Thank you. I never heard it stated that way before. But I have to wonder - does that mean man is made in the image of angels and other in the heavenly court?
The book of Genesis says that man is made in God's image, not in the image of angels. Man: The Image of God
Man: The Image of God
by John Rendle Short on March 1, 1981
According to the Bible, the first man was perfect, made in the image of God.
According to the Bible, the first man was perfect, made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26). Luke goes so far as to call Adam the Son of God (Luke 3:38). In his allegorical novel, Voyage to Venus, C.S. Lewis1 paints a word picture of the dawn of history. He makes Adam resemble Jesus Christ. This is not far-fetched, for just as Christ, on earth in human form, was sinless, so Adam for a time, was sinless too. Lewis writes,
It was a face which no man can say he does not know. You might ask how it was possible to look upon it without idolatry, not to mistake it for that of which it was a likeness. For the resemblance was, in its own fashion, infinite, so that almost you could wonder at finding no sorrows on his brow and no wounds in his hands and feet. Yet there was no danger of mistaking, not one moment of confusion, no least sally of the will towards forbidden reverence. Where likeness was greatest, mistake was least possible. Perhaps this is always so. A clever waxwork can be made so like a man that for a moment it deceives us; the great portrait which is far more deeply like him does not. Plaster images of the Holy One may before now have drawn to themselves the adoration they were meant to arouse for the reality. But here, where his living image, like him within and without, made by his own bare hands out of the depth of divine artistry, his masterpiece of self portraiture coming forth from his workshop to delight all worlds, walked and spoke, it could never be taken for more than an image. Nay, the very beauty of it lay in the certainty that it was a copy, like and not the same, a rhyme, an exquisite reverberation of untreated music prolonged in a created medium.
Man in the image of God; what does this mean in practical terms? It cannot refer to bodily, biological form since God is a Spirit and man is earthly. But while it may be true that the body does not belong to the image, since God does not have a body, yet somehow we would like to see man’s body (which is a very real part of man) included in the image. Language and creativity,—two important parts of the image, are impossible without a body. And God the Almighty agreed to share with man dominion and authority over the animal kingdom (Genesis 1:28), an activity in which the whole man, body as well as mind, is involved. Furthermore the Son of God honored the human body by becoming flesh and dwelling among men (John 1:14) (Hebrews 2:14). Lewis suggests that before the Fall, the first man, Adam mirrored Christ the man of Galilee even more nearly than Christ would have resembled his own half-brothers. If this is so, it seems almost blasphemy to consider Adam sired by a shambling ape.
Man an animal
We can think of man as placed halfway between God and the animals, possessing characteristics of each. Physiologically and anatomically man is an animal. He even shares the genetic code with them. Evolutionists call him a human primate. Much of his behavior is controlled by Pavlovian conditioned reflexes.
The Genesis account recognizes important similarities between man and the animals. Of man we read “God formed man of the dust of the ground . . . .” (Genesis 2:7) And of the animals, “Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field.” (Genesis 2:19) Animals are described as “living creatures” (Genesis 1:20), and man a “living being” (Genesis 2:7), the Hebrew word “naphesh” (breath) being used for both. Concerning the effects of the flood we are told, “Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died. Every living thing . . . men and animals, and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds of the air were wiped out.” (Genesis 7:22–23)
Later, it is explained that the “life” (naphesh) is in the blood (Genesis 9:4). Thus breathed-in life (naphesh) is not the essential factor which distinguishes man from animals. Something further is required.
God regards man differently from the animals. The Bible account is primarily concerned with the relationship between God and man. Man was created by God, in his image, for God’s joy and glory, and exists only in the context of God. It is because God is (Hebrews 11:8) that man has being (Acts 17:28). True, the earth and animals too have a place in God’s economy, but essentially, the world was created as a place for man to live (e.g. Romans 8:19–22).
God’s attributes shared with man
The main impact of the image is that God endues man with some of his divine attributes, thereby separating and making him different from the beasts. What are these special Godlike qualities which man is permitted to share? I shall mention six: language, creativity, love, holiness, immortality and freedom. You will probably be able to add to this list. All can be summed up by saying that man, like God, has an intelligence, a mind.
According to Arthur Koestler,
The emergence of symbolic language, first spoken, then written represents the sharpest break between animal and man.2
As I write this I can hear birds singing. I hope they do so because they are happy, but to be honest I admit that probably their song is to demarcate their territory, a very selfish reason. Many birds communicate by sexual display before their mates. Dolphins are said to “talk” and use a type of radar. A sophisticated example of animal communication is the “waggle-dance” of bees. A bee finding a succulent honey flower tells its fellows in the hive the whereabouts of the flower by performing a “waggle-dance.” This imparts two items of information: first the direction. Here the sun is used as a fixed direction point, and the dance made in relationship to it. Secondly the distance from the hive to the flower is shown by the number of waggles in the dance.
Another form of language has been ascribed to Sarah, a chimpanzee at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She uses plastic symbols to convey such messages as, “I want an apple.” But this is as far as she can go. Despite large sums of research money, no animal has raised communication above the concrete, here-and-now situation to penetrate the realm of the abstract. Even primates given all possible opportunities for developing speech, including a loving and idealistic human linguistic environment, fail to develop true oral speech. Only man communicates by speech and writing, and this he has done from the dawn of history.
“The acquisition of language is the most brilliant achievement of the human brain,” according to Dennis Fry in his book, Homo Loquens, Man the Talking Animal.”3 To utter a word, the infant has to coordinate breathing with delicate movements of palate, tips and tongue. Displacement by a fraction of a millimeter gives a different sound. In order to communicate he has to amass information concerning vocabulary, syntax, the phonetic system, grammar, rhythm patterns and intonation.
Take the last of these as an example: How many meanings can you get merely by altering the intonation of the word “No”? Fry says,
It is not easy to visualize how vast a store of information is represented by all this language knowledge . . . .One estimate of the total storage capacity of the human brain puts it at 1000,000,000,000,000 items of information.” The authors of an infants’ language test comment on the complexity of the task demanded of a young infant who “takes encoded word symbols that are transmitted through the air as sound patterns and learns to produce meaningful interpersonal communication through the articulation of words encoded in the same symbols . . . .” yet “. . . this phenomenon is considered universal for the human infant.4
At one time behaviorists believed that children learn to speak by mimicking words they hear, which were then reinforced by the mother. By chance, so the theory went, a child would make a sound like “momma,” the mother kisses and hugs him so that he feels good and says the word again. By this method, incessantly repeated, language was supposed to develop. What a naive oversimplification! Speech is acquired too rapidly, and the utterances, even of infants, are too unique for this to be true.
In operant conditioning a subject received an immediate reward for a correct response to a command, and punishment for a wrong one. This is known as positive and negative reinforcement. The essence of the technique lies in the immediacy of the reward or punishment. The method is used successfully in Communist brainwashing, and can be used to teach mentally retarded or autistic children to speak. But the child rarely achieves more than repetitive single words or phrases, for unless the urge to speak is present, little can be accomplished.
