There is a Latin phrase that has been debated by theologians for centuries: imago Dei. The image of God. Genesis 1:27 is where it lives: ‘So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.’
Christian tradition treats that phrase as the most dignifying thing that could be said about a human being. You bear the image of God. Your life has worth that cannot be taken away by circumstance, by power, by what anyone else decides about you. That reading is true, and it matters enormously, and entire bodies of law and ethics have been built on it.
But there is a second reading that the church has been considerably less enthusiastic about. Because if you bear the image of a God who hears the groaning of the oppressed and moves toward it, who sees the invisible and refuses to look away, who names injustice by its exact price point, who acts through human witnesses when institutional silence has failed—then the imago Dei is not only a statement about your worth. It is a statement about your obligation.
A compass doesn’t tell you who you are. It tells you which way to go. Imago Dei, then, should show how to move toward the image of God.
A Status and a Commission
Genesis 1:27 has been read primarily as a statement of status, and that reading is not wrong. The dignity it confers is real and non-negotiable. But the God whose image we bear is not static. He is, as we’ve spent five articles documenting, a God in motion: toward the cry, toward the visible suffering, toward the named injustice, toward the act that restores what exploitation has broken.
To bear his image is not simply to possess a dignity. It is to be oriented in a direction. Pointed toward the same things he is pointed toward. True north for the Christian life.
Romans 8:29 adds the layer that makes this uncomfortable: we are being conformed to the image of Christ. Not that we arrived in his image fully formed and are just maintaining it. We are being shaped toward it, pulled toward it, formed into it through the ongoing work of the Spirit. This is a process. And it has content. It means becoming more like the one who heard, saw, named, and moved. The series we’ve been walking through is not just a portrait of God. It is a portrait of what we are being formed into.
The Imitation Paul Actually Meant
When Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 11:1, ‘Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ,’ he is not primarily talking about spiritual disciplines or personal morality, though those aren’t excluded. He’s talking about orientation. The direction of a life, the things it turns toward, the suffering it refuses to ignore.
The Christ Paul is imitating is the one who crossed social boundaries to eat with the excluded (Luke 15:1-2). Who stopped on roads for people others walked past (Luke 18:35-43). Who stood between a woman caught in sin and the crowd that had already picked up their stones (John 8:1-11). Who made the Samaritan the hero (Luke 10:25-37). Who turned over tables in the one space where the economically and ethnically marginalized were supposed to be able to worship (Mark 11:15-17).
To imitate this Christ is not to adopt a political ideology. It’s to develop the same attentiveness: to hear what he hears, to see what he refuses to unsee, to name what he named, to move when he moved. The imago Dei is the theological foundation for all of it. You were made to look like someone. And that someone has a very clear and consistent pattern of behavior.
What Transformation Actually Produces
The language of spiritual transformation in the New Testament is consistently oriented outward. We are not being conformed into the image of Christ so that we can have better quiet times, livelier services, or more engaging fellowship, though all those matter. We are being conformed into the image of a God whose character is inseparable from his response to injustice.
This means that a community being genuinely formed in Christ’s image will look, over time, more like a community that hears the cries of the oppressed and is moved by them. More like a community that sees what power makes invisible. More like a community that names exploitation by its actual name. More like a community that acts: not because it has a social justice program, but because it is increasingly inhabited by the Spirit of a God who has never once heard the groaning of the oppressed and turned away.
The imago Dei is not a status that exempts us from this. It is a direction that calls us into it. And a compass, it turns out, doesn’t care how long you’ve been standing still. The moment you look at it, it shows you north. The image of God works the same way. It doesn’t record our failures to move. It just keeps pointing in the direction we’re called to go.
What Does Your Image Look Like?
This is the question Article 5 left us with, rephrased: not what kind of God are you representing, but what does the image you’re bearing actually look like in practice?
Because we can hold an orthodox doctrine of the imago Dei and believe sincerely that every human being carries the image of God and has inherent dignity. While simultaneously crossing the street to avoid the person sleeping in the doorway.
We can affirm that we are being formed into Christ’s likeness while sitting in churches that do not consistently name specific injustices from the pulpit.
We can believe in the compass while never actually looking at it or following its lead.
What would it look like to take the imago Dei seriously as a commission rather than a status? It might look like the attorney who takes on a case no one else will because the person deserves representation regardless of their ability to pay. It might look like the congregation that decides the rezoning fight in a neighboring community is their business because the people affected bear the same image they do. It might look like the individual or family that decides to actually get to know the immigrant or refugee family that moved in nearby—not to welcome them from a comfortable distance, but to walk alongside them through the paperwork, the language barrier, the disorientation of starting over in a place that isn’t always glad they came.
None of those are programs. None require a platform or a megaphone or a theology degree. They require looking at the compass. Recognizing which way it’s pointing. And taking one step in that direction, because you were made in the image of a God who has never once stood still in the face of suffering.
The compass doesn’t grade your previous stillness. It just shows you north.
And the final article in this series asks the hardest question of all: what does God expect from the people who know exactly which way north is?
The image of God is not a trophy on the shelf. It’s a compass. And it only points in one direction — toward the cry, toward the invisible, toward the work this God has always been doing.
For Further Reflection The imago Dei says you were made to look like someone. Look at the God this series has been tracing—the one who hears, sees, names, and moves. How closely does your life, your congregation, your daily choices resemble that portrait? Where is the gap largest? And what would one step toward closing it look like?
Next is Part 7, “Know Better. Do Better.”
Jesus consistently did the things that were the most loving and most consistent with his love for his Father.
That often put him at odds with the religious establishment: healing on the Sabbath, eating with known sinners, having his chosen 12 be from groups the elite would look down their noses at, interacting with tax collectors, prostitutes, known adulterors... The list goes on.
It even put him at odds with his own family. Mary and his brothers went to collect him because they thought he had become unhinged. His brothers even taunted him when he did not go down to the feast at the time they thought he ought to have.
Jesus paid the ultimate price, loving a people that largely were ignorant and mocking in their understanding of his role as messiah. And for disciples that lost faith in him as he headed to the cross, running for their lives. And most of all, he became sin for us, allowing his perfect relationship with his Father to be severed, taking on all the fury of the wrath of God poured out on him as he took the punishment we deserved in order that we could have any chance of redemption. And through grace, giving us the reward that only he deserved.