Sect. 124Interpretation of Gen. 1:26: “Let Us Make Man to Our Image and Likeness.”Interpretation of Gen. 1:26: “Let Us Make Man to Our Image and Likeness.”

I. The change of phrase from “Let there be” to “Let Us make,” when God is about to create man, and the description of man as the image of the Creator, give to this last and crowning creation a special solemnity. The notion of man as the image of God is the perfect theological idea of man. God Himself looks upon man, not like philosophers, as an animal endowed with reason, but as His own likeness. This idea exhibits man’s essence and destiny in direct relation to God. It affords a basis for a deeper conception of human nature in itself, and also as regards its natural and supernatural evolution and final perfection in short, it describes the ideal man, as realized by Divine institution in Adam.

The text (Gen. 1:26) is so full of meaning that many explanations of it are given by the Fathers and by Theologians, each seeming to view the text under a different aspect and to find in it a new meaning. The text runs: “Let Us make man to Our image (בְצַלְמֵני) and likeness (בִדְמוּתֵני—Sept. κατʼ εἰκόνα καὶ καθʼ ὁμοίωσιν): and let him have dominion over the fishes of the sea, and over the fowls of the air, and the beasts, and the whole earth, and over every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth. And God created man to His own image, and to the image of God created He him; male and female created He them.”

The Hebrew Zelem is, like our word image, something concrete, originally meaning a shadow; it is also used to designate the idols of false divinities. Demuth, on the contrary, is something abstract, well-rendered by ὁμοίωσις in the Septuagint—a similitude or likeness. The conjunction of the terms “image” and “likeness” is found nowhere else in Holy Scripture, except Gen. 5:3. Wherever the same idea is expressed in other passages, only one of the two terms is employed—a clear proof that they are considered as synonymous by the sacred writers. “God created man to His own image, to the image of God (Elohim) created He him” (Gen. 1:27). “God created man; He made him to the likeness of God (B’Demuth) (Gen. 5:1). “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, his blood shall be shed: for man was made to the image of God” (Gen. 9:6). The Hebrew text evidently shows that man is the image of God, and not merely has this image in him.

II. From this we are enabled to determine the precise sense of the text in the following manner:—

1. It is evident that the expression “image and likeness of God” signifies a distinct perfection belonging to the nature of man, or rather constituting man’s specific essence as distinguished from all other visible beings, and therefore not capable of being lost by sin. Indeed, man is described in the same terms before and after his fall, The literal sense of the text contains no more than this. It must, however, be granted that, in their fullest meaning, the words “image” and “likeness,” especially the latter, also refer to the supernatural likeness of man to God. Those Fathers who expound the “likeness” in the sense of a supernatural similitude to God, speak from the standpoint of the New Testament. The first readers of Genesis, for whom the book was primarily written, certainly were unable to detect in it any but the natural and literal sense given above.

2. The expression, “to make to the image,” may also be understood of a destination of man to become similar to God either by following the good inclinations of his nature or by yielding to a supernatural influence. But such is not the literal and proper sense; the text declares what man is, not what he ought to become. His higher destiny is a necessary consequence of his being an image of God. His power to attain his natural destination—that is, his aptitude to lead a moral life—is part of the nature which God has created in him; and, inasmuch as it is neither acquired nor freely accepted, it is not lost by sin, but remains as long as human nature itself. Sin, however, may suspend or impair man’s moral faculty.

3. Although man is really the image of God, and not merely destined to become such, still he is an image only in a relative and analogical sense. The Son of God alone is God’s absolute and perfect Image; and also the Ideal, or Exemplar, after which man is made (Heb. 1:3; 2 Cor. 4:4).

The words of Gen. 1:26, give a definition of man as a whole; for they apply to the compound of body and soul afterwards described, Gen. 2:7: “And the Lord God formed man of the slime of the earth, and breathed into his face the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” Thus, by his body, which is the organ and temple of the soul, man is an image, a shadow (Zelem, simulacrum) of God; by his spiritual soul he bears a real likeness to Him; and as animated body, he is the living image and likeness, or the living effigy of the living God. As visible and living image of God, man is the crown of visible creation (the Cosmos of the Cosmos, Const. Apost., vii. 3, 4; viii. 7), and, as such, even animals must revere and fear him.

III. The ante-Nicene Fathers considered man’s body as the image of God. In the fourth century, however, when anthropomorphic heresies arose, the custom prevailed of insisting almost exclusively on the likeness which the soul bears to God. The reasons for this change are obvious. The body is the image of God only in as far as it is informed, animated, and worked by the soul; besides, there was danger of conceiving the Ideal after whose likeness man is made, as being itself a body. Again, in the Arian controversies, the terms εἰκών and imago, as applied to the Son of God, the Image of the Father, had received a fixed meaning, viz. a likeness such as exists only between the Persons of the Trinity.