Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck enriched our understanding of what it means to be made in God’s image by emphasizing wholeness. He argued that the whole person—body, soul, and faculties—rather than a single human characteristic (like rationality) images God. Nor does the fullness of the image end there. Only humanity as a whole, spread throughout all places and all time, is “the fully finished image, the most telling and striking likeness of God.”
Bavinck’s insights about God’s image shed light on human well-being individually and in community. His observations help us discern how to respond to our neighbors in need, both in the church and in the public sphere. The doctrine of the imago Dei gives us a vision for effective compassion that addresses the needs of the whole person in the context of community.
Holistic Response to Neighbors’ Needs
To be made in the image of the triune God means we’re relational. Effective compassion recognizes this reality by seeking the flourishing of the whole person and by pursuing relationships that nurture wholeness. Because need is relational, so should our response be. But the relational nature of a person’s need is easy to overlook.
Material needs can be the most obvious and urgent, overshadowing deeper relational brokenness. “We often think of needy people as those who lack material things. But people are complex,” writes Chris Sicks. “Everyone has emotional, spiritual, relational, and material needs. Ministry is less compassionate, less effective, when it addresses one type of needs but ignores the others.”
To be made in the image of the triune God means we’re relational.
Responding to material needs also tends to be simpler. Writing a check is faster and easier than the long-term, complicated work of building a relationship. But as Sicks makes clear, mercy ministry is inescapably relational: “Real, incarnational ministry requires investment—of your time, your energy, your presence, yourself. But without those investments you have not made your love, or God’s love, tangible.”
Relationships establish the context for mercy ministry that communicates in both words of truth and deeds of love. Neglecting relational ministry denies those in need the most unique gift churches can share with them. After all, the church is built on the restored relationship made possible through Christ’s work of reconciliation. Having received such mercy, Christians should respond by desiring for others the wholeness that comes when relationships are restored—first with God and then with self, other people, and the material world.
Holistic Vision for Public Life
A vision of holistic flourishing should shape Christians’ approach to issues of human dignity in the public square. Over the past half-century, U.S. public policy has become more concerned with addressing material needs, and conditions in the U.S. have improved when compared to millions around the world who lack access to basic sustenance. For that, we ought to rejoice, but we cannot be satisfied.
While material conditions have improved, relational conditions have worsened. Four out of 10 children are born to single mothers, and data indicates these children are at much greater risk of experiencing poverty. Rates of overdoses and suicides have markedly increased in the last two decades as well.
Broken relationships are at the heart of some of the most pressing challenges individuals and communities face today. While targeting material needs, policymakers mustn’t overlook the importance of relationships to human flourishing.
While targeting material needs, policymakers mustn’t overlook the importance of relationships to human flourishing.
This means Christians have a role to play in public policy. Just as God designed the whole person in his image to flourish through spiritual, relational, and physical development, so he designed creation to flourish through humanity’s knowledgeable stewardship of its many spheres.
Our common life depends on the competencies of various institutional spheres of responsibility. Family, church, government, business enterprises, and wide-ranging associations all contribute to human well-being. Each has a role to play in addressing needs, and the testimony of church life in particular should shape policymakers’ conceptions of the range of potential responses to society’s challenges.
What Sicks points out about teaming up among individuals is also true at an institutional level. Sharing the load is essential to bring all the necessary capacities and expertise to bear on challenges that hinder human flourishing.
The Gospel Coalition