Sublime

Christ clarifies and specifies the nature, aim, and trustworthiness of all God’s dealings with us because Christ is where those dealings with us come to ultimate fruition.

Because Jesus Christ is the paradigm for what the divine image is to mean for human life – the paradigm for what it means both to have the divine image for one’s own and to be transformed according to it – the Genesis discussion of human beings’ creation in the image of God can be viewed in specifically Christological terms.

in order to give us the entire fullness of what God enjoys, God must give us God’s very own life and not simply some created version of it. God cannot give us everything that God has to give by merely transforming human life itself into some created approximation of

Humans demonstrate that, appearances to the contrary (especially in the cultural and philosophical milieu of the early church), the material world itself is plastic – by extension just as plastic to divine influence, one might hope, as human lives.

On a borderland between opposites – good and bad, beautiful and ugly – we choose to move in one direction or another; and therefore our nature must be one thing in itself and something else by participation in one of these opposites.

human nature must be characterized by an expansive openness that allows for the presence of God within it. It must be the sort of nature that has or makes room for the divine within its basic operations.

In the incarnation one finds the immediate convergence of the most disparate things – God and humanity suffering under the weight of sin and death – as the means by which the goods of God’s own life are to be conveyed to us in fulfillment of God’s original intentions for us.

Emphasis can be placed on God’s decision to have a special relationship with humans rather than on the character of human nature that warrants it. It is simply the special relationship that God chooses to have with them that singles them out from other creatures.