Christ the Key (Current Issues in Theology Book 7)

To be stronger images in both ways requires a stronger sense of participation, the presence in us of what we are not:

The Word now has us in a new way and that means we can have the Word too in a new way, beyond what was possible for us simply as Spirit-filled creatures. Unlike Christ’s humanity, the preceding weaknesses and faults of ours will have to be purged, erased, in the process, but our humanity might some day still see the holiness of Christ’s own life th

Such reflexive capacities of self-formation mean humans can try to reshape in a self-critical fashion even desires they cannot help having by nature.

Failure of definition by remaining ill-defined is not the primary point here. More to the point is failure of definition through excessive interest in, even love for, the unlimited.

one can say God does not participate in being but is it: to be God just is to be.

All living things, in other words, are dependent upon their environments in requiring external inputs for the achievement of their proper functioning. And humans would be no exception. What is exceptional in the human case is the nature of the inputs. Because they are made to be in the image of God, humans require God for their nourishment.

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.

human beings form themselves with reference to a whole host of outside influences – people, places, animate and inanimate influences, etc. – and what is formed is their whole lives, irrespective of any division between the material and the spiritual.

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.