The Relational View

We’re busy looking at different views on the image of God. While these different views tend to be pitted against each other, we think they fit into a single picture, which we’ll be discussing once we’ve looked at each of the views individually. In the previous lesson we started by looking at the substantive view. The second view we’re going to look at here is the relational view.

As the name suggests, the relational view sees certain kinds of relationships as key to understanding the image of God. Broadly speaking, we can think about this in terms of two kinds of relationships. There are vertical relationships that exist between humanity and God; and horizontal relationships that exist within humanity, between one human another another. A full account of the relational view of the image of God will include both horizontal components and vertical components. We’ll take a brief look at each, and then see how they fit together and how philosophy can help in this.

The vertical component

Let’s start by thinking about the vertical relationship. In the creation week of Genesis 1, humans are created alongside the other land animals on day six, and in this way we are very much like the other animals. The thing that distinguishes us from the rest of creation is that we alone are made in the image of God.

Now, one of the clearest ways we differ from the rest of creation is that every human is capable of having a relationship with our creator. We could even go further than this, and say part of our purpose as human beings is to have a relationship with him. We see this from the first pages of the bible, where Adam and Eve are created into a special relationship with God. And they aren’t alone in this. As we read on, the relationship between humanity and God continues to be at the forefront of the biblical story: he reveals himself to us, he makes covenants with us, he listens to our prayers, he holds us accountable for our actions, he pleads with us to turn back to him, and he welcomes us when we do. And that relationship culminates in Jesus and continues all the way to the end, when we are given a picture of a perfect relationship with God that will come with the new creation.

Unlike what was thought in many cultures around ancient Israel, this vertical relationship between humans and God isn’t reserved for specific people, like the king or priests, but is something that each person can access regardless of their place in society. John Hammett notes, because God cares for the well-being of all his creation, it is reasonable to think that this vertical relationship is available even to those whose disabilities or under-development would hinder relationships with other humans:

Only God knows what is absolutely necessary for a relationship with him; only God knows how to deal with the spirits of the mentally challenged, children, those with Alzheimer’s, and those with other disabilities. We may affirm that each person has the capacity for a relationship with God because we believe God has the capacity to reach every human spirit… the possibility that God can establish relationships with humans in exceptional ways in exceptional circumstances should be left open.

The biblical doctrine is that every human is made in the image of God, regardless of their place in society or mental capabilities. So, it stands to reason that if the capacity for relationship with God is part of that image, then God would ensure that each person had it, regardless of their circumstance. This privilege also brings with it a responsibility for each of us to use that capacity as best we can. We each need to cultivate a relationship with God, regardless of how religious our family or community happens to be. Consider, for instance, that even in the Old Testament, where God physically lived among Israel in the temple and priests mediated their relationship, it was still up to each person to bring their own offerings and prayers to God.

So, from a relational point of view, that’s the vertical component to the image of God. Just as God knows himself, so we as his limited image-bearers can know him in our own limited way.

The horizontal component

But theologians have also noticed that there is a horizontal component to the image of God that fits together with this vertical component. We can see a hint of this in the initial creation of humans in the creation week:

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.”

So God created man in his own image,

in the image of God he created him;

male and female he created them.

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.” (Gen. 1:26–28)

We’ll get to all this language about “dominion” in the next lesson, but for now I want to draw our attention to the corporate nature of the image of God. In v27, when God creates humans in his image, it speaks about us with one collective noun, like “humanity” or “mankind”. This suggests that we together bear the image of God. This is confirmed in v28, when he speaks to us all together, telling us to be fruitful and multiply. And it is noteworthy that when the idea is first introduced in v26, God uses the plural when he says, “let us make humanity in our image”. In other words, the image itself is of something corporate or collective.

Now, if humanity is going to bear the image of God together, then we had better be able to form relationships with each other; and this is precisely what we have in mind when we talk about the horizontal component to the image of God. It doesn’t take much to see that humans are capable of much richer relationships than any other animals in God’s creation. No other species on earth can cooperate to form societies like we do, which build cities, develop technologies, work the ground to produce resources, and establish international economies. On a more personal level, it is undeniable that humans are capable of loving one another in ways that far exceed other animals. Of course, with this higher capability for cooperation and love, so too comes the possibility of greater corruption and cruelty. This goes to show that just like the vertical component, this horizontal component of the image of God means we have the responsibility to live up to that image.

Commenting on the corporate nature of the image of God, John Walton says the following:

The status is expressed as corporate (since all people by virtue of being people are included). Consequently, we are not individually his images; we are corporately his image.

So that’s the horizontal component to the image of God. With the hindsight of all of scripture, we can say that just as God has within himself the community of the Trinity, so humanity as his limited image-bearer has community within itself.

Combining these two components together

Now, we have these two types of relationship that make up the image of God, the vertical and the horizontal. From a biblical perspective, these two components aren’t disconnected from each other, but go hand-in-hand. Consider the phrase that God routinely spoke through the prophets, that “they will be my people, and I will be their God.” (eg. Jer. 31:33, Ezk. 37:27, Zech. 8:8) In this phrase these ideas are connected together: together they form a people because they all belong to God. Or consider that the two greatest commandments are first to love God, and second to love your neighbor as yourself (Matt. 22:36–40, cf. Prov. 14:31). Or that the fruit of the God’s Spirit in us is love (Gal. 5:22, 2 Tim. 1:7). Or that we are empowered to forgive and show mercy to one another because God has forgiven us and shown us mercy (Matt. 6:12, Luke 6:32–36).

So, we want to say that the vertical and the horizontal work together as two parts of one image of God. But there does seem to be something of a tension between the two, which is briefly worth thinking about. The tension is this: the fact that each of us has our own capacity for relationship with God suggests that the image of God is something we each have individually, but the fact that humanity bears the image together suggests that the image of God is something we have collectively. In other words, the vertical component seems to pull us towards individualism whereas the horizontal component seems to pull us in the opposite direction towards collectivism. So, is it possible to hold on to both the vertical and the horizontal without one compromising the other?

This is a question philosophers have been wrestling with for a long time in politics and metaphysics. As Matthew O’Brien explains:

The attempt to navigate successfully the narrow strait between [atomic individualism and organic collectivism] has been a recurring theme in Western metaphysics, from the time of Plato to the present. The organic collectivist holds that the most fundamentally real things… are complete and sovereign human societies; on this view… individual human beings are merely cells of the social organism, with a nature, an identity, and an existence wholly dependent on that of the whole. In contrast, the atomistic individualist… holds that individual human beings are the substances, with societies as mere aggregations or “heaps”...

We can be pretty sure that there is some third option between these two extremes because we can give examples of such things, even if we don’t know how to account for the differences. To see this, consider a sports team like the Springboks. The team as a social entity inherits some things from its individual members. For instance, the team is in South Africa because each of its members are in South Africa; or the team is healthy because each of its members is healthy. If all facts about the team were reducible to facts about its individual members like this, then it would be an example of atomic individualism, where the team is just the sum of its individuals.

But there are also facts about the team that aren’t reducible like this. For example, if the team signs up for a tournament, then this would be independent of the members — they could all get sick and be replaced before the tournament begins and nothing would change about the team being signed up for the tournament. As a social entity, then, the team is more than just the sum of its members.

But it’s not like the members somehow lose their individuality when they become part of the team, as would be the case with organic collectivism. Imagine the team wins the tournament they entered. The victory belongs to the team as a whole, but at the same time, it is something that each of the members participates in — by which I mean that they each have that one and the same victory, without having to divide it up into parts to distribute amongst themselves. Somehow, the victory is both collective and individual at the same time, without either destroying the other.

Returning to the image of God, then, we can think of it the same way as the victory of the team. Just as victory belongs to the whole team, so too does the whole of humanity together bear the image of God. We do this by leveraging the horizontal relationship we have amongst ourselves, to love one another and work together. And together we have a relationship with God our creator. But just as each individual team member participates in the victory of the team, so too does each individual human being participate in the image of God. One person’s vertical relationship with God does not diminish another person’s relationship with God, as if he needs to split his attention between us.

Conclusion

That’s where we’re going to end our discussion of the relational view of the image of God. We’ll have more to say in our follow-up discussion videos but what we’ve said suffices to show one way we could unpack the view.

To summarize, on this view the image of God is made up of two components that go hand-in-hand: the vertical relationship between humanity and God, and the horizontal relationship that humanity has within itself. In order to fully live out the image of God, we need to love God and love our neighbor, with each reinforcing the other. God empowers us to love one another, and out of love for one another we spur each other on to love God.