The way I am doing it, it points to and glorifies Christ, as all sound views of scripture should. I am not responsible for how other people do it. Nor does it change the idea that human life is sacred. After all, the capacity is universal and we never know in advance who will choose to exercise it.
But I am still waiting for you to address the scriptures I gave as I did the ones you gave.
But, you have lost the mandate for God to want to redeem the whole world, thereby.
I don’t follow. He wanted to “make man in His own image.” That is, make the human race “in Christ”. Christ and the Church the two are one flesh. That’s what He still wants. He did not give us that capacity to lose us to the Lake of Fire.
The text says that God “created adamah in His image;” not that He “wanted to.” If adamah is inclusive and monogenistic, then your proposal doesn’t quite work. If there are human beings who do not bear the “imago Dei,” then all kinds of fundamental things are lost.
No sir. That is one of the problems. The text does not say that. It is just wrongfully translated like that. It says God “created ha-adam in His image.” ha-adam is THE man. And Christ is “the Man.” This is one of the things I have been trying to get people to see when I beg them to actually look at the text.
See interlinear here…
http://biblehub.com/interlinear/genesis/1-27.htm
Well, since you can’t theologically, be referring to the "creation"of Christ, (and you’re right; it’s in the singular --the previous one is in the plural), just who is The Man referring to? It can"t be “the Adam,” because in Hebrew, names are anarthrous.
I’ll be ducking in an out over the next few hours; we’re building a back patio. The absence is regretted.
I have addressed your proof texts to the extent I feel I need to.
You have taken verses with ambiguous meanings, and have adamantly applied a meaning to them. But as soon as you do that, they fly in the face of what Noachide Law means and does, and it flies in the face of what it means to be “human”.
You want to attach “image of God” as some grade of righteousness. And you justify it as a glorification of Christ. I think there are lots of ways of Glorifying Christ by cherry-picking vague theological statements.
To be human is to bear the Image of God. This to me is adequate and evident in both Old and New Testaments.
You write a chapter on each idea … in hopes of pummeling the reader into submission. Your train of reasoning seems forced or arbitrary at each turn.
But most importantly for the goals of Peaceful Science.Org, your views alternately repel either conventional Creationists or Pro-Evolution Christians. So for all these reasons, your model is beyond the scope that I could ever endorse… no matter how thorough or energetic your analysis is.
But Christ is both fully man and fully God. The LOGOS was not created. He was God and is God, and originally present with the Father. But the fusion of uncreated God and created man in the heavenly realm is a new thing- the heavenly man. Congratulations, you have found the Incarnation in Genesis chapter one. It was always God’s plan. It wasn’t something God had to cook up later when things failed to go as He anticipated.
This what is meant when it says
Cults look at that and say “it says He was born, it says He is a creature” and conclude He was not God. But the creeds had it right all along. He is both fully God and fully man. And as a man He was firstborn of all our race. This is who Yahweh is, the anthropogenic form of God.
It still gives me a feeling of awe.
And true it is.
And humans are also the image of God.
If I were you, I’d investigate how Paul intended to mean this phrase… because it seems clear enough he was trying to describe Christ in a way that would impress the pagan audiences.
He could have simply been stating what would be obvious to any Jewish audience, but new to pagans.
Or maybe he was simply pointing to the “transfigured” nature of the Christ - - something that the rest of mortal humanity obviously didn’t qualify for.
But if you are trying to conjure up yet another quality of Christ, that isn’t transfigurement, and isn’t humanity, I think you are making things unnecessarily complex.
Humanity is special, above the rest of the animal kingdom.
Christians are special, above the mortal non-believers.
Christ is special, above all mortal humanity.
That wraps it up pretty well. Any attempt to add to these “natures” is gobbly gook.
I have to reject that interpretation, Mark. As “the firstborn of all creation,” Jesus had already manifested Himself in creation well before the creation of man “in His image.”
It’s not that I find it a terrible thought; it’s that I find a confusing thing to throw in the narrative at just this point, if it’s not about the creation of man in His image, instead… that’s what sets us apart from every other creature on earth!!
That is true too, but not in the form of a man, even a heavenly man. Why even when God spoke His first word into creation, let there be light, the Logos who is both the word of God and the light of the world entered the universe.
It is about the plan to MAKE man in His own image-- a process. That’s 1:26. In 1:27 God does things to make man in His own image. He starts His plan. He makes THE Man in Heaven the template/goal, Adam on Earth to initiate the process of getting humanity to that goal, and men and women generally whom He will make into the Image.
Other creatures don’t have that capacity, and it is not an option, or God’s intent, for them.
Thanks for clarifying; are you saying that, in some fashion, like “finalizing the genetic and pneumatic blueprint for humankind in heaven,” God “planned out humanity” before “creating male and female in His image” in the third statement, and that it’s not referring to some change of state in Christ? If so, --I’ll just say it this way; why the last-minute “design changes?” Why does verse 27 say what it says the way it says it; what purpose is it aiming to accomplish? Or, what is it describing?
I meant that for the rest of us becoming “in His image” is a process in this realm, though present reality in heaven. His plan is to “make” man in His image (1:26). So he 1) Creates The Man in His image- the template, the one we have to be in to be in His image. 2) Then Yahweh Elohim creates Adam on earth (You may not care for this part but Adam is created in chapter one and formed in chapter two in order to more perfectly be a figure of Christ (Rom 5:14) who was both created as a man and uncreated as God (He just changed form like Adam was formed in chapter two)). 3) And of course he creates the bulk of the human race whom He intends to “make” in His image (part 1) via Adam (part 2). Which order you see this in depends on if you are looking from earth up or heaven down.
Why not, “Let us make the one Who is our image in the likeness of a man” if there’s some change in Christ’s mode of being described in this verse? Seems backwards. I ask this question this way because it sounds a bit like modalism, which is not as bad as emanationism, but still not considered orthodox. Excuse the labels; I hate them, too. I’d just need a lot more clarity to see this as a coherent proposal.
He was not in the “likeness” of a man. He became a man. And God. And He did not become the Image until He did. The LOGOS was not the image, the Heavenly Man is the image.
Christ is the image of God, and God has no other image that is accessible to anyone but Himself. That is why when Thomas asked to see the Father, Jesus said “if you have seen Me, you have seen the Father.” That is why 1st Timothy 6:16 describes Christ in the full glory of God with these words: “Who only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto; whom no man hath seen, nor can see". It is why the first chapter of the Gospel of John says “18 No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.” Some translations say “He has explained Him” for that last phrase. Further, in chapter six that gospel declares “46 Not that any man hath seen the Father, save he which is of God, he hath seen the Father.”
So it could not have been put the way you suggest and stay accurate. Only God can see God. For man to access the Image, God must become Man as well.
Sorry, still seems a non-sequitur to me. If the preincarnate Christ is the “template” for what it means to be made in God’s image, no particularly physical aspect is necessary on Christ’s part. It His personhood, His character and attributes, etc. that are in view, here.
Now, you and I are in agreement that, at the time of Adam’s sojourn in the garden, Jesus did appear to Adam in the form of a man, but in an obviously divine form, as well. There need be no confusion on Adam’s part that they shared the same “state of being” --Jesus was not “formed of dust.”
I am amazed that you understand that it was Christ, the Logos of God who assumed the form of a man in the garden in Genesis chapter two (most people have not made such a connection) but fail to connect that to what happened in Genesis 1:27. Elohim in chapter one is not anthropomorphic yet Yahweh Elohim in chapter two is. What happened? Genesis 1:27.
Now that does not mean that He was in the same state of being as Adam. Maybe He was in the form we will be when we get our new bodies in heaven. Maybe He was something more. But He was not yet born of a woman. He was not born in corruptible flesh. He was rather as the Angel of Yahweh.