No question today is more pertinent than this: What does it mean to be human? With declining belief in God and rising secularization come renewed debates concerning human nature. Culture now seems to hold to two contradictory beliefs: Either that we’re entirely material beings, meaningless clumps of matter in an endless void; or that we’re sovereign masters who determine our own meaning, with an internal sense of who we are that we dare not defy.
It’s no surprise that rejections of God lead to confusion concerning the image of God and the biblical teaching that we’re humbly related to this material cosmos and yet dignified as the crown of creation. With the advent of artificial intelligence and ongoing debates about race, gender, and sexuality, it’s all the more important to be clear about what we are and who we’re made to be.
Learning about a Christian theological anthropology is no mere academic exercise. It gets to the heart of who we are, explains our daily experience, and pushes us toward the love of neighbor and the common good.
A Christian theological anthropology gets to the heart of who we are and pushes us toward the love of neighbor and the common good.
In my book, For Us and for Our Salvation, I seek to address these issues by providing a biblical, theological, and practical introduction to the doctrines of humanity and sin. In this article, I present 12 theses that summarize a biblical and Reformed-catholic theological anthropology that I explain throughout the book. These 12 theses, I hope, can ground us as we stand in culture’s ever-changing landscape.
1. All human beings are made in the image of the triune God and are thus called to represent, enjoy, and glorify God forever.
God creates each individual according to his image. The first-person plural in Genesis 1:26 indicates that the whole triune God is the archetype for the human being, for each person of the Trinity shares a singular divine substance (see also Col. 1:15–17). Humans are created as representatives of God and are thus religious creatures made to have communion with their Origin. Therefore, each human being as such is created good, with dignity and agency.
Our religiosity, corrupted by the fall, doesn’t lead us to cease being religious but rather causes us to elevate and idolize one aspect of creation over others, as we prefer the creature over the Creator (Rom. 1:18–23). We refuse to acknowledge God as the end for which we were made, and we seek enjoyment in other things—we idolize good, created reality and render it ultimate.
2. The doctrine of the image of God entails both ontological and ethical affirmations. God creates humans as embodied souls with intellectual and volitional capacities, and he calls humans to represent him by a proper exercise of those faculties in righteousness, holiness, and true knowledge.
Human beings are endowed with capacities for wisdom and righteousness. A twofold metaphysical concept is important here: act and potency. Potency refers to the natural power that distinguishes a particular kind of thing from other kinds, and act refers to the exercise of that power.
Humans, for instance, are the kinds of beings endowed with the potency to think rationally, but the actualization of those potencies is a distinct matter. Edward Feser clarifies,
In arguing for the existence of active potencies or causal powers, Scholastic writers emphasize the point that a cause is not always bringing about its characteristic effect. . . . My power to write must therefore be distinguished from this or that actual, particular action of writing, as a standing precondition of the latter.
Infants or those in a comatose state due to some serious injury, therefore, continue to be image-bearers, even while the potency for wisdom or will isn’t actualized in any way.
Similarly, those who are cognitively impaired still have the potency or essential capacity of reason and volition even though it manifests differently than in others, and even if the exercise of those powers is only actualized in the resurrection. (By contrast, a hypothetically resurrected squirrel will never actualize powers of rationality, because it was never in its nature to possess this capacity.) If humans are the particular creatures called to be in communion with and representatives of God, then such potencies are precisely those presupposed to make them fitting for the task.
This focus on what human beings are, with its attendant formal capacities (or essential potencies), then, doesn’t introduce a gradation for the image of God but rather complements and grounds the emphasis on human dignity. Every human is made in the image of God, whether or not he or she actualizes wisdom or righteousness.
3. Just as the visible creation witnesses to the invisible God, the image of God includes the body, as shown in its created goodness, dependence, and fittingness for the soul.
The body is a fitting home for the soul, and the soul is, in turn, the form of the body. As embodied souls, humans image God through their sexed bodies, and their personalities are communicated by way of embodiment.
God has created our bodies good, has assumed one in the incarnation, and is committed to resurrect them in the consummation of the new creation. The body is thus a reminder of humanity’s humility and exaltation (Ps. 8). Humans represent God and yet absolutely depend on God.
Humans are privileged to be embodied. Grasping our distinctiveness—even from that of the angels—can help us think well about artificial intelligence. Consider the parallels between angels and AI: Both are free from bodily limitations, both are said to be more intelligent than humans (although, angels also have a unique intelligence that AI cannot possess), both have longer lifespans, and both have access to a wealth of information that no human does.
One might ask the question this way: If the angels were created a little higher than humanity (v. 5), why is it good for us, not them, to be the image and representation of God?
The answer lies in our embodied agency and relational responsibilities toward one another. Wisdom and righteousness are embodied virtues. We bear unique responsibility for the other, as we share familial and natural relations with each other. Angels and AI cannot replicate this familial or physical bond and thus cannot participate in the care and love intrinsic to human relations and requisite for human wisdom and righteous love for God and neighbor.
When a human is righteous or fails to be righteous, his community rises or falls with him. AI can neither take the blame nor be responsible for the well-being or demise of humanity; it cannot come alongside humanity and participate in its embodied experiences, suffering, or joy. The responsibility for AI is traceable back to its producers and users.
Human embodiment isn’t a detrimental weakness of our nature that makes us inferior to the angels or AI, but it enriches human existence with a complex web of relations and a redemptive-history into which angels long to look (1 Pet. 1:12) and about which silicon machines cannot know.
4. The image of God entails stewarding and cultivating creation: the cultural mandate.
The cultural mandate is the vocational aspect of the image of God. God calls human beings to be fruitful and multiply (Gen. 1:28), and this involves not merely procreation but also the cultivation of creation through the formation of culture. If God creates out of nothing, humans create out of nature.
Human embodiment isn’t a detrimental weakness of our nature that makes us inferior to the angels or AI.
As human beings spread across the globe, so is the glory of God spreading through human representation. This natural development leads to the affirmation that cultural diversity itself is good. Given the fall, however, cultural diversity is mired in sin and leads to much conflict and division.
This side of the fall, the cultural mandate is carried out not merely by the natural course of the family and cultural formation but also by the preaching of the gospel. The gospel is the means through which humans are reformed to represent God properly, and the gospel orients regenerate cultures to the glory of God.
5. The image of God refers to humanity as a single, corporate whole, united under a federal head, and thus humanity has a teleological orientation for a consummated existence of perfect and everlasting fellowship with God in a sanctified and perfected cosmos.
Though God creates each individual in his image, God’s absolute perfection can never be reflected by mere individuals. It’s humanity, taken together as a corporate whole, that is called to image God in his fullness.
The promise of a consummated existence of a perfect and everlasting fellowship with God is offered to the first humans before the fall through the covenant of works, as the federal head (Adam) was called to be fruitful and multiply, and to work and keep the temple-garden as the prophet, priest, and king. Adam was thus promised a glorious existence that far exceeded his finite obedience—a heavenly world filled with cultures that glorify and enjoy God.
6. Adam was the federal head of humanity, and his originating sin resulted in the imputation of guilt and the transmission of corruption to humanity as a whole.
God has designed human beings to be diverse individuals united by a singular federal head, either in Adam or in Christ. If Adam had offered perfect, personal, and perpetual obedience in the state of innocence, he would have transmitted his natural, concreated original righteousness to his progeny and would have won the reward of a glorified existence with God in immutable, sinless perfection.
Adam, however, fell, and thus his guilt and ensuing corruption were transmitted to his progeny by imputation. Guilt is the status of condemnation, and corruption refers to the loss of original righteousness, which leads to the vicious acts of the flesh.
7. Original corruption refers to the loss of original righteousness and the illicit concupiscence that now marks human nature, the source of all actual sins.
Fallen humanity has forfeited the reward of everlasting fellowship with God and is now corrupted. The promise of glory, offered in the covenant of works, was lost, and nature is under a curse.
Recall from thesis #2 that human nature is created with the potencies for righteousness, holiness, and wisdom, and that created humanity actualized them. These natural potencies also entail a difference between a mere absence and a privation.
A privation is the lack of a natural property that was supposed to be actualized. A tree that lacks sight isn’t called blind, for it was never in its nature to see in the first place. Likewise, a lion who fails to pray isn’t called impious. A human who lacks wisdom, however, is foolish, and one who fails to love God is unholy.
In human beings, then, the absence of righteousness isn’t a mere absence, since humans were created to be righteous. That lack doesn’t leave us neutral; it issues in wickedness, vice, and depravity.
The privation of original righteousness leads to concupiscence, the illicit tendency toward all sin and the source of all acts of sin. The unregenerate person is thus totally depraved: Sin has marred the whole of human nature, and it’s only by God’s common grace that humans aren’t utterly sinful.
Fallen humanity, therefore, has no internal resources to prepare itself to receive salvation, and the grace of effectual regeneration is necessary for humans to have faith in Christ.
8. Death is the just wage of sin and the unnatural separation of the soul from the body.
Having sinned against God, humans are now destined to die (Rom. 6:23). Death is the separation of the soul from the body—and this isn’t God’s creational intention. Thus, God is committed to resurrect the body, without which humans are incomplete.
Death confirms our intuition that the world is deeply broken though it was originally good. Our longing to be free from death witnesses to our original end of everlasting fellowship with God. We long for the day when death will be no more in the resurrection of the body.
9. Christ’s human obedience is the exemplar for the restored and sanctified image of God.
What’s the relationship between who we are as image-bearers and Christ, who is called the image of God (Col. 1:15–17)?
We should be careful to distinguish passages in which Christ is referred to as the divine Son of God in his preincarnate state, on the one hand, and Christ according to his incarnation and the economy of the gospel, on the other. When one claims that Christ is the image of God, we should ask, In which respect and according to which nature—the divine nature or the human nature?
Second Corinthians 4:4 is about the latter, as the context indicates, and as such Christ came after the pattern and failed representation of the first Adam. The Son, in this sense, was made in the “likeness of men” (Phil. 2:7–8), and the Word was made “flesh” (John 1:14). He was made like us in every way, so that he might be the great high priest who sympathizes with us (Heb. 2:14–17; 4:15).
As the One who succeeded where Adam failed, Christ shows us perfect human obedience, and is as such the norm for all human beings. He is the last Adam (1 Cor. 15:45–49), and we will be made like him in death and resurrection (Rom. 8:17, 29; 1 John 3:2). The incarnation was for the redemption of humans from sin (1 Tim. 1:15).
As G. C. Berkouwer notes, “In [Bavinck’s and Calvin’s] thinking they always approach the Incarnation from a consideration of man’s fall and guilt.” In this sense, therefore, though Christ is the norm and standard for perfect human obedience, his human nature can only be understood by looking at that nature first, for he was made like us.
The place of Christ’s righteousness, as exemplified in his embodied human character, is in pointing us to the norm of human living—the law of God. The divine Son is the eternally begotten image of God, and his eternal sonship means he fittingly assumed a human nature in our likeness as a son of Adam, and lived that human life as the second Adam in perfect obedience to the law of God.
He shows us the perfect human being who images God in knowledge, righteousness, and holiness (Eph. 4:24; Col. 3:10). As humans imitate Christ and follow the law by the Spirit, we’re being conformed to that image once again.
Sanctified and perfected human beings are therefore image-bearers not merely ontologically but also morally and consummately. The saints of the church triumphant in heaven live consistently with who they are.
10. Regeneration of the ‘inner self’ is a definite starting point for the renewal of human nature and is a guarantee for a resurrected, glorified, and consummate human nature.
Regeneration is the result of God’s effectual calling, through which he restores our nature such that we’re enabled once again to obey God in holiness. God regenerates the “inner self,” that is, the center of human personality that directs the whole person.
It’s humanity, taken together as a corporate whole, that is called to image God in his fullness.
Talk of a “new man” or a “new creation” shouldn’t be misread as if our human nature itself is replaced with another. Christians are still human beings. Christians are still the same persons as their former, non-Christian selves, but re-formed and redirected. Regeneration doesn’t transmute us from humans to angels or something wholly other but rather conforms us to who we were made to be. The “newness,” in other words, refers to the spiritual qualities that now mark out the human nature of the believer.
Likewise, we should take care when talking about our sinfulness. We shouldn’t think of our fallen state as bestowing on us a “sin nature” alongside our human nature. Yes, we are by nature children of wrath; we have a body of sin (Rom. 7:24), but sin is parasitic on the good and doesn’t have a nature or substance of its own (for then God would be the author of sin).
Augustine, then, argues that the “creature, which cleaves to God, differs from those who do not, not by nature, but by fault.” As Thomas McCall reminds us, we have to remember that any talk of sinful nature presupposes that “our natures, originally created as good and called such by God, have become corrupted by sin.”
The Spirit as given is the firstfruits of the consummate human nature of the age to come (Rom. 8:23). This is a down payment for the glorified human nature that Christians will receive in the resurrection—what God has begun in us, he will complete (Phil. 1:6). Though Christians still struggle with indwelling sin now, they can, by the Spirit’s power, obey God. And in the last day, Christian righteousness is confirmed such that the presence of sin shall be no more.
11. Humanity is created male and female, and this sexed, complementary difference is good. It witnesses to Christ and the church, whether in marriage or in faithful singleness.
Human beings are sexed, embodied creatures, created male and female. This sexed distinction is good—males and females complement each other, as seen in the fruitfulness of procreation and companionship. Our bodies are thus authorities that one must heed, and our basic identity is given rather than constructed by our own sincerity, psychological inner sense, or desires.
John Kleinig rightly shows,
[It’s] misleading and unhelpful to identify a person as either homosexual or heterosexual. We are sexual people who can engage in heterosexual or homosexual acts or even in both kinds. But that does not determine who we are.
If God has given us our bodies, we should seek to glorify God with them, living in ways that please him, for our own good. We can act in ways consistent with who we are as image-bearers and as united to Christ, or we can act in ways inconsistent with those basic realities.
Our sexed bodies also point us to the hope of the resurrection. Gender dysphoria and the problems that have to do with our bodies now—including aging, decay, suffering, and the conflict between the sexes—are features of the fall and should make us long for the day when we will be perfected, glorified, and one with our consummate bodies.
As the One who succeeded where Adam failed, Christ shows us perfect human obedience, and is as such the norm for all human beings.
As Matthew Mason argues, “For those who experience gender dysphoria but cling to Christ for mercy and hope, surely one of the glories of the new creation will be to receive back the body they were originally given, transformed and glorified, to inhabit that body as their Creator and Redeemer’s loving gift, and finally to be at rest.” In the last day, we’ll exist in harmony with all that God has intended us to be.
We should also take care not to pressure ourselves into exemplifying (or even listening to!) all the cultural norms associated with masculinity and femininity that go beyond embodiment and Scripture (e.g., personality traits), for no one male or female can possibly exemplify them all (thesis #5), and we should distinguish between cultural custom and nature. Only in the last day, when the corporate image of God is consummated, can we see the fullness of masculinity and femininity.
Finally, both marriage and singleness point us to Christ, though in distinct ways. Marriage testifies to Christ’s sacrificial love and the church’s sanctified submission. Singleness testifies to the sufficiency of Christ as our true Bridegroom. To say singleness is a gift shouldn’t be misunderstood as claiming that those with the “gift” of singleness would find it easy or have no desire for a marital relation now. Singleness is a gift per se because it has eschatological significance—we will not be given in marriage in the last day, for the substance has come.
The church, therefore, should be a welcoming community for married families and singles, for the church is the body of Christ in which each has his or her place, and those who don’t have children may, too, have children in the Lord and participate as mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters in the community of Christ.
12. Human cultural diversity, though often leading to division due to sin, is a creational good, and the kingdom of God will comprise a diversity of cultures with a common confession of the triune God.
“Race” is a social construct, raised by sinful imagination, and the differences one sees among the peoples are cultural, not ontological. These organic cultural differences that morph and shift over time arise naturally due to the geographical and historical distribution of humanity have resulted in sin, conflict, and division after the fall.
In the last day, the kingdom of God will be made up of a diversity of tribes, tongues, and nations, with a common confession of the triune God. We should witness to this eschatological vision now by not mistaking cultural preferences for theological essentials, and by hospitality and a love of neighbor that crosses cultural boundaries.
God desires for the cultures, united under the confession of his lordship, to be consummated, and no single Christianized culture in any time or place is coterminous with the Christian culture or the kingdom of God. Christians are thus called to bear a chastened, transformational witness to the way of the kingdom now.
Holistic Vision
These 12 theses serve as merely an entryway to a broad Christian Reformed anthropology. If the pressing issue of our day concerns what it means to be human, we urgently need to retrieve the broader Christian tradition and biblical teaching on this doctrine.
We’re created in God’s image, made for fellowship with God and others, and restored by Christ and the Spirit. Christians, therefore, aren’t becoming less or other than human but becoming more fully human. May this witness to our fellow image-bearers.
The Gospel Coalition