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I entered my first semester of teaching confident in my ability and smug about my qualifications. After four years of study in biblical languages and English literature, I figured I knew my material. But I failed to take one thing into consideration: the students.

Seventh graders, it turns out, are not impressed with academic records. They do not fall into hushed silence or stand at attention when you enter the room. The ill-fitting wardrobe and questionable grooming habits of the newly minted college graduate do not inspire awe in middle schoolers. Sure, most of my students were respectful. But they were not impressed.

One student, whom I'll call Stewart, was particularly unimpressed. He was the only son of a single mom and attended our small, rural Christian academy because his grandmother believed it would do him good. I often wondered whether she ever considered how much good it would do the rest of us. He didn't listen. He could not sit still. He had the "inside voice" of a lawn tractor. And in his mind, he was always a victim.

If this conversation never took place, it might as well have:

"Stewart," I say as if I'm doing him a great honor. "How did you answer number four?"

"Mr. O'Brien," he says as if he were speaking to me for the first time in ages, "guess what I did last night."

"No, Stewart. I want you to tell me how you answered number four."

"Okay." He pauses. "I went shopping with my grandmother."

"Stewart," I interrupt. I'm in control.

"And she bought me this jacket to wear when I'm riding my dirt bike."

"Stewart." (Less calmly.)

"And then we went out for pizza."

"Stewart!" I pound my desk. The other students look down at their desks, embarrassed.

"Geez." He slumps in his chair. "Why are you always so mad at me?"

"Stewart, just answer number four." I repeat the question for clarification: "What is a noun?"

"A comma. No, wait—it modifies something. No, I don't know … running. Is running a noun?"

My left eye begins to spasm.

For most of the first semester, I tried to summon the patience to deal with Stewart by appealing to an important Christian doctrine. He deserves my respect, I told myself, because he's made in the image of God.

It didn't work. It's true, of course, but it didn't offer me any specific direction for how to treat him. And that set me on a course to rethink what this doctrine might mean, at least in a situation like this.

Christians have struggled for nearly 2,000 years to pin down what the Bible means when it says that humans are made in the image of God (Gen. 1:27). Beginning with Irenaeus in the second century, theologians have thought of the imago dei as an essential part of the human makeup. It's something every person—however righteous or despicable—"possesses." For the early church fathers, the evidence of the divine image was human reason or will or moral capacity. Evangelicals don't disagree, although contemporary thinkers have added the human impulses for creativity and community to the list of evidences that we bear God's likeness.

When I tried to apply this understanding of the divine image with Stewart, the emphasis was on the dignity of the human person. If the imago dei highlights the ways we are "like God," then every person on the planet deserves to be respected, protected, and valued.

Yet the more I thought about it, the clearer it became that we apply this doctrine with remarkable flexibility. We assert that everyone bears the divine image, yet we think differently about unborn children and convicts, our grandmothers and disrespectful seventh graders. It's easy to treat people with dignity if that dignity is being reciprocated. But when someone breaks the cycle—a convict commits another crime, an unruly student doesn't respond to patience or kindness, or someone makes your life a living hell—you suddenly need something more to work with than "he deserves my respect." Such was my experience, anyway. So I turned to the Bible for help.

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July 2009, Vol. 53, No. 7