In God's Image

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, ESV)

All people are made in God's image. What does it mean to be made in God's image? Surely the implications are manifold. But I see one facet of the question as concerning what we alone have in common with God, and all those things that set us apart from the other forms of life. Some things that come to mind are knowledge, consciousness, and individuality.

Thomas Aquinas's thinking on the concept of infinity is novel to me, but very sensible. In his explanation of God's infinitude, Aquinas does not see infinity as a matter of unlimited quantity but of transcendence; God is not "more" than everything but rather, in His simplicity and primacy, He exceeds classification, exceeds potentiality (i.e. He is unchanging), is above all things. According to Aquinas, man too has a sort of infinitude in his intellect, his ability to know things, because although we cannot know all things, our immaterial knowing transcends the material, the physical, exceeds any quantity of anything quantifiable. Our knowing is in the image of the First Knower.

Christian philosopher Peter Kreeft puts it very well when he says that what we each call ourselves, or more accurately, our own self, ("I") is in the image of what God calls Himself ("I AM"; Exo. 3:14). The reasons for this are also in God's image. No one other than the individual himself can call himself "I," says Kreeft, which makes the name a private one, and the individual's ability to have awareness of--and in turn, relationship with--himself, identifying himself as "I," is in the image of God: in the image of His consciousness (i.e. self-awareness) of and relationship with Himself.

The divine name "I AM" even implies something more; it implies Being itself. Aquinas says that God's existence is His essence; His being (be-ing) identifies God completely. " 'I AM THAT I AM' " (Exo. 3:14, KJV). God sanctified man from beast in creating him (i.e. male and female alike; Gen. 1:27) by making him a little being, a human being. Our being is in the image of His Being. (It is not the same as His Being, however, because our being (our existence) does not identify completely who we are. That we are is corrupted by what we are, precisely because unlike God, that we are is not what we are. That which makes us what we are is confined to space and time, confined in this earthly existence to the flesh, where sin can enter.)