For a second group, humans display the image of God in their being given responsibility for the earth. As God creates and sustains, so humans exercise their creativity on earth and care for it, and in this they are image-bearers of God.
A third group has stressed the human conscience, a moral awareness of good and evil, as the mark of the image of God in humankind. As God is a God of justice, humans reflect that God in their consciences’ sense of the just and the good. Even a disturbance of conscience, the “uneasy conscience,” could be seen as testimony to humans’ Godlikeness.
For a fourth group, the image is sometimes founded in the human capacity for self-transcendence. Again, humans’ ability to reason can be emphasized here, not as the mark of God’s image but as a means to transcending self and apprehending God. The experience of self-transcendence becomes the seat of the image of God. As God is transcendent, somehow greater than, more than, or beyond creation, so humans have potential to transcend themselves in various ways. This view is evident in the works of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and some Protestant thinkers. For Paul Tillich, for example, humans possess the image of God in having a structure of freedom that “implies potential infinity.” Humans themselves are never infinite, but there is “a drive toward the infinite” that enables them to experience self-transcendence in their finitude. Similarly, Wolfhart Pannenberg proposes self-transcendence—for him, openness to the future and anticipation of God—as establishing a “broad consensus for a contemporary anthropology seeking the uniqueness of humankind.”
Pannenberg, however, as well as others, also utilizes a fifth understanding of the image of God. This fifth view stresses that humans are bearers of God’s image in their relationality, their being with and for others. The others to whom humans relate are other humans, with whom a “co-humanity” (Karl Barth), nature, and the world more generally (Pannenberg) is shared. As Jürgen Moltmann put it forcefully, we must not think of humans as made in the imago dei without also knowing humans as made in the imago mundi. Still other theologians (e.g., R. R. Ruether) working with this fifth perspective also stress that this relationality should be “authentic,” liberating, egalitarian—avoiding, for example, tendencies to construct itself in a dominative mode that favors male, Caucasian, or other aspects of privilege.
The Fall. A second pervasive theme of Christian anthropologies in the West is evident in the fact that theologians have traditionally interpreted humans as “fallen,” “deformed,” or variously failing to manifest and realize the good that they are created in God’s image to be.
Whether theologians presume a first “fall” in history (a first sin of some sort that historically inaugurates the more widespread departure of later peoples from their created goodness) or whether they take the scriptural and doctrinal notions of “the fall” more symbolically (as representing the recalcitrant and pervasive reality of human evil), the perduring theme in Christian anthropology is that humans exist in a condition that is against that which is good in and for them. This condition is described in different terms: as “condemnation,” “lostness,” “depravity,” “radical deformity,” “estrangement,” “alienation,” or “oppression.” A Christian thinker’s view of human “fallenness” is distinctively shaped by which of these terms are selected. In whatever way the condition of fallenness is characterized and in whatever terms, several related key controversies rage around this theme.
A first set of controversies concerns the extent of the distortion. How radical is human evil? To what degree is the goodness of humans as created in the imago Dei destroyed? Conceivably, a spectrum of responses to these questions could range from one side asserting that the fallenness is complete, such that there are no vestiges of goodness in humans, to another side taking the fallenness as a disruption that, however extensive and painful, still leaves human goodness as capable of redressing the evil. Traditionally, however, even the widest extremes among positions in classical Western theologies resist easy correspondence with the two ends of this conceivable spectrum.
Neither Augustine nor Calvin—both of whom stress the radical deformity of humans through the fall—denies the persistence in human creation of the good gifts of God. The radicality of the fall, for both thinkers, signifies not that human creaturely life has lost every vestige of goodness, but that humans are so hampered they cannot themselves redress what ails them; the radicality of the fall also means that every domain of human life—affections, thoughts, actions—is distorted even if there remains the occasional good affect, good thought, or good action.
Similarly, theologians who see the extent of the distortion as less drastic rarely claim that the remaining goodness of humanity is in itself capable of redressing the fallenness. Friedrich Schleiermacher, for example, who wrote that human consciousness involves not just original sinfulness but also an “original righteousness,” still taught that some further transformation was necessary if that perduring “righteousness” was to redress the pain and suffering in human life.
A second set of controversies concerns the locus of the distortion. Where in human life is the distortion seen primarily at work? One approach identifies certain “faculties” of the human soul (affections, body sensations, mind, and will). A given theologian may privilege one of these as the primary locus of human fault, but usually when this is done, the other “faculties” play contributing or correlative roles. So Augustine, for example, may focus primarily on the will as problematic—its bondage and its refusal or inability to will the good. But the will is stimulated by its bondage; it steers the whole being wrongly because of the appetites of the body and related affections, and in consequence turns the mind wrongly away from contemplating the things of God, toward contemplating things of earth and body.
The controversy here reached new levels of intensity in late-twentieth-century discussions, especially when Christian feminist theologians challenged the dominant anthropology, as exemplified by Augustine, which would accuse the body and its appetites and affections for humanity’s evil will. Feminists do not simply reverse the Augustinian stance, thereby praising body and faulting mind; rather, they see the locus of the distortion in precisely the dichotomizing, fragmenting opposition of body and mind. Further, they point out that this dualism’s devaluation of the body also devalues woman and nature, both of which are perceived as dangerous bodily domains that are distorting and in need of control. The locus of the distortion is, then, according to these critiques, to be found in what Rosemary Radford Ruether has termed a dualist “distorted relationality” rather than in some single faculty of human being.
The question of the locus of the fall, again, however it is conceived of (e.g., as estrangement or lostness), can also be focused individually or continually. In the classical theologies, especially in Western societies, the focus has largely been on what individuals do and have—their guilty consciences, their wills, their bodily desires, their false thoughts, and their idolatries. It is true that Augustine could speak of “original sin” as a great “train of evil”—a legacy, if you will, by which individuals were conditioned; this does tend to shift the locus toward domains and circumstances larger than any individual. But the sin or fallenness showed its real force in the way it entered the individual’s bodily life, especially his or her sexuality, and affected the individual being.
In contrast, especially by the nineteenth century, theologians began articulating human fault and distortion as a communal or social problem, in part because of interaction with emerging cultural and social theory. Paradigmatic here is Schleiermacher, for whom sin is elaborated as “corporate sin.” For him sin pertains not severally to each individual, but “in each the work of all, and in all the work of each; and only in this corporate character, indeed, can it be properly and fully understood.” More recently this issue has arisen again, especially in Latin American liberation theology, wherein, without denying the personal or