AP

What is Man?

We live in an age where questions surrounding the nature of man abound. Questions relating to the sanctity of life, gender, and sexuality divide the community. We also face a crisis of meaning and vocation. We seem to have forgotten who we are and what we are for. Scripture teaches us plainly that God made man, male and female, in the image of God. What does it mean to be made in the image of God? Theologians throughout history have debated the issue, some distinguishing image from likeness, others identifying it only with part of man. Yet in the Reformed tradition we find general agreement, culminating in a conception of the image that has widespread consequences for how we view ourselves in relation to the world, to others, and to God.

The Reformed interpretation of the image generally does not distinguish it from a separate likeness. Man is seen as a creature pointing to his creator whose glory shone through every part of him. This is seen most in where man differed from all other creatures, in his spiritual capacities of the intellect, will, and affections. Yet, according to Calvin, ‘although the primary seat of the divine image was in the mind and heart, or in the soul and its powers, yet there was no part of man, not even the body itself, in which some sparks did not glow.’[1] Even man’s mortal body revealed God’s glory. Reformed theologians were fond of quoting Ovid’s words on this point: ‘while all other living things being bent over look earthward, man has been given a face uplifted, bidden to gaze heavenward and to raise his countenance to the stars’.[2]

From the image as expressed in the created nature of soul and body, there is consequently the image seen in his vocation and god-like dominion over the creatures. Through man’s rule he participates in an analogous way, befitting a creature, in the work of God. Just as God created by dividing one thing from another and giving them names (Gen. 1:4–5), so also God entrusted man to do the same (Gen. 2:19). Therefore, in his filling the earth, his exploration, cultivation and acquisition of its wealth and resources, and in his construction of technology and ideas, he participates in the work begun by God as a sub-creator (in Tolkien’s words) with the hope of one day entering into God’s sabbath rest (cf. Heb. 4:1–10).

To this point, Reformed thinkers were in agreement with many who came before, but they went further. The Catholics who followed Thomas Aquinas and later Robert Bellarmine found a conflict in this union of the body and soul. The body, they said, has its passions, appetites, and desires which have the power of drawing man away into sin (concupiscence). The mind ought to rule these bodily passions, yet naturally it is unable. Therefore, they claimed, a supernatural gift of original righteousness was required so that man in the garden would not be drawn by his passions into sin. This gift of righteousness, they claim, was lost by his fall, leaving man post-fall in a neutral state with an uncorrupted nature; fallen man is able by his natural powers to do good, yet requires the infusion of divine grace through the sacraments to be cleansed of original sin and elevated to God.

The Reformation disagreed. Looking to the New Testament, it found texts that spoke of Christ’s renewing of the image in fallen man – texts such as Ephesians 4:24 and Colossians 3:10. These passages focus particularly on three qualities: knowledge, righteousness, and holiness.[3] Therefore, Calvin argued, “what was primary in the renewing of God’s image also held the highest place in the creation itself.”^[4] There was no natural conflict between the soul and the body, both were made good, righteous, and holy. There was no superadded gift, God made man naturally so. The image of God in man pertained not merely to his intellectual faculties but to his positive moral virtues. Consequently, at the fall man did not revert back to a natural neutral state but became corrupt in every faculty of his nature. There is no neutral man. There is righteous man and unrighteous man. Man was innocent, became fallen, may be redeemed, and glory shall follow – each according to his nature.

A further consequence of this is that man was made with a concreated knowledge of God.[5] He did not have to deduce God’s existence or nature from reason. No sooner was man self-conscious but that he was also God-conscious. After the fall, man retains this concreated knowledge, and even though he lives in the echo-chamber of the created world, all things resounding to the glory of God (Ps. 19:1), he suppresses that knowledge in unrighteousness (Rom. 1:18).

Geerhardus Vos drew a most significant conclusion from this fact. That man bears God’s image ‘means above all that he is disposed for communion with God, that all the capacities of his soul can act in a way that corresponds to their destiny only if they rest in God. This is the nature of man. That is to say, there is no sphere of life that lies outside his relationship to God and in which religion would not be the ruling principle.’^[6] Unlike in the Catholic conception, where religious fellowship is something added to man’s nature, what Vos called the deeper Protestant conception of the image implied that man was created in natural religious fellowship with God. Vos continues:

According to the Roman Catholic conception, there is a natural man who functions in the world, and that natural man adopts a religion that takes place beyond his nature. According to our conception, our entire nature should not be free from God at any point; the nature of man must be worship from beginning to end. According to the deeper Protestant conception, the image does not exist only in correspondence with God but in being disposed toward God. God’s nature is, as it were, the stamp; our nature is the impression made by this stamp. Both fit together.^[7]

Therefore, man in all his being, has as his chief end God; and in all he does he should strive to glorify and enjoy God forever. There is no sphere of man’s life or being that isn’t permeated by religion – his relationship, his vocation, even in his politics – in all he is either disposed to towards God or suppressing the knowledge of him and his law. There is no such thing as ‘secular man.’

By his fall, man suffered not merely a privation of a part of his being, but a disorganization, a dissolution, a death (Eph. 2:1). No part of his being is unaffected, after having such a core element destroyed. Man’s relationships are disordered (Gen. 3:16), his vocation is self-serving (Gen. 4), his worship is idolatrous (Deut. 29:16–18)[8], and his mind is at enmity to God (Rom. 8:7). Fallen man stands in absolute antithesis to God. Only insofar as God’s common grace restrains man’s wickedness can such a man function and performs acts of outward or civil good.

Only through the work of the Christ, the greater Adam, his full obedience, perfect righteousness and substitutionary death have we hope of restoration. In him and by his Spirit we are born again. In him we ‘have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator’ (Col. 3:9–10). One day the redeemed shall participate in his resurrection, our souls made perfect in righteousness, our bodies fitted for eternity in the presence of God. Then we shall be established, the image restored and never again to fall, and we shall glorify and enjoy God to eternity.

– Elijah Harris

[1] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. by John T. McNeill, trans. by Ford Lewis Battles, The Library of Christian Classics, 2 vols (Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), i p. 188.

[2] Calvin, Institutes, i, p. 186; quoted also by Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, ed. by James T. Dennison Jr., trans. by George Musgrave Giger, 3 vols (P&R Publishing, 1992), i, p. 465.

[3] C.f. Westminster Confession of Faith 4.2, and Shorter Catechism A.10

^[4] Calvin, Institutes, i, p. 189

[5] Ibid., p. 45

^[6] Geerhardus Vos, Reformed Dogmatics, ed. & trans. by Richard B. Gaffin Jr. (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2012–2016), ii, p. 13

^[7] Ibid., pp. 13–14

[8] As Calvin wrote, ‘man’s nature… is a perpetual factory of idols.’ Institutes, 1.11.8 (p. 108).