The Image of God in the Full Expression of Man

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27).

Man is the undifferentiated word used to describe both the male and female expression of mankind.  It takes both the male and female expression to represent the whole of human experience and fully epitomize the human condition.  Just as Jesus Christ represents El Shaddai, the father/mother God, and must be replicated in mankind to save them, so Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein monster, drawn from both her female imagination and the dead male flesh of the monster, so is the full expression of our human condition outside a salvation experience with Jesus Christ.

Throughout ancient literature and Holy Scripture feminine beauty is that beauty which is derived and defined from a masculine perspective.  This is no commentary about the equality /inequality of the sexes, except to distinguish mankind’s posture from God’s.  We are the bride of Christ, and we need His masculine posture to define our feminine one.  Our eternal beauty is only a reflecting one of His.  He beautifies by His love; we are worthless, unloved, and without our own internal beauty without Him first loving us. This is an unequivocally established principle throughout Scripture and much ancient literature.

I believe George Gordon, aka Lord Byron, in “She Walks in Beauty,” is saying exactly this; the innocent heart at peace within the seat of emotional man is best described as “she” in the “tender light” of “the night” which the “gaudy day denies.”  She walks in beauty which walks in less than the full light of enlightenment, and the feminine posture is the posture of faith—that posture we must all walk in (both male and female)—if we ever expect to arrive at our gender specific and individual destiny (which is only found in context with—and relationship to—God and others).