gradual emergence, in cultures shaped by the church, of concepts such as the unity of mankind, the essential value and dignity of all human beings (regardless of qualitative inequalities of whatever kind), the worth of the individual person and his/her vocation to be free and not enslaved, and the consequent belief in human rights.
I close with a few remarks recalling the earlier analysis of human rebellion as it moves in our day to eliminate God and replace him with man. By means of a technology-based ideology of individual autonomy and a false idea of freedom, we are trying to appropriate and exploit for our selfish purposes all the variety of gifts that God has given us in his creation and through his redemption in Jesus Christ. Blindly, violently, foolishly, we are pulling up the roots of the tree in which we have life. Having excluded, in the name of human freedom, all reference to a transcendent source of being, we have imprisoned ourselves. On the basis of an evolutionist understanding of human nature, we have confirmed a body/mind dualism that has us now presuming to dictate to material reality, including to biological structures and our own human bodies, whatever our subjective feelings and desires want it to be. Our minds rule, our bodies are mere matter. This is sheer illusion, a hubristic power-grab. Only sexual and social anarchy can result. Rebellion and self-hatred masquerading as a noble quest for freedom from constraints and limits for our “authentic self, ” is leading to widespread despair and the loss of the very sense of identity we are straining to establish. The “man” I referred to above, whom we are intent on putting in God’s place, is inhuman. Having cast the Creator aside, we are de-naturing his creature, man/woman, and damaging all the other creatures of the world it is our calling to care for. We are enslaving ourselves, while thinking we are doing just the opposite. It is tragic.
Part Three, which includes a short essay on the Holy Spirit, baptism, the new birth, and the charismatic gifts, is hands-on, practical material, and includes notes from parish seminars given by my wife Victoria and me on the subject of Christian identity, pastoral care and counselling, and inner healing through prayer. I have retained the repetitions in the material because they may be pedagogically useful by impressing on readers the principles and procedures under discussion. My aim is to provide basic scriptural and practical guidelines to equip Christians in local parishes, house churches, prayer groups, and other communal structures, with down-to-earth principles for living the Christian life and creating strong communities. I am convinced that these principles and procedures are essential for the building up of the body of Christ and are not adequately taught and deployed in the church today, either in theological colleges or in parishes—this is my reason for wanting to include these talks in this volume of essays. If we are to carry out our mission of evangelism in the revolutionary environment of today’s world, we must be very clear as to who we are in Christ: sons and daughters of God the Father. We are new creations (Gal 6:5). It is our certainty about this identity that will enable us to be healed, trained, and anointed by the Holy Spirit in ways that go beyond what most Christians experienced in earlier generations.
This work of healing and training is not just the task of priests and pastors, though these ordained leaders should certainly have received the formation enabling them to train lay people in their communities to assist them in their pastoral care. The Christian believer, as a new creation in Christ through the work of the Holy Spirit, is called to be conformed to Jesus, who is himself the very image of God (Col 1:15; 2 Cor 4:4). The possibility of conformity to Jesus presupposes the essential nature of human beings as created in God’s image. The doctrine of the imago Dei is therefore basic to all pastoral work in the church—hence, as I said above, the inclusion of these hands-on notes in this collection of theological essays. The seminar talks, which, deliberately, I have hardly altered, attempt to show from a variety of angles how this plays out—or can play out—in the practical daily life of a Christian believer as he or she enters more and more deeply into his/her new spiritual identity as a son or daughter of God that is God’s gift through faith.
The essay in the next section, Part Four, is an in-depth study of the central sacrament of the church: the Eucharist. From a number of perspectives, including unity in the body of Christ, the Holy Spirit’s action in the Eucharist, and the issue of sacrifice, I explore the meaning and efficacy of the Passover and the Eucharistic celebrations. How is Christ’s body—crucified, sacramental, and ecclesial/mystical—present to us when we receive the bread and wine? While I do not explicitly develop the doctrine of the imago Dei in this piece, it must surely be evident that the spiritual efficacy of this central sacrament of the church, in which believers participate in the body and blood of Jesus, presupposes and depends on the prior ontological reality that the believers are created in God’s image, that is, in the image of Jesus.
Part Five consists of four talks on apologetics given in a church in Paris, which, once again, are underpinned by the biblical revelation of the imago Dei. The aim is to provide a few basic apologetical tools for Christians as they share their faith with unbelievers or inquirers. The church is under attack today on all sides, and Christians must be better equipped conceptually than we have been in earlier centuries to carry out our mission of spreading the gospel. Our love for our neighbor and our social action must be complemented by a stronger grasp of the intellectual challenges we face. I touch on matters such as cosmology, Darwinism, secularism, Christ/truth/Scripture, and Islam, showing in outline how the truth about human nature revealed in Genesis 1:26–28 illuminates, challenges, or brings correctives to each of these subjects. Other subjects could be added, of course, but I chose to focus on these.
Part Six shifts the perspective to the subject of aesthetics. In the lengthy opening essay, beauty is understood to be the radiance of divine truth. Herein lies the mystery of its glory. Man/Woman made in God’s image is called and gifted to apprehend this glory. Again, as in the essay on the imago Dei, I explore this biblical revelation and mount an in-depth critique of the reigning ideological “isms” of our day—materialism, productivism and the instrumentalization of nature it entails, consumerism, relativism, individualism (as distinct from individuality)—in an attempt to highlight our current alienation from nature and the impoverished sensitivity to beauty and truth that results from this. I cover some of the same ground as in the Imago Dei text in Part Two, and in talks three and four of Part Five, but from different angles. My hope is that what repetition there is will clarify further and reinforce the critique of late modernity that I am making.
Going on to consider certain aspects of Greek philosophical thought, I discuss the issue of form and contrast the Platonic intuition with the Hebraic and Christian vision. For the Greeks, the awareness of beauty arose from the contemplation of form, which was understood as the translation of being itself, and the rational order of the cosmos, into concrete manifestations; for the Hebrew and Christian mind, a beautiful form is an expression of God’s creative word. In both cases, form reflects metaphysical reality and manifests rationality. Herein lies its beauty, in which we are called to participate. Such a vision is utterly remote from modernity’s and postmodernity’s positivistic perception of the physical world, which sees concrete things, including the human body, as mere disposable matter that human reason and will are called upon to control and manipulate for utilitarian purposes. Any notion of participation in metaphysical reality is totally absent; reverence before form, wonder before beauty, have disappeared.
Next, I underline strongly the relational dimension of our connection with other objects/creatures in the world, as over against the functionalist attitude of our productivist societies. This involves a discussion of naming—the task given by God to Adam in the garden of Eden (Gen 2:19–20)—as it may be applied to science and art. It is the relational dimension between us and the world, rooted in the imago Dei and in the stewardship of God’s creatures that the imago Dei entails, that enables us to name creatures, to observe and know them, and that opens human beings to the perception and experience of the mystery of beauty. We are equipped by nature to investigate the world, scientifically and artistically. Our relation with creatures is the counterpart of our imago Dei relation with God. This means, of course, that our inversion of the imago through our rejection of the true God (original sin) has brought about a progressive alienation from nature and a ruinous exploitation of its bounty, culminating in the catastrophic ecological/environmental predicament mankind is facing today.
