The Thesis of In Our Image

The thesis of In Our Image is that the traditional Christian assertion that God made man in his image (Gen. 1: 26) has been turned on its head by Christian orthodoxy, and that it is most often the believer who makes God in his image.

It is true that the Bible as a whole seems to support the traditional Christian theist view of a God out there who creates mankind according to his will and demands high standards of holiness, but a too-superficial reading of the text will tend to overlook the significance of myth and symbol, thereby missing the point that the Bible is essentially a human document expressing human concerns.

Holiness, although of the essence, is not primarily a top-down affair imposed or demanded from above, but a bottom-up one which is created by, and lies at the heart of human experience.

Christian fundamentalists read the Bible with black-and-white literalism, while liberals often reduce religious experience to the merely human. Smith here argues for a via media which appeals to the harmonious existence of faith and reason as the chief means of addressing man's modern existential situation.