Imago Dei Quotes

The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection.

One great reason why the rich in general have so little sympathy for the poor is because they so seldom visit them. Hence it is that one part of the world does not know what the other suffers. Many of them do not know, because they do not care to know: they keep out of the way of knowing it – and then plead their voluntary ignorance as an excuse for their hardness of heart.

What is the Imago Dei, the Image of God? It’s a hive. God is the total hive, and we are all the hive cells. We are all mind bees, buzzing in our Singularity.

Disciples of Jesus do not mimic Jesus; we manifest him. We are personators of Christ, not impersonators. Christ’s presence in our lives is more “thereness” than “likeness,” more “withness” than “whatness.” Jesus made our creation in the imago Dei more “spit” than “image” (as in “spit ‘n’ image”).

The only power that can effect transformations of the order (of Jesus) is love. It remained for the 20th century to discover that locked within the atom is the energy of the sun itself. For this energy to be released, the atom must be bombarded from without. So too, locked in every human being is a store of love that partakes of the divine- the imago dei, image of god…And it too can be activated only through bombardment, in its case, love’s bombardment. The process begins in infancy, where a mother’s initially unilateral loving smile awakens love in her baby and as coordination develops, elicits its answering smile… A loving human being is not produced by exhortations, rules and threats. Love can only take root in children when it comes to them- initially and most importantly from nurturing parents. Ontogenetically speaking, love is an answering phenomenon. It is literally a response.

All right, all right, you go right on thinking you an act of God created in his image, and I’ll go right on thinking I’m descended from an ape. When you look in the mirror I should think you’d feel pretty discouraged; I wouldn’t be happy to look at myself and think that my faces is an Imago Dei. It wouldn’t make me feel I’d done very well by God. But when I look in the mirror and that I’m descended from an ape, I feel I’ve done remarkably well.

To “do justice” means to render to each what each is due. Justice involves harmony, flourishing, and fairness, and it is based on the image of God in every person—the Imago Dei—that grants all people inalienable dignity and infinite worth.

...give from the heart since each person is the very icon of God incarnate in the world.

[...] Like the God in whose image people are made, people are irreducible. There's always more to a person - more stories, more life, more complexities - than we know. The human person, when viewed properly, is unfathomable, incalculable, and dear. Perversion always says otherwise.

Gemara Shabbat teaches that attendees at a funeral are charged with shedding tears, and that such people are forgiven for all their sins. Why? Because an emotional life doesn’t just make us human, it solidifies our reality of being created Imago Dei, B’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God.

Augustine captured the two ideas in two Latin coinages, which prima facie cut against each other: imago dei and peccatum originis. The former says that humans are unique as a species in our having been created in the image and likeness of God, while the latter says that all humans are born having inherited the legacy of Adam’s error, “original sin.”61

Universal Blessing: You do not do elements that focus on negative feelings of shame or embarrassment. • General Revelation: You do not do elements that require some prior knowledge of God or the Bible (Bible drills, etc.). • Imago Dei: You do not do elements that require students to utilize the ungodly attributes within themselves (Yo’ mamma joke contest).

[...] The little everyday neglect of imagining other people well can add up to a lifetime of flawed, perverted vision, an expenditure of soul in a waste of emotionalism.

We're a tragic mix of imago dei and total depravity. Holding this tension rescues you from utopianism and hedonism, nihilism and cynicism. If you want to treat humans well, you must understand what we humans are. And what we are all, right now, is a mashup of these twin natures. The best person you know is a seat of depravity. The worst person you know is an image-bearer of our Creator.

We should not regard what a man is and what he deserves: but we should go higher – that it is God who has placed us in the world for such a purpose that we be united and joined together. He has impressed his image in us and has given us a common nature, which should incite us to providing one for the other. The man who wishes to exempt himself from providing for his neighbors should face himself and declare that he no longer wishes to be a man, for as long as we are human creatures we must contemplate as in a mirror our face in those who are poor, despised, exhausted, who groan under their burdens . .

The Self is the ordering and unifying center of the total psyche (conscious and unconscious) just as the ego is the center of the conscious personality. Or, put in other words, the ego is the seat of subjective identity while the Self is the seat of objective identity. The Self is thus the supreme psychic authority and subordinates the ego to it. The Self is most simply described as the inner empirical deity and is identical with the imago Dei.

Do you dishonour his house by acts of violence more becoming the wolves of the mountains, than beings to whom the great Creator has given a form after His own likeness, and an immortal soul to be saved by penance and repentance?

The Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, and Martin Luther King's 'Letter from the Birmingham Jail' all have their metaphysical roots in the biblical concept of the imago dei ((i.e. humans bearing the image of God). If pro-lifers are irrational for grounding basic human rights in the concept of a transcendent Creator, these important historical documents--all of which advanced our national understanding of equality--are irrational as well.

Through the eyes of Jesus, we will see God differently, no longer as a distant father figure, but through the paradigm of the missio Dei to find the sent and sending God. Second, we will see the church differently, no longer as a religious institution but as a community of Jesus followers devoted to participating in his mission. We call this the participatio Christi. And third, through Jesus’ eyes we will see the world afresh, not simply as fallen or depraved but as bearing the mark of the imago Dei–the image of God.

When the ego is inflated by the Archetype of the Self, some functions of the ego are connected to the reality principle and other sectors harbor grandiose persuasions based on archetypal imagery (Imago Dei) and emotion. Typical with this type of inflation, one feels with great excess, indestructible (protected by God), absolutely justified (having God's mandate) in his or her action, and free from psychological shadow (being supremely good). We termed this type of inflation theocalypsis and will talk more about this concept later in this book.

As the body of Christ in particular, we are invited to participate in this holy work of holding space. The apostle Paul speaks to this idea when he says, Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. 2 Corinthians 1:3-4 Paradoxically, as we engage in our own deep emotional work, we love each other in the most alive, empathic ways. We do not see the people in front of us as tasks of obligations – they are the imago Dei, and we see and feel with them.

The formula presents a symbol of the self, for the self is not just a static quantity or constant form, but is also a dynamic process. In the same way, the ancients saw the imago Dei in man not as a mere imprint, as a sort of lifeless, stereotyped impression, but as an active force. The four transformations represent a process of restoration or rejuvenation taking place, as it were, inside the self, and comparable to the carbon-nitrogen cycle in the sun, when a carbon nucleus captures four protons (two of which immediately become neutrons) and releases them at the end of the cycle in the form of an alpha particle. The carbon nucleus itself comes out of the reaction unchanged, “like the Phoenix from the ashes.”108 The secret of existence, i.e., the existence of the atom and its components, may well consist in a continually repeated process of rejuvenation, and one comes to similar conclusions in trying to account for the numinosity of the archetypes.

In 1941, Dorothy L. Sayers provided a detailed analysis of that creative process in The Mind of the Maker. She developed the relevance of the imago Dei for understanding artistic creation in explicitly trinitarian terms. In every act of creation there is a controlling idea (the Father), the energy which incarnates that idea through craftsmanship in some medium (the Son), and the power to create a response in the reader (the Spirit). These three, while separate in identity, are yet one act of creation. So the ancient credal statements about the Trinity are factual claims about the mind of the maker created in his image. Sayers delves into the numerous literary examples, in what is one of the most fascinating accounts ever written both of the nature of literature and of the imago Dei. While some readers may feel she has a tendency to take a good idea too far, The Mind of the Maker remains an indispensable classic of Christian poetics.

This passage sets forth three major themes in Gregory’s doctrine of apokatastasis and reveals the manner in which they are intertwined: first, every free will ultimately will rest in God; second, this means that evil will ultimately cease to exist, for evil “exists” only through the exercise of the will, and when every will chooses God, evil can no longer be chosen; and third, the means by which this will come about is a process of purifying punishment which will consume the accretions of evil on the soul until only the good is left. This reflects the grounding of Gregory’s view of the nature of evil in neo-Platonic thought. 15 Evil is the “deprivation of the good.” 16 Only good, the fullness of which is the nature of God in which humanity participates via the imago dei, 17 has real, infinite existence; evil as a parasitic corruption of the good has no independent existence and is therefore finite. 18 Consequently there will ultimately be a time when there will be “no evil remaining in anyone.

In a sermon entitled “The American Dream,” Martin Luther King, Jr., said: You see, the founding fathers were really influenced by the Bible. The whole concept of the imago dei, as it is expressed in Latin, the “image of God,” is the idea that all men have something within them that God injected. Not that they have substantial unity with God, but that every man has a capacity to have fellowship with God. And this gives him a uniqueness, it gives him worth, it gives him dignity. And we must never forget this as a nation: There are no gradations in the image of God. Every man from a treble white to a bass black is significant on God’s keyboard, precisely because every man is made in the image of God. One day we will learn that. We will know one day that God made us to live together as brothers and to respect the dignity and worth of every man. This is why we must fight segregation with all of our nonviolent might.80

If God made man in His image, and man made me in the image of man, am I in possession of the Imago Hominis? Am I, for the lack of a more precise term, a human being like you? - Troy Salcedo

The fact that we are made in the imago Dei acknowledges that we are improvisers. Humans are called to emulate God’s creativity as an acknowledgment of the call-and-response between earth and heaven, the basileia tou theou and the malkut shamayim.

This is the essence of Imago Dei. Humankind – you, me, and everyone you know – has been made to reflect God, his attributes, and point others to the relationship with him that is possible through Jesus Christ.

The Genesis account of the advent of mankind (Adam-man) is far more eloquent and significant than a casual reading of the passage in English might suggest. In this majestic “Poem of the Dawn” or “Hymn of Creation” (cf. H. Orton Wiley, Christian Theology, Vol. I, Nazarene Publishing House, Kansas City, Mo., pp. 450 ff.), the metaphorical use of the terms “dust,” “image,” “likeness,” “create,” “made,” “breath of life,” and others, contributes much to biblical understanding of man, sin, redemption, holiness, and all the implications of “grace” in relation to man. The writer of the Genesis story chose his words carefully. In 1:26 he tells us that God said, “Let us make man in our image after our likeness,” and (1:27) then, “God created man in his own image … male and female created he them.” Strangely, the second account (Genesis 2) introduces a most mundane and earthy note to the almost too idealistic and incredible first description. “The Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life [‘lives, ’ Hebrew plural, here]; and man became a living being” (Gen. 2:7; RSV). Note the progress; formed, breathed into, and then the process of becoming. There will be no attempt made here to formulate any theory of man's appearance on earth. These terms are noted to suggest that the wording gives room for more than one interpretation. However, no attempt to interpret these passages from the standpoint of modern science should be permitted to obscure the main ideas proposed in Genesis 1—2. This is not a scientific account nor was it in any sense intended to be. The role of science is to unpack all the facts possible which are built into man and his history and world. But the meaning of man and his universe must be derived from another source. And it is this meaning that the biblical story seeks to impart. This starkly beautiful, unembroidered introduction to man as made in his Creator's image establishes the fundamental religious meaning of man as he stands in relationship to God and to nature. This noble concept must precede and throw light upon all that the Hebraic-Christian teaching will assume about man—a sinful creature as of now, yet created in the Imago Dei.

Trying to understand man without recognizing him as imago Dei is like trying to understand a bas-relief without recognizing it as a carving.

The desire for autonomous freedom results in a similar paradox: Adam has the semblance of freedom, but is in fact unfree. Prior to the fall, the human being existed in the image of God. In order that God might recognize the imago dei in creation, God created a free creature.

Imago Dei? The image of God?” “Right.” I look at her and smile. “You know that you’re created in the image of God, right?” She nods. “Sure, Genesis, chapter 1, but what’s your point?” “Just that we’re each created in the image of God, but we’re all different. You have red hair, mine is brown. You’re tall, I’m not. But not only that, we all have different wiring on the inside too—things that make us unique. But all of us, in some way, reflect an image of God—of who He is. So who’s to say what’s right or what’s wrong about how we look?

This understanding [of the image of God] turns our supremacism upsidedown, for if we resemble God in that we have dominion, we must be called to be “imitators of God” (Eph. 5:1) in the way we exercise it. Indeed, far from giving us a free hand on the earth, the imago Dei constrains us. We must be kings, not tyrants – if we become the latter we deny, and even destroy, the image in us. Huw Spanner

We miss the full force of the imago Dei concept if we simply identify it with various ways humans are distinct from animals (e.g., reason, morality, love). The biblical concept instructs us as to how we are like God, not just how we are different from animals. To discover the meaning of the imago Dei, we must pay close attention to the way Scripture speaks about it. The

Here the Lord says, “Let us make man in our image.” Some argue that the “us” in this passage refers to the Trinity, but it is unlikely that the Old Testament author, traditionally identified as Moses, had the Trinity in mind. The revelation that God is Triune was not clearly revealed until the New Testament. It is therefore wrong to apply this New Testament understanding to an Old Testament text. (See anachronistic.) The most ancient and most probable interpretation is that the Lord was speaking to angels. This tells us that the imago Dei is something we share in common with the angels and gives us our first hint as to what the concept means. Throughout

ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. (John 17:20–23) Sin isolates people from God and from other people. It thereby destroys the essence of humanity, our imago Dei. Jesus came to restore this divine image by breaking down the walls that separate us from God and each other. Indeed, he is the paradigmatic “image of God” precisely because, unlike fallen humanity, he exemplifies a perfect love for God the Father and a perfect love for others.

Opponents of this view often point out that it is not rooted in an exegesis of Genesis 1:26–28, the central biblical text that discusses the imago Dei. Indeed, it is frequently argued that the view that the imago Dei refers to the soul is more influenced by Greek philosophy than by Scripture. More specifically, it is argued that the traditional emphasis on reason as one of the hallmarks of the imago Dei is a distinctly Hellenistic, not Hebraic, notion.

The teaching that the imago Dei is about exercising authority is disclosed elsewhere in Scripture. For example, in Psalm 8:4–6 we read: What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor. You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet. The supreme dignity of human beings is that they, like God, exercise authority over creation. This teaching is applied in a more particular fashion when Scripture refers to certain individuals who are given authority over others as God’s “sons.

These observations strongly support the understanding that “us” refers to God in his Triune nature, and therefore, that the imago Dei refers to our relationality. Like God, we are created to live life as an “us,” not just as an “I.” But

[...] Like calling someone a fool or an idiot. It's one of those things Jesus tells us never to do. Calling someone a pervert without acknowledging our own inner pervert might lead to the destruction - or at least the perversion - of our own soul. We become perverts in our determination to catch a pervert.

Finally, some agree with Christians that humans are created in the image of God, but by this they mean something very different from what Christians mean. For example, when Mormons affirm that humans are created in the image of God, they usually mean that God has a human form. Indeed, they believe that humans who follow God’s will on earth will someday become gods themselves and beget children in their own image on their own planet. Few Christians throughout history have given any credence to the notion that the divine image refers to the body. While Christians have always agreed that humans are made in the imago Dei, and while this sets them apart from naturalistic evolutionists, New Age theorists, and postmodern relativists, they have not always agreed on what this imago Dei refers to. Amid the variety of opinions expressed throughout history, three have at various times been popular. The

Many have emphasized that our ability to reason is the distinguishing mark of the soul. Others have argued that our ability to communicate sets us apart. Still others have stressed that our ability to love or to sense God or to make moral judgments manifests our imago Dei. Many theologians have concluded that all of these features manifest the soul. In each case, however, the divine image is located in the soul of humans. St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and John Calvin are classic representatives of this perspective. A

A different understanding of the imago Dei gained popularity in the twentieth century, though it had predecessors in earlier church history. This view locates the imago Dei in the commission of God for humans to “have dominion” over the earth. This view is sometimes referred to as the functional view of the imago Dei, for it locates the essence of our divine image in what we as humans are called to do. As God is the loving Lord of the entire cosmos, humans are called to be the loving lords of the entire earth. A

third understanding of the imago Dei also gained popularity in the twentieth century, though it too had historical predecessors. In the early part of the twentieth century, Karl Barth argued that the central defining feature of the imago Dei is human relationality. Hence, this view is called the relational view of the imago Dei. Humans are created in the image of the Triune God and thus are meant to find their essence and destiny in community with one another and with God The following three essays offer arguments in favor of each of these views.

This understanding of God provides the key to understanding what the Bible means when it declares that humans are made “in the image of God.” The imago Dei means that humans, like God, are essentially beings who exist in relationship. We are created to exist in relationship with God and with each other. To the extent that we live in isolation from God and from each other, we are not fully human. The

Invoking the Christian doctrine of imago Dei, las Casas argued that despite the practice of human sacrifice and cannibalism among some natives, they were nevertheless human beings, endowed with reason, and therefore must not be enslaved or forcibly converted to Christianity. Mather and las Casas, the English Puritan and the Spanish Dominican, might not have had much else in common, but they had this: a Christian theology that insisted on the common humanity of all mankind and therefore imposed limits on what one man could do to another, even a master to a servant or slave.

Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other,” both sides could not be right on the question of slavery. The side that was wrong about it was also wrong about the Founding—and, by extension, about Christianity, God, and human nature. If slavery were an affront to the Declaration, it was even more so an affront to the doctrine of imago Dei, and therefore an offense against God, a sin that cried out to heaven for vengeance

Human beings truly are created in the imago Dei and this image is fulfilled perfectly in Christ, who is “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For in him were created all things in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible . . . He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church . . . For in him all the fullness was pleased to dwell.”333 Because of the Son of God’s hypostatic union with human nature, human beings are empowered by the life-giving soul of Christ to participate in the process of cosmic redemption. The human soul becomes the gateway of salvation “and when it opens itself in its innermost being to the influx of divine life, the soul (and through it the body) is formed into an image of the Son of God.”334 In becoming configured to Jesus of Nazareth, true God and true man, according to the pattern of his self-giving and self-emptying life, human beings sacramentally are incorporated into the mystical Body of Christ, thereby incorporating the totality of created being along with them. As enmeshed within the created order—both materially and spiritually—human beings serve as the lynchpin of salvation’s circuit.

This whole world is going from unconscious to conscious, kicking and screaming all the way there. We are moving from animal to imago dei, to an image of God, which is unlimited and eternal Love.

I doubt if you can see the image of God (Imago Dei) in your fellow humans if you cannot first see it in rudimentary form in stones, in plants and flowers, in strange little animals, in bread and wine, and most especially cannot honor this objective divine image in yourself.

Now we’re not good or evil; we’re good and evil. Nothing we do erases God’s image in us, and nothing we do is untouched by our sinfulness. We each now live in the tension of imago dei and total depravity—a tension that every other origin-story misses, yet one which explains the data of human history.

Carrying such a tension of the opposites is like a Crucifixion. We must be as one suspended between the opposites, a painful state to bear. But in such a state of suspension the grace of God is able to operate within us. The problem of our duality can never be resolved on the level of the ego; it permits no rational solution. But where there is consciousness of a problem, the Self, the Imago Dei within us can operate and bring about an irrational synthesis of the personality.

When human depravity looms large in your view, remember imago dei, and that through Christ goodness will one day win. Never place your hope in a program to fix humanity.

God's will for our lives is that we conform to the image of Christ, whose incarnation shows us humanity perfectly conformed to the image of God.

Only God is infinite, incomprehensible, self-existent, eternal, immutable, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, and sovereign. When we strive to become like him in any of these traits, we set ourselves up as his rival. Human beings created to bear the image of God aspire instead to become like God (...) Like our father Adam and our mother Eve, we long for that which is only intended for God, rejecting our God-given limits and craving the limitlessness we foolishly believe we are capable of wielding and entitled to possess.

How should the knowledge that God is ______ change the way I live?

Growing in holiness means growing into being loving, just, good, merciful, gracious, faithful, truthful, patient, and wise. It means learning to think, speak, and act like Christ every hour of every day that God grants us to walk this earth as the redeemed.

We are not defined by our desires. It’s about our behavior. It’s not about our being...The pervasive message of Scripture is that we are the imago Dei (the image of God) and, therefore, morally culpable beings. As God’s image bearers, we are moral agents. We are not animals. We can and do rise above our appetites and inclinations. We are not defined by them.3

God has already had the last word on who is deserving of respect and whose rights are worthy of being fought for and protected.

Because people made in the image of God were made to stand on equal footing alongside each other before the God of heaven. They were made to bow to Him and Him alone, not made to bow to and be cowed by the brutality of their fellow image bearers. And whether in a pamphlet, in a newspaper, in a speech, in the Bible, or from the voice of God Himself booming from heaven, this knowledge cannot be hidden from image bearers forever.

The doctrine of the imago Dei, that human beings are created in the “image and likeness of God,” is central to Christian life and practice and touches, perhaps even helps to form, every other doctrine of the Christian faith in one way or another.

To have been created intentionally, imagined in the mind of God, and then brought into being communicates something profound about a person’s intrinsic worth. It speaks—you are loved; you are wanted; you are valued. Further to this, to have been created as some kind of reflection or embodiment of the divine serves only to strengthen the idea that human beings are of infinite worth and beauty.

The Lord justified and sanctified the line of His forefathers. Likewise, every one of us, if we follow Christ, can justify ourselves in our individual being, having restored the Divine image in us through total repentance, and by so doing can help to justify our own forefathers. We bear in ourselves the legacy of the sins of our ancestors; and, by virtue of the ontological unity of the human race, healing for us means healing for them, too. We are so interjoined that man does not save himself alone.

This is the case even among those considered to be conservative and evangelical thinkers. Stanley Grenz once asserted, “In this manner the Christian vision of God as the social Trinity and our creation to be the imago Dei provides the transcendent basis for the human ethical ideal as life-in-community. Consequently the reciprocal, perichoretic dynamic of the Triune God is the cosmic reference point for the idea of society itself.”[5] But the obscurity and debate that continue to surround the imago Dei or “image of God” hardly serve as conclusive proof that God intends the divine reality and being somehow to be normative for humanity. Mercifully, not all theologians have adopted this misuse of the trinitarian reality. Richard Bauckham quite rightly observes that “true human community comes about not as an image of the Trinitarian fellowship, but as the Spirit makes us like Jesus in his community with the Father and with others.”[6] The hard fact is that neither Scripture nor the Lutheran Confessions ever offer the mystery of the trinitarian Godhead as the model or even a model for Christian living or the shape of Christian life. As the saying goes, “God is God, and you’re not.”[7] The Christian life is shaped not by God’s trinitarian nature as model, but by God’s revealed word and work in us.[8]

Some of the evangelical scholars and pastors who are most vocal about male headship and female submission argue that the relationship between husband and wife models the relationship between God the Father and God the Son. Wives follow the leadership of their husbands, just as Jesus follows the leadership of the Father. The marriage hierarchy, like marriage itself, they argue, is embedded in the imago Dei.

race” is not a defined biblical reality, and that instead Scripture drives us to see all humanity as one race, one given an identity by God through the imago Dei and offered God’s mercy even in the face of our shared depravity.

Paul’s view of sin is not the breaking of arbitrary divine rules, but that it is subhuman or nonhuman behavior, deeds that are unfitting for humans to perform. This implies that whatever--whether deed, attitude, affection, or motive—violates the structure of humanhood as defined by the imago Dei is sin.

GOD IS SO WONDERFULLY GENEROUS in his self-disclosure. He has not revealed himself to this race of rebels in some stinting way, but in nature, by his Spirit, in his Word, in great events in redemptive history, in institutions that he ordained to unveil his purposes and his nature, even in our very makeup. (We bear the imago Dei.)

In Greek, Humanity, anthropotita, is female and it feels suitable to call her a she from now on. She is all. She is the poet of the universe, She is the image that god was crafted to resemble. She is the Imago Dei.

Above all, faith makes it possible to discern despite those inequalities “the ultimate inner equality” that has its irreversible foundation in defining the individual in terms of the imago Dei,68 and hence this radical equality can never be relativized by falsely alleging the original inequality of persons, races and peoples.