The Image of God

To be made "in the image of God" is the ground of Christian anthropology — it answers "What am I?" The image is what we are given (mind, freedom, a royal calling, the capacity for God); the likeness is what we are called to become. The image itself is Christ, and though sin defaced it, only the Image Himself could restore it.

For Inquirers

Right at the start of the Bible, after making the whole world, God says something about human beings that he says about nothing else he made: "Let us make man in our image." Every person, the claim goes, is stamped with the image of God. It's one of the most important sentences in the whole Christian understanding of who you are, so it's worth being clear about what it means.

It's tempting to hear that and picture God as having a body like yours — a face, two hands. But it means something deeper and more interesting than that. It means something about you is a kind of reflection of God, the way a portrait reflects the person it was painted of, or the way your face looks back at you from a still pond. Your ability to think and reason, to choose freely, to make and create things, to love someone more than yourself — none of these belong to rocks or stars or animals. They're small echoes of a God who thinks, chooses, creates, and loves. You are, in a real sense, a little living picture of him.

Two enormous things follow. The first is that every person has this — the kind and the cruel, the stranger and the enemy alike — which means every human being has a worth that no king, government, or crowd can hand out or take away, because God gave it and only God could. The second is that the picture can be smudged. Christians believe something went wrong early on, and the image in us got dirtied and dimmed — though never erased. A great deal of the faith is the story of that portrait being cleaned and restored, until one day we don't merely carry God's image but truly grow to resemble him.

Overview

To be made in the image of God (Latin Imago Dei, from Genesis 1.26-27) is the foundation of Christian anthropology — the answer to the question "What am I?" Every human being bears it, and with it a God-given worth no power on earth can grant or revoke.
Orthodoxy hears two notes in Genesis: the image is what we are given — reason, freedom, a royal calling, the capacity for communion with God; the likeness is what we are called to become, a real resemblance to God grown into over a lifetime (see Theosis).
The image itself is Christ — "the image of the invisible God" (Colossians 1.15) — so we are made according to Him. Sin defaced the image but never destroyed it; and only the Image Himself, come in the flesh, could restore it.

Summary

The Imago Dei — the Image of God — is the ground of all Christian anthropology. Genesis says God made humanity "according to our image and likeness" (Genesis 1.26-27), and the Greek Fathers hear in those two words a distinction that shapes everything: the image (eikōn) is the endowment given at creation — the rational soul with its mind and free will, its royal calling to rule creation under God, its immortality (a gift of God's goodness, not a possession of nature),[^pomazansky] and above all its capacity to know and commune with God; the likeness (homoiōsis) is the perfected resemblance to God we are meant to grow into by grace. Crucially, the image after which we are made is Christ Himself, "the image of the invisible God" (Colossians 1.15); to be in the image is to be shaped toward Him. This is why human dignity is theological rather than social — conferred by God at creation and therefore beyond any power to revoke — and why the Fall could wound us so deeply without unmaking us: the image was defaced, not destroyed. Its restoration is the whole drama of salvation, accomplished when "the very Image of the Father" took flesh to renew the ruined portrait,[^athan-effaced] and completed as each person is transformed "from glory to glory" (2 Corinthians 3.18) into the likeness for which they were made. Cross-link Theosis, Nous, Free Will, Original Sin.

"Let us make man in our image"

Everything begins with a sentence in the first chapter of Genesis. Through the whole account of creation God simply speaks and it is so — "let there be light," and there is light — until He comes to make a human being, and the grammar changes. Now there is deliberation, counsel, a pause: "Let us make man according to our image and likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea… and all the earth" (Genesis 1.26-27). St. Gregory of Nyssa lingers on that difference. The sun is made with a word and no counsel precedes it; "while only to the making of man does the Maker of all draw near with circumspection," preparing the world first "as it were a royal lodging for the future king," and bringing man in last — not as an afterthought but as the guest of honor, "to be king over his subjects at his very birth."[^nyssa-king] To be made in God's image is to be the one creature the Creator paused over, and made for Himself.

Image and likeness: what you are, and what you are for

The Greek Fathers heard two distinct words in that verse — image and likeness — and refused to let them collapse into one. St. John of Damascus states the distinction as cleanly as it can be put: "the phrase after His image clearly refers to the side of his nature which consists of mind and free will, whereas after His likeness means likeness in virtue so far as that is possible."[^jod-image] The image is the endowment — what every human being simply is, whether they know it or not: a rational soul, free, able to love, made to commune with God. The likeness is the vocation — actually becoming like God in holiness, which can be pursued or neglected, developed or defaced. The image is the starting capital; the likeness is what we are meant to do with it (see Theosis).

And the image after which we are made is not an abstraction. St. Paul says plainly that Christ "is the image of the invisible God" (Colossians 1.15) — He is the Image, eternally; we are made according to that Image. This is why the whole Christian life can be described as being "conformed to the image of his Son" (Romans 8.29): to grow into the likeness is simply to grow toward Christ, who is what the image was always pointing at.

A royal portrait: reason, freedom, and a calling to rule

What, concretely, is this image in us? The Fathers point first to the soul — not the body, for "God is most pure Spirit," and the image is found in the immortality of the soul (itself a gift, not a natural right), in its reason, its capacity for love, and its freedom.[^pomazansky] Gregory of Nyssa fixes on that freedom as the very mark of royalty. The soul, he says, "immediately shows its royal and exalted character… in that it owns no lord, and is self-governed, swayed autocratically by its own will; for to whom else does this belong than to a king?" Made to rule creation, human nature was fashioned "by its likeness to the King of all… as it were a living image, partaking with the archetype both in rank and in name" — not crowned with gold, but "instead of the purple robe, clothed in virtue, which is in truth the most royal of all raiment."[^nyssa-king] To bear God's image is to be a small sovereign, made to reign over creation and over oneself, robed not in cloth but in goodness.

Nyssa reaches for one image above all to describe it, and it is worth holding onto because it will return: the image of a painter. Our Maker, he says, "painting the portrait to resemble His own beauty, by the addition of virtues, as it were with colors, shows in us His own sovereignty" — laying on the soul, in place of a painter's reds and whites, "purity, freedom from passion, blessedness, alienation from all evil."[^nyssa-portrait] Every human being is a portrait of God, painted in the colors of the virtues.

A dignity that cannot be revoked

Because the image is set in us by God at the moment of creation, the worth it confers is not something a society grants — and so not something a society can withdraw. If human dignity were merely a value assigned by cultures or constitutions, then whatever assigned it could also cancel it, and the dehumanized would have no appeal beyond the very power crushing them. Scripture locates dignity somewhere no power can reach it. It grounds the gravest of laws in the image: "He that sheds man's blood… for in the image of God I made man" (Genesis 9.6) — spoken, notably, after the Fall, of fallen men. And St. James turns it on our everyday speech: with the tongue "we bless our God and Father, and with it we curse men who are made in the image of God" (James 3.9). The point in both is the same and it is uncompromising: the image remains in every person, however sinful, however hostile — which is why to degrade another human being is never merely a social wrong but a theological one. How we treat one another is inseparable from how we regard the God whose image the other bears. And our highest powers — reason, art, justice, self-giving love — are not evolutionary accidents but the echoes in us of a God who reasons, creates, judges, and loves.[^nyssa-portrait]

Defaced, not destroyed

If the image is so glorious, what did the Fall do to it? Here Orthodoxy speaks carefully. It generally avoids the Western phrase original sin, with its overtones of inherited guilt, and speaks instead of ancestral sin: from Adam we inherit the consequences of the fall — mortality, corruption, a will pulled off course — but not his personal guilt[^ancestral] (the whole distinction has its own entry: Original Sin). And what the Fall did to the image is best said in a single word: it defaced it. It did not erase it. St. Athanasius describes the tragedy exactly — "God's image was being effaced, and His work ruined"[^athan-effaced] — the way a treasured portrait is dimmed and dirtied by stains, its lines still faintly there beneath the grime. The image survives most deeply in the nous, the soul's innermost eye for the direct perception of God[^palamas-nous]: in fallen man it is darkened, clouded, distracted — but never in any person wholly put out. This is the double truth Orthodoxy insists on holding: we are genuinely wounded, not lightly, and yet we are never nothing, never mere ruin. The portrait is spoiled. The portrait is still there.

Restored by the Image Himself

A spoiled portrait cannot repaint itself, and here is the deepest reason the eternal God became a man. St. Athanasius asks what could possibly be done "save the renewing of that which was in God's image" — and answers that it could come about only "by the presence of the very Image of God, our Lord Jesus Christ. For by men's means it was impossible, since they are but made after an image; nor by angels either, for not even they are God's images… None other then was sufficient for this need, save the Image of the Father."[^athan-effaced] Then he reaches for exactly the picture Nyssa used, and turns it toward the Incarnation: "as, when the likeness painted on a panel has been effaced by stains from without, he whose likeness it is must needs come once more to enable the portrait to be renewed on the same wood… in the same way also the most holy Son of the Father, being the Image of the Father, came to our region to renew man once made in His likeness."[^athan-portrait] The Artist stepped into His own painting. The Original came in person so that the copy could be drawn true again.

And restoration, once begun, is not a bare acquittal but a lifelong transfiguration — the growth of the defaced image back into the shining likeness it was always for. This is Theosis. Having "put on the new man, who is being renewed in knowledge after the image of his Creator" (Colossians 3.10), the Christian is, by the Spirit, "transformed into the same image from glory to glory" (2 Corinthians 3.18) — the very language of a portrait taking on color after color until the likeness is complete. The end of the whole story is the promise that we "may become partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1.4); or, as St. Athanasius says in the sentence the entire tradition returns to, "He was made man that we might be made God."[^athan-exchange] That is what the image was for from the first paused sentence of Genesis: not merely to resemble God from a distance, but to be filled with His own life.

Sources

[^pomazansky]: Fr. Michael Pomazansky, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, "The image of God in man" (in the chapter "Man — the Crown of Creation") — the image resides in the soul, not the body; the soul's immortality is a gift of God's goodness rather than a property of nature; the image comprises reason, free will, and the capacity for love. [^ancestral]: Fr. Michael Pomazansky, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, "Man's Fall into Sin" — man "has received death and corruption through Adam… though he does not share Adam's guilt. There is, of course, no notion of original guilt in Orthodoxy." See Original Sin for the full treatment. [^palamas-nous]: St. Gregory Palamas, Topics of Natural and Theological Science and on the Moral and Ascetic Life (Philokalia) — the image "refers not to the body but to the nature of the intellect. Nothing in nature is superior to the intellect, for if there were then it would constitute the divine image." See Nous. [^nyssa-king]: St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man II–IV — man made last, as a king brought into a "royal lodging" prepared for him; the soul "owns no lord, and is self-governed, swayed autocratically by its own will," fashioned "by its likeness to the King of all… as it were a living image, partaking with the archetype both in rank and in name," and "clothed in virtue, which is in truth the most royal of all raiment.". [^nyssa-portrait]: St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man V — "our Maker also, painting the portrait to resemble His own beauty, by the addition of virtues, as it were with colors, shows in us His own sovereignty… purity, freedom from passion, blessedness, alienation from all evil… with such hues as these did the Maker of His own image mark our nature.". [^jod-image]: St. John of Damascus, An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, Book II — "the phrase after His image clearly refers to the side of his nature which consists of mind and free will, whereas after His likeness means likeness in virtue so far as that is possible.". [^athan-effaced]: St. Athanasius the Great, On the Incarnation of the Word §§6, 13 — "God's image was being effaced, and His work ruined"; the renewal of the image was possible only "by the presence of the very Image of God, our Lord Jesus Christ… For by men's means it was impossible, since they are but made after an image; nor by angels either, for not even they are God's images… None other then was sufficient for this need, save the Image of the Father.". [^athan-portrait]: St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word §14 — "as, when the likeness painted on a panel has been effaced by stains from without, he whose likeness it is must needs come once more to enable the portrait to be renewed on the same wood… in the same way also the most holy Son of the Father, being the Image of the Father, came to our region to renew man once made in His likeness.". [^athan-exchange]: St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word §54 — "He was made man that we might be made God; and He manifested Himself by a body that we might receive the idea of the unseen Father; and He endured the insolence of men that we might inherit immortality.".