Righteousness and Holiness

Westminster Shorter Catechism 10 summarizes the Bible’s teaching on the creation of mankind by saying, “God created man male and female, after his own image, in knowledge, righteousness, and holiness, with dominion over the creatures.” This statement is based in part on Ephesians 4:24, which states that God’s likeness consists in “true righteousness and holiness.” Whatever else we may say about our bearing the image of God, it means at least that humanity, as originally created, reflected His own moral excellence in a manner appropriate to creatures.

In some sense, our original holiness and righteousness must have been gifts from God. After all, everything good that we have is a gift from Him, the source of all good things (1 Cor. 4:7; James 1:16–18). Roman Catholic and Reformed Protestant thinkers, however, have disagreed on how the Lord gave us righteousness and holiness at creation.

Roman Catholics have said that this righteousness and holiness are a superadded gift, a donum superadditum, that was infused into humanity. Distinguishing between image and likeness, Roman Catholics have said that the former consists of things such as our capacity to reason and certain virtues that do not require supernatural help for us to possess while the latter consists of theological virtues such as faith, hope, and love. At creation, God added His likeness to His image by infusing these things into us.

Reformed theologians, on the other hand, have stated that it is wrong to distinguish the image and likeness of God because they are synonyms. The Hebrew language often uses different but synonymous words to stress a particular point. In Genesis 1:26–27, the synonyms tell us that among all other creations, people are uniquely like God. Original righteousness and holiness were gifts to us, but not an extra trait infused into us. They were natural to us because, as the seventeenth-century Reformed theologian Petrus van Mastricht says, it is sin for rational, decision-making creatures to lack holiness and righteousness. God had to create us holy and righteous by nature; otherwise, He would be the author of sin, which is impossible (1 John 1:5).

These different views affect how Rome and the Reformed view the effects of sin, which we will discuss in due time. For now, we will note that to bear the image of God in its fullest splendor, we must be people of righteousness and holiness.