Lecture 2-1: Three Interpretive Traditions of the Imago Dei

Genesis 1:26-27 (World English Bible):

Psalm 8:4-5 (WEB):

Psalm 8 is worth reading alongside Genesis 1 because it asks the interpretive question in its own way: it does not say humanity is glorious because humanity is intelligent, or because humanity rules, or because humanity relates. It simply marvels that God, who made the heavens, "thinks of" and "cares for" a creature this small. All three traditions below can plausibly claim Psalm 8 as support — which is itself evidence that Genesis 1:26-27 alone will not settle the question.

The text says less than we want it to

Read Genesis 1:26 slowly. "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness" is followed immediately, in the same breath, by "and let them have dominion." The verse does not pause to explain what "image" means before moving to what image- bearers do. Verse 27 restates that humanity — "male and female" together — is made in God's image, again without definition. This is not unusual for Genesis 1; the chapter narrates rather than defines throughout. But it means that every substantive claim about what the image is has to be built from clues elsewhere in Scripture, from the Hebrew vocabulary itself (tselem, image; demuth, likeness), and from theological reasoning about what is fitting for a doctrine of God and humanity to say. Three constructions have earned lasting followings.

The substantive (or structural) view

The oldest and, for much of church history, the dominant reading locates the image in some capacity that humans possess and other creatures do not — classically, reason and will, sometimes broadened to include moral agency or spirituality. On this view, the image is a structure built into human nature: something a person has, as part of what a human being is, independent of whether that capacity is currently being exercised.

Thomas Aquinas gives the classical statement. In the Summa Theologiae (Ia, q. 93), Aquinas locates the image specifically in the intellectual nature of the soul — the human capacity to know and to love, which mirrors (however remotely) God's own nature as a being who knows and loves. For Aquinas, the image is most properly present wherever this intellectual capacity is present, which is why he can speak of the image being more fully realized in the person actually exercising wisdom and love toward God than in someone not doing so, while still holding that even an infant or a person who has lost the use of reason retains the image, because it names something about human nature, not a momentary performance.

The strength of the substantive view is that it gives a clear, definite answer: the image is a real endowment, present in every human being by nature, which explains why Scripture can appeal to "the image of God" (Genesis 9:6) as the reason murder is uniquely wrong — every human, without exception, carries this endowment. The difficulty, which this chapter will return to directly in 2-2, is that if the image is a capacity — and specifically a cognitive one, reason — then a question naturally follows once something else appears that can reason, or appears to: does that thing share, or threaten, or dilute the image?

The functional (or representative) view

A second tradition, which has gained significant ground in Old Testament scholarship over the last several decades, reads "image" against its use elsewhere in the ancient Near East. In Mesopotamian and Egyptian royal ideology, kings were sometimes called the "image" of a god — not because the king structurally resembled the deity, but because the king was installed to represent that deity's rule on earth, functioning as a visible stand-in for an otherwise invisible sovereign. Statues of a king placed in distant provinces served a similar function: an image was something that represented and made present the authority of the one it depicted.

On this reading, Genesis 1:26-27 is a radical democratization of that royal language. Rather than one king alone being god's image on earth, every human being — male and female alike, without royal rank required — is appointed God's representative, given the office of "dominion" that verse 26 names in the very same sentence as "image." The image, on this account, is not a possession located inside a person but a vocation: a commissioned role of ruling the earth on God's behalf, as God's own representative would.

J. Richard Middleton, in The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1 (2005), is the fullest contemporary defense of this reading. Middleton argues at length that the grammatical and literary structure of Genesis 1:26-28 — "image" followed immediately by "have dominion," with no break in the sentence — supports reading the image as constituted by, not merely followed by, the task of rule. He also stresses the "liberating" edge of this move: against ancient ideologies in which only the king bore the divine image, Genesis 1 extends that dignity and that commission to the whole human race.

The strength of this view is that it takes the grammar of the text with full seriousness and explains why "image" and "dominion" sit in the same sentence. Its implication for chapter 2's later question is significant and will be developed in 2-2: if the image is a task appointed, rather than a capacity possessed, then a machine performing cognitive tasks well simply has not entered the category at all, because a machine has not been commissioned by God to represent God's rule.

The relational view

A third tradition locates the image neither in a capacity nor in a task, but in relationship — the image consists in being-in-relation, first to God and then to other humans, rather than in any attribute an individual could be said to possess in isolation.

Karl Barth, in Church Dogmatics III/1, makes the case most influentially by pressing on the second half of Genesis 1:27: "male and female he created them." Barth argues this clause is not incidental biological detail tacked onto the image statement but is part of what the image names — the image is reflected precisely in humanity's existence as an I who exists essentially in relation to a Thou, an existence-in-encounter that mirrors, at an immense distance, the relational life within God's own triune being. On Barth's reading, no human individual considered alone — apart from relationship — bears the image fully; the image is intrinsically a shared, relational reality, not a private possession.

The strength of the relational view is that it takes seriously a feature of the text (the male-and-female clause) that the other two traditions tend to treat as background detail rather than definitional content, and it connects the doctrine of the image to the doctrine of the Trinity in a way many find theologically rich. Its implication for 2-2, developed there in full: relationship is not something a machine claims, enters, or is owed by anyone, which places the relational view, like the functional view, largely outside the reach of the machine-intelligence question as usually posed.

Holding the three together, for now

These three traditions are not simply compatible restatements of the same idea; they genuinely disagree about where the weight of "image" falls — in a possessed capacity, an appointed task, or a lived relationship — and contemporary theologians continue to defend each position seriously, sometimes attempting partial syntheses that lean toward one while borrowing insights from another. This is a point where readers will not agree, and this course will not force agreement. What this lecture has tried to do is state each position in a form its own defenders would recognize as fair, because 2-2 depends on having three real positions on the table, not three caricatures.