We read classic literature, mostly—Camus and Conrad, Dante and Dostoevsky, Euripides and Eliot, Milton and Shakespeare. And for spice, Jonathan Franzen. The book that evening was Pascal’s Pensees—a full-throated defense of the Christian faith.

I started to answer the question by saying the Genesis creation accounts show that God is creative, orderly, social. At which point the guy in the corner, an atheist who had grown up evangelical, stopped me and said, “Social? That’s interesting. I’ve never heard that before.”

This is a common problem. Christians say “image of God” a lot, but how many of us have really thought through what all it means? I rarely do. Even more importantly, how many of us have even contemplated why God made us in His image? What is the purpose of being created in the image of God?

I contend that God is, in His Trinitarian self, an orderly community of selfless love. And He made us in His image for this purpose: to create, sustain and extend orderly communities of selfless love across the globe.

Let’s look at each one of those words to further understand.

Create

God is creative and He made us to create as well. What we create is called culture—something that God, even before sin entered the world, began to work through people to make. As theologian John Frame has said, “creation is what God makes by himself; and culture is what he makes through us.”

Sustain

Modern culture idolizes the new, but much of what we do every day is maintain the gifts already given to us–God’s gifts in nature and, through the traditions of people, God’s gifts in culture.

Extend

Adam and Eve were not designed to stay in Eden, even before their sin. They were to “fill the earth,” as Gen. 1:28 says. And Gen. 2:24 says a man will leave his father and mother’s house to live with his wife. So households will multiply, eventually, filling the earth.

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