Chapter 2: The Image of God and Human Dignity — Part 3

Working It Out: Who Is Included (continued)

Enemies

Christ's command to love enemies and pray for persecutors (Matthew 5:43–48) is the furthest extension of this doctrine and the hardest. Its logic is precisely the image of God: your enemy bears it, undamaged by his hatred of you, and the Father makes His sun rise on the evil and the good.

This does not mean pacifism follows automatically — Chapters 33 and 34 examine that argument seriously from both sides. It does mean that hatred is forbidden, that dehumanising language about enemies is forbidden, and that the treatment of prisoners, civilians, and the defeated is not a matter of tactics but of doctrine. The witness of the martyrs, ancient and recent, is that this is actually possible for human beings, though never by their own resources.

The poor and the socially rejected

St James describes a congregation seating a well-dressed visitor prominently and a poor one on the floor, and calls it judging with evil thoughts (James 2:1–4). It is a picture drawn from life, and every parish can recognise itself in it if it is honest. The favouritism is rarely explicit. It shows in who is invited to serve, whose opinion is sought, whose children are welcomed, who is greeted first after the Liturgy, and who is left standing alone with a cup of tea.

St Basil, preaching in a time of famine, made the argument that has echoed through Christian social teaching ever since: that the bread you are storing belongs to the hungry, the coat in your wardrobe to the naked, and that hoarding surplus while others starve is not merely uncharitable but a species of theft. Chapter 29 works out what this means for property, giving, and business.

Arguments and Counterarguments

"Why should dignity attach to species membership rather than to capacities?"

This is the strongest secular objection and it deserves a serious answer. The argument, associated most prominently with the philosopher Peter Singer and with much contemporary bioethics, runs roughly as follows. What matters morally is the possession of certain capacities — self-awareness, the ability to have preferences about one's future, the capacity to suffer. To grant special status to all and only members of Homo sapiens, regardless of capacities, is arbitrary in the same way that granting special status to a race would be arbitrary. On this view some non-human animals may have stronger claims than some humans, such as those with profound cognitive impairment.

Three responses.

The empirical response. Capacity-based criteria admit of degrees, and therefore generate degrees of moral status. Once worth is a matter of more and less, someone will be assessing it, and history is unambiguous about who ends up at the bottom of such assessments. The twentieth century's programmes of involuntary sterilisation and the killing of disabled patients were carried out by highly educated professionals applying, in their own terms, rational criteria of worth. This is not a claim that anyone holding this philosophical position today wants such outcomes; most emphatically do not. It is a claim about what the framework licenses once it leaves the seminar room.

The logical response. Every capacity-based criterion excludes some humans that virtually everyone wants included. Self-awareness excludes newborns and the deeply anaesthetised. Rationality excludes the severely brain-injured. Preference-having excludes the temporarily comatose. Defenders adjust the criteria to avoid the counterexamples, but each adjustment is made precisely to preserve a conclusion the theory was supposed to derive.

The honest concession. The Christian is not entitled to pretend this is easy either. We ground dignity in a metaphysical claim — the image of God — which cannot be demonstrated by experiment. We say the ground of worth is invisible. What we can say is that the alternative accounts are not neutral or evidence-based either; they are also metaphysical commitments, chosen partly because of what they make possible, and they are considerably less stable in the hands of the powerful.

"Human rights already do this work without theology."

Largely true in practice, and Christians should be glad of it rather than sniffy. The modern human rights framework has protected real people, and it is available to societies that will never accept a theological premise.

Two observations. First, the historical debt is substantial. The conviction that every individual has inviolable worth regardless of status did not arise from nowhere; the historians who have traced it, whatever their own beliefs, generally trace it through Christianity. Second, a right requires a ground. If human rights are conventions we have agreed on, they can be un-agreed, and in living memory they have been, by states that simply reclassified a category of person as outside the covered set. The Christian claim is that the worth is there whether or not any document recognises it — which is exactly the claim you need on the day the document is revoked.

"The Church has been the worst offender."

This must be met without defensiveness. Christians owned slaves. Christian arguments were used to justify racial subjugation, colonial expropriation, the mistreatment of disabled people, the humiliation of unmarried mothers, and the silencing of abuse victims for the sake of institutional reputation. In some places this was not a fringe distortion; it was respectable and official.

Three things can be said, and only the third is a defence.

The failures were real, and no amount of pointing at secular atrocities cancels them. The Christian who responds to this charge by changing the subject has already lost the argument and, more importantly, has failed the people who were harmed.

The standard by which we condemn the failures is the tradition's own. When Gregory of Nyssa denounced slave-owning in the fourth century, he was not importing an external ethic; he was reading Genesis. The reformers who fought slavery and the campaigners who built asylums, hospitals, and orphanages were overwhelmingly arguing from the same text as the people they were fighting. That a doctrine has been betrayed is not evidence that the doctrine is false. It is evidence that human beings are as Chapter 3 will describe them.

Repentance is the only credible response. Not explanation, not context, not proportion. Chapter 42 addresses what institutional repentance actually requires, which is considerably more than an apology.

"Doesn't equal dignity mean everyone must be treated identically?"

No, and confusing these two produces a great deal of bad argument. Equal dignity requires that everyone be treated with equal respect; justice frequently requires that people be treated differently according to need, situation, vulnerability, and responsibility. A doctor triaging a ward gives unequal amounts of attention on the basis of equal concern. A parent treats a toddler and a teenager differently without valuing them differently. What equal dignity forbids is not differentiation but contempt, and any differentiation that says or implies you are worth less.

Difficult Cases

The person with no measurable awareness. A patient in a persistent vegetative state after catastrophic injury shows no evidence of consciousness and, on current understanding, may never again. On a capacity account they have little or no moral status. On the Christian account nothing has changed about who they are. This does not mean every treatment must be continued indefinitely — Chapter 12 shows why refusing a burdensome and futile treatment is entirely compatible with reverence for the person, and is not the same act as killing them. It means the person in the bed is still a person, and is owed the treatment of one.

The perpetrator of atrocity. Is a man who has tortured children of equal dignity with his victims? This is the sharpest test of the doctrine, and the Christian answer is yes — and it is also the least sentimental answer available, because it is the ground on which he can be held responsible. You do not put an animal on trial. Equal dignity is why he must receive a fair trial, must not be tortured, and must not be treated as vermin. It is emphatically not a reason to reduce his sentence, to release him near children, to press his victims to forgive, or to describe his crimes in softened language. Dignity and innocence are different things, and Chapters 22 and 31 keep them apart with some care.

Competing dignities. Sometimes two bearers of the image have claims that cannot both be honoured: a mother whose life is threatened by a pregnancy; a family that cannot both care for a dying parent at home and protect a vulnerable child; a hospital with one bed and two patients. The doctrine of equal dignity does not dissolve these; it is what makes them tragic rather than merely administrative. Chapter 5 provides the reasoning tools, and Chapter 45 addresses what to do when no choice available is a good one.

The person who is genuinely dangerous. Recognising someone's dignity does not oblige a parish to give an offender access to children, or a woman to remain in a house with a man who beats her, or a congregation to tolerate behaviour that terrifies others. Safeguarding is not a suspension of the doctrine of the image; it is an application of it, to the people at risk. Chapter 22 is unambiguous about this.

Ourselves. The doctrine applies to the reader. Some people who would defend the dignity of any stranger hold themselves in real contempt — because of something they did, or something done to them, or because they were told for years that they were worthless. If the image of God cannot be destroyed by murder, it has not been destroyed by your worst week. This is not encouragement; it is doctrine.

Pastoral Guidance

To the parent of a child with a disability: your child is not a lesser version of a child you did not get. The Church has sometimes given you the opposite impression through pity, through unhelpful theology about healing, and through simply not making room. If you have stopped coming because it was easier at home, I understand, and the failure is not yours.

To the older person who feels a burden: the sense that you are taking up space you have no right to is not humility and it is not from God. You are not valuable because of what you can still do. You never were.

To the person who has experienced racism or contempt in a parish: what happened to you was not a personality clash and it was not oversensitivity. It was a denial in practice of what was being confessed in the Creed a few metres away. You are entitled to say so, and to be heard.

To the person who believes they have made themselves worthless: the crucifixion is the Church's answer to the question of what a human life is worth, and the answer was given before you had done anything, good or bad.

To the servant, the deacon, the Sunday school teacher, the parish council member: this doctrine is enacted or denied in small, concrete decisions that nobody minutes. Who is greeted. Who is interrupted. Whose child is described as "a handful." Whose name is learned. Whether there is a ramp. Whether the person who smells is served their tea in the same cup as everyone else. The doctrine of the image of God is not tested at synods. It is tested in the hall after the Liturgy.

There is a story in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers about Abba Moses the Black, an Ethiopian who had been a robber before becoming a monk. He was summoned to a meeting called to judge a brother who had sinned, and he came carrying a leaking basket of sand behind him. Asked what he was doing, he said that his own sins were running out behind him where he could not see them, and that he had come to judge another man. The Fathers judged nobody that day.

Practical Principles

1. Human worth is intrinsic, universal, and permanent. It is not earned, cannot be increased by achievement, and cannot be forfeited by sin, illness, age, or crime.
2. When you find yourself constructing an exception — a category of human being to whom the ordinary rules do not quite apply — stop and examine what you are doing. Every historical atrocity began there.
3. Distinguish dignity from innocence, from merit, and from safety. A person may be of equal worth and still be justly imprisoned, justly excluded from a role, or justly resisted.
4. Equal dignity requires equal respect, not identical treatment. Justice often means treating people differently according to need.
5. Watch your language, especially about groups you dislike, and especially in private. Contempt in the vocabulary precedes contempt in the conduct.
6. Test your parish by its access, not by its intentions. Buildings, rotas, and seating say more about what a community believes than its statements do.
7. Where dignity conflicts with dignity, do not pretend the conflict away. Name it, use the reasoning of Chapter 5, seek counsel, and accept that some outcomes will be grievous.
8. Apply the doctrine to yourself. Self-contempt is not a virtue and it disables you for loving anyone else.
9. Remember that the least visible person in any room is the one by whom, according to Matthew 25, you are being assessed.

Questions for Reflection or Discussion

1. "I forgot I was a person." Where, in your own community, are people likely to be handled rather than met? Be specific.
2. Which of the categories in this chapter — the unborn, the elderly, prisoners, refugees, the disabled, enemies, the poor — do you find easiest to defend, and which hardest? What does your answer reveal?
3. The distinction between image and likeness: how does knowing that your worth is settled but your growth is not change how you approach your own failures?
4. Has your parish ever seated a well-dressed visitor better than a poor one, in the manner James describes? What would have to change for that to be impossible?
5. Christ was a refugee child in Egypt. How should that shape a Coptic Christian's instinct towards migrants — and where does the instinct stop being a policy argument and start being a matter of doctrine?
6. Think of someone you find it genuinely difficult to regard as your equal in dignity. What would praying for them by name, daily, for a month, actually do?

A Prayer

Lord God, You made every human being in Your image and did not withdraw it when we defaced it. Give me eyes to see You where I have not been looking: in the person I find tedious, in the one I have written off, in the one I am afraid of, in the one no one has greeted. Forgive me for the exceptions I have quietly made. And when I cannot see any worth in myself, remind me what You paid, and that You did not consider it too much. Amen.