The Image of God: A Vocation

The image of God is a crucial dimension in the meta-narrative. Any doctrine of salvation that does not take into account the image of God will end up out of whack. Readers are simply unable to grasp the essential human problem and God’s solution presented in the World Renewal Project when they miss how the image of God plays into the story. In many ways, it is the center of the great salvation narrative in the sense that God’s very mission is to restore the image that was ruined (but not beyond repair).

The way that modern readers tend to conceptualize the image of God is quite foreign to the Old Testament and thereby also foreign to Paul’s thought. Normally we think of the image of God in humanity as something ontological (about our being, or nature). We tend to neglect the vocational dimension of the image of God in humanity. N.T. Wright, brings this back into balance. Wright says this, “I understand this [the image of God] as a vocation as much as an innate character. Humans are summoned to worship and love their creator, and to reflect his image into the world.” Wright further develops the thought with this:

In particular, and following from the vocation of human beings to reflect God’s wisdom into the world, this kind of monotheism included the ovation to humans in general to bring God’s justice to the world: justice is to human society what flourishing order is to the garden. It was thus, in principle part of the inner structure of creational monotheism that humans should set up and run structures of governance, making and implementing laws, deciding cases, constantly working to bring a balance in God’s world. Human governance was a good thing: it was how the one God intended the world to be run. Human judgment was a good thing, the making of wise and proper decisions about what should and should not be done….The word, human life, including ordered human life: all of this was good and God-give (N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, Vol. 3, 628.)

So, in the context of the creation and the need for governance, where does the image of God fit in? The image of God is to be the variable that characterizes the kind, or quality of rule humans will have over that which they have been entrusted to them by God. Humanity is to reign over the creation in the likeness of God. Their reign is to marked by self-giving love. They are to reign the way that God reigns, with mercy, grace, wisdom, love, and gentleness. So the mission appointed to humanity is not only to reign, but to reign in the likeness of God. With this in place, God, through humanity, maintains his sovereign will in his created world, but through human agency. This is the vocational dimension of the image of God.

With this we have the theme of the sovereignty of God running through the creation account. And what is God’s will? His will is for fruitful life and blessing to abound throughout the earth. It is when we arrive in Genesis 3 that things run amuck. It is only against this background that the reader of scripture can fully understand the World Renewal Project set in the context of the problem of sin.

(This is an excerpt from a working book manuscript titled Holiness in Fresh Perspective: Covenant, Cross, and Kingdom. All rights reserved)