Are the Image and the Likeness of God Two Separate Categories?

There has been a lot of effort to retain both Greek philosophical conclusions (e.g., Aristotelian) concerning what constitutes the distinction of a human being from other creatures and blend it with what pretty much everyone in ecclesiastical history has seen as the image or likeness in the Bible, which is displayed there in terms of a righteous role or relationship the original humans had with God. The former is ontological and the latter functional. God, then, is said to place value on the human because of both of these.

Some Church Fathers tended to keep these two ideas together by seeing the image and the likeness in Genesis 1 as conveying two different ideas. The "image" referring to human ontology, and the "likeness" referring to the perfect and right relationship humans had toward God in fulfilling the role they had been assigned by Him.

It is difficult to get this from the Hebrew text, which reads as follows: 
 ויאמר אלהים נעשׁה אדם בצלמנו כדמותנו וירדו בדגת הים ובעוף השמים ובבהמה
ובכל הארץ ובכל הרמשׁ הרמשׁ על הארץ 

ויברא אלהים את האדם בצלמו בצלם אלהים ברא אתו זכר ונקבה ברא אתם

And God said, "Let us make man as our image, according to our likeness. And he is to rule over the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the domesticated animals, over all the earth and over all of the smaller animals that scurry upon the ground." So God made man in His image, in the image of God He made him, male and female He made them. 

Instead, because the LXX does not follow the Hebrew text, and most Fathers were reading the LXX, they tended to see a distinction made in its syntax.

καὶ εἶπεν ὁ Θεός· ποιήσωμεν ἄνθρωπον κατ᾿ εἰκόνα ἡμετέραν καὶ καθ᾿ ὁμοίωσιν, καὶ ἀρχέτωσαν τῶν ἰχθύων τῆς θαλάσσης καὶ τῶν πετεινῶν τοῦ οὐρανοῦ καὶ τῶν κτηνῶν καὶ πάσης τῆς γῆς καὶ πάντων τῶν ἑρπετῶν τῶν ἑρπόντων ἐπὶ γῆς γῆς. καὶ ἐποίησεν ὁ Θεὸς τὸν ἄνθρωπον, κατ᾿ εἰκόνα Θεοῦ ἐποίησεν αὐτόν, ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ ἐποίησεν αὐτούς.

And God said, “Let us make man according to our image and according to likeness, and he is to rule over the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the domesticated animals also of all the land, and all of the smaller animals that scurry upon the earth." So God made man, according to the image of God He made him, male and female he made them.

Arguments are typically made from the Greek translation that the image and likeness are distinguished from one another due to the fact that the conjunction kai separates the two and the preposition ἡμετέραν is placed after εἰκόνα and not after both εἰκόνα and ὁμοίωσιν. Hence, God makes man according to His image and then also adds a likeness. 

This argument is made, mainly by some Church Fathers and the Eastern Orthodox to follow, because it is clear that man loses his special relationship with God that makes him like God in any sort of perfection after the Fall, but the idea that he still has free-will, or a rational mind, or intuitive feelings that move toward God, etc. can be retained even after the Fall by asserting that man is no longer the likeness of God (in perfect relationship with God and functioning as a likeness), but he is still the image of God (ontologically sharing divine characteristics).

Of course, ontological categories are nowhere to be found in the Genesis text when it comes to the image, so these qualities are a result of speculation by the Fathers who pondered in a Greek, Platonic context how man could be the image of God if he was a physical being. The answer was largely that man only imaged God in his spiritual nature (rational mind, free-will, etc.) not in his physical one, since God is not a physical Being. 

Setting aside the fact that this means that only part of the man is God's image, or ever could be, and the unbiblical anthropology that idea creates, neither the Hebrew Bible, nor the LXX translation, nor the New Testament understanding of these passages supports the idea that image and likeness are two separate categories.

Hebrew often conveys ideas in parallelism. It repeats words and many times ideas in other words, especially when poetic conventions are used, as in Genesis here.

For one, the LXX is a translation that can either get the original language right or wrong. Since the Hebrew parallelism conveys the idea that the image and likeness are synonyms, it really does not matter whether a translation obscures this fact.

Second to this, the addition of the kai and position of the possessive pronoun do not in themselves convey the idea even in the LXX that the translator means to divorce the words from one another. Instead, it is simply a way of placing emphasis, like framing a picture, on the first statement and less emphasis on the restatement of the idea. It has nothing necessarily to do with the author's desire to categorize the two terms differently.

The addition of the conjunction is common in Hebrew, so a Jewish translator, especially one translating with knowledge of Late Hebrew, which tends to be more formal by supplying words and letters that earlier Hebrew may have left out, is often going to supply a conjunction in his translation when a parallel presents itself, even if the original language does not have it, and if he wishes to emphasize the word "image" it is the perfect spot to do so.

Furthermore, this also creates a problem in the Genesis text, as God never makes man in His likeness. He only makes man in His image, so that what God says He is going to do, He never does, since the text states that God made man in His image, but never repeats the idea that He makes him in His likeness. This problem is avoided merely by seeing that the two terms refer to the same thing.

However, it is possible to break the two in later interpretations (cf. Matthew's literary use of Zechariah 9:9 in 21:2-7 vs. that of Mark 11:2-7 and Luke 19:30). It is possible that the LXX translators, being influenced by Greek philosophy themselves, desired to make this very distinction in the text that did not originally convey it. The real question is whether the New Testament adopts a distinction or remains faithful to the synonymous parallelism of Hebrew text. Hence, we must turn to the New Testament.

First, the most ambiguous New Testament text that can be used to support the idea that all men are the image of God is James 3:9. However, the word in the text here is "likeness," not image. Hence, either all men are the likeness of God, which means that the image and likeness are interchangeable terms, or this text is talking about believers and cannot be used to distinguish the word "image" from the word "likeness." Of course, when the context is studied further, James is talking about Christians cursing and speaking against other Christians (e.g., the conflicts and quarrels that produce this are "among them" 4:1 and speaking against and condemning one another v. 11). 

Ephesians 4:24 states that Christians, now that they are saved, are ἐνδύσασθαι τὸν καινὸν ἄνθρωπον τὸν κατὰ θεὸν κτισθέντα ἐν δικαιοσύνῃ καὶ ὁσιότητι τῆς ἀληθείας "to put on the new man which is created according to God's [image/likeness]in righteousness and piety which comes from the truth."

The word for image or likeness is not in this text, but it is in the parallel passage to this one.

In Colossians 3:9-10, the parallel passage to Ephesians 4:24, this is explained, not as the likeness of God, but as the image of its Creator (εἰκόνα τοῦ κτίσαντος αὐτόν), i.e., the new man as opposed to the old. 

"Do not lie to one another since you have put off the old man with its practices and have been clothed with the new man that is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its Creator."

This new man is in the process of becoming what it is not already. In Ephesians, Christians are told to put it on as though it is not on already. In Colossians, Christians are told that this new man that is made in the image of its Creator is being renewed by knowledge. It is not something the human already has regardless of the new creation and continual renewal that conforms the Christian mind and life to it. This is the word "image," not likeness, so the image cannot be ontological and something attributed to all mankind whether in Christ or not.

Finally, in the last New Testament text that discusses the image of God, the man, and not the woman, is said to be the image of God, so a Christian man is not to cut have long hair so that he looks like a woman.

Ἀνὴρ μὲν γὰρ οὐκ ὀφείλει κατακαλύπτεσθαι τὴν κεφαλὴν εἰκὼν καὶ δόξα θεοῦ ὑπάρχων· ἡ γυνὴ δὲ δόξα ἀνδρός ἐστιν.

"For a man [Christian man in context] is not supposed to have his head a covering that hangs down [i.e., long hair] being made the image and glory of God, but the woman is the glory of man." 

In other words, since man is God's image, he must look like a man in his hair, and since the woman is not God's image and glory, but only participates in the image through the man, she is to distinguish herself with long hair.

It seems that Paul here refers to the word "likeness" as "glory" instead, but what is truly significant is that the particular Fathers who made the argument for the distinction between the two words appealed to the idea that the image was a generic qualilty of humanity because both the  man and woman were made as the image in Genesis 1:27, whereas in Genesis 1:26, only the man is made both image and likeness. They argued, therefore, that the image was the ontological quality of humanity shared by both man and woman.

This text indicates that the woman is not made the image by herself, but rather participates in it by becoming the glory of the man. As I have argued before, anyone attempting to derive human dignity and worth from the concept of the image, which is functional and not ontological will be thoroughly disturbed by Paul's argument and seek to either dismiss it or twist it beyond recognition. However, if it is understood that image and likeness of God are functional and have to do with the mission God gave to the human couple to join Him in filling up the earth with covenant human beings, then one can see how the woman participates in that mission through the man. Furthermore, since the image is a mission given to the man and both man and woman only become the image when they participate in God's creational work to fill up the earth and rule over it, it must be seen that the image of likeness are one and the same thing.

The idea that these words or concepts are separate, therefore, (and this includes those who want to divide up the image of God witout dividing up the words as well) has no legitimate scriptural support.