Governments are still accountable to God’s demands in Genesis 9 not to murder the innocent. No immigrant, regardless of their legal status, should be abused or murdered. Yet this does not mean those here illegally cannot rightly be deported, as deportation has nothing to do with human dignity. 

The topic of mass immigration, insecure borders, and the loss of national character and identity is probably the single most pressing matter for the West today. Last week’s Christmas market attack in Magdeburg, Germany, where a Saudi Arabian immigrant plowed his car into a crowded market, killing five and wounding over 200, and, in America, the horrific news that a sleeping woman was set on fire and burned alive in a New York subway car by a homeless Guatemalan immigrant, remind us of the urgency of resolving this problem.

There is growing support among the common people of Europe, England, and America that this must stop. The political leadership class that has intentionally pursued a global, open-borders world by inviting more immigrants than could be assimilated and then demonizing and criminally penalizing their own citizens who object must be removed and ostracized. American support for mass deportation is higher than it’s ever been, hovering around 55% in general support for deporting illegal immigrants, although varying according to changing details or circumstances. Tom Homan, Trump’s nominee for “border Czar,” has taken a hard line on immigration and has sworn to act immediately upon Trump’s numerous future executive orders.

A major obstacle to effective immigration policy, however, are American evangelicals and conservative Christians who have been taught that Christian love and Christlikeness require welcoming all immigrants, no matter their legal or illegal status. Invariably, if you debate the topic of immigration with these conservatives, eventually, they will claim that the image of God in man and human dignity requires a compassionate and welcoming policy toward immigrants, the poor and homeless, and other needy groups in society. In fact, human dignity and the image of God are often invoked in many different settings and conversational topics as a catch-all ethical foundation for moral deliberation and public reason. Yet this is a sign of intellectual malaise, stagnancy, and modern innovations and not a reflection of the Christian tradition. 

The Image of God

There are three basic questions that arise regarding the “image of God” (or the imago Dei). First, what is it? Second, did the fall and human sin damage or erase it? Third, what are the ethical and social implications of the image, specifically relating to human dignity? While the scholarly debate over the exact definition of the image of God has gone on for decades, the predominant view is that it refers to human rationality and volition (including emotion, speech, self-reflection, intentionality, etc.). This is in accord with Aristotle’s observation that men, out of all animal life, are the only rational animals precisely because they have the capacity for speech; and that speech and rationality mean that men are sociable, which is what makes them political animals as well.

While some scholars claim that the text in Genesis l:26-28 emphasizes man’s role or function as determined by God, the reality is that the image as rationality implies both a function for man (his temporal work and final end) as well as relationship and sociability (procreation, civil association, etc.). The best way to frame this passage is to conceive of Adam as a divine representative, a vicegerent of God, placed in a Garden-temple with a dual priest-king commission to conquer the uncultivated world beyond the Garden and to take the name and knowledge of God to the ends of the earth as a divine intercessory. To accomplish this, man had to be made in God’s image in order to fulfill this role as a species and to properly represent God to the rest of creation.

A major debate in Christian theology revolved around whether the Fall and God’s curse upon mankind resulted in the image of God being blotted out from man’s nature. This determination was closely related to how one defined the image. For example, Samuel Willard (1640-1707), a New England Puritan clergyman most famous for his massive work, A Compleat Body of Divinity, believed that the image of God was identical to “original righteousness”—a righteousness and inward holiness given to Adam by God that perfected the human constitution, oriented him toward heavenly things, and secured his moral rectitude and integrity (Question X, Compleat Body of Divinity). When the Fall resulted in man’s original righteousness being removed, the consequence was the image of God was lost as well. For others, like Francis Turretin (1623-1687), the image of God encompassed both essential and accidental properties: it was “antecedently in nature (as to the spirituality and immortality of the soul); formally in rectitude or original righteousness; consequently in the dominion and immortality of the whole man” (Institutes of Elenctic Institutes, 5.10.6). Thus, for Turretin, the loss of original righteousness damaged the image but did not completely eradicate it.

My own view is closer to Turretin’s, that the image of God remains in fallen man even though not in its original glory or perfect function. Man’s reason and sociability remain in the post-lapsarian state, and even though natural man can arrive at a natural knowledge of God, the full knowledge of God’s nature and his salvific work—and the fulfillment of man’s divine commission—requires divine revelation and help in the form of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

What does the image of God imply? Certainly it means that man has reason and deliberation, and thus the ability to discern truth from error and to seek knowledge and overcome ignorance. It means that man is primarily a social being, not a lone individual; he is born into a family and society that indelibly shapes and molds him into a particular kind of person (for good or ill). It means that he is a free creature, capable of uncoerced choice, and thus of being morally responsible and accountable for his own actions. Finally, it means that man is a religious being, created by God for the knowledge of God and communion with the Holy One. 

These are general observations that do not clearly or obviously map onto political constitutions or public policy. However, one particular implication of the image of God for public ethics and politics is God’s covenant with Noah in Genesis 9. There, God declares that he will “require a reckoning for the life of man”: whoever sheds the blood of man must pay a blood debt of their own life in return (Gen. 9:5-6). The reason given in this passage is that “God made man in his own image.” Clearly, man is the living image of God (he does not merely possess the image), and so an unjustified assault upon man’s life is an assault upon God. This passage has been the locus classicus for capital punishment for capital crimes in society for centuries, although the text itself does not stipulate that human authorities will execute criminals.

What is the relationship between the image of God and human dignity? What does dignity even mean? Many Christians assume that the image of God automatically confers dignity or worth to every human being, and thus each person intrinsically possesses and cannot lose their dignity no matter what sin they commit or how evil they might become. Yet no passage in Scripture that references the image of God says anything like this (and there are only a few passages that explicitly mention the image). While Genesis 9 clearly contains an ethical teaching from the image of God, it also stipulates a death penalty for those who murder their fellow man. For these criminals, the image of God and their presupposed essential dignity does not confer immunity from just punishment.

The Defiling of Dignity

American Christians believe that they can contribute something meaningful and relevant to political discourse and policy debates and that this contribution primarily comes from theological insights that only Christians can provide. However, in this case, the Christian rhetoric surrounding the image of God and human dignity is not in the vanguard but in the train; religious conservatives are reacting to a secular discourse on human dignity that predated them by decades.

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