Image of God

The image of God (imago Dei; Hebrew tselem ʼElōhîm) is the defining dignity of humanity: "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness… So God created man in his own image… male and female he created them" (Genesis 1:26–27). Of all creatures, human beings alone are made to resemble and represent their Maker, crowned "with glory and honor" and given dominion (Psalms 8:5–6).

Scripture does not exhaustively define what the image consists of, and three complementary dimensions have been recognized: the structural (capacities such as reason, conscience, and moral will), the functional (the royal vocation of ruling and stewarding creation as God’s representatives, like a king’s statue set in his realm), and the relational (the capacity for personal communion with God and one another). Each has biblical warrant, and together they describe humanity as God’s worshiping, ruling, relational representative.

The Fall corrupted but did not erase the image. After it, the sanctity of human life is still grounded in it — "whoever sheds the blood of man… for God made man in his own image" (Genesis 9:6) — and James forbids cursing people "who are made in the likeness of God" (James 3:9). So the image grounds both universal human dignity and universal moral accountability.

Redemption is the restoration of the image. Christ himself is its perfection — "the image of the invisible God" (Colossians 1:15; 2 Corinthians 4:4; Hebrews 1:3). Believers are "being renewed in knowledge after the image of [their] creator" (Colossians 3:10) and "transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another" by the Spirit (2 Corinthians 3:18). The believer’s destiny is to be "conformed to the image of his Son" (Romans 8:29) and to bear "the image of the man of heaven" (1 Corinthians 15:49).