Chapter 2: The Image of God and Human Dignity — Part 1

The Man in the Corridor

A hospital chaplain I once spoke with described a scene she could not forget.

A man had been admitted after a long period sleeping rough. He was in his fifties and looked seventy. He had a wound on his leg that had been left far too long, and he smelled of it. He was confused, occasionally aggressive, and he had no visitors and no next of kin on file. Over four days on the ward, she noticed something that she said she had noticed a hundred times before and had never got used to: the small, almost invisible adjustments people made around him. Voices got slightly flatter. Explanations got shorter. Nobody was cruel. Nobody did anything you could put in a complaint. It was simply that he was being handled rather than met.

On the fifth day a young healthcare assistant sat down beside the bed on her break, with no clinical task to perform, and asked him where he was from. He told her. Then he told her about a sister in Swansea he had not seen in eleven years, and about a job he had once had fitting kitchens, and at some point in the middle of this he began to cry, and said the thing that the chaplain repeated to me: "I forgot I was a person."

Everything in this chapter is an attempt to explain why that sentence is theologically impossible, and why it is nevertheless the most common experience in the modern world.

What Is Actually at Issue

The question of this chapter is the most important question in ethics, because every other question depends on the answer: what is a human being worth, and why?

Almost everyone today will say that all human beings are equal in dignity. It is written into constitutions and declarations. But say it slowly and it is an extraordinary claim, and one that the visible evidence does not obviously support. Human beings are manifestly unequal in almost every measurable respect: in strength, intelligence, health, beauty, usefulness, virtue, and the amount they contribute to anyone else. If worth tracked any of these, it would vary enormously. So on what grounds do we insist that it does not?

There are three broad answers available.

Worth is conferred by capacity. A being has moral status because of what it can do — reason, choose, suffer, form preferences, be self-aware. This is the dominant view in secular bioethics and it has the merit of giving a reason rather than an assertion.

Worth is conferred by society. A person's standing is a legal and social construction: we agree to treat each other as bearers of rights. This is honest about how rights actually function in practice and it is why the phrase "human rights" is usually accompanied by a document.

Worth is intrinsic and received. A human being is of infinite value because of what they are and to whom they belong, independently of capacity, contribution, or recognition. This is the Christian claim, and its ground is a single verse on the first page of the Bible.

The differences between these are not academic. They determine what happens to the man in the corridor. On the first account, his worth genuinely has diminished; his capacities have. On the second, his worth depends on a society that has visibly stopped noticing him. On the third, nothing whatever has happened to his value, and the failure is entirely on the side of those who cannot see it.

The Witness of Scripture

The foundational text

"So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them" (Genesis 1:27, NIV). The preceding verse records the divine deliberation: let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness (Genesis 1:26).

Several features of this text repay slow attention.

It is said of the whole human race, not of a class within it. In the surrounding cultures of the ancient Near East, the language of the divine image was applied to kings, and sometimes to cult statues. Genesis takes the royal vocabulary and distributes it to everybody, including the slave, the foreigner, and the newborn. This was, in its own context, a radical democratisation of worth.

It is said of male and female together. The verse does not say that the man is the image and the woman derives from him. Both, equally and in the same breath.

It is given before any human being has done anything. The image precedes all achievement, all obedience, all merit. Adam has not yet worked, spoken, or chosen. The value is not a reward.

It survives the Fall. This is decisive and often missed. After the flood, the prohibition of murder is grounded explicitly in the fact that human beings are made in God's image (Genesis 9:6) — said of a humanity that has just been described as thoroughly corrupted. Later, James forbids cursing other people on the same grounds: they have been made in God's likeness (James 3:9). The image is defaced, not deleted.

Its consequences in the Law and the Prophets

The Old Testament draws practical conclusions with insistence. The alien, the orphan, and the widow — the three categories of person with no legal protector in an ancient society — are placed under God's direct patronage (Deuteronomy 10:18). Israel is commanded to love the foreigner residing among them, with the reason attached: you were foreigners in Egypt (Leviticus 19:34; Deuteronomy 10:19). The deaf must not be cursed nor a stumbling block placed before the blind (Leviticus 19:14) — a prohibition of cruelty to those who cannot see it coming, which is to say, cruelty that carries no social cost. The elderly are to be honoured (Leviticus 19:32). The gleanings of the field belong to the poor by right, not by charity (Leviticus 19:9–10; Ruth 2).

The prophets treat the mistreatment of such people not as a failure of kindness but as a form of blasphemy, because it is an assault on God's own property. Proverbs makes the logic explicit: whoever oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker (Proverbs 14:31).

Life in the womb

Scripture speaks of God's personal knowledge of and relationship with a human being before birth. The psalmist describes God knitting him together in his mother's womb and seeing his unformed body (Psalm 139:13–16). Jeremiah is told that God knew him before he was formed (Jeremiah 1:5). Isaiah's servant is called from the womb (Isaiah 49:1). In the New Testament, the child in Elizabeth's womb responds to the arrival of the pregnant Mary (Luke 1:41–44).

Two cautions are necessary if we are to use these texts honestly. First, none of them is a treatise on the moral status of the embryo; they are poetry, prophetic call narratives, and narrative. Second, that does not make them irrelevant. What they establish is a consistent scriptural habit of mind: God's relationship with a person begins before anyone else can see them. Chapter 7 takes up the full argument, including the genuinely difficult passage in Exodus 21:22–25 and the range of ways Christians have read it.

Christ: The Image in Person

Christian anthropology is not finally derived from Genesis 1 but from Christ, whom the New Testament calls the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15) and the exact representation of His being (Hebrews 1:3). Human beings are made in the image of God; Christ is the image. We learn what we were meant to be by looking at Him.

And He did something with that dignity that changes everything: He gave it away downwards. The Incarnation is the eternal Word taking a human body and, in it, taking the position of the lowest — born in an outhouse, a refugee before He could walk, an executed criminal.

Look at where He put Himself, deliberately, in a society organised around honour and shame:

• He touched people with contagious skin disease (Mark 1:40–42), when the correct and lawful action was distance.
• He spoke theology with a Samaritan woman with a complicated marital history, alone, in public, at midday (John 4). His disciples' surprise is recorded; so is the fact that He gave her the clearest statement of His identity in the Gospel.
• He allowed a woman of bad reputation to touch His feet in a Pharisee's house, and defended her to His host (Luke 7:36–50).
• He called a collaborator with the occupying power down from a tree and invited Himself to dinner (Luke 19:1–10).
• He healed on the Sabbath a woman bent double for eighteen years and called her a daughter of Abraham (Luke 13:10–17), restoring her standing as well as her spine.
• He set a child in the middle of a status argument (Mark 9:33–37), in a culture that did not sentimentalise children.
• He praised a Samaritan and a Roman centurion for faith He had not found in Israel (Luke 10:25–37; Matthew 8:10).

And then He gave the criterion by which the nations will be judged, and it is not doctrinal precision, church attendance, or moral respectability: hungry, thirsty, a stranger, naked, sick, in prison — whatever you did for one of the least of these, you did for me (Matthew 25:31–46). This is the strongest statement of human dignity ever made. It does not merely say that the destitute person deserves care. It says Christ is identified with them, so that the way you treat the man in the corridor is the way you have treated God.

The Early Church

The Fathers understood the image of God in different but complementary ways, and they turned it immediately into practice.

St Gregory of Nyssa located the image especially in the human capacity for freedom and for knowing God, and argued that a being made in the image of the free God must itself be free, since a slave-nature could not image a free nature. From this he drew a conclusion that stands almost alone in the ancient world. Preaching on Ecclesiastes, he attacked the ownership of human beings as such: to price a human being is to attempt to price the image of God, and the whole world would not cover the sum. He was not campaigning for legislation; the fourth century offered no mechanism for that. He was declaring that the practice on which his entire society rested was theft from God.

St Gregory of Nazianzus preached an entire oration on love for the poor, focused on people suffering from what the ancient world called leprosy — people driven out of towns, considered cursed, and abandoned by their families. He insisted that these were not lesser beings but bearers of the same nature, our own flesh, and that we who are well are simply those whose turn has not yet come.

St Basil the Great did not stop at preaching. Outside Caesarea he built a complex — hospital, hospice, almshouse, and lodging for travellers — which became so extensive that it was spoken of as a new city; Gregory of Nazianzus described it in his funeral oration for Basil. This is the ancestor of the hospital as an institution. It exists because Christians believed a destitute stranger with an incurable disease was worth a building.

St John Chrysostom hammered the point weekly at a wealthy urban congregation: that the poor man at the church door is an altar, that Christ is in him, and that to adorn the church while stepping over him is a contradiction rather than a piety.

Early Christian practice followed. The Didache forbids abortion and infanticide in the same clause as it forbids murder. The anonymous Epistle to Diognetus, describing Christians to a curious outsider, notes that they marry like everyone else and have children like everyone else, but do not expose their unwanted infants — a practice that was legal, common, and unremarkable in the Roman world. Lactantius condemned both infant exposure and the gladiatorial games as murder, refusing the standard distinctions by which respectable people excused them. Christians also became known for remaining in cities during epidemics to nurse the sick, including strangers and pagans, when those with means had fled.

None of this was sentimentality. It was Genesis 1:27 applied by people who had understood what it meant.

St Athanasius supplied the image that ties this to salvation. He compares humanity to a portrait painted on wood which has been spoiled by dirt; the way to restore it is not to throw the panel away but for the subject of the portrait to come back and sit again, so that the likeness can be renewed on the same material. The Incarnation is God returning to sit for His own portrait. Human dignity is therefore not only a fact about our origin but a claim about our destiny.