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The Imago Dei Revealed Through Genesis

Part 3, Fallacies

By Dr. Andrew Corbett, 20 January 2026, from Melbourne Victoria.

We have seen that Brent Strawn has observed that the imago Dei is “an empty cipher”[25] and that some scholars regard it as intentionally undefined so that humankind would deliberately have to consider, and even speculate, of its significance and implications.[26] This is almost certainly the reason why so much scholarship about the imago Dei has focused on the perceived attributes or capacities of, what is believed to be, the unique qualities of being a human. We considered the most common of these in Part 2. But John Kilner has argued that these so-called traits of what the imago Dei is do not define what it is. He reasons that each of these viewpoints are verbs not nouns – and that a human being cannot be defined by their ability or otherwise to exhibit these qualities. Kilner’s reasoning is obvious because we know that not all human beings can intellectually reason, reflect God’s character, or functionally relate to other humans – yet we know that they are still a human being and thus bearing the imago Dei. While there is reasonable disagreement about which capacities might be uniquely human, there are some views about the imago Dei that are clearly fallacious and have been cause of abuse and oppression. In this part of the series we will overview these fallacies and how they have distorted what the Bible reveals about the imago Dei.

The Peril of Distorting the Imago Dei

In Part 2 I explained that biblical hermeneutics sometimes involves the use of speculative philosophy. This involvement considers the flow of the text and asks relevant probing questions of it. It then factors in a consideration of what might seem to be ‘minor’ details. I refer to this before I remind us of the key text:So God created man in His own image,

in the image of God He created him;
male and female He created them.
Genesis. 1:27

The ‘minor’ details leading up to this verse reveal some salient details about the Creator in whom the imago Dei was to image. In Part 2 I listed those details which I now summarise as: God is revealed as omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent. Since the imago Dei is to image God, it is paramount to reflect on character of the God being imaged, rather than working eisegetically by reading back into the text what might be those traits any reflection on what are perceived as uniquely human traits. Kass’s astute question remains our starting point for defining the imago Dei:

What is God like, how is God understood? Only by answering these types of questions can one determine if (and how) human beings properly “image” God…. As Leon R. Kass puts it: “To see how man [sic] might be godlike, we look at the text to see what God is like.”[27]

To start with self-refection, subjectivism, about how we perceive ourselves as bearing God’s image, risks diminishing our objective, theological, proper starting point. Even though Kilner warns that the canonical data is surely not an exhaustive revelation of who God is,[28] but what is revealed in the sacred text is still sufficient for two purposes. Firstly, the Scriptures provide an adequate presentation of God’s identity and character exemplified in Christ (John 14:9; Heb 1:3). Secondly, there is enough clarity on what constitutes our preliminary understanding of the imago Dei to be able to determine fallacious aberrations of it. Therefore, I will now survey several errors – which should be thought of as dangerous fallacies – that have caused great harm to the very people that the doctrine of the imago Dei should ensure care, dignity and respect. These fallacies are (i) Chauvinism; (ii) Racism; and, (iii) Ableism. I will then return to my principal hermeneutic, the perspicuity of the bible, to counter these fallacies.

The Fallacy of Chauvinism

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.”
Genesis 1:26

Each of the fallacies that I am considering were promoted as being based on God’s Word – particularly Genesis 1. The chauvinism fallacy regards that woman do not bear the image of God. The text cited above is one of the biblical justifications for chauvinism. Perhaps you can see why? After all, this text specifically declares that God spoke of creating “man” – with no mention of creating a “woman”. Another key text for those who have promoted chauvinism is First Corinthians 11 –

7 For a man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man. 8 For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. 9 Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.
First Corinthians 11:7-9

In this passage there seems to be a clear distinction made between men having been made in the image and glory of God, and women on the other hand having been made in the glory of man. There is much evidence from Church history that this passage was used by many Church leaders to deny that women were imago Dei.

After the first century, among the earliest evidence of a connection between the image of God and second-class status for women is the writing of Tertullian at the beginning of the third century. Tertullian suggests that man rather than woman is God’s image, and that woman “destroyed so easily God’s image, man.”[29]

The implications of this outlook become more apparent late in the fourth century in the writings of Ambrosiaster, Diodore of Tarsus, and Chrysostom. Ambrosiaster explicitly maintains that women are not God’s image, and his influence helped ensure that women would receive inferior status in canon law. Diodore and Chrysostom from the school of Antioch similarly deny image-of-God status to women, thus maintaining that God has placed women, like everything else in the created order, under the dominion of men.
John F. Kilner, Dignity and Destiny: Humanity in the Image of God (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2015), 32.

As we see, Tertullian (ca. 160-240) believed that the first woman “destroyed so easily God’s image, man” and subsequently, as a result, women no longer bear the imago Dei. In the fourth century Church fathers mentioned in the Kilner quote “explicitly” taught that women were not God’s image. Then, in the fifth century, Augustine reasoned that only men were capable of being fully in the image of God.

Because of Augustine’s huge theological influence throughout the centuries, his conclusion that women are not fully in God’s image has fostered viewing women as inferior to men in church and society.

Kilner asserts that “Augustine tended to associate women and women’s bodies with emotion, sexuality, and other nonrational traits that he considered unreflective of God.” Perhaps building on Augustine’s teaching, Thomas Aquinas (13th century) :

takes up the question of women’s image-of-God status in order to refute the idea of some in his day that women are not at all in God’s image. However, he does so in a way reminiscent of Augustine, by acknowledging that in the temporal sphere women are not as fully God’s image as men are. In fact, drawing on Aristotelian arguments for the inferiority of women’s souls as well as bodies, Aquinas characterizes a female as a defective, undeveloped male.

In the sixteenth century, John Calvin seems to have reiterated Aquinas’s view about women by stating “the woman was created in the image of God, albeit in a secondary degree.” Later theologians then built on Calvin’s teaching claiming that since it was the woman who instigated the fall into sin by yielding to the temptation from the enemy, that women then generally lost the status as the imago Dei –

Men, with their “superior” godlike attributes such as reasoning and rulership (without serious regard for the degree to which those are socially developed rather than inherent), have often determined that men are the norm of humanity. They are the ones truly in the image of God. Women, then, in this outlook are at best deficient in terms of God’s image. Many theologians have gone so far as to suggest that women lack God’s image entirely, perhaps having lost it in “the Fall” (the Fall, as described in Genesis 3, being Adam’s and Eve’s first disobedience of God and resulting separation from God). Consequently, according to such theologians, women are not really human.

This theological position about women, largely held by the more traditional (“mainline”) church denominations, may have contributed to their simultaneous positions leading to the prevention of women from holding certain ministry or leadership positions within their churches. However, the consequences of rejecting the belief that women are created in the image of God is even more consequential than how church organisations regard women. The imago Dei is what humans are. Therefore, to not be regarded as the imago Dei is to not be regarded as a human. This is why Yale professor Margaret Farley observes:

“[N]umerous studies have already documented the tendency of Christian theology to … [refuse] to ascribe to women the fullness of the imago dei.” Theologian Stanley Grenz and others see this problem “throughout church history.” It has had quite a destructive impact on women. A consultation of the World Council of Churches in the late twentieth century concluded that “the doctrine of God’s image (imago Dei) has by tradition been a source of oppression and discrimination against women.”
Professor Farley’s assessment that a distortion of the doctrine of the imago Dei has “been a source of oppression and discrimination against women.

The Fallacy of Racism

I will offer three historic examples of the doctrine of the imago Dei being distorted to justify the oppression of certain people groups: (i) Native American Indians; (ii) Enslaved Africans by Europeans; and, (iii) Antisemitism by the Nazis.

(i) The Planned Extermination of the Native American Indians

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (1809-1894) was the son of a Congregationalist Pastor, a medical doctor, and a Harvard professor. He was “one of the greatest champions” to exterminate American Indians. He argued “that Native Americans were not fully “God’s image” as the “white man” was, “and so it would be appropriate for the “red man” to be “rubbed out.” His reasoning for this may have come from the philosophy of John Locke ho defined “what it is to be human—and therefore God-like” in terms of ‘the busy improvement of wealth-producing capacity.’ Native Americans did not appear to be very God-like and so “the result was again a violent one.”

From Wikipedia post about Holmes, we observe his public racism against African Americans and native American Indians:

In 1850, when Holmes was the Harvard professor of medicine he was approached by Martin Delany, an African-American man who had worked with Frederick Douglass. The 38-year-old requested admission to Harvard after having been previously rejected by four schools despite impressive credentials.^[83] In a controversial move, Holmes admitted Delany and two other black men to the Medical School. Their admission sparked a student statement, which read: “Resolved That we have no objection to the education and evaluation of blacks but do decidedly remonstrate against their presence in College with us.”^[84] Sixty students signed the resolution, although 48 students signed another resolution which noted it would be “a far greater evil, if, in the present state of public feeling, a medical college in Boston could refuse to this unfortunate class any privileges of education, which it is in the power of the profession to bestow”.^[72] In response, Holmes told the black students they would not be able to continue after that semester.^[84]^[85] A faculty meeting directed Holmes to write that “the intermixing of races is distasteful to a large portion of the class, & injurious to the interests of the school”.^[72] Despite his support of education for blacks, he was not an abolitionist; against what he considered the abolitionists’ habit of using “every form of language calculated to inflame”, he felt that the movement was going too far.^[86] This lack of support dismayed friends like James Russell Lowell, who once told Holmes he should be more outspoken against slavery. Holmes calmly responded, “Let me try to improve and please my fellowmen after my own fashion at present.”^[87] Nonetheless, Holmes believed that slavery could be ended peacefully and legally.^[88]

Holmes regarded Native Americans as “a sketch in red crayon of a rudimental manhood”. As to the “problem of his relation to the white race”, Holmes saw only one solution: “extermination”.^[89]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Wendell_Holmes_Sr.

(ii) Enslaved Africans by Europeans

When people today think of ‘slavery’ it is often a memory of seeing kidnapped Africans forcibly sold as slaves in chains and manacles to Europeans. The horrors of this immoral trade was often justified with a disfigured view of the imago Dei. This is the American freed slave Frederick Douglass, in 1841 attempted to correct the United States Supreme Court’s fallacious understanding of the image of God:

When the U.S. Supreme Court upheld slavery practices in the notorious Dred Scott decision of 1857, Douglass appealed to a higher court regarding this decision: It is an attempt to undo what God has done, to blot out the broad distinction instituted by the Allwise between men and things, and to change the image and superscription of the everliving God into a speechless piece of merchandise. Such a decision cannot stand. God will be true though every man be a liar.Douglass was not without support even in the judicial system, for Judge Nathan Green of the Tennessee Supreme Court had argued years earlier that “a slave is not in the condition of a horse. The slave … is made in the image of the Creator.”
Kilner 2015, 11-12

I have written more extensively on this particular issue in an article “Something’s Missing”. Needless to say that slave-traders and owners frequently justified their trade with a highly distorted view of the image God and anti-slavery campaigners went to great lengths to counter these distortions with a more exegetically correct interpretation of the Bible.

(iii) Antisemitism by the Nazis

There were two large factors in the creation of Adolf Hitler’s racism. Firstly, the reports of the efforts in the United States to “suppress and exploit Native American people”; and, secondly, the portrayal of this by the German novelist Karl Friedrich May (1842-1912) “that Hitler devotedly read.” The idea that not all people are imagers of God, and therefore not really human, in 1927 sowed the seeds for Hilter’s book, Mein Kampf. In this book Hitler wrote that the stronger members of a society were “images of the Lord” and that weaker are deformed images which need to be “cleansed from society.”

Hitler’s fallacious view about the imago Dei was challenged by a few German Christians including Dietrich von Hildebrand, who was forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1933. He argued for humanity continuing to be the “undeformed image of God”. In 1934 he wrote, “All of Western Christian civilization stands and falls with the words of Genesis, ‘God made man in His image.’”

The problem, then, was understanding God’s image in terms of something that can be deformed by sin or other causes, as can any human attribute. That understanding logically invited the conclusion that some people can be more in God’s image than others and so warrant greater respect and protection. What resulted in Nazi Germany were categories of people who were untermenschen (subhuman), those in whom the attributes that constituted God’s image were most deformed, marred, distorted, etc. They became the targets of Nazi efforts, first to eliminate people with disabilities or other frailties through neglect, forced sterilization, or killing. Later the focus turned to exterminating gypsies and Jews.
Kilner 2015, 21

Kilner cites Cahill (2006) who laments, “the devastating refusal by Christian theology to attribute the fullness of the imago Dei” to groups such as the millions exterminated by the Nazis. While Hitler’s antisemitism is infamous, despicable treatment of the disabled is far less so. We now consider the third class of imago Dei fallacy – ableism.

The Fallacy of Ableism

I have already referred to several biblical and theological scholars throughout history whom I greatly admire, yet disagree with their understanding of the imago Dei that has resulted in the fallacies of chauvinism and racism. My disagreement with these men does not entirely diminish my respect for them. The same now goes for Martin Luther (1483-1546).

A few years ago Kim and I travelled to Germany to visit the town where Luther posted his 95-theses on the Cathedral’s door. This gesture is considered by many to be the historic marker for the beginning of the Reformation. But Luther held to a fallacious view of the image of God. He believed that the imago Dei was evidenced by the capacities of the soul to reason. This is why he advocated for the drowning a 12-year-old child because he was “feeble-minded”. Being of limited intellectual capacities, to Luther, was evidence of the corruption of the child’s soul and lack of being an image of God. Kilner remarks, “Such treatment of people with disabilities was characteristic of the culture in which the early church developed, and has offered an influential pattern for the church’s treatment of people with disabilities whenever Christians have reduced being in God’s image to particular attributes.”

Conclusion

I am going to argue that the imago Dei which makes humankind unique is not defined by any verb. I am not suggesting that these verbs referred to in Part 2 are not among the resultant unique capacities possessed by human beings. Neither am I suggesting that the design of our bodies is entirely irrelevant to understanding the image of God – but in this life, which is subject to futility (Rom. 8:20) – we all have the glorious hope of having our bodies transformed in the Resurrection.

What I will be arguing for is that the Genesis texts reveal that the imago Dei is ontologically unique and is not distorted, lost, or forfeited because of the Fall. The key text of this study, Genesis 1:27, presents the imago Dei as being “male and female” who were created as complementary equals and ultimately became the father and mother of all nations and ethnic distinctives.

I am not saying the Fall has not impacted our abilities to live as imagers of God. I am, on the contrary, saying that even within the Book of Genesis (under the Old Covenant), this was still somewhat attainable, as I will show. However, I am arguing that the text of Genesis 1-2 intimates that what was revealed in those passages was a prelapsarian nascent vision of the image of God which was not completed. To more fully grasp what the eschatological vision our imaging looks like we must behold the risen, ascended, and glorified Saviour.

I charge you in the presence of God, who gives life to all things, and of Christ Jesus, who in his testimony before Pontius Pilate made the good confession, to keep the commandment unstained and free from reproach until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, which he will display at the proper time—he who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see. To him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen.
First Timothy 6:13-16

In our next instalment I consider the impact of the Fall on our propensity to image God.

REFERENCES

[25] Arnold B. T., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Genesis. Brent A. Strawn, Chapter 10, “From Imago to Imagines: The Image(s) of God in Genesis,” 211-235. Cambridge University Press; 2022, 211.

[26] Briggs nicely captures the gist of the third contextual insight: Genesis uses the phrase image of God to set us reading the canonical narrative with certain questions in mind, or, as one might say, the image of God serves as a hermeneutical lens through which to read the OT’s subsequent narratives. [35] The imago is, therefore, an “anthropological question.” [36] // [35] Briggs, “Humans,” 123. [36] Ibid., 124. Arnold B. T., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Genesis. Brent A. Strawn, Chapter 10, “From Imago to Imagines: The Image(s) of God in Genesis,” 211-235. Cambridge University Press; 2022, 219-20. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108529303.010

[27] Strawn, 2022, 220, citing Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom, 37. Similarly, von Rad, Genesis, 59: “If one wants to determine the content of this statement more closely, one must ask how ancient Israel thought in details of this Elohim,” though he immediately goes beyond Genesis by mentioning the divine predicates “wise” (2 Sam 14:17, 20) and good (1 Sam 29:9).

fn28 Kilner 2015, 74. “Yet nowhere does the text claim that Christ reveals everything about God—just that Christ does truly represent many things about God.”

[29] Kilner 2015, 31-32, citing Tertullian, 2002: bk. I, ch. 1, and Ruether, 1974: 157.

[30]

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[33]

[34]

[35]

[36].