---
title: 'The Image of God and Human Dignity'
type: text
hasMedia: true
requiresPurchase: false
authors:
- 'Ben Dunson'
date: 2026-03-24
topics:
- 'Anthropology (Doctrine of Man)'
- 'Ethics (General)'
- 'Social Issues'
scriptures:
- 'Genesis 1'
- 'Genesis 9'
- 'Romans 1'
- 'Romans 3'
- 'Romans 8'
- '2 Corinthians 3'
- 'Colossians 1'
- 'Colossians 3'
url: https://confessional.org/the-image-of-god-and-human-dignity
---

# The Image of God and Human Dignity

The image of God in man means that man was created to reflect God’s rule over creation and His glorious moral character. While man retains the vocational and existential dimensions of the image of God, the moral image of God was lost in the fall, and can only be restored through union with Christ. The various Biblical dimensions of the image of God have to be carefully considered when determining how this applies to the basic rights of a human being. 

When God made man on the sixth day of creation, man was made “in our image, after our likeness” (Gen. 1:26). This compact phrase is foundational to understanding man’s nature; at the very least, it reveals that man is uniquely like God.

Theologians have debated the meaning of the phrase “image of God,” but recently the term has taken on more significance as it is increasingly used by modern ethical theories to ground their view of the significance of the human person.

It played a prominent role in twentieth-century Roman Catholic social teaching, where it was linked to inherent dignity and equality. *Gaudium et Spes* (1965), for instance, argues that since all possess a rational soul and the same divine calling, “the basic equality of all must receive increasingly greater recognition” (Section 29). Two sentences later, the document argues that “with respect to the fundamental rights of the person, every type of discrimination, whether social or cultural, whether based on sex, race, color, social condition, language or religion, is to be overcome and eradicated as contrary to God’s intent.” It cites inherent dignity over fifty times to advocate for various social and political positions.

This linkage between the image of God, inherent human dignity, and human rights has significantly impacted recent evangelical thought. Sometimes this influence is explicit, but often it appears to have been absorbed through cultural osmosis. A recent article from the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission argues that the *imago Dei* means every human possesses inherent worth “by virtue of being human.” This has practical consequences; a 2023 SBC resolution used the “inherent dignity” of man as an image-bearer to argue for a pathway to legal status for illegal aliens.

Others have criticized the specific coupling of image of God, human dignity, and various contemporary ethical applications. One specific challenge to this way of thinking argues that while man was made in God’s image with knowledge and basic moral goodness, this image was lost in the Fall. The image of God, on this understanding, cannot serve as the basis for asserting qualities such as inherent human dignity.

To evaluate the ethical use of the image of God we must determine what the Bible has to say about it. We first encounter the language of God’s image in the creation account in Genesis 1:26–28:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

This passage does not provide a definition of the image of God, but it does clearly reveal what is at the heart of it: man was made to rule over the world that God made and rules sovereignly over. In that sense, mankind reflects God’s being. This could be called the vocational dimension of the image of God.

In the New Testament, a second dimension of the image of God is clearly seen, though it is implicit even in the Old Testament usage: man reflects, or was originally created to reflect, the moral goodness of God. This could be called the moral dimension of the image of God.

The New Testament describes man as having an original moral righteousness as an image bearer who reflected God’s own righteousness. One way it does this is through the connection between image and glory. Adam and Eve as created, prior to sinning, were glorious beings in that they reflected God’s glory—His moral perfections—perfectly. In 2 Corinthians 3:18, Paul writes that regenerated believers “with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.” Man’s original glory as an image bearer, wholly lost in the fall, is restored in Christ.

Paul writes in Romans 1:21–23 that men in their sinful rebellion against God, “although they knew God . . . did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.”

The glorious image of God in man was thrown off by man so that he might worship idolatrous images. “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” Paul writes in Romans 3:23. But in Christ, “those whom \[God\] foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers” (Rom. 8:29; see also Col. 1:15). God conformed them to the image of His son by restoring their original glory (Rom. 8:30). To be renewed in this way is to bear the image of the creator once again (see Col. 3:9–10). The moral dimension of the image of God is restored only in union with Jesus Christ. Sinners outside of Christ do not retain the image of God in this particular sense.

It is because of the total loss of the image of God in unredeemed man that some have argued that the image of God cannot serve as the basis for a doctrine of human dignity. However, Genesis 9:6 says that “whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.” Capital punishment for murder is in this text grounded in the fact that man is made in the image of God. Man is not an animal, nor an inanimate object. He cannot be unjustly attacked precisely because he is made in the image of God. This we could call the existential dimension of the image of God.

We may now return to the question of human dignity. Is this a sound Christian concept? If what is meant by human dignity is simply the fact that man as an image-bearer of God must be treated justly, then there might be no objection. But conflating human dignity and the modern concept of “human rights,” namely, to insist on an almost unlimited number of things that are due all people because they bear the image of God, from social welfare, to free college tuition, to a universal basic income, to the right not to be offended, to the right to settle in any nation they choose, is unbiblical. The biblical concept of the image of God does not provide support for such “rights,” nor for “human dignity,” if this is what is meant.

On the other hand, even though the moral image of God was completely lost in the fall, the fact that man retains the vocational and existential dimensions of the image of God, those “certain remains of it existing in the mind and heart of man after the fall” (Francis Turretin, *Institutes of Elenctic Theology*, 9.8.3), means that there is a moral obligation binding on all men to treat every fellow man justly. The biblical concept of the image of God does, then, undergird basic principles of human justice.

Christian theological and ethical reflection must carefully distinguish the various biblical dimensions of the image of God: the vocational, moral, and existential dimensions each have a unique focus and unique implications for salvation, Christian living, and even ethical applications in civil society, law, and government.