Sacred Symbology pt. 5. The Imago Dei: A Prophetic Think Tank
The same language is found here, which strongly implies that it never states. Here, the Imago Dei means that man
must worship and serve God alone, not simply as a creature before his creator, but as a divine servant in God’s intimate family, who is to act as God’s regent and to share in the creative and governing power over all other beings. Such an exalted revelation of man’s worth and identity, one of the highest points of Hebrew theology, finds its ultimate culmination in the NT theology of the Incarnation and the identity of Jesus as the unique Son of God and the new Adam: through sin and death, he reconciles man to God and recreates him to be a participant in the divine nature itself (parenthesis mine).1
I beg the reader to reflect on the words in italics. A lot of this seems spot on until we investigate the assumptions behind the language. We have to remember that “Incarnation,” the enfleshment, is not only the realization in space/time of a transcendent person but of Christ as the incarnation and concretization and therefore the fulfillment of the Word of God, which is none other than the words of the prophets that foretold him. The new Adam is the reversal of fallen humanity by this means, as Even and Adam effectively rejected this prophetic Word of God. This shows how this identification of the Imago hides and is hidden within our puerile and prosaic language.
What is being described, since it involves Christ, and is an Imago Dei that is a potential and a prophecy of man, is not what man is by birth or what man can become perfectly before the appearance and knowledge of Christ. Imago Dei is the man that was enfleshed in the image of God that became an ideal to be realized after the fall and is the reason for Christ. Imago Dei is, therefore, a prophecy of man to be fulfilled as well as Christ’s fulfillment of God’s Word. It is then Man’s belief in the meaning of God’s ultimate “image” and its use in communication with God in his belief fulfillment of that Word, which is not an image of a general appearance of a conceptual God but the demonstration of his existence and nature in an image of God’s fulfillment of his historical, prophetic Word and given to man for moral handling and legal trust, which is his fulfillment. It is only through the historical prophetic act that God can show an image of himself to man as proven, and it is only through Man’s regard for and use of that imago can man can show God fulfilled as the imago and become its full personal human example in belief, speech and action.
The communication between man and God is not a mere exchange of words, or a manipulation of any kind of linguistic object, whether physical or conceptual. This is a kind of communication that is the special prior grounds to communication with God. Without it, there may be Man talking to the concept of God, but not God Himself, and therefore no response by him.
If you don’t have any prior personal connection to the president, you can take the phone, call an imaginary number and believe you are talking to the President, but your only talking to yourself unless you have the actual number he is first interested in you. So why would he be interested in you? The interest starts of course that you know something or do something that agrees with his own sovereign designs and thoughts. This interest is in the meaning of the imago. It is always that imago which is miraculous content combined with Man’s love for truth that signifies their relationship which is founded at the very least on an agreement of its Truth between them.
It remains a topic for another article, but this brings to mind how the Calvinist idea of unmerited favor in salvation can be reconciled with the idea of Man bringing anything to it without the implication that he is saved by works. Also, how the Catholic idea of religious works as a part of salvation can be reconciled with the unmerited favor of God and faith alone to salvation that the NT describes. Since the latter is more obvious as to its lack of solution, what about the former?
For those who insist that salvation has an unobstructed path through the unseen and direct act of God called predestination, it is incumbent upon them to demonstrate that the entirety of the concept of “works” that the New Testament writers would entertain is applied to physical movement as well as the spiritual movement of man, and is not restricted to works of the body. If the concept of works is assumed covering anything, objective or subjective, then it must admitted that knowing and believing a revelation has no place in salvation, and then admitted that evangelism as the main and crucial work of the NT is worthless. It must also be demonstrated that “gift” as it was used by the NT writers was used only as a gift of “Christ” or a gift of “faith,” the flattened concepts, and not what Jesus of Nazareth gave to the world through his fulfillment of the prophets, and not a faith which is, as is the definition of pistis, not a feeling but a conviction and persuasion of a truth about him in certain evidences. Imago Dei in the sense that is proposed here is a gift to man from God in a demonstration of himself. The Imago Dei in fulfillment is Man’s righteous response to its apprehension. This describes salvation through unmerited favor to Man in the sense of God’s giving of this Imago without man’s involvement objectively or subjectively and mans righteous spiritual knowledge and engagement of it through a “work” that is not a work but which can appear as and spoken of something that it is not. None of this could possibly be “credited” to Man because the means of salvation did not come from him and the belief in truth is credited to the truth, not the belief.
But, getting back to the subject at hand, “Transcendence” is derived from the Latin trans scandere, which means “going beyond” or “climbing across.” It is used in theology to speak of God being above nature and not dependent upon it. The word “immanence” denotes God that is present in the cosmos. “Transpond,” as I use it, speaks of information that which must lie precisely between transcendence and immanence that connects the two: the action of God and man condescending or climbing over the ontological and epistemological barriers between them and speaking to each other and exchanging knowledge. The stress is laid not only upon an attribute of God but upon the authority and revelational speech of one and the response of the other to that revelation, causing emphasis to be placed upon what kind of speech it must be. The two either agree or disagree: Man in his understanding and acceptance of that kind of revelation and God in his acceptance of man’s kind of response to the highest form of knowledge that he may understand and believe.
Well, what kind of knowledge then should we expect it to be? First, if we are speaking of a being well beyond our natural understanding, prior knowledge and world, although he is foreign in the ultimate sense it is reasonable to expect that this being must have a similar interest to ours which is in peaceful and beneficent co-coexistence with other intelligent, creative life forms of his making. If this was not the case, then we can at least say that a reasonable expectation of honest communication is not possible, because if this was a malevolent being that thought of us as mere cattle, his desire to communicate would either be regarded as worthless, of malevolent intent or deceptive.
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