What Is a Human?
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).
In my experience, when professional and armchair theologians alike address this topic, the main conceptual domains they explore concern the first part of the definition above, that is, the ways humans are like God. The theological phrase for ways humans are like God is “communicable attributes.” Communicable attributes are characteristics that “God shares or ‘communicates’ with us.” (Grudem, Systematic Theology, 156.) In other words, God can be characterized by his being and doing, and some of these beings and doings communicate with, or are shared with, humanity. God’s ways of being that are shared with humanity include descriptions like justice and mercy, both of which God’s people are commanded to embody. God’s actions, or means of doing, that are shared with humanity include capacities like intellect and communication.
In summary: God is. And there are certain characteristics that describe who God is. Some of those characteristics are shared by humanity. And by and large, these shared characteristics have functionally defined what it means for humanity to be imago Dei.
An Important Order and Imago Dei
When we talk about understanding humans as the image of God, we need to prioritize our unique context in creation rather than our shared characteristics with our Creator. In our understanding of the imago Dei, the human being ought to take priority over any and all human doings. Our shared characteristics with the Creator are worthy of consideration, but they are subservient to, and derive from, our unique and distinguished place among his creation. Theologian Millard Erickson says it this way:
The image should be thought of as something primarily substantive or structural. The image is something in the very nature of humans, in the way in which they were made. It refers to something a human is rather than something a human has or does. By virtue of being human, one is in the image of God; being so is not dependent upon the presence of anything else. (Christian Theology, 470)
For another theologian, this contradistinction between (and proper ordering of) being and doing is so significant that she neither endorses the language of humans as image bearers nor the language that humans are made in God’s image. Rather, in her new book, Dr. Carmen Imes argues for the phrase “being God’s image.”
Being God’s image is not the same as being God, just as an idol is not itself a god but merely represents one. However, I think that to talk about being God’s image (rather than being made in God’s image) reinforces the concept that the imago Dei is essential to human identity rather than a capacity that can be lost. (Being God’s Image, 5–6)
The So What of all This
What Imes states above cannot be ignored. Among God’s creation called human, there are no persons who are more or less imago Dei than anyone else. To be imago Dei is essential to being human. However, if we overemphasize the communicable attributes in our functional understanding of what it means to be imago Dei, we may unintentionally consider some humans less valuable than other humans. This way of thinking is behind so many of the great evils in our world.
The reverse is also true. The Christian anthropology of imago Dei insists that every human life is sacred. All that God created was good. But humanity alone was created very good. For the Christian, all care and concern for other people stems from the imago Dei. The sanctity of human life propels all our social justice pursuits because it requires the belief that each human person is uniquely and divinely designed and is not only distinguishable from every other human person but is located in a distinguished place among the rest of creation.
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.
Every person is inestimably valuable.
Each and every few-man.
I mean, human.
Greg Harris lives east of Vancouver, British Columbia with his wife and children. He has worked in pastoral ministry for over a decade and loves engaging in discussions with his church family about the Bible, theology, and spiritual formation. He is an infrequent tweeter, but you can find him on Twitter at @GregoryGHarris.