Abstract
This paper explores the difficulty of articulating the doctrine of imago Dei—the theological claim that all human beings bear the image of God—in discourse environments dominated by moral identity collapse and moral panic. It argues that the doctrine, when subjected to the pressures characteristic of such environments, undergoes one of two characteristic distortions: it is either sentimentalized into a vague universalism that denies meaningful moral differentiation, or it is selectively applied in ways that effectively deny its universality. The paper retrieves the classical formulation of the doctrine, which simultaneously affirms universal human dignity, universal moral fallenness, and universal moral accountability, and examines the specific features of contemporary discourse—linguistic instability, emotional saturation, and discursive speed—that make the accurate articulation of this formulation increasingly difficult. It concludes that imago Dei is capable of functioning as a load-bearing moral concept only when it is articulated with sufficient disciplinary rigor to survive the distorting pressures of high-conflict environments, and that the failure to achieve this rigor results not in a neutral absence of the doctrine but in its active replacement by less adequate and ultimately destructive substitutes.
1. The Problem
The doctrine of imago Dei occupies a structurally unique position in theological anthropology. It is the ground of human dignity—the claim that every human being, regardless of any other consideration, possesses an inalienable worth conferred by the Creator and therefore immune to revision by human judgment. It is simultaneously a claim about the universality of that dignity: no human being is excluded from it by virtue of their conduct, their beliefs, their social standing, or any other contingent feature of their existence. In a fully functional moral discourse, this doctrine operates as a constraint on the treatment of persons—as a floor beneath which no assessment of any individual may descend—while leaving entirely intact the capacity for robust moral differentiation among actions, beliefs, and character.
The problem that this paper addresses is what happens to this doctrine when the discourse environment within which it must be articulated has been so thoroughly shaped by the dynamics of moral panic and moral identity collapse that the doctrine’s characteristic moves—affirming dignity while preserving judgment, condemning wrongdoing while preserving the standing of the wrongdoer—are rendered structurally unintelligible to the audience receiving them. This is not primarily a problem of theological correctness or exegetical accuracy; it is a problem of communicative function. A doctrine that is theologically precise but communicatively inert—that cannot be heard as meaning what it actually means—has lost the practical force that justifies its articulation.
The specific communicative failure that characterizes the present environment is a systematic misreading that operates in both directions simultaneously. When the affirmation of universal human dignity is offered in a moralized discourse environment—when someone asserts that even those who have acted reprehensibly retain a dignity that constrains how they may be treated—the assertion is reliably heard, not as a claim about ontological status, but as a claim about moral assessment. It is heard as an exculpation, as a denial that the wrongdoing was genuinely wrong, or as a signal of sympathy with the wrongdoer. The affirmation of dignity is interpreted as the withdrawal of condemnation, because the discourse environment has so thoroughly collapsed the distinction between ontological status and moral assessment that a statement about the former is automatically processed as a statement about the latter.
The misreading operates with equal reliability in the opposite direction. When wrongdoing is condemned in clear and unambiguous terms—when someone asserts that a specific action was genuinely evil or that a specific belief is genuinely false and harmful—the condemnation is heard not as a moral assessment of the action or belief but as an ontological verdict upon the person who performed or holds it. The condemnation of the deed is interpreted as the denial of the dignity of the doer, because the same collapsed distinction that produced the first misreading produces this one as well. The doer and the deed are fused; a verdict upon the deed is automatically a verdict upon the person.
The result is a double bind. In a moralized environment, affirming universal dignity is heard as excusing wrongdoing, and condemning wrongdoing is heard as denying dignity. The classical doctrine requires both moves—affirmation and condemnation, dignity and accountability—but in the environment described, each move is heard as the negation of the other. The speaker who attempts to articulate the classical position is therefore perceived simultaneously as offering an excuse for evil and as engaging in dehumanization, depending upon which half of their statement is processed first and which interpretive lens is activated by the audience’s current state of moral threat detection. The doctrine that was designed to hold these commitments in productive tension instead becomes the occasion for the confirmation of both suspicions.
2. Distortions of Imago Dei
The double bind described in Section 1 does not produce a neutral silence around the doctrine. It produces characteristic distortions—deformations of the classical position that resolve the tension by abandoning one of the two commitments that the tension is designed to hold together. Two such distortions are identifiable as recurrent patterns in contemporary discourse.
2.1 Sentimental Universalism
The first distortion is sentimental universalism, which resolves the double bind by preserving the affirmation of universal dignity at the cost of moral differentiation. In this distortion, the imago Dei is invoked as a ground for the claim that all persons are fundamentally good, that moral failures are explainable by circumstances that effectively excuse the agent from responsibility, and that the attribution of genuine evil to persons or their actions represents a failure of compassion or understanding rather than an accurate moral assessment. The slogan “everyone is good” or its functional equivalents—”no one is truly bad,” “we all do the best we can,” “evil is just misunderstood good”—expresses the logic of this distortion with varying degrees of explicitness.
The appeal of sentimental universalism is intelligible. It genuinely preserves something important: the insistence that all persons retain a dignity that constrains how they may be treated, and the resistance to the ontological downgrading that the cascade described in the preceding paper produces. In a discourse environment where the condemnation of wrongdoing routinely becomes dehumanization of the wrongdoer, the sentimental universalist is reacting to a real and serious pathology. The problem is that the remedy is as destructive as the disease, because it achieves the preservation of dignity by eliminating the moral differentiation without which dignity itself becomes a morally unintelligible concept.
A dignity that cannot be distinguished from its absence—a worth that attaches equally to the person who rescues the vulnerable and the person who exploits them—is not functioning as a moral concept at all. It is functioning as a sentimental assertion of equivalence that dissolves the very distinctions that moral reasoning requires. The imago Dei, in its classical formulation, does not assert that all persons are morally equivalent; it asserts that all persons are ontologically equivalent while remaining morally differentiated. Sentimental universalism collapses this distinction in the opposite direction from the cascade: the cascade eliminates ontological unity in the name of moral differentiation, while sentimental universalism eliminates moral differentiation in the name of ontological unity. Both distortions destroy the classical synthesis; they differ only in which half they sacrifice.
Theologically, sentimental universalism represents a failure to take seriously the doctrine of the fall—the scriptural insistence that human beings, while retaining the imago Dei, have been morally disordered by sin in ways that affect their reasoning, their desires, their choices, and their actions (Genesis 3; Romans 1:18–32; 3:9–18). The imago Dei and the reality of the fall are not competing doctrines in the classical theological synthesis; they are simultaneous affirmations that require each other. The image grounds dignity; the fall grounds accountability. To affirm the image while suppressing the fall is to produce a theological anthropology that cannot account for the observable realities of human moral failure and cannot therefore provide any basis for the moral assessment of human action.
2.2 Selective Humanization
The second distortion operates in the opposite direction. Selective humanization resolves the double bind by preserving moral differentiation—and specifically, the capacity to condemn—at the cost of ontological universality. In this distortion, the imago Dei is effectively applied only to those whose beliefs and conduct fall within the category judged acceptable by the relevant community. Those who hold different beliefs or engage in condemned behaviors are not explicitly denied the imago, but their dignity is treated in practice as conditional upon their moral and ideological conformity. The dignity of persons who are “like us”—who share our values, our allegiances, and our moral frameworks—is affirmed and defended vigorously; the dignity of those who are categorized as belonging to the morally condemned class is either ignored or actively denied in practice, even if it is formally affirmed in theology.
Selective humanization is the more dangerous of the two distortions in some respects, because it is more easily concealed beneath formally correct theological language. A community can affirm the imago Dei of all human beings in its doctrinal statements while consistently applying the practical protections of that affirmation only to those within its moral circle. The discrepancy between the formal doctrine and the operative practice may not be visible to the community itself, because the violations of the doctrine occur at the level of practical judgment—in which cases of mistreatment are taken seriously, which persons are given the benefit of the doubt, whose claims of dignity are heard as legitimate—rather than at the level of explicit theological assertion.
The biblical tradition is acutely aware of this specific distortion and addresses it with notable directness. The apostle James identifies selective humanization by name when he condemns the practice of showing favoritism—honoring the person of wealth and social standing while dishonoring the poor (James 2:1–9). His argument is precisely that this practice is inconsistent with the imago Dei: to dishonor those made in God’s image is to violate the royal law of love, regardless of whether the dishonored person meets the community’s standards of social acceptability. The parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37) functions as a structural refutation of selective humanization by demonstrating that the obligations of neighbor-love extend precisely to those who fall outside the expected circle of solidarity—to those whom the moral and religious community has placed in the category of the excluded.
The practical mechanism of selective humanization in contemporary discourse is the bifurcation of moral vocabulary: the same actions are described in terms that emphasize the humanity and dignity of the actor when the actor belongs to the approved category, and in terms that emphasize the depravity and unworthiness of the actor when the actor belongs to the condemned category. This bifurcation is not always conscious or deliberate; it is often the automatic expression of the identity fusion described in the preceding paper in this series, in which moral group membership determines the application of ontological protections. The result is a discourse environment in which the doctrine of imago Dei is in practice a doctrine of in-group dignity—a concept that protects those who already enjoy social standing within the relevant community and fails precisely those who most need its protection.
3. The Classical Position
Against both distortions, the classical theological synthesis maintains three simultaneous affirmations that resist reduction to any simpler formula. These affirmations are not in tension with one another within the synthesis; they are mutually supporting and mutually necessary. The difficulty is that articulating all three simultaneously, without allowing any of them to cancel or qualify the others, requires a precision of expression that contemporary discourse environments actively resist.
The three affirmations are as follows: first, all human beings bear the image of God; second, all human beings are morally fallen; third, all human beings remain morally accountable.
The first affirmation—universal image-bearing—grounds the inalienable dignity that constrains all treatment of persons and that neither sentimental universalism nor selective humanization accurately preserves. It is universal without exception: the wicked bear the image no less than the righteous, the condemned no less than the honored, the enemy no less than the neighbor. This affirmation is the direct ground of the prohibitions against murder (Genesis 9:6), against cursing human beings (James 3:9), and against the practical dishonoring of persons that selective humanization produces. It is not a moral assessment; it is an ontological claim. It says nothing about whether a person has acted well or badly; it says something about what they are.
The second affirmation—universal moral fallenness—grounds the recognition that no human being is exempt from the disorder introduced into human nature by sin. This is not a claim about any particular action or belief but about the condition of human nature as it actually exists in the world: a nature that retains the image and the dignity it confers while being genuinely and seriously disordered in its orientation toward good and evil, truth and falsehood. The scriptural testimony on this point is unambiguous: “There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God” (Romans 3:10–11, ESV, citing Psalm 14:1–3). This affirmation is the direct refutation of sentimental universalism, which resolves the tension between dignity and fallenness by suppressing the latter. The classical synthesis refuses this resolution: fallenness is as universal as the image, and neither qualifies the other.
The third affirmation—universal moral accountability—grounds the legitimate practice of moral differentiation and the proportional judgment of actions, beliefs, and character. Because all persons are moral agents capable of genuine choice—a capacity itself grounded in the imago Dei—all persons are legitimately subject to moral assessment. The accountability is universal: it does not exempt those whose overall character is admirable from responsibility for specific failures, and it does not release those whose overall character is defective from the possibility of genuine moral credit for specific good actions. This affirmation is the ground of moral seriousness: it establishes that moral assessments track something real and important about what persons do and who they are becoming.
The relationship among these three affirmations can be expressed in the following schematic form:
| Affirmation | Constraint |
|---|---|
| Dignity | Does not remove judgment |
| Judgment | Does not remove dignity |
The constraint columns are as important as the affirmation columns. Dignity does not function as a trump card that renders moral judgment impermissible; the person who acts wickedly is genuinely acting wickedly, and that assessment stands. Judgment does not function as a revocation of dignity; the person who is correctly judged to have acted wickedly retains the image and all the constraints upon treatment that the image entails. The two commitments hold simultaneously without either canceling the other. This is the synthesis that the two distortions described in Section 2 fail to maintain, and its maintenance is the condition of imago Dei functioning as a genuinely load-bearing moral concept rather than as a decorative assertion.
Augustine’s formulation is instructive here. In his engagement with the Donatist controversy, Augustine insisted simultaneously on the seriousness of sin—which he did not minimize—and on the inalienable dignity of the sinner, which was the basis of the church’s continuing obligation to pursue, through persuasion and pastoral care, those who had defected from the faith (Frend, 1952). The dignity did not excuse the defection; the defection did not revoke the dignity. In his reflections on the image, he located it in the rational and volitional capacities of the soul, capacities that persist even in the morally disordered, though their exercise is compromised (Augustine, De Trinitate XIV.4). The image remains; its proper function is impaired; accountability is unaffected.
4. Why This Is Hard to Express Now
The classical synthesis described in Section 3 is not logically unstable; it is not internally contradictory; it is not beyond the cognitive reach of educated adults. Its difficulty in the present environment is not a logical difficulty but a communicative and cultural one. Three specific features of contemporary discourse environments function as barriers to the accurate articulation and reception of the synthesis.
4.1 Linguistic Instability
The first barrier is linguistic instability—the condition in which the key terms required to articulate the synthesis have become so multiply loaded with competing meanings, emotional associations, and ideological valences that their deployment in the classical sense is reliably misread as deployment in some other sense. The words “good,” “evil,” and “human” are the primary examples.
In the classical synthesis, “good” and “evil” function as moral predicates that apply primarily to actions, dispositions, and choices, and only derivatively and with significant qualification to persons. A person may do evil things while bearing the image; a person may bear the image while being morally assessed as wicked in their habitual conduct. The terms mark moral assessments, not ontological classifications. In the collapse described in the preceding papers in this series, “good” and “evil” have migrated from the domain of moral assessment to the domain of ontological classification: a “good person” is one of us, a member of the ontologically approved class; an “evil person” is one of them, a member of the ontologically condemned class. When these two semantic systems occupy the same vocabulary without clear differentiation, the classical speaker and the collapsed-discourse listener are using the same words to mean fundamentally different things, and the miscommunication is systematic and invisible to both parties.
The word “human” exhibits a parallel instability. In the classical synthesis, “human” is a univocal ontological term: all members of the species are human without gradation or qualification. In collapsed discourse, “human” has acquired a covert adjectival meaning—functioning, in practice, as a synonym for “a person whose dignity is acknowledged by my community”—so that claims about the humanity of contested individuals are received not as ontological assertions but as ideological ones. To say that a despised or condemned individual “is human” in the classical sense is to assert their ontological status; to say it in the collapsed discourse environment is to make an apparently political claim about their group membership.
Wittgenstein’s (1953) observation that the meaning of a word is its use in the language—that words do not carry their meanings independently of the practices within which they are employed—is directly applicable here. The classical speaker intends the classical uses; the discourse environment supplies different uses; and the gap between intention and reception is not bridgeable by insisting on the correct meaning, because the correct meaning is simply not the meaning that the available linguistic context will sustain.
4.2 Emotional Saturation
The second barrier is emotional saturation—the condition in which discourse participants are operating under such continuous and intense moral threat detection that the cognitive resources required for accurate interpretation of nuanced claims are consistently preempted by the emotional processing of perceived threats. The human threat-detection system is, by well-documented evolutionary design, prone to false positives: it is better to misidentify a neutral stimulus as threatening than to fail to identify a genuine threat (Öhman & Mineka, 2001). Under conditions of moral panic, this system is running at high sensitivity, and the threshold for triggering a threat response—including the misinterpretation of a dignity claim as an exculpation, or a moral condemnation as a dehumanization—is correspondingly low.
The cognitive effects of this state are well-established. Elevated states of emotional arousal narrow attentional focus, bias interpretation toward threat-confirming readings, and reduce the working memory resources available for the effortful processing that accurate reception of complex statements requires (Eysenck et al., 2007). A statement that requires the simultaneous processing of two distinct and apparently opposed commitments—dignity and judgment, fallenness and accountability—places precisely the kind of cognitive demand that emotional saturation forecloses. The discourse participant operating under high moral threat detection will reliably process only one element of the dual claim and interpret the other in terms of whatever threat-confirming frame is currently active.
The prophetic tradition is sensitive to the relationship between emotional state and receptive capacity. The frequency with which the prophets address Israel and Judah in terms of their hardened hearts (Isaiah 6:10; Ezekiel 3:7; Zechariah 7:12) reflects an awareness that the problem of failed moral communication is not always a problem of the message but of the condition of the receiver—a condition that is itself morally serious and that requires address in its own right before the content of the message can be accurately received. The New Testament instruction to “be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger” (James 1:19, ESV) identifies the affective preconditions for accurate moral communication: the reduction of emotional reactivity is a prerequisite for the kind of attentive reception that complex moral claims require.
4.3 Discursive Speed
The third barrier is discursive speed—the rate at which claims are exchanged in contemporary digital discourse environments, which is systematically incompatible with the processing time required for the accurate articulation and reception of nuanced distinctions. The classical synthesis requires, at minimum, that its two commitments be heard together—that the affirmation of dignity and the affirmation of judgment be processed as a single integrated claim rather than as two separable assertions between which the listener must choose. This requires time: time for the speaker to complete the statement, time for the listener to hold both elements in working memory simultaneously, and time for the interpretive process to integrate them into a coherent understanding.
Contemporary digital discourse operates at a pace that systematically forecloses this time. The characteristic formats of social media—brief posts, rapid replies, truncated exchanges—are structurally unsuited to the communication of claims that require more than a single easily-processed assertion to convey accurately. The nuanced distinction between an ontological affirmation and a moral assessment cannot be expressed in the format that the dominant discourse environment rewards; and when it is expressed in formats that do not fit the environment, it is either ignored or processed in fragments, with predictable results.
McLuhan’s (1964) insight that the medium shapes the message is directly applicable: the communicative medium does not merely transmit the message but imposes constraints on what kinds of messages can be accurately transmitted within it. A medium optimized for brief, emotionally resonant, easily shareable content will systematically distort or suppress messages whose accuracy depends upon sustained, multi-part, carefully qualified articulation. The imago Dei in its classical formulation is precisely this kind of message; and the dominant contemporary communicative medium is precisely the kind of medium that cannot transmit it without distortion.
5. Practical Consequence
The three barriers identified in Section 4—linguistic instability, emotional saturation, and discursive speed—operate together to produce a consistent practical consequence: the doctrine of imago Dei is either avoided or flattened in contemporary moral discourse rather than functioning as the load-bearing moral concept its classical articulation requires it to be.
Avoidance occurs when the communicative difficulties described above are perceived as too great to navigate—when the speaker who attempts to articulate the classical synthesis anticipates the double-bind described in Section 1 and withdraws from the attempt rather than risk being misread as either excusing wrongdoing or denying dignity. This withdrawal is not irrational; in many discourse contexts, the anticipated misreadings are genuinely probable and the social costs of those misreadings are genuinely significant. The result, however, is a moral discourse conducted without a concept capable of performing the function that imago Dei is uniquely equipped to perform: grounding a constraint on the treatment of persons that is independent of moral assessment and therefore capable of surviving moral condemnation without being swept away by it.
Flattening occurs when the doctrine is retained in name but reduced to one of the two distortions described in Section 2. The term imago Dei continues to appear in theological and ethical discourse, but it has been stripped of the complexity that gives it its structural function and reduced to either the sentimental universalism that denies moral differentiation or the selective humanization that denies ontological universality. A flattened doctrine is in some respects more problematic than an avoided one, because it maintains the appearance of the classical concept while performing a fundamentally different function. It borrows the authority and resonance of the classical formulation while undermining its content, producing a discourse in which the term is present but the concept is absent.
Neither avoidance nor flattening is a satisfactory outcome. The avoidance of imago Dei in moral discourse does not produce a neutral absence; it produces a vacuum that is filled by less adequate and more dangerous concepts. When the doctrine that grounds universal human dignity is absent from active moral reasoning, the constraints it provides are absent as well, and the cascade described in the preceding paper proceeds without the conceptual resources needed to interrupt it. The flattening of the doctrine is equally consequential, because a flattened imago Dei cannot provide the specific constraint that the cascade threatens—it can resist dehumanization only by denying moral seriousness, or it can affirm moral seriousness only for those who already enjoy dignity within the relevant community. Neither version is capable of maintaining the dual commitment that the classical synthesis requires.
6. Core Thesis
Imago Dei requires disciplined articulation to survive in high-conflict environments; otherwise it collapses into sentimentality or disappears under moral pressure. This thesis is not primarily a counsel of pessimism but an identification of the specific intellectual and formational demands that the present environment places upon those who wish to deploy the doctrine as a functional moral concept rather than as a decorative theological assertion.
Disciplined articulation means, at minimum, the following. It means the explicit maintenance of all three elements of the classical synthesis—universal image-bearing, universal fallenness, universal accountability—without allowing any element to be tacitly suppressed under the pressure of the discourse environment. It means resistance to the linguistic instabilities described in Section 4.1 through the deliberate clarification of terms, the rejection of the binary ontological vocabulary that collapsed discourse has substituted for moral vocabulary, and the recovery of the classical distinction between moral assessment and ontological status. It means the cultivation of the affective preconditions for accurate reception—the “quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger” disposition that James identifies as necessary for the reception of moral truth—both in the speaker, who must maintain the composure required for nuanced expression, and, insofar as possible, in the discourse environment itself.
It also means the recovery of communicative forms capable of sustaining the complexity that the doctrine requires. The dominant digital discourse formats are, as Section 4.3 argues, structurally unsuited to this complexity. This does not mean that those formats must be abandoned—they are the media within which much of contemporary moral discourse occurs—but it does mean that imago Dei cannot be adequately articulated within their constraints without significant supplementation from forms that permit sustained, qualified, multi-part engagement: extended writing, face-to-face conversation, catechetical instruction, and the communal practices of faith communities that transmit the doctrine not merely as a proposition but as a habit of perception and response.
The practical implication is that the communities most capable of performing the disciplined articulation that the doctrine requires are those that have maintained the formational practices through which the dual commitment—to dignity and to judgment, to ontological unity and to moral differentiation—is cultivated as a stable disposition rather than adopted as a momentary position. These are communities that have not merely taught the doctrine of imago Dei as a theological proposition but have formed their members in the practice of seeing every human being as an image-bearer, of condemning wrongdoing without condemning the person, of maintaining the distinction between the sin and the sinner under conditions of genuine moral seriousness and genuine emotional difficulty.
The ministry of Jesus Christ exemplifies this practice at every point. He addressed the crowds whom the religious establishment had effectively written off—”this mob that knows nothing of the law”—as persons capable of receiving truth and responding to it (John 7:49). He engaged the Samaritan woman at the well—a person whose community, conduct, and gender placed her outside every circle of approved social standing—as a full moral and spiritual interlocutor, addressing her with complete honesty about her situation while treating her with complete respect as a person (John 4:7–26). He maintained, in the face of enormous social pressure to simplify, to side, to condemn or to excuse, the dual commitment that the classical synthesis requires and that the present discourse environment makes so difficult to sustain. This is not offered as a rhetorical appeal to authority but as a demonstration that the synthesis is livable—that it has been lived, and that the communities formed in its practice can learn to live it as well.
The doctrine of imago Dei is not merely a theological proposition about the structure of human nature. It is a practical resource for the restoration of moral discourse—a concept capable, when properly articulated and practically sustained, of interrupting the cascade at its most fundamental stage by maintaining the ontological floor beneath which no moral assessment may drive the evaluation of any human being. The failure to articulate it with sufficient discipline does not leave moral discourse in a neutral position; it leaves moral discourse without one of the primary resources capable of resisting the dehumanizing dynamics that moral panic and moral identity collapse consistently produce.
Notes
¹ The term “moral panic” is used in this paper both in its technical sociological sense—introduced by Cohen (1972) to describe episodes of disproportionate social alarm directed at groups perceived as threats to social values—and in a broader sense that includes any discourse environment characterized by the systematic elevation of moral threat detection to a level that forecloses nuanced moral reasoning. The broader usage is intended to capture the chronic features of contemporary discourse environments rather than merely the acute episodes to which Cohen’s original concept referred.
² The phrase “load-bearing moral concept” is introduced to distinguish between two functions that doctrines can perform in moral discourse. A decorative moral concept is one that is formally affirmed and rhetorically invoked but does not actually constrain moral reasoning or produce determinate conclusions in contested cases. A load-bearing concept is one that actively constrains reasoning, produces determinate conclusions, and whose removal would cause identifiable structural failures in the moral discourse that depended upon it. The argument of this paper is that imago Dei is designed to be load-bearing and that the distortions and avoidances described render it decorative.
³ The three-part classical synthesis—universal image-bearing, universal fallenness, universal accountability—is not unique to any single theological tradition within orthodox Christianity. It is found, with varying emphases and varying accounts of the mechanisms involved, in Augustinian, Thomistic, Reformed, and Wesleyan anthropology. The argument of this paper does not depend upon any of the specific intramural debates among these traditions about the extent to which the image has been damaged or obscured by the fall; it depends only upon the formal structure that all of these traditions share: the simultaneous affirmation of all three elements without the suppression of any.
⁴ The contrast drawn in Section 3 between the imago Dei as an ontological claim and moral assessment as a separate and distinct operation is central to the argument and requires emphasis against a possible misreading. The claim is not that ontological status and moral assessment are unrelated—they are related, in that the imago is itself the ground of moral accountability—but that the relationship is asymmetrical: ontological status grounds accountability without being revocable by the outcomes of accountability. The image is the condition of the possibility of moral assessment, not a prize that moral assessment can revoke.
⁵ Section 4.1’s treatment of linguistic instability draws on the tradition of ordinary language philosophy as well as on more recent work in conceptual engineering—the philosophical project of deliberately revising the concepts employed in discourse in order to improve their epistemic or moral performance (Cappelen, 2018). The application of conceptual engineering to theological vocabulary is not yet well-developed in the literature, but the conceptual resources are available, and the need is evident.
⁶ The reference in Section 4.2 to emotional saturation and its cognitive effects draws on clinical and experimental psychology of anxiety and threat response. The application to moral discourse is analogical rather than direct: the mechanisms of threat detection in physical contexts are not identical to those in moral contexts, and the relevant literature should be applied with appropriate care. The core point—that elevated states of threat-oriented emotional processing reduce the cognitive resources available for nuanced interpretive tasks—is sufficiently well-established to support the argument without requiring a detailed technical account of the specific mechanisms involved.
⁷ The distinction in Section 5 between avoidance and flattening as two practical responses to the barriers described in Section 4 is intended as a diagnostic tool rather than as an exhaustive taxonomy. Other responses are possible, including deliberate misappropriation of the doctrine for ideological purposes, which would constitute a third category distinct from both avoidance and flattening. The two responses identified are, however, the most common and the most structurally significant for the argument being advanced.
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