This presents quite a theological problem. It first of all makes sin a scandal, and that may be an understatement. Sin is impossible because God is good and sovereign and impossible transgress... But if people are the image of God--if the human family, in its relational connections, shows us what God is like-- then God is not so good, at least not all the time. Sometimes, according to the image as we can see it, God is selfish, indifferent, murderous, racist, sexist, vengeful, violent, crude, objectifying, discriminatory, oppressive, Holocaustal, homophobic, and genocidal. The human family can be a very dark image... and if it's an image of God, then how can God be trusted? But that's exactly what's wrong with sin... it's not just that sin is bad... it's sin because it offers an image of God that doesn't correspond to who God actually is. It gives us an image, yes, but only the negative and never the photographic. Sin is, as I believe Karl Barth put it, "the impossible possibility." It's something that, according to who God actually is, is an "ontological impossibility" (I think I should credit George Hunsinger for this phrase), but a very dark and real reality. Sin is truly scandalous, not just in its execution but in its very existence. This is so precisely because God has created humankind in God's own image and has, eschatologically, always been the God of the incarnation, the God revealed in Jesus Christ.
(A quick word on incarnation: incarnation, too, is scandalous. For whereas God is imaged in the whole human family, in the incarnation the human family--its "objective" identity--is imaged in the subjective particularity of one person, Jesus of Nazareth--God with us.)
So the Imago Dei, the idea that human beings are the photograph of God, is truly a theological and philosophical challenge because of the reality, the impossible possibility, of sin. But that's just the first challenge. There is a second, and perhaps even more personal, challenge presented in this bold biblical claim.

And that brings us to one final thought about human beings being created in God's image. While sin and diversity seem to make this claim all but unintelligible, it is finally proven not by demonstration but by love. Human beings are God's image, finally, not by virtue of their ability or inability to reflect God's character in the human family, but by virtue of their being loved by God. Even when humankind is dark and detestable, they remain the image of God because God remains in love with them. And what God loves always tells us, shows us, something about who God is. We learn about God by seeing what and who God loves. We are created in God's image because God loves us perfectly.
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