if human beings are singled out from other creatures by imaging God in these stronger fashions, there must be something unusual about the nature with which they were created that makes sense of that fact.

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.

On this way of reading those verses, the second person of the trinity is what human beings are created to image.

The entrance of free will into the process only adds to the plastic, shape-shifting character of human nature.

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.

Following Augustine, we could say, using my terminology, that at our creation we were images of God through participation in both strong and weak senses. We were images in the weak sense in having, for example, a rational nature, a nature formless in and of itself without illumination from the light of the divine image.

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

In contrast to other creatures, human beings are unusually flexible, capable of adapting, of altering their behaviors in order to adjust to changing social and natural environments.

one has to exist and be something oneself, participate in God in the weak sense, in order to receive what one is not – the presence of God.