# Dan McClellan — What Does It Mean to Be Created "In God's Image"? **Summary.** A running critique (internal evidence — his open-access monograph *YHWH's Divine Images* and Steven Herring as his Oxford Hebrew instructor — identifies the commentator as [[Dan McClellan]]) of a devotional YouTube video that reads the *imago Dei* as interior faculties (reason, will, speech, spirit) set against sinful "flesh," and reads Genesis 1:26's plural "let us make" as proof of the Trinity. McClellan argues the scholarly-consensus reading is nearly the reverse: in the ancient Near East a deity's *tselem* (image) and *demut* (likeness) named outward form, and by extension a physical object that represents and manifests a god's presence, power, and agency on earth. Applied to Genesis 1 — a priestly, exilic/post-exilic text — the doctrine is a *democratization* of Mesopotamian royal ideology: not just kings but all humanity function as God's living representatives. (Source: Readwise/Articles/What Does It Mean to Be Created "In God's Image".md) --- ## Key Claims 1. **Image = representation and manifested presence, not resemblance to a body-God alone and not "interior faculties vs. flesh."** *tselem* parallels Akkadian *ṣalmu* (divine image); *demut* denotes likeness/appearance/outward form. Ancient divine images (idols) were not merely objects of worship — they manifested a god's presence, power, and agency for petition, gratitude, worship, communion, punishment, or monitoring. To be made in God's image is to *function* as that kind of representative. (Source: Readwise/Articles/What Does It Mean to Be Created "In God's Image".md) 2. **Democratized royal ideology.** Genesis 1, written in the exilic/post-exilic period, borrows the Mesopotamian and Egyptian trope in which the *king* is called the image of a god — and extends it so all humanity bears that representative status. "We are God's representatives on earth." McClellan reads this as an exilic community "one-upping" the royal ideology that had subordinated it. (Source: Readwise/Articles/What Does It Mean to Be Created "In God's Image".md) 3. **The biblical God is fundamentally anthropomorphic.** Biblical authors conceptualize God as human-shaped, male-presenting, corporeal, located at a point in space and time; non-anthropomorphic descriptions are figurative or later philosophical overlays. Citing research associated with Justin Barrett, he argues even orthodox believers default to "intuitive" anthropomorphic God-talk, which the "reflective" non-anthropomorphic concept has to override. (Source: Readwise/Articles/What Does It Mean to Be Created "In God's Image".md) 4. **"Let us make" (Genesis 1:26) is the divine council, not the Trinity.** The cohortative is a vestigial reference to the other *elohim* / *bene elohim*, supported by Genesis 3:5, 3:22 ("like one of us"), and Genesis 6. Formal Trinitarian doctrine is dated to the mid-to-late 2nd century CE, so it cannot be the priestly author's intent. (Source: Readwise/Articles/What Does It Mean to Be Created "In God's Image".md) 5. **The "flesh is inherently sinful" reading is middle-Platonic/Gnostic, not Genesis.** Framing flesh as something to transcend is a first-to-third-century CE philosophical idea. McClellan ties the early Christian defense of *bodily resurrection* to the ~170 CE development of *creatio ex nihilo*, which resolved both the sovereignty problem (matter co-eternal with God) and the moral status of the material world — the opposite of treating flesh as a prison. (Source: Readwise/Articles/What Does It Mean to Be Created "In God's Image".md) > [!contradiction] Genesis 1:26 plural — Trinity vs. divine council > **Devotional/evangelical reading:** the plural "let us make man in our image" shows Father, Son (the Word), and Spirit present at creation — the Trinity. **Critical reading (McClellan):** the plural is a vestige of the divine council (the other *elohim*), read anachronistically as the Trinity, a doctrine that did not exist until the mid-to-late 2nd century CE. Both positions are preached from the same verse; they cannot both be the author's intent. Filed as the specimen case of reading later dogma back into an ancient text. Pairs with the developing-monotheism / divine-council thread in [[Dan McClellan]]. --- ## Analysis for this wiki The ninth [[Dan McClellan]] source, and the first to take on the *imago Dei* directly. It extends the entity's documented "developing monotheism / divine council" position (El / Elohim, the seams in the text) into one of the most heavily preached verses in Genesis. **Deconstruction relevance.** Classic [[Deconstruction]] material in the McClellan vein — two popular doctrines (the image as body/spirit dualism; Genesis 1:26 as a Trinity proof-text) are shown to be later theological and philosophical frameworks retrojected onto a text that meant something else. The pastoral payoff is affirming rather than only corrosive: if the image is representation and vocation, human worth is not a contest between "spirit" and a shameful body. That reframing connects to the anti-"flesh is sin" strand relevant to religious-trauma and body theology. > [!note] Tradition / source-caution > Academic critical scholarship (ANE comparative religion, the history of Israelite religion, priestly authorship of Genesis 1). Two cautions. First, tone: the critique is at times contemptuous of the target creator's motives ("plunk the tuning fork in the loins of the dogmatism of the audience"), which can read as *ad hominem* even where the textual arguments are strong. Second, scope: the claim that God is *uniformly* anthropomorphic in the Bible is itself a scholarly position, not universal consensus; the dating of Trinitarian development and the priestly authorship of Genesis 1 are mainstream critical positions but disputed by traditional interpreters. McClellan himself flags that he "quibbles" with parts of Garr's framing of monotheism. Named academic anchors: W. Randall Garr, *In His Own Image and Likeness*; J. Richard Middleton, *The Liberating Image*; Yair Lorberbaum, *In God's Image*; Catherine McDowell, *The Image of God in the Garden of Eden*; Stephen Herring, *Divine Substitution*; plus Crouch and Schüle papers and McClellan's own *YHWH's Divine Images*. > [!question] Concept-page candidate — "divine council" > The divine council now appears across the McClellan corpus (developing monotheism in the [[Dan McClellan]] entity; the *bene elohim* here) and is doing real interpretive work against Trinity proof-texting. One more focused source (or a directed pass) would justify a `concepts/divine-council.md` node. Held below threshold for now; folded into [[Dan McClellan]] and this page. A parallel "imago Dei" concept node is a second candidate — strong here but currently single-source.