In the Image

So how exactly does human nature hold the image of God in a way that all the images and statues of the world do not? Bearing the image of the Creator is often spoken of in terms of moral qualities (such as love or patience). But if this were what bearing God’s image meant, then Adam would have lost the image before he even stepped out of the garden. Bearing the image of God is more than a sum of our parts, “everything we are is like God. We are the image of God (1 Corinthians 11:7). To say we are ‘in’ God's image is to say that we are made ‘to be the image of God.” (1)
The image of God encompasses our entire being, not just our outward composition. “The image of God embraces everything that is human.” (2) It manifests throughout our body, soul, spirit, but also has something to do with our morality, intellect, and language capacities, the creation mandate, and the way that humans learn to relate to God, nature, and each other. I would say that becoming more feminine, means traveling towards the image of God in your mind, body, and soul, in order to relate to men, nature, and God how we were meant to. But I believe that women, bear the image of God differently than men do. If this statement tempts you to write me off as heretical, allow me the chance to convince you. My first argument is from common sense: women are different in their bodies, emotions, even the way their brains function in some capacities. I have already made the case that our souls in heaven will continue to be a particular gender. Though the creation mandate was the same for man and woman, as is their intellectual capacities, women definitely relate to the world outside them differently than a man.
The major reason I connect bearing the image of God being to gender, is because Scripture does. Genesis 1: 27 says “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them”. Most books on women’s issues over-quote this verse without really coming out and saying what its significance or meaning is. The phrase ‘male and female He created them’ is an explanation of how mankind was created: either as male or female. This doesn’t mean that the image of God only has to do with gender or that human sexuality is the only way mankind displays God. “The point is not that God is male, female, or both. To say that our eyes image God, remember, is not to say that God has eyes; it is rather to say that our eyes picture something divine. Similarly, our sexuality pictures God's attributes and capacities.” (3)
God is also renewing the image in his people and is transforming us to look more like “Christ, who is the image of God” (2 Corinthians 4:4). 1 John 3:2 tells us that one day “we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is”. If we bear the image of God either uniquely as a man or as a woman, that means that we also grow in looking more like God, and therefore Christ, as we become more of a woman.

(1) D. J. A. Clines, in "The Image of God in Man," Tyndale Bulletin 19 (1968): 53.

(2 & 3) Piper, John, and Wayne Grudem. Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism. Wheaton: CrossWay Books, 1991.