C. Michael Patton and Rhome Dyke · The Theology Program · 43 minutes
Lecture by C. Michael Patton, Th.M., and Rhome Dyke, Th.M., from The Theology Program, published on their public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
This session climbs to the summit of the anthropology unit: the imago Dei, the image of God in man. The teachers confess the study convicted them personally, because traditions that rightly stress human depravity often quietly lose all respect for human beings, ourselves, other believers, and especially unbelievers. Before the course descends into sin next week, it pauses to establish how high God set his crowning achievement. Listen for the thought experiment that recovers the shock we have lost: what if Scripture said everyone around you was in the form of God?
The imago Dei, Latin for the image of God, answers not only what it means to be human but what human is: human in distinction from the animals and human in comparison with God. The questions stack up fast. Are we like God in all respects or a few, and which: our rule over creation, our rationality, our will, our capacity for love and desire? What of the image was lost in the fall, what was retained, and what does it mean for a Christian to bear the image now? The teachers add the question they care most about: how the doctrine governs the way we treat each other.
Patton names the imbalance up front. Traditions that emphasize the fall and the utter depravity of man, a doctrine this course will itself teach, can lose all respect for man, period: for ourselves, for other believers, and most of all for unbelievers, and it distorts ministry, evangelism, and everyday speech, which is exactly where James will press. Our focus falls so completely on what we are in the fall that we forget what we are in God: all depravity, no dignity. The teachers found the preparation convicting, discovering that their own criteria for who deserves respect differ from the Bible’s, and they promise the unit will build a deliberate tension: this week the value of man raised high, next week the extremity of what sin has done.
Genesis 1:26 and 27 is the foundation, and its drama is easy to miss from familiarity. After the earth, sky, birds, fish, and cattle, the narrative stops. God says, let us make man in our image, according to our likeness, the Trinity speaking within itself, and let them rule over the fish, the birds, the cattle, and all the earth. Then the text hammers the point with repetition: God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them. Something different is happening here, set apart from everything made before. And notice what is not said: the text never defines the image. It states the fact and leaves the content for the whole of Scripture to fill in, which is why so many studies work by contrast with the animals.
The second pillar is Psalm 8, David under the night sky: when I consider your heavens, the moon and the stars you have ordained, what is man that you take thought of him? Yet you have made him a little lower than God, crowned him with glory and majesty, and put all things under his feet, sheep and oxen, beasts, birds, and fish. David knew a fraction of the universe’s vastness that we know, and the wonder still overwhelmed him: of all the galaxies, God’s focus fell on the man on this small planet. The class draws out the passage’s teaching together: dominion, the inclusion of male and female alike in the image, and the absence of any hierarchy of being between them.
The teachers frame the image through the experience of making something. A creator puts himself into his best work and hopes it expresses who he is, and Genesis presents man as exactly that: not one more good thing in a sequence but the finality the whole sequence was building toward, the crowning achievement God pronounced very good. Here a tension must be held with both hands: elevate man too high and you devalue God, but devalue man and you also devalue God, telling the Creator his crowning achievement is not very good after all. We must reckon honestly with sin without ever withholding the majesty God built into man.
Church history offers two instructive poles. Calvin taught that the image resides primarily in the soul, and yet that sparks of the divine glow in every aspect of man, even the physical, so that something of God can be seen in all of him, the direction most evangelicals still lean. Karl Barth in the twentieth century swung to the opposite wall: the image lies solely in relationality, our capacity for encounter, because God is wholly other and there is no analogy of being between him and us; our love is not like God’s love, our reason not like his reason, any more than a worm’s movements are like ours. The teachers present Barth’s view as the modern form of the old instinct to strip man of nearly everything, against which the unit is arguing.
The teachers then lay out the aspects of the image within man, holding, with Calvin, that every element of man carries some spark of the divine unless Scripture shows otherwise. The list, with its running -ality joke intact: personality, eternality, relationality, volitionality, rationality, spirituality, physicality, morality, and, the coinage they could not resist, dominionality. All of these belong to God’s own nature, and man bears each in creaturely measure.
Do animals share these? Some, in degree. Patton’s beloved German Shepherd, Rocky, watched his delinquent companions Mindy and Muffin squeeze through the fence hole, grabbed the last tail to hold her back, hesitated a long time when she escaped, and then went through himself. He knew it was wrong, Patton insists, but his was a taught morality, not an innate one. Animals show some personality, some rationality, some dominion, but no innate moral sense and, so far as we know, no spirituality, no capacity to relate to God, and no immaterial part that cannot die. John Frame’s judgment is quoted: everything we are reflects God in some way, though everything we are is also different from God. And Grudem’s: the differences between humans and the rest of creation are often differences of very great degree, so that all creation reflects some likeness to God, yet only man is so like God that he can be said to be in God’s image.
Each aspect carries a like and an unlike. Like God, we are persons with self-consciousness; unlike him, not triune. Like God we will exist into eternity; unlike him we have not existed from eternity, the difference some capture by calling God eternal and man everlasting. Like God we have capacity and drive for relationship. Like God we have volition, choosing according to our will as God chooses according to his greatest desire, and God, the teachers note in a preview of the free will session, is the only one with true free will in the fullest sense. Like God we reason, contemplate, and plan; unlike him we are limited and must solve problems by trial and error. Like God we are spiritual; unlike God we are corporeal, and yet even the body reflects him: our eyes and ears image the God who sees and hears without organs, and it was God who built a physical universe for physical beings, one more reason never to denounce the physical side of man. Like God we are inherently moral, knowing good from evil, though we gained that knowledge in the fall and, unlike God, we know evil from personal experience. And like God we exercise dominion, ruling creation and using its resources for benefit, enjoyment, and survival.
How did the fall affect the image? Three options: man fully retains the image and only misrepresents it through sin; man fully lost it and it is restored only in Christ; or the image is retained in all men but marred by sin and restored in Christ. The class, and the teachers, take the third. The proof begins in Genesis itself. Genesis 5, after the expulsion from Eden, says God made man in his likeness, and then that Adam fathered Seth in his own likeness, according to his image, a deliberate parallel with no hint of a canceled image. Genesis 9 removes all doubt: long after the fall, God tells Noah that whoever sheds man’s blood, by man his blood shall be shed, for God made man in his image. Not part of man, not a remnant: man is in the image of God, which is why murder had already been outlawed in the story of the first family, where Cain killed Abel. Whatever the image is, we are still in it. Nothing is fully lost.
James 3 turns the doctrine into ethics at the smallest scale. No one can tame the tongue, a restless evil full of deadly poison: with it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who have been made in the likeness of God. James builds the dichotomy deliberately, blessing the Highest while cursing what the Highest placed his image in, and he is talking about people, not just Christians. The driver who cuts you off is an image-bearer. The teachers add Calvin’s teaching on the command to love our enemies: we love them not merely as an act of gracious charity but because, bearing God’s image, they deserve the love we give. The person is distinguished from the sin: this is no softness toward evil, but a refusal to curse what God called very good. And because the phrase image of God has gone dull with repetition, Patton runs his thought experiment: look around the room and say instead that every person here is in the form of God, and feel the force return.
Scripture’s great example, after Christ himself, is David, who would not lift his hand against Saul, rebuked the captain who wanted to, and executed the man who claimed to have killed the king, all while Saul, slaughterer of the priests, hunted him. In David’s early years the book of Samuel holds him up for seeing the dignity of an image-bearer even in an enemy, the same logic Paul applies in Romans 13 to governing authorities as unworthy as Nero. The session closes with questions to carry home: by what measures does our society actually assign dignity, morality, jobs, money? Do we really believe that everyone we work with, every neighbor, every stranger on the road bears God’s image? Why do Christians so often carry an unbalanced pessimism about man? And how should this doctrine reshape ministry, since evangelism is nothing less than reaching out to image-bearers in hope of the image restored?
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Key TermsTap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all sixteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. What imbalance do the teachers say infects traditions that rightly teach depravity?
2. What makes Genesis 1:26 and 27 stand apart in the creation narrative?
3. What does the Genesis text notably fail to do?
4. What amazes David in Psalm 8?
5. Why does devaluing man end up devaluing God?
6. How did Calvin and Barth differ on where the image lives?
7. What does Barth’s worm comparison illustrate?
8. What does Rocky’s story of the fence hole demonstrate?
9. How does Grudem, as quoted, frame the difference between man and the animals?
10. Which pair correctly states a like and an unlike within one aspect of the image?
11. How does even the body reflect God, on the teachers’ account?
12. Which option on the fall’s effect does the course take?
13. How does Genesis 9:6 prove the image survived the fall?
14. What contradiction does James 3 expose in the tongue?
15. On Calvin’s reading of the command to love our enemies, why do they deserve that love?
16. Why is David the session’s closing example?
All sixteen correct. Lecture 5 is complete.
By what measures do you actually assign dignity: morality, achievement, income, agreement with you? Name one person whose bearing of God’s image you have functionally denied, and what treating them as an image-bearer would change this week.
Patton’s thought experiment: say of everyone around you, they are in the form of God. Why has the phrase image of God lost its force for us, and what would it take to recover the shock?
The teachers hold that we can never separate depravity from dignity without losing something essential. In your own theology, which of the two have you emphasized at the expense of the other, and how has it shaped your evangelism?
Genesis 1 carries the summit of the unit: God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them, and God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.
The teachers leave the class with their closing questions as the week’s assignment: examine how you measure dignity, where your pessimism about man is unbalanced, and how the doctrine should reshape your ministry to image-bearers. Grudem’s treatment of the image, already read for class, rewards a second pass, and John Frame’s dictum is worth memorizing: everything we are reflects God, though everything we are is also different from God. Next week the tension the teachers promised arrives in full: original sin, and what the fall actually did to the image-bearer.