A Brief Statement

I hold that man is the crown of God’s earthly creation — the one creature made in the image of God, male and female, to know Him, to represent Him, and to steward the world He has made. He is a living unity of an earthly body and an immaterial inner nature — spirit, soul, and body together — fashioned from the dust and quickened by the breath of God. In Adam, he fell: the image was defaced but not erased, and the whole person — mind, will, and affections — was corrupted and brought under death.

Yet fallen man is not abandoned man. He remains God’s image-bearer, the object of God’s redeeming love, and in Christ, he is being remade after that image, destined for the resurrection of the body and the restoration of all that sin defaced. Human dignity and human identity, therefore, rest not in ourselves but in our Creator and Redeemer — and that is the surest ground a searching age could find.

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A Detailed Exposition

Made in the Image of God

The Bible’s answer to “What is man?” (Psalm 8:4) begins at the sixth day, where man alone is said to be made “in the image of God” (Genesis 1:26–27). The Hebrew words are tselem, “image,” and demuth, “likeness”; the New Testament’s word is eikōn, used of Christ Himself as “the image of the invisible God.”¹ What this image consists of has been variously understood, and the views are best taken together rather than against one another: the image is substantive — the rational, moral, and spiritual capacities that set man above the beasts; it is relational — the capacity to know and commune with God and with one another; and it is functional — the commission to rule and steward the earth as God’s representative.² It is shared equally by male and female, who together bear the image (Genesis 1:27), and it is the ground of all human dignity. The very first word about man is a word about God: we are defined by whose image we bear.³

Created from Dust and Breath

The second chapter of Genesis fills in the manner of our making, and it holds together two truths that the whole doctrine of man must keep. “The LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature” (Genesis 2:7). We are dust — made of the same stuff as the world, earthy, dependent, mortal; this is our humility. And we are breath — enlivened by the very breath of God and bearing His image; this is our dignity.⁴ From this it follows that the body is not a prison to be escaped, nor a mere shell housing the “real” person. God pronounced the material creation “very good” (Genesis 1:31), and man is by design an embodied creature. The contempt for the body that marked the old pagan dualisms has no place in Christian thought.

The Constitution of Man: Spirit, Soul, and Body

What, then, is the inner makeup of this creature? Scripture speaks of man’s immaterial nature under more than one term — soul (Hebrew nephesh, Greek psychē) and spirit (Hebrew ruach, Greek pneuma) — alongside the body (sōma).⁵ Christians have long differed over how to count these. The majority have held to dichotomy — that man is two parts, a material body and a single immaterial soul or spirit, the two words naming one inner life from different angles. I hold rather to trichotomy — that spirit, soul, and body are distinguishable: the spirit as the God-conscious element, by which we commune with our Maker; the soul as the self-conscious element, the seat of mind, will, and affections; and the body as the world-conscious element, by which we touch the physical creation. Paul’s prayer that “your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless” (1 Thessalonians 5:23), and the Word’s power to pierce “to the division of soul and of spirit” (Hebrews 4:12), seem to me to support the distinction.⁶ I hold this as conviction, not as a test of fellowship; the deeper truth, on any reckoning, is that man is a unity — not a ghost in a machine, but a single person who is at once embodied and ensouled.⁷

The Fall and Its Effects

Man did not remain as God made him. In Adam’s disobedience, the whole race fell, and the effects reach every part of our nature. The image of God was defaced but not destroyed — fallen man still bears it, which is why the shedding of human blood is an assault on God’s image, and why we may not curse those made in His likeness (Genesis 9:6; James 3:9).⁸ But the ruin is deep and total in its extent: the spirit, once alive to God, is now “dead in trespasses and sins” (Ephesians 2:1); the body is subject to decay and death, for “sin came into the world … and death through sin” (Romans 5:12); the understanding is darkened (Romans 1:21; 1 Corinthians 2:14); and the original righteousness is lost. This is what the older divines meant by total depravity — not that man is as bad as he could possibly be, but that no part of him is untouched by sin and that he cannot save himself. I treat the remedy in my paper on Soteriology; here it is enough to say that the grace which saves also begins the repair of the image.⁹

Free Will and Responsibility

Made in God’s image, man is a moral and responsible being — a creature with a will, accountable to his Maker for his choices. This is no small dignity, and Scripture everywhere assumes it: God commands, invites, warns, and judges, all of which presuppose that we genuinely choose. Yet the Fall has bound the will it did not abolish. Fallen man still chooses freely according to his nature, but his nature is now enslaved to sin, so that he will not — and apart from grace cannot — come to God (John 6:44; Romans 8:7–8).¹⁰ Divine sovereignty and human responsibility are not rivals: God works, and man is accountable, and Scripture holds the two together without apology. The freedom that matters most is the freedom Christ gives — the liberation of the will to love and obey God at last.

The Body Redeemed

Because man is an embodied creature, redemption must reach the body too, and it does. The eternal Son did not despise our flesh but took it: “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14), forever hallowing what He assumed. And the salvation He brings is not the soul’s escape from the body but the redemption of the whole person, “the redemption of our bodies” (Romans 8:23), in a resurrection that raises this mortal frame imperishable and glorious (1 Corinthians 15:42–44) — a hope I trace further in my paper on Eschatology.¹¹ The end of the story is the renewal of the image: the Christian is even now “being renewed … after the image of its Creator” and “being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another,” to be at last “conformed to the image of His Son” (Colossians 3:10; 2 Corinthians 3:18; Romans 8:29). What sin defaced, grace restores — and more.¹²

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Practical Implications

Ministry Emphasis: Christian Identity and Human Dignity

First, this doctrine answers the question our age cannot stop asking: “Who am I?” The world says we must look within and invent ourselves, and the search leaves people exhausted and unmoored. Scripture says our identity is received, not constructed: we are made in God’s image, fallen in Adam, and — in Christ — remade. To know whose image you bear is to find solid ground in the shifting sand and rest for a restless heart.

Second, it grounds the sanctity of human life. Every human being, from conception to natural death, bears the image of God — the unborn and the aged, the disabled and the dying, the powerful and the powerless alike. This conviction stands behind the protection of life against abortion and euthanasia, and behind a watchful conscience as biotechnology gains the power to manufacture, edit, and discard human life. The weakest image-bearers have the strongest claim upon our care.

Third, it teaches us to honor the body rightly — neither worshiping it, as the culture does, nor despising it, as the old heresies did. How we treat our bodies, our sexuality, our suffering, and our dying all follow from this: the body is good, it is part of who we are, and it will be raised. We are not saved from our bodies but, in the end, in them.

Finally, it shapes how I would minister and how the church should engage its neighbors. To sit with men who are hurting and broken — by what others have done to them, or by what they have done — is to remind them, gently and truly, whose image they still bear and what grace can yet make of them. And to engage the culture is to hold conviction and kindness together: standing unmoved in the truth while extending the compassion of Christ, because the person across the table, however far from God, is no accident but an image-bearer for whom Christ died.

Made in His image, marred in the fall, and — in Christ — being made new: this is the story of man.

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Biblical, Exegetical, Theological, and Historical Notes

Genesis 1:26–27 uses two Hebrew words: tselem (צלם), “image,” and demuth (דמות), “likeness” — not two different things but a single reality named twice. The New Testament term is eikōn (εἰκών), used of man (1 Corinthians 11:7; James 3:9) and supremely of Christ, “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15), into whose image the redeemed are being remade (Romans 8:29).
The image of God has been understood in three principal ways, best held together as complementary: the substantive (the image consists in man’s rational, moral, and spiritual capacities); the relational (in his capacity for fellowship with God and with others); and the functional (in his commission to rule and steward the earth as God’s vice-regent, Genesis 1:28; Psalm 8:5–8). Each captures part of the truth.
The plural “Let Us make man” (naʼaseh, Genesis 1:26) has been explained as a plural of majesty, a divine deliberation or address to the heavenly court, or — as the church has often discerned — an early intimation of the plurality within the Godhead later revealed as the Trinity. The last reading coheres with the whole of Scripture; see my paper on Theology Proper.
Genesis 2:7 holds together man’s lowliness and his glory: he is formed of dust (and to dust he returns, Genesis 3:19), yet enlivened by the inbreathed “breath of life,” becoming a “living creature” (nephesh chayyah). The body is therefore good, part of God’s “very good” creation (Genesis 1:31), and not a prison from which the soul must escape — the error of Platonic and Gnostic dualism.
Scripture’s key terms: for the immaterial nature, nephesh (נפש) / psychē (ψυχή), “soul,” and ruach (רוח) / pneuma (πνεῦμα), “spirit” (each also meaning “breath” or “wind”); for the material, sōma (σῶμα), “body.” These terms overlap in usage, which is part of why their precise relation is debated.
Dichotomy holds that man is twofold (body and soul/spirit), “soul” and “spirit” being two names for the one immaterial nature; it is the majority view and reads 1 Thessalonians 5:23 as a comprehensive way of saying “the whole person.” Trichotomy holds that spirit, soul, and body are distinguishable (1 Thessalonians 5:23; Hebrews 4:12), the spirit being the God-conscious faculty and the soul the seat of personality; it has been common in the dispensational tradition (e.g., Chafer). I hold trichotomy, while granting that the terms are not always used with such precision and that the difference between the views is one of degree, not of fundamental anthropology.
Whichever division one adopts, man is a unity — not a loose assembly of parts but an embodied soul, a single living person. A related and genuinely open question is the soul’s origin: creationism holds that God creates each soul directly; traducianism, that the soul is transmitted with the body from one’s parents. Scripture does not plainly decide the matter, and I would not be dogmatic about it.
After the Fall, man still bears God’s image, though defaced. God grounds the sanctity of human life in it after the flood (“Whoever sheds man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in His own image,” Genesis 9:6), and James forbids cursing those “made in the likeness of God” (James 3:9). The image is marred, not erased.
The Fall’s effects are comprehensive: spiritual death (Ephesians 2:1), physical death and mortality (Romans 5:12; Genesis 3:19), a darkened understanding (Romans 1:21; 1 Corinthians 2:14), and the loss of original righteousness. This is total depravity in the proper sense — not that man is as evil as possible, but that sin has touched every faculty and that he cannot redeem himself. The remedy is treated in my paper on Soteriology.
Man’s will is real and the ground of his accountability, but since the Fall it is in bondage to sin: the natural man “does not accept the things of the Spirit of God … and he is not able to understand them” (1 Corinthians 2:14), and “no one can come” to Christ unless drawn (John 6:44; Romans 8:7–8). He chooses freely according to his nature, but that nature must be renewed by grace before he will choose God. Sovereignty and responsibility are taught together throughout Scripture.
The incarnation (“the Word became flesh,” John 1:14) and the bodily resurrection together affirm the goodness and permanence of the body. Salvation includes “the redemption of our bodies” (Romans 8:23); the resurrection body is the same yet glorified — “sown perishable … raised imperishable” (1 Corinthians 15:42–44). See further my paper on Eschatology. This is the decisive answer to any view that treats embodiment as sub-spiritual.
Redemption aims at the restoration of the image: believers are “being renewed in knowledge after the image of [their] Creator” (Colossians 3:10) and “being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18), to be at last “conformed to the image of His Son” (Romans 8:29). The last Adam restores, and surpasses, what the first Adam lost (1 Corinthians 15:45–49).