NOTES for Gen 1:24-31
God creates human beings and animals, including domestic animals, on one day. So what, after all, is the qualitative difference between human beings and the other living creatures God has made? Above all, it is that every living creature except human beings is created according to one pattern or another, "according to its type," as the author of the Pentateuch says (the Synodal translation: "according to their kinds"), while human beings have no properly human "type." God does not create humanity according to a pattern, but according to His own image and likeness. The difference is clear: any pattern, even the most perfect, is still limited and finite; only God Himself, who creates these patterns, is infinite and boundless. All living creatures, even the most perfect, are programmed in one way or another, and one can speak only of varying degrees of complexity in the program God has designed for them. But God did not design one common program for human beings. He created each person so that He could guide each one personally, according to an individual program made for that specific person. If we were the ones designing such programs, repetitions and templates would be unavoidable. But God's creativity is infinitely diverse, and so there are no two identical persons in humanity. Standardization, templates, repetition: all of this entered human life after the fall, after which the human being became much more animal than at the beginning. That is why a spiritually healthy person so strongly protests against uniformity and standardization: he feels that all of this is leading him away from what God meant him to be. It leads him to where he becomes less and less like the image of his Creator.