In this article I have been sharing the thoughts of the Fathers of the Church about the revelation made to humankind that we have been created in the image and likeness of God. As my readers may have already surmised, even the Fathers had difficulty is trying to understand how humans are made in God’s own image and likeness. Many different ideas surfaced. As I shared in the last    issue, the entire tradition on this point may be    summarized by saying that man is in the image of the Word and that he is the image of God through the mediation of the Word. Of course we all understand that Jesus Christ is the Word of God. We are, therefore, an image of the image.

This general statement includes rather divergent interpretations. For example, the Alexandrians espoused the Philonian concept of an invisible image which they applied to the Word. That this insistence on invisibility ran the risk of minimizing the humanity of Christ was revealed more clearly after the disputes about   salvation. The outcome was the balanced synthesis of Maximus the Confessor, perhaps one of the greatest of the Fathers of the Church.

In addition, the term spiritual has also become better understood over the years, as is indicated by a recent text of a modern theologian: What distinguishes man from the angels is that he is made in the image of the Incarnation. The purely spiritual becomes incarnated and penetrates all of nature through its life-giving energies.

At this point I would encourage my readers to think about their own lives and answer this question: What about me is in the image of God and how am I like God? We need to truly bring these ideas home to ourselves personally if we ever want to really understand them. Think about it. Our faith tells us that WE are made in God’s image and likeness. So what does this mean to us?

Clement of Alexandria was the first to inquire into the origin of this distinction. It is neither Platonic, no matter what Clement believed, nor Stoic, nor Philonian. It is based on Genesis. This idea of man being made in God’s image and likeness is a scriptural idea. The distinction in Hebrew between the two expressions ought not, therefore, to be exaggerated; it is a matter of resembling an image (in our image, after our likeness). The Septuagint (i.e., Greek translation of the Old Testament), however, made these into a coordinate expression, in our image and likeness. The Greek words eikon and homoiosis were introduced here by the translators. I shall explain the ideas that these words introduced in the coming issue. We are made in Christ’s image and likeness.