Human beings are said to be made in the Image and Likeness of God. We are different than the beasts in that we have reason and free will, which also gives us the ability to love. God infuses this image and likeness the moment He creates the human person. We see this not only in Genesis 1:27 when it explicitly says that human beings are made in God’s image, but we also see it when God gives His breath to Adam and gives him life. But as mentioned before, this is ultimately something mysterious.
And while we are made in God’s image, we are still material beings. Human beings are both spiritual and material. This is not a dualist understanding of the person, where both the soul and the body are two separate substances that are joined together. Instead, the soul is the form or the essence of the human person. There is, therefore, a unity of the soul and the body: what affects one affects the other. This is one of the reasons why death is so horrible to us, because when the soul separates from the body it is, in many ways, inhuman. This is also why there must be a resurrection in the end, because to be truly, fully human, you must have soul and body together.
Part of this understanding involves our final cause or teleological end. Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) wrote beautifully on this subject by pointing to the creation of the sabbath in the first story of creation. There is an incompleteness in the material world qua material world. There is a need for God’s presence. The creation of the sabbath points us to this need. Human beings are called to take a rest from their labors and focus on God. This is not only because God made us, but He made us for Himself. In setting aside time to worship Him, we find fulfillment in Him. In this way, “Creation is oriented to the sabbath, which is the sign of the covenant between God and humankind.”
When it comes to the fall and original sin, we are also getting into some difficult territory because of its mysterious nature. Genesis 3 puts into story form an understanding of what happened. God makes everything good. But sin enters the world, not from God. Genesis 3 describes humanity’s disobedience to God and the corruption of human nature. Regardless of how this happened in history, the original good state of the human is broken, necessitating a Savior.
There are several open questions that linger in discussing anthropology in the Creation stories. One of them is how or if evolution plays a part. There are also questions of sex and gender. If both men and women are made in God’s image, does that mean that they are exactly the same? And if we treat men and women differently, is that because they are inherently different? Also, when discussing Original Sin, all of the language we use seems inadequate to fully capture the mystery of its reality. As Stephen Duffy pointed out in his article, all of the different ways we have attempted to describe original sin (how it came about, how it is transmitted, what is its exact nature), ultimately break down because we do not have the capacity in our language to fully describe it.
This is part of the reason why it is difficult to translate these deep theological truths. Even with years of theological study, these things are difficult to comprehend.
What I would encourage Catholics to do is to prayerfully engage with the Genesis 1-3T. Start with prayer, asking the Holy Spirit to give you light in your mind and heart. Ask yourself how you would create the perfect world. Try to imagine it to the best of your ability.
Then read how God creates: He has no need for us, but out of His goodness, love, and generosity, He makes us so that we could experience all of those things. I would also point out that He makes us from nothing and that all things come from Him. Engage with the stories of creation, showing that God creates with intention, order, and structure. There is nothing God makes that is not part of His plan. The universe is not an act of random chaos as we see in other ancient creation myths or in Darwinism. We are made by God and for God. St. Augustine’s insight is that our hearts are made for God and we are restless until we rest in Him.
God made a perfect world for us, but Chapter 3 shows us how we fell. We are broken by sin, but we never lose that Image of God in us.
To help unpack the meaning of the creation story, I would recommend studying Pope St. John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body.” Writing to the modern world, John Paul understood the necessity to go back to the beginning and help us understand who the human person is. These insights include his reflections on things like Original Innocence, Original Nakedness, Original Justice, etc. When discussing Original Sin, we look to how it is described in Genesis 3, but there is ultimately something beyond our ability to fully understand. Once we establish the ways in which God made us good, especially through John Paul’s Theology of the Body, we can see the ways that this original nature is broken, causing the loss sanctifying grace and a deep division between God and human beings.
But this division also causes separations between human beings and each other. There is a fracturing of the human family. This also leads to things like concupiscence, which is our attraction to sin.
And it is Christ who saves us from this sin. During this season of Lent, let us remember that we are made in God’s image, but we have damaged ourselves by sin. But our Lord loves human beings so much that he became one of us so that He could restore that image of God in us.
Copyright 2025, WL Grayson
W.L. Grayson
I am a devoutly Catholic theology teacher who loves a popular culture that often, quite frankly, hates me. I grew up absorbing every movie, TV show, comic book, science fiction novel, etc. I could find. As of today I’ve watched over 2100 movies and tv shows. They take up a huge part of my life. I don’t know that this is a good thing, but it has given me a common vocabulary to draw from in order to illustrate whatever theological point I make in class. I’ve used American Pie the song to explain the Book of Revelation (I’ll post on this some time later) and American Pie the movie to help explain Eucharist (don’t ask). The point is that the popular culture is popular for a reason. It is woven into the fabric of our lives and imaginations, for good or ill. In this blog I will attempt to bring together the things of heaven with the things of earth. Of course this goal may be too lofty for someone like me.
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