Bavinck on the "image of God"

In his In the Beginning: Foundations of Creation Theology, Herman Bavinck devotes a chapter to working out the doctrine of the image of God. Some portions are more difficult to read through than others, being more polemic in nature and contrasting various different perspectives on the topic. But the closing of the chapter sees Bavinck providing a succinct expression of his views on the subject. I found them rewarding and edifying. He says,

The whole world raises itself upward, culminates and completes itself, and achieves its unity, its goal, and its crown in humanity. In order to be the image of God, therefore, man had to be a recapitulation of the whole of nature. The Jews used to say that God had collected the dust for the human body from all the lands of the earth. Though the image is strange, a true and beautiful thought is expressed in it. As spirit, man is akin to the angels and soars to the invisible world; but he is at the same time a citizen of the visible world and connected with all physical creatures. There is not a single element in the human body that does not also occur in nature around him. Thus man forms a unity of the material and spiritual world, a mirror of the universe, a connecting link, compendium, the epitome of all of nature, a microcosm, and precisely on that account also the image and likeness of God, his son and heir, a micro-divine-being. He is the prophet who explains God and proclaims his excellencies; he is the priest who consecrates himself with all that is created to God as a holy offering; he is the king who guides and governs all things in justice and rectitude. And in all this he points to One who in a still higher and richer sense is the revelation and image of God, to him who is the only begotten of the Father, and the firstborn of all creatures. Adam, the son of God, was a type of Christ.(1)

(1) Bavink, In the Beginning:Foundations of Creation Theology, pg. 194-5.