Sublime

If humans are to be radically reworked through attachment to God, then what is of interest about human nature is its plasticity, its susceptibility to being shaped or molded by outside influences generally.

But for this core not to disappear into subjectivism, we must also recognize the experiential within personhood. To be “in Christ” is to have an experience of the person of Jesus encountering our own person. Person or personhood (hypostasis) is a distinct spiritual and theological assertion having its origins in the early church fathers, particular

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

with the doctrine of the incarnation, Christians get to have it both ways: God is certainly transcendent and utterly “other” than the universe, but in the person of Jesus Christ we believe in a human being who is also divine.

Gorman says beautifully, “For Paul, to be in Christ is to be a living exegesis of this narrative of Christ, a new performance of the original drama of exaltation following humiliation, of humiliation as the voluntary renunciation of rights and selfish gain in order to serve and obey.”26

In another formulation from Tanner: “Jesus therefore mediates divinity and humanity because he unites both and not because he is something in between”

But the premise of such a worry is strongly disputed by most theologians who identify the image with the Word: it is by being in the image of the second person of the trinity that we come to be in the image of the trinity as a whole.

It is the “although [x] not [y] but [z]” that makes justification central to Paul. It bears this form and plays this song; to put it simply, although [x] God is righteous, this righteousness does not [y] leave God to abandon us but [z] becomes sin for us so that God might minister to us (2 Cor. 5:21).

there’s no reason to let Paul win the day and reject James. Both views—that faith is a way of life and a gift from God (Paul) and that faith includes believing some truths and must be supplemented by our effort (James)—may be true when interpreted truly.