What Does It Mean to Be Made in God’s Image? — Athanasius
⏱ 14 min read
The phrase arrives in church almost weekly. Made in God’s image. It is the sentence that gets reached for whenever the preacher wants to argue for human dignity, or for the unborn child, or for the elderly relative, or for the refugee at the border. It is the sentence Christians use when they want to say something true about all of us, and they want the truth to land hard. The trouble is that the phrase has often landed hard outwardly — as the doctrinal floor for arguments about other people — and very rarely landed at all inwardly, in the woman at her own kitchen sink, who would never deny the doctrine but cannot quite locate it in her own felt sense of herself on a tired Wednesday morning.
This is the question the early church, and especially Athanasius — the fourth-century Alexandrian bishop whose short book On the Incarnation defended the imago Dei against every reductive heresy of his age — was writing for. Athanasius’s claim is older than most modern formulations and slower than the bumper-sticker version. He argued that the image of God in the human being is so structurally constitutive that the only adequate response to its damage was for the Word Himself to take human flesh — that the same Word through whom the image was given is the Word by whom the image is restored. The doctrine is high. The pastoral consequence is intimate. And the most concentrated devotional language for it — what it actually feels like to be a creature made in God’s image — comes not from the abstract Greek of Athanasius but from the prayer-language of Augustine, who took the patristic doctrine and showed what it sounds like inside the human heart. The Stilling Waves Bible Study Workbook for Women carries a similar slow form into daily companionship, if you would like a place to take this practice after the article. For now — read slowly. The question deserves more than the bumper sticker.
Athanasius and Augustine, taken together, give the patristic answer to what does it mean to be made in God’s image in two halves. Athanasius gives the structural claim: the human being is so constituted by the image that nothing less than the Incarnation could restore it. Augustine gives the felt claim: the human heart, made in the image, knows itself as restless until it rests in the One whose image it bears. We will sit with Augustine’s three short prayer-passages, because they are where the patristic doctrine becomes most translatable to the woman at the sink. The patristic answer, in short, is that being made in God’s image means being a creature whose whole orientation — body, mind, heart, soul — is built for God, and the for-ness is what the image is.
The first passage: made for Thyself
“Thou awakest us to delight in Thy praise; for Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.”
— Augustine, Confessions
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
This is the patristic doctrine of the imago Dei compressed into two clauses. Thou madest us for Thyself. Athanasius would have written paragraphs of careful Greek to defend the claim against the gnostic and Arian alternatives of his day. Augustine, three generations later, says the same thing in a single line of Latin prayer. The image of God in you is not located primarily in your reason, or your moral conscience, or your capacity for relationship — though it includes all of those. It is located, more deeply, in the for-ness of your whole being. You were made for God in the same structural sense that the lung is made for air. The image is the orientation. The dignity is the consequence.
This is the line that, slowly read, will start to do quiet work on the question you have been carrying for years without naming. What does it mean to be made in God’s image? The Sunday-school answer is: it means you have inherent worth. That answer is true. The patristic answer is deeper: it means you are made for God, and the unrest of being not-yet-at-rest in Him is the diagnostic signature of the image in you. The image of God in the human being announces itself, in this life, most often as the felt unrest of a creature who has been planted in soils she was not built to grow in and is restless until she finds the One she is for. The restlessness is not the failure of the image. The restlessness is the evidence of it. (For the woman whose restlessness has become its own felt weight, the matched slow read of Augustine’s famous line is at my heart is restless until it rests in you — Augustine, slowly read.)
Thou awakest us to delight in Thy praise. Notice the verb. Awakest. The capacity to delight in God — to do, joyfully, the thing the image-bearer is for — is not produced by the image-bearer. It is awakened by God. Athanasius is explicit about this in On the Incarnation: the image, once damaged by sin, could not be restored by the image-bearer alone. The Word who gave the image is the Word who must renew it. The renewal happens, slowly, in the soul of the woman who lets Him do it — by the small daily showing-up that lets the awakening happen on His schedule rather than hers. Your part is not the awakening. Your part is the not-sleeping-through-it when it comes.
For the modern Christian woman, this is the part that gently dismantles the chronic guilt of devotional inconsistency. You have been blaming yourself for not feeling more of the image-of-God-ness that the doctrine says you bear. Athanasius and Augustine would tell you, with the patient tone of the fathers who knew what they were doing: the feeling is His to give. The image is structural; the felt sense is gift; the gap between the two is where the slow daily prayer-life lives. The image of God in you is intact whether you feel it today or not. The slow waking-up to it is what the rest of your life is for. (For the woman who has been told her need for rest is itself a failure of devotion, what the Bible says about self-care walks the scriptural grounds underneath this slow waking.)
The second passage: the light, the bread, the power
“Thou light of my heart, Thou bread of my inmost soul, Thou Power who givest vigour to my mind, who quickenest my thoughts, I loved Thee not.”
— Augustine, Confessions
This is the patristic doctrine of the imago Dei translated into the language of the felt interior life. Read it once at speed, then read it again, slowly.
Augustine is naming the four most internal facts of being a human being — the light by which the heart sees, the bread by which the inmost soul is fed, the power that gives vigour to the mind, the One who quickens the thoughts — and confessing that each of them is God Himself. This is the patristic doctrine at its highest pitch. To be made in God’s image is to be a creature whose every interior function is sustained by the God whose image she bears. You do not light your own heart. You do not feed your own inmost soul. You do not generate the vigour of your own mind. You do not quicken your own thoughts. The image of God in the woman at the kitchen sink is the ongoing, moment-by-moment fact that she is being held in being by the One she was made for.
This is the line that does the deepest pastoral work. The doctrine of the imago Dei, as it is often preached, can sound like a one-time endowment — God made the human being in His image at creation, the endowment is therefore intact, and the moral consequence is that we owe respect to every human being who bears the endowment. The doctrine is true at that level. Augustine, following Athanasius, goes deeper. The image is not a one-time endowment. It is a continuous dependence. The same God who gave the image at creation is the God who is — this very breath — the light of your heart, the bread of your inmost soul, the power of your mind. Being made in God’s image is not a thing that happened to you in the past; it is a thing that is happening to you in the present, constantly, in every interior function of your being.
I loved Thee not. Augustine ends with the four words that turn the doctrine into worship. He is naming the gap. The four attributes of divine sustenance have been continuous. The love-back has not. The image of God in him has been intact the whole time; the love that the image was made to direct toward its Original has been absent. The grief in those four words is the precise grief of a creature who realises she has been receiving the constant inner sustenance of the One she was made for and has been ignoring Him. The patristic doctrine of the imago Dei is not, in this reading, an excuse for self-congratulation. It is an invitation to worship. The image in you is the Father’s gift; the response of love is what the image was made to do. The slow growing of that response is the work of the rest of your life. (For a quieter daily entry-point to this kind of slow reading, a beginner study Bible for women is the gentle starting place, and inductive Bible study for beginners walks the slower method of reading scripture from the inside out.)
The Stilling Waves Bible Study Workbook for Women is built around this kind of slow inward turning. A short passage each day, room for the response Augustine and Athanasius together would call for — the small daily love-back of the image-bearer toward the One whose image she bears — and no demand to perform what the patristic fathers knew is His to give.
A somatic for the image-bearer
Pause here. The patristic doctrine of the imago Dei has a body to it — On the Incarnation is, after all, the great patristic defence of the body’s place in salvation — and the body is one of the places the image-of-God-ness is most easily felt before the mind catches up.
Sit somewhere quiet. Let both feet press flat to the floor. Take one slow inhale through the nose. On the exhale, let the eyes lower — not closed, just lowered. Notice the slight settling of the body. Now, on the next breath, do not think the words but rather receive them, slowly, in the centre of the chest: He made me for Himself. He is the light of my heart. He is the bread of my inmost soul. He sustains me, this very breath. Each phrase on its own exhale. Not performed. Not believed-against-the-evidence. Received, slowly, as the simple report of what is already true and what the imago Dei in you has been quietly oriented toward since before you knew your own name.
Do this three times. Then let the awareness rest, for a moment, on the patristic recognition that the body itself is part of what bears the image. Athanasius defended the body against every reduction of his age — against the gnostic claim that the body was unspiritual, against the docetist claim that the Word only seemed to take flesh — because he knew that being made in God’s image is not a thing that happens to the soul despite the body. It is a thing that happens to the whole human being, body and soul together. The chest opening a little. The shoulders lowering. The breath going deeper. That is not separate from the imago Dei. That is the imago Dei, in its bodily form, slowly being recovered.
The third passage: trembling and kindling
“I trembled for fear, and again kindled with hope, and with rejoicing in Thy mercy, O Father; and all issued forth both by mine eyes and voice, when Thy good Spirit turning unto us, said, O ye sons of men, how long slow of heart?”
— Augustine, Confessions
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
This is the most concentrated description in Confessions of what it actually feels like when the imago Dei in a person responds to the One whose image it is. I trembled for fear, and again kindled with hope. The dual motion — the trembling and the kindling — is the patristic signature of the image-bearer recognising her Original. The trembling is the reverence: the awe of a creature in the presence of the Creator she is for. The kindling is the love: the hope rising, the heart catching fire, the rejoicing in mercy. These are not opposed. They are the two simultaneous motions of an imago Dei that is finally awake to what it is for.
This is the line that, for the modern Christian woman, will gently recover what the bumper-sticker version of made in God’s image has lost. The doctrine is not primarily a statement about static worth that the world will or will not honour. It is a statement about the responsive structure of a soul made for God — a structure whose proper functioning is to tremble and kindle in His presence. The dignity is real because the responsiveness is real. The patristic answer to the question what does it mean to be made in God’s image is, finally: it means you are a creature whose deepest functioning is to respond to God — to tremble in reverence, to kindle in love, to weep, to speak, to be slowly drawn into the active form of the imago Dei that has, the whole time, been your structural orientation. (For the daily small showing-up that lets this responsiveness be recovered, how to bible journal for beginners is the entry-level form of slow scriptural reading; and the wider letter to the depleted Christian woman whose responsiveness has gone quiet is at Christian self-care: 20 ideas that aren’t bubble baths.)
All issued forth both by mine eyes and voice. That phrase is the patristic anthropology in miniature. The image-bearer responds with the whole of herself — eyes and voice, body and word, tears and speech. Athanasius’s insistence on the unity of body and soul in the imago Dei is being lived out, in this small moment, in Augustine’s actual experience. The image of God in the human being is not a faculty. It is the whole creature, integrated, responding to the One she is for. The modern fragmenting of the imago Dei — into the cognitive-only or the moral-only or the social-only versions — is what the patristic fathers were trying to prevent. The image is whole. The response is whole. The slow daily recovery of that wholeness is the work of the Christian life.
O ye sons of men, how long slow of heart? Augustine ends with the Spirit’s question. The question is the question that has been quietly put to every image-bearer who has ever wondered why her felt sense of being-made-in-God’s-image does not match the doctrine she would defend if pressed. How long slow of heart? Not as a rebuke. As an invitation. The patristic answer to what does it mean to be made in God’s image is, in the end, an invitation — the invitation to let the long slowness of the heart be gently broken in upon by the One whose image you bear, who is patient, who is the light of your heart and the bread of your inmost soul, who has been the whole time the One you were for.
What this image-bearing will look like over a year
The patristic tradition is explicit that being made in God’s image is something that becomes more visible over time, not in a single dramatic conversion but in the slow daily turning of the image-bearer toward her Original. The first month feels like learning the patristic vocabulary. The third month, the vocabulary begins to feel less foreign. By the end of the first year, the woman who has been daily turning has not become a more polished version of herself; she has become more herself — the imago Dei in her, slowly awakened, moving toward the One it was always for, trembling and kindling in the small private moments when the Spirit turns toward her.
The dignity she had been arguing for, on behalf of others or on behalf of herself, has become the unforced background of who she is. She does not have to defend her image-of-God-ness on a Tuesday afternoon. She is for God, and the for-ness has begun to settle into the centre of her, and the small daily kindlings have begun to add up into a steady inward warmth that does not need to be argued for because it is being lived. (For the sibling articles in this contemplative-fathers series, see who am I in Christ — Murray on abiding identity and what is my identity in Christ — Owen on the indwelling Christ.)
☕ Get Seven Days of Stillness — free
A free gift from Hayley Louisa Mark. A short devotional companion drawn from the 140-Day series — seven passages, seven contemplative practices, sent to your inbox over the coming week.
No noise. No spam. Unsubscribe whenever you wish.
A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Bible Study Workbook for Women. Each day, a short passage and room for the slow turning the patristic fathers named — the small daily awakening of the imago Dei toward the One you were made for.
The Stilling Waves Bible Study Workbook for Women carries the patristic slow vocabulary — made for Thyself, the light of the heart, the bread of the inmost soul, trembling and kindling — into a daily companion built for the woman whose question what does it mean to be made in God’s image is, at last, ready to stop being doctrinal and start being daily lived.
