What Does It Mean to BE the Image of God? with Nika Spaulding

Kay >> I’m Kay Daigle of Beyond Ordinary Women Ministries. Welcome to this podcast/video episode. Our special guest today is Nika Spaulding. Welcome, Nika.

Nika >> Thanks, Kay. I’m excited to be here with you.

Kay >> Well, it’s always great to have you. We always love it when you are our guest. Nika is the Resident Theologian at St Jude Oak Cliff in the Dallas area. She has a Master of Theology from DTS and our topic today is about the image of God. We’re talking about what it means to be God’s image. Explain that a little bit for us, because I think we usually we would say what it means to be in the image of God, but what does it mean to be God’s image?

Nika >> Yeah, that’s really good. I like that you clarify that because I think that’s an important part of this conversation. We use the phrase image of God, or imago dei if you’ve heard the Latin one, this idea of humanity at the end of creation, God makes the heavens and the earth. He makes all these days; he fills the days. It’s incredible.

And then creation crescendos at the top and kind of breaks from the pattern. You sort of have a creation, day and night, creation, day and night, day, night. And then all of a sudden, the camera zooms in and God gets to the top of creation, which is in Genesis 1:26-27. Let’s make mankind in our image male and female and you have this image language that gets picked up there.

And what’s really interesting about that is people forever have been talking about the image of God. It’s a big idea in theology, but sometimes people will talk about it as if it’s something you can do, or it’s something that you receive, or maybe like you can bear it or you cannot bear it. And really I think an important distinction is, no, no, you just are the image of God. You don’t do something to become the image of God. We just exist as the image of God because that’s what it means to be human. It’s all humans are the image of God rather than we can act like the image of God. And one of the distinctions that I like to make is sometimes people think that we are the image of God because we’re rational.

We were talking about pets before we hit record, and I love my dog more than I probably should. But I have to accept at some point that humans are more important than my dog. I may not emotionally accept that, but I can intellectually accept that on some level. And people will say, well, yeah, because you can reason, you can marry, you can logic, sort of all these things. And it’s like, well, that then means people who with intellectual disabilities then don’t image God. And we wouldn’t say that. We would say people with disabilities, people at the end of their life, people who lose their capacity to think and reason still are the image of God.

And so when we talk about the image of God, I think it’s important to talk about it from the biblical, ancient, Near Eastern context. And how the first audience who hears they’re the image of God, what they would have thought of as opposed to what philosophers 2,000 years later would have said about it.

Kay >> So, who was the first audience for this?

Nika >> Yeah, so I love this because when we think about Genesis, the story is in the beginning. But when you think about the first audience, it’s really the people coming out of the Exodus. And so, Moses writes the first five books, and we believe that he wrote them around the time. So if you think about it, the people have been recently enslaved by Egypt. They probably have been around foreign gods and foreign practices, and Moses rescues them. And the natural question is, who’s this God that just rescued us? And Moses is like, I’m so glad you asked. And so, the first part of Genesis 1 is this introduction to who God is and what God has created. And then he tells you and by the way, I’m not only going to introduce you to who God is, but I’m introducing you to who you are in relation to God. And that’s what Genesis 1 is doing.

And so it’s really a people who are coming out of oppression, who are going to go into the promised land as God has promised them. And they’re asking and answering the question Who is God and who am I, who are others? And that is who it’s written to. And I think that’s really important because they have a different idea of what it means to be the image of God than I would if I had never heard this and somebody said I was the image of God, I don’t actually know what I would have thought of, but they would have had really concrete ideas based on the world that they live in.

Kay >> And what would that be?

Nika >> Yeah, I love this. One, I’m stealing all these ideas from Carmen Imes, who wrote Being God’s Image. And then my friend Nathan Wagnong, who did his doctoral research on the image of God. And what both of them have done is they said—Okay, in the ancient Near East, which is where the people are, where they exist, where they live, what did the image of God mean then?

And there are four big things. And so the first one is this, it’s corporal. And what I mean by that is a fancy word for it’s material. It’s not an idea, but it’s a thing. And so most of the time when you hear image of God in the ancient Near East, they’re thinking of an actual statue of a god that is in a temple that’s like made of something. And that statue is meant to reflect the glory of the god that it’s representing. And so I always make the joke, it’s a material world and we’re all material girls. And so part of what it means to be the image is it’s more than intellect. Like we were just saying, it’s more than reason. It’s more than your spirit. It is your whole self bears the image of God, your hands are good, your mind is good, your body is good. And all of you, not just your mind, but all of you, is meant to reflect the glory of God. So that’s the first thing is that it’s material.

The second thing that would have been really interesting for them is when God says, we’re going to make all of humanity our image male and female, he democratizes the image of God. And where that’s different is in the ancient world, either the image of god was an actual statue that represented the god or it was just the king. They believe the king, the Grand Poobah, whoever was at the top was the spokesperson for God. And this is a very normal idea in the ancient world. So it’d be normal for you to think like, Oh, that guy, the one in charge, he’s the image of God. And when Moses says—No, no, no, no, no, all of us are the image of God—that would have been a really wild idea. And it tells the people who are coming out of Egypt, “You all belong to the royal family.”

One of my roommates grew up in a very sweet, loving Christian home. I did not grow up in the same environment. And so sometimes we like joke about how our childhoods are very different. And she told me she used to wear this shirt all the time in middle school that said something like, be nice to me, I’m a daughter of a king, therefore I’m a princess or something to that effect. And I want to make fun of her. And then I told her, it’s pretty good theology, though, because this idea of you’re the image of God means all of the people of God belong to God’s family, not just the king. And so that’s the same thing. So the first one is material. The second is democratized.

The third one is it’s familial language. In other words, it’s family language. One of the other places we see this image language is not just in Genesis 1, but in Genesis 5, it talks about after Adam and Eve have sinned, they’ve left the garden and then Cain kills Abel. In Chapter 5, the story moves forward and it talks about Adam has an image, Seth. And so it calls his own offspring the image of Adam and this idea of it’s kinship, it’s family language that’s connected to the image of God. And so God’s not just saying—Hey, you’re a royal people—but he’s also saying—and you’re in my family. And that, I think, would have been really wild for the ancient Near Eastern Israelites to hear this, because there were stories in the ancient world of gods having family, but they were all gods. So the idea of a God having family of humans, that is a really beautiful and incredible idea.

And then finally, the last thing is it’s functional. So it’s material, it’s democratized, it’s family, and then it’s functional. You have a role to play. And so right after God tells them you’re my image, the image is supposed do the work of God in the world, he tells them you’re to rule and reign. And that’s what people talk about. I go back to my dog. As much as I love my dog, she’s not supposed to rule my house. Now she does, we need to admit that, I’m kidding. But humans were given the responsibility to reign over creation, to do what God would want. As we say, do heaven like on earth as it is in heaven type things. That’s what an image bearer is supposed to do, an image being not a bearer, an image being.

And so we have this not only is it a beautiful privilege, but it will also have been a beautiful responsibility that the people of God would have understood as they’re coming out of Egypt that, hey, you have work to do. You’re meant to do good in the world as the representative of God here on Earth. And when you think of that, that’s a really beautiful, big, responsible way of thinking about what it is that we are still supposed to be doing, not just those in the ancient Near East.

Kay >> Do we see image of God verbiage anywhere else in the Scripture?

Nika >> Yeah, I mean, I think this is where Jesus comes and you have this incredible Colossians passage where it says he’s the visible image of the invisible God, right? And you have this incredible moment where you go, if you want to know what God’s like, look at Jesus. And that can go too far, right? Where people are kind of like, well, the Old Testament God is a little wonky and wild. I’ve read those stories of the flood and the conquest, but Jesus, tender, mild Jesus in Colossians cuts right through that. And says, no, no, no. He is the image of that. And yet then Jesus calls us to follow him and to do those very same things.

And so, this idea of image, it’s taken from Genesis and it moves all the way through the biblical story as if to say, hey, this is a real responsibility that we all have. And when we’re not sure how to do it, God sent himself to be the perfect representative for us. But the image of God is something that it’s a really beautiful theme that gets pulled all the way through. And we see it most beautifully in Jesus. But we’re not off the hook, right? He goes and he says, hey, do all the things that I’ve taught you to do, teach all the things I’ve taught you to teach. And I think that’s really important in this understanding of being God’s image, not bearing God’s image.

And I think about, I taught on this recently and I said, “Okay, imagine, I live in a world where my family has always kind of ( I’ve said this to you before, Kay) where we make strong women and kind men.” So the idea that somebody would come to my family and say, “Hey, we think guys and gals are both important.” We would have gone—yeah. I mean, that wouldn’t have been earth shattering to me.

But I think about, Moses leading the people out of Egypt. And I try to imagine myself in the sandals of a 14-year-old Israelite girl. And she lives in a patriarchal world. There’s a pecking order man, women, children, slaves. She’s just been oppressed by Egypt. And I’m sure, that has a psychological effect upon you that you don’t think you’re valuable and worthy. And she’s been, you know, they’re not wealthy. They’re an enslaved people that they’re trusting God to provide their daily bread.

They’re not exactly the elite that are heading into the promised land. And then here’s Moses telling her you matter, you belong to God, you’re in God’s family and you have a role to play. And you also are part of that royal family. I just think that message probably would have been hard to internalize.

I think that is part of what makes the image of God hard is it almost seems too good to be true. And if it was too good to be true then, I still think there’s probably many of us today who go, really? I’m the image of God and I’m going, well, yeah, actually, I think I think that’s really important for you to know about yourself.

Kay >> Yeah. And I was about to say definitely that same problem is true today. People cannot fathom that. They can’t accept it. They can’t understand how that could possibly be true.

Nika >> Yeah. Well, and I think one of the difficulties about the image of God is not only is it hard to believe for ourselves, but if I put myself back in the sandals of the Israelite girl, I think, one, I would be blown away that I as a female could be the image of God, because most only men. There were female goddesses. But for Yahweh, who likes to call himself father. I would be going, in what way am I the image of God? So, I would have been blown away by that. I would have been challenged to realize I can’t bear God’s image alone. That’s part of this language as well as like male and female.

This idea of a community bears God’s image. And that would be hard, where there was so much division between men and women in the ancient world. I have guy friends now I go play pickleball with and goof off. But really, in the ancient world, there was a male domain and a female domain and they cross, but not in the same ways that in more modern times that we see. And so, I think that would have been a challenge. Sure. But, where I would have probably maybe been a little frustrated, is when I would have been thinking about those stinking Egyptians who treated me so poorly and wronged my family, wronged the people I love for so long. And I would have been challenged by that message that they, too, are God’s image.

And I think that is not only the double side of this that makes the image of God hard is if we get to the point where we accept it for ourselves, which we should, we also have to accept it for every human. And we as humans have a tendency to want to degrade and diminish. And, sort of, well, I’m an image of God, me and mine are, yeah, it makes sense that we are the image of God but not the Egyptians, right? And God puts a challenge right there in Genesis 1 to see all of humanity through the lens that God does, which is they are ultimately the image of God. Doesn’t mean that there aren’t boundaries. It doesn’t mean there isn’t justice. Certainly, all of that applies. But we as Christians are too quick to dehumanize in our rhetoric and sometimes in our behavior and Genesis 1 stands in stark contrast to that and is a challenge to us, not just for ourselves, but for the way that we treat our neighbors.

Kay >> Well, I mean, isn’t it true that really for centuries the church leadership said that women were not made in the image of God? It was only men.

Nika >> Yeah. This is why you got to go to seminary sometimes and learn all these words and all these things, right? There’s this really beautiful interplay in the Hebrew where there’s sort of a source and a thing that comes out of the source. And what I mean by that is out of adam, man, comes adamah, woman. Out of the earth comes the humankind. You have this corresponding language.

And when you read the Hebrew, there seems to be this really strong correspondence between adam and adamah. When you translate it into the Greek, now you got aner and gune. And so suddenly it seems as if you’re saying, man is made in the image of God and woman is made in the image of man. And when you do that, you inevitably end up with a pecking order. You end up with God’s up here, and then men are here and then women are here. And that is not at all the language that is in Genesis 1 when you read the Hebrew and certainly not the message that is throughout.

I always joke that people go, why is there two creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2, and I’m like it’s because God’s a really good storyteller. And so in Genesis 1, he backs the camera out 30,000 feet, creating the world and everything in it. Then he zooms the camera in and suddenly you have a really relational God talking about Adam and Eve. Adam doesn’t have a companion suitable for himself. He brings in all the animals and gives names for them. And then he creates a woman out of Adam’s side. And even there where he talks about an ezer, that language, that Hebrew word for what a woman is. Many times our English Bibles translate it as “helper,” and that’s not really a good translation of what it is. It really is more like a suitable companion, which is how the NET, our alma mater DTS, translates it.

So ezer is already a word that has a lot of strength. And so I think over the years, whether it be unintended bias or not, it’s crept in. And we’ve allowed this idea of the image of God to be reserved for one half of humanity. When the Hebrew is saying, hey, man is incomplete without woman and the two of them together bear God’s image. And that has such huge implications for what we even understand what it means.

I always tell people if you lived alone on an island and you had no other people on that island, I would say to you, sure, you’re going have to do the best you can to be God’s image there. But if you lived out on that island and there were other people there, but you just refuse to talk to them, you’re not actually living into the image of God because God himself exists in a community, three persons, one essence as a Trinitarian God.

And so, when God himself says, let us, plural, make humanity male and female, you see this community piece of the image of God that goes missing when only men are the image bearers. And so, I think it’s an important distinction and hopefully the better writing is coming out and kind of putting that away. But you’re absolutely right, for a long, long time, men were the image of God and women were grateful to have men to be after. And thankfully, I think we’re coming away from that and getting better theology and better study on this.

Kay >> Right. I totally agree. I wanted to bring it up, though, because some of our audience may have heard this, that men are made in the image of God and women are not, or they knew that for many centuries that was the teaching. So how is it that we know that that’s not the case? So thank you for laying that out for us. I think that’s really important for women to understand.

Nika >> Absolutely.

Kay >> They are made equally in the image of God, just as men are.

Nika >> Yeah. And I think, you look at the Bible, people sometimes say the Bible is not good for women, right? Or they’ll make accusations against God. I go—I don’t know, if you read it seems like God really loves women. He seems like he’s constantly using them. I mean, you look at the Deborahs and the Marys and the Nymphas.

This weekend on Mother’s Day, I preached about Eunice and Lois. Paul is writing to Timothy, who’s planted a church in Ephesus. And he tells Timothy, hey, I know that you have a sincere faith because of your mom and your grandma and they passed that on to you. And I think, here’s this older man writing to a younger man. Things are hard in Ephesus when they planted the church. There was rioting, they have pagan worship of Artemis there. Things are tough for Timothy. Things are tough. And Paul doesn’t say to him, hey, man, buck up, eat Bible for breakfast. And get out there and be a man. Instead, he says, hey, don’t forget you have a sincere faith because you had a good mom and a good grandma. And I think there’s something really tender and beautiful and I made the statement, “Every good man knows a mom got them there and every good woman that was a mom got them there.”

And I think this is important to understand: God allows his own son to be entrusted to a young woman. And there is so much about the Bible that’s beautiful. And when we start with the right understanding that men and women are the image of God and that means we need each other. Then hopefully that moves into spaces of cooperation and love and community as opposed to the fighting and the friction. The world does fighting and friction just fine. What if Christians could come together and do unity and love and companionship? We might show the world there’s a different way.

Kay >> Yeah. The whole idea of being the image of God, I never heard this. I wish I could remember exactly when it was that I began to hear this teaching. I had gone through Genesis. I understood we were created originally in the image of God, but nobody talked about what that meant for us. It was just a fact out there: we are made in the image of God. But a fact that did not apply to me necessarily, did not mean anything to me as far as how I was to live. It’s real interesting.

I’m so happy that this has become just more common teaching, I suppose. That you hear this now a lot, that people remind us that we’re made in the image of God and so are all these other people that we don’t necessarily like. They are also made in the image of God. And we need to treat them as being made in the image of God. And it certainly has application to, as you said, people who have less mental capacity than the average person. It has so many ramifications. It was sad to me that I had never really heard any of this until I was probably 50 years old.

Nika >> It’s sad to me too, because it was actually one of the driving ideas in the early church movement. I read a book by John Dickson. It’s called Bullies and Saints, and he rightly takes some of the complaints about Christianity, says, you’re right, that was not a good moment. But we also do have good moments and it’s a really beautiful book.

And he talks about in the early about 200 to 300, it was so normal to infanticide in the Roman world. You know, if you had a child and couldn’t afford it, you just dispose of the baby by throwing it out into the wild. And he had so many firsthand primary documents where people were just like-hey. And there was a soldier to his wife who said—hey, if it’s a boy, I’ll send you a little more money, but if it’s a girl, go ahead and toss her out. And it was Christians, driven by this idea of the image of God, saying hold on: even babies, even children, even infants are worthy of protection and goodness. In so many worlds, even our own today, because children just have full status, they’re not protected in the same way that men or adults or money-makers are, so there are massive implications.

I think we lost something along the way when we got rid of the image of God, and I’m grateful people are bringing it back.

Because the ways I was introduced to it, Kay, is that you’re in the image of God because you ‘re creative and God is creative, and God is powerful, and you can be powerful. And I thought, “What if I’m not powerful? What if I don’t have those abilities? Am I still the image of God if I end up in a coma? Am I still in the image of God if I have a disability?”

I’m thankful there are people like Carmen Imes and other scholars have come along and said that we’ve got to think about this in a more holistic, whole life way. And the biblical context has been a real gift where people have studied the ancient Near East and gone—we’ve gotten this wrong and if we get it right, that has huge implications for how we view ourselves and our own worth and dignity and how we view others’ worth and dignity.

I think this is a really important concept for the church and grateful we get to talk about it for Beyond Ordinary Women. It should be a normal part of theologic discussions in our churches.

Kay >> Absolutely. And I hear it far more frequently now then I did. And I’m really thankful for that. So what other applications are we to take away for today? If I am the image of God, what does that do?

Nika >> Yeah. So, the first big one is you belong to the family of God. And we had a tough couple of weeks at our church. A young man passed away unexpectedly. And so on Mother’s Day, knowing that his mom would be there, I said, we need moms but we also need mamas. And I talked about in the Bible there is what we call fictive kinship—this idea of you’re not just your family is the family, but the family of God you belong to. And I made the point, I believe that God understanding that family was everything in the ancient world said—look, families can fail; people can fail; dads can fail. Life is cruel. You can lose people. So when you belong to me, you belong to a bigger family.

I’m sure everyone listening can think of people in their lives who have been like moms, who have been like dads, who have been spiritual brothers and spiritual sisters to them. And so that’s one of the things is when you understand that you are the image of God, then you understand you belong to a big spiritual family, which is a comfort if your family hasn’t been great and even if your family’s been great, it’s a responsibility to go out and be somebody’s spiritual mom and daughter and sister and care and love for them.

And so I think we have to take that seriously, that we belong to the family of God. And I made the comment, sometimes this looks like all the moms in our body took care of the reception, because the mom who lost her son was hurting. She couldn’t do the reception. And that’s what it looks like when you belong to the family of God. You step up and you care and you love when times are hard. And so, I think that’s the first one.

I think the second one is we bear the responsibility of bringing heaven to earth. That idea of we are called to rule and reign. We didn’t lose that when we forfeited Eden. And I think sometimes maybe we go—well, we ate the apple and we’re out. And I go—no, no, no, no, no. The idea of (Even the proverbs talk about this.) that where we bring wisdom, it’s as if we’re bringing Eden to the world. Right? The idea is we’re still supposed to be God’s representatives here, which means we’re to do the work of God’s kingdom, the work of goodness, the work of love, the work of justice, the work of mercy. All of these things that God, if you don’t know what they are, I would say read the Sermon on the Mount and just do whatever Jesus told you to do.

Kay >> Absolutely.

Nika >> Yeah. And so I’d say, start there. Read those three chapters of the Bible—5, 6, 7 of Matthew—and you’ll be set. And then keep reading because you will find other amazing things to do. But that is an important thing that no one’s off the hook. Yes, it’s a privilege to belong to God’s family. It’s a beautiful gift, but it is also a responsibility, I think one that we have to take seriously.

And then finally, I would just say, there’s no getting around it. We’ve talked about it. You have to treat everyone with worth and dignity. You just do. I don’t know a lot of Christians who go around just beating people up, right? I don’t. That has happened in our history. But the average person listening to this podcast is probably not in danger of causing any physical harm.

But I think we’re all in danger if we really check our rhetoric that we can sometimes use language that’s dehumanizing. That we can use language that is not fitting of those who you know. You can disagree with people. You can call people out for the wrongs that they’ve done. You can be just but sometimes the name calling, the gossip about them, some of these things, I just think, that’s not how we would talk if we really took seriously that that person is worthy of dignity and honor. They may not be acting like it. They may not be somebody that you need close to you in your life. But we don’t return hate with hate. We return hate with love or at least distance. And I think sometimes especially in our politics or maybe even in our, I always joke, when you watch sports, you’re just like—I hate that guy. And you think—okay. Hopefully you don’t talk like that in real life.

I always tell people, you always know if you’re too caught up in sports when someone gets injured and you think “good!” and you go—wait a minute, that’s a real person. I shouldn’t actually celebrate that. And so I think there are just times maybe we should consider our online speech, how we talk about people when they’re not in the room and maybe the ways that we talk about, when it comes to those hot button issues in life where there’s people of a different race or different political persuasion or whatever, we use terms and phrases I think we need to put away if we’re going to be serious about the image of God.

Kay >> And I think that often we categorize people because of some of those things.

Nika >> Yeah.

Kay >> And it enables us to sort of distance ourselves from any of those or any of those problems. And that’s just not the way of Jesus. That’s not the way we image God. God is there. God is with them. And he loves them as much as he loves us. And they are made in his image. And the idea of being the image of God is one of those ways that we know we’re not supposed to live that way, that we are supposed to see people and empathize with their problems and their needs instead of blaming them for everything that’s wrong with them.

Nika >> Yeah, I think that’s so good. Yeah.

Kay >> Well, thank you Nika. This has been very helpful and hopefully it will help a lot of people out there as they think about how to live out their lives and show forth God to the world and do the work of God in the world.

We have some other resources that sort of border on this idea. A year ago, I took a trip to the border and I talked about that and seeing those people who were coming in as people instead of just numbers and a problem, and that is called “Learning to Love Our Neighbors.” And you can find that by going to BeyondOrdinaryWomen.org, go up to the menu, under Resources go down to the Caring Well on the menu. We also have some video and podcasts for other groups that sometimes we marginalize. We have “Sexual Identity and Gender Identity”, which is really purposed to help us understand how to love people that we don’t necessarily agree with the choices they’ve made. We have several resources on Racial Reconciliation, and we have one on Sexual Abuse in the Church.

So I think all of those are really dealing with people that we need to care and love well who are not necessarily like those in this audience. That we would be listening or watching what you’re talking about.

Nika >> I think that’s terrific. Yeah.

Kay >> So, we invite you to browse those and browse our other resources. And we thank you again, Nika. It’s always fun and a privilege to be on air with you.

Nika >> I love it. I’ll come back as often as you invite me. I love Beyond Ordinary Women. I love what you all do.

Kay >> I’ll invite you more.

Nika >> Great.