The Image of God, the Gardener

The view that the human person is created in “the image of God” has played an important role in the Christian tradition, providing a foundational symbol for affirming the intrinsic dignity of the human person. The symbolic language of “image of God” is rooted, of course, in the first creation narrative of Genesis, where people and communities of faith are told explicitly that God creates the human person in God’s image (Genesis 1:27).

In the second creation narrative of Genesis, however, there exists an implicit imago Dei anthropology. Rather than making the outright claim that the human person is created in the image of God, the author of the second creation narrative suggests this idea through allusion. This deserves careful consideration. The key to interpreting the allusive language at work here lies in verse 2:15. In this verse, God calls the human person to “cultivate and care” or (acknowledging an alternative translation of the Hebrew) to “serve and keep” the garden.

Here, God gives the human person the symbolic vocation of “gardener” — calling the person to care for the soil and all that comes from the soil. What is particularly striking about this call is that in the preceding verses of this narrative, God is depicted as the gardener. The Lord God plants the garden in Eden and makes the nourishing and beautiful trees of the garden grow (2:8-9). God also forms the living creatures of Eden (including the human) out of the garden’s life-giving soil. Thus, in the second creation story, it is precisely in serving and caring for “the garden of the world” that the human comes to most fully inhabit the image of God the Gardener. Indeed, in this narrative, one finds that love of God is expressed through the closely linked loves of neighbor and earth.

The sensibilities of the second creation narrative of Genesis are captured beautifully in Michael Cook’s painting “Night Prayer.” There, “the human one” lies at rest upon the fertile soil from which God had formed Adam. The folds of the clothes and body mimic the folds of the earth itself, subtly emphasizing the closeness of the human to the earth. In repose, the person’s arms encircle a shoot of vegetation emerging from the earth as a parent would cradle a newborn child. The image conveys a deep sense of intimacy between the human and creation.

To be clear, with my interpretation of Genesis 2, I am not suggesting that the vocation of gardener ought to be taken in a literalist sense. I do not maintain that the symbol of gardener needs to be strictly identified with an agrarian lifestyle. Rather, the symbol points to an existential posture, one of service and care for creation. Thus, it is possible for an engineer who uses her knowledge in prudence and love to participate in the work of the gardener. Likewise, it is possible that a farmer, utilizing destructive farming methods, may fail to respond properly to God’s call. Given this, the work of gardener requires careful discernment. This is especially true in a world in which the globalized economy and cultures of consumerism tend to drive all forms of praxis toward ambiguous, if not outrightly destructive, outcomes. Given this, the call to the gardner’s work — the invitation to inhabit the image of God more deeply — is also always a call to conversion. Amid the current ecological and social emergencies, this call is particularly pressing.

Editor’s note: Daniel P. Castillo, Ph.D., is director of the Masters of Theological Studies Program at Loyola University Maryland. His research interests include liberation theology and environmental ethics. In 2019, he published “An Ecological Theology of Liberation: Salvation and Political Ecology.”