Earlier today, a friend of mine posted an open question on Facebook:
If God made Man [sic] in his image, [in] whose image did he make animals?
I was tagged in the comments by a mutual friend who guessed rightly that I might have some thoughts on the matter. Other responses ranged from “He just made them up” and “Man is the only thing he made in anyone’s image”, to “the Bible doesn’t say.” Each of these, it seems to me is a valid response to the question. But, hoping to stir things up a bit, here’s what I responded with:
The first thing to say is that there’s no reason to think that animals would have to be created according to any image whatsoever. The traditional Christian idea that God creates the world ‘ex nihilo’ (out of nothing), means that creation is an act of divine sovereignty, freedom, and gratuitous love. In creating the world, God had no need to rely on anything outside himself. Given this, there’s no reason to think that God would have had to make creatures according to some image. So, I think it’s perfectly legitimate for Christians to say animals are not made in any image; that they are just not image-bearing creatures.
But there’s another way that a Christian might respond to your question, by developing our understanding of “image-bearing” so that other animals too might be said to bear the image of their creator in some way (albeit differently from the distinctive way in which humans image God).
To put my argument as succinctly as possible: While it is the case that Genesis 1 says that God creates Adam and Eve in his image and likeness, and that this has traditionally been interpreted as marking a significant distinction between humans and all other creatures, there are at least two major reasons that a Christian might reject such a view:
(1) the Bible never denies that other animals can and do image their creator in certain ways. As David Cunningham has pointed out, “the Bible’s silence with respect to the attribution of the imago Dei to non-human elements of the created order cannot, by itself, serve as an argument for a strong distinction between human and non-human creation in this regard.” There are numerous instances throughout the Bible in which other animals do indeed seem to image God, or certain characteristics of God, in various ways (Isa 31 , for instance, sees God as a lion growling over his prey; in Mat 23:37 and Luk 13:34, Jesus’ compassion and longing to gather Jerusalem to himself is conveyed in the image of a mother hen gathering her chicks; the lamb is repeatedly used as an image of Jesus throughout the New Testament, the dove decending at Jesus’ baptism in Mat 3:16 is a familiar image of the Holy Spirit, and there are numerous examples in the psalms and proverbs of animals imaging various Godly characteristics). And this point hasn’t been lost on the Christian tradition. Aquinas agrees with Augustine that a trace of the Trinity can be found in all creatures (Summa Theologica 1.45.7 citing Augustine’s De Trinitate). In an interesting passage, that deserves to be quoted at length, Aquinas even says:
“[God] brought things into being so that His goodness might be communicated to creatures and represented by them, and because His goodness could not be adequately represented by one creature alone, he produced many and diverse creatures that what was wanting to one in the representation of the divine goodness, might be supplied by another…the whole universe together participates in the divine goodness, and represents it better than any single creature whatever.”
(2) Even more importantly than the first point, the New Testament dramatically revises our understanding of the image of God from Genesis 1. Passages like Col 1:15; 2Cor 4:4; Rom 8:29; 1Cor 15:49 reveal for the first time that Jesus Christ alone is the true image of God, the unique revelation of the unseen God. This Christ-centered revision of the image of God, undermines interpretations that suggest that human beings have a superior standing in relation to other creatures because they uniquely represent or resemble God. As David Clough puts it, “the key distinction is that between Christ and sll other creatures, rather than particular groups of creatures that image God in different ways.” In other words, recognizing that Christ alone is the true image of God, relativizes the differences drawn between humans and other animals based on the way we image God. Humans have a distinctive calling to image God in a particular human way (and this is tied to “dominion” and “stewardship”). But all creatures image their creator in ways that are unique to each species. To quote Cunningham again: “The birds are like God in their ease of movement; the bees are like God in their simultaneous unity and multiplicity; the penguins in their constancy…and the cats, as T.S. Eliot reminds us, in their mystery.”
What are your thoughts on the matter, Dear Reader?
THEOLOGICAL ANIMAL 