Book Review - Created in God's Image

Hoekema, Anthony. Created in God’s Image. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1986. 264 pp. $22.00

The fact is widely held that an artist’s work reflects much of the personality and make-up of the artist – the experiences, heritage, struggles, emotions, beliefs and so on. Surrealist sculptors and painters Salvador Dali and Joan Miro’s incessant desire for autonomy, liberation and revolution was reflected in their various cross usage and experimentation of medias.[1] The same producer/product reflection-relationship can be said for architects, authors, scientists and scholars. However, can one posit this same creator/product relationship to the Creator of the universe? Is it even proper to attribute this distinction to God? If so, what are the boundaries of this relationship? What is the nature of this relationship? Primarily, does the Bible have anything to say about the creature’s reflection of its Creator?

Created in God’s Image is Anthony Hoekema’s systematic attempt to answer some of these long pondered questions through a survey of biblical and historical information “about the nature and destiny of human beings” (ix); what is formally known as the doctrine of anthropology. From a Reformed perspective, Hoekema aims to

Present the image of God as having both a structural and a functional aspect, as involving man in his threefold relationship—to God, to others, and to nature—and as going through four stages—the original image, the perverted image, the
renewed image, and the perfected image (ix).

To his three goals we now turn.

In his theological summary of the image of God, Hoekema argues that,

The image of God in man must therefore be seen as involving both the structure of man (his gifts, capacities, and endowments) and the functioning of man
(his actions, his relationships to God and to others, and the ways he uses
his gifts) (73).

To be included in the structural aspects by which “man is like God, and therefore images him” are his rationality, moral sensitivity, conscience, capacity for worship, responsibility, volition, aesthetic sense, and others (70-71). These capacities which “enable man to function as he should in his various relationships” (70-71) “have not been lost” (10) post-fall, but have been retained according to Hoekema (72). On the other hand, man lost the image of God in the functional sense (72). This aspect of the image of God consists of “true knowledge, righteousness, and holiness” (71). In this sense the image of God “means man’s proper functioning in harmony with God’s will for him” (72). From the perspective of the God-given gifts (structural or broader sense) and purposes of those gifts (functional or narrower sense) the heinousness of sin can be seen “by the fact that man is now using God-given and God-imaging powers and gifts to do things that are an affront to his Maker” (72). Pre-fall both the structural and functional aspects were in harmony in man to glorify God in his threefold relationship.

From Genesis 1:26-27, Hoekema contends that “God has placed man into a threefold relationship: between man and God, between man and his fellowmen, and between man and nature” (75). As the perfect image of God, Jesus was in perfect functional peace in this threefold relationship, and likewise, so should man. The primary relationship for man as a “created person” (5) is with his Creator, and all of his “other relationships are to be seen as dominated and regulated by this one” (75). The second relationship given by God to man is his relationship to his fellowman. This relationship is to be used to glorify God by not viewing “gifts and talents as an avenue for personal aggrandizement, but as a means whereby he or she can enrich the lives of others…through acceptance and love” (78). The final aspect of man’s threefold relationship is his rulership over nature. This cultural mandate is “the command to develop a God-glorifying culture” (79); “to cultivate and care for that portion of the earth in which [man] is placed” (80). Hoekema believes that “the proper functioning of the image of God is to be channeled” (81) through this threefold relationship and that by looking at the four stages of humanity one can arrive at a more robust biblical view of the image of God.

The four stages of the image of God are: the original image, the perverted image; the renewed image and the perfected image. Briefly, the original image is in the pre-fall environment where the threefold relationship and functional and structural aspects all functioned properly. The perverted image is the situation post-fall into sin, where “the image of god was not annihilated but perverted” (83) in the sense that the structural sense remained but the functional sense changed from using his gifts and capacities for doing God’s will to fulfilling his own fleshly desires. The renewed image is the “restoration of the image [that] takes place in the redemptive process” (85) of sanctification. Finally, the perfected image is the glorious state of the image of God which is not a return to the original image but a moving beyond it into a situation where man is not only able not to sin (posse non peccare), and able not to die (posse non mori) but also not able to sin (non posse peccare) and not able to die (non posse mori) (92). Alongside these three stated purposes, Hoekema provides several worth while views.

Even though Hoekema is writing well within the Reformed tradition, he does hold to a modified view to said position in regards to the covenant of works. Standing with a few more recent Reformed theologians such as, G. C. Berkouwer, John Murray and Herman Hoeksema, he shares “their conviction that we ought not to call the arrangement God made with Adam and Eve before the Fall a ‘covenant of works’ (119). Among the classical Reformed theologians Hoekema confronts are Herman Bavinck[2] and William Shedd[3] to name two. Another not mentioned is Stephen Charnock.[4] One final Reformed theologian holding to a covenant of works with whom Hoekema did not interact due to his passing is Wayne Grudem.[5] Grudem actually deals with all four of Hoekema’s objections giving sufficient answers to affirm that in some sense the covenant of works is still in force and in others it is not. The ways in which he claims the covenant of works as still functioning are: 1) If one perfectly obeyed the law, then as Paul implies in Rom. 7:10; 10:5 and Gal 3:12, then he would have eternal life; 2) The punishment of death for breaking the covenant is still binding; and, 3) Christ perfectly fulfilled the covenant of works in our place. The sense in which the covenant of works is not binding are: 1) We do not have the law to refrain from eating of the tree in the Garden from which Adam and Eve ate; 2) Due to the sin nature which has been imputed to us from Adam, we no longer have the ability to meet the requirements of the covenant and thus, benefit from its blessings, we only get its punishments; and 3) “Christians have been freed from the covenant of works by virtue of Christ’s work and their inclusion in the new covenant, the covenant of grace.”[6] Now we shall turn to two objections dealing with what Hoekema terms as the “heart of the image of God” (22).

On pages 29, 57, and 73 he makes statements exact or similar to his statement on page 22, “the heart of the image of God is love. For no man ever loved as Christ loved.” Objection 1: The claim that the heart of the image of God is love goes against the doctrine of divine simplicity. By claiming that the heart of the image of God is love, Hoekema violates aseity because it pares the divine attributes. God is identical to His attributes and His nature, thus His existence. By elevating love he has a normative attribute. Why elevate love as a normative attribute, why not holiness or justice or righteousness? Perhaps a good starting place would be at God’s aseity. It imposes no methodological problem because any doctrine of God rightly starts with God’s self-existence. If talking of the heart of the image of God as an attribute then start where Van Til does, “First and foremost among the attributes, we therefore mention the independence or self-existence of God” and, “we must take the notion of the self-contained, self-sufficient God as the most basic notion of all our interpretive efforts.”[7] It may be interesting to see where this approach would lead. This brings us to the second objection.

Objection 2: Jesus himself made statements about His other attributes as well, not just love as the central understanding of the heart of God. Speaking as the perfect reflection or exact representation of the image of God, Jesus calls himself the “light of the world” (John 8:12; 9:5); “the way, the truth and the life” (John 14:6). As judge, Jesus says He “came to cast fire on the earth” (Luke 12:49). In Revelation, He says He will stand as judge holding the world in trial (Rev. 3:10). There are other arguments but these should suffice for now as we move to the book’s impact on the field and its readers.

Created in God’s Image is a God-centered breath of fresh air in a narcissist society emitting deadly carbon monoxide for the soul. Hoekema has offered a highly laudable theological anthropology which has spanned the gambit of the field of study. He has rightly connected the historico-redemptive hermeneutic approach to the imago Dei. God’s redemptive plan and the presence of the imago Dei are no coincidence. Were Hoekema writing today, after multiplied critiques of the destructive integration of psychology with Christian theology, perhaps he would not have added their perspectives (204-05). That said, the critique is minor.

Readers are presented with a straight forward, balanced view of the Reformed tradition on the doctrine of man. The work is highly assessable due to Hoekema’s nimble perspicuity as he dissects biblically and historically the doctrines at hand. There is much spiritual value prompting the reader’s introspection over the heinousness of their sin in using the gifts of God for idolatrous purposes. Hoekema writes with spirited command over his topics of interest. I found myself amening the bulk of his work.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Wikipedia, last updated November 15, 2006, "Joan Miro," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Mir%C3%B3#_ref-0/ (accessed November 15, 2006).

[2] Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend, God and Creation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), 560-88.

[3] William G. T. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, ed. Alan W. Gomes (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 2003), 479, 535-37.

[4] Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1996), 250-51, 253.

[5] Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), 516-18.

[6] Grudem, Systematic Theology, 518.

[7] John M. Frame, Divine Aseity and Apologetics (Reformed Theological Seminary, Prof. of Systematic Theology and Philosophy), 4.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bavinck, Herman. Reformed Dogmatics. Edited by John Bolt, trans. John Vriend. God and Creation. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004.

Charnock, Stephen. The Existence and Attributes of God. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1996.

Frame, John M. Divine Aseity and Apologetics. Reformed Theological Seminary, Prof. of Systematic Theology and Philosophy.

Grudem, Wayne. Systematic Theology. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994.

Shedd, William G. T. Dogmatic Theology. Edited by Alan W. Gomes. Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 2003.

Wikipedia. "Joan Miro." last updated November 15, 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Mir%C3%B3#_ref-0/ (accessed November 15, 2006).