Q10. How did God create man?
A. God created man male and female, after his own image, in knowledge, righteousness, and holiness, with dominion over the creatures.
What is meant when we say that human beings are made in the image of God? We begin with the foundational text.
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 and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them (Gen. 1:26-27).
The two words used in the Genesis text, namely “image” (tselum) and “likeness” (demut) have often been treated as if they each have a unique significance. But this has just as often been disputed. Bavinck displays some ambivalence in commenting, “there is no material distinction to between them,” but then adds, “The concept of ‘image’ is more rigid, that of ‘likeness’ more fluid and more ‘spiritual,’ so to speak.”1
God’s Image 101
While the fullness of what this “image” implies has often been a matter of controversy and speculation, some central elements are undisputed.
Human beings are not simply material, but have a spiritual dimension called the soul. This basic fact keeps us from two extreme errors. One is the Gnostic error applied to human nature—that the spirit is the image of God and that the body is an evil prison—and the other is the Modernist reaction to that, which unifies the body and soul only by leveling the immaterial. Obviously no professing Christian is going to go to the actual extreme opposite of the Gnostic view and embrace materialism. But it became quite fashionable over the past century to react against Gnosticism (or even original Platonism) by denying the traditional Western insight that the soul has an excellence that the body does not. Many of the best Christian theologians have maintained that that which is most like God in man is more of what is meant by this “image,” namely that which is immaterial or spiritual.
Granting that excellency of the soul over the body, the body is still designed by God; that body is good, and it will be renewed with the soul on the Last Day (1 Cor. 15:50-58; Rom. 8:20-25). Calvin moved in the direction of incorporating it into the image, whereas Bavinck2 (and Anthony Hoekema following his lead)3 went all the way and insisted that the body must be integral to the image. In one sense, this is only to follow the Aristotelian-Thomist conception of human nature as being complete only as a composite of soul (form) and body (matter).
Important consequences follow from even these basic and commonly accepted notions.
First, this doctrine implies that while man is like God, he is not God. We are analogies and not identities. We will see that this is not the case about Christ, who is the Image as to essence and person (see Heb. 1:3). Of course it is impossible for God to make another God anyway, since two divine attributes are self-existence and eternity. For our part, we are creaturely, dependent, and finite. Morally speaking, we are accountable to God; He is not accountable to us (Job 38–42). He can cease our existence instantly and effortlessly; we cannot chase him away no matter how hard we try.
Second, from the analogous sense of image-bearing, it follows that there are certain attributes of God that we call “communicable” and which find analogies in this image. We see this in the two verses that the Catechism uses for these attributes (Eph. 4:24, Col. 3:10). So there are analogies within the analogy. For example, human beings can “create” in a secondary sense. Only God can create ex nihilo. However, since man is rational, he exercises dominion over nature by two kinds of creativity: 1. material creativity and 2. immaterial creativity. Examples of the first are building and agriculture. Examples of the second are music, theories, and stories.
Third, it implies that we are different from the lower animals. Man has been given dominion over the other creatures God has made (Gen. 1:28; Ps. 8:6). While we must not abuse animal life, humans have a greater ultimate worth than animals. This has implications for ethical issues such as abortion, animal rights, and environmental activism.
And though it is not as clear of an implication as these, it is still the majority position that man “consists of two essential elements, body and soul.”4 Man is basically a body-soul unity (dichotomism). This view has been preferred over trichotomism with respect to the number of basic dimensions the soul has. What do we make of all of those passages that seem to mention the “soul” of man and the “spirit” of man in the same place? Concisely stated, the soul and spirit are two perspectives on the same faculty of human nature. So rather than the spirit being a third faculty over and above the other two—the trichotomist position—when various texts speak of three, or more (which is a significant clue) “parts,” they are in fact not speaking of parts. It is simply a Hebrew or Greek literary device for emphasis of one sort or another. What about 1 Thessalonians 5:23? Here, “your whole spirit and soul and body” are used to emphasize the wholeness of perfection. When the terms occur together (as here and in Heb. 4:12) it is difficult to find any significant difference in meaning. Compare the fourfold representation of “heart,” “soul,” “mind,” and “strength” in Mark 12:30.
There are different “models” of what it means to be made in God’s image.
First, in the Structural View, the divine image is rooted in some constituent part of humanity. Turretin speaks of this in terms of wisdom in the mind, holiness in the will, and rectitude in the affections. This is essentially what WCF IV.2 has in view when it speaks of man made in “knowledge, righteousness, and true holiness.” The advantage of this view is how it clearly distinguishes human from non-human. If the divine image is not connected to our natures, then it is reduced to arbitrary designation. It would be as reasonable to say that my dog or computer is the divine image as much as to say that a human being is. One disadvantage is that it may not properly distinguish between proper function and essential function. For example, it could be suspected that if the image of God is rooted in intellect, then those with lesser or no mental capacities are not human. Or, as another instance, if the image of God is rooted in spiritual morality, the non-Christians are not human.
Second, in the Functional View, the divine image is explained in terms of what we do. In Genesis 1:26-28, we see Adam given dominion. By extension, all who are born to the race of Adam are still given this dominion. Psalm 8 speaks of this dominion still being in effect after the fall. To exercise dominion in the right way is to be more like the image than if one was not. This view has the advantage of immediate context. Man is the vice-regent, the steward of God on earth. Here the disadvantage is somewhat similar to in the first view. For example, if the image of God is rooted in function, what of those who are incapacitated: whether by birth, oppression, lack of opportunity, injury, or aging?
Third, in the Relational Model, we see a Trinitarian focus. In social spheres, orders, or relationships, we model something of the glory of God in the tri-personal sense. This can be viewed as a sub-set of the structural view: as this capacity for relationship is part of the nature of man. The advantage here is that it plays very well to our own age. This is most clearly seen in the institution of marriage and the family. The disadvantage here is that it can tend toward Social Trinitarianism. It can begin to project onto the Godhead the features of his analogies in his effects.
Fourth, in the Christological Model, while Adam may have been the “prototype” of man, treated from the perspective of a left-to-right history, it is actually Jesus Christ who was conceived to be the God-Man before the foundations of the world, and thus was actually the Idea to which Adam conformed from the first. Irenaeus put it like this,
“For in times long past, it was said that man was created after the image of God, but it was not [actually] shown; for the Word was as yet invisible, after whose image man was created, wherefore also he did easily lose the similitude. When, however, the Word of God became flesh, He confirmed both these: for He both showed forth the image truly, since He became Himself what was His image; and He re-established the similitude after a sure manner, by assimilating man to the invisible Father through means of the visible Word.”5
In this view, dominion can be conceived in terms of the three offices of Christ: prophet, priest, and king. But the clearest case for this is how it relates to sanctification. Paul’s words here, “put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator” (Col. 3:10)—these give opportunity for the Westminster theology to be at one with this other historic view.
God’s Image is Male and Female
The flow of the text from Genesis 1 to 2 is instructive. It is often asked whether there were two first couples (as if this was some oversight by Moses), since it can appear to the new reader that Adam and Even were had already been formed in 1:26-27 once we arrive at Chapter 2. However, what we see in the difference between 1:26-27 and 2:15-24 has to do with the particular aims of Chapter 1 (the cosmological account) versus Chapter 2 (the anthropological account). These are two perspectives on the same event, the latter being a more paused or slow drawing out of Eve’s relation to Adam, while the former had more to do with the image of God (Adam and Eve together) in their relation to God. If we look at the account, Eve is made a help “fit for him,” so at the very least we can say that whatever Adam was given to do, from dominion to multiplying (1:28) to keeping the ground (2:15) and so forth, Eve was designed in such as a way as that they would glorify God together in that task, and he at the head (1 Cor. 11:3, Eph. 5:22-24).
What we have said so far about the creation in general and the image of God in particular, also applies to these differences between men and women. They are designed by God and they are good. It may be that there is a strong etymological connection between the material of man and woman, as to their specific origins, and their vocation. Brakel makes this very specific:
In the original language, the Hebrew tongue, man is called (Adam), which is derived from a word which means ‘to be red,’ … the word (Adamah, red earth) is derived from this. In Greek man is called (Anthropos, of an erect posture). After the fall man is also called (Enos, wretched one).6
At the very least we can say that man (adam) was taken from the ground (adamah). Now woman (ishah) was taken from man (ish). Thus do the designs of the sexes, as image-bearers, obtain glory for God in ways consistent with their natures. Man seeks for glory in shaping the ground; woman in relationships. This is not part of the fall, but of the original design. Indeed what is part of the fall is to hate that design.
That means that the members of the institution of marriage are not arbitrarily selected but according to nature. That means that the complementary roles assigned to men and women are not reducible to culture, but according to nature. Nature testifies to man and woman being complementary for each other. So this is not ethics by Divine Command Theory (i.e. “Because God says so — apart from whether or not it is good and right”) but rather Natural Law Theory, which is that God commands and creates things with objective natures, which natures reflect excellencies of his nature. Isaiah 43:6-7 spoke of both sons and daughters having been formed for God’s glory. Marriage itself and the raising of children are also images of God in that sense of extending the same reflection of God. So it says, “Did he not make them one, with a portion of the Spirit in their union? And what was the one God seeking? Godly offspring” (Mal. 2:15).
God’s Image in its Attributes
The Westminster Divines base this part of their answer on two parallel texts in Paul’s letters. The first we already saw from Colossians, about “the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator” (Col. 3:10). Elsewhere Paul gives us the other two attributes:
“put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (Eph. 4:24).
Putting the two verses together, we measure man was here by what he is having restored: IN KNOWLEDGE, RIGHTEOUSNESS, AND HOLINESS.
Without getting into every dimension of these, the term original righteousness ought to be understood. This is the first of what are called the four states of man: 1. innocence, 2. sin, 3. grace, and 4. glory. So this first state of innocence, or original righteousness, refers to the state in which Adam and Eve lived before their fall into sin. Ecclesiastes 7:29 speaks of “man” in what is clearly the original sense: “God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes.” This uprightness is both positional and existential. That is, man was created both innocent before God’s court and ignorant of the ways of sin; or as Thomas Boston put it,
“straight with the will and law of God, without any irregularity in his soul … God made him thus: He did not first make him, and then make him righteous, but in the very making of him, He made him righteous. Original righteousness was created with him; so that in the same moment he was a man, he was a righteous man, morally good.”7
More than that, this righteousness was both positive and negative. Dabney explains that it was native rather than having to be acquired.8 In other words, God “conferred upon [Adam] as the original habitus of his will, by the creative act which made him an intelligent creature … The Pelagians, … Socinians, and many of the New England school assert that Adam could only have received from his Maker a negative innocency; and that a positive righteousness could only be the result of his own voluntary acts of choice.”9 However, this righteousness was mutable, “for if Adam had been unchangeably righteous,” Boston argued, “he must have been either by nature or by free gift: by nature he could not be so, for that is proper to God, and incommunicable to any creature; if by free gift, then no wrong was done to him in withholding what he could not crave.”10 And Boston infers from this moral uprightness a natural inclination to God: “It was not left in an equal balance to good and evil.”11
As to original knowledge: Did Adam have more knowledge than all other human beings? There is a sense in which that is true. If we distinguish original knowledge, and that perfect (in the sense of original, pre-fall). However, there is another sense in which that is not the case. God is making the new creation greater than the original. Grace perfects nature, rather than simply restoring it. Within that movement 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.
If the image can be restricted to these communicable attributes in a way that is distinct from the essence of man (as Dabney seemed to do) then, one can say that the image was lost in the fall without the essential attributes being lost, or else the likeness that was lost was its accidens.12 To specifically use either of the Genesis 1:26 words as that which was lost seems difficult to square with Genesis 9:5-6 and other passages that ground moral law commandments in the image or likeness to God (e.g. Jas. 3:9). Dabney takes these verses into account and concludes that what remains is “his possession of an intelligent spiritual nature.”13 Vos makes a similar distinction 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.14
God’s Image for Dominion
What is meant by these last words, WITH DOMINION OVER THE CREATURES? Dominion means to exercise authority and control over things that we have been given. The word dominion comes from the Latin domine, which means “lord” or “master.” Think of a house as well (domus in Latin). Now the whole earth is God’s house (Ps. 24:1), but as Supreme Lord, he has delegated to us smaller parts of “the house” in order to care for things that are really, ultimately his things. How we care for them (also called “stewardship”) is a trust to render back to him all of these things in better condition that we found them in their natural state.
Now if there is any hierarchy in the created order—as there is not only within each of the orders of creation, but as there is between the natures of men and women (e.g. 1 Cor. 11:7-9)—then there is a more focused or proper dominion settling upon the employer than the laborer, more upon the teacher than the pupil, more upon the elder than the younger, more upon the sovereign than the representative, more upon the parents than the children, more upon the husband than the wife.
We asked if the fall eradicated the image? We should ask the same about dominion. The same two pieces of strong evidence for the continuity of the image (Genesis 9 and Psalm 8) factor in here. In the former, the creation covenant is reaffirmed to Noah and his descendants, and although not all the same language is used, the form is basically the same. Psalm 8 is a celebration of that very dominion and it is even more than reaffirmed, but even redeemed, in Christ being the fulfillment of that Psalm in Hebrews 2:6-9.
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1. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, II:532
2. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, II:554-62
3. Anthony Hoekema, Man Created in God’s Image (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 67-68.
4. Brakel, The Christian’s Reasonable Service, I:308.
5. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, in Ante-Nicene Fathers: Vol. 1 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994), 544.
6. Brakel, The Christian’s Reasonable Service, I:307.
7. Thomas Boston, Human Nature in its Fourfold State (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1964), 38.
8. Many among the Reformed have maintained that Rome sought a “middle view” between the Semi-Pelagian grounding of righteousness in the real active record of man, and the Reformed view. The solution was the doctrine of the donum superadditum. Bavinck saw more sweeping motives for this in devising a whole new “supernaturalism” of man’s ends, whereas Dabney restricted his cynicism to the soteriological question.
9. Dabney, Systematic Theology, 296.
10. Boston, Human Nature in its Fourfold State, 45.
11. Boston, Human Nature in its Fourfold State, 41.
12. Dabney, Systematic Theology, 293.
13. Dabney, Systematic Theology, 294.
14. Geerhardus Vos, Reformed Dogmatics, Volume Two: Anthropology (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2012), 12.
