Having just faced down a grave evil and prevailed in a world-altering, global war, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was an attempt by the United States and her allies to reassert what is true about every human person and the necessary morality that flows from a common commitment to human dignity that is owed to and from every individual.

Notably, this Declaration included the following statements about the centrality of marriage and the family toward an overarching aim of upholding and protecting human dignity:

1. Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
2. Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.
3. The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.2

Now, it must be admitted this is nowhere near a sufficient proclamation of all that is true about marriage and family, especially as compared to the great Christian tradition. But note a few things. First, here in black-and-white is gender binary, enshrined for all time in this significant historical document: It is “men and women” who have the right to marry and found a family.

But more fundamental is the recognition in this declaration of what is right according to Nature, what is natural to man, where it states that “the family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society.” What does it mean to be natural? Here we find an echo of another, prior declaration that shaped the West, one wherein men appealed openly to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” in the United States’ Declaration of Independence. But this is to raise one of our time’s greatest questions: can the laws of Nature, or what is natural, be asserted apart from an appeal to Nature’s God?

Remarkably, when it came time for the United Nations to adopt this declaration in 1948, there were forty-eight countries voting in favor, and eight abstentions. Six of these abstentions came from the Soviet-aligned communist bloc. At least one of these communist countries was ideologically opposed to the very idea of natural rights at all, instead insisting that rights are granted by the state. Another abstention came from Saudi Arabia, an historically and ideologically Muslim country, largely on the grounds of its disagreement with Western ideals of marriage and in protest to the notion that people have the right to change their beliefs. The final abstention came from South Africa, largely because they saw this declaration as a threat to their regime of apartheid.

In sum, opposed to the UN’s Declaration of Human Rights were arrayed Marxism, Islam, and racism—in other words, totalitarian statism, sexism, and challenges to the natural family and human dignity.

Looking at the landscape today, we might observe that it is largely these same ideologies that threaten our doctrine of the image of God, our anthropology.

1. The Image of God and Western Man

Last year, I attended a conference in London sponsored by a new organization called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC). This organization was recently founded as an international coalition of leaders who are concerned about the obvious and ongoing decline in the West in nearly every sector: in our economies, our institutions, our social fabric, and our faith. At the conference were two consistent themes: first, opposition to the rise of cultural Marxism and radical Islam; and second, the absolute necessity of recovering the conviction of the immeasurable worth of every human person, owing to the imago Dei. We lose this conviction; we lose Western civilization.

It is arguably the doctrine of the imago Dei, given to the world by the Judeo-Christian tradition, that contributed most to human flourishing and the peace of civil society in the world. On this doctrine stand a host of attendant commitments to the dignity and worth of every person, male and female, including the natural and inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, freedom of conscience, bodily autonomy, and the like.

But one of the most obvious facts of our time is that the doctrine of the image of God is not a given in every sphere of life. Nearly every one of our anthropological challenges today—and there should be no doubt that ours is an anthropological age3—stems from a misapprehension, misappropriation, or even a complete denial of the imago Dei. But to acknowledge the divine image, isn’t it true that one must first acknowledge the Divine?

Without a Creator God, there is no creative purpose. According to Charles Taylor, this is a defining mark of modernity: “The cosmos is no longer seen as an embodiment of meaningful order which can define the good for us.”4 How is meaningful order lost? By denying our Maker, we have turned Psalm 100:5 on its head and declared that it is we who have made ourselves. Historian Jacques Barzun laid part of the blame at the feet of the father of modern naturalism, when he wrote, “The denial of purpose is Darwin’s distinctive contention.”5 But Darwinians do not have a monopoly on denying purpose in God’s creation, especially in God’s design of humanity as male and female. Every time we downplay or ignore God’s creative purposes in our bodies as male or female, or in Nature, or in God’s inspired and perspicuous Word, we contribute to the denial of our divine purpose.

We must re-attend and return to God’s revelation in the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture to recover and reassert the biblical teaching of the imago Dei, especially against the proliferation of anthropological errors with which our society is awash.

I would contend that the most significant threat to the imago Dei comes by way of what is most natural to humanity, as recognized by the United Nations back in 1948, and what is most repugnant to the Marxist revolutionaries: Marriage and the family. There is a reason why no-fault divorce, and free, on-demand abortions were among the first societal reforms in Bolshevik Russia. In a communist-industrial society, it is the de-natured, androgynous, de-coupled individual person who is best able to contribute interchangeably to the greater good of the state. In this view, marriage and family are obstacles to be overcome in order to squeeze maximal fealty and utility to the state. Any other human bond are barriers that may be destroyed. This was Friedrich Engels’s main contention in his work, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. Inheritable property keeps families insulated from the arm of the state (something Engels did not celebrate).

When we look around today, we see the cultural Marxists carrying the torch that was passed on at just the moment when economic Marxism was found wanting and imploding, at least in the West. Although they may not have Marx or Engels on their shelves, these cultural revolutionaries have been influenced by or are downstream of Antonio Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse, Judith Butler, and the like. But make no mistake: the revolutionary goals are the same.

Many cultural observers found themselves asking in 2020 what “disrupting the natural family” has to do with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) organization. Nothing, unless the movement is underwritten by intersectional Marxism, which became clear in the months and years following, which is why this aim was found (and then taken down after public outcry) on the BLM website in 2020. The Marxist doctrine of intersectionality brings together the most pernicious threats to natural marriage and family we face, while the LGBT ideologues promote fruitless relationships within a movement that not only ignores male-female design but plays the Maker as it commends the cutting off of healthy organs to remake them into a different image.

This is one vantage of the lay of the land today. And it is just here where the Bible’s teaching on the image of God, particularly in the book of Genesis, comes as a breath of fresh air. Because not only do we need a recovery of a full-orbed understanding of the imago Dei if the West is to survive, but we need to come to grips with how the institutions of marriage and the family are themselves bound up in this all-important doctrine as both an implication and a bulwark for its safeguard from its would-be detractors.

2. The Image of God in Genesis

The image of God is mentioned three times in the book of Genesis: in 1:26–27; 5:3, and 9. By surveying these three texts, I aim to reassert the biblical teaching of the imago Dei in its proper context and push back against anthropological errors at war with the truth.

James Madison famously asked, “What is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” This isn’t quite right. The greatest of all reflections on human nature is found in Scripture, and government—including self-government, familial government, ecclesial government, the government of social and cultural norms, and statecraft—is the consequent response to what one believes about human nature. And as Herman Bavinck reminds us in his Reformed Ethics, “Origin determines direction and purpose.”6 If so, then let us return to humanity’s origin story.

2.1. Blessing, Fruitfulness, and Dominion (Genesis 1:26–31)

In Genesis 1:26, on the sixth day of creation, God turns to the special creation of man:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

Set apart from the rest of God’s creative acts, this creature is to be made in God’s image and likeness. While “image” and “likeness” are near synonyms, as Peter Gentry has suggested in several places, most recently in print in an article for Eikon Journal, דְּמוּת, or “likeness,” likely refers to man’s vertical relationship to God via his obedient sonship, while צֶלֶם, or “image,” likely refers to man’s horizontal relationship as servant king over creation.7 Indeed, this purpose is closely identified with God’s special creation of man, as “they”—note the plurality—will “have dominion … over all the earth.”

This mediating role, representing God to creation and creation to God, is made more evident in Genesis 2, where the author presents a zoomed-in look at God’s special creation of the man, Adam. After creating the earth and everything in it out of nothing, on the sixth day God takes some of the earth and molds it like clay into the body of something not yet seen in the world: a man.

It is noteworthy that before God’s breath of life comes to animate him in Genesis 2:7, there lying on the ground is not just an ordered pile of dirt, but something God calls the “man of dust.” This detail may signify the priority and irreducibility of man’s bodily constitution. God made man a hybrid, a mediating creature with visible (bodily) and invisible (spiritual) attributes, in order to represent the invisible to the visible, and the visible to the invisible—indeed, to make visible the invisible.

This is how man is to image God: as a psychosomatic unity, imaging forth God’s nature in our own nature. Upon receiving the breath of life from the mouth of God, the man awakes a living creature. The first words the man hears are from the mouth of God, as God addresses the man as a “Thou,” a personal agent distinguished in this divine address from the rest of creation. It is at this point in the narrative, in Genesis 2:16, that the Septuagint begins to translate the generic word for man, אָדָם, with the personal name, Ἀδάμ, in place of the heretofore impersonal ἄνθρωπος.

If this is the case, then our bodily constitution is not immaterial to how we bear the image of God. As Bavinck summarizes in his Reformed Dogmatics, “The whole being … and not something in man but man himself, is the image of God.”8 Elsewhere in his Reformed Ethics he writes, “We are God’s image with respect to all of our existence, in the soul with all its capabilities (thinking, feeling, willing) and also in the body.”9

In other words, our bodies, male and female, are not immaterial to how we image God. Indeed, they are consummate with being God’s image. With this in mind, let us return to Genesis 1:27 to see how God’s image subsists:

So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

These three lines of Hebrew poetry contain a whole world of theological anthropology, against which the world is at war. In this verse, not only are male and female both said to be created in the image of God—a truth denied by hyper-patriarchists, misogynists, and Islamists by their practice—they are also both referred to, first, as is clear by the parallel structure, under the singular generic Hebrew term אָדָם. Importantly, this term becomes the particular name of the first man in the very next chapter. But in Genesis 1, this name establishes Adamic headship and, by implication, male headship in the family.

But perhaps more at the center of our anthropological crisis today, we must note the inherent binary in the dimorphic, complementary shape of humanity made in God’s image: “male and female he created them.” The very words used to describe the creation of the אָדָם in Genesis 1:27 as “male and female” point to a social-sexual complementarity that is fleshed out in Genesis 2. The Hebrew term for “male,” זָכָר, in Genesis 1:27 is a word that etymologically hints at outwardness and prominence as a definitional aspect of this creature, and the Hebrew term for “female,” נְקֵבָה, is a word that etymologically hints at inwardness and receptivity.10

To downplay, ignore, or efface our maleness or femaleness is a direct affront to the imago Dei. We are, after all, in the image of God as male or female. If our bodily constitution as psychosomatic units is the way in which God has made us to image him, either male or female, then to undermine this binary, as LGBT activists aim to do, is nothing less than an attack on the image of God.

But it isn’t just LGBT activists who undermine God’s image in humanity as male and female. In a recent review,11 I recently responded to an article by Christa McKirland that appears in the third edition of the egalitarian book Discovering Biblical Equality titled, “Image of God and Divine Presence: A Critique of Gender Essentialism.”12 Some may be surprised to find in this book, which is widely promoted in mainstream evangelical circles as a foremost text in defense of gender egalitarianism, a capitulation to some of the most destructive aspects of transgender ideology. Aside from using and promoting the unbiblical, gender-neutral pronoun “Godself,” as if God’s self-revelation is not consistently and clearly masculine in Scripture, McKirland uses preferred pronouns for a woman who presents herself as a man, and then writes this astonishing paragraph:

The implications of this chapter, however, are not to provide a moral prescription for transgender persons, but to (1) show how gender-essentialist logic may actually be contributing to the internal angst of some trans persons, and (2) to emphasize that the priority of the scriptural text is on following Jesus, not being ‘real men’ or ‘real women.’ For those who are discerning whether their givenness should be altered, the New Testament rubric for any such choice (which would include all bodily modifications, not just those affecting sexual anatomy) is how such can be done in submission to the Spirit and in order to become more like Christ.13

The “altering” McKirland refers to here in the context is so-called sex reassignment surgery: the cutting off of healthy organs to match a troubled mind. The author suggests that, if this is to be pursued, it should be done in submission to the Spirit. How is this possible? McKirland does not answer. But a biblically faithful answer must declare that it cannot be done in submission to the Spirit who inspired Genesis 1 and 2. Such activity would be done contrary to God’s Spirit, because it would be a defacement of the image of God.

How did we get here in evangelicalism, in this book, written and promoted by many prominent and influential evangelicals, adopting the very Marxist frameworks that are actively at work trying to tear down everything we hold sacred? In this chapter, at least, the destruction comes through a rejection of what is termed by McKirland as “gender essentialism.” At the center of the author’s argument is the notion that “the Scriptures do not make maleness and femaleness central to being human, nor can particular understandings of masculinity and femininity be rigidly prescribed, since these are culturally conditioned.”14 But is this true?

At the very least, a plain reading of Genesis 1:26–27 must note the close connection between being made “male and female” and “in the image of God.” And if Bavinck and Clines are correct, then our bodily constitution is not some kind of gnostic shell that merely houses the real image, but it is part of the very essence of our humanity as the image of God, soul and body together being the substrate of our humanness—not one over the other.

What is more, Jesus taught in Matthew 19:4–5 that our maleness and femaleness is meant to point beyond itself when he said,

Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh”?

In this passage, Jesus brings together the text of Genesis 1 and 2 to make this theological point: our maleness and femaleness bear witness to their complement in the other by design, a complementarity that finds meaning in the institution of marriage and family. John Paul II refers to this reality as the “spousal” meaning of the body in his book, Man and Woman He Created Them.15 Whether or not “spousal” is the right word to describe the sexual meaning of the human body, he nevertheless rightly directs our attention to discerning a meaning and purpose behind God’s bodily design for male and female sexual complementarity.

Back in Genesis, directly after the Bible establishes male-female equality in the imago Dei and complementarity in sexual differentiation in Genesis 1:27, we are given the primary reason why God designed for his images to come in two distinct genres as male and female. As Genesis 1:28 says,

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

This verse is known by a variety of names, one of which is the Creation Mandate. But what is its relationship to the imago Dei? Instead of understanding the image of God as some kind of intellectual rationality, as Aquinas does (leading him to speculate that angels likewise bear God’s image), I suggest it makes more sense to see the image of God not as something that is written over, or on, or in, mankind, but something that mankind was written in—in other words, mankind, form and function, images God because he is the image of God.16

In this view, function follows form, or essence, and form presupposes function. God has both in mind in his design of mankind as male and female in his image. This is why in Genesis 1:26, God says, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion…” The function, in this case dominion, is already considered in the form. In other words, it would be a mistake to drive a wedge between form and function, as if one and not the other is the meaning of being made in God’s image. The same point can be made by considering both the nominal and verbal meaning of the word image: One thing can be described in nominal terms as being the image of something else, while it can also be described in verbal terms to image another thing.

This, I would suggest, is the connection between Genesis 1:28 and 1:27. God blesses the man and the woman, both made in his image, and commands them to image him in this way: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion.” To paraphrase, “image me as my image.” Our procreativity allows us to participate in God’s creativity, and our Lordship in God’s Lordship. Indeed, the filling and dominion-izing must come by means of procreation, for mankind is only two in the beginning. The world is to be filled with God’s image, and this is done by imaging God’s creativity: it is why he created them male and female in his image, after all.

Some have attempted to cordon off procreativity from the image of God, even by way of implication. To be sure, I am not suggesting that those who are not married, or those who are not procreative, somehow bear God’s image less. But I would suggest the converse: God’s image is further adorned, expanded, and propagated through procreation. I think this is what Bavinck is getting at in his Reformed Ethics when he suggests that God’s original, creation covenant with mankind involved “becoming the image of God more and more through procreation, worship, and culture.”17

2.2. Procreation and Sonship (Genesis 5:1–3)

The next place in Genesis the image is mentioned is in Genesis 5:1–3:

This is the book of the generations of Adam. When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and named them Man when they were created. When Adam had lived 130 years, he fathered a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth.

The toledot structure of Genesis indicates this is a new section,18 and we have a summary statement in verses 1–2 of what we already saw in Genesis 1:27—man, male and female, created in God’s likeness. But note that the word “image” is missing in verse 1. In fact, “image” doesn’t appear until verse 3, when it is predicated of Seth, being a son of Adam “in his own likeness, after his image.” Here the author is catechizing God’s people in procreative image-propagation: Adam is in God’s image, Seth is in Adam’s image, who in turn bears the image of God by virtue of his sonship from Adam. In this way, our image-bearing points us to the fact that we are members of the human family, and being a part of a family shows us what it means to be in the image of God. I think this explains, in part, Luke’s genealogy, wherein Seth is called the son of Adam, who is called “the son of God.” To be in God’s image is to be, as Paul affirms to the Athenians in Acts 17, God’s “offspring.” Procreative capacity—paternity and sonship—is, at the very least, one way we image God.

Those who would diminish or destroy man’s procreative capacity, and the God-given institutions that are meant to promote such—marriage and family—are an affront to God’s image and must be opposed, which would include those who would intentionally sever procreation from these institutions.

2.3. The Life of Man (Genesis 9:6)

The final text that mentions the image of God in the book of Genesis is in Genesis 9. In Genesis 9, we find Noah and his family debarking the Ark after scores of days enduring a global flood. Eight persons: father and wife and his three sons and their spouses. How does God charge this new Adam and his family in the recreated world? He republishes the Creation mandate in Genesis 9:1:

And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every bird of the heavens, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea. Into your hand they are delivered.”

Contrary to scholars like VanDrunen, the dominion mandate is not here absent, but rephrased, if perhaps diminished—“into your hand they (creation) are delivered.”19 Nevertheless, the procreative mandate is still very much in force, even if it is marred by the curse. Why? Because mankind still bears the image of God, even after the Fall, and God’s image must be propagated. This is made clear in verses 5–6, when God grants the power of the sword to human society as a mediator of divine justice.

And for your lifeblood I will require a reckoning: from every beast I will require it and from man. From his fellow man I will require a reckoning for the life of man.

Whoever sheds the blood of man,
by man shall his blood be shed,
for God made man in his own image.

The logic of what theologians have called the “power of the sword” is grounded in a right understanding of the value of every human life—which is precisely dependent on man being made in God’s image. Why and how does one become an image bearer? As an offspring of an image bearer, which is why image-bearing is so closely connected to procreation, and why something like abortion is such an affront to our Maker. It is no accident that, insofar as the world loses faith in the Divine, there follows an erosion of the dignity associated with the divine image. This is seen nowhere more clearly than the utter disregard for human life in the womb.

But tragically, it is not staying there. Just recently, another infant in Britain was mercilessly killed when a high court ordered her life-support to be removed against the protestations of her parents. Herein is the dissolution of all that is holy: marriage, family, and procreation. This is no mere battle of ideas. This is a battle of life and death. And a society that does not uphold and protect the dignity of every human being, regardless of size, age, gender, or capacity, is a society that is spurning the blessing, design, and purposes of God.

Right after giving human society the power of sword to protect the dignity of every human life, as if to highlight its centrality and importance for God’s purposes for humanity, God again repeats the creation mandate in Genesis 9:7: “And you, be fruitful and multiply, increase greatly on the earth and multiply in it.”

At the heart of the Christian faith, after all, is the expectation and fulfillment of the birth of a son to a family, who would grow up to give his life for his bride and join many sons and daughters at the wedding supper of the lamb. Christianity is irreducibly familial, which itself is grounded in the imago Dei.

3. Conclusion

Patristics scholar Robert Louis Wilken argues in his book The Spirit of Early Christian Thought that “the biblical doctrine of the image of God set Christian thinking on a different course”20—indeed, a course that would come to reshape the world. This teaching is summed up beautifully in the teaching of Gregory Nyssa in his On the Making of Man, where he said, “Remember how much more you are honoured by the creator than the rest of creation. He did not make the heavens in his image, nor the moon, sun, the beauty of the stars, nor anything else you can see in creation. You are made in the likeness of that nature which surpasses understanding…. Nothing in creation can compare to your greatness.”21

This is what the Christian faith has to give the world: human dignity in the imago Dei. But as evangelical Christians, we must also teach that God’s creation of mankind in his image as male and female is just as fundamental to human dignity and the divine image, promoting unashamedly the institutions of marriage and family. For against this is the world at war: maleness, femaleness, natural marriage, and the family. But what God has created and revealed is not only good, but very good. And it is good for us—for the recovery of the West, yes—but also for the regeneration and renewal of every human person, male or female, by personal faith in Christ, who is the perfect image of the invisible God (Col 1:15).

[1] “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” United Nations, https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights.