitutes his proper and highest destiny, man will be changed in the deepest depths of his being; a radical reversal will take place within him.”18 Now Brakel makes a further distinction that will help us achieve balance:

“As a result of Adam’s fall, the image of God in its narrow sense, consisting of spiritual knowledge, righteousness, and holiness, has been entirely removed from all the faculties and propensities of the soul. Nevertheless, Adam did not lose his human nature. He retained the soul in its essence and propensity, consisting of intelligence, will, disposition, reason, and consciousness of God.”19

Reason has been effaced, but not erased. Adam descended from holy reason to profane reason, but not from reason to non-reason. Or as Boston puts it, “Man lost none of the rational of his soul by sin: he had an understanding still, but it was darkened.”20

Much of the Puritan and even Reformed Scholastic treatment of natural theology belongs to reactionary polemics. Beeke and Jones commented, “Among the Puritans, the role of natural theology was often expounded in relation to Arminian, Papist, and Socianian views that were in conflict with Reformed orthodoxy.”21 Muller notes a further distinctive feature of the Reformed which, in my reading, follows from the first:

“The orthodox writers do not typically mingle natural theology with the theology based on biblical or ‘supernatural’ revelation … Once, however, natural theology has been admitted to the ‘encyclopedia’ of theological study, differences arise among the Reformed orthodox concerning its purpose and its relationship to the other forms of theological discourse.”22

This should be no surprise in retrospect. If the nature of natural theology is reduced, via reaction, to a tendency toward false theology (given sin), then the equally unavoidable insight that there is still a true natural theology (given the objectivity of truth in itself) instantly creates a tension at the very foundations of theology.

So there is both legitimacy and limitations to the soteriological critique of natural theology among the Reformed Scholastics. The legitimacy is that if sin affects the whole man, and if reason belongs to man, then it follows that sin affects reason. On the other hand, the limitations are simply that objective truth beheld by reason is not the same thing as that subjective reasoning. The moment one blurs the distinction between those two, one is left with either the Double Truth Theory of Averroes or else a sharp division between supernatural and natural truths of the Neo-Orthodox sort.

For Owen, “So intimate was the connection between that primeval theology and man’s unfallen intellect that, when they were torn asunder by sin, thereafter the first knowledge and doctrine could no longer profit humanity.”23 Now the word “profit” here is ambiguous. We could read this charitably to mean that the “primeval theology” can no longer be attained as Adam could have it, or that natural theology can no longer lead the unregenerate soul “profitably” toward God without the Spirit and the word doing what God intends for the elect. Now if that is all that is meant, then there is no disagreement among the Reformed. However, as Turretin pointed out, “The question is not whether this knowledge is perfect and saving … but only whether any knowledge of God remains in man sufficient to lead to believe that God exists and must be religiously worshipped.”24

The “profit” of natural theology need not remain ambiguous, nor can it be reduced to how the unregenerate soul handles its truth, all other things being equal. Rather natural theology has a profit, objectively speaking, such that its data can subsequently be redeemed, whether in apologetic encounters or in the constructing of systematic theology. 

Where is the line of demarcation between the profitable and the futile? Boston is concise here: “There is a natural weakness in the minds of men with respect to spiritual things,” and he cites 2 Peter 1:9 in the nearsightedness of man apart from the graces of the Spirit. This is affirmed by Paul in 1 Corinthians 2:14. There is a spiritual knowledge and there is a natural knowledge; but there is also a spiritual knowledge of natural things: “the spiritual person judges all things” (1 Cor. 2:15). And as to Peter’s imagery, it may be considered that nearsightedness is still a sight. Calvin’s imagery comes to mind, that of the Scriptures as the corrective lenses to what was already the case in nature.25

In fact, we can be even more precise. What sort of things are “spiritual things,” such that natural theology does not attain them? Boston says of this natural man: “He knows not what a God he has to do with: he is unacquainted with Christ, and knows not what sin is.”26 Then perhaps what is missing is the spiritual sense, as Edwards says of the perception of the excellence of God’s holiness.27 Still commenting on 1 Corinthians 2:14, Boston says of natural man and spiritual things, “He may indeed discourse of them, but in no other way than one can talk of honey or vinegar, who never tasted the sweetness of the one, nor the sourness of the other.”28

Of course a man who had tasted neither can at least tell that one is a purer liquid. If he describes the other as being more viscous, that may not impress our sensations as much as if he spoke of its sweetness, but it would not be less true on that account. So in the same way, an unregenerate mind can understand some of the differences between infinity versus finitude, omnipotence versus impotence, and majesty versus condescension.

Again, my question is not the apologetic encounter. It matters little to the thesis that the unregenerate will not begin to cross any of those chasms toward God; only that the contrasts are intelligible to him and that these kinds of concepts will serve him well in the school of the Spirit and the Word if such a one becomes born again. 

Did mankind know right and wrong prior to the law of Moses? That is the contention of Paul in Romans 2:14-15. However one may prefer to overlap (or not) the terms natural law and moral law, all would at least acknowledge the “substance of the law” element of the Gentiles’ conscience. The trouble with not equating this to natural law is that one is hard pressed to call it anything else, since Paul calls it “a law” and quarantines it to nature outside of the Scriptures. 

At first glance, Romans 2:14-15 may actually seem to attribute too much to natural man. Is natural man indeed a “law unto himself” and does he literally “do what the law requires”? All parties among the Reformed can agree that this is not endorsing either moral autonomy or works-righteousness. Instead Paul is making distinctions of mode between Jew and Gentile. He is distinguishing between the mode of the law to the Gentles apart from the specially revealed law, and by their “doing,” he means only observing,29 so the mode in which the Gentiles relate to its moral obligations. But behind the distinctions is the common field. Paul is clearly speaking of a law of nature which contains the same “substance,” or the same moral obligation, as the moral law summarized in the ten commandments. The phrase “written on the heart” is agreed by all to reference the conscience.30

One other passage must be brought in so as to maintain our distinction between the soteriological and the epistemological when it comes to reason in the state of nature. We can frame the import of this passage in the following way: There is a way to pit Paul against Paul on this very issue. We have seen his doctrine of general revelation in Romans 1. Now we ought to balance this in relation to his doctrine of Christological knowledge in 1 Corinthians 1 and 2.

Paradoxically, (a) all know God by nature and (b) no one knows God by nature; yet the paradox is shown to not be a genuine contradiction by observing the context of both passages. When he says “the world did not know God” (1 Cor. 1:21), he is speaking of knowledge from a soteriological point of view; whereas his statement that, “they knew God” (Rom. 1:21) is speaking of knowledge from an epistemological point of view. One is supernatural revelation and the other natural. 

In summary of this second state, let us consider four objections against there being a true knowledge of God in all and through the external world.

Objection 1. There are many people who do not believe in God, which is a real denial and ignorance of this knowledge. Even Scripture says, “The fool says in his heart there is no God” (Ps. 14:1).

Thomas examined this verse in connection with whether the existence of God is “self-evident.”31 While he disagreed with Anselm’s point about what even “the fool” acknowledges, part of his resolution is to distinguish between different senses of the term self-evident and its applicability to this question. Brakel suggests the usual psychology of atheism: the motive of sin. Within this reasoning there are hints of the deadening of the internal sense of the divine. He turns to the analogies of a man in a coma or a newborn child. As they still “possess” reason, yet without the function, so likewise the atheist “can become completely oblivious” to God.32 But this becoming is still begotten by the suppression, which is a deliberate act—a reverse engineering of the discursive act—that must be conscious of the truth it suppresses.   

Objection 2. Granting that there is a “seed of religion” in all mankind, nevertheless this is not a clear conception of the true God.

Brakel divides between “the practice of religion” and “the propensity toward the acknowledgement of a deity,”33 so that we cannot object that such people groups do not have this knowledge because they distort it in idolatrous forms. Indeed Paul’s condemnation in Romans 1 turns instantly from what all know to how they worship. What sense is there in a condemnation of “exchanging” the truth of God for a lie, if they could not consciously make that exchange? And how could they make the exchange without possessing the proper currency?

Objection 3. Natural theology was designed to communicate God to man in blessedness, just as much as supernatural theology was. Since that is now impossible with natural theology, it follows that the end of natural theology is at least discontinued.

Brakel responds in two ways to the fear that if natural theology is grasped by the pagans then they might be restored to God by it: first, “The apostle does not say that they knew all that is to be known about God,” and second it “does not imply that this light was fully sufficient, even if they had lived in accordance with it.”34 

Objection 4. Sin so distorts the mind, the rebellion against God so determines its thoughts, that unregenerate natural theology is a contradiction in terms. The unbeliever will always mean something different than the corrective offered by supernatural theology. This is the basic Van Tillian objection. God is the only ground of predication that does not land us in irrationalism. God’s is the only interpretation of facts that maintains the connection between the universal of truth and the particulars of facts.

Indeed God is the only such ground. Classical realism already sketched a philosophical rationale for that.35 The basic problem with the Van Tillian objection is its “all or nothing” approach to each discrete reasoning act. If by “Unregenerate natural theology is a contradiction in terms,” we mean something like: “They will distort it the moment you give them an inch,” or “They cannot justify even the truths they utter in terms of their unbelieving presuppositions,” we have no argument. Amen to all of that.

However, if there is such an utter severing between (1) objective natures to which the mind conforms and (2) the totality of thoughts in each natural mind, then no statement by an unbeliever could correspond to the truth, by definition. While we may disagree on where the line is in this or that act of reasoning, there has to be some analogical relationship as in the Thomistic view.36

What is lost by maintaining that all was lost? I should say that the point of this question is not to suggest that all Van Tillians must say that all has been lost. However what we are treating here is the intellect’s connection to the truths that belong to general revelation and its essential operations. Let me offer one example. If one was to suggest that the knowledge of the image of God about itself is utterly lost, then one undercuts any biblical foundation of ethics.37 As the image of God is the immediate object violated in any breaking of Commandments 5 through 10, and as these commandments summarily comprehend the moral law, it follows that the unintelligibility of the image renders social man excusable in his rebellion, murder, adultery, theft, false witness, and coveting. He must actually know the substance of these moral obligations with his mind, to some extent, in order to actually be guilty of breaking them. 

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1. I am not unaware that this attribute will be controversial among those of both the Presuppositionalist and Reformed Epistemology schools of thought. Discursive reasoning is precisely reasoning, and so it is considered necessary by many to quarantine this human act away from the field of what we consider to be divinely revealed truth. The trouble with this is rarely considered. However, we are faced with a choice: Either all true conclusions were already true or else not. If they were, then the truth of the proposition was known by God (omniscience implies that this is always so with all true propositions) and the human reasoner was utterly dependent on God for all of its constituent elements; or else, if they were not, then the truth of the proposition was created by the finite human reasoner. Now aside from the many problems this would bring up for the nature of truth, it would be an odd position to maintain for those schools setting out to protect either the authority of divine speech [Presuppositionalism] or the sanctity of properly basic belief [Reformed Epistemology]. The Reformed Classicalist position is that every member of the class “All acts of right reasoning” are subsets of the class of divine revelation.

2. Owen, Biblical Theology, 20.

3. Junius, A Treatise on True Theology, 116.

4. Junius, A Treatise on True Theology, 117.

5. Junius, A Treatise on True Theology, 118.

6. Owen, Biblical Theology, 24.

7. Thomas Boston, Human Nature in its Fourfold State (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1964), 47.

8. Boston, Human Nature in its Fourfold State, 48.

9. Boston, Human Nature in its Fourfold State, 40.

10. Boston, Human Nature in its Fourfold State, 40.

11. Geerhardus Vos, Reformed Dogmatics, Volume Two: Anthropology (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2012), 12.

12. Owen, Biblical Theology, 27.

13. Junius, A Treatise on True Theology, 151.

14. Junius, A Treatise on True Theology, 152.

15. Junius, A Treatise on True Theology, 153.

16. Owen, Biblical Theology, 27.

17. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1986), 1; Francis Crick, What Mad Pursuit (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 138.

18. Vos, Reformed Dogmatics, II:14.

19. Brakel, The Christian’s Reasonable Service, I:18.

20. Boston, Human Nature in its Fourfold State, 207.

21. Joel Beeke & Mark Jones, Puritan Theology (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2012), 12.

22. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, I:272.

23. Owen, Biblical Theology, 27.

24. Turretin, Institutes, I.3.3

25. John Calvin, Institutes, I.6.1.

26. Boston, Human Nature in its Fourfold State, 85.

27. Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections in The Works of Jonathan Edwards: Volume One (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2009), 277, 279, 283.

28. Boston, Human Nature in its Fourfold State, 86.

29. Of the conjoining of “doing” with “by nature,” William Hendriksen renders Paul as saying “without prompting or guidance coming from any written code, therefore in a sense spontaneously” – Exposition of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1981), 97.

30. Even Martin Luther, who downplays the positive dimension of Paul’s words, nevertheless concludes, “All of this proves that they know the Law by nature, or that they can distinguish between good and evil” – Commentary on Romans (Grand Rapids: Kregel Publications, 1976), 60.

31. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Pt.I, Q.2, Art.1

32. Brakel, The Christian’s Reasonable Service, I:12.

33. Brakel, The Christian’s Reasonable Service, I:10.

34. Brakel, The Christian’s Reasonable Service, I:14. Italics mine.

35. e.g. Unless all terms assigned to particulars (whether subjects or predicates) ultimately correspond to essences that are immaterial, immutable, eternal, simple, etc., then no propositions could be meaningful. But this cannot be left in its original Platonic mode for reasons that Augustine developed. All such “forms” must actually be 1. attributes of God or else 2. ideas in the mind of God.

36. Van Til’s argument against Thomistic analogy in favor of his own represents more of the same misappropriation of the soteriological critique of natural theology. He has in mind a kind of spectrum of the use of “analogy” in theoretical systems. The world has an idea of analogy in that “man cannot exhaustively explain reality to himself, and that, therefore, he projects the idea of a god who does.” Likely he has in mind Feuerbach, Nietzsche, or Freud. Rome also had its notion of analogy—here he has his peculiar reading of the Thomistic doctrine in mind—where man is not made “fully and exclusively dependent on God,” and so man is on equal footing and thus is not an analogy to God. It is only in the Reformed system where God is “self-contained” [contra the atheist system] and wholly self-sufficient [contra the Romanist system], that man and his knowledge can be properly analogical — see Van Til, A Christian Theory of Knowledge (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 1975), 16-17.

37. Here I am not offering a critique of Van Til so much as one aspect of VanDrunen’s view of Genesis 9:5-6. There is irony in putting him in this place, since the critics of VanDrunen’s Radical Two Kingdom view are typically Van Tillian. I join them in their criticism of VanDrunen, yet from a classical perspective. What he does is to root the common sphere in the Noahic Covenant; but then he restricts the meaning of Genesis 9:5-6 so that the “image” that grounds a just use of force is exclusively that by which the bearer of the sword (Rom. 13:1-5) represents God as his agent on earth, and not at all the traditional Western idea of natural law in which the same image functioned as the form of natural rights such as life, liberty, and property. So VanDrunen writes that, “Contrary to popular assumptions, the reason this text appeals to the image of God is probably not to highlight why murder is so bad but to explain why God delegates such a profound authority to human beings” — Politics after Christendom (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2020), 107.