This series is drawn from our "Christian Foundations Charter". This charter, which is available on our "Home Church Resources" page, seeks to combat the loss of Christian identity within the western Church by restoring a distinctly Christian ethic.
Core Foundation 3: Human beings bear the image of God and therefore possess inherent dignity and worth.
From what is true to who we are
We traced goodness and truth back to the same source: the character of God. Goodness isn’t a rule God consults, it’s who he is. Truth isn’t a human construction, it’s grounded in his own self-revelation. Now we’re going to follow that same thread into a more personal question: what does God’s nature say about us?
The problem of misidentification
In his book, The Quest for Truth, F. Leroy Forlines opens his discussion of human nature with a simple but sharp illustration. A mechanic can’t properly service an engine without first knowing what kind of engine he’s working on. Get the identification wrong and every prescription that follows will be wrong too: the wrong fuel, the wrong parts, the wrong adjustments. The same is true, he points out, of plants and animals. What heals one can be fatal to another. Misidentification isn’t a small mistake. It’s the root of every mistake that follows.
Now apply that to human beings. There are two fundamentally different ways to identify what a person is. One view says a human being is, at bottom, an animal among animals, distinguished by degree rather than kind, with needs and a nature that trace back to an animal ancestry. The other says a human being is a creature made by God in his own image, accountable to him, patterned after him in a way no other creature is. These aren’t small differences in emphasis. They produce entirely different prescriptions for what a person needs, what dignity means, and how a person ought to be treated. Get the identification wrong, and everything built on top of it — ethics, law, medicine, how we treat the vulnerable — inherits the same error.
Scripture doesn’t leave this an open question.
What is man?
The psalmist puts the question about as directly as it can be put:
Psalm 8:4-6 (CSB) — What is man that you remember him, the son of man that you look after him? You made him little less than God and crowned him with glory and honor. You made him lord over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet.
This isn’t simply a philosophical treatise, but wonder expressed as a question that answers itself. Set against the vastness of the heavens (the verses just before this describe the moon and stars), a human being looks impossibly small. And yet God remembers him, looks after him, and crowns him with glory and honor. Whatever a human being is, this psalm insists it isn’t insignificant. Human dignity isn’t earned through size, strength, or achievement, but is conferred by the attention and design of God.
You and I have value, not because of our success or achievements, but because of what God made us to be!
Image, not function, not merely relationship
The Psalmist applies the meaning of our creation:
Genesis 1:26-27 (CSB) — Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness.” … So God created man in his own image; he created him in the image of God; he created them male and female.
Some interpret our being created in “God’s image” as referring to something man does, chiefly his exercise of dominion over creation. while others believe it isn’t something built into human nature at all, but describes a relationship, man reflecting God the way a mirror reflects light without possessing any light of its own, while still others say the image is something that actually exists within a human being, a real quality or capacity resident in his nature. This last view is the common baseline view expressed across different Christian traditions over time, and it’s what I believe is correct.
Genesis isn’t describing a function man performs or a relationship man participates in, but is naming what man is. The image of God is something built into the very constitution of a human being, not a role he plays or a reflection that only appears when the light hits him right.
This matters because it changes where our dignity comes from. If human dignity is functional, tied to what a person does or produces, then dignity is always conditional and always fluctuating. Harming or otherwise diminishing one person is not the same as doing so to another because their inherent value differs based on what they’ve done. Likewise, if our dignity is relational and dependent on an active connection with God being maintained, then it comes and goes with the state of that relationship. But if the image is substantive and is something inherent to a person’s very nature simply by virtue of being human, then dignity is fixed. It doesn’t rise and fall with usefulness, ability, or even faithfulness.
All of this means that the attributes of goodness that are established by God’s nature are applicable to human relationships and interactions by virtue of our own nature. Whereas it’s not wrong for me to cut down a tree, and thereby “take” a bird’s home, it is wrong for me to take another person’s home because the bird, not possessing the relevant attribute’s of God’s nature, does not exist in the same moral framework as human beings. “Taking a bird’s home” does not wrong or violate the bird in the same way that taking another person’s home does because they do not possess the same sense of dignity as humans. That does not absolve humans from any responsibility to lower animals — we are responsible to them as stewards of God’s creation — but it does establish separate moral frameworks between us and the animal kingdom.
Much more could be said about this, but the simple point is that human dignity and value is established by the fact and design of our creation. And the implications of this fact and design are far reaching.
What the image consists of
The content of the divine image in humanity comes from two New Testament texts, Colossians 3:10 and Ephesians 4:24, which describe believers being renewed “after the image of him that created him” and being made “in righteousness and true holiness.“
From these two passages, F. Leroy Forlines describes our divine likeness in two dimensions. Humanity possesses a rational likeness: human beings are designed to think, reason, and know, not because education makes people rational, but because by design they already are. And we possess a moral likeness: human beings are designed with a genuine moral nature, not because moral teaching makes people moral, but because by design they already are. These two dimensions together define human personhood as beings who think, feel, and act as patterned after a God who does the same. We are persons, in contrast to animals, precisely because of our ability to think, experience emotion, and make rationally and morally informed action.
This means being made in God’s image isn’t primarily about looking like God in some physical sense. It’s about being the kind of creature capable of knowledge, of moral judgment, of relationship, in a way that echoes, however finitely, the God who made us.
Calvin: the image as an inward good
John Calvin, writing from within a different theological framework centuries before Forlines, wrestled with the same text, and lands in a strikingly similar place. Against a view of his day that tried to locate the divine image partly in the physical body, Calvin insists the image, whatever glory shines through the outward man, has its proper seat in the soul. It’s an inner good, not an outward one. And when Calvin turns to define what that inward good consists of, he reaches for the very same two texts Forlines uses centuries later; Colossians 3:10 and Ephesians 4:24. There he identifies knowledge, righteousness, and holiness as the content of the divine image in humanity.
That convergence of conviction between different systems of thought is worth pointing out plainly. Two theologians separated by roughly four hundred fifty years, writing from different traditions and for different purposes, land on the same textual foundation and largely the same conclusion: the image of God is a real, inward endowment, chiefly concerned with knowing rightly and living rightly, not a matter of physical resemblance or a status that only exists when actively exercised.
All of this points forward to something that we’ll deal with later, but which I think will be helpful to say here, that if our dignity is grounded in our being created in the divine image, then the realization of our dignity is found in the real expression of the divine image. Nothing fulfills humanity more than when we realize the attributes of the divine image in our life. That is why genuine love, whether experienced by a Christian or non-Christian, is so deeply satisfying, because it resonates with something deep within us. And that is why the corruption of something as sacred of love is, likewise, so deeply painful and wounding.
Where they part ways, and why Forlines has the better of it
There’s a real difference between them, though, and it matters for this particular foundation. Calvin’s language for what the fall did to the image is severe. He describes what remains after Adam’s sin as “frightful deformity,” calling it “confused, mutilated, and disease-ridden.” He affirms the image wasn’t totally destroyed, but the weight of his rhetoric falls almost entirely on the ruin.
Forlines draws a more careful distinction, between what he calls constitutional likeness and functional likeness, or in simpler terms, between personhood and personality. Personhood is the basic constitution of being a thinking, feeling, morally aware creature. Personality is how that constitution actually gets exercised, in thought, feeling, and action. Forlines argues that the fall devastated the second without erasing the first. Human personhood remains intact because we are still thinking, feeling, and acting beings. All of the constituent parts of humanity’s personhood remained intact after the fall even though they suffered catastrophic functional damage.
This distinction matters for our purposes because of what James does with it.
Cursing the image-bearer
James writes to Christians about the danger of an untamed tongue:
James 3:9 (CSB) — With the tongue we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in God’s likeness.
Notice who James is describing. He isn’t talking about pre-fallen humanity in the garden. He’s talking about the people you actually deal with, in a fallen world, people fully capable of being cursed at, people whose behavior might well earn a curse by any ordinary human standard. And James’s argument is that cursing them is still, in itself, an offense against God, because they are still made in his likeness. That argument only carries its full force if the likeness in view is something robust and intact in fallen people, not a nearly obliterated trace.
Genesis 9:6 makes the same point from another angle: human bloodshed carries the weight it does, serious enough to warrant capital punishment, specifically because the one killed bears God’s image. Scripture treats the image in fallen humanity as a present and weighty fact, not a faded memory.
The point is very simple: humanity did not lose her dignity in the fall, though its realization and expression were catastrophically corrupted. We still possess inherent value as divine image bearing beings. And that dignity conferred upon us by our Creator is holy to him. So it must shape how we think of, speak to, and treat our fellow human beings.
Dignity that isn’t earned
Put together, this gives us a foundation that resists two opposite errors. It resists treating human worth as something achieved, whether through intelligence, productivity, moral performance, or social standing, since the image is constitutional, not functional. And it resists treating fallen human beings as having forfeited that worth through their sin, since Scripture applies the language of God’s likeness to sinful people without qualification. The unborn, the severely disabled, the elderly with failing minds, the person currently committing evil against you, all remain, by design and by constitution, image-bearers. That’s not a sentimental add-on to Christian ethics. It’s the ground floor.
This leads us to Paul’s appeal to the human conscience, where he says that the Gentiles, who never received the law of Moses, still show the law’s work written on their hearts. The image of God in us isn’t only the ground of our worth, but is also the ground of our accountability to God. And that’s where we’re headed next.
A Dedicated Faith 