Christ the Key (Current Issues in Theology Book 7)

In the human case, to the contrary, the inputs have a much greater effect on the way its nature is played out; to an unusual degree, human nature takes shape in conformity with what helps it grow.

What humans are thought to image – God, the trinity, or the Word – determines in great part whether theologians focus primarily on human nature in and of itself as the image of God.

Now that the Word has taken our humanity to be its own, the Word has become in a sense proper to us, for all the difference in nature that remains between divine and human. We can be knit into the Word as never before in virtue of the fact that the Word has made our humanity its own in the incarnation.

Christ is said to be the image of God in these New Testament passages, because, it is thought, the divinity with which he is identified – the second person of the trinity – is itself the image of the first person of the trinity. The image most properly speaking – the express or perfect image of God (Heb 1:3) – just is the second person of the trini

This idea that humans image God through participation can mean, however, two very different things. In a first quite weak sense, participating in God means nothing more than being a creature of God.

This is not an entirely passive or haphazard process of openness to influence by the environment, but one that the exercise of human choice directs.

This defining feature of human reason and will gives them their expansiveness, their positive inclination to the universal – that is, an interest in principle in everything that may be good or intelligible – and their negative tendency to be dissatisfied with anything short of the total and complete truth or good.97 This unlimited openness makes th

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

But what one makes of these desires is something else. Human beings direct themselves to the ends to which their nature also directs them, as Aquinas maintains; and therefore they remain free at least in the way they pursue those ends.