Christ the Key (Current Issues in Theology Book 7)

there is only one perfect or express image of God – the second person of the trinity – and that perfect image becomes the creature’s own by way of a close relationship with it, the closer the better, a closeness consummated in Christ.

Christ is the paradigm for this strong sort of imaging through participation. The human being, Jesus, is the image of God in a much stronger sense than any creature, human or otherwise, could ever be on its own, because Christ’s humanity has the divine image for its own through the Word’s assuming or uniting that humanity to itself in becoming inca

On this way of reading those verses, the second person of the trinity is what human beings are created to image.

In making such choices, whatever the degree of their freedom, humans manage to differentiate themselves from the complex totality of the environment that surrounds them by focusing their energies, turning their attention to specific items of special interest within that environment and engaging in a more concentrated way with them. But this very ex

Following Augustine, we could say, using my terminology, that at our creation we were images of God through participation in both strong and weak senses. We were images in the weak sense in having, for example, a rational nature, a nature formless in and of itself without illumination from the light of the divine image.

But the premise of such a worry is strongly disputed by most theologians who identify the image with the Word: it is by being in the image of the second person of the trinity that we come to be in the image of the trinity as a whole.

Failure of definition by remaining ill-defined is not the primary point here. More to the point is failure of definition through excessive interest in, even love for, the unlimited.

one has to exist and be something oneself, participate in God in the weak sense, in order to receive what one is not – the presence of God.

good. For the infinite being and goodness of God to come within them they must have the capacity to expand in their own created goodness without end.