Christians decry abortion and medical assistance in death because each human person is imago Dei. Christians decry sexism, racism, ableism, and other dehumanizing -isms because each human person is imago Dei. Christians care about alleviating poverty and providing holistic care because each human person is imago Dei. Christians seek justice for all who are oppressed, marginalized, and ignored because each human person is imago Dei.

We were listening to the music team finish their rehearsal before heading into the pre-service meeting. My five-year-old daughter, my middle-little one, stood beside me in the foyer as she does most weeks when she comes early to church with me. Oftentimes she doesn’t recognize the songs the band plays. But when she heard them playing the song “Great Things,” she confidently looked up at me and said, “I know this one!”

The band arrived at the chorus, and my daughter sang along.

Oh, hero of Heaven, You conquered the grave
You free every cactus and break every chain

I smiled at the thought of Jesus freeing every cactus from its chains. I didn’t correct her; we will sort that one out another day. She is in a stage of life where her vocabulary is growing exponentially, and she gets a remarkable amount of the words right. But sometimes a captive gets called a cactus.

Another one of the words my middle-little mispronounces these days is human: she calls them “few-man.” I’ve tried correcting this one, but to no avail quite yet. It’s one thing to mispronounce the word human, but it’s quite another to misunderstand the intrinsic importance of each human person. Ultimately, I am more concerned that my daughter understands the value of each human than properly pronouncing the word itself.

I have been contemplating the concept of theological anthropology for a while now as I search for answers to the question: what is a human? When it comes to the topic of humans as imago Dei, the response is often similar to my pre-service sidekick in the foyer. We either meet the term with silence because we don’t know what it means, or we meet it with confidence because we are sure that “I know this one!”

The Image of God

The bedrock scriptural passage for all Christian thinking regarding humanity is Genesis 1:26–27, 31 (NIV):

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them . . .

God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.

This key anthropological passage contains the English phrasing the image of God, or imago Dei in Latin. There is no shortage of material written on imago Dei, but one fairly standard and representative definition of the image of God is “that man is like God and represents God” (Wayne A. Grudem, Systematic Theology, 442).

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