Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 07:2 (Fall 2025)
Article: A Forum On The Image Of God
Author: Peter J. Gentry

Eikon 7.2 (Fall 2025) p. 34

A Forum
On The Image Of God

Peter J. Gentry

Alastair Roberts

Erik Thoennes

Vern S. Poythress

Eikon 7.2 (Fall 2025) p. 35

Peter J. Gentry
On The Image Of God

Peter J. Gentry is Senior Professor at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

What, in a nutshell, is the image of God? In the past, a majority of Christians have taken the view that since God is invisible (John 4:24), humanity does not resemble God physically, but rather in terms of morality, personality, reason, and spirituality. This interpretation is inadequate because it is not based on the linguistic meaning of the fundamental text in Genesis 1 according to its ancient Near Eastern background:

²⁶ And God said, “Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky

Eikon 7.2 (Fall 2025) p. 36

and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

²⁷ So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

Let us immediately notice two things: (1) the grammar in Hebrew makes plain (as the translation above shows), that “ruling” is a result of the image and not the essence of the image; (2) the last two clauses of v. 27 are comments on the first sentence “God created man in his own image” and prepare the reader for the commands given in v. 28 (a) to reproduce and (b) to rule. The literary structure is as follows:

God created mankind in his image according to his likeness: