Theological traditions have interpreted the divine image in several complementary ways. Substantive accounts emphasize human capacities such as reason and moral freedom, relational accounts stress communion with God and neighbor, functional accounts interpret humanity’s vocation to represent God’s wise rule within creation, and Christological accounts identify Jesus Christ as the true image in whom humanity’s vocation is revealed and restored.1 No single account exhausts the doctrine, but each resists reducing the image to a slogan detached from embodied and social life. Genesis locates human dignity in God’s creative act rather than in achievement, status, usefulness, nationality, wealth, employment, education, physical ability, or political recognition. Dignity is not conferred by the powerful, earned through productivity, or lost through poverty. It also cannot depend upon a person’s present capacity for autonomous action, because infants, people with profound disabilities, persons living with dementia, prisoners, and those whose choices are restricted by coercion or addiction do not possess less sacred worth.2

Agency is an important implication of human dignity, but it must never become its measure. Infants, people with profound disabilities, persons living with dementia, prisoners, and people constrained by coercion, poverty, illness, or addiction do not bear less of God’s image because their choices are limited. A Christian account of the person must therefore reject both paternalism and an autonomy-centered ideal that treats dependence as a defect in human worth. Dignity is unconditional; agency should be protected and developed wherever possible; participation should be appropriate to capacity; and dependence should call forth faithful care rather than diminished status.........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)