Christ the Key (Current Issues in Theology Book 7)

God’s own incomprehensibility is imitated here but in only a negative and prospective way. Rather than being unlimited through inclusiveness, through unbounded fullness in the way God is, our powers are unlimited through lack, through an initial failure of predetermination, by not being anything in particular in any very concrete way to start, and

Jesus is not the comprehensible stand-in or substitute for an incomprehensible divinity but the very exhibition of the incomprehensible divinity of the Word in a human form or medium.134 Jesus displays in his life what it means to be an incomprehensible image in the flesh of an incomprehensible God.

To be determined by human nature means to be determined by the open-ended nature of human reason and will, and therefore not to be determined to choose any one thing. Humans can think of a variety of things that it would be good to do in certain respects and for certain purposes, and what they decide about what is most important to them in the cour

Human materiality is essential, moreover, to the image of God so as to take the whole of existence, irrespective of any division between spirit and matter, to God. This is why angels or disembodied pure intelligences are not the image. Only in virtue of the fact that they have bodies can the whole world hope in humans.

Becoming what we are only by way of the influence upon us of the divine image incarnate in human flesh, we become incomprehensible to ourselves in that what we have become is no longer anything explicable in simply human terms.

Unlike the natural inclinations of inanimate forces or even animals, the rational and volitional capacities of humans do not incline in a highly canalized direction to conform to the givens of their own natural form or essential definition.

How might the fact that humans are open to radical transformation – which we now see to be shared by the whole human person, body and soul – be an image of the divine image in and of itself, that is, considered apart from what happens to humans through incorporation of the divine image? One can say human nature in this respect forms an image of tha

character of human lives as they are made over in him will be ultimately comprehensible according to a divine image that cannot itself be comprehended.

humans still stand out by their failure to be clearly limited by a particular nature as other creatures are.