The Political Implications of Imago Dei

There are a number of political battles in which people throw around this idea that human beings are made in the image of God but do so in an unexamined way. Let's explore this idea some.

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 blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” (Genesis 1: 26-28)

There are numerous political debates today in which this idea of the imago Dei, that human beings bear the image of their Creator, is used to assert ideas like the individual person is the core political unit in any society, justifying the rights of the individual. Or it is used to assert the equality of all human beings. It is used in feminist arguments. The image of God comes up in debates over mass immigration. Opposition to slavery is rooted in the understanding that it is immoral for one image bearer of God to own another image bearer of God as property. It comes up in the abortion debate. We could add to this list, but you get the idea. It is useful for us, especially in today’s political context where so much is in flux, to explore this idea and think more deeply about its political implications. I have no intention here to answer every question or address every potential political use for the idea, but merely to sketch out a theological framework within which we can think more deeply about the use of the imago Dei politically.

What is interesting is that even in the Old Testament passage above, there is a foreshadowing of the Trinitarian understanding that will be revealed to us in Jesus Christ. “Let us make man in our image…” implies that our image bearing has an “us” quality as much as it has an “I” quality. All throughout the scriptures there is a definite understanding that God is not calling to himself primarily individuals, but rather a community, a people, a nation. Even when he covenants with one man, Abraham, he is promising to make out of him a people. God’s relationship with him has a telos and what God is doing in Abraham is he is revealing his purpose. A people is being made known in the miracle birth of a son to a married couple who are beyond the childbearing age.

But what about the person, the individual? Does the person get subsumed and lost in the group, such that their welfare does not matter? That is not what is being said at all. There is no ground in the Christian faith to abuse or mistreat a person because of some perceived benefit to the group or the people. At the same time, the welfare of the person is not set against the needs of the people as a whole. Our God is Trinitarian. Three-in-one. Three persons, one essence. What this means is that the person and the community are meant to be held in tension. In a Christian context, while the family remains covenantally important, community for the Christian is not primarily the family, but rather the church. Again, this does not mean that the family is subsumed into the church and subordinated to it, just that the two are held in tension. We are not primarily individuals. We are not primarily the nuclear family. Rather, we are persons-in-community and we are a family-in-community. And that community is not just any community, it is the church. Who we are as a people, even politically, is not properly realized so much in the state as it is in church. This is not the church as an institution, but rather as a people gathered by God into a unified whole in Christ’s name. Within this community, who we are as image bearers mirrors the divine nature of three-in-one the Trinity. We are persons-in-community. The image of God manifests itself in this tension, in this mystery. It manifests itself most fully when when the balance between the two is properly maintained and we do not tilt to one side or the other. The “rights” of the group do not erase the individual; nor do the “rights” of the individual set him apart from or over the community. They are held in balance.

To demonstrate this, let us look at the person more closely. In terms of normal personal development, how is it that we establish our individuality? It begins very young, the first time we tell our parents., “No!” This begins the process of establishing ourselves as other from our parents first of all, and secondarily other authority figures. Testing limits, pushing boundaries, these are all part of the process of us saying that we are not merely a clone of our parents or the community within which we are raised. But without that “other” we have no boundaries against which to push. Those of you who are Christian readers might be thinking, “Does this mean that it is necessary for us to sin, to disobey, in order for us to establish our identity?”

No, it does not. Even if one tests the boundaries, but does not transgress them, those boundaries are crucial for establishing identity. We begin with “I am not my mommy and daddy,” — who, for the very young, are somewhat indistinguishable from “God” — to eventually coming to some sense of self. When we are teens we will try on different masks and identities to see how they fit. Is this me? For many of us, we really don’t get comfortable with who we are until we are well into our 40’s or older. By this time you and your sense of your own identity has interacted with hundreds of different people in a multitude of different situations and you know who you are and what you are capable of. At least if the process is healthy, you do. Some never get there. They never develop that quiet sense of self knowledge and confidence in who they are.

That is the first aspect of this. Additionally, because of our subconscious and preconscious filtering and actions, there is always a sense where we can never fully know ourselves. There are things that we will feel, think and do that remain out of our conscious awareness. There is a portion of ourselves that is always uniquely ours, that part of us that cannot be explained scientifically, that cannot be put into words which can be used to describe any other human being. Because we are truly unique beings, there is a part of us that always remains unknowable to the world. Again, this is similar to the essence and energy of God. While God is unknowable in his essence, he is known through his energy, through those things that he shows to the world through his actions. God can be met and experienced but in the end he is ineffable. He cannot not be truly known. So too it is with us as persons. There remains a part of us that can be intuited, that can be met, that can be experienced, but there is also a part of us that is fundamentally unknowable, ineffable. But in that part of us that can be experienced, there is always a part of ourselves that remains hidden to us. In this sense, we need other people to mirror back to us those things about ourselves that we can’t or don’t want to see. Even though this aspect of our personhood has been affected by sin, in that there are parts of ourselves of which we are ashamed and thus wish to hide, I am still of the mind that there would always be things about ourselves that we need others to show us. In order to know ourselves, we need to be in community with other people. The life of the hermit is, in this respect, unhealthy. Even the most guarded introvert, even the person most comfortable being on his own, still needs community to be fully himself.

You need boundaries. You need other people to push against to establish those boundaries. You need other people to establish the reality that you are not the other, you are different and unique. At the same time, you need the other person to see you, to see into you, so as to reveal to you those parts of yourself that you cannot yourself see on your own. To be a person, to be an individual, you need a community. In this sense, the idea that the individual is a fully self-contained, a fully self-known discrete entity is really not defensible. Even the idea that you have some inner truth that you need to get out to the world and that this process then establishes your true identity is itself a falsehood. You cannot know your own “inner truth” unless someone else is there to help reveal it to you. The idea that morality means being true to yourself is simply silly, because in order to be true to yourself, you need someone else to help tell you who you are. And, as I talked about in my most recent piece on diversity and high trust societies, there exists an unspoken bond between people in a community, a spiritual bond, a shared collective consciousness. The things you all know. You are truly a person-in-community. In this you mirror, or bear the image of, your Creator who is Triune, Father, Son and Spirit, three persons, one essence.

We also must understand that the image bearing is not a static thing. Each person is not given a set quantity or a set amount of the image of God that is the same as everyone else. We live is a world that is sinful. Thus, whatever it is about us that images God, it is something that has been corrupted by sin. Whether it is our spirit, our soul, our intelligence, our creativity, our physical prowess, our goodness, our morality, our holiness, any and all of the qualities that might be attributed to God and that we too might then image have all been corrupted by sin. By this measure, if we give ourselves over to moral corruption and folly, we then further corrupt and obscure the image of God within us. When you engage in sinful acts — pride, vanity, acedia, anger, dejection, greed, lust and gluttony — you are degrading and defacing the image of God within you.

Just as we can deface the image of God, so too the image of God can also be aspirational. But if all we see and know are other sinful human beings who are damaged and defaced image bearers of God, how do we know what it means to truly and fully bear the image of God in all it was intended to be? Jesus himself says:

“Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9)

Part of the whole point of the Incarnation, that God the Son would himself become man and live among us is that he would show us what it means to be an image bearer of God.

“He is the image ( εἰκὼν, icon ) of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.” (Colossians 1:15)

In this sense, Jesus is the perfect image bearer of God, what humanity was created to be. We manifest the image of God to the degree that we ourselves are Christlike. We can see in and through Jesus everything that God the Father wants revealed in and through his image. If we see Jesus, we see God. If people can see Jesus in us, then they can also see God the Father. To be an image bearer is aspirational. It also means that those who belong to Jesus through repentance and faith, because they are “in Christ” made new, they bear the image of God more fully and clearly than those who do not know Jesus.

“Therefore, if any one is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come.” (2 Corinthians 5:17)

The spiritual life is the revelation of who we already are “in Christ.” In this context, we are also more fully revealing the image of God as that is also revealed “in Christ.” “In Christ” there is this coming together of God and man, where we become one with God. But as with community, it is a oneness that does not erase or negate our personhood. God also remains God, other and unknowable in his essence, except as this essence is revealed in and through the Son. We have community with God in the way that we are in community with each other. This is what communion is all about. We participate in the body and blood of Jesus. All of this is centred and rooted in the church, the community, the communion of believers.

“ Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.” (2 Peter 1:4)

And this same essence, as we reveal who we are “in Christ,” it is also revealed to us and to the world. There is a tremendously aspirational aspect to bearing the image of God that is directly tied up in the degree to which we reveal our own Christ likeness both as individuals and as a community.

Now that we have broached the understanding that we do not all bear or manifest the image of God to the same degree, we can confront the idea that even though we all bear the image of God, we do not do so “equally.” And even if we did, there are natural hierarchies, just as there is a natural hierarchy within the Trinity, within the Godhead. The Father is preeminent. In the same way, some are also given preeminence over others. God chooses some to lead. Because we are persons-in-community, we should not be shocked if some communities are given leadership over other communities. Just as in the discipling process we are expected to submit to the leadership, teaching and guidance of those whom God has set over us as elders, so too there are times where one group of believers will find themselves needing the leadership and discipling of another group of believers. God establishes roles. Just because, for example, he gives leadership to men, does not thereby diminish a woman’s capacity to bear the image of God. She just does so differently. Having dominion over creation falls into this image bearing role. As does the role of steward that I talked about in a recent piece. As some are given 1, 5 or 10 talents of gold in the well known parable of Jesus, so too are each of us given a different capacity. Those with greater capacity will also be judged more harshly. Did you use that capacity to exploit others, or are you building up the community as a whole?

This leads to the final thing I want to mediate on here. Because we bear the image of God as persons-in-community, we cannot be fully human and claim for ourselves “rights” that set us against the broader welfare of the community. Nor can the community claim for itself powers that set itself against the welfare of the person. There is always a tension here between the two. But, and here is something to think about: how, in our mass society, both in terms of the mass market and also mass democracy, there is a constant drive to undermine the community so as to leave the individual helpless against the predatory nature of mass markets and mass politics. What do we do with this? Does the community have “rights”? Should we not see our mass society’s drive to break down community as essentially an act of destroying the ability of people-in-community to fully express the image of God? Is mass media, the mass economy, mass politics, because they use the isolated individual to build power and wealth, can we only operate nations, politics and economies of scale by essentially destroying people-in-communities’ ability to properly bear the image of God? Is mass society, by its very “mass-ness” essentially dehumanizing?

So what is the point of all of this? It encourages us to re-conceive our politics, not in terms of nations or even as modern, western secular societies, but rather as us as image bearers, as people-in-community. Specifically, we should see the church as a people to be the central organizing locus for us as Christians as we give expression to our interests as people-in-community. From a Christian perspective, there is no individual politics because the person is never fully a person unless he is a person-in-community.