In pop-Christianity, the “image of God” has become little more than theological shorthand for human dignity. When Christians want to draw attention to the value of someone our society seems to disregard, they will inevitably say something like, “This person was made in the image of God!” Such arguments may carry emotional freight, but they do not begin to exhaust the depth of its meaning. In particular, this pop-Christian approach misses the rich theological significance of gender with respect to the image of God. My thesis is simply this: the image of God is a ‘sexed’ reality whereby men and women fulfill unique vocations in their God-ordained purpose to fulfill the Creation Mandate (Gen. 1:26–28).[1]
1. Speaking about the nature of humanity in its two kinds is notoriously difficult. For the greatest precision of speech, see Michael Carlino and Kyle Claunch, “Gender Essentialism in Anthropological, Covenantal, and Christological Perspective,” in Eikon 6.2 (Fall 2024): 20–71. For a historical review of Reformed theologians who speak of male nature and female nature, see Zachary Garris, “Do Men and Women Have Different Natures?”
Various Aspects of the Divine Image
The Image of God as Male and Female
The image of God is much more than an indicator of human value. It not only describes what humans are, it describes what humans do. Both of these (what we are and do) are irreducibly gendered. Let me explain. From the first text that mentions the image of God (Gen. 1:27), we see that it is ‘sexed.’ Although “man” is created in God’s image, we also discover that there are two kinds of man(kind): a male kind and a female kind. Why two kinds? Because God’s image cannot multiply from a single sex. There must be two, and they “image” God together in their one-flesh union. This at least partially accounts for why the whole story of Scripture moves to highlight, glorify, and even exaggerate the distinctions between men and women, though both are made in the same, divine image.[2]
2. William E. Mouser and Barbara K. Mouser, The Story of Sex in Scripture (Waxahachie, TX: International Council for Gender Studies, 2006), 11.
The Image of God as the Heart of the Household
The image of God, therefore, is at the heart of the household. The household is built from a “one-flesh” union between husband and wife. These two distinct yet complementary parts create interdependence, division of labor, and diversity of output. It also produces children—new image bearers. These sexual-relational dynamics are fascinating and glorious. The interplay between male and female is the stuff of romance, comedy, drama, art, music, and poetry. These are the social building blocks of civilization.
The Image of God as the Engine of Dominion
The image of God is the engine that powers the Creation Mandate (or “Dominion Mandate”), a God-given vision of a global civilization that would descend from a single human pair. God’s creation of man in his image indicates his intention for them to rule. The sequence of events in Genesis 1:26–28 reveals a divine pattern that links the image of God to exercising dominion. In verse 26, God says, “Let us make man in our image,” followed by “let them have dominion.” Then, verse 27 says, “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them,” followed by this statement in verse 28, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion . . .” The pattern in these verses is clear: image, dominion, image, dominion. In other words, the image of God doesn’t merely tell us that man was made to rule, it tells us how he would rule. Man, as male and female, would exercise dominion over the earth by establishing households: getting married, having children, and building them up in the faith.
Herman Bavinck put it this way: “Dominion over the earth is an unfolding of the image of God in humanity . . . Dominion is inseparable from the image of God according to which people were created. Sin did indeed introduce an immense change in the image of God, but insofar as human beings still display the image of God, they also retain the calling and the power to subdue the earth.”[3] Therefore, God’s original creation of man and woman at the beginning of the story contained the seeds that would sprout and bloom at the end of the story. Everything in between was propelled by thousands of generations of men and women whose distinctions work together to fulfill this divine purpose.
3. Herman Bavinck, The Christian Family, trans. Nelson D. Kloosterman (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian’s Library Press, 2012), 117.
Different Bodies, Different Natures, Different Duties
The “image of God” is not a generic value marker for humanity, but a powerful declaration of God’s design for man, woman, the household, and the governance of society. So we should not be surprised to discover that men and women have different bodies which correspond to their different natures and different duties. These sexual differences are imprinted onto every human soul, and as such, they are gloriously eternal. When God first created Adam, Genesis 2:7 says that “the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.” The Hebrew words for “living creature” are nephesh chayyah, which together indicate a psychosomatic unity of body and spirit. Every human being is an embodied soul, a composite of spirit and flesh, uniquely knit together in each individual. Every hair follicle, blood vessel, brain cell, and DNA strand has an assigned purpose given by the Creator. C. S. Lewis once said, “Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body—which believes that matter is good, that God Himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body is going to be given to us even in Heaven and is going to be an essential part of our happiness, our beauty, and our energy.”[4]
4. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (London, England: William Collins, 2012), 77.
In other words, God’s good design is sexual. We are not androgynous carbon units. Manhood and womanhood are not suits of clothes. Gender is not assigned; it is only acknowledged. Sexuality isn’t merely a physical characteristic, but characterizes the entire person, including the soul. God created Adam with a male body and a masculine soul. Eve was created differently. She was formed from Adam’s side with a female body and a feminine soul.[5] As J. Budziszewski put it, “Human beings aren’t one thing but two things together, composites of physical body and rational soul, each element equally personal and equally part of what we are.”[6]
5. Some people claim that the existence of intersex people should lead to the rejection of the gender binary. Intersex, and related conditions, such as Swyer’s syndrome, is a physical condition where a person has ambiguous genitalia, exhibiting characteristics of both male and female. This is a very rare phenomena, occurring in roughly 0.018% of the population. Intersex does not negate the rule but proves it. In other words, the existence of intersex does not require the recognition of a third gender, but the acknowledgement that this condition is a rare deviation from the pattern and is the result of the fall.
6. Budziszewski, J., On the Meaning of Sex (Wilmington, NC: ISI Books, 2014), 40–41.
Therefore, men have male bodies, masculine souls, and are called to perform masculine duties to perform in service of the kingdom. Likewise, women have female bodies, feminine souls, and feminine duties to perform in service of the kingdom. Male and female bodies are similar in most respects, having the same organs and body functions. These God-given differences are gifts that bring beauty, wonder, excitement, and mystery into our human experience.
When Adam first sees his wife, she is naked, and he notices that she is physically different—and he immediately burst into song. “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh,” which is a statement of equality. She and he are alike. But he goes on, saying, “she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man” (Gen. 2:23). This is a statement of distinction and purpose. She and he are different. There was something delightfully similar about her, yet something curiously different, which triggered the first love song in the Bible. What Adam observed on the outside was only the beginning of his exploration of all the delightful differences contained within. Therefore, God is glorified when men and women consciously obey their bodies and live according to their sexual design.
The Gnostic Rebellion Against God’s Design
The gnostic understanding of human beings, which is so common in the modern world, does the opposite. The essence of a person, some say, is what’s on the inside. What one feels like is who he or she truly is. The body is incidental, maybe even incorrect. According to modern gender theory, gender is a matter of feelings and self-styled performances. And with devastating effect, a whole generation has been conditioned to think this way.
Today, a large number of people form significant relationships online. In some video games, players choose an avatar and play the game as someone other than themselves. They play a role, enacting a game-world fantasy. One’s avatar can be male, female, or a different species of being altogether. In the make-believe world of video games, it’s simply entertainment. But it can subconsciously reward gnostic thinking, where the player sees himself as something other than what his body says. Further, he can find more gratification in an online gaming “community” than in reality. His gaming avatar is more exciting, skilled, powerful, and attractive than anything in his real life. It’s a disembodied experience that gratifies a gnostic desire to escape one’s own body. If a man imagines himself a young, desirable female character, he can become that by clicking the settings icon. Simple. And gnostic. In the gaming world, the body is irrelevant (except for the thumbs).
Christianity is an Embodied Faith
Modern Christians are so conditioned by feminism to ignore sexual differences that it seems heretical to acknowledge them at all. I once heard a sermon where the preacher emphatically declared, “the fruit and gifts of the Spirit are not gendered!” He repeated it for emphasis. Even though this pastor would call himself “complementarian,” he was preaching a gnostic workaround that neuters God’s Word and how men and women are called to bear spiritual fruit in uniquely masculine and feminine ways. This version of ethical androgyny is common in the modern church. If we ignore the ethical implications of God’s design for our bodies, we become ignorant fools.
The body matters. The Apostle John wrote, “I had much to write to you, but I would rather not write with pen and ink. I hope to see you soon, and we will talk face to face” (3 John 13–14). John recognized the need for an embodied, face-to-face interaction. German theologian Werner Neuer once said, “Soul and body form an inseparable unity, being male or female characterizes the whole person and not only his or her body. . . . Sex is therefore not just one personal characteristic among others, but a mode of being which determines one’s whole life. ‘Sexuality is the ultimate, irremovable and irreplaceable mode, which makes a person the kind of person he or she is.’”[7] As embodied souls, we are not spiritually androgynous, but our souls correspond to our bodies. Sex encompasses our whole person, both outward and inward.
7. Neuer, Man and Woman, 27. In this quote from Neuer’s book, he is quoting Catholic philosopher and theologian Fritz Leist.
Since our bodies are eternal, sexuality—which is not to be confused or conflated with sexual intercourse—is also eternal. Sexuality is the reality through which we experience both this life and the life to come. At his return, Christ will “transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself” (Phil. 3:20–21). The “glorious body” referred to here is Christ’s resurrection body. The resurrection body of Jesus was not androgynous. It was male, as it was from his birth. Since Christ ascended to heaven bodily, the maleness of that body is eternal. This means that we, too, will not experience eternity as disembodied, floating spirits, but as men and women with glorified bodies.
The Moral Obligations of Sexuality Evident in Nature
Natural law, or the revelation that comes by way of nature, recognizes that some truths are self-evident and entail moral obligations. The apostle Paul gives an example of this in Romans 1 when he says that homosexual intercourse is always sinful because it is always unnatural. How so? Between two men, homosexual intercourse is consummated in the part of the body designed to expel waste. That act is “contrary to nature” (Rom. 1:26) and it testifies to death. Nature, on the other hand, teaches that sex between a man and woman creates new life. If we reflect on God’s design, we recognize that nature speaks. It tells a story. Nature testifies that man was designed to beget children and woman was designed to bear them. Of course, this doesn’t mean all heterosexual sex is good. Fornication and adultery are also sinful. Only Scripture can explain the full meaning and design for sex. But nature has a voice in the matter too. Sex has a built-in logic that is obvious to anyone who isn’t trying to suppress it.
The reason I’m making this point is to encourage us to reflect on the meaning of God’s design of our bodies and what this teaches us about how to glorify God with our sexuality. As stated above, the image of God is ‘sexed.’ This fact reinforces moral obligations that are spelled out in Scripture, but also in nature itself, we can discover, as Paul does, that some acts are natural, while others are contrary to nature.
So, God’s design for sexuality is revealed in both Scripture and nature, such that the “is” of God’s design for sexuality implies an “ought.” Because God has embedded principles and meaning into the created order, every command in Scripture that prohibits sexual immorality is for the good of nature. Indeed, grace restores nature. And acknowledging the way that God has made nature with specific designs for men and women, sex and procreation, marriage and morality, does not make Scripture’s commands arbitrary, it rather follows Scripture’s invitation to observe what God has revealed in creation and live in accordance with it. Put simply, the Bible speaks Truth with a capital “T,” and nature speaks truth with a lowercase “t.” It is perilous to ignore the testimony of either.
Therefore, if God designed sex with any goals in mind, we should expect them to be revealed in Scripture and evident in nature. They are. God designed male and female with a potentiality that is fulfilled when through marriage and childbearing. Both mother and father are needed to raise the child, and this is because boys and girls need models of their own sex who demonstrate how to live and relate to the other sex. Two image bearers join in a one flesh union to create a new image bearer that will, Lord willing, grow up to do the same.
The Meaning of Male and Female
This leads us to the meaning of male and female. Of course, the full scope of what manhood and womanhood means cannot be contained by definitions. We are far too complicated for such reductionism. And yet, we must still attempt to define them for the modern world that is so eager to eliminate sexual distinctions altogether. So, I offer these definitions from J. Budziszewski as a starting point (not the finish line). He says, “Sanity begins with the fact that men are potentially fathers, and women potentially mothers. This is not just a fact about what kind of thing they might or might not do some day, but about what kind of being they are inwardly aimed at becoming.”[8]
8. Budziszewski, On the Meaning of Sex, 54.
He goes on to make a helpful distinction between potentiality and possibility. The design for womanhood includes the potentiality for motherhood, even though, for various reasons, motherhood is not possible for some women. In other words, what most fundamentally distinguishes woman from man is her potential for motherhood, even though it may not always be possible. Budziszewski says,
A potentiality is something like a calling. It wants, so to speak, to develop; it demands, so to speak, a response. Of course, this is figurative language because a potentiality has no will of its own. Yet it really is directed to fruition. The potentiality for motherhood is like an arrow, cocked in the string and aimed at the target, even if it never takes flight. It intimates an inbuilt meaning, and expresses an inbuilt purpose, which cannot help but influence the mind and will of every person imbued with them.[9]
9. Budziszewski, On the Meaning of Sex, 55–56.
The potentiality for motherhood goes beyond the physical aspects of giving birth. Since she is an embodied soul, her potentiality for motherhood encompasses her whole being. Similarly, an adoptive mother who has not physically given birth is no less a mother, as she is expressing the potentiality she was designed for.
The potentialities of manhood and womanhood find expression in the institution of marriage, where the sexual purposes of union and procreation are fulfilled. J. Budziszewski said the reason is that
children change us in a way we desperately need to be changed. They wake us up, they wet their diapers, they depend on us utterly. Willy-nilly, they knock us out of our selfish habits and force us to live sacrificially for others; they are the necessary and natural continuation of the shock to our selfishness which is initiated by matrimony itself. By seeking the unity but deliberately refusing the gift of children, we still get a kind of unity, but it goes bad. Because it turns inward, it ferments, turns sour, and begins to stink. The decisive factor is not sterility, which is nobody’s fault, but deliberate rejection of fertility. If we willfully refuse the procreative meaning of union, then union itself is stunted. We merely change from a pair of selfish MEs to a single selfish US.[10]
10. Budziszewski, On the Meaning of Sex, 31.
Conclusion
As stated at the beginning, the image of God is a ‘sexed’ reality whereby men and women fulfill unique vocations in their God ordained purpose of fulfilling the Creation Mandate. Every human being is either male or female, created in God’s image, with equal value and dignity. By God’s design, men and women have different bodies and natures since every human is also a composite of both body and soul. These differences are for God’s glory and our good. God created them for the purpose of union and procreation in the covenant of marriage. Thus, what it means to be male or female is essential to marriage, the foundational relationship of the household, and entails the inherent potentialities of fatherhood and motherhood, which are the foundational relationships for all of civilization.
Grace doesn’t overturn nature. It restores it. It is not legalism to conform to our sexual nature. With Spirit-led eyes of faith, under the authority of Scripture, we can observe God’s design in nature, draw ethical conclusions based on that design, and be empowered to live within those moral parameters. The modern, gnostic tendency to see our bodies and natures as plastic, malleable, and incidental to who we truly are on the inside is an error of cosmic scale.
Men are not women and women are not men. We must go beyond acknowledging this physical reality and press into what it means ethically. Failure to do so is spiritual transgenderism. Men have male bodies, masculine souls, and masculine duties that God calls us to fulfill. Women have female bodies, feminine souls, and feminine duties that God calls them to fulfill. The grace of Jesus Christ redeems and restores that which was marred by the fall. By grace, we can demonstrate the beauty and wonder of God’s good design for sexuality with humility and gratitude.
(This line of argumentation is developed further with pastoral applications in my book, God’s Good Design: A Biblical, Theological, and Practical Guide to Human Sexuality.)
