The Image of God and Human Dignity in the Immigration Debate
On Using Imago Dei as a Lever to Shift the Immigration Discussion to the Left
The topic of mass immigration, insecure borders, and the loss of national character and identity is probably the single most pressing matter for the West today. Last week’s Christmas market attack in Magdeburg, Germany, where a Saudi Arabian immigrant plowed his car into a crowded market, killing five and wounding over 200, and, in America, the horrific news that a sleeping woman was set on fire and burned alive in a New York subway car by a homeless Guatemalan immigrant, remind us of the urgency of resolving this problem.
There is growing support among the common people of Europe, England, and America that this must stop. The political leadership class that has intentionally pursued a global, open-borders world by inviting more immigrants than could be assimilated and then demonizing and criminally penalizing their own citizens who object must be removed and ostracized. American support for mass deportation is higher than it’s ever been, hovering around 55% in general support for deporting illegal immigrants, although varying according to changing details or circumstances. Tom Homan, Trump’s nominee for “border Czar,” has taken a hard line on immigration and has sworn to act immediately upon Trump’s numerous future executive orders.
A major obstacle to effective immigration policy, however, are American evangelicals and conservative Christians who have been taught that Christian love and Christlikeness require welcoming all immigrants, no matter their legal or illegal status. Invariably, if you debate the topic of immigration with these conservatives, eventually, they will claim that the image of God in man and human dignity requires a compassionate and welcoming policy toward immigrants, the poor and homeless, and other needy groups in society. In fact, human dignity and the image of God are often invoked in many different settings and conversational topics as a catch-all ethical foundation for moral deliberation and public reason. Yet this is a sign of intellectual malaise, stagnancy, and modern innovations and not a reflection of the Christian tradition.
The Image of God
There are three basic questions that arise regarding the “image of God” (or the imago Dei). First, what is it? Second, did the fall and human sin damage or erase it? Third, what are the ethical and social implications of the image, specifically relating to human dignity? While the scholarly debate over the exact definition of the image of God has gone on for decades, the predominant view is that it refers to human rationality and volition (including emotion, speech, self-reflection, intentionality, etc.). This is in accord with Aristotle’s observation that men, out of all animal life, are the only rational animals precisely because they have the capacity for speech; and that speech and rationality mean that men are sociable, which is what makes them political animals as well.
While some scholars claim that the text in Genesis l:26-28 emphasizes man’s role or function as determined by God, the reality is that the image as rationality implies both a function for man (his temporal work and final end) as well as relationship and sociability (procreation, civil association, etc.). The best way to frame this passage is to conceive of Adam as a divine representative, a vicegerent of God, placed in a Garden-temple with a dual priest-king commission to conquer the uncultivated world beyond the Garden and to take the name and knowledge of God to the ends of the earth as a divine intercessory. To accomplish this, man had to be made in God’s image in order to fulfill this role as a species and to properly represent God to the rest of creation.
A major debate in Christian theology revolved around whether the Fall and God’s curse upon mankind resulted in the image of God being blotted out from man’s nature. This determination was closely related to how one defined the image. For example, Samuel Willard (1640-1707), a New England Puritan clergyman most famous for his massive work, A Compleat Body of Divinity, believed that the image of God was identical to “original righteousness”—a righteousness and inward holiness given to Adam by God that perfected the human constitution, oriented him toward heavenly things, and secured his moral rectitude and integrity (Question X, Compleat Body of Divinity). When the Fall resulted in man’s original righteousness being removed, the consequence was the image of God was lost as well. For others, like Francis Turretin (1623-1687), the image of God encompassed both essential and accidental properties: it was “antecedently in nature (as to the spirituality and immortality of the soul); formally in rectitude or original righteousness; consequently in the dominion and immortality of the whole man” (Institutes of Elenctic Institutes, 5.10.6). Thus, for Turretin, the loss of original righteousness damaged the image but did not completely eradicate it.
My own view is closer to Turretin’s, that the image of God remains in fallen man even though not in its original glory or perfect function. Man’s reason and sociability remain in the post-lapsarian state, and even though natural man can arrive at a natural knowledge of God, the full knowledge of God’s nature and his salvific work—and the fulfillment of man’s divine commission—requires divine revelation and help in the form of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
What does the image of God imply? Certainly it means that man has reason and deliberation, and thus the ability to discern truth from error and to seek knowledge and overcome ignorance. It means that man is primarily a social being, not a lone individual; he is born into a family and society that indelibly shapes and molds him into a particular kind of person (for good or ill). It means that he is a free creature, capable of uncoerced choice, and thus of being morally responsible and accountable for his own actions. Finally, it means that man is a religious being, created by God for the knowledge of God and communion with the Holy One.
These are general observations that do not clearly or obviously map onto political constitutions or public policy. However, one particular implication of the image of God for public ethics and politics is God’s covenant with Noah in Genesis 9. There, God declares that he will “require a reckoning for the life of man”: whoever sheds the blood of man must pay a blood debt of their own life in return (Gen. 9:5-6). The reason given in this passage is that “God made man in his own image.” Clearly, man is the living image of God (he does not merely possess the image), and so an unjustified assault upon man’s life is an assault upon God. This passage has been the locus classicus for capital punishment for capital crimes in society for centuries, although the text itself does not stipulate that human authorities will execute criminals.
What is the relationship between the image of God and human dignity? What does dignity even mean? Many Christians assume that the image of God automatically confers dignity or worth to every human being, and thus each person intrinsically possesses and cannot lose their dignity no matter what sin they commit or how evil they might become. Yet no passage in Scripture that references the image of God says anything like this (and there are only a few passages that explicitly mention the image). While Genesis 9 clearly contains an ethical teaching from the image of God, it also stipulates a death penalty for those who murder their fellow man. For these criminals, the image of God and their presupposed essential dignity does not confer immunity from just punishment.
The Defiling of Dignity
American Christians believe that they can contribute something meaningful and relevant to political discourse and policy debates and that this contribution primarily comes from theological insights that only Christians can provide. However, in this case, the Christian rhetoric surrounding the image of God and human dignity is not in the vanguard but in the train; religious conservatives are reacting to a secular discourse on human dignity that predated them by decades.
The invocation of human “dignity” by American and international political leaders began in earnest in the early twentieth century. The foreign policy wing of the Progressive Party at the turn of the century often invoked the idea of “human uplift” as a moral and civilizational justification for colonialism abroad. Senator Orville Platt (R, CT), in defending the U.S. invasion and occupation of the Philippines, said this in 1899:
“I believe that we have been chosen to carry on and to carry forward this great work of uplifting humanity on earth. From the time of the landing on Plymouth Rock in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, in the spirit of the Constitution, believing that all men are equal and endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights, believing that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, we have spread that civilization across the continent until it stood at the Pacific Ocean looking ever westward.”
President Roosevelt, in his Fourth Annual Message to Congress in 1904, declared that
“it is very much wiser and more useful for us to concern ourselves with striving for our own moral and material betterment here at home than to concern ourselves with trying to better the condition of things in other nations. We have plenty of sins of our own to war against, and under ordinary circumstances we can do more for the general uplifting of humanity by striving with heart and soul to put a stop to civic corruption, to brutal lawlessness and violent race prejudices here at home than by passing resolutions about wrongdoing elsewhere.”
Human uplift was both a domestic and foreign concern.
The notion of uplifting humanity to the heights of moral and civilizational development quickly morphed into an explicit rhetoric of “dignity.” The most famous of these, of course, was the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations, which, in its Preamble, declared that the “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” It then went on to claim that “the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.”
President Harry Truman, in his 1949 inaugural address, presented the differences between communism and democracy as the “material well-being, human dignity, and the right to believe in and worship God” only presented by democracies. In 1962, President Kenedy gave an address on the first anniversary of the Alliance for Progress, in which reiterated that his mission was “to complete the revolution of the Americas—to build a Hemisphere where all men can hope for a suitable standard of living—and all can live out their lives in dignity and freedom.” In his 1982 address to the British Parliament, President Ronald Reagan condemned the Soviet Union as a country that “runs against the tide of history by denying human freedom and human dignity to its citizens.” Hilary Clinton, as President Obama’s Secretary of State, gave a speech on the Human Rights Agenda for the 21st Century, proclaiming that
“To fulfill their potential, people must be free to choose laws and leaders; to share and access information, to speak, criticize, and debate. They must be free to worship, associate, and to love in the way that they choose. And … to pursue the dignity that comes with self-improvement and self-reliance, to build their minds and their skills, to bring their goods to the marketplace, and participate in the process of innovation.”
Today, “human dignity” runs cover for every conceivable human expression, choice, or lifestyle. Same-sex “marriage” is said to be respecting the dignity of gays and lesbians to marry the ones they love; homosexual orientation and transgender identity are not chosen, but dignified expressions of human sexual variety that demand our recognition and celebration lest we violate these person’s reputational dignity; illegal immigrants, believing all women, people of color and their racial grievances, Ukrainian freedom fighters, Jews in Israel fighting Hamas terrorists—all of these and hundreds of more groups all lay claim to the universal power of “human dignity” that justifies their particular existence and causes.
Evangelicals and conservatives today who talk about dignity and the image of God are following this pattern. Christian ethical and theological scholarship in America did not start writing about the image of God in regular form until the 1970s. This development is best viewed as a reaction to the dignity discourse and an attempt to theologically back-fill a foundation that could justify and ground popular invocations of human dignity. Today, however, you can hardly read a book on Christian ethics or public policy without running into this issue. For example, in his popular book, Christians at the Border: Immigration, the Church, and the Bible (2008, 2013), M. Daniel Carroll R. begins his exposition of Old Testament theological truths relevant to the immigration debate with a discussion of the image of God. While Carroll admits to the threats to national security, from unwise immigration policy, to real changes to national identity, and to the unprecedented influx of Hispanic immigrants in the past fifty years, he overcomes these political, social, and national concerns by wielding the image of God as trump card. At heart, immigration for Carroll is about the individual immigrant, her suffering and plight, and the overwhelming concern for U.S. policy and Church ministry alike to, ultimately, accept her with open arms and help her in her distress. Nothing less will do if one wants to honor the immigrant image bearer and uphold her human dignity.
The Pre Modern (Christian) View
The modern evangelical understanding of the image of God and human dignity is myopic and stale. Turning to a pre-modern thinker can help us visualize this matter differently. In 1486, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, a young and dashing Italian philosopher, composed a brief oration as an introductory treatise for a larger work. That larger work consisted of nine hundred philosophical and theological theses (known as the Conclusiones) that he was planning to present at Rome for a conference on philosophical peace. This preparatory discourse represents a window into his beliefs, and it later acquired the title Oration on the Dignity of Man. The title is somewhat misleading, as Pico only mentions dignity a couple of times in the short work. Yet even still, the entire piece presents his understanding of what makes man unique and dignified (or not) in Pico’s view.
In Pico’s view, what made man different from all the other creatures created by God was that man had an indefinite form. Instead of giving to man a rigid and permanent form, man was a microcosm of all living things: he was the center of the universe, and within his constitution he embodied all the different elements of creation. Pico, imaginatively recreating what God might have said in creating man, says the following:
“I [God] have placed thee [man] at the center of the world … neither heavenly nor earthly, neither mortal nor immortal have We made thee. Thou, like a judge appointed for being honorable, art the molder and make of thyself; thou mayest sculpt thyself into whatever shape thou dost prefer. Thou canst grow downward into the lowest natures which are brutes. Thou canst again grow upward from thy soul’s reason into the highest natures which are divine.”
For Pico, man’s intermediate state between the physical and spiritual worlds (a Platonic idea) was his interpretation and understanding of what the biblical image of God meant.
Pico didn’t abandon the idea of man’s final end as the beatific vision. Man still retained a telos and purpose, which was to guide his choices and behavior.
“But why all this? In order for us to understand that, after having been born in this state so that we may be what we will to be, then, since we are held in honor, we ought to take particular care that no one may say against us that we do not know that we are made similar to brutes and mindless beasts of burden. But rather, as Asaph the prophet says: ‘Ye are all gods, and sons of the most high.’”
Instead of “abusing the very indulgent liberality of the Father” in giving man free choice in order to harm ourselves, instead men ought to strain toward salvation and glory: “Let a certain holy ambition invade the mind, so that we may not be content with mean things but may aspire to the highest things and strive with all our forces to attain them … Let us spurn earthly things; let us struggle toward the heavenly … let us emulate the angels in dignity and glory. When we have willed it, we shall be not at all below them.”
For Pico, man did not have an essential dignity. He was created by God for glory and immortality but given an indeterminate form and the ability to accept or reject his purpose. For men who abuse their freedom and make evil choices, they become degraded to the form of a beast or plant; they have no dignity, and other men are under no obligation to treat them as if they did. For men who wisely employ their freedom to do good and seek God, they become like the angels in glory and so achieve a divine dignity fitting for man. For Pico, human dignity is a choice. It is in man but only in potentia; it is not made manifest until deliberately developed, cultivated, and achieved.
Conclusion
Pico della Mirandola’s perspective on man’s constitution as a microcosm of God’s creation can help fill out the tepid and emaciated evangelical banter about the image of God. Man is far more fluid and variable than many Christians might be comfortable admitting (which, in part, explains the craziness in modern society), yet he still has a nature and a higher purpose to which he is called and expected to conform. Most importantly, human dignity is not part of the image of God. As God himself tells us, the image does make demands upon how we treat other humans, but humans do not possess a raw and innate dignity that confers worth upon all they do or become, and that subsequently demands that individuals and governments treat them with respect. More often than not, men degrade themselves and choose to become bestial or vegetative. In these cases, they should be treated as such.
This does not mean that all illegal immigrants are beasts or plants that can be discarded without a second thought. Governments are still accountable to God’s demands in Genesis 9 not to murder the innocent. No immigrant, regardless of their legal status, should be abused or murdered. Yet this does not mean those here illegally cannot rightly be deported, as deportation has nothing to do with human dignity. A renewed understanding of the image of God and human dignity does imply that criminal illegal immigrants who have lost their dignity and who pose a particular harm to society should be targeted first and dealt with harshly. They should be incarcerated, prosecuted, and sent back to their country of origin. This, in fact, is the only dignifying response by any government truly concerned to rule for the welfare of its people.
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