This study takes one question slowly. When Genesis says God made humans in his image, what is the image? The answer matters because it decides who counts. Christians have given four main answers. Each one sounds reasonable until you test it against a hard case, such as a grandmother with dementia, a child who will never speak, or an argument once used to justify slavery. Here you will lay the four answers side by side and run them through those cases. Then you will see which ones hold.
You can work through it alone in about an hour, or with a group over one long session or two shorter ones. Have a Bible open. Keep a sheet of paper nearby, because the first exercise asks you to write something down before you read anything else.
Step one: name what you already believe
Before reading further, finish this sentence in your own words: Humans are made in the image of God, which means that humans…
Don’t polish it. Most people write something about thinking, choosing, loving, creating or caring for the world. Keep your sentence. You will come back to it at the end and check whether it survived.
If you are leading a group, collect a few answers aloud without commenting on them. The point is to bring hidden definitions into the open, not to grade them. Some people in the room may care for a parent with dementia or live with a disability themselves. Let them decide whether to bring that into the conversation. Nobody should be used as an example.
Step two: read what Genesis says, and what it leaves out
Read Genesis 1:26-28. The center of the passage is verse 27: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27).
Now make three observations, and write each one down.
- Who is the subject of the verbs? Count how often God acts and how often humans act.
- What comes right alongside the image? Look at verse 26, where God says “let them have dominion” over the creatures, and at the blessing in verse 28.
- What does the passage never define? Look for any list of human features that make up the image.
You should find that God does all the creating, and that rule over creation is given together with the image. You should also find that the text never says which human feature the image is. That silence is why Christians have answered the question in more than one way. It also means any definition you hold is an interpretation. The verse itself never states it.
Two later texts add a fact every account has to respect. After the flood, God forbids murder “for in the image of God made he man” (Genesis 9:6). James warns against cursing “men, which are made after the similitude of God” (James 3:9). Both were written about people living after sin entered the world. Whatever the image is, human failure did not erase it, and it is still the reason a human life may not be treated as cheap.
Step three: the four accounts, in order
Dr. Daniel Hill, who teaches at Dallas Theological Seminary and works in theological anthropology, sets out three standard Christian answers and then offers a fourth. Learn them in this order, because each one shifts the weight a little further away from the human being.
- The substantial account. The image is a property humans have and other creatures lack. Hill describes it as “saying that there’s some property you possess that differentiates you from all the other creatures, whether it’s reason or righteousness or something like that.” The weight rests on what you are.
- The relational account. Humans image God by existing in relationship. Hill puts it this way: “you image the trinity”. The weight rests on how you are connected.
- The functional account. The image is a vocation. God sends humans into creation to serve as his priest-kings. The weight rests on what you do.
- The mediatorial account. This is Hill’s own hybrid, and he calls it the mediatorial or instrumental account. It keeps the idea of vocation but changes what the vocation rests on. In his words, “it’s a promise of what he will do in and through us, as opposed to a task we carry out, based on some capacities we have”. He states the content of the promise: “God has promised to make his word, his presence and his rule known in and through human creatures.” The weight rests on what God has pledged to do.
One way to keep the four straight is to ask a single question of each: What would a person have to lose to stop bearing the image? On the first account, the property. On the second, the relationships. On the third, the ability to carry out the task. On the fourth, the answer is nothing a person could lose, because God made the promise and God keeps it.
Faithful Christians hold each of these views. Some combine them. This study does not ask you to pick a winner. It asks you to see what each one implies.
Step four: run the hard cases
This is the main exercise. For each case below, go through all four accounts and ask two questions. Does this account say the person still bears the image? If so, on what grounds? Write a short answer for each pairing. In a group, split into four teams, give each team one account, and have them defend it against all three cases before reporting back.
Case one: powers that fade
Hill points out that everyone has a range of powers, from reasoning to walking around, and that “what we tend to forget is that they’re all going to wane.” Old age dims reason and restricts movement. For some people, he notes, limited powers describe their whole life, as with muscular dystrophy or severe cognitive impairment. He then states the question directly: “Are they still in the image of God if they’ve lost the power of reason?”
Test the substantial account first. If the image is reason, it seems to shrink as reason shrinks. Hill sharpens this with a question he puts to his students about eating an orangutan, noting that “an orangutan might be able to reason a little bit better than an infant.” He adds that “infants don’t have object permanence”. If reason is the test, the infant scores lower than the ape, and nobody believes that. Then test the relational and functional accounts. A person who no longer recognizes anyone, or who cannot carry out any visible task, seems to fail those tests as well.
Now test the mediatorial account. Hill’s answer is that a person whose powers are waning is “still someone who has been commissioned by God, and God has made a promise to do something in and through your continued existence.” He follows it with this: “just in virtue of you being present, God is at work in and through your life.”
Case two: disability from birth
Read Exodus 4:10-12. Moses protests, “I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue” (Exodus 4:10). God replies: “Who hath made man’s mouth? or who maketh the dumb, or deaf, or the seeing, or the blind? have not I the LORD?” (Exodus 4:11). In the KJV, dumb simply means unable to speak. Then God says, “Now therefore go, and I will be with thy mouth, and teach thee what thou shalt say” (Exodus 4:12).
Observe the order. God does not fix Moses’s speech and then send him. He sends him with a promise of his own presence. This is narrative, so it describes one call and does not lay down a rule for every case. It does show a pattern. Hill reads the reply as God telling Moses, in effect, not to tell him what he can and cannot do through him.
Hill names the habit this text confronts. We assume capacities show usefulness, so “people without those capacities are less useful and therefore less valuable.” He gives an example: “if someone can’t speak, we think, well, how can they pray?” His verdict is that this is a failure in our thinking and “not a problem on God’s end”. He goes further than tolerance. Of people who are blind or deaf he says, “I need them to show me things about God.”
Run the four accounts again. Which ones explain why Hill could say he needs people with disabilities? Which ones can only say such people are owed care?
Case three: ranking human beings
Hill has been reading abolitionists of the nineteenth century, among them Theodore Wright and Maria Stewart, who argued that they and their people deserved freedom because they bore God’s image. Ask why they had to make that argument at all. Hill’s answer is that “there’s a tendency to denigrate the humanity of someone else” so that you can do what you want to them.
He gives an example. He describes Immanuel Kant as claiming that people with darker skin could not learn civility, were governed by their passions, and could be disciplined but could not attain culture or create. Look at the shape of that claim. It names abilities, says a group lacks them, and concludes that the group has less humanity. Hill says such reasoning means “you’ve set up a little hierarchy” in which some people claim more humanity than others. He traces horrendous treatment to it and adds that “we are creative in our wickedness”. Lisa Fields drew the link in the same conversation: people can mistreat someone without guilt only after they have first stripped that person of their humanity in their own minds.
Now compare this case with case one. A family member with dementia and an enslaved person are not in the same situation. But any account that grounds the image in measurable abilities leaves both exposed to the same move. Abilities come in degrees, so the image comes in degrees, and people can be ranked. Ask which of the four accounts gives that ranking nowhere to start.
Step five: the misconception to avoid
After these cases, many readers swing to the opposite error. They conclude that if the image rests on God’s promise, then a person’s particular gifts and features do not matter at all. Hill does not say that. He describes height, eye color and hair texture as good particulars that point to “the loving care of God”, and he insists that the first thing about you is that you are “a creature, who is loved and upheld by God.” The distinction is between what grounds your worth and what expresses God’s care. Your abilities are real gifts. They are just not the foundation.
Be honest about the limits too. Hill’s account says God works through a person’s presence. It does not explain how that happens in someone who can no longer speak. A defender of the substantial view also has a reply. Reason can belong to human nature even in a person who cannot use it, the way sight belongs to human nature in someone born blind. That version protects the person with dementia as well. The hard cases defeat a crude capacity view. They do not settle the whole debate.
Questions for discussion
- Go back to the sentence you wrote in step one. Which of the four accounts was closest to it? Did it survive all three cases, and if not, which case broke it?
- Genesis 1 joins the image to dominion without defining it. Is that silence a problem for Christians, or does it protect something? Give a reason from the text.
- Genesis 9:6 and James 3:9 treat the image as still present after sin. Which of the four accounts handles those verses most easily, and which has to work hardest?
- In Exodus 4, God answers Moses’s limitation with a promise of presence and does not remove it. What would change in a church that read people with disabilities through that scene?
- Hill says “we tend to think more about rights than about duties.” He would rather start from the duty to seek the flourishing of other persons. How would starting from duties change the dementia case? How would it change the slavery case?
- What is the strongest reason someone might still prefer the substantial account after these tests? State it fairly before you respond to it.
A practice for this week
For seven days, listen for sentences that tie a person’s worth to what they can do. Some will be your own. Examples include talk about someone being “a burden,” a joke about a slow coworker, or a quiet thought that a nonverbal person cannot really pray. Write each one down exactly as it came to you.
At the end of the week, take one sentence and rewrite it on two foundations. First write it the way the substantial account would, then the way the mediatorial account would. Hill says, “I have responsibilities to seek the good of those around me, and to view my flourishing as tied to theirs.” Then ask one concrete thing of yourself. Who is the person behind that sentence, and what do you owe them as a fellow image bearer?
If you are meeting as a group, bring the rewritten sentences back, not the originals. That keeps the focus on the change rather than on confession.
Finally, look again at what you wrote on the first day. If it still holds, write down which hard case tested it most. If it doesn’t, write the sentence you would put in its place.