Discuss: after the Fall, man remains the image of God.

In the creation of man God did not impute a substance of righteousness into his creation, nor was man created with the capacity not to sin, but to choose between an ethical obedience to his creator or a marred disobedience to the one that breathed life into his nostrils. Therefore, even after the fall and man has been ethically and morally corrupted by sin, he is not totally corrupt through and through because he still bears the glorious image of God his creator.
Genesis 5: 1 says, “When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God” but there is no substantive righteousness given there, only the image of the immutable God the creator. When the fall of man occurs there is no account of a substantive change with Adam and Eve but a moral implication of withheld blessing and no longer withheld cursing upon them both because of the choice they made to disobey God’s command not to eat of the fruit.

1 Corinthians 11: 7 says of man’s creation that “he is the image and glory of God”, and there is no scripture that points to this image being removed from man. There is a corruption, pollution and eventual carnal death as a result of the curse, but the fingerprint, the breath of life and the image of God are still present within the created glory of man. This cannot be removed from man and is eventually restored, recreated and redeemed by the life giving Spirit for those elect that are promised the blessing of eternal life through the Lord Jesus Christ.

James 1: 18 says, “He chose to give us birth through the word and truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all he created”. Here again we see that much like a child who has disobeyed his parents does not lose the image that he bears as a child of his mother and father, but has made a moral choice to disobey. Those that are in Christ are now like the child who obeys their father in word and truth, so that they can properly bear the image of God as a first and most beautiful fruit of his creation. We recognize that all men subsequent to the fall continue to bear the image of God, albeit in a polluted way, but all those that are in Christ Jesus bear the image of God as it is meant to be and will one day bear that image in Heaven fully as it is meant to be.