Image of God

Conservative actor, comedian, and political commentator Steven Crowder is drawing criticism for comments he made on his program “Louder with Crowder,” where he seemed to make fun of Mattel’s newly announced Barbie doll with Down syndrome.

Christians carry the reputation of Christ, his message, and his church in our hands every day. Our words, attitudes, and actions influence people towards the Gospel or away from it. The world either sees an accurate picture of Jesus and his work through us, or they see a distorted version of Jesus. Christians must consider this in how we interact with others, even when political issues are at stake.

I have tremendous empathy for young people who live in confusion in a chaotic, messy culture. I believe that if I was young today being called “sir,” I might wonder if I was supposed to be a boy. I have empathy for these kinds of teenagers and young adults.

The biblical answer to what it means to be human is revolutionary. It’s the idea that God created everything and called everything good. Then He put Man and Woman on the earth to rule over it as His image-bearers. To represent Him and His will to the rest of the created order. The significance of this cannot be overstated. Here are three important reasons why.

Chuck Colson would say that, barring the message of salvation, the greatest gift Christianity gave the world is the idea of the image of God. Christians need to know and understand the image of God for three distinct reasons. 

The very concept of “bodily autonomy” was originally a Christian contribution to an often cruel and barbaric world. Far from suggesting that our bodies are mere heaps of matter for us to do with what we will, the Christian view was that to defile the body, either our own or another’s, is to violate the image of God. Regardless of how old, how young, how healthy, or how sick, a Christian view is that our bodies are not our own. “You were bought with a price,” Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, “therefore glorify God in your body.”

Jane Goodall recently won the 2021 Templeton Prize. The prize honors those who "harness the power of the sciences to explore the deepest questions of the universe and humankind’s place and purpose within it." Goodall is a longtime supporter of the Great Apes Personhood project, which seeks to confer human rights on primates. For all Goodall's talk of "intelligence," "purpose," and a "spark of divine energy" in living things, she seems to miss the utterly unique place of human beings in creation.

In this cultural moment where everything from movies to sports to even the church is politicized, it’s too easy to let our partisan team spirit shape whether or not we obey God and love our neighbors. But this part of the great commandment isn’t optional.

 Our lack of understanding and our inability to articulate what the image of God means, and what difference this doctrine makes, is an incredibly debilitating oversight in the Church right now, and this is for at least three reasons.