Gen. 1:26, 27—“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.... And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him.” It is of great importance to distinguish clearly between the two elements embraced in this image of God, the natural and the moral. By virtue of the first, man possessed certain faculties (intellect, affection, will); by virtue of the second, he had right tendencies (bent, proclivity, disposition). By virtue of the first, he was invested with certain powers; by virtue of the second, a certain direction was imparted to these powers. As created in the natural image of God, man had a moral nature; as created in the moral image of God, man had a holy character. The first gave him natural ability; the second gave him moral ability. The Greek [pg 515]Fathers emphasized the first element, or personality; the Latin Fathers emphasized the second element, or holiness. See Orr, God's Image in Man.
As the Logos, or divine Reason, Christ Jesus, dwells in humanity and constitutes the principle of its being, humanity shares with Christ in the image of God. That image is never wholly lost. It is completely restored in sinners when the Spirit of Christ gains control of their wills and they merge their life in his. To those who accused Jesus of blasphemy, he replied by quoting the words of Psalm 82:6—“I said, Ye are gods”—words spoken of imperfect earthly rulers. Thus, in John 10:34-36, Jesus, who constitutes the very essence of humanity, justifies his own claim to divinity by showing that even men who represent God are also in a minor sense “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4). Hence the many legends, in heathen religions, of the divine descent of man. 1 Cor. 11:3—“the head of every man is Christ.” In every man, even the most degraded, there is an image of God to be brought out, as Michael Angelo saw the angel in the rough block of marble. This natural worth does not imply worthiness; it implies only capacity for redemption. “The abysmal depths of personality,” which Tennyson speaks of, are sounded, as man goes down in thought successively from individual sins to sin of the heart and to race-sin. But “the deeper depth is out of reach To all, O God, but thee.” From this deeper depth, where man is rooted and grounded in God, rise aspirations for a better life. These are not due to the man himself, but to Christ, the immanent God, who ever works within him. Fanny J. Crosby: “Rescue the perishing, Care for the dying.... Down in the human heart, crushed by the tempter, Feelings lie buried that grace can restore; Touched by a loving heart, wakened by kindness, Chords that were broken will vibrate once more.”
1. Natural likeness to God, or personality.
Man was created a personal being, and was by this personality distinguished from the brute. By personality we mean the twofold power to know self as related to the world and to God, and to determine self in view of moral ends. By virtue of this personality, man could at his creation choose which of the objects of his knowledge—self, the world, or God—should be the norm and centre of his development. This natural likeness to God is inalienable, and as constituting a capacity for redemption gives value to the life even of the unregenerate (Gen. 9:6; 1 Cor. 11:7; James 3:9).
For definitions of personality, see notes on the Anthropological Argument, page 82; on Pantheism, pages 104, 105; on the Attributes, pages 252-254; and on the Person of Christ, in Part VI. Here we may content ourselves with the formula: Personality = self-consciousness + self-determination. Self-consciousness and self-determination, as distinguished from the consciousness and determination of the brute, involve all the higher mental and moral powers which constitute us men. Conscience is but a mode of their activity. Notice that the term “image” does not, in man, imply perfect representation. Only Christ is the “very image” of God (Heb. 1:3), the “image of the invisible God”(Col. 1:15—on which see Lightfoot). Christ is the image of God absolutely and archetypally; man, only relatively and derivatively. But notice also that, since God is Spirit, man made in God's image cannot be a material thing. By virtue of his possession of this first element of the image of God, namely, personality, materialism is excluded.
This first element of the divine image man can never lose until he ceases to be man. Even insanity can only obscure this natural image,—it cannot destroy it. St. Bernard well said that it could not be burned out, even in hell. The lost piece of money (Luke 15:8) still bore the image and superscription of the king, even though it did not know it, and did not even know that it was lost. Human nature is therefore to be reverenced, and he who destroys human life is to be put to death: Gen. 9:6—“for in the image of God made he man”; 1 Cor. 11:7—“a man indeed ought not to have his head veiled, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God”; James 3:9—even men whom we curse “are made after the likeness of God”; cf. Ps. 8:5—“thou hast made him but little lower than God”; 1 Pet. 2:17—“Honor all men.” In the being of every man are continents which no Columbus has ever yet discovered, depths of possible joy or sorrow which no plummet has ever yet sounded. A whole heaven, a whole hell, may lie within the compass of his single soul. If we could see the meanest real Christian as he will be in the great hereafter, we should bow before him as John bowed before the angel in the Apocalypse, for we should not be able to distinguish him from God (Rev. 22:8, 9).
Sir William Hamilton: “On earth there is nothing great but man; In man there is nothing great but mind.” We accept this dictum only if “mind” can be understood to include man's moral powers together with the right direction of those powers. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2:2—“What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!” Pascal: “Man is greater than the universe; the universe may crush him, but it does not know that it crushes him.”Whiton, Gloria Patri, 94—“God is not only the Giver but the Sharer of my life. My natural powers are that part of God's power which is lodged with me in trust to keep and use.” Man can be an instrument of God, without being an agent of God. “Each man has his place and value as a reflection of God and of Christ. Like a letter in a word, or a word in a sentence, he gets his meaning from his context; but the sentence is meaningless without him; rays from the whole universe converge in him.” John Howe's Living Temple shows the greatness of human nature in its first construction and even in its ruin. Only a noble ship could make so great a wreck. Aristotle, Problem, sec. 30—“No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.” Seneca, De Tranquillitate Animi, 15—“There is no great genius without a tincture of madness.”
Kant: “So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end, and never as a means only.” If there is a divine element in every man, then we have no right to use a human being merely for our own pleasure or profit. In receiving him we receive Christ, and in receiving Christ we receive him who sent Christ (Mat. 10:40). Christ is the vine and all men are his natural branches, cutting themselves off only when they refuse to bear fruit, and condemning themselves to the burning only because they destroy, so far as they can destroy, God's image in them, all that makes them worth preserving (John 15:1-6). Cicero: “Homo mortalis deus.” This possession of natural likeness to God, or personality, involves boundless possibilities of good or ill, and it constitutes the natural foundation of the love for man which is required of us by the law. Indeed it constitutes the reason why Christ should die. Man was worth redeeming. The woman whose ring slipped from her finger and fell into the heap of mud in the gutter, bared her white arm and thrust her hand into the slimy mass until she found her ring; but she would not have done this if the ring had not contained a costly diamond. The lost piece of money, the lost sheep, the lost son, were worth effort to seek and to save (Luke 15). But, on the other hand, it is folly when man, made in the image of God, “blinds himself with clay.” The man on shipboard, who playfully tossed up the diamond ring which contained his whole fortune, at last to his distress tossed it overboard. There is a “merchandise of souls”(Rev. 18:13) and we must not juggle with them.
Christ's death for man, by showing the worth of humanity, has recreated ethics. “Plato defended infanticide as under certain circumstances permissible. Aristotle viewed slavery as founded in the nature of things. The reason assigned was the essential inferiority of nature on the part of the enslaved.” But the divine image in man makes these barbarities no longer possible to us. Christ sometimes looked upon men with anger, but he never looked upon them with contempt. He taught the woman, he blessed the child, he cleansed the leper, he raised the dead. His own death revealed the infinite worth of the meanest human soul, and taught us to count all men as brethren for whose salvation we may well lay down our lives. George Washington answered the salute of his slave. Abraham Lincoln took off his hat to a negro who gave him his blessing as he entered Richmond; but a lady who had been brought up under the old regime looked from a window upon the scene with unspeakable horror. Robert Burns, walking with a nobleman in Edinburgh, met an old townsfellow from Ayr and stopped to talk with him. The nobleman, kept waiting, grew restive, and afterward reproved Burns for talking to a man with so bad a coat. Burns replied: “I was not talking to the coat,—I was talking to the man.” Jean Ingelow: “The street and market place Grow holy ground: each face—Pale faces marked with care, Dark, toilworn brows—grows fair. King's children are all these, though want and sin Have marred their beauty, glorious within. We may not pass them but with reverent eye.” See Porter, Human Intellect, 393, 394, 401; Wuttke, Christian Ethics, 2:42; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:343.