What comes to mind when Genesis 1:26-28 tells us that human beings are created in God’s image? Popular conceptions might explain this text by appealing to the various faculties of the human being: freedom of the will, self-consciousness, rationality, and the capacity to have religious fellowship with God. Others might also emphasize the creation of human beings as embodied creatures and thus as gendered – male and female we were created. What’s also clear from this doctrine is that all human beings, therefore, have dignity, worth, and value by virtue of what they are metaphysically: image bearers.
While all of these features of the image of God are indeed important, they emphasize the human being as an individual. Whether you are male or female, you have an intellect, will, body, soul, and so on, and you have dignity. But is there something about human beings considered together that communicates something more about who we are as image bearers? In other words, what if it takes more than the individual to communicate the fullness of God’s image? This is precisely Herman Bavinck’s (1854-1921) provocative suggestion: the image of God is too rich to be confined to the individual or even to the human family. In his words, the image of God
can only be somewhat unfolded in its depth and riches in a humanity counting billions of members. Just as the traces of God (vestigia Dei) are spread over many, many works, in both space and time, so also the image of God can only be displayed in all its dimensions and characteristic features in a humanity whose members exist both successively… and contemporaneously side by side. (Reformed Dogmatics, 2. 577. Hereafter RD)
The appeal to the vestiges of God there signals Bavinck’s dependence on the classical conviction concerning the divine perfections as the ground for creation’s manifold diversity. While the divine perfections exist simply and absolutely in God, a finite creation can only reflect the glory of its Creator by a multitude of diverse objects. Thomas summarized this classical conviction well: “goodness, which in God is simple and uniform, in creatures is manifold and divided and hence the whole universe together participates the divine goodness more perfectly, and represents it better than any single creature whatever.” (ST I, 47. 1.). Far from being a hindrance to appreciating the diversity within creation, then, the doctrine of divine simplicity (i.e. that God is not composed of parts and that all that is within God is God) undergirds it.
Bavinck expands on this doctrine for anthropology by giving it a covenantal and organic tinge: because of the diverse perfections of the simple God and his Trinitarian processions, human beings are created to mirror him in a single organism comprising a unity-in-diversity. While we are indeed a diversity of individuals, we are united together under a federal head in Adam or in Christ. As such, part of what it means to be made in God’s image is precisely to be in ethical solidarity. We are God’s image bearers not simply as individuals, but as a corporate and ethical unity – a single organism.
Corporate Solidarity and Celebrating Diversity:
There are two important implications to draw from this theological anthropology. Firstly, this emphasis on our organic make-up amplifies the value of every individual precisely because we are responsible for one another and we need each other in order fully to reflect God. Secondly, it clearly articulates why the church will comprise many tribes, tongues and nations in the last day. Diversity is not a problem to overcome: it’s a celebration of God’s creation and redemption. Let me tease these two implications more fully.
Firstly, because no human individual can fully express the image of God, human vocation and responsibility necessarily take on a corporate dimension. Contrary to the individualism that pervades our world today – as seen in our obsession with social media and super-hero movies – imaging God will not be seen in the hero that comes out of nowhere but in the creations of bonds of love. This makes sense of a couple of key claims in Bavinck’s Reformed Ethics, where he argues that ego-centricity is the root of sin, which perpetuates atomistic individualism, and the remedy of the redemptive work of the Spirit that links us back towards organic unity by renewing bonds of love for each other (RE, 110, 248).
Herman Bavinck’s missiologist nephew, Johan Bavinck (1895-1964), further argued that sin often causes us to forget how we play crucial roles in the sins of others, and sin makes us leave behind our responsibility for others. An organic anthropology means taking seriously the corporate dimensions of sin:
In our sinning we do not stand isolated from one another: almost every sin we commit happens in community. Numerous sins are inherently of that nature. The sins of adultery and of quarrelling and dispute, for example, are communally based. But also those sins that are individually committed still happen in the greater context of society, and society as such has been the provocation behind them. That is the reason why, when a crime is committed, we can hardly make one person totally responsible for the act. Our judicial systems, which as a rule punish an offender in isolation, are always more or less one-sided because they do not take into account the role played by the parents, teachers, or friends of that person. All sin carries with it a degree of communality, as it finds its roots in society. We do not sin as individuals, but as members of our greater social environment. – (Johan Bavinck, Between the beginning and the end, 60).
Secondly, and finally, we should celebrate diversity within the church as this is where human beings are redeemed in order to reflect the glory of the Triune God. Redemption in Christ creates not uniformity but diversity-in-unity, and unity-in-diversity, and this diversity includes the different languages, peoples, and nations that populate the heavenly city.
There, each people group will manifest something of the glory of God and who we are as image-bearers: “Tribes, peoples, and nations will make their own particular contribution to the enrichment of life in the new Jerusalem… The great diversity that exist in all sorts of ways is not destroyed in eternity but is cleansed from all that is sinful and made serviceable to fellowship with God and each other.” (Bavinck, RD, 4. 727). Our task here is to witness to that final day, when “humanity in its entirety – as one complete organism, summed up under a single head, spread out over the whole earth, as prophet, proclaiming the truth of God, as priest dedicating itself to God, as ruler controlling the earth and the whole of creation – only it is the fully finished image, the most telling and striking likeness of God.” (Bavinck, RD, 2. 576).
What we do here should reflect what we will be. If eschatology shapes ethics, we do well to take seriously this call to forge bonds of love in a way that celebrates our created and redeemed diversity.
This resource is part of the series More than Imago Dei: Theological Explorations on Race. Click here to explore more resources from this series.
For Further Reading
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 4 volumes. Baker Academic, 2003-8.
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Ethics, vol. 1., Baker Academic, 2019.
Johan Bavinck, J.H. Bavinck Reader. Eerdmans, 2013.
Johan Bavinck, Between the Beginning and the End. Eerdmans, 2014.
James Eglinton, Herman Bavinck: A Critical Biography. Baker Academic, 2020.
Irwyn Ince, Beautiful Community, IVP, 2020.
N. Gray Sutanto, God and Knowledge, Bloomsbury, 2020.
Gray Sutanto is a Professor of Systematic Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary. He previously served as the Pastor of Covenant City Church in Jakarta, Indonesia. He hold a PhD in Theology from the University of Edinburgh. He is a member of the St. John Fellowship of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
