Not at all. When God says, “Let us make man in our image”, He is talking to the heavenly assembly (not, it isn’t the Trinity, for some reasons that should be obvious) and He and the heavenly assembly are spirit beings, so right from the start we know that the “image of God” is something spiritual.
Second, the proposal “Let us make” and the actualization “So God made” bracket some material, and that bracketing is a way of including a definition. That bracketed material says that mankind has dominion over all living things, so the “image of God” has to do with having dominion [which, BTW, doesn’t mean doing as you please with something but managing it to make it thrive].
Third, the translation of “בְּצֶ֥לֶם” (be-tse-lem) as “in the image” isn’t necessarily the best; the Hebrew prefix בְ (b) when translated “in” can have several meanings, and here it’s a fair bet that “as” is better. בְ can also indicate that the noun following it should be taken as a verbal noun, in which case (in agreement, BTW, with Dr. Michael Heiser) the combined word should be translated by “as imagers” (of God), which would make this relational rather than substantive. That fits with the point above since having dominion is a relationship.
So the “image of God” has nothing to do with physical form or appearance, it has to do with the spiritual status of being as God to all other life(forms), i.e. being God’s representatives or (in accord with the New Testament) ambassadors. This fits with ancient near eastern usage of an ambassador of a king being “the image” of the king, which didn’t mean he looked like the king but that he was supposed to think like the king and thus represent the king’s views and understanding to wherever it was he was appointed.
In this context Genesis 9:5-6 makes perfect sense: the ambassador or representative of a king was regarded as being – imaging – the king in the place where he was assigned, so an assault on the representative was the equivalent of an assault on the king himself, so the authorities where such an assault took place would be expected to deal with the attackers as though they had been assassins attacking the king himself.
“After” suggests that prior to that moment the relationship was different somehow. But that’s backwards: the usage in Genesis 1 determines the meaning of Genesis 9, not the other way around.
Besides which, a body can change, which implies a lessening of the Image: someone who is blind, or someone missing a leg, or someone with leprosy would be less the image of God than someone who is whole; for that matter, someone who is obese or someone who is scrawny would be less in the image of God than someone as fit as an old-time carpenter/contractor!
God is claiming that whenever wholeness happens, and whenever calamity happens, He did it – that’s the logical progression from “I am the Lord, and there is no other.”
God created a universe so that we could live here - also that we Would live here. God created a universe.
Oh, yeah, and God created an actual universe so immense that light itself may never reach all the way across it. Most of the universe is so far away that light from it will never get here.
Purpose? Genesis (when read as theology) makes it clear that we are the end-all and be-all. We are souls for God to love.
God is Love.
Our “instinctive interests” are evolutionary mechanisms (Dawkins’ “selfish gene”) that, like illness and death, are encoded in our genome and transmitted by DNA replication. In that sense, the fact that “we are flawed” (i.e.: submitted to illness, death, and concupiscence) is clearly “a generationally inherited ting”, isn’t it?
So unless you are going to claim God controls the minutia of evolution, God has lost hcontrol of creation.
Ooh a virus. That’s brilliant. God planted a virus into the gennome! Something that wasn’t there originally and the only antiviruse is Christ.
Death existed long before the first human. Otherwise the earth would have got overcrowded millions of years ago… Assigning actual death to sin is just ludicrous.Spiritual death is the loss of innocence so that you are able to commit sins.
Only if you redefine “generationally inherited”. Every living thing pursues its instinctive interests. It is in the nature of life itself, and could not be otherwise.
All right, but every living being inherits “its instinctive interests” encoded in the genome, the same way as it inherits genetic flaws causing illness, aging clocks, and mortality timers. In this sense the fact that humans are submitted to illness, death, and concupiscence is biologically transmitted from generation to generation.
Does this mean that the divine life in the Holy Trinity is ruled by “instinctive interests” and “could not be otherwise”?
Even if I accept the genetic “inheritance” of instinctive interests, I do not accept the genetic inheritance of the guilt of one particular sin committed by an ancestor, a doctrine which dominated Western Christianity for centuries and which led to predestinarian extremes like Calvinism and Jansenism.
I’m certainly not saying that “the divine life in the Holy Trinity” is governed by instinctive interests, but none of us currently fully lives that divine life.
As I’ve said, the Eastern Church never accepted the “original sin” doctrine as proposed by St. Augustine, and they never experienced movements like Calvinism.
It is God, who has created the world where life evolved ruled by mechanisms of “genetic inheritance” that transmit illness, death, and instinctive interests.
Nonetheless, when God made humankind, God called and ordered human beings to share eternal divine life.
And divine life excludes illness and death, and is not governed by instinctive interests, as you rightly claim:
So it is fitting to assume, that in the beginning, God endowed human beings with “original grace” to overrule the “flawed state” where the rest of creation was.
This said, you further rightly claim:
So, the obvious question is:
For which reason are we currently in the flawed state we are?
I would like to propose that we discuss this particular question and postpone for later other interesting aspects you refer to, like “the doctrine proposed by St. Augustine”, Calvinism, Jansenism, Eastern Church.