εἰκών

Christ is the eikōn of God. Humans were made in the eikōn of God.

It is the same Greek word.

That repetition runs from Genesis to Colossians, and it tells us something English translations sometimes hide. The word for the image humans were made to bear, the image we lost in the Fall, and the image we are being remade into — is the same word as the word for Christ. Christ is what we were supposed to be. Christ is what we are becoming. The Greek does that with one word.

The Word

εἰκών (eikōn), pronounced AY-kone. A feminine noun, third declension. The word from which our English icon descends.

In ordinary first-century Greek, an eikōn could be many things: a portrait, a statue, the image of an emperor stamped on a coin, the likeness of one person reflected in another. When Jesus asks “Whose eikōn is on this coin?” (Mark 12:16), He is using the everyday sense. Caesar’s face is on the coin. That is the eikōn.

But the word carries more weight than English “image” does. In Greek philosophical and religious usage, an eikōn was not merely a picture of something. An eikōn participated, in some sense, in the reality of what it imaged. A statue of a god, in Greek thought, was not just a stone object that looked like the god. It made the god present in a way a bare description could not. The later Eastern Christian theology of icons builds on this — icons of saints are means of contact with the saints they image, not just pictures. The Lutheran tradition has been more cautious about that development; we do not need it for the New Testament use. But it is worth knowing that eikōn always carried more substance than English “image” suggests. When the New Testament calls Christ the eikōn of God, the word is not saying “Christ resembles God.” It is saying Christ makes God present.

Range of Meaning

In its New Testament usage, eikōn covers a wide field:

• A portrait or visible representation. A statue, a painting, a likeness.
• A coin’s image. Caesar’s face stamped onto silver (Mark 12:16). The everyday political-economic sense.
• The image of God in humans, from the creation account. “Let us make man in our image” (Gen 1:26, where the Septuagint uses eikōn for the Hebrew tselem).
• The image to which humans are being conformed. “Predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son” (Rom 8:29).
• Christ Himself as the image of the invisible God. The dominant theological sense in Paul’s letters.
• An idol, when the image is worshiped instead of what it images. This is the negative use — the same word in moral inversion.

The word’s range is unified by a single idea: an eikōn is something that represents something else. The variations are about what is being represented, by what, and whether the representation is being honored or distorted. Context tells you which sense is in play, and the sense almost always matters theologically.

Where You’ll Meet It

“Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…’ So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” (Genesis 1:26–27, ESV)

The first use, and the one all the others reach back to. The Hebrew is tselem; the Septuagint translators chose eikōn. By the time the New Testament was being written, eikōn was the word a Greek-speaking Christian heard when he read Genesis 1. Paul’s later uses are not innovations. They are unfoldings.

“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.” (Colossians 1:15, ESV)

The verse where Paul makes the connection between the Genesis image and Christ explicit. Christ is the eikōn of the aoratos (invisible) God. What you cannot see in God directly, you see in Christ. The invisible God has not left Himself unimaged. He has imaged Himself in His Son.

“In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” (2 Corinthians 4:4, ESV)

Paul again. The good news is, specifically, the good news of “the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” Where the eikōn is seen, God is known. Where the eikōn is hidden, blindness reigns.

“And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.” (2 Corinthians 3:18, ESV)

The image is also our destiny. When we behold Christ — through the Word, through the means of grace — we are being transformed into the same eikōn. The Christian life is image-restoration.

“For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son…” (Romans 8:29, ESV)

The same point, on the largest scale. The endpoint of God’s saving work in us is conformity to the eikōn of His Son. The image we lost is being restored through the image who is Christ.

“And Jesus said to them, ‘Whose likeness and inscription is this?’ They said to him, ‘Caesar’s.’ Jesus said to them, ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’” (Mark 12:16–17, ESV)

A pastoral footnote to the larger argument. The coin bears Caesar’s eikōn and so belongs to Caesar. The implication, often missed, is that humans bear God’s eikōn and so belong to God. We are God’s coinage. We bear His image, and so the question “what do we owe God?” has the answer the question always had: ourselves.