Sacred Symbology pt. 5. The Imago Dei: A Prophetic Think Tank
Lastly, there is no reason to suggest that the ability of man to respond in a relationship with God is without a shared interest beyond the mere ability, and ability alone suggesting no compatibility over what that ability communicates between one party and the other.
All of them demand a certain interest which not only attracts one to the other but is the subject of their communication itself, but none supply it.
Man is an image of God. Every image is an appearance and a signification which hides but transmits an abstract meaning. It is not necessarily bad to think of Man as a Functional, Substantive or Relational symbol of God, because he is. The point we are making is that no symbol is not created for the transmission of a certain category and species of knowledge. No symbol is not to be a pointer to that knowledge and no other knowledge. No symbol is to be handled in a way that assumes that it has a primary assignation to an arbitrary signification unintended by that symbols creator (except, of course, in our meaningless modern art). If it is, it suggests a God unable to love Man and unwilling to condescend to him through communication and pass something transformative.
If this is agreed, the remaining disagreement is likely to arise over the idea of a requirement of “certain” knowledge which the symbol represents, is bound and communicates.
You might think I am grossly misinformed about our theologians and church fathers about the issue of certain knowledge required for an image of God. Do they not believe that our salvation is given and affected through a certain knowledge? What about the redemptive plan as laid out in the Bible? What about the gospel? Is this not certain, as opposed to a general knowledge of God, and was this not typically their underlying assumption with their formulation of the Imago Dei?
Yes, but the problem was in the way they have understood and taught redemption and the gospel, and this will become clear just thinking a bit about the traditional constructions of the Imago Dei. These ideas are different and novel, but they are not categorically unique, remarkable and demonstrably supernatural.
Concepts, which are symbols, are not this knowledge of which I speak at the heart of the Image. First, they are things made by people for the cognition of people, and endlessly redefined and redefinable. Secondly, “Knowledge” is a symbol but not the knowledge itself, which makes up the meaning and is the function of the symbol. Our expected Image must be a knowledge that is instantiated upon divine phenomena which force divine meaning, not an idea of the phenomena. If only ideas are the basis for the Image, conscious, direct connection between the believing imago of God and God is not required of him for a relationship as a fulfillment of that symbol, since the idea at the heart of a conceptual world where they lead instead of follow truth is that they can be legally held and believed without knowledge of what they signify. This was, before the Cross, the default assumption of religious humanity, since it had no objective example of God working that was universally accessible, that an object of construction can hold and bring any necessary meaning of God to man upon its focused posession and meditation. Since the conscousness in view is of transcendent reality, not human constructs. no invented human conceptual construct can carry that conscousness. It must be a sharply divine ideational construction perpared to compete agaisnt human ones.
In fairness, it must be first be remarked that at least most theologians are placing emphasis on either a substantial, functional and relational approach to the Imago Dei where all three also play a part. I also use all of these to some extent in my definition. The problem with any one of them, or a happy mixture of them, does not come from that which distinguishes one from another, but that each share an emphasis on man in his relation to God as His symbol, and the issue of man’s moral motivation through God’s information through the symbol is left open-ended. In that sense, they are exclusively anthropocentric.
These conventional theories define the human symbol’s resemblance to God based upon a belief in what God must be but give no certain reason why God should honor Man for carrying the Image other than to say that man looks similar to Him. The tendency is the equation of things of substantial nature with its formal relation to a superficial nature, such that all we need to talk about is the formal relation and leave out talk of true substances. How we break this is removing ourselves entirely from this theological language game altogether, where the Imago of God is first the Holy thing and the reason why God should accept Man for his handling of that spiritual knowledge and become a true moral Imago Dei.
Of course, the subject of the Image of God is about man as a symbol (imago) of God. But our question here is not to think about how man can be an image of God either by thinking primarily about man as a symbol or God, but instead identifying one thing, one Imago of knowledge, that God is willing to give man and man is willing to accept from God that enables them to exchange expressions of love for a certain truth expressed by that symbol, in which truth is also primarily that thing which is given, received and given back as it was intended. I think that focus on this transcendent symbolic type is the answer, not first or necessarily that of man as Imago, as this is theoretically a symbol before man and then between man and God. Christ is the ultimate imago of God, His knowledge is His informational imago, and man is imago to the extent that he believes them for some moral reason in respect to some moral knowledge of transcendence.
The image of God is first the law of symbolic communication and the ultimate content of that communication which God gives man and man obeys and covets, which most perfectly joins man and God by their love for truth. Again, “Image” in the “image of God” refers to “symbol,” we must keep in mind. The Image of God is of course man, and this is an unconscious, involuntary image by birth, and a potentiality. It remains but a pointer to God instead of a completed Man until that credit is expressed and there is a relational, substantive and functional symbol by which man and God are fundamentally tied as creator/symbol. It is the informational symbol that God gives to man as well as the good informational symbol which man returns voluntarily to God in his reaction to it that which makes Man a quintessential moral symbol. What is that informational symbol as first given by God to which man is expected to react? Where is it found, this thing that is the image of God before Man can be His fulfilled image?
God is not, of course, a symbol, but he uses them to communicate with Man about him and by him, assumed by a transcendent symbolic type. “Symbol” is a language token of knowledge. The transcendent symbolic token of knowledge that they exchange is given with an emphasis on its container or content depending upon the nature of the party that sends or receives.
In a symbol, there is content and a container. On the sender side, God sends a container of the symbol, the hidden, non-contingent, divine controlling aspect of the content of the symbol, which is a divine truth, to the apparent, ultimately contained one, man. The symbol is a revelation of the Truth about God. This means that this transcendent token has a sharply supernatural origin and effect on man in respect to fixed divine working parameters in divine knowledge impossible to transmit without the symbol. The content of the symbol, the visible part of a Truth comprehensible to Man, carries that Truth of God for Man’s consideration and obedience to the abstract container part. When received by man, the end of the place and object of content, the supernatural, alien component of that Truth content is partly pared down into a humanly comprehensible form before it is returned to God by Man, denoting its acceptance by the human party and his transformation by it. Man becomes one with that Truth, or, we could say, Man becomes the Truth given because God to Man becomes to him one with the Truth He gave. When the imago of Truth is given back to God the response by the container, God’s sovereign power and nature are to then, without any further preconditions, evince and substantiate that ultimate content. Not because of its incomprehensibility, but its lucid and accurate outward expression by Man of God’s initial Truth symbol of himself. Imago is complete, fulfilled.
Let me restate this so it is not so abstract.
The image of God, from God, is then perhaps not only a resemblance between man and God in the way He appears or in his abilities. The image of God is before this a symbolic word from Him emphasizing its container (controlling authorities) and, when completed, a symbolic response by man emphasizing its content in an expression of a particular faith in respect to it alone.
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