ABSTRACT
I want now to turn to a second aspect of the image of Man, and I hope you will forgive me if I again refer to the first chapter of Genesis. If one were to accept that Man was created in the image of God, then it would follow that, in some sense, God exists in the form of the image of Man. Now, if you look at a Man, the most obvious thing that you see is his external physical habitus, and, on this basis, you would proceed to infer that God, too, must have a head, eyes, ears, nose, mouth, neck, trunk, arms, legs, and so on—a god that is bound by the limits of his integument just as is Man and, naturally, you endow him with the gender of the superior sex. No mature Bible scholar can, of course, take seriously any such literally anthropomorphic image of God. But, if we reject the latter image while proceeding on the notion of Man having been cast in the image of God, it would follow that, in focusing on his physical habitus, we have somehow misperceived the essential nature of Man. That is, the image of Man that is projected by the Bible cannot be taken as referring to the physical man. If the emphasis on corporeality falsifies the image of God, it by the same token falsifies the image of Man.
