In brief#
Bearing the image of God means that human beings reflect God in creaturely measure. It does not mean they share the attributes that belong to God alone. Scripture describes human life as dependent and fragile, and it names immortality as something God possesses and gives rather than something creatures own.
That is the biblical claim on this page, and it stands on its own. A second and quite different claim, about how the idea of an inherently immortal soul entered Christian thinking, is treated separately below, because it is a historical question and the evidence for it works differently.
The traditional argument, stated fairly#
Many defenders of eternal conscious torment (ECT) hold that human beings, uniquely among earthly creatures, were made for endless existence, and that this follows directly from being made in God's image. God does not create an image-bearer and then unmake it. On that view the question at the judgment is never whether a person continues, only where they continue, and annihilation would be a defeat for the Creator rather than a sentence from him.
That is a serious position and it is not an unreasonable inference. The question is whether Scripture actually draws it.
26God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the sky, and over the livestock, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” 27God created man in his own image. In God’s image he created him; male and female he created them.
The text says image and likeness. It does not say immortality, and no later passage supplies that definition.
What the image is, and what it is not#
Nobody holds that image-bearing transfers God's attributes wholesale. We are not omniscient, not omnipresent, not omnipotent. Human beings do reflect God in justice, compassion and love, but these are dull reflections of perfect attributes rather than shares in them. Scripture nowhere declares that every human being has an eternal spirit.
Joseph Dear presses the parallel that follows from this. Being made in God's image gives us a sense of justice and morality, yet without Christ we remain lost in sin and inclined toward evil. The image gives us the idea of righteousness because God is perfectly righteous, and yet we are not actually righteous as he is.
[Dear]Why could it not be that being made in God's image allows us to have an idea of immortality, since God is immortal, but because of sin, outside of His mercy and grace in Jesus Christ we are not actually immortal like the God whose image we bear?
The parallel does not prove the conclusion. It does show that the inference from image to immortality is not forced, because the same inference from image to righteousness is one nobody makes.
How Scripture describes human life#
The assumption running through Scripture is that human beings are not immortal. We are expected to die. The language is consistent and it is not flattering.
Man is like a breath. His days are like a shadow that passes away.
Whereas you don’t know what your life will be like tomorrow. For what is your life? For you are a vapor, that appears for a little time, and then vanishes away.
6The voice of one saying, “Cry!” One said, “What shall I cry?” “All flesh is like grass, and all its glory is like the flower of the field. 7The grass withers, the flower fades, because Yahweh’s breath blows on it. Surely the people are like grass. 8The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God stands forever.”
Peter picks up that passage from Isaiah at a pointed moment, immediately after telling his readers what has changed for them.
23having been born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, through the word of God, which lives and remains forever. 24For, “All flesh is like grass, and all of man’s glory like the flower in the grass. The grass withers, and its flower falls;
The seed is imperishable and the word abides, and then the grass withers. The author reads the sequence as deliberate: you were the grass and the flower, temporary things, and in Christ you have been born of something that does not perish. He notes as an inference, and it is an inference rather than a statement of the text, that this cannot be describing their bodies, since the letter is written to people who have not yet received the resurrection body.
The body is on the same footing until then.
42So also is the resurrection of the dead. The body is sown perishable; it is raised imperishable. 43It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power.
What is sown is perishable. What is raised is imperishable. That is a change, and a change implies a prior state that was otherwise.
Where Scripture locates immortality#
Having described human life as perishable, Scripture is direct about where immortality is actually found.
15which in its own times he will show, who is the blessed and only Ruler, the King of kings, and Lord of lords; 16who alone has immortality, dwelling in unapproachable light; whom no man has seen, nor can see: to whom be honor and eternal power. Amen.
Immortality is stated as belonging to God alone. It then appears as a gift.
but has now been revealed by the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus, who abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light through the Good News.
I am the living bread which came down out of heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. Yes, the bread which I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
And it appears as something to be sought.
to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory, honor, and incorruptibility, eternal life;
The author's question about that last verse is a fair one. Why would immortality be described as something sought after if human beings already possessed it by nature? In context it arrives bundled with glory and honour, and the unrighteous are not described as receiving either of those.
One passage is sometimes read the other way.
He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in their hearts, yet so that man can’t find out the work that God has done from the beginning even to the end.
Eternity set in the human heart is not a statement that human beings are eternal. It reads more naturally as a longing for, or an inclination toward, what is eternal. That is how the author takes it, and the same verse goes on to say that we cannot find out what God has done from beginning to end, which sits awkwardly with a claim about our own constitution.
The historical claim, kept separate#
The source document puts the historical point bluntly: the immortality of the soul is from Plato, not the Bible. Something real sits behind that. Greek philosophical accounts of the soul did shape later Christian anthropology, and traditional Christianity did come to hold a doctrine of the naturally immortal soul that the biblical writers do not state.
The biblical claim above does not depend on the historical one. If the history were fully reconstructed and turned out differently, 1 Timothy 6:15-16 would still say what it says.
A denial from the beginning#
The author ends where the question first arose. The first denial that human beings die was not made by God.
The serpent said to the woman, “You won’t surely die,
The claim that human beings possess life independently of God, in his own words, is a lie from the beginning.
What this argument establishes#
- That Scripture nowhere states that the image of God confers inherent immortality.
- That immortality is attributed to God alone and described as a gift brought to light in Christ.
- That human existence is repeatedly described as dependent and perishable.
What it does not establish by itself#
- That human beings are merely physical, or that the intermediate state between death and judgment is unconscious. Nothing above settles that.
- How God sustains the unrighteous until the day of judgment. That he does is treated elsewhere; the mechanics are not described here.
- That every defender of ECT rests the case on the image of God. Many do not.
Related sections and passages#
- The Biblical Case for Conditional Immortality develops the positive argument at length, and is where the author says this discussion properly continues.
- The Tree of Life and Conditional Life takes up the access to unending life that Genesis describes as guarded.
- Is Conditional Immortality a New Teaching? covers the historical side of the same question.
Sources and notes#
The quotation on the image of God is Joseph Dear's [Dear]. A longer treatment of the claim that God alone possesses immortality, carried over from the source document as further reading, is available as a standalone article [God Alone Is Immortal]; it argues the conditionalist case rather than surveying the alternatives.
The historical caveat above is this site's own qualification of the source document's wording, not the author's. He states the Plato claim directly. This page keeps the substance of it and narrows what is asserted.