Imago Dei: The Inevitable Image

“So God made man in His own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” — Genesis 1:27

Pentax 645 | 75mm F/2.8

Often, origin myths are downright silly—Man being formed from the vomit of some deity, or man coming out of bamboo trees, or man being formed out of the corpse of some god. Even more popular in this day and age is man evolving out of primal ooze, but only after millions of years.

The question of origin comes early—as early as the child can recognize that things come from somewhere. “Where do people come from?” Children often ask out of innocence, unaware of the implications it has regarding justice, death penalty, abortion, and numerous matters that decide one’s fate in society. For the child asking, it is merely a question to satisfy curiosity. For the rest of us, the implications are a matter of life and death.

GFX50R | 85mm F/1.4

Our perpetual quest to understand our beginnings is reflected in the plethora of origin myths across cultures. In understanding where we come from, we can have a collective moral basis which in turn produces a functioning society. Consider as an example the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. -The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776.

At the very core of this notion is the acceptance that God made man—and He made them with certain inalienable rights. Accepting the very notion of a creator God yields certain boundaries about society, and liberates man from meaningless existence.

Yet almost every one of these myths have no real answer for any real issue in our present society. They all fail to present unwavering consistency in explaining the past as it relates to the present and future. In short, almost all of these myths fail to fulfill our perpetual quest, except one.