The Substantive View

When it says in our Bibles that humanity has been made in God’s image, what does that mean? It’s taken to be a really important question in biblical, systematic, and practical theology—and rightly so: it’s something that defines us as humans.

For all its importance, though, it’s turned out to be a bit of a tricky thing to pin down. One scholar writes quite pessimistically:

innumerable definitions have been suggested: conscience, the soul, original righteousness, reason, the capacity for fellowship with God through prayer, posture, etc. Most of these definitions are based on subjective inferences rather than objective exegesis.

All these things and more have been grouped together and explored in countless ways over the centuries, but we can narrow it down to three major views, which we’ll be exploring over the first three lessons of this module: the relational view; the vocational view; and, what we’ll be looking at today, the substantive view. Down the line we’ll see how these three views come together.

The gist of the substantive view is that what makes us God’s image bearers is some feature of human substance: there’s something about what we are as humans, something about human nature that also reflects something of what God is like.

The image of God in Genesis 1

Let’s begin by looking at those all-important verses from Genesis 1. On the sixth day of creation, God created all sorts of animals, and each of them, we’re told, was created “according to their kinds” (Gen. 1:24–25). Then God creates humans, the pinnacle of his creation, according to his kind:

Then God said, “Let us make humanity in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground” (v. 26).

The difference between humans and other animals is that humans are made in God’s image. Or, put differently, what it means to be made in God’s image can be seen in what sets us apart from other animals. John Calvin would seem to agree: “it seems that we do not have a full definition of ‘image’ if we do not see more plainly those faculties in which man excels, and in which he ought to be thought the reflection of God’s glory.”

The question, then, is: what sets us apart from other animals? Closely related to that is another question: what does it mean to be human? What, essentially, is human nature? To answer those questions, we’re first going to need to work out some of the building blocks, and to do that we’ll see how philosophy can help us, mainly getting help from Aristotle and Aquinas. Then we’ll see how this squares with what the Bible teaches.

As an aside before we get going, if this seems like an odd way to go, starting with philosophy, you might want to check out our first lesson of our previous module in systematic theology, Know Thy Maker, where we think about the place of philosophy in systematic theology.

Form and matter

Everything in the world around us is made up of form and matter. Loosely we might think of the form as what a thing is, and matter as what a thing is made of. Take a house, for instance: “house” is the form, or “house-ness”; the bricks and cement are the matter. The form is what makes something to be the sort of thing it is—it’s what makes the bricks and cement to be a house, as opposed to, say, a pizza oven—and the matter is what is made into that something—it’s the bricks and cement made into a house.

What the form does, then, is to put that thing into a category, grouping it together with other things like it. When I say “house”, you know what I mean—you have some concept in your head of what “house” means, or what house-ness is. That’s because of its form. But to move from house-ness in general to this house in particular, we need the matter. The matter is what makes it concrete (pun intended); it’s what individuates it—what makes it this house, rather than just house-ness.

So the form is what categorizes something; it’s also what organizes it. It provides the blueprint, as it were; it gives it the shape it needs to be that thing.

Now, putting it this way runs the risk of oversimplifying things. Thinking about the form as a thing’s shape seems intuitive at first. What is a house? Well, something that is shaped like a house. The problem is, what is the shape of a house? Between the little rectangular prism with a pitched roof that I live in, to an igloo, to a hut, to a mansion, all these have vastly different shapes, yet they all count as houses. What gives them all the form “house” isn’t so much their shape as it is what their shape is for—namely, living in: “form is functionally characterized [emphasis theirs]. That is, form is defined by what form does [emphasis added].”

Thinking about it this way actually helps to spell out some of the differences between non-living and living things. The form isn’t just about the shape, but as it turns out, for something like a house to do what it’s supposed to, it really does just need to be the shape that it is. It doesn’t actually need to do anything else; it just needs to be there.

But living beings do do more than just sit around; they move themselves toward their purpose or end goal. Non-living things need to be moved by something else; living things have an inner principle that moves them: namely, life.

So the form is what categorizes something; it’s what organizes something; and in the case of living things, it’s what animates them. For Aristotle and Aquinas, what this means is that, for all living beings, their form is their soul.

The soul

This might seem like a strange thing to say. I’m sure most of us are used to hearing that only humans have souls. But for Aquinas, the soul is just what animates living beings—from the Latin word anima, which is the word Aquinas uses for soul. For Aristotle and Aquinas, all living beings have souls, including animals and plants.

Perhaps the reason that might seem strange is that for most of us, when we talk about the soul, what we imagine is a “ghost in the machine”, the sort imagined by Plato or Descartes. We think of an immaterial being that uses a body—perhaps even, as Plato argued, that the soul just is that person. At any rate, this seems to fit better with the hope we have as Christians that we survive the death of our bodies, which is something only humans have to look forward to—not animals, and definitely not plants. And that’s true. But when we understand Aquinas’ view a bit better, we see that this doesn’t end up being a problem.

Kinds of souls

Aquinas, following Aristotle, distinguished between three types of souls. The most basic is the nutritive soul. Plants have nutritive souls. Remembering that souls are forms, and that forms are functionally characterized, the function of the nutritive soul is to grow, and to take in everything it needs to flourish. The monstera sitting on my desk has roots, which it uses to absorb water and the nutrients it needs from the soil. It keeps bending over to the one side, because the nearest source of light is the window about a meter and a half to the right.

The second is the sensory soul, which animals have. On top of the capacities a nutritive soul has, the sensory soul adds the capacity for perception, and the ability to take in and respond to sensory data.

Finally, we have the rational soul. This is what humans have. Aristotle and Aquinas defined humans as rational animals. We’re like animals—we have nutritive and sensory capacities—but we also have rational capacities—a will and an intellect. This means our nutritive and sensory capacities work differently to animals, in that they’re “mediated through the rational intellect which is capable of forming judgments about what counts as good.”

Humans as rational animals

It’s these additional faculties—will and intellect—that help us answer our problem from earlier: this is what sets humans apart from plants and animals, and this is why humans can survive death. Nutritive and sensory faculties depend entirely on a body for their functioning: things like growing, digesting food, and reproduction. To smell you need your nose; to see you need your eyes; to walk around you need your legs. But the intellect isn’t like that. The intellect doesn’t depend on the body to function, and because it can function apart from the body, the rational soul can survive the death of the body.

But this isn’t just a long way of saying that maybe Descartes actually had a point. Firstly, we might be rational animals, but we are still rational animals. We might be intellectual beings, but that isn’t all we are: we also have sensory and nutritive capacities, and we need our bodies to realize those. And in any case, while it’s true that the intellect can function apart from the body, it’s limited in how much it can do, since our intellects work by abstracting data taken in by our senses. As one writer puts it: “Aquinas thinks there is something misleading about attributing cognitive functions to just the soul itself. Rather, even such higher cognitive functions as understanding are to be attributed to the whole material composite that is the human being.”

And so, secondly, let’s remember that humans are composites of soul and body, which is just to say that, like pretty much everything else in the world around us, we’re composites of form and matter. The soul is the form of the body, and the body is what individuates the soul. When you were created, your body and soul were created together to form you. And you experience life differently from everyone else—taking in different things through both sensory and intellectual faculties, which goes even further to make you your own person. And one day, when your soul is separated from your body at death, these experiences don’t just go away: “[the soul] retains knowledge, experiential memory, and the blueprint for a particular body.”

How the soul was understood by the biblical authors

Hopefully this doesn’t sound quite so strange any more. Rather than a disembodied self that uses a body, Aquinas sees the body and soul as an integrated whole.

And so did the biblical authors. We find something similar in the Hebrew word נפשׁ, sometimes translated “soul”. We might think of the Shema in Deuteronomy 6: “You will love Yahweh your God with all your heart and with all your נפשׁ” (v. 5). נפשׁ can have a variety of meanings—from somebody’s neck or throat, to their desire, their life, or, what is probably meant in Deuteronomy 6, as a reference to the whole self as a person. What it definitely doesn’t mean is the ghost in the machine imagined by Plato or Descartes.

In the time leading up to the first century, when the NT was written, there was a change in tide: a number of Greek philosophers—though not all—made a harder split between the material and immaterial, between spirit and body. Perhaps, then, this is something we might expect to see come out in the NT, especially its biggest contributor, the apostle Paul. But although Paul no doubt drew from Greek thought where he found it helpful to make his point, it’s far more likely that in his base worldview he was closer to what we see in the OT—something closer to נפשׁ. Immaterial and material, soul and body make up the human person. One scholar summarizes Paul’s view this way: “Because of their interpenetration the soul is the animation of the body and the body is the incarnation of the soul. The soul has a body and the body has a soul and man as a whole is both, a psycho-physical unity.”

Humans as image bearers

Where, then, does this leave us? We began by asking two related questions: (1) what does it mean to be human? And (2) what about that sets us apart as God’s image bearers? We’ve seen that humans are essentially rational animals, and for this reason Augustine, Aquinas, and many others through church history have maintained that what sets us apart as God’s image bearers is that we’re intellectual beings.

Much more could be said, and much more will be said in our discussion videos. For now, though, this is what we mean when we talk about the substantive view of being made in God’s image: as thinking beings, humans are set apart from the rest of God’s creation as his image bearers, which, as rational animals, is essential to our nature as humans.