he dwells here and the world is filled with his dynamic being; but nature itself is impersonal, so we cannot know the personal God, its Creator, simply by observing it. But providence is an implication of creation, and redemption is an implication of providence. Christians believe, with the historical witness of the New Testament narratives and apostolic letters as the ground for their faith, that Jesus Christ was the Word of God made flesh, the very utterance of God himself—one with him in being—become incarnate. God is personal and communicates; he speaks, whereas idols, as the prophets never tire of pointing out, are dumb (e.g., Jer 10:5); he speaks, and in Jesus that communication is made physically manifest to us. He is God’s self-revelation—his Word—God who comes down to us (Isa 64:1; cf., John 1:11). “No one has ever seen God,” writes John, “but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known” (John 1:18). And Jesus himself says later in this gospel: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well . . . Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father . . . ” (John 14:6–7a, 9b).
Jesus is presented in Scripture as the image—the eikon (eīikōn) and very representation—of God (Heb 1:3; 2 Cor 4:4; Col 1:15). Now we are considering a few aspects of the doctrine of human beings as created in God’s image. It is proper and necessary, in doing this, to glance at the sweep of the scriptural revelation and not simply to remain in the book of Genesis, for the full meaning of the text in Genesis 1 and 2 is only revealed in Christ. If Christ is God’s image and we are made in that image, then we are created in Christ’s image, and to find out who human beings are essentially, and to what they are called, we must look at Jesus. And similarly, we must look at this same Jesus—the One who is both God and Man—to see who God is.
Jesus Christ is unique. Yet the union in him of the divine and the human points to our human vocation, which is to be united with the Godhead, gathered up into eternal, dynamic communion with the Father through the Son in the Spirit. It is to this that human beings are called, for this that they were created. To refuse this vision after having first received it, as Western civilization is now doing, is to move inevitably, on the wings of technology-as-ideology and the infinite manipulations it makes possible, toward the sophisticated dehumanization of mankind. It is not that those who have faith in Christ, or those others who truly long for God (whatever their religious perspective), will be made divine, but rather that they will be taken up into the divine life, of which already here below faithful Christians have the vital deposit, the indwelling Holy Spirit, not because of any intrinsic merit of their own, but because they have been fortunate to hear the call and have been willing to open themselves to receive the gift and to bear witness in this life to the Giver.
But the call goes out to all men and women and is constitutive of true human identity; if we fail to heed it in our inner conscience, we alienate ourselves not only from our Creator but from each other. The result is the violence of human history, growing ever more intense as technology extends human means. The rejection by modern culture of Jesus Christ, the God-man who reveals in himself the glorious destiny to which all human beings are summoned, is the ultimate source of the alienation afflicting the West and wreaking such havoc across the world. We do not want to be what we are called to be by our Creator—the modern mind sees that call, falsely, as heteronomy and rejects it; we want to be what we will make ourselves to be, gods of our own manufacture. And this slavery to our own will we blindly call freedom.
VII
The God Revealed in Jesus Christ is Love; He is Righteous and Faithful
The God who destines us to union with himself is love. He creates in love (what greater love than the act of creation, when God goes out from himself to fashion an other, then calls that other to fellowship with himself?); he redeems in love (God in Christ humbles himself to become man, to pass unrecognized amongst his own, to bear opprobrium for our sake, to carry our sin, to suffer and die on a cross, all of this so that humanity-in-him—in him who is our representative and, for each of us, our substitute—might die with him on the cross to the egocentric nature and, forgiven, be raised with him, as a new creation, to newness of life, which means to a life of love); and he glorifies in love (by faith we are resurrected with Christ already, and abide already with him in the Father; and by hope we live in expectation of the fulfillment of this spiritual reality when, at his coming again, we shall be resurrected and clothed with spiritual bodies, and shall see him as he is and be like him (Eph 2:6; John 14:20; 1 John 3:2).
The revelation of the Word of God tells us all of this. This is the gospel—the good news—to which the whole Bible points. It hinges on God’s incarnation in Jesus, the meaning and purpose of which are disclosed in his crucifixion and resurrection. Christ’s resurrection, following on his crucifixion, is the pivot of revelation and hence lies at the heart of truth. Here, in this cross and empty tomb, we understand who God really is. The source and end of all reality—cosmic and historical—is love. This truth, revealed to us fully in Christ, is the essential meaning of Jesus’s assertion in the Gospel of John that he is the truth. He shows us the true nature of reality. All is gift, all is grace, and these are expressions of love. In the person and life of Jesus of Nazareth, as he went about among men doing good, showing kindness and mercy, and dispensing wisdom and justice with great authority, we see what love means in practice: here we glimpse what God is like and how we are meant to be.
When we think of God’s righteousness, we must think of it within the framework of love and grace. His righteousness combines justice and mercy and aims, with respect to mankind, to bring us back into an orderly relationship with himself and with each other. It involves salvation (e.g., Isa 46:13a: “I am bringing my righteousness near, it is not far away; and my salvation will not be delayed.”). This, precisely, is his supreme work of love, carried out effectively and definitively in Jesus. What God the Son suffered on the cross where he was “bruised for our iniquities” (Isa 53:5) expressed both God’s just judgment upon human sin and his merciful forgiveness accomplished and offered to sinners, his beloved creatures made in his image, who had gone astray.
The doctrine of the imago Dei contains implicitly these comprehensive truths, as the genetic code in each cell contains the whole human being in its compass. The God who created us in his own image loves us. Furthermore, he is faithful. He is steadfast and dependable; we may rely on him; he will not lie. This is another part of what we mean when we speak of God as the truth revealed in Christ. We may abandon him—or try to—but he does not abandon us. To the contrary—he remembers us.40 Discipline us he does, for that is part of love; but the ultimate judgment—death—due us for our rebellion against him who is life, he took upon himself in Christ, so as to make it possible for us to choose this life while we are on earth. If it were not so, there could be no possible hope for a race mired in endless war, capable of frightful sexual depravity, exploitation, genocide, and heartless terrorism. These great evils are our work, not God’s. They arise out of man’s refusal of him, not his of us. He remains faithful and available to us even in the midst of our depravity and degradation. We have only to humble ourselves and look to him to see what he offers us through his self-revelation in Christ. But in our human pride we almost invariably demand that he be present to us on our own terms, in the way that we see fit and appropriate and effectual. It is not thus that we will find him, either in our daily lives or at the heart of horrors like genocide and war.
VIII
Hatred of God and the Denial of Sin and Guilt are the Roots of Utopian Pretensions; Ideological Tribalism and the Totalitarian Impulse
On reflection, it is astonishingly foolish to think that such a race as ours, capable of what we have shown ourselves to be capable of, could save itself or change its own duplicitous heart. As something cannot arise out of nothing, so good cannot arise out of perversity. Human pride tries to get around this problem—a problem of moral logic—by denying our sinfulness and guilt, a denial that is achieved by blaming it on God, on society or institutions, on the unconscious, or on some other scapegoat like a different ethnic group or class, in order to shift the onus from humankind, collectively and individually
