What does the Bible mean when it says we are created “in God’s image”? (Genesis 1:27) Since we live in a fallen world, do we still have the image of God — or was it lost when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit? With the image of God, we have arrived at theology. Image of God is neither a thought nor an “idea,” but harsh reality. We cannot impose Greek thought on the Bible. We cannot interpret Genesis 1:26-27, without Genesis 5:3. For there it says, after we have once more been reminded of how God created man in the image of God, that this man, Adam, became the father of a son “after his own image.” The matter here is the human form. Man is here assigned his cultural task. Genesis 9: 6 must be so understood that reverence is paid to man because of something that he is, but only because God created him after His image the nature of man is a likeness of Him.
God became flesh. This, of course, presupposes that Christ was Himself the likeness of God. We shall be like Christ, who is like God. In 1 Corinthians 4:4, Christ is called the image of God; in Colossians 1:15, the eikon (image) of God. In Philippians, God gives up His own form in order to seek out man under His own form, the form of a slave or servant. Herein is the heart of the Gospel. This says a lot in two respects: grace is irretrievably surrendered and seen as supernatural; nature is held too safe and incontrovertible. It is no accident that the birth pangs of the Reformation went hand in hand with iconomachy and iconoclasm. Whenever theology questions the image of God, the images are thought of, and vice versa. The proper exegesis of Genesis 1 always goes together with that of the Second Commandment. Thus the image of God that he bore was extinguished, to the degree that he alienated himself from God through sin, alienated himself from the bond with those goods which one can share in, in him alone. Thus Adam can sin; an animal does not sin. We are saved; everything else is not saved.
The Creation is neither a pious opinion nor a plausible hypothesis, nor an obvious point of departure. It is a matter of faith. Faith begins solely with Christ, the Mediator of Creation. Thus we understand the image of God in man on the basis of the image of man in Christ. Only through the knowledge of Christ can we attain the knowledge of man. We can only point to ourselves and say “Behold the man. The image is and remains so. It is visible and tangible, it is not a spirit, not an idea; it does not participate in what we call “spirit,” and no more in what we are accustomed to call “body”; it is a man: Ecce homo. The revelation of Jesus Christ is not concerned with infinite man in contrast to finite man, but with the living, holy God in contrast to the sinner. Faith is not an abstraction, but obedience. It is the duty which is laid upon us as bearers of the map of God. The dominion over the world comes to us from the King on the Cross. Therefore we do not believe that we are immortal, but that God has the power to rouse us from death, to renew our mortal flesh, to create us anew.
This visibly is invisible reality, this sacramental within us. We seek the path from art to theology and from theology to art. The holy is concerned with the whole man, not an abstract ‘spirit,’ which might be hindered by a material body. Religion needs the arts, because it cannot live without forms and figures. But the arts must also come to religion. The dance reflects the movement of God, which also moves us upon the earth. The drama presupposes the holy play between God and man. Verbal art is the hymn of praise in which the Eternal and His worlds are represented. Architecture reveals to us the lines of the well-built city of God’s creation. Music is the echo of the eternal Gloria. In the pictorial arts, we found images.