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Luther's Existential Imago Dei, The Deprivation Thesis, And Sanctity Of Life, Tyler M. John

The Research and Scholarship Symposium (2013-2019)

On Ryan Peterson’s reading of Martin Luther, the imago Dei (iD) is a human’s capacity to experience God. Traditionally, Christians have understood the iD to be a property that a) qualitatively separates all human beings from all non-human animals and b) gives humans a greater moral worth than non-human animals. If Peterson’s Luther is right, humans made in the iD and no other material created things have the capacity to experience God, and this capacity makes them worth more, morally, than non-human animals.

I defend this conception of the distinctness of humans by demonstrating the following: For any human being …