Learning Our Faith from the Church Fathers – 20140518

Since I raised the question in the article in today’s Bulletin about the Eastern Church’s understanding of the image and likeness of God relative to man’s human nature, I thought that I would also share some thoughts on this same topic from the Fathers.

The relationship of the image to the model has a special importance in the thought of the Eastern Fathers. It lies at the heart of allegorical exegesis: the Old Testament contains the shadow of true reality, the New Testament bears its image, but the reality itself will be found only in the world to come. The same holds true for the visible world: things are copies of eternal models (in this respect the Eastern Fathers were heavily influenced by Plato’s philosophy). It should be noted that the Western mind examines the efficient cause whereas the Eastern concentrates on the exemplary cause, pondering the meaning of emerging facts.

Among these many relationships there was one of crucial importance: man, who belongs to the world of reason and   dominates the visible world, is made in the image of God, the ruler of the intelligible world. Even though man’s creation in the image of God has never been questioned, there has existed a wide divergence of opinion about the nature of this image. In the fourth century, pseudo-Caesarius echoed this lack of consensus. Nowhere, do the Fathers present an organic theology of the image: they offer elements of a synthesis, but the synthesis itself is missing. This is probably one of the reasons why the Western world has looked askance on the idea of Theosis.

Both in content and certainly terminology, this theme goes back to a twofold source, one scriptural, the other philosophic. Indeed there are several passages in Scripture which speak, in various ways, of the image of God. The basic text is Genesis (1:26-27) describing the creation of man. The weight of the description is derived not so much from the term image (the Semitic mentality is not formal), as from the context of the revelation proper to Scripture: man is on the side of God. Adam comes from God just as he begets children himself. A study of the Pauline theology of Christ as the image of God allows us to divine the texts into two groups, one which presents Christ as the image of God, the other which deals with Christ as the model for Christians.

During the next few issues, I would like to take time to look at these two groups. I do this since Theosis is the primary concept of our spiritual theology and it deals with the idea of us humans being made in God’s image and likeness.

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