Genesis states that humans were created in the image of the Creator and, as the original text states, “according to the likeness of God.” The word translated ‘likeness’, homosiosis, suggests something more precise in Greek: the ending, -osis, imples a process, not a state (the Greek for likeness as a state would be homoioma). The word homoiosis would moreover have very definite resonances for anyone who had read Plato, who envisages the goal of the human life as homoiosis – that is likening, assimilation – to the divine. In the Theaetetus, Socrates remarks in a phrase very popular among some of the Fathers: ’flight [from the world] is assimilation to God so far as is possible’. So, to be created according to the image of God and according to His likeness suggests that we have been created with some kind of affinity for God which makes possible a process of assimilation to God, which is, presumably, the point of human existence.

This idea chimes in very well with the few uses of the language of image in the New Testament (NT), for it is in the context of saying something about the goal of our being disciples of Christ, that the NT resorts to such language: we are being changed into his image from glory to glory. Even without using the language of image, there are passages in the NT that suggest much the same idea: forinstance, in the first epistle of John we read, ‘Beloved, we are God’s children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.’ The language of image is the language of sight; the suggestion of these passages is that being in the image means there is a likeness between humankind and God.