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

The Coptic Orthodox Understanding

The Coptic Church confesses what the whole Church confesses about the image of God. Three emphases give the Coptic version its particular colour.

First, the image is a vocation, not only a possession. The distinction between image (eikōn) and likeness (homoiōsis) in Genesis 1:26 was developed by Alexandrian theology, especially by St Clement and later writers, along these lines: the image is given to every human being at creation and cannot be lost; the likeness is the growing resemblance to God that a person acquires through grace and struggle. This is a genuinely useful distinction. It means your worth is already settled and your becoming is not yet finished, and it prevents the two from being confused. A saint is not worth more than a criminal. A saint has become more like the God whose image they both bear.

Second, the body is included. The Alexandrian and Coptic tradition, faced with philosophies that treated the body as a prison, insisted that the human being is a unity of body and soul, that the body shares in the dignity of the person, and that it will share in the resurrection. This is why the Coptic Church treats the bodies of the dead with such reverence, why relics matter, and why the martyrs are honoured in their physical remains. It is also why a great deal of modern bioethics — which routinely treats the body as raw material belonging to the "real" self that inhabits it — feels foreign to this tradition. Chapter 15 develops this fully.

Third, dignity has been tested under persecution. The Coptic calendar dates from the accession of Diocletian in AD 284, and is called the Era of the Martyrs. This is not an antiquarian detail. A Church whose calendar begins with a massacre has a particular relationship to the doctrine that human worth is conferred by God and cannot be revoked by the state, because it has needed that doctrine repeatedly.

That testing has continued into living memory. In February 2015, twenty Egyptian Copts and one Ghanaian man, Matthew Ayariga, who chose to identify himself with them, were murdered in Libya for their faith. What is remembered in the Coptic Church almost as much as their deaths is the response of their families, who spoke publicly of forgiveness for the killers within days. Beshir Kamel, brother of two of the men, thanked the murderers on television for having included his brothers' confession of faith in their own propaganda video. The Coptic Orthodox Church recognised the twenty-one as martyrs.

Whatever else one says about human dignity, that is what the doctrine looks like when it is under maximum pressure: the conviction that the killers had not succeeded in reducing the victims to anything, and that the killers themselves had not fallen out of the reach of mercy.

Pope Shenouda III returned constantly in his teaching and his public life to the theme of human worth and to the duty of the Church towards the poor, the sick, and the socially forgotten, and to the principle that love of God is verified in the treatment of people. I summarise the tenor of his teaching rather than quoting.

Working It Out: Who Is Included

The doctrine is easy to state. Every historical failure of Christian ethics has come at the point of application, where a group is quietly reclassified as an exception. It is worth naming the categories explicitly.

Men and women

Genesis 1:27 states the equality of the sexes in the image of God in the same sentence in which it states the image itself. St Paul states that in Christ there is neither male nor female (Galatians 3:28). Christ conducted His ministry in a way that scandalised His contemporaries: women travelled with the group and funded it (Luke 8:1–3); He taught Mary of Bethany as a disciple and defended her right to be there (Luke 10:38–42); women stayed at the cross when the men had gone; and the risen Christ appeared first to women and sent them to tell the apostles, in a culture where their testimony carried little legal weight (John 20:11–18; Matthew 28:1–10). Any account of Christianity that treats women as secondary has to explain why God arranged the resurrection narrative this way.

The Coptic tradition venerates St Mary above all created beings, and honours a long line of women: the martyrs Demiana, Marina, Dolagy, Barbara, Catherine; the Ammas of the desert, Sarah, Theodora, and Syncletica, whose sayings were preserved alongside those of the Fathers; consecrated women and the modern revival of the order of deaconesses in the Coptic Church; and the countless women who have in fact catechised most Copts alive, since it is mothers and Sunday school servants who hand on the faith.

Equal dignity does not by itself settle every question about roles in the family or in the Church, and it would be dishonest to pretend it did. The Coptic Orthodox Church, like the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches, reserves the sacramental priesthood to men, and understands this as a matter of sacramental sign and apostolic order rather than of worth or capacity. Many Protestant Christians hold, with equal sincerity, that this reading confuses a first-century cultural arrangement with a permanent theological principle, and that the New Testament's own evidence of women in leadership — Phoebe, Junia, Priscilla — points the other way. Chapters 18 and 42 examine the arguments on both sides properly. What must be said here is this: whatever position one takes, no reading of Scripture that assigns women lesser worth, lesser intelligence, or lesser standing before God is compatible with Genesis 1:27, and where such readings have been taught they have been a corruption. And the question of whether a woman may serve at the altar is entirely separate from the question of whether she may be shouted at, controlled, patronised, or struck. On the latter the Church's answer is not complicated.

Race and ethnicity

St Paul told the Athenians that from one man God made all the nations (Acts 17:26). The first Gentile convert in Acts is a Roman officer, and the conversion requires a vision to overcome Peter's own prejudice, after which he says plainly that God shows no favouritism (Acts 10:34–35). An Ethiopian court official is baptised on a desert road (Acts 8:26–40) — a passage of particular resonance in African Christianity.

The most damaging misuse of Scripture in the history of race was the so-called "curse of Ham," used for centuries to give theological cover to the enslavement of Africans. It should be stated bluntly that this reading is not merely uncharitable but exegetically false. In Genesis 9:20–27 the curse falls on Canaan, not on Ham; it says nothing whatever about skin colour; the Canaanites of the biblical narrative were a Levantine people; and the text is manifestly concerned with the later relations of Israel and Canaan. A passage was tortured into saying something it does not say because a profitable system needed a justification. Chapter 32 tells this story in full, including the Church's failures and the Christians who resisted.

Copts have their own experience of being treated as a lesser category, in Egypt at various periods and as immigrants in Europe, North America, and Australia. That experience carries an obligation. A community that knows what discrimination feels like has no excuse for the casual contempt that can be found within Middle Eastern Christian communities as easily as anywhere else — towards Africans, towards South Asians, towards domestic workers, towards other Christians of the "wrong" background, towards those who marry outside the community. A parish that would be outraged at prejudice against Copts and tolerates prejudice by Copts has not understood the doctrine it recites in the Creed.

Disability and illness

When the disciples asked whose sin had caused a man's blindness, Christ rejected the premise of the question outright (John 9:1–3). This should have permanently ended the assumption that disability is a punishment or a sign of God's displeasure. It did not, and Christians still make it — sometimes crudely, more often in the softer form of insisting that healing is available to anyone with enough faith, which quietly informs a disabled person that their continued condition is their own fault. That teaching wounds people badly, and it is not the teaching of the Church.

Two truths must be held together, and both are needed. Illness and impairment are real evils; they are part of the disorder that entered creation, and it is right to resist them, to treat them, and to pray for healing. And a person with an impairment is in no degree less a bearer of the image of God, less capable of holiness, or less valuable than anyone else. Denying the first turns into sentimentality; denying the second turns into contempt.

The practical test for a parish is not what it believes but what it has built. Can a wheelchair get in? Is there anything for an autistic child, or is the family managing on their own at the back? When a person with a learning disability wants to serve, is there a role, or only a polite deferral? Does the deacon with a stammer ever read? Chapter 10 addresses the sharper question now arriving through prenatal screening: a society can express its judgement about the worth of disabled lives without ever saying a word about it, simply through which pregnancies it routinely offers to end.

The unborn

The most contested application in modern ethics. Chapter 7 gives it a full chapter. Two points belong here. First, whatever else is disputed, the early Church was united and explicit in condemning both abortion and the exposure of infants, in a society where both were legal and normal. Second, the question of whether an embryo is a bearer of the image is exactly the "who counts" question this chapter is about, which is why the abortion debate is not a peripheral issue but a direct test of the principle. Christians who are passionate about the unborn and indifferent to the born — to the mother in crisis, to the child in poverty, to the family with a disabled infant — have not understood the doctrine either. Consistency cuts in every direction.

The elderly

The fifth commandment (Exodus 20:12) is addressed to adults about their ageing parents, not primarily to small children about tidying up. Its context is a society in which the old had no pension and no protection except their own family. St Paul says that anyone who does not provide for their own household has denied the faith (1 Timothy 5:8). The Gospel opens with two elderly people, Simeon and Anna, who are given the first recognition of the Messiah, having waited most of a lifetime for it.

A society that measures worth by productivity necessarily devalues the old, and it does this without any policy or announcement, simply by making itself uninhabitable to them: a culture of speed, of screens, of families spread across continents, of care delivered in fifteen-minute visits. Chapter 12 addresses end-of-life decisions; the point here is upstream of those decisions. Much of the pressure towards assisted dying comes from elderly people who have concluded that they are a burden. That conclusion was taught to them.

Prisoners

Christ's judgement scene includes the prisoner explicitly (Matthew 25:36), and Hebrews tells Christians to remember those in prison as though they were in prison with them (Hebrews 13:3). Joseph, Jeremiah, Peter, and Paul were all imprisoned; a substantial portion of the New Testament was written in custody.

A person may justly forfeit their liberty. They cannot forfeit their humanity. This distinction is the foundation of every argument in Chapter 31 about punishment, conditions of detention, torture, and capital punishment. It also has an immediate, unglamorous application: prison visiting is a corporal work of mercy that almost no parish organises and almost anyone could do.

Refugees and migrants

The Coptic Church has a unique stake in this. The central narrative of Egyptian Christianity, after the Gospel itself, is that the Holy Family came to Egypt as refugees, fleeing a massacre (Matthew 2:13–15). Coptic tradition traces their route through Egypt and honours the sites along it; the Feast of the Entry of the Lord into Egypt is celebrated annually. Copts venerate Christ as a refugee child. That is not a metaphor available for occasional rhetorical use; it is the foundation of Egyptian Christian identity.

The Old Testament commands care for the resident foreigner and grounds it in Israel's own memory of being foreigners (Leviticus 19:33–34). Christ places the stranger in the judgement scene.

I want to be careful here, because this is a point where moral principle is frequently used to short-circuit a genuine policy argument. Scripture obliges Christians to treat migrants and refugees as bearers of God's image, to protect them from exploitation and cruelty, and to be generous. It does not, by itself, dictate a specific immigration quota, and Christians of goodwill differ about numbers, borders, integration, and the practical limits of any state's capacity. Chapter 30 and Chapter 32 handle those disagreements. What is not open to disagreement is the moral status of the person. You may argue about policy. You may not talk about human beings as an infestation.