Being Human

The functional view — the image is the job

Common among Old Testament scholars; associated with the ancient Near Eastern background work of Gerhard von Rad and, in evangelical writing, J. Richard Middleton, *The Liberating Image*.

To be in God's image is to be his representative ruler on the earth. The image is not a thing inside people; it is the office they hold.

• It reads the text in its own world. In Mesopotamia and Egypt, an "image" of a god or king was a statue set up to represent an absent ruler's authority in a place. Genesis takes that exact idea and gives it to all humanity.
• Genesis 1:26 puts image and dominion in a single sentence — "let us make man in our image... and let them have dominion." The connection is in the grammar.
• It explains why the creation mandate follows immediately, and why Psalm 8 links human glory to rule over the works of God's hands.

The honest difficulty: If the image is a function, someone unable to perform any function seems to lack it — precisely the conclusion Genesis 9 and James 3 refuse to draw when they ground the dignity of any human in the image, with no test of capacity attached.

The substantive view — the image is what we are

Irenaeus, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas (*Summa Theologiae* I.93), and most of the Western tradition until the twentieth century.

The image consists in the capacities that set humans apart from animals — reason, will, moral awareness, conscience, the capacity to know God.

• It accounts for the observable, enormous gap between humans and every other creature: language, abstract reasoning, moral obligation, art, worship, the knowledge that we will die.
• It fits the New Testament renewal language: the new self is renewed "in knowledge after the image of him that created him" — knowledge is a capacity word.
• It has the longest history in the church and grounds the classical case for human dignity that shaped Western law.

The honest difficulty: It risks locating dignity in capacities that vary between people and can be lost — the very move that has historically been used to exclude the disabled, the unborn, and the dying. Defenders answer that the capacity belongs to the human nature rather than to any individual's current exercise of it, which is a real answer but requires care.

The relational view — the image is being made for relationship

Karl Barth, *Church Dogmatics* III/1 and III/2; Emil Brunner, *Man in Revolt*; widely influential across twentieth-century theology.

The image is not a possession but a relation. Humans are the creature God addresses and who can answer — made for God and for one another, as the pairing of male and female in the same verse indicates.

• It takes seriously that the image is stated in the same breath as "male and female created he them."
• It matches the shape of the whole Bible, which is a story of God addressing people and people answering or refusing.
• It grounds worth in God's relation to a person rather than in anything the person contains, which is unlosable.

The honest difficulty: Pressed hard, it can make the image depend on a relationship being active, which would leave those in rebellion — or unconscious — outside it. Genesis 9 says otherwise about murderers.

Dichotomy — body and soul

The dominant view across church history; Augustine, Calvin, most Reformed and Lutheran systematics; Louis Berkhof, *Systematic Theology*.

A human is a material body and an immaterial soul. Soul and spirit name the same immaterial reality from different angles — spirit stressing its God-ward orientation, soul stressing its life and individuality.

• The interchangeable usage across both testaments is the strongest evidence, and it is extensive.
• James says the body without the spirit is dead — a two-part statement using the word trichotomists reserve for the third part.
• Jesus speaks of killing the body but not the soul, again a two-part division at the point where it matters most.

The honest difficulty: It has to explain 1 Thessalonians 5:23, and "emphatic piling up" is a good explanation but not a knockdown one.

Trichotomy — body, soul, and spirit

Some early Greek fathers; popularized in the modern era by Watchman Nee, *The Spiritual Man*, and by the Scofield Reference Bible; common in Pentecostal and dispensational teaching.

Body relates a person to the physical world, soul is the seat of mind, emotion, and will, and spirit is the faculty by which a person relates to God — dead in the unbeliever and made alive in the new birth.

• 1 Thessalonians 5:23 lists all three, deliberately, in a solemn benediction — not a casual place to pile up synonyms.
• Hebrews 4:12 speaks of soul and spirit being divided, which at least implies they are distinguishable.
• It gives a clean account of why an unbeliever can be intelligent, emotionally rich, and morally serious while still described as dead in trespasses.

The honest difficulty: The interchangeable use of the two words elsewhere in the New Testament is hard to square with a fixed anatomy, and the framework has sometimes produced a spirituality that treats mind and emotion as second-class — a genuinely harmful outcome.

Monism / holistic anthropology

Much modern Old Testament scholarship; in evangelical form, Joel Green, *Body, Soul, and Human Life*.

Scripture presents the human as an indivisible whole. Talk of a separable soul owes more to Plato than to Genesis; the biblical hope is resurrection of the person, not survival of a detached part.

• Genesis 2:7 says the man *became* a living soul, rather than receiving one — the whole person is the soul.
• It correctly identifies that the Bible's hope is resurrection, and that popular Christianity often replaces this with a disembodied afterlife Scripture never promises.

The honest difficulty: It struggles with the intermediate state — Paul's "absent from the body, present with the Lord," the souls under the altar in Revelation 6, and Jesus telling the thief "today shalt thou be with me in paradise." Something of the person evidently persists between death and resurrection.

Traducianism — the soul comes from the parents

Tertullian, *A Treatise on the Soul*; Martin Luther; most Lutheran theologians; W. G. T. Shedd, *Dogmatic Theology*.

The soul is transmitted with the body through natural generation. Parents beget whole persons, not bodies awaiting souls.

• It explains the transmission of a fallen nature without making God the direct creator of a soul that arrives already corrupt or that is corrupted on arrival.
• Genesis 5:3 has Adam's likeness passing to his son in the language of Genesis 1:26 — image language, now flowing down a family line.
• It fits the unity of the person: children resemble parents in temperament and disposition, not only in body.
• It takes Genesis 2:2 seriously — God rested from creating, and human generation since has been procreation rather than fresh creation.

The honest difficulty: It raises hard questions about how an immaterial soul could be divided or transmitted at all, and it must account for Christ, who took a real human nature from Mary without inheriting sin.

Creationism — God creates each soul directly

Jerome; Thomas Aquinas; the settled Roman Catholic position; Calvin, and most Reformed theologians including Charles Hodge, *Systematic Theology*.

God immediately creates each individual soul and unites it with the body conceived by the parents.

• Zechariah 12:1 and Hebrews 12:9 speak of God as the one who forms and fathers human spirits.
• It safeguards the simplicity and indivisibility of the soul, which cannot be split off in pieces.
• It gives a cleaner account of the incarnation, and it accords each person a direct, individual origin from God.

The honest difficulty: It has to explain how a soul God has just made pure comes to be fallen — usually through inherited guilt imputed from Adam, or through corruption arriving via the body. The Reformed tradition has developed careful answers, but the explanatory burden is real and its own theologians acknowledge it.

Old-earth creation

Hugh Ross and Reasons to Believe; Norman Geisler; historically B. B. Warfield and, on the day-age question, a number of nineteenth-century conservatives.

God created directly and supernaturally, and Adam was a real first man — but the creation days are long ages or a literary framework, and the earth and universe are billions of years old.

• The Hebrew *yom* does carry a range of meanings, including an unspecified period, and Genesis 2:4 itself uses it of the whole creation week.
• It keeps a historical Adam and special creation, so Romans 5 stands intact.
• It removes the conflict with the independently converging dating methods of geology, astronomy, and radiometry without surrendering direct divine creation.
• Augustine, long before any of this was a scientific question, argued in *The Literal Meaning of Genesis* that the days should not be pressed as ordinary days and warned Christians against making the faith look foolish on questions of nature.

The honest difficulty: "Evening and morning" with an ordinal number is a hard construction to stretch, and Exodus 20:11 grounds a literal week on the creation week. It must also place death — of animals at minimum — before the fall, which sits uneasily with Romans 8's account of a creation subjected to futility.

Evolutionary creation / theistic evolution

Francis Collins, *The Language of God*; the BioLogos Foundation; a large share of Christians in the sciences.

God created through evolutionary processes over billions of years. Genesis 1–3 teaches theological truth — that God made everything, that humans bear his image, that sin entered by human rebellion — in the idiom of its own culture rather than as a scientific account.

• It takes the convergence of independent lines of evidence seriously: radiometric dating, ice cores, distant starlight, the fossil sequence, and comparative genomics all point the same direction without being calibrated against each other.
• It has a real hermeneutical argument, not merely a concession: Genesis is written to answer who and why, using the cosmology its first readers had, and it is not obliged to correct their physics in order to tell the truth about God.
• It can affirm the image of God, the fall as a real event in human history, and the full authority of Scripture, and many of its adherents do.

The honest difficulty: It has the hardest time with Adam. If humanity descends from a population rather than a pair, Paul's one-man-to-one-man argument in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 needs reworking, and proposals to preserve a representative or federal Adam are contested even among those who hold this view. It must also account for animal death and predation before the fall, and for Jesus' and Paul's apparently historical references.

The framework and analogical-day readings

Meredith Kline; Henri Blocher, *In the Beginning*; C. John Collins, *Genesis 1–4*.

Genesis 1 is structured literature — days one to three form the realms, days four to six fill them — teaching the order and purpose of creation rather than its chronology. The days are God's workdays, analogous to ours, not measured by our clocks.

• The literary structure is genuinely there and is too neat to be accidental: light, sky and sea, land are made, then lights, birds and fish, land creatures fill them.
• It declines to make Genesis answer a question it was not asked, without conceding that the text is myth.
• It preserves a historical Adam and a historical fall.

The honest difficulty: The structure being real does not prove the sequence is not, and the narrative prose of the chapter reads as a report of events. Critics reasonably ask whether the framework is discovered in the text or brought to it.