In the Bible’s opening moments, Genesis 1 declares the most fundamental truth about human identity: we are created in God’s image. God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. (Gen. 1:27) Theologians have wrestled for years with what it means to bear “God’s image.” Is the image of God tied to our rational minds? Our capacity for relationships? Our elevated status? Some combination of these three, or something entirely different?
Whatever the image of God points to, one thing is rather clear: our bodies are essential to bearing God’s image. The Hebrew word for “image” is tselem, and it almost always refers to “idols” throughout the Old Testament. What are idols? They’re visible representations of an invisible deity. The term basically means the physical “carved or hewn statue or copy” of a nonphysical being. In Genesis 1, this “statue or copy” is humanity, and the nonphysical being is Yahweh.
“Visibility and bodiliness” are central to the meaning of the phrase “image of God.”
I love how theologian Marc Cortez puts it: the image of God is “a declaration that God intended to create human persons to be the physical means through which he would manifest his own divine presence in the world.” Or as Old Testament scholars Karl Löning and Erich Zenger write, “According to the meaning of the Hebrew word tselem, which stands for ‘image,’ humans are to be in the world as a kind of living image or statue of God.” We are God’s idols—visible representations of God on earth. Now, humans aren’t just material bodies. Genesis 2:7 says that God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” God’s life-giving spirit is also essential for personhood. But the term image precisely highlights human physicality, which means the most fundamental statement about human nature (we bear “God’s image [tselem]”) highlights our embodied nature. And not just embodied nature, but our sexed embodied nature. We bear God’s image as male and female.