2. Moral likeness to God, or holiness.
In addition to the powers of self-consciousness and self-determination just mentioned, man was created with such a direction of the affections and [pg 517] the will, as constituted God the supreme end of man's being, and constituted man a finite reflection of God's moral attributes. Since holiness is the fundamental attribute of God, this must of necessity be the chief attribute of his image in the moral beings whom he creates. That original righteousness was essential to this image, is also distinctly taught in Scripture (Eccl. 7:29; Eph. 4:24; Col. 3:10).
Besides the possession of natural powers, the image of God involves the possession of right moral tendencies. It is not enough to say that man was created in a state of innocence. The Scripture asserts that man had a righteousness like God's: Eccl. 7:29—“God made man upright”; Eph. 4:24—“the new man, that after God hath been created in righteousness and holiness of truth”—here Meyer says: “κατὰ Θεόν, ‘after God,’ i. e., ad exemplum Dei, after the pattern of God (Gal. 4:28—κατὰ Ἰσαάκ, ‘after Isaac’ = as Isaac was). This phrase makes the creation of the new man a parallel to that of our first parents, who were created after God's image; they too, before sin came into existence through Adam, were sinless—‘in righteousness and holiness of truth.’ ” On N. T. “truth” = rectitude, see Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:257-260.
Meyer refers also, as a parallel passage, to Col. 3:10—“the new man, that is being renewed unto knowledge after the image of him that created him.” Here the “knowledge” referred to is that knowledge of God which is the source of all virtue, and which is inseparable from holiness of heart. “Holiness has two sides or phases: (1) it is perception and knowledge; (2) it is inclination and feeling” (Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:97). On Eph. 4:24 and Col. 3:10, the classical passages with regard to man's original state, see also the Commentaries of DeWette, Rückert, Ellicott, and compare Gen. 5:3—“And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, after his image,” i. e., in his own sinful likeness, which is evidently contrasted with the “likeness of God” (verse 1) in which he himself had been created (An. Par. Bible). 2 Cor. 4:4—“Christ, who is the image of God”—where the phrase “image of God” is not simply the natural, but also the moral, image. Since Christ is the image of God primarily in his holiness, man's creation in the image of God must have involved a holiness like Christ's, so far as such holiness could belong to a being yet untried, that is, so far as respects man's tastes and dispositions prior to moral action.
“Couldst thou in vision see Thyself the man God meant, Thou nevermore couldst be The man thou art—content.” Newly created man had right moral tendencies, as well as freedom from actual fault. Otherwise the communion with God described in Genesis would not have been possible. Goethe: “Unless the eye were sunlike, how could it see the sun?” Because a holy disposition accompanied man's innocence, he was capable of obedience, and was guilty when he sinned. The loss of this moral likeness to God was the chief calamity of the Fall. Man is now “the glory and the scandal of the universe.” He has defaced the image of God in his nature, even though that image, in its natural aspect, is ineffaceable (E. H. Johnson).
The dignity of human nature consists, not so much in what man is, as in what God meant him to be, and in what God means him yet to become, when the lost image of God is restored by the union of man's soul with Christ. Because of his future possibilities, the meanest of mankind is sacred. The great sin of the second table of the decalogue is the sin of despising our fellow man. To cherish contempt for others can have its root only in idolatry of self and rebellion against God. Abraham Lincoln said well that “God must have liked common people,—else he would not have made so many of them.” Regard for the image of God in man leads also to kind and reverent treatment even of those lower animals in which so many human characteristics are foreshadowed. Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems, 166—“The current philosophy says: The fittest will survive; let the rest die. The religion of Christ says: That maxim as applied to men is just, only as regards their characteristics, of which indeed only the fittest should survive. It does not and cannot apply to the men themselves, since all men, being children of God, are supremely fit. The very fact that a human being is sick, weak, poor, an outcast, and a vagabond, is the strongest possible appeal for effort toward his salvation. Let individuals look upon humanity from the point of view of Christ, and they will not be long in finding ways in which environment can be caused to work for righteousness.”
This original righteousness, in which the image of God chiefly consisted, is to be viewed:
(a) Not as constituting the substance or essence of human nature,—for in this case human nature would have ceased to exist as soon as man sinned.
Men every day change their tastes and loves, without changing the essence or substance of their being. When sin is called a “nature,” therefore (as by Shedd, in his Essay on “Sin a Nature, and that Nature Guilt”), it is only in the sense of being something inborn (natura, from nascor). Hereditary tastes may just as properly be denominated a “nature” as may the substance of one's being. Moehler, the greatest modern Roman Catholic critic of Protestant doctrine, in his Symbolism, 58, 59, absurdly holds Luther to have taught that by the Fall man lost his essential nature, and that another essence was substituted in its room. Luther, however, is only rhetorical when he says: “It is the nature of man to sin; sin constitutes the essence of man; the nature of man since the Fall has become quite changed; original sin is that very thing which is born of father and mother; the clay out of which we are formed is damnable; the fœtus in the maternal womb is sin; man as born of his father and mother, together with his whole essence and nature, is not only a sinner but sin itself.”